Setting Smart Goals

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

We’re going to take a look at setting SMART goals.

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Scott Benton: Today, in order to help assist your overall use of the success cycle, which is what we talk about on this podcast in order to help you better understand the actual practice of law, a subject, by the way, that’s not taught in school and why we’ve developed this podcast. We’re going to take a look at setting SMART goals.

Now goal setting is crucial for your personal and professional growth in law. It’s not something that is necessarily a part of the success cycle, although it is going to encompass the entire success cycle because as you achieve more and more goals, you’re just going to get better at your job. Now you’ve probably heard the explanation of smart goals before.

This is nothing new. It gets talked about all the time. Whenever you hear about goals smart goals is typically where people [00:02:00] go. Now, smart goals is not a new idea. This is not something that we’ve come up with on the classroom 2 courtroom podcast, not by a long shot. In fact, you’ve probably heard this discussion over and over again, but I thought that it would be a good discussion here for us in the classroom 2 courtroom community because it really does bolster and encompass everything that’s in the success cycle, all three components of it.

The more that you reach your own goals as an attorney, the more that you develop as an attorney and go after what you’re interested in, the better that you’re just going to become as an overall attorney and the faster and more efficient, you’re going to be able to use the success cycle. So we’re going to look at the SMART goals.

Now, SMART is an acronym. If you don’t already know this, that stands for specific. Measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. And while Smart Goals can be used for absolutely anything you do, we wanted to be able to use these in more of a legal context.

Now, this is important to keep in mind when you’re [00:03:00] looking at where you want to go because goal setting keeps you on track with your career objectives and they help you manage your time and your resources much more efficiently. This is importanto keep in mind when looking at where you want to go because goal setting keeps you firmly on track with your career objectives and they help you manage your time and your resources efficiently.

Okay, so let’s go through these one by one, the SMART goals. S stands for specific. Now, goals should be clear. They should be specific. They should be well defined.

You want to avoid vague intentions like, I want to become a better attorney or I want to become better at litigation. That’s really more of a vague statement. What does that mean? How do you measure that? You want to become a better attorney by when? Technically in five minutes, you’re a better attorney.

If you’ve done something that was better than what you did five minutes ago, you’ve achieved that goal, but that’s not really what you mean. So you want to be very clear about the [00:04:00] definition of what your goal is.

Clear goals help you focus on specific areas, key areas, whether it’s improving client relationships, or maybe mastering a legal skill, or expanding your practice if you’re looking at growing, if you have your own business.

So instead of improve litigation skills as a goal, you want to aim for improve motion drafting by reviewing at least five high quality motions a week and incorporating best practices. So Now you can see how much better that is than improving litigation skills. It’s very clear. It’s very specific.

And it talks about a time period, which we’ll get into. It says that it wants that goal is going to review at least five high quality motions a week. And it’s going to then later distill down the best practices and incorporate those into the legal practice overall.

For client management, you want to set a goal like Increase client communication by sending weekly [00:05:00] updates to all active clients. Again, that’s very specific. Again, that puts a sort of a time element on top of it.

Now as a practical tip, you want to break larger goals into smaller, more actionable tasks to prevent yourself from becoming overwhelmed. If you have 20 giant goals on your list, then you’re just going to get stuck in the quicksand. It’s going to slow you down too much. So you want to break those bigger goals down.

down into goals that you can actually do and perform until it’s you’ve broken it down into the most minute goal possible so that you can get those tasks done. So if your goal is to master appellate arguments, let’s say, you might want to break that down into research, drafting briefs, and practicing oral arguments.

Those are actionable, those are bite sized, those you can accomplish.

Next in the SMART goals we have M, and M stands for measurable. So you want to set measurable goals to assess how close you are [00:06:00] to achieving those. Now, without tracking, you’re not going to know if you’re on the right path or not. Measurement helps you adjust your efforts.

So if you’re not progressing, you can analyze why you’re not progressing and you can change strategies. As an example, let’s say that you want to track the number of hours that you spend preparing for court cases, and you want to compare it with your efficiency of success and its outcomes.

