Craig Miller recently shared something that caught my attention: "Most managing partners think their unbillable time is going to legal work. It isn't." Then he lists where it really goes: "confirming things already agreed. Calendar rescheduling. Document chasing. Follow-up emails. Status messages."

That short inventory is painfully familiar to anyone who has watched a high-value partner spend a Tuesday acting like a human routing system. Craig Miller's bigger point is the one I cannot stop thinking about: the issue is not that leaders are disorganised or not trying hard enough. The issue is infrastructure.

"The low-frequency noise of a firm that runs on manual coordination."

In other words, the firm has quietly made the managing partner the operating system. And when every process that should route automatically routes through one person instead, the work does not just feel busy. It becomes structurally expensive.

The myth: unbillable time equals legal thinking

Partners often assume their unbillable hours are being consumed by worthy-but-nonchargeable legal work: mentoring, business development, knowledge sharing, risk management. Some of that is true.

But Craig Miller is pointing at a different category: coordination overhead. It is the effort required to keep work moving when the firm runs on manual handoffs, unclear ownership, and ad hoc communication.

Coordination overhead has a few telltale characteristics:

It is fragmented into tiny tasks that feel too small to track.
It spikes around transitions (intake, engagement letters, first drafts, filing, billing).
It produces lots of messages but little progress.
It tends to flow uphill to whoever is most accountable (often the managing partner).

And because it is invisible on the timesheet, it is easy to underestimate.

Craig Miller's "operating system" metaphor is the real warning

When Craig Miller says, "the partner has become the firm's operating system," he is describing a routing failure.

A well-designed firm has routing rules:

Who approves what, and at what threshold?
Where does work go next when a document is ready?
What triggers client updates, and who sends them?
What happens when a deadline moves?

In a manual environment, those rules exist only in people's heads. The person with the fullest mental model, the most context, and the biggest sense of responsibility becomes the default router.

That router is often the managing partner.

The result is not just annoyance. It is a system that cannot scale because it depends on an expensive human bottleneck.

The silent P&L leak: capacity that never shows up

Craig Miller gives a clean example: "A managing partner at £400/hour absorbing 10 hours of coordination per week is carrying £200,000 per year in capacity that never materialises."

That number matters because it highlights why firms miss the problem. The firm does not record it as a loss. "It just never appears." No write-off, no failed matter, no angry client, no dramatic event. Just missing capacity.

And the true cost is often higher than the math suggests because coordination overhead also:

Delays work, which delays billing.
Increases rework (because information lives in inboxes and hallway conversations).
Creates inconsistent client comms (because updates are improvised).
Burns out the people who are "safe" to rely on.

If you are trying to grow, improve profitability, or simply reduce partner stress, you cannot fix this with personal productivity tips. You have to change the routing.

What the "low-frequency noise" looks like in practice

Craig Miller's list is simple, but each item has a predictable root cause.

Confirming things already agreed

This often means decisions are not captured in a durable place. If the only record is an email thread, people will keep asking, "Are we still doing X?"

Fix: a single source of truth for decisions (matter notes, task comments, or a short decision log) and a clear owner to post outcomes.

Calendar rescheduling

Rescheduling is rarely just rescheduling. It is a cascade: notifying attendees, re-booking rooms or links, adjusting deadlines, and re-aligning who is doing what.

Fix: standard meeting cadences, fewer meetings that require partners, and a rule that changes trigger automatic updates (for example, a deadline shift updates dependent tasks).

Document chasing

Chasing happens when nobody is clearly responsible for the next step, or when the next step depends on information scattered across inboxes.

Fix: matter workflows with explicit handoffs, and intake checklists that prevent work starting until minimum inputs are received.

Follow-up emails and status messages

Status updates become constant when the system cannot answer basic questions:

What is the current state of this matter?
Who is waiting on whom?
What is the next due date?

Fix: task-based work management where status is visible without asking, plus agreed client update triggers (for example, weekly update every Friday by the matter lead).

The infrastructure underneath: routing, not heroics

When Craig Miller says the problem is not leadership or organisation, I read that as: stop relying on heroic coordination as a business model.

Infrastructure in a professional services firm is not only IT. It is the combination of:

Process design (what should happen)
Roles and ownership (who does it)
Tooling (where it is tracked)
Standards (what good looks like)

If any one of those is missing, the managing partner becomes the glue.

A practical playbook to remove the managing partner bottleneck

Here is a straightforward way to act on Craig Miller's point without launching a massive transformation program.

1) Measure coordination, even if it is messy

For two weeks, track coordination touches by category: scheduling, chasing, approvals, status, internal escalations. You do not need perfection. You need visibility.

A simple count like "30 status pings" is often enough to justify change.

2) Map the top 3 workflows that generate the most noise

In many firms, the culprits are:

New matter intake and conflicts
Draft-review-approve cycles
Billing and collections

Draw the workflow in plain language. Identify where work stalls and why.

3) Define routing rules (ownership beats consensus)

Replace "everyone can do it" with clear ownership:

One accountable role for each stage (intake owner, matter manager, billing coordinator).
Approval thresholds (what needs a partner vs what does not).
Escalation rules (when to involve the managing partner).

4) Put the workflow into a system people will actually use

This can be a matter management tool, a ticketing system, or a lightweight task platform, but it must:

Show the next action and owner
Store decisions and key documents
Reduce status questions by making status visible

If your tooling forces people back to email for the real work, the routing will fail.

5) Standardise client communication triggers

A major source of partner interruption is uncertainty about what the client knows.

Set defaults:

A weekly update cadence for active matters
A "milestone reached" update template
A single point of contact for routine updates

This does not remove partner involvement. It stops partners being pulled into every micro-update.

6) Protect partner time with explicit "do not route" rules

Make it normal to say:

"This does not route through the managing partner. Route it through the matter lead."
"Use the checklist, then escalate if still blocked."

Cultural permission matters, but it only works when the workflow exists.

The takeaway I am keeping from Craig Miller

Craig Miller is not arguing that coordination is beneath partners. He is arguing that coordination should be designed.

If a firm wants partners doing partner work, it cannot depend on manual coordination to keep matters moving. The more the firm grows, the more that "low-frequency noise" becomes a high-frequency tax.

Build routing. Make ownership explicit. Put decisions where they can be found. And treat missing capacity as a real cost, even if the P&L never labels it.

This blog post expands on a viral LinkedIn post by Craig Miller. View the original LinkedIn post →