Originally published on LinkedIn on 3 September 2026.
Every firm carries a cost that never shows up as its own line in your P&L. Instead, it shows up as movement in the numbers you already track every month. This week, that’s write-down rate. This cost commonly comes from the gap between how a leader reads a situation and how their team actually experiences it. Each week, this brief takes one situation, the pattern behind it, and shows exactly which number it moves.
How the leader reads it
You run an open door. If something were genuinely wrong on a matter, you’d expect to hear about it, that’s what the door is for. Silence, in your mind, is a reasonable proxy for things being fine. Nobody’s flagged anything, so nothing’s wrong.
That reasoning feels solid because it’s usually true of the big, obvious problems, the ones too large to miss bit it’s the small, early, still-uncertain ones it quietly misses. The kind an associate talks themselves out of because they don’t want to look foolish or waste your time.
How the team experiences it
From the fee earner’s side, an open door isn’t the same thing as an invitation to walk through it with something that might be nothing. Raising a concern early means raising it before you’re certain, which carries its own risk, that can look like a lack of confidence or worse, that they’re wrong about the client, the matter, or the judgement call.
So, the calculation shifts. Wait a little longer. See if it resolves itself. Get more certain before saying anything. By the time it’s raised, it’s no longer a small, early concern, it’s a confirmed problem, and confirmed problems take longer to unwind than early one’s ever would have.
What it’s costing you
This shows up directly in write-down rate. A problem caught early is usually a conversation and a quick correction, absorbed into the normal course of the matter. The same problem caught late usually means extra time spent unwinding a mistake that’s had longer to compound. That time still gets recorded, but when the bill is reviewed, it’s rarely charged at full value, since it’s the firm correcting its own error rather than delivering new value to the client. The partner reduces it before it goes out. A write-down rather than a full write-off, but the effect on the numbers is the same, work done that the firm doesn’t get properly paid for.
There’s real research behind why silence is such an unreliable signal here. Amy Edmondson’s original studies of hospital teams found that the better-performing teams didn’t make fewer errors, they reported more of them. The difference wasn’t the error rate, it was whether people felt safe enough to say something before it became serious. Teams with low psychological safety weren’t quieter because things were going better, they were quieter because raising a concern felt riskier than staying silent. Silence, in other words, is often a measure of how safe it feels to speak, not a measure of how things are actually going.
Why your current reporting might not show this
A file or matter review typically happens periodically, and it reviews what’s already been raised or already visible in the file.
An open-door policy isn’t a system either, however genuinely meant. It relies entirely on someone choosing to walk through it, at the moment they’re least certain, which is exactly the moment they’re least likely to.
None of these ask the question that actually matters here: does raising something small and uncertain feel safe, or does it feel risky? That’s not something a periodic review or an open door can answer, since both depend on the concern already having been raised to be seen at all.
One question to ask this week
Think of the last time someone brought you a concern while it was still small and uncertain, not after it had already become a confirmed problem. Ask yourself plainly: when was that, and how did I respond?
If you can’t remember a recent example, that’s worth sitting with.
Catching Problems is one of the operational blind spots quietly costing firms real money, in write-downs that trace back to a concern that sat too long before anyone said anything. If you want to know whether it’s happening in your own firm, and what it’s costing, the Financial Diagnostic is free and starts with a short 5-minute call to get your report underway.
Next week: Situation 6, Addressing Mistakes.