Getting workload visibility in two weeks.

“We need to hire” and “we've got too much capacity” are sometimes both said in the same firm in the same week. The reason is that nobody has a real view of who's loaded with what. Two weeks of patient work produces that view — and the conversations that come out of it are different ones.

Before you start, run your current numbers through the Capacity Planner: current matter load vs nominal capacity, plus how soon you'll hit the ceiling at current new-matter pace. That gives you the headline figure to test the new view against.

Week 1: build the view

Day 1 — agree the unit

Before you measure anything, agree what “a unit of work” means at your firm. Three options, in order of precision:

• Active matters — count of matters open and billable per fee-earner. Crude but honest. Best for firms where matter sizes are similar (most consumer-facing practices).
• Weighted matters — matters tagged with complexity (S / M / L) and totals weighted (1 / 2 / 4). Better for firms with a wider matter-size spread (commercial, litigation, family).
• Forward billable hours — estimated hours remaining on each open matter, totalled per fee-earner. Most accurate, also the most fragile (estimates drift).

For a first pass, weighted matters is usually the sweet spot. You can move to forward hours later once the rhythm is sticking.

Days 2–4 — populate

Open the matter tracking sheet (or your existing tracker). Add a column for complexity weight if it isn't there. Spend two half-days walking through it with the fee-earners, matter-by-matter, agreeing weights and sanity-checking which matters are actually still active.

You'll find — every time — that 10–20% of matters listed as “active” are actually dormant or closed. Those get cleared. The remaining list is your real workload picture.

Day 5 — the one-page view

Pivot the data. One row per fee-earner, columns for: count of active matters, weighted total, oldest matter, due-this-week count, capacity headroom (target − weighted total). Capacity target is whatever you agreed in Day 1 — for fee-earners running normal complexity, around 12–16 weighted units; senior people, similar but with higher complexity tolerance.

Print it on A3. Put it on a wall. The visibility itself is half the value.

Week 2: install the rhythm

The weekly capacity meeting

Same time every week — Monday morning is normal. 30 minutes max. Everyone who allocates work attends; the matter handlers are optional but useful. Three agenda items:

1. Who's over capacity?Look at the headroom column. Negative numbers mean someone's overloaded. Specific question: what's in the way of someone else taking some of it?
2. Who's under capacity?Positive headroom isn't a problem; it's opportunity. Specific question: what work could move to them this week?
3. What's coming? Pipeline of likely new matters this week (check the enquiry tracker). Where will it land?

Three rules that make this stick: don't turn it into a matter status review (separate meeting), don't skip it for anything other than a fee-earner's holiday, and the partners attend whether they're allocating or not (sets the tone).

The mid-week check

Wednesday lunchtime, the practice manager (or whoever owns the view) glances at the sheet. Anything dramatically changed since Monday? Dramatic = a matter handler called in sick, a new big matter has landed, a planned matter has been abandoned. If yes, a 5-minute message in Slack/Teams to whoever's affected. No formal meeting.

What to do with what you find

Pattern: same person always over capacity

Either they're genuinely the best (fix: distribute or hire), they're hoarding (fix: a delegation conversation — see cleaner handoffs between lawyer and support ), or your weighting is wrong (fix: re-weight).

Pattern: capacity exists but matters drift anyway

Probably a delegation problem more than a capacity problem. The work's there to do; the people are there to do it; but the routing is broken. The fix is in the handoffs and intake routing more than in hiring.

Pattern: load is structurally above target every week

You need to hire. The interesting question is “another fee-earner or another paralegal?” — see hire another lawyer or another paralegal? for the decision tree on that one.

Pattern: load is structurally below target

Either pricing is too high (you're losing the work) or intake is leaking (you're losing the enquiries). The Client Conversion Calculatorwill tell you which — if your conversion rates are healthy but volume is low, it's top-of-funnel; if conversion is low, it's in the intake process.

What good looks like at week 4

The capacity meeting takes 20 minutes, not 40. People stop saying “I'm flat out” in passing because they know it'll be checked against a number on Monday. Allocation decisions take 60 seconds because the headroom column tells you who has it. Hiring conversations are anchored in the structural pattern (“this person has been negative for 8 weeks straight”) rather than gut feel.

And — the version of this conversation that uses the new view is calmer. Numbers don't feel personal in the way “you look stressed” does. That's the durable bit.