One of the main objectives of any resource management programme is to maximise revenue by ensuring associate idle time is kept to a minimum.

But tasks themselves regularly sit idle and unattended, generating no revenue for your firm.

The period between a task’s conception and work beginning on it – what we call "passive time" – is a significant productivity sink for law firms, and it's something Capacity is uniquely placed to help your firm tackle.

Passive time

Passive time is more than just a delay; it’s lost opportunity.

From the moment a task is created, any time it sits unaddressed in a queue represents non-billable hours that could otherwise be contributing to firm revenue.

When passive time is high, it doesn’t just slow down the legal work pipeline; it adds unnecessary stress to lawyers and puts client satisfaction at risk.

Capacity is designed specifically to address this issue. By intelligently managing task distribution, Capacity helps law firms accelerate the transition from task conception to task completion – speeding up the treadmill of work without exhausting any of your people.

Test your reactions

We think of passive time like a law firm reaction test. The sooner fee-earners begin work on a new task, the sooner they'll be freed up for the next one – creating space for your firm to take on more work and earn more revenue.

In practice, some tasks are assigned quickly in law firms. That’s usually when they’re particularly urgent, or when the work allocator knows that there are only a handful of associates who can take it on.

Yet when a task is rapidly assigned, there’s no guarantee an associate will begin work on it. It may remain idle in their in-tray while they complete other work – or, if they do begin work on it right away, it means they’re leaving another task idling.

Our clients have told us that, before using Capacity, some tasks could take weeks to assign. Others had to be reassigned multiple times because the chosen fee-earner was either over-capacity or underqualified. Some simply got lost, and were only picked up when a partner chased the work.

As a result of these inefficiencies, passive time runs high in large law firms, and delays to dependent work only serve to compound the productivity sink.

How Capacity cuts passive time

To explain how Capacity helps radically reduce passive time, we need to touch on how our tool works.

We'll start with our algorithm. When work allocators search for an associate, our algorithm surfaces the most available associates, removing the most common bottleneck of manual task assignment: assigning work to people who are already over-capacity.

This benefit is compounded when all the associates in your global network, no matter where they're working from, are active on Capacity. Now, your people can find available associates in Paris, Singapore, Edinburgh, or Austin.

Meanwhile, when work needs to be reallocated, supervisors can do so immediately on Capacity. The process of finding a new, available fee-earner takes just seconds, minimising the idle time of the task.

With Capacity, your firm’s reaction time rapidly improves, unlocking hidden productivity from your existing workflows.

Benefits of reducing passive time

When passive time is minimised, law firms can begin to explore entriely new benefits, all of which deliver a significant competitive edge.

By assigning work to associates sooner but maintaining the same deadline, firms can provide those associates more time to complete the task. The means less stress, higher work quality, and more revenue in billed hours.

Alternately, firms can shorten their client deadlines without changing the expectations placed upon their associates. That means delighting your clients with the speed of your service delivery.

Finally, firms can simply take on more work. With more matters completed sooner – and fewer tasks gathering dust and preventing their progress – they can move quicker to capture business and begin work on new revenue-generating ventures, or set aside time for supervision, training, bro bono work, or diversity and wellbeing initiatives.

With Capacity, your operation becomes slicker. No change to headcount, no meddling with the fourth dimension – just a more streamlined, efficient resourcing system that unleashes your firm’s full potential.

As always, we'd be delighted to show you how Capacity works. Get in touch to learn more, follow us on LinkedIn, or book a demo directly through our website.