Recruitment is a crucial but expensive part of running and growing a successful law firm.
You need to make the smartest call with each hire — this means picking the right candidates without going over budget.
To help you make the most informed hiring decisions, time tracking tools can generate reports that provide crucial data about your existing staff.
What are these time tracking insights?
Read on to find out.
Table of Contents
#1: You’ll know what roles you need to fill
According to American Bar Association research, over 50% of small law firms face challenges like:
- Spending too much time on administrative tasks,
- Rising competition, and
- Changing demand in specific practice areas.
Employing more staff can help mitigate these issues, but only if you hire the right people.
Sure, you can easily tell if a candidate fits your firm — but how do you know which roles to fill?
Do you need more paralegals to do research and administrative work or an associate to help with cases? And which areas should they specialize in?
Sigh.
To make smarter hiring choices, you need to know how your team spends time — every minute spent on each client, case, and task.
Such data helps you recognize problem areas and focus your recruitment on specific candidates who can fill the gaps.
With an attorney time tracking tool, your staff can automatically log the time spent on different tasks — providing vital information without complicating anyone’s work.
Some time trackers even use this data to automatically generate time reports, showing valuable insights into your team.
For instance, the Summary report in Clockify shows crucial information for any chosen period, including:
- Work done for each client,
- Time spent on individual tasks, and
- Total hours worked by each employee.
With Summary reports, you’ll easily spot overworked attorneys with too much on their plates.
In fact, you’ll know when to hire an associate to ease their workload, especially if the attorney handles cases for highly profitable clients.
#2: You’ll be able to determine what salaries you can offer
Before employing more people, you need a clear overview of your firm’s finances.
Detailed time reports provide a bird’s-eye view of everyone’s billable and non-billable hours.
With the right time tracking tool, you can see billables on a daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly basis.
Based on real-time data on billable hours and profitability, you can determine:
- Hourly rates you can offer to new hires in each role, and
- Number of new employees you can afford at those hourly rates.
For the best results, you can easily use Clockify as a billable hours calculator — you only need to:
- Set hourly rates for each employee and client,
- Mark appropriate tasks as billable, and
- Track time spent on those tasks.
Based on your staff’s billable hours and labor costs, Clockify also automatically calculates the profitability of each task.
In the Summary report, you can apply various filters to see the profitability of every employee, department, and client — or the general profitability of the whole firm.
Depending on the filters you apply, the report will display different profitability rates as a bar graph.
Besides making your recruitment more cost-effective, Clockify reports also help you determine hourly rates for new clients.
You can quickly check if your previous work for similar clients was profitable and raise your rates or refuse the new client if necessary.
#3: You’ll reduce turnover with proper incentives
Hiring the right candidates is only half the work. In the long run, retaining top-tier talent is just as important — while high turnover is time-consuming and expensive.
Sure, a positive firm culture and learning opportunities can help you keep your best people.
However, proper compensation is still the #1 issue for attorney retention.
Besides a decent base salary, most firms give top attorneys a yearly bonus based on their performance and the firm’s profitability.
In-depth time reports can help you recognize your top performers and create clear incentives for everyone.
To learn who had the most billable hours in the past year or any other time frame, simply check the Summary report again. Clockify automatically updates its reports in real time, so the information will always be up-to-date.
If you want to reward the most efficient employees who focus on non-billable work as well, you can check the Assignments report.
This report shows employee efficiency based on how much time they spend on tasks, regardless of whether the work is billable.
The Assignments report automatically generates a status bar for each scheduled task, showing the assigned employee’s performance. The bar is labeled green if the employee completes the task quicker than anticipated and red if they take longer to complete something.
You can easily see who was the most efficient, even at non-billable work, which can still be crucial for the firm.
Clockify also makes it easy to export and share all reports with your staff in different formats, including PDF, CSV, and Excel.
As a result, it’s easy to maintain transparency and motivate everyone to do better.
For example, share the Weekly report each Monday and let everyone see who was the top performer in the past seven days.
Hire top talent now — with Clockify
Time tracking can improve your hiring process by:
- Highlighting the ideal candidates for your current needs,
- Helping you determine the right hourly rates for your staff, and
- Showing which top performers you need to reward.
Clockify can help with all of this, even if you’re not tech-savvy.
You and your staff can easily use its various time tracking features without any previous experience with similar tools.
The platform takes mere minutes to set up and won’t disrupt your staff’s established workflow.
If you need any further assistance, you’ll find in-depth instructions in the form of video tutorials and illustrated Help pages — and you can also contact customer support via phone, email, and live chat.
Clockify’s detailed reports give you invaluable hiring insights immediately, presenting all the information you need to recruit and retain the right people.
Start hiring top talent right away.
