Time recording is the least glamorous skill in legal practice and one of the most consequential. A fee earner who records time accurately and contemporaneously generates substantially more revenue than one who does not — not by working longer hours, but by capturing the value that is already there. Yet time recording discipline varies enormously across firms and individuals, and poor practice is deeply embedded in legal culture.

This guide sets out practical, evidence-based best practices for fee earners who want to record time well — not to satisfy billing managers, but because accurate time recording is a direct financial return on the work they have already done.

Why Time Recording Matters (More Than You Think)

The Recording Gap

Research consistently shows that fee earners who reconstruct their time at the end of the day — let alone the end of the week — systematically under-record by 15–25%. An eight-hour working day produces perhaps six hours of billable activity. A fee earner who records contemporaneously captures five to five and a half hours; one who reconstructs at 5:30pm captures four to four and a half. Over a year, that gap compounds: 30 minutes per day is 130 hours per year. At £250 per hour, that is £32,500 in unrecorded fees per fee earner.

A firm with 10 fee earners, all reconstructing time daily rather than recording contemporaneously, is writing off over £300,000 per year in work that was done but not captured.

The Write-Off-at-Billing Problem

Recording time is necessary but not sufficient. Time that is recorded vaguely — “telephone call 0.5”, “reviewing documents 1.0” — is vulnerable to write-off at billing review. A billing partner who cannot understand what was done in a time entry will write it off rather than risk a client query. Research suggests 20–30% of write-offs at billing arise not from genuinely unrecoverable time but from inadequate narratives.

Client Transparency

Good time recording also serves clients. Clients who receive detailed billing narratives — who can see exactly what was done on their matter and when — are more likely to pay promptly and less likely to dispute. The Legal Ombudsman data consistently shows that billing disputes correlate strongly with poor time recording: clients who cannot understand their invoice query it; clients who can see the work done tend to pay it.

The Fundamentals: Recording Contemporaneously

What “Contemporaneous” Actually Means

Contemporaneous time recording means logging the entry at the point of doing the work — or as close to it as possible. The practical standard is: log the entry before moving on to the next task. Do not let more than two or three tasks accumulate before recording.

This is a discipline, not a technology question — though technology helps. The fee earner who opens a time entry when they pick up the phone, lets it run while they take the call, and logs the narrative before hanging up is capturing time correctly. The fee earner who completes three phone calls, two emails, and a document review and then tries to reconstruct all five entries from memory at lunchtime is not.

The Six-Minute Unit Standard

The standard unit in UK legal practice is six minutes (one-tenth of an hour). This is not arbitrary: six-minute recording requires some granularity, but does not encourage over-precision that slows the recording process. Three-minute units are used by some high-volume practices (particularly in debt recovery or fast-track litigation) but are uncommon in general commercial practice.

Avoid rounding up systematically. A five-minute phone call is one unit (0.1). A twelve-minute call is two units (0.2). A twenty-minute call is three or four units (0.3 or 0.4 depending on whether it ran closer to eighteen or twenty-four minutes). Systematic rounding up to the nearest half-hour or hour is a regulatory risk and a client trust risk.

Recording Every Recoverable Task

Fee earners often under-record because they apply a mental filter — “that was only two minutes, not worth recording” or “I don’t think the client would pay for that.” This filter is the enemy of accurate time recording.

The test for whether to record is not whether the time was short or whether the client will pay — that judgment belongs to the billing partner, not the fee earner. The fee earner’s job is to record every minute of professional time spent on the matter. If the billing partner writes it off, that is their call. If the fee earner never records it, it is never evaluated.

Items that are routinely under-recorded include:

Short phone calls (under five minutes)
Reading incoming correspondence
Short emails sent in response to a client or third-party query
Reviewing documents drafted by a colleague
Short internal discussions about a matter
Court attendance waiting time

A fee earner attending court who records only the hearing time and ignores 90 minutes of travel and waiting time is discarding a significant portion of a day’s billing potential.

Writing Narratives That Survive Billing Review

The Standard to Aim For

A good time narrative answers three questions:

What was done? (specific action, not generic category)
In relation to what? (the specific issue or document, not just “the matter”)
Why was it necessary? (implied or stated — enough context for the billing partner to understand)

Poor narrative: “Telephone call with client — 0.3”

Adequate narrative: “Telephone call with client re progress on exchange of contracts”

Good narrative: “Telephone call with client re lender’s requirements for title report and impact on completion timeline; advised on likely two-week extension and recommended client contact broker to confirm funding availability”

The good narrative takes perhaps 15 seconds longer to write. Multiplied by 20 entries per day, that is five extra minutes. In return, the entry is more likely to survive billing review, less likely to be disputed, and more informative for the client.

Avoiding Blocked Billing

Blocked billing — combining multiple activities into a single time entry — is not technically prohibited but is heavily disfavoured on detailed assessment. A single entry for “correspondence, telephone calls, and document review — 4.0 hours” gives the costs officer or paying party no basis to assess whether the time was reasonably spent. Courts will often apply a blanket reduction to blocked entries.

