As a small or solo law firm attorney, how can you get it all done?

As I sit down to write an article to answer this titular question, I find myself pondering the same riddle in my own life. As a solo attorney – or rather, an attorney in a law firm so small it only includes me and my wife – I am keenly aware of what needs to get done.

Time_&_Billing_300x250As I sit down to write an article to answer this titular question, I find myself pondering the same riddle in my own life.  As a solo attorney – or rather, an attorney in a law firm so small it only includes me and my wife – I am keenly aware of what needs to get done.  There are the obvious, lawyerly tasks like making court appearances, meeting or otherwise communicating with clients, drafting court documents, and researching.

But there are also a number of less glamorous chores that are only tangentially related to the practice of law, if at all, including creating and sending out invoices, managing your schedule, organizing your files, and otherwise keeping the lights on for your practice.  If you’re anything like me, you don’t feel that much like a lawyer when you spend your time doing these things.  But for lawyers in small law firms, they are often a necessity, especially if your firm doesn’t have full-time administrative help.

Perhaps the worst part isn’t that these things need to get done, but the fact that you need to spend as much of your time as possible doing actual lawyer stuff – you know, the stuff that generates income, which, in turn, means that you want to spend as little of your time as possible on anything else.

So we now revisit the same question: how can you get it all done?

I suppose this is the part where you expect that I have some kind of magic bullet to offer.  Sorry to disappoint, but I don’t.  Being shackled to the fetters of managing the operation of your law practice is paradoxically the price you pay for the freedom and independence of being in a small firm.

But just because there isn’t a cure-all doesn’t mean that there aren’t ways to make your life easier.  And while these recommendations may not be magic bullets, their efficacy shouldn’t be underestimated.  So let’s call them “magic arrows” instead.

Keep your information and paperwork organized

Sponsored

Although it may seem obvious and predictable advice, there’s a lot more to organization in your law practice than what you find when you look up the word in the dictionary.

After all, you’re tasked with managing not only professional, lawyerly duties like keeping client files ordered and secured, keeping up on your legal education requirements, tracking your billable hours, and keeping all of your deadlines straight, but also with maintaining an up-to-date contacts list, putting together client invoices, and paying your firm’s bills on time.

Given the lack of time that you likely experience, it’s unsurprising if you ever find yourself taking shortcuts on some of these organizational responsibilities.  But chances are that, had you taken any shortcuts – like writing a client’s number down on an errant sheet of paper that happened to be on your desk at the time, then failing to add it to your contacts list (because, hey, you’ll remember where that scrap of paper is, right?) – you’ll know that these shortcuts actually just make your life more difficult later (like when you spend 45 minutes looking for that piece of paper two days later).

What do I propose?  Yes, do the basics of organization, as detailed earlier.  But true organization – the kind that will save you time – is more than that.  It’s the kind of organization that must be considered in the context of lawyers’ special needs, and those looking to achieve this organization may wish to look to a practice management system specially designed for small law firms.

Free trial of Firm Central and Westlaw

Sponsored

Take your contacts list, for example: Instead of just traditionally organizing your database by name, you should organize it by client matter – and how that contact is related to the client matter.  In the course of many of your cases, you likely have encountered individuals that you will only have contacted a handful of times or less.  You add in all of that person’s contact information into your database, and you are able to easily locate the information throughout the course of the case as needed, but you never need it more than two or three times total.

Fast-forward several years: You see this name again in your contacts from time to time, but now you have completely forgotten who this person is and why he or she was important.  Now do this with 20 more such contacts, and you can see where a problem might emerge.  Your contacts list is now cluttered with unknowns that may be too important to remove from your directory.

Yet, tying each contact in some way to a larger matter helps you to find the information that you need right when you need it.  Additionally, notating the contact’s role in its associate client matter will prove invaluable if ever an issue arises down the road in a specific matter that requires you to find the right person to contact.

But organization clearly doesn’t end there.  After all, keeping your client files organized isn’t just a matter of individual convenience; it’s often a professional ethical obligation.  I would strongly recommend maintaining an electronic file for all of your client matters.  While your state requirements may vary on whether you also need to maintain a physical file, you should always have an electronic one.  I could wax on about the virtues of electronic client files and so forth, but there are plenty of other resources that have devoted far greater space that already do that.

The point is that electronic files – which should all be converted into searchable data if they aren’t already – make your job as an attorney far easier.

