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You Are Responsible For Controlling How Your Time Is Spent

Use good judgment to spend your time wisely and win for your clients.

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You don’t need to answer that email right now — or maybe you do. You probably don’t need to edit or add to that document you just received, just this second — or maybe you should. What you certainly must do is make the judgment call about how you spend your time so you can serve your clients.

Just under a year after I had started working as an assistant district attorney, I had a docket of over 220 cases. These were my cases and, while we had guidelines and bosses, these were my cases alone. No one else had the responsibility to move them except me. This was the 1990s. Giuliani was mayor. The police were making more arrests than they ever had. We were awash in cases (and it was frankly a blast). Just to try to keep track in this pre-cloud/pre-iPhone era, most of us had different colored pens which we used for entries in our calendar for our court deadlines and appearances — black for basic filings, green for motions, red for hearings and for trials. I generally started my day before 8:30 a.m. and, outside of Friday, on a weekday I was always in the office well past 10 p.m., besides working most weekends most of the time.

The point is that it was a busy a time. And while I was that busy, I learned a great rule that helped me manage my time.

I never answered my phone.

Now, most lawyers would not put this out there as a general rule, especially if, like my colleagues and I, you hope that sometimes that phone is ringing with a new client. But I had to learn not to answer my phone when I was receiving dozens of calls after 5 p.m. while I was trying to prepare for the next day, speaking with witnesses, using the computer system developed in the 1950s to make requests for police officers to appear in court, and attending to a myriad other things. If I answered the phone every time a call came in, I would not have left at 10 p.m., I would have left at 1 a.m. And — at least as importantly — I would have many times interrupted important discussions with a colleague or simply thinking about my cases, trying to figure out the best way to proceed.

We don’t have a “Don’t Answer the Phone” rule at our firm, nor ever would we. But the lawyers do know that while they have a host of obligations to their clients, their supervisors, their colleagues, and others, when it comes to how they choose to spend their time, a lot of the discretion is in their hands, and only in their hands. Indeed, you can be a first-year lawyer, on your first day of work at some firm where someone tells you to get them a memo or pull a case or do whatever, and even then you still decide exactly how to accomplish that task. Yet, many lawyers don’t appreciate this discretion and will not really use their judgment as to how they should spend their time. What is important to get done today, or now? What needs devoted uninterrupted time? But, instead, many lawyers allow something else to determine their priorities. They do what they love the most, or hate the most, or what is due to a feared boss, or avoid the work for an ungrateful client, or have some other non-prudent means for determining what they will do.

A good lawyer cannot do this. A good lawyer must be a steward of her time, acknowledging the limits on her time, as well as her work obligations, in order to decide the best way to use that time. This prudential stewardship is a massively underrated good lawyer skill that winning lawyers learn to develop.

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Maybe when the phone rings (especially now that we have that invention of caller-ID, not available on Centre Street in Lower Manhattan two decades ago), you do need to pick up the phone. But maybe not. Use good judgment to spend your time wisely and win for your clients.

john-balestriereJohn 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.

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