Successful Implementation Of Law Department Time-Tracking

Thanks to “e-billing,” law departments now have troves of information about outside counsel activities, but few departments have figured out how to keep tabs on how their own resources are deployed. They should, says HBR Consulting managing director Kevin Clem in this Today’s General Counsel article. He suggests that one effective way of doing that is time-tracking. “Having a detailed view into employees’ day-to-day tasks enables law department leaders to transform their staff workload from the tedious to the strategic, giving meaningful work to attorneys and paralegals while transferring administrative tasks to non-attorney support staff, automating them, or discontinuing them entirely.” One challenge is to avoid damaging staff morale, the worst case being that it’s seen as a precursor to layoffs. It’s possible to avoid such problems or at least minimize them, Clem writes, and he provides some suggestions.