Recently, Carolyn Elefant at Legal Blog Watch summarized an interesting debate over a question that many lawyers will soon be asking themselves. Let’s say your law practice succumbs to the logical and inevitable, stops routinely billing by the hour, and institutes other system(s) of pricing and selling your work. Query: do you still need to docket your time? There are two schools of thought: continue to track your time because it allows you to determine your costs and your lawyers’ profitability and because clients might demand an accounting of the time you spent; or, stop tracking your time because it’s entirely irrelevant to your profitability and it’s none of your clients’ business anyway.

I fall into the latter category, for the reasons provided by Allison Shields in a comment on Carolyn’s post…

Why would a client care about time records or how the work gets done as long as it’s done based upon agreed-upon specifications? Clients only really care about time and time records because they perceive that’s what they’re paying for – and lawyers back that up by c