In the legal profession, where time is quite literally money, and productivity and efficiency are paramount, an alarming gap persists between hours worked and hours billed. RBS’ Legal Benchmarking Report from 2019 found that the average full-time solicitor records only around 1,000 chargeable hours annually, despite The Guardian’s reporting that many lawyers work far beyond the traditional nine-to-five, often late into the night and across weekends. The key issue, as MacIntyre Hudson’s Legal Benchmarking Report for 2022 highlights, lies in administrative overload. That is to say that solicitors spend a significant share of their day on non-chargeable tasks such as typing and formatting of documents. Tasks which could be more efficiently handled through a legal transcription service rather than consuming fee earner’s time which then would become non-chargeable as opposed to chargeable time. This issue raises an urgent question for managing partners, practice managers and law firm owners: how can firms boost chargeable hours whilst protecting the wellbeing of their teams?
Setting Realistic Chargeable Hour Goals
Before any optimisation can occur, any foundation must be re-evaluated. Chargeable hour targets must be realistic, fair and sustainable. Unrealistic goals do not encourage higher productivity. Instead, they contribute to burnout, presenteeism and disengagement.
The Guardian article titled “‘Toxic, cut-throat’: the work culture awaiting junior lawyers”, offers a sobering insight into the impact of unreasonable billing targets. New entrants to the profession often find themselves under extreme pressure, not only to perform but to outdo their peers in order to secure their position or progress. This results in an environment that many have described as “toxic” and “cut-throat”, damaging both mental health and long-term performance.
This issue is not limited to the UK. American law firms also suffer from hyper-competitive internal cultures, partly due to an aggressive recruitment model. Johnny C. Taylor Jr., President and CEO of the Society for Human Resource Management, explained:
“In law firms, there are a large number of recruits with only a few ever making that coveted partner status. So, by definition, you have to do better than your colleagues if you want to make it.”
This dynamic forces lawyers to overextend themselves to stay ahead. It is a race that many cannot win, and which very few can sustain without consequences to their health, personal lives and ultimately, professional longevity.
Therefore, setting chargeable hour targets must be done with a long-term strategy in mind. A firm may well wish to increase profitability, but this must not come at the cost of employee retention or firm culture.
So perhaps it is not about increasing chargeable hour targets. Perhaps sustainable efficiency begins with working smarter, more efficiently, being more productive rather than working longer hours.
Productivity: Returning to Fundamentals
There is a common misconception within legal practice that completing administrative tasks oneself is more efficient. Fee earners often believe it is quicker to type a letter, create a file note or amend a client record themselves than to delegate it to a colleague. While this may seem true in the moment, it is a shortsighted approach with significant cumulative cost.
Before undertaking any non-billable task, every fee earner should routinely ask themselves two key questions:
- How much chargeable time will I lose by doing this task myself?
- Can someone at a lower cost complete this more efficiently?
For example, should a senior solicitor spend ten minutes correcting formatting in a letter or uploading documents to the case management system? Or should a member of the administrative staff do the task, freeing the solicitor to focus on fee-generating work?
Time lost to admin is often invisible however, it becomes glaringly obvious when viewed through the lens of profitability.
Delegation as a Strategic Tool
Delegation is not merely a skill, it is a strategic tool. When implemented effectively, it enables firms to operate at peak efficiency.
Senior lawyers benefit enormously by entrusting junior lawyers, paralegals, secretaries and administrators with the appropriate tasks. This allows work to be completed at the correct level of cost and skill, reduces delays and results in better and cheaper outcomes for clients.
Delegation is about resource allocation. It ensures that each member of the team is focused on the work that matches their grade and value. The result is not only a more efficient workflow but also improved morale, enhanced training opportunities and better utilisation of firm wide expertise.
Valuing Time
Efficiency is not merely a logistical challenge. It is also a psychological one.
Even when time is properly allocated and administrative tasks are successfully delegated, many lawyers still fail to capture the full financial value of their work. The reason for this is not technical, operational or legal. It is emotional.
Fee Discussions
One of the most obvious areas in which the inner saboteur appears is in discussions around fees. Many solicitors, including those with years of experience and strong client portfolios, struggle to state their rates with confidence. When it comes to pricing, they falter. They may discount their fees without being asked. Additionally, they may under record time to avoid what they perceive as an uncomfortable or confrontational discussion. They may include additional work without charging for it, hoping to maintain goodwill.
