Time Tracking Software for Lawyers and Law Firms in 2026: Billing-Ready Options for Attorneys

Lawyers who bill by the hour need time tracking software that attaches every entry to a client and matter, applies a billing rate and rounds the way their engagement letters describe. For a solo practitioner who wants data kept on one machine, Offlegal is the only tool in this guide built for law practice: it tracks time per matter and creates invoices without a cloud account. For firms that prefer a hosted timer, Clockify and Harvest both publish pages for lawyers and law firms. For firms that want to host their own, Kimai and Solidtime are open source.

Enlisted's catalogue holds very few tools built for lawyers, so most of this list is general-purpose time trackers that suit legal work once you set them up around matters. The picks below are grouped by job: legal-specific tools, hosted timers, self-hosted trackers and automatic capture.

How we picked

Enlisted looks at whether a tool does the core job (record time against clients and projects, produce reports or invoices), whether the vendor's own pages connect it to law practice or professional services, its licence, whether you can self-host it, how it is priced and, for open-source projects, how recently the code was updated. We did not pick by popularity. See how Enlisted ranks tools for the method. Two tools here are built for legal work (Offlegal and Legal Tech), two vendors publish pages for lawyers or law firms (Clockify and Harvest), and the rest are general time trackers that fit billable work for attorneys.

What attorneys should check before choosing a time tracker

Two requirements decide most legal time tracking purchases.

Rounding and billing increments. Many firms bill in set increments and round each entry up. Clockify's page for attorneys says it can round time up to a minimum billable increment, and Toggl Track offers rounding in its reports, with a choice of interval and direction. For any other tool, confirm in the documentation that rounding exists, whether it changes the stored entry or only the report, and whether it matches what your engagement letters promise.

Where client time data lives. Time narratives often describe privileged work. Hosted tools store that on the vendor's servers, so read the security pages and your own confidentiality obligations. Self-hosted tools (Kimai, Solidtime, Traggo) and Offlegal's local-only design keep the data on infrastructure you control, at the cost of doing your own backups and updates.

Also keep in mind that client trust accounting is a separate job. None of the tool listings here say they manage trust accounts, so plan to handle that in your accounting software or practice management system.

Built for lawyers: legal practice tools with time tracking

Offlegal: best for solo lawyers who want everything on one PC

Offlegal is an offline legal CRM for Windows that tracks clients, matters, documents, time and invoices on your own computer. Where a hosted time tracker sends entries to a vendor's cloud, Offlegal's site describes zero cloud sync, no account sign-up and AES-256 encryption applied locally.

Time tracking sits inside the matter: the site says billable time is tied to the right matter, and invoices and transactions are recorded against the same file. It also includes built-in e-signature for documents and can export the whole case database to a backup file. The vendor positions it for solo practitioners and firms that keep data in-house, and its pricing is a one-time purchase rather than a subscription.

• Best for: solo lawyers and very small practices that want client records and billable time on their own machine, with no subscription.
• Watch out for: it runs on Windows only and has no cloud sync, so there is no access from a phone or a second computer unless you move backups yourself. The site does not describe multi-user collaboration, so check that before buying for a firm. See the Offlegal site for details.

Legal Tech: a Bulgarian practice management suite, only a loose fit

Legal Tech is a cloud platform for law firms and legal departments, in Bulgarian, covering client and court case files, hearing and deadline reminders, task assignment, document generation and register lookups. Its listing mentions reports on work done per case, but not billable time tracking, so it suits a Bulgarian-speaking firm that wants case management first and would pair it with a timer. Most readers of this guide can skip it.

Best for hosted timers, rounding and invoices: Clockify, Harvest and Toggl Track

These three are hosted, closed-source trackers with free plans, and each has a page aimed at lawyers. They share the basics: timers or manual entries, clients and projects, billable rates and reports. The differences are in the details.

Clockify: best free-plan tracker with rounding for legal billing

Clockify is a hosted time tracker and timesheet tool with reports, billable rates, invoicing, approvals and time off. Its attorney page says you can mark time as billable or non-billable, set an hourly rate for each employee and project, round time up to a minimum billable increment, and break tracked time down by client in reports that export to PDF, Excel or CSV or can be shared by link. Apps cover the web, desktop and mobile.

That combination, rates per person and per project plus rounding and client reports, maps well to hourly legal billing. The vendor also lists approvals, which helps if associates log time and a partner signs off.

• Best for: small firms that want a free plan to start and need rounding, per-lawyer rates and client reports.
• Watch out for: it is cloud-only in Enlisted's data, and it is a time tracker rather than a practice management system, so matters, documents and trust accounting live elsewhere. Read the Clockify attorney page for the details it states.

Harvest: best for tying lawyer hours straight to invoices

Harvest is a hosted time tracking and invoicing product built for professional services teams that bill by the hour. People log time against clients and projects, and the same data feeds reports and invoices that can take online payments. It also has expense tracking, desktop and mobile apps, and a companion product, Harvest Forecast, for planning workload.

The vendor publishes several pages for law firms. They describe one-click timers, automated invoice generation from tracked time and links to accounting tools such as QuickBooks and Xero, and they say Harvest does not track passively, so entries come from timers or manual input.

• Best for: firms that care most about going from logged hours to a client invoice in one tool.
• Watch out for: the free plan is sized for a single person, so a multi-lawyer firm will move to a paid plan quickly. Its law-firm page is the place to confirm what it covers for you.

