The Business of Law in Numbers: What Law Firm Operations Leaders Told Us in 2026
This year, COOs, CFOs, and IT leaders at law firms told us what the work around the practice really takes. These are their numbers. None of them are about practicing law.
Ask a law firm operations leader where the time goes and they rarely say “inefficiency.” They give you a number. Over more than a hundred calls in 2026, we wrote those numbers down. They came from firms of every size, from a few dozen people to the Am Law 100, and from the people who run the firm rather than practice in it.
A note on how to read them. Each figure is what one person told us about their own firm. We have not named the firms or the people, and your firm will differ. But if one of these sounds familiar, you are in good company: these are the ordinary costs of running a law firm on systems that do not talk to each other.
Time entry: the job firms raise first
Time entry came up on more of our calls than any other job. Partners rebuild their week from timers, handwritten notes, and a scroll back through Outlook and the calendar. Secretaries key in time from attorneys' spreadsheets and voice memos. And when time is posted late, work in progress and receivables wait with it. The short entries suffer most: the two-minute email that never gets billed. More on the mechanics in contemporaneous versus reconstructed time entry and on time entry automation.
Intake and conflicts: the same details, typed again
The pattern here is retyping. A new-matter memo gets transcribed into the practice management system, then typed again by the conflicts team, then again into docketing. One COO described intake as a thousand-step process. Conflict searches run on every name variation and come back as reports someone has to read line by line, often while an attorney waits to open the matter. See new matter intake and conflict checks.
Email and documents: filing is a job of its own
Every email that matters to a matter has to land in the right place in the document management system, and at many firms that is a person dragging and dropping. Partners back from court face hundreds of messages with deadlines buried inside. On the IP side, a single filing sets off a chain of forms and follow-ups. See inbox to matter file and DMS filing and profiling.
Billing and staffing: where the time turns into money
Billing is where all of the above shows up as revenue. Prebills that miss a client's guidelines get cut, and a challenged bill is rarely recovered in full. Payments arrive without invoice numbers and someone has to work out where they belong. Meanwhile the people who know how it all works are retiring, and their replacements take months to hire. See prebill review.
What the numbers have in common
Read the list again and notice what is missing: drafting, research, review, argument. The practice of law is where most firms have spent their AI budget, and for good reason. These numbers live on the other side of the firm, in the business of law, where the work is repetitive, high-volume, and spread across six or seven systems. That is also why it is so expensive: no single task is large enough to fix on its own.
All twelve numbers are on one page:download the law firm numbers sheet (PDF).
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Frequently asked questions
Where do these numbers come from?
From conversations Caddi had in 2026 with operations, finance, and IT leaders at law firms, from small firms to the Am Law 100. Each figure is as the person reported it on the call. Firms and people are not named, and individual firms vary, so read them as what peers told us rather than an industry survey.
What is the business of law?
The work that runs the firm around the practice: time entry, intake and conflicts, docketing, email and document filing, prebill review, billing, and collections. It decides whether a matter gets opened, recorded, billed, and paid, and it is mostly done by hand between systems that do not talk to each other.
Which back-office job costs law firms the most time?
On our calls this year, time entry came up more than any other job, followed by email filing, intake, prebill review, and conflict checks. The cost is spread thin: minutes per attorney per day that add up across a firm.