Anaqua recently acquired WiseTime® and its leading automated time capture software to complement our integrated IP practice management solutions in AQX®Law Firm and PATTSY WAVE®.
Last week, we sat down with Domenic Leo, VP and General Manager, Law Firms at Anaqua, and Thomas Haines, VP of WiseTime, to find out more about the acquisition and WiseTime’s future as part of Anaqua.
Now, in the second part of our Q&A, we look at how WiseTime can support both law firms and their staff in driving business efficiency and understanding the costs of running their firm.
What challenges does WiseTime help solve for law firms?
Tom: Law firms need to track every minute of their professionals’ time and efficiently bill their clients. Law firms are constantly looking for better visibility into who is spending time on what—this is even more important now as a remote working society.
We help law firms reduce their costs, manage their time and billing more efficiently, and lower the cost they’re incurring in creating timekeeping data. Clients have told us they have increased revenue by double-digit percentages as a result of the efficiencies they’ve achieved using our software. Others have increased their billable time by 40%.
Dom: WiseTime helps law firms to not only understand the cost of work performed for their clients. It also provides a better understanding in general of the cost of running the law firm business. When you are running a business, you want to always understand whether you are making the best use of your resources. Most of your capital is human capital. Are you optimizing the work of your team in a way that contributes to meeting your strategic goals and maximizing revenue opportunities?
WiseTime provides law firms with the data to make informed decisions on how to run their business more effectively and better understand which parts of their business are most profitable.
What makes WiseTime different from other timekeeping systems?
Tom: Traditional manual systems offer start and stop timers and date entry through a form. What WiseTime does in the background is to passively track the work you’re doing across all your different platforms on your computer. Throughout the day individuals work on multiple systems across a variety of activities. WiseTime seamlessly captures this data through our autonomous timekeeping capability and collates the information for you in your private daily timeline. Without any manual entry, WiseTime creates a skeleton of their day, so users can view accurate activity information of all billable and non-billable activities. This offers huge potential to identify and improve non-billable time leaks as well as increase billable time captured.
Our clients tell us that they love how they can get more hours back in their day. This enables them to increase and drive their overall revenue as a result of the efficiencies. We are helping give law firms greater visibility into their staff’s activities and data to determine where to focus their business efforts while maintaining the privacy of each professional via an explicit time-sharing process.
How does WiseTime create efficiency for IP professionals throughout their day?
Tom: Essentially, your time is far too important to be wasting time on this administrative task. Whether you’re a patent attorney, a paralegal, or another kind of legal professional, your time is incredibly valuable.
We can be your time-keeping personal assistant. Instead of 30-60 minutes each day on this task, you can spend ten minutes. If you can free up an hour of productive time per day, that's significant. This provides real value to IP professionals so that they can put their attention towards getting more work done for clients rather than an internal task.
What is driving the need for innovation in time and billing?
Tom: Simply put, law firm clients are expecting faster response time with better visibility into the work being performed. In addition, client procurement teams are now incorporating professional service providers into their review. Law firms must increase their productivity, efficiently and effectively, to remain competitive.
Having made considerable productivity improvements via the use of IP practice management software such as AQX® Law Firm and PATTSY WAVE®, law firms are now looking for new opportunities to use assistive technologies to drive a new wave of productivity improvements in time and billing. In turn, this will improve the capacity of partners to manage and optimize how they run their businesses, driven by accurate and timely data.