

Whatever method you use, track your billable time accurately-and in real time, if possible. Communicating clearly can help manage clients’ expectations regarding billing and payment. For example, how often you will bill them. Have clear policies to explain rates and billing practices to clients from the start. To run a successful, client-centered law firm, you need to prioritize your client’s experience. The following law firm billing best practices are essential: At the same time, you can ensure your clients receive the best possible service and experience. A billable hours chart can help you accomplish this. Knowing and following reasonable standards for billable hours can help ensure that you and your firm can bill efficiently and effectively. You can also use a billable hours calculator to help expedite the process. For example, if you worked for 15 minutes at a rate of $100 per hour, you could use the chart to see that the time increment is 0.3. The chart uses increments of 1/10th of an hour.


To quickly calculate what to charge for portions of an hour worked, use the chart below as a reference. Six-minute periods are easy to calculate with the help of a billable hours chart, and they allow for reasonable increments without rounding up by too much. Conversely, billing in larger increments could lead to excessive padding, leading to unhappy clients overpaying for legal services. When tracking billable hours manually with a billable hours chart, most lawyers adhere to 1/10th of an hour (aka six-minute) increments.īilling six minutes at a time is standard practice for practical reasons: Manually billing by the minute or in smaller increments is difficult and time-consuming to track and calculate by hand. It is a simple table to help you quickly calculate how many increments of an hour to charge, based on how long you worked. What is a billable hours chart?Ī billable hours chart is an attorney billable hours template. Also, we’ll cover how other tools can make tracking attorney hours even easier and more accurate. This blog post will explore how a billable hours chart can help lawyers better track time for invoicing. By billing in standard time increments and using an attorney billable hours chart, you can spend less time trying to calculate your billable hours manually. With this in mind, there are tools that lawyers can use to make it faster and easier to calculate and log their hours-like a billable hours chart. It’s clear that lawyers must find ways to track their hours as effectively and accurately as possible to reach their targets-without losing valuable time on the act of tracking. According to the 2021 Legal Trends Report, lawyers spend just 2.5 hours each workday on billable work. Many firms expect attorneys to reach minimum billable hour requirements ranging between 1,700 and 2,300 hours per year.

Thankfully, using a billable hours chart can help. Time is money-especially when it comes to how many billable hours in a year an attorney can accumulate.
