February 12, 2025 • 12 mins
I spoke with Joseph Frantz, the Founder of TimeSentry, an AI native time tracking solution for hourly billing professionals. We discussed how law firms can use artificial intelligence to capture more value from clients and work smarter, ways that organizations currently approach this process, and where legal technology is headed in 2025.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to Reinviting Professionals, a podcast hosted by industry analyst Ari Kaplan,
(00:07):
which shares ideas, guidance and perspectives from market leaders shaping the next generation
of legal and professional services.
This is Ari Kaplan, and I'm speaking today with Joseph France, the founder of Time Century,
an AI native time tracking solution for hourly billing professionals.
(00:28):
Hi Joseph, how are you?
I'm doing great hour, you are.
I'm doing really well looking forward to this conversation.
Tell us about your background and the genesis of Time Century.
I started my career as a statistician.
I was working in a macroeconomic research department, and I was working on labor market
economics.
I was living in New York, and I wasn't making very much money, but I had access to all
(00:50):
the labor market data.
So I downloaded it from like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and I sorted highest to lowest,
and that's when I decided I should become an investment banker.
So I went to grad school, I studied finance, I went back into investment banking, I did
immersion acquisitions for two years at Lazard, covering healthcare services.
It completely burned me out, I was working 90 hour weeks, and so I went to go to see
(01:13):
a FOVA startup, and then the startup completely burned me out financially, and then so I went
back into advisor.
I worked in chapter 11 of bankruptcy and restructuring advisory for the next six years,
but after my first couple of weeks of work, somehow this had never even come up in the interview,
the managing director came up to me, "Okay, you've got to submit your hours," and I was like,
(01:34):
"Hours, what are you talking about?
I have no idea what I've done for the past couple of weeks, I've just been responding,
it's been all putting out fires."
So he's no, because we built in the bankruptcy court, you have to track all your hours,
you have to track them, you're like, "Down to the minute," and I was like, "Oh, I already
had the job, and I needed money."
So I was like, "I guess I have to do this," and then so I tracked 12,000 hours because I have
(01:58):
the receipts on it, and I tracked, "Okay, I spent 45 minutes on the phone with the client," and
I spent 30 minutes analyzing the financial data of this subsidiary and building a waterfall.
And after doing that for many years, and eventually I got used to it, but I'd never liked it.
I would get behind an entry, and I'd be, "You just start working and you're focused," and
(02:19):
it's never like top of the mind, but then you have to submit an invoice, because it's
the 30th or whatever, and then you've got to catch up time.
And so because I knew from my background, pre-grad school sort of coding and writing scripts
and analyzing data, I knew how to analyze data, and that's when I started trying to write
a program that could analyze my data and come up with my time sheet for the day.
(02:41):
Eventually, I had some okay answers, but the answers weren't that good, but the technology
was improving, and I could see that the ability to do this, it was technologically feasible,
but I didn't have time when I had a full book of clients to actually work on this.
I was basically faced with decision, I was like, "If I want to work on this, I have to leave
(03:01):
professional services, and I have to go all in on this."
So I did, and that was maybe about 18 months ago, and I've been working on creating high-quality
time sheets at the click of the button ever since.
It's interesting, it used to be maybe my least favorite part of the job.
Now I do it 10 hours a day of creating time sheets, but because we're creating more abstract
solution for time sheets, I know more about time sheets than I ever thought I would.
(03:25):
How does time-century work?
The way that it works is we ingest a number of different feeds from different data sources.
One of the most common ones we use is emails.
You send an email, the email has not only the actual content of the email, "Okay, xyz,
you would book many people build a point one for drafting an email, but the email also has
(03:46):
contextual data about whatever you are working on."
So we back-solve from the contextual data that's in the email to whatever you are working
on, but we have any number of data sources.
For example, we have chat bots that can be in a Teams or Slack chat.
