AItimecaptureandbilling:findingthehoursyoualreadyworked

The leak is in the gap between work and record

Firms rarely underbill because they charge too little; they underbill because work happens and never becomes an entry. An email answered, a document revised, a call taken between meetings — logged at day's end, if at all. The mechanism is mundane: memory is a bad timesheet.

AI-assisted time capture attacks that gap directly. Smart time finding reviews activity across email, documents and meetings, detects billable hours that were never entered, and surfaces unbilled time and revenue leakage as suggestions for a human to accept.

Capture: three modes, one workflow

Not every hour is found by AI, and not every hour is best entered live. The system supports all three modes, then runs entries through a status workflow — logged, pending approval, approved, invoiced — so nothing bills that hasn't been reviewed.

• Live timer with start, stop and pause for work as it happens.
• Manual entry for quick capture after the fact.
• Batch entry — up to 50 entries at once — for reconstruction at the end of a day or week.
• Expenses across 14 categories, from filing fees and court costs to travel, mileage and expert witness fees.
• UTBMS and ABA billing codes on entries for LEDES compliance and corporate e-billing.

What the AI is allowed to do with money: nothing

Financial AI in FernLex operates under explicit prohibitions, and they are worth quoting in any evaluation: AI cannot create billable time without human input. AI cannot send invoices or execute financial transactions. All AI outputs go through a suggestions inbox for review, manual time tracking always overrides AI suggestions, and AI agent activity itself is never billed to clients. The line the product draws for itself: AI surfaces insights but never touches the money.

Invoices, payments and trust

Approved time becomes an invoice from one of 80+ templates with PDF export, sent to the client, with payments recorded by check, card, bank transfer or Stripe. Recurring invoices and matter budgets keep the operational side routine — with utilization percentages and unbilled-time detection showing where a matter is drifting.

Trust accounting is held to the standard that governs it: IOLTA-compliant trust accounting with per-matter accounts, reconciliation, and an insufficient-balance check before every withdrawal. A trust health score (0–100) and 19 financial analyzers watch billing velocity, revenue leakage and cash flow — reporting on the money, never moving it.

Getting paid by the entities that audit you

Corporate and institutional clients don't accept a PDF summary of hours; they accept LEDES. LEDES 1998BI export carries coded, structured billing data into e-billing systems, and financial records are retained under tiered storage — hot for 30 days, warm for a year, cold for seven — with SHA-256 checksums and decision tracking so the billing record is as auditable as the matter record.