The firm that was busiest in its worst month

The March problem

Ask most partners which month was their best and they will name the one they billed most in. Ask which was most profitable and the honest answer is that nobody knows.

A firm of twelve takes on a matter at an agreed fee. Two associates spend four months on it. Some of that time reaches the pad they hand in at month end and some does not, because nobody writes down a twenty-minute call three days after it happened. The matter closes, the fee is collected, and it goes into the accounts as revenue with no cost attached to it. Every fixed-fee matter in the firm is in the same position.

This is not a failure of bookkeeping. The accounts are correct. What is missing is the one number that would tell the partners which kinds of work to take more of.

What recording time actually costs

Every firm that has tried this has a story about why it failed. Usually the same story: it was introduced, it was resented, the data was patchy, and within a quarter it was abandoned.

The failure is almost always about friction and timing rather than software. If logging a call takes longer than the call, short items go unrecorded, and short items are exactly where the leakage sits. If entry happens on Friday for the whole week, what gets recorded is a reconstruction, and reconstructions are systematically low.

The firms where it sticks tend to do three things: entry takes seconds rather than minutes, it happens the same day, and people are shown the bill their time produced. The third matters more than the other two. An associate who watches a fee note get defended successfully because the time record was there stops treating it as surveillance.

Dates are a separate problem, and a worse one

Billing is money. Limitation is negligence. They deserve different treatment, and a firm that keeps both in the same list of tasks has quietly decided they are the same class of risk.

• The date goes in when the matter is opened, not when someone gets to it.
• One named advocate owns it. Shared ownership means nobody checks.
• More than one reminder, and the first early enough that acting on it is still possible.
• Somebody other than the owner sees the list. This is the control that actually catches things.
• The date is closed off explicitly, because a reminder that simply passes proves nothing.

Where this stops

It will not make anyone record their time. That is a management decision that partners have to make and hold, and no system substitutes for it.

It will not read your existing files. Firms that try to migrate a decade of closed matters spend months on it and get nothing back. Open with live matters, leave the archive where it is.

A sensible first quarter

Live matters and their next dates go in first, which is usually two or three days of work. Then one practice group runs time entry for a full billing cycle while the rest of the firm carries on as before. If that group's bills come out defensible, the argument for extending it makes itself. If they do not, the firm has learned something cheaply.

Billing moves last, after one cycle has been produced both ways and the figures agree.