We have Zoom bots that can join a Zoom meeting, like the one that we're on right now, and
then at the end of the meeting, it'll analyze the content of the meeting, write a time description,
(04:11):
map that to the appropriate client to the matter, and then that'll show up in your list
of suggested entries at the end of the day.
So really what we're doing is we're taking all this data from all these different sources,
meetings, calendars, chats, emails, and then using that to determine the statistically
most likely distribution of what someone was doing on that day.
(04:33):
We tend to get pretty good results during our accuracy is 80 to 90%.
On a given day, depending how many data sources we ingest, if we have your calendar, your email,
if you're bringing the Zoom bots to the call, if you've used our phone integration, then
we're pretty accurate in terms of the ability to create high quality billing records.
(04:54):
How confirms use AI to capture more value from clients and work smarter?
We're an AI time tracking and billing solution, but I stay very up to date on what are all
of the tools out there that exist, not just time tracking, but document drafting, and
(05:15):
client intake, etc.
Ultimately, when you think the consumer, which is the client, the consumer is always going
to be value conscious.
And so if you can use AI to create more value for the client, you can actually raise your
hourly rates because you can say, "Hey, it's going to take me an hour, but I'll get five
(05:40):
to ten times as much done as the next attorney down the line who's not actually using all
of the best in class tooling and hasn't adopted all of these techniques yet."
And so one of the ways to capture more value is use the best tools you can get your hands
on and raise your hourly rates.
But even though you're raising your hourly rates, you're actually decreasing the amount
(06:05):
of money you're charging per unit of value because if you can do three or four things in the
time that it would have taken you to do one thing in the past, if you're going...
And by the way, I think it's actually more interesting and more fun to think at a higher
level.
I think almost any professional agrees at higher level thinking, abstract thinking is more
engaging and more exciting and worth more to the client.
(06:27):
If you can abstract away all of these administrative layers and taking documents and really the
nitty-gritty of the work and get to thinking for your client, advising them, guiding them
through incredibly important decisions in their life versus performing the secretarial
(06:48):
function, then you can really capture a lot of value there.
And I think that's a huge opportunity for any firm that's willing to be tech forward.
What are the characteristics of legal technology that are most popular that you're seeing in
law firms?
The drafting tools are really popular.
I'm seeing big adoption in drafting tools.
(07:10):
The tools that are really taking off are still highly specialized.
Either highly specialized or they're highly general.
For example, I do know a lot of attorneys and firms that love clawed or open AI and those
tools are extremely general purpose tools.
Similarly, one of the big success stories in AI has been in PI AI to summarize medical records.
(07:35):
These tools have a very narrow, extremely narrow use case.
There's one type of record that goes in.
There's one type of summary that goes out and the whole tool has been built around like
taking this one very specific workflow and really nailing it, but it's really not a platform
technology.
It's a workflow technology.
(07:57):
I've seen a lot of success in narrow, highly specialized workflow technology across the legal
tech space.
I think whatever practice area you're in, if you think it could theoretically be automated
with a little bit of work, you should explore whether or not the tool exists because I talk
to start up founders who do really niche tiny specific tools in legal tech and you always
(08:22):
talk to them and they'll start the company and they'll be like, I didn't know.
I didn't think anyone was doing this and then actually there's five companies that do this
that it's actually a very competitive space.
I think the same is true as a potential customer.
If you think there's a particular part of your workflow that it might make sense to automate,
it will serve you well to explore whether or not there's a tool out there that exists that
(08:44):
provides that service.
There's an R2 researching and buying and big marketing budgets don't always back good
tools in many cases they back average tools.
It does require research and if the product doesn't exist, that's a great opportunity to
reach out to a smaller company and say, hey, I think this could exist.
(09:07):
It's very adjacent to what you're already doing.
I would be interested in being a customer if you had this feature and they will oftentimes
either point you in the direction of a great solution or be like, hey, that sounds like
a good idea.
I've done that in the past in both cases.
People have come to me and say, hey, I have this thing.
