How to find out where your team’s time is actually going (2 of 8)

Most legal transformation efforts fail at the starting line.

Not because the solutions are wrong, but because no one properly defined the problem first.

In the introduction to this series, I argued that your legal department has an engineering problem, not a talent problem. That the team is not falling behind because people are not working hard enough, but because it was never designed for the volume, speed, and complexity it is now being asked to handle.

Before you can redesign anything, you need to know where the hours are actually going.

Not where you think they are going.

Not where they should be going.

Where they are going right now, in practice, across your team.

That is what this article is about. The diagnostic that comes before everything else.

Why the Diagnostic Comes First

Every legal transformation I have been part of (and I have been part of many) follows the same pattern when it fails: someone identified a solution before they had properly defined the problem.

• The CLM system implemented before anyone properly mapped the contracting workflow or the business needs.
• The outside counsel panel restructured before anyone understood what the firms were actually being asked to do, or what their capabilities were.
• The intake portal built before anyone knew what volume of requests it needed to handle, or what types.

The result is always the same: tools that are underused, processes that are bypassed, and a team that is still just as stretched as before, now with the added weight of a change initiative that did not deliver.

Bottom line: you are even further behind that you were when you started.

The diagnostic is not exciting. It does not make for a compelling slide. It is a hard sell because it doesn’t feel like it adds value right away. But it is the only honest starting point.

You cannot engineer what you have not mapped. And you cannot map what you have not measured.

What You Are Actually Looking For

The goal of the diagnostic is not to produce a perfect dataset. It is to get a clear enough picture of reality to make good, informed decisions about where to intervene first.

There are 4 questions you are trying to answer.

1. Where is the time going?

This means identifying the actual categories of work your team handles: contracts, employment matters, regulatory queries, M&A support, litigation management, business advisory, compliance, internal projects, IP, and so on.

But it also means looking one level deeper.

Within contracting, for instance: how much time is drafting versus review versus negotiation versus chasing signatures versus filing? Those are very different activities, with very different levers for efficiency.

2. Who is it going to?

Is the work distributed sensibly across the team? Or are certain people chronically overloaded while others have capacity? Is work landing with lawyers when it could be handled by a paralegal, a legal operations professional, or an automated tool?

This is not a performance question. It is a design question.

If your most senior lawyers are spending 40% of their time on administrative tasks, that is not their fault. It is a structural problem.

3. Where is it coming from?

Which business units, which geographies, which functions are generating the most demand? Is that demand proportional to the business activity they represent, or are certain teams consuming disproportionate legal resource because of how they work, not because of inherent complexity?

Understanding the demand profile is essential before you design any intake or triage system.

4. What is it actually costing?

Not just in external spend, but in internal time.

A matter that generates no outside counsel invoice but requires three senior lawyers for two weeks is not a low-cost matter. It is just a cost that does not appear on the budget line where leadership is looking.

This is the invisible cost that most legal departments are carrying silently, and it is usually far larger than anyone suspects.

How to Run the Diagnostic in Practice

You do not need a sophisticated tool to do this. You need 2 things:

• a simple framework, and
• the discipline to apply it honestly.

Step 1: The Time Audit – Two Weeks of Data

Ask every member of your team to track their time for two weeks. Not in a compliance spirit, but in a diagnostic spirit.

The goal is not to create a performance record. It is to generate a shared map of reality.

Use a simple spreadsheet. Five columns are enough:

• Date
• Category of work (use a predefined list of 8–10 categories maximum)
• Internal client or business unit
• Time spent (half-day increments are sufficient)
• Nature of the activity: strategic / advisory / drafting / review / admin / chasing

The last column is the most important one. It is where the insight lives.

In my experience, legal teams are consistently surprised by how much of their time falls into the ‘chasing’ and ‘admin’ categories. Not because they are inefficient, but because the systems around them force them into those activities.

Step 2: The Intake Analysis – Six Months of Data

Pull your request data for the last six months. If you do not have a formal intake system, this means going through emails, Teams messages, and meeting notes. It is imperfect but do it anyway.

You are looking for patterns:

• the types of requests that come in most frequently,
• the ones that generate the most back-and-forth, and
• the ones that could in principle have been handled without a lawyer if the right information had been available.

That last category is your self-service opportunity. We will come back to it in Article 3.

Step 3: The Honest Conversation

Once you have the data, sit with your team and name what you see. Not to assign blame, but to build a shared understanding of what is actually happening versus what you assumed was happening.

In every diagnostic I have run, there are at least two surprises: one thing consuming far more time than leadership realized, and one capability the team has that is being chronically underused.

Both are important. The first tells you where to intervene. The second tells you what resource you have to work with.

What the Data Will Tell You

Once you have two weeks of tracking and six months of intake data, you will be able to see clearly:

• The top 3 time consumers in your department
• The work that is being done by the wrong people
• The requests that are recurring and could be systematized
• The business units that are generating friction rather than value
• The activities that are administrative overhead, not legal work

This is not a comfortable list. But it is an honest one. And honesty is the only starting point that leads to durable change.

The legal departments that transform successfully are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones with the clearest picture of their own reality.

A Note on Resistance

Some people on your team will push back on the time-tracking exercise. They will say it feels like surveillance. They will say they are too busy. They will say they already know where the time goes.

Address this directly.

The purpose of the exercise is not to evaluate individuals. It is to design a better system, one that makes everyone’s work more sustainable. Frame it this way: “We are doing this because I want to give you back time, not take more of it. But I need the data to know where to start.”

What This Unlocks

Once you have done your diagnostic, you will almost certainly find that a significant proportion of your team’s time is consumed by a particular category of work: answering the same questions from the business, over and over again.

The same employment query.

The same question about contract thresholds.

The same data protection clarification.

Different requester, same answer, every single time.

That is not legal work. And every time a lawyer answers it, two things happen: time disappears, and the business learns to call again next time.

The cycle does not break by itself. But it does break. Article 3 shows you how.