With eLuminate’s time-tracking feature, you can record exactly how many hours you’ve spent working on one case, or monitor how much time one of your employees has spent working on a task you’ve delegated. One of the best ways Social Security or personal injury attorneys can utilize time tracking is by monitoring how many resources are spent on individual tasks.

What are Tasks?

Consider Tasks to be similar to a to-do list. Unlike Events, Tasks do not have a specific time at which to be completed, merely a due date. You and your employees pluck away at them when you have time. Some commonly used tasks in eLuminate are requests to send out retainer packages, following up with leads that have not returned paperwork, and preparing for depositions.

How can you record the time you spend on tasks?

There are many ways to track how much time you’ve spent on a task. The primary way is to start time tracking from the bottom of your browser window in eLuminate. Simply type in the name of your task and time will start recording. Most attorneys like to have tasks be named after clients they’re associated with, such as “John Smith.” Once time tracking is started, it will not pause, regardless of if you open new eLuminate tabs, close the browser tab, or close your browser window entirely, unless you choose to stop it.

You can also track time for a task by going directly through a matter. You’ll need to go to the claimant’s matter with whom the task is associated with, scroll down to see all the tasks linked to that matter, and begin tracking time for the task you are about to work on.

Another way to track time with your task is within the task view directly. You can do this by clicking the “Tasks” tab on eLuminate’s navigation bar. From here, you can find the task you are working on and can click the green “play” triangle to start recording time. This is a great way to track tasks that are not necessarily associated to just one matter, such as reviewing police reports.

A final way to track time is by adding the time spent on a task directly onto the task’s spreadsheet, after the task is already complete. This can be useful if you want to record time spent on a task in the past, such as arguing a case in court.

Pinpointing inefficiencies in your firm

Once you’ve tracked how much time you spend on a specific task, you can easily pinpoint inefficiencies within your firm and determine how to address them.

For example, let’s say you have two paralegals working on vetting your leads before deciding to sign them as clients. If one seems to spend significantly less time sending MER requests to hospitals, you can have him or her focus on that task, while utilizing the other members of your intake staff elsewhere.

Additionally, you can compare different time-tracking records to find correlations between time spent on one task and hearings won. If you find that your firm tends to win more cases if an attorney spends “x” number of hours preparing for a hearing, you can use this knowledge to better prepare for future hearings and increase your percentage of won hearings.

When you use time tracking, you do not have to record large periods of time. It’s more likely than not that you work on tasks sporadically throughout the day. With a time-tracking feature, you can look back over multiple days and see exactly how long you’ve worked on one task.

Would you like to learn more about time tracking and how eLuminate can make your firm more efficient? Give us a call today at 617.800.0089. We would love to give you and your associates a free demonstration of our case management software.