At Capacity, we think one of the most powerful benefits of our work allocation tool is that it forges new, powerful, and trusted connections between your international offices.

With Capacity, a partner in Boston can send work to an associate in Edinburgh at the drop of a hat.

An overworked office in Singapore can draft in the help of an idle team in Paris.

Partners across your organisation can find the talent they need for specialised, sensitive, or highly urgent work.

And all these new connections are not temporary; once established, the grow stronger as seniors get to know juniors across the network.

And they multiply too, as practice groups and teams establish new channels to distribute work on new matters.

Those new connections have the obvious impact of boosting overall utilisation while providing better service to your global clients.

Less obvious are the network effects unleashed by this interconnectivity – and that's where we think Capacity helps firms harness their full potential.

Networked brains

Network effects are most obvious and astonishing in the human brain.

For the London Underground to resemble anything like our brains, it would have to expand its station count by 2,573,529,411,765 times, and then shrink to the size of one of its track rats.

That brain – your brain – uses enough energy in a single day to power a smartphone for four months. It’s busy in there: a speed-of-light transit system that never sleeps.

Brains are networks and energy, and they’re particularly good at keeping us alive because they adapt and evolve as they learn, helping us react to our changing environment.

The grey matter’s all there from an early age, but it’s the connections, the plasticity of our synaptic pathways, that makes our brains truly flexible and all-conquering.

It’s the same for law firms, we think. The headcount (braincount?) is all there, but the connections between your people can fire off in exciting and profitable new directions. That plasticity helps firms adapt, learn, and grow – surviving and thriving in a changing world.

How Capacity builds connections

In basic terms, Capacity stores all relevant details about all your talent in one place, and processes it into ranked lists of suitable candidates whenever someone is distributing work.

Law firms already have such systems, but they're not centralised, they're difficult to manage and, crucially, they don't update in real time.

On Capacity, everything from an associate's location and language proficiency to their skills, experience, and preferences are there for your people to look up, and they're kept accurate by your fee-earners.

The most important data point is each associate's availability. We ensure that data is highly accurate, and updated in real time, so that our clients can trust our platform to connect them with available, skilled lawyers.

With Capacity, it takes that partner is Boston less than 90 seconds to find the perfect lawyer, wherever they are, to take on their task.

Learn more

There are further upsides to explore with Capacity, including the spreading of the most urgent work across timezones, or the utilisation of your remote and hybrid workers who may be less accessible when they're not in the office.

We detail some of those extra benefits in our articles on hybrid work, internal networking, and utilisation smoothing – or you can get in touch with our team to book yourself in for a demo. We'd love to show you how it all works.