Time Tracking for Independent Lawyers and Legal Professionals

Legal billing has more rigour attached to it than almost any other profession. The six-minute increment — 0.1 hours — is standard. Contemporaneous logging, recorded at the time of the work rather than reconstructed later, is considered best practice and, in many jurisdictions, an ethical obligation. For solo practitioners and freelance lawyers, the challenge is maintaining that rigour without a full practice management system.

Why legal billing is different

Most professions bill to the nearest quarter hour or half hour. Legal billing typically goes to the tenth — six minutes. A quick call with a client is 0.1 or 0.2 hours. Reviewing a short document is 0.2 or 0.3. Court appearances are logged at the same granularity.

This precision exists for two reasons: clients expect it, and your practice depends on it. Under-recording by even 0.1 hours per matter per day compounds to significant revenue lost over a year. Over-recording, even accidentally, creates professional risk. Accurate, contemporaneous records protect both sides.

The case for real-time logging

Most billing disputes in legal practice come down to records that were reconstructed from memory rather than logged in the moment. When a client receives an invoice showing 12 hours for "research and drafting," and there's no contemporaneous record of when that work happened, the invoice becomes difficult to defend.

Real-time logging — starting a timer when you begin a task and stopping when you stop — produces accurate, defensible records. It also ensures you capture the small interactions that are easy to forget: the three-minute call to confirm a court date, the email response to a brief question, the quick review of opposing counsel's letter.

What freelance lawyers often leave unbilled

• Short communications. A 0.1-hour email response is easy to skip. Across a busy matter, those entries accumulate.
• Review time. Reading documents, reviewing correspondence, analysing facts — all take time. Log them at the time, not at day's end.
• Travel to court or client meetings. Travel time is billable in most arrangements. Log it as a separate session entry with a clear description.
• Post-meeting follow-up. The ten minutes after a client call where you write notes and update the file is recoverable time.

Retainer billing and trust accounts

Many freelance lawyers work on retainer — clients pay upfront and hours are drawn down against the balance. Accurate time tracking is especially important here: you need to know the retainer balance in real time, and the client expects a clear accounting of how it was used.

Cashlog doesn't replace full practice management software — if you need matter codes, trust accounting, and IOLTA compliance, a dedicated legal billing tool is the right choice. But for freelance lawyers who need contemporaneous time records and professional invoices without the overhead of a full system, it provides exactly that: a live timer, client-level session logs, and one-click PDF invoicing.

The non-negotiable

Whatever tool you use, log the time when you do the work — not at the end of the day, not on Friday afternoon, not before the invoice goes out. Contemporaneous records are the foundation of accurate, defensible legal billing. Everything else follows from that.