Everyone has a sense that lawyers spend too much time on administration. The question is what has actually been measured.
This article reports one survey and one benchmark. It says clearly what they leave out.
How small-firm lawyers say they spend their time
The Thomson Reuters Institute surveyed lawyers at small firms. The answers are self-reported, so they show how people describe their time, not a measurement of it. The copy we found is hosted by a third party, and we did not find a later edition.
Thomson Reuters Institute, 2023 State of U.S. Small Law Firms, 2023 (https://confilegal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/State-of-US-Small-Law-Firms_Final-11.8.23-Web.pdf): in a survey of 400 lawyers at firms of up to 29 lawyers, run in July and August 2023, respondents said they spent 61% of their time practicing law and 9% on administrative tasks. They spent 11% managing the firm, 14% with clients and 6% on marketing.
Thomson Reuters Institute, 2023 State of U.S. Small Law Firms, 2023 (https://confilegal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/State-of-US-Small-Law-Firms_Final-11.8.23-Web.pdf): in the survey, 77% rated excess administrative time a significant challenge (24%) or a moderate challenge (53%), the top challenge. Earlier editions, for 2021 and 2022, showed 56% practicing and 11% administrative.
A different measure: billable hours
Clio's utilization rate measures billable hours in a day. It is a measure of billable time, which is not the same as administrative time.
Clio, Legal Trends Report 2025, Law Firm KPIs page, 2025 (https://www.clio.com/resources/legal-trends/benchmarks/): the utilization rate is 38%, based on usage data from Clio's customers.
What nobody has measured here
We did not find a measurement of how much of a lawyer's day goes to administration. We therefore do not say that lawyers lose any share of their day to it.
The small-firm survey and the Clio data describe different things and different firms. Neither one can be turned into a statement about the lost time of a particular firm.
How a firm can find out for itself
- List the administrative tasks people repeat every week
- Ask each person to note, for a short period, how long those tasks take
- Look for tasks where the same details are typed more than once
- Pick one task to simplify and decide how the firm will tell whether it helped
Sources
Thomson Reuters Institute, 2023 State of U.S. Small Law Firms, 2023
Report published November 2023. This is a copy hosted by a third party, and no later edition was found.
https://confilegal.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/State-of-US-Small-Law-Firms_Final-11.8.23-Web.pdf
Clio, Legal Trends Report 2025, as shown on its Law Firm KPIs page, 2025
Page last modified October 16, 2025.