Comment by planet-and-halo
5 years ago
Well this gets back to the question of the output. For the law firm itself, this might be a valid approach. For the client, though, this is a terrible way to measure productivity. At a certain point hours may even be inversely proportional to productivity (assuming the client's output is desirable legal outcomes). This works very much the same as software engineering, except that usually (ignoring the case of consulting firms) all of the work is done in-house.
But the question in the grandparent post was about capacity - and in this regard, if some customer needs "X much" of legal services performed, then it's reasonable to state that if your legal team that can devote twice as much hours to that customer, it has twice as much capacity.
Completely agreed.