Lawyers hate timekeeping — Ping raises $13M to fix it with AI
Ping, which uses artificial intelligence to automatically track lawyers' work and fill out timesheets for them. There's a massive opportunity to eliminate a core cause of burnout, lift law firm revenue by around 10% and give them fresh insights into labor allocation.
Traditionally, lawyers have to keep track of their time by themselves down to the tenth of an hour — reviewing documents for the Johnson case, preparing a motion to dismiss for the Lee case, a client phone call for the Sriram case. There are timesheets built into legal software suites like MyCase, legal billing software like TimeSolv and one-off tools like Time Miner and iTimeKeep. They typically offer timers that lawyers can manually start and stop on different devices, with some providing tracking of scheduled appointments, call and text logging, and integration with billing systems.
Ping goes a big step further. It uses AI and machine learning to figure out whether an activity is billable, for which client, a description of the activity and its codification beyond just how long it lasted. Instead of merely filling in the minutes, it completes all the logs automatically, with entries like "Writing up a deposition - Jenkins Case - 18 minutes." Then it presents the timesheet to the user for review before they send it to billing.
The big challenge now for Alshak and the team he's assembled is to grow up. They need to go from cat-in-sunglasses logo Ping to mature wordmark Ping.
See the full story here; https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/lawyers-hate-timekeeping-ping-raises-133345567.html