Quinn Ross explains how lawyers can work less without losing productivity, and his firm's lessons
Despite growing enthusiasm for reduced-hour models, the four-day workweek remains out of reach for most Canadian law firms.
While a handful of firms – such as YLaw and The Ross Firm – have gained attention for successfully implementing shorter workweeks, the legal profession continues to struggle with the structural, cultural, and operational challenges that make such a shift extremely difficult.
Two years ago, Canadian Lawyer spoke with Quinn Ross, Leena Yousefi, and Joe O’Connor about the future of reduced working time in law.
Today, O’Connor, CEO of consulting firm Work Time Revolution, says Ross’ and Yousefi’s firms have continued to benefit from the model – but widespread adoption has yet to follow.
Most firms he worked with focused on the opposite end of the spectrum – struggling with chronic overwork.
O’Connor says lawyers often work 50 to 60 hours a week, which can lead to burnout and turnover. His work primarily focuses on helping firms find a better balance within the traditional five-day model, so lawyers aren’t constantly working late or bringing work home on weekends.
“I think we need to be realistic here. If you're a law firm where people are, on average, working 10 or 11 hours a day, I'm not going to go in and say, ‘You know, you need to move to a four-day work week,’ because it's too much too soon… You need to start at ‘What do we need to do to make sure people can get home in time to have dinner with their kids?’ That needs to be the fundamental starting point.”
During informal conversations, lawyers from various firms echoed this sentiment, with a broad consensus that the legal industry must transition to a standard 40-hour workweek before attempting to reduce that number by an additional 20 percent.
According to O’Connor, part of the challenge is cultural. The legal profession still equates productivity with input – long hours, constant availability, and packed calendars.
“In the past, clocking long hours was seen as a marker of being a good lawyer,” he says. “But that’s less true today, and it won’t hold up tomorrow.”
As AI takes on more routine tasks, he believes that lawyers' essential traits will shift to creativity and sound judgment, not the sheer volume of work.
While moving to a reduced-hour model doesn’t necessarily require abandoning the billable-hour model, he says it does require greater efficiency – especially within the non-billable portion of time.
Some firms have blended billable and flat-fee models to reflect this.
“It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing,” says O’Connor, adding that technological advancements will probably challenge time-tracking and billing models in law firms.
“If a task takes eight hours and a lawyer spends 11, firms often absorb that cost. But if that same task can be done in six or seven hours at equal or better quality, the fee shouldn’t change. The real question is: are clients paying for time, or are they paying for value?”
Quinn Ross, managing partner of The Ross Firm, says the four-day model remains central to his firm’s values, but it has not been without complications.
Employees who have previously experienced the traditional five-day workweek embraced the change enthusiastically. However, he says that new employees who joined under the four-day model lacked that frame of reference, leading to issues with expectations, appreciation, and, at times, performance.
This disconnect contributed to the firm’s only self-selected departures – some of whom later reapplied after working elsewhere.
As the firm grew from 12 to 100 people, maintaining the flexibility and responsiveness needed to make the model work became nearly impossible.
“One hundred people in five days? No problem. One hundred people in four days? No way,” Ross says.
At that scale, the required personal management and adaptability broke down, and the firm ultimately reduced its headcount to around 40.
The four-day model, he adds, is great at exposing inefficiencies.
At Ross’ firm, an entire layer of front-end administrative staff had to be eliminated when it became clear that their work created workflow bottlenecks and unnecessary siloing between lawyers, clerks, and admin roles.
“We thought we were building a system, but really, we were just leaning into inefficiencies that looked structured,” he says.
Ross explains that about seven weeks ago, the firm eliminated the group responsible for tasks like client onboarding, information gathering, and appointment scheduling. While necessary, these roles were non-billable and created delays in the workflow, as lawyers and clerks had to wait for these tasks to be completed before proceeding.
He adds that the size of the firm turned out to be a major limiting factor in introducing a shorter work week.
Other pain points following shorter work weeks include physical office coverage – especially in a hybrid environment with multiple locations – and unplanned absences.
While his law firm developed systems to manage these gaps, Ross says sick days or short leaves still strain resources.
“We’ve created systems of coverage, but it is still an annoying pain point.”
Ross is candid about the cost of implementing a reduced workweek. It is an expensive model for firms to adopt because they are giving up 20 percent of their mode of production – which, for lawyers, is time.
To offset this, his firm restructured pricing, expanded its flat-fee offerings (now 25 percent of work) and doubled down on operational efficiency. Despite working fewer days, Ross says lawyers are hitting their billable targets thanks to better time attribution and more focused workflows.
He also acknowledges that a perfect four-day week is not always achievable in practice, especially in law.
In his law firm, lawyers are not expected to strictly avoid work on their scheduled day off. Instead, they are given autonomy over how they use that fifth day.
Even if work is being done, that internal locus of control provides a sense of ownership and balance. According to Ross, this approach contributes meaningfully to resilience and well-being.
“If you're going to work, great. If you're going to work some of it, fine. You want to work all of it? No problem. If you want to work none of it, excellent – because you're a mature professional and you'll handle your business.”
Ross adds that the extra time lawyers gain on their fifth day allows them to reserve weekends purely for enjoyment and relaxation rather than catching up on chores and errands left unfinished during the workweek.
The four-day week isn’t seamless – primarily due to persistent gaps in office coverage, costly operational trade-offs, and a constant need to recalibrate workflows. Managing a reduced-hour model requires ongoing adaptation, cultural buy-in, and a willingness to rethink long-held assumptions about how legal work should be done.
As Ross put it, it’s not a plug-and-play solution and doesn’t suit every environment or scale. But for his firm, the benefits outweigh the burdens.
“The fact that we're still doing it is a testament to its efficacy.”
