By Sam Davidoff, CEO and Co-Founder, Align
The original article was published in ALM's Law Journal Newsletters, here.
Here’s a number that would stop most lawyers cold: three hours.
Accordingto Clio’s 2025 Legal Trends Report, which aggregates anonymized data from tensof thousands of legal professionals across the United States, the averagelawyer bills just 3.0 hours out of an eight-hour workday — a 38% utilizationrate. After write-offs, the hours actually invoiced drop further, to 2.6.
Before you object — and if you’re a partner or associate billing well north of that figure, you should — a few clarifications matter. The Clio data skews toward smaller and mid-sized practices and doesn’t fully capture Am Law 100 associates grinding toward 2,000-hour annual targets. An average, as always, conceals as much as it reveals.
Other surveys measure the gap differently. Bloomberg Law’s 2025 Attorney Workload Survey, which draws from a large-firm sample, found lawyers logging 48 hours per week with only 36 of those billable shows a utilization rate closer to 75% by that measure. If you work in Big Law, that may sound closer to reality.
The numbers also differ because the denominators do: Clio measures billable time against a standard eight-hour day; Bloomberg measures it against actual hours worked, including the overtime that’s already baked in.
But whether the number is 38% or 75% the same point holds true: a substantial share of every lawyer’s week is going somewhere other than billable client work.
If clients aren’t being billed for these hours, what happens to them? That’s not a hard question. The firm absorbs them. These are direct costs that hit the law firm’s bottom line. Which is why you’re still reading this article. Because as everyone knows the product of a law firm—at least in an economic sense—is hours, and hours you don’t bill for is product that never leaves the factory floor.
A fair question at this point: if those hours are being worked, why aren’t they billed? This story is also familiar, and it’s not getting better.
Billing guidelines have systematically removed administrative and coordination work from the billable column. Reorganizing a binder, reconciling document versions, re-distributing materials after a last-minute change: these tasks appear in timesheets, but experienced billing attorneys know not to include them. They are non-billable not because they go unrecorded, but because the market has already decided they don’t count. Some of this is reflected in write-offs and client rejections. But the larger part is that firms already know, before they submit an invoice, which categories of work clients won’t pay for, and so they don’t even bother trying to bill for it.
That boundary is moving, not holding. As clients gain access to AI tools that can perform routine tasks in seconds, they are beginning to ask a more pointed version of the same question: why didn’t your system just do this? The category of work clients are unwilling to pay for is expanding. What billing guidelines started, AI expectations will accelerate. Firms that haven’t addressed the coordination layer won’t just absorb the current cost, they’ll absorb a growing one.
But wait; there’s more. The economic picture is only part of the story. There’s another cost to these non-billable hours.
Litigation, in particular, runs on deadlines and proceedings. The non-billable hours don’t come out steadily at two per day, they concentrate in the 72 hours before a major deposition, a hearing, or a trial. That’s the window when the administrative tax is highest, the stakes are highest, and the cost of being depleted is most consequential. That window is worth examining in some detail, because it’s where the utilization problem stops being a statistic and becomes a quality-of-work problem.
Consider a mid-sized litigation team preparing for a significant deposition. There is a lead partner, a senior associate, a junior associate, and a paralegal. The binder for the deposition — exhibits, prior testimony, background documents, examination outline — was assembled earlier in the week. Since then, three things have changed: a document was added to the exhibit list, the examination outline was revised, and the partner wants the tabs reorganized to match a new sequencing decision.
None of these are unusual. All of them require someone to rebuild or redistribute materials. Depending on how the team works, that means the paralegal reprints and re-tabs, the associate circulates a new PDF set, everyone confirms they have the right version, and someone — usually the person with the least time to spare — ends up reconciling discrepancies at 11 p.m. the night before. It’s not interesting work; it’s work no one really has time for; and it ends up being done by the most tired and most taxed workers.
