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Scott Benton: Hey everyone, this is Scott Benton here. How are you? I am the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom Podcast. We are a podcast dedicated to law students and recent law students. people who have passed the bar, graduated law school, looking for their first job in the legal field. And we are here to help you make that transition easily from legal student to legal professional.
And we’re here to show you that it’s actually fun to do. So sit back today we’re going to answer the question of What Is The Fastest Way To Advance My Career?
What is the fastest way to advance my career? I’m sure that is something that you would like to know a lot of times when people start their legal career they get in at a certain level and they want to begin to climb that ladder and earn more and more money and if That’s the boat that you fall into then this episode is going to help you [00:01:00] figure out a strategy to get there and what we think is the fastest way.
Scott Benton: Now it turns out you have this tool that you can use at any time and we’ve talked about this on previous podcasts but we’re going to talk about it here as well because instead of discussing how it’s going to affect you case by case It’s we’re going to look at it from a different perspective which is how to advance your career. And this is a tool that you can use when you begin your legal career, this is a tool that you can pick up and begin using even if you’ve been practicing for a while for a few years, and that is the use of attorney notes.
So, what are attorney notes and attorney notes? It’s a document that you’re going to open up and start to dump everything onto this document about a particular case. The documents called attorney notes, and it’s going to have the case number on it, case name and number, and you’re just going to start dumping everything you can onto this document.
Now the [00:02:00]reason that you want to dump everything onto this document is because you don’t want to hold a lot of information and details and all kinds of case facts in your head that you’re trying to memorize because when you have several cases, even honestly, if you just have one case and you’re trying to retain all of that in your mind and access it, it’s going to become very cluttered, very cumbersome. It’s going to produce an enormous amount of stress, and you’re simply going to become ineffective in your role as an attorney at a firm.
So somehow, you need to dump all of that out of your mind, you need to focus. free up that space, that most valuable workspace that you have, which is the gray matter in between your two ears so that it could be used for what it should be used for and that is for thinking.
And if you have gummed up your mind with all of this case information of sometimes dozens and dozens of cases, then you’re doing yourself a disservice. You’re going to be [00:03:00] extremely stressed out, you’re also going to be, by the way completely bored. Burned out and you’re not going to be able to perform as well as you should.
So the secret, the way to advance your career, the way to become really efficient in working on your cases, the way to make sure you’re always hitting your minimum billable hours, which we’re going to talk about in a second, and even exceed your minimum billable hours is for every case to create this attorney notes file and dump everything into it.
And the good news is that this is a file that does not go to the client. So the conclusion of your case, when the client will receive their files, it has all the correspondence and maybe it has all different summaries and the transcripts, maybe, and all of the documentation that you’re going to receive.
The attorney notes is not a part of that package, they never see it. You’re pretty much the only person that’s going to see it. Unless someone else in your firm takes a look at it. Occasionally, another attorney will take over or join you perhaps. [00:04:00] And this is a way for them to read over everything that you have kept track of that’s outside of your mind.
You’ve dumped it all into this file and it helps others get up to speed whenever that becomes necessary. But mostly this is going to free up your mind, it’s gonna allow you to think, it’s gonna allow you to be nimble and pivot and use your mind power to really work on your cases as cleanly, as clearly, as un-obstructedly as possible. It’s sort of like career medicine.
So if you’re bogged down with all of this stuff in your mind, then you’re gonna be pretty gummed up. brain’s not going to really operate. You need a sort of large dose of this career medicine, and the large dose of career medicine is to start to develop your skill. You’re going to need a large dose of this career medicine and, this career medicine comes in the form of freeing up your mind through the use of these attorney notes.
Now, the other benefit of using attorney [00:05:00] notes and writing everything down and giving yourself that sort of 30,000 foot view of your case is it’s going to become very clear to you looking at this document of where the case was, where it presently is and where it needs to go next.
And the reason you want that information is because you’re going to be able to see what the next steps are that you need to take. And when you see what those next steps are, that then populates the to do list for that particular case. So you’ve given yourself a clear path to determining what the work is that you need to accomplish.
That then populates your to do list. You now have the items and the tasks that you need to check off your to do list and you can perform those services and bill your client. So it becomes an extremely effective tool. It is going to absolutely streamline the way that you conduct yourself while you’re at work working on these cases.
And again, if this ever needs to go to another attorney, it’s going to be very easy to transfer that case. But do you [00:06:00] think for a minute that if you’re providing all of these attorney notes really for yourself, but for these cases that the partners are not going to see how efficient you have become, they are.
They’re going to see that there’s a marked difference. In fact, the minute that you start using these attorney notes, later on, after you’ve kind of gotten, you know, knee deep into this process, you’re going to look back at the day you started using attorney notes, and you’re going to see that was the day when everything changed for you and everything became more efficient.
It’s going to allow you to enjoy your evenings and your weekends. It’s going to really reduce a lot of stress. You’re no longer going to struggle reaching your minimum billable hours. In fact, you’re going to exceed your minimum billable hours and you’re going to find that you are even billing for more hours than you thought you could.