It's mildly related to time entry and I've said in some cases, oh, you know what, that's
(09:31):
totally within our roadmap.
Let's work on it together.
Or in some cases, I'm like, you know what, there's this company that does exactly what you
need and you should go buy with them.
Given that perspective, how do you see legal tech evolving in 2025?
I started this company in 2023 and in 2023, it was very difficult to get adoption of an
(09:57):
AI tool compared to what it is today.
There was a lot more reticence.
I think 2025 is probably going to be one of the best years for AI tools in legal tech.
And part of the reason for this is the year that tools get adopted is not the year that
tools get good.
The year that tools get good is like a year or two after adoption because there's a feedback
(10:20):
cycle.
At the beginning, there's a lot of new companies.
I think the product can't start to really improve until they have a few hundred, a few
thousand attorneys banging on it and saying, I don't like this.
I want this to be different.
Why does this say, give me x, y, z answer when clearly the answer is one, two, five.
So what's really exciting is that 2024 was a year of adoption and 2025 will be a year
(10:48):
when all of these products that were adopted start to improve and just because of the general
way the information obligates to society.
The improvement in one product sparks another idea and another product.
One of those that I think will be 2025 is natural language interfaces to legal tech products.
(11:09):
A lot of the chat thus far has been you type on a keyboard and then you press the enter key
and I think that the interface through which we access these legal tech products is going
to switch in 2025 to start really being the equivalent of the advanced voice mode.
You're asking, what do you think about this document?
(11:31):
And so you actually do start to see right now different products are naming their AI agents.
This is Steve, your AI, Eric legal and then this is Sally, your AI intake coordinator.
And I think they think the good ones will start to almost develop a reputation like a person
would like, oh, Sally is really good at doing client intake.
(11:51):
This is Ari Kapplin speaking with Joseph France, the founder of time century and AI native
time tracking solution for hourly billing professionals.
Joseph, thanks so much.
Thank you, Ari.
I had a great time.
Thank you for listening to the reinventing professionals podcast.
Visit reinventingprofessionals.com or Ari Kapplin advisors.com to learn more.
Welcome to Reinviting Professionals, a podcast hosted by industry analyst Ari Kaplan,
(00:07):
which shares ideas, guidance and perspectives from market leaders shaping the next generation
of legal and professional services.
This is Ari Kaplan, and I'm speaking today with Joseph France, the founder of Time Century,
an AI native time tracking solution for hourly billing professionals.
(00:28):
Hi Joseph, how are you?
I'm doing great hour, you are.
I'm doing really well looking forward to this conversation.
Tell us about your background and the genesis of Time Century.
I started my career as a statistician.
I was working in a macroeconomic research department, and I was working on labor market
economics.
I was living in New York, and I wasn't making very much money, but I had access to all
(00:50):
the labor market data.
So I downloaded it from like the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and I sorted highest to lowest,
and that's when I decided I should become an investment banker.
So I went to grad school, I studied finance, I went back into investment banking, I did
immersion acquisitions for two years at Lazard, covering healthcare services.
It completely burned me out, I was working 90 hour weeks, and so I went to go to see
(01:13):
a FOVA startup, and then the startup completely burned me out financially, and then so I went
back into advisor.
I worked in chapter 11 of bankruptcy and restructuring advisory for the next six years,
but after my first couple of weeks of work, somehow this had never even come up in the interview,
the managing director came up to me, "Okay, you've got to submit your hours," and I was like,
(01:34):
"Hours, what are you talking about?
I have no idea what I've done for the past couple of weeks, I've just been responding,
it's been all putting out fires."
So he's no, because we built in the bankruptcy court, you have to track all your hours,
you have to track them, you're like, "Down to the minute," and I was like, "Oh, I already
had the job, and I needed money."
