5 Creative Ways to Boost Your Law Firm’s Productivity

Every business strives to improve productivity. When production is high, a business can deliver more of its product or service, helping the organization grow and increase its bottom line. Law firms are no different, but they face the added challenge of billable hours.

Billable hours directly correlate to revenue for law firms, and these hours are based on productive client work. In recent years, law firms around the country have seen significant productivity drops in relation to billable hours. In the first half of 2023, lawyers surveyed logged a total of 1,538 billable hours — a 150-hour decrease from two years prior.

With productive billable hours playing such a key role in law firm revenue, finding ways to increase productivity is essential to your bottom line. 

Productivity Challenges for Law Firms

Law firm management and productivity are far from simple. Attorneys have to balance a wide range of responsibilities and often wear multiple hats to ensure all administrative duties are handled. The core challenge is balancing these many side tasks with billable hours.

Work can only be classified as billable hours if it directly impacts a client’s case. For example, meeting with a client, appearing in court and researching a case are billable hours. Nonbillable hours or overheads are hours dedicated to internal processes, meetings with colleagues and any other tasks that don’t contribute to a client’s case. Administrative work, like answering the phone, also falls under nonbillable hours.

Therein lies the challenge — inefficiencies in administrative work and internal protocols can take away from billable hours and negatively impact your revenue. The goal is to find ways to maximize billable hours by minimizing non-billable tasks.

Top 5 Productivity Strategies for Law Firms

Many law firms are searching for ways to increase productivity to gain more billable hours. Fortunately, opportunities for increased productivity can be found in many places. 

1. Improve Time Management Practices

For lawyers, time management can be a challenge. With so many responsibilities to manage, the lawyers at your firm need to develop trusted systems for navigating everyday tasks and making the most of their valuable time.

Time management best practices for lawyers can include:

• Plan out the week: Your attorneys likely have recurring tasks like court dates or client meetings — and weekly planning can go even further. Use a calendar application to set times for case research, administrative tasks and break time. Establishing these timeframes at the start of each week removes uncertainty about the next steps and makes it easier to dedicate time to every type of task.
• Schedule deep work: Deep work is a period of uninterrupted time when you focus on one task. Attorneys can build deep work into their schedules for billable hours like research or writing briefs. Adding deep work time to your calendar helps you communicate to clients and colleagues that you’ll be unavailable during that time. Use other techniques, like muting office chats and closing your office door, to create a space made for focus.
• Prioritize to-do items: Deadlines are critical for law firms, so prioritization is a valuable part of time management. For example, an upcoming court case will likely have higher priority items than a case you just accepted. When planning your week, make sure to address high-priority tasks first.
• Start with the most difficult task: Our cognitive function fluctuates throughout the day, and we can use this to our benefit. Our brains are often sharper at the start of the workday, making it the ideal time to tackle more challenging tasks. With the ability to focus more, attorneys can achieve more during these times, including important client work that falls under billable hours.

2. Embrace Remote Work Solutions

Remote work has become a popular avenue for all types of businesses, including law firms. Allowing your team to work from home offers greater flexibility to the workday while helping your business save on office space. Whether you enforce a hybrid structure or allow for full-time remote work, your employees can experience a stronger work-life balance that is often more challenging to achieve at a law firm.

Lawyers have inconsistent schedules based on their caseloads, and during busy weeks, they could spend several extra hours at the office. Your law office is also where lawyers are more likely to encounter tasks that fall under nonbillable hours. Between answering phones and meeting with colleagues, attorneys may find that in-office time is less productive for client work.

By limiting the distractions of being at an office, lawyers are more equipped to increase billable hours. They also have more flexibility to work during the times when they feel most focused. Research shows that employees who feel they have more control over their work have lower stress levels. Since greater stress can reduce productivity, this can also be a benefit for law firms, especially since being an attorney is considered one of the most stressful occupations.

Other benefits of remote work for your law firm are:

• Increased access to talent: With lawyer shortages in certain regions like rural areas, remote work opportunities can improve access to talent. With more attorneys working at your firm, you have more talent to contribute to the billable hours that improve your bottom line.
• Reduced overhead costs: When your attorneys are not in the office full-time, you can reduce the size of your office space. Depending on your remote work policies, you may only need a few desks and a couple of conference spaces. While reducing overhead costs doesn’t increase billable hours, it can still contribute to increased revenue. 

3. Leverage Technology and Purpose-Built Software

A major hurdle to a productive workday is time-consuming manual processes that take away from more high-value work. This challenge occurs for all businesses, but for law firms, the time spent on these processes takes away from billable hours.

One of the most common technology challenges for law firms is information governance. With the high volume of documents and emails managed at a single firm, many hours can be spent simply recalling important information from inboxes and digital storage. These tasks fall under nonbillable hours, which can result in substantial revenue losses.

To solve this challenge, law firms leverage technology solutions like:

• Legal case management software
• Online document management platform
• eSignature platform
• Time tracking and billing software
• Legal calendaring software
• Legal practice management software

These technologies are often designed to scale and support your firm as it grows, helping you reduce the number of nonbillable hours as client work increases.

