Why do estate planning solos need time tracking if they quote flat fees?

Four reasons. First, flat-fee quotes without historical hours data are guesses — and guesses systematically underestimate complex matters. After six months of ClaimHour data, you know the actual hours distribution for a revocable living trust (median 6.4 hrs), a pour-over will package (median 2.1 hrs), and a contested probate matter (median 47 hrs). That data sets the floor for profitable flat-fee quotes. Second, estate plans generate client-service overruns — follow-up calls after signing, amendment requests, beneficiary-change questions — that are often treated as free but are real attorney time. Third, probate and trust-administration work that flows from estate plans is almost always hourly. Fourth, family disputes over estate assets often generate contested litigation that is hourly and high-stakes.

What are the biggest time leaks in an estate-planning practice?

The pattern is consistent: (1) client-relationship calls after the documents are signed — 'does my daughter need to do anything now?', 'what happens if I move to Florida?', 'my husband just died, what do we do first?' — calls that lawyers typically absorb as relationship maintenance but that are genuinely billable under the hourly-rider or amendment-fee provisions of the engagement letter; (2) trust-funding follow-up calls with banks and title companies, often 20–30 minutes per asset and never logged; (3) document draft amendments — the client who wants to change the trustee after every family holiday — accumulated over months into dozens of 20-minute bursts; (4) estate administration after the client dies — the probate-opening calls, inventory discussions, tax-filing clarifications — which belong to the estate account but often go into a catch-all unbilled bucket.

Does ClaimHour capture trust-funding calls to banks and financial institutions?

Yes. The iOS companion captures call duration, counterparty name (from your Contacts app), and call direction for every call including those to bank trust departments, title companies, financial advisors, and beneficiaries. A 28-minute call to a Fidelity trust officer to confirm a beneficiary designation change is captured by duration and labeled by counterparty — no audio, no content. The entry appears in the day-end digest for one-click attribution to the estate or trust administration matter.

Can ClaimHour help with probate hourly billing alongside flat-fee estate planning?

Yes. ClaimHour handles both billing models in parallel: flat-fee estate-plan matters accumulate hours in a per-matter ledger without generating invoice entries (for pricing intelligence), while probate and trust-administration matters generate time entries that export directly to QuickBooks or LawPay as invoice line items at your hourly rate. The end-of-day digest attributes each captured event to the right matter regardless of its billing model — you approve the attribution and the digest marks it for either the flat-fee ledger or the hourly invoice accordingly.

Vertical guide · Updated May 2026

Estate planning attorney time tracking: know your flat-fee math before you quote

The flat-fee estate-planning practice looks simpler than hourly billing — one fee, one matter, done. The reality is that every flat-fee estate plan generates client-service tail, amendment requests, funding calls, and administration questions that accumulate as invisible hours. And when the estate plan gives way to probate, contested trust administration, or a family dispute, the billing switches to hourly and the leaks get expensive fast.

TL;DR

ClaimHour captures calls, document edits, and emails passively — no timers, no audio, no email contents — and gives you per-matter hours totals for both flat-fee estate-planning matters (to calibrate future quotes) and hourly probate and trust-administration matters (to invoice accurately). $29–$59/mo. Exports to QuickBooks, LawPay, FreshBooks, or CSV. No PMS required.

Where estate-planning solos lose money on flat fees

The flat-fee model for estate plans works when the quote reflects the actual hours the matter consumes. Most estate-planning solos price by intuition — "a revocable trust package is $3,000" — and absorb the variance silently. The silent variance accumulates into an annual leak that looks like low realization on the practice as a whole but has no specific name until you run the numbers.

Client-service calls after signing

The estate plan is signed. The flat fee is paid. The relationship doesn't end. The client calls six weeks later because their daughter asks if she needs to do anything. Then again three months later when they decide to add a grandchild. Then again when they read about the SECURE Act changes and want to know if their IRA beneficiary designation still makes sense. These calls are real attorney time — 15 to 30 minutes each, several times a year per client — and they almost never make it onto an invoice because the flat-fee engagement letter doesn't contemplate them and the attorney doesn't have a system for capturing them.

Trust-funding coordination

A revocable living trust is not funded until the assets are retitled. That retitling requires coordination with banks (account re-registration), brokerage firms (beneficiary designation updates), title companies (deed re-recording), and sometimes financial advisors who resist the retitling because it moves assets off their platform. Each coordination call — typically 20 to 30 minutes per asset — is a real billing event. A client with a home, two bank accounts, a brokerage account, and an IRA generates four to six coordination calls, each unreimbursed under the standard flat-fee quote.

