You sell hours. We remove some. That is a decision, not a benefit.

For an in-house team every saved hour is free. For a firm on hourly billing the same hour is revenue that stops arriving, and pretending otherwise in a sales conversation is how these deployments end in a difficult second year.

48: fee earners
12,528 h: capacity freed a year — 18%
13,079,232: revenue at risk on the 72% billed hourly
18,165,600: the same hours, if resold

18% rather than the 40% our review model produces, because that figure is for a review engagement and review is a fraction of what a firm does. Applying an engagement-level saving to a whole firm's billable base is the usual way this gets oversold.

Four things a firm can do with the hours

Three are deliberate and one is what happens if nobody chooses. The fourth is the most common.

01

Refill the capacity

Take on more matters with the same people. The only option where the efficiency turns into revenue rather than into a shorter bill.
02

Move work to fixed fee

Efficiency becomes margin instead of a discount. Firms that do this first are the ones for whom the arithmetic works from day one.
03

Bill the same and do it better

Defensible, and it shows up as quality rather than as a number. Partners are more comfortable with this than the finance director will be.
04

Do nothing and let it leak

The default. Hours quietly fall, realisation looks fine, and nobody connects the two for three quarters.

What a firm turns on first

In roughly this order, and the first two pay for the rest.

Drafting from your own bank: The distribution of what the firm has actually agreed, rather than a template somebody wrote in 2019.
Review against a playbook: Turns a partner's mark-up into a rule the whole firm applies, including the associates who have not sat with them.
Time captured as it happens: The one place the economics work regardless of fee model, because it recovers hours already worked.
Handover briefs: Associate attrition is the tax every firm pays. This is the part that reduces what leaves with them.