Integration
Automated Time Capture for Law Firms — Close the AI Billing Gap
Your lawyers use AI tools every day. That time never reaches the billing system. A background timer captures every session against the right matter and drafts the time entry — the lawyer just approves it.
Automated time capture runs a background timer on the tools lawyers actually work in — including the firm’s AI assistants — and turns each session into a draft time entry against the right matter in your billing system. The lawyer approves, edits or discards it in one click. Industry studies put revenue lost to manual billing failures at 26% of potential; auto-capture closes that gap without another timesheet-discipline campaign.
The problem
The newest billing leak: AI-assisted work
Billing leakage is an old problem — industry studies have long put revenue lost to manual billing failures around 26% of potential. But AI adoption quietly made it worse. When a lawyer drafts with an internal AI assistant, queries a RAG system, or reviews an AI summary, that is billable, matter-attributable work — and none of the AI platforms write it to your billing system. Even Harvey, the best-funded legal AI on the market, had only announced billing integration in late 2025; it is not built. Every hour of AI-assisted work is an hour your timekeeping process was never designed to see.
The result is a perverse outcome: the more efficient your lawyers get with AI, the more revenue silently leaks — because the work compresses into sessions that never get logged. Firms respond with timesheet-discipline memos. The fix is not discipline; it is removing the manual step entirely.
The solution
Where automation removes the friction
How automated time capture works
A background service watches the tools your lawyers work in — the AI assistant, the DMS, the research platform — and associates each session with the matter it belongs to, using the matter context the lawyer is already working under. When the session ends, it creates a draft time entry in your billing or practice-management system: “AI-assisted analysis, 92 minutes, Matter #5821.” The lawyer sees a queue of drafts and approves, edits or discards each in one click. Nothing is billed without human sign-off — the system removes the remembering, not the judgment.
This is deliberately not another timesheet app. There is no new interface for lawyers to adopt and abandon; the only new thing they see is a draft entry that is already correct, waiting for a yes.
The audit trail your AI governance committee wants anyway
Capturing AI sessions per matter produces a second asset for free: a complete log of every AI prompt, response and output, attributed to the matter file. When a client questions an AI-assisted line item, you can show exactly what was done. When your governance committee asks how AI is being used across the firm — and on whose matters — the answer is a report, not a survey. As bar associations and clients sharpen their scrutiny of AI use in legal work, this defensibility layer is moving from nice-to-have to required.
Built on your billing system — Elite 3E, Aderant, Clio
Draft entries are written into the billing and practice-management stack you already run — Thomson Reuters Elite 3E, Aderant, Clio, or equivalent — through their native APIs. Your billing team’s review process, rate cards and pre-bill workflow stay exactly as they are; the entries simply arrive complete instead of reconstructed from memory at the end of the week.
Example workflows we build
- Background AI-tool session tracking, attributed to the active matter
- Draft time entries created in Elite 3E / Aderant / Clio via native APIs
- One-click lawyer approval queue — approve, edit or discard
- Per-matter AI usage log: every prompt, response and output
- Recovered-hours reporting by practice group
- Configurable rules for non-billable matters and internal work
The results
The commercial impact
Our approach
From manual to automated
- 01Map your billing flow
We document which tools lawyers work in, how matters are identified, and how entries flow into your billing system today.
- 02Wire the capture layer
Background session tracking on the AI tools and platforms you choose, attributed to matters via your DMS or matter-management context.
- 03Pilot with one practice group
Drafts run alongside existing timekeeping for 2–4 weeks; we measure the delta between captured time and what would have been logged manually.
- 04Roll out & measure
Firm-wide deployment with a monthly recovered-hours report — real data, not estimates.
Why a custom build beats off-the-shelf
- Captures the tools your firm actually runs — internal AI assistants included — not a fixed list of integrations.
- Writes into your existing billing stack; no new timesheet app for lawyers to adopt.
- Lawyer approval on every entry — auto-capture, not auto-billing.
- The AI audit trail doubles as your governance and client-defensibility layer.
Frequently asked questions
Is this surveillance of our lawyers?
No — it tracks work sessions against matters, not behaviour. It does not screenshot, does not log keystrokes, and only watches the specific work tools the firm configures. Lawyers see every draft entry before anything reaches billing, and the firm controls what is captured and what is excluded. The design goal is to remove the memory burden of timekeeping, not to monitor people.
Can we ethically bill AI-assisted time?
You bill the lawyer’s time spent directing, reviewing and applying AI output on the client’s matter — which is real, supervised professional work. The system drafts the entry with an accurate description and duration; the lawyer confirms it reflects genuine billable work before approving. That is more defensible than end-of-day reconstruction, because the entry is backed by a contemporaneous, per-matter log of what was actually done.
Which billing systems does it write to?
Thomson Reuters Elite 3E, Aderant, and Clio are the standard targets; any practice-management or billing platform with an API can be wired in. Entries arrive as drafts in your existing pre-bill workflow — your billing team’s process does not change.
How does it know which matter a session belongs to?
From the matter context the lawyer is already working in — the document open in iManage or NetDocuments, the matter the AI assistant session was started under, or the matter-management record in focus. Ambiguous sessions are flagged for the lawyer to assign rather than guessed.
What about work outside AI tools — calls, meetings, email?
The same capture layer can extend to calendar, email and phone systems if the firm wants full passive capture. Most firms start with the AI-tool gap because it is the leak nothing else on the market closes, then widen the scope once the approval workflow has earned trust.
How long does it take to deploy?
A single-practice-group pilot is typically live in 3–4 weeks: one week to wire the capture layer and billing API, then 2–4 weeks running drafts alongside existing timekeeping to measure recovered hours before firm-wide rollout.
What does it cost?
Engagements are fixed-price and scoped to the outcome. Every engagement is fixed-price with ROI targets agreed up front, backed by our 90-day ROI guarantee. Book a free audit for a clear price and ROI estimate.