Originally published on LinkedIn on 29 October 2026.
The most expensive signature in your firm is the one that approves a write-down. For a firm of 20 fee earners, every percentage point of billing realisation is worth £44,000 a year.
The work is done and the costs are already paid. Salaries, rent and overheads don’t shrink when a bill does, so whatever a firm writes down comes straight off the bottom line.
Even for a modest firm, that adds up fast. The £44,000 comes from an example in the Law Society’s latest benchmarking survey: 20 fee earners, charging £200 an hour, recording 1,100 hours each, and billing 80% of that time. Fee income comes to £3.52 million. Bill one more percentage point of the time already recorded, and income and profit both rise by £44,000.
The margin it comes from is thin. Across the 121 firms surveyed, the median fee earner brought in £162,060, and 89% of that went on covering their costs. Profit lives in the remaining 11%, and every write-down comes out of it.
Why write-downs happen
The reasons are usually sound, and each one protects something that matters: the client, the deadline or the firm’s reputation. A partner doesn’t charge for a draft that took longer than it should have. An estimate the client relied on is honoured even though the work ran over. A fixed fee absorbs time the price didn’t allow for. A challenged invoice is settled to keep the client.
Each one makes sense on the day. Each one is still lost income.
What’s easy to miss is that the reason recorded at billing is often not where the loss began. “Protecting the relationship” can be the last step in a chain that started weeks earlier, sometimes with something small. For example, an associate is unsure about one point in a brief therefore asking feels like admitting they should already know, so they make a judgement call instead. The draft goes the wrong way, comes back for rework, and the extra time is written down at the bill as goodwill.
By the time the loss is recorded, the question that would have prevented it has long been forgotten.
The good news is that you can find where your own write-downs start, in a few simple steps, using figures your firm already holds.
How to find where yours start
1. Ask for the numbers Ask your finance team for a report covering the last six months, showing the value of time recorded and the value billed, by team, fee earner and matter. Divide value billed by value recorded, then multiply by 100. That’s your billing realisation rate.
£410,000 billed against £500,000 recorded gives a billing realisation rate of 82%. The other 18% is £90,000 of work the firm did and didn’t bill.
2. Check whether reasons are recorded Ask whether a reason is recorded for every write-down. If reasons are missing, or just say “discount”, the report shows how much was lost but not why.
3. Add up the write-downs Add up every write-down in the report. That’s the total income your firm earned and didn’t bill in that period.
4. Ask one question about the largest Take the three – five largest write-downs and ask the person who ran each matter: “What happened on this matter that we couldn’t bill for?” Write the answer in one line, then mark where it started:
With the client: an agreed cap, a negotiated discount, a disputed invoice Inside the firm: work redone, a brief that changed without the fee changing, a problem found too late to fix within budget
The bill shows the loss. Your team sees where it started.
By now you’ll know how much your firm wrote down over six months, and where your largest write-downs started.
Ask yourself: did the associate’s reason differ from yours? From your point of view, the client pushed back on the bill. The associate who ran the matter says the brief changed twice and nobody revisited the fee. You can both be telling the truth.
A few honest conversations can show you where the money went, but not how the whole team experiences the situations that produce those losses.
That’s important because the write-down is signed off at the end of a matter, but the loss is created during it.
There’s a second risk. When the cause isn’t addressed, people can adapt in ways that hide it. Time gets trimmed before it’s recorded, so part of the loss never appears as a write-down at all. The Law Society’s survey warns that when time is left out and the bill is then reduced as well, this “double discounting” may make recovery rates look good for the individual while it erodes profitability for the firm. Your billing realisation rate can improve while your income doesn’t.
Find the loss before it reaches the bill
I’m working with a small number of pilot firms to measure the patterns behind write-downs and their effect on billing realisation. For pilot firms, the full diagnostic is completely free of charge. It’s particularly useful if your billing realisation isn’t where you want it to be and you want a quick and effective solution.
The diagnostic is conducted remotely. You and your department team each answer the same questions about six everyday situations in your practice, taking about 12 minutes each. Your team’s answers are anonymous.
You’ll receive a bespoke report showing where your reading of each situation and where your team’s experience of it differ, what those gaps are likely to be costing, and where to focus first. We’ll go through it together on a follow-up call.
If you are interested send me a private direct message.