Legal Eagle Practice Companion

§ 02

Three things that go missing every week

Not because you are careless. Because the moment they happen, you are standing up, holding a file, and talking to someone.

01

The corridor call

0.3 on the courthouse steps

Eighteen minutes, dealt with standing up, gone by the time you were back at the office.

02

The honest correction

The timer that ran through lunch

Four hours and ten minutes against a matter you touched for forty. It notices when you leave the desk and asks, before it becomes a number you would have to defend.

03

The date with no paper

The deadline the judge said out loud

No order, no email, just a date. Enter it with a lead time and it is on the calendar before you sit down.

§ 03 Two jobs. Read the half that is yours.

It can be your system of record. Or the notebook beside one.

As your system of record. For a solo practitioner, or the one person keeping the books at a firm of two to five: everything the rest of this page describes. One person on one machine. No user accounts, no permissions, no two people in the file at once. A firm of five runs on this only if one desk keeps it. Weigh the gaps first. No e-filing, no client portal, no card or online payments, no e-signature, no bank feed. A statement is a file you download and open here. If your practice needs one of those, this is not your system of record.

Or alongside the formal system your firm already runs. This is where you catch the 0.3 on the courthouse steps, the date the judge said out loud and the parking receipt. Time comes out in five layouts: Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther, a plain one almost anything will read, and a full one that leaves nothing out.

Nothing crosses over on its own. You export it and enter it yourself. Until you have, nothing entered here is a record of anything.

The reports screen showing a monthly billing trend chart above export options for Clio, MyCase, PracticePanther and a plain CSV layout. — **Fig. 02 — Reports & exports** Five layouts out: into another system, or as your own copy.

One arrangement to avoid: half your billing here, half in the firm's system. A trust ledger kept in two places is worse than one kept in either. Read this before you download →

§ 04

Capture

Get it down in the ten seconds you actually have

Everything here exists because time recorded later is time recorded wrong, or not at all.

Quick-entry bar on every screen — date, project, hours, description — with New Client, Matter, Project, Expense and Time Entry reachable from any tab.
A live timer that pauses and resumes without losing the count.
Stock phrases for the same twenty narratives. Optional UTBMS task and activity codes. Optional rounding to 0.1, 0.25 or 0.5 of an hour, always up.
It checks the whole day, not just each entry. Thirty one-hour records on one date is an impossible day, and it says so before the day becomes a bill.

The time entries list showing date, project, type, hours, rate, amount, UTBMS code, billing status and description for each entry. — **Fig. 03 — Time entries** Every entry, with its rate and code, and whether it has been invoiced yet.

The quick-entry bar: date, project, billable type, hours and description. — **Fig. 03 — Time entries** Every entry, with its rate and code, and whether it has been invoiced yet.

§ 05 The week you have had and the week ahead, in one view.

The agenda screen listing upcoming appointments, deadlines and court dates with how many days away each is, beside a list of open tasks. — **Fig. 04 — Agenda** Everything ahead of you, and how long you have.

Your week

Hours and dates in the same picture

Hours worked on each day, with coloured dots for what is on: red for deadlines and court dates, blue for appointments, amber for tasks due.
Appointments, court dates, deadlines, reminders and events, each with a lead time.
Task checklists per project, one combined list of everything still open, and notes against any project or client.
An alert strip across the top of every screen when something is overdue or close.
Desktop notifications from an icon in the notification area, which keeps watching after you close the window.
A warning when a workday passes with no time logged.
From a rule… on the Agenda counts a deadline from a trigger date: calendar days or court days, counting forward or backward, rolling off a weekend or a holiday in whichever direction the rule says. The calendar entry keeps the arithmetic, the rule it came from, and a line telling you to check that rule before you rely on the date.

Court rule packs

Nothing looks at a matter and decides which rules govern it. Two packs: the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the appellate rules for a notice of appeal. Each is cited by number, checked against the rules as amended through 1 December 2025. The rules are amended every 1 December. So from 1 December 2026 every deadline counted from a pack says OUT OF DATE, in capitals, until you read the current rule and mark it checked. Local rules, standing orders and state courts are yours to write, with the authority for each.

§ 06

Recall

The name is in here somewhere

One box, Ctrl Shift F, across clients, matters, projects, time entries, agenda items, tasks, notes, related parties and expenses. Notes match on their body, not just their subject, so the thing you typed six weeks ago about mediation is findable by the word mediation.

A separate conflict check searches names across everything you have recorded here, and can save a dated record of the search.

The search window showing one query reaching a note, a matter, a related party and two projects at once. — **Fig. 05 — Search everything** One name, five kinds of record.

§ 07

Structure

The way it already works in your head

A matter is the engagement. Projects are the pieces of work inside it. Time books to a project, and totals roll up from there.

Rates inherit down the chain: project rate, else client rate, else your firm default. Override one at any level.
An optional budget per project.
Annual and monthly billable-hour targets, with a choice about whether paid leave counts toward them.
A holiday calendar for any year, plus your own closure days.
Rename a client, matter or project and every record follows. Before you delete one, it tells you what would be left pointing at nothing.

