Who May Work On It, and at What Rate
The staffing decision moves a bill more than the rate card does, and almost nobody agrees it in advance. What a staffing clause can and cannot do.
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Four ways of deciding who does the work
The least the work can cost on the day
Firm carries: No juniors who know the client's business in three years
Whatever mix that week produces
Firm carries: Nothing, until the bill is queried and there is no explanation
A predictable mix, agreed before the work starts
Firm carries: The cost of holding that team together across a long matter
Routine work at or below a stated grade
Firm carries: The delegation cost on small tasks, which often exceeds the saving
Four arrangements, and the one almost every client assumes is in force is the first, while the one actually operating is the second. Only the third and fourth are ever written down. One firm's own matter, not advice about how to staff anything.
Who does the work determines the bill more than what the work is. A task that takes four hours costs three times as much done by a partner as by a junior, and nobody signs anything about that.
The commercial boundary in “Who May Work On It, and at What Rate” becomes more useful when estimated work, recorded hours and authorised scope can be compared without changing the signed terms. Teams researching ways to track work hours can use explore the practical setup notes to organise that operational evidence while keeping the engagement letter and approved change record as the contractual source of truth.
Staffing is the largest unagreed variable in hourly billing.
Teams documenting “Who May Work On It, and at What Rate” may find WHO mental-health-at-work resources useful as an external benchmark. Record which parts apply to the real workflow and which do not.
What the client assumes
That work will be done at the lowest level capable of doing it. This is almost never written down and is universally expected.
When the bill shows otherwise, the client experiences it as a breach of something, even though nothing was agreed.
What the firm actually does
Staffs by availability, by relationship, and by who knows the matter. Those are reasonable grounds and none of them is "lowest capable level".
A partner does a simple task because they were on the call and it took ten minutes to do and forty to delegate.
The ten-minute problem
Delegation has a cost: explaining, reviewing, correcting. For small tasks the senior doing it is genuinely cheaper in total.
It is also the explanation for most of the senior time on a bill, and it is never visible in the narrative.
What a staffing clause can say
That named activities will be done at or below a stated grade. Document review, bundling, routine correspondence, first drafts.
Specific activities, not a general principle. General principles are unenforceable and get ignored.
What a staffing clause cannot say
That the right person will be used in every instance. Judgements made weekly under time pressure cannot be governed by a letter.
A clause that attempts it produces either breaches or theatre.
The trainee on the bill
A junior learning the matter is useful to the client over a year and useless to them on the day. Most billing guidelines prohibit charging for it.
Firms that absorb it without saying so get no credit; firms that show it as a deduction do.
Two people at a meeting
The most-queried staffing fact on any bill, and often entirely justified: one to conduct it and one to record it.
Justified or not, it needs a sentence somewhere, because unexplained it looks like duplication.
Showing the team
A short list at the start of a matter — who is on it, their grade, their rate, what each will mainly do.
Four lines. It converts every later staffing question from a surprise into a reference back.
When the team changes
A new name on a bill is a query waiting to happen, particularly at a higher grade.
An email when somebody joins costs nothing and removes it entirely.
The deduction nobody is told about
Firms routinely write off the ramp-up of a new team member and tell nobody.
Telling them converts an invisible cost into visible goodwill, at no extra cost.
Measuring the mix afterwards
Hours by grade, per matter, against what was assumed when the fee was estimated.
Firms that run this find that mix explains more overrun than hours do, and the finding is reliably surprising.
The delegation arithmetic, done honestly
A task that takes a senior thirty minutes takes a junior two hours plus twenty minutes of review. At typical rates the two come out within a few pounds of each other.
So the senior doing it is not extravagance; it is frequently the cheaper option on that task.
What it is not is training, and a firm that always takes the cheaper option on the day has no juniors who can do anything in three years.
What the client is actually buying
On a single matter, the efficient answer. Across a relationship, a team that knows their business.
Those pull in opposite directions, and the tension is real rather than rhetorical. Clients who insist on the lowest grade for everything often discover the consequence two years later.
Saying it out loud
"We will put a junior on this part; it will take longer and cost less, and they will know your business by the autumn."
Clients respond well to being told. They respond badly to finding a trainee's hours on a bill with no explanation.
The record to keep
Hours by grade per matter, against the mix assumed when the fee was set.
It is the one measurement that connects the staffing decision to the commercial one, and in most firms the two are managed by different people who never compare notes.
The practical arrangement
A named team with grades at the start, a stated rule for two or three specific activities, an email when it changes, and the mix checked against the estimate at the end.
None of it requires a negotiation and all of it removes queries that would otherwise arrive one bill at a time.