How does the Ajax pilot work?
The Ajax pilot is a critical part of onboarding. It's how firms try Ajax on their real work before signing anything.
The goal is to prove two things:
That people at your firm like using Ajax (and want to keep using it after the pilot ends)
That it's paying for itself by finding more billables and saving time
The Ajax team sets things up for you before the pilot begins. During the pilot, we run a kickoff call, calibrate Ajax to each attorney, and wrap up with an ROI review where we show you how much extra time Ajax saved your firm. You don't pay anything unless you decide to move forward after the pilot is complete.
In this article, we'll dig into each of the phases of an Ajax pilot so you know what to expect.
What happens before the pilot starts?
We make it really easy for firms to get set up. By the time day one of the pilot rolls around, Ajax is already installed and generating time entries for each attorney.
Three things happen ahead of kickoff:
Presync with your billing system. Ajax pulls in your clients, matters, and contacts, and uses that data to customize itself for your firm.
15-minute call with someone on the billing team (optional). They walk us through firm-wide preferences: how time entries should sound, what formatting conventions to use. We customize Ajax to match.
IT installs Ajax on each attorney's device. The pilot group is ready to go before the kickoff call starts.
The point of all this setup is so that on day one of the kickoff, Ajax is already generating time entries that sound the way the firm wants.
What happens on the kickoff call?
The kickoff is a show-and-tell session. We'll walk you through what Ajax does, how it works, and address how we handle security and privacy up front (rolling data deletion, no model training, no vendor data retention, SOC 2 compliant, nobody can see what's on each attorney's screens).
Then, very quickly, we get into the actual product.
Each attorney shares their screen and looks at the time entries Ajax has already generated for them. Because we pre-customized and installed ahead of time, the entries are close. Not perfect, but close.
A typical reaction is something along the lines of: "That's actually pretty close to how I'd describe this. That's what my day looks like, but I wouldn't quite use that phrase," or "it didn't quite know what matter this was because it was missing a contact."
Then we show them how to fix it, and how to push the entry into their billing system. We go around the horn doing that exact flow with each attorney. It generates a huge amount of buy-in, because people like getting something in their hands and they like that we don't waste their time.
What happens during the pilot?
Two things run in parallel through the pilot: calibration calls with the attorneys using Ajax, and executive check-ins with the decision-makers.
Calibration calls (group or 1-on-1, depending on the firm's preference)
These serve two purposes. Some attorneys need a little TLC - a refresher on how features work, or a one-on-one if they had to take a call during the kickoff. But the bigger purpose is manual customization. We tune Ajax to sound like each individual attorney and to handle the firm's specific rules.
This is one of Ajax's great strengths. It's customizable to a degree users don't expect because no other software works this way. You don't get a special version of Facebook, for example. But with Ajax, you get to decide how it works for you.
A few real examples:
"I have a standing calendar event at 6:30 p.m. to take my kid to practice. Ajax should never see that."
"I never want Ajax to group time spent reviewing an attachment with reading the email it was attached to, always two separate entries."
"His name in our database is James, but this client prefers Jim."
We can change the way Ajax describes things, groups things, and shows things. That set of customizations often takes users from "this is a pretty cool tool, but it kind of spells things out like a generic lawyer" to "wow, it sounds exactly like me."
Executive check-ins (for larger pilots)
We run periodic check-ins with the firm's decision-making group. In these calls we report the qualitative feedback we're hearing from users, plus raw stats:
Who's using Ajax
Who's releasing time entries
Who's finding more billables
They tell us what's working and where they'd like customizations or new features.
What happens at the end of the pilot?
Every pilot ends with a wrap-up call where two things get reviewed:
Qualitative feedback from users. We're extraordinarily responsive on chat during the pilot and spend a lot of time with users in calibration calls, so by the wrap-up we have a clear read on what people like, what's still rough, and what they want next.
Dollars and cents. The actual captured extra billable hours and exactly what degree of ROI the pilot drove. Firms decide based on their own numbers.
Then the firm decides whether to move forward. The vast majority do. 97% of firms that have run an Ajax pilot in the last 18 months have said yes.
What happens after the pilot if we say yes?
Not much additional setup needed once a pilot is finished, since Ajax is already installed and customized to your firm. If you decide you want to move forward, here's what happens next:
Adjust the group. Some people in the pilot group may decide Ajax isn't for them, or new people may want to join. We make each of those adjustments.
Rollout plan for the rest of the firm. We work with you on who to bring in next beyond the pilot group - only the folks who are interested, not everyone by default. We charge on a per-seat basis which means you only pay for the attorneys who actually opt in.
For a full walk-through of pricing structure and contract terms, see [link to "how much does Ajax cost?"].
What kind of support do you get during and after the pilot?
The support that we provide for our customers is remarkably good - it's hard to get across just how good. Everyone says their support is good. But this is probably the single most common thing customers mention when they refer Ajax to other firms. They email us at 11:30 p.m., and two people respond within seconds to fix the problem.
That level of responsiveness is a core mandate for everyone at Ajax. We fix customer problems, we don't give the runaround, and we want to hear from customers when things aren't working.
If a customer has a problem, that's a product issue, and we want to be alerted so we can fix it for that user and for everyone else on Ajax. That orientation carries through the pilot and stays after you've signed on.
Ready to run a pilot?
If you're interested in exploring a pilot, you can book a demo here. We'll walk through your firm's setup, show you what Ajax would look like on your matters, and start scoping a pilot if it seems like a good fit for your firm.
