Every hour is recorded to six minutes. The quality of the mind billing them is recorded nowhere.
Sloane Labs is the capacity intelligence layer for law firms, consultancies and audit practices. It reads recovery and cognitive load across matter and engagement teams, forecasts where quality and utilisation will fall short, and acts before it costs a client relationship or an associate.
Utilisation tells you how many hours were sold. It says nothing about what was in them.
The firm's entire management system is built on recorded time. Yet the variable that decides whether the eleventh hour of a review is worth billing, cognitive capacity, is not measured anywhere. Two identical timesheets can represent wildly different value delivered.
Engagement load is spiky and knowable in advance. Filing dates, closings, audit season and go lives arrive on the calendar months ahead, so the load they generate can be forecast and staffed against rather than absorbed by whoever is nearest.
Four places capacity turns into outcome
The late review
Detailed review work degrades measurably after sustained load.
The advice
Fatigue narrows advice rather than slowing it.
The write off
Work done tired takes longer and gets reworked, and the difference is absorbed in write offs rather than attributed to the staffing decision that caused it.
The partner track
Senior associates leave at exactly the point the investment starts to return.
An engagement, read the way you read a matter budget
Team capacity across an engagement, with the forward projection that lets you add resource, move a milestone or protect a weekend before quality and realisation start to slip.
Select an operating state to redraw the forecast.
Normal portfolio, no filing or closing pressure. Recovery clears week to week and capacity holds inside the tolerance band.
No intervention. The Monday brief confirms the team can absorb an additional matter.
What we read, and what each signal decides
A signal earns its place only if it changes an operational decision. Anything that does not is telemetry for its own sake.
What is actually running, not what is on a roadmap
Monday capacity brief
A single page before the resourcing meeting. Cohort capacity, what changed over the weekend, the two teams to watch, and one recommended staffing action.
Cohort capacity by practice
Practice groups, sectors and offices reported as separate cohorts with trend lines across the year. No cohort renders below five people.
Forward risk alerts
When a team is forecast to cross a capacity threshold inside 72 hours, the alert fires with contributing factors and stated confidence.
Resourcing simulation
Model an engagement before you staff it. Add resource, move a milestone or change the mix and see the projected capacity effect through to delivery.
Individual agent, opt in only
Fee earners who opt in get their own coach: recovery targets through a sprint, focus protection, answers grounded strictly in their own data. Nothing is visible to management.
Wellbeing evidence record
An aggregated, anonymised record of how load was distributed and managed. Defensible with the board, clients running supplier audits, and staff representatives.
Reading human capacity only works if the boundary is unambiguous
Trust is the adoption constraint. These are commitments, written into the agreement, not preferences.
Never linked to chargeable targets
Explicitly excluded from utilisation review, appraisal, partnership decisions and disciplinary process. That exclusion is contractual and enforced in the data model.
Opt in, always
No one is enrolled by default. Participation is individual, explicit and revocable at any time, with data deleted on withdrawal.
Five person minimum cohort
Aggregate views suppress any group smaller than five. Leadership sees cohorts, never a named individual's physiology.
Metadata, never content
Calendar and messaging integrations read timing, density and participant counts. Titles, bodies and message content are masked at ingestion and never stored.
Separated from selection
Contractually and architecturally excluded from selection, appraisal and disciplinary processes. That separation is written into the agreement.
UK GDPR and DPIA ready
Lawful basis, retention schedule, data subject rights and a pre drafted DPIA template supplied for your DPO before the first device is connected.
Six minute units, recorded perfectly. The mind behind them, recorded not at all.
An eight week pilot with a defined exit
We take a small number of design partners per sector. A partner shapes the roadmap directly, gets preferential terms, and keeps the right to walk away at week eight with no obligation.
Scope and governance
Agree cohorts, success measures and the data boundary. DPIA reviewed and signed. Integrations connected in a sandbox with a small internal group.
Baseline
Volunteers connect wearables and calendars. Individual baselines establish across a normal cycle and a peak one. No alerting yet, observation only.
Live briefing
Morning readiness briefs start reaching leadership. Forecast alerts switch on. Calibration against what the organisation already believes about its own load.
Readout and decision
Joint review of accuracy, adoption and the decisions the signal changed. Written readout, roadmap input, and a clear go or no go.
What we need from you
- One executive sponsor with authority over how work is scheduled
- Twenty to fifty volunteers across two or three cohorts
- Calendar and messaging integration approved by IT and the DPO
- Two review sessions across the eight weeks
What you get
- Full platform access for the pilot cohorts, configured to your operating calendar
- Direct roadmap influence on capability specific to your sector
- A written readout of accuracy, adoption and decisions changed
- Preferential terms and first refusal on the sector in your market
The questions we get asked first
Is this a wellbeing programme?
No. It is a capacity and quality system. Wellbeing programmes ask people how they feel. Sloane measures capacity against the engagement calendar and changes decisions: resourcing, milestone timing, redistribution and scoping.
Does it read matter or client information?
Never. Calendar and messaging integrations read timing, density and participant counts only. Titles, bodies, attachments and client identifiers are masked at ingestion and never stored, which keeps privilege intact.
Could this affect appraisal or partnership decisions?
Architecturally, no. Individual physiology is never exposed to management; leadership sees cohorts of five or more. Use in utilisation review, appraisal or partnership process is contractually prohibited.
How does this differ from a resourcing tool?
Resourcing tools tell you who is available. Sloane tells you what state they are in and where that state is heading, so the availability number means something.
What does integration require from IT?
OAuth for calendar and messaging, optional practice management metadata, and individual device authorisation for wearables. No endpoint agents, no document system access.
How do we know the signal is real?
Every score is deterministic and reproducible from versioned features, every forecast carries stated confidence, and the pilot readout compares prediction against what the practice observed.
Measure the capacity behind the hour, not just the hour
A thirty minute conversation covering the architecture, the data boundary and what an eight week pilot would look like inside your firm.