Kamron Sanders

For many lawyers, making partner at a law firm is the highest tier of the partner hierarchy.

However, accomplishing this goal isn’t always an easy task. Law firms have different partnership structures for managing partners, and different paths to get there.

What Is a Managing Partner at a Law Firm?

A managing partner is a senior attorney on a management team who is often responsible for the day-to-day operations, business plans, policies, and profitability of the firm. Like partners, managing partners have an ownership interest in the firm. 

Responsibilities of a Managing Partner at a Law Firm

A law firm’s managing partner is responsible for managing the operations of the law firm and delegating responsibilities to employees within the firm, including the lawyers and support staff. They’re comparable to the chief executive officer of the firm assisting with developing strategies and goals to support long-term growth for the firm.

Though all managing partners are responsible for both big-picture and day-to-day business affairs for the law firm, the scope and reporting relationships vary based on the size of the firm. 

It’s common for managing partners to be former attorneys, but they may have a non-practicing law degree with sufficient experience in the legal field. 

Law Firm Partner Structure

Partnership structures can take different forms, depending on the firm and its model. Traditional law firm partnership structures often choose partners based on billable hours, years of experience, and tenure. 

Traditional Partnership Structures

In this model, law firms promote based on experience and reward client acquisition and revenue generation, which are considered key factors in long-term growth.

Typically, the partner track follows this structure:

• Law firms promote senior lawyers from within the firm after a number of years of service.
• Law firms compensate equity partners with a profit share and additional responsibilities like decision-making.

This model has flaws, however, such as:

• Time and skill don’t always correspond
• Internal promotions aren’t always the best choice for the firm
• Non-lawyer staff members are excluded from partnership structures and may feel undervalued

Salary and Job Market Overview of Managing Partners

The average salary for a managing partner is $205,242 per year, but it can vary according to experience, location, or size of the law firm. On the low end, a managing partner may earn $109,000 per year, and on the high end, they may earn $395,000 per year.

Along with base salary, managing partners may earn bonuses ranging from $8,000 to $243,000 and profit shares ranging from $1,000 to $491,000. Combined, managing partners may earn up to $705,000 on the higher end of the pay range.

How Do You Become a Managing Partner at a Law Firm?

While making partner can look different at each law firm, there are a few developmental skills lawyers seeking the partner track should encompass. 

Understand the Inner Workings of the Firm 

Managing partners don’t have to be experts in all administrative aspects of the firm, but they should have a high-level understanding of their function. Managing partners are expected to know enough about the different administrative areas to effectively lead those departments and measure their impact on the firm at large. 

Develop Business Acumen

Good lawyers offer legal services but being a managing partner is more involved than practicing law. Managing partners have to bring new opportunities to the firm through new revenue streams or new client relationships, which is where a working knowledge of how to manage a business comes into play.

Build Professional Relationships

Building and maintaining a professional network is important for the success of any attorney, but it’s especially important if you want to make managing partner.  You’ll want to develop your networking skills to build strong professional relationships among your peers, staff, and other stakeholders. 

Practice Managing Change

At its heart, leadership is about managing change. The legal industry – and lawyers – rely heavily on tradition and aren’t often quick to embrace change. 

Managing partners should have the ability to shepherd the firm through change and innovation. This can include rebranding, adding a new practice group, or modernizing the practice. For managing partners today, that could mean understanding the need for legal technology and how it can improve their processes, client satisfaction and contribute to the profitability of the firm. 

Get on the Managing Partner Track

Making partner at a law firm is a lofty goal, but it takes an extra edge for an attorney to get there. Understanding business, administrative areas, networking, and leadership are essential for lawyers to show they have a mind for the business side of a law firm.

The legal invoice process can be a headache for many law firms. From managing different accounts and payment deadlines to ensuring the time tracking is accurate and the invoice reflects different fee structures, it is difficult to imagine a frictionless version of this workflow. Thankfully, automated legal billing software has made this process seamless for all-sized law firms.

This blog post will further explain how to create a custom legal invoice template and the benefits for your firm. 

