Blog post originally shared on iridium-technology.com. Iridium Technology is now part of BigHand. Learn more here.

When it comes to revenue, it all starts with ensuring that your lawyers’ hours get booked and ultimately billed. While it may sound simple, there are many roadblocks that can prevent accurate timekeeping in your firm. Perhaps the biggest one is lawyers waiting until the end of their busy day to put in their time, inaccurately remembering what they worked on, or missing billable activities entirely.  

Losing Time and Revenue

We live in an age of constant distraction and interruption. It’s not surprising, then, that small bits of work – phone calls, quick emails, edits to a document – get forgotten amidst the day’s more substantial activities. When your lawyers try to remember all of the day’s tasks and recreate them as time entries at the end of the day, it’s likely that these smaller tasks will be passed over.  

This is only compounded by the mobile nature of today’s work, especially with remote work becoming even more common due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It may not seem like much time is lost in a day, but the average lawyer loses 8-10 hours per month of billable time. That adds up quickly to impact your firm’s revenue and overall profitability. 

Finding Time and Money

Let’s assume each timekeeper can pick up ten additional billable hours per month, at a typical rate of $400 per hour, that represents $48,000 per year in potential billings.  For a 100-timekeeper firm, closing the leak represents $4.8 million in incremental revenue. 

Every bit of billable time matters – and while these may seem like small bits, they add up.  

Unleashing the Power of Automated Time Capture

SmartTime, Iridium, now part of BigHand’s intelligent timekeeping software, includes a Time Capture module that helps timekeepers accurately complete their timesheets. It automatically provides a daily record of what activities your lawyers engaged in, when they engaged in those activities, and how long those activities took. It makes creating the daily timesheet easy and enables timekeepers to find those small increments of time that usually go unbooked. 

Time Capture works by polling the firm’s systems and the user desktop to collect information on all aspects of your lawyers’ days. It finds emails, calendared meetings, phone calls, mobile calls, documents, dictation, browsing, and more. Event data is then cross-referenced to assign client matter codes, while supplementary data is added to the event description to make more substantial time entries and assist your lawyers in remembering what it is that they worked on. Users can then access their data online or receive a nightly journal report. 

Smarttime Plugs Leaks and Boosts Revenue

Complete and accurate timesheets with the least amount of effort can help your firm improve profitability while also streamlining the overall timekeeping process. But that’s not the only way SmartTime can improve process and profitability. Technology is revolutionizing the legal industry, including timekeeping practices. Not only does SmartTime improve accuracy, prevent leaked time, and increase revenue, it eases the burden on all employees in a firm, from timekeepers to the accounting department. 

If you’re interested in learning more about our intelligent timekeeping software and how it can benefit your firm, please contact us to request a demo. We’d be happy to show you how this simple implementation can save your firm thousands of dollars.