This is the test generic sign up page.

Element55 would like to invite you to a virtual lunch and webinar demonstration.

We realize we can’t meet with everyone in person, but with a lunchinar, we figure we can at least try to meet over a meal. We would love to accommodate up to five of your team members for the virtual lunch.

Simply fill out this form to learn more about time capture over lunch!

What we have here is Element55, a group of programmers and developers, plus marketing and sales, led by an industry thought-leader (even though he’s in the back).

We hope you enjoy the Legal55 experience.

Get to know Ray Deck:

Ray Deck is the president and founder of Element55. A graduate of the class of 1997 from Yale University, he founded Element55 to help law firms recover lost revenue. Since the company was started in 2001, Element55 has helped many firms (including a number of AM Law 100 firms) capture an additional six billable hours per month per timekeeper.

Ray is a co-founder of the blog Zero Click Thoughts and also keeps a more general business blog at raydeck.com. He was featured in Mass High Tech and was a speaker at the Association of Legal Administrators annual conference in 2007. Ray is the author of multiple white papers published by the International Legal Technology Association, most notably Zero Click Time Capture.

He enjoys really strong coffee, squash, and snowboarding.

Legal55 automatically captures time that professionals spend throughout the business day. From when the computer turns on in the morning until the end of the day, Legal55 captures information in the background related to time spent on the computer, phone and in scheduled meetings. Whether you are reading an e-mail, revising a document or researching on the web, Legal55 captures all that time and condenses it on to one time sheet that is e-mailed directly to the timekeeper every day, week or month depending on your firm’s billing policies.

Legal55 tracks all activities in real time for immediate reference if necessary. You can click back and forth between windows and Legal55 knows to track only the item you are most currently working on. Also, just as your screen-saver knows when you are idle or away, Legal55 accurately accounts for that time as well. This eliminates any need to close out windows to avoid inaccuracy.

Legal55 captures phone time whether you are using a land line, Blackberry or Windows Mobile device. It automatically assigns calls to a client or matter by cross-referencing contact management systems like Outlook or your CRM. For example, if you get a call from 617-555-1212, Legal55 automatically references your database to connect that number with a name or client. This also holds true for e-mails, whether sent from your PC or Blackberry.

Similarly, Legal55 works with document management systems such as Worldox, Interwoven, or Hummingbird to assign any open documents to the proper client or matter.

Legal55 is designed for the timekeeper to do the least possible work while providing the best possible information.

Billable hours are the lifeblood of professional service firms. Element55 was founded to preserve and promote profitability through seamless, complete and automatic capture of billable hours in the working day.

Element55 released Legal55 Enterprise Edition in the fourth quarter of 2002, to strong praise by Kurzman Karelsen & Frank, a Park Avenue law firm in New York City, which realized a 1:1 return on investment within one month of the beta period.

Element55 has since deployed Legal55 in major law firms throughout the country, including Edwards & Angell LLP, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosati, and Gray Plant Mooty Mooty & Bennett. Our clients have realized an average increase of six billable hours per timekeeper to whom Legal55 is deployed (case study).

Element55 is a proud gold sponsor of the International Legal Technology Association, and a founding sponsor of the Institute for Time Capture.

Contact Renee: (617) 756-9966

Forgotten Activities and Insufficient Detail Hurt the Bottom Line - But are Avoidable

by Ray Deck and Tim Norton, Element55

Every year, law firms lose hundreds of billable hours due to time that is forgotten or that slips through the cracks.

Every administrator knows billable attorneys who run from location to location fielding calls, sending emails, or taking meetings while on the go and wonders; when do they find time to bill?

Time Forgotten - Revenue Lost

The answer to this question can be found on small pieces of paper or in diary style logs with unclear notes that can lead to write-offs.

Attorneys who spend a good amount of time emailing clients while on a train or reviewing materials while they eat lunch commonly forget to bill for that time.

Some attorneys find themselves not billing for that five minute email or three-minute phone call that they had at the beginning of the day. This might happen six or seven more times that week and be forgotten simply because the attorneys are faced with bigger issues.

This quantity and diversity of activity is part of what makes the legal profession special – exercising intelligence and education over multiple media and contexts to create and deliver value to clients.

“Services Rendered”: Incomplete Narrative

Even when the attorney records time to the timesheet that covers 100% of hours worked, lack of detail costs the firm in reduced billing and collections.

Take the example of an attorney who knows when she entered the office and when she left for home last Monday, and knows that all time that day was for a specific client matter. All the time would easily get to the timesheet, but what did she do?

In some cases, this block of time is narrated as “services rendered” or some other vague description, and submitted for billing.

At this point, the billing attorney who is managing the client relationship may see this large bill for a day’s work withouta detailed description, and therefore have to discount the billto reflect that. This discount is sometimes called “slippage.”

A second and even less desirable outcome is that the client sees this large item on their bill with only a vague description, and challenges the firm on why they should pay. This situation not only can result in a discount, but it hurts the client-relationship, which has longer-term ramifications.

And worse, both these situations are completely avoidable. Simply by providing the attorneys information on what they were doing, the firm can increase the quality of narrative and other supporting detail provided to clients, eliminating unnecessary slippage.

“It All Adds Up”

The old saying is true.

Say an attorney loses an hour a week, every week for a year. Even with a low billable rate of $250 per hour, that attorney is losing $12,000 in a year just because he or she forgot about a five-minute email or a three-minute phone call.

But that’s not the scary part: let’s say your firm has 100 time keepers, and each of them lose an hour a week, that’s over $1.2 Million a year!

Where Does This Time Go?

