How does ClaimHour handle QDRO drafting sessions spread across three months?

ClaimHour captures each QDRO drafting session as a separate document-edit event with precise timestamps — document title and the duration of each editing burst. A QDRO with five drafting sessions over three months (initial draft 2 hours, revision after plan administrator's rejection letter 1.5 hours, second revision per opposing counsel's comments 1 hour, final review 0.8 hours, cover-letter drafting 0.4 hours) appears as five separate entries in the digest. Reconstruction from memory at billing time typically collapses those 5.7 hours into 'QDRO drafting — 3 hours' because the sessions are remembered as a category, not as individual events. The contemporaneous record captures the actual total.

What about business valuation expert coordination time in high-asset divorce?

Business valuation in contested divorce is one of the most time-intensive expert-coordination workflows in family law. The attorney interfaces between the client, the valuator, the opposing expert, and the court over a 3–6 month valuation process. Calls with the CPA valuator to review engagement scope, discuss methodology, and review the draft report run 20–45 minutes each and occur 5–10 times during the engagement. Calls with the opposing valuator or opposing counsel about methodology disputes add another 4–8 calls. Email-compose time for transmitting financial documents, requesting supplemental schedules, and responding to the opposing expert's questions adds 30–60 minutes per week during active valuation periods. ClaimHour captures all of this — calls as duration + contact metadata, emails as compose-time events — without reading any of the financial documents or call audio.

Vertical guide · Updated June 2026

Divorce attorney time tracking: asset discovery, QDRO drafting, and contested hearing prep

Q: How is time tracking for contested divorce different from general family law billing?

The general family-law time-tracking problem is after-hours client calls and hearing-week surge — both driven by emotional intensity and poor record-keeping at the moment of contact. Contested divorce has those problems plus three distinct failure modes that are unique to high-asset or business-owner divorces: (1) asset discovery review — financial statements, tax returns, business valuation reports, and retirement account statements are dense documents that take 2–4 hours each to review and are frequently underlogged because the attorney is reading rather than 'doing' something; (2) QDRO drafting and negotiation — a complex QDRO (qualified domestic relations order) for a defined-benefit pension takes 4–8 hours across 3–6 sessions spread over months, and without contemporaneous records, reconstruction collapses those sessions into a round-number estimate that understates the true time by 30–50%; (3) settlement conference preparation — 6–10 hours of intensive preparation in the 3 days before a settlement conference is the most economically dense work in a contested divorce, and it is the work that gets most heavily compressed in retrospective billing.

Q: How does ClaimHour handle post-divorce modification proceedings years after the original case?

Post-divorce modifications — support modifications, custody modifications, enforcement of property division — are new matters with their own billing records. ClaimHour creates a new matter tag for the modification proceeding; captured events (calls with the client about changed circumstances, document-edit sessions on the modification motion, court hearing calendar events) attribute to the new matter independently of the original divorce matter history. The original matter's time log is preserved and does not mix with the modification proceeding. Many divorce solos have long-running relationships with clients across multiple matters (original divorce, QDRO enforcement 3 years later, support modification 5 years later); ClaimHour's per-matter capture keeps each engagement's records clean.

Contested divorce billing has all the emotional-intensity capture problems of general family law — the late-night client call, the hearing-week surge — plus three failure modes specific to high-asset and business-owner cases that general family-law time tracking guides do not address. Asset discovery review sessions are long, dense, and systematically undervalued. QDRO drafting spreads across months in sessions that collapse into a round-number block at billing time. Settlement conference preparation is the most economically concentrated work of the entire case and the work most heavily compressed in retrospective invoicing.

TL;DR

ClaimHour captures financial document review sessions, QDRO drafting bursts, business valuation expert coordination calls, and settlement conference preparation time — passively, no timer, no audio, no document contents. It builds the contemporaneous time record that contested-divorce billing disputes require, including post-divorce modification proceedings and QDRO enforcement matters. $29–$59/mo. No PMS required.

The asset discovery review problem

High-asset divorce discovery involves large financial documents: tax returns (40–120 pages each for business-owner clients), business financial statements, retirement account statements, real estate appraisals, stock option schedules, and deferred compensation summaries. Each document takes 1.5–4 hours to review at the depth required for contentious litigation. The attorney does this work on their Mac or iPad, often across multiple sessions spread over a week.

The billing problem: reading a financial document looks passive. There is no obvious output — no draft, no motion, no memo — until the attorney synthesizes the review into a deposition outline or a written analysis. The instinct is to bill the synthesis (the visible work) and undervalue or forget the underlying review. A business with four years of financial statements — 400 pages of tax returns, consolidated financials, and officer compensation schedules — requires 8–14 hours of review time before the attorney can draft the first interrogatory to the opposing expert. That time needs to appear on the invoice as "review of financial records" at its actual duration, not at the 3–4 hours the attorney can reconstruct from memory a week later.

