Don’t Make Me Go Back: A Taylor Day Litigator’s Best Month of the Year

Job Fickett litigates construction and commercial cases at Taylor Day in Jacksonville: all-day mediations, depositions, three or four clients on a single case. Billing was the part of the job he liked least, and the firm’s old billing system made it worse: slow, laggy, and frustrating enough to change his behavior.

“The amount of frustration I got from the lagging and the lack of an intuitive user experience was part of the reason I was not billing nearly enough time. It was such an annoyance to be in it.”

Time kept as it happens

Since onboarding, about 98 percent of his time entries have gone through Hourglass. It stays open all day, and even the entries he writes himself, a phone call jotted on a notepad, go in there first, “just because it’s way faster. It doesn’t lag.”

“I’ve been more inclined to keep my time contemporaneously, because it’s not as much of a time-sucking task in and of itself to do it.”

The drafts have learned how he writes. “I’m looking at these entries from today, and I pretty much wouldn’t change anything about them. As it continues to train on my writing style, I think it just continues to get better, honestly.” Even review has become a capture tool: a gap between two drafted entries is what reminds him of the phone call that belongs there.

The best month of the year

The result shows up in the totals. When his firm noticed he’d gotten his time in better than ever, he didn’t hedge about the cause: “It one hundred percent is, and I think it’s also helped me get some more hours.” March was his best month of the year.

“Billing is the biggest time suck and honestly the thing I like the least about practicing law, and this has made it substantially less painful. I’m tied to it now. I don’t want to go back. Don’t make me go back.” If the firm ever stopped paying for it, he says, he’d seriously consider getting a license for himself. In the meantime, he tells his colleagues he has seen the light.