How to Track Billable Hours by Matter at a Law Firm

Most billing problems at a law firm start the same way: time was worked, but it was recorded late, recorded against the wrong matter, or not recorded at all. By the time the invoice goes out, nobody trusts the numbers.

Tracking billable hours by matter fixes that at the source. This guide covers a simple setup you can run with a small firm or a growing one.

Start with a clean client and matter structure

Every hour needs a home. Before anyone logs time, decide how your work is organized:

• One client record per client
• One matter under each client for each engagement
• A short, consistent naming pattern, such as "Smith Holdings: Lease Review"

Avoid catch-all matters like "General" or "Misc." They make it easy to log time quickly and almost impossible to bill it later.

In TracX, clients and matters are set up as clients with projects underneath them, so the structure your invoices need is the same structure your team logs against. See how that looks for firms on the law firm page.

Record time as the work happens

Reconstructing a week from memory on Friday afternoon is where hours disappear. A few habits help:

• Start a timer when you begin work on a matter, and stop it when you switch
• If you forget, enter the time the same day, not at month end
• Write a short description that a client could read and understand

Descriptions matter more than people expect. "Reviewed draft lease and flagged indemnity language" survives a client question. "Document review" does not.

Separate billable from non-billable on every entry

Not every hour belongs on a bill. Business development, training, and internal meetings still deserve to be tracked, because they explain where your capacity goes.

Mark each entry as billable or non-billable when you create it. That one flag lets you answer two questions later: what can we invoice, and how much of our week went to work we cannot invoice.

Review time before it reaches a client

An approval step is the cheapest quality control a firm can add. A partner or manager looks over entries, corrects the matter or description, and approves them. Only then does the time move into reporting and billing.

This catches the common errors early:

• Time logged to the wrong matter
• Vague descriptions that need rewriting
• Duplicate or missing entries

Fixing these during review takes minutes. Fixing them after an invoice is sent takes a phone call.

Watch the numbers before you close the month

Waiting until invoice day to look at the data means problems arrive when they are hardest to fix. A short weekly check is enough:

• Hours by matter, to see where effort is going
• Hours by person, to spot someone who has not logged time
• Billable versus non-billable split, to see how the week was actually spent

If a matter is running well past what the client expects, you want to know in week two, not week six.

Invoice from the hours you already recorded

Once time is approved, the invoice should be a formatting step, not a rebuilding step. Pull the approved entries for a client and matter, choose a detailed or summary layout, add your terms and logo, and preview the PDF before it goes out.

When the invoice comes straight from tracked time, there is no second spreadsheet to reconcile and no separate copy of the numbers to question.

A simple weekly routine

Here is a routine that works for most small and mid-sized firms:

1. Monday: confirm every matter has a clear name and an owner
2. Daily: log time as the work happens, with a readable description
3. Thursday: managers review and approve the week's entries
4. Friday: check hours by matter and by person
5. Month end: build invoices from approved time

None of this requires a large process. It requires one place where time, matters, approvals, and invoices connect.

Where this leads next

Once your firm records time consistently, the data does more than produce invoices. It shows who is carrying which kind of work, and on the Business plan, TracX uses that history to show promotion readiness from the work your people already log. That gives you a defensible view of who is ready to move up the ladder, without a separate review spreadsheet.

Get started

If you want to try this workflow with your own clients and matters, you can create a TracX account and set up your first matter in a few minutes.