A few texts a day. A finished week of billing.

Adam: Well, I'm Adam, everybody. Nice to meet you. Victoria and I are going to be talking today a little bit about Plani. In case you don't know me, you might know my wife, Veronica White. She is a bar advocate and has been in the Boston defense world for a number of years now. So you might have encountered her.

Over the years I've done a lot of data entry for Veronica in CPCS eBill, and sending out private client invoices and all this stuff. This whole project for me has been a little bit of a passion play, but I definitely wouldn't be here without Victoria as well. So do you want to just tell everybody how you're involved in this project?

Victoria: Oh, thank you. Yes. Well, I'm Victoria Kelleher, for anybody that doesn't know me. As this slide says, I have been a criminal defense lawyer for 30 years. And I hate billing. Adam has been a wonderful friend for a number of years. He sent me something that was like Plani, but it was actually designed for a different feature. And I started asking Plani if she could do my billing for me, in addition to what Adam had suggested she could do. So it grew from that, and it's been an amazing tool for me.

I think I speak for a lot of us. Billing is really, I would love to be able to do my job and not worry about my billing, and Plani really makes that possible. It's the kind of tool you can use on the fly. I don't have to worry about it. I've tried so many different apps and computer programs where you have to sit down and start a timer, and those things never work for me. This was exactly the kind of thing I had been trying to do with my partner, who is the one who does a lot of the data entry. Without this kind of a tool, it really was not possible to keep that up. So that was my involvement in Plani, in case you didn't hear it in that description.

Adam: Victoria basically insisted that I build this, and she was even using it way before Veronica was, because she just saw the vision of being able to text stuff to Plani and have it all get sorted out. It's really been amazing to see. We have about 60 attorneys using Plani right now, and the adoption so far has been very impressive.

Victoria: Yeah, it is one of those things where there was obviously just a huge need in this community, and it fills it beautifully. So I think this is going to be a really great tool for all of us. I personally think this is going to be wonderful for people, to do all kinds of billing, because it just really takes the stress out of it, the headache out of it, and the billing out of billing.

So Adam has put together this presentation to walk you through it. For people who are new to Plani, this will show you how to set it up. There's nothing complicated about it. It's very unlike, if you guys have ever done anything with billing tools or other kinds of programs, you don't have to sit there and feed it all of your cases and do all this prep work. You just simply start. I use talk to text all the time, so I'm simply just talking into my phone, and if there are things that I forget, Plani will prompt me to remind me what needs to go in there. So anyway, Adam, go right ahead.

Adam: Yeah, so let me give you a quick overview of how it works. If you send a text to Plani, if you've never used it before, she's just going to say, hi, who are you? And you can start using Plani just by texting her. We'll show you how to do that in a minute. After you tell her you'd like to use it, you just tell her your name, and she'll create an account for you. You don't have to log in. There's no password, because we know it's you, because you're texting us from your cell phone.

It does ask for your email. The reason it does that is so that at the end of the week it can send you an email with your billing log in it. And if you are lucky enough to have a bill keeper or somebody like that who does your time entry for you, you can also have them included on the email that you get at the end of the week.

From there, that's it, you're entirely set up. There's nothing else that you need to do. Now you can just tell it who you worked with. You don't have to give it a register of clients or anything like that. You can just say, I worked on the Rayburn case this morning, motion to suppress. You don't even have to spell it correctly. It'll probably correct your spelling if you do that. And if you didn't give it the time, it's going to ask you for the time. If it didn't know Susan Rayburn's first name for Rayburn, it'll ask. So, Susan, and let's say 11:15 to 2:12.

Now, what happens next is, because of what Plani is going to do for your end of week email, it's not only going to send you the time that you entered, but it's going to categorize it with the CPCS or CJA billing category codes. So it needs to know what type of code you need, because unfortunately Mass trial and Mass appellate are different than the federal. They're different from each other. It doesn't know which categories to use, so it's going to ask you the first time you have a client going in. Then it's going to remember that for the Susan Rayburn case, it's always a Massachusetts trial case. And if you only work on appellate cases, or you only work federal cases, you can tell Plani, all of my cases are always federal district court, and it'll remember that. So it'll never ask you again.

