Billable Hours Recovery Calculator
Every hour an attorney spends on admin is an hour that could have been billed. See what that work is really costing your firm, and how much of it you can win back.
Response within one business day
8 to 14 hrs
admin per person, per week
60% to 80%
of it is delegatable
Free
no signup needed
Your inputs
Start with a firm profile, then adjust any number to match yours. Every figure updates the result instantly.
Your result
What admin work is costing your firm in lost billable revenue, and what an offshore support hire can recover.
Billable revenue tied up in admin work
$432,000
1,440 billable-capable hours per year
Revenue recovered
$181,440
per year
Offshore support cost
$9,072
per year
Estimated net annual gain
$172,368
About 20.0x return on the cost of support
How the recovery is calculated
- Admin hours per week (team)
- 30 hrs
- Delegatable hours per year
- 1,008 hrs
- Billable hours recovered per year
- 605 hrs
- Recovered revenue
- $181,440
- Less offshore support cost
- -$9,072
- Net annual gain
- $172,368
Recovery rate of 60% assumes only part of the freed time converts to billed work. Lower it for a conservative view, raise it if your team has a waitlist of billable work.
Estimates only. Defaults reflect common ranges for United States law firms and are fully editable. Actual recovery depends on your caseload, demand for billable work, and how cleanly the admin work hands off.
The most expensive hour in a law firm is the one nobody bills
Most firms watch their expenses closely and their revenue loosely. They will negotiate hard on a software renewal, then let a partner spend two hours a day formatting documents and chasing records, work that quietly burns more money than any line item on the budget. The reason it goes unnoticed is simple. A cost shows up on a statement. A lost billable hour shows up nowhere. It is invisible, and invisible problems do not get fixed.
This calculator makes the invisible visible. It takes the admin hours your billable team carries every week and prices them at your own billable rate, so you can finally see the number. Then it does the more useful thing. It estimates how much of that lost revenue is actually recoverable once routine work is delegated to a trained support person, and it subtracts the cost of that support so you are looking at the real, after-cost gain. The point is not to make you feel bad about how the time is spent today. It is to give you a defensible figure for what changing it is worth.
Where billable hours quietly leak out
Non-billable work is not one big task. It is a hundred small ones, each defensible on its own, that add up to a part-time job nobody scheduled. For most firms the leaks cluster into six categories. Here is where the hours go and why they are worth recapturing.
1Intake and lead follow-up
Answering new client calls, qualifying leads, chasing signed engagement letters, and entering matters into the system. It is urgent, it is constant, and it almost never gets billed. Every hour a senior person spends on first contact is an hour not spent on a matter that pays.
2Scheduling and calendaring
Booking depositions, coordinating hearings, managing court deadlines, and the endless email volley to find a time that works for four busy people. Calendaring is mission critical, but it does not require a law degree, and at attorney rates it is the most expensive way to schedule a meeting in the country.
3Document formatting and assembly
Cleaning up drafts, fixing numbering, building exhibit binders, converting and bates-stamping files, and assembling closing or filing packets. The thinking is done. What remains is production work that drains hours from people billing several hundred dollars each.
4Records, discovery, and filing support
Requesting and chasing medical records, organizing productions, e-filing, and keeping the case file current. This is high-volume, repeatable work with clear handoffs, which is exactly why it is the first thing firms move off attorney and paralegal plates.
5Billing, time entry, and trust admin
Reconstructing time, cleaning narratives, preparing invoices, and managing trust ledgers. Ironically, the work of getting paid is itself unbilled, and when it slips, realization and collections slip with it.
6Inbox and client status updates
Routine email, appointment reminders, and the steady stream of where is my case updates. Clients need them, but a trained support person can handle the bulk so the lawyer only touches the messages that actually require legal judgment.
None of these tasks is optional. The case file still has to be organized, the deposition still has to be scheduled, and the invoice still has to go out. The question is never whether the work gets done. It is who does it, and at what rate. When the answer is a licensed attorney at several hundred dollars an hour, the firm is paying a premium price for production work. Our services overview maps each of these categories to the support role that handles it.
The arithmetic of a recovered hour
The logic behind the calculator is deliberately simple, because a number you can explain is a number you can act on. Start with the admin hours your billable team carries each week and multiply by the working weeks in a year. That is the total pool of billable-capable time being spent on non-billable work. Price it at your blended billable rate and you have the headline figure, the revenue currently tied up in administrative tasks.
From there the tool gets conservative on purpose, because an honest estimate is more persuasive than an optimistic one. It applies a delegatable share, since not every admin minute can be handed off, and then a recovery rate, since not every freed minute will be refilled with billed work. A firm with a waitlist of matters will convert most of its freed time and should set a high recovery rate. A firm that is not capacity constrained should set a lower one. The two dials let you model your own reality instead of accepting a vendor's best case.
