UK Silver Circle

Before Laurel

One of the top firms in the UK is setting a new standard for legal services with innovative technology. Yet it was still relying on manual timekeeping tools. This meant it lacked insight into how lawyers spend their time, its billing wasn’t as fast as it could be, and revenue opportunities weren’t fully realized.

After Laurel

By implementing Laurel across the firm, the Silver Circle firm solved some of its most critical challenges. With powerful data insights, it improved the speed and accuracy of how lawyers’ time is tracked and billed. In addition, it reduced manual labor while increasing profitability.

Laurel is Delivering Impressive Results for Britain’s Leading Law Firm

There aren’t many law firms that enjoy a reputation equivalent to that of this leading British firm. With more than 900 employees, the firm is known for the high-profile clients it represents, as well as the high quality of legal services it has consistently delivered in corporate, dispute resolution, employment, innovation, real estate, and private cases.

In 2016, following a year of in-depth consultations with external experts and advisors, the Silver Circle firm launched an ambitious 10-year plan. Within a decade, the prestigious firm would embark on strategic initiatives to significantly increase revenue and position itself at the forefront of legal technology and innovation.

To make this vision possible, one thing was clear to senior leadership and managing partners at the firm: time is money.

Of course, time is money in the sense that 10 years is a very specific window for the firm to accomplish its various business goals. But more importantly, stakeholders knew that optimizing timekeeping was fundamental to achieving revenue growth.

This is why the firm engaged Laurel, the only machine learning-powered, automated timekeeping solution on the market. And it’s why the two organizations formed a relationship that’s still going strong and returning exceptional results.

“Purchasing Laurel is not a timekeeping play. For us, it’s a revenue play.”

3 Key Value Drivers of Time Automation

Timekeeping is critical for law firms, yet it’s often one of the most tedious tasks lawyers must contend with. Logging billable hours is, ironically, time-consuming. Lawyers want to concentrate on their caseloads, clients want fair and accurate bills, and firms want to save money.

It was obvious to the firm that Laurel was a viable and valuable strategy for moving the firm forward in ways conventional timekeeping tools and methods could not, and it adopted the product to solve three core challenges.

1. Harnessing Data for Deeper Insight into How Work is Performed

Along with automating timekeeping, introducing Laurel was also a data play. To better support lawyers, the firm wanted a more nuanced view of the minutes and hours required across a variety of tasks, cases, and clients. Laurel helped the firm collect insights, providing the firm with a holistic understanding of how time is distributed, used, and billed.

2. Improving the Velocity and Accuracy of Accounting Processes

In terms of its operation, the firm resembles a highly efficient business enterprise more than a law firm. It prioritizes promptly releasing time into its practice management system for billing on a daily basis, with the aim of ensuring that bills are paid on time. Having a solution that can intelligently capture and categorize lawyers’ billable and non-billable tasks behind the scenes was a major boost to the velocity of the firm’s accounting processes.

3. Capturing All Billable Time—and Revenue

Laurel was rolled out across the whole firm in 2021. This created a perfect setting for a YoY comparison.

After adopting Laurel, timekeepers saw YoY growth averaging 4.02%. For the world’s top lawyers, this is a substantial difference—not only in terms of freeing up time for higher-value work, but in terms of revenue growth:

• Laurel users garnered an additional £3,506,859
• Based on this, projections for annual additional revenue with Laurel are £10,835,450
• And this means it takes fewer than two days to cover the full cost of the Laurel contract

A Relationship Forged in Time

A lot has changed since the firm was first founded in the early 1900s, and today, leading in the industry means leading in technology. That inspired the launch of the firm’s 10-year vision in 2016, and by extension, the establishment of its in-house incubator to develop solutions the firm will need to make its long-term strategy a reality.

It was the incubator that first explored the possibility of automating timekeeping. Though it had the tools, talent, and resources to design proprietary software, the team deduced that it would be too costly and complex to develop in-house. And then, the Chief Strategy Officer at the firm met Laurel Cofounder and CEO Ryan Alshak.

That marked the beginning of a mutually beneficial journey. Even though it was still an early concept at this point, the CSO realized Laurel’s solution was exactly what he was looking for. 

“Timekeeping is stuck in the 20th century. It’s basically a digital version of an analog method. Right now is the perfect time to reimagine how it’s done.”

So the incubator—and the firm itself—served as a testing ground to develop, deploy, and refine Laurel’s signature software and algorithms in a real, industry-leading law firm. At the same time, Laurel enabled the firm to gain new insights, uncover new efficiencies, and unlock new revenue growth, while also delivering a superior user experience to its timekeepers.

This relationship is still going strong. As the firm’s timekeepers raise their expectations and request new functionality, Laurel’s product teams devise new solutions—and in the end, this has a net benefit for all the law firms Laurel works with.

As the British law firm advances in its vision and meets its goals, Laurel will continue to play a vital role in growing the organization.