Tera Bullion builds billing and utilization analytics for law firms: billable hours by attorney, realization rates by client and practice area, and revenue forecasting — in live dashboards instead of the quarter-end guesswork. Firms stop pricing and staffing on instinct and start seeing exactly where hours leak between worked, billed, and collected.
Most firms discover their profitability problems at quarter end, in an accountant's summary, months after the decisions that caused them. An associate under water for a season. A practice area whose realization has slid ten points. A major client whose matters the firm effectively discounts through write-downs nobody tracks in aggregate. Each was visible in the data for months — but the data lived in three systems and nobody's job was to look across them.
Hours leak at every joint in the pipeline: worked but not recorded, recorded but written down, billed but discounted, invoiced but collected late or never. Each leak is small per matter. Across a year of matters, the gap between hours worked and cash collected is one of the largest numbers in the firm — and at most firms, nobody can say what it is.
Quarter-end reports from accounting are accurate history and useless steering. By the time the write-down pattern or the utilization slump appears in a quarterly summary, it has been compounding for months. You can't manage a quarter that's already over.
The time-and-billing system's built-in reports see billing and nothing else. Realization requires marrying hours to invoices to collections across systems — precisely the join the single-system report can't make. So firms watch hours worked and assume the rest, which is exactly how the leaks stay invisible.
Asking practice group leaders for gut assessments gets you confident narratives shaped by anecdote. The partner who just wrote down a big bill remembers it; the slow bleed of five-percent discounts across forty matters registers on no one's gut.
The common failure: firm economics live across systems — time, billing, collections — and every obvious fix reads only one of them. The answer isn't a better report from one system. It's one place where all three agree.
Before: profitability arrives as a quarterly surprise → the write-down pattern is discovered after it's compounded → pricing and staffing decisions run on instinct and anecdote → and the firm's biggest leak has no number attached.
After: utilization and realization read live on a dashboard → the sliding client relationship gets a conversation this month instead of a write-off next year → pricing decisions cite realization data by matter type → and the compensation conversation runs on numbers everyone can see.
If your firm has real volume and its economics live in three systems that never reconcile, this build finds money the firm already earned. The hours were worked. We make visible what happened to them.
Utilization is how much of an attorney's time turns into billable work; realization is how much of the billed work turns into collected cash. Firms often watch the first and assume the second. The gap between them — hours worked but written down, billed but discounted, invoiced but never collected — is where profit quietly leaks, and it's invisible unless both are measured.
The systems your firm already runs: practice management, time-and-billing, and accounting platforms, connected through their APIs and supported export paths into one warehouse. Nobody re-keys anything, and the dashboards read live rather than from a quarter-end export.
Yes — access is role-scoped by design. Managing partners get the firm-wide view; practice group leaders see their groups; individual timekeepers can see their own performance. Who sees what is a configuration decision you make, enforced by the architecture.
With the same seriousness as everything else we build for firms: encryption in transit and at rest, role-scoped access, audit logs, and no client data ever used to train shared AI models. Financial data about matters is treated as sensitively as the matters themselves.
Yes. With hours, billing, and collections history in one warehouse, forecasting follows: projected revenue from work in progress, expected collections by month based on each client's actual payment behavior, and pipeline visibility by practice area. It's the difference between hoping the quarter closes well and knowing what's coming.
Weeks, not quarters — the same pipeline-plus-dashboard pattern as the rest of our analytics builds. The timeline driver is data access to your existing platforms; once exports are open, dashboards follow quickly.
Scoped to your systems and firm size, which is why we start with a free build plan rather than a rate card. Tell us what you can't currently see — realization by client, utilization by group, collections lag — and we'll map the build.
Tell us how this works in your operation today. We'll send back a build plan — no pitch deck, no fluff, just engineering.
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