How to avoid collaboration overload

Collaboration – working together to achieve a common goal – is undoubtedly crucial to delivering high-quality legal services. But when every task becomes a group effort, and each decision requires a meeting, the benefits of collaboration can quickly give way to inefficiency and burnout. This is what’s known as ‘collaboration overload’.

Often embedded in policies and job descriptions and used as a catch-all for approaches to management, workflow, and culture-building, the call to collaborate is frequently invoked without a clear sense of how it functions in practice. The reality in today’s largely hybrid work environments is that constant pings, back-to-back meetings and an over-reliance on team chat platforms often get in the way of deep work and erode productivity.

As a result, collaboration risks becoming more of a performative, time-sapping expectation than a purposeful strategy – one that overwhelms instead of facilitates legal practitioners in performing at a high standard.

Two heads not always best

Over the past two decades, collaboration has become a hallmark of contemporary work culture. Enabled by rapid developments in communication tools, the use of which accelerated dramatically during the pandemic, the emphasis on teamwork is often framed as a way to tap into the shared knowledge and strengths of a group. The idea is that collective intelligence is greater than the sum of its parts; that the input of two workers is better than one.

The trouble is that the time workers devote to collaborative activities like messaging, email and meetings has increased by nearly 50% over the past 12 years. Across law firms of all sizes, collaboration is often so normalised by workplace culture and enabled by technology that it eats away at the time lawyers need to do solo, uninterrupted – and, crucially, billable – deep work.

“When I entered the workforce 30 years ago, there were teams who would walk the office with trolleys full of internal mail envelopes. When you were on a project or in a team, you would have set progress meetings at certain times of the week or perhaps daily,” remembers Ben Deverson, founder and managing director of legal industry management consultancy Lawganised.

“Now there are so many avenues to collaborate – there’s email, Teams, which includes the chat functions, Slack and various other platforms. You’ve got WhatsApp groups forming within offices.

Midja Fisher, who is founder and partner of The Legal Leadership Project and a former lawyer, says many of her clients report starting client work after hours or on weekends because collaborative communication eats up so much time.

“Their day is filled with email responses, disruptions, meetings and a range of other activities. That focused, quiet, individual work time often comes either very early in the morning or very late in the evening, but certainly not within the standard workday,” she says.

According to 2024 research by legal practice management software company Clio, the average lawyer has a utilisation rate of 37 per cent, which equates to 2.9 billable hours in an average eight-hour workday.

“There’s so much communication, and yet in terms of delivery of core business, we’re operating at about 30 per cent of capacity,” Deverson says. “It’s a bit like a retail store that closes off 70 per cent of its product all week.”

As for lawyers’ mental health and wellbeing, the effects of collaboration overload can be severe, explains Simon Dowling, a leadership facilitator and coach and former commercial lawyer.

“There is a load that too much collaboration creates on our people,” he says. “Many lawyers are high performers, demanding of themselves, so the need to keep up with people’s requests and to please people and to meet their needs is typically a high driver for lawyers. Once you create a world where collaboration proliferates, you’re draining the battery.”

Clear communication protocols

Nest Legal, a Melbourne-based firm specialising in conveyancing, wills, and family law, runs as a remote-first practice – a model made possible by smart use of technology and digital collaboration tools. Founder and principal lawyer Laura Vickers says clear protocols that align each type of communication with the right tool are key to maintaining smooth workflows and avoiding collaboration overload.

“If it’s a conversation about a file, we do it back and forth on Communicate, a messaging platform within [legal practice management platform] Smokeball that saves it to the file. Sometimes we move it over to our chats in Teams, where our conveyancing, wills and family law teams each have a separate chat for things like learning moments after a traumatic settlement or to workshop something together,” explains Vickers.

Firm-wide digital collaboration is split into two streams: ‘important’ and ‘chats’. “Sometimes someone’s dog is so cute it gets put into important, but that kind of stuff is usually in chats. Important is for really serious stuff,” explains Vickers, who launched Nest Legal, one of Australia’s first online firms, in 2013 and now has 33 staff.

When issues arise that require live discussion, they’re brought to the firm’s weekly Thursday huddle, directors’ meetings or all-staff meetings. Occasionally, team members will jump on a quick call – but only when necessary. Asynchronous tasks are added to each person’s to-do list in Smokeball, rather than being sent via email.

Vickers says this way of working is having a positive impact.

