Only the Narrative: A Naman Howell Paralegal Retires the Blank Time Slip

Chris Almanza is a paralegal in Naman Howell’s Fort Worth office, and he bills like a litigator. On any given week he bills on average forty-five to fifty-five hours, accounting for more than 90 percent of every hour he works. “Efficiency is key,” he says. “To maximize effectiveness for the client and profitability for the firm is most important to me.”

At that volume, the cost isn’t the work; it’s the scaffolding around the work. “If I combine all of these, it’s going to put them all on that case, and it’s going to generate the codes that I need it to. That takes more time than you would think, especially when you’re doing a hundred and fifty to two hundred hours a month. It fills in all the prerequisites for you, and you’re only focusing on your narrative.”

The first month in nine

“This is the first month in nine that I put my time in every single day,” he says. Month-end used to cost him two full days of reconstructing entries. It no longer costs him one.

The time he’d been losing was work he was already doing and failing to write down, most of it correspondence. He sometimes reads a hundred emails on a busy day and files every one of them. “Some of them are billable, and I’m not capturing that time. It’s done a huge job of helping me track those and put them into billable time slips.”

What he tells other paralegals is about the learning. The more of his time it sees, the closer an entry lands to the way he would have written it himself: grouped how he groups them, coded how he codes them, less to fix every month. “It’s consistently gotten better, more accurate, and easier to use.”