How to Record Time as a Lawyer: A Practical Guide for Australian Legal Practice

Time recording is one of those skills that no law school teaches but every law firm expects you to master from day one. Whether you're a graduate entering your first role or an experienced practitioner looking to improve your capture rate, the fundamentals are the same: record everything, record it promptly, and describe it properly.

This guide covers how the 6-minute unit system works, what you should and shouldn't record, the most common mistakes lawyers make, and the tools that can make the whole process significantly less painful.

The 6-Minute Unit System

In Australia, legal time is recorded in 6-minute increments, with each increment representing 0.1 of an hour. This means every hour is divided into 10 units. Here's the conversion table:

The standard practice is to round up to the next unit. If a task takes 8 minutes, you record 0.2 hours (2 units). If it takes exactly 6 minutes, you record 0.1 hours (1 unit). This rounding convention is well-established and generally accepted in costs assessment, provided the underlying work is genuine.

What to Record

The general rule is simple: record every task you perform in connection with a client matter. This includes tasks that feel too small or routine to bother with — because those small tasks are often the ones that add up to an extra hour or more of billable time per day.

Tasks you should always record:

• Telephone calls — including short calls to courts, barristers' clerks, and opposing lawyers
• Emails — both drafting and reviewing client-related correspondence
• Document review — reading contracts, affidavits, expert reports, correspondence
• Drafting — letters, pleadings, submissions, agreements, file notes
• Research — case law, legislation, regulatory guidance
• Client meetings and conferences — in person, video, or telephone
• Court and tribunal attendances — including travel and waiting time where billable
• Internal discussions — conferring with colleagues about a matter (subject to firm policy)
• File management — preparing matter summaries, updating matter plans, organising documents

Tasks you generally should not record as billable:

• Purely administrative tasks (photocopying, filing, binding)
• General professional development unrelated to a specific matter
• Internal firm meetings not related to a client matter
• Correcting your own errors (ethical obligation not to charge for mistakes)
• Marketing and business development activities

When to Record

This is where most lawyers struggle — not what to record, but when to do it.

The single most important habit in time recording is contemporaneous entry. Record your time immediately after completing each task, not at the end of the day.

The research on this is unambiguous. Lawyers who record time as they go capture 20 to 40 percent more billable time than those who reconstruct their day from memory. The reasons are straightforward: you forget tasks (especially short ones), you underestimate durations, and you write vaguer descriptions because you can't remember the specifics.

Practical approaches that work:

1. Keep your time entry system open all day. Whether it's Actionstep, LEAP, Clio, Smokeball, or a simple spreadsheet — have it visible and accessible.
2. Enter time immediately after each task. Finished a phone call? Enter it before you start the next task. It takes 30 seconds now; it takes 5 minutes to reconstruct later.
3. Use a timer for longer tasks. Most practice management systems have a built-in timer. Start it when you begin a task, stop it when you finish.
4. Record meetings and calls. If you record your client conferences (with consent), you can generate accurate billing entries from the recording afterwards — with the exact duration and specific details of what was discussed.

How to Write Good Time Entries

Your billing description needs to tell three things: what you did, who was involved, and what it related to. Use standard Australian billing terminology:

• "Attendance at conference with..." (not "Meeting with...")
• "Telephone attendance upon..." (not "Called...")
• "Perusal of and attending to..." (not "Reviewed...")
• "Preparing and forwarding correspondence to..." (not "Sent email to...")
• "Researching and considering authorities on..." (not "Legal research...")

For a detailed guide with examples across all practice areas, see our article on how to write better billing descriptions.

Common Mistakes

1. Waiting until end of day to record

As discussed above, this is the biggest source of lost billable time. Even waiting until after lunch to record the morning's work results in lost entries and vague descriptions.

2. Ignoring small tasks

A 3-minute email is still 0.1 hours (one unit). If you handle 10 quick emails in a day and don't record them, that's 1.0 hours of billable time — gone. At $400 per hour, that's $400 per day or roughly $96,000 per year of lost revenue per lawyer.

3. Vague descriptions

"Work on matter" tells nobody anything. A costs assessor will reduce or disallow entries with inadequate descriptions. A partner reviewing the bill may write down time they can't justify to the client.

4. Not recording follow-up work

After a client meeting, there's always follow-up: drafting a file note, sending a follow-up letter, preparing a to-do list, updating the matter plan. Each of these is a separate billable task that should be recorded individually.

5. Recording hours worked instead of hours to bill

If you spent 45 minutes on a task but your firm's policy is to bill only 30 minutes for that type of work, record both the actual time (for internal tracking) and the billable time (for the client). Most practice management systems have separate fields for this.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the minimum time a lawyer can bill in Australia?

The minimum billable unit in Australian legal practice is 6 minutes, or 0.1 of an hour. This means any task, no matter how brief, is recorded as at least 0.1 hours. A 2-minute phone call, a quick email review, or a brief file note all attract the minimum 0.1 hour charge.

Should I record time as I go or at the end of the day?

Record as you go. Research consistently shows that contemporaneous time recording captures 20 to 40 percent more billable time than end-of-day reconstruction. When you wait, you forget tasks, underestimate durations, and write vague descriptions that may be written down or challenged on assessment.

What tasks should a lawyer record time for?

Record time for every task performed on a client matter, including: reading and responding to emails, telephone calls, drafting and reviewing documents, legal research, court preparation and attendance, client meetings, file notes, and internal discussions about a matter. The only exceptions are purely administrative tasks like filing or photocopying, and tasks covered by your firm's overhead.