How to Avoid Wasting Billable Hours

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Scott Benton: Hey, everyone. Scott Benton here. How are you? I am the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast where we help you easily transition from law school student into your professional career as an attorney. And where we like to make the practice of law fun. Now today we’re going to take a look at how to avoid wasting billable hours.

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Scott Benton: Today in order to help assist your overall use of the success cycle, especially where legal services are concerned, we’re going to look at how to avoid wasting billable hours.When you work as an attorney, you’re generating Revenue e by providing legal services to the clients who hire you. Now that means that you have a certain amount of time to use each and every day, and within that time, You’re trying to perform legal services.

That means you want to focus on completing billable legal services, but if you know something about the way life tends to work, then you probably know that a lot of stuff gets in the way. As a new attorney, if you’re not careful, you’re going to get derailed by every obstacle imaginable and every distraction that could come along to pull you away from remaining focused on the [00:02:00] legal services that you’ve been hired to perform. As such, wasted time can become an impediment if you let it creep in.

So not only do you want to be aware of wasted time as a distraction to avoid, But you also want to make sure that you’re not wasting any of your time because as an attorney, Your time is one of the most valuable components that you have, so it’s worth protecting to optimize your billable hours each and every day.

One area you want to focus on is in avoiding redundant work in your legal practice. Now this includes redoing format or style changes on documents or revisiting the assignments because the expectations were unclear when you started. Maybe mistakes were made if you didn’t check with your supervising attorney early on about something that you needed more clarity on.

When it comes to court filings, if a petition gets kicked back because maybe a section wasn’t filled out correctly, then you have to redo the entire filing, which can be costly and it can even be [00:03:00] complicated, especially if it means that you’ve missed a deadline. So when you start working as an attorney, you want to make sure that you’re looking for and identifying redundant work, and then doing everything that you can to avoid it because remember, providing legal services to your clients in the form of billable time is what you’re trying to focus on doing.

So you want to have some go to practical strategies that you can use to help avoid redundancy. Now, some of this you’re simply going to learn from making mistakes and just doing it over and over and over again, but the more you get ahead of the potential for redundancy, the less you’re going to repeat mistakes doing the same work more than once.

Now make sure that you gain clarity on what the expectations are for the assignment before you start and get that clarification early. You can do that by discussing the assignment with the supervising attorney to better understand what you need to complete, including specific formatting and the writing style that they’d like to [00:04:00] see. Have all of your questions ready before you talk to your supervising attorney. Remember that they’re busy as well, so you really want to be efficient with your questions.

Also, make sure you’ve taken a look at the templates or examples of the document that you’ve been asked to fill out so you know what it should look like once it’s completed.

And understand the context of the task that you need to complete, which will also help narrow down your questions, since some of your questions might get answered simply by looking at the template or other examples for you to follow.

As you start working on the task, try not to look at it as one big project. Instead, break larger projects like that down into smaller pieces or phases or drafts, which, depending on the assignment, you can share with your supervisors. You complete each section to make sure that you’re keeping in alignment with what the assignment requires to avoid redundancy.

This also helps to catch potential mistakes or misrepresentations early on. Now [00:05:00] you can always use resources like templates or past completed work to help guide whether you’re on the right track or not, but whatever resources you have available can be utilized to help ensure accuracy along the way.

As you’re working on these sections and when you get close to finalizing them it’s important to check in with your supervising attorney, especially if you’ve been assigned a large project. And remember that it’s better to over communicate than it is to under communicate, because the last thing you want is to declare that a project’s finished, and then later when that document needs to be filed by a certain deadline, let’s say, the attorney discovers something that’s not accurate and needs to be changed, then you want to be able to cover all of that detailed work while you’re not under pressure, and when you’re not up against a deadline like that.

And don’t forget to use the feedback you get from your supervising attorney to your advantage. Treat all revisions as a learning opportunity rather than a setback. So while it might not feel [00:06:00] like it at the time, this is the point where you’re going to really learn some of your most valuable lessons that ultimately are going to help you avoid wasting time and avoid wasting those precious billable hours.

Make sure to learn from the feedback you get from supervisors on stylistic preferences and formatting to help streamline and improve your future work. So I hope you can see the critical importance of learning how to avoid redundancy by getting clear expectations on the assignments that you’re given right from the start and monitoring your own progress to remain efficient.

And always keep those communication lines open with your supervising attorney, especially when you’re working on bigger projects Don’t forget to look at templates and examples of documents that have already been completed to inform the quality of your own work And make sure to learn everything you can from the feedback that you receive.

I’m Scott Benton I’m the host of the classroom 2 courtroom podcast. Thank you so much for checking out our program and listening to this episode I hope it’s been informative and helpful [00:07:00] You If you like this podcast and you’d like to get more information about us, you can always go to our website at 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 work with us. And as always, don’t forget to share, like, and subscribe to stay on top of all of our newest episodes. And until next time, we hope you’ll join us in making the world a better place, one client at a time.