Time recording in law firms: why it slips and how to fix it

Time recording is how a law firm captures the work each fee-earner does, usually in six-minute units against a matter. It drives billing, pricing and performance data. It slips because it is recorded late and from memory, because some work feels unbillable, and because interruptions break the day into fragments. The fix is a daily routine, clear codes and fewer fragments.

This post is part of our series on law firm profit margins and what drives them. It is an operational guide. How your firm records and bills time is governed by your retainers and your COLP's policies.

One note before we start, because it matters to what follows: WasilX does not record time or push time entries into any system. This is written from an operations point of view, not to sell a timesheet.

What is time recording in a law firm?

A fee-earner records each piece of work against a client matter, with a duration and a short narrative: "Telephone call with client re draft lease, 0.3". The most common unit in UK firms is six minutes (a tenth of an hour), so a two-minute call is often recorded as one unit. The records feed three things:

• Billing, where the matter is charged by the hour.
• Management information: chargeable hours, utilisation, WIP and the true cost of fixed-fee work.
• Evidence, if a bill is challenged or costs are assessed.

Non-chargeable time (supervision, training, business development, admin) is usually recorded too, under internal codes, so the firm can see where the rest of the day goes.

Why is time recording important for law firms?

Because every financial number the firm uses starts there. Unrecorded time cannot be billed. Recorded time with a vague narrative is the first to be written down. And time recorded on fixed-fee work is the only way to learn whether a fixed fee is profitable. The chain from time entry to cash is covered in what WIP means in a law firm and law firm lock-up.

There is also a pattern in the published data. The Law Society's 2026 Financial Benchmarking Survey reported a median of 807 chargeable hours per fee-earner. The Law Gazette's coverage set that against a commonly cited range of 1,000 to 1,200 hours. Not all of that gap is unrecorded work; some is genuinely unchargeable time. But some of it is work that happened and was never written down.

Why do solicitors fail to record their time?

The causes are rarely laziness. They are structural.

• Recording is done at the end of the day, or the week. Memory fails. Short calls and emails are the first things forgotten.
• Fragmented days. A fee-earner interrupted every twelve minutes cannot record accurately, because each fragment is too small to notice.
• Self-censorship. Fee-earners leave off time they think the client will not pay for, which hides the true cost of the matter from the firm.
• Unclear codes. If nobody knows whether a client's update call is chargeable under a fixed fee, it goes unrecorded.
• Bad tools. A timer that needs five clicks is used less than one that needs one.
• No feedback. If nobody looks at recorded time until month end, recording feels like paperwork, not information.

The fragment problem is the one I would look at first, because it is the one the firm controls rather than the individual. Short, unplanned interruptions (a client calling for an update, a colleague with a question, a call transferred from reception) are both hard to record and hard to bill.

How much does poor time recording cost?

There is no reliable UK figure for the value of unrecorded time, and I have not found a published study I would trust. You can estimate it for your own firm. A method, with invented numbers:

• Pick five fee-earners and ask each to record contemporaneously, as they go, for two weeks.
• Compare their chargeable time in those two weeks with the same two weeks' average over the previous quarter.
• If a hypothetical fee-earner records 3.2 chargeable hours a day contemporaneously against 2.8 normally, that is 0.4 hours a day. At £200 an hour and 220 working days, it is about £17,600 a year of time that was happening and not being written down.

Not all of it would be billable. But it would all be known, which changes pricing and fixed-fee decisions. Repeat the exercise once a year. It is cheap, it tells you whether your routine is working, and fee-earners usually find the result as surprising as management does.

How can a law firm improve time recording?

A routine that works better than reminders:

• Record as you go, not at the end. A running timer or a quick entry after each task. If that is impossible, record at least twice a day: before lunch and before leaving.
• Five minutes at 5pm. A daily check against calendar, sent emails and the phone log catches most of what was missed.
• Simplify codes. A short list of matter activity codes and a short list of internal codes. Fee-earners should never have to guess.
• Record everything, decide billing later. Tell fee-earners explicitly: record all time; the billing partner decides what is charged. This separates recording from self-censorship.
• Show the numbers weekly. Each fee-earner sees their own recorded time against their own plan every week, privately. Visible information changes behaviour more than targets do.
• Reduce fragments. Protect blocks of focused time. Route status enquiries away from fee-earners where possible, and batch internal questions into a set time rather than a stream of interruptions.

