Written by Natalie Bogdanski, Family Lawyer Magazine contributor
Time management for family lawyers differs greatly from other types of law. Lawyers in many practice areas are known for working around the clock, but being a family law attorney carries a unique type of relentless stress. Your cases are not a matter of life and death, nor are you representing a defendant on trial for capital murder – but there is more emotional labor involved in being a divorce and child custody lawyer than there is in many other practice areas of the law.
Tips on Effective Time Management for Family Lawyers
Unlike in a personal injury case, your clients are not trying to rebuild their lives after a devastating incident that happened months or years earlier. With family law cases, the emotional and financial injuries get worse with every bank statement, every email from your ex, or every time the children come back from your ex’s house with stories about the infuriating things that happened there. Time management for family lawyers is the key to the success of your family law firm and to maintaining your sanity while providing effective legal representation for your clients. Here are some things to consider for effective time management.
Communicate With Clients by Text Message When Appropriate
Divorce cases require frequent communication between clients and their attorneys, especially when clients are preparing their financial disclosures in an effort to finalize their divorce or enable the state to calculate the child support amount. If you answer the phone every time a client calls, you will never get any work done, and you will constantly be distracted from your own family obligations. Instead, it is easier to answer some questions from current clients by text messages, the kinds of questions that naturally arise between in-person meetings.
Text messages are quicker than phone calls because you do not have to worry about small talk and the digressions that come so naturally to some clients. You also do not have to worry about the formalities that go along with email, but the client will still have a written record of your instructions. Some communications are most appropriate for phone conversations or email, so save your phone time and email time for those communications.
Set Out Blocks of Time for Tasks That Require Concentration
Multi-tasking is a constant source of stress for lawyers, and it is not a source of productivity. Decide, before your day starts, which tasks you will do and when. If you can answer last night’s client text messages while riding the train to work, then do so. If you live in a city that lacks public transportation, you can even do this by having your Apple Car Play read you the messages and dictating your responses. Save the quietest times for the most mentally challenging work and take breaks in between. After you have finished your in-person meetings for the day, walk to the bakery down the street from your office, buy coffee and a pastry, and then go back to your office to sit and do the day’s most difficult work while everyone else leaves the city. While everyone else is battling the rush hour traffic, eat your keto cheesecake (or whichever favorite treat helps you write) and draft that prenuptial agreement, that motion for contempt of court, or that petition to modify a parenting plan based on the meetings you had with your clients earlier that day.
Know Which Work to Outsource and Which to Automate
“Automate, delegate, eliminate” is a popular time management strategy. You can save a lot of stress by acknowledging which work does not need to be done, but after you do that, what is left will probably still leave everyone at your law firm with a heavy workload. Outsourcing tasks can save you time if you do it right; otherwise, it creates a big hassle as your law firm’s employees try to fix the work that the freelancers did. You can automate tasks like billing notices to free up the administrative staff of your law firm for more human tasks like answering questions from clients. You can also let clients schedule appointments through shared online calendars.
It is a good idea to outsource the composition of your marketing content. Your law firm staff has better things to do than write blog posts to post on your website each week and find appropriate public domain images to illustrate them. Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) are their own skills, and there are people out there who excel in them. You should outsource your content marketing tasks so that your staff can concentrate on the tasks that require insider knowledge of your law firm.
Sources
https://caretlegal.com/blog/attorney-time-management-tips-for-peak-productivity/
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