Task padding is billing more time for a task than it reasonably took — not fabricated work, just routine calls and letters rounded to the high end of plausible, invoice after invoice. No single entry is wrong enough to dispute on its own; the pattern only shows up once you track a task type across months, not within one bill. Raise it as a question about how time is tracked, not an accusation.

Block billing and duplicate entries get flagged because they look wrong on the page — bundled tasks, repeated line items, something a second read can catch. Task padding is different. Every individual entry looks fine. A phone call took 0.4 hours. A letter took 0.6. Nothing about any single line invites a second look.

The problem only shows up when you stop reading line by line and start asking a different question: does this task, on its own, usually take that long?

What padding actually looks like

Task padding is billing more time for a task than it reasonably took — not by fabricating work, but by rounding up, stretching routine tasks, or billing "review" time on things a five-minute skim would cover.

A few patterns worth knowing:

  • Routine correspondence billed at a flat 0.5–1.0 hours, regardless of whether the email took two minutes or twenty
  • "Review of documents" entries with no indication of what was reviewed or why it took as long as it did
  • Standard filings or routine calls billed near the top of a plausible time range, invoice after invoice, for the same type of task

None of these are block billing — each is a single task, cleanly described. That's what makes them harder to catch. There's no bundling to untangle, no missing narrative to question. Just a time figure that's a little higher than it needed to be, repeated often enough to matter.

Why it's easy to miss and hard to prove

A single padded entry is a judgment call — reasonable people can disagree about whether a phone call is a 0.3 or a 0.4. That ambiguity is exactly why padding is durable: no single entry is clearly wrong, so no single entry is worth disputing.

What makes it visible is the pattern across many invoices: the same task type, billed at a similar (high) duration, month after month. That takes a baseline for comparison — a sense of what a given task type typically runs — which isn't something most business owners without in-house counsel have any way to build from reading one invoice at a time.

What to do about it

You don't need to dispute every 0.1-hour discrepancy to make this stop being invisible. A few things help:

  1. Track task types across invoices, not just within one. A single 0.6-hour email is unremarkable. Ten of them at 0.6 hours each, every month, is a pattern worth a conversation.
  2. Ask for time increments in your outside counsel guidelines, if you don't already have this specified — some firms bill in six-minute increments by default, others round to the nearest quarter hour. Knowing which applies to your bills is a baseline you can check against.
  3. Raise it as a question, not an accusation. "I noticed routine calls are consistently billed near the higher end of what I'd expect — can you walk me through how that's tracked?" opens a conversation without assuming bad faith.

The goal isn't to litigate every entry. It's to make padding visible enough that it stops being the default.