Bill the time you already worked
eLegal captures your attorneys' billable time as they work - drives, dictated notes, photos of call logs and case notes, calendar events - and turns it into 15-minute billables and invoices.
Nobody reconstructs their day at 6pm. And nothing bills until an attorney says it does.
There is no sign-up form. We set your firm up on a call, then you log in.
What eLegal picks up on an ordinary day
- The drive to the courthouse and back
- A note dictated in the parking lot
- A photo of the call log or the text thread
- A meeting on a connected calendar
Each one becomes a 15-minute billable, tied to the right client and matter, waiting for an attorney to confirm it.
The problem
The time you lose is the time nobody wrote down
Attorneys do not lose time because they are lazy. They lose it because capturing it is manual and it happens last.
The day looks like this. Drive to the courthouse for a 9am. Two other dockets while they are there. A call in the parking lot. Three texts with opposing counsel. A client meeting.
Back at the office by four, then real work until six. Then, tired, they open the timesheet and try to remember all of it.
The second half of the problem is defensibility. Time written from memory reads like it was written from memory. Time captured when it happened comes with a record of where it came from.
What falls out, every week
- The drive nobody logged. It happened, it was billable, it never got written down.
- The short calls. Six minutes here, ten minutes there, gone.
- The narrative reconstructed from memory hours later, which reads thin on the invoice and weak if a client questions the bill.
- The end-of-month scramble, chasing attorneys for time that is now a week cold.
Illustrative arithmetic, not a statistic
At a $350 hourly rate, one 15-minute unit is $87.50. If an attorney loses two units a day - one drive and a couple of short calls - that is $175 a day, roughly $3,500 a month, per attorney.
We do not have a study, and you have seen the fake ones. Plug in your own rate. Whether your firm loses two units a day or none is exactly what a pilot answers.
How it works
Four beats
Capture, match, review, bill. Everything else in the app hangs off those four.
Capture
The attorney does the smallest possible thing. Tap record and talk. Photograph a call log or a handwritten note. Drive somewhere. Take a meeting on a connected calendar. Or type an entry the old way, which still works fine and is faster than most.
Match
Everything becomes one kind of record inside eLegal - an activity - and the system works out which client and which matter it belongs to, then scores how sure it is. That score is the safety valve.
Review
High confidence follows the attorney's chosen style: post automatically, or wait for one tap. Anything uncertain goes to the review queue. A low-confidence entry can never post itself, and that rule is enforced in the database, not just on the screen. A bill on the wrong client is a confidentiality problem, not a typo.
Bill
Posted time becomes an invoice. Retainers apply automatically, invoices lock their line items when they are sent, payments record against them, and reports export to CSV or LEDES 1998B for insurers and corporate clients.
What it captures
What is live today, and what is coming
Most of the right-hand column is a switch, not a build. We would rather tell you now than in week two of a pilot.
- Manual time entry with 15-minute rounding
- Dictation with the recording and consent flow - with AI off, the attorney types the one-line summary
- Multi-party recording with a spoken consent notice and your firm's consent rule enforced
- Photo capture of call logs, text threads, handwritten notes and business cards
- Billing locations and the drive-time billing engine, including splitting one courthouse trip across that day's matters
- Review queue, and a billing confirmation style each attorney picks for themselves
- Invoices, retainers, recorded payments, and void with a paper trail
- Reports, CSV export, LEDES 1998B export, and the AI disclosure report
- Secure client recording links - expiring, revocable, every open logged
- Team invites and roles, paralegal matter scoping, CSV client import
- AI transcription of dictation, and AI reading of photographed call logs and notes
- Live GPS drive capture on mobile - the billing engine underneath is already built and tested
- Calendar auto-capture - built, waiting on the one-time Google and Microsoft app approvals
- Email auto-capture and the automatic business line, both on the CRM option
- Online card payments
- Our own private transcription server for dictation audio
One thing to be straight about
No app can read call history or text messages off an attorney's personal iPhone. Apple gives no app that permission and Google's store bans it for a billing app, so anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing. In eLegal, personal-number calls and texts are captured by a photo of the call log or the thread, or by hand, with one tap to confirm. Calls and texts that log themselves come from a dedicated business line, which is part of the CRM option.