So I was like, "I guess I have to do this," and then so I tracked 12,000 hours because I have
(01:58):
the receipts on it, and I tracked, "Okay, I spent 45 minutes on the phone with the client," and
I spent 30 minutes analyzing the financial data of this subsidiary and building a waterfall.
And after doing that for many years, and eventually I got used to it, but I'd never liked it.
I would get behind an entry, and I'd be, "You just start working and you're focused," and
(02:19):
it's never like top of the mind, but then you have to submit an invoice, because it's
the 30th or whatever, and then you've got to catch up time.
And so because I knew from my background, pre-grad school sort of coding and writing scripts
and analyzing data, I knew how to analyze data, and that's when I started trying to write
a program that could analyze my data and come up with my time sheet for the day.
(02:41):
Eventually, I had some okay answers, but the answers weren't that good, but the technology
was improving, and I could see that the ability to do this, it was technologically feasible,
but I didn't have time when I had a full book of clients to actually work on this.
I was basically faced with decision, I was like, "If I want to work on this, I have to leave
(03:01):
professional services, and I have to go all in on this."
So I did, and that was maybe about 18 months ago, and I've been working on creating high-quality
time sheets at the click of the button ever since.
It's interesting, it used to be maybe my least favorite part of the job.
Now I do it 10 hours a day of creating time sheets, but because we're creating more abstract
solution for time sheets, I know more about time sheets than I ever thought I would.
(03:25):
How does time-century work?
The way that it works is we ingest a number of different feeds from different data sources.
One of the most common ones we use is emails.
You send an email, the email has not only the actual content of the email, "Okay, xyz,
you would book many people build a point one for drafting an email, but the email also has
(03:46):
contextual data about whatever you are working on."
So we back-solve from the contextual data that's in the email to whatever you are working
on, but we have any number of data sources.
For example, we have chat bots that can be in a Teams or Slack chat.
We have Zoom bots that can join a Zoom meeting, like the one that we're on right now, and
then at the end of the meeting, it'll analyze the content of the meeting, write a time description,
(04:11):
map that to the appropriate client to the matter, and then that'll show up in your list
of suggested entries at the end of the day.
So really what we're doing is we're taking all this data from all these different sources,
meetings, calendars, chats, emails, and then using that to determine the statistically
most likely distribution of what someone was doing on that day.
(04:33):
We tend to get pretty good results during our accuracy is 80 to 90%.
On a given day, depending how many data sources we ingest, if we have your calendar, your email,
if you're bringing the Zoom bots to the call, if you've used our phone integration, then
we're pretty accurate in terms of the ability to create high quality billing records.
(04:54):
How confirms use AI to capture more value from clients and work smarter?
We're an AI time tracking and billing solution, but I stay very up to date on what are all
of the tools out there that exist, not just time tracking, but document drafting, and
(05:15):
client intake, etc.
Ultimately, when you think the consumer, which is the client, the consumer is always going
to be value conscious.
And so if you can use AI to create more value for the client, you can actually raise your
hourly rates because you can say, "Hey, it's going to take me an hour, but I'll get five
(05:40):
to ten times as much done as the next attorney down the line who's not actually using all
of the best in class tooling and hasn't adopted all of these techniques yet."
And so one of the ways to capture more value is use the best tools you can get your hands
on and raise your hourly rates.
But even though you're raising your hourly rates, you're actually decreasing the amount
(06:05):
of money you're charging per unit of value because if you can do three or four things in the
time that it would have taken you to do one thing in the past, if you're going...
And by the way, I think it's actually more interesting and more fun to think at a higher
level.
I think almost any professional agrees at higher level thinking, abstract thinking is more
engaging and more exciting and worth more to the client.
(06:27):
If you can abstract away all of these administrative layers and taking documents and really the
nitty-gritty of the work and get to thinking for your client, advising them, guiding them
through incredibly important decisions in their life versus performing the secretarial
(06:48):
function, then you can really capture a lot of value there.
And I think that's a huge opportunity for any firm that's willing to be tech forward.