Every attorney, billing partner, or billing manager asks this question and the answer remains the same: nowhere.

When time is lost, it’s lost; it will not magically reappear by doubling next period or be recovered by the attorney billing better because that will never happen. Attorneys, busy doing real work for their clients, will not change their behaviors to capture more of their time. And so time continues to be lost.

Recovering Time Manually

In the absence of a voluntary shift in attorney behavior, the firm has a few remedies available to it to capture more of the attorney’s time.

Policies to require frequent time entry, accompanied by
incentives for on-time entry and penalties for tardiness.
These can cause an uptick in compliance, although
attorneys who remain tardy and are on the penalty end
can incur ill-will.

Rummaging “Sent Items” and the “worked on”
documents in the document management system can
help attorneys piece together some of their day, though
this requires an active step on the part of attorneys and
gives no information on how much time was spent even
on this limited subset.

Automating Time Recovery

The third option is to automate the recovery of time through providing attorneys with on-demand information on how they have spent their day, week or month. This information resource needs to be silent, ubiquitous and private for the attorney.

This means the computer – be it desktop, laptop, smartphone or other – does the work of filling out the attorney’s draft, private timesheet based on the real work done and attention paid over the course of the day.:

Phone Calls: 0.4 hours for “Email to Robert Doe (ABC, Inc.)”

Emails: 0.2 hours for “Read email from Robert Doe (ABC, Inc.) Re: The Agreement”

Documents: 1.2 hours for “Amend New Contract”

Meetings: 3.0 hours for “Deposition of Donald Smith in Smith v Roe”

Automatic time capture populates this information to a private timesheet without requiring the attorney to ever start or stop a clock. With this information available, the attorney can more accurately and completely bill for the time, without having to ponder the question “What was I doing today/yesterday/last week?”

Conclusion: Recovering Billable Hours

Automatic time capture that is oriented around the attorney’s working conditions and style will transform the submission of time from an onerous process riddled with leaks to a streamlined, simple event for the attorney that generates more complete value for the firm.

I

This year the International Legal Technology Association will be having its annual conference in Grapevine, Texas from Monday, August 25th through Thursday, August 28th. We will be exhibiting as a gold sponsor at booth #1005 (see image below for floor plan).

I

ray@Element55.com (617) 423 - 0692

Ray will be on the prowl attending sessions, Twittering, and on Monday, holding down the fort in our demo room in room C-1 in Longhorn Hall C. Be sure to

stop by and ask Ray for an exclusive demo!

Tim Norton - Sales and Marketing Director

timnorton@Element55.com (617) 869 - 8708

Renee Eliah - Marketing Coordinator

renee@Element55.com (617) 756 - 9966

Tanya Kropinicki - Marketing Coordinator

tanyak@Element55.com (617) 785 - 8028

Chin Kuo - Marketing Coordinator

chin@Element55.com (617) 756 - 9160

Tim, Renee, Tanya and Chin will be at our booth to field any questions you may have about Legal55 and how to capture more billable hours. We are looking forward to ILTA this year and hope to see you there!

We are proud to announce that this year Element55 will be exhibiting at Momentum 2008, The ADERANT User Conference, in San Diego California from May 12th through the 15th. Come check us out at booth 4!

WHOS GOING?

Ray Deck - President
ray@Element55.com (617) 423 - 0692

Tim Norton - Sales & Marketing Director
timnorton@Element55.com (617) 869 - 8708

Ray and Tim will be there to answer any questions you might have about Legal55 and how to capture more billable hours!

This year the Association of Legal Administrators will be having their annual conference in Seattle, Washington from May 5th through the 8th. We will be exhibiting at booth #110 (see image below for floor plan) and will also host a vendor session each day of the conference.

WHO’S GOING?

Ray Deck - President

Ray@Element55.com (617) 423 - 0692

Ray will be on the prowl attending sessions, live blogging and hosting our 3 vendor sessions listed below. Check back on May 5th for a twitter update to get his current location every hour during the show!

Tim Norton - Sales and Marketing Director

TimNorton@Element55.com (617) 869 - 8708

Tanya Kropinicki - Marketing Manager

Tanya@Element55.com (617) 785 - 8028

Tim and Tanya will be at our booth to field any questions you many have about Legal55 and how to capture more billable hours. We are looking forward to ALA this year and hope to see you there!

VENDOR SESSION TIMES AND DESCRIPTIONS

Monday May 5th - Capturing More Billable Hours with Zero Clicks (Room 2 A/B)

Time Capture is not Time Entry. This session will discuss how a lack of information costs the firm billable hours, both in time not reaching the timesheet and the time that is unbillable because of insufficient detail. Automatic, passive time capture helps law firms recover those hours without requiring attorneys to change their work habits.

Tuesday May 6th - Best Practices for Capturing More Billable Hours (Room 204)

Properly implemented, automatic time capture helps law firms recover and additional six billable hours per attorney per month through providing the attorney with better information - without requiring a change in attorney workflow. This is a discussion of lessons learned from implementing automatic time capture at law firms of all sizes over the last five years.

Wednesday May 7th - The Future of Zero-Click Time Capture (Room 2 A/B)

Technology is advancing at a rapid pace for law firms - we will discuss best practices for capturing time spent on new technologies in remote locations, as well as emerging trends in how attorneys are spending their time, and how to best make sure that time is captured to the timesheet - and billed!

