Category Archives: Time Management

Ways to Improve Your Performance.

16 Sunday Sep 2018

Posted by in Billing, Diligence, Job Performance, Law Office Management, Legal Ethics, Management, Time Management

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Associates: Top 10 Questions to Ask Your Supervising Attorney, by Cordell Parvin, Cordell Parvin Blog (with hat tip to William Statsky)

https://bit.ly/2oPQqmf

Let’s go with the premise that, whenever a supervisor gives you an assignment, you are familiar with office procedures, court rules, or whatever basics you need to perform the work. This post has two sections: (1) questions to ask before starting an assignment, and (2) questions to ask after completion.

Even if you already know some or all of the answers to the first, asking the second set of questions will help you get valuable feedback to improve your performance. – CCE

“[A]t the Beginning of a Project:

  1. When would you like me to complete this project?
  2. Describe what you have been told to do and then ask: Have I missed anything?
  3. How many hours are you expecting me to take on the project?
  4. Are there any materials I should review?
  5. Would it be helpful if I gave you my initial findings/conclusions?

At the end of the project:

  1. Have I covered all the areas you wanted?
  2. Is there anything more I can do to help you with this?
  3. Can you give me some feedback on my work?
  4. Are there any areas where you think I could improve?
  5. Can I help you with any other projects now?”

Focus!

06 Thursday Sep 2018

Posted by in Law Office Management, Office Procedures, Time Management

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New Book on Attention Focusing, by Scott Fruehwald, Legal Skills Prof Blog

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legal_skills/2018/09/new-book-on-attention-focusing.html

In the legal profession, multi-tasking is considered a required skill for attorneys and staff alike. Depending on the project, there are times when I want – or need – a chunk of uninterrupted time to perform that particular task. At other times, I can easily juggle several things at once. It depends on the task and how many distractions are competing for my attention.

There is an opposite point of view that multi-tasking is a myth. Rather than multi-tasking, they advocate that focusing on one thing at a time is the most efficient use of your time.

This difference of opinion about multi-tasking is why this post caught my eye. We all have days when we wonder whether our brain cells decided to commit mass suicide without warning us. Conversely, there are times when we are solidly in the zone and knock out one assignment after the other.

Professor Fruehwald’s post tweaked my curiosity about a person’s short-term memory and how it works, as well as the title of Chris Bailey’s book, “Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction.” Looks like an excellent read. -CCE

One of the most important aspects of being an effective learner is attention focusing.  Short-term memory has only about 4 to 7 slots, and an effective learner focuses her attention on the task at hand.  Chris Bailey has just published a self-help book on attention focusing for a popular audience: Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction (2018).

From the New York Times:

‘Hyperfocus’ teaches readers to control their limited capacity to focus on and process things in the moment, which he calls our ‘attentional space.’ It turns out our brain’s scratchpad is pretty small and can only hold a handful of tasks at a time. When one of those tasks is complex — like putting together a business proposal or taking care of a toddler — that number dwindles down to one or two.

Managing Distractions.

06 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by in Law Office Management, Office Procedures, Time Management

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How to Manage Interruptions and Distractions at Work, by Nicola Leach, Alliance Work Partners

https://www.awpnow.com/main/2016/07/07/manage-distractions-at-work

I admit that one of the things I like about working as a paralegal is that I never know exactly what will happen every day. I may have a mental list of target goals I want to accomplish that day. I may even get to start on at least one. But, emails, telephone calls, co-workers, demands of your clients, and unexpected and last-minute assignments often interrupt my work day. It’s what I call a normal day at the office.

I rely on checklists and our office software to keep me apprised of upcoming deadlines and when an average project has turned into a critical one. Prioritizing what comes first can be a challenge. But the biggest challenge I face is interruptions and distractions that eat away at my productivity.

If you have your own office, you can shut your door. If office drama occurs, heading back to your assigned work area and focusing on anything but the uproar is always the best policy.

