I haven't practiced for anywhere near 40 years but I did start my own practice (along with 1 partner). When we started, we had no admin support. We did the bookkeeping, we did the filing, we wrote the checks to pay the bills, we mailed the letters. From time-to-time a client came in and we even had an opportunity to practice law.

I'm not going to try and quantify what amount of time the admin stuff took, but it was significant, particularly at certain times of the month/year. We put in a lot of hours.

In the end, we got lucky and our practice became moderately successful. We could hire staff to take care of these things for us. I know some much more experienced lawyers who either never got the breaks we did or chose to practice some form of human interest law in which they measured success in something other than dollars. These guys still do a ton of admin work. You get sick, something has to slide. I'd guess a lot of people choose the admin stuff. Then you either don't get better or something happens and you're caught before you can fix it or the problem becomes so overwhelming you just ignore it.

Again, I'm not criticizing or defending anyone, just saying I can see scenarios in which its feasible this could happen.

Free the LB4!