Ray’s Intinerary

Sunday, May 4th - Best Practices in a Globalized World (8:30Am - 5Pm)
Monday, May 5th - Grand Opening Breakfast (7Am - 8Am)
Monday, May 5th - Vendors are NOT the Enemy: Managing and Building Relationships (10:30Am - 11:45Am)
Monday, May 5th - Grand Opening Luncheon (12Pm - 2Pm)
Monday, May 5th - Capture More Billable Hours with Zero Clicks (2:15Pm - 3:30Pm)
Monday, May 5th - Building Buy-in for a (Fair) Partner Compensation System (4:30Pm - 5:30Pm)
Tuesday, May 6th - Continental Breakfast (7Am - 8Am)
Tuesday, May 6th - Technology Idea Exchange (8Am - 9:30Am)
Tuesday, May 6th - Small Firm Administrators Idea Exchange (11Am - 12:15Pm)
Tuesday, May 6th - Association Luncheon (12:30Pm - 2Pm)
Tuesday, May 6th -Capture More Billable Hours with Zero Clicks (2:15Pm - 3:30Pm)
Wednesday, May 7th - David W. Brezina Memorial General Session - Professional Ethics: Keep You and Your Firm in the Integrity Zone (8Am - 9:30Am)
Wednesday, May 7th - Medium Firm Administrators Idea Exchange (10:45Am - 12Pm)
Wednesday, May 7th - Capture More Billable Hours with Zero Clicks (2:15Pm - 3:30Pm)
Wednesday, May 7th - Lead, Follow of Get Out of the Way: Is That Any Way to Talk to Your Managing Partner? (3:45Pm - 5Pm)
Wednesday, May 7th - Grand Finale Party: Savoring Seattle (6:15Pm - 9:30Pm)

Software should serve the attorney by populating the timesheet- anywhere, anytime

by Ray Deck, Element55

Attorneys create value with their time. Spending time worrying about their time detracts from that value, as does forgetting about time spent on even smaller activities. Events not recalled cannot be billed. That recall should be the goal of all time capture, and those systems must orient around the attorney.

Attorneys are diverse in specialties, and in activities that one undertakes even within a specialty. Our research indicates that an attorney routinely conducts 40 significant, billable activities in a single working day.

This quantity and diversity of activity is part of what makes the legal profession special- exercising intelligence and education over multiple media and contexts to create and deliver value to clients.

At the same time, this diversity creates a challenge when recording time, especially when the attorney must reconstruct much of the day from memory. Most of us can remember maybe the one or two major accomplishments or events a given day, but what of the other few hours that were made up of so many smaller activities, some of which were just progress on the way to a later event, but billable time just the same?

This challenge has become even more difficult with the multiplicity of platforms and technologies available to legal professionals. Email-equipped phones, phone-equipped PDAs, the office phone, telephony, desktops, laptops, remote access, web services, and more mean that there are many times, places and manners in which an attorney might do billable work.

Manual time capture, regardless of whether the medium is a journal, direct entry on the PDA, or scraps of paper, all rely on the attorney to recall these activities, either by recording in real time (which is not always convenient or possible) or
by calling on imperfect memory.

Automating Time Capture

Automatic time capture means the computer- be it desktop, laptop, smartphone or other- does the work of filling out the attorney’s timesheet based on activities conducted throughout the course of the day and cross-referencing with appropriate knowledge management systems:

• Emails: 0.2 hours for “Read email from John Doe (ABC, Inc.) Re: The Agreement”

• Phone Calls: 0.6 hours for “Call to John Doe (ABC, Inc.)”

• Documents: 1.2 hours for “Revise New Agreement”

• Meetings: 4.0 hours for “Deposition of Jane Roe in Smith v Roe”

Automatic time capture populates this information to a private timesheet without requiring the attorney to ever start or stop a clock. With this information available, the attorney can more accurately and completely bill for the time, without having to ponder the question “What was I doing today/yesterday/last week?”

The Key: A Complete Picture

Our research indicates that unless one can capture at least two-thirds of an attorney’s time through automatic time capture, the attorney still will still face essentially the same challenge of “what did I do” to fill in the gaps.

Deploying piecemeal systems that address one small circumstance/activity/platform but not others will therefore not solve the problem.

As such, it is important to integrate time capture into as many aspects of the attorney’s working experience as possible. Time spent on desktops, phones (both office and mobile, remote access, smartphones, PDAs, and BlackBerry handhelds must come together to form a common journal, which should be accessible from any of these platforms.

Best Practices

The time capture software should be easy to deploy on these various systems, and run silently in the background, populating the timesheet as activities are completed.

Time capture should not be a part of any surveillance or errant behavior monitoring setup. Rather than “big brother”, an effective time capture system is “little brother”- an assistant for capturing time.

The automatically generated timesheet itself should remain private for the attorney. The attorney should be able to delete the time on-demand with confidence that there will not be duplicates. Best practice is to have entries automatically delete when no longer useful for composing a timesheet- 60 or 90 days later.

At the same time, the attorney should be able to access the private timesheet at any time they might want to fill out their timesheet - be it in the office on a desktop, on the plane with a laptop, on the train home using a PDA, the information should be available on-demand to serve the attorney’s needs.

Conclusion: Attorney-Centric Time Capture

Legal professionals create value with their time. Spending time worrying about their time detracts from that value, as does forgetting about time spent on even smaller activities. Events not recalled cannot be billed.

Technology allows time capture systems to reverse this dynamic, and complement memory with an automatic record that can serve as a reference or a baseline for submitting time to accounting. In both cases, the work for the attorney decreases and the value realized from the attorney’s time increases.

Automatic time capture that is oriented around the attorney’s working conditions and style will transform the submission of time from an onerous process riddled with leaks to a streamlined, simple event for the attorney that generates more complete value for the firm.

