At last, a new legal tech product offering that doesn’t mention artificial intelligence. At all. Last month, 8am announced its expansion of its popular 8am™ LawPay into what it calls a more complete financial management platform. A platform that just works.
To Do or Not To Do AI
For years, the world has been divided between the digital and analogue, between systems built on discrete binary information and those grounded in the physical world. But despite all the talk of the power of digital, sometimes analogue still drives tools. The same now seems true of GenAI: the world seems divided between things powered by GenAI and things that aren’t.
And the things that aren’t don’t get much attention. But the unheralded things that aren’t GenAI can still be critical to getting what lawyers want and need to get done. All the GenAI add-ons in the world aren’t going to make good coffee if the coffee maker isn’t a good one. The same thing is true in legal tech: there are some tools that do certain jobs better without being trumpeted as a GenAI tool. It’s that underlying non-AI tool that needs to work well.
8am
What’s this have to do with 8am and LawPay? First of all, 8am is a company focused on the business end of law. It provides billing, accounting, time tracking, and collection-type tools that get to a key need: getting paid. Maybe not the sexiest part of legal tech but certainly one of the most important. As the press release announcing the expansion of its LawPay tool puts it: “8am research shows that fee collection, expense collection, and expense tracking are legal professionals’ greatest financial and operational challenges.” According to Leslie Witt, 8am Chief Product Officer, “We work closely with firms to understand how they actually operate, where time is lost, where revenue slips through cracks, and where processes break down.”
Smart Spend
One of the key and most interesting components of this unified platform is something called 8am™ Smart Spend for LawPay, about which I have written before. Smart Spend takes the pain in the ass process of turning in receipts and reports for reimbursement into an automated system that does it for you. You use the credit card provided by 8am for your expenses and the platform automatically records and links the expense details and receipts to a client invoice.
Doesn’t sound all that cool, right? But I can tell you from experience what a pain it is to try to turn in these kinds of expenses on a timely basis. You rush to get to an out-of-town deposition, choke down a meal, spend the night in some forgotten motel, and when the depo ends the next day, rush to catch a plane. When you get back to the office, you face a mountain of work and deadlines. You throw the receipts in a pile on your desk and then sometime later get around to turning them in, often losing one or two receipts in the process. It’s a pain for you and a pain for the firm.
8am saw the problem and figured out a solution. That’s what good legal tech vendors ought to do. And not being content with just eliminating a pain point, last month it announced a major enhancement to the platform. 8am says this enhancement will enable such things as centralized billing and payments. It will create and send invoices, receive payments, and track deposits from a single workspace. It will also enable time and expense tracking that captures billable hours and costs as they occur and matter-specific trust accounting that allocates and monitors client trust funds across matters for IOLTA compliance. Finally the platform will now allow for real-time reporting and dashboards to view cash flow, deposits, and trust balances instantly.
OK, So What?
The remarkable thing about the announcement and the press release were two words that did not appear: Artificial Intelligence. That’s right, not one mention. Not one sentence heralding the exhaustive implementation of AI into an existing and good platform. Not one reference to AI specialists working long and hard to develop a special GenAI platform to do the work that no other company could offer.
Instead, the refreshing and non-hyperbolic press release does what 8am often does: introduce a product by talking about the problem it solves, a problem that 8am perceptively saw. Like Clearbrief, which came up with a non-GenAI tool to check case citations about which we previously wrote, the headline is not what Smart Spend does, although that’s important, it’s that 8am adopted a process and attacked a problem in a practical way that actually helps lawyers and legal professionals. It’s the old, let’s find a solution to a problem instead of finding a problem for an AI solution. A way of thinking we don’t see a lot of these days.
Witt puts it this way: “There’s a lot of noise and excitement around the [AI] technology, and rightfully so, but our [customers] trust us to be selective and intentional about where – and how – it’s applied in their workflows…There’s a lot of noise and excitement around the technology, and rightfully so, but they trust us to be selective and intentional about where – and how – it’s applied in their workflows.”
I’ll be honest: I can’t vouch for how well Smart Spend works or if it does what 8am says it will (although I have found the 8am folks to be pretty credible). But it says a lot these days and times when a company markets a product without hyping that it’s all about a new AI application. All too often I see vendors make some big announcement about a new AI tool that isn’t all that new, really doesn’t do much of anything different, and does something that doesn’t need to be done.
8am didn’t do that. It just said what the product does. And here’s why it helps you practice law. No AI hype. No AI slop. Just good old thinking about a problem before a solution.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.
The post 8am’s Smart Spend Enhancement: Analogue Thinking In A GenAI World appeared first on Above the Law.