What should a time entry narrative include?

Enough for the client, or a costs judge, to understand what was done and why. The narrative is often written for the firm's own convenience, but it is read by the person paying, usually weeks later, when the context has gone. Write it for that reader. A useful pattern: action, subject, purpose. "Drafting letter to other side re disclosure timetable, following client instructions of 12 March." Avoid "attendance on file", "review" or "work on matter" on their own. Vague narratives are the ones queried and written off.

Should time be recorded on fixed-fee matters?

Yes, in my view, but reported separately. Time on a fixed-fee matter is not billed, but it tells you whether the fixed fee is priced correctly and whether scope is creeping. Firms that stop recording time when they move to fixed fees lose the data they need to price the next one. There is more in how to price fixed fees without losing money.

What should law firm time recording software do?

I will not recommend a product here, and most practice management systems include time recording. What matters is less the brand than a handful of behaviours. When you evaluate a tool, test these with a real fee-earner, not in a demo:

• One action to start a timer on the matter you are working on. If it takes more, it will be used at the end of the day instead.
• Switching matters without losing the running entry. Interruptions are the normal case, not the exception.
• A daily view against the calendar and sent items, so gaps are visible at 5pm rather than at month end.
• Works where the fee-earner works: at court, on a train, on a phone.
• Narrative templates for common activities, so entries are consistent and defensible.
• Clear separation of chargeable and non-chargeable codes, including a code for fixed-fee work.
• Reports a fee-earner can read about themselves, not only reports for management.

How do you get partners to record time properly?

Partners are often the least consistent recorders in a firm, and they set the culture. Three approaches that tend to work:

• Make it about pricing, not policing. Partners care about whether fixed fees are profitable and whether their teams are overloaded. Their own time is part of both answers.
• Publish a recording completeness figure by team, including the partner, not a league table of hours.
• Have the managing partner go first. A policy the senior people visibly ignore is not a policy.

How does time recording affect billing and cash?

Directly. A bill cannot be drafted until the time is on the ledger, so late recording delays every bill behind it. Entries recorded from memory days later are more likely to be vague, and vague entries are more likely to be queried by the client, which delays payment further. In other words, poor recording lengthens both halves of lock-up: WIP days, because bills go out later, and debtor days, because queried bills are paid later.

A trap: measuring recording as a proxy for productivity

When recorded hours become the main performance measure, two things happen. Fee-earners record more time on the same work (which inflates WIP that later gets written off), and they stop doing valuable non-chargeable work like supervision and business development. Recorded time is information. Treat it as a target and it stops being accurate information. The balance between hours and everything else is covered in billable hours in UK law firms and fee-earner targets.

What makes a good time recording policy?

A short written policy, reviewed yearly, covering:

• When time must be recorded (for example, by the end of each working day).
• The unit (for example, six minutes) and how part-units are treated.
• The list of chargeable and non-chargeable codes.
• What a narrative must contain.
• Who reviews recorded time, and when.
• How write-offs are approved and recorded.
• That fee-earners record all time, and billing decisions are made separately.

Where does WasilX fit?

WasilX does not record time. It works on one cause of fragmented days: the calls that interrupt fee-earners. Each fee-earner's personal assistant covers their calls while they are in court and drafts matter updates for the fee-earner to approve, so fewer "where are we?" calls land in the middle of focused work. If interruptions are what break your fee-earners' days, we are happy to talk it through.

Frequently asked questions

What is a unit of time in a law firm? Most UK firms record in six-minute units, so one unit is a tenth of an hour. Your firm's policy and terms of business set the unit you use.

Why do lawyers record time in six-minute units? It is a convention that divides an hour into ten equal units, which makes billing arithmetic simple. It also means very short tasks are often recorded as one unit.

Should solicitors record non-chargeable time? Yes. Recording supervision, training, business development and admin shows where the rest of the day goes, which is essential for capacity planning.

How often should time be recorded? Ideally as you go. At minimum, daily. Time recorded days later is less accurate and more likely to be written off.

Does WasilX record time? No. WasilX does not record time or push time entries into a firm's systems. Its personal assistant covers fee-earners' calls when they are in court and drafts matter updates for the fee-earner to approve.