Amendment requests

Clients amend their estate plans. The divorced beneficiary who needs to be removed. The new grandchild who needs to be added. The trustee who moves away and needs to be replaced. The business interest that needs a new distribution provision. Each amendment is typically priced at a separate flat fee, but the time to scope the amendment, draft the document, review it with the client, and process the signature is almost always underestimated because the attorney has no data on how long amendments actually take by amendment type.

Estate administration after death

When the client dies, the estate plan triggers administration work — probate if assets weren't transferred to the trust, trust administration if they were, often a mix of both. Estate administration is almost always billed hourly. The calls with the successor trustee, the inventory discussions, the tax-clearance letter drafts, the beneficiary-dispute mediations — all should be on the invoice. Many aren't, for the same reason: no passive capture system, no end-of-day digest, and the events happen scattered across a two-year administration that drains into an unbilled bucket.

What ClaimHour captures in an estate-planning practice

Client calls — even the short ones

The iOS companion captures call duration, counterparty name, and call direction from iOS call metadata — no audio, no content. An estate-planning solo typically has a deep contact list of long-term clients; once a client's phone number is tagged to their matter, every call attributes automatically. The 22-minute call that came in while you were in the car between client meetings shows up in the digest that evening: "Call with [client], 22 min — estate/trust matter." One click to approve and attribute to the hourly-rider line or the flat-fee hours ledger.

Document drafts — trust instruments, deeds, pour-over wills

File-open and focus-duration events capture document-edit time for Word and Pages. A trust amendment draft, a deed re-record, a pour-over will revision, an estate inventory — each edit session is captured as a labeled time block. The document title (not the contents) is what appears in the digest. A 90-minute session on "Garcia Revocable Trust Amendment — 2026" shows up exactly that way — no content, just the time and the context.

Bank and financial institution calls

Trust-funding calls to banks and brokerages go through the same call-metadata capture as client calls. A 30-minute hold-plus-conversation with a bank trust officer to re-register an account is a real billing event. Most estate-planning solos absorb this time because they're not at their desk when the call happens and can't remember the exact duration by end of week. ClaimHour captures it as it happens.

Email — client threads, estate-tax correspondence, beneficiary questions

Sent-message count and compose-window duration give you the email time signal without reading message bodies. An estate-administration email thread with a successor trustee who asks detailed questions about distribution timing, beneficiary eligibility, and GST exemptions can consume 45 minutes of compose time distributed across a morning. The digest captures that compose time, broken down by counterparty, for attribution to the estate-administration matter.

The flat-fee calibration benefit

After six months of captured hours on flat-fee matters, the estate-planning solo has a distribution — not just an intuition — for how long each document type actually takes. That distribution is the foundation for profitable flat-fee pricing. It also reveals which matter types consistently over-run the quoted fee and which are reliably profitable. Most solos who run this exercise find one or two matter types they've been systematically underquoting and adjust within one billing cycle. The captured hours pay for the software in the first repricing decision.

We walk through the full flat-fee repricing arithmetic — the engagement-letter hours-per-matter data, the effective hourly rate calculation, and the annual revenue impact — in our post on the flat-fee solo's leak.

Probate and trust administration: the hourly side

Estate-planning practices almost always include probate and trust-administration work that bills hourly. Those matters are where the largest individual billing leaks occur, because the work is spread over months or years, the attorney is often working with multiple successor trustees simultaneously, and the individual events — a 20-minute call with a beneficiary, a 45-minute inventory review, a 30-minute call with the estate's accountant — are small enough to seem not worth logging but large enough to matter when they accumulate.

For probate and trust-administration matters on ClaimHour, captured hours export directly to QuickBooks or LawPay as invoice line items at the estate's hourly rate. The administration timeline — filing date, inventory due date, accounting due date, final distribution — can be tracked as tagged calendar events that flow into the digest for attribution to the estate matter.

How ClaimHour fits estate-planning practice

If you are an estate-planning solo — revocable trusts, pour-over wills, advance directives, probate, trust administration, guardianship — and you've ever said "I put a lot of work into that estate and never charged for it," ClaimHour is built for that. Join the waitlist and we'll email when early access opens.

Get early access