title: "Memtime vs Timentry: Which Fits Law Firms?" slug: memtime-vs-timentry-law-firms meta_description: "Memtime captures time passively but lacks matter attribution and OCG compliance enforcement. See how Timentry compares for legal teams and professional-services firms." target_keyword: "memtime alternative for law firms" cluster: comparison

Memtime vs Timentry: Which Fits Law Firms?

Both Memtime and Timentry track time automatically, without requiring you to start or stop a timer. For any professional frustrated by end-of-day timesheet reconstruction, that shared promise is appealing. But the two products diverge sharply once capture ends — on the things law firms and professional-services firms care about most: matter attribution, billing compliance, and AI-drafted narrative entries.

This comparison explains what each tool actually does, where each falls short for legal work, and which is the better fit depending on your firm's billing requirements.

What Memtime Does

Memtime is a desktop application that records every application, document, and website you open throughout the day, building an interactive activity timeline. At the end of the day you scroll back through it, select blocks of work, and drag them into time entries against a project in your connected billing tool.

That model works well for:

Freelancers and creative agencies billing loosely by project
Small teams that want passive capture without a complex setup
Professionals with strict privacy requirements — activity stays on-device, and only the entries you manually approve are synced upstream

Memtime also offers one of the broadest integration lists in the passive-capture category: Jira, ClickUp, Harvest, Toggl, Xero, Clio, QuickBooks, and dozens more. If a tool is in your stack, Memtime has probably built a connector for it.

Where Memtime falls short for legal billing

Memtime was designed for project-based billing, not matter-based legal timekeeping. Three gaps matter most for law firms:

No automatic matter attribution. In Memtime, you assign time to a "project" by dragging a block on a timeline. There is no engine that reads a client matter number from a document title, recognises a sender domain from an email, or matches a meeting attendee's name to the right client. Every attribution decision is yours to make manually — which for a busy attorney handling ten open matters simultaneously means the drag-and-drop work of sorting activity into matters takes longer than the activity itself.

No compliance enforcement before submission. Memtime does not check a time entry against outside-counsel guidelines (OCGs), flag prohibited task codes, or enforce billing increments. Those checks, if they exist at all, live in your downstream billing system. By the time an entry arrives there, it may already be heading for a rejection.

No AI-drafted narrative. Memtime shows you a timeline of what you did. It does not turn that timeline into a billing narrative — the kind of specific, contemporaneous entry that satisfies client billing requirements and reduces write-down risk. That drafting work still falls to the attorney.

None of this is a product failure. Memtime is a well-designed passive capture tool for its intended audience. But if your timekeeping process involves matter numbers, client billing guidelines, or complex narrative requirements, significant work remains outside what the tool automates.

What Timentry Does

Timentry is passive time capture built specifically for professional-services firms — legal, accounting, and architecture and engineering practices. Like Memtime, it runs a lightweight desktop agent that records activity across emails, meetings, calls, and documents in the background with no timers to start.

The product diverges from Memtime the moment capture ends.

Matter attribution without manual sorting

Timentry uses a deterministic attribution engine. Matter numbers embedded in document names, sender domains in emails, client names in calendar subjects, and call metadata are matched against your matter list automatically, using firm-configured rules. AI acts as a fallback only where deterministic rules cannot resolve attribution — not as the first line of judgment.

For attorneys managing many simultaneous matters, the practical difference is large: most captured activity arrives pre-attributed to the right matter. The review step takes minutes; building that attribution from scratch takes much of the day.

Compliance rules enforced before submission

Before a time entry reaches your billing system, Timentry checks it against firm-configured billing rules: OCG requirements uploaded per client, prohibited task codes, minimum and maximum time increments, and any other rules your firm or clients require. Entries that would be rejected by an e-billing portal are flagged at the desk — before the invoice goes out, not after it comes back as a rejection.

This is the compliance layer Memtime does not have. For firms with a significant volume of OCG-governed client work, the ability to catch rejections before submission has a direct effect on realization rates.

AI-drafted billing narrative

Timentry's AI activity-clustering layer reviews a day's worth of captured work on a matter and drafts a billing narrative — a specific, time-entry-ready description of what was done, drawn from the actual activity record. You review and edit the draft; nothing is submitted automatically. But the starting point is a complete, plausible narrative sentence, not a blank field.

