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How to Craft Legal Bills That Show Value to Clients
How to Craft Legal Bills That Show Value to Clients
The best firms treat bills, and the time entries they contain, as one of the primary ways of communicating value to clients.
The best firms treat bills, and the time entries they contain, as one of the primary ways of communicating value to clients.
The best firms treat bills, and the time entries they contain, as one of the primary ways of communicating value to clients.
September 2, 2024
Adrian Parlow
Co-Founder & CEO
In this article
Title
Title
Learn how PointOne uses AI to build the world's most advanced time and billing systems.
Legal time and billing, automated.
Learn how PointOne uses AI to build the world's most advanced time and billing systems.
Legal time and billing, automated.
One of the first things new lawyers are taught is how to track time so that it can be billed to their clients. Some firms have formal training for this—what tasks are billable, how to record time spent, how to craft narratives. Others rely mainly on learning by doing. No matter how the skill is taught, one aspect of billing that’s often overlooked is how to effectively convey the value of the work being billed.
A friend of mine who works as in-house counsel shared a bill from a large law firm for over $300,000 in legal work. The bill consisted of 25 pages of time entries, listed one after another, filled with cryptic entries like “review and analyze correspondence.”
What I found interesting was that the firm had done a lot of work for the client. And the client had no concerns about the quality of the work. Yet the client still felt confused and dissatisfied, since it was almost impossible to piece together the scattered time entries into a cohesive understanding of the work.
In other words, the bill conveyed to the client, “We did a lot of things.” What it failed to do was convey, “We provided a lot of value.” Lawyers often conflate the two, but in the client’s mind they are very different.
Bills as Marketing Documents
Having spoken with hundreds of law firms about their billing practices—and formerly hiring over a dozen firms as a General Counsel—one pattern I’ve noticed is that the firms with happier clients and higher realization rates treat their bills like marketing documents.
When a law firm first pitches a prospective client, the marketing team may produce a pitch deck or other collateral to convince the client to hire them. But once the firm is engaged and producing work product, the client is constantly re-evaluating their perception of the work product they’re receiving.
Unlike other types of vendor relationships, there is very little lock-in with a given law firm. If the client perceives the work quality or the value for money to be poor, it’s generally easy to switch to another provider. (There are exceptions to this, for instance during active litigation.)
It’s therefore critical for client retention and realization on bills that firms regularly remind their clients how valuable their work product is. The most effective way to do this is not by wining and dining clients—it’s by sending them bills that actually explain the value of the work performed in a comprehensible way.
How to Write Better Time Entries
Most clients don’t fully understand what goes into producing excellent legal work. When they receive a draft document, they may not realize the careful analysis, research, collaboration, and discussion with specialists that went into producing it. A common narrative like “Attention to draft of document” does almost nothing to convey to the client all of the effort that went into making this an excellent document. Nor does it explain why they should pay thousands of dollars for it.
So far we’ve discussed what not to do when writing bills. Let’s shift to best practices that will help you produce higher-quality bills, resulting in happier clients. Everything starts with the time entries, which are the building blocks that will eventually be used to populate bills. The following are some rules of thumb for crafting good time entries.
More detail is usually better.
The most common examples of poor narratives we see are things like “Attention to matter” or “Review case file.” These narratives are accurate in the general sense, but don’t give nearly enough information for a client to understand what work was actually done.
Of course, at the other end of the spectrum, a narrative that’s a paragraph long is also not ideal. Clients are busy people and don’t have time to read a play-by-play of the lawyer’s entire day.
A good rule of thumb is for the length of the narrative to scale up based on the length of the time entry. An entry that’s 0.1 or 0.2 could be just a few words. An entry for several hours should be considerably more detailed.
Entries that feel like single tasks can usually still be broken down into sub-tasks when described in a narrative. For instance, the second narrative here conveys a lot more value. It tells the client specifically what they got—more favorable IP and indemnification provisions—in exchange for the amount they were billed.
Avoid describing low-value tasks.
As a client, nothing feels worse than being billed at $500+ per hour for tasks that feel mundane or non-value-producing. Reading incoming emails, sending DocuSigns, organizing documents, explaining tasks to other team members. These are all normal parts of being an attorney, but they can feel painful to clients, particularly those who don’t have experience working at a law firm.
There are a couple ways to mitigate this. The most effective way is to offload this type of work to paralegals or administrative staff, who bill at rates more appropriate for this work. Or even better, use technology to speed up or entirely automate low-value tasks.
