Utilisation tracker.
Week by week, fee-earner by fee-earner, with target vs actual. The view that turns 'I think we're flat out' into 'Sarah's at 80%, Liam's been at 67% for a month' — and gives you a real number for the next-hire conversation.
A working utilisation tracker with realistic sample rows for a 5-person team. Captures billable, non-billable, sick/leave, calculates utilisation % and gap to target, and aggregates WIP added per week.
Practice managers and partners who want to know where billable time is actually going. Pairs with the workload visibility playbook and the Capacity Planner.
Loud-voiced fee-earners getting capacity decisions. Hires made on gut feel rather than data. The 'we need to hire' / 'we have spare capacity' debate that loops every quarter without anyone bringing numbers.
| Week | Fee earner | Role | Target | Billable | Non-billable | Util % | vs target |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 07 Apr | SM | Senior | 32 | 28.5 | 9.0 | 76.0% | -2.6 |
| 07 Apr | RK | Senior | 32 | 30.0 | 7.5 | 80.0% | +1.4 |
| 07 Apr | AP | Associate | 33 | 29.5 | 9.5 | 75.6% | -3.0 |
| 07 Apr | LD | Associate | 33 | 24.0 | 12.0 | 66.7% | -12.3 |
| 07 Apr | JM | Paralegal | 32 | 26.5 | 12.0 | 68.8% | -9.0 |
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Setup
- Decide the target hours per role per week. Typical at small firms: senior solicitor 30–33, associate 32–35, paralegal 30–34. Annual leave and CPD baked in.
- Pull billable and non-billable hours from your time-recording system at end of week. Manual at first; automated later if your PM tool supports it.
- Add a column for blended rate (or per-FE rate if you have them). The WIP-added column compounds with the matter tracking sheet for capacity decisions.
Use the 4-week rolling average, not single weeks
Single weeks are noisy — one matter completing in a week inflates someone's utilisation; one annual-leave week tanks it. The 4-week rolling view is where signal lives.
- Below target 3+ weeks running for the same person: investigate. Often a load-balancing issue, sometimes a sign of disengagement, occasionally just a quiet matter mix.
- Above target 3+ weeks running:capacity check — is this person becoming the firm's bottleneck? See workload visibility playbook for the wider conversation.
Feed it into hiring decisions
Eight weeks of data is enough to feed a real next-hire conversation (see making the next-hire decision with evidence ). Pattern matters: chronic underutilisation in one role — check workflow upstream; chronic overutilisation across roles — capacity gap, hire.
Don't make it punitive
The point isn't to make people look bad in the column. Utilisation is a partly-controllable team-level metric — allocation, intake mix, supervisor availability all affect it. Use it to surface conversations, not to grade individuals.
Notes from other operators.
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