ClaimHour

Vertical guide · Updated May 2026

Workers' compensation attorney time tracking: capturing hours across state-fee schedules and third-party claims

Workers' comp solos operate under state-regulated fee schedules on the WC claim, uncapped contingency on the companion third-party tort case, and an hourly clock on above-schedule petitions and co-counsel fee-split disputes. Each billing model requires a different records posture — and none of them forgive reconstruction. Passive capture handles all three simultaneously without a practice management system.

TL;DR

ClaimHour captures calls with adjusters and treating physicians, document-edit sessions on AMA Guides and IME reports, email-compose time, and calendar events for IME appointments and WCAB hearings — passively, no timer, no audio, no document contents. It builds contemporaneous hours records usable for above-schedule fee petitions, third-party contingency cost-basis monitoring, and co-counsel fee-split documentation. $29–$59/mo. No PMS required.

Why workers' comp solos need time records even when fees are regulated

The instinct in WC practice is to skip time tracking: if the state sets fees at 15–25% of the first $250,000 of permanent disability plus 10–15% above that, why bother logging hours? Three reasons override that instinct.

1. Above-schedule fee petitions

Most state workers' comp fee schedules allow the attorney to petition for fees above the statutory cap on showing of unusual complexity or exceptional result. California Labor Code § 4906, for example, permits the WCAB to award additional fees where the case involved "extraordinary services." Illinois, Florida, and New York have analogous provisions. The petition requires the attorney to document actual hours worked and the nature of each task — the same contemporaneous-records standard federal courts apply under Hensley v. Eckerhart, 461 U.S. 424 (1983). An attorney who reconstructed time from memory at the end of a 20-month case is in the same position as an employment solo with block-billed entries: the WCAB's discretion to discount or deny the petition is essentially unlimited.

2. The companion third-party negligence case

Workers' comp solos frequently handle the companion product-liability, motor-vehicle, or negligence case against a third party — a case wholly outside the WC fee schedule. A manufacturing employee injured by a defective machine has both a WC claim against the employer and a products-liability case against the machine manufacturer. The third-party case runs as a standard contingency with cost-basis monitoring obligations. If the employer's conduct also violated FMLA, ADA, or § 1983 (common in municipal-employee WC matters involving disability discrimination), federal fee-shifting attaches to the civil case and requires lodestar records. A passive capture system that runs across both matters solves the records problem for both billing models simultaneously.

3. Co-counsel fee-split disputes

WC solos frequently co-counsel with personal injury firms on the third-party liability case, splitting a contingency fee. When the case resolves, the split allocation almost always references hours worked by each firm on shared tasks — depositions, expert coordination, mediation preparation. Without per-attorney contemporaneous records, the allocation defaults to a negotiation with no factual anchor. ClaimHour's per-account tracking gives each attorney their own hours export for the split calculation.

What a workers' comp day looks like in the capture log

Workers' comp practice generates dense, fragmented billable activity concentrated in phone calls and document review — the two event types hardest to capture by hand.

Adjuster calls

A WC solo on an active case may have three to six adjuster calls per week across their caseload — authorization requests, treatment approvals, settlement posture discussions, reserve inquiries. Each call runs 8–25 minutes. None of them appear on a calendar. The iOS companion captures call duration and counterparty from call metadata at the moment the call ends; the evening digest surfaces all of them grouped by contact for one-click matter attribution. A week of adjuster calls represents 30–90 minutes of recoverable time that almost never makes it onto a reconstructed time sheet.

Treating physician calls

Coordinating with treating physicians — primary treating physician, specialists, agreed medical examiners — is a constant WC workflow. Calls about treatment plans, work restrictions, return-to-work certification, and deposition scheduling are each billable at $350–$500/hr and each last 10–20 minutes. The capture mechanic is the same as adjuster calls: call metadata only, no audio. In a 30-case WC practice, the treating-physician call volume alone can represent 2–4 unbilled hours per week.

