According to RBS' Legal Benchmarking Report from 2019, a full-time solicitor achieves 1,000 chargeable hours per year on average. However, The Guardian reported that lawyers were working more hours, often outside of office hours and on weekends. Macintyre Hudson's Legal Benchmarking Report for 2022 suggests that fee earners can increase their income generation by reducing administrative tasks such as typing. This implies a link associated with the volume of administrative work solicitors have to do.
Therefore, the main challenge for managing partners and practice managers is: how can you boost chargeable hours and provide better support?
Setting Realistic Chargeable Hour Goals
It is always important to set realistic chargeable hour goals that fee earners can achieve.
The Guardian reported that some law firms pressured junior solicitors to work outside of office hours to meet high targets. This article was titled: “‘Toxic, cut-throat’: the work culture awaiting junior lawyers”. This practice harms not only your firm, but also the legal profession in general.
The BBC also reported that law firms in the US had a similar cut-throat attitudes due to too many recruits. Johnny C Taylor Jr, president and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management, said:
The legal profession needs to work efficiently and productively to meet clients' needs and generate income. But also to reduce toxicity and the cut-throat culture that seems to pervade it. One way to do this is to simplify the productivity process.
Productivity: Taking It Back To Basics
Fee earners may think it is faster to do administrative tasks themselves, but this wastes valuable time that could be used for income generation. Fee earners should consider two key questions before doing any non-chargeable task:
How much chargeable time will I lose if I do this task?
Can someone at a lower grade do this task more cost-effectively (e.g. a lower-graded solicitor or a support or admin colleague)?
These questions are essential for fee earners to maximise productivity and cost-effectiveness within office time. Time is a precious resource for a legal practice, especially if the task is non-chargeable or subject to cost reduction by a court on assessment.
Providing Sufficient Support
In most cases, productivity comes down to ensuring your firm has the necessary administrative support in place to do tasks at less cost, thereby allowing fee earners to be more productive.
We think there is not a fee earner practising today who has not spent time at a photocopier at some stage of their career. If you have solicitors standing at photocopiers is this a good use of their time? Put simply, the answer is no.
Taking Court rates for Solicitors in London, how much does it cost your legal practice in chargeable time, if a solicitor stands at a photocopier for ten minutes?
Solicitor by grade | Solicitor's rate per hour as per UK government guidelines | Cost of 10 minutes photocopying |
Grade A Solicitor (London) | £566 per hour | £94.33 |
Grade B Solicitor (London) | £385 per hour | £64.16 |
Grade C Solicitor (London) | £299 per hour | £49.83 |
Grade D Solicitor (London) | £205 per hour | £34.16 |
Doing simple tasks like these may seem like a trivial use of time. It is only 10 minutes, right? But the examples above show how precious time is for a legal practice. A fee earner who spends 10 minutes at a photocopier wastes your firm between £34.16 and £94.33, while an admin staff member would only cost £1.50 for the same task.
The example shows how a few 10-minute breaks by each fee earner can add up for a legal practice over time. That is why in the past, you had office juniors making tea and coffee for fee earners, instead of fee earners making their own drinks and these small amounts of lost chargeable time, accumulate over a year. 10 minutes here and there soon adds up to a few hours each month. As the old saying goes: "Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves" and this is what MacIntyre Hudson suggests in their benchmarking report.
Benchmarking Report for 2022
Macintyre Hudson's Legal Benchmarking Report for 2022 gave three key action points for law firms in 2022 in terms of income generation, one of their action points being:
This is something we have been saying for quite some time at OutSec Legal, and it is great to see this has finally been put in black and white in a benchmarking report. Fee earners are there to generate income, admin staff are there to do the administration. Perhaps it is time to get back to doing just that!
Questions To Ask Yourself
Do you have sufficient administrative support to do these tasks?
If so, is the administration system in place at present, working effectively and efficiently?
Generally, it comes down to one of the above points.
Dictation Is More Cost-Effective Than Typing Your Own Documents
With the advent of the computer, law firms sought to reduce secretarial and typing staff believing that this was more cost-effective for their firms. But did you know that dictation is more cost-effective than typing?
The simple fact is that we can all speak considerably faster than anyone can physically type. The following stats speak for themselves:
“The average person types between 38 and 40 words per minute”.
A “good rate of speech ranges between 140 -160 words per minute.”
Therefore, this means that dictation is four times faster than typing your own documents, meaning that two hours of typing could be dictated in only 30 minutes.
