TimePrivate is a Mac time tracker for attorney time tracking in a solo practice or a small law firm, with client and matter sitting on the device and the bill landing in tenths of an hour after you have approved the day. It records the desk, waits for you to sign the day off, and bills that day in tenths. Clio and the BigLaw suites run the rest of a practice; this one stays on time and the invoice.
TimePrivate is not released. There is no download, no trial and no purchase today. Apple Silicon Macs first, Windows on the roadmap.
| Clock time | Tenth on the bill |
|---|---|
| 6 minutes | 0.1 |
| 12 minutes | 0.2 |
| 18 minutes | 0.3 |
| 30 minutes | 0.5 |
| 54 minutes | 0.9 |
| 60 minutes | 1.0 |
Lawyers track time by recording each piece of work close to when it happens, in tenths of an hour, against a named client and matter, then correcting that record before it turns into a bill. TimePrivate does exactly that on one Mac: it captures the frontmost app and the browser domain in the background, holds the day as a draft, and bills the hours you approved in tenths of an hour. Planned TimePrivate pricing is $9 a month or $79 a year, waitlist only, which is time tracker money rather than a practice management subscription.
This is the TimePrivate conversion chart for lawyer billing in tenths, taken to the nearest six minutes, which is how TimePrivate states a day you have already approved. Draft rounding while you are still cleaning the day is a separate setting of 5, 15 or 30 minutes.
| Tenth | Minutes worked | What it usually is |
|---|---|---|
| 0.1 | 3 to 8 | A short client call, a one line email |
| 0.2 | 9 to 14 | Reading an incoming filing |
| 0.3 | 15 to 20 | A note to the file |
| 0.4 | 21 to 26 | Marking up a short agreement |
| 0.5 | 27 to 32 | Half an hour of drafting |
| 0.6 | 33 to 38 | A call plus the follow up email |
| 0.7 | 39 to 44 | Research on one question |
| 0.8 | 45 to 50 | A client meeting |
| 0.9 | 51 to 56 | A long review pass |
| 1.0 | 57 to 62 | An hour of work |
Two habits sit behind the same chart, so say which one you use in your engagement letter. Rounding to the nearest tenth sends a 4 minute call to 0.1 and a 2 minute call to nothing. Rounding up sends every started six minute block to the next tenth, which turns that same 2 minute call into 0.1. TimePrivate bills to the nearest six minutes, and the TimePrivate work hours calculator runs the same arithmetic in the browser today with nothing installed, so you can total a week in tenths before the Mac app exists.
Quarter hour billing is the other convention you will meet, mostly in insurance defence panels and some flat rate work. A quarter hour minimum turns a 3 minute call into 0.25 of an hour, which is why clients who read their bills push for tenths. Keep the two apart on the page and in the invoice narrative.
A tenth of an hour is six minutes, which is still the unit a lot of US legal billing uses, and the unit TimePrivate uses once you have signed off the day. 0.1 on the invoice is six minutes of work you approved, so a client who expects 0.2, 0.5 or 1.4 will recognize the number. While you are still cleaning the day, the app can draft in 5, 15 or 30 minute increments; those are just a way to snap the raw capture, and the bill itself is tenths. If you want to see a week in tenths right now, the TimePrivate work hours calculator already has a nearest six minute option and needs nothing installed.
Planned pricing is $9 a month or $79 a year, waitlist only, which is a Mac tracker price rather than a practice management subscription.
Lawyers keep track of time with one of five methods, and TimePrivate is built for the last one. Each is listed here with the way it actually fails, because the method you can sustain on a bad Thursday beats the method that is theoretically perfect.
Switching from a cloud tracker does not mean retyping a year. TimePrivate imports Toggl, Clockify and Harvest CSV exports along with .ics calendar files, tags and billable flags included, so the old matters land in the local database. The feature by feature versions of those two moves live on the TimePrivate comparison with Toggl Track and TimePrivate's guide to leaving Clockify with your matter history.
Client names, matter names, and a week of browser domains can sit close to information your professional rules care about. TimePrivate keeps that file in a local SQLite style database on your Mac, with no TimePrivate account and no TimePrivate server. Whether that satisfies your bar, your insurer, or a client's outside counsel guidelines is something you decide with those documents, not with a marketing page.
A supervising partner cannot open a dashboard from another city, and nothing in the capture is a screenshot. Automatic tracking writes the frontmost app and the browser domain, offers idle time back when a timer is running, and waits for you to approve the day before any of it is billable. If a colleague needs the week, you export a file.
A client is the person or company you bill, with a bill-to printed on their PDF. They never get a login. You can map a domain or an app to that client so the daily draft arrives already pointed at them.
A matter is the project name: the name on the physical file, or the numbering you already use. TimePrivate does not add conflict checks or a file-opening wizard on top of that.
Both live in the local database, and nobody else gets a seat. Optional folder sync through iCloud or Dropbox is a folder you point at, on a machine you control. Leave it off if your own policy says the matter file stays on that Mac.
