It’s Just There: The End of Month-End Reconstruction at Preg O’Donnell & Gillett

Damon Jardine runs the business of Preg O’Donnell & Gillett, a regional litigation and mediation firm working out of Seattle, Portland, and Anchorage. He does not bill the hours himself. He is the one who sees what happens to them.

What happens is that attorneys get busy. Deep in a matter, timekeeping is the first thing that goes, and it keeps going until the day it cannot: month end, with weeks of work to account for and nothing to account for it with.

“They’re reconstructing weeks of work. Going back through their emails, their calendar invites, their phone records, trying to remember what a call in the middle of a Tuesday was about.”

Every firm knows what that costs. The hours that never make it onto a bill, the ones that go on thin, and the resentment of a task that only ever gets harder the longer it is left. It is also the least defensible work product in the building: a record written from memory, weeks after the fact, for clients whose guidelines assume it was written as the work happened.

The evaluation was a conversation with engineers

Damon had looked at what else is on the market. What decided it was not a feature list.

“We’re not dealing with a salesperson.”

Hard questions got answered in the same call, by the person who had built the thing being asked about, rather than carried away and returned as a promise. For a firm being asked to put its time record, its client data, and its billing pipeline into someone else’s software, that is not a nicety. It is how you find out what is actually true.

Deployed on the firm’s terms, not sold up to them

The second half of the decision was the deployment.

“Their enterprise-first approach suited our deployment needs much better than any other solution out there.”

There was no negotiating up to a tier where the firm’s requirements would finally be met. Every firm on Hourglass runs in its own deployment, against its own database, under the same assurances, because that is the only way it runs.

The advantage is one sentence long

Ask Damon where the value is and the answer is not a percentage.

“It reduces the amount of time it takes timekeepers to enter their time. It’s just there.”

The work is captured as it happens and written up as complete, coded, compliant entries. There is no reconstruction, because there is nothing to reconstruct. Nobody opens a blank entry form at the end of the month and goes looking through a mailbox for their own week.

That is also what makes it stick. An attorney does not have to be persuaded to adopt a system that has already done the work by the time they open it.

When something comes up

The relationship after signing turned out to be the same one they had during the evaluation.

The firm raises something and is talking to the engineering team, not filing a ticket into a queue and waiting on a status. They know who has it and they hear back. For a firm of this size, that is the difference between an issue being a nuisance and an issue becoming a project.

What he would tell another firm

Look at what the tool asks of your timekeepers, Damon says. The point is not that a computer writes the entry. The point is that the attorney is not rebuilding the week in order to produce one. A tool that still leaves them digging through email at the end of the month has not solved the problem the firm actually has.

And find out who you will be talking to after you sign.