9 platforms priced · Last updated July 2026
Legal Billing Software: Law Firm and Attorney Time and Billing Tools Compared for 2026
Legal billing software records the time a lawyer spends, turns it into invoices in the formats clients and insurers accept, and keeps client money in a trust account separate from the firm's operating account. Any firm that bills hourly, holds retainers, or invoices a corporate client needs it, because generic invoicing tools cannot produce a three way IOLTA reconciliation or a LEDES file. The market splits into standalone time and billing tools from about $29 per user per month, and full practice platforms that include billing from about $39. This page prices both, and covers the change forcing firms to move in 2026: Clio ending its LawPay integration.
Legal billing software compared, with July 2026 prices
Per user per month billed annually unless noted. Checked July 2026 against vendor pricing pages. Vendors rename tiers often, so confirm the current number before you sign.
| Platform | Price (annual) | What it is | Best for | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bill4Time | From $29; Pro around $59; Legal Pro around $89 | Standalone time and billing, with matter and client records around it | Solos and small firms whose only gap is billing | Trust and legal specific features sit on the higher tiers |
| TimeSolv | About $47.50 for 1 to 4 users, $45 for 5 to 14, $43 for 15+ | Time capture and invoicing built for professional services, strong on LEDES | Firms with a real e-billing burden and a system of record elsewhere | Not a case management system; you will run something alongside it |
| MyCase | Basic $39 / Pro $89 / Advanced $109 | Full practice platform with billing, payments, and a client portal included | Best capability per dollar for firms under about ten people | Accounting add on is $39 per month for the firm and is what gives you three way trust reconciliation |
| Clio Manage | Roughly $49 to $149 across EasyStart, Essentials, Advanced, Expand | The widest practice platform in US legal, billing included at every tier | Firms that want the largest integration catalog and room to grow | Exact tier prices are disputed across sources; get a written quote. LawPay integration ends in 2026 |
| PracticePanther | Solo $49 / Essential $69 / Business $89 | Practice platform with strong billing automation and reminders | Firms whose problem is chasing unpaid invoices | The automation most firms buy it for sits above the Solo tier |
| CosmoLex | About $99 per user with a two user minimum, so a floor near $198 per month | Practice management with full legal accounting built in, not bolted on | Firms that want to stop paying a bookkeeper to run a separate ledger | The two user minimum makes it expensive for a true solo |
| CARET Legal | Enterprise $79 / Enterprise Plus $89 | Practice platform with deeper accounting and reporting than the small firm tools | Mid size firms with a controller or office manager | Two tiers only, so there is no cheap entry point for a solo |
| Smokeball | Smokeball Bill around $39; higher tiers quote only, listed floor $149 per month | Automatic passive time capture that records work as you do it | Firms losing real money to unrecorded time | Full platform pricing is quote only and terms tend to be long |
| LawPay | No monthly fee; 2.99% plus $0.30 per card transaction | Payment processing built to keep card fees out of the trust account | Taking client card payments compliantly | Payments only, not billing. Its Clio integration is ending in 2026 |
| Caseagent | Early access, priced per firm | An AI agent inside the matter that reads filings, drafts, and captures the time that work implies | Firms whose lost revenue is unrecorded work, not unpaid invoices | No trust accounting and no payment processing. You keep a billing system |
Most of these numbers are the annual rate. Paying monthly typically costs 10 to 20 percent more. For the wider platform picture see the legal case management software comparison chart and our breakdown of what legal software actually costs per year.
The 2026 change that is actually moving firms: Clio and LawPay are splitting
In May 2026 Clio announced that the agreement behind its longtime LawPay integration inside Clio Manage concludes in August 2026. Thousands of US firms run exactly that pairing. If you are one of them, your payment workflow breaks unless you act.
Do not wait for the cutoff. A processor change means new merchant underwriting, updated client payment links, and a notice to clients on auto-pay. Give it a quarter, not two weeks.
Three different products get sold as one
Almost every bad billing purchase starts here. Time capture, invoicing, and trust accounting are separate jobs, and a product can be excellent at one and absent on another.
