Matterfile

Law firms bill by the hour. A huge portion of billable work happens over email: client correspondence, court filings, document reviews, negotiations. But a lot of that time never gets billed because lawyers forget to log it, or the overhead of switching to the billing system mid-workflow is too high.

The industry estimates that lawyers lose 10–30% of their billable time to this gap. For a mid-size firm, that is tens of thousands of dollars walking out the door every month.

Matterfile connects to a firm's email system and automatically detects sent and received emails related to client matters. It matches each email to the correct client and matter using contextual signals like subject lines, contact history, matter references, and conversation threads.

Once matched, it generates time entries in the firm's practice management software. We currently integrate with LEAP and Clio, the two most widely used platforms in Australia. The lawyer reviews and approves the entries, and they flow straight into invoicing.

The result is that firms recover billable time they were previously writing off. No behaviour change required from the lawyers. No new software to learn. It just runs in the background and surfaces work that was already being done but not captured.

The core challenge was email-to-matter matching. Emails do not come with neat labels. Subject lines are vague, threads get forwarded, CCs get added, and the same lawyer might work across dozens of active matters simultaneously.

We built a matching pipeline that combines rule-based heuristics with an LLM classification layer. The rules handle the obvious cases: emails to known client contacts, replies in existing threads, emails containing matter numbers. The LLM handles ambiguous cases where the content needs to be read and understood in context.

The time entry generation uses configurable templates per firm. Some firms bill email in 6-minute units, others in 15. Some want detailed narrative descriptions, others want short codes. We templatise all of that so the output matches what the firm's billing team expects.

The integration layer speaks to LEAP and Clio via their APIs. We poll for new emails on a schedule, process them through the pipeline, and push draft time entries into the PMS. Everything is auditable. Lawyers can see exactly which email triggered each entry and adjust before it hits the invoice.

Firms using Matterfile have recovered significant previously unbilled work within the first month. The system runs continuously without any input from lawyers, and the approval rate on generated time entries sits above 90%.

The feedback we hear most often is that it is not just about the revenue recovery. It is about removing the guilt and friction of timekeeping. Lawyers hate logging time. Matterfile means they do not have to think about it.