Finally, the tool subtracts the cost of the offshore support that absorbs the delegated work. The result, the net annual gain, is the number that matters. It answers the only question a firm owner is really asking, which is whether the hours won back are worth more than the help it takes to win them. For the vast majority of firms the answer is yes by a wide margin, because attorney and paralegal billing rates dwarf the cost of trained support. To see the same decision from the expense side, the legal staff cost calculator compares the fully loaded cost of an in-house hire against an offshore one.
What to hand off first for the fastest recovery
The fastest path to recovered hours is to start with the work that is high volume, repeatable, and easy to hand off. These are the roles firms most often staff offshore first, because the workflows are well defined and the freed-up billable time shows up quickly.
Legal intake specialists
Lead response, qualification, follow-up
Legal calendar specialists
Deposition, hearing, and deadline scheduling
Document specialists
Formatting, exhibits, filing prep
Legal billing assistants
Time entry, invoicing, trust admin
Paralegals
Discovery support, records, case prep
Virtual legal assistants
Inbox, scheduling, client updates
The sequence matters less than the start. Pick the single task that eats the most senior time today, hand it off cleanly, and let the recovered hours fund the next move. Firms that try to delegate everything at once stall. Firms that delegate one well-defined workflow at a time compound. When you are ready to map your own list, the how it works page walks through scoping the first role.
How to read your result honestly
The calculator returns three numbers, and each one answers a different question. The billable revenue tied up in admin is the size of the problem, the full opportunity value of the time your team spends on delegatable work. It is intentionally the biggest number, because it represents the ceiling, not the realistic target. Do not quote it as savings. Quote it as the pool you are drawing from.
The revenue recovered is the realistic target, the portion of that pool you can actually convert once you account for what is delegatable and what refills with billed work. This is the number to take to a partner meeting, because it survives scrutiny. If anyone challenges it, you can point to the two assumptions behind it and adjust them live. The net annual gain then subtracts the cost of the help, which is the figure that decides whether to act.
A few rules keep the estimate defensible. Use a blended billable rate that reflects who actually does the admin work today, not just your top partner. Be conservative with the recovery rate unless you genuinely have unbilled demand waiting. And remember that the offshore rate already bundles onboarding, replacement coverage, and management, so you are not adding overhead back on the other side. When the recovered revenue clears the cost of support several times over, the case for delegating stops being about working harder and starts being about arithmetic. Our transparent pricing shows exactly what that single rate covers.
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate the cost of non-billable hours?
Multiply the hours your billable team spends on administrative work by your blended billable rate, then by the number of working weeks in a year. If three attorneys at 300 dollars an hour each spend 10 hours a week on admin across 48 weeks, that is 1,440 hours a year worth 432,000 dollars in billable-capable time. The calculator on this page does that math and then estimates how much of it is realistically recoverable.
What is the difference between admin cost and recovered revenue?
The admin cost is the full opportunity value of every hour your billable staff spend on delegatable work. The recovered revenue is smaller and more honest. It only counts the share of admin work that can actually be handed off, multiplied by the share of freed time that converts into new billed work. Not every freed hour becomes a billed hour, so the tool lets you set a delegatable percentage and a recovery rate to keep the estimate defensible.
What is a realistic recovery rate for freed-up time?
It depends on demand. A firm with a waitlist of matters or unbilled backlog can convert most freed time into billable work, so a recovery rate of 70 to 90 percent is reasonable. A firm that is not capacity constrained will convert less, so 40 to 60 percent is safer. The default on this calculator is 60 percent, which assumes a meaningful but not perfect conversion. Lower it any time you want a conservative number for a partner meeting.
How much admin work can an offshore support hire actually take?
Most firms can delegate 60 to 80 percent of routine legal admin to a trained support person, including intake follow-up, scheduling, document assembly, records requests, e-filing prep, billing support, and inbox triage. The work that stays in house is the part that requires legal judgment, a bar license, or a direct attorney relationship. The delegatable share field lets you model your own split.
Does the calculator account for the cost of the offshore hire?
Yes. The net annual gain figure subtracts the cost of the offshore support from the recovered revenue, so you are looking at the gain after you have paid for the help. The cost is calculated from the delegatable hours and the hourly rate you enter, which already bundles benefits, office, equipment, and recruiting into a single transparent number rather than layering them on top.
Why focus on billable hours instead of just cutting costs?
Because for most firms the bigger number is on the revenue side, not the expense side. Saving 30 percent on a support salary is good. Freeing a partner to bill 8 more hours a week at 350 dollars an hour is transformational, and it compounds. The cost calculator on this site handles the savings side. This tool handles the growth side, which is usually where the larger opportunity sits.
Turn admin hours back into billable ones
Book a free consultation and we will map the work draining your team's time to a support plan, with the recovery math done for you.