My PI cases are pure contingency — why track hours at all?

Three reasons. First, many PI matters have fee-shifting cross-claims — FCRA, FMLA, ERISA, ADA, § 1983 civil rights. When those claims succeed, the attorney fees come from a lodestar petition that requires contemporaneous time records. Second, the cost-basis ratio (cumulative hours × notional rate ÷ expected contingent share) tells you in real time whether a case is consuming more capital than the expected fee justifies — a number you can only compute if you captured the hours. Third, portfolio-level data on hours per case type is the only reliable basis for revising your contingency percentage on future similar matters.

What is the lodestar records-quality discount and how large is it?

Under Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424 (1983), courts reduce attorney fee awards when the billing records are inadequate — block-billed, reconstructed from memory, or described in terms too vague to audit. The reduction is in the range of 25–60% of claimed fees. On a $120,000 fee petition, the gap between an 8% billing-judgment discount (well-maintained contemporaneous records) and a 35% records-quality discount (reconstructed time) is roughly $32,400 per case — roughly $194,000 per year across six fee petitions.

How does ClaimHour help with medical records review time?

Document-edit duration tracking captures file-open and file-close events for Word, Pages, and PDF viewers, including medical records PDFs. The system records the edit-session duration against the document title (not the document contents, which are never read) and surfaces it in the end-of-day digest for one-click approval or matter attribution. A three-hour medical records review session shows up as a labeled, approvable entry — not a blank space in the timesheet.

What happens to client confidentiality — medical records, accident reports, settlement negotiations?

ClaimHour is metadata-only: it captures durations, counterparty names from your Contacts, subject-line keywords, and file-title edit sessions. It never reads email bodies, call audio, document contents, or PDFs. Your client's medical history, accident narrative, and settlement position never leave your device. Only the billing entries you explicitly approve and export leave the app, and those go to your billing tool (QuickBooks, LawPay, CSV), not to ClaimHour's servers.

Vertical guide · Updated May 2026

Personal injury attorney time tracking: protect your lodestar before trial

The contingency-fee model trains PI solos to stop thinking about hours. That instinct costs them twice: once when a case absorbs more time than the expected fee justifies, and again when a fee-shifting cross-claim succeeds and the petition gets cut 35% because the records weren't there. Time tracking doesn't compete with contingency practice — it protects it.

TL;DR

ClaimHour captures calls, emails, document edits, and calendar events passively — no timers, no audio, no document contents. For PI solos, that means contemporaneous records at 0.1-hour granularity for lodestar fee petitions, real-time cost-basis ratio monitoring for contingency matters, and a per-matter hours log that feeds back into case-intake pricing. $29–$59/mo. No PMS required.

Why PI solos need time records even on pure contingency

The conventional wisdom — "contingency means I don't track time" — breaks down in three places that cost real money:

1. Fee-shifting cross-claims

A single-plaintiff auto accident case is rarely just negligence. When the defendant is a financial institution collecting a deficiency balance on the totaled vehicle, the FCRA claim under 15 U.S.C. § 1681n(a)(3) carries a fee-shifting provision. When the employer-defendant fired the client for missing work after the accident, the FMLA claim under 29 U.S.C. § 2617(a)(3) carries a fee-shifting provision. When the accident involved a government vehicle and excessive force, § 1983 claims carry fee-shifting under 42 U.S.C. § 1988(b). In all three cases, a successful fee petition requires contemporaneous time records at task-specific 0.1-hour granularity. A PI solo who does not track time has no petition to file — or files one and absorbs a 35–60% records-quality cut.

2. Cost-basis monitoring for complex PI

A multi-defendant products-liability case at 33⅓% contingency and a $200,000 expected settlement has an expected contingent share of $66,667. At $400/hr notional billing rate, you can invest 167 hours before the cost-basis ratio (cumulative hours × rate ÷ expected fee) hits 1.0. In a case that generates 400 hours of work before trial — as many products-liability cases do — the cost-basis ratio crosses 1.0 at hour 167. The practice that tracks hours sees the crossing in real time and can pursue early settlement, count-dropping, or cost-advance renegotiation. The practice that doesn't track sees the crossing at resolution, when every option has closed.

3. Portfolio pricing

After six months of captured data, a PI solo knows the actual hours distribution by case type: motor-vehicle at $50k: 42 hours median; slip-and-fall at $80k: 68 hours median; products-liability at $200k: 210 hours median. That distribution is the only reliable basis for adjusting contingency percentages, screening intake by expected return-to-effort ratio, or deciding when a case is too thin to accept at standard terms. Without it, pricing is intuition, not measurement.

What ClaimHour captures in a PI practice

Calls: client calls, adjuster calls, expert calls

The iOS companion captures call duration, counterparty number, and direction (incoming/outgoing/missed). If the counterparty is in your Contacts app and tagged with a matter, the call auto-attributes. An adjustor at State Farm is a counterparty you can tag to the specific matter; a 47-minute negotiation call shows up labeled in the day-end digest. Expert witness calls — the orthopedic surgeon, the accident reconstructionist — are captured by duration and counterparty name, never by content.

Document edits: medical records, briefs, demand letters

Word, Pages, and PDF viewer focus-duration events feed the digest. A two-hour medical records review session, a 90-minute demand letter draft, a three-hour summary-judgment brief — each shows up as a labeled, approvable time entry. The document title is captured; the document contents are never read. Blacklist specific folders (client intake forms you don't want time-logged) with a one-time rule.

Emails: adjuster threads, defense counsel, co-counsel

Sent-message counts and compose-window duration per contact per day give you the email-session time signal. For a PI solo managing 20 active matters, the digest might show "8 emails sent to [defense counsel], compose time ~34 min" — a line item that should be on the invoice but otherwise vanishes.

Calendar: depositions, mediations, court appearances

Calendar.app and Google Calendar events flow into the digest. Tag an event "DEP-Smith" and it auto-attributes to the Smith matter. Deposition prep sessions the evening before show up as document-edit bursts and email-count entries, all labeled and ready to approve against the matter.

The lodestar-petition argument for PI time records

When a PI case has a fee-shifting cross-claim and the claim succeeds, the fee petition is where the capture investment pays off. Courts applying Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424 (1983), evaluate two things in the billing records: (1) whether the hours claimed are reasonable, and (2) whether the time entries are task-specific enough to audit. Block billing — "Reviewed records and drafted demand; 5.0 hrs" — is the most common cut reason. The Ninth Circuit in Welch v. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., 480 F.3d 942 (2007), upheld a 10–30% hour reduction for block billing as within the trial court's discretion. The D.C. Circuit in Role Models America, Inc. v. Brownlee, 353 F.3d 962 (2004), applied the same standard to vague descriptors.

A contemporaneous time log built from passive capture — task-specific entries created at the time the work happened, not reconstructed at month-end — is the single most reliable defense against a records-quality discount. The practical difference on a six-petition-per-year fee-shifting book is roughly $194,000 per year in preserved fee awards.

We walk through the full affidavit structure — the Blum rate paragraph, the hours table, the Johnson-factors argument, the prayer for fees-on-fees — in our long-form post on the lodestar fee-petition affidavit, line by line.

How ClaimHour fits a PI practice

If you are a solo PI attorney — motor vehicle, products liability, premises liability, § 1983 civil rights, or hybrid contingency-plus-fee-shifting — and you've ever settled a case that cost more than the fee justified, or filed a fee petition without the records to support it, ClaimHour is built for that. Join the waitlist and we'll email when early access opens.

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