How do lawyers track their time?

The ways legal professionals track the time spent on a case have evolved over the years. Traditional practices included: 

• Filling tasks and time entries directly in their calendar;
• Cross-checking the time-stamp of a sent email; 
• Monitoring the time spent working on a document; 
• Tracking the history of phone calls; 
• Excel sheets listing their daily activities; 
• Or simply writing down by memory how they spent their time throughout the day. 

Though traditional, these strategies have hidden flaws. Besides being inefficient and time-consuming, the human aspect leaves room for error. Today, there are several legal billing software, such as Bill4Time, with time tracking features and additional functionalities that have widespread benefits for firms.  

By using a time tracking software like Bill4Time, a lawyer’s hourly rate can be broken down into specific billable slots that can be easily justified on behalf of the client. Automated time tracking also saves time trying to record hours and allows for greater accuracy as a few minutes of responding to an email can be easily captured. 

When does a lawyer bill for their services? 

Lawyers will generally invoice a client once their service has been fully completed. This timeline can vary based on the practice area and the nature of the service. 

For example, corporate lawyers that work for small businesses will sometimes, as an act of goodwill, wait until a client is profitable to invoice them for their incorporation. Alternatively, an ongoing legal HR consulting service could be invoiced monthly, whereas the payment for assistance in a divorce could be completed in a lump-sum, one-time payment once everything is finalized. 

Communicating the billing timeline and policy to a client upfront is essential to mitigating common billing mistakes. Plus, no one likes receiving an unexpected hefty bill. 

While it’s almost impossible to predict the exact hours it will take to complete a client case, an approximation can give clients a general idea of what they can expect to pay and when.

How to create a custom legal invoice template

Law firms have unique yet complex billing needs. To address this reality,  legal invoicing software has emerged across the market. These resources are an indispensable piece of any firm’s tech stack as they address the complex nature of legal billing. 

Bill4Time comes equipped with features to manage all aspects of the invoicing process. The platform allows you to create custom invoice templates that can be stored for repeated use. 

Invoice templates reduce administrative work as your details, hourly rates, client information, and payment method are included in the invoice. You can also customize the invoice templates to your firm’s brand. Lastly, they can also be used to automate recurring invoices, all while keeping the process professional and organized.  

What is included in a legal invoice template?

There are a few common items that are always included in a legal invoice template:

• Contact information: both the law firm and the client’s contact information should be clearly listed in the heading of the invoice. This includes the company name, their point of contact’s first name and last name, a phone number, an email, and an address. 
• Send date: the date on which the invoice was created and sent should be indicated for accounting purposes, but also to keep in account the payment terms. For example, if the payment is due 30 days after receiving the invoice, the date indication will help better identify the deadline.
• Payment terms: the conditions and expectations around the payment should be identified on the invoice. 
• Hours billed: the total sum owed should be broken down to include the number of hours billed for the services provided. 
• Line items with the service date and associated cost: details on the services provided should be indicated to provide clarity. 
• Subtotal: the invoice should include the total sum of the different services and taxes if applicable.  
• Due date: to ensure the payment is received within a reasonable delay, the due date should be indicated on the invoice. 

Best practices for sending a legal invoice 

Having a client-focused approach to your firm’s practice applies across all client interactions. From their initial intake to the payment, having a good reputation and repeated business requires clients to feel understood and appreciated throughout their interactions. A pleasant invoicing experience can be an opportunity to distinguish yourself from competitors.  

Before sending an invoice, ask your client who the invoice should be made out to and if they have a preferred payment method — does the client prefer receiving an invoice via email or instead going through the client portal? Do they want to pay by credit card online or by check? These are all factors to consider before sending the invoice. 

How to get clients to pay their legal invoice 

Running after a client for an unpaid invoice is never enjoyable. Below are some actionable steps to help mitigate the likelihood of late or unpaid invoices. 

Clearly communicate your billing policy

The initial client intake consultation is the perfect opportunity to clearly communicate expectations around billing and payments. This information should be provided transparently during the first meeting and written in the onboarding documents. 

