Steele Family Law: How Passive Time Capture Reset the Firm’s Operating Rhythm
Steele Family Law is a solo practice in Anderson, South Carolina, founded in 2020 by attorney Greg Steele. Supported by a team of three, including an in-house paralegal, the firm devotes 90% of its practice to South Carolina family law, from private divorce and custody matters to court-appointed guardian ad litem work. The majority of the work is billed hourly, to clients and to the court. We spoke with Steele about how Billables AI reset his small firm’s operating rhythm: with time captured passively in the background, timekeeping takes almost none of his attention, and billing now runs on schedule.
Fast-Moving Cases, Careful Billing
Families come to Steele in the middle of a divorce, a custody dispute, a child in need of someone to speak for their best interests in court. That work doesn’t wait: hearings across multiple counties, home visits in guardian ad litem cases, emergency matters with three-day deadlines. Steele’s first focus is on the families and the work in front of him. They are trusting him with the hardest moments of their lives, and he wants his hours spent earning that trust, not accounting for it.
Before Billables AI, timekeeping at the firm was, in Steele’s own word, haphazard. Clio’s built-in timers and desktop trackers like WiseTime could only watch a window on a screen, while his work happened everywhere else: a report drafted at a coffee shop, emails answered in the parking lot before a hearing. Weeks could pass between the work and the record of it, leaving him to rebuild his days from calendars and filings, and whenever he couldn’t be certain of the time, he rounded the entry down. The firm absorbed the difference, and billing cycles sometimes slipped.
Up and Running on a Free Trial
Steele found Billables AI at ABA TECHSHOW. After years of trying timekeeping tools, it was almost exactly the fit he had been looking for: cross-platform, built into the Microsoft 365 applications where the firm drafts and emails all day, and integrated with Clio, where its bills live.
“We started the free trial and played around with it. Billables AI was easy to get up and running, and now it’s just become a part of our everyday lives here.”
Greg Steele
Founder
An Operating Rhythm Takes Hold
With time capture running in the background, the firm holds a cadence it never could before: time reviewed and pushed to Clio weekly, bills out monthly, a cycle that hasn’t been missed in close to a year since getting Billables AI. Catching up is no longer a project.
“I can have my time tracked easily. It sounds simple, but that’s how we found leverage: Billables AI catches everything in the bucket and organizes it.”
Greg Steele
Founder
Complete time capture also changed the conversations inside the firm. His paralegal, it turned out, had been underestimating her own time: work she would ballpark at half an hour was actually taking two or three. Bill review used to mean asking whether that was really all the time in a case; now the firm is finding time it never knew it had, and talking about where to invest it, not where it disappeared.
The Ripple Effect
The biggest recoveries are email and document drafting, and the rhythm now reaches decisions beyond the bill. Steele sets retainers based on what cases actually take and replenishes trust accounts before the firm is working for free. In guardian ad litem cases, historically unbilled until a case ended, bills now go out mid-case, backed by court orders, and collections have improved.
The results have reached the top line. Comparing January through June 2025 to the same period in 2026, the firm has seen a roughly 10% year-over-year increase in revenue. For Steele, the number reflects the holistic change Billables AI has created: a better operating rhythm that runs through everything the firm does.
Steele recommends Billables AI to any firm billing hourly, and his reason ties back to the families he serves: “It allows me to have this catch-all bucket going on in the background that just captures everything, and allows me to accurately, ethically report the value I’m providing to my clients.”
