How to increase billable hours and revenue for your law firm

How much time does the average person spend on their phone? Not surprisingly, a lot. People are spending an average screen time of 5.4 hours…

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OpenText

October 5, 20215 minutes read

How much time does the average person spend on their phone? Not surprisingly, a lot. People are spending an average screen time of 5.4 hours on their mobile phones each day, for both pleasure and work.

For busy professionals like lawyers, who tend to work long hours, it’s no different. Mobile phones and devices – especially in an increasingly remote workplace – have simply become tools to extend the billable hour day and give lawyers the ability to work anytime from anywhere. On average, lawyers spend 1.1 hours every day on their phones conducting billable work – but not all that time is being captured. For equity partners in particular, billable hours and profit per partner have a direct impact on how much they are paid (and a measure of the firm’s financial health). So, it is very important that all time is properly captured and billed.  

A new survey suggests that many law firms are losing millions in revenue in billable work, and non-productive time, which could in fact be captured if they were to just abandon some routine tasks in favor of automation. According to the survey, more than 40% of the fee-earners spent 35% or more of their time on non-billable duties (such as logging billable time), while 70% spent at least one-fifth of their time on work that they could simply never charge to a client.

The major culprits? Timekeeping itself and email management – figuring out which work relates to billable work, which doesn’t and the continued reliance on manual processes.

Case in point: when it comes to time spent communicating with clients on mobile phones (1.1 hours per day), lawyers then spend even more time trying to reconstruct the fragments of what they did for what client, when and for how long (trying to recreate time spent in six-minute increments). It’s estimated that only 20% of this activity is captured and billed. Think of the loss to firm revenue – a law firm with 100 lawyers and a blended billable rate of $300 per hour loses $8.6 million in uncaptured revenue per month.

Systemic reliance on inefficient processes not only reduces productivity (and can make associates work even longer hours than they already do and encourage unnecessary added toil). Manual processes literally take money out of the firm’s pockets. As a result, doing billable work, not being able to capture it fully on mobile devices, then adding in a bunch of more unbillable work isn’t a good thing.

Automatically capture billable time when working on your mobile device

Increasing productivity within both billable and non-billable hours can bring greater efficiency to workflows, reduce lawyer burnout and improve profit per partner. Technology to automate billable processes on mobile phones and devices is now available to help lawyers convert time spent on administrative tasks to billable hours.

Thanks to OpenText™ Mobile Time Capture for eDOCS by ZERO, OpenText™ eDOCS customers can now experience a new level of productivity when working on mobile devices. While you handle your client’s work, ZERO tracks the time spent and uploads that time to your firm’s time and billing system.  

And while you are already in the email, you can quickly and easily file that email alongside the rest of your related content into eDOCS with ZERO’s AI-powered predictive email filing for mobile phones and devices. No need to go back into your email on your desktop and file the email. It’s done the first time you look at the email, thus saving precious time so you can focus on other important matters.

Further, Mobile Time Capture for eDOCS by ZERO intuitively sorts emails by importance to ensure the most important emails are read first. offers “wrong recipient” detection in real time and provides against data loss prevention (DLP). Lawyers also have the ability to sort their inboxes by sender, filing status and importance.

Your data stays with you. Lawyers, who have treasure troves of high-value client IP, trade secrets, regulatory filings and other sensitive data in emails and attachments on their mobile phones, don’t need to worry about data security. ZERO’s embedded AI works on the device itself—no data is processed outside the devices, keeping client data secure from breach and latency.

Shore up more revenue and stress less

With Mobile Time Capture for eDOCS by ZERO, eDOCS customers can automatically bill time reading emails, reviewing attachments and documents, and responding to emails on their mobile devices. At the same time, you can save time by opening linked documents from eDOCS on mobile, predictive filing to eDOCS on mobile, and move to folder filing on mobile.

At the end of the day, you’ll have captured all of your time, increased profit and been more productive.

About eDOCS and OpenText Mobile Time Capture for eDOCS by ZERO

OpenText eDOCS is a light-footprint, cost-effective, highly flexible content management solution for legal organizations that have sensitive and high-value work product. It balances traditional requirements for security, privacy, and regulatory compliance with the need for information that is instantly accessible, anytime from anywhere, and easy to work with, share, and collaborate on.

For more information about eDOCS, visit the webpage or to learn more about OpenText Mobile Time Capture for eDOCS by ZERO, contact SolExPartners@opentext.com.

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OpenText, The Information Company, enables organizations to gain insight through market-leading information management solutions, powered by OpenText Cloud Editions.

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