Invoice your clients on-time

The best way to consistently send invoices on time is to set automated reminders. Creating a system of reminders where clients receive their monthly statements three to four days after the beginning of the month can help increase the likelihood of timely payments. Most people set their payroll towards the start of the month, meaning your client invoice would be paid after processing employee payroll. Moreover, having a set schedule crystallizes expectations and minimizes the time between completing and billing for the work. 

Offer an online payments option

Every invoice should be clear, concise, and have a simple payment system. To avoid the time-consuming practice of processing paper checks, offer an online payment option to your clients. Through Bill4Time’s built-in payment processor, Bill4Time Payments, you can accept and process online payments right within the platform. You can also create custom payment links to add to your website or even your emails. 

Simply adding this in-demand payment method can get your law firm paid 70% faster than average billing practices. 

Tracking your legal billing and invoicing  

By using automated legal billing software, you get access to comprehensive reporting to view your firm’s financial performance. Data within this dashboard includes accounting activity, the historical activity of accounts, expenses, month-by-month productivity, and user activity. 

With Bill4Time’s exclusive reporting, the types of expenses and time reports can include: 

• Account Activity report: a general accounting report that reflects payments made from the Trust account to the operating account.
• Account Balance report: an accounting report with the balance due for each Project.
• Billable Utilization report: a report outlining targets vs. what was actually billed.
• Client List report: a report showing various client details. 
• Collections report: a payments report showing the amount collected for each invoice. 
• Inactivity report: a report showing how long since a Project has been worked on.
• Invoice A/R Aging report: a standard accounts receivable aging report. 
• Invoice Email report: a history of invoices report. 
• Invoice Status report: a report listing the payments that need to be applied to invoices. 
• Project Summary report 
• Realization report: a report of the amount billed/finalized divided by the total hours. 
• Resource Utilization report: a report with the Performance Targets in the User Profile vs. Labor Hours.

By identifying and viewing this data, you can identify trends to achieve success and get insight into the forecasted revenue.

Implement a Custom Legal Invoice Template Process 

With minimal upfront work, your law firm can create a legal billing and invoice process that saves you time and money down the road. Bill4Time offers all of the features your firm needs to eliminate time-tracking errors, streamline your billing, automate your invoices, and process online payments. 

If you’re ready to optimize your firm’s time tracking and legal billing process, you can schedule a demo of Bill4Time, to see the multiple timers or online payments functionality in action. 

Keeping track of time spent on case research, briefs, client meetings, the discovery process, and other billable tasks is a big part of a lawyer’s day-to-day work and a firm’s revenue. Lawyers often devise their own method of tracking time, but that may not be the most accurate or reliable compared to other legal time tracking methods.

Forgetting to start or stop a timer, losing track of billable time, waiting until the end of the day or week, or “guesstimating” time spent on a case can not only cost the lawyer and firm money, but it may have legal implications. Without a reliable and consistent timekeeping process, law firms are prone to risks and organizational challenges like poor productivity and profitability.

How Do Lawyers Track Their Time?

Despite the increasing adoption of legal management solutions, many law firms still rely on more traditional, manual methods of calculation to charge clients by the billable hour. With this method, time is typically constructed in 10- or 15-minute increments. This time may be captured on spreadsheets, sticky notes, notepads, or other paper methods.

While it may seem convenient, this process of tracking time is inaccurate at best, and unethical at worst. It’s far too easy for lawyers to lose track of their time or make errors that can lead to inaccurate billing, client concerns, and a damaged reputation for both the lawyer and the firm.

If that’s not enough, manual time tracking is a cumbersome process. It takes extra time to track time using manual methods – time that isn’t billable. In addition, if there’s a dispute, lawyers have no way to show their process or account for the time spent on casework.

What Are the Risks of Improper Legal Time Tracking?

Lawyers open themselves and the firm to many risks when time tracking is done improperly, such as:

1. Losing Billable Time (and Revenue)

Billable hours are the bread and butter for a law firm, but they have to be accurate. No matter how stringent the processes, it’s highly probable that lawyers will forget to start or stop time, lose billable hours, or make inaccurate estimates.

