"Time Tracking for Law Firms, by Matter"

This post is for solicitors, barristers, and legal practices that bill by matter and are tired of forcing their workflow into a tool built for "projects." If your work is organized by client and matter, with narratives that need to be compliant and disbursements that need to be claimed, this is written for you.

I am not a lawyer. I built owntime for consultants, and a handful of the people who switched early were small legal practices. They taught me the language. If I get a term wrong, that is on me.

#The shape of legal time

A matter is not a project. A matter has a client, a matter number, a responsible fee earner, and a set of tasks that need narratives detailed enough to survive a billing review. Time entries are not just "3 hours." They are "3 hours reviewing the affidavit draft, calls with opposing counsel, and correspondence with the client." The narrative is the billable unit as much as the hour.

Disbursements are not just expenses. They are filing fees, courier costs, search fees, and counsel fees, each of which needs to appear on the invoice as a separate line, properly labeled, so the client and the accounts team can reconcile them.

And the daily target is not a nice-to-have. It is the number that keeps the firm alive, and in most practice management tools it is buried behind three menus. In owntime it is on the Today screen, target vs actual, so you can course-correct at lunch instead of in a December partner meeting.

#How to set this up

owntime models work as clients, projects, and tasks. For a legal practice, the mapping is straightforward.

The client is the client. The project is the matter. The tasks are the matter's stages or activities. Calls and letters. Affidavit drafting. Attendance at hearing. Each task gets its own hours budget if you want one, and the budget alerts at 75, 90, and 100 percent fire per task, which in this case means per matter activity.

The narrative lives in the entry note. owntime autocompletes notes from matter history, so if you have written "Review affidavit draft" before, it suggests it again. The note is itemized on the invoice the way billing guidelines want, timestamped and compliant.

#Disbursements that actually make the bill

A disbursement in a legal practice is a cost the firm paid on the client's behalf that needs to be claimed back on the invoice. Filing fee. Courier. Search. These are not the firm's costs to absorb. They are the client's costs, itemized.

owntime handles these as expenses with receipts. Log the expense, attach a photo of the receipt, mark it billable, and it sits against that client until the next invoice. When you invoice the matter, the disbursement rides onto the invoice as its own line item, next to the time entries, properly labeled. No separate disbursements document. No receipt you forgot to claim.

I will be honest about the capture moment. The expense has to be logged. If you get back from court and do not log the filing fee that day, it is easy to forget by Friday. The tool does not remind you about expenses the way idle detection reminds you about the timer. You still have to enter them. But once they are in, they stay billed.

#Daily targets on the Today screen

Most of the day in a legal practice is not about the matter. It is about the target. Did I bill enough today? Am I on track for the month? In a lot of tools, answering that question means running a report.

In owntime, the Today screen shows the daily target and the hours logged against it, live, as you track. You can see at 2pm whether you are on pace or behind, and you can make the call to do another hour before lunch instead of finding out in a month-end panic.

This is not a practice management system. It does not do matter opening or conflict checks or trust accounting. It is time tracking and invoicing, and the daily target is the one piece of practice management it borrows because it is the one piece that affects every fee earner every day.

#The file stays in chambers

For a legal practice, where the data lives is not a preference. It is a policy question. Privilege is privilege. Client files do not belong on a vendor's cloud without a conversation with the client and the compliance team.

owntime keeps everything in one local SQLite file at ~/Documents/owntime/timesheet.db. It is on your machine. No accounts, no telemetry, no call home. You back it up where your policy allows. The vendor does not get a copy, because there is no vendor server to copy it to.

I want to be direct about what this means and does not mean. It means your data is not on someone else's cloud. It does not mean the tool is magic. You are still responsible for the backup, the access controls, the compliance. The tool just does not add a cloud to the problem.

#The honest limits

owntime does not do trust accounting. It does not do matter opening or conflict checks. It does not do the full practice management workflow a large firm needs. If your firm runs on a dedicated legal practice management system, owntime is a companion to that for the time-and-invoice layer, not a replacement.

It also does not do six-minute-unit billing automatically. You can enter time in six-minute increments, but the tool does not force the increment. If your jurisdiction requires it, you will need to enter time that way yourself.

If your practice is small, if the time-and-invoice layer is the part that does not work, and if the data staying local matters to your compliance posture, this is worth a trial. If you need the full practice management stack, this is a piece of it, not the whole thing.

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