Or, let’s say that you want to contact 10 potential clients this week. Now that’s a measurable goal that you can easily check off once it’s completed. Okay, I contacted 10 clients this week. Done. You want to use tools like spreadsheets or case management software to log your progress. For instance, you want to be able to track the number of motions filed or success rates of negotiated settlements if that’s what your goal is, and you can do that with spreadsheets. Keep records.

In the next letter in the SMART Goals acronym, A stands for achievable. So your goals must be challenging but realistic based on your current resources, your current [00:07:00] experience, and the time that you have. You want to balance your ambition with practicality. So you want to aim high, but don’t overestimate what you can accomplish in a short period of time.

Stretch goals where you’re stretching to reach them are great, but they must be tempered with realism.

So instead of, for instance, of setting a goal of becoming a partner in two years, you might set achievable benchmarks like lead five cases from start to finish within the next year. You could also do things like set a goal to attend two CLE courses on litigation strategy this quarter. That’s realistic.

Whereas Master every aspect of litigation by the end of the year is not realistic. So make sure your goals match your available time and your energy. You want to be mindful of your current caseloads and your commitments while you’re planning out these goals.

Okay, moving on to the next letter in the SMART Goals acronym. R stands for relevant. So you want to make sure that your goals fit your long term career objectives. You want to avoid [00:08:00] goals that are just irrelevant or distracting for your, from your primary legal practice. Goals should move you closer to where you want to be professionally, whether that’s gaining experience in a niche area of law or expanding your client base.

So for an aspiring trial lawyer, a relevant goal might be gain courtroom experience by taking on more pro bono cases that go to trial.

Or, if you’re aiming to specialize in intellectual property, let’s say, you might want to focus on goals like attend three IP related CLEs and network with five IP professionals by the end of the year. So you want to regularly reassess your goals to ensure that they’re still aligned with your evolving career path and your interests.

Now, lastly, in the SMART Goals acronym, T stands for time bound. You want to assign a time frame to each goal to ensure accountability. Without deadlines, it’s going to be really easy for tasks to be just delayed indefinitely, and you’ll never get them done. Deadlines create a sense of [00:09:00] urgency and they prevent procrastination. So time bound goals also help with prioritization in a busy legal practice. So as an example, you might want to say to yourself, I will improve my public speaking skills by delivering a CLE presentation within six months.

That’s very specific. It’s measurable and you’ve given yourself a date. Or you could say, for instance, that you want to draft and submit a motion for summary judgment for this particular case by the end of the month. Now you want to use both short term and long term deadlines to structure your goals.

This is going to allow you to evaluate your progress along the way at different stages.

Now it’s a practical consideration. You might want to incorporate your smart goals into your daily or your weekly work routine. For instance, you might show up every Monday morning and review your goals and identify the key tasks that you want to accomplish for that week.

You also want to adjust as necessary. You want to be flexible because There’s always new information that comes along and your goals are going to change. So there may be case [00:10:00] developments or just changes in the workload or whatever shows up. It may mean that the goals that you’re pursuing now are not the goals that you’re going to want to be pursuing in three or four weeks.

The legal profession is dynamic, it’s always shifting, it’s always changing, and that means that your goals should shift as well. So if you’re facing an unexpectedly high caseload, let’s say, you want to adjust the time frames.

For the non urgent goals, you want to push those back. You want to remain flexible in order to do things like that. So if you achieve a goal faster than expected, you want to then stretch the next goal to continue challenging yourself. Goal setting is not just a one time event. It’s going to be an ongoing process as you evolve in your legal career. And as you evolve in your legal career, so should your goals. Sometimes they’re just going to get bigger. Sometimes they’re going to get smaller because you have more of them, let’s say.

So you want to be able to embrace flexibility. You want to be open to refining your goals that are based on shifts in the legal landscape and your interests or your feedback that you get from mentors and colleagues. But the more [00:11:00] that you work on your SMART goals, the more that they’re going to become an integral part of your legal practice.

They’re going to drive both short term and long term success for you. I’m Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. Thank you for stopping by and hanging out with us on 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 dot com or you can send us a message to keep in touch with us or you can even inquire about our seasonal associate programs that we have available for law school students. You can come and work with us if you want to. And as always, don’t forget to share, 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.

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