Kinstellar selects Laurel AI in “commercial excellence” drive 

Independent international law firm Kinstellar has selected AI timekeeping and work intelligence vendor Laurel AI as part of a wholesale transformation drive, we can reveal. 

The firm, which has circa 400 lawyers and 15 offices across Central and Eastern Europe, Southeast Europe and Central Asia selected Laurel earlier this year and is due to begin rolling it out in September. Kinstellar rolls out cloud finance system Aderant Sierra in November, which is an upgrade of its existing finance system. The selection process for both began this year, delivering on a hugely ambitious timescale. 

Advertisement

Speaking to Legal IT Insider, Rob Morris, chief growth and transformation officer at Kinstellar’s parent company Aapogee, who was brought in at the start of the year, said: “We looked at the incumbent time recording system in Sierra and we also looked at a bunch of the other ones and the different ways you can use Laurel is just phenomenal. We’re using it primarily just to focus on the billable side of things and have an improved experience for the lawyers so they can record time differently. But we see all sorts of potential benefits in terms of how we see usage of our applications, how we drive adoption, and how we get the ROI on AI tools.” 

Morris says that the firm’s priority right now “is to drive commercial excellence, improve our time to cash cycle quite significantly, so we can do better, and improve reporting to the to clients.” 

The hope is that Laurel will also save a huge amount of time for lawyers. Morris says: “At the moment, a lawyer’s biggest pain point is how it takes a few hours a day to record my timesheet. And this will take it down to 10, 20 minutes, because it does it for them.”  

Also leading the transformation drive at Kinstellar is digital transformation and legaltech innovation group head Ivan Rašić, who says of Laurel: “One of the leading reasons also why we selected them was the simplicity and the way they plug into the day-to-day workflow of our lawyers. They just select their toolkit, say, ‘Okay, these are the five tools we predominantly use day in and day out’ and then Laurel will pick up just the activity from those tools, giving you full control to evaluate what you did in the end of the day.”  

Behind the project, Morris says there is a “whole commercial excellence programme of work around how are we going to improve billing as a result of this? How are we going to improve collections? How are we going to improve our client reporting? How do we improve pricing or legal project management to improve both the lawyer experience and also the client so that we can have price certainty.”

Laurel AI, which started life as Time by Ping, was founded in 2016 by Ryan Alshak and given one of its first breaks by Mishcon’s legaltech incubator MDR Lab. It raised $100m in August and is focusing its attention on helping organisations to maps time to business outcomes (see article below.)

Emil Dyrvig, chief revenue officer at Laurel said: “We’re proud to partner with Kinstellar. At Laurel, we help firms see exactly where time goes and what their technology investments return. Kinstellar is doing that across every office at once rather than one market at a time. Together, we’re giving fee earners their time back and their leadership one clear picture of how the firm works.” 

We’ll be publishing an interview with Morris and Rašić about the wider transformation programme shortly.

Laurel raises $100m Series C as it maps time and business outcomes