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Smart Timekeeping: How Rocket Matter Helps Lawyers Reclaim Their Time
Henry David Thoreau wrote, “It’s not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?”
While this question applies to many endeavors in life, it rings especially true for the work of busy legal professionals who often feel time slipping through their fingers as they juggle a myriad of administrative tasks on top of their essential legal responsibilities.
Put simply, the real challenge lies not in staying busy but in ensuring that your busyness directly benefits your firm’s overall success and profitability.
If you’ve been watching your billable hours evaporate while you’re stuck dealing with time-consuming manual processes, it might be time to go with a different approach—especially when it comes to timekeeping practices.
In this article, we’ll explore the challenges lawyers face with effectively managing their workload and how smart timekeeping solutions like Rocket Matter can help them reclaim their time and get back to focusing on their clients.
Tired tactics: The pitfalls of traditional timekeeping
Manually tracking time doesn’t just eat into the hours you have available for billable work—it can also create other problems at your firm, like inaccurate billing, unhappy clients, and decreased profitability.
It’s also, to put it plainly, pretty tedious. The good news is that it’s an avoidable headache.
Let’s unpack some of the trickiest timekeeping pitfalls and show you how Rocket Matter’s industry-leading time-tracking software makes these frustrations a thing of the past.
Pitfall #1: Agonizing admin time
“I’d like to spend more time on manual data entry,” said no attorney ever.
But the thing is, when you manually track your time, that’s essentially what you’re doing. And manual timekeeping is often accompanied by other manual processes, like manual invoice creation and billing.
These are core tasks for any law firm, but doing them by hand simply isn’t a good use of your time. Not only do they require extra time and focus, but they can cause you to lose momentum on client projects, business development endeavors, and other revenue-generating tasks.
Demystifying the Billable Hour: How to Right-Size Your Rates
With prices rising so much over the last year (global inflation is forecasted at 8.8% in 2022), it’s the right time to look at your current rates and see if you’re charging enough to remain profitable.
The Rocket Matter solution: Streamlining your processes with features that reduce the need for manual entry
Instead of spending hours hunched over a computer manually entering time, creating invoices from scratch, and sending them out, you can get back to the work that matters with Rocket Matter’s timekeeping software.
Take advantage of key features that will keep you focused on billable hours instead of admin tasks like:
- Automated timekeeping with Rocket Matter Track, our innovative time-tracking software that logs time in the background. No tab hopping or timer switching required!
- Batch invoice generation that pulls from your time entries, ensuring accurate and timely delivery to clients.
- Integration with tools your firm uses regularly, like email and calendar systems for the automatic capture of billable work.
- Fully integrated legal practice management means that all your key information stays within one ecosystem, reducing the need to manually input data.
- Paperless prebills make it easy for the necessary parties to review and approve invoices, ensuring accuracy with less work.
Pitfall #2: Ballparking your billing
When it comes to manually inputting your hours, the potential for making mistakes due to incorrectly logged time entries or guesswork can muck up your billing process.
Mistakes with time entries on your invoices could cause you to overbill or underbill your clients—and both situations create risky situations for attorneys.
- When you underbill, you’re losing money and taking away from your firm’s bottom line.
- When you overbill, you’ll end up dealing with client disputes that could cost you money and damage your firm’s reputation.
The Rocket Matter solution: Automated time-tracking tools that ensure your invoices are always accurate
With Rocket Matter, you can gain control over your billing accuracy with features designed for how legal industry professionals work. Our legal-specific time-tracking software helps you create precise, detailed invoices with features that include:
- Automated time-tracking with Rocket Matter Track captures the time you spend working across all desktop programs, capturing your complete (billable) digital footprint.
- Multiple timers start and stop automatically as you switch from one task to the other, ensuring that nothing is missing when it’s time to invoice.
- Add LEDES codes and context to your time entries to create a full record of your work.
- Mobile-friendly time-keeping allows you to keep the clock running, whether you’re working from the courthouse or the couch.
These features collectively ensure that invoices generated using Rocket Matter's time-tracking software are accurate and reflect the actual work done and time spent on various tasks and projects.
Pitfall #3: Complicated client relationships
As mentioned above, it’s critical to get your time tracking right to maintain healthy client relationships, but that’s not all that goes into keeping your clients satisfied with your services.
Clients expect convenience, consistency, and clarity when it comes to their matters, and if you’re not providing these essentials, they may go looking for another firm.
The Rocket Matter solution: Tech tools to promote transparency, improve communication, and make it easier for your clients to pay
Making every step of the billing and invoicing process easier for both lawyers and their clients is the reason Rocket Matter exists. Our tools promote transparency and convenience and make communicating with clients a breeze.
Take your client relationships to the next level with these excellent tech tools:
- Customizable invoice templates that take the headache out of the invoicing process and clearly detail all the work performed for client matters
- Electronic invoicing software that allows you to send invoices to clients instantly with no hassle
- Online payment options that enable your clients to pay from computers or mobile devices, making the payment process convenient for them while getting you paid faster
- Secure client portals that allow your clients to see any progress with their matters and communicate with you directly for peace of mind
- File-sharing and eSignature tools that allow your clients to view important documents and provide signatures without waiting days or weeks for mail delivery
Ready to reclaim your time and get back to the work that matters most?
If you find yourself spending most of your time juggling repetitive administrative tasks and dealing with time-consuming processes that keep you away from working with your clients, it’s time to switch things up.
When you partner up with Rocket Matter, you’ll have access to tech solutions that will make your process pitfalls a thing of the past.
From time and billing solutions to ensure that every minute of your billable time is accounted for and on the level to client communication tools that promote transparency and enhance your client relationships without sacrificing endless work hours, we’ve got the tools you need to reclaim your time.
Ready to see what Rocket Matter can do for your firm? Schedule a demo or start a free trial today.
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