Billion Dollar Lawyers – and How Automated Time Tracking Can Help You Combat Greed

Billion Dollar Lawyers – and How Automated Time Tracking Can Help You Combat Greed

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Today across the globe, millions of people use timesheets, the ubiquitous time tracking tool that hasn’t changed much over the last 100 years. Not only are timesheets expensive to administrate, riddle with errors and inaccuracies, they are also costing both the users and their clients billions of dollars each year in miss-appropriated billing.

Let’s take a real case example, that of a partnership of lawyers who bill using 15 minute interval units, each lawyer with a charge-out rate of $500/hour. As a consumer who needs to use the services of a lawyer, this type of unit charge rate is astronomical, as each contact point with the lawyer, be he writing you a letter, advising you in person or on the phone, will cost you $125 dollars for every 15 minute unit of time (or less) consumed. If for example you call your lawyer because you’re suing your employer for lack of good faith, and you want to know if there has been any response to a letter sent a couple of weeks ago, then there is a strong possibility your lawyer will charge you one whole unit ($125) for your two minute phone call. Remember this phone call which contains no IP, and is just an update on the status of the current process. In fact if you stop to work out the theoretical maximum this individual can charge out in a given year, you’ll be staggered it comes to a whopping $864,000,000 per lawyer (48 weeks *5*60*60*125) – that’s almost a billion dollars for each employee within this legal practice (theoretical max. assumes 1 unit will be charged for each second of work).

Now of course nothing like these fees are actually charged out to the client, but the dollar value should give you a clear indication of how consumers are being duped and grossly overcharged by the legal and accounting profession who insist unit billing is the only way for them to charge out for the time. While that may have been the case using timesheets or time sheet technology, today in the 21st Century, there is no need for such obvious greed, nor is there a need to bill by the unit, as both hardware and software currently allows timing to be done in real-time, accurate to the nearest second.

Almost 120 years ago Ford and Taylor worked extensively on time and motion studies to bring the model T Ford into production line reality. Their work spawned the first pen and paper timesheets, which acted as journals that could be forward to accounts at the end of the month, consolidated and billed out to the client. In the late 60’s with Honeywell and IBM battling for command of the mainframe market, timesheets were digitized and centralized, giving managers an instant snapshot of staffing resources. However, even being digital, timesheets were still, and stall are manual-entry, be that into an Excel spreadsheet or an online web timesheet product. Given the nature of timesheets, given that staff are often encouraged to enter what they’ve been doing every 15 minutes, we get to see how the whole unit billing façade came into being, and how accountants and lawyers were the first to snap up this new way of printing money.

However, in early 2001, all of this began to change as the Window’s operating system became more sophisticated, and the desktop computer gained more power, allowing software developers to enter a new era of automated timesheets, or hands-free time tracking as it’s now more often called. Timesheet costs can  in terms of administration can quickly be calculated here.

Hands-free time tracking was a term first coined by an innovative company called MetriQ, now recognized as the market leader in fully automated time tracking solutions. The first to recognize the inherent costs of timesheets (a 2 minute entry every 15 minutes costs 1 hour/day to administrate), and set about creating a software solution that would allow the computer to manage the time staff spent working on a specific job. Their hugely successful Professional time tracking software finally allowed businesses to accurately time to the nearest second just how long a staff member spent completing a job, speaking on the phone or attending meetings.

Today a number of other vendors have joined the throng in a race to dominated this bloated market and to help businesses manage their costsings and billings to a level of accuracy never before dreamed of.

So what of our greedy lawyers and accountants. Certainly while timesheets dominate the market, keeping to fixed billable units is certainly not something that’s going to go out of fashion too soon, not given the mega bucks these organizations can make without too much effort. However, with the inevitable decline of the timesheet, at some point, as now happens in Auckland, New Zealand, some of the more wealthy clients of lawyers are saying – we want you to represent us, but we want to pay you only for the time you consume – and as such we’d like you to use an automated time tracking solution rather than timesheets. With modern locks and security access, this is now possible, without the lawyer being able to give false accounting or to double dip, another unlawful trick that again works for the consumer.

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Educated to Phd in pure math, and over the years, i've found myself working in a wide range of professions. Currently i am a freelance journalist and offer consulting in time management with a company called The Hands Free Timesheet Company.