Berman Fink Van Horn case study: one more hour a day
When the Ajax pilot at Berman Fink Van Horn wound down, shareholder Katherine Silverman started getting emails from her lawyers. The gist: please, can we keep this?
One of them, from shareholder William Piercy, ended up forwarded to our team: "It's not perfect, but it is life changing. Thank you for finding this application."
The firm
Berman Fink Van Horn is an Atlanta business-law firm that has advised companies and their owners since 1997, across more than 20 practice areas: business and real estate litigation, noncompete and trade-secret disputes, labor and employment, and M&A.
It is a practice built on documented time. A strategy call, a revised paragraph, an email to opposing counsel: each is billable work, but only if it makes it into the record.
Running on SurePoint LMS
BFV runs its billing on SurePoint LMS, the practice and financial management platform built for serious mid-market firms. For Ajax that is the whole point: entries have to land in the system the firm actually bills from.
Ajax reads the real work on each attorney's screen, drafts a client-ready narrative with the right matter and time, and on release writes it straight through to SurePoint LMS. No export step, no re-keying, no second system to maintain.
The results
After switching on Ajax, the pilot group's captured billable time rose from 6.1 to 7.1 hours a workday. That is a full extra hour for the average attorney, roughly a 16 percent lift on an already-full day, and more than 160 additional billable hours a month across the group. The firm has released well over a thousand Ajax-drafted entries.
Measure | Result |
|---|---|
Billable hours per day | 6.1 before, 7.1 with Ajax |
Extra billable hours per attorney, per day | +1.0 |
Added billable hours per month, pilot group | 160+ |
Ajax entries released | 1,000+ |
Silverman, who reviews hours across the firm, confirmed the lift matched what the reporting showed. She has since become the firm's loudest advocate: "I'm for free telling people about this product. I'm happy to. It's been great."
Adoption ran from the top down. Name partner Charles Van Horn compared it to his old routine: "Instead of the old school way where I type that in, then I just shadow it, right click, copy, whatever. It's being done a lot more efficiently."
Principal Jeremy Kahn: "It's really impressive what it pulls in and how it describes things and stuff like that. So I'm liking it."
And principal Ruari O'Sullivan, on picking it up cold: "Just sort of intuitively, without looking at any demos, dragging and dropping to merge entries and all that. So I'm enjoying it so far."
Frequently asked questions
Does Ajax integrate with SurePoint? Yes, Ajax has a direct SurePoint integration: released entries write straight into SurePoint LMS with the right matter, narrative, and time.
Does this work for a litigation-heavy practice? BFV's docket is business and real estate litigation, noncompete and trade-secret work, and employment disputes. Litigation days are fragmented by nature, which is exactly where an extra hour of captured time comes from.
What does a skeptical, fastidious timekeeper think? Silverman describes herself as exactly that. It took her one day of hands-on use to stop running timers, and she now reviews her drafted entries instead of reconstructing her day.
If your firm runs on SurePoint or another serious billing stack, book a demo and see what an extra hour a day looks like against your own numbers. For the buy-in conversation, here is how to get partners on board with AI timekeeping.
