P2P

P E E R T O P E E R M A G A Z I N E · S U M M E R 2 0 2 5 83 KOUROSH ZAMANI is the Co-Founder and Head of Strategic Growth and Partnerships at Laurel, the first company to apply AI to time in professional services. Under his leadership in revenue and business development, Laurel has grown ARR by more than 300% in the past year and now serves over 100 global firms— including AmLaw 5 and Big Four. Prior to Laurel, Kourosh was VP of Business Development at the investment firm Bailard, Inc., and holds an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, where he spends weekends restoring his log cabin and exploring the outdoors with his wife and toddler. Firms cannot see the hours that were never logged (hidden write-offs). They cannot tell when partners are doing associate-level work (poor leverage). They may not recognize patterns because task narratives vary wildly between timekeepers. The results often involve pricing decisions based on flawed assumptions about the actual time required for the work. This issue is a strategic blind spot, not a neatly wrapped data hygiene issue. It distorts profitability, staffing, pricing, client relationships, and competitiveness. Furthermore, in today's fast-moving AI landscape, a second blind spot is emerging: knowing where to deploy AI in the first place. WHEN TIME BECOMES TRUTH Imagine a world where your time data was not subjective. A world in which you could harness true time collected passively, consistently, and accurately, mapped with time intelligence (tasks, outcomes, and context). A world where time became your most reliable operational signal. In that world, AI is not a blunt- force speed tool. It becomes a targeted tool—applied where it creates leverage. When that foundation is in place, you can start asking and answering questions that were previously out of reach. Where are we overusing senior talent on tasks that should be delegated? Where should we apply AI automation? What is our actual floor pricing, once all write-downs and unrecorded hours are included? How do remote and hybrid teams spend their time? Are we unintentionally reinforcing timekeeper bias that distorts reporting? Is our capacity planning based on data or on gut feelings? These questions are more existential than operational in nature. Their answers impact how firms structure engagements, staff teams, price work, deploy technology, and measure success. FROM POINT SOLUTIONS TO STRATEGY The firms that thrive in the AI era will be those that adopt strategically and anchor their AI strategies in factual data about how work gets done and how much time tasks consume. True time visibility reframes how firms think about AI, not as a tool to be plugged in, but as a capability to be thoughtfully deployed. The most forward-thinking legal teams build detailed blueprints of their operations. Blueprints that map how value is created, where effort is spent, where friction lives, and where AI can help. MEASURE TWICE, AUTOMATE ONCE If you are leading AI strategy at your firm, start with the atomic unit of time. Measure how your teams work before you automate how you believe they should. Understand your baseline. Clarify your bottlenecks. Identify where the value lives. Once you do, move forward with conviction. Let the data guide your next steps and iterate as you go. Because the real opportunity to build the firm of the future is not to go faster, but to go smarter with intention, insight, and direction.

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