The audit · document 03 of 07
Where the value is lost
What the 5½ hours of work is made of, why a file spends days waiting, and what both cost in dollars — at the firm's own rates.
The hands-on time — what the 5 h 30 m actually is
Per case, median. Classified from the step trace in document 02 — a different cut of the same 5 h 30 m than document 02’s per-step bar.
Every category except attorney review is template-driven or mechanical: the same data moved, the same documents produced, case after case. The legal judgment in the opening — reviewing and approving — is about 35 minutes of the 5 h 30 m.
The waiting — why 5½ hours takes 3 days
Hands-on work is 8% of the elapsed time. The rest is the file sitting still, waiting on:
Two of the four waits are self-inflicted — the review queue exists because eight documents arrive at once needing one attorney, and the report wait doubles when ordering it is nobody’s named job. The proposed state (document 04) removes the first and caps the second.
The dollars
At the hourly rates the firm gave us — salary plus overhead, example figures: paralegal $45/h · case manager $40/h · attorney $150/h.
| Cost of opening a case | Today | Proposed |
|---|---|---|
| Paralegal time | 2 h 50 m · $128 | 1 h 10 m · $53 |
| Case-manager time | 2 h 05 m · $83 | 35 m · $23 |
| Attorney time | 35 m · $88 | 15 m · $38 |
| Per case | ≈ $299 | ≈ $114 |
Rates are the firm's own figures; the time is measured, not estimated. Recompute with different rates in one line — the time split is the finding.
Three things that went wrong — and what each one cost
Three from the last quarter — each one a category, not a one-off.
The nine-day opening — the treatment window nearly half spent (case I)
Five small waits stacked into nine days before the letters went out. No dollar figure fits this one — the cost is risk: nine days where the client felt unrepresented, and the 14-day treatment deadline nearly half spent before the file was working.
The stale referral list — two clients, two weeks of delayed treatment
Two clients referred to a provider who no longer accepts liens; both re-referred about a week later. Two weeks of delayed treatment across two cases, two apology calls, and the referral knowledge still lives in one person's memory.
The transposed policy number — an extra 1 h 40 m and a day of delay (case H)
One digit swapped during the third re-keying of the same data. The claim setup bounced, was diagnosed and re-filed: about 1 h 40 m of extra work and a day of delay — the direct product of typing the same fact three times.
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