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Welcome to LawNext PR, the podcast where we put a spotlight on the latest news coming out
of the legal tech industry.

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This is Bob Ambrogi, and in each sponsored episode of LawNext PR, I interview a legal tech
company about its latest news and developments.

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Today, I'm talking to two different companies because what they're announcing is
integration between Billables AI and SurePoint.

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And here to help me discuss it and fill us in on all the details are

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principles from both of those companies.

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let me start by introducing Arvind Sujeeth, who's the co-founder and CEO of Billables AI.

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Arvind, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and about Billables.

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Yeah, thanks Bob.

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It's great to be here.

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Thanks for having me.

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So I am the co-founder CEO, as you said, of Billables.

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I come from a technical engineering background where I've been working in AI for the past
15 years or so.

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And I've also been a serial entrepreneur.

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So previously co-founded a fintech company that was most recently VP of Engineering at an
enterprise AI platform company.

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And started Billables really through my wife, who's a partner at a law firm here in San
Francisco, who absolutely despises time tracking, called it the bane of her existence.

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So, Billables AI is an automated AI native time tracking platform that integrates with a
bunch of different work tools.

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So, we integrate directly with like Microsoft Office, Teams, Zoom, Adobe, email, calendar,
all the things that people use every day.

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And then through those integrations, we track the amount of time that they're spending
when they're working in email, reviewing documents or drafting documents, attending

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meetings, taking calls with their clients.

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And we take all of that data and then we use AI to generate a first

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of their client bill entirely from scratch.

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So we try to get as close to possible as a bill that they would have written themselves.

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and really try to save them a ton of time in that whole manual time tracking and build
generation process and also help them and their firms capture a lot of revenue that would

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have made may have been missed before because they forgot to track it.

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And we work with more than 100 firms now.

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We kind of constantly hear just how much everybody hates time tracking.

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And so we're really excited about we just think it's a fantastic use case for AI to come
and really.

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take this off people's plates so they can free up their time for their actual work and the
things they actually became a lawyer to do.

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Yeah, I'll just mention real quick, have a, you know, our how it works series of videos.

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We have one on Billables AI.

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So anybody who's interested in kind of seeing a visual demonstration of the product, can
go to, go to YouTube and search for how it works and, search for Billables as well.

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And you can find it there.

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Chris, Chris Henz, you are the product operations manager, I think at SurePoint.

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Do I have your title right?

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And tell us a little bit about what you do and your company.

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Yeah, thank you, Bob.

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It's great to be on your program today.

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Yeah, I'm the Product Ops Manager at SurePoint, and I've recently been asked to lead the
AI initiative here at SurePoint.

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So it's been really fun to work with Billables and Arvind on this project.

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SurePoint Technologies, you we're a software company that empowers mid-size law firms to
help them run their firm.

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We have an ecosystem.

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that's designed to cover practice, finance, and growth solutions and help them pull their
business and the practice of law together.

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And we've been super excited to work with the Billables team and to see the progress that
they've made as they introduce some AI-driven projects to help support our vision of

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pulling and unifying

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We'll offer them a practice together.

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And just as I mentioned for Billables, I'll say also I recently had the CEO of SurePoint
on my LawNext podcast giving an overview of a lot of the recent developments you've had,

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including your company's acquisition, was it just this year of Zen Case and what that
means for the legal industry.

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But turning to today's news,

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Arvind, maybe you could kick it off by kind of telling us what it is you're announcing
here today.

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Yeah, we're really thrilled to announce our kickoff of our partnership and a direct
integration between Billables.ai and SurePoint's LMS product.

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been an absolute pleasure to work with Lee and Chris and the whole team.

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They've been incredibly supportive in getting this project off the ground and making sure
that the two products really connect seamlessly.

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It's just what we've built through our integration.

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And so if you look at what

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what each of the products is bringing to the table here.

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SurePoint is a really powerful building software and practice management platform and
financial software for mid-size firms that has a lot of capabilities that we've heard from

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our mutual customers and from other customers, SurePoint customers, that they really enjoy
and they really like using and really value their ability to have really fine-grained

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control and operations and...

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budgeting and all of the accounting features that SurePoint has.

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But one of the things that they would really love to have is this ability to do native AI
automated tracking to always be able to not have to manually enter time entries, to be

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able to apply things like outside council guidelines very seamlessly and automatically.

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And that's exactly what this new integration does.

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what the two teams have built together is essentially a way to connect.

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the Billables AI platform directly to SurePoint's LMS platform so that after you
authenticate, you know, one time during setup Billables AI will automatically pull in the

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list of clients and matters that the firm is working with directly from LMS.

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We will continue to generate our time, our AI time entries, just as we do always in the
background in real time, as people are working, they can go in and review those entries,

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correct them as they'd normally would in Billables.

