Message From the Chair

By Nyanza Shaw, Esq.
Shaw Esquire & Associates

Welcome to the April issue of The Bottom Line.

In this message from the chair, I am going to discuss an item that is vitally important to lawyers – billable hours. While time keeping can be a burdensome task it is the core of what we have to do because if you are not billing, you are not making money. However, in today’s legal world there are a lot of lawyers, and even more clients, that despise billable hours. Associates live under the burden of billing minimums which really aren’t minimums since most big firm expectations are for associates to bill far beyond those minimums. Clients are turned off by feeling nickel and dimed for a quick call or email. Then there are some lawyers who undermine the value of their own time by writing down bills either by the prodding of a client or merely because of bad time keeping. Whatever your feelings are about billable hours, the fact is that they are important. They are even important if you are not billing by the hour. So how do you address this, keep your sanity, and make sure that you are properly collecting fees for services rendered and time spent?

Here are a couple of tips to improve your time keeping: