Molly Kremer | Stop Losing Billable Time! A Guide to Higher Hours and Lower Stress

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast, where I sit down with successful attorneys, legal marketing specialists, business leaders, and authors to talk about how lawyers and law firms can grow and sustain healthy, profitable businesses.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to another episode of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast. I'm your host, Elise Holtzman, and today we are going to talk about a very important topic, which is how to capture and count more of your billable time so you can earn more, have more time, and be a more confident lawyer.

Before we do that, this episode is brought to you by the Ignite Women's Business Development Accelerator, a nine-month business development program created by women lawyers for women lawyers. Ignite is a carefully designed business development program containing content, coaching, and a community of like-minded women who are committed to becoming rainmakers and supporting the retention and advancement of other women in the profession. Registration is now open for the 2025 Ignite cohort and early bird pricing is available. To learn more about Ignite, visit thelawyersedge.com/ignite.

I'm excited to welcome my guest Today, Molly Kremer, who is a certified life coach and former big law litigator turned billing coach, who helps attorneys go from stressfully struggling with their billing to finally solving all of their unhelpful billing habits. Although Molly was a high-achieving litigator for 16 years, she definitely made mistakes in how she approached billing her time, resulting in some unintended and unsatisfactory outcomes.

Upon pursuing a life coaching certification program in 2021, Molly started to understand the real reasons behind her unhelpful billing practices and retrained herself to bill more consistently and contemporaneously. We all know contemporaneously is the key to the castle. Since then, she's been successfully helping attorneys go from struggling with and hating the billing process to effortless timekeeping using her proven billing models and billing strategies.

That sounds great to me. I wish somebody had been able to share these ideas with me when I was practicing law and I can't wait to learn more. Molly, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge.

Molly Kremer: Thank you, Elise. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

Elise Holtzman: I am delighted to have you here. I've got to ask the obvious question. What on earth inspired you to go from being a successful litigator to becoming a billing coach for attorneys?

Molly Kremer: So you mentioned a little bit of it in my introduction. I was a litigator for about 16 years. I definitely struggled as a litigator/mom, all the things and I actually got my own coach to help me with a lot of the burnout that I was feeling around my practice. This was around COVID. Sure, a lot of your listeners also felt a lot of burnout around that time, transitioning from working full-time in an office to maybe working full-time remotely.

I definitely went through that period. I got my own coach. She really helped me transform a lot of the overwhelm, anxiety, stress around my practice. After working with her and applying some of those coaching concepts and coaching tools to my practice, I started to apply them to my billing and my billing habits, which were not great.

I definitely procrastinated entering my time. I was underbilling a lot of time unintentionally, I definitely had some rounding-up errors in my billing that I felt really icky about. I forgot a lot of time and what I call confusion-cut my time, all I mean by that is I just didn't think I could bill for something or I just didn't know how to bill for something.

All in all, I was just bleeding time. As a solution, I was overworking. I was spending more time after work on the weekends trying to recoup these hours that I had no idea were just being lost to forgetfulness, underbilling, and confusion cutting. Then also all of those non-billable distractions, which I was loving, loving social media, Amazon, all the online shopping to distract me from the legal work.

Once I started applying these coaching tools I was getting from my life coach, I applied them to my billing and things really started to shift. I stopped procrastinating entering my time. I learned how to contemporaneously keep track of my time. I felt more empowered around just billing my time. I changed my relationship to my billing. I changed my identity as a billable timekeeper and I did all of this with the mindset tools that I learned from this coach that I was with and also the coaching program that I was certified in.

I started to reach out to other attorneys just in my firm where I was working at to help them with their billing habits since I had changed mine. Also, on LinkedIn, I just started posting about some of the coaching tools that I was using that changed my billing habits and if it would be helpful for others. Then all of a sudden, a business was born. People actually started to reach out to me for help. That's how I developed my program, and that's what I do now.

Elise Holtzman: I love your story. I've been doing coaching for 16 years now, just exclusively with lawyers. A lot of people, when they hear that's what I do, they say, “Wow, lawyers really could benefit from coaching.” It's 100% true. First of all, I think you will agree with me, anybody, everybody could benefit from coaching. But there's certainly a lot that lawyers struggle with because so much is expected of us and we expect so much of ourselves.