Of course, this is not always practical. Many lawyers work solo or in boutiques where delegation is less of an option. Work may need to be done on a tight deadline, making it important for the lawyer to handle it directly.
In these cases, it’s up to the lawyer’s discretion on whether to bill the client for this work or write it off—depending on the client and relationship.
If administrative tasks are billed to the client, it can help to combine them with higher-value tasks. For example, combining a Docusign in one time entry along with the document drafting can shift emphasis toward the higher-value task of drafting.
Describe the purpose of a task or activity.
Clients understand most of the tasks and activities a lawyer might engage in—attending calls, sending emails, doing research, drafting documents, etc. But often they won’t understand why a task was done—did that internal call really contribute value to the work product they received, or did it just run up the bill?
A half-hour entry like “Confer with J. Smith” might raise red flags with a client. But once the purpose of that conference is described, it becomes much more clear what value the client received (in this case, assurances that the deal structure will not have negative tax implications).
Similarly, reviewing a document might not on its face seem to convey client value. But once the purpose of that review is described, the value becomes much more apparent.
Combine small entries for similar tasks.
This applies only if the firm and client permit block billing. If they do, it can be much easier for a client to digest a single larger entry that describes an entire task, rather than multiple time entries that describe sub-components of that task.
When listed on a bill, time entries from a single timekeeper might not be in order and may be interspersed with entries from other timekeepers. This can cause the reader to lose context, making it challenging to piece entries together to understand what work was actually done.
Include counterparties to meetings and emails.
This may seem obvious, but we’ve been surprised at how many time entries will describe a call or email without listing the counterparty. This makes it hard for a client to understand the type of work—was the correspondence internal, with the client, with opposing counsel?
Avoid abbreviations and colloquialisms.
This one is a judgment call, as not all abbreviations are bad. Abbreviations and colloquialisms that maintain professionalism and are comprehensible to the client are okay, and in fact can make bills simpler and easier to read.
However, lawyers often overestimate how much clients understand legalese, resulting in bills that are tough to interpret. Generally speaking, abbreviations and colloquialisms should be avoided except for terms that clients are highly likely to understand—keeping in mind their sophistication and familiarity with the subject matter.
Following these guidelines for time entries will produce higher quality bills—but of course, it's also more time-consuming for lawyers. AI timekeeping software like PointOne can help by automatically generating high-quality narratives that fit industry best practices and firm billing guidelines.
Reviewing and Generating High-Quality Bills
Writing time entries is the first—and more important—piece of the puzzle. But it’s not enough to ensure that high-quality bills are sent to the client. Even well-trained associates may write poor time entries. There may be inconsistencies among timekeepers for the same tasks. And the bill, when viewed as a whole, may not convey the value we’d like it to.
Doing Better Pre-Bill Review
The pre-bill review stage (also known as proforma review) is where partners, senior associates, and billing staff review draft bills to catch and fix problems before they’re sent out to clients.
Some of the most important things to look for at this stage include:
Time entries that don’t adequately convey value, as discussed above
Spelling and grammar
Entries that are categorized in the wrong client or project
Inconsistencies among timekeepers—e.g., two people on the same call billing different lengths of time
Tasks that took longer than they should have for the work performed
Missing discounts that were agreed upon with the client
Compliance with Outside Counsel Guidelines
Compliance with firm billing guidelines
While it’s important to review pre-bills carefully, there is certainly a tradeoff between the amount of time required to catch problems, and the improvement in client retention and realization on bills that can be achieved.
Using AI pre-bill review software like PointOne can help get the upside of higher quality bills without having to spend hours every month reviewing pre-bills.
Including an Executive Summary
Another practice I've seen used occasionally—but to great success—is including an executive summary of the work performed alongside a bill. This can be especially powerful for longer bills (like the one in the introduction) where it's challenging for the client to piece together time entries to understand what work was done.
This summary can be included either at the top of the bill itself or in an email to the client accompanying the bill. It would typically be a short paragraph synthesizing the time entries and describing what was accomplished during the time being billed.
This helps the client to see the bigger picture, and makes them less likely to focus on each individual entry. It also gives the law firm an opportunity to frame in their own words why that work was valuable.
Final Thoughts
For firms that care deeply about client relationships and how their work product is perceived, sending high-quality bills is critical. High-quality bills start with better time entries that are more detailed and descriptive of the value provided. Training timekeepers in good time entry skills and providing regular feedback on the time entries they write is a good start.
