Professional services
Law Firm Attorney Billing Calculator
Convert recorded time into billable increments, and see what rounding adds across a year.
Result
Business arithmetic for running a practice, not legal advice. Fee agreements, contingency limits, trust accounting and fee splitting are governed by the rules of professional conduct in your jurisdiction, and several of them are strict. Check the applicable rules before any of this affects a client agreement. Rounding practice is an ethical matter, not merely a commercial one. Quarter-hour increments on many short entries can inflate a bill substantially, and several jurisdictions and many clients object to it or prohibit it in engagement terms. Whatever increment is used should be disclosed in the fee agreement and applied consistently.
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About this calculator
Is quarter-hour billing acceptable?
It is widespread and it is also increasingly challenged, particularly where entries are short. A two minute email billed as fifteen minutes is difficult to defend, and client guidelines frequently forbid it.
What is the fairest approach?
Tenths of an hour are the common compromise, and contemporaneous recording matters more than the increment. Reconstructing a day at 6pm produces worse bills than any rounding rule.
The formula
each entry rounds up to the next increment; the difference across all entries is the rounding effect
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