But, remember that this door swings both ways. If you have no door to shut or share space with someone else, you must remember that you are not alone. Whenever you talk on the phone, mumble to yourself (I often talk to my computer as if it will pay attention to my demands), or make unnecessary noise, YOU have become the distraction.

Checklists work best for me to be prioritize my work load and make sure that nothing falls through the cracks. Your case management software might have built-in checklists you can use. If not, write your own. What works for me may not work for you. Regardless of your method, be faithful and turn it into a habit rather than a chore. -CCE

Need to Turn Your iPad Into Second Monitor? There’s an App for That.

22 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Law Office Management, Legal Technology, Technology, Time Management, Windows

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This App Turns Your iPad Into a Second Monitor, by Robert Ambrogi, LawSites Blog

http://www.lawsitesblog.com/2016/08/app-turns-ipad-second-monitor.html

When you start using two monitors, many of us are hooked. My favorite feature is the ability to drag documents and websites back and forth. Imagine having a spreadsheet or other document open on one screen, and the document or source of the information you need on the other screen. If you need to keep an eye on email or your docketing calendar, you can keep it up on one screen and work using the other. (If you do not have a second monitor, you can access your other open windows using Alt-Tab.)

I can understand why Mr. Ambrogi is excited about this app. -CCE

I am so dependent on a second monitor that I no longer feel productive without one. That can be a problem when I am away from my office. It is especially a problem when I travel and am hunkered down in a hotel room with important work to get done.

Then I discovered Duet Display, the app that turns your iPad into a monitor.

App Honey Pot for Lawyers and Other Legal Professionals.

13 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by in Apps, Clouds, Document Retention, Dropbox, Evernote, Google, Law Office Management, Legal Technology, Management, Marketing, Office Procedures, Technology, Time Management

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50+ Apps and Services to Manage and Grow Your Law Practice, by Tim Baran, Legal Productivity Blog

http://bit.ly/1O8iPGC

[H]ere’s a list culled from feedback from solos and small firm lawyers and administrators, my own experience, and lots of research, that will help to optimize the day-to-day management and growth of your practice. . . .

Continue reading →

Retooling and Law Office Management Tips From Jim Calloway.

15 Tuesday Sep 2015

Posted by in Economics, Law Office Management, Management, Marketing, Office Procedures, Technology, Time Management

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Effective Client Intake and the Rise of Firm Pricers, by Jim Calloway, Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog

http://tinyurl.com/pfxnpk5

Effective client intake and law firm pricing may not seem like closely connected topics, but they are connected and will be even more connected in the future. My column in the September Law Practice Magazine is Effective Client Intake and the Rise of Firm Pricers.

Law firms are retooling and reevaluating many of their operations and procedures. How long has it been since you have taken at look at your new client (or new matter for an existing client) intake procedures? . . .

Continue reading →

App Resources – Save Time and Plug In!

27 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by in Apple, Apps, Cell Phones, Emails, iPhones, Law Office Management, Legal Technology, Time Management

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The Beginner’s Guide to Putting the Internet to Work for You: How to Easily Save 60 Minutes Every Day, by Belle Beth Cooper, Buffer Blog (with hat tip to Shawn J. Roberts)

http://tinyurl.com/ncu683v

So many great ideas and useful apps, even if you are not tech savvy. This is stuff you can, and should, use right now. -CCE

One of the most fun and useful things I’ve been doing lately is automating small processes I do all the time. It took me a while to work up the courage to dive into automation, as it always seemed like a really difficult, technical thing to do, which should be left to programmers.

Luckily, there are lots of tools being created lately to make automation easier for those of us without a solid understanding of how our computers really work. . . .

Continue reading →

Big Brother Pilot Program Comes To Watchell Lipton Rosen & Katz.

22 Saturday Aug 2015

Posted by in Law Office Management, Legal Ethics, Legal Technology, Management, Office Procedures, Time Management

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Wachtell Lipton To Start Tracking Employee Work Status, by Casey Sullivan, BNA Bloomberg Blog

https://bol.bna.com/wachtell-lipton-to-start-tracking-employee-work-status/

This firm has a philosophy – treat its lawyers like grown ups with no billable hour requirement and other perks. Now they appear to have a problem finding their attorneys.