Two ways to buy
Standalone, or with the CRM
The same capture engine underneath. The difference is whether your calls, texts and emails are part of it.
eLegal standalone
Billing intelligence, no CRM. It keeps its own client and matter records, so it works with nothing else attached and your firm is running the same day.
- Smart drive-time billing, so one courthouse trip splits across the right clients
- Dictation into a billable note
- Call and text logging by photo of the call log or thread, or by hand, with one tap to confirm
- 15-minute billables, review queue, retainers, invoicing
- Reports, CSV and LEDES exports, and the AI disclosure report
What it does not do: no email capture, no automatic call and text capture, no per-client communication archive.
Who it fits: solos and small firms who want their time to capture itself and already have whatever else they need.
eLegal with the CRM
Communications tooEverything in standalone, plus communications tracking and the full CRM.
- Email tracking - connect Microsoft 365 or Google once, and sent and received mail is captured, matched to the client, and billed
- A dedicated business line per attorney, where every call and text logs itself with no photos required
- A per-client communication record - every call, text, email, meeting and drive in one chronological view, searchable
- The full CRM - contacts, leads, pipelines, documents, tasks, dashboards
- Cross-firm billing between onboarded attorneys
Worth knowing: the business line carries a two to three week carrier registration, and it uses your firm's legal business information.
Who it fits: firms whose calls and emails are the work, and firms shopping for a practice platform anyway.
About pricing
We share pricing on the demo call and put the numbers in writing the same day, so there is nothing ambiguous to chase later. You can start on standalone and move up to the CRM option whenever it makes sense.
Privacy and control
Most software asks you to trust it. This one hands you the receipts
This is the part your most skeptical partner should read, and it is the reason the product is built the way it is.
- AI is off until you turn it on
- Off by default for every firm. While it is off the AI features refuse to run and nothing is sent anywhere, and that is enforced on the server rather than hidden in the interface. Recording, consent capture, and billing from a typed summary all work with no vendor involved at all.
- Turning it on is a deliberate act
- A firm owner or admin reads a plain-English disclosure naming each vendor and exactly what content it would receive, then accepts it. That acceptance is recorded permanently. If the disclosure text ever changes, AI pauses for the firm until someone accepts again.
- Any client or matter can be marked never-AI
- For engagements that forbid it. The server refuses the vendor call for that client no matter what the firm-level switch says.
- Every AI touch is logged, and the log prints
- Pick a client or a matter in Reports and print the history of every AI touch: when it happened, what kind of content, which vendor, what was decided, including the ones that were refused. The ledger stores hashes and sizes, never the content itself. That is the document you hand opposing counsel.
- There is a spending cap
- Every account carries a monthly cap on AI spend. Over the cap, the calls stop.
- Your evidence stays put
- Recordings, photos and transcripts stay in eLegal's storage and never sync anywhere, even for firms using the CRM. Each firm's data is isolated at the database level, and every sensitive action lands in an append-only audit log.
Where this is going
Transcription is moving onto eLegal's own private, single-tenant server, so that dictation audio does not go to an AI company at all. That is the plan and the build, not today's state, and we will not put a date on it here.
Today, when a firm has AI on, both vendors publish that they do not train on the data and that they delete it within 30 days. We attribute that exactly the way it deserves: the vendors publish it.
What we do not have yet
We are not SOC 2 certified. We have not been through a third-party security audit. And we do not have signed data processing agreements with the AI vendors, which is exactly why AI ships off.
If one of those is a hard requirement for you today, we would rather say so now than in month three.
See it on your own matters
Ten minutes on a phone is usually enough. We walk the capture, the review queue, an invoice with a retainer applied, and the data and AI page - then you tell us whether it would catch what your firm is losing.
Pricing comes up on that call, in writing. Let us know a couple of times that work for ya'll.
Or email info@no-bsm.com. Onboarding is managed, so there is nothing to sign up for.