Even in my own experience, I've never thought of this being an entire specialty area. So I am so thrilled to have you here because this is such an important topic to discuss and what's particularly ridiculous—and people who listen to this podcast will know, I've said it before and I'll say it again—I haven't been practicing law for more than 25 years and I still occasionally have the dream.

The dream is where I haven't billed my time. It's the end of the month. I've got to get my time in. I'm going to get fired. They're going to hate me. I don't know what I've done. I know I worked, but I can't for the life of me remember which clients I worked on or what matters. I mean, the anxiety around this stuff is so—as the kids would say, the struggle is real—the anxiety around this stuff is so real.

Let's talk a little bit about, you mentioned a few of them, but what are the most common billing struggles you see that attorneys come to you for help with? What are their unhelpful billing habits?

Molly Kremer: I love how you use the word struggle because in the very beginning, that's exactly what I would frame it as, like to get off the billing struggle bus, as the kids would say because it really is. So many attorneys are on that bus, and the struggle is so real because it's such a taboo subject to talk about. It's like that black box. That compensation black box, it's the same thing with billing.

Nobody was talking about billing the whole time I was practicing for 16 years. It's this kind of invisible work. Nobody talks about how you don't know how to get better at it. So a lot of the times, not just with anxiety around billing, but there's so much shame. That shame is what keeps attorneys not changing their billing habits, not getting better. They just avoid and avoid their billing, wait till the end of the month to get all that billable time in.

Then it's even worse because now you have a backlog of 30 days of billing that you need to catch up on. It's so much harder and the shame just compiles over time. For me, the struggles that attorneys come to me with are the same struggles that I had. Definitely procrastinating, that's the main one. From the research I've done, when you procrastinate entering your time until the end of the day even, you typically lose, ABA studies have shown, at least one hour of billable time.

That's just from forgetting. That's it. You just miss it. You miss a 0.2 here, a 0.3 there. So, of course, at the end of the day, you just want to go home, get as much billing done as you can if you can, and you're going to miss some time. Procrastinating for sure. Then the ABA studies show, if you do it the next day, if you catch up on your time the next day, that goes up to even higher, one and a half hours. Procrastinating entering time. Underbilling was a big struggle that I went through, especially as a woman attorney.

Elise Holtzman: Wait, let's just pause there for one second. I'm going to interrupt you, but we're talking about an hour to an hour and a half a day, a day. That's five days a week. So I am not going to consult my calendar. I don't know exactly how many days, but if that's five times 50 weeks or 48 weeks or whatever, that's insanity.

Molly Kremer: 360 hours. I have done the math.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah. That's absolutely insane. I mean, and that's just for one of the challenges you're talking about, which is just procrastinating until the end of the day or the next morning, for example, to do your time.

Molly Kremer: Or the end of the week, or like you said, the dream, the nightmare of not entering your tent until the end of the month. For sure, that was me at some points in my career. I definitely put it off long enough where I had to go in and capture all of it. Those were my lowest billable hour months, and that's where that icky temptation to nobody likes to talk about it, but it's a thing, round up your time, bill padding, whatever you want to call it, and it feels terrible.

But then in the back of your mind, it's like, "Well, I'm not going to meet my hours. What if they fire me?" It's just a place that I don't want any attorney to be in. That's why my coaching process really takes them to the place of contemporaneously entering their time. For sure, procrastinating, that's a huge one.

Underbilling and confusion cutting. The underbilling was something I definitely struggled with, particularly because I had a lot of imposter syndrome throughout my entire legal career. Human beings who are socialized as women or in the minority culture, there's a lot of imposter syndrome. A lot of the solution specifically around billing is to underbill some of your time so that whoever's reviewing the billing will think that you are smart enough or efficient enough to get the legal work done in whatever the amount of time should be.

I was shooting at myself for most of my career about how long certain tasks should take and I was adhering to this standard that just made up in my mind or maybe that a partner told me years ago, how long an MSJ should take. If it took more time, I wouldn't care. I'd be like, “Well, I'll just have to lose that,” and I would cut my time most of the time.

What I would have to do then is overwork on the weekends or after work, taking time away from myself, my family, my friends, in order to fill that gap of underbilled time. It was interesting because I went to coaching initially for overwhelm and burnout, but really I just had to change my billing habits. I actually got back so much time by changing my billing habits because I stopped overworking.