Who gets the job of tracking the attorneys? Their assistants, of course. Will this encourage a great working relationship between the assistants and their supervising attorneys? Probably not.

How long do you think this pilot program will last, and will other firms follow their example? -CCE

Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz will start a pilot program next week, requiring its assistants to report the status and location of the firm’s attorneys each morning, according to an internal memo leaked to the legal blog Above the Law.

Still unknown: how Wachtell plans to use the information it gathers?

From the memo: ‘The lack of awareness of the status and/or location of our colleagues results in staffing and work-related complications and other concerns.’

It also explained the process. The assistants would have an icon on their computers that would include a variety of options, such as ‘working from home,’ ‘traveling on business,’ and ‘leave of absence,’ and they will be required to input the status and location of their assigned attorneys. . . .

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Let’s Think About Going Paperless.

19 Friday Jun 2015

Posted by in Economics, File Naming Conventions, Law Office Management, Legal Ethics, Legal Technology, Office Procedures, Scanners, Technology, Technology, Time Management

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How One Law Firm Went Paperless: An Interview with Andrew Kucera, by Tim Baran, Rocket Matter

http://tinyurl.com/noy2suz

For years, law firms have talked about going “paperless.” It took some time to catch on. Scanners were sometimes more trouble than they were worth. It took money and many hours to convert all the files to a paperless system. It sounded like a good idea, but not everyone was convinced.

Things have changed. These days, going paperless makes good sense and good economics. No more filing or indexing pleadings? I can live with that.

This post from Rocket Matter makes good sense. If you decide to go that route, do not start until you look into file naming conventions. Pick one that is logical and easy to understand. Now you are on your way. -CCE

While putting together the Paperless Law Office E-Book, we thought, who better to learn from than a firm who went through the process? So we interviewed Andrew Kucera who was instrumental in helping move six-person Cuttone & Kucera, PC (now, Cuttone & Associates), a real estate and business law firm in Fresno, California, to a paperless operation. . . .

Continue reading →

If You Still Enter Your Billable Time On Paper, This Post Is For You!

16 Saturday May 2015

Posted by in Economics, Law Office Management, Technology, Time Management

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Those Hated Timesheets – Are You Still Using Them?, by Jim Calloway, Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog

http://www.lawpracticetipsblog.com/2015/05/those-hated-timesheets.html

“Most lawyers hate filling out timesheets to record their billable time. Lawyers are also not perfect at Time sheet accomplishing this, leading every company with a time and billing product to tout how much money can be made if only every bit of ‘lost’ time was recorded. But the practice of recording time by hand on paper timesheets really does need to go the way of the Dodo bird.

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‘[T]here’s one observation that I can make today with a great deal of certainty. A lawyer entering their time by using pen and ink on a paper timesheet is employing an inefficient practice that should no longer be used. You need to enter your time digitally. This means you.’ . . .

Continue reading →

No Question About It – Bad Legal Writing Squanders Your Money.

01 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by in Bad Legal Writing, Economics, Law Office Management, Legal Writing, Legalese, Management, Plain Language, Readability, Time Management

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Face It — Bad Legal Writing Wastes Money, by Matthew Salzwedel, The Lawyerist Blog

https://lawyerist.com/60599/face-it-bad-legal-writing-wastes-money/

A recent article on FindLaw.com called Five Ways Attorneys Waste Money claimed that attorneys can cut clients’ costs by avoiding needless motions, staffing cases leanly, focusing on the important issues, avoiding petty spats with the opposition, and being smart about when to settle.

But the article ignored the most important way attorneys can save money for their firms and clients: by learning how to write in plain English.

Most attorneys don’t believe that writing style matters. They might concede that writing in plain English can be aesthetically pleasing to the reader; but they also say that it’s not worth the time to learn how to do it because there’s no evidence that writing in plain English saves time or money.