ClientHarlow Industries
MatterHarlow v. Bregman Construction
ProjectDiscovery
Time entry3.5 hrs — review and analyse document production

The matters screen listing matters by client with project counts, hours and amounts earned, beside a detail panel for one project. — **Fig. 06 — Matters** Matters on the left; the selected project's time, tasks, notes and parties on the right.

Your documents stay where you put them

Attach Document records that a file belongs to a project and fingerprints it. A fingerprint that stops agreeing is reported, not repaired.
Assemble from Precedent fills one of your own template documents with this matter's details. A placeholder it cannot fill is reported by name and never blanked out: a letter still carrying [[Matter.Rate]] cannot go out by accident. A .docx is refused rather than half filled: save the precedent as RTF.
Filing Package… copies chosen documents into a numbered folder with a contents list, each copy read back byte for byte. One that could not go in is listed NOT INCLUDED, and the package never calls itself complete. This is the folder you upload.
Email… opens your mail program with the message written and unsent. Send is yours to press.

§ 08 Where a practice quietly loses money.

The numbers

What the work was worth, against what actually went out

It already knows both halves. This screen puts them side by side, per client.

Worked: Billable and non-billable hours, valued at their rate.
Billed: What has actually gone out on an invoice.
Uninvoiced: What is still sitting there, unbilled.
Realization: The percentage, and what an hour actually earned.

Invoices and payments

Invoices save straight to PDF, or HTML if you would rather edit before sending. A billing trend chart, and CSV exports throughout.
Recoverable disbursements ride along onto the client's next invoice.
Billed and unbilled are tracked, so the same time is never billed twice. Time dated outside an invoice's period is left off it, and no later invoice picks it up either. So the invoice screen lists what fell outside, with its hours and value, and offers to widen the period to take it in.
An issued invoice keeps the lines it was issued with. A paid invoice cannot be voided; a voided one cannot be marked paid. Void an unpaid invoice and its time and disbursements return to the unbilled pool.
An invoice records when it was actually paid, not when you got round to marking it. Part payments each keep their date, amount, method and reference; one can be taken off again when a cheque bounces. A client who pays too much gets a credit, never quietly absorbed.
Aging runs from the due date, not the issue date. Statement… on the Clients tab prints one client's invoices, the payments received with their references, what is owed and how it ages. Money held in trust appears on the statement, but is never deducted from what is owed. Funds held are the client's until earned.
Sales tax or VAT is off until you set a rate in Settings. A client can override the firm rate, and 0 is a real answer. The rate and the amount are stored on each invoice as sent, so changing the firm rate later cannot restate what a client was already charged.

The Worked vs Billed report showing worked value, billed value, not-yet-invoiced value and realization percentage, broken down by client. — **Fig. 07 — Worked vs billed** The gap between worked and billed, per client.

The four headline figures: worked, billed, uninvoiced and realization. — **Fig. 07 — Worked vs billed** The gap between worked and billed, per client.

The expenses screen listing business and personal expenses by category with amounts, payment method and whether each is billable to the client. — **Fig. 08 — Expenses** Business and personal, kept strictly apart.

§ 09

Client money

A trust ledger per client, and a month-end reconciliation

Off until you turn it on. Turn it on only if you run your own trust account: a ledger that drifts from the official one is worse than none.

You keep a trust ledger for each client, and reconcile it once a month against the bank's own statement. Every line of the bank's CSV or OFX is classified: matched, outstanding, ambiguous, after the closing date, or with nothing behind it, which is reported as a finding. All it ever writes back is that an entry cleared, and when the bank posted it.

Reconcile… puts three figures side by side: the bank balance, adjusted for deposits and cheques it has not seen; the books to that date; and the client ledgers added up. Any two agreeing is not enough: bank and books can match while the account holds less than the ledgers say is the clients'.
Everything is worked out as at the statement date: reconciling January in February counts nothing from February. A finished one keeps the figures it was signed off with, and prints with a signature line. A month that will not balance can still be saved with a note. A gap in the history is worse than a recorded difference.
A warning level per client flags a balance before the next disbursement runs it out. An account you have not reconciled says so, and counts the months.
A bank fee cannot touch client money: taking one from pooled client money is commingling. It checks the transaction's date, not today's balance, so a June deposit cannot fund a March disbursement.
Between reconciliations it compares the account against the client ledgers, and says so when the account holds less. More in the account than the ledgers is a figure, not an alarm: an IOLTA account earns interest, and a warning that never goes off is one you stop reading.

It reads the statement, not the account. A month can balance to the penny on a closing balance you typed in wrong. It can tell you something is wrong. It cannot tell you everything is right.

§ 10

Where your data actually lives

One folder on your computer. No account, no login, no telemetry. Fortis Collective has no copy of your data. The only thing that can ever leave it is a diary you publish on purpose — the next section.

