The holiday season is still a distant prospect but for law firms the New Year means the rapid approach of Easter and the long summer break. Juggling staff levels with client demand and natural peaks and troughs in activity is essential to ensure a firm's workflow does not slip into 'go-slow' in the summer. Yet how can the law, a people-centred business, balance ever-fluctuating resource planning needs with a trading environment which encourages firms to constantly drive down overheads?

Historically, the emphasis in law firm productivity has been on chargeable hours and billing levels. Increasing profit involves creating an environment which allows fee earners to push ever more work through to a billable stage. Now firms are looking to control production costs as well, moving away from the traditional system whereby lawyers 'owned' their personal clients towards a more team-based approach. A fortunate side effect of this is that the delays which occurred when someone went on holiday have now been sizably reduced because cases can now be picked up by a knowledgeable colleague.

A team-based structure also brings benefits in terms of spreading work more evenly. Common sense and good human resources (HR) practice dictates that working individual employees flat out for long periods will lead to decreases in productivity and, if left unaddressed, stress and staff 'churn'. 'Spare resource' is also easier to plan for within a team structure, creating an environment in which no one is overworked or underemployed, and the team can cope with spikes in activity when they occur.

Increasing productivity by sharing responsibility is a key example of where the profession has learned tricks from the corporate sector. Developments in IT have also significantly affected how firms manage themselves and their resource – not least in terms of the support staff whose work has historically underpinned that of fee earners. Email and the shift towards an ever more 'paper-lite' office have made modern law firm offices tidier places and they have fundamentally changed the way that lawyers communicate with their clients.

Weedie Sisson, HR director at pension specialists Sacker & Partners says: "Email in itself has had a knock-on effect on staffing requirements across the sector. We are finding that younger lawyers – the next generation of partners – use it as a powerful tool to prepare correspondence themselves rather than rely on secretaries. In fact, whereas just a few years ago we needed a secretary to every two lawyers to ensure workflow levels, we now operate a 1:3-4 ratio and are just as efficient."

Cultivating an 'all hands to the pump' environment is not the only way in which law firms have learned to plan for change. Modern management methods are slowly taking firms away from the partner-centred model into a more 'corporate' future bring various planning tools and strategies with them. This is especially true of firms which have expanded through a mixture of organic growth and acquisition, thereby finding themselves with top-heavy management structures. Here, especially with staffing, it pays to live by the 'pyramid' principle – building structures for each business area in which each 'level' of the pyramid is 'peopled' appropriately.

For naturally top-heavy firms this can take many years to complete, but it is essential for the long-term health of the business. Ashurst, for example, recently overhauled its management structure, reducing its board to 12 members. Simmons & Simmons has also tackled this over the past three years, announcing that it plans a repeat round of its 2004 partner de-equitisation which boosted profits after a three-year slide.

Pyramid structures allow for much greater clarity when examining precisely how and where work flows through a company and how profit is extracted from it. This does not only encompass the 'cost' of employing individual staff members but also establishing how much value they add to the business.

Here at Nelsons, for example, we recently found that re-examining how we organised a basic office function such as transcription has led to unexpected discoveries about our resource.

As part of an ongoing efficiency and staff de-duplication drive, we decided to think twice before replacing any secretaries departing the firm. Instead, we have looked to share their organisational tasks among remaining secretaries – something a 'team' structure also makes possible – with the some of their document transcription work outsourced to Voicepath, a specialist third-party company. This meant we could not only reduce our overall headcount over time, but also cope with peaks in activity without the expense and trouble of temporary support staff.

Our projections estimated that this new process could shave a third off what we then spent on our secretarial pool – providing we were able to keep control over how much individual fee earners used the outsourced service. To achieve this, we effectively rationed the service, giving each fee earner access to a package of dictation time which was equivalent to what the departing secretary had undertaken.

In practice, we discovered that the cost of Voicepath processing the package of dictation was less than half of the previous internal cost, as the tendency has been for more work to be absorbed in-house by the retained staff. In effect, outsourcing routine work and giving more complex and organisational tasks to existing staff has exposed capacity for work which we never knew existed. In addition, we have found the quality and timeliness of outsourced work has matched internal standards.

While it is possible to plan for most things we must also always expect the unexpected. This is especially common in areas such as litigation where a big case can arrive in a hurry and put entire departments under huge strain. In such times it is very easy to lose sight of good HR practice, but it still pays to remember the inverse correlation between overwork and productivity. And for occasions like this, the fastest, easiest solution is the recruitment consultant.

Sisson adds: "In total, around 85% of the candidates I see come to us through agencies. And while we adopt a 'refuse to lose' approach to recruiting and retaining talent, there will still be times when we need extra hands at short notice. Contract staff are therefore a perfect solution for plugging these gaps, mainly from paralegal to one year PQE level. Without being able to call on these personnel at short notice, firms might find themselves overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work that comes in from, say, a dispute resolution case. They make a large contribution to helping firms to turnaround cases to tight deadlines while minimising the risk of staff burnout."

Apart from enabling firms to pull out all the stops, the experience gained by contract lawyers is often beneficial to the profession as a whole. Wendy Brampton, a manager for recruitment consultant, Michael Page Legal, explains: "A great many contract staff are overseas-trained lawyers using temporary experience as a way to get onto the UK career ladder. Here, the firms get work done at short notice, and the temps can better their chances of getting a permanent position. Historically, this situation has worked well in terms of deepening the UK talent pool, making it possible for firms, when they are ready to expand, to take on quality candidates."

While it is true that resource planning is often considered a 'soft' skill, we have seen that the legal profession is increasingly treating it as a strategic issue. This can be seen not only in the fact that almost all firms have dedicated HR functions but also in the various creative yet systematic ways they are using to get more value out of their existing workforces. Peaks and troughs may still govern the profession – but thankfully they are getting easier to plan for.

Tim Hastings is chief executive of Nelsons.