Toggl Track: best for a clean timer with rounding in reports

Toggl Track is a hosted time tracking tool with timers, timesheet reports, project budgets and invoicing, with apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Toggl publishes a page for lawyers and attorneys, and its reports can round entries up, down or to the nearest interval you choose.

It also covers automated tracking, time off management and profitability views, which helps once a firm wants to see which matters or clients are worth the hours.

• Best for: lawyers who want a straightforward timer on every device plus rounding applied at the reporting stage.
• Watch out for: rounding happens in reports, so confirm how that flows into invoices, and note that it is closed source with no self-hosted option. Looking for other hosted options? See Toggl alternatives.

Best for self-hosting and keeping client data in-house: Kimai, Solidtime and Traggo

Firms with confidentiality worries, or with someone who can run a small server, can host an open-source tracker. None of these three is built for law practice, so you create clients and matters in whichever structure the tool offers.

Kimai: best open-source tracker with invoicing for firms

Kimai is an open-source, web-based time tracker (AGPL-3.0, built with PHP and Symfony) with timesheets, reports, invoicing and a JSON API. Customers and projects give you a place to model clients and matters. Its security options include SAML, LDAP and two-factor sign-in, plus role and team permissions, which matter when several lawyers and staff share one instance.

Its site describes invoice templates in PDF and DOCX, configurable invoice numbers and self-hosting with Docker on your own server. A paid hosted version also exists if you would rather not run it.

• Best for: small and mid-sized firms that want a mature self-hosted tracker with invoices and user permissions.
• Watch out for: the vendor's main page does not spell out rounding rules, so check the documentation for the increment behavior you need before committing.

Solidtime: best modern open-source tracker with billable rates

Solidtime is an open-source time tracker (AGPL-3.0, built with Laravel and Vue) with projects, tasks, clients and billable rates that can be set per project, per member and per organization. One account can manage several organizations, which suits a lawyer who keeps separate books for separate entities, and imports from Toggl, Clockify and CSV files ease a move from another tool. It has a hosted version and a free solo plan, and the project lists self-hosting.

• Best for: solo lawyers and small firms moving off Toggl or Clockify who want an open-source option they can host later.
• Watch out for: releases are still numbered below 1.0, so review the project's activity and roadmap before running client billing on it. Its listing does not mention rounding either.

Traggo: best lightweight self-hosted tracker for tag-based matters

Traggo is a self-hosted time tracker built around tags instead of tasks or projects. A lawyer could use one tag for the client, another for the matter and a third for the kind of work, then read dashboards, a calendar view and a list view of the result. It is a single Go server under GPL-3.0, with simple multi-user management and no hosted version, so no third party holds the data.

• Best for: a technical solo lawyer or tiny firm that wants a free, self-hosted tracker and is happy to shape its own tag scheme.
• Watch out for: the listing shows no invoicing, billable-rate or rounding features, so you would export hours and bill elsewhere. Its releases are also pre-1.0.

Best for automatic capture when time slips through the day

Lawyers lose billable minutes to short calls, emails and document edits. Automatic trackers record what you worked on so you can turn it into entries afterward. They also record activity, so check what is captured and where it is stored.

ManicTime: best automatic tracker with local or on-premise storage

ManicTime is an automatic time tracker for Windows, Mac and Linux that logs applications and documents in use, can add screenshots and idle tracking, and lets you assign the time to projects or tasks. Timesheets, reports and invoicing from a timesheet are included, and it can store data locally or on a cloud or on-premise server. It lists integrations with Harvest and QuickBooks Online.

• Best for: attorneys who want passive capture and prefer local or on-premise data storage.
• Watch out for: capturing documents and screenshots is sensitive in a legal setting, so decide up front what to log and who can see it. There is no free plan listed, only a trial.

Timely: best for automatic timesheets in agency-style billing

Timely is automatic time tracking and capacity planning software whose Memory app logs the apps, documents and sites you use, then lets you review that record and turn it into timesheet entries. It is aimed at agencies and consultancies that bill or budget by project time, which is a loose fit for law practice, though invoices and locked time entries are listed.

• Best for: firms that want a private daily record to rebuild billable entries and also plan team capacity.
• Watch out for: it is aimed at agencies, not law firms, it is paid with a trial rather than a free plan, and it records activity on the device.

TrackingTime: best for retainers and billable hours with automatic capture

TrackingTime is a time tracking and project tool for agencies with billable hours, retainers, rates and costs, timesheets and an automatic capture feature called AutoTrack. Retainer support is the angle for lawyers, since many firms bill monthly retainers alongside hourly work.

• Best for: small firms that mix retainers and hourly billing and want roles for partners, associates and finance staff.
• Watch out for: the product is positioned for agencies, so matter-style structure is something you build with projects and custom fields.

How to choose time tracking software for your law firm

• You are a solo lawyer and want data on your own PC: Offlegal.
• You want a free plan and rounding to a billing increment: Clockify, then confirm the rounding settings.
• You care most about invoices from hours: Harvest, or Kimai if you want to host it yourself.
• You want a plain timer on every device: Toggl Track.
• You must keep client time data on your own server: Kimai, Solidtime or Traggo, or ManicTime on-premise.
• You forget to start timers: ManicTime or Timely, after deciding what activity may be logged.
• You want case files and deadlines too: a legal practice management system. Offlegal covers matters, documents and invoices locally, and in the wider catalogue you can look at CRM and project tools such as those in free CRM software or free project management software.

For other professions that bill time, see our guides to time tracking software for consultants and time tracking software for architects. To browse everything with timers and project tracking, open the project management category, or the CRM category if client records matter more than hours.