I started to be able to go home, all my billing done, be with my family, be with my daughters, be with my husband, be with my friends, be with myself, and a lot of the overwhelm just wasn't there anymore.

Elise Holtzman: That just sounds like a dream and we're going to talk a little bit more about how to make that happen. But I hear stories all the time, particularly from partners who have associates working for them or junior partners working for them, where they know that their junior partner or associate is writing down their own time.

Partners will often tell people, "Don't write down your own time. If we think you're overbilling, we will write it down for you." But to your point, we don't want to look bad. We don't want to say, “Well, it took me eight hours to do something that you thought it was going to take me 1.8 to do. You're going to think I'm an idiot,” and all of that.

The thing is this runs to no one's benefit. This is not good for the client because we don't know what's really working, what's really not. It's not good for the firm for sure because imagine on an individual level what you're talking about, how that impacts a firm's billing. If every lawyer in the firm is losing that same amount of time every day, that's a remarkable amount of time to be losing. It's certainly not good for the attorney who's struggling with this stuff.

Why are we doing those things? I mean, you mentioned imposter syndrome. Are there other hidden reasons behind this unhelpful way of billing?

Molly Kremer: One of the things I help attorneys do is I give them one of the coaching tools that really helped me, which I call my billing models. The billing models really uncover all of those hidden reasons for why they are taking the action or not taking the action. For example, the action would be to underbill time, or the action would be to procrastinate entering my time till later, or the action could be confusion cutting, not billing for certain billable tasks that could have been billed, but maybe in your mind, you're like, “Ooh, I don't know how to for it. I'll do it later,” something like that.

Really, it comes down to this model. What's going on in your thinking that is leading to a certain emotion or feeling that is causing you to either act in this way that's unhelpful or not act that's also unhelpful and leading to the result of less time billed. I give my clients this coaching model, this billing model to help uncover all of those reasons.

For example, the underbilling, what we would do is I would talk to a client and say, “Okay, where is there maybe a place where you think you're underbilling time? Let's figure out why. What's at the root of it so that we can change that?” So typically, it would be, “Well, I worked on this motion for three hours, but it really should have only taken me two hours. I don't know why it took me three hours to do.” Most attorneys or whatever it is, but the thought is, “It should have taken me less time.”

Whenever this client, for example, was thinking that thought, they would feel a little guilty. A little bit of shame or a little bit of “I shouldn't have taken that much time or the partner's going to see it and think that I'm overbilling or the partner's going to see it and thinking I'm not being efficient enough.” It just feels bad. You can put a label on it, guilt, a little insecurity, whatever that is. But that feeling in your body doesn't feel good.

So what happens is our brains want to solve for not feeling good by trying to action our way out of it. What has your brain learned over the course of many, many years? Oh, if I just underbill some time, if I just take off an hour here and all of a sudden it comes down to, “Oh, it's only two hours,” I feel better. Your brain then sees only two hours billed and it's like, yes, that's what it should have taken. The partner's going to be happy with that. They're going to think you're smart. The client's going to be happy. Everyone's happy, but me because I lose out on an hour of my time.

I take them through this exercise. I call it my CTFAR. It's a coaching concept I learned as a certified life coach and when I was getting coached and I take them through just so they can see that it really is just the thought that is creating this negative emotion within them that is causing them to either act or not act in a way that doesn't serve them and creates a result.

Here it's an actual real result, one hour of unbilled time or undercut time or underbilled time. Over the course of like a week, that really adds up to like, it could be five hours at the end of the week. That's what it was for me. That's how I help attorneys really see underneath. It really comes down to what are their beliefs.

What are some of their thoughts about the amount of time they spend on certain work? What are their thoughts and beliefs about the tasks that they're doing? Do they think it's billable? Do they think they can bill for it? So it really does come down to a lot of mindset work. Then I show them my process. I show them my four-step process to change that in order to create a better feeling, thought, belief, mindset, that helps them take more action towards empowered action, towards billing all of their time.

Elise Holtzman: Let's take a minute and talk about the importance of mindset, because you and I, as trained coaches, know how deeply important mindset is to the practical outcomes. You talked about this idea of having a thought and then we have an emotion about it and the emotion leads us to either take action or to not take action.

So you and I are familiar with that, but I think most lawyers, it's like, “Okay. I'm busy. I got stuff to do. I got to fix this billing thing. So I need a tactic. I need a strategy. I need a ding or a ping to go off on my phone and remind me.” But that's not necessarily what it's really about because you can have all the pings and dings on your phone go off to remind you that you need to be doing your time. But if your head's not in the right place about it, to your point, you're not going to get there.

