How does ClaimHour handle billing attribution when the same work session serves multiple MDL plaintiffs?

ClaimHour's evening digest presents each work session as a captured event with actual duration and document or call context. For a session that begins with reviewing common expert deposition transcripts (common benefit work) and ends with the bellwether plaintiff's damages summary (individual plaintiff work), the attorney sees two distinct captured events in the evening digest — the transcript review session and the damages document session — and can attribute each to the correct matter: the common benefit ledger or the individual plaintiff billing. The passive capture does not require the attorney to split the timer manually during the session; it automatically distinguishes separate document focus events so the attribution happens in the evening digest review rather than being reconstructed from memory at month end.

Vertical guide · Updated June 2026

Mass tort attorney time tracking: MDL common benefit work, bellwether trial preparation, and science day documentation

Q: What is MDL common benefit time, and why is it reviewed under the Hensley lodestar standard?

In multidistrict litigation, the MDL court typically establishes a common benefit fund to compensate attorneys who perform work that benefits all plaintiffs — depositions of corporate witnesses, development of expert witnesses, creation of the common discovery database, and briefing of common legal issues. Because common benefit fees are assessed against all settling plaintiffs' recoveries (typically 4–8% of each settlement), the MDL judge scrutinizes common benefit time applications with the same rigor as a federal fee-shifting petition: are the hours reasonable? Are entries specific enough to assess? Do entries show block billing that must be reduced? The Hensley v. Eckerhart (461 U.S. 424, 1983) framework applies — and courts routinely reduce common benefit awards by 15–35% for inadequate contemporaneous records, block billing, and entries that do not adequately describe the specific work performed. A plaintiff's attorney who contributes 200 hours of common benefit work but submits reconstructed billing captures 40–50% of that time in the application — and receives a common benefit award based on the submitted hours, not the actual hours.

Q: How does bellwether trial preparation create a cross-matter billing attribution problem?

In MDL practice, bellwether trials are selected to represent the broader plaintiff population and are tried to inform settlement negotiations for all cases. A solo plaintiff's attorney who serves as bellwether trial counsel for one or two of their clients faces a billing attribution problem: the preparation work for the bellwether case draws on common discovery depositions, common expert witnesses, and common legal theories that benefit all of the attorney's MDL clients, not just the bellwether plaintiff. Conversely, plaintiff-specific preparation work — plaintiff deposition preparation, plaintiff-specific damages evidence, plaintiff-specific medical record review — is billable only to the bellwether client. When both types of preparation work occur in the same session (a 3-hour morning that begins with reviewing common expert reports and ends with bellwether-specific damages documents), month-end reconstruction cannot distinguish the portions, leading to systematic misattribution and undercount across both the common benefit ledger and the individual plaintiff billing.

Q: How is a mass tort science day different from a standard Daubert hearing?

A science day is a pretrial proceeding unique to MDL litigation in which the court hears expert testimony on general causation before any Daubert challenge is formally briefed. Science days allow the MDL court to evaluate the state of the science early in the litigation and inform scheduling orders, expert disclosure requirements, and settlement posture. Science day preparation is intensive and distinctive: the plaintiff's attorney must understand the full scientific literature on general causation (epidemiology, toxicology, mechanism-of-action studies), prepare the general causation expert for a presentation format different from trial testimony, develop a narrative of the science that the judge — not a jury — will evaluate, and anticipate the defense's scientific counternarrative. For a complex pharmaceutical or medical device MDL, science day preparation generates 60–120 hours of work across 2–4 months in a mix of early-morning literature reviews, weekend expert calls, and evening presentation draft reviews. Month-end reconstruction captures 40–50% of this preparation time.

Mass tort MDL practice creates a billing problem that does not appear in any other practice area: common benefit work. When a solo plaintiff's attorney contributes depositions, expert witness development, or document review to the MDL's common discovery database, that work product benefits hundreds or thousands of plaintiffs — including those represented by other firms. MDL judges scrutinize common benefit time applications under the same Hensley lodestar standard as any federal fee-shifting petition, and courts routinely reduce common benefit awards 15–35% for inadequate records. But the work itself occurs across months of irregular sessions — early-morning literature reviews, weekend expert calls, evening deposition transcript annotations — that month-end reconstruction captures at 40–50% of actual time. For a solo attorney with 8 MDL plaintiffs and 2 bellwether cases per year at $400/hr, the annual billing gap from common benefit undercount, bellwether prep spillover, and science day preparation is $42,000–$99,600.

TL;DR

ClaimHour captures common benefit work sessions, bellwether trial preparation with cross-matter attribution, and science day preparation across multi-month irregular cycles — passively, no timer, no audio, no document contents. It builds the contemporaneous billing record that MDL common benefit applications require. $29–$59/mo. No PMS required.

