Common Rules
Rulesets are created from the rules available within your law firm. Some of the common rules are described below but your law firm may use different rules. For more details on the rules for your firm contact your administrator or [email protected].
Safety
Checks for offensive, discriminatory, or unprofessional language in time entries.
If clients have cases that may legitimately include references to difficult subjects this rule may flag these time entries.
Block Billing
Identifies when multiple tasks are combined into one entry. This is based on the analysis of the work and not on just the punctuation used.
Block billing checks will not be applied to entries shorter than the minimum entry length. The default is one hour and can be changed when creating or editing a ruleset.
If time has been included with each task, for example in brackets, Antidote will populate the time amounts when splitting the tasks. Otherwise time will need to be allocated between tasks before accepting.
Internal Meeting
Detects time spent on internal communications where the value to the client has not been captured in the narrative.
Research
Flags time spent investigating legal precedents, case law, or statutes.
Handover
Detects time spent transferring case knowledge between lawyers.
Travel
Identifies time spent traveling for work-related purposes.
Travel can often be valid with pre-approval. Flags can be ignored if approval has been provided. Consider capturing the approval in the narrative or contact us about how client approval is recorded.
Training
Flags time spent on professional development or learning activities.
Billing Administration
Identifies time spent on preparing fee quotes, managing invoices and other billing tasks.
Clerical Administration
Identifies time spent on clerical tasks such as scheduling appointments and preparing documents.
Insufficient Detail
Identifies entries that lack specific information about the work performed.
One of the most common problems is not capturing the value to the client and the relevance of the particular task performed. Antidote will provide information on what detail is missing for the timekeeper to update the entry.
Name Formatting
Checks that names are formatted consistently as per your law firm's guidelines.
Grammar And Phrasing
Checks for grammatical errors, tense consistency, and proper sentence structure.
Since narratives are often concise the grammar and abbreviation rules can flag a lot of entries. Consider testing on a low volume client or contact [email protected] for help in calibrating the rule.
Abbreviation
Identifies and expands legal terminology abbreviations in entries.