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Harvey Esquire Used Toggl Track to Automate Their Time Tracking and Recapture 25% of Their Billable Hours

Harvey Esquire is a legal services firm that works with entrepreneurs, emerging growth companies, venture capital funds, accelerators, and VC principals. Based in Los Angeles, they specialize in VC fund formation, venture deals, equity crowdfunding, and mergers and acquisitions. They frequently work on high-pressure cases and deals, with substantial stakes and intense demands on their time.

Industry

Legal

Team size

Location

California, USA

Plan

Starter

Results

Able to easily calculate profit and loss from each client with accurate billable time reporting
Built a seamless time tracking experience across multiple work tools for the team

Challenges

“Our lifeblood is the billable hour,” said Chris Harvey of Harvey Esquire. To try to keep track of every billable moment, this legal services firm used a competitive time tracking product targeted for the legal industry.

But their solution wasn’t really working. They saw losses in billable time as they scrambled to keep up with the fast pace of frequently-changing schedules and client demands. The admin of time tracking was laborious.

They also weren’t synching information properly across the other systems they used such as Gmail, Google Calendar, and Trello. They would lose minutes here or there in the chaos of the workday. Soon, those minutes accumulated into significant chunks of lost or unbilled time.

“The legal industry in general faces a problem–they struggle to find an accurate solution to time-billing. Lawyers typically round-up in six-minute increments, which led to a lot of inaccurate billing over time,” Harvey told us.

Harvey Esquire needed a simpler and faster way to accurately capture time spent on each case. They needed a way to confidently get billable information to clients, without guessing or undercutting their hard work.

"Toggl Track is wickedly easy to use. Having graphs and summaries versus detailed time entries is the most brilliant feature of the platform. It's magical."

Chris Harvey, CEO and Managing Partner

Harvey Esquire

Solution

“Toggl Track keeps our industry honest,” Harvey said. Harvey Esquire decided to implement Toggl Trackacross their entire organization. As soon as they did, they rapidly saw improvements in the ease of time tracking and reporting.

The rounding functionality, which can be turned off or on at will, gave them the flexibility they needed to ensure that every minute was accounted for (and later, included in invoices).

Toggl Track fully integrated with the systems and processes they already had in place, like Trello and Google Calendar. With minimal disruption, Harvey Esquire began to recuperate their lost time, and to dive into the larger patterns of how they were allocating time and resources.

“Toggl Track is the closest thing to automatic time-capture and beautiful reporting. It’s wickedly easy to use,” Harvey said. “Having graphs and summaries versus detailed time entries is the most brilliant feature of the platform. It's magical.”

By implementing Toggl Track, Harvey Esquire found they had the freedom to move to a different billing structure, since they could now easily calculate profits and losses from each project or client.

With Toggl Track fully integrated with Harvey Esquire’s other tools, they’ve been able to capture an additional 25% of their billable hours that would otherwise have been lost or unbilled.