ClaimHour

Vertical guide · Updated June 2026

Corporate attorney time tracking: capturing hours across transactions, retainers, and board work

Corporate solos — M&A, general counsel, securities, venture — face a time-tracking failure mode distinct from litigation practice. The work is dense on transaction days and thin between them. A closing day runs 14 hours; the billing entry runs 9. A general-counsel retainer covers a client who calls three times a week about matters you open, close, and forget within the same conversation. Passive capture is the only mechanism that sees both ends of that distribution without requiring the attorney to manage a timer through a wire transfer or a board call.

TL;DR

ClaimHour captures document-edit sessions on deal documents, calls with counterparties and clients, email-compose time, and calendar events for board meetings and closings — passively, no timer, no audio, no document contents. It builds the contemporaneous time record that general-counsel retainer renewals, M&A engagement-letter true-ups, and hourly transaction matters require. $29–$59/mo. No PMS required.

The two failure modes unique to corporate practice

1. Transaction-day compression

An M&A or commercial real-estate closing day is dense with short, high-value work segments — no single segment looks like a billable "task" but together they add up to 12–16 hours. The solo is: editing the purchase agreement at 7:45am (28 minutes), then on a call with the buyer's counsel reviewing reps and warranties (55 minutes), then redlining the escrow instructions (40 minutes), then fielding four escalation calls from the client between 10am and noon (8–12 minutes each), then reviewing the payoff letter (22 minutes), then approving the closing checklist via email (15 minutes of compose time), then on a 90-minute closing call with all parties, then cleaning up the post-closing deliverables list (45 minutes). Total: ~13 hours of real, attributable work. Billed without capture: 9–10 hours, because the attorney reconstructs from calendar events (the closing call) and misses the surrounding activity.

At $500/hr for a corporate solo, the closing-day undercount is $1,500–$2,000 per deal. On a 15-deal/year practice, that is $22,500–$30,000 of annual revenue compression from this single failure mode.

2. The multi-matter GC call problem

General-counsel clients — emerging-growth companies, family businesses, nonprofit organizations with active deal flow — call their outside GC several times per week about whatever is on their mind. A typical GC call covers 2–4 open matters in the same conversation. The attorney's instinct at billing time is to attribute the full call to the matter that was the dominant topic, or to the matter the attorney was last working on when the call came in. The result: one matter is systematically over-billed and the others are systematically under-billed — a problem that compounds over a 12-month engagement and surfaces as a client complaint at the retainer renewal conversation.

ClaimHour captures the call duration as a single event and surfaces it in the digest for per-matter allocation. A 40-minute GC call covering three matters becomes three time entries at review time, not a block-billed 40 minutes on the loudest matter. That allocation discipline is also the defense against a client who disputes the bill: you have per-matter time records, not a reconstructed narrative.

What a corporate day looks like in the capture log

Deal document editing

Corporate practice is document-intensive in a way that rewards passive capture. A solo doing M&A or commercial contracts will have Word, Pages, or Google Docs open for 6–10 hours on an active transaction day, in 20–90-minute sessions separated by calls and emails. ClaimHour captures each session as a separate edit-time event labeled with the document title and timestamps. The purchase agreement, the disclosure schedules, the ancillary agreements, the closing deliverables — each appears in the digest as a distinct item, ready to approve against the deal matter at 0.1-hour granularity. Attorneys who reconstruct from memory typically collapse five document sessions into one entry with a round-number duration; passive capture shows all five with their actual lengths.

Counterparty and client calls

A complex commercial transaction generates 20–50 calls in the 60 days between LOI and closing. Buyer's counsel, seller's counsel, lender's counsel, title company, escrow agent, accountants, and the client each call multiple times about narrow, quickly-resolved questions. Each call is 8–25 minutes. Each is billable. Almost none make it onto the reconstructed time sheet because individually they feel too short to log and collectively they are impossible to remember by the time billing happens at month end. Call metadata capture — duration, counterparty, direction — is the only mechanism that catches all 50.

Board meeting and committee preparation

For GC engagements that include board representation, the preparation cycle is the largest source of untracked time. A board meeting prep week involves: reading the previous minutes and resolutions (30–60 minutes), drafting agenda items (20–40 minutes), calls with the CFO or CEO to frame the governance agenda (two or three 20-minute calls), reviewing the consent package and updating the officer certificate (45–90 minutes), and fielding director questions by email in the 48 hours before the meeting (5–10 email responses, 4–8 minutes compose time each). None of these are "board meeting" entries on a calendar timer. All of them appear in ClaimHour's digest automatically.

