Anyone else work somewhere that uses it? My firm has switched over to it and half the bits that were meant to make life easier and save time still don't work and the basic elements seem to go on the blink regularly.
So, how much time out of a 6 minute slot would you say you spent entering data into your time records?
20 seconds would be 5% of your time, assuming enter work descriptions every 6 minutes.
If you entered all 10 descriptions once an hour how do you accurately record what you actually did?
Or, do you just roll it all up into some vague generic description covering half a day like: “Attended conference call and collated relevant data for distribution to underlings”
Hmm. But the thing is many pieces of legal work just aren't that predictable.
its a bit like going to a builder and saying "I want a house, what will it cost me?" Without being able to give any detail as to the size of house, number of bedrooms or bathrooms etc. Especially on some transactions where quite frankly no one really knows what may be uncovered as you get into it.
So fee estimates and fixed fees are all well and good but they need to be either quite wide in scope (for the former) or almost entirely predictable (for the latter) and that is a luxury most lawyers don't get.
So that's why unit costs are broken down so minutely.
we have 100 years of data on time recording for legal work between various people of various degrees of skill. If we do not know by now how much X will cost then we have a profession staffed entirely by retards so dumb that they should be embaressed to claim to be a lawyer.
IT/Accountancy/Audit/Tax advice manage to do this
the point of time recording is not accurate billing it is intrinsically linked to the model of "guy with some capital and sales skills gets a load of relative bright kids and squeezes as much work out of them as possible", which was fine circa 1850-1970 but is obsolete and holding the profession back now
I have a set of timers that run while I'm working and at the end of the day they round up to the nearest six minutes. End of the day I fill in a brief description of what I was doing.
To be fair most of what I do is fixed fee so it's just used internally to set targets and the like and monitor performance.
Frustrating part is that at the moment I have no direct access to client account info so can't see what funds we are holding and what has and hasn't been paid. Also the part that is meant to produce bills and automatically send them to clients isn't working either.
Accountants were still time recording when I worked for one in 2012 and they did it in a much less sophisticated manner with people just guessing how long stuff had taken at the end of the day.
Sumo: what if you're on a transaction and something completely unpredictable turns up like someone starts litigation in Denmark against a subsidiary, or an employment tribunal kicks off midway through or some kind of elf and safety thing shows because no one knew there was asbestos in one of the buildings, or any number of other random events?
You can't predict that and so you can't have built it into your initial fee estimate. Should lawyers handle that extra work for free or something?
No Tec but I did find accountants are better at setting out the exact scope of what is and isn't included so there is less of a grey area for clients to argue it's covered by the fee.
What is hard to predict is dealing with idiot managing agents who need chasing five times to answer a simple question and clients who if you ask them three questions only respond to two so you have to ask the third again.
you absolutely can predict that something unexpected might occur, hence why you scope your fee and re scope to cover anything else
the idea that you can't possibly figure out how to profitably charge for a piece of work unless you charge £30 every 6 minutes you spend on it not consistent with a premise that you employ smart people, it also completely stifles your own business and ties you to linear growth where you can only add 8 profitable hours a day by adding another body and associated overheads
That's the issue though isn't it, clients want to be able to project forward the costs as much as possible so if you have too narrow a scope you'll end up with it creeping on you and having to go back to the client to approve and revise the additions whereas if you have too wide a scope you'll end up pricing yourself out of the market.
It just isn't as everyday simple as you're making it sound sumo. I appreciate I'm devil's advocating a bit here but I do disagree with the premise that lawyers can accurately price everything up from the start, especially with new clients where you can't be sure what they're telling you is completely accurate.
I can pretty much guess what's involved in most things after years of doing this job. The problem is when you come up against another solicitor who treats something simple like the deal of the century. Recently did something where a solicitor acting for a big retail chain added all kinds of covenants into an agreement about landlord's works on a shop including inspections, etc. which were suitable for a shop being built from scratch when the works were simply building a straight line block partition. Took several weeks to persuade her that what she was proposing was completely inappropriate given the circumstances.
you're not devil's advocating you are, as per my first post, stuck in fraternity thinking
there is nothing wrong with being clear to a client what they are buying, what sort of contingency fee they should typically set aside/ provide for and re scoping when something weird happens.
clients, commerical clients anyway, work pretty much quarter to quarter (for good or ill) and with annual reporting. They can budget around this but they struggle with ball park figures and if expecting a bill for X when they get XXX they freak and there is no good reason for that to happen.
