Most immigration work is flat-fee — why track time at all?

Two reasons. First, because flat-fee quoting only works if you know your historical average — a solo who doesn't track time on a naturalization case has no idea whether $2,500 is profitable or a loss. Second, because the flat fee often needs a rider: RFE response, motion to reopen, hearing representation. Those pieces bill hourly and eat the margin when they're not tracked.

Does ClaimHour know USCIS case types?

You can tag matters with case types like I-130, I-485, I-589, N-400, and ClaimHour will learn contact-to-matter associations across them. The daily digest labels captured events with the matter type so your eyes can scan 'naturalization intake call — 23 min' versus 'asylum hearing prep — 48 min' without thinking.

Can I handle Spanish-speaking clients?

The capture engine is language-agnostic — it watches metadata, not content, so Spanish calls, emails, and documents are tracked the same way as English ones. The review digest is English in the menubar app; Spanish localization of the UI is on the roadmap for late 2026.

Is there a privilege concern with capturing undocumented clients' metadata?

ClaimHour is metadata-only by design — durations, counterparty names from your contacts, subject-line keywords. Nothing about a client's immigration status is inferred or stored. Data lives on your device; only approved and exported entries leave the Mac, and those go to your billing tool, not ours.

Vertical guide · Updated April 2026

Immigration lawyer time tracking: built for solo USCIS practice

Immigration solos quote flat fees for the headline work — I-130s, I-485s, naturalizations — and then eat the hourly overruns. RFE responses at 11pm. Consulate call-ins the morning of an interview. Translating a client's WhatsApp trail into an I-589 declaration. A time tracker that understands how an immigration practice actually flows is worth its monthly cost many times over.

TL;DR

ClaimHour is built for solo lawyers who bill hourly — not a native fit for a pure flat-fee immigration practice, but a strong fit for the mixed-model reality: flat-fee filings plus hourly riders for RFEs, motions, hearings, and consultations. Captures the hours you'd otherwise write off, labels them by matter type (I-130, I-485, I-589, N-400, etc.), and exports to QuickBooks, LawPay, FreshBooks, or CSV. $29–$59/mo. Metadata-only capture that never reads client emails or document contents.

Where immigration solos leak billable hours

The filings you quote flat-fee for — an I-130 petition, a green-card adjustment, a naturalization — are predictable in paperwork but unpredictable in how much client hand-holding they require. Your quote assumed 6 client calls. You actually did 14. That's eight unbilled calls, 2–3 hours of work, and $500–$750 of margin evaporating because you quoted on averages and got a nervous client.

The hours that should be billed hourly — because they're outside the flat-fee scope — are the ones that leak hardest:

RFE (Request for Evidence) response drafts — 4–20 hours of work, usually billed hourly at $250–$350/hr, often started at 9pm after the kids are asleep and never logged.
USCIS / NVC / consulate call-ins — 30–90 minutes on hold, then a 15-minute conversation. The hold time is real billable attention and almost never gets recorded.
Client intake calls for complex cases — the "tell me your whole story" hour for an asylum or VAWA consult. Usually billed flat as the consult fee, but the follow-up 3–5 short calls that happen before the retainer is signed are almost pure leakage.
Translation and document review — reviewing a client's WhatsApp history to build a declaration for an asylum case is billable attorney time. It's also the kind of work that happens in 20-minute bursts over three days and never makes it onto a timesheet.
Court or USCIS interview prep — the 90 minutes the night before reviewing country conditions, rehearsing credibility questions, or re-reading an I-589 package.

How ClaimHour captures an immigration practice's work

Calls — on your iPhone, your Mac, or both

The iOS companion watches call metadata: duration, counterparty number, direction (incoming / outgoing / missed). If the counterparty is in your Contacts app and tagged with a matter, the call auto-attributes. For hotline numbers (USCIS Contact Center 800-375-5283, consulate numbers) we ship a starter directory you can tag once and reuse. A 47-minute hold on the USCIS Contact Center shows up in your day-end digest, labeled, ready to approve.

