Automate Time Tracking & Billing for Your Law Practice

Small law firms rely on practice management software like Clio, MyCase, or PracticePanther. Their built-in time tracking requires constant, manual entry. Attorneys must remember every 6-minute increment, switch between tasks, and write detailed narratives. While contemporaneous tracking is the goal, the reality is attorneys reconstruct their day hours or even days later, leading to under-billing and vague descriptions that clients challenge.

Consider a 3-attorney firm handling commercial litigation. An associate drafts a motion, reviews opposing counsel's emails, and has a 15-minute call with a client. They might block 3 hours for "Motion Drafting," forgetting to bill the call and the email review separately. The time entries lack specificity, and 0.5 hours of billable work is lost. Add-on tools like Time Miner can find some of this, but they cannot integrate with document management and require manual review of hundreds of low-quality suggestions.

The structural issue is that practice management software is a database, not an activity analysis engine. These systems cannot read an email attachment or understand that a calendar event titled "Call with Jane Smith re: Deposition Prep" maps to the Smith v. Jones matter. They are passive tools that wait for human input. The existing add-on tools only scan surface-level data like email subjects, but they cannot parse the content of a 20-page PDF to identify the substantive work performed.

This daily friction results in significant revenue leakage, often 10-20% of a firm's potential billings. It also creates compliance risk when block-billed or vague entries are audited or challenged by clients. The administrative burden falls on the highest-value employees, the attorneys, taking them away from the substantive legal work they should be focused on.

An engagement would start with an audit of your firm's data flow. Syntora would map where work happens: email in Microsoft 365, documents in a shared drive, calendar events, and calls logged in your phone system. The goal is to identify every source of billable activity and how to access it, typically via APIs. You would receive a technical plan detailing the connections and data processing logic before any code is written.

The core of the system would be a Python service running on AWS Lambda, triggered on a 15-minute schedule. This service pulls new data from your email and document APIs. The Claude API parses the text content of these items, identifies the client matter, categorizes the activity (e.g., "document review," "client communication"), and drafts a detailed billing narrative. We use the Claude API for its large context window, which is ideal for processing long legal documents and email threads. A Supabase database stores the drafted entries for attorney review.

The final deliverable is a simple web interface where attorneys review, edit, and approve the AI-generated time entries each day. With one click, approved entries are pushed directly into your existing practice management software like Clio or MyCase via their API. The system typically processes a day's worth of activity for a 5-attorney firm in under 90 seconds. You receive the full source code and a runbook for maintenance.