But these attorneys ignore what legal-writing experts have taught — and what the empirical evidence has shown — for more than 50 years: that plain English saves time and money by increasing the ability of readers to understand and retain what they have read. . . .

Continue reading →

I Have A Little List . . . .

23 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by in Law Office Management, Management, Marketing, Office Procedures, Time Management

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40 Essential Rules Of Client Management (Collected Over 10 Years), by Matthew Stibbe, Bad Language Blog

http://tinyurl.com/kuovcje

For the last decade, I’ve been compiling a list of ‘rules’ for client management based on very personal, subjective reactions to things that happened to me, mainly in the business world. I was partly inspired by NASA’s 100 rules for project managers.

I always meant it to be very personal and some of the rules relate to very specific things that happened to me. But I realised that with proper scrubbing it might be interesting for you too. . . .

Jim Calloway’s New Legal Technology Column – This Will Be A “Must Read!”

11 Wednesday Feb 2015

Posted by in Law Office Management, Legal Technology, Technology, Time Management

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It’s Time To Love Technology, by Jim Calloway, Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog

http://www.lawpracticetipsblog.com/2015/01/ime-to-love-technology.html

Lawyers tend to have a love/hate relationship with technology. Of course, that’s often true for any of us who use today’s technology for our work. But for many lawyers, these feelings are quite pronounced and, without offering any amateur psychological diagnosis, I feel many members of the legal profession evidence a split personality when using technology.

So begins my column, It’s Time To Love Technology, in the January/February issue of Law Practice Magazine. I know that statement is easier for me to say, having an interest in technology rather than the very-typical lawyer aversion to technology. But it is time, past time actually, to be updating to technology-based digital work flows. It is time to embrace the fact that the tools of our trade are mainly technology-based tools. We would certainly judge others who did not know how to use the basic tools of their trade properly. It is time. I appreciate that you are too busy and think you don’t have the time.

But, as I noted in my column:

If you are billing a client for four hours to do something that could be done in 20 minutes, you are not doing right by your law practice or your client.

It’s Almost The First Of The Year – Time For Strategic Planning Meeting!

25 Thursday Dec 2014

Posted by in Disaster Preparedness, Law Office Management, Management, Marketing, Office Procedures, Technology, Time Management

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Leadership for Lawyers: How to Conduct a Strategic Planning Meeting, by Larry Port, Legal Productivity

http://tinyurl.com/o8txfh9

Your office may run perfectly – or so you think. We all have room for improvement. The same goes for the workplace. You may feel that, if there are any changes needed, you’ll make that decision. Fair enough. But is it possible that someone else at your office may have an idea you haven’t considered? You won’t know unless you ask. -CCE

What I’m about to ask you to do may initially seem like madness for an hourly lawyer, but I argue that it’s madness NOT to do it.

For the love of all that’s holy, PLEASE spend a day or two (even three) a year, locked in a room away from your office with the most important people in your law firm.

You need a yearly planning meeting like the one I describe below, and without it you’re spinning in circles without a navigation system. You won’t know where you’re going or when you’ve arrived.

Your annual planning meeting is the most critical conversation you will have all year for your law firm. When well-executed, you will emerge with a blueprint for the future direction of your firm. You’ll lay out concrete initiatives and goals that will, in turn, drive quarterly plans, which trickle down to your everyday to-do list.

Thought of in reverse, every activity you engage in on a daily basis should support a quarterly objective which is derived from the road map you draw in your annual offsite meeting. . . .

Jeff Richardson’s Latest for iPhones and Ipads.