What are the characteristics of legal technology that are most popular that you're seeing in
law firms?
The drafting tools are really popular.
I'm seeing big adoption in drafting tools.
(07:10):
The tools that are really taking off are still highly specialized.
Either highly specialized or they're highly general.
For example, I do know a lot of attorneys and firms that love clawed or open AI and those
tools are extremely general purpose tools.
Similarly, one of the big success stories in AI has been in PI AI to summarize medical records.
(07:35):
These tools have a very narrow, extremely narrow use case.
There's one type of record that goes in.
There's one type of summary that goes out and the whole tool has been built around like
taking this one very specific workflow and really nailing it, but it's really not a platform
technology.
It's a workflow technology.
(07:57):
I've seen a lot of success in narrow, highly specialized workflow technology across the legal
tech space.
I think whatever practice area you're in, if you think it could theoretically be automated
with a little bit of work, you should explore whether or not the tool exists because I talk
to start up founders who do really niche tiny specific tools in legal tech and you always
(08:22):
talk to them and they'll start the company and they'll be like, I didn't know.
I didn't think anyone was doing this and then actually there's five companies that do this
that it's actually a very competitive space.
I think the same is true as a potential customer.
If you think there's a particular part of your workflow that it might make sense to automate,
it will serve you well to explore whether or not there's a tool out there that exists that
(08:44):
provides that service.
There's an R2 researching and buying and big marketing budgets don't always back good
tools in many cases they back average tools.
It does require research and if the product doesn't exist, that's a great opportunity to
reach out to a smaller company and say, hey, I think this could exist.
(09:07):
It's very adjacent to what you're already doing.
I would be interested in being a customer if you had this feature and they will oftentimes
either point you in the direction of a great solution or be like, hey, that sounds like
a good idea.
I've done that in the past in both cases.
People have come to me and say, hey, I have this thing.
It's mildly related to time entry and I've said in some cases, oh, you know what, that's
(09:31):
totally within our roadmap.
Let's work on it together.
Or in some cases, I'm like, you know what, there's this company that does exactly what you
need and you should go buy with them.
Given that perspective, how do you see legal tech evolving in 2025?
I started this company in 2023 and in 2023, it was very difficult to get adoption of an
(09:57):
AI tool compared to what it is today.
There was a lot more reticence.
I think 2025 is probably going to be one of the best years for AI tools in legal tech.
And part of the reason for this is the year that tools get adopted is not the year that
tools get good.
The year that tools get good is like a year or two after adoption because there's a feedback
(10:20):
cycle.
At the beginning, there's a lot of new companies.
I think the product can't start to really improve until they have a few hundred, a few
thousand attorneys banging on it and saying, I don't like this.
I want this to be different.
Why does this say, give me x, y, z answer when clearly the answer is one, two, five.
So what's really exciting is that 2024 was a year of adoption and 2025 will be a year
(10:48):
when all of these products that were adopted start to improve and just because of the general
way the information obligates to society.
The improvement in one product sparks another idea and another product.
One of those that I think will be 2025 is natural language interfaces to legal tech products.
(11:09):
A lot of the chat thus far has been you type on a keyboard and then you press the enter key
and I think that the interface through which we access these legal tech products is going
to switch in 2025 to start really being the equivalent of the advanced voice mode.
You're asking, what do you think about this document?
(11:31):
And so you actually do start to see right now different products are naming their AI agents.
This is Steve, your AI, Eric legal and then this is Sally, your AI intake coordinator.
And I think they think the good ones will start to almost develop a reputation like a person
would like, oh, Sally is really good at doing client intake.
(11:51):
This is Ari Kapplin speaking with Joseph France, the founder of time century and AI native
time tracking solution for hourly billing professionals.
Joseph, thanks so much.
Thank you, Ari.
I had a great time.
Thank you for listening to the reinventing professionals podcast.
Visit reinventingprofessionals.com or Ari Kapplin advisors.com to learn more.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.