The Legal-Tech Tool I Built for My Own Practice — Law Time

The Legal-Tech Tool I Built for My Own Practice — Law Time

On this site I usually write about Korean law for foreign residents and businesses. This post is a little different: it is about a piece of software I built, and why a practicing attorney ended up writing code.

Running a law office means three clocks are always ticking at once. The court sets hearing dates. Every case carries its own list of tasks. And at the end of each month, billing comes due. Those three clocks usually live in different places — a calendar, a notebook, a spreadsheet — and when records are scattered, one of them always slips.

I looked for a tool that would put the whole rhythm of a lawyer's day on one screen: check the hearing dates, sort the tasks, record the hours, issue the invoice. I could not find one that fit how my law office actually works, so I built it. The result is Law Time (lawtime.kr), a case, docket and billing management service that now runs as part of my own office's work portal — I use it every day.

What it does is deliberately simple. Register a case and its hearing information syncs automatically, connected to Google Calendar. Record your hours on a case and the entries become a timesheet; when a matter is billed by the hour, the timesheet becomes an invoice. Advisory fees are calculated automatically, working-hour statistics and revenue analysis are on screen, and the data exports to Excel.

Not every case is billed by the hour — many engagements close on an agreed fee, with no time-based invoice at all. Time records still matter there. Knowing exactly how many hours each case actually takes is how an office sees which matters consume its time and which work truly earns. Law Time records time for that insight as much as for billing.

I mention Law Time here for two reasons. First, colleagues in Korea occasionally find this site and ask about it — the service is in Korean and built for solo offices and small firms, and you are welcome to take a look at lawtime.kr. Second, for my foreign clients, I think it says something useful about how this office works: the same habit of building a system before trusting memory is the habit I bring to your case — deadlines tracked, records kept, and nothing left scattered.

If you have questions about legal matters in Korea, you can reach me through lawyerseoul.com.

Jaewon Lee, Attorney at Law (Joye Law)

See LawTime.kr: Law Time
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