Time Tracking for Lawyers: Six-Minute Increments, Matter-Based Time, and Clean Timesheets

Six-minute increments divide an hour into tenths, so each unit is 0.1 hours. A task that takes up to six minutes is billed as 0.1, a task of seven to twelve minutes as 0.2, and so on. The system is common in legal billing because it makes the arithmetic simple and gives a reasonably fine level of detail. Your engagement letter should state the increment you use so the client knows what to expect.

The key question is how you round. Most practitioners round each entry up to the next tenth, which means short tasks add up quickly. A day with many brief calls and emails can produce noticeably more billed time than elapsed time. That is normal under the system, but it is also why clients scrutinize long lists of 0.1 entries. Make sure each one reflects real work and is described clearly.

Record the actual minutes and let the rounding happen at the billing stage. Keeping raw time alongside billed time protects you if an entry is ever questioned, and it gives you an accurate view of where your hours really go. The table below shows how elapsed minutes map to billed tenths when each entry is rounded up, which is the most common approach. If your engagement letter says otherwise, follow that.

A contemporaneous entry is one made at the time the work is done, or very shortly after. It is the most accurate record you will ever have, and it is the easiest to defend. Reconstructing time at the end of the day or the week relies on memory, calendar entries, and email history, all of which miss the short tasks that make up much of legal work.

The losses from reconstruction are rarely dramatic on any single day. They come from the phone call that ran over, the quick review of a draft between meetings, the email that took fifteen minutes to get right. Each one is small. Over a month they can represent a meaningful amount of unbilled work, and they make your timesheets less reliable in ways that are hard to fix later.

The practical habit is simple: start a timer when you begin work on a matter and stop it when you switch. Write the narrative while the task is fresh. If you cannot do that during the day, set aside a few minutes before you leave to complete every open entry while you still remember the details. Same-day completion is the minimum standard worth holding yourself to.

A billing narrative is the description attached to each time entry. It should tell the client what you did and why it mattered to their matter. Entries like review documents or attention to file say almost nothing. An entry like reviewed opposing counsel's revised indemnity clause and drafted response on carve-out for third-party claims tells the client exactly what they paid for.

Start each narrative with an action verb, name the specific document, issue, or person involved, and add the purpose if it is not obvious. Keep each entry to a single task where you can. Combining several unrelated tasks under one time figure, often called block billing, makes it hard for a client to judge whether the time was reasonable, and many clients and billing guidelines discourage it.

Write in plain language. The reader may be a business owner, an in-house lawyer, or someone in accounts payable. Avoid internal shorthand and abbreviations they would not recognize. A narrative the client understands is a narrative the client is less likely to question. It also helps you later. When a matter closes, a clear set of narratives is a record of how the work unfolded, which is useful when you estimate a similar matter for the next client.

• Start with an action verb: drafted, reviewed, revised, conferred, researched.
• Name the document, issue, or person.
• State the purpose if it is not obvious.
• Keep one task per entry and avoid block billing.

Every legal time entry belongs to a client and a matter. A single client may have several matters at once, such as a contract negotiation, an employment issue, and a dispute. Keeping time separated by matter is essential for accurate billing, for budget tracking, and for answering the question of how much a particular piece of work has cost so far.

Set up each matter as its own record before you start work on it, so there is always somewhere to put the time. In TimerMVP, you can set up the client and then add each matter as a project under that client, so every session lands in the right place and reports can be filtered by either level. Whatever system you use, the structure should match how you bill.

Matter-level records also make budgeting possible. If you gave the client an estimate, you can compare time spent against it at any point and raise the issue early if the work is running ahead of plan. Clients tend to accept a budget conversation in the middle of a matter far better than a surprise at the end. Matter-level data also shows which kinds of work you estimate well and which you do not.

Your time records may be reviewed by the client, by an auditor working for the client, or in a fee dispute. In each case, what matters is whether the records are credible. Entries made at the time, with specific narratives and consistent increments, are credible. Entries that appear in a batch at the end of the month, with vague descriptions and round numbers, are much harder to defend.

Keep the original record intact. If you adjust an entry for billing, such as writing down time as a courtesy, record the adjustment rather than overwriting the original. That way you can show both the work performed and the amount billed. It also gives you an honest picture of how much time you are writing off, which is useful when you review your pricing.

If your practice handles client funds in a trust account, keep your billing records consistent with the timing and amounts of any transfers from trust. Your jurisdiction's rules govern how trust funds must be handled, so confirm the specific requirements that apply to you. The time records themselves should make it straightforward to show which work each transfer paid for. When the timesheet and the trust ledger tell the same story, questions are easy to answer.

A monthly review before invoices go out catches most problems while they are still easy to fix. Go through each matter and read every entry as if you were the client. Check that each one has a clear narrative, the right matter, and a sensible time figure. Look for entries that are missing, duplicated, or obviously too long because a timer was left running.

Then look at the totals. Compare time on each matter with any estimate or budget you gave. Look at how much you wrote down or wrote off, and whether one matter or client accounts for most of it. Those patterns tell you where your estimates are off or where a scope conversation may be needed. A matter with heavy write-downs every month is often a sign that the fee arrangement no longer fits the work, and that is worth raising with the client.

A short weekly check makes the monthly review much lighter. Spending fifteen minutes on Friday to complete narratives and fix errors means the end of the month is a final read rather than a reconstruction project. It also keeps the narratives accurate, because you are completing them within days of the work rather than weeks. Fewer corrections at month end means invoices go out sooner, and invoices that go out sooner tend to get paid sooner.

• Read every entry from the client's point of view.
• Confirm the matter, narrative, and time on each entry.
• Compare totals against estimates or budgets.
• Review write-downs and where they come from.

The most common mistake is waiting too long to record time. The longer the gap between doing the work and writing it down, the more time is lost and the weaker the narrative becomes. The second is vague narratives that describe activity without content. The third is block billing several tasks together. Each one makes the timesheet harder to approve and easier to reduce.

Other mistakes are quieter. Leaving a timer running inflates an entry and, if a client spots it, damages trust in every other entry. Recording time to the wrong matter creates billing errors that take longer to untangle than they took to make. Not tracking non-billable time hides how much of your week goes to administration, business development, and courtesy work you choose not to charge for.