The Billable Leak: How One Broken Process Was Stealing a Full Day of Revenue Every Week
When I joined a law office as an Executive Assistant (EA), everything looked normal. People were busy, phones were ringing, and the team was always helping each other out. As I got into the work, I noticed 3 things that didn't look like a heavy workload—they looked like a broken system:
Trapped Capacity: Since attorneys sent requests to their assigned assistant, the system created trapped capacity. While 1 assistant was drowning in a backlog, the person at the next desk sat idle.
The 2-Hour Delay: Attorneys were sometimes waiting 1 or 2 hours for "quick" documents because their assigned EA was stuck in a meeting or buried in another task.
Stolen Time: This was the biggest red flag. 2 late-shift admins, who had their own separate jobs, were spending a majority of their time finishing EA tasks that hadn't been completed by 6:00 PM.
The EA manager thought we needed more people but I saw we were just caught in a loop of our own making.
If your job is to manage how work flows and how teams perform, you hear "we’re slammed" every day. Before you hire more headcount, you need to see if your system is manufacturing its own chaos. This is how I diagnosed the problem using plain math that any CFO would respect.
The Reality: A Snapshot of Flow Friction
I stopped looking at how "busy" people felt and started looking at how the work actually moved. This is what the data showed:
The Demand: about 50 attorneys generated ~25–30 requests per day.
The Mix: 30–35% of those requests were formatting or reformatting legal documents.
The Delay: When an EA was hit with a surge, the 1 to 2-hour wait time prevented attorneys from sending out time-sensitive filings.
Low First-Pass Yield: Roughly 60% of documents were sent back by attorneys for formatting fixes.
Capacity Theft: This inefficiency stole capacity from the 2 late-shift admins, creating Cross-System Friction by delaying their actual responsibilities to clean up the unfinished work.
The "Triple-Touch" Math: Quantifying Billable Leakage
In a law firm, a formatting mistake doesn't just "take a few minutes" to fix. Since these documents were complex, a single error could sink an entire afternoon. To get the Executive Director to see the urgency, I broke down the 3 times the firm paid for the same document:
The First Time (Overhead): An EA spent a minimum of 1 hour (and sometimes up to 5 hours) struggling to format the document correctly, only to send it off with errors. Formatting was a HUGE issue for the team.
The Second Time (Revenue Loss): The Attorney had to stop billable work for 15–30 minutes to find the formatting errors, mark them up, and send them back. This was pure revenue leakage.
The Third Time (Overhead): The EA had to stop their current task, re-open the old file, and spend another 1 to 2 hours (at minimum) attempting to fix the headers and styles.
The Weekly Cost of 60% Rework:
Daily Formatting Requests: ~10 (35% of daily volume)
Reworked Requests: 6 (60% mistake rate)
Daily Billable Leakage: 6 rejections x 20 minutes of Attorney time = 2 hours of billable time lost per day
Daily EA Capacity Loss: 6 requests x 2+ hours of rework = 12+ hours of assistant time wasted daily
Weekly Total: 10 hours of billable time vanished and 60 hours of EA capacity consumed by mistakes.
This wasn’t an "assistant workload" issue. This was Cost-to-Serve Inflation. We were paying for 210 touches to complete 150 tasks, while simultaneously leaking high-value billable revenue through preventable rework.
The Bottom Line: Across 50 attorneys, the firm was losing over a full day of billable revenue every week. More importantly, we were losing the equivalent of 1.5 full-time EAs just to handle the workload created by our own errors. We weren't slammed by attorneys; we were being buried by the friction of a broken process.
Why the System Was Breaking
That financial waste was the result of 4 structural patterns I saw:
Rigid Ownership: Each EA had at least 7 attorneys. If 3 of them sent requests at once, those tasks sat still even if other EAs were free. Capacity was trapped in individual silos.
Skill Gaps: Formatting was a specialized technical ability that a lot EAs just didn’t know how to execute. Quality was a lottery because it depended entirely on the individual proficiency of the person assigned.
Invisible Queues: "Quick help" happened through favors in side-chats. You can’t manage what you can’t see.
Capacity Theft: When the EA process failed, it leaked into the late-shift admins' time. The firm was paying twice for the same work by depleting one team’s capacity to cover for the failures of another.
The Intervention: Design Flow, Not Heroics
I suggested a 3-step flow redesign to my manager. We didn't need more people; we needed to treat these complex documents like high-stakes technical engineering, not just "admin work."
1. Pooled Intake + Technical Routing
Since formatting a single document could take several hours, an assistant’s entire day could be consumed by one task. Under the old model, if that EA was stuck in a 5-hour formatting job, any new requests from their assigned attorneys simply sat in a backlog.
The Rule: If an EA was already working on a document or couldn't start a new request immediately, that new request was forwarded to a central pool.
The Result: The attorney’s next request didn't have to wait because it went to the pool and was handled by whoever was free. This turned a localized bottleneck into a visible, manageable queue.
2. Standardizing "First-Pass" Document Engineering
Because document formatting was so technically demanding, "trying harder" wasn't a solution. We needed to bridge the skill gap with actual tools.
The Action: I created a "Definition of Done" (DoD) checklist and a library of short, technical training videos focusing on the issues that caused the most rework.
The Result: We moved away from people guessing or using their own inconsistent shortcuts, toward a repeatable standard. By raising the skill level of the whole team, we fixed the "Triple-Touch" problem at the source.
3. The Technical Control Cadence
High-complexity work suffered from process drift if it isn't monitored.
The Action: We held a 60-minute technical review every Friday (our lightest work day).
The Result: We didn't just talk; we did a "post-mortem" on the week’s rejected documents. If a document took 4 hours and still failed, we updated the training videos and the checklist immediately to ensure it didn't happen again.
The Monday Morning Playbook
If you're responsible for recovering capacity in a high-complexity environment, steal this sequence:
Spot the "Wild Card" Tasks: Find the specific jobs where one person takes an hour and another takes 5. This time gap is a clear signal that your process is inconsistent and is quietly draining your profit.
Calculate the "Do-Over" Tax: Stop looking at just "busy-ness" and start measuring the cost of work that has to be fixed or sent back. This is "rework," and its a tax on your margin that you pay every time a process fails to deliver a correct result the first time.
Stop "Hiding" Work in Silos: When tasks are sent only to a specific person, you create "Trapped Capacity"—where one person is drowning while the person at the next desk is free. Move work into a visible, shared queue so the team can balance the load and keep things moving.
Define Exactly What "Finished" Looks Like: Don't just tell the team to "be better" or "work faster". Create a simple checklist for the tasks that cause 80% of your errors so your team doesn't have to guess what a successful outcome looks like.
Fix the System, Not the Person: When a mistake happens, don't look for someone to blame; look for the hole in the process that allowed the mistake to happen. Hold a weekly review to find the "root cause" of errors so you can fix the machine once instead of apologizing to customers forever.
The Bottom Line: When work is this complex, a well-designed system is the only thing that prevents heroics from becoming a requirement for survival. By making the work visible and the standards repeatable, you don't just reduce stress, you recover the billable capacity the firm is currently throwing away.