Nevertheless, at the pre-bill stage, a second layer of review is usually necessary to clean up any lingering issues and evaluate the reasonableness of the bill as a whole.
How much time and attention is devoted to this process depends largely on the client. Private equity firms notoriously value speed and quality but rarely do more than glance at bills. Insurance companies, on the other hand, will reject a time entry for even the most minor non-compliance against guidelines.
Striking the right balance between speed of review and quality of output is key for law firms looking to maximize revenue and efficiency.
One of the first things new lawyers are taught is how to track time so that it can be billed to their clients. Some firms have formal training for this—what tasks are billable, how to record time spent, how to craft narratives. Others rely mainly on learning by doing. No matter how the skill is taught, one aspect of billing that’s often overlooked is how to effectively convey the value of the work being billed.
A friend of mine who works as in-house counsel shared a bill from a large law firm for over $300,000 in legal work. The bill consisted of 25 pages of time entries, listed one after another, filled with cryptic entries like “review and analyze correspondence.”
What I found interesting was that the firm had done a lot of work for the client. And the client had no concerns about the quality of the work. Yet the client still felt confused and dissatisfied, since it was almost impossible to piece together the scattered time entries into a cohesive understanding of the work.
In other words, the bill conveyed to the client, “We did a lot of things.” What it failed to do was convey, “We provided a lot of value.” Lawyers often conflate the two, but in the client’s mind they are very different.
Bills as Marketing Documents
Having spoken with hundreds of law firms about their billing practices—and formerly hiring over a dozen firms as a General Counsel—one pattern I’ve noticed is that the firms with happier clients and higher realization rates treat their bills like marketing documents.
When a law firm first pitches a prospective client, the marketing team may produce a pitch deck or other collateral to convince the client to hire them. But once the firm is engaged and producing work product, the client is constantly re-evaluating their perception of the work product they’re receiving.
Unlike other types of vendor relationships, there is very little lock-in with a given law firm. If the client perceives the work quality or the value for money to be poor, it’s generally easy to switch to another provider. (There are exceptions to this, for instance during active litigation.)
It’s therefore critical for client retention and realization on bills that firms regularly remind their clients how valuable their work product is. The most effective way to do this is not by wining and dining clients—it’s by sending them bills that actually explain the value of the work performed in a comprehensible way.
How to Write Better Time Entries
Most clients don’t fully understand what goes into producing excellent legal work. When they receive a draft document, they may not realize the careful analysis, research, collaboration, and discussion with specialists that went into producing it. A common narrative like “Attention to draft of document” does almost nothing to convey to the client all of the effort that went into making this an excellent document. Nor does it explain why they should pay thousands of dollars for it.
So far we’ve discussed what not to do when writing bills. Let’s shift to best practices that will help you produce higher-quality bills, resulting in happier clients. Everything starts with the time entries, which are the building blocks that will eventually be used to populate bills. The following are some rules of thumb for crafting good time entries.
More detail is usually better.
The most common examples of poor narratives we see are things like “Attention to matter” or “Review case file.” These narratives are accurate in the general sense, but don’t give nearly enough information for a client to understand what work was actually done.
Of course, at the other end of the spectrum, a narrative that’s a paragraph long is also not ideal. Clients are busy people and don’t have time to read a play-by-play of the lawyer’s entire day.
A good rule of thumb is for the length of the narrative to scale up based on the length of the time entry. An entry that’s 0.1 or 0.2 could be just a few words. An entry for several hours should be considerably more detailed.
Entries that feel like single tasks can usually still be broken down into sub-tasks when described in a narrative. For instance, the second narrative here conveys a lot more value. It tells the client specifically what they got—more favorable IP and indemnification provisions—in exchange for the amount they were billed.
Avoid describing low-value tasks.
As a client, nothing feels worse than being billed at $500+ per hour for tasks that feel mundane or non-value-producing. Reading incoming emails, sending DocuSigns, organizing documents, explaining tasks to other team members. These are all normal parts of being an attorney, but they can feel painful to clients, particularly those who don’t have experience working at a law firm.
There are a couple ways to mitigate this. The most effective way is to offload this type of work to paralegals or administrative staff, who bill at rates more appropriate for this work. Or even better, use technology to speed up or entirely automate low-value tasks.
Of course, this is not always practical. Many lawyers work solo or in boutiques where delegation is less of an option. Work may need to be done on a tight deadline, making it important for the lawyer to handle it directly.
