The companion resource to our tier-list video. 6 AI time-capture tools, ranked A to C on 4 criteria, with the research behind every verdict and every source we used, listed per tool. Research date 2026-08-24. Prices, certifications and features change, so verify anything decision-critical with the vendor.
C does not mean bad. It means the fit is narrow for this audience. Change the assumed buyer and the board changes, and we say where below. The verdicts are Alejo Pijuan's calls on top of the research; the evidence under each one is sourced so you can check it yourself.
4 questions, asked identically 6 times, in this order. The research behind them: 7 parallel deep-research passes on 2026-08-24, one per tool plus one on the market, built on vendor documentation, buyer threads, independent reviews and journalism. Vendor claims are always quoted as vendor claims.
Not the demo. What day 40 looks like, and how much of your morning goes to correcting a robot.
Where the tool stands to watch. Email only, inside 1 system, work-app APIs, or the whole desktop. That position explains every price on the board.
The criterion that eliminates vendors in the real world. A 35-attorney firm publicly reported knocking 2 tools out of its evaluation on a compliance certificate alone.
Not the sticker. What real firms report being quoted, and whether you can find that out without a sales call. Only 2 of the 6 publish a price.
Why it is on the list. The most-funded, most-credentialed tool in the category, over $155M raised including a $100M Series C in June 2025, with named deployments at large firms including Jenner & Block, Stoel Rives and MLT Aikins, and the deepest compliance engine on the board. It is the best product in this category and, honestly, the wrong purchase for many smaller firms: the reported floor is about 50 timekeepers.
Their claims, quoted as their claims: Laurel's site and its Workday Marketplace listing claim "up to 30 min recovered daily," "28+ minutes per professional per day" and a "4-11%" revenue increase. Its partner SurePoint markets the same pitch as "+30 minutes/day, up to 5% annual revenue growth," which does not match. No independent audit of these figures has been published.
Why it is on the list. The only tool on the board a normal firm can actually go and get: published per-seat pricing, month to month, no minimum users, no minimum term, no setup fee, and a form-gated 30-day free trial. A paying customer on Reddit independently confirmed paying roughly what the site says. It won Legal Tech Company of the Year at the 2026 Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards against a finalist field that included Clio and Harvey.
Their claims, quoted as their claims: "The average practitioner spends 8-12 hours on billing each month. Billables AI aims to reduce time spent to less than one hour a month" (their homepage, footnoted to their own 2025 pilot program). Named customer testimonials on their site report 10 to 30 percent more captured time; all are vendor-published and selected.
Why it is on the list. The strongest privacy evidence in the roster, and the only tool with a documented peer evaluation that stayed happy a year on: a 35-attorney firm chose it, reported the entries "actually improve over time," and eliminated 2 competitors specifically because they held SOC 2 Type 1 rather than Type 2 at the time. YC-backed, $16M Series A in March 2026 led by 8VC.
Their claims, quoted as their claims: PointOne's own site leads with a customer testimonial, "PointOne has taken our firm's average weekly billables up by an average of 20% per user," a customer's statement rather than a company measurement. The company itself pitches captured unbilled time, not time savings.
Why it is on the list. The only mainstream practice management system where auto-capture is native, matter-aware, and actually writes the entries for you. The entry is born inside the matter, so it never has to be matched across an integration boundary. That is the moat, and the walls of the ecosystem are also the ceiling.
Their claims, quoted as their claims: Smokeball's US support hub says "AutoTime users bill 10-30% more by accurately tracking more time in Smokeball." Its Australian blog says AutoTime users bill over 4 hours a day against a 2-hour average, "an extra $135k of earnings per fee earner," in Australian dollars, with both the baseline and the improvement coming from the vendor. Nobody outside the company was found confirming either figure.
Why it is on the list, and why C. The incumbent. 150,000+ lawyers already have the seat. The tier turns on one distinction: the passive capture buyers expect from "Clio AI" is still in early access, covering Outlook email and Clio-mobile-app calls only, with no published price. Clio's Chief Product Officer said on stage at ClioCon 2025 that pricing was undecided. What ships today is an overnight suggest-and-approve pass over data already in Clio: it fixes "I logged it and never billed it," and it cannot touch "I never logged it." The other 5 tools write entries before you ask. So Clio sits in C for what it cannot see yet, not for being bad, and the coda stands: a firm already on an AI-bearing Clio plan should still switch it on tomorrow morning, since it costs nothing extra.
Their claims, quoted as their claims: Clio publishes no time-saved claim for its AI time capture. The absence is the fact. The numeric claim on its time-tracking page is payments-side: "get paid 39% faster by accepting online credit card payments." Clio's own Legal Trends Report, the category's reference dataset and itself vendor-published, has the average lawyer recording about 2.9 billable hours of an 8-hour day.
Why it is on the list. The sharpest business model in the category: pay per matched billable email, no subscription, no seats, no contract, and the only tool here you can meaningfully try before buying. C on this board is about fit for this audience, and one clause in its own terms decides it: no BAA, and its terms tell practices with regular PHI exposure (naming VA, personal injury with medical records, immigration medical exams, and Social Security disability) not to route that material through it. A PI firm cannot use this tool as written. A solo estate-planning firm on Clio whose leak really is email would fairly read it a tier or 2 higher.
