Work Allocation

Work allocation is the process of assigning legal work, including matters, tasks, and non-billable projects, to associates and other legal professionals based on factors such as prior experience, skills, availability, cost, and the goal of building well-rounded experience across a career. Work allocation software centralizes this process, typically providing searchable profiles of each professional's skills, experience, and current workload, real-time forecasts of individual and team capacity, and a request process through which staffing needs are logged and matched to available people. Specific capabilities include tracking stated interests or development goals so professionals can be matched to work they want, dashboards that show which individuals, practice groups, or offices are over- or under-utilized, and integration with time and billing systems so that experience records update automatically as work is completed. Common use cases include making allocation decisions more visible and data-driven, supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion goals in how work is distributed, reducing burnout and attrition tied to uneven workloads, and onboarding new or lateral hires more quickly by surfacing their skills and availability. Generative AI is beginning to be used to summarize matter-based performance evaluations and flag narrative or compliance issues in staffing-related feedback, feeding more reliable insight into future allocation decisions.