This is rarely a matter of pricing strategy but a manifestation of fear. The fear of being seen as greedy. Or the fear of hearing a client say: “I am not paying that”. The fear of rejection. If you want to know more on the subject, why not read our article: How Legal Professionals Can Train Their Inner Saboteur.
Mindset
The perfectionist mindset that often serves lawyers so well in their technical work can become a liability when it comes to billing. A solicitor may spend hours on a piece of work, striving to ensure that every sentence is flawless. Yet when it comes time to raise an invoice, they hesitate. They question whether they have spent too long on the task. They fear that charging for the full amount would appear unjustified. If you want to know more on the subject, why not read our article: Why Lawyers Should Rethink Their Perfectionist Habits.
Undercharging
The result here is one of undercharging. Not only does this directly affect the financial health of the practice, it also erodes the solicitor’s own confidence and reinforces the idea that their work is somehow less valuable than the fee suggests.
Clients are not hiring lawyers to undercharge and apologise for their expertise. They are hiring them to provide a professional service, at a professional rate. So lawyers who avoid frank and clear conversations about fees will not build trust with a client. It creates confusion and ultimately, weakens that client relationship as result. Our article: Worth Every Penny explores this subject in much greater detail.
Time has value. Legal expertise has value. And as this article has demonstrated, time lost to administrative tasks, poorly managed workflows or unbilled hours has a cumulative cost that no practice can afford to ignore.
It is precisely for this reason that valuing time must also mean recognising where that time is best spent. Just because a solicitor can complete a task does not mean they should.
Valuing time means making intentional choices about how it is used. It means protecting your billable hours, reducing unnecessary administrate burdens and ensuring that every minute spent contributes meaningfully to your clients, your team and your bottom line.
Real Life Example
Frank Flanagan, is a Partner at Mason Hayes and Curran. Frank’s charge out rate will be much higher than someone of a lesser rank in his firm.
Frank explains some of the real world issue lawyers face when working with Microsoft Word documents:
“Problems arise as soon as you interact with someone else. If I’m dealing with affidavits or working on documents that are being exchanged with other law firms, all the numbering functionality seems to fall away.”
Frank goes onto say:
“A lot of the time you send documents out to a smaller law firm and you get them back with their own house style applied to all of the parts they worked on.”.
“Most law firms have a house style that seems to get applied to everything they do even when it is someone else’s document. Solving this problem takes up valuable time. People don’t tend to be gracious and leave it in the style of the firm that created the document”.
In all of these scenarios, Frank is receiving documents which he then needs to amend or reformat, when he receives the document back from others.
As he states: “Solving this problem takes up valuable time”, time which suddenly becomes non-chargeable for Frank. If Frank has does not have a secretary to the reformatting for him and he has to do it himself, he is ultimately losing out on time which could be used for chargeable work.
So here the question becomes: should Frank be reformatting document when his charge out rate is so high? Or should someone else be doing it for him, whose time is cheaper? And Frank does not have any support, what could he do?
Understanding the True Cost of Admin Work
At first glance, small administrative tasks may not appear to impact profitability. However, when performed repeatedly by fee earners with high charge out rates they become a substantial drain on firm resources.
Every solicitor has, at some stage, spent time photocopying, formatting or typing their own documents. While such tasks are necessary, they are also not chargeable. Consider the financial implications:
- Grade A solicitor (senior): £95 for 10 minutes
- Grade D solicitor (junior): £35 for 10 minutes
- Administrative support: £1.50 for the same 10-minute task
Over the course of a month, these “ten-minute jobs” add up to many hours of lost billable time.
Historically, firms employed office juniors precisely for this reason. They handled the daily minutiae, freeing fee earners to focus on legal work. The phrase “Take care of the pennies, and the pounds will take care of themselves” captures this ethos perfectly. Here you can see quite clearly why Frank, being a partner in a law firm, perhaps should not be spending his time reformatting at a document.
A Legal Benchmarking Report from 2022 reinforces this by emphasising that streamlined administrative support is not a luxury but a necessity for profitability.
2022 Legal Benchmarking Report: Key Takeaways
A Legal Benchmarking Report from MacIntyre Hudson in 2022 outlined three key income-focused strategies for law firms. One of the most significant was the directive to:
“Generate chargeable time capacity for your fee earners by removing administrative tasks from them.”
This statement could not be more aligned with long-standing best practice. Fee earners value lies in their legal expertise and their time should be protected accordingly.
This validation is welcomed by OutSec which has long championed the separation of legal and administrative work. The message is clear: If profitability is the goal, then admin must be kept in the hands of those best suited to deliver it efficiently, not fee earners.