That alone is going to advance your career. That alone in demonstrating that you’re able to bill even more hours [00:07:00] than the minimums, which by the way, should be your goal. Your goal shouldn’t be to reach the minimum billable hour threshold. Your goal is to exceed the minimum billable threshold, and you’re gonna be able to do that with attorney notes.
It’s gonna become a very potent and very powerful way to work on your cases and not bog yourself down with all of these facts in your mind. Trying to think through everything, getting cases confused, forgetting the value of a case, knowing what the value of the case is, one of the more important items that you need to know because you’re going to always communicate that to your client, so that they can justify the investment in hiring you and the firm to help them at the end of the day win the case and end up with generally a much, much larger sum of money.
So that becomes a worthwhile investment. Your clients are going to make sure that their trust funds are always filled and you’re going to be able to communicate that goal and the next steps to them simply by dumping everything into these attorney notes [00:08:00] and clearing your mind so that your work life and your personal life operates a lot more efficiently than it otherwise could.
The attorney notes are the secret to making sure that you are advancing in your career. It’s the secret to making sure that you’re advancing quickly. It’s going to allow you to generate more work. Then you even knew was there because the attorney notes clarify everything once you can see clearly now.
Now you can use your mind for thinking and for processing these cases for completing all the tasks that you need to complete for the cases and for simply staying on track. Now, most people aren’t going to use that. the attorney notes method that most people are probably going to try and memorize everything.
And that’s just a really difficult spot to put yourself in because the alternative is you get to a point where you’re just completely burned out. You’ve just started your career, maybe you’ve been practicing law for two or three years. You’ve tried to memorize [00:09:00] all of this information for all of your cases over a period of three years, which is just you know, a pretty tall order.
Why not free yourself up and take the time to dump all that information onto a file per case and get that all down on paper so that you don’t have to stress out trying to remember I mean, thousands and thousands of details. That sounds like a whole lot of no fun to me. It also, if you get to a point where you’re completely burned out, you know, all that time that you’ve taken to get through law school and a study for the bar and pass the bar.
I mean, not to mention the expense that it’s taken a lot of people that go through law school and pass the bar. They get out of it and they start their legal careers and they have an enormous amount of student loans that they have to repay.
If you get to a point where you have burned yourself out because haven’t sort of cleared out all of those facts and figures and details of your cases and you’ve put [00:10:00] all of that onto a separate file just to get it out of your brain, and now you’re tired, and now you’re thinking that you’re not going to be able to continue with this type of work. Well, you have this enormous student loan burden hanging over you that top of the stress is going to be even more stressful to think about.
So to sort of mitigate all of that anxiety, to mitigate all of that stress, to make sure that you’re operating and thinking as efficiently as you possibly can, you have a secret weapon available to you, whether it’s your first job, that you go to as an attorney or your fifth or you’ve been practicing for a while, you want to stop what you’re doing, you want to like collect all of your cases and look at all of them and for each one of those cases, you want to create a file called attorney notes with the name of that case on it. And you want to dump all of that information into those files.
And then watch how efficient you become from that point forward. Watch how much the stress goes away. And suddenly you are enjoying your evenings, [00:11:00] suddenly you’re enjoying your weekends, suddenly you’re enjoying your work, work suddenly becomes fun for you. So that by far is the fastest way to advance your career. And I hope this has been helpful. Now we know that there’s a lot to talk about when it comes to attorney notes.
So there are going to be several episodes that if you’re listening to the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast, We’re going to talk about this subject over and over and over again because there’s just so many nuances to it, and there’s so many important integral parts to creating these attorney notes that are going to affect every other thing that you do when it comes to your job as an attorney, such as even just communicating to your clients, which is probably one of the most important thing.
If you’re not communicating to your clients, if you’re not communicating the value of their career. case. If you’re not sort of showing them what you’ve done and what you’re going to be doing and you’re moving along efficiently and you’re not wasting a lot of their time and wasting a lot of their money by doing things that you don’t necessarily need to do because you’re disorganized.
And if you’ve put everything on attorney notes, you’re gonna be [00:12:00] able to see clearly what your next steps are. Those get transferred to the to do list for that case, and you’re much, much, much more efficient. You essentially save your client money that way by being as strategic as possible with the legal services that you are providing to them and they are going to see the value of the investment in you and the investment in the firm.
So I hope that’s helpful. This is the way to advance your career and if this is helpful information to you, if you’re enjoying the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast that we are producing and you want to get alerted every time a new episode comes out, you can go to our website. Our website is Classroom2Courtroom.com.
That’s Classroom2Courtroom.com. Put in your name, put in your email address. And whenever we release a new podcast episode, you will get an alert you can go and find the new material that we’ve put out.
And if this is valuable to you, don’t forget to share, like and subscribe. And we hope you’ll join us on the next episode of the Classroom 2 Courtroom Podcast.
I’m Scott Benton, your host. And until then, we [00:13:00] hope you’ll join us in making the world a better place one client at a time. Thank you so much and take care.
