Automatic time tracking for law firms, capturing the billable hours manual entry misses.
Lotus captures your fee-earners' time as the work happens: accurately, against the right matter, and with a full audit trail behind every entry, so the hours you work are the hours you can bill, and justify. No timers. No end-of-day reconstruction. No confidential work ever leaving the firm.
Your firm runs on billable hours. They're recorded, poorly, from memory.
Ninety percent of legal work is still billed by the hour.1 Yet the record of those hours is usually the least reliable data a firm has: reconstructed at 6 p.m., or on Friday for the whole week, from calendar, inbox and documents.
The scale of this loss is real. Attorneys work an average of 48 hours a week but bill only 36. That gap of roughly twelve hours, every week, sits between the work done and the work invoiced.2 Some of that is genuinely non-billable. Much of it is billable work that never got recorded.
The leaks are predictable. The quick call between meetings. The half-hour of research before a hearing. The email thread that turned into substantive advice. The travel to a client's office. Each one is billable, and each one is the first thing to vanish when a timesheet is written from memory hours or days later.
It isn't a discipline problem; it's how memory works. Fee-earners know the current approach isn't serving them, too: asked whether their time-tracking process is efficient, more lawyers say it isn't than say it is.2
A large part of that twelve-hour gap is administrative. Attorneys spend around two of every eight working hours, a quarter of the day, on admin like tracking their time and chasing their own entries.2 Every one of those hours is an hour not spent on billable work, and a chunk of it exists only because timekeeping is manual. Automate the capture, and a meaningful share of that admin time converts back into billable time: not working more, but billing more of the hours already worked.
Put your firm's number on it.
Enter your own figures. This shows recoverable billable time: hours already worked that better capture converts back into billable work.
Illustrative, not a quote. Shows recoverable billable time; those hours still have to be billed and collected to become revenue. Calculation basis is in the References below.
The hours you don't capture aren't the only revenue you lose.
The expensive problem is the bill that takes time and effort to defend.
When time is reconstructed rather than recorded, two things happen. You under-bill: the hours you can't remember, you don't invoice. The hours you do invoice are harder to stand behind, too, because the detail isn't there. That's where it gets costly. A bill a client can question is a bill that costs the firm three times over:
The write-down
Time that isn't defensible gets discounted at review, or knocked back by the client. Across the profession, firms already collect only around 82 cents on every dollar of work they perform, and that figure has been falling.3 Late, and with minimal supporting detail, time entries push it lower still.
The lock-up
A challenged invoice sits unpaid. The longer the gap between the work and the bill, the longer the wait, and the higher the write-down when it finally settles.
The hours spent defending it
Resolving a disputed bill takes fee-earners off billable work to justify time they already worked. Every hour spent defending the bill is an hour that can't be billed.
All three trace back to the same thing: time recorded too late to be accurate, and too lightly detailed to defend.
Capture the hours as they happen. Bill with confidence.
Lotus runs a lightweight agent on the desktop that captures time automatically as your fee-earners work. It reads the labels around the work, never its content, and builds each timesheet in near real time, allocated to the right matter.
Not all billable work leaves a digital trail, though. The partner reviewing a junior's draft, the hallway conversation about a matter, the quick strategy discussion between offices. When a fee-earner returns to their desk, Lotus surfaces that gap in the day and prompts them to account for it, while it's fresh, rather than leaving it to be reconstructed later. For time out of the office entirely, the mobile app captures client visits and calls in the field.
Nothing is billed automatically and nothing is guessed. Lotus builds the draft; your fee-earners review, adjust and approve before anything is final, adding notes against an entry, or a task to follow up, as they go. The time then flows to the systems that bill it: your billing platform draws from Lotus as the accurate source of truth for time.
On confidentiality
Lotus captures metadata (which application, which document, which window), never the content of the work. No screen recording, no keystrokes, no reading confidential files. It's automatic time capture your firm can install without putting client confidentiality at risk.
What accurate time gives a law firm.
Higher realization.