Dictation: A More Efficient Alternative to Typing
In recent years, many law firms have reduced or eliminated secretarial staff in the belief that typing their own documents is a cost-saving measure. However, this decision often proves to be a false economy.
The truth is that dictation remains one of the most effective productivity tools available.
Humans speak far faster than they type. The average person types at 38 to 40 words per minute. In contrast, most individuals speak at a rate of 140 to 160 words per minute. This means that a dictated document can be produced up to four times faster than one typed manually.
Consider this example: a two-hour document could be dictated in just 30 minutes.
The productivity gains are substantial. As The Lawyer highlighted in its article “Microsoft Word in Law Firms”, 42 percent of solicitors struggle with Word. David Lee, IT Director at Womble Bond Dickinson, noted:
“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 is not the best use of the lawyer’s time.”
The Financial Case for Dictation
Let us now consider the financial implications of relying on fee earners to type their own documents rather than using a dictation service such as OutSec.
If a solicitor spends two hours a day typing:
- A Grade A solicitor in London loses £849 per day
- A Grade D solicitor loses £257 per day
This calculation factors in the time saved through dictation and the cost of transcription. The difference is stark. Even moderate use of dictation can result in significant improvements to both chargeable hours and overall profitability.
Firms seeking to improve both efficiency and output would do well to invest in high-quality digital dictation solutions, supported by trained transcription professionals.
The Role of Case Management Systems
Case management systems (CMS) have revolutionised workflow in modern legal practices. However, while these systems are invaluable for streamlining certain processes, they do not eliminate the need for human input.
In fact, many CMS-generated tasks require significant bespoke handling. Tasks such as:
- Drafting and formatting file notes and attendance records
- Preparing letters and email correspondence
- Setting up new clients and maintaining client data
- Uploading documents and managing case files
- Conducting compliance checks and maintaining regulatory records
These are all examples of vital but non-chargeable tasks that should be delegated to administrative or secretarial staff. Expecting fee earners to complete them adds hidden costs and wastes valuable hours.
Moreover, many CMS templates still require considerable reworking before they are suitable for client delivery. It is essential that firms avoid the trap of assuming software alone can replace human support.
Final Thoughts
To build a truly efficient and profitable legal practice, firms must return to first principles. They must ask themselves:
- How much chargeable time is lost by allowing fee earners to complete non-legal tasks?
- Could these tasks be handled by someone else more effectively, at a lower cost?
The answer will almost always point towards better delegation, smarter support structures and a renewed focus on cost-effective time management.
Dictation is one of the most accessible and impactful changes a law firm can make. It reduces unnecessary overheads, increases productivity and helps lawyers meet their chargeable hour targets without sacrificing evenings and weekends.
These changes do not just improve the bottom line. They foster a healthier, more sustainable working culture for the entire legal team.
No Support? Need Help?
At OutSec 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 transcription and document production options 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 is the perfect solution for sole practitioners, small law firms or barristers who need transcription 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). You only pay for transcription time, not for unproductive time or absences;
- 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. It also gives your fee earners access to transcription support at the touch of a button;
- Provide a business continuity solution to enable law firms to access legal transcription experts in times of need.
- Enable firms to upscale support as the firm grows or at times of high workloads, without the need for employing additional staff.
Want to know more, why not get in touch with us on 020 7112 7527.
About OutSec
OutSec is the UK’s leading online transcription company whose business has grown substantially since its inception in 2002. We are now one of the most successful transcription companies in the United Kingdom.
OutSec provides secure outsourced transcription services to the medical, legal, property and surveying, universities, media and interviews, advisory boards, conferences & seminars, inventories, financial, corporate, HR, recruitment and Executive Search sectors.
Accounts are free. You pay for your transcription on a per-minute basis (rounded to the nearest minute) on a pay-as-you-go basis. There are no contracts or minimum spend. So, why not utilise our transcription services and open an account today?
We also provide a boutique Virtual Personal Assistant Service, Crystal Clara, for those who require a more personal and tailored service.
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Why is Dictation More Efficient than Typing?
Well, interestingly it is because we can all speak faster than we can type:
“The average person types between 38 and 40 words per minute”.
A “good rate of speech ranges between 140 -160 words per minute.”
In other words, dictation is up to four times faster than typing. Therefore, simply dictating a document is more cost-efficient, giving you more time to dedicate your efforts elsewhere in your business.
Picture attribution: Image by Freepik.