Legal Research

Mark Herrmann is the author of The Curmudgeon's Guide to Practicing Law and he recently moved from being a partner at Jones Day to in-house counsel at Aon.  He posts regularly at Above the Law about what it's like to be in-house, and he has a great post today about the art of writing decent attorney timesheet entries. Herrmann mocks some recent attorney time entries on bills that he received from firms, such as "11KBW" and "E to HJ." He notes that such cryptic entries are bound to be challenged by clients.

In my Advanced Legal Research class, I always spend at least one class talking a bit about expectations for new attorneys, and we talk about how to write a decent time entry.  I am sure that my time entries were inadequate when I practiced in large firms, but I suddenly realized the importance of crafting descriptive time entries when I moved in-house myself.  Suddenly, I found such entries as "Review file" and "Call with PS" enraging.  How the heck am I supposed to know who PS is or why the billing attorney was talking to him or her? As Herrmann notes in his post, most in-house attorneys "may know next to nothing about the case in which you?re recording time."  So the key is to write a succinct, descriptive entry that is free from mystifying abbreviations and that makes the activity description "intelligible . . . to a person of average intelligence who knows nothing about your case."  Want some more tips on writing client-centric time entries?  See Harry Styron's article, The Art of Time Entries, at Law Practice Today.