Billing the Right Way—What Every New Attorney Needs to Know
This month’s feature is different than our typical writing-focused one, but it is just as important. Knowing how to bill will save you time and avoid lots of stress.
Most new attorneys start their first job knowing how to research, write, and argue. Almost none of them know how to bill. Law schools don’t teach it. Orientation doesn’t cover it deeply enough. And the result is predictable: new lawyers either underbill out of uncertainty (“Was that worth putting on the clock?”), overbill out of pressure (“I have to hit my target”), or fall into vague billing habits, lumping tasks, using boilerplate descriptions, or forgetting to log time until Friday afternoon. All three create problems for the client, the firm, and ultimately the lawyer.
This post can open with the surprising math that the Yale Law School guide lays out plainly: even a diligent new attorney working 10-hour days, five days a week, 47 weeks a year, will bill only approximately 1,762 hours annually—short of most firms’ 1,800-hour floor—simply because so much of a lawyer’s day is legitimately non-billable.[1] That number is a gut punch for new associates who assume a long day at the office equals a full day of billable time. And it’s a perfect setup for the real lesson: billing isn’t just about hitting a number. It’s about recording the right hours, the right way.
I. The Math No One Shows You
A new associate arrives Monday morning, sits down at 8:00 a.m., and works until 6:00 p.m. Ten hours. But the billable clock doesn’t run during lunch. It doesn’t run during coffee breaks. It doesn’t run during department meetings, CLE, or the half-hour spent scanning legal updates. Subtract all of that, and a 10-hour workday yields about 7.5 billable hours.
Multiply that across a five-day week, and you get 37.5 billable hours. Multiply that across 47 working weeks — assuming three weeks of vacation and two weeks of holidays — and you get approximately 1,762 billed hours annually. That’s before accounting for personal calls, informal training, or pro bono work that isn’t treated as billable time. Most firms set their floor at 1,800 hours. The math leaves a new associate roughly 38 hours short before they’ve done anything wrong.
Reaching 1,832 hours — a “respectable” number — requires adding about 20 extra minutes of billable work per day or coming in one Saturday a month for a six-hour shift. Reaching 2,200 hours means working until 8:00 p.m. every weeknight and adding two to three Saturdays per month. The total time “at work” to hit that number: more than 3,058 hours per year — roughly 65 hours a week, 47 weeks a year.
That arithmetic matters because it reframes the conversation. A new associate who logs 1,600 hours may have worked just as many total hours as one who logged 1,900. The gap is usually training, not effort. Supervisors should not assume that low billing reflects laziness. New lawyers routinely leave billable time on the table simply because no one told them to pick it up.
The practical lessons from the math:
- Non-billable time is unavoidable and substantial. Budget for it.
- Time that feels like work — meetings, training, reading the firm newsletter — is often not billable.
- The only way to hit high targets without working more is to capture billable time more consistently.
- Record time as you go. The attorney who reconstructs a week of billing on Friday afternoon will always undercount.
II. What Is (and Isn’t) Billable, and Why It Matters.
The uncertainty is real. New attorneys face this question dozens of times a day: Should I bill for this? The answer depends on one basic test, drawn from Minnesota Rule of Professional Conduct 1.5, which requires that fees be reasonable and that the basis for the fee be communicated to the client, preferably in writing. Every billing decision reduces to that single word: reasonable. The caveat to these categories, of course, is that every firm is different, and some firms allow you to bill time to them, and not a client.
Here is how the reasonableness test applies to the categories that generate the most confusion:
Client communications. Phone calls and emails that advance the matter are billable. Bill in tenths of an hour. A two-minute phone call answering a quick client question is 0.1. A 45-minute discussion of strategy is 0.8. The test isn’t whether the communication felt significant; it’s whether it served the client’s matter.
Research with a learning curve. New attorneys routinely spend extra time on research because the area is unfamiliar. Bill honestly. Many firms expect associates to exercise judgment and voluntarily reduce research time on straightforward issues when the hours logged reflect inexperience rather than the complexity of the task. Some firms have written policies on this. If yours does, read it. If it doesn’t, ask. The worst outcome is a client disputing a bill because a first-year associate spent six hours researching a basic contract-interpretation question that a senior associate would have resolved in one.
Review of prior work to get up to speed. This is billable when the review is genuinely necessary to manage the current task. It is not billable when it amounts to a new attorney spending three hours reading a file that a more experienced attorney would have read in 45 minutes. Use judgment. When in doubt, reduce the entry and note in your billing records that you did so.
Travel and waiting time. Travel time that would otherwise be spent working is generally billable. Sitting in a waiting room before a deposition starts is billable. Commute time is not. Check the client’s billing guidelines; many institutional clients now expressly limit travel billing.
Internal training and supervision. Not billable to the client. This includes orientation, CLE that the firm requires, supervision meetings, and mentoring sessions. It is overhead. Track it as non-billable time in your time-keeping system anyway because it helps the firm understand where associate time goes and helps you see your actual productivity picture.
