In Search of Lost Time: Clio’s 2017 Legal Trends Report
These findings just might force lawyers to reexamine how they think about the business of law.
Today, Clio is releasing the 2017 Legal Trends Report, packed full of original findings and insights that just might force lawyers to reexamine how they think about the business of law.
Last year, the Legal Trends Report introduced three key performance indicators—utilization, realization, and collection rates—to measure how much of a lawyer’s workday contributes to actual earnings. As with last year, the most critical finding in this report is that lawyers spend only 2.3 hours (29% of an 8-hour workday) on billable tasks. When factoring in realization and collection rates, firms only collect an average of 1.6 hours of billable time per day. Clearly, there is a deep disconnect between attorneys’ aspirations for managing their time and the apparent inefficiencies of actual practice.
As a practice management software provider, Clio is uniquely positioned to analyze aggregated and anonymized data from the lawyers who use its platform. The completely data-driven Legal Trends Report is simultaneously the most comprehensive and the most granular analysis of lawyer activity ever published. For 2017, Clio followed up the inaugural report by setting out to answer the question, “When lawyers aren’t billing their time, what are they doing?”
Therefore, over this past summer, in collaboration with ATL, Clio conducted a deep and rigorous survey of approximately 3,000 practicing lawyers on how they are running their businesses. How much time are they spending on marketing, collections, and configuring technology? What use—if any—are lawyers making of key business metrics, and how do they measure success? In addition, Clio also conducted a survey of over 2,000 consumers to better understand what clients look for when hiring a law firm.
Among the topics addressed in the Legal Trends Report:
- What is the relative value of legal services across different geographic markets and practice areas?
- How do clients seek legal representation?
- How do trust accounts affect collection rates?
- What fee arrangements do law firms use?
- How do lawyers spend their non-billable time?
- Are interruptions killing productivity?
- How do firms deal with late client payments?
And much, much more. Download your free 2017 Legal Trends Report here.
