Embed widget · Free · No dependencies

The billable hour leak calculator, for your site

Name: ClaimHour Billable Hour Leak Calculator
Author: ClaimHour

Two lines of HTML give your readers a live calculator that estimates how much revenue a solo lawyer leaves on the table every year. It runs entirely in the browser, talks to nothing, and is free to use on any bar-journal post, CLE page, or law-office blog.

The gist

A self-contained JavaScript widget that computes a lawyer's annual billable-hour leak from three numbers (hourly rate, hours leaked per week, billable weeks per year), discounts the arithmetic ceiling by the Clio Legal Trends realization and collection rates (0.81 × 0.89 = ~0.72 effective), and links back to ClaimHour. Paste it anywhere. No build step, no cookie banner, no API key. The live version is below.

Live preview

This is the widget, rendered by the exact /embed.js file you'd load from any third-party site. Try moving the slider or typing a different hourly rate.

The widget renders inside an open shadow root, so your site's CSS will not leak into it and its styles will not leak out.

Copy-paste snippet

Drop these two lines wherever you want the calculator to appear:

<div id="claimhour-embed"></div>
<script async src="https://claimhour.com/embed.js"></script>

That's the whole integration. The widget mounts into the <div>, injects its own scoped styles, and starts computing on first paint.

What the numbers mean

Three inputs. Two outputs. No dark patterns.

Hourly rate defaults to $250 — the median reported by the 2024 Clio Legal Trends Report for US solo and small-firm lawyers. Move it up if your audience is New York or DC litigators; move it down for rural or fixed-fee-heavy practices.
Hours leaked per week defaults to 7, inside the 5–10 range the same report associates with unrecorded billable time at hourly-fee firms that do not use a practice-management system. Slider range is 1–15 so the reader can dial their own guess.
Billable weeks per year defaults to 48 (52 minus four weeks for holidays, CLE, and vacation). Change it if your reader runs a holiday-heavy or seasonal practice.

The widget then shows two numbers:

Arithmetic ceiling — rate × leak × weeks. The raw, undiscounted figure.
Estimated recoverable — ceiling × 0.72. The realistic number after the realization discount (~0.81 of recorded hours actually get billed) and the collection discount (~0.89 of billed dollars actually get paid). Same factors the leak-anatomy essay uses to land on the conservative $30,000/year floor.

Specs

File size: ~8.7 KB uncompressed, ~3 KB over the wire after gzip. One HTTP round trip.
Dependencies: None. Pure ES5 JavaScript. Works in every browser from IE11 onward (though shadow-DOM isolation falls back to scoped-class isolation on older browsers).
Network calls: Zero. All math runs in the browser. The attribution and CTA links are plain <a> tags; no tracking, no pixels, no cookies.
Style isolation: Renders inside an open shadow root when supported. Your site's typography, colors, and resets cannot bleed in.
Accessibility: Native form controls with explicit <label> associations and aria-live on the output. Keyboard- and screen-reader-friendly out of the box.
License: Free for any site. The attribution link back to ClaimHour is required — it is a single 11-point line at the bottom of the widget and is how we fund writing this stuff.

Who this is for

The people who will get the most mileage out of the widget:

Bar-association authors — state and local bar newsletters, CBA and NYSBA continuing-education posts, ABA practice-section blogs. A live calculator inside a practice-management article is a better teaching aid than a static table.
CLE providers — Law-office-management, solo-practice, and billing-economics courses. Embed it in the course page and the "how much am I leaving on the table" slide stops being abstract.
Legal-economics writers — anyone publishing on Above the Law, JD Journal, Attorney at Work, Legaltech News, or a Substack about solo-firm finances. The widget is topical fuel for a "here's the math on your unbilled hours" post.
Bar-coach consultants — practice-management coaches, law-firm-operations advisors. Use it on the diagnostic page of a coaching engagement.

If you are embedding this and you want us to link back to your piece from the ClaimHour blog, drop a note to hello@claimhour.com with the URL. We read all of those.

A note on honesty

The widget's default recoverable number is a ceiling multiplied by a discount — not a promise about what a specific lawyer will collect. Real-world variance is wide. The 81% realization and 89% collection figures come from Clio's 2024 Legal Trends Report, which is the single most-cited public dataset for US hourly-fee practice economics. They will differ by practice area, by firm size, and by how deep the reader is willing to chase aged receivables. The calculator is meant to surface a plausible order-of-magnitude figure, not an audit-grade forecast. We recommend saying so when you embed it.