ClaimHour captures PDF and document focus duration — the moment a document opens to the moment the attorney closes or switches away — as separate events with timestamps. Eight review sessions on a client's tax return appear as eight separate events with their actual durations, not as a single round-number "document review" entry.

QDRO drafting: the spread-across-months failure mode

A qualified domestic relations order (QDRO) for a complex defined-benefit pension or a 401(k) with employer stock and after-tax contributions is a 4–8 hour drafting project that does not happen in one sitting. The typical QDRO timeline: initial plan administrator inquiry and form review (45 minutes), first draft (2–3 hours), plan administrator rejection letter review and revision (1.5 hours), negotiation with opposing counsel about benefit-calculation elections (2–3 calls, 20–30 minutes each), final draft (1 hour), court submission and follow-up (30 minutes). Total: 8–11 hours across 3–5 months.

Reconstruction from memory at billing time compresses those 3–5 months into a single mental image of "the QDRO work," and the billing entry says 3–4 hours. The sessions in months 2 and 3 — the plan administrator revision and the opposing counsel negotiation — are the most completely lost because they occurred when the attorney's attention was elsewhere. Contemporaneous capture of each document-edit session and each plan-administrator and opposing-counsel call produces the 8–11 hour actual total, not the 3–4 hour reconstructed estimate.

Business valuation expert coordination

When a divorce involves a business interest, the attorney manages a multi-month expert engagement that is billing-intensive but looks like "coordination" rather than legal work. The CPA valuator needs access to financial records (2–3 calls to identify and request documents), needs to discuss methodology with the attorney (2–4 calls, 30–45 minutes each), and needs the attorney to review and comment on the draft report (4–6 hours of review, 1–2 calls with the valuator). The opposing expert's report needs a similar review (3–5 hours). Opposing counsel calls to dispute methodology or negotiate stipulations add another 3–5 calls during the valuation phase.

Aggregate: 15–25 hours of calls and document review during a 3–4 month business valuation engagement. Without contemporaneous capture, this phase appears on the final invoice as 6–10 hours because each individual event seemed too short to log, or the attorney deferred logging it and later couldn't reconstruct the sequence. At $350/hr, the valuation-phase shortfall alone represents $1,750–$5,250 per matter at the 50th percentile of billing inaccuracy.

Settlement conference preparation: the most undervalued work in contested divorce

The 3 days before a settlement conference or a contested trial are the most economically dense work days of a divorce case. The attorney is: reviewing the full financial picture to establish positions ($100,000 to $1.5 million asset base), preparing support calculations under the state's child and spousal support guidelines (1.5–3 hours), drafting the settlement conference memorandum or trial brief (3–6 hours), reviewing the opposing party's statement (1.5–2 hours), coordinating with financial experts about their expected testimony (2–4 calls), and managing the client's escalating anxiety via calls and texts that arrive constantly in the 48 hours before the conference.

Total preparation time: 12–22 hours across the 3-day window. Typical billing from reconstruction: 7–10 hours, because the short client-anxiety calls are forgotten, the financial calculation sessions merge with the brief-drafting session in memory, and the opposing-expert coordination calls each seemed "too short to log." ClaimHour captures each of these categories as they occur and presents them in each evening's digest for one-click attribution to the matter. The full 12–22 hours appears on the invoice.

Post-divorce modifications and enforcement

Divorce clients often return for modification proceedings — support modifications as income changes, QDRO enforcement when the plan administrator refuses to honor the order, custody modifications as circumstances change. Each is a new billable matter with its own records. ClaimHour creates a separate matter tag for each proceeding; the modification's captured time does not mix with the original divorce matter's history. A client relationship that spans a 2009 divorce, a 2012 QDRO enforcement, a 2015 support modification, and a 2026 custody modification generates four cleanly separated billing records, each defensible independently.

QDRO enforcement matters specifically — where the plan administrator misinterprets the order and the attorney must correspond with the plan, draft a clarifying order, and potentially return to court — generate concentrated short-burst billing: 4–8 hours of correspondence, drafting, and calls spread across 60–90 days. Without contemporaneous capture, each individual burst is too short to log and the final invoice understates the work by 40–60%.

How ClaimHour fits divorce practice

If you are a divorce solo handling contested high-asset cases, business-owner cases, or QDRO-intensive pension divisions — and the phrase "I know I spent more time on that engagement than I billed" has crossed your mind in the last month — 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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