Legal time tracking software for attorneys who bill by the tenth

Most lost time is lost at the end of the day. A call that ran twenty minutes, an email thread read on the train, half an hour on a research question squeezed between two other things: if it is not written down when it happens, it gets rebuilt from memory on Friday, and memory rounds down. Time tracking software is only worth having if recording the time is quicker than skipping it.

How legal time is usually recorded

Many firms bill in tenths of an hour, so six minutes is the smallest unit on the bill and a three-minute call goes down as 0.1. Clients with billing guidelines often want each entry coded as well. The Uniform Task Based Management System (UTBMS) supplies those codes: task codes describe the work by area of law and roll up into broader phase codes, and activity codes say what was done, such as drafting, communicating or researching. Some clients want granular task codes, some only phases, and some do not ask for activity codes at all. Their guidelines say which.

A record made at the time is also the best answer when a client questions a bill. An entry written that afternoon, on the matter, with a code and a description, is easier to stand behind than a weekly estimate.

What Coil does

• A timer and manual entries. Start a timer on a matter, or type an entry in hours or minutes. The timer rounds to six minutes.
• Suggested time from your browser. The browser extension looks at the tabs you had open and turns them into suggested entries, each with a guessed matter. You accept or dismiss every one, and nothing becomes a time entry by itself.
• UTBMS activity and task codes on each entry, for clients whose guidelines ask for them.
• Expenses with categories, recorded against the same matter as the time.
• Rates by office. A firm with more than one office can set a different rate in each.
• Totals that cover everything. Time lists are paginated, and the totals cover every row in the list rather than only the page on screen.
• Reports built from the same entries. Productivity, WIP and realization reports come from your recorded time, each reconciled against its own rows, each with a CSV.
• Time through the API. An AI assistant or automation you connect with a scoped token can log time and start or stop a timer, if you give it that permission and no more.
• Exports. Time goes out as CSV, in the QuickBooks layouts, and in a LEDES 1998B file.

What Coil does not do

Nothing watches your desktop. Automatic time capture inside Word and Outlook is in the next phase, and until then the suggestions come only from the browser extension. There is no mobile app, so time on the move goes in through a phone browser, on screens laid out for a desktop. Coil does not decide what is billable: a suggested entry is a suggestion, and the description on it is yours to write.

Turning time into bills is the other half of the job. Coil’s invoicing is built and in testing, not available today, so for now your time leaves Coil through reports and exports and is billed from whatever you use now.

Why it matters in a small firm

In a two-person office the lawyer doing the work is usually the one entering it, often late in the evening. A timer one click from the matter, and a list of the day’s tabs ready to accept, make that evening shorter. Entries recorded today stay on the matter, coded and rated, ready for the day Coil’s invoicing launches. Coil is free during the beta, and beta firms keep founding pricing when paid plans start.

Last checked October 28, 2026.