Kirker Davis case study: Post-it notes to +$4,639 a month
Chris Kirker's first question for Ajax was not about ROI. It was about privacy.
Kirker is the managing partner of Kirker Davis, a family law firm in Austin. Before the firm would touch AI timekeeping, he wanted to know about the "Big Brother" problem: would this make his team feel spied on? What settled it was seeing how Ajax actually works. Each person owns and controls their own entries, decides for themselves what to release into the billing system, and management never sees anyone's screen activity. That built the trust the firm needed to move forward. (We wrote up exactly what your boss can and cannot see in Ajax.)
The problem
In Kirker's own words, from the case study he wrote with us: "Like any busy lawyer, my day gets derailed. I'd like to say I record my time contemporaneously, but life gets in the way. On any given day, I was jumping between a case, a new client call, and a dozen urgent emails. At the end of the day, I'd try to piece it all together from memory, notebooks, and post-it notes. It was a mess."
He estimated he might have been losing up to 30% of his own billable time on bad days. Across a team, that kind of number gets absurd fast.
A two-week pilot, then all in
Kirker Davis started with a five-person pilot group of partners and associates. Ajax held a kickoff call, then one-on-one calibration sessions with each person. On day one there was a technical wrinkle with capture inside the firm's virtual desktop; Ajax's co-founder built a fix and had it ready by day two.
The pilot numbers were plain:
Measure | Result |
|---|---|
Additional billable work captured per user, per day | $202 |
Additional revenue captured per timekeeper, per month | $4,639 |
Return on Ajax's monthly price | 23x |
One detail stuck with everyone: a partner who had never billed a 0.1 or 0.2-hour entry in his entire time at the firm captured 6.9 hours of that small-but-valuable work in the first two weeks.
The results convinced Kirker to do more than roll Ajax out firm-wide. He made a personal angel investment in the company. As he put it: "We saw the value, bought the software, and then invested in the company. That's the strongest endorsement I can give."
What the team says
Anthony Brigano, attorney: "Ajax is actually picking up my literary style. Often the Ajax narrative is just better than mine."
Page Brown, paralegal: "I was surprised that it could capture, you know, review this document and read this email. I appreciated that it saw that I opened the document that was attached to the email and read it, and it understood that I did that. So that was really cool."
Stephen Payne, attorney: "There's all kinds of things that I'm seeing that I wouldn't otherwise capture because I keep getting pulled away doing all these other things."
Stuart Shapley, partner: "It's very easy. Extremely intuitive UI."
Frequently asked questions
How did the firm handle the privacy question? By design, not by policy. Draft entries are visible only to the individual user, each person chooses what to release, and captured data is deleted automatically on a rolling basis.
What is a realistic pilot length? Kirker Davis measured everything it needed in two weeks. Here is what an Ajax pilot looks like week by week.
Does Ajax work in virtual desktop environments? Yes. Kirker Davis ran into a capture issue inside its virtual desktop on day one, and it was fixed by day two.
If your end-of-day routine still involves reconstructing hours from memory and Post-it notes, book a demo and see what two weeks of Ajax finds.
