Monday, August 12, 2002

Software

EGlean lends a dose of accuracy to lawyer bills

By Patricia Resende

A law firm's billable hours may no longer be questionable with the use of tracking software from a Boston-based company.

EGlean Inc. has launched a new product that tracks an attorney's work including the time spent on e-mail, phone calls and Word documents.

Ray Deck, founder of eGlean, says his software "tracks an attorney's time on the phone, on the computer and in meetings, and records the time into a firm's existing time and billing system."

Legal55 automatically captures the time spent doing different tasks without the user needing to record any information.

EGlean, founded in 1999, launched the new software late last month to give attorneys a simpler way to submit more complete and accurate bills to clients, according to Deck.

He compared the traditional time-keeping methods of attorneys to setting an odometer. Some drivers will set the odometer at the start of a trip to record the miles and reset the odometer when they reach their destination, as do some attorneys with their time sheets.

Others, however, forget to record the mileage at the start of a trip and make estimates at the end, similar to the way some attorneys record their time, says Deck.

"What actually happens is you don't remember to reset the odometer until 20 miles into the trip - then you forget to check it at the end and you end up doing the math backwards," Deck said.

He says the result is that attorneys are overbilling or underbilling their clients.

"Partners are really complaining that in order to avoid (billing irregularities) they imply slippage - a discount applied to the bill - to account for vagueness."

Deck said Legal55 eliminates the need for slippage.

He admits that there are some time-tracking software products on the market today, but most still require the attorney to start and stop their own timer.

"The problem is if you're not clicking it at the start or at the end, you are not getting the value out of it," he said. "If I'm flipping around from Word to Excel and to e-mail and have a flow going I don't want to click, start, click, stop.

"The software that we have takes the question out of starting and stopping the clock and it takes care of it for you."

Users don't need to record the time on a document left open and unattended, Deck said. There is an automatic time setting that starts a "time away" clock that asks the user what he or she was doing and whether to bill the time spent away to the client.

"You get a pop-up and it asks you what you were doing and you can fill in 'research'."

In the end a user can check off whether a certain amount of time was billable.

Legal55 also replaces the need to jot down time spent on cases on scraps of paper.

John Ottaviani, a partner with Edwards & Angell, admits that he is one of those "jotters."

Ottaviani said "it would be nice to have some means of recording things I did throughout the day" but added that the software would be useful to some but may be disruptive to others.

"I think this would be useful for someone willing to take the time to respond to the inquiries that the system generates," he said.

The notion that the software may equal more billable hours is attractive.

"Do partners want more billable hours? Sure. If they are able to keep track of it and it accurately reflects the work done," Ottaviani said.

Ted Long, an attorney with Holland & Knight, said his firm has time management software but said it "seems more efficient for me to jot it down.

"The biggest time issue for attorneys is losing time," Long said. "The biggest issue for clients is making sure that there isn't excessive billing going on."

Legal55 can be used with a law firm's existing PBX System, a system that tracks how many phone calls are received and made and where the calls are generated.

The software is a server-based product, but a Web-based product will be available in the future, according to Deck.

"The Legal55 sits on this server that plugs into the LAN of the office and plugs into their PBX using Internet Explorer," Deck said.

Legal55 is being tested at a law firm in New York, Deck said, but he would not disclose the name of the firm.

EGlean is also in the process of testing the software with medium-sized to large law firms in Boston.