How can I tell how much time my lawyers fail to record?

Have each lawyer keep a plain side log for one week: a line for every call, email and short task, with a rough duration. At the end, compare the side log with the time actually entered for the same week. The gap is your number.

Is reconstructing time at the end of the month a problem?

It depends on how good your notes are. The risk is that a call from the first week is hard to recall by the end, so the entry is skipped or rounded. Check a few reconstructed entries against the calendar and the email trail.

Should the firm bill for every small task?

That is a billing policy for your partners and your fee agreements, and this post does not advise on it. The point here is narrower: whatever your policy is, the time should be recorded so the decision is yours, not an accident.

Lawyers Losing Billable Hours: What Unrecorded Time Costs a Small Firm

Lawyers losing billable hours is a problem that does not announce itself. Nobody skips a trial day. What goes missing is smaller: a ten-minute call returned in the car, a short email that answers a client’s question, a quick look at a draft before a meeting. The work was real and the client got value. The time never reached the timesheet.

This post is for the partner who suspects that is happening. You will price it with your own numbers, test it for one week and see what to ask for before you add another tool.

What unrecorded time looks like

Unrecorded time is work a lawyer or paralegal did that has no entry. It is not the same as time the firm chose not to bill. A written-off entry is a decision. A missing entry is an accident.

Look for these in your own firm:

Phone calls that begin and end between other tasks.
Emails answered from a phone, away from the desk.
A short review of a document before a hearing.
A question a client asks in passing and a lawyer answers on the spot.
A task done while waiting, with no timer running.
Time reconstructed at month-end from memory, a calendar and an inbox.

The last item is the one to watch. Reconstruction means that, at some point, a person decided what the week looked like without a record in front of them.

A worksheet with your own numbers

For this one your own numbers matter more than any outside average, so the billing rate is yours to fill in. The example column is made up, to show the format. Fill the last column from your firm.

Line	Example	Yours
Minutes of work not recorded, per lawyer per day	30
Working days in a year	230
Hours a year (30 ÷ 60 × 230)	115
Share you could bill and collect	80%
Billable and collectible hours (115 × 0.8)	92
Billing rate	$250
Value per lawyer a year (92 × $250)	$23,000
Lawyers in the firm	3
Total a year (3 × $23,000)	$69,000

Two lines here are guesses: the minutes and the share. Be honest about them, and try a lower number to see whether the answer still matters. If 10 minutes a day is closer to the truth, the same sheet gives you a much smaller figure, and you will know what the problem is worth.

For the staff side, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says paralegals and legal assistants had a median wage of $30.24 per hour in May 2025 (BLS). The same page lists gathering, organizing and maintaining legal documents among the duties. Their time can slip past the log as easily as a lawyer’s. That figure is pay, not a billing rate. Your own rate is the number to use for the worksheet.

Small tasks go missing one at a time. Together they become time worked and never billed.

Test the gap in one week

The worksheet needs two honest guesses. You can replace them with a measurement.

Pick one ordinary week and ask each lawyer to keep a side log. It can be a paper pad or a shared note.
Every call, email and short task gets a line, with a start time and a rough duration. No judgment about whether it is billable.
Do not change how time is normally entered that week. You want to compare the two records, not improve one of them.
At the end of the week, line up the side log against the time actually entered.
Add up what is in the log and missing from the timesheet. Divide by the number of lawyers and days.

The result is your real minutes a day. It may be small. It may be large. Either way, it replaces a guess with a number you collected yourself.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that most lawyers work full time and some work more than 40 hours a week (BLS). Over a long day, it is worth asking how many small tasks get a line in the log and how many do not.

What to do with your number

Once you have a figure, resist the urge to react to the total. Look at where it comes from.

If the bulk of the gap is phone calls, the fix is about how calls get logged. If it is emails from a phone, the fix is about recording away from a desk. If it is one lawyer and not the others, it may be a habit and not a system problem. Each answer points to a different kind of fix, and the side log tells you which one you have.

Then compare the total with what you would pay to close it. A fix that costs a fraction of the yearly figure is worth a trial. A fix that costs more than the figure has to be better than the estimate, and you should ask why. This is the same arithmetic you would apply to any purchase, only now it uses your own data.

Why the usual fixes disappoint

When a firm sees a gap, a few answers come up. Each one is reasonable, and each one leaves part of the problem alone.

A reminder to fill in timesheets. A weekly nudge helps, and it also points at the weak spot: the entry happens after the work, so the lawyer must remember it. The reminder asks for better memory and does not change when the record is made.

A timer. A start-and-stop timer works for a long task. It works less well for a two-minute call, where starting a timer is more effort than the call. On a short task, the timer is easy to skip.

A stricter policy. Requiring daily entry sets the expectation. It adds a chore to the day of someone already busy, and it does not make the entry easier.

Another billing subscription. A new billing screen can look nicer. If the problem is the moment of recording, a new place to type later does not move that moment.

None of these is wrong. The gap they share is that the record is made after the work, by hand, in a different place from where the work happened.

What to look for instead

Ask for	Instead of
Recording at the moment of the work, in a few taps	An entry typed at the end of the day
Short tasks as easy to log as long ones	A timer that suits only long tasks
One shared record the partner can review	Notes scattered across phones and notebooks
Entries tied to the matter they belong to	A free-text line nobody can sort
A trial with two or three lawyers first	A firmwide switch in the middle of a busy month

You can read more about the idea on our page about a custom time tracking app, and about the field on our law firms page. Billing policy, fee agreements and what the firm may charge are questions for your own counsel and your bar association, not for a software vendor.

After a month on a new setup, repeat the one-week test. If the gap between the side log and the timesheet narrows, it is working.

A shared record, seen up close

We built an inventory system and online catalog for a diamond retailer. Staff track every stone from intake to memo to sale, and customers see the price their account allows. It is shown here on sample data.

It doesn’t track time. We are showing it because of the idea underneath. It is one shared record that tracks every item through each stage. A time record needs the same shape: one place, every piece of work, each step visible to the people who need it. Seeing how that record is built, and how staff move an item from one stage to the next, shows what that shape looks like in practice.