MHSB Solutions Intelligent Automation for Law Firms

Free automation diagnostic

Legal automation ROI calculator

Estimate the staff time and money your firm could recover by automating manual intake, follow-up, billing admin, and other repetitive operations work. It takes about 3 minutes, it names no product, and every number is yours to change.

Your manual operations time

Enter the staff hours per week your team spends on each area today. These starting figures are assumptions. Replace them with your own.

New-client data entry, conflict checks, opening and setting up files.

Reminders, chasing responses, status updates, and nurture touches.

Time-entry cleanup, invoice preparation, and payment follow-up.

Engagement letters, routine forms, and repeatable document packages.

Booking consults, rescheduling, and calendar coordination.

Base wage plus benefits and overhead for the staff who do this work. Enter the figure your firm actually pays per hour.

Sourced BLS reports benefits are about 30 percent of total compensation, so loaded cost is roughly 1.4 times base pay. BLS lists a median paralegal wage near $62,890 a year, about $30 an hour, or roughly $43 loaded.

What you expect to spend per year on the tools that would take on this work. Vendor-agnostic: use whatever figure fits the tools you are considering.

Adjust automation assumptions and working weeks

The reduction share is how much of each area's time automation could remove. These are assumptions with no primary industry source, and every one is editable.

Weeks your team actually works, after vacation, holidays, and leave.

Estimated annual value of staff time recovered

$29,160

This is the loaded cost of the staff time your manual work consumes today. It becomes a benefit only when you redeploy that freed time to billable or higher-value work. The net benefit and payback below account for your tooling cost. This is a modeled estimate, not a guarantee, and it moves with the numbers you enter.

Staff hours recovered per year: 648 Net annual benefit: $23,160 Payback period: 2.5 months

Where the time is recovered

  • Client intake and new-matter setup

    New-client data entry, conflict checks, opening and setting up files.

    $6,480
    22.2% of the total
  • Lead and client follow-up

    Reminders, chasing responses, status updates, and nurture touches.

    $6,480
    22.2% of the total
  • Billing and invoicing admin

    Time-entry cleanup, invoice preparation, and payment follow-up.

    $4,860
    16.7% of the total
  • Document drafting and assembly

    Engagement letters, routine forms, and repeatable document packages.

    $7,776
    26.7% of the total
  • Scheduling and calendar coordination

    Booking consults, rescheduling, and calendar coordination.

    $3,564
    12.2% of the total

Recovered time is valued at your loaded staff cost, not at a billing rate. Every figure here depends on assumptions you can change, and the value is realized only if the freed time is redeployed.

Figures you entered

How this is calculated

For each area, annual hours recovered is your weekly hours times the reduction share times your working weeks. Value recovered is those hours times your loaded staff cost, so the headline is the labor cost currently tied up in manual work, not new revenue. Net benefit subtracts your tooling cost. Payback is the months of recovered value needed to cover one year of tooling cost, and it is shown only when a year of recovered value exceeds that cost. Full method and every coefficient are documented in the model.

Sources

  • U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026: wages were 69.9 percent of total employer compensation for private-industry workers and benefits the remaining 30.1 percent, so loaded cost is roughly 1.4 times base pay.
  • U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Paralegals and Legal Assistants (May 2025): median annual wage about $62,890, used to anchor the loaded-cost reference.
  • Clio 2024 Legal Trends Report: the average lawyer bills about 2.9 hours of an 8-hour day (37 percent utilization), used only as context for the scale of non-billable time.

The reduction shares, the weekly hours, the loaded-cost default, the tooling cost, and the working weeks have no primary industry source. They ship as clearly marked assumptions, and you should replace them with your firm data.

Sources accessed September 2026.

Turn this estimate into a plan

A Phase 1 operations diagnostic maps where your firm actually loses staff time, then shows what to automate first and in what order. No obligation, and no product pitch.

Book your automation assessment