Lynda ArtesaniLegal Accountant and Data Migration Specialist at The Proper Trust

The New Attorney's Dilemma - Bookkeeping vs Billable Hours

8 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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In this video, Lynda Artesani addresses newly licensed attorneys who are deciding whether to handle their own bookkeeping or outsource it. She frames the choice as a trade‑off between spending time on administrative tasks and maximizing billable hours at their chosen hourly rates (e.g., $300‑$500). Artesani highlights a key performance indicator – the percentage of billable hours an attorney can achieve each day – and questions how much of a lawyer’s day is actually billable when they also manage marketing and bookkeeping in‑house. The discussion sets up the problem of a low daily billable‑hours metric and invites attorneys to consider the financial impact of outsourcing non‑revenue‑generating work.

Chapters

Is it worth it to you, new attorney, to do your own bookkeeping? Or is it worth it to you to charge an hourly rate of $300, $500, whatever your hourly rate is, to build your business? And what does that KPI look like? So— That's a great question. You know, if you're, if you're doing, if you're doing all the marketing and you're not outsourcing to a legal marketing firm and you're not, and you're doing the bookkeeping and you're not outsourcing that, How much time are you actually billing every day? What is the metric? What percentage? I want to— for some reason, oh, I can't grasp the number in my head this morning, but there is a metric out there that the actual billable hours percentage per day per attorney, it's this dismal number because of