In these cases, it’s up to the lawyer’s discretion on whether to bill the client for this work or write it off—depending on the client and relationship.
If administrative tasks are billed to the client, it can help to combine them with higher-value tasks. For example, combining a Docusign in one time entry along with the document drafting can shift emphasis toward the higher-value task of drafting.
Describe the purpose of a task or activity.
Clients understand most of the tasks and activities a lawyer might engage in—attending calls, sending emails, doing research, drafting documents, etc. But often they won’t understand why a task was done—did that internal call really contribute value to the work product they received, or did it just run up the bill?
A half-hour entry like “Confer with J. Smith” might raise red flags with a client. But once the purpose of that conference is described, it becomes much more clear what value the client received (in this case, assurances that the deal structure will not have negative tax implications).
Similarly, reviewing a document might not on its face seem to convey client value. But once the purpose of that review is described, the value becomes much more apparent.
Combine small entries for similar tasks.
This applies only if the firm and client permit block billing. If they do, it can be much easier for a client to digest a single larger entry that describes an entire task, rather than multiple time entries that describe sub-components of that task.
When listed on a bill, time entries from a single timekeeper might not be in order and may be interspersed with entries from other timekeepers. This can cause the reader to lose context, making it challenging to piece entries together to understand what work was actually done.
Include counterparties to meetings and emails.
This may seem obvious, but we’ve been surprised at how many time entries will describe a call or email without listing the counterparty. This makes it hard for a client to understand the type of work—was the correspondence internal, with the client, with opposing counsel?
Avoid abbreviations and colloquialisms.
This one is a judgment call, as not all abbreviations are bad. Abbreviations and colloquialisms that maintain professionalism and are comprehensible to the client are okay, and in fact can make bills simpler and easier to read.
However, lawyers often overestimate how much clients understand legalese, resulting in bills that are tough to interpret. Generally speaking, abbreviations and colloquialisms should be avoided except for terms that clients are highly likely to understand—keeping in mind their sophistication and familiarity with the subject matter.
Following these guidelines for time entries will produce higher quality bills—but of course, it's also more time-consuming for lawyers. AI timekeeping software like PointOne can help by automatically generating high-quality narratives that fit industry best practices and firm billing guidelines.
Reviewing and Generating High-Quality Bills
Writing time entries is the first—and more important—piece of the puzzle. But it’s not enough to ensure that high-quality bills are sent to the client. Even well-trained associates may write poor time entries. There may be inconsistencies among timekeepers for the same tasks. And the bill, when viewed as a whole, may not convey the value we’d like it to.
Doing Better Pre-Bill Review
The pre-bill review stage (also known as proforma review) is where partners, senior associates, and billing staff review draft bills to catch and fix problems before they’re sent out to clients.
Some of the most important things to look for at this stage include:
Time entries that don’t adequately convey value, as discussed above
Spelling and grammar
Entries that are categorized in the wrong client or project
Inconsistencies among timekeepers—e.g., two people on the same call billing different lengths of time
Tasks that took longer than they should have for the work performed
Missing discounts that were agreed upon with the client
Compliance with Outside Counsel Guidelines
Compliance with firm billing guidelines
While it’s important to review pre-bills carefully, there is certainly a tradeoff between the amount of time required to catch problems, and the improvement in client retention and realization on bills that can be achieved.
Using AI pre-bill review software like PointOne can help get the upside of higher quality bills without having to spend hours every month reviewing pre-bills.
Including an Executive Summary
Another practice I've seen used occasionally—but to great success—is including an executive summary of the work performed alongside a bill. This can be especially powerful for longer bills (like the one in the introduction) where it's challenging for the client to piece together time entries to understand what work was done.
This summary can be included either at the top of the bill itself or in an email to the client accompanying the bill. It would typically be a short paragraph synthesizing the time entries and describing what was accomplished during the time being billed.
This helps the client to see the bigger picture, and makes them less likely to focus on each individual entry. It also gives the law firm an opportunity to frame in their own words why that work was valuable.
Final Thoughts
For firms that care deeply about client relationships and how their work product is perceived, sending high-quality bills is critical. High-quality bills start with better time entries that are more detailed and descriptive of the value provided. Training timekeepers in good time entry skills and providing regular feedback on the time entries they write is a good start.
Nevertheless, at the pre-bill stage, a second layer of review is usually necessary to clean up any lingering issues and evaluate the reasonableness of the bill as a whole.