About the Author:
Ray Deck is the President of Element55, which offers
automatic time capture software Legal55. Element55 is a
silver sponsor of the International Legal Technology
Association (www.iltanet.org) and a founding sponsor of the
Institute for Time Capture (www.timecaptureinstitute.org).
Ray can be reached at (617) 423-0692 or
ray@element55.com.

Attorneys are spending more and more hours working outside the office without the support structure of an office environment. Because this outside work often involves brief, varied activities scattered over time, stopping after each task to record the time spent can be burdensome. Even when attorneys have immediate time entry opportunities across the street or around the globe, they often go unused in favor of maintaining a flow of work or returning to nonwork activities more typical of nonbusiness hours.

Zero-Click Time Capture

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

Zero-click time capture technology complements the attorney’s memory with a timesheet prepopulated with activities over the course of the day. Rather than having to remember to start and stop a clock or fill out a time slip immediately after the fact, billing information is recorded to the timesheet in real time for reference at the attorney’s convenience. When the timesheet is opened, the attorney sees:

.20 hours on an e-mail message composed on the wireless device
.10 hours on a call received via smartphone
1.2 hours revising a pleading on the laptop while on an airplane

Capturing Billable Hours

Billable time put in away from the office often involves technologies in three categories:

Remote Access: Citrix and other virtual office environments that allow attorneys to work on systems as if they were in the office even when they are not.

Laptops: Increasingly attorneys can take their computers with them, so the ability to track hours when disconnected from the network is important.

Handheld Devices: Advanced “smartphones”and PDAs enable attorneys to work most anywhere. In essence, one can compose an e-mail message at the beach before diving into the water.

Each technology requires a different approach to time capture:

Remote access: Work conducted in the virtual environment can be captured just as seamlessly as if the attorney were using his/her own computer in the office. (see “Zero-Click Time Capture”, Finance in the Electronic Age, ILTA White Paper, March 2005).

Laptops: Time capture systems can record time attorneys spent working on their laptops even when they do not have a live network connection.

Handheld Devices: Capture systems embedded in mobile devices can track time and save it centrally without requiring a single click. They should be able to capture the full spectrum of activities an attorney might engage in on the device, rather than, for example, just phone calls.

Integrating Time Capture with Existing Systems

Information gathered from remote locations is most effective when cross-referenced with the firm’s knowledge systems, including:

CRM: A majority of activity conducted outside of the office involves communications. Cross-referencing the data with contacts and relationships to better populate the timesheet will put a significant multiplier on the value (e.g., “Call to 6175550692″ from a smartphone becomes “Call to Mr. Smith (XYZ Corp.).” This should happen even when CRM is not immediately accessible from the remote device itself. Central systems enhance data captured at the edge.

Document Management: Many new PDAs and almost all laptops enable the review and manipulation of important documents while away from the office. Many of these documents have a profile in the document management system of the firm containing contextual information such as client matter data that can help populate the timesheet (e.g.,“Revising 1239854.DOC” becomes “Revising Pleading for ABC Inc.”). Again, this integration should occur regardless of access to the document management system interface from the particular device.

Desktop-Based Time Capture: Time billed in remote locations is most effective when combined with time captured in the office. This allows a more complete picture of the attorney’s work, regardless of where he/she worked over the course of the day, week or month.

When combined with the above strategies, zero-click time capture on the remote devices allows the attorney to better understand his or her day, get more hours onto the timesheet and support those hours with greater detail- all with far less effort than simply trying to remember “What did I do last week?”

Billable Time Recorded Anywhere and Everywhere

Since the time capture system creates an information resource for the attorney, access to that information in the form of a prepopulated timesheet combining all of the above resources should be available wherever the attorney would think about or submit his or her time.

Time captured on the road should be available for review at the desk, and vice versa. Access to the information should be as ubiquitous as the opportunities to do the billable work.

What’s Next? Attorney-Centric Time?

Capturing billable hours from remote platforms is a significant opportunity and even more powerful when extended to a time capture system that works with attorneys both inside and outside of the office environment. Once attorneys have a taste of automatic time capture from one system, they may well ask, “Why not for everything?”

Time capture is not an issue for one platform exclusively. Rather, the focus should be on leveraging any and all appropriate technologies that can increase the attorney’s ability to track time regardless of location. Leveraging these technologies should minimize the hassle and likely inaccuracies in attempting to reconstruct billable hours after the fact.

Automatic time capture is an opportunity to increase the accuracy of timesheets and maximize existing investments in technologies, both inside and outside the office. For a relatively small cost - without requiring additional work from attorneys - a firm can reap substantial benefits by capturing more billable hours.

by Ray Deck of Element55
This article was first published in ILTA’s January 2007 white paper titled “Global
Challenges - Part One of a Miniseries” and is reprinted here with permission. For more
information about ILTA, visit their website at www.iltanet.org

CRM, DM, CM - how “M” Systems can Make More Money for the Firm

by Ray Deck, Element55

Law firms have deployed document management, case management, client relationship management and other systems to capture and distribute the knowledge of members and associates. These systems have been major investments, both in the technology itself, and in the setup and training to make it part of the firm.

The direct value of these systems is usually in the reporting - the aggregation and presentation of data from the various attorneys on multiple activities to give insight into the business, or retrieving relevant archived information for a present need.

The Challenge: Quality Front-end Data

The key to realizing this value is getting the attorney to provide data to the system. This is actually two challenges: the attorney (or in some cases an assistant) must input data in the first place, and the attorney must populate the fields in the system with useful information that will help the later retrieval or reporting.