From here, you're basically just telling it what happened. You could say, I also called the DA and talked about the case, whatever. And again, it's going to say, well, was that about the Rayburn case, or was it about something else? You just talk with it like you would an assistant. That's all you're doing. You can say whatever. Some attorneys provide a lot of context for Plani. Some attorneys just say, I spoke to the DA, 10 minutes. You can do that, and it will remember the context that you give it if you ask it later.

So the basic use of Plani, the way that it was designed, is around contemporaneous billing. CPCS and CJA kind of want people to do contemporaneous billing, so it's set up like that, but you can always say, and yesterday I spoke with Susan for 20 minutes at 2pm, and it'll log stuff retroactively as well. So if you're just texting it stuff as you're doing it, it assumes that you're doing it then. And if you give it alternative times or dates, it'll put those dates and times in. So that's a very basic usage of it.

I want to flip back to the slides, because there are a few other scenarios that are a little bit hard to illustrate on the demo, but I want everybody to be aware of them. So I said there's no roster. Anytime you start working on a client, just let them know. If you connect Plani to CPCS eBill, it'll look at your roster of clients and match them up with the NAC. We'll show you how that works a little bit later.

Just to let you know, if you say, I just called Susan and it took 20 minutes, it's going to log the time as if the call ended right now. So 20 minutes ago it's going to put as the start time, and right now it's going to put as the end time. Obviously, if you tell it, I spoke to Susan yesterday for 20 minutes, and you don't specify a time, it doesn't know the start and the end time. So if that's important for you, do tell Plani what that is.

Okay, so it's very flexible about how you enter time. You can tell it to start a timer if you want. If you're about to get on the phone with somebody, or if you're going to start working on a brief, you can say start the timer, and you can say end the timer, and it'll know what the elapsed time is automatically. Some of our users like to, at the end of the day, give Plani a big long list of everything that they did during the day. And that's fine. You don't have to just say one thing at a time. You can give it a whole bunch of stuff, and it'll read the whole thing, break it up, do whatever.

Victoria: You can see here the way that Adam has put it in is 3.6, which is how it's accepted in our billing programs. But you don't have to do it that way. If you just say three hours and thirty-five minutes, it's going to calculate it for you. You'll notice here that you're not seeing the start and end times. You're not going to get that as feedback in the text messages, but you will get it as feedback in your weekly emails for your records. So if you're ever audited, it will show you exactly the start and end times.

Adam: She's not a mind reader. If you say, it's 4:12 right now, if I say 10-minute call with so-and-so, it's going to record it as if the call happened starting at 4:02 and ended at 4:12. So if I'm really clever and I keep this going throughout the day, it's going to give me my start and end times for every task. You can also, after the fact, say 4:02 to 4:12, and Plani will remember that as well.

And just on the tenths of an hour thing, we have given Plani the whole CPCS document about how you're supposed to enter your time. So it knows how the roundings work. It knows that if it's less than six minutes, it goes in as 0.1. And if you work on three different activities for a client, it aggregates those times together. So it's got all of the rules built into it. You can even ask it about things in the private counsel document, and it'll give you the page number that it found the information on, if you're super interested in that kind of stuff.

We had one attorney who was telling Plani she was wrong about the way she was calculating the time, and Plani texted back and said, no, it says, quote, this. And she said, oh, I've been doing it wrong. So it's pretty complicated, this stuff. You can also text it in Spanish or any language you want, in case English isn't your favorite language. And we also have attorneys who send it voice notes. If you send it a voice note, it'll translate it into text and then automatically update itself. And we also have attorneys who text it screenshots of things. I'm not sure that I recommend this, but you could text it a screenshot of a phone call that you had, just from your iPhone messages, and it'll log the time of it as well.

I see we've got some questions. One attorney is asking, can you program it for different increments? Yes, you can. I'd want to make sure that would work properly, so I'd probably investigate that. But I know we have at least one attorney who has texted Plani to say, private clients, I always bill them a minimum of 15 minutes, so make sure that's the case. And I've seen that working.

