Lawyers billing only a fraction of their time – legal bills to get bigger?

Ok, ok, the data relates primarily to solos and small law firms using a specific software tool.  But one can imagine what will happen when software (and perhaps kind, gentle robots) ensure that Biglaw legal bills contain every last morsel of time that could possibly be billed to a legal department. On the other hand, many in-housers likely doubt that the bills they receive from their Biglaw firms lack any purported “missing time”.

“The folks at Clio dropped a bombshell that stunned attendees at the fourth annual Clio Cloud Conference to silence….During his opening address Monday at the Radisson Blu Aqua Hotel in Chicago, Clio CEO Jack Newton unveiled the “Legal Trends Report,” which delivers benchmark data on subjects like average hourly rates among the company’s users. He shocked many in the audience after revealing that, among Clio’s 150,000 daily active users, lawyers were only billing 28 percent of their available work hours…”

Read: Lawyers are only billing a fraction of their time; how can they be more efficient? at the American Bar Association