Comment by josalhor
5 years ago
To be fair to my professor, the question does make sense in the context of the subject. That is, the subject focuses on answering questions like: How much I am producing? How much could I produce? How do I measure that? Etc. The subject intentionally ignores business models.
So, the question "How do you measure the capacity of a legal team?" (note it says capacity), makes sense. It's the answer I disagree with.
But doesn't capacity imply some kind of fungible unit, whereas outputs of intellectual labor tend to be non-fungible?
Some legal work product is reasonably fungible, especially at the level of corporate law.
What I think that a lot of management type folks fail to realize, though, is that both the quality of knowledge workers' output and the rate at which they produce it tends to drop precipitously when they are tired. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lawyer who works 35 hour weeks can get more done in a given calendar period than one who works 90 hour weeks. Big name law firms, though, bill by the hour, and, even if they share this conviction, they know that their clients went to business school, and have therefore been trained not to understand it.
My professor thinks otherwise
As for my personal opinion, I haven't reflected on it too much, but I think capacity implies a quantitative (edit: measurable may be a better word?) output, but not necessarily fungible.