Z Family Law case study: 6.5 captured hours, no timers

Maura Lynch practices at Z Family Law in Maryland, and she's blunt about where she started: "I'm terrible at billing. Like, you know, this is such a huge improvement. The idea that 6.5 hours have been caught today is nothing but a miracle. Like, it's a miracle because I don't think I've been with one case more than five minutes. Like, it's been like back and forth. It's all captured."

The whole problem, and the whole fix, is sitting inside that quote. A day spent five minutes at a time across dozens of case touches is a genuinely productive day - and manual timekeeping records it as almost nothing. Capture that watches the work itself recorded it as what it actually was: six and a half billable hours.

She even had a witness. This is her telling her husband about the day: "I'm like, I built six hours today. And he's like, you didn't... I watched you. Are you kidding me? I'm like, yes, I did. So there."

The firm

Z Family Law is a family law practice in Maryland - high-empathy, high-velocity work, where attorneys and staff are juggling client crises, court deadlines, and a constant stream of correspondence. Thirteen people across the team now use Ajax.

For Kirisha Marshall, the record turned out to be worth something on its own, separate from billing: "Before we started using this, I didn't realize how many things I did in a day, so it was really nice for me to look back and, like, see, like, everything that's happened."

Carly Holton got specific about why the small entries never used to get logged: "I do a lot, and a lot of the time, I'm, like, bouncing from thing to thing to thing, and it's only, like, only takes maybe, like, two minutes where I'm jumping, but Ajax is able to capture that. And those 0.2, 0.1s add up really fast, and I never typically bother with logging them because it takes more time to log it than it does to actually do the email or whatever I'm doing."

That last line is under-billing in a nutshell. When recording the work costs more than the work itself, the recording loses - at her desk and at every firm. It's a big part of why 5 to 15% of billable time typically never makes the bill.

What changed

Honestly, nothing about the day itself. Ajax runs in the background, reads the actual work on screen, and drafts matter-matched entries in each person's own words; the person just reviews and releases. The difference is that the two-minute touches finally count, and the end-of-day reconstruction ritual is gone.

The other problem Ajax solved: email filing

Christy Zlatkus founded the firm, and she had a second problem - one every practice manager will recognize: getting emails logged to the file. They'd even tried to solve it with headcount. "With everything digital, you don't have a digital file clerk in the same way that you have a paper file clerk. And we actually tried to have a digital file clerk at one time. We had an office assistant. That's whole job was to log emails all day long. And even then, it was just imperfect because humans are imperfect."

Process didn't fix it either: "People just suck at logging their emails, no matter how many times we say it. I asked this particular attorney before they left, make sure all your emails are logged, and still I realized that I was missing a document production from, like, a week and a half ago that was emailed."

And in a litigation practice, an incomplete file isn't some clerical annoyance. Here's Zlatkus again: "I'm covering a trial for somebody... what if somebody's kid was sick or somebody themselves got sick and I need to pick up the file? If people didn't log it or we didn't have something automatically logging it, I have an incomplete file. And then I look like an idiot."

Megan Parlette actually counted what the old way left behind: "I think I logged about 100 emails, or at least I went through, and I had to check each one and make sure it was logged, and most of them were not."

Ajax files email to the right matters automatically, as part of capture. So the same system that drafts the time entries is also keeping the file complete - and whoever has to pick that file up mid-trial or mid-emergency is working from the whole record.

Frequently asked questions

Does Ajax work for family law firms? It's one of our strongest practice areas, because family law runs on frequent small increments across a lot of matters. Galbraith Family Law measured a 32x pilot return the same way - read the Galbraith case study.

What if someone is genuinely bad at billing? That's exactly who gains the most. Lynch calls herself terrible at billing, and her captured day was 6.5 hours. The system stops depending on the habit.

Do paralegals and staff get value too? Yes. At Z Family Law the users span the whole team, and staff time on client files gets captured the same way attorney time does.

If your best people are billing their busiest days at a fraction of the work they actually did, book a demo and watch a real day get captured.