Coutts Lawyers & Conveyancers, which offers services across a broad range of areas including property, commercial law and dispute resolution, takes a similar approach. With more than 50 staff across six Sydney-based offices – including many hybrid and remote workers, people who work four-day weeks and contractors – managing partner Adriana Care says strong boundaries around communication are critical for purposeful collaboration.

“We make sure emails are predominantly for contacting our clients. Internally, we have a Teams portal with sub teams, so people can stay updated at their own pace and without unnecessary interruptions. We have weekly team huddles on Teams, and we use AI to record those meetings in case people can’t attend. We also do quarterly catchups, but we don’t have a lot of face-to-face meetings,” Care says of the firm she founded 18 years ago.

She explains the structure is about more than efficiency – it’s also about connection and support. “That’s how we connect; that’s how we mentor. We’re very strict in how we communicate so it doesn’t overwhelm everyone. But we also ensure people aren’t floundering on their own and feeling unsupported.”

Vickers agrees that clear protocols also help with meeting obligations around staff supervision. “We have statutory obligations to supervise, and we also need to have evidence of that supervision. What these protocols are guarding against is the constant one-to-one DMing,” she says.

“The benefits of our approach are that meetings are less boring, risks are properly managed by the right people, and people get the supervision and learning that they need, but not at the cost of being interrupted all the time for things that you don’t need to be interrupted for.”

Empowered to make decisions

When it’s done well, collaboration leads to better decision-making, creative problem-solving and higher revenue growth. Asana’s The Anatomy of Work Global Index 2023 reports 78 per cent of Australian workers at collaborative organisations feel well-prepared to respond to business challenges.

Daniel Proietto, chief executive partner at leading independent firm Lander & Rogers, which employs more than 650 people, says the “high trust environment” fostered at the firm helps to streamline communication and collaboration as practitioners feel empowered to make decisions.

“We’ve always operated a very flat structure, and we work in an open-plan environment. No one has an office here. We have also embraced a fully flexible model, so we don’t mandate any days in the office,” he explains.

“This creates an environment where people are very comfortable to speak up, ask for support if they need it, seek clarity and seek direction. Our people know that whatever outcome will deliver the best result for the client is what they need to do.”

Deverson agrees high trust environments can combat collaboration overload by eliminating what he calls “upward delegation” – a phenomenon where junior team members delegate work to senior team members by asking for direction.

“This sort of interaction is happening on collaborative tools all the time, versus one where an empowered, or dare I say, heavily trained and mentored individual might be a little bit more equipped to make decisions,” he says. “A well-advised, well-equipped and well-mentored staff member should always be supporting upwards rather than delegating upwards.”

Fischer says a key aspect of mentoring is building less experienced lawyers’ confidence up to a level where they feel confident making decisions. “There’s a lot of professionals who talk to me about starting their career and not having confidence in themselves to make decisions,” she says, explaining that partners and senior lawyers must step back and give younger professionals space to learn.

“We want our lawyers to move from being dependent to being independent and then to being interdependent. We can’t get people from dependent to interdependent unless they go through the independent stage, the one where you might need to say, ‘I needed to know about that before you went to that client with that’. It can be scary, but we have to allow them that space.”

Knowing when to say no

Practitioners frequently assess their own success, and are assessed by others, based on how well they manage their email and the speed of their responses in chat groups. “This means we become beholden to other people’s demands on our time. This is not purposeful or productive collaboration; it’s just collaborating as an act of being of service,” Dowling says.

It might sound counterintuitive, but saying no – and feeling allowed and empowered to decline – is a key aspect of effective collaboration.

“One of the most important parts of building strong collaboration is knowing when and how to say no. If we say yes to everything, we just create a mess,” Dowling explains. “Law firms need to consider how they can help their people to be very choiceful and conscious about where they deploy their energy and know when it’s okay to say no.”

Fischer agrees, adding that while collaboration tools are powerful, they must be used with care and purpose.

Ultimately, it’s about striking the right balance – between teamwork and autonomy, connection and focus, and asking for help versus making the decision. Vickers believes that the technology firms rely on to collaborate can play a vital role in restoring the balance.

“I think this is one of the times when the tech is going to help solve the human problem, which is we know we need to collaborate better now that we’re working differently,” she says. “Loop in Teams chats is a new function that lets us draft things on the fly, and AI is obviously getting more powerful. It’s an exciting time.”