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Hi everyone! I recently started at Big Law firm coming from criminal defense background. I am overwhelmed by the billing requirements and have not gotten much direction from my partners. This might sound stupid, but I'm having a problem with the language of billing. Do you guys happen to have any tips or any samples/templates? I would be eternally grateful!!

Were you assigned an associate or partner mentor? If so, that would be a good person to ask. And are there any associates around your same level? Couldn't hurt to ask them about it. As for language and how the narratives should sound, every firm has different ways of doing it. Check with others at your firm. Its important that you have someone to discuss these kinds of questions with, some there are many of these seemingly silly administrative things that you simply won't know until you ask.

law202020 wrote:Hi everyone! I recently started at Big Law firm coming from criminal defense background. I am overwhelmed by the billing requirements and have not gotten much direction from my partners. This might sound stupid, but I'm having a problem with the language of billing. Do you guys happen to have any tips or any samples/templates? I would be eternally grateful!!

What Kaiser said can help. If you don't want to ask your supervisors, snoop around on your timekeeping app to see how others enter their time. If that's not an option, ask your secretary to print out days from other partners' time entry narratives. Each client is different and so you'll need this for various clients you work for.

Thanks for you all for the help! My partners aren't as helpful as I would like them to be, as everyone is concerned with meeting high demand of 200 billable hours/month. I will speak with our assistant and she is can print out the partners' time entries for me.

law202020 wrote:Thanks for you all for the help! My partners aren't as helpful as I would like them to be, as everyone is concerned with meeting high demand of 200 billable hours/month. I will speak with our assistant and she is can print out the partners' time entries for me.

Probably don't want to use the partner's time entries as a model. They review the bills. And often take the view that their entries can be less specific because, well, they are partners.

With that said, there is a great book I read before I started in biglaw about how to survive. I believe the book was something along the lines of how to survive biglaw . . . And it had a whole section on time entry.

My unsolicited advice is that you task bill everything and try to be vaguely specific. Like reviewing calendar for deadlines becomes, assessing and analyzing action items and further handling for case development.

My suggestion is just to be thorough and make each entry make sense such that the partner and client can understand what you did. If your entries are problematic, the partner or client will tell you.

Your entries should be detailed such that the client can see the value add from your work. Partners can always trim language, which is better than them having to add language, or ask you to do so.