Research context
Legal Billing Statistics: What the Research Says About Unbilled Time
This page collects third-party research on how much billable time lawyers lose to delayed time entry, with every source named. It also says plainly what CaseClock does and does not claim about its own results, because vague claims about billing improvement are a recurring problem in legal tech marketing.
Oliver Marler
Co-Founder, CaseClock — former lawyer
How to read this page: every figure is labelled either external (third-party research, source named) or illustrative (arithmetic from a stated assumption you can change). CaseClock does not publish measured savings or capture figures of its own. Where a lawyer describes their experience in their own words, it appears as an attributed quote on the results page, not as a statistic here.
What the research says about delay
The following figures come from external sources and describe the market, not CaseClock. They are the reason capture timing matters.
External
~10% of billable time lost
When time entries are logged the same day. Even immediate logging results in some loss.
Source: ABA research, cited by Rocket Matter and TimeSolv
External
~25% of billable time lost
When time entries are logged the following day. Waiting 24 hours meaningfully reduces accuracy.
Source: ABA research, widely cited in legal tech literature
External
50–70% of billable time lost
When time entries are reconstructed a week or more after the work. This is the reality for lawyers who log time at the end of billing cycles.
Source: ABA research, cited in attorney time tracking guides
External
2.5–3 hours billed per day
Average billed by lawyers in an 8-hour workday. The remaining time is non-billable or lost to unlogged work.
Source: Clio Legal Trends Report
What CaseClock does and does not claim
CaseClock is a lawyer-controlled billing assistant. You tell it what you did — by voice or by typing — and it drafts the time entry: matter, duration, narrative and, where your firm uses them, suggested billing codes. You review and approve it before it syncs to Clio or exports as CSV.
What we claim: capturing work in the moment, rather than reconstructing it later, is the mechanism the research above points at, and CaseClock is built to make that capture fast enough to happen. Every entry is reviewed by the lawyer before it becomes a record.
What we do not claim: a measured number of hours or dollars recovered. How much a lawyer captures with CaseClock depends on how much they currently fail to record, which varies by practice. We have not run a controlled measurement, so we do not publish one. Lawyers who have described their own experience — including numbers — do so in their own words, attributed, on the results page.
Illustrative arithmetic
To show what a given amount of recovered time is worth, here is the arithmetic at one set of assumptions. The hours-per-day line is an assumption, not an observation; change every input in the ROI calculator.
| Assumption | Value used |
|---|---|
| Hourly billing rate | $400 USD |
| Additional hours captured per day (assumption) | 0.2 hours |
| Working days per year | 240 |
| Additional annual billings per lawyer, at these assumptions | $19,200 |
| CaseClock annual cost per lawyer | $348 (at $29/month) |
The $400/hour rate is used because it is a commonly cited average for Canadian and US lawyers across practice areas, though actual rates vary significantly by market, seniority, and practice type. The result is arithmetic on the rows above, not a measured CaseClock outcome. Use your own assumptions in the ROI calculator →
What this means in practice
The core argument for capturing in the moment is not complicated. Lawyers lose billing accuracy as time passes between completing work and logging it. Any tool that reduces that gap — whether timers, passive tracking, or voice capture — produces more accurate billing records.
Voice capture is particularly effective for short, mobile tasks because it takes less time than opening a billing system and typing. A 30-second voice entry immediately after a call is, for most lawyers, a lower barrier than a two-minute manual entry at end of day.
The way to find out what that is worth in your practice is to try it on your own work: start with one lawyer, capture for a few weeks, and compare against what you billed before.
Related pages
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