Lawyers are already overwhelmed by the amount of work and number of matters they have to juggle; the last thing they want is to spend further effort trying to capture and organize their time entries. Many professionals still rely on spreadsheets and lengthy manual timekeeping processes, which increase the chance of human error and revenue leakage. When timekeepers record inaccurate time entries that don’t meet the firm’s contractual obligations, firms can face lengthy billing cycles full of corrections, rejections, adjustments, and write-downs. And, of course, all of the time spent entering — and correcting — time remains unbillable.
Automated time tracking software and billing software can help firms resolve compliance issues, underreported or lost time, and other timekeeping issues. Cloud-based and AI-powered tools such as Intapp Time can ultimately increase firms’ productivity, efficiency, and profitability.
Recognize Timekeeping Challenges
General practice firms often employ a wide range of professionals — including those in accounting, consulting, and legal departments — who all need to track time differently. Unfortunately, most timekeeping processes and software don’t necessarily meet the needs of all teams; firm leaders consistently report this as one of their biggest timekeeping challenges.
A firm’s accounting and consulting professionals, for example, may tackle a few multihour tasks each day, whereas lawyers typically need to capture time in much smaller increments. This disparity presents a challenge to the way firms and professionals think about capturing time.
In addition to recording a large number of time entries, timekeepers frequently struggle to properly categorize and describe entries in their timekeeping narratives. Even if they succeed in doing so, the data ends up being dispersed across multiple documents, spreadsheets, or other files and applications. When firms can’t view all their data in a comprehensible manner, they miss out on key insights that could help them make better pricing and resourcing decisions.
To support their professionals, firms need to invest in automated time tracking software that’s flexible, transparent, and capable of providing teams with critical data-based insights. The best solutions help you meet these objectives in the cloud using AI.
Leverage the power of the Cloud and AI
Investing in cloud-based automated time tracking software and billing software is a critical step toward improving both productivity and profitability within your firm. To increase efficiency, you need to implement tools that make time entry easier. Moving timekeeping to the cloud does that, and also centralizes data for the purpose of using it across other applications.
By migrating timekeeping to the cloud, time-entry data no longer becomes lost on individual hard drives or siloed within departments. Instead, professionals across the firm can easily and quickly access information they need, all in one place. Firms can also connect the cloud platform with the applications their users already feel most comfortable with, and let users operate in ways that work best for their time tracking needs.
Adopting cloud-based solutions also lets firms take advantage of advanced tools: The resources and elasticity of the cloud enable the use of AI to promote an easier time entry experience. AI can automatically capture both billable and nonbillable work, ensuring better accuracy and saving professionals a significant amount of time and effort. Lawyers can use this extra time to focus on pressing issues and deliver the best possible service to their clients.
AI can also help firms improve their strategies and decision-making, thereby setting themselves up for future success in the everchanging industry. Firms must leverage things like budgeting tools and AI to review historical matter schematics for the purposes of creating a future baseline. By leveraging the data-driven insights from past engagements, firms can better determine their pricing strategies and allocate their resources more wisely moving forward.
Empower Your Firm with Intapp Time
In our 20 years of serving professional and financial firms, Intapp has become extremely familiar with the challenges timekeepers face, and we’ve created automated time tracking software and billing solutions to address these challenges. Intapp Time — a comprehensive, cloud-based solution with built-in AI — offers a user-friendly interface and a wide range of benefits that help professionals work more efficiently.
Intapp Time provides a breadth of functionality — including passive and active capture, narrative templates, mobile capabilities, and even voice entry — that lets firms support multiple time-entry personas. Intapp cloud-based reporting services also provide interactive dashboards that fit reporting and on-screen data evaluation requirements for each of a firm’s personas.
In addition to providing automatic time capture and interactive dashboards, Intapp Time ensures that time entries remain compliant with client billing terms, keeping your invoices accurate and your client relationships strong. Firms can also set up alerts throughout the client matter lifecycle to help users stay up to date on engagements and gain deeper insights.
Register for our webinar, “Total Time Visibility: Delivering Improved Analytics and Visibility to Lawyers and Finance,” or schedule a demo to learn how Intapp Time can improve your firm’s timekeeping process.