Are you overworked? It is common in the solo and small law setting and it leaves many frustrated because there is just not enough time to do it all. Many attorneys feel pressure to take on more and more work because they don’t know when the next client will walk through their door. The problem is that more clients doesn’t just mean more lawyering. It means more administrative work, billing, and managing client demands. This results with attorneys either becoming so busy that they are no longer effective or they reach a breaking point. There is a bright side — if you improve your matter management you will have more time for lawyering and meeting client expectations.
Your Role as a Lawyer
Your ability to practice substantive law could be seen as a funnel. It is the lawyer’s job to digest a mountain of information about a client’s situation, and distill it down to a clear and manageable strategy. Attorneys operating at all levels of the funnel are bound to become overwhelmed, because they’re taking on far too much themselves. Lawyers need to improve matter management so they can focus their time and energy on the high value aspect of practicing law, the point at which the funnel is most narrow, when everything has to come together to achieve the client’s goal.
Delegate Non Lawyer Work
If your to-do list is becoming unmanageable, review your workload to determine what you can delegate and make a plan. There are several options to consider including hiring staff, outsourcing or contracting specific tasks or using virtual assistants. Once you determine what and who you will delegate to, you need to finalize how you will delegate and still be accountable for those tasks. Take the time to define and set expectations for the work that you delegate, considering quality expectations, as well as how you will manage the working relationship. If you aren’t clear on expectations you risk gravitating back to owning and completing the work yourself.
Automate and Streamline Administrative Tasks
If you are on a limited budget at your law firm, implementing change to automate and streamline manual administrative work will have the biggest payoff. To get started, you need to evaluate the manual, administrative work at your firm. Consider how you calculate legal deadlines, create client forms and documents, capture time, and generate invoices. Are those all manual processes? There are various technology solutions that exist to help automate these tasks and the one that many solo and small law firms can’t live without is cloud-based legal practice management. In fact, according to a Blue Hill Research study, attorneys were able to save up to 8 hours a month and require 40% less support staff when using a cloud-based legal practice management solution.
If you need a new approach to matter management at your firm, use this Matter Management Checklist for Overworked Attorneys. It is full of good advice and best practices to streamline your matter management.