Does Ajax Integrate with Gmail? How to Get Started with Gmail on Ajax
Every hour a lawyer works but doesn't bill is revenue that disappears. The biggest culprit is usually email. A five-minute reply to opposing counsel, a quick scan of a client's contract attachment, a back-and-forth chain about a hearing date. None of it feels worth stopping to log, and almost none of it gets billed.
We built Ajax's Gmail capture to close that gap. Ajax watches the work as it happens in your inbox, drafts a time entry in your voice, attributes it to the right matter, and pushes it to your practice management system. You don't start a timer and you don't reconstruct anything at the end of the day.
What is Ajax?
Ajax is an AI-native timekeeping tool built for lawyers. It runs as a desktop application that reads your screen in real time and automatically drafts time entries across every application you use, including your email client.
A lot of lawyers tense up the moment they hear "reads your screen," so the privacy answer comes first. Screen content is processed, used to generate a draft time entry, and then automatically deleted. We don't use your data to train our models.
Our infrastructure providers (including the AI providers underneath us) are contractually prohibited from retaining or training on anything that passes through. Ajax is SOC compliant. Every lawyer's Ajax is an individual silo, so nobody at your firm can see your activity, not even managing partners.
Does Ajax integrate with Gmail?
Yes, and the way we do it is worth understanding before you start.
There is no Gmail plugin to install. We don't connect to your Google Workspace through an API. We don't ask your IT team or your Google admin to approve anything. Ajax captures Gmail the same way it captures every other application on your desktop, by reading what's on your screen as you work.
That's a deliberate choice. Most tools that advertise a "Gmail integration" are reading email headers and metadata (sender, recipient, subject line, timestamp). We read the contents of the email itself: the reply you're drafting, the attachment you opened, the string of clarifications you're working through with co-counsel. That difference shows up in the time entry, where the narrative describes the work you did rather than a list of windows that were open.
A few practical implications of capturing Gmail this way:
It works no matter how you access Gmail (Chrome, Safari, the macOS Mail app, the Gmail iOS app mirrored to your laptop)
It doesn't require any Google Workspace admin approval or per-mailbox license
It captures the email together with the document, contract, or research you were doing for the same matter, so the entry reads as one coherent piece of work
It captures drafts you never send, replies you read but don't respond to, and threads you scan and close
How Ajax captures your Gmail work, step by step
Four things happen between the moment you open an email and the moment a time entry shows up for your review.
Ajax sees what's on your screen
While you read, write, and reply in Gmail, Ajax is reading the same content you're reading. Pixel by pixel, in real time. It picks up the sender, the recipients, the subject line, the body, the quoted thread underneath, and any attachments you open. It picks up the words you type into your draft as you compose them.
A draft entry lands in your voice
About 45 seconds after you finish an action, Ajax produces a draft entry. The narrative is written in the style of your prior time entries, which we ingest from your practice management system during onboarding. If you usually write "Reviewed and responded to opposing counsel re: deposition scheduling," that's what your Ajax-drafted entries look like. If you usually write "Email w/ OC re depo scheduling," that's what they look like.
Ajax attributes the email to a matter
This is the part most email-tracking tools get wrong. Matter attribution can't come from your CRM alone, because most of the people relevant to a case (judges, opposing counsel, peripheral parties, a co-defendant's paralegal, the kids in a custody case) aren't in it. Those names live in email threads and documents.
Ajax builds matter attribution from the content of the email itself. When it can't confidently attribute a message to a matter, it flags the draft entry for you to assign, then it learns from the correction. From there, Ajax handles the next email from the same opposing counsel about the same case automatically.
Related work gets grouped into one entry
A single piece of billable email work is usually seven emails across the day, plus the contract you reviewed in the middle, plus the ten-minute call where you and your client decided how to respond. As individual line items, that's fourteen entries to wade through. As one piece of work, it's a single entry of about an hour and forty-five minutes.