How much time and attention is devoted to this process depends largely on the client. Private equity firms notoriously value speed and quality but rarely do more than glance at bills. Insurance companies, on the other hand, will reject a time entry for even the most minor non-compliance against guidelines.
Striking the right balance between speed of review and quality of output is key for law firms looking to maximize revenue and efficiency.
One of the first things new lawyers are taught is how to track time so that it can be billed to their clients. Some firms have formal training for this—what tasks are billable, how to record time spent, how to craft narratives. Others rely mainly on learning by doing. No matter how the skill is taught, one aspect of billing that’s often overlooked is how to effectively convey the value of the work being billed.
A friend of mine who works as in-house counsel shared a bill from a large law firm for over $300,000 in legal work. The bill consisted of 25 pages of time entries, listed one after another, filled with cryptic entries like “review and analyze correspondence.”
What I found interesting was that the firm had done a lot of work for the client. And the client had no concerns about the quality of the work. Yet the client still felt confused and dissatisfied, since it was almost impossible to piece together the scattered time entries into a cohesive understanding of the work.
In other words, the bill conveyed to the client, “We did a lot of things.” What it failed to do was convey, “We provided a lot of value.” Lawyers often conflate the two, but in the client’s mind they are very different.
Bills as Marketing Documents
Having spoken with hundreds of law firms about their billing practices—and formerly hiring over a dozen firms as a General Counsel—one pattern I’ve noticed is that the firms with happier clients and higher realization rates treat their bills like marketing documents.
When a law firm first pitches a prospective client, the marketing team may produce a pitch deck or other collateral to convince the client to hire them. But once the firm is engaged and producing work product, the client is constantly re-evaluating their perception of the work product they’re receiving.
Unlike other types of vendor relationships, there is very little lock-in with a given law firm. If the client perceives the work quality or the value for money to be poor, it’s generally easy to switch to another provider. (There are exceptions to this, for instance during active litigation.)
It’s therefore critical for client retention and realization on bills that firms regularly remind their clients how valuable their work product is. The most effective way to do this is not by wining and dining clients—it’s by sending them bills that actually explain the value of the work performed in a comprehensible way.
How to Write Better Time Entries
Most clients don’t fully understand what goes into producing excellent legal work. When they receive a draft document, they may not realize the careful analysis, research, collaboration, and discussion with specialists that went into producing it. A common narrative like “Attention to draft of document” does almost nothing to convey to the client all of the effort that went into making this an excellent document. Nor does it explain why they should pay thousands of dollars for it.
So far we’ve discussed what not to do when writing bills. Let’s shift to best practices that will help you produce higher-quality bills, resulting in happier clients. Everything starts with the time entries, which are the building blocks that will eventually be used to populate bills. The following are some rules of thumb for crafting good time entries.
More detail is usually better.
The most common examples of poor narratives we see are things like “Attention to matter” or “Review case file.” These narratives are accurate in the general sense, but don’t give nearly enough information for a client to understand what work was actually done.
Of course, at the other end of the spectrum, a narrative that’s a paragraph long is also not ideal. Clients are busy people and don’t have time to read a play-by-play of the lawyer’s entire day.
A good rule of thumb is for the length of the narrative to scale up based on the length of the time entry. An entry that’s 0.1 or 0.2 could be just a few words. An entry for several hours should be considerably more detailed.
Entries that feel like single tasks can usually still be broken down into sub-tasks when described in a narrative. For instance, the second narrative here conveys a lot more value. It tells the client specifically what they got—more favorable IP and indemnification provisions—in exchange for the amount they were billed.
Avoid describing low-value tasks.
As a client, nothing feels worse than being billed at $500+ per hour for tasks that feel mundane or non-value-producing. Reading incoming emails, sending DocuSigns, organizing documents, explaining tasks to other team members. These are all normal parts of being an attorney, but they can feel painful to clients, particularly those who don’t have experience working at a law firm.
There are a couple ways to mitigate this. The most effective way is to offload this type of work to paralegals or administrative staff, who bill at rates more appropriate for this work. Or even better, use technology to speed up or entirely automate low-value tasks.
Of course, this is not always practical. Many lawyers work solo or in boutiques where delegation is less of an option. Work may need to be done on a tight deadline, making it important for the lawyer to handle it directly.
In these cases, it’s up to the lawyer’s discretion on whether to bill the client for this work or write it off—depending on the client and relationship.
