What type of attorney billing increments does your law firm use when billing clients? 

Billing is a crucial part of legal workflows, since every activity related to client matters must be accounted for and billed to ensure firms get paid for their services. Accurate time tracking also allows you to identify profitable tasks versus nonprofitable tasks and make informed business decisions. Plus, when clients are confident about the integrity and accuracy of a firm’s billing process, they’re more likely to pay on time.

Many law firms use legal billing increments to achieve a balance of accountability and adequate compensation. This billing method has been around since the 1920s with the creation of the billable hour, a concept most associated with the legal field.

Are legal billing increments the best way for your firm to conduct client billing? With the growth of automation tools and software solutions specifically designed for the legal industry, there are options that require less time and effort to implement. With cloud-based software, you can track billable and non-billable hours instantly and intuitively, enhancing client service while driving revenue for your firm.

What Are Legal Billing Increments?

Legal billing increments make client billing more convenient and efficient for law firms. Lawyers decide which increments they intend to bill in and then round up to the nearest increment. By setting minimal time increments, attorneys can also ensure that all time spent on client matters is compensated—from a two-minute phone call to hours spent on case research.

The standard increments used by most lawyers are:

• 1/10th of an hour or 6 minutes
• 1/6th of an hour or 10 minutes
• 1/4th of an hour or 15 minutes

For example, if you’re using 6-minute billing increments, a 3-minute telephone call is billed for 6 minutes of time. The 6-minute increment is the most commonly used billing methodology for law firms. Why? This smallest increment allows lawyers to deliver a detailed breakdown of time spent, showing the value of every single action taken on behalf of a client.

Here is an example of a billing chart using attorney billing increments:

 

Minutes	Billing Increment
1-6	0.1
7-12	0.2
13-18	0.3
19-24	0.4
25-30	0.5
31-36	0.6
37-42	0.7
43-48	0.8
49-54	0.9
55-60	1.0

Billing in Increments Can Pose Challenges to Lawyers

All lawyer billing increments can present problems to both law firms and clients. Billing in 6-minute increments, for example, can force your attorneys to try to beat the clock every six minutes.

However, if your firm chooses to use larger increments, it can also affect your relationships with clients and fellow attorneys. The larger increments suggest that your firm bills clients for more time than you spend on their cases.

Other challenges with incremental billing include:

• The time and effort required to keep track of billable hours, especially with smaller increments
• Estimating a day, week, or even an entire month by memory
• Error-prone manual invoicing
• Inaccurate invoices, which can result in loss of client trust and damage to your reputation

Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place! So, what is a lawyer to do?

Strategies for Efficient and Accurate Billing

Proper legal billing directly impacts client satisfaction, transparency, and profitability. The most effective billing involves tracking time and linking it to tasks as they are completed, minimizing the risk of inaccuracies and lost billable hours. 

Unlike the traditional time-tracking methods often used with attorney billing increments, like writing hours down throughout the day or transcribing time by memory at the end of each day or week, tracking time using automation tools is more exact, faster, and simpler. 

When manually creating client invoices, you often need to migrate data from one place to another, such as from your timesheet or notepad into your invoicing system—not the most accurate or efficient process. But by using contextual legal billing software, you can set up your tasks and events as billable items and track time automatically through an app. You won’t need to transpose time entries into an additional program, and you’ll capture more billable time.

Research shows that waiting to track completed tasks until the end of the day, week, or month results in underbilling clients and lost revenue. By leveraging legal-specific accounting tools, you’ll track time spent on relevant client matters in real time and ensure maximum earned revenue.

Forget About Attorney Billing Increments and Invest in CosmoLex Billing Software

Don’t want to deal with legal billing increment issues? The solution is to simply do away with attorney billing increments altogether. With practice management software, you’ll streamline and simplify the billing process. 

CosmoLex’s comprehensive billing software contains a legal time tracking module that allows your firm to measure billable time on the go, allowing you to accurately monitor time spent on client matters. Attach each task to a time entry and a matter, so you always keep cases organized. No more error-prone attorney billing increments—with CosmoLex’s robust platform, you’ll track billable hours efficiently and accurately.

Beyond time tracking, a contextual legal billing platform like CosmoLex enables you to eliminate routine administrative tasks, allowing your lawyers to focus more on their clients. CosmoLex lets you tackle all your firm’s financial management within one easy-to-use platform.

With CosmoLex, you can:

• Track accounts payable processes and automate invoicing
• Collect eSignatures with one click
• Access insightful dashboard analytics 
• Conduct automatic three-way reconciliations and LEDES billing
• Collect online retainer payments effortlessly with built-in credit card processing

Practice Management Tools Streamline Billing for Efficient Law Firm Operations

By simplifying your law firm accounting with intuitive time tracking and billing software, you’ll easily differentiate between billable and non-billable hours, save time, and boost profitability.

In a highly competitive industry like law, time is the best currency, and lawyers and law firms need efficient ways to manage it.

There are various methods and techniques your firm can use for time tracking and billing. While attorney billing increments are one method, automating time tracking and billing using legal-specific software gives you peace of mind and allows you to focus on more critical tasks.

Even the best manual time-tracking method doesn’t compare to the efficiency of automatic time-tracking software. To get the most out of your time, software solutions like CosmoLex help you up your game. Provide excellent client service and future-proof your legal accounting processes with one simple solution.

Try CosmoLex practice management software for free today.