Time and motion study for white collar workers. Gilbreth, the new generation.
We've come so far since the slave driver with the bullwhip.
Interesting, and definitely something I might have paid for when practicing. Too many 1am nights cleaning up my billing...
But are you sending data outside my machine for processing? Some asshole is going to argue I waived privilege. We all know that's bullshit but convincing my firm to pay for this without very specific words in the contract around your access rights to the data would make this a non-starter. And that seems to vary state to state.
Good luck! Great use of an LLM.
A lawyer dies and demands audience with the Lord right away.
- Lord, why did I have to die so young at 45, in the prime of my life?!
- Hmm, let me check our records, what's your name, John Smith? ... John Smith ... here it is! You say you are only 45? According to your billable hours you are past 112.
I work at a law firm. Great idea. My initial gut reaction is that to gain traction you’ll need to do ALOT to convince them of the data privacy.
A few suggestions: can they install it on prem? (The LLM “server”) Can they install it in their Azure or AWS tenant? Can it gather data from popular DMS and PMS? On prem and cloud? What about geolocation? Data likely needs to reside in the country of the entity if that country has sophisticated data laws What about things like information barriers - if anything sensitive is going where your teams eyeballs are / permissions allow, how do you deal with that?
Finally as I’m not overly familiar with LLMs I wonder how reliable it is - lawyers will expect perfection and all I hear about LLMs is hallucinations
This problem space is so interesting. You have the 'always on' approaches like yours, or you have things like Toggl and Clockify etc. There will always be tension in "always on at my desk" vs. "on the go" time tracking.
I'm always on the road, so very few of these 'track my screen for billing' tools appeal to me. Tenths, though, has been a good fit for my lifestyle. It's honestly helped me with my ADHD, too.
Good luck on your endeavors!
Tenths is only on iOS, the website doesn't have much other info: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tenths-billing-time-keeper/id1...
Use an LLM to hallucinate plausible billing narratives so you can charge customers 10-15% more.
This looks really similar (in concept, your design is way better and you have more features) to something I built with my lawyer/legaltech business partner a few years ago. We even applied to YC and didn’t get in.
I’m curious, though, how accurate is your llm for things like trying to “pull subtle context from an attorney’s browser activity to associate that work with a client”? I suspect this needs to be damn near bullet proof, otherwise attorneys will tear it apart. We stuck purely to file tracking, comparing diffs and syncing activity in real time on a an app with GitHub like heatmap that could also flag suspicious time entries. It worked great but we had a hard time getting adoption because people did not want to force their attorneys to use it. Interesting to see the times change dynamics, good luck!
Although you guys are (correctly) focused on lawyers, I would have loved something like this in my prior career as a consultant.
I don't think I ever submitted my timesheet on time
This is a really hard problem, and kudos to you for trying to tackle it. Time tracking narratives can be so different from practice area to practice area and also as a function of the size of the firm.
Often, it also comes down to the idiosyncrasies of the client and their org structure! I wonder if part of the solution will include using the actual invoices sent to a client to train how future invoices to that client should be prepared.
Good luck to you!
While this seems like a great tool for the lawyers, as a client I would reject any invoice generated by this tool for lack of detail. (It's not an issue with the tool in principle, so much as the output it currently generates.)
Lawyers have to track their time in short increments and give detailed descriptions for what they did with that time because they charge obscenely high rates and many lawyers have a history of padding their bills. If their rates were lower, they could get away with generic descriptions and less granular timekeeping.
For example, accounting firms can, and frequently do, get away with stating "Preparation of [x] tax return" as the only work detail on an invoice, because they charge a fraction of what law firms charge. I recently approved a $75k invoice for "Preparation of FY tax provision" without any pushback because I know the firm spent hundreds of hours on it and probably swallowed a bit of billable time.
Other prior art includes IDE monitoring.
Other tie-in's include task switching and context saving. Remember Eclipse Mylyn would save the state of the IDE associated with a task, and even associate that with a bug so another developer could pick up the world of the task.
Indeed, rather than integrating with other applications by snooping them (raising confidentiality and security issues), you might consider making a legal workspace that can publish out, producing word docs or pushing url's to browse, etc. That way, people accept that everything in context is monitored, and you can automate the crap out of any use case.
The Attorney-IDE is also how you can secure the environment, encrypting everything and even ensuring that information doesn't flow from one client to another. That could become a sales point for them to mention to their clients: that all client information is separately secured, with keys revocable at a moment's notice.
The key feature for usability of this information is seamless provenance for secure internal collaboration: all information should come with information about where it's been, who's seen it, etc. (Just don't say blockchain). If you want to add features for the managing partners to feel like gods, give them the ability to search all contexts without decrypting, so they can implement some policies while maintaining confidentiality for clients.
Business-wise, you can start with a few firms via high-touch custom integration with their policies and practices, and gradually productize through generalization and customization/assembly as you move to low-touch sales model. I suspect each use-case gets system/AI customization you can deploy out, so with luck you'll always have leading-edge high-touch feature development followed by broader deployment.
If you want the (monitored) attorneys themselves as stakeholders, layer in features for continuous tracking, to identify time-wasters (admin like time-tracking, new technology evaluation like research via Lexus vs. some new internal AI) and even negotiate or enforce ground rules (associates limited to 60 hours in exchange for lower salaries...)
The legal industry has been trending toward fixed price / subscription for ages because everyone on both sides has been burnt out - exactly what Adrian experienced. The rank and file hate it, the partners hate it, the clients hate it. People who were worth hundreds of dollars an hour were pissing away their labor on account for every minute, and miserable at not being able to spend a minute that isn't billable at the office.
If you were shopping this around to firms and they loved it, you wouldn't need to be here - they'd be throwing money at you.
