Are lawyers getting lazier? Perhaps just more efficient? Less work to go around?
Whatever the reason, a recent report on the legal industry reveals the average attorney is billing 156 fewer hours than they were a decade ago. The loss law firms are taking on that decrease in productivity is calculated to be $74,100 per attorney.
The study from Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute and the Center for the Study of the Legal Profession (CSLP) at the Georgetown University Law Center contains many interesting insights about the status of the legal profession. As we’ve previously covered, the authors see it as a wake-up call for law firms to break out of their stagnant ways. But also in the data is the drop in productivity across the industry.
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As reported by Big Law Business, study author James Jones puts the blame squarely on the heads of non-equity partners and counsel:
While associates and equity partners rank “reasonably well” in their level of productivity, “it really falters below that,” Jones said.
The lower performers would include non-equity partners and of counsel attorney, the report found. As a result, Jones said that when comparing hours billed in January 2007 to those billed in November 2017 (the latest figures available when the study was being written), he calculated that a typical firm attorney billed 156 fewer hours by the end of that ten-year period.
The calculation was based on a rate of $475 per hour, a figure that comes from averaging the rates of lawyers ranging from associates to equity partners, Jones said.
Overall, Jones concluded that based on those figures, a 300-lawyer firm “would be experiencing an annual loss currently of $22.2 million.”
It just goes to show that, while the per attorney decrease in hours billed may not seem like a lot, the cumulative impact on the firm is significant.
Maybe if firms stopped stiffing counsel on bonuses they’d see a spike in their billable hours.
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Kathryn Rubino is an editor at Above the Law. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).