In most cases, the value is realized by a different attorney from the one who would have input the original data, or by the same attorney at a much later date. In either event, there can be a disconnect between the attorney providing data at the front end, and the beneficiary at the other end.

Some firms manage this disconnect through enforcing policies. For example, many firms have a requirement that contacts be recorded in the centralized customer relationship management system. Another common situation is that the document management system is integrated into the very act of opening and saving a document in a word processor, such that providing data is just part of the work flow.

But neither example enforces the quality of data, and while it might provide a negative incentive for not following the policy, attorneys respond even better to positive incentives - answering the question “how is providing this information going to help me today?”

The Solution: Integration with the Timesheet

Automatic time capture means the computer does the work of filling out the attorney’s timesheet based on activities conducted throughout the course of the day:

• Phone Calls: .8 hours for “Call to (617) 423-0692″

• Emails: .3 hours for “Read email from jdoe@abcinc.com Re: The Agreement”

• Documents: 1.5 hours for “Revise New Agreement.doc”

Automatic time capture will integrate with the knowledge management systems to provide better narrative and descriptive data to activity-based time entries.

For example, a phone call might come in from the phone system as “(617) 423-0692″, but by cross-referencing with the customer relationship management system, that number can be matched with a name and company, becoming “Ray Deck (Element55, Inc.)”

When the CRM system contains a link to match the particular individual with a client-matter, the automatic time capture system should capture and present this as well, turning the example above into: .8 hours for “Call to Ray Deck (Element55, Inc.)” assigned to client-matter 99999-2234.

There are other examples as well:
Emails: Addresses can be translated into contacts and potentially client-matters just as with phone calls, e.g.: jdoe@abcinc.com becomes “John Doe (ABC Inc.) assigned to client-matter 04512-0001.

Documents: When a document is registered in the DMS, time spent on it can be ascribed not only to the particular document, but also the client-matter in the document’s profile. So the time spent working on the “New Agreement” above can be automatically assigned to clientmatter04512-0004.

Immediate Benefit to the Firm and Attorney

The attorneys realize this value at the front end - immediately after filling out a profile in a knowledge management system, they can reap a benefit in the form of a more completely filled out timesheet. Provide the contact information for given individual once, and the five electronic communications (phone and email) in the following week will all be ascribed to the proper client matter.

The attorney is also rewarded for the quality of data they put in. One firm in our experience had an issue where some attorneys would respond to the enforced use of a document management system by assigning almost all documents to the “firm-general” client-matter in the profile.

With automatic time capture, taking the extra ten seconds to attribute the time to the proper client-matter is reaped immediately in appropriate assignment of that time for every time he/she works on that document from then on. The firm realizes a similar immediate benefit in the form of additional hours captured. The more the timesheet is filled out with useful context, the less the attorney has to ask “what was I doing last week” or “and what client was that for?”

Implementation Considerations

The tie to the timesheet should involve a “read-only” relationship with the knowledge management systems, tapping their databases either through client-side API or server-side database query. This integration should be invisible to the user, creating value with zero clicks.

From a technical perspective, there should be no change necessary in the knowledge management systems - the time capture system should accommodate the existing structures, so as to minimize the complexity of the implementation, and account for potential future changes in the mix of KM systems (e.g. switching document management systems after a merger).

An integrated time capture system should accommodate these needs seamlessly, requiring input on the back-end of what version and type of KM systems are deployed, and allowing changes on the fly, so that all the potential time is captured with zero clicks on the part of the user, and minimal input required by information managers.

Time Capture and KM: Win-Win

These benefits mean that both the attorney and the firm realize a major, quantifiable return on their investments in knowledge management in a short timeframe- more convenience for the attorney, and more billable hours for the firm.

In the longer run, the the attorney and the firm both benefit from the reporting and retrieval available from better quantity and quality of data in the knowledge management systems on account of the short-term positive incentives.

About the Author:
Ray Deck is the President of Element55, which offers
automatic time capture software Legal55. Element55 is a
founding sponsor of the Time Capture Institute. Ray can be
reached at (617) 423-0692 or ray@element55.com.

This White Paper was published by the Institute for Time Capture and is redistributed here with permission.
For more information about the Institute, visit their website: www.timecaptureinstitute.com

by Ray Deck of Element55

A large part of an attorney’s day is spent on the telephone - with colleagues, clients, court and opposing counsel. Much of this time is billable - but not all of it gets billed. The systems that manage phone calls provide an opportunity to capture the time without having to remember when the call started or manage a stopwatch. Automatically capturing time spent on the phone is possible, and it measurably improves the completeness of time sheets and firm revenues.

Research indicates that time related to phone calls is one of the most difficult to recall because of the sheer volume of calls and the uncertainty of their length. Attorneys spend time at the end of the week or month staring at their time sheets trying to remember, “What calls did I take from this client?”

Capturing Phone Time
All office phone systems can generate call detail records (CDR) or station message detail records (SMDR) with the following information:

• Which extension made/received the call?

• Was it incoming or outgoing? (Or, in some cases, extension-to-extension)

• When did the call start?

• How long was the call?

• With whom was the call? (Phone numbers are always available for outbound calls and inbound calls with caller ID.)

Chances are your organization captures at least some of this information already. Cost accounting systems associate outbound minutes with particular clients to allocate disbursements related to the phone bill. If you have to dial an account code to make a long-distance call, you definitely have one of these. But traditional cost accounting is about capturing the pennies per minute on outbound calls. With automatic time capture, you have the opportunity to capture the hundreds of dollars-per-hour attorney time associated with all phone calls.