Job 1 · Time capture
Getting the work recorded
Timers, mobile entry, and passive capture that watches what you do in Word and Outlook. This is where firms lose the most money, and the hardest thing to compare because every vendor claims it. Smokeball's passive capture is the strongest small firm implementation. A timer nobody starts is worth nothing, which is why our guide to legal time tracking software compares the nine main options on capture method rather than feature count.
Job 2 · Invoicing and e-billing
Getting the bill out and paid
Batch prebills, split billing, evergreen retainer replenishment, payment plans, LEDES export, and reminders. Payment processing is a separate contract even when it looks like a feature: LawPay, Clio Payments, and the rest charge per transaction on top of your subscription.
Job 3 · Trust accounting
Not commingling client money
A client ledger per matter, a trust ledger, and a three way reconciliation tying the bank statement, the trust balance, and the sum of client ledgers to the same number monthly. State bar rules require it, and it is frequently a paid add on rather than a tier, so verify it in writing. If your books already live in QuickBooks, read how the legal billing to QuickBooks sync actually behaves before you rely on it.
Where Caseagent sits, stated plainly
Caseagent is not a trust accounting system and we do not process payments. We do not hold client funds and we do not produce a three way reconciliation. If you hold client money, keep a billing platform that does IOLTA properly. That is a bar rule question, not a software preference, and our guide to law firm accounting software and IOLTA trust accounting prices the options that do it.
What we do is Job 1, from the other end. The agent lives inside the case file: it reads incoming filings and correspondence, drafts responses, tracks the deadlines an order creates, and records the time that work implies as it happens, with a narrative describing what was actually done. Most firms lose more revenue to work nobody wrote down than to invoices nobody chased. See AI case analysis and the wider legal practice management software overview.
See the work before you see the invoice.
Pick a fictional sample matter, choose a task (case brief, deadline timeline, drafted response, or research memo), and watch the agent produce a first draft for attorney review.
AI first drafts for attorney review · not legal advice
Who should buy what, by firm size and billing model
The right answer depends far more on how you get paid than on how many features a vendor lists.
Solo, hourly, small trust balance
Bill4Time from $29 covers time and invoices for the least money. If you also want matters, documents, and a client portal in one login, MyCase Basic at $39 beats buying two products. Add the $39 per month accounting module the day you hold your first retainer. Skip CosmoLex until you have a second user, since the minimum puts the floor near $198 per month.
2 to 10 attorneys, mixed work
A full platform pays for itself here: coordination cost is real and per-seat pricing is still cheap. PracticePanther at $49 to $89 leads on collections automation, MyCase at $39 to $109 on value, Clio at roughly $49 to $149 on integrations. CosmoLex is the pick if you want the general ledger and the trust ledger in one system instead of a separate bookkeeping stack.
Contingency and personal injury
You are not billing hours, so case cost tracking matters far more than time capture. You need per-matter expense ledgers for filing fees, experts, and records, plus settlement disbursement statements splitting recovery between fee, costs, lien payoffs, and client. Evaluate on that math, not on invoice templates. Trust handling of the settlement check is the highest risk moment in this practice.
Hourly litigation and insurance defense
Volume of time entries is the whole problem, and your clients dictate the format. Prioritize fast bulk entry, UTBMS coding at the point of entry, LEDES export, and a rejection workflow. TimeSolv, Bill4Time Legal Pro, and CARET Legal are built for this shape. Check that guidelines are enforced before submission, not after a reduction.
If billing is only one item on a longer list, the broader buying guide is in law firm management software.
LEDES, UTBMS, and insurance defense e-billing
If any of your clients is an insurer or a corporate legal department, they will not accept a PDF invoice. They require a structured file, and their e-billing system will reject anything that does not parse.
What LEDES is
The Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard: a plain text, pipe delimited invoice format. LEDES 1998B is still the most widely required version. Every line carries a date, timekeeper, task code, activity code, hours, rate, and narrative in fixed positions.
What UTBMS codes are
The Uniform Task Based Management System, a shared vocabulary for what the work was. Litigation codes run L100 through L600, with activity codes such as A103 for drafting. Clients use them to compare firms, so coding sloppily invites write-downs.
Billing guidelines bite hardest
Insurer guidelines commonly restrict block billing, cap increments at tenths of an hour, refuse to pay for two attorneys at one deposition, and disallow administrative time. Software that flags these before submission saves more money than any discount you negotiate.
