Alcide Honoré (J.D. ’07) is always looking for ways to maximize efficiency. Between owning a practice in Atlanta, developing an app with potential to be used by lawyers around the world, and spending time with his wife and their four children, he doesn’t have many moments to spare but wouldn’t have it any other way.
Honoré moved to Atlanta and began working in finance after graduating from Duke University in 2000. He first became familiar with Georgia State University by earning his master’s degree in political science, before hearing about GSU’s College of Law and deciding he wanted to pursue his J.D. as well. Here, Honoré discusses the evolution of his career and how attending Georgia State Law helped make it a reality.
How did you go about starting your own practice?
I always knew I wanted to have my own practice and was able to take that leap about six months into working for a mid-sized firm after graduating. My focus is mostly entertainment and business transactions. I work with music producers and unscripted television talent as well as a lot of entrepreneurs, and some bar and restaurant owners.
With my finance background, I went into law school thinking I would be a securities lawyer. But I saw an opportunity in terms of what was happening in the Atlanta market and I happened to be in the right place at the right time to be able to build a practice from all referrals.
What is the app that you are developing?
It’s called Billseye. It allows you to automatically designate calls that come into your cell phone as billable and calculates your rate automatically. When the call is over you can leave a voice or text memo for notes about the call. Then when it’s time to send bills at the end of the month, you can export the call data into a spreadsheet and organize it however you’d like from there.
My brother, who is a software engineer, and I started development on this in 2017, but we really got really serious about it after it won first place in the start-up competition of the American Bar Association Tech Show in March 2020. Billseye was added to the Android Play Store in October and has had 10,000 downloads already. We are working on getting the app ready for iOS as well.
How did you come up with Billseye?
Increasingly over the last few years and especially now with so many people working from home, clients want to be able to reach you on your cell phone when it’s convenient for them. At first when I was taking these calls, I was trying to keep track in the back of my mind if it was a call worth logging or not, but it was such a pain while doing my bills to flip through and organize a whole month worth of call logs.
I value personal time and in reality, it just wasn’t worth the pain of trying to go through and total all that up. I wanted to create an easier way to make sure lawyers aren’t missing out on billable hours.
Are you glad you went to GSU Law?
Georgia State Law was a great experience. The fact that they've kept it affordable is huge. Not only did Georgia State Law allow me to stay in Atlanta to get my degree, but I also did not have a ridiculous level of debt coming out. That's definitely given me the opportunity to be more entrepreneurial, both with my practice and the app, than I would have had I gone to school elsewhere.
Interview by Mara Thompson