Hourglass review
A Microsoft-focused legal timekeeping system with capture, review, coding, and guideline checks.
Reviewed by iTechGuides Editors · Editorial team · Updated Oct 2026
Hourglass is legal timekeeping software for law firms that want to reduce manual time reconstruction and improve billing compliance. It captures activity from email, documents, calls, research, meetings, and browser applications, then drafts time-entry narratives and assigns matters, tasks, and activity codes. Firms can review, edit, approve, and export entries before delivery to legal billing systems. Its fit is strongest for Microsoft-centric practices that want dedicated firm deployment and a database tied to existing billing workflows.
The product’s Microsoft ecosystem coverage is a central strength. Integrations include Outlook, Outlook Calendar, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams, Teams Phone, OneNote, OneDrive, and SharePoint, alongside Adobe Acrobat, Kofax, Foxit, Zoom, and Zoom Phone. That breadth supports passive capture across common legal work rather than relying only on manual entries or timers. Hourglass also supports block-billing splitting, which can turn a combined block into separate entries, and its client outside-counsel-guideline checks add a compliance review before submission.
Pricing is handled through contact sales, so buyers should evaluate the deployment and commercial fit directly with the vendor rather than compare published plan tiers. The published product scope emphasizes matter tracking, manual and timer entry modes, AI-assisted narratives, human approval, and delivery to billing systems. It does not include expense tracking or billing-rate support, and access is web-based. Choose Hourglass if dedicated deployment, Microsoft integrations, broad activity capture, and pre-submission guideline checks are priorities. Firms that require expense management, billing-rate features, or native mobile and offline entry should consider a product built around those requirements instead.
Hourglass pros and cons
- Where it wins
- Captures work across Microsoft, communications, documents, calls, and research
- AI-drafts narratives with matter, task, and activity-code assignment
- Checks guidelines and supports review, approval, splitting, and export
- Where it doesn't
- Web-only access does not cover native mobile or offline entry
- Expense tracking and billing-rate support are not included
- Contact-sales pricing provides no published plan-by-plan comparison
Hourglass fact sheet, pricing and score →
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