That’s the second cost of these non-billable, administrative hours. They cluster around productive work and diminish the quality of those workers and their work product. The paralegal forced to update the binder at 8 p.m. on his own is doing his best work; the associate checking it over at midnight isn’t doing her best analysis; and the partner who gets it the next morning doesn’t have sufficient time to review it properly before court starts.
That's on top of the more easily quantifiable cost of the lost billable hours, which themselves are substantial. BigHand’s 2025 Legal Workflow Report estimated that inefficient administrative workflows cost firms up to $192,000 per partner annually in lost billable time. Deposition and trial preparation is among the most concentrated sources of that friction. The specific number may vary; the pattern is consistent across firm sizes and practice models.
What makes this inefficiency particularly difficult to address is that it’s distributed. No single person loses a full day. Instead, four people each lose fragments — an hour here, 45 minutes there — spread across a 72-hour window. That diffusion makes it hard to isolate on the fly. Sure you can look back at the end of the month at the hours you didn’t bill, but no one is going to tell associates or paralegals during crunch time that they shouldn’t work hour 12 or13. Firms see these numbers in the aggregate utilization figures they review quarterly, but what to do about is a much harder question.
The trends aren’t promising. According to BigHand’s 2025 data, 87% of firms still delegate work manually, and 31% report that lawyers are doing more administrative work than they were a year ago. That’s not because firms haven’t invested in technology. Thomson Reuters’ 2026 Peer Monitor Report found that average firm technology spending rose 9.7% in 2025 — the fastest growth rate on record.
The investment is real. What’s often missing is investment targeted at the coordination layer: the handoffs, the version control, the real-time synchronization across a trial team that determines whether the right materials are in the right hands at the right time. That layer doesn’t generate headlines at legal tech conferences. It generates billable hours when it works, and it bleeds them when it doesn’t.
None of this is visible in the industry’s headline numbers. Thomson Reuters found that the average firm posted 13% profit growth in 2025. Am Law 100 profits per equity partner have grown 53.7% since 2019. By any macro measure, large law is doing well.
And yet: a 2025 survey by ALM Intelligence and Law.com Compass found that 65.5% of lawyers say billable-hour pressure is negatively affecting their mental health, up nearly four points from the prior year. Record profits, record depletion. Both things are true simultaneously, and the preparation window is part of the reason why.
Firms that are generating strong profits while their litigators spend the night before a major proceeding managing binder logistics are leaving something on the table that the P&L doesn’t capture: the quality of the work, and the durability of the people doing it.
Clio’s 2025 cohort analysis found that growing firms — those that increased revenues by more than 20% over four years — adopt technology at roughly twice the rate of shrinking firms and use time-saving tools two to three times more frequently. But the headline obscures the more important finding: the firms pulling ahead aren’t simply spending more on technology, and they’re not solving the problem by cutting costs or headcount either.
What they’re doing is harder. They’re starting with the workflow — mapping where hours are actually going, identifying the specific handoffs and coordination tasks that bleed billable time, and then finding tools designed to address those failures. That sequencing matters. A firm that buys a brief-drafting tool because it heard about it at a conference has made a technology decision. A firm that asked first where its litigators are losing hours they can’t bill, then built or bought to address that answer, has made a practice management decision. The outcomes tend to be different.
The utilization number is a useful provocation, not a prescription. Knowing that your lawyers bill 38%— or 75%— of their hours doesn’t tell you what to do. It tells you something is wrong. The harder work is figuring out where and when the hours are going, and what would have to change for fewer of them to disappear. For most litigators, the answer to “when” is consistent: the 72hours before it matters most, when a trial team is reconciling materials, redistributing updated documents, and confirming versions at the expense of the preparation that only they can do.
A firm that has solved that layer — so that every member of a trial team has the current version of every document, correctly organized, accessible on whatever device they’re carrying, without anyone spending three hours the night before making it happen — isn’t just more efficient. It’s producing better work at the moments that clients actually experience.
Align is the only digital case binder platform built exclusively for litigators. Founded by a former top-tier litigator, Align delivers a familiar, secure, and reliable way to prepare, organize, and present your cases.
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