What hours do family-law solos most often forget to bill?

The pattern we hear repeatedly: off-hours crisis calls from clients (evenings, weekends, the week before a custody hearing), emails fired off during 15-minute gaps between meetings, and document drafts done at the kitchen table after kids are asleep. These are exactly the hours billable-moment capture is designed to see — because the lawyer's memory at end-of-week has already overwritten them with new crises.

Is ClaimHour comfortable for emotionally sensitive client communications?

It's metadata-only by design — we never read email bodies, call audio, or document contents. The fact that you spoke with a client for 47 minutes on a Sunday is captured; the content of the conversation never leaves the client's and the lawyer's devices. For family-law practices where emotional disclosures happen every day, the metadata-only architecture matters.

Can I tag calls as billable or non-billable on-the-fly?

Yes. The end-of-day digest lets you approve, edit rate, or mark non-billable in one click per entry. You can also pre-set rules per client — e.g. 'everything with [client] is billable at $300/hr' or 'everything with [spouse-opposing party] is non-billable since we can't talk to them directly'.

What about domestic-violence cases where client safety matters?

Nothing about the client's case is stored or inferred — only that a call happened, its duration, and the counterparty name from your contacts. Data lives on your device. For DV practice specifically we ship a 'hide counterparty' option that replaces names with a matter ID in the digest if your device is ever viewed by someone unauthorized.

Vertical guide · Updated April 2026

Family law solo time tracking: capture the late-night calls you always forget to bill

Of every practice area we've studied, family-law solos leak the most billable hours — not because they don't work hard, but because the work happens in exactly the moments a timer is the last thing on anyone's mind. Sunday evening calls from a client whose ex just violated visitation. Emails fired off in the parking lot before a custody hearing. 10:30pm drafts of a motion for emergency temporary orders. Here's how to catch those hours before they dissolve into the next crisis.

TL;DR

ClaimHour is built for hourly-billing solos and is a strong fit for family-law practice: passive capture of client calls (including on your iPhone), emails, and document edit time, with a 2-minute evening review. Metadata-only — we never read email bodies or document contents. Starter $29/mo, Pro $59/mo. Exports to QuickBooks, LawPay, FreshBooks, or CSV. For solos who typically leak 5–10 hours a week to forgotten after-hours work, Pro pays for itself in the first week.

Where family-law solos actually lose billable hours

We've spent dozens of hours reading r/Lawyertalk threads, bar association survey data, and talking to solo family-law practitioners. A pattern repeats:

The Sunday evening crisis call. Client's ex no-shows a custody exchange, or a teenager says something alarming, and you're on the phone for 45 minutes at 7:15pm. Monday morning there are three new fires and you don't re-enter Sunday.
The parking-lot email. You have 11 minutes before a status conference. Opposing counsel just emailed a settlement revision. You read it, dictate a response in Mail, send, walk into court. Four minutes of real attention, never logged.
The late-night motion draft. A motion to modify support needs to be filed Thursday. It's Wednesday 10pm. You draft for 90 minutes at the kitchen table. By Thursday noon, that 90 minutes has become "some time last night" in your head.
The hearing-week surge. The three days before a contested custody hearing are wall-to-wall billable, but the preparation is fragmented — 20 minutes re-reading the GAL report, 15 minutes reviewing your client's income records, 25 minutes prepping cross. None of those fragments make it onto the timesheet because each one feels too short to log.
The emotional-support component. A 30-minute call where you spent 10 minutes on facts and 20 minutes listening to a crying client is still 30 billable minutes. Most solos instinctively write off the 20 minutes as non-billable "hand-holding." In most jurisdictions it isn't — it's legal representation that happens to include emotional stabilization. The bar considers that billable. You probably weren't taught to log it.

The math on a typical solo's week

A solo family-law practitioner billing $300/hour, working a target 1,600 hours/year (about 32/week). Industry data suggests solos typically record 65–75% of worked hours. Take 70% as a realistic middle: that's 22 billed hours out of 32 worked. The 10 unbilled hours a week × $300/hr × 48 weeks = $144,000 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 5 recovered hours per week: $1,500/week, $72,000/year, at a cost of $708/year (ClaimHour Pro) or $348/year (Starter). The ROI math is unusually clean. Most SaaS tools talk in 5–10% efficiency gains; this is a 20–30% revenue recovery category.

How ClaimHour handles the family-law workflow

Calls, especially after hours

The iOS companion runs on your iPhone and watches call metadata 24/7 — incoming, outgoing, duration, counterparty. A Sunday call from a client in your contacts shows up in Monday morning's digest as "Sunday 7:15pm — 45 min — [client name]." You approve or edit in one click. Weekend and after-hours calls are the single largest source of recovered hours for family-law practice, and this is the specific workflow ClaimHour was built around.

Emails, without reading content

Apple Mail, Gmail, and Outlook integrations count sent and received messages per contact per day, and track compose-window open duration. The parking-lot email becomes "Tuesday 2:47pm — 1 email sent to [opposing counsel] — 4 min compose time." You write the narrative; we never see the body. For family-law practice where client communications are often deeply personal, this is a meaningful guarantee.

Document edit time

Word, Pages, and Google Docs in Safari expose focus duration. A 90-minute motion draft shows up with the document title and matter attribution. You can exclude specific documents or folders from capture if you don't want them in scope.

Hearing-week surges

The fragmented 15-and-20-minute prep bursts the week before a hearing are exactly where ClaimHour earns its cost. Each burst gets its own digest entry; you can bulk-approve a day's prep time in one click. After the hearing, the total comes out to the 8–12 hours you actually worked, not the 4–6 you would have reconstructed from memory.

Client-communication privilege and DV considerations

Family-law practice includes some of the most privacy-sensitive client relationships in law: domestic-violence survivors, custody-crisis clients, clients with mental-health histories that matter to the case. ClaimHour's metadata-only architecture was built with this specifically in mind.

No call audio is recorded or transmitted.
No email bodies are read, indexed, or sent to any server.
No document contents are scanned.
Counterparty names come from your Contacts app — you control what's there.
A "hide counterparty" toggle (Pro tier) replaces contact names with matter IDs in the digest view — useful if you sometimes leave your Mac unattended in a shared office.
Data lives on your device. Exports are explicit — approved entries leave as QuickBooks IIF or CSV to your billing tool, and nothing else.

What about flat-fee family-law work?

Some family-law solos use flat fees for uncontested divorces, name changes, and simple prenups. ClaimHour isn't a quoting tool, but the captured data becomes invaluable flat-fee calibration: after six months of data you'll know "our average uncontested divorce takes 11.2 hours — we should quote flat at $3,400 not $2,800." If your practice is a mix of flat-fee simple matters and hourly contested work, you get both benefits from the same capture stream.

What ClaimHour doesn't replace

Your billing system. QuickBooks, LawPay, FreshBooks — keep using what you use. We export to all of them.
Trust accounting. LawPay or a dedicated IOLTA-compliant tool still handles retainers and trust. We're capture, not accounting.
Document assembly. HotDocs, Lawyaw, or your Word templates do that work. We just notice when you're using them.
Calendar management. We read your calendar for capture, but we don't schedule or manage it.
Client portal or e-signatures. Different tool category entirely.

How ClaimHour fits

If you're a solo family-law practitioner, bill hourly (or mixed hourly + flat), and the phrase "I know I spent more time on that than I billed" has crossed your mind in the last month, ClaimHour was built for this exact pattern. Join the waitlist and we'll email when early access opens. Starter $29/mo, Pro $59/mo — both cover the capture, only Pro includes unlimited matters and bar-standard 0.1-hour rounding.

Get early access