How a law firm reclaims 25% of their time with Timeular

Erin Enderle is an Attorney at Levy & Associates, a national law firm. Erin manages all of the attorneys.

The challenge: finding a way to improve efficiency and stay profitable

When the two firms that now form Levy & Associates merged, Erin needed a way to understand how each team was using their time and what improvements they could make to ensure they were working in a similar fashion and unify the process. One firm was very technological and operated remotely, and the other firm was much more traditional with 80 people working in an office and so Erin needed a way to easily understand how she could ensure efficiency across both.

The solution: leveraging the data to identify where efficiency can be improved

At first, the attorneys were against using Timeular as they felt that introducing a time tracking tool was leading towards micromanagement. To move past this, Erin started using Timeular herself and presented her data to the team so that they would realize that time tracking was not a form of micromanagement but more a way of identifying trends and being able to understand where time is going.

Rather than looking at how long each individual activity lasted, what time she had started and finished work, or how many hours she had worked in total, Erin demonstrated how Timeular made it easy to quickly see how many hours she had spent on profitable activities rather than tasks such as emailing.

Quickly the attorneys began to see that Timeular was a helpful tool as they were able to look at their data and see where they had spent too much time on certain activities and which activities they needed to focus more time on.  Attorneys are expected to spend half of their time on profitable activities and then the other half on the activities that are not linked to profitability including answering emails and attending court hearings.

Erin meets with the attorneys every week and together they look through the insights provided by Timeular. They have seven activities that their work falls into: standard attorney drafting, production (assigning lawsuits and judgements, these are the things that drive the business), communications, hearing and trial attendance, hearing and trial preparation, meetings, other and non-attorney support work. The expectation is that 40% of an attorney’s time should be spent on production.

The result: 25% more time and improved processes

Erin explained that the attorneys have been surprised when looking through the data that Timeular generates. One attorney didn’t realize how much time they were spending on emails and have now made some changes to improve the balance.

When the team started using Timeular, Erin was able to identify that attorneys were spending a vast amount of time on preparation for hearings. As Levy & Associates is a national law firm, they have a lot of hearings covered by numerous attorneys in varying states. Often an attorney will work on the preparation for the hearing, but another attorney will attend and do the preparation for the hearing too. The hearing is being prepared for twice and both attorneys are paid.

The owner of Levy & Associates also uses Timeular to see an overview of how the team is spending their time, and so it’s helpful for the team to have everything in the same place that’s accessible to those who need it.