A Month Behind, Fully Captured: Commercial Litigation at Gould & Ratner
A Chicago business litigation partner on coming back to a month of time that was already there.
Vanessa Tiradentes tries commercial disputes: business divorces, fiduciary-duty fights, contract cases where the parties used to be partners. When a case heats up, timekeeping is the first thing to fall behind.
“I’m very busy with work, so I have not done my time,” she said at the end of one of those stretches. “I have a month’s worth of time to do this weekend. So, thank you for Hourglass, for capturing most of the month.”
A backlog that isn’t blank
That’s the difference in kind: a month behind used to mean a month of reconstruction. Now it means a month of drafted entries waiting for review, grouped by matter, with narratives written the way she writes them.
“It’s more in line with how I have been editing them,” she says of the drafting. The seventeen-tasks-in-a-day problem (every call, email, and document its own fragment) gets assembled into matter-level entries before she ever sees it.
That’s the quiet change underneath the thank-you: a trial partner spent a month heads-down on the work without the unrecorded time hanging over her, because the record was keeping itself.