We're starting to see more and more of this actually! Some kinds of legal work fit flat fees well -- eg. immigration or company incorporations. Other kinds are highly variable and unpredictable (eg. litigation or anything involving external negotiations) and so will likely remain on the billable hour
My brain definitely started to experience life in 6 min increments as well, even after just the first few months at a firm!
We do have a couple different approaches to filter out non-work. As far as firm management, we think there's a lot of useful information in time data that firms can leverage, but at the same time we don't want this to turn into spyware so we're mindful of only exposing aggregated/anonymized data
Without getting into too much detail, our approach is more metadata-based as screenshots/OCR are pretty noisy and expensive to work with. Shoot me an email if you like, happy to chat! adrian@pointone.ai
It depends somewhat on the practice area (eg. are you going to court a lot) but we find the vast majority of work is either on the computer, phone/tablet, or listed in the lawyer's calendar
These are really great points, and data privacy/security is probably the top concern from big firms. Hosting locally is definitely where this is headed for all the reasons you mentioned
Is it actually more feasible now? Do LLMs actually make this problem easier to solve?
Because I have a hard time believing they can actually extract time increments and higher-level tasks from log data without a ton of pre/post-processing. But then the problem is just as much work as it was 5 years ago when you might have been using plain old BERT.
In our experience they do! The smarter the LLM, the less pre/post-processing you can get away with and still get a good output. So no, you can't just throw raw log data at it, but it doesn't require nearly as much work as it did 2-3 years ago