4. Enhance Team Collaboration

Collaboration can be a powerful practice for boosting productivity. In the traditional sense, team collaboration involves employees with different backgrounds and expertise working together to complete projects and solve problems. A more modern take on collaboration involves data sharing. 

Your law firm has multiple experts handling different types of information, from accountants and human resources to attorneys and paralegals. While each one handles a specific set of data, there may be some overlap between the information accessed. For example, a lawyer may have worked on a similar case that another attorney wants to review, but the case’s materials might be hard to find.

Often referred to as information siloes, these isolated pieces of data are common in many law firms. The time sunk into searching for the right resources can lead to major decreases in billable hours. The key to reducing this kind of labor-intensive data searching is creating a more cohesive space for shared information, data and documents.

With a cohesive ecosystem of technology and legal teams, everyone has the resources they need to work smoothly. This connected environment also makes your practice more prepared for client work, helping lawyers increase billable time.

5. Use a Call Answering Service

When your phone rings constantly, your lawyers rack up nonbillable hours. Your attorneys have no control over when calls come in, and the phone may be ringing all day long. Clients and leads need to remain in contact with your team, but every call pulls your employees away from another, more productive task. Call volumes increase as your firm grows, making it harder for your team to keep up while managing billable responsibilities.

Call answering services are the solution. With a trusted call answering partner, you can make sure every call is answered without expecting your lawyers to put other work on hold. At AnswerHero™, our team of professional call agents removes the need to pause client work in order to answer the phone. As part of our onboarding process, you can create a script for our agents to follow, so they field calls based on the actions you request.

With a call answering service, you can also identify the different types of calls you typically receive, such as:

• Current clients looking to speak to their lawyer
• Leads wanting to schedule a consultation
• Current clients wanting to set up a meeting
• Clients needing to make a payment
• Opposing counsel needing more information about a case

Based on the various types of calls, you can determine actions for our call agents to take. For example, they can schedule appointments for your attorneys when a client or opposing counsel requests it. They can also take detailed messages so that callers are not simply sent to voicemail. 

Call answering from AnswerHero™ is here to support your firm in a number of ways. Use our agents as a virtual receptionist, so clients are greeted by a familiar voice every time they call. Call answering can also be used for overflow calls when the phone lines get busy. Our services align with your unique needs to help your team become more productive.

Call Answering Solutions From AnswerHero™

Call answering for lawyers and law firms can make a significant difference to how productive attorneys are at work. AnswerHero™ offers a range of benefits with our call answering service.

24/7 Call Answering

Clients can have questions at all hours, but your law office may not be open when they arise. AnswerHero™ operates 24/7 to make sure every call is answered, even when your office is closed. Our services are valuable for after-hours calls, including weekends and holidays, when clients may need immediate assistance.

100% Bilingual Agents

Your legal services support all kinds of people, including Spanish speakers. Our answering services are fully bilingual to expand your communication capabilities and speak to potential clients who are more comfortable using Spanish. 

Allowing callers to interact with a bilingual agent is an excellent opportunity to establish trust with a potential client during that first call. Our agents can also stay on the line to provide translation support for your employees, if needed. This additional layer of support can help widen your client base and make your leads feel more comfortable working with you.

Agents for Your Industry

At AnswerHero™, we understand that law firms involve industry-specific terminology and privacy concerns. We connect your team with agents who are familiar with the legal industry, so they can handle every call correctly and professionally to protect your firm’s reputation and your clients’ information. 

Features Designed for Success

Our call agents can field all types of calls based on the instructions you provide. In addition to answering the phone, our agents can:

• Take messages: Instead of relying on an answering machine, allow our agents to take detailed messages and record all the important details for your team to reference later.
• Route calls: Some calls are urgent and require very specific expertise. Our agents will route calls to the right person on your team to ensure your callers get their questions answered. 
• Schedule meetings: Meetings are a big part of what you do at your law firm. By integrating your calendar with our web portal, our agents can view when you’re available and schedule meetings with clients over the phone. 
• Capture lead information: Getting to know your leads, including details like demographics, occupation and how they found your firm, can give you more information about how to market your business. Our agents will collect the information you’re searching for to better understand your potential clients. 

Flexible, Contract-Free Service

Your call volume fluctuates, and you need call answering services that shift with you. AnswerHero™ offers a range of contract-free pricing plans to support you as needed. Each plan comes with a set number of minutes for the month and a price per minute if you go over your plan. Our team can help you find the right plan for your call demand, and you can also change plans at any time.

User-Friendly Web Portal

A key to productivity is collaboration, and our web portal ensures you’re in the loop with everything our agents do. Access your call history, messages and new appointments to stay connected to your client base.

Answer Every Call, Every Time With AnswerHero™

Your law firm is looking for ways to boost productivity and increase your number of billable hours. Call answering for attorneys from AnswerHero™ can help. Get in touch with us today to learn more.