According to the American Bar Association, lawyers can lose up to 10% of their billable time if they wait until the end of the day to log hours. If they wait longer, such as a day or two, that time lost can increase up to 25%.

With legal time tracking software, lawyers can quickly and easily set timers, record multiple time entries on one screen, and automatically convert appointments into time entries. Both billable and non-billable time is tracked and recorded when it happens, providing more precision and accuracy in billing.

2. Vulnerability to Billing Disputes

When lawyers use manual methods to track billable hours, there’s no accountability for their time. If a client questions the bill or believes the lawyer is “padding it,” the lawyer can’t adequately account for the time spent on case research, the discovery process, or other billable tasks.

A comprehensive record of time produces an auditable trail that can be referenced for billing disputes or questions. For example, a block of hours spent on discovery doesn’t necessarily inspire confidence from the client. Shorter, detailed time blocks, such as “one hour spent researching legal precedent” and “10 minutes responding to email from the opposing counsel,” help clients understand how the time was spent. It’s also easier to cross-reference some of this time with recorded appointments or correspondence.

3. High Administrative Costs

Manually tracking time costs productivity, as do manual billing processes. Often, firms have designated staff to sort through the timekeeping records for the firm’s lawyers, organize them, input them into a billing system, and send invoices to clients. Between the two, a lot of non-billable time is spent merely processing client bills.

Time tracking software streamlines and automates these processes to not only reduce errors and discrepancies but to help lawyers and staff save time and manpower. Lawyers can automatically track and sort their hours according to the case, client, or billable and non-billable time, simplifying the organization process for billing staff.

4. Decreased Client Experience

Clients seek out law firms for legal guidance and expertise, but the experience they have with the firm is what stays with them. Even if the outcome of the case isn’t what they had hoped, they remember how they were treated

And that includes billing.

Trust is important in the lawyer-client relationship. If clients have doubts about the accuracy of their bill or are overcharged, that can have a detrimental impact on the firm’s reputation. Having accurate, detailed, and transparent timekeeping and billing processes inspire trust and confidence from the client, and in turn, a better experience with the firm.

Accurate timekeeping is also a matter of professional ethics. According to the American Bar Association’s Model Rule 1.5, the guidelines for fees in a professional legal relationship include the proper consideration of the time and labor necessary for a matter. Keeping accurate and detailed records are one-way lawyers can adhere to these guidelines.

What Is Time Tracking Software?

Designed for the legal industry, time tracking software is a tool that allows lawyers to input, organize, and record the time spent on billable and non-billable tasks. These tools are designed specifically for the needs of lawyers to provide granular details and improve workflows.

Lawyers often handle tasks for multiple clients or cases each day, which can create confusion and mistakes. Legal time tracking for lawyers helps to simplify and streamline the timekeeping process to reduce missed hours or billing errors.

Bill4Time is a law practice management platform that allows law firms to seamlessly track their time. Multiple timers improve billable hour accuracy by allowing you to start and stop as you jump between client matters.  

The platform also comes with billing features like custom invoicing, built-in payment processing, and advanced reporting to gain better insight into your firm’s finances. 

Automate Time Tracking for Lawyers

Accurate time tracking is the lifeblood of a law firm to remain profitable, yet many lawyers still prefer chaotic manual methods that can lead to over- or underbilling, ambiguity, or client concerns. With the right tools, time tracking for lawyers can be an easy part of the workflow. A legal management platform with timekeeping tools can help lawyers track time with transparency and accountability.

The secret to a successful law firm is keeping a close eye on its performance. Law firms that consistently track their key performance metrics can determine where to scale for growth and identify other areas for improvement. Whether it’s daily, monthly, or quarterly, keeping a pulse on key business metrics with the use of legal time and expense reports can help law firms make proactive decisions to remain profitable and mitigate potential risks. 

