Attorneys are spending more and more hours working outside the office without the support structure of an office environment. Because this outside work often involves brief, varied activities scattered over time, stopping after each task to record the time spent can be burdensome. Even when attorneys have immediate time entry opportunities across the street or around the globe, they often go unused in favor of maintaining a flow of work or returning to nonwork activities more typical of nonbusiness hours.
Zero-Click Time Capture
One solution is to shift the focus from time entry to time capture. Automatic time capture remembers the amount of time the attorney spends working on a given document, communication or other activity then saves it for reference and submission at a later date.
Zero-click time capture technology complements the attorney’s memory with a timesheet prepopulated with activities over the course of the day. Rather than having to remember to start and stop a clock or fill out a time slip immediately after the fact, billing information is recorded to the timesheet in real time for reference at the attorney’s convenience. When the timesheet is opened, the attorney sees:
.20 hours on an e-mail message composed on the wireless device
.10 hours on a call received via smartphone
1.2 hours revising a pleading on the laptop while on an airplane
Capturing Billable Hours
Billable time put in away from the office often involves technologies in three categories:
Remote Access: Citrix and other virtual office environments that allow attorneys to work on systems as if they were in the office even when they are not.
Laptops: Increasingly attorneys can take their computers with them, so the ability to track hours when disconnected from the network is important.
Handheld Devices: Advanced “smartphones”and PDAs enable attorneys to work most anywhere. In essence, one can compose an e-mail message at the beach before diving into the water.
Each technology requires a different approach to time capture:
Remote access: Work conducted in the virtual environment can be captured just as seamlessly as if the attorney were using his/her own computer in the office. (see “Zero-Click Time Capture” , Finance in the Electronic Age, ILTA White Paper, March 2005).
Laptops: Time capture systems can record time attorneys spent working on their laptops even when they do not have a live network connection.
Handheld Devices: Capture systems embedded in mobile devices can track time and save it centrally without requiring a single click. They should be able to capture the full spectrum of activities an attorney might engage in on the device, rather than, for example, just phone calls.
Integrating Time Capture with Existing Systems
Information gathered from remote locations is most effective when cross-referenced with the firm’s knowledge systems, including:
CRM: A majority of activity conducted outside of the office involves communications. Cross-referencing the data with contacts and relationships to better populate the timesheet will put a significant multiplier on the value (e.g., “Call to 6175550692″ from a smartphone becomes “Call to Mr. Smith (XYZ Corp.).” This should happen even when CRM is not immediately accessible from the remote device itself. Central systems enhance data captured at the edge.
Document Management: Many new PDAs and almost all laptops enable the review and manipulation of important documents while away from the office. Many of these documents have a profile in the document management system of the firm containing contextual information such as client matter data that can help populate the timesheet (e.g.,“Revising 1239854.DOC” becomes “Revising Pleading for ABC Inc.” ). Again, this integration should occur regardless of access to the document management system interface from the particular device.
Desktop-Based Time Capture: Time billed in remote locations is most effective when combined with time captured in the office. This allows a more complete picture of the attorney’s work, regardless of where he/she worked over the course of the day, week or month.
When combined with the above strategies, zero-click time capture on the remote devices allows the attorney to better understand his or her day, get more hours onto the timesheet and support those hours with greater detail- all with far less effort than simply trying to remember “What did I do last week?”
Billable Time Recorded Anywhere and Everywhere
Since the time capture system creates an information resource for the attorney, access to that information in the form of a prepopulated timesheet combining all of the above resources should be available wherever the attorney would think about or submit his or her time.
Time captured on the road should be available for review at the desk, and vice versa. Access to the information should be as ubiquitous as the opportunities to do the billable work.
What’s Next? Attorney-Centric Time?
Capturing billable hours from remote platforms is a significant opportunity and even more powerful when extended to a time capture system that works with attorneys both inside and outside of the office environment. Once attorneys have a taste of automatic time capture from one system, they may well ask, “Why not for everything?”
Time capture is not an issue for one platform exclusively. Rather, the focus should be on leveraging any and all appropriate technologies that can increase the attorney’s ability to track time regardless of location. Leveraging these technologies should minimize the hassle and likely inaccuracies in attempting to reconstruct billable hours after the fact.
Automatic time capture is an opportunity to increase the accuracy of timesheets and maximize existing investments in technologies, both inside and outside the office. For a relatively small cost - without requiring additional work from attorneys - a firm can reap substantial benefits by capturing more billable hours.
by Ray Deck of Element55
This article was first published in ILTA’s January 2007 white paper titled “Global
Challenges - Part One of a Miniseries” and is reprinted here with permission. For more
information about ILTA, visit their website at www.iltanet.org