We also communicate to clients the benefit of getting high quality legal work at a lower charge than had an attorney performed the same services, which would have had to happen if we were not present to do it instead. We tell them about how knowledgeable we are about their cases and the work we do in their behalf. This is our golden opportunity to create and reinforce perceptions that we (as paralegals and as a part of the legal team representing them) are astute, capable, industrious and trustworthy. We tell them not only the nature of the work we have undertaken and why it important, but also by virtue of how we couch our time records we inform about how sophisticated we and the work we perform are. Time entries are our most common form of communication with our clients and employers. When dealing with people who think of billing their time this way I remind them that to the contrary, recording our billable time is amongst the most important writing we will ever author. Many think that billing time operates much like a one way street to be recorded and quickly forgotten. The task of preparing time entries is often viewed as a painful but necessary burden that is somehow less important than the work that is being billed, to be done only when no other assignments are immediately pressing.
Some legal assistants view billing time as an anathema, an excruciating experience to be avoided at all costs, and when unavoidable, to be given little or no serious consideration with regard to composition, tenor or readability. As a paralegal manager, I often encountered paralegals who regarded their time entries as though once recorded, they disappeared into the black hole of Calcutta never to be seen or heard from again.
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