MDL common benefit work: the Hensley standard applied to plaintiff's billing

In multidistrict litigation, the lead plaintiff steering committee typically establishes a common benefit fund, assessed at 4–8% against every settling plaintiff's recovery, to compensate attorneys who perform work that benefits all plaintiffs. The MDL court oversees the common benefit fund and reviews fee applications submitted by contributing attorneys. These reviews apply the Hensley v. Eckerhart (461 U.S. 424, 1983) lodestar standard: are the submitted hours reasonable? Are entries specific enough to assess the nature of the work? Do entries show block billing that must be reduced? Courts in major MDLs — pharmaceutical, medical device, consumer products — routinely reduce common benefit awards for inadequate records quality.

The categories of work typically compensated from a common benefit fund include: depositions of corporate officers, scientists, and regulatory witnesses; expert witness identification, retention, and preparation; legal briefing on common issues (personal jurisdiction, preemption, general causation, class certification); creation and management of the document review database; and participation in MDL steering committee meetings. Each category generates billable work in irregular sessions: a Thursday morning reviewing a corporate deposition transcript; a Sunday afternoon call with the general causation expert about a newly published epidemiological study; a Tuesday evening drafting a section of the science day brief.

For a solo attorney contributing 200 hours/year of common benefit work at 50% reconstruction capture: 100 hours submitted in the common benefit application instead of 200 hours of actual work = $40,000 in common benefit awards foregone at $400/hr, before any judicial reduction for record quality. The reduction risk compounds: a common benefit application supported by reconstructed round-number entries is the application most likely to receive the 15–25% judicial reduction that contemporaneous records avoid.

Bellwether trial preparation: cross-matter time attribution in MDL practice

A bellwether trial in MDL litigation involves preparing one or two representative plaintiffs for trial while simultaneously managing the ongoing common discovery obligations that affect all of the attorney's MDL clients. The preparation work is a mixture of common-benefit work (reviewing the common expert witnesses' opinions, understanding the common liability theory) and plaintiff-specific work (preparing the bellwether plaintiff for deposition and trial testimony, reviewing the plaintiff's specific medical records and damages evidence, coordinating with the plaintiff's treating physicians for specific trial testimony). The two categories of work cannot be separated at the level of the calendar — they occur within the same sessions, sometimes within the same hour.

A 3-hour morning session that begins with reviewing the defense's general causation expert report (common benefit work, billable to the common fund) and ends with reviewing the bellwether plaintiff's specific exposure records (individual plaintiff work, billable to the individual client) appears in month-end reconstruction as a single "trial preparation" entry. The attorney cannot reconstruct the proportional split from memory. The common benefit ledger receives too little, the individual plaintiff billing receives too little, and neither record accurately reflects the actual time invested.

Dollar arithmetic for a solo attorney with 2 bellwether cases per year at $400/hr: 10–25 hours of cross-matter preparation spillover per bellwether case = 20–50 hours/year of misattributed or untracked preparation work = $8,000–$20,000 in billing loss across common benefit and individual client billing.

Science day preparation: irregular expert coordination across 2–4 month cycles

Science days are a distinctive MDL proceeding in which the MDL court hears expert presentations on general causation before Daubert challenges are formally briefed. For the plaintiff's attorney, science day preparation generates an intensive 60–120 hour preparation cycle across 2–4 months. The cycle includes: systematic review of the epidemiological and toxicological literature on general causation (30–60 hours of literature reading and annotation sessions spread across weeks), expert call series to develop the plaintiff's scientific narrative (4–8 calls of 45–90 minutes each with 1–3 general causation experts), review of the defense's scientific literature and expert disclosures (10–20 hours), preparation of the science day presentation materials (15–25 hours), and post-science day analysis and strategy sessions (5–10 hours).

The irregular scheduling of science day preparation work is the primary billing failure mode: literature review occurs in available time slots (early morning, weekends, late evening) rather than in calendar-blocked sessions. The expert calls occur when the expert is available rather than when the attorney has a billing reminder set. The preparation sessions span months in which other litigation is also proceeding. In reconstructed billing at month end, the science day preparation cycle appears as 5–8 round-number entries that capture 40–50% of actual preparation time.

Dollar arithmetic: 1 science day per MDL practice cycle, 60–120 hours of actual preparation at 50% reconstruction capture = 30–60 hours untracked = $12,000–$24,000 at $400/hr per science day. For a plaintiff's attorney participating in 2 MDL proceedings with distinct science days per 3-year cycle: $8,000–$16,000/year in science day preparation time that the common benefit application does not reflect.

How ClaimHour fits mass tort practice

If you represent plaintiffs in MDL mass tort litigation — and you have ever looked at the common benefit application your steering committee submitted and realized that the hours listed were half of what you actually remember working — ClaimHour was built for that gap. The passive capture builds the contemporaneous record across months of irregular preparation sessions without requiring a running timer. The evening digest distinguishes common benefit document sessions from individual plaintiff document sessions for clean attribution. The call-duration capture records every expert call at actual duration for the common benefit log. Join the waitlist and we'll email when early access opens.

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