If administrative tasks are billed to the client, it can help to combine them with higher-value tasks. For example, combining a Docusign in one time entry along with the document drafting can shift emphasis toward the higher-value task of drafting.
Describe the purpose of a task or activity.
Clients understand most of the tasks and activities a lawyer might engage in—attending calls, sending emails, doing research, drafting documents, etc. But often they won’t understand why a task was done—did that internal call really contribute value to the work product they received, or did it just run up the bill?
A half-hour entry like “Confer with J. Smith” might raise red flags with a client. But once the purpose of that conference is described, it becomes much more clear what value the client received (in this case, assurances that the deal structure will not have negative tax implications).
Similarly, reviewing a document might not on its face seem to convey client value. But once the purpose of that review is described, the value becomes much more apparent.
Combine small entries for similar tasks.
This applies only if the firm and client permit block billing. If they do, it can be much easier for a client to digest a single larger entry that describes an entire task, rather than multiple time entries that describe sub-components of that task.
When listed on a bill, time entries from a single timekeeper might not be in order and may be interspersed with entries from other timekeepers. This can cause the reader to lose context, making it challenging to piece entries together to understand what work was actually done.
Include counterparties to meetings and emails.
This may seem obvious, but we’ve been surprised at how many time entries will describe a call or email without listing the counterparty. This makes it hard for a client to understand the type of work—was the correspondence internal, with the client, with opposing counsel?
Avoid abbreviations and colloquialisms.
This one is a judgment call, as not all abbreviations are bad. Abbreviations and colloquialisms that maintain professionalism and are comprehensible to the client are okay, and in fact can make bills simpler and easier to read.
However, lawyers often overestimate how much clients understand legalese, resulting in bills that are tough to interpret. Generally speaking, abbreviations and colloquialisms should be avoided except for terms that clients are highly likely to understand—keeping in mind their sophistication and familiarity with the subject matter.
Following these guidelines for time entries will produce higher quality bills—but of course, it's also more time-consuming for lawyers. AI timekeeping software like PointOne can help by automatically generating high-quality narratives that fit industry best practices and firm billing guidelines.
Reviewing and Generating High-Quality Bills
Writing time entries is the first—and more important—piece of the puzzle. But it’s not enough to ensure that high-quality bills are sent to the client. Even well-trained associates may write poor time entries. There may be inconsistencies among timekeepers for the same tasks. And the bill, when viewed as a whole, may not convey the value we’d like it to.
Doing Better Pre-Bill Review
The pre-bill review stage (also known as proforma review) is where partners, senior associates, and billing staff review draft bills to catch and fix problems before they’re sent out to clients.
Some of the most important things to look for at this stage include:
Time entries that don’t adequately convey value, as discussed above
Spelling and grammar
Entries that are categorized in the wrong client or project
Inconsistencies among timekeepers—e.g., two people on the same call billing different lengths of time
Tasks that took longer than they should have for the work performed
Missing discounts that were agreed upon with the client
Compliance with Outside Counsel Guidelines
Compliance with firm billing guidelines
While it’s important to review pre-bills carefully, there is certainly a tradeoff between the amount of time required to catch problems, and the improvement in client retention and realization on bills that can be achieved.
Using AI pre-bill review software like PointOne can help get the upside of higher quality bills without having to spend hours every month reviewing pre-bills.
Including an Executive Summary
Another practice I've seen used occasionally—but to great success—is including an executive summary of the work performed alongside a bill. This can be especially powerful for longer bills (like the one in the introduction) where it's challenging for the client to piece together time entries to understand what work was done.
This summary can be included either at the top of the bill itself or in an email to the client accompanying the bill. It would typically be a short paragraph synthesizing the time entries and describing what was accomplished during the time being billed.
This helps the client to see the bigger picture, and makes them less likely to focus on each individual entry. It also gives the law firm an opportunity to frame in their own words why that work was valuable.
Final Thoughts
For firms that care deeply about client relationships and how their work product is perceived, sending high-quality bills is critical. High-quality bills start with better time entries that are more detailed and descriptive of the value provided. Training timekeepers in good time entry skills and providing regular feedback on the time entries they write is a good start.
Nevertheless, at the pre-bill stage, a second layer of review is usually necessary to clean up any lingering issues and evaluate the reasonableness of the bill as a whole.
How much time and attention is devoted to this process depends largely on the client. Private equity firms notoriously value speed and quality but rarely do more than glance at bills. Insurance companies, on the other hand, will reject a time entry for even the most minor non-compliance against guidelines.
