The gap is bigger than you think
Clio's Legal Trends Report has tracked this for years: the average lawyer bills about 2.9 hours of an 8-hour workday, roughly a third of the day turning into billable time (Clio Legal Trends Report). The other hours are not idle. They are calls, emails, quick reviews, a hallway conversation at the courthouse, the work that happens between the things you remember to write down.
Where court-appointed time leaks
For CPCS and CJA work, the leaks are specific. The six-minute call to the DA you meant to log and did not. The twenty minutes reviewing discovery on your phone. The drive you forgot was billable. None of it is dramatic on its own. Over a month it is real hours, and at your hourly rate it adds up to a number that would annoy you. One attorney found several unbilled hours the first time she reconciled her records against what she had actually filed.
Reconstructing it later is worse than losing it
The instinct is to rebuild the week on Sunday night from memory and your calendar. That is how accuracy slips, and in the worst case it is how you get in trouble, because reconstructed time is exactly what an audit or a bar complaint targets. Notes written as the work happens are both more complete and safer (see why contemporaneous billing matters).
How Plani helps
Plani exists for this gap. You text your time the moment it happens, a line at a time, and it captures the calls, the drives, and the short reviews you would otherwise drop. At the end of the week it hands you everything, sorted and categorized. It is about getting paid for work you already did.