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[00:00:07] 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 a law school student into your professional career as a bonafide attorney and where we make the practice of law fun, where we always make it fun.
[00:00:21] Scott Benton: Now today, we’re going to take a look at the differences between working fast and working slow and how.
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[00:01:16] Scott Benton: Sometimes, working fast is actually the equivalent of working slow, and working slow happens to be the equivalent of working fast. I think you can probably see where this is going, but when you first start working as an attorney, you’re likely not going to know how to fill out the forms, for instance.
[00:01:33] Scott Benton: And the last thing you want to do is fill out a motion that you file with the courthouse, and that gets kicked back to you because it wasn’t accepted by the court. The court kicked it back to you. Now, you’re being asked to make corrections. This is an example of working fast. You wanted to get the motion filled out quickly. You probably assumed it was properly filled out or maybe filled out enough to go through.
[00:01:55] Scott Benton: You didn’t really do all the necessary research to make sure it was filled out 100 [00:02:00] percent correctly and then it ended up circling right back to you and ended up on your desk again. That’s frustrating and that’s something you definitely want to avoid. Now, it’s great that you want to work quickly, but especially when you’re starting out, it doesn’t help to focus only on the speed of getting your work done.
[00:02:17] Scott Benton: Instead, you want to work on accuracy. In this example, even though the motion was filed quickly, it turned out to be the slowest possible way to get it done because it just wasn’t done accurately. Now, you’ve got to start all over again. What you thought would take maybe an hour or two ends up taking days to complete because you’re going too fast.
[00:02:40] Scott Benton: As paradoxical as it might sound, the fastest way to get something done that you’ve never done before Or that little about is to work slowly and do the research until you know for certain that you’ve done everything correctly so the filing will go through.
[00:02:57] Scott Benton: Now working slowly might take [00:03:00] you even a day or two to get all the necessary sections done correctly. It might mean doing some online research or talking to other attorneys or paralegals who are much more deeply familiar with that particular process you’re trying to complete. And you might even want to talk to a filing clerk at the courthouse where the document is eventually going to be filed once it’s complete.
[00:03:20] Scott Benton: You want to stop and take your time. You want to make sure that every section is correctly filled out with no mistakes. You want to check and you want to double check at this point in the process because it’s new and it’s familiar to you. You haven’t really done this before or maybe you’ve done it once or twice.
[00:03:36] Scott Benton: So unless you become an expert in a particular filing with a particular courthouse, because all courthouses are different, which you’re eventually going to get to that point, don’t put any pressure on yourself to work quickly simply for the sake of working quickly. Chances are it’s not going to pay off and it’s going to lead you into a far more efficient path.
[00:03:58] Scott Benton: And in the long run, the [00:04:00] slow road is what you’re going to end up getting. Which is what you don’t want. You want to go as fast as possible, given that you are a brand new attorney or you’ve only been working for a short time as an attorney. This is really the power of working slowly, where efficiency becomes somewhat counterintuitive.
[00:04:19] Scott Benton: While you think working fast is good and working slow is not so good or bad, Just the opposite is true. So you want to make sure you’re slowing down and getting everything right the first time out. That way, even if it takes a few hours longer to complete one of these legal services that you’ve got to get through, because of the research that you have to do, or the calls you need to make for clarification, in the long run, it turns out this is the shortcut.
[00:04:49] Scott Benton: Not speed, but efficiency and Correctness and making sure the form is properly researched. All of that time that you’re spending in the [00:05:00] beginning is the shortcut. So you want to keep that in mind. This is the fastest path.
[00:05:06] Scott Benton: You also want to keep in mind that you’re going to bump up against a lot of obstacles in the beginning because whatever law firm that you happen to go work for, there are already a number of systems that are in place that you’re going to need to have to get up to speed on as quickly as you can.
[00:05:22] Scott Benton: So that once you do get up to speed, eventually now you can do your job with abandoned and you’ll get there, but only if you go slow. If you slow down and you work slowly to ensure the accuracy of your work. Working fast is simply a trap and you don’t really want to get yourself into that trap. Working fast is what on television shows or in the movies or that you read about in thriller novels.
[00:05:51] Scott Benton: But trying to work in a way that only works in fiction. is going to send you the wrong direction completely, [00:06:00] especially when you start your first job as an attorney. The speed is going to come, just think about it, the speed is going to come eventually, once you’ve been able to understand all of the systems that the law firm has that has hired you in the first place.
[00:06:13] Scott Benton: And make no mistake, there’s going to be a lot on your plate when you first begin working as an attorney. And then, You’re going to get to a place where you have a few cases of your own. And then, before you know it, you’re going to have 30 cases that you’re working on, or maybe even more. So you want to be able to learn the practice area of law that you’ve gone into.
[00:06:34] Scott Benton: You want to do all the research for all the forms and processes that you’re going to be involved in. And you want to be able to utilize the systems that the law firm has in place and use those efficiently as well. If you try to rush your law firm education, it’s just going to take an extra long time for you to understand everything that you need to understand, because you’re just, you’re likely going to make a lot of mistakes. Now, it’s okay to make mistakes, and we [00:07:00] learn through making our mistakes. That’s true, but rushing or going fast means that you’re just going to miss a lot of stuff.
[00:07:07] Scott Benton: And you’re most likely not going to check the work that you’ve assembled or even really go back over the instructions or the research that you’ve done or even look at case histories to really understand what’s going to work. But you can do that much better if you decide to take the slower path to getting your work done.
[00:07:26] Scott Benton: Now, over time, and that might mean after six months or so, maybe a little bit longer, you’re going to start to find that many efficiencies in your work have started to show up.
[00:07:37] Scott Benton: You’ll have a firm grounding on successfully educating your legal services through repetition, through just doing the same thing over and over again, and through deeper research and experience that you get. It’s just a matter of time and you’re going to hear a lot about that this is why they call law a practice. It’s like a sport that you’re working on all the [00:08:00] time because with law or with sports, you’re never going to reach a place of perfection, but you’re going to get better and better as you continue to practice your craft.
[00:08:09] Scott Benton: That I can promise you.
[00:08:10] Scott Benton: My name is Scott Benton. I’m the host of the Classroom 2 Courtroom podcast. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. If this is material that you like and you want to receive an alert every time we put out a new episode, you can go to our website, which is classroom2courtroom.
[00:08:23] Scott Benton: com. That’s classroom, the number two. Courtroom. com. You can leave us your contact information. You’ll get an alert when we put out a new episode. So how cool is that? Additionally, if you like this material, don’t forget to share and subscribe. And by doing that, it’ll help you stay on top of our newest episodes as well.
[00:08:39] Scott Benton: Cause you’ll get an alert through the podcatcher that you’re on. So until next time, we hope you’ll join us in making the world a better place, one client at a time. Thank you so
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