Striking the right balance between speed of review and quality of output is key for law firms looking to maximize revenue and efficiency.
One of the first things new lawyers are taught is how to track time so that it can be billed to their clients. Some firms have formal training for this—what tasks are billable, how to record time spent, how to craft narratives. Others rely mainly on learning by doing. No matter how the skill is taught, one aspect of billing that’s often overlooked is how to effectively convey the value of the work being billed.
A friend of mine who works as in-house counsel shared a bill from a large law firm for over $300,000 in legal work. The bill consisted of 25 pages of time entries, listed one after another, filled with cryptic entries like “review and analyze correspondence.”
What I found interesting was that the firm had done a lot of work for the client. And the client had no concerns about the quality of the work. Yet the client still felt confused and dissatisfied, since it was almost impossible to piece together the scattered time entries into a cohesive understanding of the work.
In other words, the bill conveyed to the client, “We did a lot of things.” What it failed to do was convey, “We provided a lot of value.” Lawyers often conflate the two, but in the client’s mind they are very different.
Bills as Marketing Documents
Having spoken with hundreds of law firms about their billing practices—and formerly hiring over a dozen firms as a General Counsel—one pattern I’ve noticed is that the firms with happier clients and higher realization rates treat their bills like marketing documents.
When a law firm first pitches a prospective client, the marketing team may produce a pitch deck or other collateral to convince the client to hire them. But once the firm is engaged and producing work product, the client is constantly re-evaluating their perception of the work product they’re receiving.
Unlike other types of vendor relationships, there is very little lock-in with a given law firm. If the client perceives the work quality or the value for money to be poor, it’s generally easy to switch to another provider. (There are exceptions to this, for instance during active litigation.)
It’s therefore critical for client retention and realization on bills that firms regularly remind their clients how valuable their work product is. The most effective way to do this is not by wining and dining clients—it’s by sending them bills that actually explain the value of the work performed in a comprehensible way.
How to Write Better Time Entries
Most clients don’t fully understand what goes into producing excellent legal work. When they receive a draft document, they may not realize the careful analysis, research, collaboration, and discussion with specialists that went into producing it. A common narrative like “Attention to draft of document” does almost nothing to convey to the client all of the effort that went into making this an excellent document. Nor does it explain why they should pay thousands of dollars for it.
So far we’ve discussed what not to do when writing bills. Let’s shift to best practices that will help you produce higher-quality bills, resulting in happier clients. Everything starts with the time entries, which are the building blocks that will eventually be used to populate bills. The following are some rules of thumb for crafting good time entries.
More detail is usually better.
The most common examples of poor narratives we see are things like “Attention to matter” or “Review case file.” These narratives are accurate in the general sense, but don’t give nearly enough information for a client to understand what work was actually done.
Of course, at the other end of the spectrum, a narrative that’s a paragraph long is also not ideal. Clients are busy people and don’t have time to read a play-by-play of the lawyer’s entire day.
A good rule of thumb is for the length of the narrative to scale up based on the length of the time entry. An entry that’s 0.1 or 0.2 could be just a few words. An entry for several hours should be considerably more detailed.
Entries that feel like single tasks can usually still be broken down into sub-tasks when described in a narrative. For instance, the second narrative here conveys a lot more value. It tells the client specifically what they got—more favorable IP and indemnification provisions—in exchange for the amount they were billed.
Avoid describing low-value tasks.
As a client, nothing feels worse than being billed at $500+ per hour for tasks that feel mundane or non-value-producing. Reading incoming emails, sending DocuSigns, organizing documents, explaining tasks to other team members. These are all normal parts of being an attorney, but they can feel painful to clients, particularly those who don’t have experience working at a law firm.
There are a couple ways to mitigate this. The most effective way is to offload this type of work to paralegals or administrative staff, who bill at rates more appropriate for this work. Or even better, use technology to speed up or entirely automate low-value tasks.
Of course, this is not always practical. Many lawyers work solo or in boutiques where delegation is less of an option. Work may need to be done on a tight deadline, making it important for the lawyer to handle it directly.
In these cases, it’s up to the lawyer’s discretion on whether to bill the client for this work or write it off—depending on the client and relationship.
If administrative tasks are billed to the client, it can help to combine them with higher-value tasks. For example, combining a Docusign in one time entry along with the document drafting can shift emphasis toward the higher-value task of drafting.
