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Comment by kolbe | Hacker News Reader

Not my industry, but a friend of mine in law was discussing how incredible her in-house software is for managing billable hours relative to all her past companies. I poked around, and most law firms, even very deep pocketed ones, use somewhere between a bad tech system and no tech system to manage and track their work.

A small team could easily collaborate with some law firm (maybe take an investment from a few law firms), and create some very valuable software.

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I'm a lawyer and a programmer and run a legal-tech startup. The largest issue I've found with lawyers and technology is that they don't understand it, and there is a lot of fear around it.

Most of the time I spent selling my software was assuaging the risk-averse mindset that exists in the profession, rather than advertising the benefits. I actually gave a TEDx talk on this point as I think it's an enormous issue in the industry.

So the ease of creating the software isn't the issue, it's the culture. That said, legal tech now has a pretty healthy ecosystem which is a delight to see!

Is your talk up somewhere? That sounds very interesting.

Sure - it's here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HakaHEDs7Q

I think it is also partly because any inefficiency in work leads to an increase in the Billable Hour. When it makes you more money it isn't really broken.

Spot on! The problem goes past efficiency and is related to the broken pricing model. The financial crisis actually caused this to change a bit as more and more clients were after fixed costs. I hope that trend continues.

tech system to manage and track work

This is an exceedingly hard problem unless 100% of your work is input through a revision control system.

not when 90% of your work is done through email....

Very true. We are building a platform to solve this problem at Apperio (https://www.apperio.com).

Most law firms, even small ones, use 'Time Matters'; it's actually quite sophisticated and is now a De Facto standard for the industry.

Here's another product used by major law firms called "Carpe Diem": https://www.tikit.com/products/large-law-firms/time-recordin...

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