For attorneys whose billing burden includes not just capturing time but writing defensible descriptions of it, this is a meaningful reduction in effort per entry. For more on why uncaptured narrative detail leads directly to billable-hour leakage, see Why Law Firms Lose Billable Hours — and How to Recover Them.

Cloud connectors for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and telephony

Timentry connects at the cloud level to Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Zoom, and telephony providers — not just via desktop activity tracking. This means email metadata, calendar events, and call records are captured from the source system with rich context (subject lines, attendees, durations, participants), not just as "Outlook was open for 40 minutes." For attorneys whose billable work runs heavily through email and calls, the quality of the underlying capture is higher.

Real-time revenue and utilisation visibility

The Timentry dashboard surfaces captured-but-unbilled hours, realization rates, and utilisation by timekeeper, by matter, or across the firm — in real time. Partners and finance managers can see where billable work is sitting unrecorded before month-end, not after. Memtime does not offer this view.

Live timers and a weekly timesheet grid

For work that doesn't flow through email, documents, or calendar — phone calls on a personal device, client lunches, in-person court appearances — Timentry supports up to ten concurrent live timers alongside its passive capture. A weekly timesheet grid provides a structured view for final review before submission. The two modes sit in the same product.

Side-by-Side Comparison

| Feature | Memtime | Timentry | |---|---|---| | Passive desktop capture | Yes | Yes | | No timers required | Yes | Yes | | On-device activity storage option | Yes | Yes (on-device filtering available) | | Automatic matter attribution | No | Yes (deterministic + AI fallback) | | AI billing narrative drafts | No | Yes | | OCG / compliance enforcement | No | Yes | | Microsoft 365 cloud connector | No (desktop only) | Yes | | Google Workspace cloud connector | No (desktop only) | Yes | | Zoom & telephony capture | Via desktop agent | Yes (cloud connectors) | | Legal / e-billing integrations | Limited (Clio) | Broad | | Utilisation and realisation dashboard | No | Yes | | Live manual timers | No | Yes (up to 10 concurrent) | | Weekly timesheet grid | No | Yes | | GDPR data-rights tooling | On-device storage | Yes (explicit GDPR controls) |

Pricing and Fit

Memtime prices by seat, starting with a plan accessible to solo practitioners and scaling to team tiers. For a single professional with straightforward billing needs, the entry cost is low.

Timentry is priced for teams and firms where the attribution engine, compliance layer, and AI narrative drafts deliver return on investment across multiple timekeepers. Contact the Timentry team for pricing based on firm size and requirements.

If you bill one or two clients by project, have no OCG obligations, and want the broadest possible integration list for non-legal tools, Memtime may be sufficient. If you run a firm where any of the following apply — matter-based billing, client billing guidelines, e-billing submission, or multiple timekeepers whose unbilled time is visible to management in real time — the gap between the two tools is measured in hours per week of work that one automates and the other does not.

Which Should You Choose?

Choose Memtime if:

You bill by project, not by client matter number
You have no OCG requirements or e-billing compliance exposure
You want the broadest generic integration library (Jira, ClickUp, project management tools)
Fully on-device, privacy-first storage is a hard requirement that overrides other features

Choose Timentry if:

Your work is billed by client matter with narrative requirements
You have clients that submit outside-counsel guidelines or use e-billing portals
You want AI-drafted billing entries rather than a timeline to drag entries from manually
You need real-time visibility into unbilled time across your timekeepers
Your team's work runs through Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Zoom, or telephony systems and you want cloud-level capture context, not desktop-activity logs

For firms that have already considered Laurel and found it targets enterprise and AmLaw clients, Timentry sits between Memtime's general-purpose approach and Laurel's large-firm tier — with the legal-specific features of an enterprise product at a fit and price point for small and mid-size firms. See Laurel Alternatives for Law Firms for a broader view of the passive-capture market.

Try Timentry

If your timekeepers are still reconstructing their day at 5 p.m. — sorting activity into matters manually, writing narrative entries from memory, and discovering billing rejections after the invoice goes out — passive capture alone does not solve the problem. The combination of automatic matter attribution, compliance enforcement before submission, and AI-drafted narrative entries is what Timentry was built to provide.

Talk to the Timentry team to see how it works for your firm.