Fail Safe Tips for Tickler Cards and Reminder Date

We have four more topics to talk about in the area of "fail-safe" systems for being sure that the administrative part of your law firm operates efficiently.

Remember, the "administrative" part of your practice is one of five areas that make up every business in the world. Those parts are "clients" or "customers," "administration," "getting the work done," "billing" and "collecting your bill."

To date we have discussed thirteen areas of "fail-safe tips." In our office we use eighteen "fail-safe" administrative systems on a day-to-day basis. If we carry out these administrative tasks in the proper manner, everything seems to fall into place and it allows us to get onto the business of actually helping the client solve whatever legal problem they may have entrusted to us.

This week's "fail-safe tip" is to have a tickler card and a due date system for distribution of reminder dates and due dates and a system for posting such information on a prominent bulletin board.

We have already discussed tickler cards and why they are so important. In our office we call this our "blue card" system. Literally, every single date in our office is put through this tickler system and every single due date has a reminder date that is put into the system as well.

A description of how these tickler cards look and how the tickler card system is generally used, can be found in a previous column on the topic.

The purpose of this article is to absolutely and positively accentuate the "fail-safe" nature of this system of tickler cards and due dates, and the distribution system and the posting system that goes with them.

Simply put, every date involving every matter that comes into your office every day must be put into some tickler card system. Typically we would put a due date on the tickler card in the appropriate blank, and also put a reminder date that could be anywhere from a day, to three days, to a week, to a month, before the actual due date. Depending on how much time you need to be reminded about the impending due date, you could pick the appropriate date for a reminder.

The beauty in these cards is you can show a card going to the responsible lawyer, a card going to the assigned lawyer, and a card going to the paralegal assigned to the client's matter. You can make up to six carbon copies of these cards at one time. The reason you need six, is each person who is on the distribution list needs to get a card that would be a card for both the reminder date and the due date.

If there are not enough cards for everyone who is assigned to a matter, it is quite easy to make a photocopy of the cards and put them on the paralegal's desk as a reminder of the item that needs to be done for a particular client's matter.

We outline the due date in red magic marker in order to accentuate the fact that if something is not done on that date, we have committed malpractice. We put a green magic marker around the reminder dates to remind us that we are still within time to accomplish a task, but the due date is getting close.

Every week the tickler cards for the following week are pulled and are sorted and placed on the appropriate lawyers or paralegal's desk with regard to the work that needs to be accomplished. Now, comes the most important part of the tickler cards "fail-safe" system. Copies of these tickler cards are posted on a bulletin board for each day that is a reminder day or a due date day. Obviously, those of you who are technologically oriented can see how this could be easily done on an electronic basis.

In our office we use a bulletin board that lists Monday through Friday listed across the top, and we literally pin the tickler "blue cards" up on the board. Everyone in our office has a license to stand in the doorway of the person who is assigned to accomplish the particular task on the day it is due and to glare at the individual who has responsibility for doing the task until such time as the due date task is completed.

The Missouri Bar Plan legal malpractice insurance company gives a discount for having this type of a redundant tickler card system in your office.

The "fail-safe" nature of this system of tickler cards can be broken down as follows:
1. It is imperative that every date that comes to the attention of everyone in your office be placed in a tickler system.
2. Every date that comes to everyone's attention in the office should be placed into the tickler system receive a reminder date.
3. Every date that comes to everyone's attention in your office needs to be placed into a tickler system with a due date and a reminder date. It should be routed to the lawyer responsible for the matter, the lawyer assigned to accomplish the task, and the paralegal that is working on the case.
4. It is imperative in your office that every due date that comes to the attention of everyone in the office that is placed in a tickler system with a due date and a reminder date that is routed to the individuals in the office who are responsible for accomplishing the task be placed into a system where it can be easily retrieved on the week before either the reminder date or the due date will come up on the calendar.
5. It is absolutely imperative that in your office where every due date is placed in a tickler system with a reminder date and routed to individuals who are responsible for accomplishing the task and where it is placed into a system for retrieval, be retrieved the week before the due date and that copies of such reminders be routed to those individuals whose names appear on the tickler card and that those items be posted on a bulletin board for everyone in the office to be able to review.
6. It is absolutely imperative that every date that comes into your system that is placed into a tickler system and that receives a reminder date and that is routed to individuals to whom have the responsibility of accomplishing the task and that are put into a retrieval system and such cards are pulled the week before they are due and they are routed to the individuals responsible for accomplishing the task and posted to a bulletin board that every single person in the office has a license to stand in the doorway of the persons responsible for accomplishing such task until such time as the task is completed.

I hope you understand why the emphasis was put on the foregoing, because without it, you simply do not have a tickler system that works!

The foregoing is probably not the only type of tickler system that works, but I have been utilizing this system since approximately 1976, and I can only remember two occasions that the system has broken down.

Unfortunately, those two breakdowns cost me $5,000 each. That was the amount of money we had to contribute to the malpractice claim that was made because of our office missing a statute of limitations. In both of those cases, the problem became that the lawyer assigned to the file did not understand the difference between the two year statute of limitations in the state of Kansas on personal injury claims, and the five year statute in the state of Missouri.

In both cases, there was a breakdown in the tickler system with regard to getting the appropriate reminder and due dates put into the system, retrieved at the proper time and acted upon in the proper way. In both cases, when we went back to try to figure out what had happened, it became clear that there were people implementing parts of the system that simply did not understand what they were doing and the reminder cards and tickler cards were simply not placed in the proper way that they could be retrieved at the proper time.

Needless to say, since that time we have redoubled our efforts to be sure that this does not ever happen again.

As an aside, on those cases that now have a statute of limitations shorter than five years, we write in bold magic marker on the face of the file, a reminder of the appropriate statute of limitations so that every time we see the file we are reminded of the existence of a shorter than normal statute of limitations. Even though we have this additional system in place now, we still are very scrupulous about how we input information into our tickler system, how it is pulled, and how it is circulated and posted. We are almost finished talking about all of the "fail-safe" administrative systems that we utilize in our office.

We will be finishing these up in the next couple of weeks and then we will be getting on with the remainder of the normal "administrative" systems we have in our office.

I hope you are understanding the "fail-safe" nature of these systems and why I have singled these out to spend so much time talking about each individual system so that you can see why these systems, or ones similar to them, are so important to the functioning of a modern day law office.

I will be summarizing all of these "fail-safe tips" in the final article regarding these administrative systems, and I hope to be able to give you a quick checklist that you can utilize in your office to do an audit of these core administrative systems to be sure that you have some system in place in order to cover each and every one of these important administrative areas. Next week we are going to talk about the fifteenth "fail-safe" tip regarding closure letters to clients and thank you letters to referring parties at the conclusion of each client's matter. Hopefully, you will see how all of these systems work together from both a marketing and an administrative point of view. These systems are not only practical, but can be easily implemented and set up in such a way to allow you a golden opportunity to be able to get additional legal business from clients and from client recommendations.

Talk to you next week!

Jim Wirken is a civil trial attorney and the Chairman of the Board of The Wirken Law Group in Kansas City.