Technology

Hybrid Work Model Raises Interesting Challenges When It Comes To Billing

Keeping track of what who does what.

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It seems as though most lawyers are eager to move to a hybrid work model that allows out-of-office working for one or two days a week. And they’re willing to sacrifice raises for it.

But while attorneys may be eyeing a bold new world that combines the benefits of a communal office structure with the technological gains of a robust COVID-inspired remote office infrastructure, firms are worried about how this new model will impact billing.

It’s not that firms think attorneys will bill less from home — we already learned during the pandemic that the billing doesn’t stop and may actually increase. But there are serious concerns about what working from home does to workflow and whether or not it leads associates to take on more work that would customarily be performed much cheaper by support staff.

Workflow, productivity, and profitability software company BigHand just released a report compiling the results of almost 1000 respondents from firms in North America, the UK, and APAC. And what firms are worried about is a confluence of retiring staff and associates billing for administrative tasks they’re taking on themselves.

Well, it’s not all about retirement:

Yes, firms cut back on staff during the pandemic. It’s a perverse firm tradition to wait until an economic downturn to cut back on staff as opposed to doing it in a boom when those folks can more easily find another job. From the firm’s perspective they feel they can afford underutilized staff in the good times, but that doesn’t make it sting any less when the firm downsizes in a recession.

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Still, 56 percent of North America respondents and 49 percent of UK respondents expect between 20 and 40 percent of their support staff to retire in the next five years. And 61 percent of North America and 64 percent of UK firms expect to lose the same range of staff through natural attrition over the next five years.

So with staff leaving and attorneys working from home…

Hybrid working raises challenges for 30% of NA firms, 35% of UK firms and 53% of APAC firms, there are concerns regarding the need for lawyers to undertake more administrative work instead of delegating to support staff. In NA, 36% cite the difficulty of ensuring an even distribution of work between support staff, as well as 31% of UK firms and 38% of APAC firms.

It’s difficult enough to rewire a young lawyer to delegate copy jobs when the staff is sitting right outside the office. It must be near impossible to get lawyers to hand off admin tasks to someone existing in the cloud. Yet that’s going to become an issue as clients demand efficiency.

The report talks about this problem in terms of a decline in billable hours — noting that 52 percent responded that hours had either declined or stayed the same. The more dramatic figure to me is that this means 48 percent saw an increase, which makes me wonder if demand was really up or if associates just lumped more administrative tasks into their overall figures. Because as bad as associates losing billable time to preventable work might be, associates passing work over to clients that could be more efficiently handled by others would be worse.

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Staying on top of that’s going to require firms to manage workflow and deliver the sort of transparency needed to please clients. But right now it looks like a lot of that is being handled on the fly.

And that’s going to be a bigger deal when everyone’s not under the same roof. Some sort of “automated reporting on the volume and types of tasks, support staff capacity and utilization and the speed of turnaround” is going to be essential at that point. If it isn’t already.

There’s a lot more in this report — that’s just what jumped out at me. You can check out the whole thing here.

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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