Delegate As Soon As Possible As Much As You Responsibly Can

Wherever you work, as you grow in your career, learn to delegate as quickly as you can to lawyers and other professionals you ensure can handle the work.

Wherever you work, as you grow in your career, learn to delegate as quickly as you can to lawyers and other professionals you ensure can handle the work. 

When I started as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, just under a year into the office (at the stage when our bureau chief not too affectionately called for all first-years or “rookies” like us the Summer of Hell), my caseload was fairly brutal. By the time that hot summer came along, with Giuliani’s police department arresting everyone in the world, I peaked at a caseload of 211 cases. It was a lot. But it was great as I learned tons every day.

I could not have handled it all without two sets of people: first, my excellent “trial preparation assistant,” or paralegal, who now happens to run the firm where I work, and the fantastic social workers in the Witness Aid Services Unit, who assisted the crime victims in our cases.

I’d like to think I did a great job. But, as I wrote, I could not have done so without delegating, and, in that case delegating to non-lawyers. And with my ridiculous caseload, there was simply no hope for me to do anything close to a good job without relying, heavily, on these non-lawyers.

This is a key to success for great lawyers: delegate, delegate, delegate. Delegate early in your career. Do so to non-lawyers (as long as they’re up to it) and be available as a resource if needed. Don’t focus on your belief that you’re the best one to do the job. Or, more precisely, don’t think that you’re the only one who can do the job as well as it needs to get done.

Perhaps you can do the work better, and faster, than a colleague can get the work done. That’s not the question. The question is how do you win for the client? And the long-term question is: how do you develop your practice, growing to do more challenging matters with clients that benefit from your increasing experience? One part of the answer is: delegate, delegate, delegate.

To be sure, you need to be a wise manager, as all lawyers must be. Delegate to the lowest-level staff member who is competent to do the job well, and who has the resources (including you or someone else as a supervisor) to tap into so that she may serve and win for the client.

Sponsored

But don’t be a self-centered, immature professional, thinking only you can do the work. Maybe—maybe—you are the best at the given task. However, your job is not to accomplish a particular task better than anyone else. Your job is to win for the client.  And if you’re as good as you think you are in that particular task that you can delegate (however little you may want to), your time is very likely better spent on a task that you can’t delegate.

Most good lawyering is done best as a team. That starts with a lawyer quarterbacking the team who knows to delegate early and often.


John Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.

Sponsored