‘Information overload’ is causing UK lawyers to under-bill for the work they do, a new survey has suggested.

Research at work is now taking so long that 45% of UK legal professionals sometimes do not bill for the time they spend on it, according to the 2010 International Workplace Productivity Survey by market research agency WorldOne, commissioned by legal publisher LexisNexis.

UK lawyers suffer the most with information overload, spending 55% of their time receiving and managing rather than using information; more than in Australia (54%); South Africa (51%); the USA (49%); and China (47%), the research found.

More than eight in 10 UK legal professionals think that the amount of information they have had to manage for their jobs has increased in the last five years, the research suggested.

‘Workers across the globe are just about managing to keep their heads above water in a rising tide of information,’ said Rob Farquharson, director at LexisNexis Connect UK & Ireland. ‘The results of this survey reveal not just how widespread the problem is, but also the very real impact that information overload has on professionals and the bottom line.’

The research also found that 58% of respondents thought that the quality of their work was suffering as they could not sort through information fast enough, while 46% said they felt ‘demoralised’ by being unable to manage all of the information that came their way at work.

Some 600 legal professionals in the UK, USA, China, Australia, and South Africa were surveyed.