At Capacity, we believe resource management is one of the most influential processes in large law firms.

Resource managers sit right at the centre of it all, giving firms – and technology companies – the insight to work smarter and better.

So it is with great pleasure that today we publish our latest report: The State of Resource Management in Legal 2026, which is the legal industry's first-ever report to focus solely on resource managers.

The report covers the professional backgrounds of RMs, their key traits, their success stories, and the challenges they're still seeking to overcome.

We've tapped over 235 years of experience, surveying 52 RMs and interviewing a further 21, to put together the clearest picture yet of how resource management programmes are evolving in the world's most ambitious law firms.

Key findings

→ 14% average reduction in the utilisation gap Resource managers have overseen a meaningful decrease in the gap between the busiest and quietest lawyers.

→ Associates trust RMs with information they might not otherwise share More than 9 in 10 say associates come to them first.

→ Nearly half of work still bypasses RMs 45% of all work flows around, rather than through, the RM function.

→ KPI frameworks are still rare Just 30% of RMs operate with established performance metrics.

→ Partner engagement remains inconsistent 60% say some partners have yet to fully buy in to the RM programme.

→ Workloads exceed what RMs consider ideal More than 2 in 3 (69%) manage more fee-earners than they believe is sustainable.

→ Expansion is on the horizon 3 in 4 firms plan to grow their RM function within the next year.

What they said

We spoke with William, our CEO and Co-founder, and Alex, our Head of Communications, to learn their key takeaways from the report.

William Dougherty, CEO

Having worked closely with resource managers for nearly a decade, I was delighted to see their value represented in this report – both in their measurable successes and in their clear human impact on the culture of the firms in which they operate.

We hope that this report can help underscore the importance of resource management across the legal sector, start conversations among operations leads, and foster intelligence sharing between RMs on everything from new KPIs to ways they can win parter buy-in

We at Capacity learned a lot from conducting this research, and we're grateful to everyone who took part.

Alex King, Head of Communications

I'm delighted to spotlight resource managers in our latest report – the practitioners in the very centre of what we see as the legal sector's most important and untapped process.

In putting together this report, we found the interviews most rewarding. We structured them so that the RMs we spoke with could lead us in interesting directions, and often that meant sharing stories from the front line – details that can't be captured in a datapoint.

An associate saved from termination. A partner turned evangelist for the RM programme. And the resource managers themselves, protecting a junior here, encouraging one there, and somehow keeping the entire ship on an even keel throughout. There was lots to inspire in this report.

To download your copy of the report, head to this page.

And to take part in the 2027 edition, make sure you've signed up to our newsletter – we'll send out requests for contributions in Q3 of 2026.