Heading into 2025, law firms adopted policies allowing their employees to return to the office, work from home, or a combination of both. Optimism accompanied these policies, intended as they were to boost revenue by allowing employees to work where they felt most productive.
Research indicates that these policies have been successful. Demand for legal services has returned to pre-pandemic levels and revenue for firms of all sizes is up. (See, 2023 Clio Trends Report, https://www.clio.com/resources/legal-trends/2023-report/). Yet one of the challenges that predates the pandemic persists. Firms continue to struggle with how to capture all or at least a majority of their employees’ billable time.
According to the Thompson Reuters, lawyers in private practice billed on average about 3 – 4 hours per day in 2024. 2023, 2022, and 2021 weren't much better, with lawyers capturing only around 3 hours per day. Though skeptical of these statistics, firms accept that their employees do not capture 100% of their billable time.
The problem is not that lawyers fritter away their days. Rather, they stay busy working on behalf of clients and simply neglect to bill for everything they do. (Harvard Business Review, Gretchen Gavett; "Workers Are Bad at Filling Out Timesheets, and It Costs Billions a Day").
Compounding the problem are inefficient and outdated time tracking methods, such as manual entry. (ABA Law Practice Magazine, Laura Keeler; "Tracking Time to Save Time").
Increasingly law firms are turning to tools that allow their employees 1) to work from anywhere; 2) to bill from anywhere; and 3) to capture billable time automatically.
Take MHPS, PLLC (www.mhpslaw.com), for instance. Based in Nashville, MHPS is completely cloud-based and monetizes its productivity tools with Time Miner (https://www.timeminer.com).
Time Miner connects MHPS’s phone, email, and practice management systems and automatically creates time entries for billable activity. It then exports those time entries to the firm’s primary billing system so that no billable time is lost. By automatically capturing time that is often lost, Time Miner pays for itself and adds directly to MHPS’ bottom line.
As 2024 draws to a close and firms wonder how to build on the success of their updated policies, they might consider following MHPS’ lead and monetize their productivity tools by using cloud-based options in conjunction with Time Miner.