If you are a managing partner at a large law firm, chances are at least some of your lawyers are dragging you down.

Three-fourths of law firm managing partners at firms with more than 250 lawyers told consultancy Altman Weil Inc. that having too many lawyers billing too few hours — what they call overcapacity — is sapping their firm’s profits.

At the same time, the survey released Tuesday of 320 firms found that those firms where managing partners are more empowered to make changes on staffing and pricing are financially outperformed firms where partners are more autonomous.

That begs the question: Will more law firms cull their ranks of non-performing partners and unused associates?

The most newsworthy example of this occurred in 2013, when New York powerhouse Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP axed 60 associates and trimmed pay for 30 partners. But at many firms, the problem persists.

“They want to be humane, but they want to make their money,” said Eric A. Seeger, a principal at Altman Weil who helped author the 124-page Law Firms in Transition Survey.

“There are trade-offs associated with making every possible dollar that can be made.”

Joseph B. Altonji, a founding principal of LawVision Group, said firms won’t “grow their way” out of the overcapacity problem, which is most acute among non-equity partners.

“The reality is excess capacity remains a continuing problem within the industry, and it’s not going to change,” Altonji said. “It’s a longer-term challenge.”

In the Altman Weil survey, 67 percent of firms with 250 or more lawyers say they have too many non-equity partners. Meanwhile, only 38 percent of firms with 250 or more lawyers “are working on” reducing that number.

Turning those non-equity partners into equity partners, by and large, is not how they intend to trim that number.

More than 80 percent of firms said less than 50 percent of their current non-equity partnership would be made full partners. And 41 percent said that zero to 25 percent of that current roster would make full partner.

Kent M. Zimmermann, consultant at the Zeughauser Group, said one of the first things he does when he starts working with a law firm is to find out how many lawyers are billing less than 1,000 hours a year on a three-year average.

“In a large firm, you can’t have a lot of people billing under 1,000 hours,” Zimmermann said.

“In a lot of firms, that’s a good place to start. Something else many firms are doing is dividing their partners into quartiles. And on a three-year average, they look at the quartiles, and the bottom quartile each year either gets a plan to get their numbers up or they counsel them out of the firm.”

The survey also showed that law firms are financially benefiting from decisions to change major aspects of their business.

Firm leaders were asked to rank their “decision-making authority” on a scale of 1 to 10. Among the firms where leaders marked an eight or higher, 74 percent reported increases in profits per equity partner from 2013 to 2014. Among the firms where leaders marked a zero to 5, 65 percent reported a rise in that same number.

And 76 percent of “high-authority firms” increased their revenue per lawyer in 2014, compared to 62 percent of “low-authority firms.”

The survey also asked about changes in how the firm views efficiency and staffing.

It found 76 percent of firms that changed their “strategic approach to efficiency” increased profits per equity partner from 2013 to 2014. Only 61 percent of firms that did not make that change saw a rise in profits.

Similarly, 75 percent of firms that changed their “strategic approach to pricing” had increases in profits per equity partner, compared to 66 percent of firms that had not made those changes.

“Certainly, the leadership team cannot drive change by themselves in a partnership,” Altman Weil’s Seeger said. “However, they can frame and explain why the change is necessary. And they can create initiatives to be implemented by the leadership team and the partnership, but it has to be a cooperative effort.”

He added: “And firms with an extremely high level of autonomy, where you can’t tell individual partners what to do and they can effectively resist any change, they will.”