NALFA and LAW360 Dub The Results As Surprising.
Clio, a Canadian company that provides cloud-based practice management for firms, has presented a recent Legal Trends Report released Thursday last week with some very interesting findings, which some websites (NALFA and Law36) find to be surprising—as do we.
Based on a survey of 70,000 legal professionals (many being Clio clients) which are solo practitioners or middle-market firms of about 200 lawyers, Clio reported that the average utilization rate for reporting legal professionals was only 30%, which is 2.4 hours of billable hours each workday. As we interpret these findings, that means that many lawyers only bill 30% of their total time in a day directly to clients. It also found that lawyers invoice clients for only 1.9 hours during an eight-hour workday and collect only 1.6 hours of that time. So where did the rest of the time go? Clio reported that lawyers spend their time on billing/financial matters, marketing/business development, as well as firm organization/administration.