Scott Benton: [00:00:00] Hey everyone, it’s Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom to Courtroom Podcast. How are you? Our podcast is dedicated to mostly law students and people that have just graduated law school looking for their first job so they can start their career as attorneys.
Now that you have your full blown attorney ticket and we are here to make that transition easy and understandable and teach you how to practice law, which is something that you’re not going to learn about in law school. That’s what this podcast is all about and we’re here to make the practice of law fun.
Scott Benton: Today’s question that we’re going to look at is Should You Stop Working On Your Cases In Order To Complete Your Attorney Notes?
Now we’ve done several podcast episodes talking about attorney notes. This is an area that’s going to come up over and over and over again. Your attorney notes are going to [00:01:00] really profoundly affect your to do list or your G sheets, which becomes your to do list. And you’re always going to have a lot of work, you’re going to know what the next steps are in all of your and you’re going to be able to proceed providing legal services in a very efficient manner.
So, doing your attorney notes is extremely valuable. We explain what attorney notes really are and how to do them on other podcast episodes. We’re going to do several episodes about attorney notes because there are a lot of nuances, but basically it is a journal of your entire case. It’s a separate file that you keep with your case file.
Your attorney notes, by the way, never go to the clients. You can say anything you want on them. Sometimes you have maybe some rhetorical questions that you’re asking or thoughts about the case and every time something new comes along, you’re going to want to summarize that new event.
Maybe you got letter that came in from opposing counsel, you’re going to want to summarize that, include that in the attorney notes, date and time stamp that entry so [00:02:00] that you have a chronology of everything that has happened on a case. And those are basically attorney notes.
Now, what a lot of attorneys attempt to do is they try to memorize everything and keep all that information about a case and really dozens of cases in their head, which is going to gum up their ability to think clearly. It’s going to slow them down, it’s going to confuse them the way to sort of get around that confusion and kind of cluttering up your mind is to put everything you know about a case onto a file that you are calling your attorney notes.
And so the question that this podcast is trying to answer on this episode is, Should You Stop All Of The Work That You’re Doing on your cases so that if you don’t have your attorney notes completed, should you just stop completely and sit down and write them out?
And the answer is going to be for me, if you haven’t already guessed a resounding, yes, absolutely. You should stop what you’re doing and you should make sure that all of your cases have your attorney notes.
Now there is [00:03:00] one caveat to that, which is you might have some hard deadlines that you have to hit or some very urgent and important tasks that you must complete for some of your cases. And of course, you shouldn’t miss deadlines, you shouldn’t. If something’s on fire that you have to complete, then you definitely should complete those items.
But understand that if you don’t have your attorney notes completed on a case or your all of your cases that is going to make you incredibly inefficient. It’s also going to stress you out, it’s also going to make it so that you can’t enjoy your evenings and weekends whatsoever because you’re going to constantly be worried about whether or not you’ve missed some deadline or whether or not you’ve forgotten something that has simply fallen through the cracks because you’re trying to retain all of that information in your head, it’s just impossible to do.
It’s also making you a less efficient thinker, you’re a less creative thinker when it comes to case strategies. You’re just not going to really come up with [00:04:00] strategies that are as potent and powerful and well thought out as you can if all of that information is not in your brain, but instead dumped out on several files, one attorney note file for each case.
All of that information is not living in your head, it’s not taking up space, it frees you up to think clearly.
And so yes, you should stop what you’re doing where you can barring deadlines and barring important matters that you must get done and sit down and get through those attorney notes because those attorney notes, by the way, are going to generate items on your to do list.
You’re going to see very, very clearly what the next steps are in a case, so it’s gonna make you more streamlined. Every case is going to be far more streamlined, you’re certainly gonna cut down on any potentially wasted time that you spend on a case. And then, of course, go and build a client for, so your client’s gonna be a lot happier.
You’re gonna be more efficient in pushing those cases forward. forward because you’re really going to have to cut down [00:05:00] just by nature of the clarity that you have on the steps that you’re taking in the legal services that you’re providing.
And that’s just frankly going to make everybody happy, it’s also going to make you very happy because it’s going to cut down on the extraneous tasks that you do when you’re just starting. disorganized. If you’ve ever been disorganized, you know that being disorganized just it tends to create a lot more work for you because you’re doing a lot of catch up work, you’re doing a lot of unnecessary. You’re just not able to think quite as clearly.
