Three Strategies for Busy Attorneys

As attorneys we are constantly juggling responsibilities—properly prioritizing tasks, being timely getting back to clients, meeting deadlines, and so on. The best strategies for an effective practice include managing your time, setting client expectations, and making the most of the time you have. 

Managing Your Time

• Pomodoro—The Pomodoro Technique, also known as the tomato timer, breaks down your day into smaller, focused periods—usually 25 minutes of focused work followed by a 5-minute break and a longer 30-minute break after 4 hours of work. Though the specific timeframes are less important, this technique can help users tackle tasks that seem daunting by forcing them to break it into smaller parts, take care of jobs that are less interesting by setting a time-limit and reward, and supply a natural break allowing you to move between different tasks over the course of the day.
• Time-Blocking—Another popular option is time-blocking, where you assign nearly every minute of your working day to specific tasks or group of tasks (for example, assigning 30 minutes for responding to emails). Time-blocking can help remove distractions from your day, as long as you have appropriately prioritized your tasks and blocked time for responding to any urgent issues that arise.

Setting Client Expectations 

• Responding to Communications—Setting client expectations from the outset regarding communication is key to ensuring happy clients and helping you manage your time. If clients expect email responses in minutes or hours, constantly checking your email will distract you from completing larger tasks. If clients are not hearing back from you and don’t know when they will, they will clog your inbox and voicemail with inquiries. You may want to consider setting aside specific periods at the beginning and end of each day to respond to emails and voicemails. You can communicate this clearly to clients and colleagues and not feel distracted by calls or emails outside of those periods.
• Explaining Timelines—Clients always believe it will take you mere moments to complete tasks in their case and that their trial will be next month. It’s important to clearly communicate realistic timelines to your clients regarding how long you expect tasks to take, how long the court process can take in your jurisdiction, and how long is reasonable to expect opposing parties to respond to correspondence, requests for information, and settlement proposals. Experience will help you gauge each of these timelines, and it is always better to under-promise (longer timelines) and over-deliver (shorter timelines).
• Making Appointments—If you are having trouble getting motivated to complete a client task within the promised timeframe, and the Pomodoro or time-blocking techniques aren’t working for you, try adding deadlines to your calendar or even scheduling a client appointment to go over the status of the task.

Making the Most of the Time You Have

• Delegating—Delegating tasks and responsibilities provides the dual benefit of freeing you up to focus on more complex and interesting tasks while also helping your colleagues and staff to develop their skills and become stronger practitioners themselves.
• Billing Contemporaneously for Everything—Billing contemporaneously for everything you do drastically reduces the amount of billable time lost in the ether, gives you the power and flexibility to courtesy-discount certain entries when finalizing the bill (and earn good will from the client when they see a discount), and helps clients gain a better understanding of how long various tasks take. I routinely have everyone bill everything they work on in a client’s case—even if it is just calendaring court deadlines and is ultimately not charged to the client—so the client knows we are hard at work on their case even when they don’t see it.
• Using AI—Of course there are many caveats to using AI, including not using identifying client information in your prompt, remembering to double and triple check all sources cited for the cited proposition, and understanding it’s horrible for the environment. You will also absolutely have to rewrite most, if not all, of what AI generates for you. That said, sometimes starting from a bad draft can get you going on a project more quickly than staring at a blank screen.