I also have a question here about whether you can have a combination of private cases. We have clients like Victoria who have private cases, CJA, as well as CPCS cases. When you get the report from Plani at the end of the week, they're all broken down into their different categories, and I'll show you a little bit about what that looks like. So you get all the different billing codes. Private cases right now, for billing codes, we're just using the Massachusetts trial court ones from CPCS, because most people don't need to do categorization for private clients. But if that's a need, you can always let us know.

Just on CPCS as well, that's something that's a little bit more advanced in Plani right now. It will warn you as you start approaching the 10-hour limit there, and at any point you can ask it, hey, how many hours have I billed today for CPCS? And it'll give you the update. If you go over it, it'll certainly let you know as well.

Adam: At the end of the week you get a couple of different things. On Sunday at 8:00am, you will get an email from Plani. One is the billing log. You'll get an email that shows you everything that you logged for the week. It'll do both just by the hours as well as by the billing categories. And it will also attach a spreadsheet that has all of the clients in the format that CJA and CPCS want you to put them into their systems, to make the data entry a lot easier. In this particular case we worked on the Grace Okafor case, and if you did multiple things for that case on one day, it'll put them in all the different columns, like you do when you enter them into CPCS.

Now, you can ask Plani to send you this email whenever you want, because sometimes the last day of the month is on a Tuesday. You literally just text Plani, can you send me the billing report? And it'll email you. We have one attorney who for some reason was asking Plani to do it like every hour. Maybe she was checking to make sure it was doing it right. It did give her a little bit of sass. It was like, I just sent that to you. But it did send it to her again anyway. And you can also, in text, say, hey, what did I work on today? And it'll give you the report. Or, what did I work on last Tuesday? So the goal is, you're just texting stuff to Plani, it's logging it, it's remembering it, and at the end of the week you get an email with this, both in Excel format as well as in plain text.

Adam: If you text Plani and ask her to enter time into CPCS, she's going to send you a link to a page where you can fill in your CPCS login and password. All of that information is encrypted within Plani. The way that it works is Plani will literally log in like a bookkeeper or somebody that you hired, with your credentials, and enter time in the right categories. It will save the time. It will not submit the time. It still needs to be verified by you. There's that dialog box that pops up that says, I promise this is all proper, and Plani will not do that.

If there is a required notice in CPCS, it will text you and let you know that you have them, so that it's available to you. And whenever it enters time into CPCS, it double checks every entry, and then it checks at the summary screen to make sure again that everything went in properly, and will let me, as well as you, know if anything didn't happen properly.

Now, for those of you who have clients who unfortunately have multiple NACs, which is something that happens periodically, Plani might not know which case belongs to Rayburn if there are multiple NACs in there. So it will text you back and it'll be like, hey, there are these three NACs, which one should I use? And you can just tell it, and it will go ahead and pick the right NAC. If you're billing on multiple NACs in CPCS, we don't have a solution for that at this point, but it's something we are working on.

I mentioned that we've got about 60 attorneys using Plani. About 10 have been using the CPCS entry so far, and it's been going really well.

Victoria: What it seems like is that each attorney should have their own Plani. Then you don't need to start putting hours into the system for people anymore. The point is this is all going to do that automatically. So you won't need to be the middle person getting hours and putting stuff in. There are still some things that can't be done, like vouchers, and we're going to get to those, that some assistance might be required for. All of that is going to be sent to everybody in their weekly email, so you'll still have all that information.

Adam: Just to be clear, it does a match on the name that's pretty close. But it will also ask you, if it's finding a name that's close, that it can 100% confirm. And right now we're at the end of the fiscal year for the Commonwealth, so there are situations where it won't be able to enter time for the new fiscal year until the billings for the old fiscal year are cleared out, and it will alert you of that. It's not going to lose anything. It'll just wait until the stuff from the last fiscal year is cleared up.

Just in an effort to be transparent, we also came up with a bunch of stuff that, just to be clear, we don't do at this point. We do our best to log the start and end times of things. But if you're not telling us when they are, or you're not logging it contemporaneously, we can't really guess at it. I'm bringing that up because I know the assigned counsel manual says you're supposed to be documenting the start and end times.

