Case Study
From Billables.ai to Ajax: an associate lawyer’s switch
Firm Name
Russell Alexander
Location
Ontario, Canada
Practice Area
Family Law
From Billables.ai to Ajax
Family Law
Ontario, Canada
<1 hour
To see the benefit, in her words
LSO
Start & stop times drafted
0
Plugins to babysit
100%
Dockets reviewed before release
The Lawyer
A skeptic by trade
Anna Elizabeth Polito is an associate lawyer at Russell Alexander Collaborative Family Lawyers, an Ontario firm practicing exclusively family law from offices across the province. She came to Ajax the way she says lawyers come to most software: skeptical. Her firm had already tried other timekeeping tools, including Billables.ai, and she carried that experience into the rollout.
Her question going in was a working lawyer’s question: is this going to actually take something off my plate, or just assist me?
The Evaluation
How is Ajax different from Billables.ai?
For Polito, the difference was where the work ended up. “Within the first couple of dockets, I realized not only was Ajax doing everything better than I was doing it, it was actually picking up on things I wasn’t billing.” The things she wasn’t billing were the small ones: the three-minute email reads that never became dockets because writing the docket would have taken as long as the work.
In her account, her old tool still left the descriptions and time blocks to her, so the task never actually left her list. Ajax drafts them in.
The Story
Start and stop times, the Ontario way
Ontario lawyers docket under Law Society requirements that include recording when work started and when it ended, rather than duration alone. Ajax drafts entries with the start and stop times already in them, which Polito calls the biggest time saver of all.
The descriptions hold up too. Her test is whether a docket would survive a cost submission: “I don’t want it to simply say read email.” Ajax writes the detail in.
The Results
It just works in the background
Her old setup needed tending, in her account: plugin installs across Word and Chrome, and pauses when the connection dropped. Ajax runs in the background of her day. She opens it in the morning, watches the dockets accumulate, and clicks accept as she goes, reviewing every entry before it releases, because that review is the job, and in her experience the drafts rarely need correcting.
Her advice to lawyers sitting where she sat: budget hours, and only hours, to see the difference.
“I’ve tried both and I know that Billables isn’t comparable to Ajax. Billables added more to my plate and Ajax simply took matters off of my plate.”
Anna Elizabeth Polito
Associate Lawyer
What The Team Says
In her own words
“We’re not talking about weeks of having to get it up and running. We’re talking about a matter of less than an hour for you to see what the benefit is.”
Anna Elizabeth Polito
Associate Lawyer
“Within the first couple of dockets, I realized not only was Ajax doing everything better than I was doing it, it was actually picking up on things I wasn’t billing.”
Anna Elizabeth Polito
Associate Lawyer
“It doesn’t add a task, it takes away a task and allows me more time to bill.”
Anna Elizabeth Polito
Associate Lawyer
About Customer
About Russell Alexander Collaborative Family Lawyers
Russell Alexander Collaborative Family Lawyers is an Ontario firm practicing exclusively family law, with offices across the Greater Toronto Area and the province. Its lawyers handle divorce and separation, collaborative practice, mediation, and the full range of family law matters. Anna Elizabeth Polito practices as an associate lawyer with the firm. Learn more at russellalexander.com.
