Here’s something we all know but maybe don’t acknowledge enough: it’s that a significant number of lawyers in private practice leave their job simply to get away from the pain of time recording and the pressure to achieve billing targets.

What’s maybe less well-known is that, increasingly, those stressors are no longer entirely absent in in-house legal departments.

Indeed, nowadays there’s every chance you could be jumping out of the private practice time-recording frying pan and into the time accountability in-house fire.

The big shift

The big shift I’m seeing is that corporate legal departments have started asking me about time recording. This is new. It’s well known that in-house lawyers hate time recording. But things change.

The background to this is that for the longest time in-house legal departments were simply viewed as a corporate cost center, and the wider business just swallowed that cost. But no more.

As costs ramp up and budgets are increasingly squeezed, there’s a growing pressure on GCs to demonstrate accountability and efficiency.

And the classic way to show the board that their in-house lawyers are providing value for money – and are maybe even worth investing more in - is to have data that demonstrate how much less its costing to handle matters internally than to put it out to external firms.

In addition, when I’ve been asked directly about time recording, it’s because, in a much more cost-conscious world, legal work is now being crossed charged to internal departments and subsidiaries. Unfortunately, “I think it took about three hours?” doesn’t fly anymore. The cross-charges need data… especially given that they’re under pressure to justify every line of their budget.

Also, it should be noted that in some jurisdictions in-house needs contemporaneous and accurate time records to be able to recover legal costs during litigation.

In short, there’s a new need to record time, perhaps not to the same granular level as private practice law firms, but time capture data nonetheless.

Growing sophistication

As well, in-house legal is getting more sophisticated. There’s a new breed of Legal Operations Managers (Legal Ops) who’re getting into resource allocation and planning.

For that, they need metrics that tell them, for instance, if a senior lawyer is spending their time on routine or low value admin tasks, so that resources can be reallocated and more senior people moved on to more strategic higher-value work. It’s not the worst thing.

Likewise, when Legal Ops have data on who’s doing what it means then can allocate and reallocate work to balance workloads, identify bottlenecks and also - bigger picture - in future hire the people they actually need, rather than who they think they might need.

And when Legal Ops and GCs start to get super-sophisticated, they start wanting to apply the visibility they have over who’s doing what to process improvement and risk identification and management. Or to put it less fancily, spotting early where some wheels might be about to fall off and redirecting resources so they don’t.

Where does it leave us?

The bottom line is that there are good reasons why in-house teams are increasingly subject to some kind of time measurement. But there’s also a recognition that any kind of manual time entry is widely, and sometimes very deeply, disliked.

Besides which, research tends to demonstrate it’s pretty inaccurate. In particular, when time recording is done retrospectively, there’s chronic underreporting. And it’s also, erm … time consuming…

There’s also the objection that when you’re asking in-house lawyers to adopt a ‘billable-hour’ mentality, you’re shooting yourself in the foot by not giving them the bandwidth to do the strategic thinking, scenario planning and big-picture problem-solving that arguably only in-house lawyers can do.

Where does it leave us? Well, there’s definitely a big push for more in-house metrics. But at the same time, an understanding that there’s value in treading lightly.

The good news is that this is happening at a time when technology – specifically AI – is emerging that aims to make time and activity logging much more frictionless.

The goal is to find the sweet spot – where the system is not a burden on lawyers, but at the same time it produces enough data to evidence what lawyers are doing and to help Legal Ops make informed management decisions.

For now, you should know this: for a bunch of reasons, you likely won’t escape some kind of time accountability just by leaving private practice.

But also, increasingly, technology is looking to take the pain away.