Rebuilding a billable day from the trail the systems already keep
Time is billed in tenths, and the entry that never got written is usually a call taken in a car or a document reviewed late. The trail already exists in the sent items, the calendar, the phone log and the document history in NetDocuments. Matching that trail against what is in Clio produces a list of gaps, each with a suggested narrative and a task code. The list is only useful in the same week, because after that the trail is all there is and the memory of the call is gone.
The same client name is typed into the conflicts database, the practice management system, the document management system and the ledger, and a conflict is only found later if two people spelled it the same way.
A firm organises everything by matter, and the matter record is created by hand from an intake form. That single re-keying step seeds four systems, and because there is no shared identifier between them, every later reconciliation is a name match against human typing.
- Clio
- Outlook
- NetDocuments
When this is the wrong thing to build
Pick something else if the firm bills flat fees or contingency only, since there is nothing to recover and the reconstruction becomes an audit of how people spend the day, which is a management question and a bad reason to install software.
The constraint that shapes it
The conduct rules decide what may be automated here, and they are adopted state by state rather than nationally, so specifics have to be checked against your own jurisdiction. More on how this sector works.
Two sources of truth. One queue of the rows that do not line up. Read what this shape is, or start from one of these.
- Rebuilding an annual operating expense reconciliation from the lease
- Reconciling a broker trust account three ways every month
- Matching a closed transaction back to the lead that produced it
- Collapsing two overlapping MLS feeds into one property list
- Matching refrigerant bought against refrigerant put into equipment
- Finding the parts the truck says it still has
- How do I find billable time I forgot to enter last week?
- Can Clio create time entries from Outlook calendar events?
- What counts as a contemporaneous time record for a billing audit?
- Why do my time entries get cut for block billing?
- How do small firms capture phone calls as billable time?
Back to law firms, or see how this is priced and scoped.