26 Saturday Jul 2014

Posted by in Android Phones, Apple, Apps, Cell Phones, iPad, iPhones, Law Office Management, Legal Technology, Tablets, Technology, Time Management

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In the news, by Jeff Richardson, iPhone J.D. Blog

http://www.iphonejd.com/iphone_jd/2014/07/apple-2014-q3.html

In this version of Jeff Richardson’s “In the news,” we get a wide variety of iPhone and iPad candy. There is  information about Apple’s new partnership with IBM, smart watches, making the most of Wi-Fi on an iPhone or iPad, apps to track billable hours and listen to podcasts, the iStick – a new thumb drive with a USB and Lightning connector to transfer files between a computer and an iPad without having to use a cloud (a bit pricey for my budget), and Touch ID – a fingerprint scanner for iPhone 5s.

For those of you already in football mode, Jeff shows us how to subscribe to NFL Sunday Ticket from any iOS device for $200.

If you are a hiker, you may be interested in a new device that lets you connect to another iPhone or Android device up to 50 miles away even when there is no cell or Wi-Fi Service. You may think of other ways this kind of thing would be handy.  It is nice when traveling abroad because it will allow you to remain in touch with another GoTenna user without having to pay the high international cell roaming fees.

If you think that no one hears you, send an email to Apple COE Tim Cook. Someone sent an email about the quality of the music played while waiting on hold with Apple. Mr. Cook read the email, and fixed it. -CCE

The Reason Why You Should Use Evernote.

11 Sunday May 2014

Posted by in Evernote, Law Office Management, Legal Technology, Technology, Time Management

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A Great Free Guide for Utilizing Evernote, by Jim Calloway, Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog

http://www.lawpracticetipsblog.com/2014/05/great-evernote-guide.html

Here’s a great explanation of why you need to use Evernote.

‘Evernote is software that is a digital extension to your biological memory. Remembering ideas becomes trivial….The intellectual demands on professional life can be overwhelming. Great minds are best deployed to the intractable problems to hand. But life is made up of lots of little things that have to be remembered. Evernote stops you wasting effort on remembering all those little things, and liberates your imagination.’

That explanation was written by Philippe Doyle Gray, a barrister from Sydney, Australia. I was privileged to sit in on the session he taught at ABA TECHSHOW on How to Optimize Evernote. He is now sharing his paper and his training videos on how to use Evernote with the world. Sometimes a picture, or a short video, really is worth a thousand words. Check out his online collection of Evernote resources for lawyers. We believe that Philippe was the first Austrailian to give a presentation for ABA TECHSHOW and my guess is that this will not be his last time. . . .

Jim Calloway And The ABA TECHSHOW.

05 Saturday Apr 2014

Posted by in Law Office Management, Legal Blogs, Legal Technology, Management, Marketing, Technology, Time Management, Using Social Media

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ABA TECHSHOW 2014 – Interview with The TECHSHOW Chair, by Jim Calloway, Jim Calloway’s Law Practice Tips Blog

http://tinyurl.com/khy3wwj

If you are interested in legal technology and law office management and you don’t know about Jim, it’s time to get acquainted. Jim Calloway is the Director of the Management Assistance Program of the Oklahoma Bar Association.  He is a nationally recognized expert, and the recognition is well deserved. Among other things, he produces, with Sharon Nelson, The Digital Edge: Lawyers and Technology, a monthly podcast. You will also find his articles on the ABA’s and Oklahoma Bar Association’s websites.

In this post, he shares an interview with Techshow Chair, Natalie R. Kelly, 60 Sites in 60 Minutes lineup, the ABA Journal article on the program, and 60 sites list. Really good stuff. -CCE

How to Stop Procrastinating And Top Time Management Tips From The Experts.

07 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by in Law Office Management, Time Management

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Digital Edge Podcast – Time Management for Lawyers, by Jim Calloway, Jim Calloway’s Practice Tips Blog

http://tinyurl.com/kuandok

Meg Spencer Dixon pulled three consecutive all-nighters before she began pursuing time management as a career. Now, she is a consultant in task management for legal professionals. In this edition of  The Digital Edge – Lawyers and Technology podcast, Time Management for Lawyers, Sharon Nelson and Jim Calloway invite Dixon to discuss her top tips for legal professionals looking to master project management, how to stop procrastinating, and more.