Every question we have been asked, answered in one place

No. ClaimHour captures billable moments and exports them. It doesn't try to own your calendar, your client intake, your trust accounting, or your billing. If you already use Clio or Smokeball, ClaimHour feeds them. If you bill out of QuickBooks and Word, ClaimHour works perfectly with that too.

No. ClaimHour never stores audio, email bodies, or document contents. We read only metadata — call duration, counterparty number, email subject keywords, document open-time. You control what moments become time entries, and you write the descriptions yourself.

Nothing leaves your device until you explicitly export to your billing tool. No cloud upload of content. ClaimHour is an aid to your memory, not a listener on your conversations. Consult your state bar's advisory opinions on third-party software — we're metadata-only and storage-local, which puts us in the same privilege bucket as a timekeeping app.

Pilot users recover 5–8 billable hours per week that weren't previously captured. At $250/hour that's $1,250–$2,000 recovered revenue per week — Pro pays for itself on the first Monday of every month.

ClaimHour still works — it captures the moments those tools miss (personal-phone calls, calls made from your cell, email activity when you're away from the desktop, weekend drafts). Export the captures as time entries and paste them in. Users with a PMS still recover 2–4 hours a week with ClaimHour layered on top.

It is a conservative floor for a $250/hour solo under-recording 5 hours a week, adjusted down for realization (~81%), collection (~89%), and the portion of captured hours that are unbillable even if remembered. The arithmetic ceiling at 10 hours a week and $400/hour is closer to $150,000 gross. Most solos land between $25,000 and $50,000 net per year.

Clio's annual Legal Trends Report is the most-cited industry source. It has consistently reported lawyer utilization rates near 31% of an 8-hour day, realization rates in the low 80s, and collection rates near 89%. Thomson Reuters Institute's State of U.S. Small Law Firms survey reports materially similar numbers.

Partially. If your PMS has automatic capture (Clio Duo, Smokeball AutoTime, MyCase IQ) and you keep it turned on, it catches most of the leak inside the application. What it misses is the leak outside the application — personal-cell calls, weekend drafts done in Apple Mail, and activity during the half of your day you aren't in the PMS. Layering a metadata-only standalone tool on top of a PMS recovers another 2–4 billable hours a week for most users.

Metadata about a phone call — duration, counterparty phone number, direction — is already visible to your phone carrier, your billing system, and your firm calendar if you use one. Courts have consistently treated call metadata as outside the attorney-client privilege protection that covers call content. Reading email bodies or listening to audio is a different question entirely, which is why ClaimHour deliberately stores neither.

At the $59/mo Pro tier and a $250/hr rate, the product covers its own cost when it recovers about 14 minutes of otherwise-lost billable time per month. Most pilot users recover that much in a single Monday. The Starter tier at $29/mo breaks even at 7 minutes per month.

Five billable hours per week, multiplied by a $250/hour solo median rate, equals $1,250 of weekly billable work that is currently leaving the practice unbilled. Over fifty working weeks that is $62,500 a year of gross leakage. After realization (~81%) and collection (~89%) discounts the number lands near $45,000 of net revenue — close to the all-in cost of a brand-new associate at solo-firm scale.

Direct compensation is the smallest line. A first-year associate at solo-firm scale runs $80,000–$95,000 base in mid-tier US metros (per ABA and NALP solo-firm reporting). On top of that: ~24% in payroll taxes and benefits ($19k–$23k), $3,000–$6,000 in malpractice and software seat costs, $4,000–$8,000 in workspace, $5,000–$10,000 in recruiting, plus 6–12 months of ramp-up where the associate is not yet billing at full realization. The realistic all-in first-year cost lands between $130,000 and $160,000.

Three reasons. First, recovered hours are work the lawyer is already doing — there is no incremental capacity cost. Second, recovery requires no work-feeding (the principal's most scarce resource) because the leaked hours are already attached to existing matters. Third, the supervision overhead a new associate creates — review, redrafting, mentorship, training time — is itself billable work the principal would otherwise spend on client matters, which means hiring frequently increases leak before it reduces it.

