Fee Earners

The term ‘Fee Earner’ is becoming a misnomer. Firms are increasingly expecting lawyers to do everything, their point being that they have paid for and installed expensive software to enable this.

They have got a point, but they are wrong. It is a false economy to require (so-called) fee earners to log their own time, do their own bills, follow up unpaid bills, send their own emails and a whole plethora of other non-chargeable procedures just because the case management system enables them to do this.

Even if they are tech-savvy, all of these non-chargeable operations represent time spent not fee earning, for example, if the fee earner is expected to log 50 chargeable units a day, and it takes him / her one minute to log each unit, that is almost an hour of non-chargeable time wasted.

It is not just the time though, it is the break in concentration that results from switching from fee earning that also needs to be considered. On a long-term basis, it is mentally draining and I am sure that it is one of the reasons why many firms have a high turnover of fee-earning staff.

If I were running a High Street practice I would be looking to simplify, and where possible re-assign as many of these nonchargeable procedures as I could, to enable a fee earner to do what he/she is employed to do.

Being a slave to software is not the best way forward.

Nomad