Lawyers lose three hours a day - and AI thinks it can get them back

Ask any lawyer what their most precious commodity is, and the answer is almost always the same: time. Yet despite all the effort spent tracking it, around three hours a day still go missing, according to new research.

While some of the missing hours cover necessary non-billable activities such as training or business development, a portion is genuine client work that simply never makes it onto a timesheet. At an hourly rate of £400 that’s a loss of around £20,000 per lawyer of actual billable time annually.

A new State of Work 2025 report by Laurel, the AI time recording platform, crunched data from 2,000 legal and accounting professionals to uncover modern working patterns.

Fragmented time

The findings show how fragmented the typical work day has become. During core hours, professionals spend nearly half their time on emails, chats and meetings, rarely enjoying more than 15 minutes of uninterrupted focus.

The average worker has 110 email interactions per day making sustained concentration rare, the kind needed for deep legal analysis or drafting.

The report highlights how much meetings contribute to the fragmentation. Meetings now make up about 30% of all professional time - around 16.6 hours per week - with nearly half of that spent multitasking on other work.

A third of all meetings analysed included more than nine participants - well beyond the size proven for effective decision-making (echoing Jeff Bezos’ famous "two-pizza" rule for meetings which says attendees should be limited to those who can be fed by two pizzas).

The result is expensive professionals spread thin, with senior lawyers spending up to 38% of their week in meetings, often without full engagement, according to the report.

Deep work

Many lawyers now complete their most demanding analytical work in the evenings or on weekends, when communication demands ease. Around half of all "deep work" is now taking place outside the traditional working day.

AI and technology

Technology may offer part of the solution as AI advances, allowing lawyers to focus on higher-value, complex tasks. And firms adopting automated time-capture systems have reportedly recovered nearly half an hour of billable work per day per fee-earner.

The report suggests the financial upside could be significant. Firms switching to AI-powered time tracking tools report recovering an additional 28 billable minutes per day per professional - working out at an average of $37,000 (£28,000) per lawyer each year in previously missed billable work.

Meanwhile, AI productivity tools themselves add roughly $11,000 (£8,400) in extra annual revenue per professional, according to the research which looked at AI usage at one Big Four firm and found those using AI tools billed an additional 0.7 hours per week.

Putting it all together, the report estimates the total opportunity reaches $74,000 (£56,000) per lawyer annually - or around £5.6 million in additional recoverable revenue for a 100-lawyer firm.