How Ajax Works With Aderant Expert
A 200-lawyer firm with a $96 million book that misses five percent of its billable time is leaving $4.8 million a year off its invoices. Hourly firms miss 5 to 15% of their time, Expert firms included, because people type up their time from memory days later.
Ajax captures the time while the work is happening. The first thing an Expert admin asks is how the time gets into Expert.
How released time gets into Expert
Released entries collect in a staging area, and every night Ajax drops a structured file onto your firm's SFTP in whatever layout your Expert team specifies. Your administrators load it through the scheduled import they already run.
Your team runs the import with your own layout and your own credentials. With the file delivery, Ajax never has a login to Expert. If your firm has API access enabled through Aderant we can use that too, but the setup doesn't depend on it.
The details differ a little between hosted Expert, on-prem and Sierra, and we sort them out with your administrators when we set up the delivery.
Some IT teams don't allow any outside connection into the network. For those firms, we set up a connector on a server inside the firm that only makes outbound connections.
How the entry gets drafted
Ajax sits on the lawyer's computer and reads the work on screen as the lawyer does it. About 45 seconds after the work, there's a drafted entry with the narrative written and the client and matter predicted, and once Ajax knows your matters that prediction is right about 92% of the time. The lawyer reviews it, fixes anything wrong, and releases it, and drafts stay private to that lawyer until then, with leadership only ever seeing aggregate reporting.
Hundreds of law firms run this today, and released entries flow through direct integrations into Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, SurePoint, Filevine, Centerbase, Soluno, and Orion, and Ajax is compatible with most other billing systems as well. The full list is here.
Setup
Everything up to the file drop works the same for every Ajax customer. We set up the Expert delivery with each firm, and you'll be on the calls with the engineers doing it.
FAQ
How does the setup work?
We set up the connection with your administrators and IT team when your firm comes on.
Does Ajax need credentials into Expert?
With the file delivery, your team's import job loads the file Ajax delivers, so the credentials stay yours. If you'd rather use Aderant's API, your IT team creates the service account and controls it.
Can anything get into Expert without review?
No. An entry only leaves Ajax after its timekeeper has reviewed and released it.
What will our IT team ask?
Mostly they ask about security. Ajax is SOC 2 Type II and HIPAA compliant. All customer data is encrypted in transit and at rest using AES-256 encryption. Raw captured data is deleted automatically on a rolling basis. Drafts are private to the individual timekeeper and firm reporting is aggregate. Sign-in supports SAML single sign-on and SCIM provisioning through your identity provider. There's a security review checklist for law firm IT here.
If you're on Expert, book a demo. Most of it will be the file delivery.
