How a Boutique Litigation Firm Fixed Its Revenue Recognition and Found $85K in Misbilled Time

Sam's List Editorial | 2026-06-06

How a Boutique Litigation Firm Fixed Its Revenue Recognition and Found $85K in Misbilled Time The work was done. The time was logged. The invoice was never sent. For a three-partner litigation firm doing

.8 million in annual billings, $85,000 in billable time was sitting in the time-tracking system with no corresponding invoice. Not written off. Not billed. Just sitting there, aging invisibly until the matters closed and the window to bill it passed. This is what it looked like when Legal Ease Bookkeeping ran a WIP reconciliation for the first time. The Client:
.8M in Billings, No WIP Visibility Three litigation partners. Annual billings of
.8 million. A billing platform for time tracking and invoice generation, and a separate general ledger system for bookkeeping. The firm's prior bookkeeper did the job as it had been defined: reconcile invoices to cash receipts. When money came in, it was recorded. When invoices went out, they were tracked. The books balanced. What the books didn't track was the step before the invoice — the work in progress. WIP is the accumulation of billable time that has been entered into the time-tracking system but hasn't yet been converted into an invoice. In a litigation practice, WIP is often substantial. Cases move slowly. Multiple attorneys record time on the same matter over months. Partner review of invoices adds another delay before the invoice hits the client. If no one is watching WIP — specifically, watching for time entries that are sitting unissued past a reasonable billing cycle — you get exactly the situation this firm was in. Time disappears. What Legal Ease Found: $85,000 in Unbilled Time, Some of It Years Old Legal Ease Bookkeeping's engagement started with a WIP reconciliation process. This meant pulling the full open WIP ledger from the billing platform — every time entry that had been logged but not yet billed — and cross-referencing it against the invoice history and matter status. The number was $85,000. That figure represented billable time entries from attorneys at the firm that had been entered correctly into the time-tracking system, assigned to the right client matter, and then never converted into an invoice. The time itself wasn't disputed. The attorneys had done the work. The billing workflow had simply not triggered invoice creation. Some entries were recent — within the current billing cycle, where the delay was normal. Others were 60, 90, and more than 120 days old with no invoice and no corresponding write-off decision. In a few cases, time had been entered on matters that were...

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