Most solo attorneys we speak with have already figured out at least a partial solution for email timekeeping. There are tools on the market that connect to Gmail or Outlook, log the emails you send, and push entries to your practice management software. Some of them work reasonably well for that specific use case.
What they have not solved is phone calls.
We recently spoke with a solo litigator who split his time evenly between litigation and transactional work. He had already set up an email timekeeping tool that was doing its job. Emails were getting logged. Entries were going into Clio. For that part of his day, the friction was low.
But he told us plainly that about half of his billable communication happens on the phone. Calls with clients, calls with opposing counsel, calls that run long and involve meaningful work. And those calls were not being captured at all.
The 50 Percent That Disappears
It is worth sitting with that number for a moment. Half of this attorney's billable communication time was going entirely untracked, and he knew it. He was not confused about where the gap was. He just had not found a tool that closed it.
He uses RingCentral for his phone system, which has an API. In theory, this is a solvable problem. A timekeeping tool that integrates with RingCentral could pull call logs, capture durations, and generate entries the same way it does for emails. The technology exists. The question is simply whether any given tool has built that integration.
His position was direct. Email-only tools are interesting but not a differentiator anymore. The market has several options for email. What would actually make a timekeeping tool worth switching to is the ability to capture calls from platforms like RingCentral, alongside emails and video meetings.
Flat Fee Work Complicates the Picture
He also raised something that comes up often in these conversations: the distinction between matters billed hourly and matters billed on a flat fee.
For his transactional work, which is flat fee, there is no billable component to tracking emails. He does not need those entries logged and pushed to Clio because the billing is already settled. So he manually selects which matters to include in his timekeeping tool, limiting it to the litigation side of his practice.
This creates a real design question for timekeeping products. If a tool captures everything and the attorney has to manually exclude flat-fee matters, that is additional work, not less. But if the tool allows configuration at the matter level, where the attorney can designate certain matters as excluded from billing capture, the tool becomes genuinely useful across a mixed practice.
His instinct was that a flat monthly fee would be the right pricing model for a tool that covers all his communication channels. He mentioned a threshold of around a hundred dollars a month as the point where the value proposition needs to hold up, and said that for email alone he would not be near that number. For phone calls added in, the math starts to make sense.
What Makes Attorneys Actually Switch Tools
This attorney was already using an existing email timekeeping tool. Getting him to switch, or even to run a parallel tool, requires something meaningfully different. It is not enough to match what he already has. The tool has to do something his current setup cannot.
For him, that differentiator is phone calls. He is not asking for screen recording. He is not asking for browser tracking. He just wants his RingCentral calls to show up alongside his emails in a single place, with entries that can be reviewed and pushed to Clio.
He also mentioned, almost in passing, that he was part of a legal technology group with over a hundred attorneys, and that his current tool's founders had presented to the group recently. The implication was clear. Legal tech spreads through peer networks. Attorneys trust other attorneys. A tool that earns that trust by genuinely covering all channels has a real path to word-of-mouth that matters in a profession built on referrals.
The Real Gap
The attorney we spoke with is not unhappy with his current setup. He has email covered. He is managing. But managing is not the same as solved.
Half of his billable communication is still leaving no record unless he manually logs a call before he forgets how long it ran. For someone billing at several hundred dollars an hour, that is not a rounding error. It is a meaningful portion of annual revenue sitting on a memory that gets worse as the day gets longer.
The attorneys adopting the next generation of timekeeping tools are not looking for something marginally better at what their current tool already does. They are looking for something that covers the ground their current tool leaves exposed.
Phone calls are that ground.