Feeding the Time Sheet
The key to realizing this opportunity is getting the time from the phone system to the attorney’s time sheet. The more automated the process, the easier it is to capture more time, and the attorney spends less time trying to remember a given call. Capturing phone time for the time sheet has different requirements than cost recovery:

Update in Real Time
Attorneys expect to see information about what they’ve done within a few minutes of hanging up the phone. In contrast, cost recovery processes can only queue up information and process it at month end when bills go out. To contribute to the time sheet, the processing of phone-related information must be accelerated to be available to attorneys in a much shorter timeframe.

Capture All Calls
While cost accounting looks only at outbound calls for disbursement purposes, attorneys spend even more time on inbound and internal (extension-to-extension) calls. While the phone system may not be initially configured to generate this wider output, it can be, and capturing these additional calls dramatically increases the value for attorneys.

Integrate with CRM
Customer relationship management databases (e.g., InterAction, Outlook, Notes) let you convert a cryptic phone number into a useful name and company that the individual called. There is an enormous difference in usefulness between: “Phone call to 912125551234″ and “Phone call to John Smith (ABC, Inc.).” The prospect of descriptive phone related time entries also incentivizes the use of CRM, creating a virtuous cycle.

Put It in Context
Phone calls do not happen in a vacuum - e-mail messages, document preparation and other activities are often part of the preparation or follow-up related to the call. Presenting activities done before and after the call lets the attorney allocate all the time, rather than just the portion actually on the phone.

Make the Connection
The technical requirements for capturing phone time data to the time sheet will vary based on the models and systems involved, but the process involves five steps:

Configure the Phone System
While all phone systems have CDR features, they are not always turned on unless a call accounting system is already attached. Even after confirming that CDR is active, make sure that all calls are generating records - local outbound, inbound and, if possible, extension-to-extension calls. Also, including caller ID (often called ANIS) in the record adds a great deal of value to the captured inbound calls. This configuration is a matter of changing a few flags in the software.

Extract the CDR Stream
In older phone systems, CDR is streamed over a serial connection that can be tapped with a terminal program or serial logger. In newer systems, the data can be captured using a network service. If there is already a call accounting system in place, the time capture system should share the feed.

Parse the Records
Once the record is captured, the key data points need to be extracted. Each phone system vendor (and sometimes each model) has a different way of laying out the CDR.

Process through CRM
Match the phone number in question with an appropriate contact whenever possible. Contact management systems have different mechanisms available for extracting this information.

Add to the Time Sheet
Finally, with all the data points in hand, the newly minted time entry should be pushed to the automatically generated time sheet, where it can be used as a reference or revised and submitted to accounting.

An integrated automatic time capture system will take care of these five issues at one time, as well as put the phone calls in a rich context of other activities, such as reading e-mail, revising documents and attending meetings, all captured without the attorney ever starting or stopping a clock.

What’s Next? Capture More Billable Hours
Cell phones, BlackBerry devices and other communication devices represent an additional opportunity to capture communications. Further, once attorneys have a taste of automatic time capture from one system, they’ll ask, “Why not for everything?”

Automatic time capture is an opportunity to increase the completeness of time sheets and leverage your existing (phone, customer relationship) technology investments. For a relatively small cost - and without requiring additional work from attorneys - the firm or law department can reap the benefits of capturing more billable hours.

Every year, law firms lose hundreds of billable hours due to time that is forgotten or that slips through the cracks. Every administrator knows billable attorneys who run from location to location fielding calls, sending emails, or taking meetings while on the go and wonders; when do they find time to bill?

Time Forgotten - Revenue Lost

The answer to this question can be found on small pieces of paper or in diary style logs with unclear notes that can lead to write-offs. Attorneys who spend a good amount of time emailing clients while on a train or reviewing materials while they eat lunch commonly forget to bill for that time. Some attorneys find themselves not billing for that five- minute email or three-minute phone call that they had at the beginning of the day. This might happen six or seven more times that week and be forgotten simply because the attorneys are faced with bigger issues. This quantity and diversity of activity is part of what makes the legal profession special – exercising intelligence and education over multiple media and contexts to create and deliver value to clients.

“Services Rendered”: Incomplete Narrative

Even when the attorney records time to the timesheet that covers 100% of hours worked, lack of detail costs the firm in reduced billing and collections. Take the example of an attorney who knows when she entered the office and when she left for home last Monday, and knows that all time that day was for a specific client-matter. All the time would easily get to the timesheet, but what did she do? In some cases, this block of time is narrated as “services rendered” or some other vague description, and submitted for billing.

At this point, the billing attorney who is managing the client relationship may see this large bill for a day’s work without a detailed description, and therefore have to discount the bill to reflect that. This discount is simetimes called “slippage.” A second and even less desirable outcome is that the client sees this large item on their bill with only a vague description, and challenges the firm on why they should pay. This situation not only can result in a discount, but it hurts
the client-relationship, which has longer-term ramifications. And worse, both these situations are completely avoidable. Simply by providing the attorneys information on what they were doing, the firm can increase the quality of narrative and other supporting detail provided to clients, eliminating unnecessary slippage.

“It All Adds Up”

The old saying is true.

Say an attorney loses an hour a week, every week for a year. Even with a low billable rate of $250 per hour, that attorney is losing $12,000 in a year just because he or she forgot about a five-minute email or a three-minute phone call. But that’s not the scary part: let’s say your firm has 100 time keepers, and each of them lose an hour a week, that’s over $1.2 Million a year!

Where Does This Time Go?

