JJ Signal · Research · 9 min read
The billable hour leak is a retrieval problem
Senior time in a professional practice goes on reconstructing what the firm already knows.
Published Professional Services
The expensive hours in a 35-to-75 person practice are senior hours spent searching, not senior hours spent thinking. Proposals, compliance packs and onboarding files all consume them the same way, and all three are the same underlying problem: the firm's own history is not retrievable by anything except somebody remembering it.
The evidence
Drawn from our own delivery work. Each claim states its sample and its method, including where the sample is small.
- 01A proposal took six to nine partner hours, the large majority of it locating and adapting a past one.Timed across one advisory firm's proposal pipeline over a quarter. Partner-level rates make this the most expensive search in the business.
- 02The same three recent engagements were cited repeatedly regardless of fit, while better-fitting older work went unused.Compared against the partners' own blind ranking of best-fit precedents. Recency was doing the work that relevance should have been doing.
- 03An evidence pack took around three weeks of a senior manager, assembled from screenshots and a hand-maintained spreadsheet.One accountancy practice. The first migration of that spreadsheet into structured grants found 31 stale entries, which is also a measure of how wrong the authoritative record had become.
What follows from it
If your firm's answer to 'have we done something like this' is a person's memory, you are paying partner rates for search and getting worse results than retrieval would give you. Fix the index before buying anything that writes.
What we would do
- 01Index the back catalogue on what predicts relevance — sector, engagement shape, team size, outcome — not on folder structure.
- 02Return passages with their source document and date, so a partner can check provenance before reusing a claim.
- 03Leave every price, scope and date field blank by construction. Drafting reasoning is useful; drafting commitments is not permitted.
- 04Benchmark retrieval against the partners' own blind ranking, because that is the only definition of relevance that matters here.
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