Automated Time Capture Solution Accelerates Lawyer Time Entry and Helps Increase Billings

June 2008: If you asked 10 lawyers to name their least favourite work tasks, there is a distinct probability that time recording would feature high in each lawyers’ list. While good time recording is vital for the financial health of any practice, it is unfortunately one of the least loved tasks in a lawyer’s working life.

Recognising this contradiction, US software company Integration Appliance Inc. (IntApp) has developed a product that eases the time-keeping burden placed on lawyers by automatically creating a daily activity report which acts as an aide-memoire to their billing needs. And, as a result, firms using its Time Builder product are increasing revenue per fee-earner and improving the efficiency of their administrative and financial processes.

Thomson Elite recently announced that it has expanded its reseller agreement with IntApp and will now offer IntApp Time Builder directly to its law firm customers.

Eldean Ward, Business Development Manager for IntApp, says there is often a heterogeneous mix of time-keeping procedures within any firm, but no matter what method or technology a firm adopts, time tracking is never approached with enthusiasm by lawyers.

"The quality of time-keeping is always a reflection of the level of diligence with which a lawyer approaches the task," Ward says. "While electronic timers and automated time entry applications can help, they are only worthwhile if the lawyer remembers to use them."

He says while you can encourage lawyers to record more diligently, it is a losing battle to try and implement hard and fast rules. There will always be a wide spectrum of time entry habits at any firm and each individual’s time-keeping efforts will improve or deteriorate depending on the pressure of work.

"Lawyers who leave their time-recording to the end of the week, or even worse, to the end of the month are working off memory," says Ward. "Typically they will trawl through their Sent Items in Microsoft Outlook and try and reconstruct their activity during each day, assigning time and billing details to each event.

"What Time Builder provides is a day-by-day, hour-by-hour and minute-by-minute breakdown of the activity the lawyer has undertaken each day. Essentially it is a memory prompt that ensures their time entries for that day are complete."

Time Builder achieves this by interfacing with all the key tools lawyers use throughout the day – phone, email, calendar, mobile and document applications. It records typical lawyer activity, such as viewing PDFs, editing documents and browsing the web.

It then cross-references their activity against known client matter information stored in the firm’s line of business systems (CRM, financial and practice management systems) to produce a consolidated journal.

"What our technology is good at is integrating with other systems. We can retrieve information and then filter out the superfluous activities, leaving an optimised list of events that are most likely to be relevant to their billing needs," Ward says.

Lawyer activity journals are available in a "daily diary" format distributed via email and are also accessible by lawyers or their assistants in a native browser format or directly within Elite WebView – the integrated component of the Elite financial and practice management system used by lawyers to track and enter time records. When integrated with WebView, Time Builder lets lawyers review their activity journals and submit time through a single, unified interface.

Ward says time filters can be set to direct what the application records and what it ignores. "For example, you can set it so it eliminates emails that have been looked at or written in less than two minutes – because chances are those are not meaningful for billing purposes."

The application minimises the need to re-key data because so much of the necessary time recording narrative is recorded automatically and it helps improve the timeliness of people entering their timesheets. "If you make the job easier to do, people are more willing to approach it and therefore you get an improvement in the quality of time entry."

Presenting activity as a day-by-day journal provides obvious benefits to those lawyers who do not typically record their time during the course of each day, says Ward. "There may be 30 or 40 events during a day and it is very easy to lose a six minute phone call or email during a day’s work. Time Builder makes sure that activity does not go unnoticed or unrecorded."

He says Time Builder provides out-of-office advantages for lawyers as well. "Once a lawyer leaves the office their ability to record time for after hours work diminishes rapidly. But with Time Builder if a lawyer works from home or from a client location, we can capture that time thanks to an application that sits on the lawyer’s laptop."

Lawyers facing long daily commutes – such as those travelling to the City in London – often put in an hour's work before they even reach the office. But such is the pace of work it is very easy for a lawyer to forget that once they step off the train and into the office. Time Builder captures and records the offline activity automatically.

Ward says the product provides an excellent return on investment. "The pay-back is achieved rapidly for law firms even if lawyers find only an additional hour to bill every month or so."

IntApp launched the product around 18 months ago, and has recently made its first sale to a UK law firm. Ward believes there are few, if any, applications that operate in the same way as Time Builder.

"If you analyse the path from work product to invoice, the most vulnerable part of the process, and where leakage occurs, is the transition from work product to time entry. This is what Time Builder helps to eliminate – by capturing activity that might otherwise go unnoticed – and hence, unbilled."

For further information, please contact Elite at elite.enquiries@thomson.com

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