What hours do solo criminal-defense lawyers most often forget to bill?

The pattern repeats across every defense solo we've talked to: jailhouse client visits where the wait, screening, and transit time match or exceed the actual face time; the half-day spent in court for a fifteen-minute docket call; ADA / prosecutor phone tag over the course of a plea; investigator and witness coordination calls; and after-hours arrest emergencies (the 11pm call from a client's spouse, the Sunday morning bond hearing). Of these, jail visits and court waits leak the worst because the lawyer's brain reflexively logs only the in-room time, not the surrounding hours that were equally not-doing-anything-else.

How does ClaimHour handle attorney-client privilege for criminal-defense work?

ClaimHour is metadata-only by design. We never read email bodies, call audio, document contents, or attachments. The fact that you spoke with a defendant for 23 minutes from the courthouse is captured; the substance of the conversation never leaves your devices. For criminal defense, where attorney-client privilege is the most heavily scrutinized privilege in law and a discovery request or grand-jury subpoena is a recurring occupational risk, the metadata-only architecture is the load-bearing privacy posture, not a marketing line.

Can I use this for court-appointed CJA or state-panel cases with set fee schedules?

Yes — appointed work is one of the practice patterns where time capture pays for itself fastest. CJA and most state-panel programs require contemporaneous time records broken down by activity type (in-court, out-of-court, travel, etc.). ClaimHour captures the raw durations and lets you tag activity codes per entry; export is CSV which you reformat into your panel's voucher template (CJA-20, state-specific equivalents). The tool isn't a CJA voucher generator — it's the upstream time source most appointed solos either reconstruct from memory or under-claim because they didn't track contemporaneously.

What about jail or lockup visits where I have no cell signal and can't take notes?

Calendar entries you set before the visit ("Visit — Smith — Lee County Detention") become a single digest line you confirm later — start time, end time, location-tagged. The iOS companion records call metadata for any calls in or out, including the call you make to the deputy from the parking lot to confirm the visit ended. After the visit you have one digest line covering check-in time, contact time, and check-out — no notes, no cell signal required.

How do I separate retainer-billable hours from work funded out of trust?

ClaimHour captures the hours; trust-vs-operating accounting still happens in your trust software (LawPay, IOLTA-compliant tools, or your reconciler). The export labels each entry with the matter you've assigned, and you draw against the matter's retainer in your billing system. We're upstream of the trust-accounting decision, not a substitute for it. For a matter on a $7,500 retainer drawing at $325/hr, ClaimHour gives you the clean draw-down log; LawPay (or whatever you reconcile in) records the trust withdrawal.

What about co-defendant joint-defense privilege calls?

Capture works the same way — duration, counterparty, direction. The metadata-only posture means the substance of the joint-defense call is never recorded. If the JDA includes a litigation-hold provision (most do), that applies to the substantive content, which we never had. Best practice many defense solos use: tag JDA calls with a dedicated matter code (e.g., "JDA-Smith") in their digest so a future privilege log is one query away.

Vertical guide · Updated April 2026

Criminal defense time tracking: for solo defenders without a practice management system

Criminal-defense solos run the most fragmented billing day of any practice area. A pre-trial motions hearing eats half a Tuesday for fifteen minutes of in-court argument. A jail visit means a 90-minute round trip and a 25-minute interview. The ADA on a felony plea calls back four times in a week, three minutes each, never logged. By month-end, a defender working 50-hour weeks has somehow only billed for 22 of them. This is what time capture is supposed to solve — and most of the tools sold to defenders solve it only inside a $89/mo practice management subscription you didn't sign up to pay.

TL;DR

ClaimHour is built for hourly-billing solos and is a strong fit for criminal-defense practice — retainer-draw matters, flat-fee misdemeanor work, mixed-model felony defense, and CJA/panel appointed cases all work the same way. Passive capture sees the calls, the court-day waits, the jail-visit transit, and the ADA voicemail tag the digital tools normally miss. Two-minute end-of-day digest. Metadata-only — no call audio, no email content, no document scanning, no witness lists, nothing privileged ever leaves your machine. Starter $29/mo, Pro $59/mo. Exports clean to QuickBooks IIF, LawPay, FreshBooks, or CSV (and from CSV into CJA-20 or your state-panel voucher template). For solos who lose 5–10 hours a week to under-recording, Pro pays for itself in the first week.