Rather than keeping metrics in a spreadsheet or paper, law firms can use law practice management software to quickly generate reports. It’s important to know what to track first — continue reading to learn the type of legal time and expense reports firms should pull and best practices. 

What Are Legal Time and Expense Reports?

Time and expense reports can reveal whether a law firm is profitable or simply breaking even. Typically, time and expense reports may include:

• Time entry reports, which cover the time entries by client or matter
• Time summary reports, which include weekly and monthly time entry totals by the client, matter, and staff member

These two reports can offer insights into how current hours are divided between clients and matters. This can show which ones are taking too long to complete or where time can be better managed, either by the firm or by the staff members.

What Information is Captured on Legal Time and Expense Reports?

1. Billable Performance/Revenue Report

This report provides in-depth knowledge of the actual revenue vs. the target revenue of the law firm. It features performance metrics like collection, utilization, and actualization rates. When a law firm has these metrics at hand, they can determine where things are working and what can be done to improve the numbers, as well as the individual performance of staff members.

Time tracking software streamlines the timekeeping process by accurately and quickly tracking time with a timer on a phone, tablet, or desktop. Billable and non-billable time can be tracked separately for keener insights. Best of all, law firms can review and track daily or weekly time summaries to keep up with the productivity and financial status of the organization.

2. Statement of Cash Flow

A statement of cash flow helps law firms track and manage revenue generation. This should include the net income, cash from operating activities, adjustments on net income, and depreciation. This report can indicate whether the firm may need more cash or when it’s safe to commit some funds to savings.

With the support of legal management software, firms can generate time and expense reports to get a comprehensive view of their finances. This report should reflect payment history, summary reports, expenses, or any overdue balances.

3. Accounts Receivable Report

The accounts receivable report shows the money owed to the law firm. This report is essential for tracking the status of invoice payments and if any are unpaid. Law firms should monitor accounts receivable on a firmwide basis and per-client basis.

If client invoices have a tendency to be delayed, it may be beneficial for law firms to streamline the process with online payment options. The paper billing process is slowly phasing out in the legal industry with advancements in legal technology. Bill4Time Payments is a native payment processor on the Bill4Time platform. Having online payments built into a firm’s legal practice management software allows for a convenient, secure way for payments to be collected faster. Bill4Time Payments also comes equipped with exclusive reporting to keep track of payments, refunds, overdue balances, and more. 

4. Monthly Revenue Report

The monthly revenue report is important for law firms to appreciate the capital flowing in and out. This report considers the time billed and current collection, and it can be narrowed to reflect daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or yearly revenue.

Bill4Time comes with custom features including detailed revenue reports and report customizations that allow for in-depth views of different performance metrics. The combinations are virtually limitless to help firms reach their goals.

5. Balance Sheet Report

A balance sheet covers the assets and liabilities of the firm, including accounts payable and current capital. This helps law firms gauge the firm health and make adjustments to ensure that things are on track for success in the short and long term.

With time tracking software, law firms can generate balance sheets with granular firm data like balances for individual clients or trust payments for IOLTA compliance.

6. Profit and Loss Statement

The income statement is a report that firms can use to track earned revenue and expenses paid, including overhead, marketing costs, insurance costs, and other expenses. This statement shows the most recent figures for the entire year, rather than periods of highs and lows, to evaluate the firm’s health on an annual basis.

Each profit and loss statement tracks the full previous year, working backward to plan for future performance. Firms can also customize these reports to account for seasonal performance or periods of change that may have impacted the numbers.

How Time and Billing Software Streamlines Expense Tracking

These legal time and expense reports are a great foundation for the type of metrics law firms should be tracking on at least a monthly basis. With legal management software like Bill4Time, law firms can leverage robust reporting functionalities and custom features to monitor firm health and performance.

A business can’t run smoothly without a consistent process, proper legal project management, and work allocation among staff. In law firms, tasks can originate from many sources — clients, partners, or firm management. How these tasks are distributed typically depends on specialization, skill, and time sensitivity. Unfortunately, what’s not mentioned in this list is bandwidth. Accounting for staff workloads can be difficult in situations where there are too many time-sensitive tasks or limited staff. If your staff is overloaded with tasks the likelihood of items falling through the cracks increases as well as burnout. Both of which lead to a decrease in productivity and disruption of business. 

