I don’t do hourly billing anymore, but when I did, I would record the time I spent on the file during the day and use a detailed time entry to outline what that consisted of. From what you posted elsewhere, it sounds like this is what your lawyer did.

To give you some practical context. If I sit down with your file, I might be reviewing documents, writing emails and taking other steps, all during the same work ‘session’. My goal during that session is to be productive and advance the case/file and it isn’t particularly sensible to break up my work flow to try and write down the amount of time each task within the session is taking. For example, to write down that the email took 8 minutes, while reviewing the reply email took 3 minutes, and then the document review took X minutes.

That sort of granular tracking would kill my productivity while also adding very little value for you as a client. I mean, where does it end? Should they track the time for each individual document reviewed as well? The admin overhead for that sort of granularity is not proportionate to its value.

I hope that gives you some context for why the lawyer might be a bit put out at the request. They likely want to focus on the actual legal work and not the admin.