The $30,000 you already lost this year.

The average US solo lawyer bills hourly and loses roughly $30,000 a year in unbilled time. Not to tax. Not to AR write-offs. To forgetting. The 3pm call from the car. The email thread between meetings. The Sunday motion draft. All real work. None of it on the invoice.

At a median hourly rate of $250, the working solo leaks 5 to 10 billable hours every week. That's $25,000 to $50,000 of unbilled revenue a year — paid for in long evenings reconstructing time from memory.

Three moments that already vanished from your timesheet this week

If you bill hourly as a solo, this happened to you before Wednesday:

• A 14-minute client call taken from the grocery store parking lot. No note made. By 5pm, forgotten.
• Nine emails over two days settling a scheduling dispute with opposing counsel. Each felt too small to log. Together: 38 minutes you'll never bill.
• An hour drafting a motion on Sunday evening. Monday you log "0.5" because you can't remember the exact stretch.

None of that is a failure of character. It's a failure of the billing model: hourly rates work only if you capture the hours. Capture is the bottleneck, and the current answer to capture is "remember harder."

The category that fixes this — and why it's closed to most solos

There are tools that fix this, and they work. Smokeball AutoTime. Clio Duo. Billables.ai. Each one passively captures billable moments and pre-fills time entries.

But every one of them assumes you've already surrendered to a Practice Management System. Smokeball's entry price is $49/user/month. Clio Manage starts at $39 and jumps to $89 for Suite, which is where Duo lives. Billables.ai is bundled into MyCase at $39–$139. Before you pay for capture, you've already paid $40–$160/month for the PMS shell around it.

Roughly 30% of US solo lawyers — about 120,000 practitioners — refuse that shell. They bill out of Word plus QuickBooks (or LawPay, or FreshBooks, or plain CSV), and they're explicit about it on every thread where a PMS pitch appears: "I'm not paying $89 a month to track 10 matters I could track in a spreadsheet." For them, the whole capture category is closed. Not because the tools don't work — because the tools won't sell without the bundle.

ClaimHour

ClaimHour is a Mac menubar app, with an iOS companion, that watches the billable moments you forget — phone calls, email activity, document edit time — and turns them into pre-filled time entries you approve in a 2-minute end-of-day digest.

No practice management system required. No calendar integration. No client intake forms. No trust accounting. It does one thing: capture the moments your timesheet misses, and hand them to whatever billing tool you already use.

The critical design choice: metadata only

A tool that watches a lawyer's phone, email, and documents has to clear one bar before anything else matters: attorney-client privilege. ClaimHour's answer is architectural.

• Calls: we read duration and counterparty phone number. Not the audio. Not a transcript. Not a summary.
• Email: we read send/receive counts and subject-line keywords against your client list. Not bodies. Not attachments.
• Documents: we read edit time per open window — how long Word or Pages had focus on a file whose path matches your matter folder. Not the contents. Not the edits.

Nothing leaves the device until you export. No cloud upload of content. No listener in the middle of a conversation. ClaimHour is an aid to your memory — closer in kind to a timestamping app than to a recording app. That's not a marketing line; it's the reason you can use it at all.

Your day with ClaimHour

1. Install once. Paste in your client list — names and phone numbers, one per matter. Three minutes, one-time.
2. Work normally. Phone calls, email, drafts. ClaimHour watches in the background, capturing metadata to a local database.
3. 5pm digest. A 2-minute review: "You spent 47 minutes on 6 billable-looking events across 4 matters. Confirm or edit." Every entry is rounded to the bar-standard tenth of an hour (0.1 = 6 minutes). You edit descriptions, you reject false positives, you add a note.
4. Export. QuickBooks IIF. LawPay. FreshBooks. Or plain CSV if you roll your own. One click. The entries land in your billing tool with the right matter, the right date, the right duration.

The ROI math, without the fluff

At a $250/hour median rate, recovering even 5 hours a week that currently vanish is $1,250 of recovered weekly revenue. Pro is $59 a month. It pays for itself on the first Monday of every month. Every hour it captures after that is revenue you weren't billing.

We priced it to be less than one recovered billable hour per year, across all tiers:

• Starter — $29/mo — 100 captured events/month, 1 matter, weekly digest, CSV export. For the solo who bills 1–2 matters at a time and wants to see what's possible.
• Pro — $59/mo — unlimited captures, 10 matters, daily digest, QuickBooks IIF + LawPay + FreshBooks export, bar-standard tenth-of-an-hour rounding. The default for a working solo.
• Scale — $99/mo — unlimited matters, 2 seats (for you + a paralegal), custom export, API access, priority support. For a micro-firm that stays lean.

Who this is for

US solo lawyers, bar-admitted, 0–10 years out, billing hourly, without a Practice Management System. Family law, immigration, criminal defense, small civil. Median rate $250. Psychographic: price-sensitive about SaaS, privacy-paranoid by training, skeptical of AI hype, .com-loyal. Joined the bar to lawyer, not to admin.

If you already use Clio or Smokeball and love it, ClaimHour still catches the moments those tools miss — personal-phone calls on a second line, emails sent from your phone away from the desktop, weekend drafts — and layered on top, most PMS users still recover 2–4 hours a week.

What ClaimHour is not

• Not a practice management system. It doesn't own your calendar, your client intake, your trust accounting, or your invoicing. It feeds whatever you already use.
• Not a transcription tool. No audio, no transcripts, no "AI call summaries." That market is saturated and it's not our wedge.
• Not HIPAA-covered. We never touch protected health information, because we never touch content. If your practice requires a BAA for this category of tool — it doesn't, with us.
• Not Windows or Android. v1 is Mac menubar + iOS. Windows and Android come after. No Linux plans. If that disqualifies you, the waitlist is still open — it costs you nothing to sit on.

Where we are today

• Landing + waitlist: live at claimhour.com. Waitlist writes to a local SQLite; you'll hear from us when early access opens.
• App: in build. The menubar capture loop for calls and documents is the first piece to ship.
• Pricing: $29 / $59 / $99 per month. No free tier on launch — this product exists to be paid for.
• Privacy posture: metadata on-device, exported only on your approval. Full detail in our privacy policy.

Early access is opening to the first 50 waitlist members. You'll get a year of Pro for the price of Starter, and a direct line to us on the feature list.

A note on how we shipped this

ClaimHour is being built in public under @bitinvestigator. The build log — domain registration, landing work, first waitlist signup, launch — is all timestamped. If you like watching small products come into being, follow along.