Everything you are saying about being unable to price because of situation A, B or C is not new. The fact that you run into this, and that you have recorded what happens when this occurs means that there is a set of data for you x every lawyer employed for the last 100 years on what happens then. That data set, unless it is useless paper simply thrown away maps the legal advice process in minute detail on a massive scale and should allow any firm to price at least as accurately as hourly rates do the value of work.
Absolutely as sails says, you will get a GC who phones every 2 minutes because they think of a problem and then another and then another and it's a pain in the arse but a good professional should be able to manage that.
And if you still don't accept that premise then you are proving that carriage makers can't become car salesmen.
Meh, I dunno, when you have to bring in deal support from half a dozen different teams and you're relying on them accurately predicting their bit which could be anything from HR to pensions to banking to overseas counsel I maintain that it just isn't as simple as that and while you can scope something up with caveats all it takes is for one of those support teams to go over and your entire fee estimate could end up being thrown out the window. Hence, obviously, communication with the client is essential but predicting costs of others or hoping that their predicted costs will stay broadly in line with their actual billed hours is quite a tricky game to play and that's not even going into if something goes horribly wrong somewhere.
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What is it? How many do you take a day?
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It's a time recording and billing system.
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Do lawyers still record time spent in 10 minute periods?
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Tenths of an hour.
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i mis-read the title . I thought it was going to be a little, long forgotten ditty
Caesar adsum iam forte
Brutus aderat
Caesar sic in omnibus
Brutus sic in at
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So, how much time out of a 6 minute slot would you say you spent entering data into your time records?
20 seconds would be 5% of your time, assuming enter work descriptions every 6 minutes.
If you entered all 10 descriptions once an hour how do you accurately record what you actually did?
Or, do you just roll it all up into some vague generic description covering half a day like: “Attended conference call and collated relevant data for distribution to underlings”
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nothing is holding firms back more than time recording, it's a sort of Fraternity obsession
Doddering old managing partner fooks stick to it because they were forced to do it so pass on the madness
all other lawyers hate it
client General Counsels hate it (and most don't believe it)
client Finance teams and CFOs pull their hair out over trying to budget it
93% of people with a legal problem don't go to their lawyer because they don't know what it'll cost but it will be expensive
93%?!!! the market penetration of legal services in the UK is crica 7%!!!
accountants, IT etc just hand out a fixed fee or monthly subscription that you can plan for the next 3 years
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Hmm. But the thing is many pieces of legal work just aren't that predictable.
its a bit like going to a builder and saying "I want a house, what will it cost me?" Without being able to give any detail as to the size of house, number of bedrooms or bathrooms etc. Especially on some transactions where quite frankly no one really knows what may be uncovered as you get into it.
So fee estimates and fixed fees are all well and good but they need to be either quite wide in scope (for the former) or almost entirely predictable (for the latter) and that is a luxury most lawyers don't get.
So that's why unit costs are broken down so minutely.
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I agree, Sails. It's pretty awful.
I also agree that the billable hour is a lead weight around the neck of the legal profession.
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they are entirely 100% predictable to the penny
we have 100 years of data on time recording for legal work between various people of various degrees of skill. If we do not know by now how much X will cost then we have a profession staffed entirely by retards so dumb that they should be embaressed to claim to be a lawyer.
IT/Accountancy/Audit/Tax advice manage to do this
the point of time recording is not accurate billing it is intrinsically linked to the model of "guy with some capital and sales skills gets a load of relative bright kids and squeezes as much work out of them as possible", which was fine circa 1850-1970 but is obsolete and holding the profession back now
0
0
I have a set of timers that run while I'm working and at the end of the day they round up to the nearest six minutes. End of the day I fill in a brief description of what I was doing.
