A recent Corporate Counsel story, “More In-House Lawyers Are Logging Their Hours. Should You?,” reports that one of the biggest perks of going in-house is saying goodbye to tracking your time. You’d be hard-pressed to find an in-house attorney who misses reporting billable hours for each tenth of every hour.
And yet, despite this baggage, the time sheet seems to be gaining popularity with in-house lawyers. At the recent LegalTech conference in New York, hosted by Corporate Counsel’s parent company ALM Media, there was a lot of chatter about whether in-house counsel should punch the clock.
One defender of the time sheet is Adam Storch, a top executive at the professional services firm Marsh & McLennan Cos. Speaking on a LegalTech panel, he said that logging your hours is an “act of you being conscious how you’re spending your time.”
That’s exactly why Stephen Kaplan, general counsel and executive vice president with XOS Digital in Orlando, tracks his own hours—voluntarily. He says it allows him to, at any moment, show his employer what he’s working on and justify his presence based on objective data.
He’s worked for XOS since 2013, but he’s been logging his hours as in-house counsel with other companies, too, for the past decade, he says. He’s been using the online project management app Paymo in recent years. Before that, he simply tracked his time using Excel.
“It’s rare that I’ve had to justify my value to the organization, but [time tracking] shows you everything you’ve done, every project that’s on your radar,” Kaplan says. “When you do it right, it’s a built-in organizational system.”
He argues that new technology has made tracking time less intrusive than people might think. With Paymo, Kaplan uses a web timer on his cellphone and desktop in his office. It’s just a matter of remembering to turn it on and off for a phone call, a meeting, a business lunch, and when drafting legal contracts or other documents, he says.
Kaplan points out that the legal department is one of the only departments that, without tracking hours, has difficulty coming up with metrics that prove the company’s return on investment is worthwhile. And, ever since the recession hit, metrics have become increasing important in the eyes of chief financial officers, who are no longer viewed as “just bookkeepers,” he says. “It’s a CFO’s job these days to ask the hard question of every single member of every single company: Why are you here?” Kaplan says.
Ascena Retail Group’s GC Duane Holloway says time tracking could result in more accurate internal cost allocation and help GCs when allocating resources as the business evolves.
That said, “the cons outweigh the pros,” according to Holloway. He says that logging hours is a time burden on lawyers who are already strapped for time. It’s good to objectively and rigorously evaluate legal departments, he says, “but there are ways of doing so that are less burdensome than traditional minute-by-minute or hour-by-hour time tracking.”
Some in-house lawyers log their hours for reasons having nothing to do with efficiency. Adam Rubin is GC for the promotional sweepstakes company PrizeLogic, which works with several Fortune 100 clients such as Walgreens, Pepsi and Best Buy. In many ways, PrizeLogic operates as an advertising agency. And it’s standard within the ad industry that employees report billable hours for each client. That goes for employees on the marketing team, as well as in-house counsel. “Often, people are required by a contract to track the hours. This is a trend, not just for lawyers, but all employees,” Rubin says.
Rubin says that to determine whether an in-house lawyer is valuable to an organization, you have to look at a lot more than the hours they work. “If you’re basing your evaluation of employees based on hours worked, you’re missing out on a more important analysis of the employee,” he says. His recommendation is to “set measurable goals … and [review] whether or not that employee is reaching that goal.”
At the end of the day, the value of logging hours probably depends on your industry and job security. Even XOS’ Kaplan agrees with that. “It’s not for everyone,” he says.
It’s not necessary “if you are naturally very organized or if you work in a department where your value has never been called into question,” he says. “But how many of us are in an environment that checks both of those boxes?”