Free Online Time Clock
An attorney’s time is money. Remembering that gives you more paralegal power. Any time you can adeptly automate a time-consuming task for your attorney, you are making exponential contributions to your firm.
I have noticed that so many small firms or solo practices are either not using a clock-in feature at all or are using an old way that requires someone to calculate the hours.
Keep Your Eye On Your Pennies (Or… Minutes)
First of all, to have an absolutely successful firm you must be meticulous with all your timekeeping, not just client billing. How in the heck do you expect to do this if no one is even paying attention to arrival and departure times? We all know none of us get lunches in the legal field so this should be easy, right? Lol, you already know the Paralegal Power Blog keeps it real.
But seriously. Time is of utmost importance in a law firm. Even if employees are paid a salary instead of hourly, you still must know how many hours they are clocked in daily. And if you are not getting paid a salary of at least $100,000, you should be getting compensated for overtime. It’s always a good idea to remain in compliance with federal laws.
Compete Fiercely With Yesterday’s You
We want to do our best every day and continue to improve. A paralegal should know exactly how many hours she clocks in a week, not just how many she bills. What are you accomplishing during the non-billable hours? I hope you are not billing time monthly to figure your own timesheet like so many legal professionals working for solo attorneys or small firms. Or even worse, doing it for free.
If so, check out this free option that we have used in the past at Paralegal Power. It served us well when we needed it. It isn’t perfect and I never paid to upgrade but it does have a lot of cool features such as it can keep track of Paid Time Off, Year-to-Date and a request feature for time off.
The administrator can also set GPS parameters and time limits for clocking in. And obviously, it calculates the hours and pay and creates actual pay stubs for the firm’s employees.
What’s Your Stats?!
Time management is to paralegals what stats are to sports players. You want to know how many hours you spend at your law firm. Often in interviews paralegals will be asked if they have experience working 60 hour weeks.
Knowing how much time overall it is taking you to accomplish the totality of your tasks can certainly go a long way in requesting help as well. The legal field has a bad habit of not recognizing a good work/life balance. Make sure you are advocating for balance in your life like only a good paralegal would, with evidence to back up your claim of being overworked.
Even if your firm is charging flat fee rates, it is important to know exactly how many hours each employee is clocked in. You can set goals for improvement if you know approximately how many hours it is taking you to finish these cases.
Freshest Firms Keep Time for the Low
No matter what the structure of your law firm is, even if you are a sole attorney with no help or only contract help, you should be using an automated time clock.
If you need an affordable time-tracking app, and who doesn’t, you could really benefit from Freshbooks. It’s accounting software that has time tracking abilities. So you and other members in your firm can bill time to clients for quick and easy invoicing.
For more useful tools for your law firm check out our Resource Page.
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About the Author
Valentina Zapata Harris
Mother | Advocate | Blogger
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