Emails — counts, not contents

Apple Mail + Gmail + Outlook for Mac integrations track sent/received counts per contact per day. We don't read email bodies. For an RFE response thread with a client over four days, you'll see "8 emails with [client], ~47 minutes of composition time" in the digest — the time signal comes from Mail/Outlook's compose-window open duration, not from content analysis.

Documents — edit-time bursts

Word, Pages, and Google Docs in Safari all expose focus duration. A 90-minute burst of editing an I-589 personal statement is a clear signal; ClaimHour labels it with the active document title (not contents) and asks you to confirm the matter. You can blacklist specific files or folders if you don't want them in the capture scope.

Calendar — USCIS dates, court dates, interview prep

Calendar.app and Google Calendar events flow into the digest. If you tag a calendar event with a matter name or prefix (e.g. "INT-Garcia" for a naturalization interview with Mr. Garcia), the event time is pre-attributed. Court appearances and USCIS interviews become single-click approvals rather than memory reconstructions.

Matter-type labeling for USCIS practice

ClaimHour ships with optional starter matter-type tags that fit a typical immigration solo:

Matter type	Typical billing model	What ClaimHour usually captures
I-130 family petition	Flat fee + hourly rider for RFE	Client calls, RFE draft sessions, USCIS status-check calls
I-485 adjustment of status	Flat fee + hourly for complications	Medical exam follow-ups, interview prep sessions, hold time with USCIS
I-589 asylum	Mostly hourly or mixed	Country-conditions research, declaration drafting, client interview sessions
N-400 naturalization	Flat fee	Civics-prep coaching calls, interview rehearsal, document re-gathering
Removal defense	Hourly or hybrid retainer	Master/individual calendar prep, ICE check-in prep, motion drafting
Employment (H-1B, L-1, PERM)	Flat fee to employer	Employer liaison calls, PERM audit responses, labor certification tracking

The tags aren't enforced — you can rename them or ignore them entirely. They exist because "file" is easier to scan in a digest than a matter number.

A week in an immigration solo's digest

For context, here's an anonymized example of a Wednesday evening digest for a solo handling mixed family-based and asylum work:

08:12–08:26 — 14 min, Call with [asylum client], incoming — flagged as asylum intake follow-up
09:05–09:58 — 53 min, Word document edit burst "Garcia I-130 cover letter" — attribute to I-130 family?
10:30–11:17 — 47 min, Call to 800-375-5283 (USCIS Contact Center) — attribute to which matter?
12:45–13:04 — 19 min, 3 emails sent to [employer contact] — attribute to H-1B employer matter?
15:20–16:52 — 92 min, Pages edit burst "Asylum declaration — client initials MV" — attribute to I-589?
19:10–19:31 — 21 min, Call with [family of client] — attribute to I-485?

Each line is one approval click, or you can bulk-approve a category. Total review time: about 2 minutes. Result: ~4 hours of captured work that would otherwise have been written off.

Flat-fee quoting: the side benefit of tracking

Immigration practice is dominated by flat fees because clients expect them and bar competition has settled on them. The trap is that a flat fee quoted without historical data is a guess. After six months of ClaimHour data, you know: "Our average I-130 takes 8.4 hours from retainer to approval. At $250/hr effective rate, our current $1,800 flat fee is breaking even. Either the fee needs to move to $2,100 or we need to streamline the intake — and we have the data to make the call."

This is the quiet reason solo immigration practices that track time consistently have healthier margins than those that don't. You're not billing hourly — you're using hourly data to price your flat fees correctly.

Privacy posture for immigration clients

Immigration clients include undocumented individuals, asylum seekers, victims of domestic violence, and survivors of trafficking. The privacy stakes are unusually high. ClaimHour is metadata-only — we never read email bodies, call audio, or document contents. Your client's WhatsApp history, immigration status, or case narrative never leaves your machine. Only the entries you explicitly approve and export leave, and those go to your billing tool, not ours.

We've written about this stance in more depth at why we built ClaimHour and our privacy policy. If you're evaluating capture tools for a sensitive practice, those two pages are worth reading before you decide.

How ClaimHour fits

If you're a solo immigration lawyer — family-based, employment-based, asylum, removal defense — and you've ever said out loud "I know I put more hours into that case than I charged for," ClaimHour is built for that. Join the waitlist and we'll email when early access opens.

Get early access