Timekeeping Lightning Session: .5 Well-Spent

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Session Type: Lightning Sessions

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Let’s be honest, no attorney or extern/clinical student wakes up in the morning excited to keep track of their hours in six-minute increments. However, keeping track of your hours is required in many legal settings, and not just large firms with billable hours. It is a foundational legal skill, which ensures attorneys get paid by clients, or receive attorney's fees or government and non-profit funding. There are also ethical and client management dimensions that professors and students should reflect on and consider when keeping time, including accounting for multitasking, billing for informal conversations among team members, self-editing your timekeeping, and considerations when reusing previously generated work product. In the externship context, we use timesheets to ensure that students are working on substantive assignments at their placements throughout the week. In the clinical context, it is important to learn how to keep time for the purpose of seeking attorneys’ fees and outside funding. It is also a useful tool for clinical and externship students, supervisors, and professors to be able to review students’ assignments and monitor efficiency. In this thirty-minute (.5) lightning session, we will discuss the reasons for teaching timekeeping as a professional skill in externships and clinics. We will also discuss tools and methods for teaching it effectively.