What 4,798 entries look like
In July 2026, 69 court-appointed attorneys logged 4,798 time entries through Plani across 652 clients, totaling 4,147 hours. That is enough real billing to see the shape of the work instead of guessing at it.
The first thing in the data is how small the entries are. The median entry is 27 minutes. Not an hour. Not a morning in court.
A third of your billing is 15 minutes or less
1,631 entries, 34 percent of everything logged, were 15 minutes or under. 789 of them, 16 percent, were six minutes or under, a single tenth of an hour.
Individually they are nothing. Together they were 227 hours in one month. Spread across 69 attorneys that is about 3.3 hours each, every month, in entries so small you would never miss one. Over a year it is close to 40 hours. A full billable week, assembled entirely out of six-minute phone calls.
This is the part reconstruction cannot recover. You will remember the suppression hearing. You will not remember the four calls to the ADA on a Tuesday in July.
Investigation is the quietest leak
By category, prep for hearing and trial was the largest at 752 hours. Investigation was second at 560 hours, ahead of drafting motions and legal memos at 490.
Investigation being that large is worth sitting with, because it is the category that happens in fragments. A records request. A call to a witness who does not pick up. Twenty minutes with discovery on your phone. It is rarely a block on your calendar, which is exactly why it goes unbilled when you reconstruct later.
Travel was 183 hours, under 5 percent of the total. Attorneys spend a lot of worry on the mileage form. It is not where the money is.
Billing is a bedtime chore
Thirty percent of entries went in after 6pm or before 6am. The 11pm hour alone had 365 entries, nearly as busy as mid-morning. Six percent came in on weekends.
Nobody is doing paperwork at 11pm because they want to. They are doing it because the day did not have a gap in it. The later the entry, the more of it is memory rather than record.
Nobody writes narratives
The median description is 23 characters. "call w/ ADA re: plea." "reviewed discovery." That is what a real time record looks like, and eBill accepts it fine.
If you have been putting off logging time because you think each entry needs a paragraph, that is a story you are telling yourself. It costs you the entry.
Reconstructing it later is worse than losing it
The instinct is to rebuild the week on Sunday night from memory and your calendar. That is how accuracy slips, and in the worst case it is how you get in trouble, because reconstructed time is exactly what an audit or a bar complaint targets. Notes written as the work happens are both more complete and safer (see why contemporaneous billing matters).
The broader profession has the same problem at a larger scale. Clio's Legal Trends Report puts the average lawyer at about 2.9 billable hours out of an 8-hour day (Clio Legal Trends Report). The missing hours are not idle time. They are the same short, forgettable work.
About these numbers
This is one month of billing from 69 attorneys using Plani, aggregated. No client names, no attorney names, no per-firm figures. It is not a survey and it is not a random sample: these are people who already decided to use a billing tool, which likely makes them better at capturing time than average, not worse. Read the 227 hours as a floor.
How to stop losing it
The fix is not discipline. It is shortening the gap between doing the work and recording it, to about zero. Log the six-minute call while you are still in the parking lot, in whatever fragment of a sentence you would actually type.
That is what Plani does. You text your time as it happens, a line at a time, and it sorts out the client, the category, and the minutes, then files it into eBill for your review. It exists because the small stuff is a third of your billing and almost none of it survives Sunday night.