Start Billing the 0.1
The four-minute email and the two-minute call are real work, and most partners never bill them. Here is what those tenths add up to, why they get written off, and how firms are getting them back.
A partner on one of our time entry pilots said it in one line.
“I usually didn't bill 0.1s, but now with this, maybe I'll bill point one.”
He was not describing a new habit. He was describing the entries Caddi had drafted from his inbox that morning: short replies to clients, quick notes to opposing counsel, the kind of work that takes a few minutes and never makes it onto a timesheet. A 0.1 is six minutes, the smallest unit most firms bill in. (If the increment itself is new to you, start with billable hours, explained or the history of who decided six minutes.) Most partners stopped billing them years ago.
What a tenth adds up to
One 0.1 is nothing. A day of them is not. Take a partner who sends a dozen short, substantive emails a day and bills none of them. That is 1.2 hours a day. At an illustrative rate of $600 an hour, over about 220 working days, it comes to roughly $158,000 a year, for one partner, from work that already happened.
Your numbers will differ: rates, practice, and client guidelines all move the math. But the order of magnitude is why another partner, after watching drafted entries for a week, put the case for the whole system this way:
“There are not a lot of partners going through and billing the time for every email that they send. So if we can get even a 0.8, .9, 1.2 every day, this thing pays for itself.”
Why the 0.1 gets written off
Nobody decides to give away six minutes. It happens for three ordinary reasons.
- Logging it costs more attention than it is worth. Stopping to open the time system for a two-minute reply breaks the real work, so the reply wins and the entry never happens.
- Reconstruction cannot see it. When time gets rebuilt at the end of the day or the month, the long tasks survive and the short ones vanish. That is the core argument of contemporaneous versus reconstructed time entry, and the tenth is where the loss is steepest.
- It feels petty. Plenty of partners self-censor small entries before the client ever sees them. Some of those calls are right. Most are never made consciously at all.
Add it up and the 0.1 is one of the quietest leaks in law firm revenue: it never shows up as a write-down, because it was never written down in the first place.
| Logged by hand | Caddi | |
|---|---|---|
| The two-minute client reply | Skipped, because logging it breaks focus | Drafted as a 0.1 on the right matter |
| Month-end | Rebuilt from memory; short tasks disappear | Reviewed from entries drafted each day |
| Who decides what is billed | Nobody, the entry never existed | The attorney, approving or deleting each draft |
| Client billing guidelines | Checked by a partner's markup pass | Checked at prebill review before the bill goes out |
What changes when the entry is drafted for you
The work already leaves a record. The inbox shows who you wrote to and about what. The phone system shows the call. The calendar shows the meeting. Caddi reads that record each day and turns it into draft entries in your time and billing system, matched to the client and matter, so the attorney reviews a list instead of reconstructing a week. The matching is the part attorneys notice first:
“It's able to look at an email and, even if it doesn't have the client matter number in it, figure out how that should be inserted into my timesheets. I really like that.”
And the review is short. One partner, closing out a month of time from drafted entries, estimated what doing it by hand would have taken:
“It was super helpful. That would have been a six-hour project.”
Bill it, or write it down on purpose
Not every short email is billable, and the client's guidelines always win. Some clients bar block billing or cap entries for routine correspondence, and some tenths should be combined or written down. The goal is not to bill every keystroke. It is to stop losing time to omission, and to make every write-down a choice someone made. Pair drafted entries with prebill review against client guidelines and the entries that would draw a challenge get caught before the bill goes out (see how to automate prebill review).
See your own tenths
Read how time entry on Caddi works, see the law firm overview, or book a demo to watch a day of your email and calls turn into drafted entries.
Caddi
See how Caddi AI Agents can bill the 0.1s you used to write off and draft entries your attorneys only approve
Frequently asked questions
What is a 0.1 in legal billing?
A 0.1 is one tenth of an hour, six minutes, the smallest unit most law firms bill in. A short substantive email, a two-minute call with opposing counsel, or a quick review of a document usually rounds up to a 0.1 under a firm's tenth-of-an-hour policy.
Should attorneys bill for short emails?
If the email is substantive work on a client matter and the engagement and the client's billing guidelines allow it, it is billable time like any other. Many attorneys skip it anyway because stopping to log six minutes feels like more trouble than it is worth. The client's guidelines always govern, so some short entries will be combined or written down on purpose. The point is to make that a decision, not an omission.
How do you capture 0.1 entries without running a timer?
Draft them from the record of the work that already exists. The inbox, the phone system, and the calendar show what an attorney did and for which client. Caddi turns that record into draft time entries matched to the client and matter each day, and the attorney approves, edits, or deletes them in the time and billing system the firm already uses.