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And then with a single click of a button, they can export those entries back to LMS, which
will show up as like unreleased entries in LMS that they can go in, do a final review and,

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and then a release for, for their accounting or directly into the pre-bill review process.

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And so this, as you can imagine, dramatically simplifies the interaction or the
integration of a automated tool like Billables AI and a platform like, like SurePoint.

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Before this integration, you would have to.

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kind of manually figure out how do I get the data from LMS back into Billables?

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How do get it from Billables back in LMS?

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And now it's basically, anyone can do it.

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It's like a simple one-click experience.

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And so it's available now.

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We actually have a bunch of mutual customers that are already on it saying amazing things.

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They're really liking it.

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And we're also excited, you know, on a broader scheme to kick off our partnership where my
co-founder, Nancy, is actually gonna be speaking at the SurePoint Conference in Austin

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next week.

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It's been a really amazing collaboration and we're excited for what will continue to be in
the future.

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Chris, from your perspective and the perspective of SurePoint, what's the significance of
this integration?

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Yeah, I think the most important thing that Arvind mentioned is that it's a seamless
integration, which means Billables was able to take advantage of the API that LMS offers.

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And in doing that, the seamless connection simplifies that workflow.

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The passive time capture is an important element of the billing cycle, especially the
front end of it, capturing time spent.

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And it's one of the most unpleasant parts of the attorney's daily work, right?

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Is tracking the time and having to be accountable for it.

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So when our chief partner officer brought Billables to us, we were delighted to have the
opportunity to partner with somebody who is AI first, right?

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Focused on AI and bringing that innovation.

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And then the fact that we could have a seamless integration, which the way I like to put
it, takes the work out of the workspace, really was a great pairing of our two products.

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You you refer to the pain of timekeeping and it is probably one of the greatest pains that
many lawyers feel in their daily work.

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But there's also a real economic consequence to this because of the pain of timekeeping, a
lot of lawyers don't do it very well.

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And that means lost revenue.

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Is that fair to say?

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100%.

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And I want Arvind to mention, they've measured the savings and it's dramatic.

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So Arvind, why don't you talk about what you've measured in terms of real time capture and
how that impacts billing hours.

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Yeah, thanks Chris.

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And I think you're exactly right, Bob.

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mean, as Chris has mentioned, we've been fortunate to been able to run some case studies
with some of our customers as they've onboarded onto Billables where they would compare

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exactly the amount of time that they were tracking when they were doing it their old way
through their manual tracking methods, which was all over the board, right?

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Things like jotting down notes, using timers, setting themselves emails, you know, like
people, we've seen everything.

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Comparing that to what was captured with Billables and what they were able to bill after

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week or after a month with Billables.

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And we've seen pretty consistently across different practice areas, different kinds of law
firms, anywhere from 10 up to 30 % additional revenue being captured using, using

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Billables.

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And it just shows like just how painful it is, how easy it is to forget things.

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There's things that have people are working all the time in the evenings and they're
taking calls like on the weekends.

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And a lot of that stuff, you know, falls through the cracks, but with an automated like AI
native system, you can capture it.

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It's waiting for you Monday morning.

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When you come in, you can, you can.

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record it and you don't lose that time.

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And so, yeah, it's pretty tremendous, I think, like how much a system like this can help
you capture.

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Yeah.

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If I am a customer of SurePoint and I want to take advantage of this integration, what do
I have to do?

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How do I get going on it?

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Yeah, so if you're a Billables AI customer and a SurePoint customer, it's super simple.

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In Billables AI, there's a place on our integrations page where you'll see a place to
select SurePoint as your billing provider.

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You'll click authorize.

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You'll put in your service account for SurePoint along with your SurePoint URL, and you'll
click OK.

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And that's it.

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Billables will automatically connect.

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It'll pull in the clients and matters immediately and sync that up.

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And then when you go to release entries and Billables, there will be an option, a single
button that you can just say, click release to SurePoint.

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And from there, you can have a separate tab open where you go over to LMS and you'll see
those entries kind of magically appear within a few seconds.

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Yeah.

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All right.

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Chris, anything to add to that in terms of how you get going on it and the whole setup
process?

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to add other than to say they've made it so simple you you you can't help but enjoy it.

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Sounds good.

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What about the...

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I am always going to be asked by lawyers whenever I talk about anything, are there
security issues?

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Are there any concerns I have about transmitting this data in this way, sharing this data
in this way?

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So are there any concerns?

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What's the answer to that on the security side?

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Yeah, it's a great question.

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And I think it's important that folks are asking those questions and they're doing their
research and their diligence with any vendors.

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And I think that both these platforms have been built with security in mind as part of its
core and available as a tech-forward startup with a very engineering-centric DNA.

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And starting out in the space of automated timekeeping, we knew this was going to be a big
deal, right?

