Time Is Money

An hour on paper

An hour of legal work counts only if a record shows it. The client who pays the bill can insist on that, and so can a judge who orders the other side to pay. The Supreme Court of Florida built that rule into the way courts award fees in Florida Patient’s Compensation Fund v. Rowe, a 1985 decision about the fee in a medical malpractice case. This reading follows that case from the first step it set out to the question it now helps answer about software. What does an hour need, on paper, before anyone has to pay for it? The activity asks you that twice: once about three days of your own time, and once about a month of a firm’s.

Lena Rowe had won a malpractice suit against Lee Memorial Hospital. A 1980 statute, section 768.56, told courts to award a reasonable attorney’s fee to whichever side prevailed in a malpractice case. The Florida Patient’s Compensation Fund, which owed the part of her judgment above the hospital’s $100,000 in primary coverage, attacked the statute as unconstitutional. The trial judge upheld it and set a fee but was unsure the fee had been computed the right way. The Supreme Court of Florida upheld the statute too. Then it answered the trial judge’s question for every court in the state.

What Rowe asked for

The court was worried about more than one fee. The legislature had passed more than seventy statutes letting courts award fees, and the court noted a concern that judges were setting them without objective, uniform standards. It adopted a method federal courts were already using, the lodestar. First, the judge finds the number of hours reasonably spent on the case. Second, the judge finds a reasonable hourly rate, what lawyers of comparable skill and experience charge in that community. Multiplying the two produces the lodestar, and only then may the judge adjust it.

The first step is where time records enter the law. Rowe (opens in a new tab) told fee applicants to present “records detailing the amount of work performed” and to claim only the hours they could properly bill their own client. Inadequate documentation, it warned, may reduce the hours claimed, and so may hours the judge finds excessive or unnecessary. The court added that Florida courts had stressed accurate, current time records, especially when someone other than the client pays the fee.

Two years earlier, in Hensley v. Eckerhart (opens in a new tab), the U.S. Supreme Court had started federal fee awards from the same product of hours and rate. It also gave a name to the habit behind Rowe’s instruction: billing judgment. A lawyer asking the other side to pay should leave out hours that are “excessive, redundant, or otherwise unnecessary,” just as a lawyer in private practice leaves them off a client’s bill. In other words, a fee award applies the client’s test. An hour the firm could not honestly bill its own client is not an hour the other side owes.

What a judge reads

Records cut both ways, because a judge reads them the way a skeptical client would. In Haines v. Sophia (opens in a new tab), a family law client discharged her lawyers after four months, having paid them $56,251, and the firm asked the court for $42,000 more. The trial judge went through the time sheets. She found several lawyers billing for the same hearings, secretarial work billed as legal work, and one entry of 35 hours on a single Sunday for reviewing files. The firm said the entry covered the whole holiday weekend, but other entries suggested otherwise, including 2.5 hours of record review billed separately on July 4 of that weekend. In 1998 the Fourth District affirmed the refusal of any further fee, remarking that the entry required a “rewriting of the laws of physics.”

The firm’s own records were the best evidence against it. And the court made a point that reaches every timekeeper: careful time records matter between lawyer and client even when no one else pays the fee.

A second way to fail is to put a day’s work under one number, so the reader cannot see what each hour bought. That is block billing. In Moore v. Kelso-Moore, a trial judge found that a firm’s block billing “made it impossible to determine the reasonableness of the hours expended” on several matters. Grouping is not forbidden as such. In Spanakos v. Hawk Systems, Inc. (opens in a new tab), the Fourth District upheld an award that included a 4.1-hour entry and a 6.4-hour entry. Each was detailed, and their tasks mostly served the preparation for one summary judgment hearing. The test is whether a reader can take the entry apart.

The last failure is time written down long after the fact. A contemporaneous time record is made as the work happens. Reconstructed time is rebuilt later, and Florida courts accept it only as far as evidence supports it. In Brake v. Murphy (opens in a new tab), a trial judge awarded $388,412.50 for 2,219.5 hours of a lawyer’s work, based mostly on the lawyer’s own testimony and limited reconstructed records. One rebuilt line claimed 220 hours of telephone conferences between 1990 and 1992, with no word of what the calls concerned. The Third District reversed the award in 1999. A reconstruction built entry by entry, with the date, the task, and the time, can support a fee, but “numbers plucked from the air and standing alone” cannot.