Talk to me a little bit about your view on how mindset interacts with actual execution on something like this.

Molly Kremer: 100%. Well, I really am of the opinion that every action that we take is always fueled by either a positive or a negative emotion in our body, I think emotions really are energy and motion. That is the fuel that we take with our actions. Whenever we're feeling a negative emotion, our brain, trying to keep us safe away from this negative feeling, will always try to avoid that negative feeling.

That's where a lot of procrastination comes in. Our brains think it's the billing that's causing us to feel bad when really it's the thought, "I'm too busy to bill. I've got to get to the next legal task." You feel rushed. You feel panicky. So your brain's like, "How do I solve for that?" Don't do the billing. Go do the billing later. Get to the legal work. That's what's more important.

You need to check off all this legal work. You've got to get back to the client email. You've got to get back to the phone call you just got versus the billing work is not seen as important, something you can always do later. You can do it at the end of the day, the end of the week, end of the month. But what's important right now, feeling like you are checking off the to-dos on your legal task list, versus having the legal work and the billing work be just as important.

That's part of the work I do with clients as well. Really showing them how to create a mindset where the billing work is just as important as the legal work and how to interweave it throughout their day so that they can contemporaneously bill, have all their time entered by the end of the day, and be able to get home to their kids or family or themselves.

Elise Holtzman: This really resonates with me, and I talk to my clients about this all the time too, is the idea that there's a difference between importance and urgency. We forget to pay attention to the things that are really important to us but don't seem urgent in any given moment. If you don't bill your time right this second, the whole house of cards isn't going to come down.

The problem is you can say that every day and every hour for the rest of your life when it really is important for you to bill that time for everyone, for your firm and for you personally. I think this is a really important point, both about the idea of the mindset getting in the way and also paying attention to things, focusing on things that are not just urgent where somebody's running around with their hair on fire because they feel like it has to get done right away, but also the things that never seem urgent in the moment, but are super, super important.

Molly Kremer: Right, for the long run. I think this is really important, especially with billing, because there is no urgency around billing, and it's hard to manufacture urgency. You literally have to create a practice where you get to it, you have that self-determination, fuel the action of billing versus being motivated by let's say deadline fear at the end of the month, a lot of attorneys do do their billing.

The reason they do it is because of the fear, that urgency of like, “Oh crap, I have to get this done or else I'm going to be on that email list of all the attorneys who didn't get their billing in, and shame on you.” So that fear-based motivation, I help attorneys get from fear-based motivation to self-determination-based motivation.

It is a little bit of a jump, but I show them my billing models, how to get them from that feeling motivated by fear and panic and anxiety and overwhelm, that dream again, the nightmare versus every single day being self-determined, self-disciplined enough to get it done as they go.

It's so interesting too because a lot of that urgency is created in one of the concepts I teach about people pleasing, which we try to please all the people out there with all their requests, and we do get a little reward for it. We get a little dopamine hit because we respond to the email. Maybe we just get a thank you for the quick response. That feels good versus billing, nobody's on the other side of billing. It's just you and your billing.

So I teach my clients in my program really how to create that dopamine in their brains by celebrating each and every time they get their billing done. They get to feel that dopamine hit, knowing that they are contemporaneously done, getting their time done now, so that they're not left at the end of the month scrambling to get it all done.

But it is a process. It's a lot easier when you have someone on the other end that you're just pleasing. You can get that dopamine hit super easy and super quick. But there is a way around it.

Elise Holtzman: I love the idea of the dopamine burst. I talk to people about that a lot when it comes to personality type, and how lawyers are driven to succeed. With billing, you're right. No one's going to pat you on the back and say, "Great job billing today. You did this fantastic job. We're so proud of you. We're making you a partner because you got your time in on time." It doesn't work that way. It's just a slog.

If you think of it as the daily slog, this is there on you every single day. I really respect this idea of taking the time to turn it into something where you're self-motivated to do it, rather than doing it to please somebody else, but it's getting you something and then making it a habit so that you can continue doing it for your career without having to worry about it on a regular basis, like, "How am I going to make this happen? Oh, my God."