A TimePrivate rule is how a Tuesday on github.com becomes 0.4 on a named matter instead of a pile of unlabelled minutes.
The same rule works for a local app, so a day in Pages can belong to one matter if that is where the memo lives, and when the mapping is wrong you just edit the draft. Automatic capture is there so a forgotten timer does not erase the afternoon; you still file the matter. The longer note on what gets written down, and what never is, lives on the automatic time tracking page.
Draft rounding of 5, 15 or 30 minutes is still useful while you clean the day, and the bill TimePrivate produces for lawyer work is tenths, so keep those two increments separate when you explain a line to a client.
App in front, domain in the browser, idle offered back. A closed-lid hearing will not appear, so add those hours by hand when you return.
Nothing is billable until you say so, which is what keeps a time entry from becoming a monitoring feed.
TimePrivate bills in tenths. The PDF can carry rates, tax, expenses, a due date and the client's bill-to, on this machine. The invoicing path is the operations write-up.
Duplicate next month if the matter is a retainer. Statuses live next to the entries so you can answer which week a tenth came from.
If a bookkeeper or a co-counsel needs the week, you export a file, because there is no manager dashboard for them to open.
Planned at $9 a month or $79 a year, with nothing to download today and no seat license that grows with headcount.
Suppose the Mac saw 36 minutes on a client staging host you mapped to Northshore 2026-014, 18 minutes in Mail that you decide was the same matter, and 70 minutes on a browser domain that belongs to a different client. A running timer then offers 12 minutes of idle after a call. You keep those 12 minutes on 2026-014.
After you approve the day, TimePrivate bills those lawyer hours in tenths. Northshore is 36 + 18 + 12 minutes, which is 66 minutes, which is 1.1 on the bill, not a raw minute dump onto a client who expects 0.1 increments. The other client gets their own tenths on their own bill-to. Nothing from the first matter leaks onto the second PDF because the invoice is built from approved, labelled time, not from "whatever the frontmost app was".
A hearing with the lid closed still has to be typed, because automatic capture cannot invent it. Treat the draft as the desk record and the calendar as the appearance record, then reconcile both before the bill goes out.
Whether $300 an hour is a lot depends on the market, the practice area and who is paying, and TimePrivate is a time tracker rather than a rate survey, so it will not tell you what to charge. What is plain arithmetic, and what TimePrivate puts on the invoice, is what one tenth of an hour is worth at your rate. That is the number worth memorising, because a tenth is the smallest thing you can forget.
| Hourly rate | One tenth (6 min) | Two forgotten tenths a day, over 200 days |
|---|---|---|
| $150 | $15 | $6,000 |
| $300 | $30 | $12,000 |
| $450 | $45 | $18,000 |
| $600 | $60 | $24,000 |
| $900 | $90 | $36,000 |
The right hand column is arithmetic on an assumption, not a study of your firm: two six minute items missed per working day, across 200 billed days. Nobody has measured your leakage and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. The point is the order of magnitude. At $900 an hour, two unrecorded calls a day is the same money as a junior salary, which is why lawyers at that rate tend to be the strictest timekeepers in the building. TimePrivate attacks that specific hole by recording the desk in the background so the forgotten items are sitting in the draft when you approve the day, rather than being reconstructed from memory on Friday.
A TimePrivate time entry carries the description you type next to the tenths, and that description is what a client actually reads. "Attention to file, 2.4" is the entry that gets written down by a billing reviewer. "Draft and revise reply brief, section III, 2.4" is the entry that survives. TimePrivate does not write the narrative for you, because nothing on your Mac knows what the work was for, but it does keep the description attached to the approved hours through to the PDF.
Block billing is one narrative covering several tasks under a single lump of time, such as "review correspondence, call client, revise agreement, 3.7". Plenty of outside counsel guidelines forbid it, and if yours do, split the day into one entry per task before you approve it, because TimePrivate bills exactly the entries you approved and will not unbundle them later. Splitting is easier when the draft already separates the work by app and domain, which is the whole reason the automatic capture is there.
When a corporate client asks for e-billing, they usually mean a LEDES file, most often the LEDES 1998B format, with UTBMS task and activity codes on each fee line. UTBMS was created by the American Bar Association, the Association of Corporate Counsel and PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the code sets are maintained today by the LEDES Oversight Committee. TimePrivate does not produce a LEDES file and does not carry UTBMS codes. It produces a PDF invoice and a CSV export of the underlying entries. If a client mandates LEDES submission, submit through their system and keep the TimePrivate record as your own copy of what was worked and when.
The 80/20 rule for lawyers is the Pareto principle applied to a practice: the rule of thumb that roughly 20% of clients produce about 80% of revenue, and that a similar small slice of matters produces most of the headaches. It is a rule of thumb rather than a measurement of your firm, and the only way to know your own ratio is to sort your own hours by client. TimePrivate exports every approved entry to CSV, so a quarter of tenths goes into a spreadsheet, sorts by client, and tells you which four names are carrying the year.
