Originally published on LinkedIn on 5 November 2026.
This is Part 2 of a four-part series, Why firms are losing money to operational blind spots. Part 1 asked why good leaders miss costly write-downs. This week’s answers how pressure turns good judgement into write-downs.
A write-down takes a minute to approve, but a cause can be set weeks earlier, in the busiest week of the quarter, when nobody has time to look. In Part 1, one point of billing realisation was worth £44,000 a year to a 20-fee-earner firm. This week is about how some of that is lost before the bill is written.
The blind spot
The busiest week of the quarter is rarely the week a firm will question its own judgement. Matters are moving, clients are pressing and a deadline is close, so decisions are made quickly. From the partner’s side, that is good judgement doing its job: protecting the client, the date and the relationship.
The associate handling the matter reads the same week just as seriously. They know the client and the deadline matter, so a question that would normally be asked is weighed against the partner’s time, and it is postponed or goes unasked. With little time left, a draft is finished by the partner rather than sent back with comments.
Both are doing the sensible thing, because both know the client and the deadline come first, but they can see different things. The partner sees the deadline. The associate sees the matter itself, including any point they are unsure about. In a pressured week, nobody stops to compare.
In my experience, hybrid working makes this harder. A question that would once have been asked in passing at a desk now means sending a message or booking a call, and an associate is less likely to interrupt a partner who is busy. The associate misses the chance to clarify the point and build their knowledge, and the matter goes out on that footing. Where that happens, the work may need rewriting or correcting later, and that is time a firm may not be able to bill for.
As Part 1 showed, the reason recorded at billing is usually a sound one. The record shows why the write-down was made. It does not show the unasked question behind it. A cause can sit earlier, in the week the work was done, and nothing in the billing record says why.
Why pressure narrows a partner’s attention
When a deadline is close, a partner’s attention narrows to the client and the date. In 1992, the psychologists Steven Karau and Janice Kelly tested what time pressure does to groups. They gave 36 groups of three a planning task with too little time, enough time, or more than enough. The groups with too little time stayed closer to the task and spent less of their interaction on the interpersonal side of working together. On some measures, their work was also shorter and less creative.
This was laboratory research, not a study of law firms, but it suggests how pressure shifts attention. The practical point is simple. A partner under pressure is not choosing to overlook the associate. The client and the deadline take up the attention, and what the associate knows about the matter slips outside it.
None of this means pressure always narrows a partner’s attention, or that a busy week always leaves a question unasked. Karau and Kelly’s own model says that whether a narrower focus helps or harms depends on the task, and a close deadline can sharpen work as well as limit it. What the research gives you is a reason to look.
What your busiest weeks may be costing you
If you worked through Part 1, go back to the largest write-downs on your list. If you didn’t, start with the five largest from the last six months, or all of them if there are fewer.
Beside each, note when the work was done. If the matter ran for months, note the weeks when most of the written-down time was recorded. Mark the weeks you would call your busiest. You can probably name them from memory: a completion, a court deadline, year end, a partner away. Count how many of the write-downs fall in those weeks.
If most of them do, those weeks are worth a closer look. Note what was happening in each: the deadline, the client, and how many matters you and the associate were each carrying. Add up those write-downs to see how much is at stake.
It’s a small sample, so treat it as a pointer, not a finding. Busy weeks hold more work, so they might hold more write-downs anyway, and write-downs can have more than one cause.
Conclusion
Write-downs can have a few causes, but the reason captured in you r practice management system may not always be the root cause. Some can be traced back to your busiest weeks, where you may find communication gaps between colleagues. When a deadline narrows a partner’s attention, things can be missed. A question that goes unasked leaves no trace in the record. This is why the week the work was done deserves as much attention as the write-down itself. Your own figures will show you where to start looking.
Taking it further
Tracing your largest write-downs back to the weeks they began may show you where the cause lies. If you want to be sure, TrustLytics® looks at six everyday situations where write-downs can begin, and shows where your firm is most exposed. It is built to identify and stop the revenue quietly lost to write-downs.
The full diagnostic is a free pilot, takes about 12 minutes for each person, and your team’s answers are anonymous. If you want to know how it works, send me a DM.