Short, administrative tasks. Calendaring a deposition: not billable. Sending a one-line confirmation email: generally, not billable (though reasonable people disagree). Drafting a cover letter for a document production: billable if the letter requires legal judgment. The rule of thumb: if a paralegal or administrative assistant could have done it, billing at attorney rates for it is harder to justify.
The guiding principle is simple. Before billing, ask: Would a reasonable client, one who knew what I did and why, find this charge fair? If the answer is yes, bill it. If the answer is no, don’t. If the answer is uncertain, find guidance.
III. The Common Billing Pitfalls
Five practices account for most billing problems in law firms. New attorneys commit them not out of dishonesty, but out of habit, pressure, or the absence of guidance.
A. Block Billing
Block billing means grouping multiple tasks into a single time entry. Example: “Reviewed documents, drafted motion, conference with client, 4.5 hours.”
The problem is not aesthetic. Block billing makes it impossible to assess whether any individual task was reasonable. Courts routinely reduce fee awards, sometimes by 20 to 30 percent, when block entries prevent a line-item review. Many corporate clients and insurance companies now prohibit block billing outright in their outside-counsel billing guidelines. Some courts have called block billing grounds for denial of fees altogether.
The fix is simple: one task, one entry. Break out each discrete activity.
B. Delayed Time Entry
Reconstructing a week of billing on Friday afternoon, or, worse, at month’s end, is one of the most common and costly mistakes in legal practice. Memory is imperfect. A lawyer who didn’t write down that 20-minute phone call on Wednesday morning will not remember it by Friday. Research confirms what every practicing attorney already knows: delayed billing leads to undercounting, which means the firm doesn’t get paid for work performed.
The rule: enter time contemporaneously, as each task is completed, or at least at the end of each day. Many firms use timekeeping software accessible by phone precisely because billing entries made in real time are more accurate and more complete.
C. Vague Descriptions
“Research.” “Review file.” “Conference with client.” These descriptions are useless. They tell the client nothing about what was done. They tell a reviewing partner nothing about whether the time was well spent. And in a fee dispute or fee petition, they are indefensible.
Good billing entries describe the subject matter, not just the category of work. Compare:
- Before: Research — 2.1 hours
- After: Research on Minnesota choice-of-law doctrine as applied to indemnification clauses in commercial lease agreements, focusing on First, Eighth, and Ninth Circuit split — 2.1 hours
The second entry takes 15 seconds longer to write. It tells the client exactly what they paid for. It allows a partner to evaluate efficiency. And if the client ever pushes back on the bill, it holds up.
D. Padding
Padding, billing for time not actually worked, is not merely a bad habit; it is dishonest. Under Minnesota Rule 8.4, conduct involving dishonesty or misrepresentation is professional misconduct. A lawyer who bills 2.5 hours for a task that took 1.5 hours has misrepresented services to a client. That is not a billing error. It is an ethical violation.
New attorneys sometimes pad unintentionally, by rounding up too aggressively, or by counting time spent thinking about a matter while doing something else. The test: if you weren’t actively working on the client’s matter, you weren’t billing for it.
E. Failing to Write Down Judgment Calls
To start, younger attorneys should not write their own time off or reduce it. That is the partner’s job. Most firms operate like this. But reductions do happen. When a lawyer reduces an entry because a task took longer than it should have or because the work product didn’t meet expectations, that reduction should be documented in the billing record as a write-down, not simply omitted. Write-downs are a normal, professional part of billing. They protect the attorney in later disputes, demonstrate good faith to the client, and give the firm accurate data about where time is being written off and why. Invisibly reducing entries is the habit of lawyers who are ashamed of the reduction. Documenting write-downs is the habit of lawyers who stand behind their judgment.
IV. The Ethics Guardrails
Billing is not a purely administrative function. It is a professionally regulated one. Every billing decision is governed by the Minnesota Rules of Professional Conduct, and an attorney who bills improperly faces consequences that go well beyond an unhappy client.
Rule 1.5: Reasonable Fees. The rule prohibits “clearly excessive” fees. It sets out eight factors for determining reasonableness, including the time required, the novelty and difficulty of the issues, the skill required, the fee customarily charged in the locality for similar work, and, critically, the experience, reputation, and ability of the attorney performing the services. That last factor matters for new attorneys. A first-year associate billing at an associate rate is expected to take longer than a fifth-year. But the client is still entitled to reasonable total charges. When a new attorney spends four hours on a task a senior associate would finish in one, the supervising partner must decide whether to bill all four hours, reduce the entry, or write off the excess. Rule 1.5 makes clear that charging an obviously excessive fee, even through inattention, is misconduct.
Rule 1.5 also requires written communication of the fee basis. Preferably at the outset of representation, and in writing when feasible, the client must know the basis on which they will be charged. This means new attorneys need to understand the engagement letter before they start billing. What is the hourly rate? What billing increments does the firm use? Does the client have specific billing guidelines? Attorneys at large firms with institutional clients will often find that those clients have issued outside-counsel billing guidelines that govern what can and cannot be billed. Those guidelines are effectively contractual. Violating them is not just an ethical problem; it can result in fee reductions, strained client relationships, and lost business.
