Managing a calendar well is essential to being a good litigator, but don’t go crazy.
When people talk about the qualities of good lawyers, one of the most repeated is “attention to detail.” I hate this. I don’t hate the opinion as I share it: a good lawyer has to be careful and pay attention to details others might miss. What I hate is how commonly I hear this quality mentioned while it seems that even more important, fundamental qualities essential to a good lawyer (such as integrity, good judgment, and willingness to work very hard) are not identified. Still, I acknowledge that what I’ll call a smaller skill like attention to detail is key to being a good lawyer.
Another smaller skill, also essential to being a good trial lawyer, is managing your schedule well. Most trial lawyers understand this and have some mechanism for calendar management, which must work for the individual lawyer. There is absolutely no one size fits all. I like to think that there are rules that all of must follow (e.g., don’t give up on cross examination), but we have to follow those rules with our own style (someone may do cross as well as me or better, but simply in a very different way). The same applies to calendaring: some use reminders and alerts on their phone up the wazoo; some have assistants help them while others never do; and some use post-its while other use fancy Moleskine journals.
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You need something and you need to do it. However, you also need not overdo it, something I see some trial lawyers do in a way that causes them stress.
As lawyers we generally enjoy the effort we put into schedule organization, but as noted in this title’s piece, don’t go crazy. I see some lawyers, especially younger ones, devote what becomes too much effort to working out every detail and quarter hour of their day, only to see such well-made plans go out the window because of an unexpected event. As colleagues of mine share virtually every single week at our meetings early on Monday where we discuss what we learned in the last week, we need to expect the unexpected. It’s part of the job (and a fun one) that we never know how our days will go. But then we can’t stress out devoting too much of our time and energy to planning out our weeks and days. Be detailed but be flexible.
How exactly we plan our time is a matter of style. But we do need to have some plan, and, as much as it may not be in our trial lawyer nature, a flexible one.
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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 [email protected].