Vela Wood case study: a record month in three weeks
"Within three weeks of starting Ajax, we billed our biggest month ever."
That is Kevin Vela, co-founder and managing partner of Vela Wood, a Chambers Spotlight-ranked corporate law firm in Dallas and Austin. About 70 people, 42 legal professionals, and a practice spanning M&A, private equity, venture capital, and fund representation. Since 2009 the firm has helped launch more than 1,900 companies.
Why corporate work loses time
Corporate transactional work is uniquely hard on timekeeping. Vela Wood's attorneys are not in court on a defined schedule. They are negotiating deal terms across fifteen matters at once, reviewing data rooms, drafting shareholder agreements, and hopping between calls with investors and opposing counsel. The work is fragmented by nature, and the fragments are where billable time goes missing from the record.
Vela knew the firm was losing revenue to that fragmentation. He did not know fixing it would produce a record month within a month.
Deployed in record time, adopted for real
Vela Wood turned Ajax on in September 2024, one of the earliest firms to adopt it. Andrew Lin, the firm's director of technology, on the rollout: "We got up and running in record time, with minimal IT overhead."
Eighteen months later, Ajax is core infrastructure. Sixty people across the firm are active users. In one recent 30-day period, the firm released 986.7 billable hours through Ajax, worth $419,743. The heaviest users start the vast majority of their time entries in Ajax; they no longer open their billing system to enter time at all.
Jeff Villalobos, a senior attorney, quantified his first days: "By the 1st, there were 3 billable hours I wouldn't have caught. That's $1,500."
Associate Bobby Gojuangco described the day-to-day: "It's been seamless and gives me a few hours back every weekend."
Then three of them invested
Kevin Vela, Andrew Lin, and Bobby Gojuangco each made personal angel investments in Ajax. Law firms do not usually invest in their vendors. In Vela's telling, they had seen what the platform did for their own firm, and every hourly-billing firm in the country has the same problem. When you watch a tool solve a universal problem from the inside, you want to be part of it.
His advice to peers running transactional practices: pilot it with your busiest deal lawyers. The ones juggling the most matters show the most improvement.
Frequently asked questions
What does "biggest month ever" actually mean here? Vela Wood's highest-billing month in firm history, which arrived within three weeks of deploying Ajax. Ajax was capturing work the attorneys were already doing but not recording: the quick email review between deal calls, the ten-minute document comparison, the research detour that never got logged.
How heavy is the IT lift? Light. Ajax installs per machine, runs in the background, and needed no infrastructure changes at Vela Wood. The director of technology called it record time.
Does Ajax suit transactional practices specifically? Deal work is fragmented across many matters, which is exactly the pattern Ajax is built to capture: it sees the documents, the email chains, and the research on screen, and groups them into matter-matched entries.
If your deal lawyers end the day with more work done than time recorded, book a demo, or read how automatic time tracking for lawyers works.
