We’re thrilled to welcome Professor Andrew Ting as the newest advisor to Billables AI. A seasoned legal executive, educator, and startup advisor, Andrew brings a powerful combination of legal, strategic, and operational insight to our team. He currently leads the legal, compliance, and government affairs teams at Panorama Education, supporting positive outcomes for over 15 million students nationwide. His career spans leadership roles across the technology, financial services, and venture capital industries, with deep expertise in corporate governance, capital markets, M&A, and policy advocacy. Andrew is a Super Angel investor with Alumni Ventures, one of Billables.AI's investors, and was previously a General Counsel for venture capital funds.
Andrew’s background—serving as General Counsel for companies like Koalafi and Promontory MortgagePath, advising startups and venture funds, and teaching at both Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business and George Washington University Law School—makes him uniquely equipped to support Billables AI’s mission. As we continue building AI-powered solutions that elevate legal practice management, we’re excited to partner with Andrew to help guide our strategy, deepen our industry impact, and support the growth of innovative, high-performing legal teams.
We asked Andrew to share his stories on the front lines as a former biller at a Big Law firm earlier in his career. Read on to hear how his past experience with billable timekeeping led to his partnership with Billables AI:
If This Tool Existed Back Then, I Might Still Be in BigLaw
“Your client may not read your memo, but your client will read your bill.” The senior law firm partner scowled down at me from his desk. “Andrew, I expect you to be responsible for all the time entries from all of the associates on this deal. Review them. Edit them for consistency. Make sure they comply with all the client’s billing codes. That means breaking up time entries and recategorizing them if necessary. Let me know if we have to write off any time that isn’t documented properly.” The senior partner swiveled back to his triple monitor screens. The meeting was over.
I sighed. The reward for good work is more work. 😂 I was a senior associate at Latham & Watkins, now in charge of billing not just my own time but billing for all the other associates on my team. But even billing my own individual time was a manual mess!
Back then – 15 years ago – billing was a painfully manual affair. Every morning, I tore off a piece of legal sized paper from a billing pad with time sheet rows marked in 0.1 hour increments, from 7 AM to 1 PM on the front side and 1 PM to 7 PM on the back side. (Many days, I ran out of room on the sheet because I worked earlier and later). In one day, I often billed 5+ clients, with clients frequently calling me out of the blue to ask about today’s securities filings, crossing out closing checklist items, and sometimes just to socialize. Unplanned calls and crises wreaked havoc with my schedule, and my time sheets often reflected about 10+ scribbled time entries a day, jumping back and forth between client matters. In my 7 years at Latham & Watkins, assuming I billed 250 days in a year, that equals 1,750 time sheets, and 20,000+ time entries. ⏰ The profuse, profitable measure of my professional BigLaw life. 💰
Every morning, I gave my legal secretary Marsha my time entry for the prior day. Marsha’s daily job was transcribing her attorneys’ time into Carpe Diem, our timekeeping software with a user interface reminiscent of Windows 95. I reviewed Marsha’s transcribed entries in Carpe Diem, making minor manual adjustments. Writing down my time entries, reviewing my time entries … took a lot of time. Non-billable time. 🫠 I wished there was some magic software solution that could automatically track my time based on everything I did – in email, in research, in calls. ✨ I wished there was some magic software solution that could automatically generate my time entries. 🪄 Marsha was an excellent secretary, but she was stuck transcribing time entries - not the highest and best value of anyone’s time!
And now my senior law firm partner was asking me to review the time entries not just for myself, but for each associate on my deal team!
Looking up from my billing timesheet in Latham & Watkins' Washington DC office, 2011.
Not surprisingly, my amount of non-billable billing time exploded. 🤯 I discovered that other timekeepers were inconsistent. If 3 attorneys showed up at a meeting, one attorney would report 0.2 hours, one attorney would report 0.4 hours, and one attorney would report 0.7 hours. Although timekeepers sometimes fudged by combining time entries like “Prepare for meeting with A. Ting; meet with A. Ting and N. Jeng (0.7)”, I worried that a client would see the inconsistency for the same task and call us out on it. My solution was usually to round down to the lowest common denominator, because our time cost a lot of money and I didn’t want to overcharge. Also, each timekeeper had a different style of recording their time entries. Inconsistent time entry narratives + inconsistent time entry durations made me anxious. As my non-billable billing time exploded, I again wished there was some magic software solution that could automatically and accurately track every timekeeper’s activities, and automatically generate consistent time entries for every timekeeper for each deal.
Honestly, one of the reasons I left BigLaw was because of these billing pains. Back then, there was no magic software solution.
Now I’m a Chief Legal Officer at an education AI company, reviewing time entries for my BigLaw firms. (Yes, I am a client who reads both the memo and the bill. 😅 ) I am a tech optimist, excited about applying AI to solve problems like billing. So when I met Arvind Sujeeth and Nancy Jeng, the founders of Billables.AI, I was super excited. Because Billables.AI is indeed the magic software solution that BigLaw attorneys need to augment and automate billing, that solves all of the pain points that I confess I experienced above. Check out Billables AI and sign up for a demo!
