Accurate time tracking for lawyers is key, not just for billing but also for building client trust, staying compliant, and keeping the firm profitable. Yet, manual tracking can be tough to stay on top of when lawyers are focused on tackling important legal work for their clients.
Despite the rise of automated time-tracking tools, research in our most recent Legal Trends Report found that the average lawyer records just 2.9 hours of an eight-hour day for billable work—leaving 5.1 hours a day unbilled.
This is where AI time tracking for lawyers is changing the game. AI-powered time-tracking technology can automatically detect, track, and organize legal work activities, allowing lawyers to capture their time precisely but with minimal effort.
Let’s explore how the latest AI time-tracking solutions can help law firms narrow the gap between hours worked and hours billed—boosting billing accuracy, streamlining administrative tasks, increasing profitability, and more.
Want to use AI to transform the way your firm works? Clio Duo, your legal AI partner built into Clio Manage, automates routine tasks like time tracking, and helps you work smarter—book a demo today.
Popular AI time tracking solutions for law firms
To take advantage of the benefits of AI time tracking for lawyers, you need the right tool. To help you start your search, we’ve rounded up some popular AI time-tracking solutions for law firms:
Clio Duo
Clio’s legal AI solution, Clio Duo, offers time entry suggestions for unlogged work, such as calls, notes, completed tasks, and emails, for each matter—helping ensure no billable time gets missed without you having to manually remember to go back and hunt it down after the fact. You can also use Duo’s chat feature to create time entries from anywhere in Clio Manage using the chat panel located near the search bar.
The best part? Clio Duo is built directly inside of Clio’s practice management software, so you can leverage AI without switching between tools or compromising the security of your firm’s or client’s information with third-party software.
MagicTime by Lawgro
Made for lawyers, Lawgro’s MagicTime is an AI-based automated timekeeping tool. MagicTime captures billable minutes in the background from all your apps (such as Gmail, Word, Outlook, various court websites, calendars, and more) and builds your timesheet so you can easily review and file it in a few clicks.
BigHand’s SmartTime is an AI-based tool that automates time capture and time entry for law firms. The tool creates AI-generated timesheets, which lawyers can then review and finalize—making the timekeeping process faster and easier.
SmartTime’s time-gap analysis also helps pinpoint gaps in recorded time, which lets you review and ensure no billable hours are missed. Additionally, SmartTime automatically generates time entries with auto-narratives, ensuring consistent, detailed descriptions for each entry.
PointOne
PointOne’s automated timekeeping solution uses AI to automate the process of time tracking and bill review for law firms. You can use PointOne to automatically capture your entire day from work done on your laptop and mobile phone and generate time entries describing your activities. For those who prefer using timers, PointOne can also create automatically generated narratives, or notes.
PointOne also integrates with Clio Manage. This integration allows you to automatically capture time and send time entries back to Clio for seamless time tracking and easy organization.
Billables.ai
Made for lawyers, consultants, and professional services, billables.ai generates AI-powered timesheets that automatically capture and organize customizable reports of your billable activity.
Billables.ai integrates with many of your work tools, including Clio, to ensure all billable hours are captured. With Billables.ai’s Clio integration, you can automatically track billable hours and create time entries related to your Clio Manage clients and matters.
Plus, billables.ai adapts to your unique billing preferences over time—improving accuracy and efficiency the more you use it.
Laurel
Laurel’s AI-powered timekeeping solutions work behind the scenes to accurately capture and organize your billable activities with minimal review.
Laurel uses features like Smart Work Coding™ (which automatically assigns appropriate billing codes to time entries for accurate billing and insightful reporting) and Smart Work History (which allows you to seamlessly track work across digital platforms like email to phone calls to ensure every minute is accounted for) to elevate efficiency and billing accuracy.
How accurate is AI time tracking?
AI-powered time tracking is typically very accurate—especially compared to manual time tracking. AI time trackers can automatically detect and analyze digital tasks like emails, calls, calendar events, and other suggested time entries, flagging them as potential billable hours.
Key features to look for in AI time tracking software for lawyers
While the exact features vary depending on the specific tool you use, the following key features are commonly found in AI time-tracking tools for lawyers:
Automatic time tracking: With AI time-tracking tools for lawyers automatically capturing billable hours and generating time entries, the risk of manual errors decreases, while making it simpler to track time, and minimizing the chance of missed billable hours.
Intelligent categorization of billable activities: Many AI tools go beyond just tracking billable hours—they can also intelligently categorize and organize billable activities. This cuts down on administrative burdens for lawyers and staff while improving accuracy in timekeeping by automatically assigning billing categories.
