How a Growing Law Firm Makes Time Tracking Easy and Straightforward

Foster Yarborough PLLC is a general commercial litigation firm in Houston, TX that prides itself on its ability to give clients “straight talk” and fight for them “every step of the way.” 

Partner Ben Foster started the firm in 2018 before teaming up with Patrick Yarborough 18 months ago — and they’ve been growing ever since. The general commercial litigation firm aims to “provide pragmatic and efficient solutions to the legal problems that real people experience everyday.”

“We do civil litigation, we do some employment law, some intellectual property law, and we do some class action stuff,” Ben said. “So it's kind of a mix of hourly work and then work that's on a contingency fee, or work where we get paid a percentage of the case.”

It’s no secret that the legal industry comes with many unique headaches — and according to Ben, it’s the case-related frustrations that add the biggest burden. 

“It's the nature of what we do for a living, which is managing other people's problems,” he said. “That means dealing with clients who are routinely upset. It also means that there's somebody on the other side of that case who's actively working to make my life more difficult and to make my chances of success lower.”

Because of this stress, the last thing Ben and his team need is another burden making their lives even more difficult — luckily, Harvest doesn’t cause any more issues for them.  

Foster Yarborough has been using Harvest since 2018 for time tracking, expense management, and invoicing, despite the common hesitation in the legal industry to adopt technology.

Law firms and technology 

According to Ben, the legal profession is “bad at using technology to make its lives easier,” but not because the right tools aren’t available. 

“It’s not because the tools don't exist, it's because the lawyers are unwilling to invest the time and the energy into learning how to use them,” he said. “It's a profession that has always been really resistant to technological change. And I think it's because very few lawyers have any kind of technical background. They're sort of disinterested in technology and computers. I don't actually think it's because they're too busy. I just think it's a problem of priority.” 

Which is why the best tool for legal time tracking is one that’s easy to use, straightforward, and simple to teach — and Ben says Harvest checks all those boxes. 

Getting team members up to speed

With a continuously growing caseload, Ben doesn’t have the time to focus on teaching his team difficult software — and his team doesn’t have the time to learn it. Which is why Harvest is his top choice, even after trying out other legal software. 

“There are a lot of software companies out there that specifically target legal companies,” he said. “And I’ve taken demos to see how they worked before … but the value proposition is just not there. The best thing about Harvest is how easy it is for people to get up to speed with and to use. It takes basically no time to teach somebody how to use Harvest, and it takes very little time, frankly, to teach somebody how to do even slightly more complicated tasks like invoicing.” 

Straightforward invoicing

It’s no secret how critical it is for law firms to have accurate and easy invoicing tools, and Ben uses Harvest to make the invoicing process simple and straightforward for both his team and clients. 

“I find the invoicing to be extremely straightforward and much better than other types of legal software that I've tried to use in the past for invoicing,” he said. “It's super easy to set them up. There's good flexibility in terms of communicating those invoices to your clients both through Harvest's own system or frankly just downloading a pdf of the invoice and emailing it to someone. I find that super easy to use.” 

Collecting payments and updating records is another critical process for the legal industry, a process that Ben says is “problem free” thanks to Harvest’s integration with Stripe and Quickbooks. 

“We've never had any trouble with Stripe and taking credit card payments for invoices,” he said. “And we use QuickBooks for our bookkeeping and getting the paid invoices recorded properly with the integration has always been flawless. That's all been totally problem free for us.”

Harvest eliminates the barriers of adopting legal technology by making it easy for Foster Yarborough to adopt and use. And with accurate invoicing and recordkeeping, Ben and his team don’t have to worry about wasting time resolving payment issues. They can focus instead on what matters most to them — fighting for their clients. 

Ready to follow in their footsteps? Get started with a free trial today.