The end of the billable hour? Credit: Marraco/Adobe Stock With Hours Tenuous, New Metric Looks to Baseball to Assess Lawyer Productivity
Researchers assert the new metric is more strongly correlated to profitability.
August 15, 2024 at 02:16 PM
4 minute read
Law Firm Profitability
What You Need to Know
- With hours generally declining over the years, and firms still growing more profitable, analysts are trying to find better ways to capture lawyer production.
- A report this week describes a relative performance measure, which uses attorney fees and realization data to compare similarly situated lawyers to a hypothetical 'replacement-level' attorney.
- According to analysts, the measure better correlates to profitability, and may become more useful as generative AI proliferates and possibly reduces hours even further.
Although multiple groups have charted a modest rise in productivity this year, the number of hours that lawyers bill has arguably become a less useful measure of the work they do and the revenue they generate, and has generally continued declining even as firms have become more profitable than ever over the last decade-plus.
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