How Cedent tracks billable time
As you work a case, Cedent drafts time entries from the activity it sees — reading email, sending replies, reviewing documents, editing drafts — so you are not reconstructing your day from memory. Every entry is a draft you review, adjust, and approve. Nothing is billed automatically.
What Cedent bills
Section titled “What Cedent bills”Cedent estimates your time — the attorney’s review, drafting, and revision — not the AI’s work. An entry reflects effort you spent on the matter, as a starting estimate for you to confirm.
Activities that produce a draft entry include:
- Reading an inbound email and sending a reply.
- Reviewing a document once it has been read in.
- Editing a draft Cedent prepared.
- Finalizing a court filing.
- Meetings and hearings, from completed calendar events.
- Working a matter in the chat.
You can also add time by hand for anything off-platform, like a phone call.
How the estimate is made
Section titled “How the estimate is made”The estimates are deliberately conservative and tied to real effort. For an email you send, Cedent bases the time on what you actually wrote — it sets aside the quoted thread you are replying to and your signature block, and estimates from your own words. Document and drafting time scale similarly with the work involved.
Every estimate is then rounded to your firm’s billing increment — six, ten, or fifteen minutes — which you set in Settings → Firm Profile.
Auto-drafted entries show a confidence indicator and a link to the email, document, or draft that prompted them, so you can check each one against its source before approving.
Guard against double-counting
Section titled “Guard against double-counting”Cedent flags entries that look double-counted — two entries whose times overlap, or a day that adds up to more than eight billable hours — so you can catch them before approving. These are advisory flags: Cedent never changes a duration on its own.
Common questions
Section titled “Common questions”Does Cedent bill for the AI’s time? No. Entries estimate your own review and drafting time, not the AI’s work.
Are these entries final? No — they are drafts and estimates. You review, adjust, and approve them, and you attest that they reflect time you actually spent. See Reviewing and exporting time.