The problem
Short calls, emails and document edits on a family matter are easy to leave unrecorded when the next client is waiting. If two fee earners forget 10 minutes of recordable time a day each, that's 400 minutes over 20 working days, 6.7 hours a month.
What the AI does
Smokeball's Prosper+ plan, at £89 per user a month, lists automatic time tracking, interactive invoices and online payments. Time tracking runs alongside your matter work, and each fee earner reviews the captured entries, writes a clear narrative and corrects anything wrong before it is billed. The client's bill is still the fee earner's responsibility.
A worked example
A two-fee-earner family firm in Nottingham works on hourly rates. Both fee earners use Smokeball Prosper+ for matters and review the day's automatically captured time at 5pm before it goes into billing.
Before
About 10 minutes of recordable time a day each left off the bill: 6.7 hours a month
After
About 10 minutes a day each recovered, and 5 minutes a day each to review entries
What it's worth
Assuming fee-earner time is worth £150 an hour: recovered time is 10 minutes x 2 fee earners x 20 days = 400 minutes (6.7 hours), about £1,000; review time is 5 minutes x 2 x 20 = 200 minutes (3.3 hours), about £500; net about £500 a month. Only applies to hourly-rate work and assumes 10 minutes a day recovered, which you should test. Cost is £89 per user, so £178 for two fee earners.
How to set it up
- Ask Smokeball for a demo and the contract term.
- Set up matter types and rates with your accounts team and agree a narrative style for time entries.
- Run it for a month on two live files and compare captured time against what the fee earners recorded by hand.
- Review captured entries daily, correct them, and delete anything that does not belong to the matter.
- Check the first bills line by line before they go to clients.
What goes wrong
- Automatic entries can be wrong or assigned to the wrong matter. Billing a client for time not spent breaches your duty to charge fairly, so review before billing.
- Many family matters are fixed fee or legal aid. Recovering unrecorded time matters less there; check your mix first.
- Prosper+ is £89 per user a month, so each extra fee earner adds £89. Ask for a written quote and the contract term.
- Time entries can reveal matter details. Keep access to them to people who work on the file.