ARTICLE
10 practical points for fee earners to increase profitability (and avoid losing fees)
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n the current civil litigation climate and, in particular, the imminent increase in Fixed Recoverable Costs for all cases valued at up to £100,000, it is more important than ever to maximise your return from work done and to avoid wasting time and losing costs. The intention of this article is to give you some practical (and hopefully simple) ways to achieve and / or avoid this. 1. Time recording I know this is boring and time consuming but hear me out! Let’s assume you work on 10 files a month. On each one you fail to record 12 minutes each month. Overall, that is 2 hours per month or 24 hours a year which = £3,024.00 as a Grade D fee earner on Guideline Hourly Rates. If your Grade A fee earner does the same that is at least £6,120. 00. Missing 12 minutes on each file every week changes these figures to £13,104.00 and £26,520.00! In other words, you are probably losing yourself and your firm a fortune! 2. Clerks / Secretaries / Assistants Think they are not fee earning? Think again! Most of the time they won’t be, but it is the nature of the work that makes it chargeable / recoverable, not who does it. Many conveyancing secretaries are actually conveyancing assistants and whilst 20 | SURREYLAWYER
Sue Nash
you are working on a fixed fee for conveyancing work, what if you have a civil litigation assistant that you trust to produce, send and check letters of authority (for example) or to collate documents for a brief to Counsel? [More about ‘collating’ below]. This is Grade D fee earning work and you are probably missing capturing it – see above for how much this could generate for you / your firm. 3. Collating / Sorting / Paginating / Copying Think none of this is chargeable? Once more, think again! The first two are – only the second two are not – and there is a precedent supporting this (Ahmed v Aventis Pharma Ltd (Rev 1) [2009] EWHC 90152 (Costs) (19 November 2009)). This leads to the more general point that it is important to use the correct words to describe the work done as some work is not recoverable Inter Partes and some is. A good example is ‘research’; if you are researching CPR or established precedents, then it is not (you are expected to know this, and it is built into your hourly rate) but if you are looking to find and then read a recent case which is relevant to the matter you are dealing with then it is. Likewise, reviewing a document is more likely to be recoverable than checking it.