To limit risking business continuity or your staff’s mental health, it’s essential for law firms to create streamlined, consistent systems to distribute workloads and keep all employees on the same page. 

Here are 3 tips for better legal project management and work allocation of law firm staff: 

1. Plan and Strategize

Effective work allocation requires thorough planning and strategizing with real-time visibility into the staff’s schedules and workloads. This is especially true of large firms with a lot of staff members. If partners or management aren’t aware of how much each associate or staff member is balancing, they may unintentionally overload them. 

Ideally, there should be a centralized task management system that management uses to plan and assign work to associates and other staff members. This system should be updated daily and would provide current information on everyone’s current responsibilities. This ensures that management and partners can monitor their workloads and avoid piling everything onto just a few people.

With this information at their fingertips, partners and management can make strategic decisions to ensure that the appropriate work is allocated to the appropriate staff. 

2. Divide Work Evenly

Overloading some associates and leaving others underutilized can quickly lead to issues of burnout, poor work-life balance, and job dissatisfaction. At a time when firms are struggling to attract and keep talent, proper work allocation is paramount. 

Legal practice management software can help partners and firm management to evenly distribute work. LPMs provide a comprehensive view of the staff and their time, schedule, and skill sets, giving partners and management all the information they need to develop all the staff’s competencies and keep the workload more balanced. Workloads should be balanced across departments as well. Work allocation requires planning, especially so in larger firms with multiple departments or offices. This is all the more reason to make work allocation a strategic and streamlined process. 

Processes for work allocation can be standardized and systemized across the firm, offices, and practice groups. Law firms can set this up on their own with task and time management solutions, but if necessary, a larger firm can hire support staff to handle work allocation and develop systems to assign work to the appropriate parties.

For example, a work allocation manager can manage workflows and monitor skills and availability across all practice areas, departments, and locations to ensure the entire machine is running smoothly.

3. Track Development Needs

It’s tempting to hand off high-priority tasks to the most capable and experienced associates or staff members, but that doesn’t serve the firm’s long-term needs. If the same staff members keep learning, growing, and succeeding, it leaves skill and experience gaps in others. 

Law firms should have a comprehensive view of the qualifications, skills, and proficiencies each associate has, areas of growth, and the skills they’d like to develop in the future. This provides a more democratic method of assigning tasks while keeping the whole team learning and growing together. A law practice management software that has custom reporting functions can help keep track of user activity or where tasks have been historically allocated to simplify this process.

If significant skills gaps are discovered, law firms need to take a proactive approach to correct them. All associates and staff members should have management training, business development training, client training, and communication training. Associates should have ongoing development in areas related to their practice or the firm’s goals. Partners and managers should be available for support and ongoing mentorship to help associates stay on track to reaching their goals.

The Importance of Legal Project Management

Legal project management and work allocation across teams can be a unique, ongoing challenge. However, with the right systems and processes in place, your firm can ensure that work is dispersed evenly and fairly. When done strategically, not only will this help move work forward and support productivity, but it will improve the overall satisfaction of your staff at the workplace. Above all, the livelihood and health of your staff is the true marker of a successful business.

Lawyers often struggle with time management. Perhaps it’s from taking on too much, or lack of resources to keep them better organized. Whatever the cause, adopting effective time management techniques can help lawyers be more productive throughout the day and increase their billable hours. Many tools are available to law firms, like Google Calendar to enhance productivity and time management. This tool helps to track time effectively and avoid wasted time, missed deadlines, and inaccuracies that can lead to discrepancies in the billable hours.

Too many lawyers and law firms shy away from technology, but it’s a valuable tool to help with the day-to-day tasks of a law firm. With the shift to remote work, the demands of clients, and the increasing workloads, technology is a vital addition. Even something as ubiquitous as Google Calendar can go a long way toward improving the processes at a law firm, especially when it’s combined with legal practice management software.

