Field note
Reading utilisation without turning the room into a league table
Chargeable hours matter. So do supervision, duty, and the week someone covered a trial at short notice. Here is how we keep those hours visible.
Utilisation is a ratio with a denominator the partnership chose. Treat that denominator as a local fact. A chambers that counts clerking support differently from a high-street firm should not borrow someone else's percentage and call it a standard.
The league-table instinct is strong because a ranked list looks decisive. It also hides the week a senior associate spent sitting behind leading counsel, which the time codes may show as non-chargeable even though the diary was not free.
Our resource utilisation reviews therefore keep hour types visible. Chargeable, supervision, duty, business development, and leave sit as separate stacks. If the firm only records two of those, the pack says the rest cannot be seen.
Comparisons, when we use them, are this team against its own prior period. We do not drop in a figure from a magazine survey of 'top firms'. That number was not measured on this time sheet.
A mild but useful test: if you can remove the names and the picture still supports a staffing conversation, the chart is doing its job. If you cannot, you have drawn a ranking, not a utilisation review.