Describe the purpose of a task or activity.
Clients understand most of the tasks and activities a lawyer might engage in—attending calls, sending emails, doing research, drafting documents, etc. But often they won’t understand why a task was done—did that internal call really contribute value to the work product they received, or did it just run up the bill?
A half-hour entry like “Confer with J. Smith” might raise red flags with a client. But once the purpose of that conference is described, it becomes much more clear what value the client received (in this case, assurances that the deal structure will not have negative tax implications).
Similarly, reviewing a document might not on its face seem to convey client value. But once the purpose of that review is described, the value becomes much more apparent.
Combine small entries for similar tasks.
This applies only if the firm and client permit block billing. If they do, it can be much easier for a client to digest a single larger entry that describes an entire task, rather than multiple time entries that describe sub-components of that task.
When listed on a bill, time entries from a single timekeeper might not be in order and may be interspersed with entries from other timekeepers. This can cause the reader to lose context, making it challenging to piece entries together to understand what work was actually done.
Include counterparties to meetings and emails.
This may seem obvious, but we’ve been surprised at how many time entries will describe a call or email without listing the counterparty. This makes it hard for a client to understand the type of work—was the correspondence internal, with the client, with opposing counsel?
Avoid abbreviations and colloquialisms.
This one is a judgment call, as not all abbreviations are bad. Abbreviations and colloquialisms that maintain professionalism and are comprehensible to the client are okay, and in fact can make bills simpler and easier to read.
However, lawyers often overestimate how much clients understand legalese, resulting in bills that are tough to interpret. Generally speaking, abbreviations and colloquialisms should be avoided except for terms that clients are highly likely to understand—keeping in mind their sophistication and familiarity with the subject matter.
Following these guidelines for time entries will produce higher quality bills—but of course, it's also more time-consuming for lawyers. AI timekeeping software like PointOne can help by automatically generating high-quality narratives that fit industry best practices and firm billing guidelines.
Reviewing and Generating High-Quality Bills
Writing time entries is the first—and more important—piece of the puzzle. But it’s not enough to ensure that high-quality bills are sent to the client. Even well-trained associates may write poor time entries. There may be inconsistencies among timekeepers for the same tasks. And the bill, when viewed as a whole, may not convey the value we’d like it to.
Doing Better Pre-Bill Review
The pre-bill review stage (also known as proforma review) is where partners, senior associates, and billing staff review draft bills to catch and fix problems before they’re sent out to clients.
Some of the most important things to look for at this stage include:
Time entries that don’t adequately convey value, as discussed above
Spelling and grammar
Entries that are categorized in the wrong client or project
Inconsistencies among timekeepers—e.g., two people on the same call billing different lengths of time
Tasks that took longer than they should have for the work performed
Missing discounts that were agreed upon with the client
Compliance with Outside Counsel Guidelines
Compliance with firm billing guidelines
While it’s important to review pre-bills carefully, there is certainly a tradeoff between the amount of time required to catch problems, and the improvement in client retention and realization on bills that can be achieved.
Using AI pre-bill review software like PointOne can help get the upside of higher quality bills without having to spend hours every month reviewing pre-bills.
Including an Executive Summary
Another practice I've seen used occasionally—but to great success—is including an executive summary of the work performed alongside a bill. This can be especially powerful for longer bills (like the one in the introduction) where it's challenging for the client to piece together time entries to understand what work was done.
This summary can be included either at the top of the bill itself or in an email to the client accompanying the bill. It would typically be a short paragraph synthesizing the time entries and describing what was accomplished during the time being billed.
This helps the client to see the bigger picture, and makes them less likely to focus on each individual entry. It also gives the law firm an opportunity to frame in their own words why that work was valuable.
Final Thoughts
For firms that care deeply about client relationships and how their work product is perceived, sending high-quality bills is critical. High-quality bills start with better time entries that are more detailed and descriptive of the value provided. Training timekeepers in good time entry skills and providing regular feedback on the time entries they write is a good start.
Nevertheless, at the pre-bill stage, a second layer of review is usually necessary to clean up any lingering issues and evaluate the reasonableness of the bill as a whole.
How much time and attention is devoted to this process depends largely on the client. Private equity firms notoriously value speed and quality but rarely do more than glance at bills. Insurance companies, on the other hand, will reject a time entry for even the most minor non-compliance against guidelines.
Striking the right balance between speed of review and quality of output is key for law firms looking to maximize revenue and efficiency.
