Professional services
Law Practice Capacity Calculator
How many matters a small practice can carry at once without service quality falling over.
Result
Business arithmetic for running a practice, not legal advice. Fee agreements, contingency limits, trust accounting and advertising are all governed by the rules of professional conduct where you practise, and several are strict. Check the applicable rules before any of this affects a client agreement or a marketing decision. Concurrent load matters more than annual throughput for service quality, because it is what determines whether anything gets dropped. Matters that run longer than expected are the normal case rather than the exception, which is why the reserve is not optional.
Get a Free Business AuditQuestions
About this calculator
Why does matter duration change the answer?
Because a matter open for a year occupies a slot for a year even if it only consumes twenty hours. Concurrent load is driven by duration, not by hours.
What happens above capacity?
Response times slip first, then deadlines get tight, then something is missed. Overloading is a professional risk before it is a commercial one.
The formula
annual matters = usable billable hours / hours per matter; concurrent = annual matters x duration / 12
Put this calculator on your site
Free to embed. Paste this where you want it to appear. It stays up to date automatically because it loads from BDEVY.
Please keep the attribution line. It is the only thing we ask in return.
Estimating is the easy part
The jobs you never hear about cost more than the ones you mis-measure. BDEVY builds the marketing, systems and automation that bring them in.