Professional Growth Through Legal Billing Practices

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Scott Benton: Hey everyone, Scott Benton here. How are you? I am the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast where we help you easily transition from a law school student into your professional career as an attorney and where we make the practice of law fun. And today we’re going to take a look at professional growth through legal billing practices.

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Scott Benton: Today in order to help assist your overall use of the success cycle, we’re going to look at professional growth through legal billing practices.

Now, when you first start out as an attorney and while you’re getting up to speed and learning all the business systems that your firm uses to provide legal services to their clients, at first, you’re really not going to be as clear or efficient as you might need to be when it comes to writing time entries for the legal services that you’ve performed.

In fact, you’ll be surprised at how long it takes you to actually start to write really good time entries. However, the more you improve your billing practices, the better your writing becomes, which leads to stronger client communication. It builds better relationships, and it enhances your own personal and professional growth. So, you really want to understand your client’s perspective.

Thinking about how clients view their billing entries [00:02:00] is essential for improving the clarity and transparency of those entries. And this is something that you really want to pay close attention to.

If clients don’t understand what they’re being billed for, they may feel confused, which reduces the level of trust that they have with you, or they may start to disengage entirely, which you definitely don’t want them to do. That means they’re probably going out there and looking for another firm to represent them, and you want to do everything you can to keep your clients working with your firm. So you want to review time entries and billing from the client’s point of view. When you’re looking at them, you want to ask yourself, do the descriptions make sense? Are they detailed enough to demonstrate value? Are they easy to understand? If clients or colleagues raise concerns about billing that looks unclear. You want to use that as an opportunity for growth, an opportunity to learn. So instead of reacting defensively, you want to look at this as a chance to refine your skills.

One thing you can do is keep a log of all of the common [00:03:00] feedback that you’re getting and the mistakes you’re making to help better identify the patterns or the specific areas that require improvement that you want to make to your billing process.

Each law firm has its own style, its own formatting, and its own vocabulary that they like to use for their time entries. Self reflection involves learning and adapting to these firm standards while you’re still being transparent for the client.

You want to review past billing entries from senior attorneys to help better understand how they structure their own time entries.

Remember that clients may not understand legal jargon or vague descriptions. So you want to look for examples of when your time entries need to be written more clearly, and you want to convert any jargon that you’ve used into common language and phrases.

So as an example, instead of writing research, you want to reflect on whether you could be more specific. So you might say something like, research on case law regarding breach of contract claim, one hour. Look at how [00:04:00] consistently you’re logging your time entries. Ask yourself, are you writing them as each task is completed, or are you trying to recall them at the end of the day, or even days later? In the success cycle, we talk about logging your time entries immediately after finishing each individual task, before returning to the to do list, and then moving on to the next task that you’re going to complete.

Now, this is going to help ensure that the details on your time entries are fresh and accurate. If you wait until the end of the day or if you wait until the end of the week to write them, chances are pretty good that you’re going to forget a lot about what you did, and your time entries may be vague or even turn into block billing, which you definitely want to avoid.

Consider how your time entries communicate progress to the client. Clients want to know that their case is moving forward and that they’re receiving the best possible value for the time that they’re built.

So you want to ask yourself if your time entries include enough detail to reassure clients about the progress on their case and the [00:05:00] investment that they’re making. Now firms often create a growth oriented environment for their newer employees. So as senior attorneys frequently mentor newer lawyers on how to write clear and transparent billing entries, you really want to make sure that this is a core part of your training and of your learning process. So ask for feedback from senior attorneys about your time entries and have them review examples that you’ve written for critique to help you improve. You can also ask peers or mentors to review the time entries as well in order to help foster growth and improvement. Now, this is quickly going to help you identify common mistakes that you’re still making and areas that need more detail.

A growth mindset means admitting your mistakes and viewing them as a learning opportunity. Remember to stay open to the areas where you’re struggling in, in terms of logging time and creating transparent billing entries. Look at any billing errors that you’re making not as failures, but as important [00:06:00] stepping stones towards professional growth.

Okay, so now you also want to avoid common pitfalls in time entry and billing, and there’s a few ways to do that. When time entries don’t clearly show how legal work aligns with the goals of the case, the clients might start to feel a little stressed out and disconnected.

So you want to ask yourself, if each entry helps the client see how the work is moving their case forward. Overall, professional growth is crucial not only for personal development and legal practice, but also in creating better and more transparent billing entries. For your clients, thesee improvements build trust with you as their attorney and with the firm that you’re working for, and they ensure clients feel that they’re getting a tremendous amount of value from the legal services that they’re paying for, and that is very, very important and key.

If someone’s feeling like their money is well spent and they see a lot of value in the work that you’re doing together, then they’re going to want to stay and work with you all day long. This is Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. Thank you so [00:07:00] much for dropping by and hanging out with us on this episode.

If you like this podcast and you’d like to get more information about us, you can always go to our website at classroom2courtroom. com. That’s classroom, the number two, courtroom. com, where you can send us a message, keep in touch with us.

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