Issue link: https://epubs.iltanet.org/i/30285
is closing the gap. A return to a world where lawyers don’t spend an inordinate amount of time accounting for their time is within reach. Getting there, however, will require moving beyond entrenched thinking about time-entry software. Today’s status quo, which is incremental enhancements to flawed, manual approaches to time-entry tools in a race with ballooning complexity, is an evolutionary dead end. The legal industry has the unprecedented opportunity to move beyond a decades-old approach to electronic time entry to something more evolved and intelligent; but this will require new attitudes, new technology and IT vision. Enhanced time recording and activity- capture is a necessity if law firms are to survive continuing economic and competitive pressures. EVOLUTIONARY DRIVERS Clients: What is it that the client is really buying? Hours? Hardly. Clients want advice, guidance, help, strategy, a sounding board, protection and more. At the same time, they want to know that they’re paying a fair price for the quantity of services rendered and the level of expertise provided; that their lawyers are doing the right things at the right time and acting in their best interests; and that their lawyers are working to maximize client value and efficiency, and not just their firm’s financial performance. These client demands led to the development of an entirely new class of technology — e-billing — “While a lawyer’s thoughts can’t be tracked, nearly 100 percent of their work product exists electronically” which arose from an invoicing environment that had become so complex that the only possible remedy was automation. Still, however, from the client’s perspective, the industry continues to fall short in providing such things as updates into matter progress, insights into accruals/unbilled time, an effective way of collaborating with outside counsel and control of data privacy. To respond to these demands, firms must find ways to deliver more information about their activities in a concise, timely and defensible fashion. Lawyers: Lawyers bring a slightly different perspective. They want to be able to deliver valuable legal services and maximize firm revenue and profitability. In doing so, they want to waste as little precious time as possible dealing with non-billable activities and business inefficiency. In terms of time tracking, unrecorded activities, lack of narrative detail or other oversights frequently result in client disputes and write-downs. [See sidebar for considerations of the burden current time-entry requirements place on lawyers.] FROM BUGGIES TO MODEL TS… AND BEYOND Consider the following anecdote about productivity tracking in the auto industry: Apparently, there was a time when, in support of inventory control, workers had to count each www.iltanet.org Financial Management 13