When McKenna Long & Aldridge holds a firm meeting, there is always the metaphorical elephant in the room. The elephant’s color is green.

“Every time you get a group of lawyers in a meeting, you know that every one of them is mentally calculating how much money they’re losing,” says Ashley Tenney, McKenna Long’s business development manager. “And if you have an all-day meeting or even longer, that’s a lot of billable time—hundreds if not thousands of dollars per lawyer.”