Where criminal-defense solos actually leak billable hours

Across r/Lawyertalk threads, NACDL listserv archives, and the bar-survey data the Clio Legal Trends Report has published since 2019, the same eight patterns recur in defense practice — none of them caught by a calendar-based timer:

Jail and lockup visits. Drive to the facility (35 minutes). Sign in, surrender phone, wait for the deputy to fetch your client (20 minutes). Conduct the interview (40 minutes). Walk out, debrief on the way to the parking lot, drive back (35 minutes). The 130 minutes shows up in your day as "I was at the jail this afternoon." The contemporaneous note, if any, says "Smith visit." Three weeks later you bill 0.7 hours.
The court-day wait. A 9:00am felony arraignment docket calls cases by who showed up first and who has private counsel waiting. You arrive at 8:45 and your case is reached at 11:20. The 155 minutes between is real billable attention — you can't leave, you're reading the file, you're talking to your client in the gallery, you're negotiating with the ADA in the hallway. Most solos either bill nothing for that time (because "I wasn't doing anything") or bill 0.3 because that's what feels honest. Both are wrong; the bar is unambiguous that court-mandated wait time is billable.
ADA / prosecutor phone tag. Plea negotiations on a contested misdemeanor often play out over two weeks of three-minute calls, two-line voicemails, and one-line text messages. Each call individually is "too short to log" so it doesn't get logged. Aggregate, that's an hour and twenty minutes of billable attorney work for a $325/hr defender — $433 — that lives nowhere on the bill.
The 11pm arrest call. Existing client gets pulled over, fails the field sobriety, blows above the limit, calls you from booking. You're on the phone for 22 minutes coaching them through the bond hearing. You make two more calls — bondsman, then the family — and write a one-paragraph email summary to yourself. By Monday morning the whole episode is "yeah, I helped them out Saturday night" and on the next invoice it's nowhere.
Discovery review sessions. Body-cam footage on a felony assault case is six hours of multi-camera video. Police reports run 80 pages. Lab analyses, dispatch logs, jail call recordings. A solo doing this work in 90-minute bursts over five evenings — at home, after dinner, on the iPad — almost never reconstructs the total accurately. Five 90-minute bursts is 7.5 hours; the timesheet says "discovery review — 4 hrs."
Investigator and witness coordination. Calls with your PI to scope a canvass, calls to fact witnesses to schedule statements, calls to expert witnesses to talk scope and rate. Each is 8–15 minutes; aggregated across a felony trial prep, it's 6–10 hours that lives in your call log and almost never on the invoice.
Pre-trial motions drafting at home. A motion to suppress, a motion in limine, a Brady motion — drafted at the kitchen table after the kids are asleep. The next day, "I worked on the suppression motion last night" maps to maybe an hour on the timesheet; it was actually two hours and twenty minutes.
Bond hearings, custody status calls, sentencing-day surges. The day before a sentencing or the morning of a contested bond hearing is a fragmented blur — character letters arriving by email, character witnesses calling to confirm time, the client's family asking what to wear, last-minute mitigation research. None of it is "a task" on a timer; all of it is billable attention.

The unifying feature: the work happens in places, times, and chunks where pulling out a stopwatch is either physically impossible (jail), socially impossible (in court), or psychologically impossible (your client is in crisis). Anything that requires the lawyer to start a timer in those moments will fail, and has been failing, for thirty years.

The math on a typical defense solo's week

A solo criminal-defense practitioner billing $325/hour, working a target 1,800 hours/year (about 36/week — defense work runs longer than family-law work, court calendars don't care about your billable target). Industry data and our own conversations suggest defense solos record 60–70% of worked hours, materially below the 70–80% other practice areas hit, because the work is more fragmented and more frequently happens in places without keyboards. Take 65% as a realistic middle: that's 23.4 billed hours out of 36 worked. The 12.6 unbilled hours a week × $325/hr × 48 weeks = $196,560 of unbilled revenue per year.

Passive capture typically recovers 40–60% of that gap in the first month — not all of it, because some of those "unbilled hours" really were non-billable, but most of it. Call that a conservative 6 recovered hours per week: $1,950/week, $93,600/year, at a cost of $708/year (ClaimHour Pro) or $348/year (Starter). For appointed work where panel rates are lower ($85–$180/hr depending on jurisdiction), the absolute dollars shrink but the percentage recovery is the same — and panel work specifically rewards contemporaneous tracking because vouchers get audited.

If you read our companion essay why US solo lawyers leak $30,000 a year, the math is structurally the same; the headline number is just different because defense rates are higher and defense practices fragment harder. The conservative $30k/yr floor across all practice areas becomes a $90k+/yr floor for defense solos at typical 2026 rates.

How ClaimHour handles the criminal-defense workflow

Calls — including the 11pm arrest call

The iOS companion runs on your iPhone and watches call metadata 24/7 — incoming, outgoing, duration, counterparty number. A Saturday night call from a client in custody shows up in Monday's digest as "Sat 11:08pm — 22 min — [client name]." The two follow-up calls (bondsman, family) appear as separate lines, each pre-attributed to the same matter if the contacts are tagged. Approve all three in three clicks, total digest review time 30 seconds. After-hours arrest calls were one of the design constraints — the workflow specifically should not require the defender to do anything in the moment beyond answering the phone.

