Billing and Time-sheet – Critical Link

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One of the main law management areas is the link between work information (who, when, how much – timesheet) to the client’s billing. This is a critical step to and efficient financial analysis.

This one represents the second phase of the information planning, in other words, once each team’s element gets used to the time-sheet, the natural next phase is the billing interconnection.

The idea is to know exactly what tasks are associated with each billing document, so that we can make credible financial analysis, like: team productivity analysis, individual productivity, retainers, clients and files.

The main goal is to quickly convert several lawyers’ time-sheet into a single value that can be or not the final billed sum. We all know that rarely the final value billed to the client is the multiplication between value/hour and time, there are more variables to be considered like the case complexity and the client’s economic status, or even a pre-established budget.

What we must do in this situation is to find a time value proportional to what will be billed, value correspondent to time bill and not the actual work time. This point is fundamental. The time-sheet mustn’t be changed and it should be kept so that we can maintain a direct relation between the work time and the billed time.

You may ask yourselves: what about the retainers? The retainers must be treated the same way, because that way,you ensure its continuous evaluation and renegotiations.

What happens frequently is that the financial department worries about billing and not directly with time-sheets.

If there is this awareness between those responsible to bill and register in the time-sheets, it will drastically increase the organization economic indicators. Adding a tool that helps making this step you may do it in a simple and effective way. KamaeLaw (www.kamaelaw.com) can give you, that way, the necessary help to make it happen.

Remember: “What you don’t measure, you don’t manage!”