Does LeanLaw report on billable hours, productivity, and write-downs by attorney?

A productivity report has to keep two different questions apart: how many hours a timekeeper logged against expectation, which is utilization, and how much of that logged time actually survived to a paid invoice, which is realization. A report that shows only hours worked answers neither one.

Utilization and realization aren’t the same number

Utilization tells you whether a timekeeper is generating billable hours at the pace your firm expects. Realization tells you whether those hours held their value once a bill goes out — write-downs, discounts, and time that never gets invoiced all eat into it before a dollar is collected. A firm can have strong utilization and weak realization at the same time: everyone’s logging hours, but a lot of that value disappears between the timesheet and the invoice. Since these are two of the four numbers that describe a firm’s revenue cycle, mixing them into one “productivity” figure hides exactly the gap a manager needs to see.

Write-downs sit at the exact seam between the two numbers, which is why they deserve their own line rather than getting folded into either one. A write-down happens after a timekeeper has already logged the hour — so it counts fully toward utilization — but before that hour reaches a client’s invoice, so it never counts toward realization at all. A firm that only looks at utilization never sees the write-down happen; a firm that only looks at realization sees the dollar gap but not which timekeeper’s time created it or why. Visibility into write-downs by timekeeper is what turns “our realization dipped this quarter” into a specific, addressable pattern instead of a firm-wide mystery.

A test to run on your current system

Pick one timekeeper and one closed month. Pull three totals for that period: hours entered, hours that actually made it onto an invoice, and dollars from that invoice that were collected. If your current system can produce all three cleanly, broken out by that one timekeeper, you already have what a productivity report needs to show. If getting there means exporting time entries to a spreadsheet and matching them against invoices by hand, that manual step is the actual gap, not a missing feature.

Run the same test a second way: ask whether non-billable time shows up as its own category in that timekeeper’s numbers, or whether it disappears into the same bucket as time that was billable but got written down. Those are different problems with different fixes — one is a staffing or intake question, the other is a billing-review question — and a report that can’t tell them apart will point a manager at the wrong conversation. A WIP, realization, and velocity view is the kind of report built to hold all three of these threads side by side rather than forcing a choice between them.

A hypothetical example

Say a hypothetical associate logs 160 hours in a month against a 150-hour target. On a utilization-only view, that looks like a strong month. But if a partner writes down a chunk of that time during pre-bill review and only 120 hours make it onto invoices, realization tells a different story than utilization did. Neither number is wrong; they’re measuring different points in the same work-in-progress-to-billed-to-collected path, and a report that shows only one of them will tell a manager the wrong thing about that associate’s month.

A report that separates all three threads is only half the answer, though. The other half is cadence: pulling this once a year at review time tells you what already happened and little else, while pulling it monthly lets a manager catch a slipping realization number while there’s still a chance to change how bills are reviewed for that timekeeper before the next cycle closes.

What this depends on

• How your timekeepers log time — as it happens or reconstructed at month’s end
• Whether non-billable time is categorized separately or lumped in with write-downs
• How your firm sets a utilization target per role, since that number is firm policy, not a universal standard
• Whether compensation or review decisions are tied to these numbers, which changes what people have an incentive to log

Once utilization and realization are separated, the useful question looks past what happened last month to which one is actually moving for a given timekeeper, and whether that points to a workload problem or a billing-and-collection one — the same reconciliation question a compensation report has to answer at the attorney level.

That distinction matters more for an hourly practice than almost anywhere else in a firm’s numbers, because utilization and realization are two of the four figures that describe the health of the whole revenue cycle — the other two being collection rate and billing velocity. An hourly firm that leaks revenue tends to leak through realization specifically, which is exactly why folding it back into a single “productivity” number defeats the point of tracking it separately in the first place.

Related questions

What about a report on billable hours for a paralegal instead of an attorney? The same utilization-and-realization split applies regardless of role; what matters is whether the report isolates the numbers per timekeeper rather than blending them into a firm-wide total.

Is there a way for managers to see everybody’s billed time across the firm? Whatever the view, the useful test is whether it rolls up by timekeeper and by a consistent period, so one person’s month is actually comparable to another’s.

Do you track an expected amount of billable hours for an associate? An expected-hours target is a number your firm sets based on its own staffing and rate model; a productivity report earns its keep once it can hold that target next to actual hours, whatever your firm has chosen it to be.