[00:00:00]
[00:00:07] Scott Benton: 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 of course, where we make the practice of law fun because why else would you want to become an attorney?
[00:00:23] Scott Benton: This is fun work, it should be fun work, and that’s what this podcast is here to accomplish. Now today, we’re going to talk about how to make your work life feel as if you’re serving time in jail.
[00:01:00]
[00:01:24] Scott Benton: This is obviously the opposite of fun, but let’s say that for some reason, even as a thought experiment, you really want to make your day as difficult as possible as an attorney. And you want the minutes to feel like hours, and you want the hours to feel like days.
[00:01:39] Scott Benton: And in fact, you want to make the whole experience of work feel as if you’re serving time in jail instead of billing for time. for providing excellent legal services to your clients. Now, if you don’t already know, let me be the first to tell you that it’s very easy to make every day feel endless and [00:02:00] punishing as if you’re sitting behind bars in the County clink.
[00:02:03] Scott Benton: And you can do that not as an attorney, but as anything, really, it’s your choice. In fact, if You may have seen others doing this by design or by accident. Sometimes people just don’t know that for some attorneys, they’re not billing for time so much as they’re serving time. You may have seen that. And there’s a way for you to do this too.
[00:02:26] Scott Benton: So if you want to feel like work is something like spending time in prison, here’s exactly how you go about doing that. First, on the previous night before you go home, do not, I repeat, do not update your to do list. Your to do list is the first and most critical part of the success cycle, which is the model, the working model that we talk about on the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast for practicing law.
[00:02:53] Scott Benton: Now, if you neglect this important and critical part of the success cycle process, then you’ve already broken [00:03:00] your work pipeline, which means your entire next day at work has already been sabotaged. So congratulations, you definitely know how to make work feel like you’re sitting in jail. And when you show up next morning, make sure you don’t know what you’re doing for the day.
[00:03:17] Scott Benton: Don’t have any idea what legal services you’re providing or which tasks are more important than others. In your mind, make sure that all tasks have equal urgency, and make sure that you get to them whenever you can, regardless of any deadlines. When you get to the second part of the success cycle, which is to perform the legal services on your to do list, just go ahead and pick up any task at random, perform that service, bill for the time, and this is important because ultimately it means that you get paid and the firm gets paid.
[00:03:49] Scott Benton: Once you’ve built through your time, pick the next legal task that you’re going to perform and perform that service. So you want to spend your day bouncing from one legal task to the next with really not much [00:04:00] of a plan.
[00:04:01] Scott Benton: Never pick up the phone to talk to your clients and certainly don’t ask them about their case or bother to build a strong working relationship with your clients. Now this, as you’ve set out to accomplish, will make your day feel absolutely glacial.
[00:04:16] Scott Benton: Going to work for the week, or the month, or the year is going to feel not unlike a jail sentence you’ve received after a conviction in a court of law. Going to work This is exactly what working on a case from the outside in looks like. When you approach your work this way, your day becomes monotonous and unhappy.
[00:04:35] Scott Benton: And if that’s what you want, There are many roads to get you there, but if you really want to enjoy your work as an attorney, and if you want your day to go by quickly, and you want to meet and exceed your minimum billable hourly requirement, then you want to work on your case from the inside out, which we actually talk about a lot on this podcast, so even though this episode isn’t going to go into much [00:05:00] detail about working on your case from the inside out, there are plenty of episodes that do.
[00:05:03] Scott Benton: Now, working on a case from the inside out means spending a lot of time with your client, asking them about the case facts beneath their case facts, and we often say that you want to dig three layers down before you get to the real valuable gems of the information that you’re looking for on the case that you’re working on.
[00:05:21] Scott Benton: Ultimately, you want to get to the why reason for your client hiring you to represent them in the first place. And that’s not always easy to do.
[00:05:29] Scott Benton: Once you’ve built a solid working relationship with your client, and you’ve dug three layers down into their case and into their story, and once they’ve developed a certain level of trust with you, and they’ve become willing to tell you just absolutely anything, That’s, by the way, that’s usually when you’ve gotten to know them well, and you know the names of the people in their family, and you know their pets, and their schedules.
[00:05:50] Scott Benton: Then you’re going to know that working on your cases from the inside out and not from the outside in is possible and that you’ve accomplished that goal. [00:06:00] Your jail sentence has just spontaneously ended early if you can get yourself to this point. And you’re going to be able to let yourself out of that self imposed jail cell.
[00:06:10] Scott Benton: So remember that working on your cases from the outside in and by not utilizing the attorney notes and by not using the success cycle fully, it’s going to feel like drudgery work and it’s going to feel as if you’re a prisoner to your job.
[00:06:23] Scott Benton: However, the good news is that by simply changing your approach and working on your cases from the inside out, this idea alone is going to make your job as an attorney the fun and energizing and life affirming job that it’s supposed to be. The choice is yours.
[00:06:41] Scott Benton: So I hope that’s been helpful. My name is Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode. Now if this podcast is material that you like and you want to get notified whenever we post a new episode, you can go to our website. Our website is classroom2courtroom.
[00:06:56] Scott Benton: com. That’s classroom, the number two, courtroom. com. [00:07:00] You can leave us your contact information. We’ll send you an email anytime we post a new episode. You can also stay on top of all of our new episodes by sharing, liking, and subscribing wherever you find this podcast. And until the next episode, we hope you’ll join us in making the world a better place, one client at a time
[00:07:17] Scott Benton: thank you so much.
