The Firm Playbook: Burnout and bottlenecks: You can’t have one without the other

By Nermin Jasani

Burnout and bottleneck, these are the two things I see repeatedly in law firms that want to grow but can’t. Year after year, a law firm may only get marginally closer to its financial goals, but it never quite gets there. It’s not sure what’s wrong or why it keeps falling short. Is the problem a lack of marketing? A lack of legal or administrative support?

You’ll end up spending a lot of money, time, and energy trying to solve this issue without actually realizing that the foundational problem is burnout and bottlenecks. Vacations, time off, meditation, hiring more people, bringing on more clients – all of these steps may not be as impactful if they don’t solve your firm’s dependence on you. You’ll need to go deeper if you truly want to solve the problem.

After 15-plus years of working with lawyers, I’m convinced that there’s a throughline connecting both burnout and bottlenecks in a law firm. Where there’s one, there’s the other. Your burnout isn’t necessarily a personal problem and your bottlenecks are part of what’s keeping your firm from growing.

What is burnout and a bottleneck?

Lawyers burn out or feel burned out when they’ve been operating at 110 percent, putting out fires, doing the legal work, and constantly weighed down by thoughts like “is the firm growing?” There’s emotional exhaustion, and the reality of an endless “to-do list” that only gets longer the more you do. It’s that feeling of “I’m the only one who can do this” and “everything depends on me.”

Bottlenecks are all the places that require a firm owner’s input before anything is finalized. This could be reviewing the final drafts from your team or making final hiring decisions or sending out invoices to clients. Some of these areas should require a firm owner’s input. Some should not.

A bottleneck basically means you are responsible for completing the task, whatever it is, to some degree. That responsibility becomes a mental load of “Did that go out?” and “Did they do it right?” And that becomes the emotional burden trigger for burnout.

Bottlenecks are not only a business cost but also an emotional cost that you are paying, usually without realizing it. There are many reasons for bottlenecks in firms, and this isn’t to say that the firm owner is responsible for creating 100 percent of them. It’s simply one of the fastest ways to identify what’s actually happening.

If you are feeling burned out, ask yourself, where am I the bottleneck on decisions in my law firm?

If you are the bottleneck in about 20 unfinished projects in your firm, ask yourself: Are those incomplete projects making you feel burned out?

Real-life examples

Here are some real life examples from clients I have worked with (and you will likely find yourself in one of these scenarios).

1. If you are the final approval on invoices, meaning you review every hour your team bills, you adjust time down if you feel it was too high or the client may complain, and after reviewing the initial invoice you then send out final invoices.

The reality is that every single invoice doesn’t need to be reviewed by you. Insisting on reviewing every invoice delays billing, delays payments, and creates unnecessary stress.

When you have “review invoices” sitting on your to-do list, and the time between sending them and getting paid keeps stretching out, it creates the constant question of, “Will there be enough money to __________?”

Enter burnout.

Fix the issue of needing to review every invoice and you’ll feel some immediate relief.

A few solutions could be reviewing invoices above a certain dollar amount or for your highest-paying clients or you batch review invoices and time entries each week so you’re not doing it all at once in a five-hour time block.

2. If you’ve had one of those days where your paralegal called out sick and now you have to re-arrange deadlines and re-assign items, while your phone team is pinging you about an upset client, and your associate is stuck in court. All of these seemingly small things, experienced day in and day out, lead to burnout because you become the dumping ground. Everything escalates to you. This is what bottlenecks look like in real life.

I’ve never met a law firm owner who said, “I love being the bottleneck in my law firm’s growth.” But what’s often between the lines of the places where firm owners stay involved is fear. Fear that something will be messed up. Fear that the ball will get dropped. Fear that clients will complain.

Believe it or not, identifying the fear is most often the first step.

Striking the right balance

There is a balance between being a healthy law firm owner and being an unhealthy bottleneck. And this takes time to get used to. It’s never an overnight shift where you’re involved in everything one day, and only 10 percent of day-to-day decisions the next.

Once you start systematically working on the bottlenecks in your firm, you’ll feel that elephant on your chest lighten. You’ll have your weekends back. You’ll stop thinking about unsent invoices at dinner. You’ll get more comfortable with not being involved in every moving piece of your business.

The solution

My suggestion is to start small.

What is one thing that happens weekly/monthly that you can remove yourself from and delegate to someone else? Is it approving social media content, reviewing blogs, doing first round interviews, or something else entirely?

If you’re burned out, it won’t be resolved by rest alone. And if you’re a bottleneck, you need to understand the emotional cost before you’ll actually do something about it.

Instead, see burnout as a symptom that something in your firm’s operational process isn’t working.

The path to growth is not to suffer through burnout like a badge of honor. The path is to redesign the structure and processes of your firm.

Nermin Jasani, Esq. is the founder of Wildly Successful Law Firm, a consulting firm that helps law firm owners scale from 7 to 8 figures with strategy, structure, and smarter decision-making. After starting her career as a lawyer on Wall Street advising hedge funds, Nermin transitioned into consulting in 2017 to help lawyers solve the business problems law school never prepared them for. Today, she’s known for her direct, data-driven approach that turns ambitious firms into predictable, profitable, and well run businesses. She can be reached at [email protected].