Explore the essential tips for new attorneys mastering billing entries in this episode. In this episode, of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast, understand the importance of clarity and communication in billing, avoid common mistakes, and learn to convey the value of your work. Discover how to turn feedback into growth opportunities and build trust with clients through effective billing practices. 

For more insights, visit our website at classroom2courtroom.com. Listen now to refine your skills and enhance client relationships and firm success.

Scott Benton: Hey everyone, Scott Benton here, how are you? I am the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast where we help you easily transition from a law school student into your professional career as an attorney and where we like to make the practice of law fun and today we're going to take a look at the learning curve for writing billing entries.

Scott Benton: Today, in order to help assist your overall use of the success cycle, as far as the log your time portion goes, we're going to look at the learning curve for writing billing entries.

Now, the last third of the success cycle is log time, which means you're going to be writing billing entries after completing a task, and it's something that, surprisingly, can be difficult to do at first, and it may take some trial and error before you actually get good at it. Remember that when you create a billing entry, generally speaking, unless it's changed by your senior attorney later on, which is something that they do, that's what's going to show up on the billing statement that the client is going to receive and that they're going to be looking at and reading.

They might even pick up the phone and they might ask you what that charge is for. So you really want your billing entries to be as concise and clearly written and easy to understand as you can possibly make them. The better you get at writing billing entries, the easier that you're going to make the overall billing process and why we want to consider the learning curve.

for you when you're starting out as an attorney for writing billing entries. Now, first, you want to understand the process. New attorneys need to understand that billing isn't just about tracking time. It's really about communicating the value of the work that you're providing to your clients because clients are always going to be asking themselves, was this a good investment or not?

Now, there can be vague descriptions of the tasks that can often leave the clients confused. The entries could be overly technical, they could use language that clients may not understand, which you want to avoid. One entry could contain multiple tasks, which creates ambiguity.

Incidentally, this is also called block billing, and it's definitely something that you don't want to do, and it's why you want to create a separate billing entry each and every time that you complete a legal task. So you don't want to wait to do all of them at the end of the day, let's say, or even at the end of the week.

I can promise you that that's going to be an instant headache that you really don't want to create for yourself. So you need to figure out how to get good at writing your billing entries, and fortunately you can do that by converting mistakes you make along the way into learning opportunities, and by listening to the feedback that you're getting.

Now, how you handle those calls when they come in and how you field those questions is what's going to either preserve the trust or maybe even set it back another step, so you want to be careful and aware of your response to those calls.

You want to use those questions as opportunities to learn what wasn't communicated effectively in your billing entry. You want to listen to your client's concerns and you want to take note about which types of entries cause that particular confusion. Now, this is where you want to focus on improving your writing so in this kind of conversation, you definitely want to do a lot more listening than you do talking.

You want to listen to your client as closely as possible.

These are teaching moments that are going to help you refine your billing skills. Let your supervising attorney teach you the important nuances that they know because chances are that they've learned their own valuable lessons from writing hundreds of billing entries themselves.

So you really want to absorb their expertise as much as you can and as quickly as possible. You also want to lean into the feedback. So instead of letting yourself get defensive, or angry, or hostile, I know you're not going to do any of those things, and I use those words just for emphasis, you want to embrace these corrections so that you understand how they make your billing clear and more professional.

That's just going to confuse everybody. Also, you want to provide context, so don't Simply say, research or meeting, you want to explain what the research or what the meeting was for and how it advances the client's case. So over time, you're going to develop a strong sense for what makes an effective billing entry.

You want to really aim for the day when your clients no longer call you up and question your charges because they can clearly see the value in each and every entry that they're reading on their billing statement. Also, as you improve, your supervising attorney is probably going to make Fewer and fewer corrections to your billing entries, which demonstrates your growing skillset and your growing confidence.

Push yourself to become truly excellent in this area because billing not only gets you and the firm paid, but it also builds client trust and it leads to success in both client relationships and firm operations. You want your clients to trust you and you definitely want your firm to trust you.

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