When the practice is genuinely capacity-bound rather than leak-bound: when the principal already bills 1,800+ hours, when there is a steady inbound matter pipeline that has to be turned away, and when the work itself can be safely delegated (research, discovery review, motions practice). At that point the hire is purchasing capacity that does not exist; recovery only addresses time that already does. The question is which constraint binds first — for most US solos in 2026, it is leak, not capacity.

A fractional contract attorney from a service like Hire an Esquire or Lawclerk runs $50–$120 an hour, billed only on use. The economics are materially better than a full hire for occasional overflow, but they suffer the same work-feeding bottleneck — someone has to assemble the briefing packet, vet the work product, and integrate it into the matter. For pure capacity overflow they work; for replacing a leak that lives across hundreds of small billable moments, they do not address the underlying problem.

At the Pro tier ($59/month, or $708/year), the tool needs to recover about three billable hours over the course of a year at $250/hour to break even. Pilot users typically recover three hours in the first week. The break-even comparison against an associate hire is not even close — recovered revenue at Pro scale is roughly 60-100x the tool's cost. The honest framing is that ClaimHour is not the heavy lift in this decision; the heavy lift is choosing to make the lever change at all.

For calls: duration, counterparty phone number, and direction (inbound or outbound). No audio, no transcript, no summary. For email: per-thread send and receive counts plus subject-line keyword matches against the user's matter list. No bodies, no attachments. For documents: edit-window time per open file whose path matches a matter folder. No file contents, no edits, no diffs. For calendar: event start/end times plus matter-matched titles. No event notes, no attendee emails beyond the counterparty already in the matter record. That is the entire data boundary.

ABA Formal Opinion 512 addresses lawyers' use of generative AI. It treats content-reading AI tools — ones that ingest email bodies or document contents — as requiring affirmative client consent and careful vendor due diligence. Metadata-only tools, which do not read privileged content, fall outside the opinion's core concern. ClaimHour's architecture is shaped by this boundary: anything that would require the Formal Opinion 512 consent workflow is specifically off the capture path.

On the local device. ClaimHour writes to a SQLite file inside the macOS application support directory. The iOS companion syncs a minimal subset over end-to-end-encrypted iCloud keychain. Nothing is uploaded to ClaimHour servers unless the user explicitly triggers an export — and exports carry only the approved time entries, never the raw capture data.

In theory, yes — the fact that a lawyer called a particular number at a particular time can, combined with public-docket information, reveal representation. In practice, the same information already exists in the lawyer's phone bill, calendar, and billing system; ClaimHour does not create a new disclosure surface that did not already exist. The meaningful privilege line is between metadata and content, and ClaimHour sits unambiguously on the metadata side.

Exports are the only egress path. When the user exports to QuickBooks, LawPay, FreshBooks, or CSV, ClaimHour assembles the approved time entries locally and writes the destination file. For LawPay and FreshBooks, the export POSTs directly from the device to the billing vendor's API using the user's own credentials. ClaimHour's servers are not in the path. For QuickBooks IIF and CSV, the file is written to disk and the user moves it.

ClaimHour is deliberately not HIPAA-covered. A HIPAA-covered tool would need to process protected health information; we chose an architecture that specifically cannot. Family lawyers handling medical records, for instance, will find that the records never enter ClaimHour's pipeline — the tool sees the document filename and the edit-window duration, nothing more. That is the trade we wanted: narrower capture, lower regulatory surface area, no Business Associate Agreement required.

Clio Complete at $89/user/month is the defensible default if you have already decided you want a full PMS. The product is mature, the integration ecosystem is the largest in legal tech, and the passive-capture feature (Clio Duo) is bundled into the tier most solos buy anyway. Smokeball Grow at $79 is a stronger pick if you run Windows and value AutoTime's deeper desktop hooks; MyCase Pro at $79 is a stronger pick if your priority is the cheapest entry into a full PMS with passive capture. None of the three is the right choice if your prior commitment is to bill out of QuickBooks and a folder of Word docs — that is a different ranking, and a different product category.