These two examples are only the beginning of thinking about how to organize your information in the best ways possible.  The important aspect to focus on isn’t maintaining strict organization per se, but rather on minimizing the amount of time wasted on locating and retrieving the desired information in your practice-.  One such method of achieving this is through a practice management platform, such as Firm Central by Thomson Reuters, with a fully indexed global search function, which allows you to locate what you need to in a matter of seconds.

Visit Firm Central Practice Management   for more information

 

Maintain a schedule for more than just deadlines, meetings, and appearances

It goes without saying that lawyers should maintain a calendar to keep all of their important dates straight so that no meetings, deadlines, or court appearances are missed.  Keeping an up-to-date and comprehensive calendar with all of the upcoming events certainly ties in with organization, but as you may have guessed, calendars should be used for more than just organization.

To illustrate, let’s say that you look at your calendar for the next two weeks, and you see multiple events, such as a filing deadline for a brief or a court appearance.  Now what may not be on your calendar is what preparation is necessary before the scheduled event occurs, nor how much time that preparation will take.  But if you were to integrate these elements into your calendaring system, it would become an effective time management routine.

I’ll be more specific: You just found out that you have to file a response for a specific case within 30 days.  Instead of only marking that deadline on your calendar, also plan out exactly what must be done by the time the deadline occurs – for example, which specific documents you need to prepare, and how and to whom they are to be delivered – and make a note about it within the deadline event itself (this is assuming you are using an electronic calendar system).  Finally, plan out how long each item of preparation will take, and, looking at other events on your calendar that occur within a week or so before the deadline in question, plan out when you will accomplish each of those tasks.

Perhaps you already have an accurate sense for how much preparation time is needed for any given event on your calendar.  If that’s the case, you have my envy, because I, like many others, tend to underestimate the amount of time that a specific task is going to consume.  This causes me to overbook my time – leading to an even greater loss of time for other things in my life not related to my profession.

We all can be inefficient with our time, and that’s acceptable only if we have time to spare.  Unfortunately, time is something most attorneys can’t afford to waste, and a comprehensive calendar system can cut back on these inefficiencies to a significant degree.  Firm Central’s Deadline Assistant is one such option to help manage your calendar in the best way possible.

Manage your matters and case deadlines electronically with Firm Central Deadline Assistant:  FirmCentral.com

Centralization is key

Organization is important, as is time management.  But the greatest organization and time management schemes often fail to simplify the extensive information and records that  are an innate part of any law practice.

And although the copious files and information that lawyers must process may be a necessary part of the profession, the time wasted in jumping between different programs and platforms when working with these files isn’t.  As always, I’ll provide an example to better illustrate my point: If you’re operating a paperless office (or as paperless as ethics rules allow), you may have a platform for managing your client files, another for managing your calendar, yet another for managing your billing, and another for managing your contacts.  And we haven’t even gotten into the potentially even more platforms used for emails, legal research, and document drafting.

This dispersion not only eats away at your time because of having to constantly switch between two, three, or more platforms when working on any given task; you also may have to put additional effort to bridge the translation between the two platforms.  For example, your time and billing platform may be able to track the amount of time that you spend on a given client matter and generate accurate invoices, but does it automatically add that invoice to your file management system?  Can it interface with your contacts database and/or email client to send out the invoice to the client?  Can your word processor automatically save and upload a document to your document management service?  Can you bring quotes and citations directly from your online legal research platform into your word processor?

These hypothetical situations may well be a reality for many reading this – if they are using a centralized law practice management software that actually does integrate all of these features into one platform – such as Firm Central.  Otherwise, you may be stuck bridging the gap yourself, which takes extra time.  Granted, that extra time may be de minimis for a individual instance, but multiple such instances will snowball into a colossal waste of time in the long run.

Plus, centralized platforms allow you to waste less time on the small things – which, although require only minimal effort on an individual basis, can eat away at both your patience and sanity after a while.

As I mentioned above, these recommendations aren’t going to fix everything and magically create untold levels of new time and availability.  But they can help you to save time wherever you can – not to mention also keeping your sanity together as well as possible.  And that may just be enough for most of us.

To try a truly integrated platform of practice management and Westlaw legal research system for free visit:   Firm Central Free Trial

 

Jeremy Byellin- Attorney At Law

Jeremy Byellin is an attorney practicing in the areas of family law and estate planning.

He lives in the Minneapolis area with his wife, who is also an attorney, and his son and daughter.

In his spare time, he enjoys running and being outdoors.