AMA Guides and IME report review

Independent medical examination reports and AMA Guides ratings analysis are the document-intensive backbone of WC practice. A defense IME report averages 40–80 pages. Reviewing it against the treating physician's opinion and the applicable AMA Guides edition takes 1.5–3 hours of focused reading. ClaimHour captures file-open focus-duration events for Word, Pages, and PDF viewers — the document title and edit-start/stop timestamps, never the contents. A three-hour IME review session appears in the digest as a three-hour document-edit event labeled with the file name, ready to approve against the matter.

IME appointments and WCAB hearing prep

Calendar events tagged with a matter name flow directly into the digest. An IME appointment day — pre-appointment document review, the IME itself (captured as a calendar event), the post-IME call with the client — all appear as connected entries in that evening's digest. WCAB hearing prep follows the same pattern: pre-hearing document-edit sessions, calls with the client the night before, and the hearing-day calendar event. Hearing-week surge — the same phenomenon that creates the largest untracked time blocks in criminal defense and family law — is captured automatically in WC practice.

The third-party cost-basis problem in WC-adjacent matters

When a WC solo also handles the companion product-liability or motor-vehicle negligence case at 33⅓% contingency, the cost-basis monitoring obligation applies in full. At $350/hr notional billing rate and a $200,000 expected third-party settlement, the cost-basis ratio (cumulative hours × notional rate ÷ fee_pct × expected settlement) crosses 1.0 at hour 190. A WC-adjacent PI case that drags into expert-witness retention, Daubert briefing, and a multi-day trial can reach 250+ hours. Without per-matter captured hours updated in real time, the solo learns about the cost-basis crossing at resolution.

If the third-party case also involves an FMLA or ADA violation by the employer (a disability-accommodation failure that led to the injury), federal fee-shifting under 29 U.S.C. § 2617(a)(3) or 42 U.S.C. § 12205 attaches. The lodestar petition for those counts requires contemporaneous records at task-specific granularity under the Hensley framework.

We cover the cost-basis ratio formula and the four shapes of discovery scope creep in the discovery-scope-creep flag post.

How ClaimHour fits workers' comp practice

If you are a WC solo handling above-schedule fee petition cases, companion third-party liability matters, or a co-counsel split practice — and you bill out of QuickBooks without a PMS — ClaimHour's passive capture layer closes the records gap that state-regulated fee schedules create. Join the waitlist and we'll email when early access opens.

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Related questions

Do workers' comp attorneys need time records if fees are state-regulated?

Yes — for above-schedule fee petitions (most states allow petitions showing unusual complexity), companion third-party negligence cases (fully unregulated contingency), and co-counsel fee-split disputes. Each of these requires contemporaneous hours records at task-specific granularity, the same standard federal courts apply under Hensley. The WC fee schedule applies only to the direct WC claim; everything adjacent to it lives under ordinary billing-records standards.

What work events does ClaimHour capture for a workers' comp practice?

The four most valuable capture surfaces are: (1) calls — adjuster calls, treating-physician calls, defense-counsel calls, and hearing-scheduler calls (call duration + counterparty metadata, no audio); (2) document-edit sessions — AMA Guides review, IME report analysis, and medical-records review (file-open focus-duration, document title only, no contents); (3) email-compose time — correspondence with adjusters, opposing defense firms, and WCAB hearing offices; (4) calendar events — IME appointments, WCAB hearings, deposition prep sessions. All four flow into the evening digest automatically for one-click matter attribution.

How does ClaimHour handle a practice with both WC cases and third-party liability cases?

Each case gets its own matter tag. Captured events group by matter in the day-end digest so you approve hours against the right case. The WC component exports as a per-matter hours log; the third-party component exports in the same format covering the contingency case and any fee-shifting petition. Both exports feed into the same QuickBooks or LawPay billing workflow.

Can ClaimHour capture IME preparation time?

Yes. IME prep has three components ClaimHour captures automatically: the pre-IME document review session (PDF focus-duration of the IME report and prior medical records), outbound calls to treating physicians for background clarification (call duration + contact, no audio), and the calendar event for the IME appointment itself. All three appear in the evening digest ready to approve against the matter at 0.1-hour granularity.

Further reading