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“I Don’t Have Time to Delegate.” The Economics Are More Complicated Than That.
By Christine Shimoda
There’s a familiar piece of advice given to busy lawyers: delegate more.
The logic is compelling. If work can be done well by someone at a lower billing rate, the client receives better value. A more junior lawyer gets an opportunity to develop. The senior lawyer creates capacity for higher-value work. Over time, the firm builds a deeper bench and becomes less dependent on a small number of people.
Everybody wins.
Except sometimes they don’t.
Because underneath the time question sits another tension we don’t talk about nearly enough: the economics of delegation look different depending on whose economics you’re considering.
The First Few Times May Cost More
Imagine a piece of work that would take an experienced lawyer an hour to complete. Delegating it might require time to explain the context and expectations, answer questions, review the work and provide meaningful feedback.
On that one assignment, delegation may genuinely be less efficient.
But that isn’t necessarily the right comparison.
If the work recurs, the investment shouldn’t remain constant. The next time, the other lawyer has more context. Feedback from the first assignment carries forward. Judgment develops. Over time, a 20-minute briefing may become a five-minute conversation. Several checkpoints may become one. A lawyer who initially needed a defined task may eventually be ready to take a problem and come back with a recommendation.
That reduction in your involvement is the point.
Delegation is an investment rather than a transaction. The question isn’t only, “How long will this take me today?” It’s also, “What capacity could this investment create over time?”
Recent research reinforces the idea that delegation is about more than moving work off a leader’s plate. In her Harvard Business Review article, Why Aren’t I Better at Delegating?, Elsbeth Johnson, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, explores why leaders continue to hold onto work even when they know they should delegate it. Among the consequences, she points to lost development opportunities for more junior people and the time leaders continue to spend on work that could increasingly be done by others.
But in a law firm, there’s another layer.
What If The Incentives Point The Other Way?
Suppose a senior associate has a significant billable-hours target.
She delegates ten hours of work to a junior lawyer. The client benefits from the lower rate. The junior develops. The firm begins building additional capacity.
But the senior associate just lost ten billable hours. She may also spend non-billable or written-off time explaining the work, answering questions and reviewing the result.
From the firm’s perspective, delegation may be desirable. From the individual’s perspective, it may be economically irrational.
We may be asking lawyers to behave like leaders while continuing to reward them primarily as individual producers.
That doesn’t mean billable targets are inherently incompatible with delegation. It means we need to acknowledge the tension rather than treating reluctance to delegate as simply a behavioural problem.
And Then There’s The Client Budget
The same complexity shows up at the matter level.
Delegation theory tells us that distributing work across billing rates can create better client value. But what if the team wasn’t built into the original scope?
Bringing another lawyer into a matter has a cost. They need context. Their first attempt may take longer. The senior lawyer still needs to review their work.
If that investment wasn’t contemplated in the original budget, the lawyer may face an uncomfortable choice: exceed the budget, write off some of the development time, or simply do the work themselves.
Again, “delegate more” doesn’t solve the problem.
Perhaps the better questions begin earlier:
Are we scoping matters with the team in mind?
Are we giving ourselves room to develop people while delivering value to the client?
When someone delegates effectively, does our measurement system recognize the value they’ve created beyond their own hours?
And, perhaps most importantly: Whose economics are we optimizing?
The client wants quality, efficiency and predictability. The individual lawyer has targets and compensation considerations. Developing lawyers need meaningful opportunities. The firm needs profitability, leverage, succession and sustainable capacity.
Those interests overlap. They aren’t identical.
So sometimes “I don’t have time to delegate” is a habit worth challenging. And sometimes it points to a much more interesting conversation about how the work is priced, staffed, measured and rewarded.
What tension does delegation create in your firm? We’d be interested to add it to the conversation.
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