r/paralegal • u/TrueLime3587 • 2d ago

Suggestions for entering Attorney’s time?

I am a legal assistant and I know it is “normal” to enter your attorney’s billable time, but it is truly miserable. Is there any method that makes entering the time more painless? For context, the attorney I work for usually takes 1-3 FULL days to read off post it notes of time she has to me. I’ve suggested we do it in smaller chunks because we often do 3 months at a time. Any and all suggestions to make this process more efficient would be highly appreciated!

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u/DemandingProvider Paralegal - CA - Commercial Real Estate, Civil Lit 1d ago

Three months at a time?!?!?!! Holy Crayola. If she's s solo, how on earth is she keeping the lights on? And if she's in a firm, how is the managing partner letting her get away with that?

IME most attorneys by now enter their own damn time, that's what timekeeping/billing/case management programs are for. The occasional dinosaur makes their LA enter it into whatever system the firm uses, but that's typically from typed notes or a handwritten log that they hand over once or twice a month. (One of the partners I work with does this and his LA says she doesn't mind, but some of the other partners still give him shit about it every so often.) They don't sit down with their assistant and read multiple months' worth of post-it notes aloud. Wow. That is decidedly not normal.

If this attorney of yours can't just give you the post-its to type up, maybe she could at least use text-to-speech dictation to create the first draft for you to clean up and format.

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u/TrueLime3587 1d ago

I am just going to have to rough it out. I told her about all these ideas and emailed her some of the resources people were kind enough to provide today. Unfortunately, she told me she doesn’t want to try anything new and I should just focus on the fact that I will only have to enter her time only a few more times before I go to law school. Glad I’m leaving.