How to reduce lawyers' Administration Time...

Followers of my approach to fixing law firm profitability over the last twenty-five years will know that I am passionate about the endemic poor productivity of endless streams of lawyers.

They often work hard but ineffectively, and usually under-charge... through a failure to appreciate what they've done for clients and poor client engagement and billing practices...

When confronted with poor daily average output one refuge of many lawyers is to point to all the "inescapable Admin time" that eats into huge parts of their day...

Sorting out the reality from the myth is not always easy...particularly if the lawyer is not prepared to be accountable for tracking what is really going on...


KMSFirmTime is regarded by me as either inescapable, non-negotiable, time, or as elective invested time.

Elective invested time goes into Business Development, Knowledge Management, Training/Supervising/Mentoring etc...but that's not what I want to talk about in this post.

General Admin is a small part of KMSFirmTime...and once a lawyer knows what's involved a lot of it can be eliminated.

Note also that if a lawyer records ten individual small general Admin tasks in a day, they may have spent 10-15 minutes actual time...not an hour simply because they can point to 10 six-minute units. In ClientTime a bit of leverage can be a very good thing but not so much in FirmTime.

General Admin can encompass a multitude of things, from reading internal memos to logging on and off the computer system, to planning the day and filing.

One downside of removing too much Admin Support is that lawyers end up doing too many tasks that they should not be doing...like filing and copying and collating.

Often however the excessive recording of units for General Admin is a combined result of not having enough to do in Client files and a total inability to genuinely multi-task...

As a simple example...why can't planning the day take place alongside logging on or off?

If a lawyers has limited client work, why does it take twenty minutes every day to plan the day...there's just not that much to do and not much change in priorities from yesterday usually.

Advice...get your team members busy on legal work for clients and make that the primary focus of every day...that's what they're trained for and that's what will give them professional satisfaction.

Get the Business development program up and firing and get everyone a healthy backlog of Client work.

The unhealthy focus on recording units for General Admin will quickly evaporate in my experience...