For those of you who work in a law firm and have partners who share work on clients, it's not set up for you to collaborate between lawyers. It's just you right now.

I also want to say, and this is probably the most obvious thing in the world to everybody here, but please do not ask Plani to provide legal help with things. Some attorneys have asked for case law or things like that. It may tell you something, but I would not trust it at all. It does do some other interesting things. Attorneys have asked it for travel distance between locations, and it does fine with that. But I wouldn't be trusting it with anything legal at all.

Victoria: One attorney is asking, if there's a motion to suppress, will she follow up to ask whether it was drafting, research, or a hearing? If you say worked on a motion to suppress, will she assume that you're drafting, as opposed to having a hearing on it?

Adam: Let's just do it right now. Motion to suppress for one hour. What it's going to do is give you the billing category that it selects. And if you don't like it, if it didn't choose correctly, you can just text it back. So it said draft motion, legal memo. And you say, no, it should be investigation. So it does its best to pick the right category, but if you notice that it picked the wrong category, just let it know.

Victoria: Can she send me billing reports sorted client by client?

Adam: Yes, that's exactly what she does. Billing reports are always going to be sorted by client.

Victoria: Can I somehow send her my own timesheets and just have her enter everything into eBill?

Adam: No, I don't think so. You have to do it through this tool, by texting her information. If you copied and pasted all of the information into the text box, it would do its best, but I'm not sure how that would work. One thing people have requested, which we can work on, is email. So if you email [email protected] and send it a spreadsheet, it could potentially read the spreadsheet and do stuff. It doesn't do it today, but that's another thing we could look at.

Victoria: I send Plani my receipts, which I think somebody else was asking about, expenses. I'll take a picture of my receipt, because otherwise my car is going to be full of little receipts that don't end up where they're supposed to. And I'll text her that picture. She will accurately read the receipt, tell me the date and the amount. She'll ask me what case it goes on. Right now Plani is not doing input for vouchers, but I will have that in my weekly emails, so I no longer have to worry about receipts in every corner of my car and in my coffee cups.

Adam: One question asks, is confidentiality assured? In the weekly email that you get, you're going to get it in two formats, both by date, and you can see the start and end time here, and then also in the CPCS format, which mirrors the way it looks in eBill, to make it easy to enter it in yourself if you want. So the answer is yes, Plani will document by start and end time. In the spreadsheet, you will have that information. If you're audited, you'll have it available, so that you can provide CPCS with all the start and end times for all your input.

Plani is confidential to you. Nobody else has access. The software has access to your billing records that you give it, and it stores them for you. No other attorney or outside person, except for my company, has access to that. And we only do that to make sure that we're providing you the service and things are working properly. From an attorney-client privilege standpoint, it's no different than email, because there's still a company that holds that email for you. But we do keep everything confidential here. We're not selling the data, we're not using the data for anything else except providing the service to you. That's all laid out in the privacy policy and terms of service.

Going back to another question, if you've been audited, can you request billing for the previous six months? I believe the answer is yes. You are going to have all of your emails, because each week you're getting an email. So you yourself will have that all stored, based on your weekly emails, unless you're deleting them and not saving them.

Right now the documents that Plani sends out are only week by week, but 100% we're going to need to do longer periods of time in these spreadsheets. I know Veronica gets audited once a year, and it's a real pain. So we will have a feature that allows you to just say, hey, give me all the last six months worth of billings on this client. Now, I just want to be super clear. Plani is not going to go into eBill in CPCS and get all of that for you. It's only going to be for the stuff that you gave Plani when using her.

People have asked if Plani can prepare invoices for private clients, if it can track hourly rates and provide client communication about bills and invoices. Maybe one day, but we're not doing that today for sure. And we definitely do not track IOLTA accounts or anything like that. We're trying to keep it very simple, so that we just get the time entry part of it solved, because I know what a pain that is for everybody here.

What we are working on is additional billing categories. I'm learning a lot about the different panels that there are with CPCS. Probation Surrender and Mental Health use different billing categories than the ones I have known through Veronica. So we're going to be working to get those in there. CPCS mileage and time is something that people submit that Plani doesn't automatically enter, so we're going to be working on that. And also vouchers, which I know are important to a lot of people.

