"I'll log that later" is one of the most expensive sentences in legal practice.
Picture a partner finishing a 90‑second call with a client. They hang up, glance at the clock, think I’ll log that later (spoiler: they never do), and jump to the next thing.
Phone calls are the most frequent billable event in an attorney’s day, yet they’re also the easiest to forget to log. Multiply one missed call by every attorney on your team, every day of the year, and you have one of the biggest sources of revenue leakage at your firm.
In this guide, we'll calculate how much untracked phone calls are costing you and show you the easiest way to capture that time.
If you don't bill by the hour, don't click away just yet! We'll get to why tracking time still matters for fixed-fee firms in a moment.
What is automatic time tracking (and what does it miss)?
Automatic time tracking is software that records the time an attorney spends on a task so they don't have to stop to enter it manually.
If your firm runs on a modern practice management system, you may already have something that does this. Tools like Smokeball's Auto Time and LEAP's automatic time recording track activity as it happens and turn this activity into time entries. This could be the document you're drafting, the email you're sending, or the matter you're working in.
But there's one piece of work they almost always miss...phone calls.
That's why firms pair their legal software with a phone system that records time automatically. Client calls can be logged the moment it ends, against the correct matter, whether the attorney is at their desk or taking the call on their mobile.
How much are untracked calls costing your firm?
We've all been there. The call you took in the car and never recorded. The quick question you answered on the way to court. The client who rang "just to check one thing" while you were between meetings.
These calls happen upwards of 10 times a day, and they’re where revenue leakage gets really expensive. It's not because any one call is worth much on its own. It's because there are so many of them, and because they're the easiest to wave through as the cost of doing business.
A 30-second call still costs a unit of billable time. Here's what that habit actually costs your firm:
Across a ten-attorney firm, that's $150,000 walking out the door every year. Scale that to 50 attorneys and it's $750,000. At a 150-attorney firm, it's more than $2 million.
And that's just the short calls. It doesn't count the longer calls you know slip through too. Think, the client update that ran 20 minutes, the negotiation you meant to log after lunch and never did. This is the floor, not the ceiling. The real number is almost certainly higher.
Why calls don't get logged
There are three main reasons why many attorneys don’t log calls.
- The call feels too small to matter. A single unit doesn't move the needle on today's billing target, so it gets skipped.
- Logging it takes longer than the call did. Open the matter, find the time entry screen, type a description, pick the rate, hit save. By the time you're done, you've spent more time on the admin than you did on the phone.
- Your attention is already somewhere else. Another call is ringing, an email just landed, you're walking into a meeting. The 30 seconds you just spent on the phone is the last thing on your mind.
There's a quieter fourth reason, too. Every unlogged call is a tiny decision.
“Is this worth charging for?”
“Will it look petty?”
Multiplied across 10 calls a day, that's a stream of small, awkward judgment calls you've handed every attorney to make alone, between calls. That's not a decision a junior should be making in the moment.
When time is captured automatically, the judgment is taken off their shoulders. The entry simply exists, and what to do with it becomes a considered decision the firm can make later (i.e., bill it, trim it, write it off, etc.).
That’s not a discipline problem, and the fix isn't a stricter time-entry policy or a reminder in someone's calendar. It's a system that captures the time on the call itself, before the attorney has to decide whether it’s worth tracking, and before it can be forgotten.
Why fixed-fee firms should track call time too
If your firm is fixed-fee or value-based, you might be tempted to skip this article. Time tracking your calls accurately still matters though, because it's the only way to know what your work actually costs you.
You probably have a rough sense of how long a matter takes on paper. What's far harder to see is how much phone time goes into it — the client who calls three times a week for reassurance, the matter type that always involves long back-and-forths with the other side. When that time isn't captured, it doesn't show up anywhere. You're pricing a fixed fee against a cost you can only guess at.
Track it, and the picture sharpens. You might find one matter type quietly eats twice the phone time of another at the same fee. That's not a billing question — it's a pricing question, a staffing question, and a "should we even take this work?" question.
This is the case that Legal Tech Consultant, David Lisitsa, makes in the video below. He argues that automated time tracking is one of the few tools in legal tech with no real downside.
Even if you're a fixed-fee firm, knowing your true cost of doing the work (phone time included) is what makes the next quote, the next hire, and the next service line decision a confident one instead of a hopeful one.
The firms that get good at this don't just bill more accurately. They price better, and they're more profitable for it.
How VXT captures call time automatically
In our conversations with law firms, we've found that around 20% of billable time goes unrecorded. We built VXT's automatic time tracking to help firms get some of that time back.
VXT is the only phone system built specifically for law firms. It integrates with your legal software to display client details on incoming calls, and to save important information like billable time, call transcripts, and file notes to the right matter in your legal software automatically. Almost 2,000 firms use it every day, with 140+ new firms joining each month.
The principle behind the time tracking feature is simple: capture the time at the moment the call happens, not hours or days later.
Three things make it work.
- It syncs with your legal software. Each user's charge-out rate, along with your matters and contacts, is already in VXT, pulled from the legal software you use every day.
- One click at the end of every call. When a call wraps up, VXT prompts you to log the time. In one click the entry is saved straight to the right matter in your legal software, with the rate and duration already filled in. If you only want to bill part of the call, you can edit the duration, the rate, or the description.
- It works wherever you take the call. VXT's mobile app records time from calls you take on your phone, not just at your desk. The attorney walking from court to the carpark taking a quick client call still gets the time logged, on the same workflow as the one they'd use back at the office.
What firms using VXT are saying
The benefits aren’t theoretical either. Here's what three firms have seen since switching to VXT's automatic time tracking on calls.
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On the workflow
"The VXT integration with Actionstep helps us catch so much more billable time because at the end of the call we can click a button to save to the suggested matter and it automatically records your time back to the file. You don't even have to think about it."
Joshua Reimer · Managing Director
Johnstone & Reimer Lawyers
On the numbers
"We love that VXT automatically tracks our billable time from phone calls. We're recovering 30 extra minutes per lawyer daily."
Alistair van Schalkwyk · Director
ASCO Legal
On the bigger picture
"It's clear that VXT is built for law firms, with all the functionality around time recording and note capture. Plus, the ability to do anything at any time anywhere is what we find most valuable. We're definitely capturing a lot more billable time. It pays for itself."
Linda Bardell · People & Compliance Manager
Treadwell Gordon
The ROI math is simple
Start with what's being lost. Clio's 2025 Legal Trends Report found that lawyers bill for just 2.6 hours of work in an average 8-hour day. Some of that gap is genuinely non-billable, but a real slice of it is billable work that was done and never captured.
From our conversations with firms, around 20% of billable time is going unrecorded, and phone time is one of the biggest culprits. For a single attorney billing at $300 an hour, recovering even half of that 20% is worth real money:
At most firms, that's the difference between a good year and a great one.
That's just a quick example. You can find an estimate of how much revenue your firm is losing — based on team size, rates, and how many calls go through each day — with our ROI calculator.
Now on the other side of the ledger. VXT Phone starts at $45 per user per month. At a $300 hourly rate, you only need to recover two billable units before your phone system starts making you money!
The easiest revenue leak to fix
Asking an attorney to remember and log every call is like asking a barista to log every coffee they pour from memory at the end of their shift. It's not the barista's job — it's the till's.
The calls are already being made. The work is already being done. The clients are already being served. The only thing missing is the time entry.
If you'd rather not leave $15,000 per attorney on the table this year, give VXT's automatic time tracking a look.
