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How O'Hagan Meyer Attorneys Found the 25% of Time They Were Missing
At a firm with more than 20 offices, Legal Technology Manager Irina Ziminski ran the PointOne rollout to give attorneys a better way to recover the work they were already doing.
Julia Bodet
Growth
5 minutes read
Percent of Released Time Automated by PointOne | Increase in Billable Hours Captured |
64% | 25% |
CUSTOMER
O’Hagan Meyer is a national business litigation firm with a strong labor and employment practice. Its litigators handle thousands of matters each year across jurisdictions and industries, from high-stakes business disputes to day-to-day employment issues.
PRACTICE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Juris
TIMEKEEPING BEFORE POINTONE
iTimeKeep
HEADCOUNT
639
LEGAL PROFESSIONALS
400+
WEBSITE
Why Timekeeping Was Costing O'Hagan Meyer Attorneys Billable Time
At O'Hagan Meyer, timekeeping took real time out of every attorney's week. Attorneys worked across clients, matters, offices, and billing requirements, then had to reconstruct it all after the fact. One associate juggled 25 cases and still lost track of dozens of emails a day. Another attorney watched 0.1s and 0.2s slip away until some days read under six hours. One partner often went a week without entering time while she focused on client work, then rebuilt it from her inbox.
For Legal Technology Manager Irina Ziminski, that made timekeeping a technology problem worth solving.
Irina was brought in to evaluate new tools and innovations for a firm operating across more than 20 locations. Her role was to vet the technology, determine where it fit, and guide the firm through the practical work of adoption. In addition, she also understood the people behind the process.
Legal professionals did not dislike timekeeping because they did not value accurate billing. They disliked it because it pulled them away from the work they wanted to do.
“In general, the relationship between attorneys and timekeeping is a strained one. There is a large percentage that dislike doing it just because it is more of a bureaucracy part of their day-to-day workflow. They would rather practice law.”
— Irina, Legal Technology Manager, O’Hagan Meyer
Reconstructing Time from Email and Client Billing Guidelines was Painful
Attorneys confided in Irina regarding the pain of rebuilding their weeks from memory. One received 2,000 emails in 24 hours. To bill that time, the attorney had to find the client's communications, connect each email to the right matter, recall the substance of each reply, and write an entry for all of it.
Between working through the inbox and writing about how much time it took to go through it, attorneys are accruing wasted time that could otherwise be spent on moving their client’s cases forward.
Then, there were the billing rules. Attorneys at O’Hagan Meyer could not reasonably memorize every client’s requirements.
“Reviewing that many emails, it’s nearly impossible for a human being to remember where they were. If I’m entering time for 10 or 15 different clients, I do not memorize everybody’s rules and everybody’s guidelines," said Irina.
The result was not just attorney frustration. An entry that missed a requirement could be rejected at pre-bill and sent back, creating exactly the kind of administrative loop O’Hagan Meyer was trying to reduce.
A PointOne Rollout Led by the Legal Technology Manager
Irina expected a firmwide change to bring questions, exceptions, and resistance, so she planned for them.
She tracked which licensed attorneys had not yet been trained, prioritized their onboarding, and worked with PointOne to run group and one-on-one sessions across offices. She brought the firm's client billing rules over from iTimekeep so PointOne could apply them automatically, and she centralized training guides and FAQs on the firm's intranet.
PointOne also worked together with O’Hagan Meyer to apply user feedback to shape the product. After users flagged delays in email capture, PointOne launched instant email capture. As demand grew, the firm added 20 licenses and expanded to 120 users.
PointOne gave attorneys a draft instead of a blank timesheet. It created entries from the emails, meetings, and documents behind each day, and attorneys reviewed and decided what to release.
For Irina, the value was straightforward: less time reconstructing work and more time for clients.
An Automated Timekeeping Tool That Attorneys Want to Use
Within one or two weeks, one attorney came back to Irina with a discovery:
“I have no idea that I was missing about 20% or 30% of my billing time. I am telling everyone about the system because it is amazing. It is saving me so much time that I can actually focus on the fun things and practice law, which is what they enjoy to do the most.”
That attorney began telling colleagues about PointOne, not because they had been asked to promote new software, but simply because it had made their day easier.
O’Hagan Meyer did not set out to make attorneys love timekeeping. It set out to reduce the burden of it.
By taking ownership of the project and planning for the realities of a large, distributed firm, Irina helped turn timekeeping into a process that could support attorneys instead of interrupting them.
“Timekeeping used to be a dreaded task, and now it is an exciting tool.”
— Irina