Time is the most precious commodity in the practice of law. But for many small companies across the United States and Canada, it’s falling through the cracks, one missed time-stamped email or forgotten call at a time.

Attorneys bill 2.5 hours per day. Lawyers and legal staff spend a lot of time on administrative tasks such as timekeeping, which directly impacts their billable hours. Indeed, the average lawyer bills only 2.5 hours out of a standard 8-hour day, as we learned from the 2023 Clio Legal Trends Report. The rest is lost to overhead, distractions, and manual processes.

This article explores how manual time entry silently holds your firm back and how AI-powered solutions like Tempello change the game for law firms using Clio.

The Hidden Burden of Manual Time Entry

1. Timekeeping Disrupts Focused Legal Work

Every minute a lawyer spends recording their work is not spent practicing law. This administrative overhead breaks concentration and adds mental friction, whether it’s toggling between a timer, jotting down time logs, or logging into Clio to enter billables manually.

Research from the American Psychological Association shows that context switching—shifting from one task to another can cost as much as 40% of productive time. Manual time entry contributes directly to this inefficiency.

2. Underreporting and Incomplete Entries Are Common

It’s human nature to forget small, billable tasks: a quick email, a five-minute call, or reviewing a document on the go. Over time, these missed entries compound.

The ABA Journal reported that attorneys underreport their billable hours by up to 20%, often unintentionally. These lost minutes and hours mean less revenue and more unpaid labor.

3. Manual Systems Aren’t Scalable

If you’re managing time entries manually, growth becomes harder. As your caseload expands or your team grows, the time-tracking burden increases exponentially.

Without automation, even your top-performing associates can hit a productivity ceiling simply because they’re spending too much time tracking work instead of doing it.

The Clio Paradox: A Powerful Tool Still Needs Better Input

Clio is the leading practice management platform for small law firms in North America. It helps with time tracking, billing, and case management only if users consistently enter data.

Why Clio Users Still Struggle with Timekeeping:

• Time tracking is still a manual process unless actively monitored.
• Lawyers forget to start timers or enter time retroactively.
• Staff may delay or underreport time to avoid tedious admin work.

In short, Clio can only reflect reality if someone keeps feeding it data.

Automation Isn’t Just a Time Saver—It’s a Revenue Generator

AI-driven legal automation timekeeping tools, like Tempello, solve the time entry problem at the root. Instead of relying on human memory and input, Tempello uses machine learning to capture work passively and precisely.

What Tempello Does:

• Captures every email related to a legal matter
• Syncs those emails to the correct matter in Clio
• Books time automatically and without manual input

This results in a 20%+ increase in monthly billings and over three hours saved per user per week.

Real Numbers: What Three Extra Hours per Week Means

Let’s quantify what recovering three hours per week can do for a small firm:

• Hourly billing rate: $250
• Weekly reclaimed time per user: 3 hours
• Monthly impact per attorney: 12 hours x $250 = $3,000
• Annual impact per attorney: $36,000 in additional revenue

Multiply this across your team, and the numbers quickly become transformative.