Policies On Billing For Attorney Travel Time

Most litigators need to travel for court conferences, depositions, site inspections, and other events during the life of a lawsuit. Depending on the type of appearance, a lawyer might spend more time traveling to attend an event than at the appearance itself. While many lawyers bill for travel time in some fashion, I have encountered vastly different policies surrounding how much an attorney should bill clients for the time spent traveling to and from appearances.

Full Billing

I worked at a few different firms that billed clients for all of the time a lawyer spent traveling to and from an appearance. Managers at these shops told associates to start billing from the moment they left their home to the moment they arrived at the office after the appearance was over. One of the insurance defense shops at which I worked explicitly reasoned that we were allowed to bill for all of this travel time since we were charging lower rates to the clients and full billing for travel time helped to compensate for this discount.

In some circumstances, billing every minute of travel time had some unusual consequences. In certain instances in which we needed to appear in a distant city for a short conference, we might bill a day’s worth of time for an appearance that only took 15 minutes. However, some clients would rather have their typical lawyer handle a matter and pay for all of a lawyer’s travel time rather than hire local counsel.

Half Billing

I once worked at a law firm in which we could only bill half of our travel time for a given client.  Apparently, this was the agreement reached between the client and the law firm, and I guess this was a compromise to accommodate the understanding that travel time is different than other time spent by a lawyer. The attorneys at the firm and myself were not too impacted that we were only able to bill half of our travel time to this client since this usually meant we could still bill plenty of time to the client. Still, it was a little annoying to enter the full amount in our time entry system and then make half of it nonbillable so that we could comply with the client’s wishes and still track our time.

50-Mile Rule

I once worked for a client who agreed with our law firm that only travel time connected to an appearance 50 miles from our office would be billed. If we needed to appear somewhere over 50 miles from our office, all of the travel time was billable, but if we appeared somewhere less than 50 miles from our office, none of our travel time was billable. None of the associates liked this policy. It seemed unfair that some appearances could yield a windfall of billable hours whereas other more local appearances would not involve any billed travel time. I am not sure how the law firm and the client came up with this rule, but it seems like the client did not want to pay for more local, and perhaps more routine, travel by its counsel.

Time From The Office

Whereas some clients pay lawyers for their travel time from the moment they leave home, other clients ask lawyers to only bill for travel time it would take to get to an appearance from a lawyer’s office. To some extent, this makes sense.  Lawyers typically arrive at their office during their typical workday and without billing a client. If it takes longer for a lawyer to get to an appearance from their home than from their office, a client should not be penalized for the extra time. As a functional matter, it was always tricky to figure out how long it would take for a lawyer to travel to an appearance from their office rather than from their home if coming directly from their home, but usually a rough estimate was agreeable.

In any case, lawyers need to be careful to follow all ethical rules surrounding travel time and make sure they agree with clients about how travel time should be billed. So long as all stakeholders are in agreement, lawyers can propose a variety of compromises to deal with the issue of billing for travel time.

Jordan Rothman is a partner of The Rothman Law Firm, a full-service New York and New Jersey law firm. He is also the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a website discussing how he paid off his student loans. You can reach Jordan through email at jordan@rothman.law.

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