How better time management at your law firm could save you an extra £111k per fee earner each year

Implementing a sound case management system is only part of the answer; you need to be able to see into the data to have a clear idea of what is happening when you delve deeper. With over 30 years of experience in the legal sector and over 40,000 customers, we’ve identified the three critical questions that partners and managing partners should be reviewing to highlight the financial impact of wasted time across their firm, and to start exploring solutions:

• How do you value time?
• How do you capture time?
• How do you manage time?

How do you value time at your law firm?

Do your fee earners value their time, and more importantly, do they appreciate its worth to the business? They may say they do, but looking closely at their behaviours will tell you more.

Do you have fee earners that…

• Say yes to everything? A fee earner that says “yes” to every request will never achieve their goals. Saying no is an essential skill that successful people realise is necessary to accomplish their goals. This doesn’t mean fee earners should be unhelpful or inflexible. It is a matter of getting priorities right.
• Are ruled by interruptions? We have all experienced those frustrating ‘working days’ that quickly become one significant interruption. It is sometimes necessary to learn to take control of their day and shut out interruptions. It is quite acceptable to close the door, turn off the phone and shut down your email to schedule some time to focus on your fee-earning activities.
• Allow the priorities of others to trump their own – allowing others to schedule meetings in your calendar is all well and good, but when you readily accept requests from colleagues wanting help with their priorities, all to the detriment of your workload – you need to re-think your approach. A great work colleague will help out team members, but you have to set those boundaries and internal limits, and above all, be kind to yourself and your colleague’s priorities.
• Are blasé about time limits – when meetings and appointments run over, they can and sometimes will expand to fill your day. Ending meetings and appointments on time is a skill fee earners must embrace. When you communicate up front that you have a time limit for a particular activity, it’s incredible how people magically adjust to fit the time allotted.
• Accept lateness without question – when a person accepts lateness readily, it becomes acceptable. This is one of the business's most blatant forms of ‘time theft’. Fee earners need to hold themselves and others responsible for being on time. When someone turns up late, the fee earner should politely point out that the time slot has been missed and take steps to reschedule. This conveys to everyone that the fee earner’s time is valuable.

Your fee earners’ time is the most precious resource the business has. It might sound obvious, but if a fee earner does not set expectations about the value of their time, others will continue to take it whenever they see fit as the firm’s profitability continues to fritter away.

Let’s look at the numbers on valuing time alone.

Imagine if just one fee earner could generate one extra hour per day of fee earning time by valuing their time more effectively – at an average rate of £200 per hour – they could make an additional £46,400 per year in fees (based on an average working year of 232 working days).

For a firm with five fee earners, you’re looking at £232K per annum

Ten fee earners – £460K+

20 fee earners – £928K

30 fee earners – £1.392M

40 fee earners – £1.856M

50 fee earners – £2.32M

The numbers speak for themselves.

Use our cost per case calculator

How do you capture time?

Did you know, email leakage alone could be costing £18K per fee earner every year?

Let’s assume your fee earners are valuing time and managing it effectively. Wouldn’t it be an absolute crime if there weren’t capturing it and billing it?

Time recording isn’t always fully embraced by fee earners. When they are working on a challenging case, juggling lots of facts and recording complicated evidence in various formats, getting into the habit of recording their time can often slip to the bottom of their priority list.

One area that provides a perfect example is fee-earner emails. When a fee earner sends a short email to a client or responds to a client’s email, they may argue it only takes a short amount of time and that capturing it would mean spending more time recording it than it took to send the email in the first place. As a result, many fee earners are reluctant to charge for their shorter emails/email replies.

Imagine a fee earner missing out on, say, four units of billable time each day (i.e. four short emails) @ £20 per unit (based on an average fee earner hourly rate of £200). As a result of not recording this time, and therefore not billing it, over the year, it equates to £18,560 (based on an average working year of 232 working days).

Scary numbers!

Especially when you think about all the other activities that your legal case management system has not captured.

A case management system should provide integration with your chosen email system and should not only automatically file any incoming or outgoing emails against the relevant case, but it should also record fee earner time spent on emails, either automatically recording a one unit of time, or giving a simple prompt allowing the fee earner to type in the accurate number of units quickly.

This is just one example where billable time is hemorrhaging from your bottom line, and we all know there are many examples of other activities where the same logic applies.

It would be interesting to review this regularly and analyse where most of your billable time is lost. Your legal case management software should allow your fee earners to record all time and even allocate a ‘non-billable’ time code automatically as part of a legal procedure in its case management functionality.

If your fee earners are not already recording all of their time, an interesting exercise would be to allocate, say, a week when every fee earner is tasked with recording every moment of their time as either billable or non-billable. Then run a report giving an overall picture of time for the business during the experimental week. Your case management system should then be able to show you time statistics by department, by fee earner, and by activity. You can multiply it up over 12 months, and when you share it with your colleagues, it will make a massive statement about how precious fee-earner time is to the business.

How can your fee earners manage their time better?

1. Books and resources

There are many great training courses, blogs and books available and no shortage of advice when it comes to finding ways to improve time management.

To get an idea of effective time management, books such as The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey, The One Minute Manager By Ken Blanchard, and Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy, are probably the three most famous that spring to mind. All offer sound advice on how to be more proactive and less reactive, tackle goal setting effectively and avoid procrastination.

2. The Urgent/Important matrix

From talking with managing partners, we’ve found the Urgent and Important Matrix, devised by Stephen Covey, to be really effective in helping law firms to manage their time better.

Living in a time-pressured world it is common to have multiple overlapping commitments that all seem to require immediate attention. Urgency is no longer reserved for special occasions. This matrix invites you to separate your tasks into four boxes.

	URGENT	NOT URGENT
IMPORTANT	BOX 1 URGENT  & IMPORTANT	BOX 2 NOT URGENT  BUT IMPORTANT
NOT IMPORTANT	BOX 3 URGENT BUT  NOT IMPORTANT	BOX 4  NOT URGENT &  NOT IMPORTANT

•  Box 1: It quickly becomes apparent which items on your to-do list belong here
• Box 2: Is for the fee earner’s longer-term priorities, strategy, and development.
• Box 3: Is for time-pressured distractions, and the fee earner must take each on its merits and decide whether to complete these actions or not.
• Box 4: The actions in this box are neither urgent nor important and the fee earner must question whether they should be on their to-do list.

As the theory behind this tool goes, many people find most of their activities fall into boxes 1 and 3.

Box 2 tends to be underused yet is probably the most important box because it is important that Partners and fee earners can work tactically and think simultaneously.

This tool aims to help people organise their time better to expand the use of Box 2 – allowing themselves time to work on important tasks before they become urgent.

A sound case management system should help you manage your priority action list.

What are the cost savings of the Urgent/Important matrix?

Let’s suggest that by adopting this matrix, each fee earner could save one hour per day by simply managing their time more effectively, again based on the average rate of £200 per hour – each fee earner could earn the firm an extra £46,400 per year in fees.

3. Switch to an award-winning case management system

One of the most reliable ways of improving your fee earners’ efficiency, productivity and profitability, is by using a high performing, end-to-end case management system that matches your ambitions and enables your law firm to thrive.

Access Legal’s award-winning case management system is agile, secure and future-proof. It can be cloud-based or delivered as an on-premises solution and users have the freedom to work securely from anywhere on any device. A true end-to-end system that manages the case management lifecycle, it will empower your team with the tools to let them get on with what they do best and drive better case outcomes.

With a considerable market share of 40,000+ users at more than 3800 law firms across the UK, Access Legal has helped many businesses within the legal profession over the past 25 years.

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