May 4, 2007
Law Firm Mobility Technology That Finds Time
While at the ALA conference in Las Vegas, I had lunch with Varsha Bhat, President of PensEra Knowledge Technologies. PensEra is a Juris, Inc. Alliance Partner. It is their TimeKM™ technology that is at the heart of the Juris mobility component that turns BlackBerrys®, Palm®s and Microsoft® Pocket PCs into an extension of their Juris system. There are already over 10,000 attorneys submitting time and expenses using the TimeKM mobility service.
One of the things Bhat is always quick to point out is the quick return on investment law firms experience when they equip their attorneys with PDA devices like the BlackBerry along with TimeKM, either directly or as part of their Juris system. She talks about “new found time”. For example, an attorney might receive a cell phone call while driving and talk with a client for 10 or 15 minutes. In many firms, there is a good chance that time will never make it into the law firm’s billing system. With TimeKM, the time is captured and with a click it is automatically available for billing by the firm. Instead of a phone call, it could have been e-mail that reaches an attorney at a theatre as he or she is waiting for the performance to start. The attorney can respond to that e-mail and at the same time enter the time worked. Again, with no further action by the attorney, that time is automatically available for billing by the firm. Bhat’s team puts it this way: "It is as simple as…Work, Click, Bill.“
Before considering any other benefits, found time makes mobility a no-brainer from a financial point of view. According to the TimeKM folks, the typical attorney finds two to three hours per month in new time from periods in the day and week that they usually consider to be downtime.
However, there is more to the story of found time than just billable work captured during an attorney’s downtime. For example, 94 percent of surveyed users reported that it helps them stay in control of e-mail. Imagine the difference of arriving in the office without that long list of unopened e-mail to attend to. Ipsos-Reid, one of the top 10 research firms in the world, reported that surveyed firms averaged 53 minutes per day of recovered productive time. Put that in your bonnet - almost an hour per day per fee earner.
The key is that TimeKM’s approach doesn’t force the attorney to change his/her behavior. It doesn’t push accounting and administrative functions from the back office to the attorney. It lets the attorney capture the time and it makes that available to the attorney’s assistant or the firm’s administrative staff to validate. Or the timekeeper can fill in the details after the fact. The objective is to first capture the time and make it easier for the attorney to do that as the work is performed.
Capturing time at the point work is performed is becoming more standard. It speeds up billing and gets money in the firm’s bank account faster. The benefits go beyond the direct financial impact. More and more firms are being called on the carpet as a result of the imperfect memory of their legal professionals. If you don’t capture your time as the work is performed, you are not going to get it right. That leads to client-mandated adjustments and rejected bills. And, those memory lapses can be viewed more seriously. Billing abuses make great headlines, and there are always people out there who love to turn an imperfect memory into something bigger. The way to reduce that risk is to equip the firm’s professionals with the tools to capture time as the work is performed.
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Filed under Technology by Tom Collins
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