Let’s face it, hourly billing is cursed in so some ways. However for the legal professionals who invoice by the hour, maybe the best curse is solely need to preserve monitor of their time. That’s the reason a number of corporations in recent times have developed passive timekeeping instruments for legal professionals — instruments that preserve monitor of a lawyer’s time even when the lawyer forgets to.
Now, an evaluation of passive timekeeping knowledge by the regulation follow administration firm MyCase finds that legal professionals who use passive timekeeping billed an additional 64 hours final yr. Assuming an hourly billing fee of $350, that provides as much as a further $22,425 these legal professionals have been capable of bill.
The discovering got here within the first of a collection of three benchmark studies to be revealed this yr by MyCase and its sibling firm LawPay. This primary report, published last week, seems at regulation agency productiveness, utilizing anonymized knowledge from legal professionals who’re MyCase clients.
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It discovered that, total, the variety of billable hours legal professionals captured utilizing the time-tracking instruments in MyCase greater than doubled from 2021 to 2022, for a complete of 18,426,955 hours.
However for legal professionals who used Good Time Finder, a characteristic that tracks all of a lawyer’s exercise throughout the MyCase platform, they captured a further 579,665 hours. At that $350 hour fee, that advertisements as much as extra billables of practically $203 million.
Along with timekeeping, the benchmark report additionally checked out different key efficiency indicators amongst MyCase clients. For this a part of the report, it appeared solely at solo legal professionals, as a result of they’re probably to make use of a single billing technique.
One of many KPIs the report studied was utilization charges — or the variety of hours billed in an eight-hour workday. Right here, along with wanting solely at solos, it additional narrowed the sphere to solely solos who had greater than 1,000 time entries a yr, reasoning that they deal with a statistically important variety of instances that contain hourly billing.
For that group, the info confirmed that they invoice a median of three.1 hours per day, for a utilization fee of 39%.
Nevertheless, for solos who had not less than 5,000 time entries in 2022, their utilization fee was notably larger. They billed 6.1 hours a day, for a fee of 76%.
One other KPI that the report examined was work in progress by follow space, or the ratio of lively issues to the variety of issues closed over a time period.
“The WIP fee is vital as a result of it gives perception into how effectively your agency’s caseload is managed and helps regulation corporations perceive the share of their workload that’s in progress,” the report mentioned.
It discovered that the follow areas with the very best WIP charges are chapter, immigration and private harm, whereas these with the bottom are employment and visitors.
The ultimate productiveness benchmark the report examined was the variety of court docket date reminders despatched to shoppers. Total, MyCase clients despatched 92,439 court docket date reminders to their shoppers in 2022. By follow space, the common per-case variety of reminders despatched was highest in private harm and chapter, and lowest in household regulation and matrimonial.
The report was written by Nicole Black, senior director, SME and exterior schooling, at MyCase. MyCase shall be releasing extra benchmark studies later this yr.