Real-time tracking and reporting: With AI time tracking, lawyers can assess accurate real-time data about how time is actually being spent or lost. This data empowers better strategic decisions to identify areas that need improvement and areas that are working well. For example, by understanding which clients are getting billed the most hours, you can allocate resources more effectively.
Seamless integration with practice management tools. Many AI time-tracking tools can integrate with practice management tools like Clio, allowing for seamless syncing of time-tracking data across platforms—meaning less toggling back and forth between tools, more time savings, and more efficient and accurate time tracking.
Lawyers often underestimate the true burden of manually tracking billable hours, which is why many are turning to contingency or flat fee billing models—read more in our latest Legal Trends Report.
Can AI time tracking help reduce administrative costs in a law firm?
Absolutely! First, AI time tracking reduces the administrative burden on lawyers by allowing them to submit time entries more efficiently. Additionally, legal professionals managing billing can expedite the process, quickly reconcile expenses and time entries, create bills, and promptly send them to clients—eliminating the need to chase lawyers for their time entries at the end of the month.
Benefits of AI time tracking for lawyers
If you, or someone at your firm, isn’t convinced that AI time-tracking solutions benefit law firms, let’s look more specifically at the benefits. Today’s AI time-tracking tools offer the following:
Accurate and reliable time tracking: Memory is fallible, and manually tracking hours often leads to errors and missed or forgotten billable hours. AI time tracking, on the other hand, is designed to be accurate and reliable, automatically capturing the exact amount of time spent on digital tasks and often identifying patterns to detect potential sources of missed billable hours.
Increased time captured and billed: Because AI time tracking tools are more accurate and reliable, they lead to more billable hours getting automatically captured and recorded. By reducing human error and eliminating manual tracking, AI tools ensure you aren’t leaving hours on the table when you go to bill your clients.
Reduced administrative tasks: AI time-tracking tools take care of many tedious administrative tasks, streamlining workflows and saving valuable time. AI time-tracking tools can, for example, automatically track billable hours, generate detailed time entries, and organize reports—significantly cutting down on the manual time and effort of time tracking for lawyers and staff.
Cost savings that enhance profitability: Using AI tools for time tracking can enhance law firm profitability in many ways.
Spending less time on manual time tracking, fixing human errors, and time tracking admin means less time and money spent on overhead costs and more hours for lawyers to focus on client work.
By using AI tools to automatically capture more billable hours worked, lawyers increase the potential revenue they bring in—without actually working more hours.
Plus, when time tracking is quicker, invoices can get sent out more quickly, too—leading to shorter payment cycles and increased profitability.
Insights and analytics for improved decision-making: It’s not just about saving time and capturing more hours. AI time tracking tools allow you to turn your firm’s time data into a valuable tool for analyzing your law firm’s performance and key performance metrics, such as your law firm’s utilization and realization rates. More accurate time tracking translates into more accurate insights to guide your business decisions.
How does AI time tracking integrate with existing law firm tools?
AI time-tracking tools sync with many existing law firm tools like case management software, digital calendars, and email platforms. This integration allows AI time tracking tools to automatically capture billable time from activities in other law firm tools, saving lawyers time and reducing manual effort.
Choosing the right AI time tracking solution
When choosing an AI time-tracking tool for your firm, there are several important factors to consider. As with any tech tool you plan to implement at your firm, you’ll want to ensure it’s:
Once a potential solution meets these criteria, consider the following additional factors when choosing an AI time-tracking tool for your firm:
Is it compatible with current firm systems? As mentioned above, the ability for an AI time-tracking tool to sync with your existing tech stack—especially your practice management and billing software—is key to ensuring streamlined workflows and reducing the chance of error.
Do the benefits outweigh the costs? You’ll also want to evaluate whether a particular tool makes financial sense for your firm. While AI time-tracking tools can help you capture more billable hours, which can lead to increased profitability, the cost of more advanced AI tools and their features may not be justified for solo practitioners or smaller law firms. Larger law firms, however, may see a greater return on investment of higher-priced solutions that offer more complex features.
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There are only so many hours in a day, but technology can help lawyers make the most of them.
By delegating time-tracking tasks to AI tools, lawyers can save time while reducing the risk of lost billable hours due to manual error. In turn, more efficient time-tracking can lead to cost savings, increased profitability, and more time for lawyers to focus on clients.
While there are a variety of AI time-tracking tools to choose from, look for options that are secure, have features that fit your practice size and needs, and integrate smoothly into your practice management strategies.
Built right into Clio Manage’s practice management software, Clio Duo is your legal AI partner, helping you work smarter and accelerate everyday tasks from time entries to summarizing cases and much more. Want to learn more? Schedule a demo.
