Robert Ambrogi Blog
Voting ends this Friday to pick the 15 legal tech startups that will get to compete in the ninth annual Startup Alley at ABA TECHSHOW in April. As it turns out, I recently got an update from the winner of the very first Startup Alley back in 2017, then known as Time By Ping, but since a 2023 rebranding, now called Laurel. Late last year, I caught up with its founder and CEO Ryan Alshak.
The company has come a long way since its launch in 2016 and its Startup Alley win the next year. Now a Series B company with $55 million in venture funding, Laurel was one of the first to use AI, and then generative AI, to automate time capture for lawyers.
More recently, it has expanded beyond legal into the accounting and consulting sectors, In 2024, it was named as 700th on the Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S.
The company reports 300% year-over-year growth, with its accounting business now representing one-half of its operations, Alshak said.
Related: Time By Ping Raises $36.5M Series B; Exclusive LawNext Interview with CEO Ryan Alshak.
Today, Laurel has evolved beyond its original vision of automating time capture for lawyers to also provide law firms with sophisticated analytics about their operations, including the ability to measure the impact of generative AI tools on lawyer productivity.
Impact on Firms’ Bottom Line
Alshak says that Laurel’s AI-powered timekeeping system increases lawyer billing by an average of 28 minutes per day and improves realization rates by 1-4%, resulting in profit increases of 4-11% for law firms that use its platform. A Big Four accounting firm has independently validated these results, he says.
“We are still the first and only company to apply gen AI timekeeping to enterprise professional service firms,” Alshak said. “The incumbents, of course, have gen AI on their roadmap. I do believe that they will struggle quite a bit in terms of productizing AI, but also marrying gen AI with user experience. So we not only have a lead, but we’ll continue to accelerate that lead.”
Read more about Laurel in the LawNext Legal Technology Directory.
The company’s platform works by integrating with virtually every program that lawyers use to create digital work, including email, Microsoft Office applications, PDF readers, web browsers, and video conferencing platforms. It then uses AI to analyze that digital footprint and convert it into ready-to-review time entries.
Laurel founder and CEO Ryan Alshak.
According to Alshak, the average lawyer interacts with 250 distinct activities in a given day. The platform’s AI clustering model looks for similarities across these activities to group related work together into ready-to-review time entries.
For example, if a lawyer is working on a summary judgment motion, the system will group together all related activities, such as working on Word documents, reviewing PDF templates, conducting legal research, and sending emails about the motion.
Ensuring Guideline Compliance
One of the platform’s key innovations, Alshak said, is its compliance module, which ingests firm billing guidelines, client guidelines, and matter guidelines, and trains its large language model to produce compliant narratives. The system flags non-compliant narratives in real-time, allowing lawyers to correct them before submission.
“Non-compliant narratives are the number one reason why a bill does not get paid or gets rejected by the client,” Alshak said.
The platform serves as the primary time-keeping interface for users while integrating with firms’ existing practice management systems, including Elite 3E, Aderant, SurePoint, Clio, ActionStep, and ProJuris.
Three quarters of Laurel’s users either exclusively or primarily rely on its AI to help them with their time entries, with most users completing their previous day’s time entries between 8 and 10 a.m. the following morning.
Operational Analytics
Beyond time capture, Laurel is increasingly focused on providing firms with detailed analytics about their operations. The platform can track where users are working and how it relates to productivity, potentially helping firms make data-driven decisions about such things as return-to-office policies. It can also analyze what Alshak calls the “shape of work” – showing how lawyers’ time is spent across different activities and applications.
One of the platform’s newer capabilities is its ability to measure the impact of generative AI tools on lawyer productivity. As firms invest heavily in gen AI applications, Laurel AI can track changes in how much time lawyers spend in various applications before and after the implementation of gen AI tools.
“These firms are spending millions and millions of dollars on gen AI tooling, but they don’t have any sophisticated way to measure the ROI of that investment,” Alshak said. “We can tell you these are the programs that were being used before gen AI, these are the time being spent on programs after gen AI, and you can start to understand the impact of these tools across your firm.”
The company is also experimenting with natural language interfaces to its data. In one proof of concept, it enabled a CFO at an accounting firm to use natural language queries to identify CPAs who were working sufficient hours according to Laurel’s tracking but not billing enough hours in the billing system.
“Previous to Laurel, firms only had access to what got billed, but what got billed is missing all the non-chargeable time, it’s very inaccurate. Laurel, for the first time ever, is surfacing the source of truth of what hours worked look like.
“The reason this is so powerful is you can now start to understand actual utilization and throughput – these users are working between 180 and 190 hours a month, but they’re only billing between 120 and 140.”
Impact On Profitability
The financial impact for firms can be substantial. Alshak shared an example of a 600-lawyer firm with a blended rate of $375 per hour projecting $20 million in additional bottom-line profit from using the platform. Another firm, with 1,300 timekeepers, reported validated increases of 22 minutes of additional time per day per timekeeper, resulting in $42 million in additional revenue.
Laurel AI primarily serves AmLaw firms, but also works with mid-market firms that have at least 50 timekeepers. Implementation typically takes between two to four weeks for firms using already-integrated billing systems. A recent integration with Clio signals the company’s intention to further expand into the small and medium-sized firm market.
For firms already using the platform, the results have been compelling enough to drive internal adoption. Alshak shared an example where a firm’s COO sent an email to all lawyers noting that after five months, lawyers using Laurel were billing nearly 52 minutes more per day – almost a full billable hour – than those not using it.
“After this email got sent,” Alshak told me, “the half of users not on Laurel instantly wrote, saying, ‘Hey, how do you get me on this platform? My colleagues are getting an extra hour of credit a day working the same amount that I am.’”
From Copilot to Autopilot
Looking ahead, Laurel’s expansion into accounting and other professional services verticals opens avenues for growth beyond the legal market. “The vision of the business has always been to not only understand time for professional service firms, but eventually any knowledge worker as we move more from a copilot to an autopilot,” Alshak said.
It is a vision that has evolved considerably since the company’s Startup Alley win in 2017, and it demonstrates how a legal tech startup can grow from a promising concept into a major industry player. As this year’s Startup Alley competitors prepare to make their pitches, perhaps Laurel’s journey will inspire them to imagine what is possible.