A2.Time
    Mike Shapiro

    About

    Mike Shapiro

    Lawyer, consultant, and builder. Started billing my time in 2003. Still doing it — differently now.

    • 20+ years across law, consulting, and product
    • Founded four companies
    • Executive MBA — Kingston University (UK)
    • Based in Netanya, Israel

    The timeline

    How A2.Time came to be.

    2003

    First client

    I graduated from law school and took my first paying case: a court trial. He paid me $10,000 in one lump sum when we won. I felt like I'd arrived.

    Looking back, I'm not sure I had. The trial ran 18 months. I couldn't tell you if $10K over that time was a win or a loss.

    2005

    The spreadsheet

    I built a spreadsheet. Columns for date, client, matter, hours, description, rate. I started logging every hour. Within a month I could see what I already suspected: the trial had paid me about $15 an hour by the end of it. Other work I'd been turning away would have paid two or three times that.

    The spreadsheet wasn't the point. The visibility was.

    2007–2022

    Building firms on the principle

    For fifteen years I built professional-services businesses on the same discipline. I ran a 30-person international consultancy through the 2008 crisis. I co-founded a corporate law firm and scaled it to 25 people. Then a boutique that reached $1M in revenue with 25% year-over-year growth. Every survival decision, every pricing decision, every hiring decision came from time data.

    One case still bothers me. A client asked us to file his company for liquidation — fixed fee, standard scope, we'd done dozens like it. It turned out to be a full-scale bankruptcy proceeding. Hundreds of hours we couldn't recover. We ate the cost.

    The second lesson time data gives you: you can't price new work well if you don't remember what old work actually cost.

    2018–2025

    Two attempts at productizing it

    I built A2.Legal — a practice management SaaS for lawyers — as a spinout from the firm. Raised angel investment and reached my first paying customers. The product worked; the market taught me lawyers, as a group, don't buy new software easily.

    I took a two-year detour to co-found an InsurTech that priced insurance using satellite data. Very different domain, same underlying principle: pricing follows understanding. First US enterprise contracts, AWS Founders Club, Starburst. Then I came back to the original idea.

    2025

    A2.Time

    This time I built it for the audience I always wanted to help most: freelancers and solo practitioners. Same principle, better tool, no law firm behind me.

    This is A2.Time.

    What I believe

    Three things I've come to believe about billing your time.

    1. 1

      Time is not what you sell — it's what you have to understand about yourself first.

    2. 2

      Every pricing mistake is a data mistake in disguise. You can't quote well if you don't remember what similar work actually cost.

    3. 3

      Tools should make the invisible visible. If your time tracker is asking you to work harder to track time, it's wrong. Time tracking should be a byproduct of doing your job, not a job in itself.

    A note to the reader

    If you're a freelancer or a solo practitioner reading this, we probably have more in common than we don't. I built A2.Time for the person I was in 2003 — someone who was smart about the work, and hopeless about the business.

    If that's you, come find out where your time actually goes. If A2.Time doesn't work for you, tell me why within 14 days of your first monthly or annual payment and I'll refund it in full, personally. My email is ma@a2time.com. I read it.