February 14, 2022
Posted by: DevDigital
The old adage “time is money” never seemed more relevant than when Nashville attorneys Sean Martin and Pierce Schubert realized they were missing out on critical hours devoted to their clients. Phone calls and texts messages that were made and sent were often overlooked when addressing the comprehensive billing history for all clients enlisting their services.
Whether managing a law firm with a multitude of attorneys or a single independent individual every hour counts, and therefore must be counted. Keeping track of time spent with clients is easy when looking at calendars. It’s obvious when inhouse meetings are scheduled or lunch appointments are attended. Those minutes and hours are tracked quite efficiently.
But what happens to those more “invisible hours”? Work hours, especially for attorneys, are most often a 24/7 profession and communication regarding the workload of any client can happen at any time of day and sometimes during inconvenient situations. Maybe it’s a phone conversation that occurs while sitting in traffic or rushing to another appointment. It might be an exchange of text messages while sitting in a movie theater. All are important.
If the last two years have taught us one thing we know we can work practically at any time anywhere. What were once typically face-to-face communications may have shifted to more mobile phone interactions that are no less significant or valuable. Again, time is money and must be tracked, documented, and most importantly billed.
Enter Sean and Pierce. They spotted this overlooked source of revenue and sought to solve the problem of time spent managing clients, but not time billed. The concept of TimeMiner was born!
TimeMiner is a mobile app for iOS or Android cell phones and performs functions that scrub attorneys’ phones and emails to determine which calls, texts, and emails can be tracked and billed for specific clients. A partnership using the tech skills of DevDigital combined with the TimeMiner concept developed by Sean and Pierce created a phone app any attorney can install and begin almost immediately maintaining a much more efficient record of time spent and subsequently billed.
There are unique features in TimeMiner that make it not only user-friendly but also secure in its usage. TimeMiner runs only when you need it. It does not run constantly in the background nor does it monitor your activity. You are in control of what data you want and when.
Reports can be generated based on the client, the date and duration of communication, and the dollar value based on the hourly rate of the attorney. Valuable time that was once missed is now captured and billed accordingly thus increasing revenues for individual attorneys as well as larger firms. The once overlooked revenue can range from hundreds of dollars per month to potentially hundreds of thousands per year.
Creating the app is only part of the story as the DevDigital SEO team utilized their skills to take a new website and app and propel it toward success. Keywords “mobile billing software” contributed to this goal and in December 2021, 26 people downloaded TimeMiner via Google Play and 26 people downloaded it via the Apple Store.
Their organic bounce rate decreased by 12% and their pages-per-website-session increased by 2%. TimeMiner increased 69 positions and reached the 27th position for the keyword “mobile billing software” search. This is an incredible start for a new website. Another significant outcome reported by the SEO team was 5,200 organic sessions as compared to the only 4,100 sessions from other combined avenues.
“TimeMiner was designed to capture small increments of billable time. Lawyers, for example, rarely forget to bill for a three-hour meeting, but often do for a three-minute email or a thirty-second phone call. By capturing billable time for incremental tasks automatically, TimeMiner users can expect a significant increase in their billable time. 'Those .1s add up',” founder Sean Martin is fond of saying.
The legal profession is a competitive industry and managing time and billable hours is critical for success. The accurate tracking of time regarding services provided is obviously hard data that delivers the dollar figures that can measure the success of one attorney or an entire firm, but the anecdotal aspect factors in as well. Accuracy and efficiency translate to clients’ perceptions of that one attorney or that huge firm. The use of TimeMiner indirectly can play a role in how clients view quality and integrity. Thanks to the joint endeavor of combining the DevDigital SEO team talents and Sean and Pierce’s innovative idea TimeMiner is well on its way to rising in the rankings of mobile billing software searches for the legal profession.