Rule 8.4: Dishonesty. Padding time, fabricating entries, or billing for work not performed is professional misconduct under Rule 8.4. Discipline for billing fraud ranges from reprimand to disbarment, depending on the extent and intent of the misconduct. This is not theoretical: attorneys are disciplined for billing misconduct every year in Minnesota and across the country.
The emerging AI billing question. The profession is wrestling with a problem that would have seemed far-fetched ten years ago: when an AI tool completes a research task in 20 minutes that used to take two hours, what does the attorney bill? Billing the full two hours is almost certainly unreasonable under Rule 1.5. Billing 20 minutes for the attorney’s time reviewing and validating the AI output is defensible. Several state bar ethics opinions are now addressing this question directly. The safest approach: bill for the time actually spent on the task, whether the work was done manually or with AI assistance, and ensure the client’s billing guidelines don’t prohibit AI-assisted work products entirely.
Section 5: A Practical Checklist for New Attorneys
Good billing habits, like good writing habits, are built through repetition. The following checklist is designed to be reviewed at the end of each billing day, not at the end of the month. Think of it as a brief self-edit of the day’s time entries before they become locked in the billing system.
Daily Entry Checklist
Accuracy
- Did I enter time contemporaneously, or at least the same day?
- Does each entry reflect the time I actually worked, not rounded up, not guessed?
- If I reconstructed any entries, have I flagged them for review?
Specificity
- Does each entry describe the subject matter of the work, not just its category?
- Could a client read this entry and understand exactly what they paid for?
- Have I avoided the words “research,” “review,” “draft,” and “conference” standing alone, without further description?
Task Separation
- Is each entry a single, discrete task, not a block of multiple activities lumped together?
- If I worked on multiple tasks in one sitting, have I broken them into separate entries with separate times?
Ethical Soundness
- Would a reasonable client find each charge fair, knowing what was done and why?
- Have I documented any voluntary write-downs in my billing records?
- If I used AI assistance on any task, have I billed only for the time I actually spent?
Guideline Compliance
- Have I checked whether this client has outside-counsel billing guidelines that govern this type of entry?
- Does my entry comply with the firm’s standard billing format?
Before/After: A Model Entry Comparison
The difference between a weak billing entry and a strong one takes less than a minute to bridge. Here is what that looks like in practice:
| Entry | |
| Before (problematic) | Nov. 12 — Reviewed documents, drafted correspondence, conference with attorney — 3.5 hours |
| After (professional) | Nov. 12 — Reviewed deposition transcript of plaintiff’s damages expert re: lost-profits methodology (0.8); drafted letter to opposing counsel identifying deficiencies in document production response (1.2); conference with supervising attorney re: scope of anticipated summary-judgment motion and division of drafting responsibilities (0.5) — Total: 2.5 hours |
Three things changed: the tasks are separated, the subject matter is described, and the time, now 2.5 hours, not 3.5, reflects what the work actually required. The shorter entry, the more honest one, is also the more professional one.
A Final Word
Billing is a writing discipline. Like all good writing, it demands precision, discipline, and respect for the reader. The client reading an invoice deserves the same clarity that a judge deserves when reading a brief: a clear statement of what happened, what it cost, and why it was worth it. New attorneys who internalize that principle, that the billing entry is a communication, not just an accounting record, will not only stay out of trouble. They will build client trust, support accurate firm records, and develop the professional habit of standing behind their work, all the way down to the last tenth of an hour.
Notable Legal Tech Tool
We are pleased to highlight a new interactive Eighth Circuit appellate-rules and brief‑writing tool created by Joseph Ketsenburg. Built on top of the court’s local rules, briefing checklists, and “Pointers on Preparing Briefs,” the tool walks practitioners through the requirements that most often trip up filers—typeface and word limits, statement-of-the-case structure, jurisdictional statements, and more—so they can focus on crafting clear, persuasive arguments instead of hunting through PDFs. It is an excellent example of how thoughtful design and automation can reduce compliance anxiety, prevent avoidable rejections by the clerk’s office, and free attorneys to spend more time on the substance of their briefs.
Law Journal Articles
Hurwitz, Justin (Gus), Precision’s Price: Optimal Accuracy, the Justice Gap, and Legal AI (March 01, 2026). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6325198 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6325198
Desnoyer, Brad, Iceberg Ethos: Credibility and Hemingway in Predictive Legal Writing (February 26, 2026). 79 Rutgers Law Review 1 (Forthcoming), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6308878 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6308878
Kochan, Donald J., Obviousness (March 06, 2026). George Mason Legal Studies Research Paper No. LS No. 26-07, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=6359520 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.6359520
[1] https://law.yale.edu/sites/default/files/area/department/cdo/document/billable_hour.pdf
