Showing fee-earner load without turning reports into surveillance

A panel that sorts lawyers by open matter count will be resisted, and often rightly so. Matter complexity, client type, and support staffing differ wildly inside one firm.

We present load as ranges and practice-group averages first, with named detail available only to the people responsible for allocation. Leadership packs emphasise imbalance between groups, not a league table of individuals.

Where individual views are needed, we pair counts with stage mix and aging so a heavy caseload of short matters does not look identical to a heavy caseload of stalled files.

Agreeing the audience for each view in the kick-off meeting prevents the reporting pack from becoming a political document after go-live.