Picture the passage of work through your law firm, and you might well hold the image of a river in your mind's eye.

Ideally, it's in full flow, with very few rapids, eddies, dams, and logjams.

But this isn't usually how work flows through law firms. There are always snags – scenarios where the flow of work is interrupted:

• An associate is overburdened with a task that could have gone to a more available associate.
• A task is dependent on another being completed, which is still in the works.
• A junior needs supervision to complete a task, but their partner is busy.
• Work is allocated to someone who isn't experienced enough to complete it, so the work need to be reallocated.
• Laterals and returnees twiddle their thumbs while tasks languish in the in-trays of others.

We could go on.

With Capacity, you finally have a tool that you can trust to get work to the people who need and want it, just at the right time.

No more snags, no more hold-ups, and no more unnecessary overwork – instead, more work completed to a high standard, and to deadline, driving up profits and client satisfaction.

We like to think of ourselves as the solution to the workflow logjam – and how better to illustrate what we mean than to turn to the age-old art of the log driver.

Log driving

Log driving began in the 16th century as a means to transport Finnish and Swedish lumber down to coastal cities.

These countries were well suited to floating logs downstream, because their springtime floods saw the water level rise and the flow quicken.

But if you chuck a load of long, rigid objects into a complex system like a river, you're going to get... snags.

Some logjams last for decades – like the world's largest, tangled across 20 square miles of Canada's Mackenzie River delta, with 400,000 stuck logs.

Every logjam is a pain to untangle, requiring a heap of extra labour to attend to the problem and slowly redistribute blocked objects downstream.

Sound familiar?

Chuck a load of long, rigid tasks into a complex system like a law firm, and you will also get some snags.

• People end up overloaded or idle.
• Work gets lost or delayed because supervision is scattered.
• Stress, confusion, and mistakes pile up.
• Seniors spend more time chasing work than reviewing it.

No wonder we turn to the language of the log driver – jams, flows, streams, and floods – when talking about issues we face at work.

Enter Capacity

The goal of work allocation technology is to prevent workflow snags, keeping tasks flowing smoothly through your firm.

We know that every holdup costs you money, disturbs your people, and disappoints your clients.

That's why we've developed a solution, in Capacity, that eliminates them. The vital ingredients:

• An intuitive platform your people actually want to use.
• Accurate, real-time availability data to ensure utilisation is smooth
• The ability to staff a matter or task in less than 90 seconds
• An algorithm that recommends candidates based on the criteria your work allocators care about
• Data-driven reporting and insights to further enhance the process

Now, our clients are able to identify and prevent resourcing bottlenecks before they disrupt ongoing work.

They're able to locate available resources from across their entire organisation – vastly improving productivity

They're able to hone talent management so their lawyers are always developing while their laterals and returnees hit the ground running from day one.

And, in the case of staff absences, they're able to reallocate their work to a suitable associate at the drop of a hat.

Next generation

Log driving was eclipsed as a means of lumber transportation by the advent of rail routes and logging roads.

You can still enjoy the spectacle in select places across Scandinavia, in the Catalan Pyrenees, and along Bavaria's Isar river.

But modern logging firms get the job done much quicker with trains and trucks – they'd never go back to river transportation.

And our clients get the job done much quicker with Capacity. They too have told us that they cannot imagine going back to how things were done before.

Learn more

We believe that firms thrive when interruptions, disruption, and delay are kept to a minimum.

Learn more about our product and how it can help your firm thrive in our blog pieces on smoothing utilisation, boosting collaboration, and associate disengagement – or book a call with our team to get your own private tour of the product. We'd love to show you how it works.