Email-intensive phases

Corporate practice generates bursts of high-value email activity during due diligence, negotiation, and closing. Each sent email in a complex negotiation is 4–12 minutes of compose time — reading the prior thread, deciding on position, drafting the response, reviewing for tone. Over a two-week diligence period, a solo corporate attorney sends 80–120 substantive emails. At an average of 7 minutes per email, that is 9–14 hours of compose time that almost never appears on the invoice at its true value. ClaimHour captures compose-window open duration per message; the monthly total is frequently the most surprising line item for corporate solos when they first see their capture data.

General-counsel retainer calibration

The single highest-ROI use of corporate time-tracking data is retainer renewal calibration. Most GC solos price their monthly retainers on feel — what the client will pay, what competitors charge, what seems fair for the relationship. After six months of captured data, that conversation changes entirely: you know the actual hours each GC client consumed, the effective hourly rate of each retainer, and which clients are consuming 3× their retainer allocation on escalation-heavy months.

The arithmetic is simple. A $4,000/month retainer client who averaged 18 hours/month at your $350/hr effective rate is worth $4,200/month of revenue — you are break-even, and any month above 18 hours is a loss. A $6,000/month retainer client who averaged 12 hours/month is $2,200/month of pure margin. Without data, you optimize the relationship impression; with data, you optimize the pricing. For a six-client GC practice generating $420,000/year in retainer revenue, a one-hour-per-client-per-month improvement in captured time and one correct repricing per year typically yields $25,000–$45,000 in additional revenue.

We walk through the general economics of unbilled time — including the realization-rate gap — in why solo lawyers leak $30,000 a year.

Securities, venture, and startup counsel

Securities-focused corporate solos — representing founders in seed and Series A rounds, counsel on Reg D offerings, outside counsel for emerging-growth companies at the pre-IPO stage — face all the above failure modes plus one more: the closing intensity is compressed into a single week (the week before a financing close) and the preceding months are a low-activity consulting relationship that generates unpredictable call volume.

The pre-close sprint is structurally identical to M&A closing day, repeated across 3–5 consecutive days. The preceding consulting relationship generates 2–5 calls and 8–15 emails per week, each short, each easy to forget, each billable. ClaimHour handles both: the sprint is captured automatically through document-edit sessions and call metadata; the ambient relationship is captured through call metadata and email compose time throughout the year.

How ClaimHour fits corporate practice

If you are a solo corporate attorney — M&A, general counsel, securities, commercial contracts — billing hourly or on retainers-against-hourly, and the phrase "I worked harder on that deal than what I billed" has crossed your mind in the last quarter, ClaimHour was built for the gap between those two things. Join the waitlist and we'll email when early access opens.

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Related questions

Do corporate attorneys really leak significant hours without time-tracking software?

Yes — and the dollar amounts are unusually large because corporate rates are high. The two worst categories are transaction-day compression (a 14-hour closing day gets billed as 9 because short document-edit bursts and escalation calls are retrospectively undervalued) and multi-matter GC calls (40 minutes covering three matters gets attributed to one). At $500/hr, a 5-hour weekly undercount is $130,000 of annual revenue uncaptured.

How does ClaimHour handle a GC call that covers multiple open matters?

The call is captured as one duration event. In the evening digest you split it across matters by time allocation — 10 min to the employment question, 20 min to the vendor contract, 10 min to the board governance item. Three separate time entries, attributable to three matter codes, done at review time rather than mid-call. No timer management during the conversation.

Can ClaimHour help calibrate the right price for a GC retainer renewal?

Yes — this is one of the highest-value use cases. After six months of data you know the actual hours each GC client consumed and the effective hourly rate of each retainer. If a $5,000/month retainer averaged 22 hours at your $400/hr rate you have a $3,800 contribution margin; if it averaged 42 hours you have a $1,800 loss. That data is the negotiation anchor at renewal.

How does ClaimHour handle transaction-closing day billing?

Document-edit sessions on deal documents are captured as separate edit-time bursts with precise timestamps. Calls with counterparties and clients are captured individually. Email-compose time flows in automatically. The full 14-hour transaction day appears in the evening digest in chronological order for one-click matter attribution — all the short bursts that reconstruction-from-memory collapses into one round-number block are preserved individually.

Further reading