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Legal Eagle Practice Manager\

LegalEagle_Data.json: your live data
LegalEagle_Data.json.bak: the previous save
history\LegalEagle_<date>.json: a dated snapshot each day, 14 kept
safety-<timestamp>.json: taken before any destructive change
activity.log: what the app did, so last Tuesday has an answer
crash.log: written only if something goes wrong

Saved so a crash cannot truncate it

Writes go to a temporary file and are swapped in. An interrupted save cannot leave half a file. The previous save and the dated snapshots protect you against a bad afternoon, not a lost laptop.

You can encrypt it

By default the file is not encrypted. The first run asks once; say no and it does not ask again. Lock it to your Windows account, or set a passphrase that travels with the file and resists someone who already has your Windows login.

A log you can read out loud

The activity log records what the app did — a restore that replaced more than you expected, an import that folded two entries into one. It holds counts, outcomes, file names and durations. Nothing else: no client names, no matter names, no narratives, no amounts. It sits in clear text beside a file you may have encrypted, so it is safe to read out over the phone.

A forgotten passphrase is final. It is not stored anywhere. Nobody — including us — can open your data without it. Encrypting the file protects it on that computer. It is not a substitute for full-disk encryption, a locked Windows account and a locked office.

§ 11 One direction. Nothing comes back.

The diary

The next month of your diary, where your phone can reach it

Legal Eagle can write an encrypted file of the next thirty days into a folder you already sync — OneDrive, Dropbox, Drive. The app writes the file; your sync client is what carries it. It is off until you turn it on, and it is deliberately small.

What travels

Your diary for the next thirty days — appointments, court dates and deadlines.
Client names, phone numbers and addresses, so a hearing can dial or map from the entry.
Matters, projects and open tasks, to say what an entry belongs to.
Your rates and rounding increment, so a figure means the same thing at both ends.

What never leaves

Time entries and their narratives.
Invoices, and the next invoice number.
The trust ledger.
Expenses.
Notes, beyond what is pinned to a calendar entry.

Read this before you turn it on. A publication carries client names, phone numbers, addresses and the titles of hearings — that is enough to identify who you act for. It is encrypted with a different key from your data file. The risk it guards against is the synced folder, not someone sitting at your desk. The Android app that reads it is not released yet.

§ 12

Before you download

Read this part first

Better you read this now than find out in month three. Where it stops is as much the design as what it does.

Nothing arrives on its own.
It has no network code at all: nothing is sent, filed or fetched. A statement gets in because you opened the file. One user, one machine, no second person entering anything. If your firm runs a formal system, that system stays authoritative for billing, trust accounting, conflicts and deadlines.
It compares the statement with your books, and stops there.
It will not create or alter a trust transaction to make the two match. The closing balance it measures against is one you typed in. Nothing here promises that what it does satisfies a trust accounting, recordkeeping or reconciliation obligation imposed by your jurisdiction or bar. If it and your trust account disagree, your trust account is right.
Notifications are best-effort, and you remain responsible for every deadline.
They are delivered on this computer only, while Windows is running, you are signed in and the app has not been exited. No notification is guaranteed to be delivered, delivered on time, or seen. Do not rely on this as your only docketing system.
The conflict check sees only what you have entered here.
It does not search your firm's records or any external database. A search returning no results is not a determination that no conflict exists, and is not a legal opinion. You remain responsible for performing an adequate check.
One machine, and one direction.
It is a single-user Windows application, and the data file stays on the computer you installed it on. It can publish a read-only copy of your diary to a folder you sync, but nothing is ever read back in, there is no second desktop, and there is no Mac build.
The phone companion is not released.
An Android app that reads the published diary and raises court-date reminders is in development. There is no iOS build. Publishing works today; the thing that reads it is not something you can install yet.
Nothing it produces is legal, accounting or tax advice.
Invoices, reports, statements, exports and calculations included. Review the output for accuracy before relying on it or sending it to a client. Backups adequate to your practice remain yours to keep.

§ 13

What you need, and the first five minutes

Requirements

Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.
Nothing else. The .NET runtime is built into the application, so there is no framework to install first.
About 200 MB of free disk space.
Somewhere of your own to keep backups — if the machine goes, the practice goes with it.

The first five minutes

Run the installer and open Legal Eagle. It asks once whether to encrypt the file.
Answer three questions — your name or firm, your usual hourly rate, and your billable target for the year.
Add a client, then a matter, then a project inside it.
Log time against the project from the quick-entry bar, or start the timer.
Put your next deadline in the agenda with a lead time.

There is no installer to download yet. Version 9.0 is built and in daily use, but it is not packaged for anybody else's machine. Leave an address and you will hear once when it is, and not otherwise.

Tell me when it's ready

Start with tomorrow's time

Not last month's. Put tomorrow in, and see whether it is still there on Friday.

Tell me when it's ready Before you download

§ 15

Questions worth asking first

Can my whole firm use one copy?

The licence is granted to you personally, for computers you own or control. It does not extend to a firm, an organization or other individuals unless separately agreed in writing.

What happens to my data if I uninstall it?

Uninstalling does not delete your data folder. It stays where it is under %LOCALAPPDATA% until you remove it yourself.

Run your whole practice on it. Or just the 0.3.