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And we knew this was something that we needed to address from the very beginning.

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So we've built everything about the platform with sort of security and privacy in mind.

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There's everything you would expect, like end-to-end encryption, access control, know, the
right kinds of like data segmentation and isolation.

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And on top of that, we've been very careful about what we do and do not even retain,
right?

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So we won't even store.

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like the work product, the underlying emails, the underlying documents that we use to
capture and track our time.

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We will fetch those through our integrations with Microsoft and Google and others.

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We'll generate the entries and we'll throw it away.

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So what we will retain is kind of the billing entries themselves, which will then get
exported to LMS and SurePoint.

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But you would have had that data in LMS anyways, right?

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So it's not really any different than going in and sort of manually typing it directly
into LMS from a security standpoint.

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So I don't think that there's anything particularly that anyone needs to be concerned
about.

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I think it's great that folks are asking the questions and doing that homework, because
that's not always true.

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But I think in this case, it's a very secure connection.

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And we've done all the diligence that I think is necessary to make sure that we're keeping
everyone's data safe.

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And one more thing I'll add to that is we also were one of the only, I think, time
tracking platforms out there that don't take screenshots.

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which I think is a really important and valuable thing when it comes to not only security,
but user privacy, right?

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Like a lot of people see some of these time tracking applications and they feel like big
brother is watching them.

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And we try to be very thoughtful and very careful about, we're trying to help you generate
your bills and track your time.

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And that's it.

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We don't care about like, you know, when you're on Facebook or anything else you're doing,
that's for you.

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And so the entries that we generate are only for you to see until you approve them.

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We're not taking screenshots.

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We're not going to capture anything outside of those integrations.

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I kind of want to double click on that last point also just to make sure that people who
are watching this understand that the entries that you generate are not final.

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They still get a chance to review them.

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They get a chance to approve them, edit them, make changes, whatever.

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And that's important to know, I think, right?

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Yeah, absolutely.

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And thanks for emphasizing that because it is really important.

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it's very much, I think your client bill is the accuracy obviously matters enormously.

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It's a relationship document with your clients.

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And while AI is good and it's getting better every day, it is not so good that it's going
to, it should be sending bills to your clients without you looking at them.

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Right.

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So we, do our very best.

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And also, you know, I think it's pretty remarkable how close it can get to getting entries
that you would have written yourself, but it's still really important that you.

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as an attorney, as a paralegal, as a timekeeper, do take that look at it, review it, make
sure that it's right.

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As you're making any corrections and Billables, it learns from those corrections actually,
and it's gonna get smarter and smarter.

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It's gonna learn your personal style and preferences.

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And then when you're ready to go, you can release it into LMS and nothing goes out the
door without you looking at it.

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We're getting close to the end of the time here, but Chris, is there anything else that
you want people to know about this integration that we haven't talked about?

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No, I think we've covered it all, Bob.

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I would like to just repeat something that Arvind said about the security.

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So it's an important question to ask.

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And Arvind mentioned that that data already exists in LMS, right?

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They're just reviewing it and then cleansing it and putting it back in.

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And on that point, SurePoint is SOC 2 certified and compliant.

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So that's, that's is a secure platform.

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Yeah.

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Arvind, anything else you'd like to add?

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Yeah, just real fast, because I think there's a kind of a common thread with some of the
security and some of the other things that I think also make this a particularly great

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partnership, which is the mid-market segment that SurePoint really thrives in.

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I think there's a lot of really interesting complexities that mid-market firms face that
really small firms don't face or really big firms have different...

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They might have entire teams or entire departments that can deal with things.

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But I think it's just a really, that segment when you look at complexities around
security, around billing guidelines, around the number of clients and matters they work

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with.

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I think that what we've seen already in the customers that are mutual customers is that
it's like a perfect fit for this kind of partnership and this kind of integration.

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These are the firms that can often benefit the most from an automated platform like
Billable's AI for timekeeping.

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and a platform that has these really strong accounting capabilities like LMS and
SurePoint.

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And putting them together, I think, is really creating something unique in the market that
hasn't existed until now.

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Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense.

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I SurePoint has a reputation as a strong financial and business software to begin with.

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So combining the automated timekeeping makes a lot of sense.

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Well, thanks to both of you for coming on and sharing this news.

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And congratulations on bringing about this integration.

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I'm delighted to have Billables as a partner and Bob, thank you for having us on your show
today.

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Yeah, thank you.

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Thank you so much, Bob.

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It's great to be here.

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And thanks, Chris.

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I'm excited to keep working with you.

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Great.

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And that does it for today's episode.

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If you enjoyed it, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube to search
for LawnexPR there.

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You can also find all the episodes on the Lawnex Legal Tech Directory under the resources
tab.

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This is Bob Ambrogi.

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Thanks for joining us today.