How To Develop Good Time Management Skills For A Law Firm

For many different lawyers, it can feel like there aren’t enough hours in any day to complete everything you have to do. Time management is a serious struggle for most people across the globe, but in this profession, the effects hit differently. According to law.com, managing your time correctly has not only been proven to be more productive but also greatly impacts your return for well-invested time. Efficiency is the key to getting all your work done and satisfying your clients.

It is almost impossible to get efficient without even conquering the time management challenges you have. If you are in a law firm and want to have good time management skills, then the tips in this blog might prove useful:

1.   Use plenty of to-do lists and calendars

It can be far easier to manage your time when you see all of your tasks set into proper lists with time durations of when they are due. Almost every email platform is enabled with to-do lists or tasks. They are built in to automate with reminders that can pop up at the times appropriate for you so you never fall behind. You can also include attachments in most reminders so it eliminates the time it could take to search for them on your computer. If you have an upcoming event, to-do lists can come in handy with reminders that can be set days ahead of the occasion.

2.   Establishing Boundaries

As an legal profession it can be hard to say no. Clients will always have needs and it can feel nice to be needed as well. Taking on more tasks that you have appropriate time to handle is the fastest way to not only overload yourself but to also fall into chaos and have so much mis-managed time. Establishing boundaries is a very useful way to manage your time as it allows you to take a step back and evaluate what your firm has room to do as far as taking on new clients, meeting the demands of current clients and even working with current coworkers or employees. Establishing boundaries prevents the chaos that can come from over-committing and ensures that you are not investing more time and energy than you may have. If you take care of you then you are taking care of your clients as well.

3.   Don’t do everything

For many lawyers, in our experience, its a hard task to not do everything yourself. A ton of people across the globe have the mentality of "if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself!" We neither agree or disagree with this statement but we do know that doing everything yourself will eventually lead to burnout. This point also ties in with establishing boundaries. Take a step back to look at everything you do on a day-to-day basis and evaluate what tasks can be given to another attorney, a paralegal, and a legal assistant. A key indicator that you may be trying to do everything yourself is if you are completing more non-billable hours than you are billable. On a report from 2021 Legal Trends, it was shown that the average lawyer billed for only 2.5 hours out of their day. This is a clear indicator that much of their work could have been outsourced to a legal or administrative assistant to allow the lawyer more time to focus on the billables. Do not force yourself to handle everything. Give yourself a much needed break and outsource your administrative tasks to free up more time for you to work on the billable duties for your clients.

4.   Leave multi-tasking behind

It has been shown that multitaskers tend to have a 40% drop in productivity and 50% more errors when they try and do too many things at once. As a lawyer, we understand that your mind can race with everything that you have to do. However, for the sake of your clients, it might be in your best interest to utilize the to-do lists, and complete one task at a time. We get the appeal that comes with the possibility of efiling a document while returning a phone call and hole-punching important documents but, we've seen too many times that the wrong document can be efiled while the callback number was incorrectly dialed and the important documents have been hole-punched on the wrong side. To avoid these doable errors it might be the wise decision to take one step at a time and not only increase your productivity but decrease in the errors that could be made.

5.   Use technology

The sea of available apps or software out there designed to make our lives easier can help you work more efficiently. Platforms like Asana, Clockify, Monday and Clio have been well proven to increase in productivity and take a load off of multiple firm owners and employees shoulders. A greater benefit is that most of these apps are free to utilize. Having another source to take all that goes on in your mind and putting it down in a workflow can ease the burden you may carry while also organizing your firm to better navigate the workday. Take full advantage of all the advances in this field and conquer the day ahead of you! 

There, of course, are more ways to develop the best time management to help in a law firm. But, we hope that our top 5 ways prove useful to you and not only how productive you are but how free you can feel when your thoughts are more organized and your productivity has increased. If you'd like further insight to these 5 key points or would like to see more ways of how to develop good time management skills feel free to leave a comment below or send us a message! We wish you a 60% more productive week with 50% less errors!