With realization across the profession sitting in the low 80s and sliding,3 there's real room to recover. Accurate, detailed capture is how you move it the other way: more of the work you do becomes work you can bill and defend, so more of every dollar earned is a dollar collected.
Bills that hold up.
Detailed, contemporaneous time entries are far easier to stand behind at review: fewer write-downs, faster payment, fewer disputes.
Fee-earner time back.
Automatic capture takes the daily admin of timekeeping off your fee-earners. Less time reconstructing the week, more time on client work.
A clearer view of where time and work stand.
The single biggest collaboration challenge law firms name is tracking tasks and deadlines, followed by getting a clear picture of project status.4 Lotus tracks tasks and deliverables against their due dates, and, because it runs on accurate captured time, shows how much time and effort a matter is consuming against its budget, live. It won't tell you whether the work is done well, but it will tell you what's outstanding, what's due, and where the time is going, while there's still time to act. A matter burning through its budget shows it early enough to have the conversation with the client, rather than absorbing the overrun or fighting for it at the bill.
A lighter load on your people.
Timekeeping is often the last thing a lawyer does at night, and the pressure to reconstruct it feeds an always-on culture the profession is actively trying to escape.5 Taking that burden off your fee-earners won't fix overwork, but it removes one of the daily frictions that follows them home.
Questions law firms ask.
Does Lotus replace our billing system?
No. Lotus is the accurate source of truth for time. Your billing system draws the time data it needs from it, and you decide what flows where.
Can it capture time against specific matters?
Yes. Time is allocated to the right client and matter as it's captured, and your fee-earners confirm it before anything is final. You use your own matter structure and your own language for it.
Does it support our billing increments, six-minute units?
Yes. Lotus rounds to the billing increment your firm uses, whether that's six-minute (0.1-hour) units or whatever you've set, and keeps both the actual captured time and the rounded value, so you bill to your firm's convention while the true record stays intact underneath.
Can fee-earners add notes to their time?
Yes. As they review an entry, they can add a note against it, captured alongside the time, while the detail is fresh.
Is this surveillance software? Our people won't accept that.
No, and that's by design. Lotus captures metadata, never the content of the work: no screenshots, no keystrokes, no reading documents, no live location. It records what's needed to build an accurate timesheet, and nothing more.
What about time out of the office, court, client sites, travel?
The mobile app captures time in the field, including client visits and calls on the move, so time away from the desk is recorded while it's fresh.
See it on a real matter workflow.
A short demo shows Lotus capturing time, building timesheets, and the reporting on top, with the data behind it. Twenty minutes, no obligation.
- Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker data, as reported in the 2026 Report on the State of the US Legal Market (Thomson Reuters Institute & Georgetown Law): approximately 90% of legal work billed through standard hourly rate arrangements.
- Bloomberg Law, Attorney Workload and Hours Survey (2024 Wrap-up), Bloomberg Industry Group, 2025: average 48 hours worked per week vs. 36 billed; time-tracking process efficiency split; ~2 of every 8 working hours spent on administrative tasks.
- Thomson Reuters Institute, Law Firm Rates analysis: worked-vs-collected realization declining toward and below pre-pandemic levels (~82%).
- Bloomberg Law, Attorney Workload and Hours Survey (2024 Wrap-up): collaboration challenges, with tracking tasks and deadlines named the biggest challenge by law firm respondents (43%), followed by a clear picture of overall project status (36%).
- On lawyer wellbeing and the “always-on” culture: Thomson Reuters, The threat of burnout in the legal profession; One Legal, Working hours of lawyers and burnout. (Burnout-prevalence figures circulating in the market should be verified against their primary academic source before use.)
Illustrative figures assume: a starting point of 36 billable hours per week per fee-earner (Bloomberg, ref. 2); a target of 44 billable hours per week (recovering ~8 hours, roughly the extra day lost to administrative work); a conservative $200 hourly rate (below typical market rates); and ~48 billable weeks per year. Example: 8 recovered hours × $200 × 48 weeks ≈ $76,800 per fee-earner per year. Recovered billable time must still be billed and collected to become revenue; the calculator shows recoverable time, not guaranteed revenue.