Stark & Stark: Advancing Attorney Productivity Through Smarter Timekeeping
A lawyer’s day rarely happens in one place. It moves between inboxes, phone calls, calendars, and documents, and at the end of it, somebody still has to make sense of it all and turn it into a time entry.
At Stark & Stark, with offices across New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York, half the firm handles plaintiff personal injury work on contingency, while the other half bills hourly across investment management, securities, commercial real estate, general litigation, and family law. Different billing models, but the same underlying challenge: work spread across too many communication channels to create a complete, accurate picture of the day.
Built Around the Way We Work
Stark & Stark had two essential requirements for an AI-enabled time-tracking solution: it had to integrate with their current tech stack, SurePoint, and it had to be user-friendly.
“We wanted to capture the full picture of an attorney’s day, but with as little disruption as possible. The real test was how few clicks it would take to turn an activity into something ready to submit,” says Thomas Kline, the firm’s Director of IT.
Billables AI stood out for offering multiple ways to view captured activity, so each timekeeper could work in whatever format made sense to them, and for keeping the path from captured activity to a submitted entry down to two or three clicks.
The Whole Day, In One Place
Before Billables AI, entering a single day’s time at Stark & Stark typically took anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour per attorney, as timekeepers pieced their day together from every channel they used to interact with clients. Phone calls were the biggest blind spot. A five-minute call can be important enough to bill, but if nobody writes it down at the moment, it simply disappears. “It’s very hard to match a client matter to every single call. Even if it is extremely substantive, it’s easy to just forget it happened,” Kline says.
Billables AI’s approach is to bring the whole day into a consolidated view. Rather than making timekeepers hunt down their own activity, a single timeline draws automatically from the tools they already work in. For Stark & Stark, that meant capturing activity across Microsoft 365 (Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Office), along with document work in Tungsten Power PDF, video conferences, and email, with calendar-linked activity tying it all together. And it doesn’t matter whether the work happens at a desktop or on a mobile device; Billables AI captures it in real time, so timekeepers never have to stop and wonder where they did something or whether it made it onto the record.
However, one gap remained: the firm’s 8x8 cloud phone (VoIP) system. Billables AI built the integration, and now phone calls land on the timeline automatically, with the number, the duration, and often a matching calendar appointment attached.
“It was really awesome of Billables AI to go the extra mile and build that integration for us, and they turned it around quicker than almost any other vendor we’ve dealt with.”
Thomas Kline
Director of IT
Less Time Spent, More Time Captured
That same daily task now takes most timekeepers just 10 minutes. And the relief is as real as the time saved. “It has saved me a significant amount of time and reduced my stress level. Knowing my time is being captured accurately has been a huge relief, and it’s let me focus my attention on more urgent matters,” one timekeeper says.
Those gains hold because the system helps guard against the hours that used to slip away. Kline singled out the billing gap analysis feature: when a user’s timesheet is missing data that Billables AI was able to capture, the system offers it as a suggested billable entry. “It surfaces the gap and asks if something should go there,” Kline says. “It’s really, really useful.”
A Clearer Picture of the Work Itself
As adoption grows, Stark & Stark is expanding the rollout to additional attorneys, with Lunch & Learn sessions and a dedicated group of internal champions helping encourage firmwide engagement. The rollout also surfaced a use case nobody planned for. Stark & Stark’s contingent associates don’t bill clients, so they never tracked their time. But the firm runs a program to develop its first-year associates, making sure they get enough exposure across different kinds of work: document review, conducting depositions rather than just listening, time in court. So the firm had them start logging their activity in Billables AI too, giving the program real data to work from.
The associates initially questioned the value of tracking time they weren’t billing, viewing it as another administrative task. But within a week or two, Billables AI learned to recognize their work and automatically assign the appropriate non-billable codes, keeping the effort minimal. What it gave the shareholders who oversee them was the thing they’d been missing:
“It’s hard to quantify what your associates are working on, and what they’re not working on enough. Face time only tells you so much, so the shareholders wanted something more measurable. Now they have it: a quantifiable set of activities to review, more meaningful conversations with their associates, and a better picture of what they’re actually working on.”
Thomas Kline
Director of IT
Looking ahead, attorneys have asked for more mobile capabilities. Billables AI already captures work on the go, but timekeepers want to do more than capture from their phones. They want to review their full timeline and edit their entries on iPhone and Android. It’s a capability Billables AI has started to build.