To be fair most of what I do is fixed fee so it's just used internally to set targets and the like and monitor performance.
Frustrating part is that at the moment I have no direct access to client account info so can't see what funds we are holding and what has and hasn't been paid. Also the part that is meant to produce bills and automatically send them to clients isn't working either.
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0
Accountants were still time recording when I worked for one in 2012 and they did it in a much less sophisticated manner with people just guessing how long stuff had taken at the end of the day.
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0
Sumo: what if you're on a transaction and something completely unpredictable turns up like someone starts litigation in Denmark against a subsidiary, or an employment tribunal kicks off midway through or some kind of elf and safety thing shows because no one knew there was asbestos in one of the buildings, or any number of other random events?
You can't predict that and so you can't have built it into your initial fee estimate. Should lawyers handle that extra work for free or something?
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0
No Tec but I did find accountants are better at setting out the exact scope of what is and isn't included so there is less of a grey area for clients to argue it's covered by the fee.
What is hard to predict is dealing with idiot managing agents who need chasing five times to answer a simple question and clients who if you ask them three questions only respond to two so you have to ask the third again.
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you absolutely can predict that something unexpected might occur, hence why you scope your fee and re scope to cover anything else
the idea that you can't possibly figure out how to profitably charge for a piece of work unless you charge £30 every 6 minutes you spend on it not consistent with a premise that you employ smart people, it also completely stifles your own business and ties you to linear growth where you can only add 8 profitable hours a day by adding another body and associated overheads
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0
That's the issue though isn't it, clients want to be able to project forward the costs as much as possible so if you have too narrow a scope you'll end up with it creeping on you and having to go back to the client to approve and revise the additions whereas if you have too wide a scope you'll end up pricing yourself out of the market.
It just isn't as everyday simple as you're making it sound sumo. I appreciate I'm devil's advocating a bit here but I do disagree with the premise that lawyers can accurately price everything up from the start, especially with new clients where you can't be sure what they're telling you is completely accurate.
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0
I can pretty much guess what's involved in most things after years of doing this job. The problem is when you come up against another solicitor who treats something simple like the deal of the century. Recently did something where a solicitor acting for a big retail chain added all kinds of covenants into an agreement about landlord's works on a shop including inspections, etc. which were suitable for a shop being built from scratch when the works were simply building a straight line block partition. Took several weeks to persuade her that what she was proposing was completely inappropriate given the circumstances.
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0
you're not devil's advocating you are, as per my first post, stuck in fraternity thinking
there is nothing wrong with being clear to a client what they are buying, what sort of contingency fee they should typically set aside/ provide for and re scoping when something weird happens.
clients, commerical clients anyway, work pretty much quarter to quarter (for good or ill) and with annual reporting. They can budget around this but they struggle with ball park figures and if expecting a bill for X when they get XXX they freak and there is no good reason for that to happen.
Everything you are saying about being unable to price because of situation A, B or C is not new. The fact that you run into this, and that you have recorded what happens when this occurs means that there is a set of data for you x every lawyer employed for the last 100 years on what happens then. That data set, unless it is useless paper simply thrown away maps the legal advice process in minute detail on a massive scale and should allow any firm to price at least as accurately as hourly rates do the value of work.
Absolutely as sails says, you will get a GC who phones every 2 minutes because they think of a problem and then another and then another and it's a pain in the arse but a good professional should be able to manage that.
And if you still don't accept that premise then you are proving that carriage makers can't become car salesmen.
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0
Meh, I dunno, when you have to bring in deal support from half a dozen different teams and you're relying on them accurately predicting their bit which could be anything from HR to pensions to banking to overseas counsel I maintain that it just isn't as simple as that and while you can scope something up with caveats all it takes is for one of those support teams to go over and your entire fee estimate could end up being thrown out the window. Hence, obviously, communication with the client is essential but predicting costs of others or hoping that their predicted costs will stay broadly in line with their actual billed hours is quite a tricky game to play and that's not even going into if something goes horribly wrong somewhere.
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