Track the hours even when the fee is not hourly, because the tracked hours are how you find out what the flat fee really paid. A $4,000 flat fee that took 26.4 hours is an effective rate of about $152 an hour, and you will only ever know that if the hours were recorded against that matter. Retainers work the same way with a different question: duplicate last month's TimePrivate invoice, compare the tenths, and see whether the retainer still covers the work or has quietly become a discount.
Non-billable time belongs in the same record for the same reason. Time on administration, on a pitch that did not convert, on a client who calls six times a week, is invisible in the accounts and expensive in the calendar. TimePrivate lets an entry sit against a client without being billable, so it appears in the CSV and not on the PDF. If you bill projects rather than matters, the same arithmetic is written up on the TimePrivate consultant time tracker page and the TimePrivate billable hours calculator.
Clio is practice management: matters, documents, billing, a firm database in their cloud. TimePrivate is a Mac time tracker with local invoices. If you need the rest of the practice operating system, stay with the category built for it.
Firm size decides this faster than any feature list. A solo or a two to five lawyer firm where each person bills their own tenths and one person sends the invoices is the TimePrivate audience, and the lack of seats is the point. A mid-sized firm with a billing clerk, matter-level budgets and a partner who reviews everyone's time needs approval chains and firm-wide reporting that TimePrivate does not have. Anything larger is running trust accounting, conflicts checks and e-billing compliance, none of which is on this roadmap.
There is no timekeeper hierarchy, no office-level reporting, and no integration bench for a records department, so a two-hundred lawyer shop will bounce off this immediately. The audience is a solo or a small firm that bills its own tenths.
If outside counsel guidelines require a specific e-billing format or a designated vendor, TimePrivate does not negotiate that. Produce a PDF and a CSV if they will take it. If they will not, keep their system and keep your own copy anyway.
Yes. TimePrivate bills lawyer time in tenths. 0.1 is six minutes. The on-page work hours calculator already offers a 6 minute, tenth option if you want that arithmetic today.
Lawyers keep track of time five ways: a running timer started when the work starts, reconstruction from the calendar and sent mail at the end of the day, a paper day sheet, a spreadsheet timesheet filled in later in the week, and automatic desk capture that you file yourself. TimePrivate is the last one. It records the frontmost app and the browser domain, holds the day as a draft, and bills what you approve in tenths of an hour.
A billable hours chart converts minutes worked into tenths of an hour, which is the unit most US legal bills use. Rounded to the nearest six minutes, 3 to 8 minutes is 0.1, 27 to 32 minutes is 0.5, and 57 to 62 minutes is 1.0. The chart earlier on this page runs the full scale, and the TimePrivate work hours calculator does the same arithmetic for a whole week in the browser.
That depends on the market, the practice area and who is paying, and TimePrivate is a time tracker rather than a rate survey. The useful arithmetic is what a tenth is worth at your rate: $30 at $300 an hour, $45 at $450, and $90 at $900. Two forgotten six minute items a day across 200 billed days is $12,000 at $300 an hour and $36,000 at $900.
It is the Pareto principle applied to a practice: the rule of thumb that roughly 20% of clients produce about 80% of revenue. It is a rule of thumb rather than a measurement of your firm. Export a quarter of approved TimePrivate entries to CSV, sort by client, and you get your own ratio instead of the maxim.
No. TimePrivate produces a PDF invoice and a CSV export of the underlying entries, and it does not carry UTBMS task codes or write LEDES 1998B files. If a corporate client mandates LEDES submission, submit through their system and keep the TimePrivate record as your own copy.
Yes. Clients and projects exist in the local database. The project name can be the matter name or number you already use. You can map github.com, or another domain or app, to that client and project.
No claim of that kind is being made. TimePrivate keeps the file on your Mac with no TimePrivate account. Whether that satisfies your professional obligations is a question for you and, if you have one, counsel who advises the firm.
Not in any useful sense. Clio runs a practice. TimePrivate tracks time and produces a PDF invoice on a Mac. If you need matter management, documents and firm billing in one cloud system, stay with the category built for that.
The app draft rounding available today is 5, 15 or 30 minutes. Lawyer billing in TimePrivate is tenths on the bill. Use the work hours calculator's tenth option if you want to preview a week in 0.1 increments in the browser.
There is no manager dashboard. If someone else needs the week, you export a file, which works for a solo or small firm and will not work for a supervised timekeeper model.
No. TimePrivate cannot stop another program from running on the same Mac. It simply does not take screenshots or log keys itself.
No. Waitlist only. Planned pricing is $9 a month or $79 a year, Apple Silicon first, Windows on the roadmap. No download, no trial, no Stripe on this site.
If you bill in tenths from one Mac, join the TimePrivate waitlist and we will write the day it opens.
Not released yet. Leave your email and we will write to you the day it opens.