News Archive for July, 2006

Element55 is pleased to publish a new white paper by time capture expert Ray Deck, Capture Time on the Road. A brief excerpt:

More attorneys are spending more hours outside the office, before or after usual business hours and without the support structures of an office environment. But for all the variety in the time, manner and place of the activity, the work is still billable, and needs to be captured to the timesheet…

Excluding scheduled meetings and court time, time away from the office is often the most difficult to record for most attorneys. First, just being away from the office means that there are no support structures that many attorneys otherwise rely on to remember to catch the time as it happens.

Second, because the work often involves various small activities scattered over time, stopping after each activity to record the hours is burdensome. Even when the attorneys have immediate time entry opportunities outside the office, they often go unused in favor of maintaining a flow of work or returning to the non-work activities that are (or should be!) the norm outside business hours…

The solution is to shift the focus from time entry to time capture. Time capture remembers time the attorney is working on a given document, communication, or other activity and saves it for reference and submission at a later date.

Click to read the complete thought leadership article.

Element55 was featured in a recent cover story of Mass High Tech, “Law firms’ needs fuel local tech innovations.” A brief excerpt:

Entrepreneur Ray Deck struck upon his latest venture while pitching his product at a New York law firm.

It was 2002 and Deck was trying to sell his predictive software produced by his third startup company, Eglean Inc. The customer wasn’t much interested in the software, but it was interested in Deck’s in-house system for tracking the hours of his software developers.

The law firm wanted something similar to automatically track attorney hours — something that could generate revenue.

“They said what they really needed was something that helps where the pain is, which was billable hours,” Deck said recently at his office outside Central Square in Cambridge.

He’s been trying to soothe that pain ever since.