But what if you could think clearly? What if you could sort of streamline all of your processes? And that’s what attorney notes ultimately are going to help you do. But if you are on some kind of deadline and you can’t get to them, then it means that you’re going to have to sit down stay late after work. You’re going to have to stay behind when everybody’s gone so that you can get through your attorney notes and really, really clarify everything that you’re doing on your cases.
And if you can’t stay late, you can always come in on the weekends and spend time [00:06:00] time, which is always helpful. Remember, one hour of uninterrupted time is worth three hours of generally normal work time. So so hour of uninterrupted time it tends to be very, very productive, very valuable time.
And if you have to do that in the evenings or on the weekends, then that’s something you’re going to definitely want to do. But ultimately, we want to get you to a point where you’re enjoying your evenings and your weekends, and you’re not spending a lot of time on your cases, or at least you’re not stressing about them, worried about missing deadlines or concerned that maybe something important has fallen through the cracks.
That just leads to a very unhappy evening or weekend stressing out about what is it that you’ve forgotten about. And that’s what happens when you try to retain everything in your head, which you don’t want to do and which attorney notes will help you accomplish.
It’s also going to help you with your reaching your minimum billable hour requirements. It’s also going to help you exceed your minimum billable hour [00:07:00] requirements because of how efficient you are in putting everything from the attorney notes onto your to do list. You can now just start going through those.
It’s also going to provide, by the way Uh, when you do your billing for your clients, they’re going to see that you’re accomplishing quite a lot in a short period of time. They’re going to be happy to continue to pay you for your legal services. That clarity that you’re providing to your clients, that they see see on their billing invoices, for instance, so they can read and look at what they’ve been billed for and everything that you have billed for that time, it’s going to that sort of clarity is going to help them see that path and that combined with reiteration of the value of the case, your clients are going to see this very, very clearly themselves that this is a worthwhile investment.
And they are going to continue to pay for your legal services and not just sort of disappear and have their trust funds run dry. So that’s very important. It’s also just being an efficient attorney, an attorney that has less stress, less [00:08:00] visible stress on your face and your body and your body language.
The partners of the firm are going to recognize that. Of course, they’re going to see that you’re not only hitting, but exceeding your minimum billable hours, which is a very powerful position for you to be in if you want to move up in the company, if you want to become maybe a senior level attorney, maybe a partner someday.
If you do these attorney notes religiously and do, and you dedicate yourself so that every time something new comes in on a case, you stop, you summarize it, you date and time stamp it, put it in the attorney notes for that particular case. Then there’s going to be no stopping you, frankly, and you’re going to rise as high as you want to on the, firm that you’re working in.
You’re going to make a lot more money. That’s the bottom line. It’s going to put more money in your pocket. It’s going to put more money in the pockets of the firm. And it’s going to make you a, very efficient attorney. We do know that and you’re going to be a very sharp attorney as well.
So, should you stop and do everything you can to get these attorney notes completed? Yes, absolutely. [00:09:00] Definitely deadlines. If you have those lingering, make sure that you don’t, want to be sanctioned by a court, for instance, which if you miss a deadline, sometimes they’ll sanction you, you don’t want that happening. You certainly don’t want anything falling through the cracks. You want to make sure that you are getting everything done that needs to get done.
And so don’t stop, don’t let those things kind of fall through the cracks. You definitely want to make sure that you are getting all of your work done and hitting your minimum billable hours.
So definitely get your Attorney notes completed, whatever it takes staying late or coming in on the weekends and making sure that those get done. And then more importantly, make sure that you are using those attorney notes as often as you can get all of that information out of your head onto paper, free up your mind so that you can be as nimble as possible, as creative as possible and as strategic as possible with your cases.
So I hope that’s helpful. I hope that’s useful information for you. Definitely if you haven’t listened to our other podcast episodes about attorney notes either ones that we’ve already recorded, ones that we will record [00:10:00] in the future, because this is a topic that’s going to come up over and over and over again.
It is really your most powerful source of generating tasks for you to complete and, legal services that you’re going to provide to your clients and it’s going to really help to streamline your ability to push your cases forward.
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