Time Matters has been a staple in legal and professional services firms for decades, and for good reason. It is one of the most flexible practice management platforms on the market — built to adapt to how your firm actually works rather than forcing you to adapt to it. The challenge is that this flexibility comes with complexity, and most firms end up using a relatively small slice of what the software is capable of.
I've worked with Time Matters at firms of all sizes, and the pattern is almost always the same: the software gets installed, staff learn the basics, and then everyone settles into a routine. Years go by and nobody has revisited the configuration. Meanwhile, the firm is manually doing things the system could be handling automatically, staff are working around quirks that could be corrected in minutes, and opportunities to surface better information are being missed entirely.
The following tips are drawn from what I see most commonly underutilized when I work with firms. None of them require a ground-up reconfiguration — they're targeted improvements that can make a real difference in day-to-day efficiency.
Build Matter Templates for Each Practice Area
If your firm handles more than one type of work — litigation, real estate, estate planning, corporate matters — you should have a dedicated matter template for each practice area. A well-built matter template pre-populates the matter type, default staff assignments, custom field layouts, and associated task and event templates so that opening a new matter takes seconds instead of minutes and nothing gets missed.
Without templates, every new matter is built from scratch and relies on whoever is opening it to remember every required field, the correct billing setup, and which staff members need to be assigned. Templates enforce consistency and eliminate a common source of intake errors. If your firm is opening matters without templates in place, that's the first thing worth fixing.
Use Custom Fields to Capture What Matters to Your Firm
Time Matters ships with a standard set of fields for matters, contacts, and records, but the standard fields were designed to cover general use cases — not the specific information your firm needs to track. Custom fields let you extend the database to capture exactly what's relevant to your practice without workarounds like stuffing information into notes fields where it can't be searched or reported on.
A litigation firm might add fields for court, judge, opposing counsel, and trial date. An estate planning firm might track the date a will was last reviewed or whether powers of attorney are on file. A real estate firm might capture closing date, property address, and transaction type as structured data rather than free text in a notes field.
The key distinction is searchability. Information buried in a notes field is essentially invisible to the system. The same information in a properly defined custom field can be filtered, sorted, and pulled into reports. If your staff are routinely typing the same pieces of information into notes, that's a sign those should be custom fields.
Set Up Document Templates with Auto-Fill
One of the most time-saving features in Time Matters is the ability to generate documents directly from the system using templates that automatically pull in matter and contact data. Rather than opening a blank Word document and manually typing the client's name, address, matter number, and attorney information, you create the document from within Time Matters and the fields populate automatically.
This works for engagement letters, cover letters, retainer agreements, court filing covers, transmittal letters, and virtually any other document your firm produces repeatedly. The time savings per document may seem small, but across an entire firm over the course of a year it is substantial — and more importantly, it eliminates the transposition errors that come from manually copying information from one system to another.
If your staff are still opening Word and typing client information by hand for documents you produce regularly, document templates should be on your list.
Leverage Task and Event Templates for Recurring Workflows
Time Matters allows you to create task and event templates — pre-built sets of deadlines, to-dos, and calendar entries that can be applied to a matter with a single action. For practice areas with predictable workflows, this is a significant efficiency gain and a reliable way to ensure nothing slips through.
A litigation firm can build a template for the standard sequence of events after a complaint is filed — answer deadline, discovery period, motion deadlines, pretrial conference, trial date — all calculated relative to a trigger date. A real estate firm can template the sequence from contract to closing. An estate planning firm can template the steps from intake to execution of documents.
The alternative is relying on individuals to remember and manually create every deadline for every matter. That works until it doesn't — and when it fails, the consequences can be serious. Task and event templates turn a process that depends on individual memory into one that's built into the system.
Customize Your List Views and Columns
The default column layouts in Time Matters list views are generic. Most firms leave them as-is and work around the fact that the information they actually need to see at a glance isn't visible without opening individual records. This is entirely configurable.
You can customize which columns appear in your matter list, contact list, and other views — adding the fields that are most useful to your staff and removing the ones that aren't. You can also create saved views that filter and sort records in ways that are relevant to specific roles. A billing coordinator's view of open matters looks very different from what an attorney needs to see, and both can be set up and saved so the right information is surfaced without manual filtering every time.
Configure Security and Permissions by Role
Time Matters has a robust security model that allows you to control what each user can see, access, and modify — down to the record level. Many firms set this up once during installation and never revisit it, which means permissions that were appropriate for a three-person office are still in place at a fifteen-person firm, or staff who have changed roles still have access to things they no longer need.
Proper permission configuration serves two purposes. The first is operational — staff see what's relevant to their work and aren't distracted by records that don't apply to them. The second is security — limiting access to sensitive matter information and financial data on a need-to-know basis is a basic safeguard that's easy to overlook until there's a problem.
If you haven't reviewed your Time Matters security configuration recently, it's worth taking the time to do so. At a minimum, make sure that departures and role changes are being reflected in the system.
Take Advantage of the Dashboard
The Time Matters dashboard is the first thing most users see when they open the application, and at most firms it's either left at the default configuration or largely ignored. That's a missed opportunity. The dashboard can be configured to show each user exactly what they need to see at the start of their day — upcoming deadlines, recently accessed matters, unbilled time, assigned tasks, calendar events, and more.
A well-configured dashboard turns Time Matters into a command center rather than just a database to look things up in. It surfaces the information that requires attention without requiring staff to go looking for it. Spend time with your users understanding what they need to see first thing in the morning, and configure the dashboard to show it.
Use the Timer and Time Entry Tools Consistently
Time Matters has built-in timers that can be started, paused, and stopped directly from within the application and linked to a matter when the timer is saved. This is a straightforward feature, but the number of firms that don't use it — or use it inconsistently — is striking. Attorneys and staff who rely on reconstructing time at the end of the day from memory leave billable time on the table. Consistently using the built-in timer eliminates that problem.
Make sure staff understand how to use the timer and that it's established as the standard practice at your firm, not an optional tool. The difference between timely, accurate time capture and reconstructed time entries at day's end shows up on your invoices.
Run Reports to Surface What the System Knows
Time Matters stores a significant amount of data about your firm's matters, contacts, staff activity, and billing — but that information only becomes useful when you pull it out in a form you can act on. The built-in reporting tools allow you to generate reports on open matters by status, staff workload, billing activity, time entries by attorney, matter age, and much more.
Many firms run little to no reporting from Time Matters and end up pulling this information together manually from spreadsheets or relying on memory and individual knowledge. The system already has the data — reporting just requires taking the time to configure the reports that answer the questions you're regularly asking.
The Underlying Point
Time Matters is not difficult software to use at the basic level — that's part of why it's been so widely adopted. But the gap between basic use and optimized use is significant, and closing that gap is almost always worth the investment of time or the cost of a consultant to do it properly.
The firms I work with that get the most out of Time Matters are the ones that approach it as an ongoing tool to be refined rather than a system that gets installed and left alone. Workflows change, practice areas evolve, staff turn over — the configuration should reflect where the firm is now, not where it was when the software was first set up.
If you're not sure where your firm stands or you'd like a walkthrough of what's possible for your specific practice, we're here to help. Reach out to Alliance Premier Consulting Group and let's take a look at what your Time Matters installation could be doing for you.