Increase Your Billable Hours: Seven Tactics for Optimizing Your Time

As the writer Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” How you spend your days at work is important. You want to feel productive and able to focus on providing great client service, not swamped with paperwork that never allows you to come up for air.  

If your firm uses billable hours, managing your time is what ensures you do enough billable work for the whole operation to be profitable.  

Increasing billable hours is key to increasing the profitability of any law firm. With so many tasks to get done each day, though, it can feel difficult to ensure that team members are focusing their energy on the ones that bring in the most revenue.  

The answer lies in proper time management. Here are seven crucial time management techniques you can start using today.

1. Create a detailed policy for your firm 

Adequate time management is an outgrowth of accurate time tracking, but it’s not enough for senior partners to tell attorneys and staff to track time. They also need to provide guidance on how staff should handle their time tracking.  

As such, before you can improve time tracking at your firm, first consider establishing a written time-tracking policy for all employees to follow. Doing so will help forge a healthy respect for working hours and encourage attorneys to become aware of how they spend their time. It also sets an expectation that attorneys identify opportunities for using their time more wisely. 

Administrators and senior partners can use time-tracking software with dashboards and reporting features to gain an overview of staff performance in one central location. These dashboards also provide a visual representation of billing statistics for individual attorneys, which senior partners can use to help attorneys set time-use goals.  

Meanwhile, reports allow you to keep track of that data and evaluate its changes over time. 

2. Digitize your to-do list 

List-making seems so simple, but it can make a significant difference in how you manage your time.  

As you write down the things you need to do each day or week, prioritize each task so that the most important thing gets accomplished first. You can do so according to cases, deadlines, or billable vs. non-billable tasks. No matter how you arrange your list, it will help keep you on track. 

If possible, avoid handwritten to-do lists, as they are easy to lose or leave behind on your desk. Digital solutions can be accessed from anywhere and integrated with your preferred software tools, making it easier to keep track of lists and edit them. 

3. Use a project management software 

Time management and project management go hand in hand. To meet goals, you need to be able to adhere to schedules and budgets with little deviation. And to accomplish that, you need to be able to map out a plan, tag in collaborators for support, and prioritize tasks so that things get done quickly and accurately. 

Project management software is invaluable for law firms. With project management software, you can map out matters and projects logically, communicate deadlines with your team, and establish (and update) deadlines. You can then evaluate your schedule as a whole, identifying opportunities to delegate or shift tasks and maximize your billable hours.  

You can get the most out of your project management software by using one that allows you to create reusable templates for recurring projects.

4. Use a time tracker 

Using a digital time tracker allows you to record tasks as they happen, thus avoiding spending time later trying to remember what you need to invoice for. If you’re away from the office, you can conveniently track time on a mobile app so you don’t miss a beat. 

In addition to being a convenient solution, digital time tracking can also help you understand how much time you spend on billable vs. non-billable activity. With that knowledge, you can change how you work, leading to better profitability. 

5. Integrate time and billing 

Software with integrated time and billing features streamlines both processes, saving an arduous effort for everyone in the office. When you increase productivity and operational efficiency in such a way, you’ll likely find you have more billable time available in your schedule. 

Integrating the two also ensures greater accuracy in both, making it so that every possible billable hour actually makes it into the invoice. In turn, you’ll increase your cash flow and help the law firm thrive financially. 

6. Try automation 

Time spent working on invoices and other billing tasks means less billable time for staff to increase the firm’s revenue. Automated billing allows you to use templates to get invoices out faster. You can split, batch, and schedule invoices, further streamlining your process. 

Document templates also help you generate detailed documents—including invoices—in seconds. You simply create a template of a document your firm uses repeatedly, then insert merge fields into each document wherever you need them to appear.  

These fields will automatically populate the next time you create a document from the template, saving even more time that you can use for billable tasks. 

7. Use client collaboration tools 

One of the best ways to manage time in your firm is to give your clients the power to take care of certain tasks on their own.  

By providing access to a client portal, you can allow them to view and pay invoices and find details on your work and progress, which cuts down on routine communication that can unnecessarily obscure your schedule and keep you from working on billable tasks.

Good time management is good firm management 

The quote by Annie Dillard about time goes on to state: “A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days….” 

A legal practice will certainly understand the need to catch the days (and the hours they contain!), and luckily there are plenty of ways to save time and stay profitable as a result. Be more organized and strategic, measure everything, and take advantage of the latest tech so you can work smarter, not harder. 

Fortunately, TimeSolv’s full-featured platform allows you to do all of that.  

Help your staff can regain control of their time with: 

• Streamlined project management and document management 
• Automated billing with flexible templates 
• Convenient time and expense tracking 
• A self-service client portal 
• Time and expense reporting 
• Customizable dashboards to give you a bird’s eye view of your firm 

Start your free trial today to see how TimeSolv can help you increase your profits. 

More useful posts:

7 Ways to Improve Your Law Firm Profitability with Zero AR & More Billable Time

ZERO AR: How to Achieve ZERO Accounts Receivable with TimeSolv and Batch Client Payments  

Is Your Legal Billing System’s Invoice Reconciliation Broken? Here’s How to Fix It