AM Law 200 Top VC Firm

Before Laurel

As the top-ranked law firm for tech innovators and investors, speed and client trust are competitive differentiators. The organization needed a timekeeping solution that was as far ahead of the curve as its attorneys and clients.

After Laurel

Time Automation greatly accelerated the pace of timekeeping, with a 40% increase in release velocity. A 24% increase in the number of tasks captured ensured bills were more precise, improving client trust, and 70% of users releasing more billable time significantly lifted firm revenue.

How Valuable is Laurel? We Asked the Firm’s Timekeepers

An investor puts their money on a promising young entrepreneur. A company takes the strategic step of acquiring a competitor. A private equity f irm backs a bold and innovative new brand. These types of deals tend to be featured in the business headlines, but just as fast-paced and fascinating are the law firms working tirelessly behind the scenes to guarantee that all goes according to plan.

And no one does that better than this international firm. Trusted by first-time startups, emerging and established businesses, and the investors that back them, the firm has been ranked as the top of its class by PitchBook for the last eight years. One of the keys to its success? Hiring the best lawyers in the industry, and empowering them with tools and processes that are as cutting-edge as their clients.

Every technology investment the organization makes benefits individual attorneys and the business as a whole—and for the firm, timekeeping was the next frontier. It was essential to find a solution that would enable its lawyers to keep pace with the breakneck speed of the innovation economy without burning out.

For years, firm managers had been observing how their conventional time capture tool was leaking billable time and encountering poor adoption. So when they came across Time Automation that shifts the timekeeping paradigm from lawyers telling a machine what they did during their workday to the machine telling the lawyers, they knew it was the right choice. That’s why the firm chose to roll out Laurel.

Time Capture Just Can’t Cut It

Lawyers despise time capture. It provides them with a seemingly bottomless pile of disorganized time entries that they then have to painstakingly categorize and correct before release—meaning they spend their time on mind-numbing busywork when they could’ve spent it on work that actually matters.

The firm ushered in Laurel to free its lawyers from draining administrative tasks, boost their happiness and productivity, and directly impact the bottom line. Laurel’s AI-powered automation runs unobtrusively in the background, capturing all of a lawyer’s billable activities, intelligently assigning them to the correct Client Matters and work codes, and formatting them as a review-ready timesheet. 

How much better was Laurel? The team did a head-to-head comparison with Intapp Time, monitoring time released, the number and granularity of time entries, and the speed at which entries were released into the billing system.

More Time Captured and More Time Released Means Higher Revenue

Because Time Automation is so effective in tracking activity across a firm’s chosen apps, websites, document management software, and phone systems, 70% of users reported that they were able to capture and release more time.

Similar to other firms that have deployed Laurel, timekeepers were often capturing an extra 30–60 minutes every day, and a few attorneys reported even more. If these gains were extended across the entire firm, they could equate to over $100,000 every single day—and tens of millions each year.

Each timekeeper also increased the number of time entries they released into the billing system. Laurel prevented time leakage by capturing all digital work activity across emails, documents, research sites, phone calls, calendar meetings, and other work applications, and as a result, timesheet granularity rose by an average of 24%.

AI, the driving force behind Time Automation, predicts Client Matters and Phase Task codes and links related sessions and tasks. All timekeepers need to do is to make final edits to their timesheets before releasing them into the billing system. This proved to be a huge benefit to the firm, since greater precision improves client trust in bills and improves realization rates.

The speed of release, from the time the work is performed to the time it enters the billing system, increased as well. Release velocity with Laurel was more than 40% faster than it was with Intapp Time—again, because the timesheets created by Laurel are review-ready with all entries properly categorized. This allows timekeepers to get hours into the billing system faster, ensures work is billed to the client in a timely manner, and shortens the collection cycle.

“As someone who struggles to enter my time when things get crazy busy, Laurel was able to capture the universe of emails, calls, etc. without my having to reverse engineer where I spent my time.” - Corporate Associate

A Strong Vote of Confidence for Laurel

The benefits of Time Automation were immediate and tangible. It didn’t take long for the firm’s lawyers to get used to the software, with more than half feeling fully accustomed to it in five days or less. In the first two weeks, 80% of users also saw the system’s accuracy improve, since Laurel’s machine learning models learn from behavior and become more refined with increased use. This demonstrates that over the longer term, timekeeping will get even easier.

“Laurel captures more time for computer-based tasks, as it is far more diligent than I could be about recording each email, document view, etc.” - Litigation Associate

In the end, Intapp Time couldn’t compete with Laurel—over 90% of timekeepers agreed that adopting Laurel would be key to moving the firm closer to a successful daily time release policy. Now, the firm is a delighted customer, and has made Laurel the default timekeeping tool that their new associates learn as soon as they’re welcomed to the team.