Vertical guide · Updated May 2026

ERISA attorney time tracking: building lodestar records for § 502(g) fee petitions on LTD and benefits denials

ERISA disability and benefits cases take 2–4 years from the first denial letter to final judgment. Most of that time is the pre-litigation administrative stage — and most ERISA solos are not tracking hours during it. By the time the case enters federal court, between 60 and 120 hours of attorney work has gone unrecorded, uncaptured, and unrecoverable at the fee petition.

TL;DR

ClaimHour captures calls with treating physicians and plan administrators, document-edit sessions on denial letters and administrative records, email-compose time during the administrative exhaustion phase, and calendar events for plan appeals and depositions — passively, from the moment the matter is created, no timer required, no PMS needed. For ERISA LTD and benefits solos filing § 502(g) fee petitions, that means a complete contemporaneous record from the first denial call through final brief. $29–$59/mo.

The ERISA records gap: why administrative exhaustion destroys the fee petition

The federal ERISA exhaustion requirement — built into ERISA § 503 and enforced across every circuit — requires claimants to exhaust the plan's internal administrative remedies before a court will hear the case. For a long-term disability denial, that means two administrative appeals: a first-level appeal (typically 45–60 days for the plan) and a final appeal (another 45–60 days). Plans frequently toll the time limits on plan-required medical records; the actual elapsed calendar time is 14–26 months.

During those 14–26 months, the ERISA solo generates substantial attorney work that almost no solo tracks:

Reading the denial letter and claim file (4–8 hours of document review)
Obtaining updated treating-physician letters and declarations (3–6 calls + 2–4 email threads per physician)
Submitting medical evidence and requesting the claim file under 29 C.F.R. § 2560.503-1(h)(2)(iii) (document drafting, call to plan administrator)
Reviewing the plan's independent medical review report (1.5–3 hours per IMR)
Drafting the first administrative appeal brief (8–15 hours)
Drafting the final pre-litigation appeal brief (10–18 hours)

That is 30–60 hours of attorney work before a complaint is ever filed — on top of client calls, status emails, and document reviews accumulated over 14+ months. Without a capture layer running from day one, every hour in this stage is reconstructed from memory, email subject lines, and calendar entries, if it is documented at all.

What § 502(g) fee petitions require

ERISA § 502(g)(1) grants courts discretion to award reasonable attorney fees to a substantially prevailing party. The Supreme Court in Hardt v. Reliance Standard Life Ins. Co., 560 U.S. 242 (2010), held that a claimant who achieves "some degree of success on the merits" qualifies — so remands to the plan administrator for further proceedings count. Most circuits now award fees to prevailing LTD plaintiffs as a matter of course.

The lodestar calculation applies: reasonable hours × reasonable rate, reduced for inadequate records. The three most common cut reasons in ERISA fee petitions mirror those in employment practice:

Reconstructed administrative-stage hours

When an ERISA attorney presents fee-petition entries from the administrative stage that were logged six months after the fact, courts treat them as reconstructed time — subject to the same skepticism as any other reconstructed entries. The Ninth Circuit in Welch v. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., 480 F.3d 942 (9th Cir. 2007), articulated the standard clearly: contemporaneous records are the benchmark, and reconstruction creates an inference of inflation. ERISA solos who track hours from the first denial letter forward have no reconstruction problem to explain.

Block-billed administrative-stage entries

Because administrative-stage hours were not tracked at the time, they tend to end up as block entries in the fee petition: "Reviewed claim file, drafted appeal brief, calls with treating physician — 14 hours." Courts in most circuits apply a 10–30% reduction for block billing, exactly as they do in employment and civil rights fee petitions. The block billing happens not from carelessness but from the math of reconstructing three months of work into a single fee petition entry.

Missing pre-litigation hours entirely

The worst outcome is not discounted hours but omitted hours: an ERISA solo who cannot reconstruct the administrative stage at all simply does not include those hours in the fee petition. A 30–60 hour administrative stage at $350/hr is $10,500–$21,000 of earned fees that never get claimed. That is not a discount; it is a write-off.

What passive capture looks like across an ERISA LTD case timeline

Month 1–2: Initial denial review

The case starts with a call from the client reporting the denial. iOS call metadata captures the call duration. The evening digest surfaces "call from [client], 34 min" for matter attribution. The next session is a document-edit event: opening the denial letter, reviewing the plan document, and reading the applicable policy definitions. PDF and Word focus-duration events capture that session in full.

Months 3–14: Administrative exhaustion

Each treating-physician call for supporting letters — typically 3–5 physicians per LTD case — generates a captured call event. Each email thread with the physician's office generates captured compose-time. Each document-edit session on the plan's independent medical review reports, treating-physician declarations, and draft appeal briefs is captured at file-open focus-duration. The first and second administrative appeal briefs — the most hours-intensive single documents in the administrative stage — show up in the digest as multi-hour edit sessions, ready to approve against the matter the evening they are drafted.

Months 15–30: Federal litigation

Once the case enters federal court, the billing pattern shifts to depositions (rare in ERISA LTD cases, which are typically decided on the administrative record), motion briefing (cross-motions for summary judgment), and oral argument. Document-edit sessions on the administrative record, the parties' briefs, and the district court's opinion are all captured. Calls with the client on status and settlement posture are captured. The fee petition, when drafted, draws on a complete contemporaneous record from month one.

How ClaimHour fits ERISA practice

If you are an ERISA solo handling LTD denials, health benefit claims, or pension disputes — and you bill under QuickBooks without a PMS — ClaimHour's passive capture layer closes the administrative-stage records gap that destroys ERISA § 502(g) fee petitions. Join the waitlist and we'll email when early access opens.

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Related questions

What is the ERISA § 502(g) fee-shifting standard?

ERISA § 502(g)(1) (29 U.S.C. § 1132(g)(1)) grants courts discretion to award a reasonable attorney's fee to either party. After Hardt v. Reliance Standard Life Ins. Co., 560 U.S. 242 (2010), a claimant who achieves some degree of success on the merits qualifies. Most circuit courts award fees to prevailing plaintiffs in LTD benefit-denial cases. The lodestar calculation under Hensley applies, with the court's discretion to reduce for inadequate records.

Why does the pre-litigation administrative stage create the biggest records gap?

ERISA requires exhaustion of the plan's administrative remedies before filing suit — typically two administrative appeals taking 14–26 months. Most solos are not running a time-tracking system during this phase: no docket number, no case management system yet. But the administrative stage generates 30–60 hours of substantive attorney work (reviewing the claim file, obtaining treating-physician declarations, submitting evidence, drafting appeal briefs) — and almost none of it makes it into the fee petition without a capture layer running from day one.

Does ClaimHour capture time spent reviewing administrative records?

Yes. ERISA administrative records — the plan document, claim file, denial letters, independent medical review reports, and prior appeal briefs — are typically Word and PDF files. ClaimHour captures file-open focus-duration events for Word, Pages, and PDF viewers, recording the document title and edit-start/stop timestamps, never the contents. A two-hour review of a 600-page LTD claim file appears in the digest as a two-hour document-edit event labeled with the file name.

How does ClaimHour handle the long time horizon of ERISA cases?

ClaimHour stores captured events indefinitely by matter. An LTD case running from the first administrative denial through trial — 3–4 years — generates a continuous captured-hours record from the moment the matter is created in the app. The fee petition export covers the full case history: administrative stage calls and document reviews, litigation-phase briefs and depositions, and fee-petition preparation time. No reconstruction required at any stage.