Is this MacOS? Seems like this needs to be multi-device & multi-OS: attorneys often collaborate using their phones, and laptops while not in the office and do billable work there. All the attorneys I know work in Windows too.
I worked at a top US law firm as a corporate lawyer for almost 10 years (my first career). I'd say the brain starts to experience life in 6 minute increments. I think you'd need to accurately capture all the moments when an associate is in front of your computer but not working for this to work. I suppose your plan B would be to sell this to firm management as a timekeeping audit tool. it could be a valuable informative tool that they don't initially rely on but can use to test accuracy etc before they move on to actually using it.
Can you extend this to other legal staff who need to bill time? For example people in litigation support have the same time documentation overhead problems, and find it just as tedious and distracting.
Looks like a useful tool, I know some other ones exist for lawyers so probably need to address why this is an upgrade over those old school ones. A bit of social proof/case study would help, but overall seems like you have a product with a clear market and a value prop that is easy to express. Best of luck! More thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtyXzCYmVVs
Personally, I think https://laurel.ai is the leader in this space. Very impressive though! It's a great space to be in.
Having a close family member working in BigLaw in the United States, I can confirm that lawyers absolutely HATE time tracking — so your market is definitely valid.
If you can make this work and get adopted, I know at least one person who would be very happy.
As to getting product-market fit, you will have a huge issue getting traction in big law firms unless you can run the app on-premises or on the local machine, or provide some serious (read: insane) security guarantees. There are simply too many information security issues that can be existential to firms and their clients to trust any startup with cloud solutions, whatever dept it is in, M&A, IP, Litigation, or even T&E. (I've tried to suggest solutions many times for many of their information mgt issues, and it is a hard NOT EVEN CONSIDER). Perhaps if you get bought by one of the major cloud firms, they might consider it; e.g., I know they are using MS products, but IDK if they are self-hosted or not). Small firms without those kinds of issues are your best bet right now, but even some of them have litigation issues with serious InfoSec issues. Perhaps (this is just speculation) dedicated and isolated server racks for each client firm and VPNs could work. In any case, put that up-front in your sales pitches.
The other thing you'll need is connections to the phone system and the lawyers' mobile phones to at least capture call logs and link them to clients. This should be easier as the firms install partitions with their own software on the phones.
The other thing that takes almost the most time, is composing the description for each time block for the client to read. These entries must essentially "sell" the time block to the client, informing them of the work that was done in a way that they agree that it delivered value. If this part isn't done well, the clients tend to challenge line items on the bill, consuming valuable time and getting write-offs. Presumably, you could train the LLM on all past bills to pre-generate good descriptions for each time slot, which would help as it's easier to edit than to write from scratch. Also, doing anti-training on past entries that were written off may be very helpful (at this point, they just have forbidden word lists).
You are definitely on to a hot market, and I hope you can get to market fit really soon — may the wind be at your backs!
To what degree do lawyers actually want to track their time accurately?
I used to work a timesheet intensive job (consulting). The quiet rule was log the minimum 45h/w if you like your engagement; log your actual hours if you hate it.
When my lawyer bills me 1 hour, I know it doesn’t actually take him 1 hour. That’s just his rate. This has been my general experience with small shops. Do bigger firms pay closer attention to detail?
Amazing founders working on an idea that AI can actually deliver value on today. This is one to watch for sure.
Time tracking sucks and I applaud efforts to free people from having to do it manually, so best wishes.
I'm also concerned that automated time tracking is extremely close to automated surveillance and not only "productivity monitoring", but also "productivity judging". What do you think about this?
Maybe the problem you're trying to solve shouldn't exist in the first place. It seems that people-y professions (as opposed to technical ones) such as law, sales etc. are really keen on setting unreasonable expectations. Most of the SW industry at least heard of the mythical man-month.
Super cool, I'd love to learn more about your tech stack and how you capture data from my computer and phone! Screenshots and OCR like Rewind? I have a good number of lawyer friends who might be interested in this.
If I was a lawyer I'd sign up just for the inevitable lawsuit pursuing damages when this software inevitably fails. You better have a rock solid legal team or you're wading into infested waters with pants full of chum.
Do lawyers work in front of laptops always? I used to be in consulting so I know sizable time had to be spent while away from my laptop. Just curious how lawyers work.
As an attorney I really hate the process of time tracking (I'm good with the actual time tracking).
I'll be looking at the demo wistfully.
Does this software hide the 5.5 hours per day spent doomscrolling on reddit, or does the lawyer have to figure that out for themselves?
Demo shows billing 2 minutes work as 0.2 hours = 12 minutes.
No wonder lawyers have such fancy suits and a reputation for overcharging :)
I'm not a laywer but your product pitch really made me think this is a very cool solution.
This is why one should agree on and pay fixed pricing to lawyers. Most of it is just standard procedures which don't take much time and should be easy to estimate. Most of the work is done by the secretaries anyway. Lawyers even charge huge amounts for taking simple photo copies.
> Your entire day captured, task by task.
Scary.
We created and sold a company that did this, eventually it was sold to bighand.
Feel like this has been a popular startup idea for at least 15 years
> Capture every 0.1. Stop letting time slip through the cracks. Capture and bill 5-10% more time.
Does this mean that historically, Lawyers have been leaving money on the table by billing less time than they spend? /s
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This is really cool. Though, as someone who has worked in GTM at SaaS company, your website is confusing - most of the copy is written about features and the Q&A is geared towards associates ("will this let my boss spy on me?") but the "book a demo" button seems designed to lead partners into a demo. If the end goal is to convert potential executive sponsors and decisionmakers into a demo, the messaging should be revamped to almost entirely emphasize business outcomes rather than features. If you're curious, check out the free resources on the Product Marketing Alliance website!