Admin Efficiency Isn’t About Speed. It’s About Reducing Decision Friction

When law firm leaders talk about improving administrative performance, the conversation almost always drifts toward speed. Faster turnaround times. Quicker responses. Tighter SLAs.

From what we’ve seen, that focus is misplaced.

Most delays in administrative services don’t come from slow work. They come from unclear decisions.

What actually slows teams down is decision friction, the drag created when no one is sure who owns a task, who has authority to act, or what to do when a request falls outside the norm. When that friction isn’t addressed, support teams compensate with workarounds, rework, and escalation. Everyone stays busy, but nothing moves smoothly.

Fixing this isn’t about pushing people to move faster. It’s about clearing the roadblocks that shouldn’t be there in the first place.

What Decision Friction Looks Like in Practice

Decision friction rarely shows up as a visibly broken process. Instead, it hides in plain sight:

• Repeated emails asking for clarification on routine requests

• Tasks sitting in inboxes waiting for approval that shouldn’t be required

• Two people unknowingly working the same issue because the instructions weren’t clear

  
  

We’ve seen support professionals spend more time trying to get direction than actually completing the work. And because these moments aren’t logged or tracked, leadership often assumes delays are isolated incidents rather than systemic issues.

Over time, the friction compounds.

How Friction Leads to Delays, Rework, and Workarounds

When decision ownership isn’t clearly defined, staff are forced to interpret situations on their own. One person escalates a routine request “just to be safe.” Another makes an assumption and moves forward, only to redo the work later when the assumption turns out to be wrong.

Attorneys, trying to keep matters moving, step in and handle tasks themselves. That might solve the immediate problem, but it undermines the support model and quietly shifts administrative work back onto billable time.

Eventually, these behaviors become standard operating procedure. The firm adapts around the friction instead of removing it, and the real problem stays hidden.

Why Even Experienced Staff Get Stuck

This isn’t about capability. We regularly see highly experienced support professionals hesitate when authority boundaries aren’t clear.

When people aren’t sure how far their decision rights extend, they default to caution. They seek approval for routine items, delay action to avoid overstepping, or escalate issues that don’t warrant it. Confidence drops, not because staff lack skill, but because the system doesn’t support decisive action.

Firms often misread this hesitation as underperformance, when it’s really a structural failure.

The Hidden Cost of Over-Escalation

In many firms, escalation becomes the default response to uncertainty. Over time, this creates three predictable problems:

• Senior staff become bottlenecks for minor decisions

• Front-line teams lose confidence and autonomy

• Truly critical issues get delayed because everything is treated as urgent

When too many small decisions flow upward, leadership attention is diluted, and response times suffer across the board.

How to Reduce Friction Without Adding Staff

Improving efficiency rarely requires more headcount. It requires a better structure.

The firms that make real progress take the time to:

• Clearly define decision ownership at each level

• Map approval paths, and eliminate approvals for routine work

• Document escalation criteria so it’s used for exceptions, not defaults

Once those guardrails are in place, support teams move faster, not because they’re rushing, but because they know exactly what to do and when to act.

Case Study: Clarity Before Speed

In one Am Law 100 firm, leadership was frustrated by inconsistent administrative turnaround times across offices. Staffing levels were adequate, and vendors were performing to contract, but routine requests were still slowing down. The real issue wasn’t execution. It was decision ambiguity. Support teams didn’t have consistent authority to act, approvals varied by office, and escalation had become the default response to uncertainty.

Mattern helped the firm reset the structure around decision ownership and workflow governance. We clarified who could decide what, standardized approval paths, and removed unnecessary escalation from day-to-day work. Once that friction was removed, performance stabilized quickly. The firm met its service-level objectives and improved overall administrative efficiency, while also reducing related costs by 31%, not by pushing people to work faster, but by giving them the clarity to act.

The Mattern Perspective

Speed is not a function of effort. It’s a function of structure.

At Mattern, we help firms remove the friction that quietly slows administrative operations. If your support teams are working hard but results still feel sluggish, it’s worth examining what’s getting in their way.

Almost any service provider or internal team can perform well if they’re managed clearly and held accountable.

If this sounds familiar, we should talk. Contact info@matternassoc.com.