Lawyers Waste $80,000 a Year Reading E-mail

Did you ever wonder what the real cost is for a lawyer to "clear out" their email boxes apart from getting to client matters?  According to the industrious Edward Poll, "your practical guide to profit" in Venice, CA, the specific number is $80,000 down the drain.

"Based on personal experience, it is easy to estimate that most lawyers take about one or two hours each working day to 'clear out' their e-mail boxes," Ed says.  If we assume 200 workdays per year (there are more), and two hours per day and $200 hour billable value for an attorney (most are charging more today), the calculation is $80K of wasted billable time annually. 

"It goes without saying that this is hugely expensive," he writes in a new LawBiz Management Special Report.  The 60-page booklet focuses on "Business Competency for Lawyers."  Contact Ed at either 800.837.5880 or edpolll@lawbiz.com about getting a copy.  Also check out his press release.

"Given the rapidity of response that e-mails encourage, it's likely that very few lawyers are truly capturing the time that they're spending on legitimate client communications, like phone conversations and e-mail communications," Ed writes. "Yet lawyers are going so fast doing so many things, that they don't actually write down their time notation as they're working on e-mails."

"Client e-mail gets so enmeshed in what has been called 'administrivia' that their importance is not adequately accounted for.  The result is lost profitability."

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Ed is a nationally recognized coach, law firm management consultant, lawyer and author -- and he's spot-on about the loss of profit.  But lawyers must be very careful how they inovice clients for emails and voicemails. I once used a lawyer in Chicago who handled annual corporate filings for me.  I left the lawyer a short voicemail saying that I wanted to make a change in my corporate structure.  A month later I got a separate bill from the lawyer for $102.15 for listening to my little voicemail and delegating the work to a paralegal. 

So I mailed the bill back with a letter saying, "With all due respect I think the charge is excessive and I courteously request that you write the charge off.  In my practice, I listen to voicemail and read emails at no charge; the time is built into the overhead of my practice."

The lawyer wrote me back that billing for voicemails was a policy of the firm, and if I didn't like it, I should find a different firm.  So I did.  I stopped using that firm, and 5 years of goodwill from the old firm went down the drain.

Comments

[Jack Yan]

Well done, Larry! Reading correspondence should be part of overheads—whether that correspondence is electronic or physical.

[Max]

Gosh, just think how much time they might waste reading blogs (if they should ever discover what blogs are). As an ex-attorney, I can tell that joke. Seriously, though, an excellent post. I came across your blog while searching for "service excellence" blogs. I'm interested in professional service, how to deliver it well, and how to use technology to create killer apps for the delivery of vertical professional service offerings. Client lock-in and all that. For example, why don't attorneys create solid customer portals to store work product as well as billing documents? If they had killer functionality, there clients would be less likely to use a different law firm on the next deal. The answer: Because they are attorneys and don't think that way. But their marketing folks could.

There seems to be a dearth of blogs in this theme. Most bloggers don't get "service".

Keep up the great work.

By the way, junk faxes are illegal. Why is there no effective enforcement of that law?

[moke]

Silly really. My office gets nearly 300 letters of Faxes a day. Do you think if there was no email you wouldn't spend that time on something else?