Finding the billable time you forgot to enter.

Where it hides

Ask any attorney how much time goes unrecorded and the honest answer is "some". The industry surveys say it is a lot more than some. It is rarely the big blocks: a deposition gets entered. It is the twelve-minute call with the adjuster that happened while walking to the car, the three emails to opposing counsel answered from the kitchen, the client meeting that was on the calendar but never made it to the time sheet because the next meeting started.

Timers do not catch it, because the work that goes missing is exactly the work nobody started a timer for.

The evidence is already in two places

Your mailbox knows what you wrote and to whom. Your calendar knows who you met and for how long. Clio knows what you entered. Put the three side by side and the gaps show: a day with four substantive emails on the Delgado matter and no Delgado time entry; a forty-minute meeting with a client and nothing logged that day on their file.

That comparison is what the assistant runs. It matches each email and meeting to a Clio matter by the people involved, keeps only the ones it can tie to one matter with confidence and a known date, and lists the days where the matter shows no time entry. Every item comes with the evidence: the date, who it was with, the subject, and a suggested description written the way your other entries read.

It counts volume, not just presence. Three separate emails on a matter that day and one entry logged means the other two are flagged as possibly missing; one entry does not automatically cover everything that happened. Only your own entries count: if a paralegal or another attorney logged time on the same matter that day, your item still shows, with a note that a colleague logged time there. A hearing, deposition or mediation on the matter's Clio calendar counts too, once it has happened, if no time entry sits beside it; a deadline on that calendar does not, since a deadline is not something you attend. Bounces and auto-replies never count.

What it never does

It never invents a duration. It never says "you forgot to bill this". It says "possible missing time", because the work may have been entered under a different day, or rolled into another entry, or been a two-line email that was not worth a tenth. You decide. When you say "log twelve minutes for that one", the entry is created with the matter, the date, and the wording from the evidence, shown to you first, and only on your yes. The description reads as your own work: it never mentions software, and it never reaches a client looking like anything but your entry.

It also cannot see what left no trace. A phone call with no calendar entry and no email trail is invisible to it, so if your missing time was that call, this is not the tool that finds it. "Covered" means an entry exists for that matter and day, not that the amount was right. And when an email or meeting does not clearly resolve to one matter, it is left out rather than guessed at, which is usually the answer when something you expected to see is not there.

Logging what you find

Logging is one sentence: "Log 12 minutes for the Appleton one and 6 for each of the other two." It already knows the matter, the date and who each item was with, so what comes back is one proposal for the whole list - matter, date, minutes, wording, billing code, rate - and one yes creates them all. Change any wording or detail and it shows you a fresh list. It never proposes a number of minutes, ever; leave one out and it asks.

Read the suggested wording before you say yes. It is built from the matter and the kind of work, or from the email's or meeting's subject line when that line is short and plain, and the proposal tells you which, because a subject line is the other person's words rather than yours. The system refuses a description that names Clio, Claude or an AI assistant, since it goes straight onto a bill; ordinary words like "AI licensing agreement" pass.

The first time it logs time for you it asks which of the firm's billing codes you usually use and what hourly rate, then uses those on every entry until you say otherwise; you can name a different code or rate for any single entry. Once you have logged time for an item, the next review shows that item as covered, not a different one that happened to be on the same day. And if you change your mind, "undo that entry" shows you what it will remove and waits for your yes.

What a week looks like

"Check my billing for missing time this week." Seven days back, grouped by matter: "Three possible items on Alvarez - two emails with the adjuster on Tuesday, a call on the calendar Thursday - and one on Delgado. Want any of them logged?" Say "this week" or "the last three days" and the review stays that narrow instead of looking back ninety days. A pre-bill reviewer can run the same check on one matter before the invoice goes out, alongside the entries whose wording a client would not understand.

The number that matters is small and compounding. One recovered quarter-hour a day at a modest rate covers the assistant's cost in the first day of the month; the rest is yours.

MG Legal Ops runs on each attorney's own computer, on their own Clio and Microsoft 365 logins, through Claude Code; the billing review guide is the full description. Pricing, and the fourteen-day trial, no card to start.

Also read: Filing Outlook email to Clio matters, and why it slips and Claude Code for law firms. All articles.