Because I've had people say to me, "Oh my God, if I could just practice law and I didn't have to bill time, or maybe I'll go in-house. Going in-house would be great because then I don't have to bill time." We should be able to keep lawyers in the profession, or at least in the private practice profession, and get them a better approach to billing so I love this approach.

Molly Kremer: What I always say about that, anytime an attorney says, "I want to go in-house," I say, "Okay, you will get rid of billing, but there'll be a whole other slew of problems that'll be waiting for you in-house. Don't worry. Something will come up there as well."

Elise Holtzman: Right. There's always going to be something. There's always a bucket of crazy somewhere so look at the bucket of crazy that you have. Molly, people love stories. We all love hearing about things that other people, especially lawyers have gone through. What are some stories that you have, or what are some long-term benefits that you've seen your attorneys, your clients get from the work that they do with you?

Molly Kremer: I've definitely worked with over a hundred attorneys now in my program and who knows how many attorneys I've helped just by posting on LinkedIn a lot of value content that I do with my one-on-one clients. But I think that the best story is I worked with a client probably about a year ago and a lot of my clients come to me with ADHD.

I, myself, definitely have some tendencies. I've never been diagnosed specifically with ADHD, but I feel like I definitely have a lot of attorneys in my program with it because they tend to have that frenzied pace all day long. They tend to over-focus on the work to the detriment of, obviously, the billing work. With this client, she really was able to have this more solid, sturdy, work on the task, bill for my time, work on the task, bill for my time, and it really helped to slow down that frenzied pace that she was in for most of her career.

For her, I remember at the end of our time together, she just was expressing so much gratitude about how now she actually really enjoys getting into the office every day, being able to have this slower pace, not feeling that urgency all day to respond to all the clients and all the emails and everything, and really doing this billing work for her.

That's a huge part of my program is really giving attorneys the tools to empower themselves, to do something that really is for them. Because again, like you were just talking about, we don't do this billing work for other people. We do it for ourselves so that we meet our billable hour requirement, so that we continue to be employed by the firm, so that possibly we can get a promotion, get a bonus.

All of it really is for us, but I think so many attorneys are in the service to other people world, but I think it's hard for them to take those moments throughout the day to make sure they're capturing their time. I really help attorneys to make that both servicing their clients and the people they're working with and servicing themselves so that they don't, at the end of the month, they're the ones who are not pleased by having this huge pile of billing.

For this client, it was such a relief to know that there is another way to practice other than this frenzied pace all day long. Being able to do her billing while she went really gave her that sense of empowerment and that sense of just nice, an easy way to practice versus constantly responding to other people's urgency all day long.

Elise Holtzman: Molly, as we wrap up our time here together today, I want to ask you a question that I ask all of my guests at the end of the show. There's a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge where experts sometimes forget that what is so obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to others. When it comes to making your billing practices consistent, effective, and nearly effortless, what's a principle or piece of advice that may seem obvious to you but is important for people to hear?

Molly Kremer: For me, it's definitely what we've been talking about throughout this podcast episode. It really is that mindset, thinking, belief behind the action versus just actioning all the time. In order to change any habit, there's always a thought piece. There's always a mindset piece behind it. That is the piece that is so crucial.

Once you shift into that better-feeling mindset, you really are able to take better actions that help you get more of what you do want, less of what you don't want. Anytime you're struggling with anything, whether it's billing or anything in your practice, anything, always check in on “What am I making it mean?”

What are the thoughts that are driving the actions that are creating the unwanted results that I have in this area of my practice, again whether it's billing, whether it's a client, whatever it is, there's always a mindset piece behind it. There's always a thought and once you can really uncover what it is and do the work to start to shift into that better feeling thought so that you can take more actions versus avoiding things, then really you'll get more of the results that you want in your life, which includes better billing habits. That's what I'm all about.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, I love it. I think it's really important advice, Molly, it's something to keep in mind because it's not just about better billing software. It's not just about powering through and willpower. There's more to it than that. Most lawyers I find, as you say, are so frenetic and are so busy running around serving others that we don't slow down long enough to consider what's going on for us.

This is a great reminder. I appreciate that reminder for all of us to slow down and think about things and ask ourselves the tough questions and be a little bit patient with ourselves as we figure this stuff out. Thank you so much for being here today, Molly. I really appreciate having you. It's been a really nice chat.

I'm going to thank our listeners for tuning in as well. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.

Thank you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.