Every attorney, billing partner, or billing manager asks this question and the answer remains the same: nowhere. When time is lost, it’s lost; it will not magically reappear by doubling next period or be recovered by the attorney billing better because that will never happen. Attorneys, busy doing real work for their clients, will not change their behaviors to capture more of their time. And so time continues to be lost.

Recovering Time Manually

In the absence of a voluntary shift in attorney behavior, the firm has a few remedies available to it to capture more of the attorney’s time:

Policies to require frequent time entry, accompanied by incentives for on-time entry and penalties for tardiness. These can cause an uptick in compliance, although attorneys who remain tardy and are on the penalty end can incur ill-will.

Rummaging “Sent Items” and the “worked on” documents in the document management system can help attorneys piece together some of their day, though this requires an active step on the part of attorneys and gives no information on how much time was spent even on this limited subset.

Automating Time Recovery

The third option is to automate the recovery of time through providing attorneys with on-demand information on how they have spent their day, week or month. This information resource needs to be silent, ubiquitous and private for the attorney. This means the computer – be it desktop, laptop, smartphone or other – does the work of filling out the attorney’s draft, private timesheet based on the real work done and attention paid over the course of the day.:

Phone Calls: 0.4 hours for“Email to Robert Doe (ABC, Inc.)”

Emails: 0.2 hours for“Read email from Robert Doe (ABC, Inc.) Re: The Agreement”

Documents: 1.2 hours for“Amend New Contract”

Meetings: 3.0 hours for“Deposition of Donald Smith in Smith v Roe”

Automatic time capture populates this information to a private timesheet without requiring the attorney to ever start or stop a clock. With this information available, the attorney can more accurately and completely bill for the time, without having to ponder the question “What was I doing today/yesterday/last week?”

Conclusion: Recovering Billable Hours

Automatic time capture that is oriented around the attorney’s working conditions and style will transform the submission of time from an onerous process riddled with leaks to a streamlined, simple event for the attorney that generates more complete value for the firm.

About the Authors:

Ray Deck is the President of Element55, which offers automatic time capture software Legal55. He is the author of Zero Click Time Capture, Capture Billable Hours on the Road (both publisehd by ILTA) and Attorney-Centric Time Capture. Ray can be reached at (617) 423-0692 or ray@element55.com.

Tim Norton is Director of Marketing and Sales of Legal55. He can be reached at timnorton@element55.com or (617) 869-8708.

This White Paper was published by Element55.

Element55 is a sponsor of the International Legal Technology Association (www.iltanet.org) and a founding sponsor of the Institute for Time Capture (www.timecaptureinstitute.org). For more information about reducing slippage through automating time capture, visit our web site
(www.element55.com)

Billable hours are the lifeblood of any major law firm, and capturing those hours accurately and in a timely matter is critical.

But recording billable activity to timesheets is often a pain for attorneys, and enforcing timely recording a headache for many firm administrators - with the frequent result that legitimate billable time goes unrecorded and unbilled. The law firm of Edwards & Angell LLP found a pain remedy - and a way to reclaim additional billable hours with less effort. Last year, the 300-attorney firm implemented a fully- automated time capture system which records most time as it is worked, even when the attorney does not keep contemporaneous notes. It’s called zero click time capture.

A Timesaving Timesheet

The heart of the system is a timesheet that is automatically pre-populated with activities conducted over the course of the day, such that it is mostly filled out when the attorney first opens it. He sees, for example:

.10 hours on an e-mail message to a client in re the schedule for completing a deal this month

.80 hours on a phone conference with opposing counsel

1.4 hours revising the pleading for another case

According to Keith Kotler, Director of Accounting at the firm, the system allows attorneys to find out exactly what they did during the day, and he says attorneys are amazed to learn all the little, yet billable, things they actually did. Some of them have an idea, of course, based on what they wrote down on a notepad. But what a surprise when they open up the timesheet and see the actual duration of their phone calls and quantity of their e-mail responses.

Integrating with Information Systems

The underlying power of zero-click time capture lies in its ability to communicate with the various applications and communication systems throughout the office to contribute to the automatic time entries without the attorney having to start or stop the clock or keep manual journals for most common activities. The system provides the following capabilities:

Integrates with the phone system to record the time, duration and phone number for outgoing and, when caller ID is available, incoming calls

Communicates with applications on the desktop and which document or e-mail message is being worked on or viewed in a given moment

Queries scheduling software on the attorney’s calendar for appointments and meetings

Information management systems “fill the gaps” to provide better information on a captured activity:

Document management systems identify the proper client and matter for a document.

Contact and relationship management systems identify the person so attorneys don’t merely get the phone number or e-mail address on the timesheet.

By collating information from multiple systems, automatic time capture gives the attorney the best possible picture of the day, with some time attributed to the proper client-matter and the balance containing enough description to make an intelligent decision how to assign the time.

Rollout and Attorney Reception

Rolling out the automatic time capture system at Edwards & Angell was relatively easy. According to Michael Morris, Training Director at Edwards & Angell, there was minimal resistance to the new automatic time entry system because almost everyone immediately recognized the benefit and realized that the new system would not be demanding more work on their part.

Some attorneys initially expressed concern that the system might enable closer scrutiny of their daily activities by accounting. But very soon they became convinced that was not the case. In fact, the new system proved to be incentivizing, as attorneys saw that all phone calls, e-mail and other time was being automatically recorded on the fly- and at the end the day all they had to do was put on the finishing touches by assigning to a matter and tweaking the narrative. They loved that they wouldn’t have to pull out rag-tag sheets of paper at the end of the week to piece the whole thing together. The automatic time capture serves as a memory jog for everyone. It has helped track time that would otherwise have fallen by the wayside. And by automatically ensuring that time is captured completely and in a timely manner, timesheets are more complete and detailed - a great benefit for clients who demand extremely detailed time records.