As to CJA, we do already have the billing categories, so it works for all of the time entries. It just is not automatically able to populate the CJA billing pages yet. That's something we'd like to investigate and figure out how to do. We haven't even started working on that, though, just to be clear.

Victoria: When you get audited by CPCS, they do want detail about everything. So should you be giving Plani a lot of information, or just a little? I would say, if you tell Plani what you've been doing, not just met with client, but met with client and we did this, that's probably sufficient, from what I've helped Veronica with in terms of CPCS audit submissions. In some cases, if you're doing research, they're going to want to know what you researched. So if it's easy to throw it in the chat with Plani, it'll all be there, and when you ask for it back, you'll get it. Whatever you're giving her, she's going to give back to you.

Adam: Plani will capture whatever you're telling her and store it with the billing record. It takes all the text you give her. With the CJA work, for each row you do have to enter a little description of what you're doing, for each client. So when you get the report back for CJA, it will clean up whatever you gave it and put it into a little blurb, so you can paste it in as well. And as soon as anybody gets audited who's using Plani, let me know, and we'll work through the process to have Plani sort that out.

I do want to mention that Plani is free for now. Plani has been free since we set it up, and we're going to be moving to a paid model on September 1st. It costs me money to run this, as well as quite a bit of time to build it. For people who are using Plani early, we are doing a founder rate. For people who sign up and give us a credit card by September 1st, the rate is going to be $30 a month. For people who sign up after that point, it's going to be $50 a month. When we did our first sync with Victoria on her CPCS billing, I think we found, how many hours did we bill that were accidentally unbilled, Victoria?

Victoria: Yeah, at least a couple. Maybe it was six. It was quite a bit. I will say, just time-wise, not having to sit down and go through my records and put in, entry by entry, all my billing, it's a huge time saver. Not to mention all the stress that comes with that, and the tedium, and worrying about audits. For me, I'm not getting paid a dime, so I'm not here to sell Plani. Although I will tell you, I was very excited about this, and it's really been a game changer for me, in terms of my ability to work through my day and not have to worry about keeping track of my time all the time. I'm always talking into my phone, always texting people through talk to text. So texting Plani as I'm going through my day is not heavy lifting for me at all.

Adam: There is a question about, have we discussed this with CPCS? I did meet with the Chief Information Officer of CPCS. I explained what we were doing, and I asked him for permission to connect directly to CPCS, which we are not allowed to do. That's why we use this approach that we've developed. He did let me know that they're going to be revamping eBill, and that sounded like a two or three year project. So they may want to include something like this themselves in the future. Not really sure.

If you haven't already tried Plani, if you go to the website meetplani.com, clicking the Try Plani button will give you some disclosure information. If you click on the Text Plani button, it will open up your messages app, and you can just send a text to Plani saying, I'd like to try Plani. You're welcome to use it for the next two months for free. We are still working out the kinks, so you may get some strange behavior every once in a while, but we are monitoring that.

For any of you who are using Plani, you have said to it, oh, wouldn't it be great if it could do this? And then a day later, Plani texts you and says, oh, I can now do this, and here you go. So I would definitely give it a try. Tell Plani anything you'd like it to do. If you tell Plani things like, wouldn't it be great if you could log miles in CPCS? It knows to let me and my team know that you'd like to do that.

How do we know it's going to be safe and sound? This is something that I'm doing with Veronica. All of her time is going in Plani, and it's very important to her and to me that we keep Veronica's stuff safe. So you are in the same boat with her. One of the reasons we're going to start charging is so that we can provision automatic backups and add other things that we need to do to make sure we're putting double checks on everything.

On support: I am the live person. I am monitoring every text exchange that Plani has with you. If there's an error in Plani, I get a text message saying that. So I would start by texting Plani, and I'm sure that I will see it.

Victoria: It's so user friendly from my perspective. Anything that's new, there's a little bit of stress just starting to use something different, a learning curve. But really, it's very simple and straightforward. Try Plani first, because I definitely look at everything that's going on there.