Free calculator
How much revenue is your firm losing to billing leakage?
Firms typically lose 15–30% of billable time to unlogged work — time reconstructed from memory, sessions logged short, AI-assisted work that never reaches a timesheet. We model 26%. Move the sliders.
Estimated revenue leaking annually
$13.7M
of potential billings never reaching an invoice, across 100 lawyers
$6.8M
conservatively recoverable per year (capturing half the leak)
7.8 h
lost per lawyer, per week — work done but never logged
Assumes 250working days and the 26% leakage rate industry studies attribute to manual billing failure. Methodology below. Your firm’s real number depends on practice mix — the audit maps it precisely.
Get this breakdown for your firm — plus the fix
We’ll send your numbers with the full methodology, and the four workflows — billing capture first — that close the leak on the systems your firm already runs.
Methodology
The math, in the open
No black box: the calculator multiplies your fee-earning lawyers by your blended billable rate and daily billable hours across 250 working days to get potential annual billings. It then applies a 26% leakage rate — our own modeled estimate, set inside a documented range: industry estimates put collectible-hour loss to unbilled time at 15–30%, and Clio’s Legal Trends Report finds the average attorney captures just 2.5 of 8 billable hours a day. Recovery is modeled at a deliberately conservative 50% of the leak.
potential = lawyers × rate × billable hours/day × 250 days leakage = potential × 26% (modeled, inside the documented 15–30% range) recoverable = leakage × 50% (conservative capture)
Where this leakage actually comes from: lawyers reconstructing their day at 6pm and rounding down “to be safe”, work sessions that never reach the timesheet — and increasingly, AI-assisted work, because no AI platform writes its usage to a billing system. A lawyer who spends 90 minutes with the firm’s AI assistant on a matter has done billable, supervised professional work that timekeeping was never designed to see. The more efficient your lawyers get, the bigger that blind spot grows. This figure is specifically about time that never reaches a bill — pre-bill write-downs and slow collections are real, separate drains on realized revenue that this calculator does not attempt to model.
The fix
How firms close the leak
Workflow 01
Automated time capture
A background timer turns every work session — AI tools included — into a draft time entry against the right matter. The lawyer approves in one click. This is the workflow that closes the leak directly.
The framework
The Four Operational Intelligence Gaps
Billing is one of four gaps between the AI law firms already own and the workflows where revenue is made — alongside regulatory alerts, knowledge capture and diligence reports.
By firm size
What this looks like at your firm
A 500-lawyer firm and a 12-lawyer boutique close the leak very differently. See the approach for large, mid-size and small firms.
FAQ
Billing leakage, answered
Where does the 26% leakage figure come from?
It is Chronexa’s own modeled estimate — we’d rather say that plainly than borrow false precision from a study that doesn’t exist. It sits inside a documented range: industry estimates put collectible billable-hour loss to unbilled time and write-downs at 15–30%, and Clio’s Legal Trends Report — the most-cited benchmark in the industry — finds the average attorney captures just 2.5 of 8 billable hours a day and firms collect 93% of what they bill. We model 26%, near the middle of that range, specifically for time that is worked but never reaches a timesheet — reconstructed from memory, logged short "to be safe", or lost entirely to AI-assisted sessions. Your firm’s actual rate depends on practice mix and timekeeping discipline, which is what an audit measures.
Why does AI adoption make billing leakage worse?
Because no legal AI platform writes its usage to your billing system. When a lawyer spends 90 minutes working with an AI assistant on a matter, that time is billable, matter-attributable work — and it is invisible to your timekeeping process. The more your lawyers use AI, the more work compresses into sessions that never get logged.
Does this apply to fixed-fee or contingency work?
The calculator models hourly billing, where leakage converts directly into lost revenue. On fixed-fee work the same failure shows up differently — as unmeasured effort and margin erosion you cannot see. Mixed-model firms should apply the calculator to the hourly share of their practice.
How is the recoverable number calculated?
Conservatively: half of the estimated leak. Automated time capture — a background timer that turns work sessions into draft time entries the lawyer approves in one click — typically recovers a large share of unlogged time, but we model 50% so the business case never depends on a best-case assumption.
Is the data I enter here stored anywhere?
No — the sliders run entirely in your browser. We only receive your inputs if you choose to submit the form with your email, in which case we use them to prepare your breakdown.
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