260 Hours, Nothing Missed: Running Fort Worth on Hourglass

Shane O’Dell runs Naman Howell’s Fort Worth office and one of the busiest inboxes in it: three hundred emails on an ordinary day, more when he’s traveling, which is most weeks. Last month he billed 260 hours.

He noticed what Hourglass had become to him the week it briefly wasn’t there. “I realized how dependent I am on it already, because when it didn’t work for those few days I thought, damn it, now what? Back to the old way? I’m not sure what needs to go in there and what doesn’t.”

The path of least resistance

The tell of software lawyers actually like: they route more work through it than they have to. “I find myself entering my manual entries into Hourglass too, just because it’s easy to use. I’ve already got it open, so I’ll type it in and push it all out at the same time instead of keeping it in two places.”

The economics matter as much as the convenience. His assistant used to spend her hours entering his time. “It frees up my paralegal to go bill instead of entering my time, which is, obviously, a huge efficiency gain. Anything we can do to make it easier for people to bill is better.”