Tips for Collecting the Tools You Need to Get the Work Done Part II

We are continuing to talk about the third part of every business in the world which is "Getting the work done." As you know from reading these articles on a week to week basis, there are five things that make up every business in the world: 1."Clients" or "Customers," 2. "Administration," 3. "Getting the work done," 4. "Billing," and 5. "Collecting."

This week's "tip" for "Getting the work done" is to talk another type of a meeting with your staff that allows you to constantly keep your client's matters on track and moving towards a resolution. This week's "tip" is to add "litigation/docket and calendar meetings."

"Things to do/case list meetings" are either case specific or personnel specific meetings dealing with the particular things that need to be done in a particular case or the particular things that need to be done in a particular individual's case list on multiple different matters. On the other hand, "litigation/docket and calendar meetings" are where you get all of your staff together, secretaries, administrative assistants, paralegal, associates and partners in order to go over the master "things to do" list covering multiple different cases for multiple different people. Additionally, you will review at a minimum the next thirty days of the calendar to be sure that everybody is on top of what needs to be done in the next thirty days.

These meetings only last about thirty minutes to an hour. That is really not too much time to take out of a particular week to be sure that everybody is on the same page of the hymnal.

We use Time Matters in our office for keeping our calendar. It lends itself to a listing of uncompleted tasks. This listing is constantly updated with things being crossed off when they are completed and being added to the list when it is determined that they need to be done. This system seems to work very well and our office only generates on average about four pages of these things to do from our uncompleted task list that is kept on our computer system.

We have a computerized calendar in our office that is also run on Time Matters and we have a system where everybody puts everything into the calendar so that we have a master calendar and also individual calendar. Because a vast majority of business in our law firm is generated by me, I have found that the master calendar really becomes my personal calendar as well.

For the calendar system, I have asked that everybody put on the master calendar every place that they are going to be for the five working days of each week, Monday through Friday, from 7:00 in the morning to 7:00 at night. This system allows me to see when people will be unavailable first thing in the morning as well as unavailable late in the afternoon or into the evening. This system also tells me when people will be out of the office for personal time or vacation time. It also allows everyone in the office to know where I am in the same twelve hour period so they can reach me if they need to for some client or personal emergency. Now that the system is perfected, it seems to be working very well.

The Time Matters system allows us to put in items that will show up on a master calendar and on the calendar of other individuals. If people want, they can look at the master calendar or they can simply go in and look at their own individual calendar.

Time Matters also allows you to adjust the hours that you want to put things into the calendar and also to have tasks that are due for a particular day show up at the beginning of the calendar on that particular day's calendar.

Any type of a hand written or computerized system would work. When people's calendars are kept on individual basis in hand written format such as day timers, it simply is chaotic and leads to the potential for too many mistakes.. There is absolutely no substitute for a computerized calendar. As you get a computerized system, you've got to be sure that the information is input properly in order for it to be taken out properly, and utilized and relied upon in your day to day practice. The old saying "Junk in, junk out," is absolutely true.

Your firm's calendar can be synchronized with palm pilots, blackberries and other hand-held devices. The information can be uploaded and downloaded off of these devices into your main computer calendaring system.

We utilize these "litigation/docket and calendaring meetings" for discussions of not only the work that we are doing in client's cases, but also administrative things that need to be shared with each other. You can remind people of upcoming events, holidays, people who will be out of the office, people who will be departing and people who will be arriving. We have found in our office, no matter how hard we try, it is almost impossible to get everybody together at least once a week. Therefore it is very important that you try to meet at least once a week, and if you really put an effort into it, you will probably end up meeting about once every two weeks, but hopefully no later than once a month.

It is very helpful to have multiple people in your firm know what is going to be coming up so that everybody can plan accordingly to try and help get the client's matter in proper fashion and to support the people who are charged with getting the client's matter done properly.

Periodically, we have been know to serve some type of treat at these meetings and utilize these meeting as a moral booster for everyone in the office as well as a sharing of information and a coordination of future activities.

If your firm is large enough, it's probably not practical to have the whole law firm sit in on these meetings. Not to mention, that the litigators and the non-litigators would have a chorus of groans as each others deadlines were brought up and discussed. If your law firm has departments, no matter how small they may be, then it would probably be a fairly good idea to have these "litigation/docket and calendaring meetings" on a department by department basis.

The ironic thing about my practice is that it most of the time operates as though I am a solo practitioner, but I simply could not get all of the work done that needs to be done without the personnel that I work with on a day to day basis. Because of the fact that we have additional lawyers in the office, we meet the definition of a small firm. When I had a law firm of thirty-four lawyers, we used to have these "litigation/docket and calendaring meetings" with all the people that were the litigators in the firm. We would usually have at least a dozen of us in the meeting.

One of the major difficulties in operating a successful law practice is to try and communicate about what is going on, what needs to be done, and what is going to be happening in the near future. You can try as you will to utilize written communication, but there really is not much substitution for some quality "face time." These "litigation/docket and calendar meetings" serve that "face time" function. You need to encourage people to attend, you need to encourage people to participate, you need to encourage people to raise issues at these meeting that are for the collective good and the collective understanding of everybody. If you have something that needs to be passed out and discussed, this is a perfect time to do so. In short, I have seen absolutely no downside of any kind to these types of meetings.

I read a book one time by an author by the name of Mackey. I believe the name of the book "How to Swim With Sharks Without Getting Eaten." One of the things that I remembered in the book was a comment by Mackey regarding rewarding his employees for doing the right thing. He constantly tried to find people doing the right thing and when he did he liked to reward them. One of the ways that he rewarded these people was to have periodic meetings and in front of everybody pay them a bonus in multiples of one hundred dollar bills depending on the quality of and quantity of what he found these people doing correctly. I must admit, have been sorely tempted on a couple of occasions to follow Mackey's lead. What I try to do in these meetings is to use them as problem solving meetings, communication meetings and motivational meetings. No, I have not resorted to the delivery of cold hard cash yet, but I can certainly see the day coming when some individual in our firm brings in a major case and we receive a retainer. What a great way to say thank you: cash!

The format of these "litigation/docket and calendar meetings" is only limited by your imagination. If it's good for the client, if it's good for the staff and lawyers of the firm, if it's good for the firm, it would be fair game for being looked into and discussed at one of these meetings.

If you don't have such a meeting a this time, start small. Try to have periodic meeting with regard to your cases. Try periodic meetings with individual case lists. Then, once everyone has gotten used to these types of meetings, expand the meeting into "litigation/docket and calendaring meeting" and see how everybody's understanding of how the law office operates, how the client legal work is accomplished, and how all of this leads to everyone in the firm being able to make a living, will very quickly not only become self-evident, but also celebratory.

Next week, I am going to try and further expand upon a topic we touched upon earlier. This is to talk a little bit more about "things to do list per case." I want to be sure to talk about when it is important to have a trial outline in a case and how various parts of that trial outline can be used with regard to helping in "getting the work done." I think you will see that some of the comments with regard to the utilization of the trial outline will be very interesting in how you can utilize certain parts of the trial outline at various stages on the handling of the case without actually having to go through all of the trouble of having all of the twenty-six forms utilized all at the same time.

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.