Raising utilisation in 90 days.

“Just bill more” is the worst utilisation advice ever invented. People who could bill more usually already do; people who can't are stuck behind something other than effort. The 90-day playbook is about finding what they're stuck behind, in priority order.

Before you start, get the number. The Utilisation Calculatortakes five inputs and gives you the gap in hours, the revenue at stake, and a directional score. Run it; that's your baseline.

What “good” looks like

For small firms doing a mix of hourly and fixed-fee work, roughly:

• Associates / fee-earners: 65–75% utilisation. Below 60% has a structural cause. Above 80% sustained leads to quality problems and attrition.
• Senior associates / salaried partners: 55–70%. Some non-billable time is now their job (BD, supervision, training).
• Equity partners: 40–55%. They have other jobs.

These are bands, not targets. The interesting question is always why a specific person sits where they sit, not whether they're “at target.”

Days 1–14: measure honestly

Pull last quarter's utilisation by fee-earner. For each person sitting below the band, do two things:

1. Confirm time entry compliance.Half the “low utilisation” you'll find is people not recording time, not people not doing work. The fix is in killing the three biggest admin drains — start there if compliance is patchy. Don't debug utilisation against bad data.
2. One-week shadow log.Person logs what they're actually doing in 30-minute blocks for a week. You're looking for where the non-billable hours are actually going. Rarely is it laziness; usually it's admin, meetings, supervision, or matters where the work is genuinely scarce.

After this fortnight you'll know which buckets are real: admin drag, meeting overload, low matter volume, slow ramp-up on a new starter, capacity hidden by mis-allocation, or genuine personal-performance gap. The fix is different for each.

Days 15–45: fix the top two leaks

Don't try to fix all six. Pick the two biggest pools and attack those. The most common combinations across small firms we've looked at:

Combination A — admin and email triage

~30% of fee-earner non-billable time. The fix: pull file admin out of fee-earner hands (paralegal or office manager owns it), triage the shared inbox once at 8.30am every working day, and hold-the-line on same-day time entry. Detail in killing the three biggest admin drains .

Combination B — internal meetings

Small firms have surprisingly meeting-heavy weeks. Three practical moves:

• Cap recurring internal meetings at 30 minutes. Default to 30 — if you need 60, justify why.
• One meeting-free morning a week, firm-wide. Tuesday is good. Calendar block, no exceptions.
• Kill the standing 9.30am all-team meeting. Most firms have one. Most don't need it. A weekly 15-minute Monday morning with the matter tracker on screen replaces it.

Combination C — uneven matter allocation

One person has too much, another has too little, the partner keeps grabbing the meaty work. Fix is the matter-allocation meeting, weekly, with the matter tracker on screen — see getting workload visibility in two weeks . Run the Capacity Planneragainst your active matter count and pipeline; if planned hires don't close the gap, the issue is allocation, not staffing.

Days 46–75: protect billable time

Once the leaks are plugged, the focus shifts to keeping it that way. Three durable habits:

• Weekly utilisation visibility.Pull the numbers, share them with the team. Public is fine — humiliating isn't. The point is for everyone to see where they sit relative to the bands so they can self-correct.
• Monthly “why” conversation per person. Not a performance review. A 15-minute “what's in the way of more billable time?” with the matter handler and a partner. The first time this conversation happens, you'll be amazed how much capacity is hidden by stuff that's nobody's job to fix.
• Block calendar time for “real work.” Most fee-earners need 2–3 hour blocks of uninterrupted time to draft anything serious. If their calendar is sliced into 30-minute chunks, they'll never bill 6 hours in a day. Block it; protect it; stop scheduling over it.

Days 76–90: convert the lift to revenue

Utilisation is up; what isn't up is fees, automatically. For that:

• Make sure the lift is actually getting recorded. Same-day time entry compliance check. The number gets eaten here first if anywhere.
• Make sure recorded time is getting billed. Pre-bill review hasn't silently absorbed it. How to reduce billing leakage covers this.
• Make sure billed value is getting collected. Aged debt review. Same article.

What good looks like at day 90

Team utilisation up 8–12 points across the people who were previously below the band. No-one is working more hours; they're just keeping more of the hours they were already working as billable. Time entry compliance over 95% on the tracker. The matter-allocation meeting takes 20 minutes a week and surfaces whatever the next bottleneck is.

Re-run the Utilisation Calculatorat day 90 and compare with the baseline you took on day 1. The revenue-at-stake number should have shrunk meaningfully — that's the lift, in cash terms.