Marcellino Moore case study: $178K a month recovered
Ask Danielle Walle, an attorney at Marcellino Moore, what she thinks of Ajax and you get one of the all-time customer reviews: "You can take it out of my cold, dead hands."
She has reasons. Walle released 123 entries through Ajax during the firm's pilot, more than anyone else on the team, and prebilling, the dreaded monthly process of reviewing and submitting time, went from a multi-day ordeal to about an hour.
The firm
Marcellino Moore, formerly Marcellino & Tyson, is a Charlotte, North Carolina firm founded in 2012, handling family law and employment matters across two offices. Nearly everyone at the firm bills time.
Family law is fast. On a given day an attorney is in and out of court, fielding client calls, drafting custody agreements, responding to opposing counsel, and managing urgent motions. The transitions happen every few minutes, and every transition is an opportunity for billable time to disappear. Co-founder and managing partner Matt Marcellino knew the missed time was real before he could measure it. Quick emails worth a 0.1, calls worth a 0.2, document reviews between hearings worth a 0.3, none of it recorded, because by the time you sit down to do your time you have forgotten half of what you did.
What the measurement showed
The firm deployed Ajax to all 18 of its timekeepers in the summer of 2025 and compared results against each person's own billing history from the month before:
Measure | Before Ajax | With Ajax | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
Billable hours per day | 3.4 | 4.6 | +1.3 |
Billable dollars per day | $1,010 | $1,440 | +$431 |
Extra dollars per user, per month | $9,907 | ||
Recovered per month, across 18 timekeepers | $178,321 | ||
Return on investment | 50x |
That is more than two million dollars a year in work the firm was already doing but never billing.
Marcellino's framing is the part worth sitting with: Ajax did not make his attorneys work harder. It made their existing work visible. The hours were always being put in; now they are being captured. His recommendation to peers: "Would I recommend Ajax to other attorneys? Absolutely. I wish we had it 10 years ago - it's an immediate benefit."
Managing partner Jennifer Moore kept her version shorter: "I definitely have loved it. I captured a lot more than I otherwise would have."
Why family law misses so much time
Family law clients generate constant, small, urgent interactions, and family law attorneys switch contexts more than almost anyone in the profession. Manual timekeeping punishes exactly that pattern: the smaller and more frequent the tasks, the more of them vanish from memory before they get recorded. Ajax reads the actual work on screen as it happens and drafts the entry in the attorney's own words, so the 0.1s stop depending on recall.
Frequently asked questions
Is $178,321 a month typical? It reflects 18 timekeepers each capturing about 1.3 more billable hours a day, measured against their own prior billing. The per-person lift is what travels between firms; the firm-wide total scales with how many people bill.
What changed for prebilling? Entries arrive drafted and matter-matched throughout the month, so month-end review became about an hour for the firm's heaviest user instead of days.
Where do I start if this sounds like my firm? A measured pilot against your own billing history. Here is what to expect week by week, and here is how firms stop losing billable hours.
If your attorneys switch matters every few minutes, book a demo and measure what is going unbilled.