Furthermore, a recent report from The Lawyer: “Microsoft Word in Law Firms” suggested that:
“42% of solicitors said ‘their lack of Microsoft Word skills delayed responses to clients’.”
This has further ramifications for productivity here. In the report, David Lee, IT Director at Womble Bond Dickinson states:
“If you have a lawyer typing their own documents, taking longer than necessary, due to an insufficient understanding of the Word environment, it will naturally take longer to produce and therefore delay the time it takes to respond to the client. This can be unhelpful and isn’t the best use of the lawyer’s time.”
This is besides the fact that typing their own documents in the first place, is not an efficient use of a fee earner’s time.
So I Save Costs Just By Dictating?
Yes. So, for example, if you have a fee earner who spends two hours a day typing their own emails/documents, they are losing out effectively on one and a half hours in chargeable time. This time could be put to be better used elsewhere: either to increase efficiency (and increase those chargeable hours) or allow fee earners to release valuable WIP and lock up.
Calculation
So let’s take an example of a grade A solicitor (using London rates). We would work this out as:
(i) Grade A solicitor’s lost time: £566 per hour x 1.5 hours = £849.
(ii) Less OutSec Legal’s cost for transcribing 30 minutes of dictation: £1.40 x 30 = £42 plus VAT (£8.40) = £50.40
If you take (i) from (ii) this gives you the cost of the lost chargeable time.
Answer
Therefore, the amount of money lost by a Grade A solicitor in London by typing his own documents is £798.60.
Using the same calculations for grades B, C and D solicitors in London:
• A grade B solicitor would lose £527.10;
• A grade C solicitor would lose £398.10; and
• A grade D solicitor would lose £257.10.
In an age where law firms need to be more efficient and cost-effective, this is a big deal. Even more so, if this is occurring daily. Over a year, this can represent a huge loss for law firms coming from a single fee earner.
The more fee earners you have typing their own documents and emails, and not using digital dictation to dictate them, the more money your practice is losing.
Should I Be Typing My Own Correspondence Into A Case Management System?
Case management systems can automate some tasks, but sometimes it is more cost-effective to use typists instead of a fee earner. As the examples above show, a small task can take time and prevent fee earners from doing chargeable legal work. Some tasks that require human input are bespoke:
file notes/attendance notes;
letters;
emails.
These all will happen during the life of a case. Then you have to take into account any documents which a case management system may generate that require a lot of reworking. Having fee earners doing such tasks is simply losing your practice money.
Conclusion
In conclusion, remember to strip everything back to the basics. If you have a fee earner who is not meeting their chargeable hours, look at potential causes.
Do you have sufficient support mechanisms in place?
Remember to ask those two important questions:
How much will it cost my firm in chargeable time if I do something?
Can someone else do the task and will it be more cost-effective for someone else to do it?
If you want your fee earners to achieve those chargeable hour goals, dictation is one area I think all law practices should look at.
Firstly, it is more cost-effective than a fee earner typing their own documents.
Secondly, it may mean your lawyers do not have to stay late (or work at weekends) to meet their chargeable hours’ targets as it is reducing their admin.
Thirdly, it may result in lawyers feeling less stressed and less pressured at work. It reduces time spent on transcription which can be better used elsewhere.
This simple change could be an easy win-win scenario for all.
About OutSec Legal
At Outsec Legal, our services are designed to support legal professionals by providing reliable and high-quality legal transcription, allowing your practice to focus on clients and fee production. Whether your practice needs help with day-to-day transcription or support during busy periods, our pay-as-you-go option enables legal practices of all shapes and sizes to access support as and when they need it.
So What Are The Benefits?
Sole Practitioners/Barristers/Small Law Practices:
OutSec Legal is the perfect solution for sole practitioners, small law firms or barristers who need typing assistance on a pay-as-you-go basis, as it provides a cheaper alternative to employment.
Medium to Large Law Practices:
Medium to large law firms use OutSec to:
Reduce secretarial staff (completely or partially). This reduces the need for expensive office space (or enables space to be utilised for more productive use/fee generation);
Allow fee earners to concentrate on chargeable hour targets, rather than typing emails or amending documents;
Provide an effective solution to enable your fee-earning staff to work remotely. Therefore providing further opportunities to reduce expensive office space or increase your fee earner headcount with less space. It enables flexible working and makes law firms more agile;
Provide a business continuity solution to enable law firms to access secretarial staff in times of absence.
Enable firms to upscale support as the firm grows or at times of high workloads, without the need for employing additional staff.
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