# How Obermayer Drove Firmwide Adoption with Laurel Obermayer set out to solve a timekeeping problem and ended up with a firm-wide process that changed how attorneys work. ## Key Takeaways - - - The feedback is consistent. Attorneys love seeing their activity captured. They like knowing Laurel caught what they did throughout the day. ## Headquarters - **Location:** Philadelphia, PA - **Founded:** 1904 - **Industry:** Law Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel LLP is a full-service law firm founded in 1904, with over 100 attorneys across offices in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Delaware. As the firm looked to modernize its operations, one challenge kept surfacing: getting attorneys to capture their time consistently. Controller Lisa McGinnis took on the problem. ## The Challenge: Getting Attorneys to Enter Time Obermayer had a clear goal of making it easier for attorneys to capture their time accurately and consistently. The challenge wasn't finding attorneys who cared about it, it was finding a solution that would fit naturally into how they already worked. When Laurel came to the firm with an answer, the demo was promising. And Lisa, who understood exactly what it would take to implement, configure, roll out, and drive adoption of a new system, wanted to be certain before committing. "Before we invested our time into something like that, I wanted to make sure that this was the right tool," she says. What followed was a thorough evaluation process: a conference, a committee, and ultimately a unanimous recommendation. ## The Process: A Committee That Made the Decision Credible Before committing, the firm surveyed the market and explored alternatives. When they felt confident they had a full picture, the firm formed an AI committee to make the call. The committee included attorneys and technical staff. It evaluated multiple solutions before delivering a unanimous recommendation: Laurel. A proposal went to the management committee, they approved it, and the contract was signed. The composition of that committee was as important as its conclusion. "The AI committee included attorneys who were part of the test groups and wanted to solve this problem," Lisa explains. "Once we found the right solution, they spread the word within their practice groups. That buy-in made all the difference." By the time the rollout began, the internal advocates were already in place. ## When Attorneys Become the Advocates Lisa was responsible for the messaging and the launch. A firm-wide training in December exceeded expectations. Attorneys left wanting in—reaching out one after another: "I want to be part of the pilot." The pilot kicked off right in the middle of year-end close, with half the firm on holiday. The timing worked in their favor. A focused group of attorneys, with fewer distractions and more bandwidth to explore the tool, got up and running quickly and enthusiastically. Then they started talking. Within days, five more attorneys asked to join. A second training expanded the pilot to roughly 20 users. From that initial pilot, the firm moved to a full firm-wide launch in early February. Within weeks, the previous timekeeping system was turned off. The transition was nearly seamless. ## What the Attorneys Are Actually Saying Attorneys are seeing, for the first time, a complete record of what they did in a day. "The feedback is consistent. Attorneys love seeing their activity captured. They like knowing Laurel caught what they did throughout the day." For other attorneys, seeing the activity log made the final step easy: once they realized Laurel was already doing the work of remembering, flipping an entry to a time record required almost no additional effort. The behavioral change has gone further than timekeeping. One attorney told Lisa that Laurel had made him a better attorney. His file naming conventions weren't client-centric enough for Laurel to connect related activities automatically, and once he saw that, he changed how he named things. "He realized he needed to start naming things a little bit more client-centric so that the activities would pull together. And he would know what was connected to what, so he could quickly flip it to a time entry." Another attorney noticed, for the first time, how much time he was spending on things he shouldn't have been. ## Getting Change Management Right For Lisa, the key to a successful rollout was simple: meet people where they are. Laurel's implementation team provided the foundation, and Lisa made it her own. "I know our attorneys, I know how they think, and I customized everything so it felt like it was coming from inside the firm." Every few days she sent an update, turning incoming questions into how-tos for the whole firm. "If one person is asking, somebody else likely wants to know too." The other half of the equation was removing friction. As long as the old way was still available, there was no urgency to change. So Lisa kept the message consistent: it's going away, here's the date. Once the deadline was real, adoption followed. "Make things as easy for adoption as possible. Remove any roadblocks that could be in the way." For Lisa, the measure of a successful rollout isn't a number. It's the absence of complaints, the attorneys who surprised her, and the partner who said Laurel made him a better attorney. The firm set out to solve a timekeeping problem. What they built was something stickier: a process that worked, a team that believed in it, and a tool that changed how people work.