Efficient Strategies for Delivering Fast-Paced Work

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Hey everyone, Scott Benton here. How are you? I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast where we help you easily transition from a law school student into your professional career as an attorney and where we make the practice of law fun. And today we’re going to take a look at efficient strategies for delivering fast paced work.

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Today in order to help assist your overall use of the success cycle, which is what we talk about on this podcast all day long, we’re going to take a look at efficient strategies for delivering Fast paced work. When we talk about the success cycle on this podcast, we talk about the three stages, which are G sheets, which stands for get it done.

Sheets otherwise known as the to do list. You can think about it as the to do list. We also talk about performing the legal services. And then we talk about logging your time, otherwise known as billing for your services When it comes to the performing legal services portion, we’re always looking for efficiencies to help streamline the delivery of completed legal services, which is really easy to get bogged down in.

You want to make sure that doesn’t happen. Now, many standard legal services should take a certain amount of [00:02:00] time to complete in theory, especially services like filing a petition with a courthouse. Now, when it comes to discovery or depositions, those are probably a little bit more case dependent, so we can’t just stick on a point 4 or a point 6 onto those.

It’s gonna be dependent on what the needs of the case are. As you’re working on your day by day tasks and delivering legal services on your cases, especially when you have deadlines, then we definitely want to be able to focus on efficient strategies for delivering fast paced work. As new attorneys face large volumes of research materials they need to manage and they need to wade through, and with a clock running on those deliverables, meaning that they’re usually under a lot of pressure.

We want to highlight the importance of organizing your legal research to improve your productivity and your effectiveness. Now, organizing your legal research can drastically reduce the time that you spend searching for relevant case law or statutes and other critical documents that you need. In fact, your ability to [00:03:00] locate a key precedent or a brief and minutes can literally be the difference between meeting a deadline or not meeting a deadline.

So you want to make sure that you have all the necessary information readily available for drafting motions. or during litigation. If the law firm you’re working for is well organized, then they’re going to follow conventions in how they organize their case files on their main drive, so you can easily find anything that you need.

Now the problem is, if they’re disorganized, then you yourself are going to have to create your own organized case files. If the firm is well organized, and you’re going to find that most of them are, then you’re going to see that each case file is organized with subfolders or items such as statutes, case law, secondary sources, and notes.

Things like that for instance. For individual files, the firm will use descriptive naming conventions that you really want to understand and you want to use them exactly as [00:04:00] instructed. That’s going to be important later on if you or anybody else in your firm is looking for something specific. So if you know the naming conventions, you’ll be able to find documents that you need efficiently because if you know that for instance all 850 petitions will have the name 850 in the title.

Then that’s going to make the search terms that you use really easy to find exactly what it is you need. So make sure you understand how to use popular legal research databases. Now you want to make sure that you understand how to use popular legal research databases like CEB, or LexisNexis, or Westlaw, to conduct your research.

If you have to take courses on how to become extremely knowledgeable about using these platforms, then definitely take those courses, until you’re not only proficient with those platforms, but also that you’re so good, you’re practically teaching everyone in the field. to accelerate their own use of those research databases as well.

Now if you move from one law firm to another, the new [00:05:00] law firm that you join may use a legal research database that you’re simply unfamiliar with. In that case, you want to make sure that you have your mentor at the new law firm go through, in detail, how to look up information on the new platform that you’re going to need.

And whenever you have questions, don’t wait very long before asking someone how to do something.

Delivering legal services means you’re under a lot of pressure at all times to get things done, and wasting time falls very far outside of that priority. You want to be quick, nimble, accurate, and efficient. Now you want to also stay organized under tight deadlines. So first and foremost, you want to break bigger projects down into smaller, bite sized chunks. A big project is going to feel overwhelming, and it’s going to feel like it’s impossible to complete. But smaller tasks that are part of that bigger project are going to be easier to take because you’re taking them step by step, small piece by small piece.

Give yourself a clear goal for each section in that [00:06:00] process so you know when it’s done. And use time management tools like a to do list or task trackers or calendar reminders to keep yourself on track. This is a key component to the success cycle and in fact it’s the first step in that model, so make sure that you’re using an effective to do list Where you list out absolutely everything that you need to do and then order all of those items in terms of their priority and start knocking off your to do list items one by one until you get through all of them.

Be an absolute machine when it comes to this. You want to look at your to do list, pick the next item, perform that task, Bill for your time and then get back to the to do list and do the next item and just keep going.

You also want to bookmark your key sources, so if you have documents that you’re going to need to go back to later on, make sure you keep a list of all of those links.

And if you find an article or a citation in a legal research database, then make sure to bookmark those pages as well so you can reference and return to them immediately if [00:07:00] you need to. Keep your research continuously organized and up to date and review your folders regularly in order to remove or archive any outdated documents that you don’t need any longer.

And make sure you’re keeping in regular contact with your senior attorneys to make sure that you’re not off track. Remember that senior attorneys have generally amassed just an enormous wealth of knowledge that they’re happy to share with you to help you bypass any potential pitfalls. In fact, they’ll help you a lot. So make sure not to overlook their tremendous value to learn everything you can about the law firm that you’re working for. They’ll make sure you’re not heading down blind alleys or getting overloaded with unnecessary research. They’re going to keep you properly on track.

So in addition to understanding how to operate every single system in the law firm that you work for, and. to the point of extreme efficiency, which may include taking workshops on utilizing all the tools that are available to you. You also want to work on organizing your own personalized [00:08:00] systems for completing legal research in a way to improve your own efficiency, your own productivity, and your own case management skills.

Part of your success is going to be in figuring out which methods work best for you. The long term benefits of mastering research organizing, which includes smoother project completion, delivering better client services and building an enhanced professional reputation with your skills is going to dramatically catapult you into higher and higher levels of success in your career as an attorney.

I’m Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. Thank you so much for checking out this episode. Now, if you like this podcast and you’d like to get more information about us, you can always go to our website, which is classroom2courtroom. com. That’s classroom, the number two courtroom.

com, where you can send us a message to keep in touch with us. You can even inquire about our seasonal associate programs that we have available for law school students. You can apply to come and work with us if you like. And as always, don’t forget to like [00:09:00] share and subscribe to stay on top of all of our latest episodes.

And until next time, we hope you’ll join us in making the world a better place. One client at a time.