A paralegal’s entries face one more test. Section 57.104(1), Florida Statutes (opens in a new tab), tells a court setting a fee to consider a paralegal’s time when it was nonclerical, meaningful legal support under a lawyer’s supervision. Copying, scanning, and labeling are clerical, and a court will not award them as attorney’s fees. Scheduling can fall on either side: in Spanakos, scheduling in a contested case with many parties needed a lawyer’s attention, and the fees stood. The description decides which side of that line a judge sees.

The rate, the multiplier, and the price

Rowe’s second step sets the rate. The lawyer seeking fees must prove the market rate, and the judge sets it as if the fee would be paid whatever the result. Only after the multiplication does the judge adjust for the outcome. Rowe allowed a contingency risk multiplier of 1.5 to 3 when a lawyer took the case for a share of the recovery, and a cut when the client lost on unrelated claims. It also said that a court-awarded fee should never exceed what the client agreed to pay.

The multiplier has since shrunk. In 2023 the legislature added section 57.104(2), which creates a strong presumption that the lodestar is a sufficient and reasonable fee. A court may depart from it only in a rare and exceptional circumstance, with evidence that competent counsel could not otherwise be retained. In Florida, the product of hours and rate is now presumed to be the fee.

Inside a firm, the same billable hours are measured three ways. Utilization, realization, and collection track how much of a timekeeper’s day is billable, how much of that reaches an invoice, and how much of the invoice the client pays. An hour written off before the bill goes out is lost at the second step. A vague entry invites that write-off, and a padded one invites a dispute.

Not every fee starts from the hour. Rowe itself explained the logic of the contingency fee: a lawyer paid nothing when the client loses must charge more when the client wins. Alternative fees price something other than effort. A flat fee prices the task, a contingency fee prices the result, and a subscription prices access to a set of services. Each still has to be reasonable under Rule 4-1.5.

When the work gets faster

The hourly rule has a hard edge. In 1993 the American Bar Association’s ethics committee took up lawyers who bill the same hours twice (opens in a new tab). A lawyer who spends four hours at the courthouse on three clients’ hearings, it said, “has not earned twelve billable hours.” A lawyer who flies six hours for one client while working five of them for another has not earned eleven, and reusing old work does not re-earn the hours billed the first time. Florida’s Rule 4-1.5(a)(2) treats a fee sought by intentional misrepresentation of its amount as clearly excessive. That is padding and double billing, and the Haines court called lawyers fiduciaries who may not inflate the time they record.

Generative AI puts the same rule under new pressure. A summary that took an afternoon can now take minutes to generate and half an hour to check. In 2024, Florida Bar Ethics Opinion 24-1 (opens in a new tab) answered the billing question directly: the efficiency must not produce falsely inflated claims of time. The opinion is advisory, but it rests on Rule 4-1.5, which binds. A lawyer who wants to charge a client the actual cost of the tool must tell the client first, preferably in writing. A subscription that cannot be traced to one client’s matter stays in overhead. And the lawyer should be careful not to charge for time spent developing minimal competence with the tool.

Rowe reaches the same place from the courtroom. It told lawyers to claim only the hours they could properly bill their own client, and an hour the tool saved was never spent. So it cannot go on an hourly bill, and it cannot be shifted to the other side in a fee award. A firm that wants to share in the value of its speed has to change the price instead of the hours. Opinion 24-1 suggests how: a flat fee or a contingent fee for specific services, agreed in advance, so the benefit of the efficiency goes to lawyer and client alike. That is billing for AI-assisted work under the rules as they stand.

Keeping your own clock

Rowe asked for records made by people who expected someone to read them. The activity starts there. Start your timer the day it opens, since Part 1 runs for three days while you practice on a firm day with the Timekeeper Trainer. Then open Temko Eden’s prebill and read each entry the way a judge would, with the firm’s own records beside it. Read your own log that way before you post it.