Their claims, quoted as their claims: Tempello's surfaces variously claim "average 25% more billables in week 1," 20 to 30 percent more in the first month, and 2 to 5 hours saved per week; the figures change shape depending on which of their own pages you read, with no published methodology. No independent user has published a verified before and after.
Research-based guidance, not legal or purchasing advice. The right answer depends on your practice mix, your practice management system, and what your clients' billing guidelines allow. Verify current pricing and certifications with the vendor before signing anything.
Start with what you can actually try. Billables AI is the only full-workday capture tool with a published price, month-to-month terms, no minimums and a free trial; the honest number for the full product is the $109 tier, not the $47 headline. If you are already on Clio with an AI-bearing plan, switch on the built-in suggestions first, it costs nothing to test and tells you how big your "logged but never billed" leak is.
If your unbilled work really is mostly email and you run Clio or MyCase, Tempello is a cheap, triable bolt-on, unless your practice touches medical records: its own terms exclude PI, VA, immigration-medical and SSD practices. Smokeball firms already inside the ecosystem should price the AutoTime add-on but review the nightly batch output carefully before trusting the invoices.
Billables AI is the one you can have working next week at a price you saw in advance. It covers the Clio, MyCase, SurePoint, LeanLaw, Centerbase and Litify stack with genuinely passive API capture and SOC 2 Type II since July 2026.
PointOne is the step up when compliance is the job: the strongest privacy evidence on the board, an OCG rules engine, retroactive capture and voice entry, at buyer-reported pricing around $150 to $200 per user per month on an annual commitment, with a weeks-long deployment. A real 35-attorney firm made exactly this trade and stayed happy a year on. If your firm runs on Macs, note that Laurel is out (no macOS desktop assistant, vendor-documented), which simplifies the shortlist.
This is where Laurel, the board's #1, actually fits. Real connectors for Aderant and Elite 3E, Intapp Terms auto-sync, automated outside-counsel-guideline ingestion with rule enforcement before an invoice goes out, BYOK, and named large-firm deployments. Buyer-reported pricing runs roughly $110,000 to $140,000 a year at 50 users, sold on an ROI story rather than a sticker, and the deployment-quality record is mixed enough that a rigorous pilot with exit criteria is the sensible structure.
PointOne also sells upmarket, but its Aderant and Elite 3E integrations were vendor-claimed only at research time; make independent confirmation part of the evaluation. Windows-only environments should note both Laurel's desktop dependency and their own VDI setup before scoping.
All researched in the same 2026-08-24 sweep. None of these lines is a knock; each tool sits outside the board's frame for a stated, factual reason.
The screen-reading maximalist: it reads actual on-screen content across every application, so it needs no per-app integrations and catches work nothing else sees. Kept off the on-camera board in favour of PointOne for the same buyer; the capture posture makes the privacy conversation the first conversation.
Not legal-specific: it records activity into a local, offline timeline that never leaves the device, and you write the entries yourself. The extreme-privacy anchor of the category rather than an AI timekeeper, with published pricing of $12 to $24 per user per month.
The large-firm incumbent, 510+ firms and 70,000+ monthly users, with AI capture arriving through its Premium tier and a new Harvey integration that turns work done in Harvey into draft time entries. Enterprise-suite scope aimed at the Aderant ecosystem rather than this board's buyer.
Enterprise timekeeping and billing-compliance governance for large firms, now fronted by Intapp's Celeste AI, claiming $150B in annual billings flowing through it. A buying-committee product for firms already in the Intapp ecosystem.
Enterprise time capture combining timers, passive monitoring, AI timesheets, time-gap analysis and manager approval workflows. Built for large and global firms whose problem is supervisory review as much as capture.
Previous-generation autonomous activity logging, now part of IP-management company Anaqua. It produces an hour-by-hour activity report and leaves the lawyer to finalize entries, and it retains a loyal user base, particularly in IP practices.
Background capture across email, documents and court sites for solo and small firms, with contact-only pricing and a small public footprint. Too little independent evidence existed at research time to place it on a ranked board.
7 parallel deep-research passes ran on 2026-08-24, 1 per tool plus 1 across the market, drawing on vendor documentation and release logs, terms of service, buyer threads on Reddit and Hacker News, independent reviews, review platforms, and legal-tech journalism (LawNext, Artificial Lawyer, Law.com, Business Insider, Bloomberg Law). The tier placements are Alejo Pijuan's rulings on top of that research. He has not used these tools hands-on; most cannot be used without a sales call, which is itself a finding about the category.
Known gaps, stated rather than hidden: X and Twitter discourse was not sampled; some Reddit sweeps were cut short by a scraping quota, so absence of complaints is not proof of quiet; most tools in this category have zero reviews on G2, Capterra or TrustRadius, which is itself one of the clearest facts about how this software is sold. Anything the research could not verify is either marked as a vendor claim on this page or left out.
We have no affiliation with any tool on this page, no affiliate links, and nothing was sponsored.