Jail and lockup visits

The Mac and iOS companions read your calendar, with consent. A calendar event titled "Visit — Smith — County Jail" creates a placeholder digest line at the event's start; the iOS app updates the line with actual start/end times based on your phone's screen-lock state and (optionally) Significant Location data. The visit's digest line shows total wall time including the wait, sign-in, interview, sign-out, and walk back to your car. You decide what's billable — most solos treat the entire window as billable for in-custody clients because, for those minutes, you cannot do other work. Privacy posture: location data, if used, is on-device only; we never ship location off your phone, and the feature can be disabled in settings without losing the rest of the capture.

Court days

Court-mandated wait time is one of the largest leak categories and one of the easiest for ClaimHour to catch. A calendar event "Smith — arraignment — Courtroom 4B" creates a digest entry; the actual wall time is recorded from the moment your phone is silenced (most defenders use Focus mode for court) until you exit the building. The hallway plea negotiation with the ADA — captured as a sub-segment because your phone came off silent and you took two short calls — gets a separate digest line. End-of-day review: one entry for "in-court time" and one for "ADA negotiation in hallway," each ready to approve as billable.

Emails — counts and compose-time, never bodies

Apple Mail, Gmail, and Outlook for Mac integrations count sent and received messages per contact per day, and track compose-window open duration. The two-paragraph response to opposing counsel becomes "Tuesday 3:14pm — 1 email sent to [DA office] — 6 min compose time." We never see the body, never index the subject line beyond a configurable tokenizer that recognizes matter prefixes (e.g. "RE: State v. Smith") for auto-attribution. For criminal-defense practice where every email might end up in a discovery dispute or attorney-discipline review, the no-content guarantee is the entire point.

Document edit time — motions, briefs, sentencing memos

Word, Pages, and Google Docs in Safari all expose focus duration. A 95-minute editing burst on "Smith — Motion to Suppress" shows up labeled with the document title (not contents) and the matter folder, asking you to confirm. Witness statements, plea memos, sentencing letters — the entire motion-and-brief workflow gets captured as edit-time bursts you can bulk-approve.

Investigator and expert calls

Calls to your PI, to expert witnesses, to fact witnesses are captured by call metadata the same way client calls are. If you tag your PI's number in Contacts with a matter assignment, the calls auto-attribute. For multi-matter PIs ("she's working three of my cases this month") the digest will ask which matter to attribute each call to — single click per call, 4 seconds of decision per call.

Billing models in defense practice — and how ClaimHour fits each

Billing model	What ClaimHour adds	Where the recovered hours show up
Retainer-against-hourly (most common for felony work)	Clean draw-down log per matter	Faster retainer burndown, fewer "I'll have to come back to you on the trust balance" calls to clients
Flat fee — DUI, simple misdemeanor, expungement	Capture data lets you re-price flat fees correctly after 6 months	You discover an "$1,800 simple DUI" actually takes 9.4 hours not 6, and either re-quote at $2,400 or carve out hourly riders for trial-track cases
Mixed flat + hourly rider (most common for misdemeanor practice)	Captures the rider hours that almost always slip — "if it goes to trial, hourly at $325/hr"	Trial preparation hours, motions hearings, and discovery review get billed at full rate instead of disappearing into "well, I quoted flat for the case"
Hourly (white-collar, complex felony, federal)	Highest absolute recovery — every leaked hour is $300–$500	Discovery review bursts, ADA/AUSA phone tag, expert coordination, motion drafting
Court-appointed CJA / state panel	Contemporaneous time source for vouchers; reduces audit risk	Activity-coded time records (in-court / out-of-court / travel / interview) ready for CJA-20 or state-panel reformat
Hybrid retainer with success-fee component (rare; sometimes for civil-side defense work)	Captures the time so the success-fee math is grounded	End-of-matter accounting shows the hours-equivalent value of the engagement

Mixed-model practices are the default in defense; ClaimHour's design doesn't ask you to commit to one model up front. You tag a matter as flat-fee, hourly, retainer-draw, or appointed when you create it, and the captured hours route accordingly in the export.

Privilege, work product, and witness confidentiality

Criminal defense practice operates under the most heavily-litigated privilege regime in law. Attorney-client privilege, work-product doctrine, joint-defense agreements, witness identity confidentiality (especially in violent-crime and gang cases), and the Sixth Amendment's effective-assistance baseline all impose hard limits on what a defender can let third parties see. Any tool that touches a defender's daily workflow has to live inside those limits or it's not a tool — it's a future grievance complaint.

