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Vertical guide · Updated May 2026

Products liability attorney time tracking: expert witness records and MDL billing

Products liability solos on contingency carry 3–7 year case timelines, 3–6 expert witnesses per case, and — if they participate in MDL leadership — 15–40 hours per year of coordination work that is recoverable from common benefit funds but invisible in reconstructed time sheets. The billable-hour gap is wider here than in most contingency practices, and the fee-petition exposure on a complex case is proportionally larger.

TL;DR

ClaimHour captures phone calls with expert witnesses and opposing counsel, document-edit sessions on expert reports and Daubert briefs, email-compose time, and calendar events for MDL calls and depositions — passively, across all active matters simultaneously. For products liability solos billing from QuickBooks without a PMS, that means contemporaneous records spanning the full multi-year case lifecycle. $29–$59/mo. No PMS required.

Why products liability has a wider time-tracking gap than most contingency practices

Products liability cases have three structural characteristics that widen the gap between hours worked and hours documented:

Multi-year case timelines

From initial client intake through expert disclosures, Daubert proceedings, and resolution, complex products liability cases — defective medical devices, pharmaceutical mass torts, automotive products, construction equipment — routinely run 3–7 years. A solo attorney who reconstructs time from memory has a 3–7 year reconstruction window rather than a 3–4 month window. The human memory problem compounds exponentially with time: a call with a biomedical engineering expert in year two is not reconstructable from year-seven memory.

The cost-basis implications of a 5-year timeline are also severe. An attorney who does not track hours contemporaneously has no early-warning system when a case's actual cost basis (cumulative hours at notional rate) exceeds the expected contingent share. Complex products cases routinely exceed cost-basis thresholds that would have justified early settlement conversation if the attorney had known — but the calculation cannot happen without a running hour count.

High expert-contact volume

A typical complex products case — a defective hip implant case, for example — involves at minimum a biomechanical engineering expert, a regulatory expert (familiar with FDA 510(k) clearance or PMA processes), and a treating physician expert. Each expert relationship generates attorney time across four phases: (1) initial selection and conflicts check (2–5 hours); (2) case briefing and document production to the expert (3–8 hours across multiple sessions); (3) iterative report review — multiple drafts with marked comments and phone review calls (4–10 hours per expert per draft cycle); (4) deposition preparation — preparing the expert to testify and reviewing the opposing expert's report (4–8 hours per expert).

Across three experts over a 5-year case, that is 90–150 hours of expert-coordination attorney time distributed across 40–60 separate sessions. The individual sessions are short enough — 30-minute review calls, 2-hour drafting sessions — that they are consistently omitted from reconstructed time sheets. The cumulative impact on the cost-basis ratio and any eventual fee petition is substantial.

MDL coordination overhead

Products liability solos who handle multiple plaintiffs in the same multi-district litigation may be invited to serve on Plaintiffs' Steering Committee leadership or liaison counsel roles. MDL leadership work includes monthly leadership calls (2–4 hours each, 24–48 hours/year), coordinated discovery strategy meetings (10–20 hours/year of calls and email), bellwether selection review, and common benefit fund contribution tracking. This coordination work is compensable from MDL common benefit funds — but only if it is documented contemporaneously. Attorneys who treat coordination calls as administrative overhead rather than billable events lose the common benefit compensation entirely.

The cost-basis ratio in complex products cases

In a contingency-fee products liability case with no fee-shifting claim, the cost-basis ratio is: cumulative captured hours × notional billing rate ÷ (fee percentage × expected settlement × probability of recovery). A solo attorney handling a defective pharmaceutical case with a 33% contingency, a $500,000 expected settlement, and a 60% probability of recovery has a denominator of 0.33 × $500,000 × 0.60 = $99,000. At a $350 notional rate, the cost-basis threshold fires when captured hours reach $99,000 ÷ $350 = 283 hours.

In a complex pharmaceutical case, 283 hours can be reached before summary judgment — especially when expert-report preparation and Daubert opposition briefing are accounted for. An attorney who discovers at hour 400 that the cost basis crossed the threshold at hour 283 missed the conversation window at which a settlement discussion might have been productive. The cost-basis ratio calculation requires a running contemporaneous hour count; without passive capture, the count is always retroactive.

