Nobody Bills the Handover

Or why a hospital ward manages absence better than most law firms.

Once a month I take myself off to a barn between Shrewsbury and Whitchurch.

It sits next to an award-winning farm shop. Maynards — whose bacon and sausages find their way into kitchens including Dishoom. And who doesn't love a Dishoom breakfast.

Part of the reason for going is to give my wife a husband break. Part of it is catching up: the reading and the blog writing that get pushed to the edges of a working week. But mostly I go there to rest.

Why does that matter, and why so often?

The case for stepping away isn't that you come back faster. It is that you don't arrive at Thursday having quietly become worse at your job.

My friends Barry and JoJo, of Feast and Fables, write a Substack called Encourage Meant. A good deal of it is about slowing down and noticing the world you are walking through. Worth five minutes of your week.

The four-day week, meanwhile, still gets shouted down in our sector with impressive regularity. The objection is always the same. Matters cannot wait. Clients cannot wait. Someone has to be at their desk.

The objection is never really about the work. It is about what a day away does to a timesheet.

If revenue is a function of hours recorded, then a day off is a day of lost income. Not lost progress — lost income. Those are two entirely different things, and the billable hour cannot tell them apart. That isn't a partner being difficult. That is a charging model doing exactly what it was built to do.

I have been in hospital recently, which gave me an unexpectedly good seat for watching how other people solve this.

Whole industries run on shifts. Days on, days off, teams rotating through the same work and the same people. Much of the public sector does it at scale. I watched the handovers on my own ward — one team briefing the next, on patients whose condition could change inside an hour. Let's face it thats why they do obs every four hrs , more after heavy surgery.

Did the standard of my care drop when the shift changed? No. It did not. The handover was designed, written down, and treated as part of the job rather than an interruption to it. Every different member of staff knew what was what with each patient and please don't go but you cannot compare the Battle of the Leylandii Hedge with having bits of your gallbladder removed bit by bit.

One of the nurses on the ward had previously managed a large group of hotels. I asked him why he had switched. Better work-life balance, he said. A nurse, on shifts, with better work-life balance than hotel management. Sit with that one for a minute.

So could a law firm run a four-day week, or a proper shift pattern, without stalling its matters? Of course it could. Nothing in litigation moves faster than a ward round and certainly not as fast as an A&E Department - watch The Pitt on HBO you will see what I mean.

What stops it is not the work. It is two things. A charging model that mistakes presence for productivity. And matter management so poor that nobody could hand over even if they wanted to.

That second one is the quiet problem. If the position on a file lives in one fee earner's head and their sent items, then that person cannot go away. Not because the client needs them. Because nobody else can find anything.

Colin Chapman's line — simplify, then add lightness — usually gets wheeled out around here to talk about pricing. It works just as well on absence. A matter that is properly mapped, with a current position anyone can read in five minutes, is a light matter. It can be put down and picked up again. A matter that only functions while one particular person is holding it is heavy. Heavy things don't get handed over.

Trinity term ends today, and a good many of you will be away shortly after. The Long Vacation is one of the more civilised inventions the profession has managed to hold on to.

So use it. Delegate properly. Do a real handover — written down, not shouted over your shoulder on the way to the car park. Set the out-of-office and mean it. Then turn the email off. Off, not muted.

If your firm cannot manage a fortnight without you being reachable, that is not a compliment. It is a finding.

Rest, like good coffee, should never be hurried.

And what we sell is judgement, and the quality of the outcome. Never the number of hours it took to get there.

#fikafriday