Choosing the Best Law Firm Time Tracking Software

Blockbuster legal dramas depict lawyering as a profession filled with suspense and intrigue—grappling with complex questions of jurisprudence, going toe-to-toe with the opposition, and passionately arguing your case in front of judge and jury.

What’s not shown is everyone going home after the day is won to calculate their billable hours and send out invoices. Unfortunately, manual tracking methods can be tedious and time-consuming. This often leads lawyers to delay the task and forget to track every billable minute, which leaves money on the table.

The solution to this is timekeeping software for lawyers. But with so many options on the market, how can you decide which best suits your situation?

In this article, we’ll discuss essential features that your law firm time tracking software should have. We’ll also explain how to choose the optimal tool for your practice.

What is Law Firm Time Tracking Software?

Like in all other professions, there is an accounting side to being a lawyer. If you expect to get paid you must track the hours you worked, figure out how much you’re owed, and bill clients appropriately.

Legal time tracking software substantially eases the burden of tracking your time, making it easier to be transparent with clients and get paid for your services. With time tracking software, you can use timers as you work, for example. This eliminates the need to write down every time entry or recall what you did at the end of the day or week.

Why Should Your Firm Use Time Tracking Software?

Your law firm faces a dilemma: on the one hand, you need to keep track of the hours you work for each individual client in order to calculate your billable hours. On the other hand, this is a difficult and tedious process that takes time away from substantive work.

When the problem is stated this clearly, the benefits of using law firm time tracking software become obvious. Not only can you bill for more hours by making them easier to track, you can also free up time that can be better spent thinking about cases and serving clients.

What Features Are Essential For Time Tracking Software?

In this section, we’ll highlight several things you should look for as you start vetting legal tech providers.

Minutes Capturing

One thing your preferred attorney time tracking software should support is minute-by-minute tracking. For example, MyCase (industry-leading legal practice management software), offers the ability to start and stop up to three timers as you switch between cases.

This precision benefits both you and your clients. You’ll be able to maximize revenue by capturing all the time you spent on a case. You’ll also be able to produce itemized invoices and clearly communicate billing terms, which foster transparency and trust in your client relationships.

Automation

This probably goes without saying, but good law firm time tracking software should automate as many of the best practices for legal billing as possible. It would make no sense to migrate to a software-based time tracking solution if it took just as much time to stay in compliance as doing everything manually.

For example, time tracking tools should be able to generate invoices based on existing time entries. This can substantially improve both the efficiency and accuracy of the time tracking and billing process. When done correctly, automation reduces the risk of human error and ensures that fewer billing adjustments need to be made.

Automation also means much less time spent on the process overall. And let’s face it—no one ever went to their grave wishing they’d spent more time entering numbers into billing software.

Time Adjustment

Any good attorney time tracking software should support the ability to make adjustments for timing later on. E-billing software benefits include being able to add or remove time, adjust the start or end time of a task, or take a single task and split it up across multiple entries.

With time adjustments, you’ll be better able to provide accurate billing, further increasing transparency and trust.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Tracking

As the saying goes, what gets measured gets managed. With only a fuzzy idea of where your hours are going, you have no way of optimizing your legal workflow.

But with KPI tracking offered by timekeeping software for lawyers, you can make data-driven decisions about metrics like billable hours, revenue, and profitability. For example, you can find out which matters eat up the most time among attorneys and paralegals and compare that to which matters produce the greatest revenue. Are they aligned?

Crunching KPIs will allow your legal practice to make more money and run more efficiently.

How To Choose The Right Law Firm Time Tracking Software

Now that you’re familiar with law firm time tracking software features, let’s discuss how to make the best decision possible for your practice.

1. Assess Your Current Abilities

This process begins where so many others do: figuring out what your current abilities are. You need to evaluate your process for tracking time and diagnose its weaknesses. With this information, you’ll be able to settle on time tracking software for lawyers that best compensates for these weaknesses.

2. Focus on Security

In an increasingly digital world, security is a large (and growing) problem. Now that virtually every aspect of our lives is stored and processed using software, we all want to make sure the tools we use are safe from nefarious hackers.

This is especially true in a professional setting, where a substantial security breach could mean lost revenue and clients, as well as permanent reputation damage.

When you’re shopping for timekeeping software for lawyers, it’s worth asking basic questions about the software’s security. For example, does it support end-to-end encryption and two-factor authentication? Security-conscious software options typically include these kinds of safety measures because they make it substantially harder to break the software while only imposing very modest requirements on users.

3. Leverage Reporting

Throughout this piece, we’ve mentioned various ways in which time tracking software for lawyers can help you gain insights into your workflow and where it might be inefficient.

A key part of this is reporting. By making it possible to visualize metrics like billable hours over time, it becomes easier to communicate problems and solutions with members of your team. This can also help you assess how new strategies are working out over time.

4. Ask About Technical Support

No software, however well-designed, is without its quirks. You should think seriously about the technical support offered by different attorney time tracking software packages.

The last thing you want to do is spend time learning a new tool and incorporating it into your practice, only to discover later that no one will answer the phone when a problem arises.

If you find yourself leaning towards a particular offering, check up front that it has robust technical support.

Final Notes

However unglamorous it may be, time tracking with case management software is a crucial part of running a successful law firm. Together, MyCase and LawPay offer a holistic solution.

With robust automation, support for reporting and KPI targeting, and industry-leading technical support, MyCase and LawPay have helped tens of thousands of firms streamline their time tracking and billing processes, optimize workflows, and maximize revenue.

Contact our team today to see what we can do for you!