Portals and rejections
Invoices land in a vendor portal on the client's side, and a rejection restarts a cycle that already runs 60 to 90 days. Ask which portals a platform is tested against, and whether you can resubmit a corrected file instead of rebuilding the invoice.
Narratives matter
"Review documents" gets cut. "Review defendant's supplemental production, 412 pages, for privilege issues raised in the March 14 order" gets paid. Good narratives come from writing time entries the day the work happened, which is the argument for capture at the point of work.
Six things to test in a legal billing software demo
Every demo shows a clean invoice going out on time. Ask for these instead, using your own numbers, during the trial.
01 · Run a three way reconciliation
Load a trust account, deposit, disburse, and produce the reconciliation report. Ask whether your state bar's format is the one it prints, and watch whether the software stops you overdrawing a single client ledger.
02 · Export a real LEDES file
Not a screenshot of a LEDES button. Generate the file, open it, and confirm task codes, timekeeper IDs, and rates sit where the client's portal expects them.
03 · Time an actual month end
Generate a batch of prebills, edit three the way a partner would, and send. If the round trip takes two days at 40 matters, it takes a week at 120. Measure it, do not estimate it.
04 · Ask for the payments contract
Card and eCheck rates, chargeback handling, surcharging rules in your state, and whether fees can ever touch the trust account. LawPay's published 2.99% plus $0.30 per card transaction is your benchmark.
05 · Test a messy fee arrangement
A flat fee with hourly overage, a contingency with advanced costs, or a matter split between two paying clients. Straight hourly works everywhere. Hybrids are where billing software quietly fails and someone rebuilds the invoice in a spreadsheet.
06 · Get your data back out
Ask how you export time entries, invoices, payments, and trust ledgers if you leave, and in what format. Trust records stay retrievable for years after a matter closes, and a flat PDF dump will not satisfy an auditor.
Deadline math is a separate discipline from billing math. Our free court deadline calculator handles the first one.
Legal billing software, common questions
What US firms ask most while they are still shortlisting.
What is legal billing software?
Legal billing software records billable time, converts it into client invoices in the formats law firms and their clients require, and keeps client funds separate from firm funds. It differs from general accounting software because it handles trust ledgers, retainer replenishment, split hourly and contingency work, and LEDES electronic billing files.
How much does legal billing software cost?
Dedicated time and billing tools start near $29 per user per month with Bill4Time and about $47.50 with TimeSolv. Full practice platforms that include billing run from $39 with MyCase and $49 with PracticePanther up to roughly $149. CosmoLex sits near $99 per user with a two user minimum.
What is the best legal billing software for small law firms?
For a solo who only needs time capture and invoices, Bill4Time from $29 or TimeSolv near $47.50 per user is the cheapest honest answer. For a small firm that also wants matters, documents, and trust accounting in one place, MyCase Basic at $39 or PracticePanther Solo at $49 wins on capability per dollar.
Do lawyers need special billing software?
If you hold client funds or bill insurers and corporate clients, yes. General invoicing tools cannot produce a three way IOLTA reconciliation, cannot stop you spending unearned retainer money, and cannot export a valid LEDES file. Firms on pure flat fees with no trust account can often survive without one.
What is LEDES billing?
LEDES stands for Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard, a fixed file format for electronic invoices. Insurers and corporate legal departments require it so their e-billing systems can read every line item automatically. Each entry carries UTBMS task and activity codes, a timekeeper ID, hours, and a rate.
Does legal billing software include trust accounting?
Most full practice platforms do, but check the tier. MyCase charges $39 per month extra for the accounting add on that performs three way trust reconciliation. CosmoLex builds trust accounting into the core product. Standalone time and billing tools often track trust balances without reconciling them to a bank statement.
Is Clio ending its LawPay integration?
Yes. Clio announced in May 2026 that the agreement behind the LawPay integration inside Clio Manage concludes in August 2026. Firms running both must move card and eCheck processing to Clio Payments, keep LawPay outside Clio and reconcile manually, or move their billing platform entirely.
The billing problem usually starts before the invoice
Keep your billing platform. Caseagent works inside the case file: reading filings, drafting, tracking deadlines, and recording the time that work implies. Early access for US law firms, and early users lock in launch pricing.