It goes by different names - “timesheets,” “progress reports,” “standups,” “operating reviews,” “sprint planning” - and it pervades every industry. Jack ran update meetings in private equity and at Humming Homes, a home services startup. Alex ran them at Amazon and at dub, a fintech startup. Yours may be synchronous or async, daily or quarterly, but you probably know the feeling. The feeling of spending all your time keeping people up to speed about the work instead of doing the work. Of watching your precious time for deep work get carved up by a flurry of meetings and Slack updates.
Enter Ajax: the world’s first truly-automated timekeeper for lawyers…
No matter who you are, what we’ve written so far probably sounds familiar. But if you’re not a lawyer, here’s something you may not know: they have it much, much worse than you do. Attorneys track their activity in 6-minute increments using archaic, unfriendly software. That means every time a lawyer switches tasks, she has to record a detailed narrative along with the duration, client, and activity and other codes. Every task, every day, for her entire working life. And if she gets anything wrong, she doesn’t get paid…
…or, if it’s a particularly busy day, maybe she isn’t able to keep up with real-time entries. Instead, when she gets home at midnight (lawyers work hard), she’ll have to spend 20 minutes reviewing her day and then entering in her hours, before she can finally get some sleep.
Try this - if your livelihood depended on it, could you write up detailed narratives for how you spent every 6 minutes of the last hour? How about for 3 hours ago? 3 hours before that?
Having to answer those questions saddles lawyers with a heavy cognitive burden. Lawyers want to sink themselves into their cases, but part of a lawyer’s brain is always consumed with remembering timekeeping details about the work, rather than the work itself. Our dad still remembers the client codes his firm used for IBM back in the ‘90s (2280 and 2281).
A few lost minutes every hour - plus a chronic inability to focus deeply - add up to a few lost hours every week. This death by a thousand cuts has a massive economic impact: ~$100B of annual lost revenue across the ~1M lawyers in America.
Over a 50-year career, a lawyer will spend almost a cumulative year on the most wasteful, menial chore you can imagine. We’re here to fix it.
“Software that generates my timesheet for me” consistently ranks #1 on law firms’ employee surveys. When millions of wealthy people desperately want to pay for something, somebody usually builds it. But until recently, automated timekeeping was impossible. Lawyers read and write unstructured documents, but software couldn’t parse the semantic meaning of that text, match it to the right client, and generate descriptions...until now.
Traditionally, B2B software companies have built for the median user - the “Ideal Customer Profile” - so they can build once and sell many times. That doesn’t work for legal timekeeping. As any lawyer will tell you, it’s “as much art as science”, and lawyers track and bill differently based on their practice areas, personal preferences, and unique client relationships.
At Ajax, we believe software should adapt to its users’ workflows, preferences, and quirks, instead of making them adapt to it. LLMs now allow us to reason about unstructured text. Our challenge is to take these raw tools and compose self-improving, end-to-end automated, personalized timekeeping tools. We capture data passively (and securely) from devices as lawyers work and generate timesheets for them, saving them time, pain, and thousands of dollars every month.
We’re in a private, paid, beta with a carefully-selected group of firms. We’re improving the product every day, and we won’t stop until we’ve freed millions of lawyers from the worst part of their daily lives.
If that sounds fun to you, we’re hiring! And if you're a lawyer struggling with your timekeeping, join our waitlist here.