What passive capture records look like in products liability practice

Expert witness calls and coordination

Expert witnesses call with questions about the case theory, with requests for additional documents, and with updates on the draft report. Attorney-to-expert calls — to review draft language, to respond to the opposing expert's report, to prepare for deposition — are the largest single category of unlogged time in complex products cases. iOS call metadata captures each call: duration, counterparty number, timestamp. A four-year expert relationship that generated 60 calls is represented in the log with 60 timestamped entries, not a single reconstructed estimate.

Document-edit sessions on expert reports and Daubert briefs

Expert reports go through multiple drafts. The attorney reads the draft, marks comments, calls the expert to discuss the weakest sections, reviews the revised draft. Each review session — 45 minutes in Word marking the biomechanical report, 2 hours drafting comments on the regulatory expert's methodology section — is a document-edit focus-duration event. Across three experts and four draft cycles per expert, that is 12 captured report-review sessions in the record. The Daubert opposition brief — challenging the opposing expert's methodology under FRE 702 — generates its own drafting sessions, captured the same way.

MDL coordination calls

Monthly MDL leadership calls appear as calendar events in the matter record. Email-compose time captures the drafting time for coordinated discovery position papers and leadership correspondence. In a 36-month MDL with monthly leadership calls plus biweekly subcommittee calls, that is 72+ captured calendar events representing the full coordination record — sufficient for a common benefit fund application demonstrating active participation.

Client calls across a multi-year timeline

Products liability clients — injured patients, surviving family members — call throughout a 4–7 year case to ask about progress, to discuss settlement offers, and to debrief after depositions. A client with a serious injury who stayed in contact across five years may have generated 80–100 phone contacts. Each call appears in the passive capture log with duration and timestamp. The fee-petition affidavit can reference 80 client contacts as documented fact rather than estimate.

How ClaimHour fits products liability practice

If you are a products liability solo handling 5–20 complex cases on contingency — with 3–7 year timelines, multiple expert witnesses, and potentially MDL coordination overhead — ClaimHour's passive capture layer builds the contemporaneous record from the day you take each case. Cost-basis monitoring requires a running hour count; fee-petition lodestar affidavits require contemporaneous records going back to engagement. Both require the same thing: hours logged at the time they occurred. Join the waitlist and we'll email when early access opens.

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Related questions

Why do products liability cases have a larger time-tracking gap than other contingency practices?

Three structural factors: (1) multi-year timelines — 3–7 years from intake to resolution makes memory reconstruction unreliable; (2) high expert-contact volume — 3–6 experts per case × 40–80 attorney hours per expert across selection, briefing, report review, and deposition prep = 120–480 hours of expert-coordination time per case distributed across 40–60 individual sessions; (3) MDL coordination overhead — 15–40 hours per year of leadership committee work that is recoverable from common benefit funds but omitted from reconstructed time sheets.

How does contingency-plus-lodestar work in products liability cases with fee-shifting claims?

Most products liability cases are pure contingency. But companion claims can carry fee-shifting: ADA Title III claims, state consumer protection statutes (California CLRA, Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act § 2310(d)(2)), or RICO civil claims at 18 U.S.C. § 1964(c). When a fee-shifting claim is present, Hensley's partial-success framework requires per-claim hour segregation from the first day of representation. An attorney who did not track which hours were attributable to fee-shifting vs. pure-contingency claims from the start cannot reconstruct that segregation years later.

What time-tracking failure mode is most common in MDL products liability practice?

The invisibility of coordination work. Monthly leadership committee calls, coordinated discovery strategy meetings, bellwether selection review — 15–40 hours per year of recoverable work that attorneys treat as administrative overhead and do not log. In MDL common benefit fund distributions, attorneys who can demonstrate contemporaneous records of their coordination participation receive larger allocations than attorneys who rely on reconstructed estimates. Calendar event capture and email-compose time attribution make the coordination work visible at the time it happens.

How does passive capture handle expert-witness coordination time that spans multiple years?

Each call with the expert's office is captured as an iOS call metadata event: duration, counterparty, timestamp. Each document-edit session on the expert report — in Word or Pages — is a focus-duration event with the document title and the session length. Across a 4-year case with three experts and 12 draft cycles, the passive capture log produces a chronological audit trail of 40–80 discrete events covering the full expert-coordination record. A fee-petition lodestar declaration that references this log is substantively more defensible than one citing expert-coordination hours as a single reconstructed total.

Further reading