Managing capacity – and work allocation/distribution more broadly – is often overlooked as a focus for legal transformation and improvement.
Many law firms still assign junior lawyers to a partner who will be their sole/primary source of work.
And busy in-house teams often find themselves with little time to do more than send a quick round-robin email and then allocate work to whoever is first to respond.
Or – in both environments – partners or internal clients simply send their work directly to whichever lawyers they are most comfortable with. However, multiple factors are now coming together to mean that a more efficient and deliberate approach to tracking capacity and allocating work should be a priority for most in-house legal teams and law firms.
Managing capacity – and work allocation/distribution more broadly – is often overlooked as a focus for legal transformation and improvement.
Many law firms still assign junior lawyers to a partner who will be their sole/primary source of work.
And busy in-house teams often find themselves with little time to do more than send a quick round-robin email and then allocate work to whoever is first to respond.
Or – in both environments – partners or internal clients simply send their work directly to whichever lawyers they are most comfortable with.
However, multiple factors are now coming together to mean that a more efficient and deliberate approach to tracking capacity and allocating work should be a priority for most in-house legal teams and law firms.
With remote and hybrid working here to stay, keeping a tab on how busy your lawyers are at any given time is no longer as simple as seeing who was in first, worked through lunch or left last.
And relying on calls/emails (or, worse still, spreadsheets) to track this has obvious limitations since they can only provide ‘snapshots’ and are neither efficient nor user-friendly.
Whether it’s too much work, not enough work or not the right work – an ad hoc approach to tracking capacity and managing workloads can have a serious impact on lawyers’ mental health.
This also poses threats to the business in the form of higher employee turnover, brand damage or even litigation risk to name but a few.
While we’d be careful not to over-generalise, studies do suggest that work-life balance is a top priority for younger lawyers entering the profession.
In the context of the recent ‘war for talent’, money will likely not be enough to attract and retain the best talent going forward.
Without a suitable system in place, there is a very real danger that bias (whether unconscious or otherwise) will impact how work is distributed.
This might be at the allocation stage – with those requesting help from or allocating work to individuals in a less than objective manner.
But this can also arise on the other side of that relationship. For example, certain individuals or groups might feel that they cannot say no – or, conversely – that there could be negative consequences if they did try to broaden their horizons to new teams, people or practice areas.
In-house legal teams are increasingly looking for evidence of a sensible and properly enforced approach to capacity tracking and work allocation when deciding which law firms to instruct or appoint to their panels.
This is partly driven by their desire to use their power as buyers to bring about positive change in the industry when it comes to areas such as mental health and D&I.
However, it’s also about efficiency and commerciality.
In-house teams want to know that their law firms are choosing the right mix of people to do the right work at the right time in a way that maximizes efficiency and quality of outcome.
Firms that are unable to point to a properly documented policy – and processes and systems which bring that policy to life – will increasingly find themselves on the losing end of bids.
The same is also true for in-house legal teams.
As the organisations they work for seek to improve standards around CSR and ESG, all teams will need to improve their own processes to support those goals.
This is likely especially true for legal teams, who often play a central role in helping their organisations to plan and deliver such goals.
It doesn’t make sense to flood some lawyers with work and leave others with little to do.
Allocating work in a way that takes proper account of capacity and experience will ultimately lead to faster turnaround times and better-quality work.
Allocating work to people who are too busy/stressed and/or lack the right skills or knowledge increases the risk of mistakes being made.
An ad hoc approach to allocating work can create risks and delays even before work is started, due to the increased likelihood of there being ‘crossed-wires’ around who is handling what, when.
This should be an end in and of itself but there are also numerous related benefits: better morale, a better internal culture, improved retention rates (important considering that lawyers are expensive to recruit and train), increased operational resilience (what happens the ‘favourite’ lawyers leave?), less risk of losing valuable corporate memory and institutional knowledge as lawyers quit or burn out, a stronger brand…
For the lawyers, a fair and sustainable workload that aligns with their interests and career goals while taking their current level of knowledge and experience into account will support their development and progression.
For the company or law firm this creates more rounded and valuable lawyers and teams.
This in turn supports increased operational resilience as a result of having less single points of failure, and ‘stickier’, more diverse relationships between in-house legal teams and their internal stakeholders, or law firms and their clients.
For in-house lawyers, whose knowledge of their business and industry is at least as important as their legal knowledge, broadening the variety of stakeholders and issues they engage with should be a ‘no-brainer’.
For law firm partners engaged in highly specialised work, finding new clients isn’t always the issue.
In some cases, there might even be a reluctance to push for new opportunities due to a fear that they simply wouldn’t be able to cope with the demand.
A more considered approach to how work is allocated could help to ensure there is a broader pool of resource to draw on, rather than a single ‘superstar’ partner and perhaps their mentee.
While self-reporting can have its own challenges as explored earlier in this article, this should probably still be the first/principal element of your system – ultimately you want to create a culture of trust and individual responsibility.
The key is to make the process as simple and user-friendly as possible (you can learn more about how we approach this at Tabled here: A simple way to set capacity for legal work allocation.
On its own, capacity data only tells part of the story.
Knowing that everyone is ‘maxed out’ isn’t that useful if you can’t see why and use this information to identify the best next steps.
Capacity tracking should therefore be supplemented with data that will give a more complete picture of your workflows e.g.
How many live matters is the team currently handling?
Which business stakeholders or clients did these matters come from?
Which lawyers are handling which matters?
How are these matters currently progressing (i.e. tracking against workflow milestones and KPIs such as target turnaround times)
Having a more complete dataset also allows you to build up a higher-level picture of utilisation within your legal department or practice area and spot trends.
E.g. if everyone is at maximum capacity all of the time despite best efforts around capacity management, this might suggest (and – crucially – support the business case for) other changes e.g. additional headcount, more/different outsourcing or new technology. (For a deeper dive into the topic of data-driven legal teams: 5 questions to help become a data-driven in-house legal team).
With a new and improved capacity tracking and work distribution system in place, your lawyers will likely start receiving a broader variety of work, from a more diverse range of colleagues. Consider how to set them up for success.
This might involve thinking about additional training and education, whether in new/adjacent legal areas or ‘softer’ skills to help with networking and client relationship management etc.
You might also consider broader workflow management tools to help them track, manage and collaborate across all of their matters more efficiently (tip: avoid the temptation to turn to a spreadsheet for this!).
It would also be worth exploring ways to flatten learning curves and/or automate certain areas of work through the creation and use of templates, playbooks, FAQs and other self-service tools and document automation.