Legal Billing & Client Trust Ledgers: 6-Minute Increments, Fee Arrangements & Reconciliations

What you'll build

What you will be able to do

Each lab ends with a concrete result that you build yourself and the checker confirms, cell by cell.

• Round ten raw time entries up to tenths of an hour, look up each time-keeper's rate, value the week and measure how much the rounding rule adds.
• Turn fourteen time entries into a matter × task-code grid with one copyable SUMIFS, measure the share of document work and find each matter's effective hourly rate.
• Measure how much of each matter's standard value is billed and collected, pool the rates correctly, flag matters below target and total the write-offs on closed matters.
• Price one matter five ways – rate card, blended rate, fixed fee, capped fee and a success fee weighted by its probability – and pick the cheapest one for the client in expected terms.
• Split a recovery into fee bands, calculate a tiered contingency fee with one SUMPRODUCT, and see how the order 'costs first, then fee on the net' changes what the client takes home.
• Compare spend with progress per phase of a litigation budget, forecast each phase at completion (without dividing by zero), total the expected overrun and flag phases that burn too fast.
• Build a running balance per client inside one shared trust journal, summarise the month-end balances, catch the line that overdrew a client and colour it with a rule.
• Adjust the bank balance for items in transit, roll the trust journal forward, compare both with the sum of the client ledgers and trace the difference to one mis-keyed balance.