What Is Google Calendar?

Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service that’s available on the web and as mobile apps for Android and iOS platforms. It’s part of the Google Suite of office software, which includes tools like Google Drive and Google Meet.

With Google Calendar, users can create and edit events, set up reminders, and add special calendars for events like birthdays. Google Calendar also syncs with Gmail to automatically track events from emails and add them to the calendar, avoiding errors and double entries.

The calendar has some other helpful features, including reminders for to-do activities, recommended titles, contacts, and locations when creating events, and goals to set and track personal goals. Events are tracked in the local time, but users can specify a different time zone for an event.

1. Law Firms Can Access Google Calendar from Anywhere

Lawyers are working remotely or in the field more often, fueling the need for a cloud-based solution. Google Calendar resides in the cloud, ensuring that lawyers and other staff members can access and alter their schedules wherever they can access the internet, whether on smartphones or laptops.

The calendar allows you to quickly change views between a single day, week, month, or year view to get a full-picture view of their schedule. If others have shared their calendars, each user can opt to see the schedule or hide it to keep things more streamlined and organized.

2. Leverage Tools and Features

Google Calendar has many built-in tools for organization and time management. Events have a set start and stop time or the option for an all-day event. Users can enable a recurring function with a set frequency for events that take place regularly, such as continuing education or staff meetings that occur weekly or biweekly.

Lawyers and other staff members can also organize events by color. For example, client meetings or events that fall under billable time could be marked in blue, while meetings with staff members or non-billable time could be marked in red. For individual tasks on the to-do list, they can be marked in purple.

3. Enhance Law Firm Collaboration by Sharing

Like the rest of Google Suite, the calendar improves collaboration firm-wide. Lawyers can send invites to anyone with an email address and they’ll receive it in their online calendar with the Google syncing feature.

Calendars can also be shared with the entire firm, so everyone has access to each other’s schedules and important events. Share settings ensure that lawyers and other staff members can limit who can see calendars and events, and who can make alterations to the schedule. Lawyers and other staff members can invite other people to events as well, which then shows up in the calendar. People outside the Google Suite will have options to answer “yes,” “no,” or “maybe” to the event.

4. Prioritize Upcoming Tasks and Events

One of the best time-management tips is to organize the day’s tasks by priority. This ensures that the most important tasks are done first, followed by the medium- or low-priority tasks. Lawyers should begin with a full list of things that need to be done in the near future. These can be organized in Google Calendar. This provides a full list of everything that needs to be done, which can then be prioritized by importance. Lawyers can use colors, tags, or notes to designate the most important and least important tasks to stay on track.

Another option is to start with the most tedious or difficult tasks first, then work toward the easier tasks. Similarly, these tasks can be tagged or color-coded for organization in Google Calendar. This feature also offers optional notifications, such as push notifications, as a reminder to complete different tasks.

5. Use Google Calendar Integration with Legal Practice Management Software

Legal practice management software has many tools to manage time and track billable hours. Bill4Time’s Google Calendar integration keeps track of important events and deadlines, ensuring that lawyers are always on top of their to-do lists. The integration automatically converts events to a time entry to better manage time and avoid losing billable hours. This is helpful for lawyers tracking meetings with clients or related to ongoing cases.

With bi-directional sync between Bill4Time and the Google Calendar, you never have to worry about double entry. Both solutions update, so you always have the most up-to-date information no matter which platform you use. Having this feature safeguards from the inevitable human error and allows for a more streamlined billing and invoicing process. 

How Law Firms Can Use Google Calendar and Legal Practice Management Software for Better Time Management

Google Calendar has a variety of tools that are helpful for law firms, including collaboration, access from anywhere using the cloud, and organizational tools like reminders, push notifications, and color coding for events and meetings. Combined with integrations from a legal practice management software like Bill4Time, Google Calendar can ensure that a law firm runs as efficiently and error-free as possible, maximizing billable hours and keeping the day-to-day running smoothly.