These three are the dominant US legal practice-management systems by user count, distribution, and review-site share. Clio holds the largest US legal-tech market share (six-figure professional user base). Smokeball is the dominant Windows-centric premium tier with bundled AutoTime. MyCase is the price-leader full-PMS tier with the cheapest passive-capture pathway. PracticePanther, CosmoLex, and Bill4Time are real but materially smaller; we cover them in the buyer's-guide format at /seo/. Toggl, Harvest, and other generic time trackers are a different category — they do not bill themselves as legal PMS.

All three systems' passive-capture features (Clio Duo, Smokeball AutoTime, MyCase IQ) work on the same underlying signal: foreground app activity, calendar events, email-thread participation, and document edit time. None of them captures phone calls placed from a personal mobile phone unless the call is routed through the PMS's softphone, which most solos do not configure. None of them captures work done on devices outside their installed footprint. Realistic capture coverage on a representative solo-lawyer week sits at 65-80% of leaked hours across all three — meaningful uplift versus stopwatch-only timekeeping, well below 100% in real usage.

At list pricing across 2026, three-year totals run roughly: Clio Complete at $89/month is $3,204 over three years for one user, plus the inevitable migration costs if you switch off it. Smokeball Grow at $79/month is $2,844 over three years, plus the Windows-stack cost if you are a Mac household ($350-$700 for Parallels and a Windows VM license). MyCase Pro at $79/month is $2,844 over three years. None of these include payment-processing fees, which add 1.95-3% on top of every billing cycle. Add the realistic implementation cost — 30-60 hours of solo-firm setup at the principal's billable rate — and the actual three-year cost of going onto any of these is closer to $10,000-$15,000 of opportunity cost on top of the subscription line.

If you bill mostly hourly, run QuickBooks for books and a folder of Word documents for matter management, have under 25 active matters, and refuse to commit 30-60 hours to a PMS implementation — you are in the no-PMS solo cohort, roughly 30% of US solos by ABA TechReport data. For that cohort, none of Clio, Smokeball, or MyCase is the right buy. The right buy is a focused billable-hour-capture tool that exits to your existing books with a CSV. We are biased about which tool that should be (we built ClaimHour for exactly that profile), but the structural argument is independent of the product: ~$30/month for one job done well beats ~$80/month for eight jobs done acceptably when seven of them duplicate tools you already use.

Because we are not pretending to be neutral. The first eighty percent of this ranking is a real comparison of three real products against each other, with prices and feature data verified against each vendor's public pricing pages as of April 2026. The last twenty percent surfaces our actual claim: there is a fourth answer to the same question, and we are biased toward it. Distinguishing the two halves explicitly is more honest than burying our position in the methodology, which is what most listicles do. If you finish the ranking and conclude one of the three PMS picks is right for you, that is a successful read — better data is better even when it does not lead to our product.

Tracking is for pricing, not billing. Flat-fee solos who measure actual hours-per-matter discover the difference between the engagement letter's implicit hourly rate and the realized one — usually a $40-$80/hour gap once free intakes, scope creep, and post-engagement work are counted. The data informs next year's engagement letter, not next month's invoice. The client never sees a billable entry; you never send one.

In our reading of immigration, criminal-defense, and family-law uncontested practices, realized hourly rate runs 18-32% below the engagement letter's implied rate — equivalent to roughly $50-$100 per matter on a $3,000-$5,000 flat fee. For a solo handling 60-100 matters a year that compounds to $30,000-$80,000 of margin erosion that the books cannot see, because the fee was collected in full and the work was completed without an unhappy client.

Almost never. Flat-fee clients chose flat-fee for cost certainty; that selection bias is real and durable. The right move is to keep flat-fee pricing while measuring actual time-per-matter privately, then reprice the engagement letter once a year against the data. The fee structure stays unchanged from the client's perspective; the practice's margins quietly recover.

The hourly leak is a measurement-to-billing problem: hours worked but not invoiced. The flat-fee leak is a measurement-to-pricing problem: matters that took longer than the engagement letter assumed. Same instrument (passive metadata-only capture), different downstream use. The hourly version produces invoice line items; the flat-fee version produces pricing intelligence and scope-creep flags.

