Case capacity calculator
Estimate the administrative load your open matters generate each month, and compare it against what your current staff can absorb.
Administrative load in an immigration practice scales with the number of open matters rather than their difficulty. Multiply open matters by the non-legal hours each consumes monthly, subtract what current staff can absorb, and the remainder is the gap — usually absorbed as non-billable attorney time.
Matters currently open, not new matters per month.
Non-legal time only: status monitoring, document chasing, packet assembly, client updates. Most firms land between 0.5 and 3.
Full-time equivalents currently handling this work.
The rest goes to substantive preparation, training and everything else.
Estimated monthly picture
- Administrative load
- 180 hrs
- Current capacity
- 96 hrs
- Shortfall
- 84 hrs
That shortfall is roughly 0.5 full-time equivalents of administrative work with nowhere to go. In practice it does not vanish — it is absorbed by attorneys as non-billable time, or it turns into slipped follow-ups.
Check this against your real numbers →An estimate, not a quote. It assumes 160 working hours per full-time equivalent per month and treats administrative load as proportional to open matters — a simplification, since matter types differ. Nothing you enter is transmitted anywhere; the calculation runs entirely in your browser.
How to read the result
A shortfall does not mean work is going undone. It means the work is being absorbed somewhere less visible — attorneys doing non-billable administration, follow-ups slipping, or evidence being refreshed later than it should be. The number is useful mainly as a way to size that leak before comparing it against the cost of covering it.
The one input worth being honest about is administrative hours per matter. Firms consistently underestimate it, because the time is spread thinly across many matters rather than concentrated anywhere. If you have never measured it, try a week of tracking before trusting the output.