Block billing is a data problem

Nearly every outside counsel guideline prohibits block billing, and nearly every prebill still contains it: the 3.4-hour entry that reviewed a motion, drafted two emails, called the client, and revised discovery responses, all in one narrative. Carriers cut these entries on sight: when tasks are fused, the auditor cannot evaluate any of them, so the reduction is applied to all of them.

Why smart people block-bill

It is tempting to read block billing as laziness. It is closer to the opposite: it is the honest output of reconstruction. An attorney recalling Tuesday from a calendar and a sent-mail folder genuinely cannot say whether the motion took 1.2 and the emails 0.4, or the other way around. Rather than invent a split, they record the block, which at least has the virtue of being true in total.

The guideline says itemize. Memory says I can’t. The block is the compromise, and it costs the firm money every time.

Splitting after the fact is the wrong job

Most fixes attack the symptom. Prebill reviewers break blocks apart by judgment, which replaces the attorney’s guess with a further-removed guess. Training reminds everyone to itemize, which works for two weeks. Some firms run entries through software that suggests splits from the narrative text, inferring the underlying activities from a sentence that was itself written from memory.

All of these share the same flaw: they try to recover information that was never recorded. The split is not hiding in the block. It was lost on Tuesday.

Captured time arrives itemized

The block never forms if the record is kept while the work happens. The motion review, the two emails, the client call, the discovery revisions: these were separate activities with separate durations, and a system watching the work sees them separately. The timekeeper reviews a day that is already itemized, with a draft narrative per activity, instead of performing archaeology on their own Tuesday.

That inverts the compliance problem. Itemization stops being a demand on the attorney’s memory and becomes a property of the data. The guideline is satisfied by default, the auditor can evaluate each task on its merits, and the 3.4-hour block, along with the reduction that always followed it, never exists at all.