Global IP Students

Time-tracking is extremely important, and you’ll need to learn quickly how to do it, and do it accurately. Most litigation and other non-criminal firms will require you to keep track of your billable hours, and you may even have a billable-hour requirement, though this is usually reserved for associates. If you don’t know much about time-tracking, here’s a little more info: Every hour of work you do for a client needs to be billed to that client, for purposes of accurately charging the client and for recovering fees in court judgments.

Especially if you’re in a large firm, you’ll be doing work on as many as a dozen cases every day, and after 13 hours at the office the last thing you’re going to remember is how many fractions of an hour you spent doing research for Client A, or how long it took you to do an index search at the courthouse for Client B. To this end, time-tracking software enables you to record your time on a specific case or for a specific client. Added to the mix are the complications of working on cases which aren’t yet opened, working for people who aren’t yet clients (in the hopes that they will be), doing pro bono work, taking care of administrative paperwork, getting training, and checking your email. Which of those hours are billable, and which are not, and how do you keep track of them? These are things you’ll need to learn on your first day. In sum, time-tracking can be very complicated, and needs to be accurate (if it’s exaggerated, the firm loses reputation and clients; if its underestimated, the firm loses profitability), and learning how it’s done from the outset at your firm is essential to your success.