The Billable Hour Is an Uptime Metric

Most businesses lose productivity when their systems go down. Work gets delayed, people catch up later, and the cost is real but diffuse.

A firm that bills by the hour loses something more specific. It loses the hour. And unlike a manufacturer who can run the line longer tomorrow, you cannot bill Tuesday twice.

That makes the arithmetic on IT reliability unusually clean for law firms, and worth actually doing.

Do the arithmetic once

Take your attorneys and paralegals, whatever they bill at, and multiply by the number of them. That is roughly what an hour of firm-wide downtime costs in billable capacity you cannot recover.

For a small firm with a handful of fee earners, an hour of everyone being unable to work is typically several hundred dollars of capacity, sometimes more. A morning is a meaningful number. A day is a number that gets a partner’s attention.

Now compare that to what reliability costs. A second internet connection with automatic failover. Monitoring on the server that runs your case management. Backup that somebody actually tests. Those are monthly costs measured in tens or low hundreds of dollars.

Most firms are one avoided outage per year away from those things having paid for themselves. Most firms have more than one outage per year.

The costs that do not show up in that number

The arithmetic above is the floor, not the total. Three things sit underneath it.

The deadline that does not move. Court filing deadlines are indifferent to your server. Most outages are survivable. An outage the afternoon before a filing is a different category of event, and the cost is not measured in billable hours.

Work that never gets captured. When the billing system is down, time still gets worked. It gets written on a legal pad, or remembered, and some of it never makes it back into the system. That is revenue that was earned and never invoiced, and it does not appear in any outage report.

The client’s experience of it. A client who cannot reach you, or who is told that the firm cannot access their file today, forms an impression. It is rarely fatal and it is never helpful.

Where the hours actually go

In our experience the recurring losses in a law firm are not dramatic. They are small and constant:

• Remote access that takes several attempts each morning
• A billing system that is slow at month end when everyone is in it
• Practice management software that has to be restarted a few times a week
• One person whose machine has a problem everybody else’s does not
• Password resets and lockouts, particularly after phone changes

None of those generate an emergency. All of them are billable minutes, every day, for every person affected. Added across a year they usually exceed the cost of the outage everyone remembers.

What to ask for

You do not need to become technical to hold your IT provider to this. Ask for three things.

A number for last year. How many hours were fee earners unable to work due to a technology problem? If nobody can answer, that is the first thing to fix, because you cannot manage what nobody measures.

Monitoring that finds problems before people do. The measure of a good provider is not how fast they answer the phone. It is how often you never had to call.

A single-point-of-failure list. What could stop the whole firm working? Usually it is a short list: the internet connection, the server, the practice management system. Each one has a known, affordable mitigation.

The reframe

Firms tend to treat IT as an expense to be minimized. That is reasonable for anything that does not affect billing.

But the parts that determine whether people can bill are not overhead. They are the equipment that produces the product. A firm would not run a single copy of an irreplaceable file, and it should not run a single internet connection or an unmonitored billing server for the same reason.

The question is not what reliability costs. It is what an hour of the whole firm not working costs, and how many of those you are willing to have.

Related reading

• IT services for law firms
• When your billing system goes down, you stop billing
• Your whole company is one circuit away from stopping