An interview with CloudCapcha’s CEO, Phil Lowe
As the company enters the UK legal market, he’s challenging leaders to rethink not just how they record time but what that data reveals about performance, productivity and growth. Rather than rebuild a traditional practice management system in the cloud, CloudCapcha began with focusing on a single, critical problem: time – reimagining it as an intelligent layer across the firm’s entire ecosystem. It’s a vision built for the modern legal reality where technology stacks evolve, systems rarely stand still, and the possibility of M&A can reshape a firm overnight. CloudCapcha’s design philosophy embraces that complexity, creating a flexible, data-driven foundation that moves with the business, not against it – a platform built not just to manage time but to reveal what time is really telling you.
We asked Phil to talk us through the big ideas.
Putting time back where lawyers work
Q: You’ve said you started by rethinking time recording from the ground up. What does that mean in practice?
Phil Lowe: Many firms still operate with systems that look like digital replicas of a paper ledger. If you look at a traditional practice management stack, it’s four big blocks:
- time recording, WIP and billing, workflow/reporting, and the finance ledger.
Historically, all of that has lived inside one system. There’s a “time” screen, a “WIP” screen, a “billing” screen and inevitably, a lawyer somewhere muttering that they need to leave their actual work just to record the fact they’re working.
We asked a simpler question: where do people actually live digitally, all day? Ten years ago, it was Outlook. Today, it’s Microsoft Teams. That’s where collaboration, communication and client work all happen. So instead of rebuilding yesterday’s timesheet in a browser, we built WorkCapcha as a native Teams app. From a lawyer’s point of view, time isn’t “somewhere else” anymore; it’s simply part of their everyday environment, as natural as replying to a message or joining a call.
Q: And that applies across desktop and mobile?
Phil: Exactly. Because it’s a Teams-native app, you don’t need a separate mobile app, another rollout, another approval cycle. If your firm has Teams, you’ve already done the hard work. You download Teams, and WorkCapcha is just there – same experience, same logic, same interface.
It’s a very deliberate design choice: start with the individual, not the legacy architecture.
Capturing more activities: towards a true “DayBook”
Q: Lots of tools claim to “capture time automatically”. What’s different about your approach?
Phil: For us, the timesheet is the output not the goal. The real question is: how much of the working day are you capturing as truthful data?
We built what we call the DayBook – a digital memory of everything a fee-earner does. Not just some emails or some documents and the bits that are easy to log but the full picture:
- activity from Microsoft Graph (Teams, Outlook, meetings, etc.)
- activity in the browser (online systems, portals, research tools)
- and desktop / legacy apps – even the ones hiding behind Citrix, Virtual Desktops or Terminal Servers.
Most systems in the market only manage a sliver of that. They might pick up activity in Word and email, but not applications in the browser or in older desktop applications. If you are left with partial truth it means you’re still anchored back to guesswork and reconstruction. Adding hallucinatory Gen.AI on top of this data makes the answers no better.
Our philosophy is simple: if you’re going to automate time capture, do it properly. Capture as much of the day as is technically possible, then use AI – specifically machine learning and neural networks – to propose entries against the right client, matter and activity.
The lawyer can still do manual entries if they like, but they’re no longer staring at a blank timesheet at 6pm. The system has already done the heavy lifting.
An agnostic API – by design not as an afterthought
Q: You talk about having an “agnostic API”. What does that mean for a law firm?
Phil:
We’re trying to help firms avoid being locked into a proprietary stack. We decided early on that WorkCapcha should be able to sit on top of whatever practice management system a firm already has – and whatever they might move to in future.
We’ve integrated with multiple legacy systems in accounting and we’re doing the same in legal. If you’re running P4W, SOS, or something shiny and new, our API plugs into the time and billing layer without forcing you into a full replatform. One firm told us another vendor walked away the moment they heard “P4W.” Our view? If integration is hard, that’s exactly where we can deliver the most value.
From the C-suite’s perspective, that matters. You’re not just buying a product; you’re buying a partner willing to wrestle with complexity rather than avoid it.
Multi-Back-End – built for M&A reality
Q: How does this play out for firms backed by private equity or those in active growth and consolidation?
Phil: This is where it gets interesting.
In both accounting and legal, we’re seeing the same pattern: a cornerstone firm gets investment and is told, “Grow. Buy other firms.” Five years later, you’ve got one group brand on the website but behind the scenes, you might have three, five or ten different practice management systems inherited from acquisitions.
In the old world, you didn’t get the benefits of new tooling until everyone migrated onto one common system. That consolidation can take years and cost a fortune.
We’ve designed WorkCapcha to be multi-back-end. That means:
- all fee-earners use the same Teams-based time capture experience.
- behind the scenes, WorkCapcha knows which back-end to talk to for each client/matter.
- it can post time to different systems from one common front end.
If you’re a PE-backed group running on multiple PMS platforms, you can still deliver a single, consistent timesheet experience on day one and start improving capture and revenue immediately. The consolidation project can run on its own parallel timeline instead of being a blocker.
No one else in our space is doing multi-back-end at this level. For acquisitive firms and investors, that’s a big lever on ROI.
UK-based and EU-friendly: why data location matters
Q: Finally, how important is it that CloudCapcha is UK-based? Does data location really matter anymore? Who owns the data?
Phil: Increasingly, yes.
When we talk to CIOs, COOs and GCs, the questions aren’t just “what does it do?” but “where does it do it?” and “who can touch the data?”
We’re a home-grown UK/EU business, hosting data in-region. For firms with European clients or cross-border matters, that’s non-negotiable. There’s a growing, and justified, sensitivity about data sitting in US jurisdictions. Questions about sovereignty, surveillance and AI training data are no longer theoretical. People want to know where their information lives and who it belongs to.
For us, sovereignty isn’t a marketing slogan; it’s part of the design. If you’re going to push more of your working day – and your clients’ information – through an automated system, you need to be confident that the infrastructure meets UK/EU privacy and regulatory expectations.
But perhaps the bigger issue is who gets to benefit from the deeper value in the data. We encourage our Client Firms to download their work activity data into their data warehouses so that they can generate insights across the enterprise.
Final thoughts: what should law firm leaders be asking?
Q: If you had one piece of advice for a managing partner, COO or CFO looking at time capture today, what would it be?
Phil: Don’t just ask “what does it do?”. Ask:
- Where do my lawyers spend their day and does this meet them there?
- How much of their real activity does it actually capture?
- Can it work with what I have now and what might happen next?
- Where is my data stored and does that align with my client obligations and risk appetite?
- How do I get access to our data so we can do cross-platform modelling?
If a solution can tick those boxes – time in the right place, rich activity capture, agnostic and multi-back-end integrations, UK/EU data sovereignty and data warehouse access, then you’re not just buying software. You’re buying breathing space for your strategy and the clarity to act on it.
That’s the gap CloudCapcha is here to fill, giving firms the visibility to find truth in their data and the freedom to focus on what matters most. Because when you understand time, you reveal performance, and with that, the potential to be exceptional.
