Practice Management · 6 min read
Fee notes without the nine-at-night
How a Dublin practice cut its fee-note backlog from three days to ninety minutes using a thirty-second voice memo per matter.
Every practice has the same routine. Counsel finishes court, comes back, runs into a junior, takes a phone call, and forgets to tell the clerk what hours to put on the fee note. The clerk discovers this on Friday at half past five, when fee notes for the week are due. The reconstruction begins.
The hidden cost of reconstruction
The actual cost isn't the hour spent drafting. It's the hour spent trying to remember whether the consultation was forty-five minutes or an hour. It's the call to the instructing solicitor to check whether counsel attended in person. It's the corner-cut that ends up under-billing.
A senior clerk we work with audited a quarter of fee notes against counsel's actual diary and found 22% were under-billed by half an hour or more, on average. Not because anyone was being shy — because nobody could remember the small attendances.
What changes with capture-at-source
clerk& asks counsel to record a thirty-second voice memo as they leave court. "O'Reilly v Aviva, listing, half an hour, defended adjournment to seven weeks." That's it. By the time counsel sits down with a cup of tea, the fee note is drafted in the practice's house style with the right reference number, the right counsel rate, the right VAT line, and the right attendance description.
The clerk reads, edits where needed, dispatches. The reconstruction work disappears.
The numbers
- Three days of fee-note backlog cut to ninety minutes for a 14-counsel practice.
- Average drafting time per fee note: 8 minutes (manual) → 90 seconds (review only).
- Under-billing reduced from 22% to 4% of fee notes — and most of that 4% was caught and corrected.
What you need to make it work
- Counsel buy-in for the thirty-second voice memo. Not a five-minute attendance note — thirty seconds, while walking back.
- House-style template loaded once: your headings, your fee-note layout, your reference format, your VAT line.
- A clerk willing to spend the first week reviewing and correcting — so the system learns what "correct" looks like for your practice.
After that, the room runs differently. The fee-note evening goes away. The clerk leaves at six. Counsel stops worrying about the small attendances they didn't write down.