How Lydecker Made Timekeeping Deadlines Easier to Meet

CUSTOMER

Lydecker is a national litigation and insurance-defense law firm serving clients across nine states. Its attorneys and paralegals represent clients in fast-moving matters where a single day can span hearings, depositions, insurer communications, and case strategy.

PRACTICE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Clio

TIMEKEEPING BEFORE POINTONE

Clio

FIRM SIZE

274

WEBSITE

https://www.lydecker.com/

An 8 p.m. deadline could not recover work attorneys no longer remembered

“Timekeeping used to be stressful. But now we have resources to make it easy. Now it’s manageable.”

—Danielle Cerny, Chief Operating Officer, Lydecker

Lydecker’s attorneys and paralegals schedules are often unpredictable. A day may begin in a deposition, move to a hearing, include zoom calls with an insurer or client from the car, and end with urgent emails or drafting. The work is substantive, fast-moving, and often spread across multiple matters.

But all of it still needs to be recorded before Lydecker’s hard 8 p.m. ET month-end deadline.

For Danielle Cerny, who has been Lydecker’s COO for six years, the challenge was that attorneys’ time was difficult to see and account for across tasks, matters, and practice groups.

Billing deadlines could not recover meaningful work that someone no longer remembered. 

A lawyer’s day is difficult to track six minutes at a time

“Attorneys and paralegals, we get busy,” senior paralegal David Pastrana says. “We could be at a trial, depositions, or a hearing. It’s inevitable that you’re going to be losing time. You’re not going to remember what you did a week ago.”

That work can include short but important calls, case-related emails, research, preparation, and conversations with a client or insurer. Once the day ends, attorneys and paralegals have to search calendars, emails, documents, and memory to rebuild it. That reconstruction could take 30 minutes to an hour and still leave gaps in the record.

For Lydecker, the operational and financial consequences included:

• Limited visibility into work completed but not yet recorded

• Missing billable activity

Lydecker looked for a better process, but it had to work for lawyers. The firm needed a system that respected the pace of litigation work, fit different working styles across nine states, and gave attorneys control over the final entry.

PointOne transformed timekeeping from entry to review

PointOne prepared suggested time entries from the work attorneys and paralegals were already doing across email, calendars, documents, meetings, and desktop activity.

Instead of opening an empty time sheet at the end of the day, users began with a detailed record of their work. They reviewed the suggested matter, duration, and narrative, then made any necessary edits before releasing the final entry.

The change was meaningful because it shifted the attorney’s role. Rather than recreating a day from memory, PointOne served as a timekeeping assistant that generated complete and ready to invoice entries. Legal professionals then only had to apply legal judgment to review the entries.

That mattered especially for the firm’s initial skeptics. Cerny expected pushback from attorneys who wanted to see proof that the entries would be useful before changing their process.

The proof came through the quality of the entries. Skeptical users saw suggested time populate with less editing required than expected. Instead of spending an hour rebuilding the week, they could focus on reviewing the work that needed attention.

During one training session, a new user watched their day’s work populate in PointOne and immediately saw a different future for timekeeping:

“This is gonna make my life way easier. Why weren’t we using this before?”

—Terri Walters, Paralegal

AI timekeeping that fits Lydecker’s Clio billing workflow

For Lydecker, making timekeeping easier could not mean adding another disconnected process. Attorneys still needed to review their work, finalize entries, and keep billing moving toward the firm’s month-end deadline.

PointOne connects directly to Clio, using the firm’s existing client and matter structure so each suggestion is tied to a matter Lydecker already bills against. Attorneys review the suggested matter, duration and narrative, make any edits, and release approved time to Clio. 

The direct integration with Clio keeps Lydecker’s client and matter data in one secure workflow, backed by PointOne’s SOC 2 Type II–audited controls and ISO 27001 certification, rather than moving it through exports, spreadsheets, or a second billing record.

That gave the firm a simpler path from the work completed during a litigation day to the system used for billing. Attorneys retained control of each entry, while operations and IT could support one connected process across offices and teams.

How tailored onboarding drove 77% adoption across nine states

Lydecker’s rollout strategy combined product configuration with direct support: PointOne led live onboarding in small groups, weekly office hours, targeted reminders, and one-on-one sessions for users who wanted more help.

That support was important because the timekeeping looked different across attorneys, paralegals, and teams working on the same litigation matters.

James T. Spratt, Partner at Lydecker, estimated that PointOne helped him record about 20% of his own billable work that he was previously not capturing by prompting him with the drafted entries related to that work.

For Spratt, learning the workflow was easy: 

“It took me less than 20 minutes to become comfortable using it.”

Within three months, 77% of Lydecker users had adopted the workflow.

For operations and IT leaders, the rollout showed that adoption does not require asking attorneys to take on another administrative system. It requires reducing the work that stands between completed legal work and a complete time entry.

Better entries with less end-of-day work

The benefit transcended the time sheet. With less time spent rebuilding the day, attorneys “can focus on their more substantive work, practice law, and provide customer service to the client because it’s freeing up their time,” Cerny affirms.

For one attorney, this also meant giving her time back on weekends to spend with her children. 

That result: timekeeping no longer had to follow an attorney home.