Reality Check

The firm conducted a review to quantify the increase in time captured. It was learned that attorneys and paralegals who used the automatic time capture software were, on average, capturing an additional six hours per month - valuable time that otherwise would have been missed and gone unbilled.

Two Lessons Learned

The system can be customized for individual work styles. Professionals have different styles of work that need to be considered when tracking their time. For example, some get more value out of tracking all their e-mail, while for others, only those that account for a significant amount of time need to be captured. Adjusting to the variation in work style was important to attorney adoption. Technical support is minimal. The firm’s user support team reported that the majority of inquiries they fielded regarding the automatic time capture were easily resolved simply by tweaking the thresholds for time capture to better reflect the attorney’s working style.

ROI the Firm Can’t Deny

The firm has concluded that the new system is the best example to date of direct return on investment in clear dollars, thanks to the combination of firm-level financial benefit, convenience for individual attorneys and client benefits.

This article was published in ILTA’s white paper, Finance: Accounting in the Electronic Age, in March 2005 and is reprinted here with permission. For information about ILTA, visit their website at

www.iltanet.org.

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Element55 President Ray Deck attended the ILTA 2007 conference with the agenda of meeting members of the legal technology community, learning more about legal technology issues in the sessions, and sharing his experiences with the legal technology community via liveblogging the conference.

Part of the agenda is live-blogging the conference to share insights in legal technology with members of the community that couldn’t be there, attended different sessions, or who are just looking for another take on the session.

In addition to founding Element55, (read the story of our origin in this Mass High Tech piece) Ray is author of seminal thought leadership pieces on Attorney-Centric Time Capture among others (downloadable here).

The following are required for the Legal55 components

• Dedicated database in an existing Microsoft SQL Server system. Legal55 does not require its own SQL Server system, and its moderate load works well with other databases on the same server. Anticipated size is limited, expected to be roughly 2MB per attorney in data/indices when fully populated.
• A virtual server host for the network appliance. Element55 supports VMWare Server, VMWare ESX, and Microsoft Virtual Server. At least 512MB should be allocated to the virtual appliance.
• For the client, Windows 2000 or newer, with at least 256MB of memory. Legal55 has been tested successfully on Windows Vista.
• Blackberry integration requires Blackberry Enterprise Server with Mobile Data Service and handheld devices version 4.0 or above.
• For phone capture on older phone systems, a serial cable connection may be necessary. Contact us to learn more about the specific requirements in your environment.

Note: This is now part of the webinar-a-thon to fight cancer! Thank you for your support!

Questions? Contact Us Directly

Thank you for your interest in the ILTA White Paper, Capture Time around the World. Please let us know who you are, and if you would like us to follow up with additional information on how you can recover billable hours attorneys otherwise miss.

This article is presented in Adobe Acrobat. It may take a minute or so to download.

Element55 will be exhibiting at the Annual Conference and Exhibition of the Association of Legal Administrators in Las Vegas, Nevada. President Ray Deck (author of several white papers on zero-click time capture) will be among those available to meet and visit at the conference.

We will provide updates on date and booth location as we get closer to the conference. We look forward to seeing you there!

To schedule a private appointment, just send us an email: ala2007@element55.com or call us at (617) 423-0692.

Element 55 is participating in the fight against cancer by contributing $25.00 to the Jimmy Fund of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in the name of each individual that participates in a live webinar introducing Legal55 Time Capture.

It’s our way of thanking you for learning about us, while making a donation to a very worthy cause.

Just fill in the information below and agree to listen for at least 5 minutes on the date you sign up for. If you like what you hear, you’ll have the opportunity to potentially connect with peer companies that are considering and evaluating the service. Ask as many questions as you like. This format was designed to give you information and elicit comments from end users.

Attorneys, finance, IT, administration staff at law firms employing 20 or more billable timekeepers are welcome to join.

We are limiting each session to ten connections, though you may have multiple people sharing a connection if you like. We are scheduling a number of sessions, and giving you the option to choose a time more convenient for you - even if the session is one-on-one, it’s part of the webinar-a-thon

The webinars run about 25 minutes, but if, after seeing this in action for the first few minutes, you think it’s not for you, just leave, and you will still receive the mailing below to have your contribution made.

After the end of the event, you will be asked for a little bit of “snail mail” contact information, so that we can make a contribution to the Jimmy Fund of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in your name as a “thank you” for your time. Contributions will be no less than $25.

This is a series of webinar sessions running through the second half of March.

We have a number of dates scheduled below, or, if none works for you, simply put in a date that does, and we will arrange a webinar that fits with your availability.

We also encourage you to contribute to the fight against the disease of our century by making an additional donation.

Welcome Technolawyer Subscribers!

Just click below to download the thought-leadership piece, Auto-Capture Time On The Phone, authored by noted time capture expert Ray Deck and published by the International Legal Technology Association.

This article describes best practices in implementing time capture with your telecommunication systems.

This article is presented in Adobe Acrobat. It may take a minute or so to download.

Welcome Technolawyer Subscribers!

Just click below to download the thought-leadership piece, Capture Billable Hours On The Road, authored by noted time capture expert Ray Deck.

This article describes best practices in implementing time capture for mobile professionals.

This article is presented in Adobe Acrobat. It may take a minute or so to download.