Ajax groups intelligently across the day. You can configure whether you want block billing or itemized entries, depending on your client's billing guidelines.
What Ajax does with the email once it's captured
Captured work flows back into the system where your billing happens.
When you release an entry from Ajax, it appears in your practice management system as a time entry, ready for invoicing. We sync with Clio, MyCase, and PracticePanther in both directions. If you edit the entry in your PMS afterward, the edit reflects in Ajax. If you add a new matter, Ajax picks it up automatically.
There's a second flow worth knowing about: email filing. Once Ajax has attributed an email to a matter, it can file the email itself into the right matter folder in your PMS or document management system. So the entry shows up where you bill, and the email shows up where the case lives, with no dragging or copy-paste in between.
How to get started with Gmail on Ajax
There's nothing for you to install inside Gmail. The setup happens at the desktop level, and we handle the technical work on our end.
A typical onboarding looks like this:
We install the Ajax desktop app on every team member's machine
We connect Ajax to your practice management system and pull in your matters, billing codes, and prior entries
We customize Ajax's settings to your firm's billing guidelines (UTBMS codes, client-specific narrative rules, grouping preferences)
Ajax runs silently in the background for about two days before your kickoff
On day one, every attorney sees real time entries already waiting for them, written in their voice
A note on the word customize. We don't train models on your data. We configure Ajax's output settings based on your firm's existing patterns. That distinction matters for security positioning, and it's the reason we can integrate with firms that handle cases for six of the eight money center banks.
Pricing starts with a flat $100 trial fee. Ongoing pricing depends on firm size, and you don't pay anything ongoing unless the trial returns ROI you can see in your own numbers. About 97% of firms that pilot Ajax move into a subscription afterward. The fastest way to see whether Gmail capture is worth it for your firm is to run the trial against a week of real email work.
What this looks like in recovered revenue
A worked example for a five-attorney firm averaging $300 an hour: if each attorney recovers 30 minutes a day of previously unlogged email work, the firm captures an additional $16,500 a month. That's a hair under $200,000 a year, and it's a conservative estimate. Thirty minutes a day is well below what most firms find sitting in their email when they look closely.
One honest caveat is that these projections assume the recovered time is billable and gets collected. Some of it won't be. Even at a 50% collection rate on what Ajax surfaces, the math still works for most firms.
Common questions about Ajax and Gmail
Does Ajax read my personal Gmail?
Your Ajax is yours. Nobody at the firm can see your activity, not even managing partners, and there's a pause button if you switch to a personal task. Screen content is processed and then deleted on a rolling basis.
Does Ajax work with Gmail on mobile?
Ajax is a desktop application, so mobile screens aren't captured unless they're mirrored to your laptop. A long email reply on the train doesn't get logged unless you also worked on it from your desk.
Will Ajax replace Gmail or my practice management system?
No. Ajax sits between them. You keep using Gmail the way you already do. The drafted entries go into your PMS for billing.
What about emails I draft but never send?
Those get captured too. Ajax reads the screen, so drafting and reviewing count as work whether or not you hit send. If you spent fifteen minutes wrestling with a tricky response and then deleted it, that fifteen minutes still shows up in the entry.
What doesn't Ajax capture?
Anything that never touches a screen. That includes phone calls where you never opened a related document, in-person conversations, and handwritten notes from a hallway chat with a partner. Pen-and-paper work is a blind spot for any screen-based tool, ours included.
Final thoughts
Most billable email work is small. A reply here, a forwarded attachment there, a quick clarification before lunch. That's exactly why it leaks. Nobody stops to log a four-minute task, and by the time the week is over, the four-minute tasks have added up to half a day nobody got paid for.
Ajax catches that work because the desktop is always watching the content of your screen, and because the matter context comes from the email itself without you having to tag matters in your CRM first. If you want to see what a week of your own Gmail looks like as time entries,book a demo.
