[sdz]

This reminds me of an old Joel Spolsky blog post [1] about exactly this for programmers. The gist is that for tasks that require a great deal of attention and focus (like programmaing and, here, legal analysis), task switching is extremely expensive and should be avoided whenever possible. A bit of management advice from the post regarding this principle:

    Good managers see their responsibility as removing obstacles so that people can focus on one thing and really get it done. 

[1]: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html

[lkozma]

Joel must have got this idea from Peopleware.