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

Maura Lynch, an attorney at Z Family Law in Maryland, is candid about her starting point: "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."

That sentence contains the entire problem and the entire fix. A day spent five minutes at a time across dozens of case touches is a productive day that manual timekeeping records as almost nothing. Capture that watches the work itself records it as what it was: six and a half billable hours.

She even had a witness. 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, the kind of high-empathy, high-velocity practice where attorneys and staff juggle client crises, court deadlines, and constant correspondence. Thirteen people across the team now use Ajax.

Kirisha Marshall found the record itself was worth something beyond 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 explained 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 the arithmetic of under-billing everywhere: when recording the work costs more than the work, the recording loses. Firms typically find 5 to 15% of billable time never makes the bill for exactly this reason.

What changed

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

The other problem Ajax solved: email filing

Christy Zlatkus, the firm's founder, had a second problem that every practice manager will recognize: getting emails logged to the file. Her firm had tried solving 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 did not 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 is not a clerical annoyance. 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 measured the backlog the old way created: "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 as part of capture, automatically. The same system that drafts the time entries keeps the file complete, so whoever picks it up, mid-trial or mid-emergency, is working from the whole record.

Frequently asked questions

Does Ajax work for family law firms? It is one of our strongest practice areas, because family law runs on frequent small increments across many 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 is who gains the most. Lynch describes herself as 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 team, and staff time on client files is captured the same way attorney time is.

If your best people bill their worst days at a fraction of the work done, book a demo and watch a real day get captured.