ClaimHour's metadata-only architecture was specifically designed for this constraint set. We've written about the technical details in a long-form architecture post; the criminal-defense-specific summary is:

No call audio, ever. The 22-minute Saturday night arrest call is captured as duration + counterparty + direction. The substance of the call — the legal advice you gave, the facts the client disclosed — never enters our system, never goes to any server.
No email body reading. The ADA email exchange is captured as send/receive counts and compose-window time. The substance of the plea offer, your counter, your client's response — none of it is read, indexed, transmitted, or stored.
No document content scanning. The motion to suppress draft, the sentencing memo, the witness statements — captured as edit-time bursts labeled with the document title and matter folder. The actual text of the motion never leaves your machine. We do not OCR the screen, log keystrokes, or watch the clipboard.
No witness or contact list upload. Counterparty names come from your iPhone Contacts and stay on your device. We do not transmit, sync, or replicate your Contacts. The "list of people the defender has called this week" never exists outside your phone.
Optional "case-name redaction" for shared-office practice. If you sometimes leave your Mac unattended in a shared office or co-working space, a Pro-tier toggle replaces all matter and counterparty names in the digest view with hashed IDs — useful in suites where you share space with another defense firm or with civil-side practitioners.
On-device storage with end-to-end-encrypted iCloud sync. The capture database lives in macOS application support, encrypted at rest with SQLCipher. iCloud sync (optional) uses CloudKit's CKAsset end-to-end encryption — Apple cannot decrypt the contents, and we cannot either. Egress is user-triggered export only.

For a practice that operates under Brady, Giglio, the Sixth Amendment, and ABA Formal Opinion 512 (2024) on AI tools and client consent, the metadata/content distinction isn't a marketing line. It's the load-bearing privacy posture. We deliberately don't ship — and have publicly committed not to ship — a list of capabilities (call transcription, email-body reading, AI-drafted billing narratives) that competitors do ship and that would force the no-PMS solo defense ICP into a per-matter consent workflow they aren't going to run.

Court-appointed CJA and state-panel work

Appointed work is a particular case where ClaimHour's value clarifies. CJA panel attorneys submitting CJA-20 vouchers, and state-panel attorneys submitting equivalent forms (Florida Office of Criminal Conflict Counsel, Texas TIDC, New York 18-B, California CAP, etc.), are required to keep contemporaneous time records broken down by activity code: in-court hours, out-of-court hours, travel hours, interview hours. Most appointed defenders we've talked to either reconstruct these from memory at voucher-submission time (and under-claim by 15–30%) or use a manual log that misses the same fragmentary work that breaks every defense solo's billable day.

ClaimHour captures the raw durations and lets you tag each entry with an activity code at digest-review time. Export is CSV, which most appointed-counsel programs accept directly or which you reformat into the program's voucher template using a one-time spreadsheet template. We are not a CJA voucher generator; we are the upstream time source that makes the voucher accurate. For a panel attorney with 30 active appointments, the savings versus reconstruction-from-memory at voucher time is typically 8–12% of total appointed billings — for a $90,000/year appointed practice, that's $7,000–$11,000 of recovered work that was happening but wasn't getting paid.

What ClaimHour doesn't replace

Your trust accounting. LawPay or your IOLTA-compliant tool still handles retainers, trust withdrawals, and three-way reconciliation. ClaimHour exports the hours; trust accounting reconciles the dollars. We are upstream of trust, not a substitute for it.
Your conflict-check system. Whether you run Smokeball, Conflicts (the Lawyerist tool), or a Word-document master list, your conflict process stays where it is. ClaimHour reads your matter list to attribute captured time; it does not gate intake.
Your case management. If you use Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, or Smokeball for documents, calendar, contacts, and client portal, you keep using them — but most no-PMS defense solos run these out of Word + Apple Mail + iCloud Drive + a paralegal, and ClaimHour was built for that stack.
Your discovery review tool. Body-cam playback, audio transcription tools, and document review platforms (Relativity, Casefleet, OnlineDeposeRecord) do their own work. ClaimHour captures the hours you spent in them; it does not replace them.
Your investigator's billing. Your PI sends you their own invoice, billed however they bill. ClaimHour captures your time talking to them; it doesn't capture or itemize the PI's time.
Bar-required client communication archives. Many state bars require attorneys to retain copies of substantive client communications. Continue using whatever email archiving and document-retention process you already use — ClaimHour is metadata-only and is not, and is not pretending to be, a communications archive.

How ClaimHour fits

If you're a solo criminal-defense lawyer — felony private practice, misdemeanor flat-fee, mixed model, CJA panel, or state-panel appointed — and you've ever looked at a month's bills and thought "I worked harder than this said I did," ClaimHour was built for the gap between those two things. Join the waitlist and we'll email when early access opens. Starter $29/mo, Pro $59/mo, Scale $99/mo (two-seat — useful for solo + paralegal practice).

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