Separate entries are almost always better. Six entries of 0.5–1.0 hours are more defensible than one entry of 4.0 hours covering the same activities.

Recording for Inter Partes Recovery

Where a matter is likely to proceed to detailed assessment, the time records become the raw material for the bill of costs. Narratives must meet the higher standard required for court scrutiny — specific enough to describe the work, linked to the issues in the case, and with no hint of duplication.

Instruct fee earners on contentious matters to write narratives as if they will be read by a Costs Officer scrutinising each entry. The practical standard is higher, but the discipline of writing for an informed critical reader produces universally better records.

Time Recording by Task Type

Emails and Correspondence

Every substantive email sent or reviewed is recordable. “Reading and responding to email” is recoverable; so is “reviewing lengthy email from opponent’s solicitors setting out revised position on indemnity clause and considering implications”. The second narrative recovers the time; the first often gets written off.

For email-heavy matters, some firms use automated email-to-time tools that log the time spent on each email. This can improve capture rates significantly — particularly for fee earners who spend large parts of their day in email and routinely under-record because individual emails feel too small to log.

Telephone Calls and Meetings

Telephone calls are among the most under-recorded activities in practice. A fee earner who takes 10 calls per day and records only the six that lasted more than ten minutes is discarding up to an hour of recordable time per day.

Log the start time when the call begins. Log the narrative immediately after hanging up. For long or complex calls, make a brief note of the key topics during the call to assist with narrative writing — a sticky note or a draft email to yourself works well.

Document Review and Drafting

Document review is often recorded too low. A fee earner who spends two hours reviewing a complex contract and records 1.0 because “that seems like enough for reading” is under-recording. Review time is professional time and should be recorded accurately.

Drafting is usually more consistently recorded, but narratives are often weak. “Drafting contract” is not a narrative. “First draft of asset purchase agreement, covering conditions precedent, representations and warranties, and IP assignment provisions” is.

Research

Legal research is recoverable and should be recorded. Include the specific issue researched and, briefly, what you found or concluded. “Research into limitation periods applicable to latent defects in construction contracts” is recoverable and informative; “research” is neither.

Technology: Tools That Help

Practice Management Integration

All major practice management systems (Clio, LEAP, Actionstep, Osprey, Proclaim) include time recording functionality. The better systems allow recording from desktop, mobile, and browser-based interfaces so there is no friction to logging time wherever you are — in court, at a client meeting, or on the move.

Time recording modules that integrate with email (tracking time against email chains automatically) and calendar (auto-generating time entries from meeting invitations) significantly reduce the recording gap.

AI-Assisted Time Recording

The most significant recent development in time recording is AI-assisted capture: tools that monitor fee earner activity — emails opened and replied to, documents reviewed and edited, calls attended — and automatically generate draft time entries for approval. Rather than the fee earner creating entries from scratch, they review and approve (or edit) entries suggested by the AI.

Early adopters report 30–40% improvements in captured time compared to manual recording, driven by the elimination of items that were done but never recorded — short emails, brief calls, and document reviews that fell below the mental threshold for manual logging.

Timers

Simple built-in timers in practice management systems are underused. Starting a timer when a task begins and stopping it when the task ends is the most accurate way to record time. Fee earners who adopt the timer habit consistently capture more time than those who estimate retrospectively.

Building the Habit: Training and Culture

Why Training Matters

Most solicitors qualified without formal training in time recording. They picked up habits — good and bad — from the environment they trained in. A training session of two hours on time recording best practice, backed by the firm’s billing data showing the gap between recorded and billed time, can shift behaviour significantly.

Include time recording in supervision conversations. Ask trainees and newly qualified solicitors to share their time sheets weekly and give feedback on narrative quality. This normalises good practice early.

Setting Expectations

Firms that set clear targets — for example, 5.5 billable hours per day as a minimum expectation — and monitor them create accountability. But targets work only if they are accompanied by training, tooling, and a culture that values accuracy over inflation.

A fee earner who records 7 billable hours per day from an 8-hour working day is generally recording accurately. One who consistently records 7+ hours but whose billing realisations are low is recording time that is not recoverable — the issue is at the billing end, not the recording end.

Obiter and Time Recording

The most sustainable solution to the recording gap is removing it as a manual burden. Obiter reads fee earner email, documents, and activity throughout the day and automatically generates time entries with full narratives for approval. Fee earners spend less than a minute each day reviewing and approving their time — rather than 20–30 minutes reconstructing it. The result is higher capture rates, better narratives, and lower write-offs at billing, without adding to the already significant administrative load on busy fee earners.

Summary

Accurate time recording is not paperwork — it is the mechanism by which professional skill and effort are converted into firm revenue. Fee earners who record contemporaneously, write specific narratives, and capture every recoverable task generate substantially more revenue than those who do not, without working any harder. The habits are learnable, the tools are available, and the financial return is direct and measurable.

Time Recording Best Practices for Fee Earners