DannLaw case study: 38x ROI on time already worked
Marc Dann keeps meticulous time. He is the founding partner of DannLaw and the former Attorney General of Ohio, and much of his firm's work ends up in front of a judge in a fee application, where documented attorney time converts directly into recovered fees.
His verdict after turning on Ajax: "It's clear I've been missing a bunch of time because I've been picking up time that I wasn't billing for."
Where documented time is revenue
DannLaw is a consumer-protection and foreclosure-defense firm serving clients from Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and New Jersey. The firm is a national leader in using federal statutes like RESPA and TILA to hold mortgage servicers and financial institutions accountable.
Much of that work is taken on contingency but billed by the hour, with detailed fee applications filed in court. That makes every unrecorded hour a real loss. And because the payoff is not immediate, time slips away easily for attorneys pulled in a dozen directions at once.
The firm did not want another manual timer or a second place to work. Ajax installed quietly on each attorney's computer and drafted time entries from the work already on screen: the emails, the documents, the research. Lawyers reviewed the drafts and released the ones they wanted, which flowed straight into the firm's billing system.
Missed time, found on day one
Senior Counsel Andrew Engel captured nearly an hour of billable time on his very first day that he would not otherwise have recorded. In his words: "I saw immediately on the first day that I captured just almost an hour of time in little that I wouldn't normally bill. So that was the thing that struck me right away."
He also had a warning for the skeptics: "I'm a very old dog, and I don't learn new tricks, but this is really great because it is intuitive."
Associate Attorney Whitney Kaster found hours of fragmented work, the constant switching between matters, that had never made it onto a bill: "I think it's going to change my billing in a wonderful way that my boss will love."
Across the attorneys using Ajax, the results held:
Measure | Result |
|---|---|
Billable time recaptured per attorney, per workday | 0.9 hours |
Added billable value per attorney, per month | $7,598 |
Return on the cost of Ajax | 38x |
Attorney Dan Solar described why the small stuff matters: "It's been very helpful, especially because I get pulled around in all sorts of different directions. So it's good to have those, especially on the email front, keeping track of all the little things that I shoot out."
And Hank Wolfe, on the review workflow: "I opened it up and it took me a minute and a half to do all. It would have taken me probably 20 minutes to figure out. So it saved me."
Frequently asked questions
Does Ajax help with court fee applications? Yes, indirectly but meaningfully. Fee applications live or die on contemporaneous, detailed records, and Ajax drafts entries as the work happens, with more detail than most lawyers write from memory. Nothing has to be reconstructed weeks later.
What if a lawyer already keeps good time? Marc Dann did. Ajax still surfaced work he was not billing for, because even meticulous timekeepers lose the in-between minutes: the quick reply, the document glance, the call that ran long. Firms typically find 5 to 15% of billable time never makes the bill.
How much work is the review? Minutes a day. Entries arrive drafted in your own style; you edit or release. Hank Wolfe's first session took a minute and a half.
If your practice files fee applications or just bills by the hour, book a demo and compare a week of Ajax against your own billing history. You can also read how automatic time tracking for lawyers works.