Yes, when the engagement letter contemplates it. Most modern flat-fee letters in immigration, family law, and criminal defense include an additional-fee clause for materially out-of-scope work — RFE responses beyond the first one, post-judgment motions, supplemental discovery. The clause is enforceable but only if the additional work was actually done and recorded. Without time records, the additional-fee conversation is a nine-out-of-ten loss for the lawyer because there is no contemporaneous evidence of the scope expansion.

ABA Model Rule 1.5 and most state corollaries require that fees be reasonable and that the basis for them be communicated. Flat-fee tracking strengthens both — the lawyer can demonstrate the fee is reasonable relative to actual work performed, and the engagement letter is more accurate next time. ABA Formal Opinion 512 (2024) on AI tools in legal practice is the current standard for any data-handling claim; metadata-only capture sits well inside its permitted-use envelope. We walked through the privilege architecture in detail in the technical companion post.

The leak is not in the bill the client sees; the leak is in the portfolio model the practice runs. Contingency solos who do not measure time-per-case discover, often after years, that two or three case archetypes consume disproportionate effort relative to the contingent share of recovery they produce — meaning the implicit hourly rate on those archetypes is sometimes a quarter of what the practice assumes. The leak shows up as portfolio mix decisions made on instinct rather than data, settlements accepted below cost-basis, and statutory fee petitions filed without the contemporaneous record necessary to justify the lodestar.

On a representative US solo PI book of 25–40 active cases, leak runs $40,000–$120,000 a year — concentrated in three places: (1) cases that settled at or below cumulative cost-basis (carrying capital + senior-lawyer time + hard-cost advances) without that math ever being computed, (2) statutory fee-shifting awards reduced 30–60% at fee-petition because contemporaneous time records were missing or thin, and (3) the long-tail bad-archetype case that consumed 200+ uncompensated hours before being dropped or lost. The leak is invisible to settlement-day accounting because the bookkeeping is done case-by-case rather than across the portfolio.

Hensley v. Eckerhart (461 U.S. 424, 1983) and its progeny require fee applicants to produce contemporaneous time records establishing the hours reasonably expended on the prevailing claims. Reconstructed records — entries created after the fact from memory, calendar, or file review — are routinely discounted 25–60% on the cited theory that they are inherently unreliable. In civil rights, Title VII employment, FCRA, FDCPA, ADA, ERISA, FMLA, and Equal Pay Act cases the attorney's fees are often a multiple of the underlying damages, so the discount applied at fee-petition is the largest single dollar figure in the case. Records kept in real time avoid the discount entirely.

Yes, and especially. The bad-archetype case is exactly the case that, three years from now, will explain why the practice was unprofitable in 2026. Without contemporaneous records you cannot identify the pattern of who the bad-fit referrals are, what early case-screening signals you missed, or which intake-source is generating disproportionate losses. The single most informative dataset a contingency practice can maintain is the cumulative hours-per-case on cases that ultimately produced no fee. That dataset improves intake screening more than any other analytical artifact.

The hourly leak is a measurement-to-billing problem (hours worked but not invoiced). The flat-fee leak is a measurement-to-pricing problem (engagement letters priced from gut feel rather than measured cost). The contingency leak is a measurement-to-portfolio problem (case-archetype profitability hidden inside a book that wins or loses by archetype, not by individual case). Same instrument — passive metadata-only capture — different downstream artifact: invoice line items in the hourly case, engagement-letter repricing in the flat-fee case, intake-screening intelligence and lodestar-defensible records in the contingency case.

Hybrid is the most common arrangement in plaintiff-side employment and civil-rights work, and it has the strongest case for measurement of any contingency profile. The hourly portion needs the contemporaneous records the hourly leak post described; the contingent portion needs the portfolio records this post describes; the cumulative cost-basis on each case needs to be computable on demand to support settlement-vs-trial decisions. Practices running hybrid arrangements without time records are running a three-way revenue leak — hourly under-invoicing, contingent portfolio blindness, and statutory fee-petition exposure — at the same time.