That figure is deliberately conservative. It assumes a single lost unit, one fee earner's charge rate, and no busy weeks. The estimate that circulates for chargeable work never reaching a time entry runs somewhere between ten and twenty per cent, and it deserves less weight than the arithmetic above rather than more. It comes from software suppliers writing about the problem their software solves, the published ranges disagree with each other, and by definition the leak is the part nobody wrote down. That is why the figure this article rests on is one you can check on the back of an envelope instead. Even at the bottom of the circulating range, the number for a mid sized firm runs well past it. The point is not the precise total. The point is that the total is large, recurring, and invisible on your management accounts, because you cannot report on time you never captured.
Why the work goes unrecorded
Why does the work go unrecorded? Rarely through laziness. It goes unrecorded because the recording happens after the work, and the work is the priority. A fee earner takes a call from a client, deals with the point, moves to the next matter, and the intention to log six minutes competes with everything else until the day ends and the memory of the exact task has softened. Time recorded at the end of the week is time reconstructed, and reconstruction rounds down, because a professional who is unsure will honestly enter the smaller figure. The leak is a by-product of how a busy fee earner protects the client and their own integrity at the same time.
The evidence never vanished
Here is the part firms miss. The evidence of that lost work has not vanished. It is sitting in your systems already. The call was against a matter. The email was sent from the firm's account, timestamped, addressed to the client, filed to the case. The client relationship system and the mailbox between them hold a record of a great deal of the activity that never turned into a time entry. The raw material for capturing the leak is present. What has been missing is anything that reads across it, matches the activity to the matter, and puts a draft entry in front of the fee earner while the detail is fresh.
This is work an agentic assistant is well suited to, because it is routine, high volume, and needs a human to confirm rather than to originate. The Bracton AI Assistant is built into Bracton, the case and client management platform, where it reads across every live matter alongside the time recording and the ledgers, and it is sold on its own to run inside the case management or client relationship system your firm already has. On either route it reads the caseload rather than one open file. It can identify activity that has an obvious chargeable footprint, an email sent to a client on a matter, a logged call, a document produced, and prepare a draft time entry for the fee earner to check, adjust and approve. Nothing posts to the ledger on its own. The fee earner signs off every entry, keeping the professional judgement about what is properly chargeable exactly where it belongs, and the audit trail records what was suggested and what was accepted.
The effect is not to invent time. It is to stop losing time that was genuinely worked. A draft entry offered at the point of activity, rather than a blank timesheet at the end of the week, changes what a tired fee earner remembers to bill. Recover a fraction of the leak and the figure at the top of this article starts to reverse. Recover half of it in a ten fee earner firm and you have funded the assistant many times over before considering anything else it does across the caseload.
There is a professional dimension too. Accurate contemporaneous time recording supports fair billing, cleaner cost assessments, and better information for the client about what their matter is costing. Capturing worked time properly is sound practice as well as sound economics.
The way to size this for your firm is to look at your own data, not the general estimate. The demonstration shows the software working a caseload in your browser, and the written exercise on your own records starts with the money your firm holds for clients: book a client account review.