At last, a new legal tech product offering that doesn’t mention artificial intelligence. At all. Last month, 8am announced its expansion of its popular 8am™ LawPay into what it calls a more complete financial management platform. A platform that just works.
To Do or Not To Do AI
For years, the world has been divided between the digital and analogue, between systems built on discrete binary information and those grounded in the physical world. But despite all the talk of the power of digital, sometimes analogue still drives tools. The same now seems true of GenAI: the world seems divided between things powered by GenAI and things that aren’t.
And the things that aren’t don’t get much attention. But the unheralded things that aren’t GenAI can still be critical to getting what lawyers want and need to get done. All the GenAI add-ons in the world aren’t going to make good coffee if the coffee maker isn’t a good one. The same thing is true in legal tech: there are some tools that do certain jobs better without being trumpeted as a GenAI tool. It’s that underlying non-AI tool that needs to work well.
8am
What’s this have to do with 8am and LawPay? First of all, 8am is a company focused on the business end of law. It provides billing, accounting, time tracking, and collection-type tools that get to a key need: getting paid. Maybe not the sexiest part of legal tech but certainly one of the most important. As the press release announcing the expansion of its LawPay tool puts it: “8am research shows that fee collection, expense collection, and expense tracking are legal professionals’ greatest financial and operational challenges.” According to Leslie Witt, 8am Chief Product Officer, “We work closely with firms to understand how they actually operate, where time is lost, where revenue slips through cracks, and where processes break down.”
Smart Spend
One of the key and most interesting components of this unified platform is something called 8am™ Smart Spend for LawPay, about which I have written before. Smart Spend takes the pain in the ass process of turning in receipts and reports for reimbursement into an automated system that does it for you. You use the credit card provided by 8am for your expenses and the platform automatically records and links the expense details and receipts to a client invoice.
Doesn’t sound all that cool, right? But I can tell you from experience what a pain it is to try to turn in these kinds of expenses on a timely basis. You rush to get to an out-of-town deposition, choke down a meal, spend the night in some forgotten motel, and when the depo ends the next day, rush to catch a plane. When you get back to the office, you face a mountain of work and deadlines. You throw the receipts in a pile on your desk and then sometime later get around to turning them in, often losing one or two receipts in the process. It’s a pain for you and a pain for the firm.
8am saw the problem and figured out a solution. That’s what good legal tech vendors ought to do. And not being content with just eliminating a pain point, last month it announced a major enhancement to the platform. 8am says this enhancement will enable such things as centralized billing and payments. It will create and send invoices, receive payments, and track deposits from a single workspace. It will also enable time and expense tracking that captures billable hours and costs as they occur and matter-specific trust accounting that allocates and monitors client trust funds across matters for IOLTA compliance. Finally the platform will now allow for real-time reporting and dashboards to view cash flow, deposits, and trust balances instantly.
OK, So What?
The remarkable thing about the announcement and the press release were two words that did not appear: Artificial Intelligence. That’s right, not one mention. Not one sentence heralding the exhaustive implementation of AI into an existing and good platform. Not one reference to AI specialists working long and hard to develop a special GenAI platform to do the work that no other company could offer.
Instead, the refreshing and non-hyperbolic press release does what 8am often does: introduce a product by talking about the problem it solves, a problem that 8am perceptively saw. Like Clearbrief, which came up with a non-GenAI tool to check case citations about which we previously wrote, the headline is not what Smart Spend does, although that’s important, it’s that 8am adopted a process and attacked a problem in a practical way that actually helps lawyers and legal professionals. It’s the old, let’s find a solution to a problem instead of finding a problem for an AI solution. A way of thinking we don’t see a lot of these days.
Witt puts it this way: “There’s a lot of noise and excitement around the [AI] technology, and rightfully so, but our [customers] trust us to be selective and intentional about where – and how – it’s applied in their workflows…There’s a lot of noise and excitement around the technology, and rightfully so, but they trust us to be selective and intentional about where – and how – it’s applied in their workflows.”
I’ll be honest: I can’t vouch for how well Smart Spend works or if it does what 8am says it will (although I have found the 8am folks to be pretty credible). But it says a lot these days and times when a company markets a product without hyping that it’s all about a new AI application. All too often I see vendors make some big announcement about a new AI tool that isn’t all that new, really doesn’t do much of anything different, and does something that doesn’t need to be done.
8am didn’t do that. It just said what the product does. And here’s why it helps you practice law. No AI hype. No AI slop. Just good old thinking about a problem before a solution.
Stephen Embry is a lawyer, speaker, blogger, and writer. He publishes TechLaw Crossroads, a blog devoted to the examination of the tension between technology, the law, and the practice of law.
