Fail-Safe Tips for Putting Together an Office Memo Manual

We are almost at the end of the topics in the area of "administration" as the second area that makes up every business in the world. Remember, the first area is "customers" or "clients." The next three areas are "getting the work done," "billing," and "getting the bill collected." You will soon be able to grade yourself on how well you are doing with regard to these tips on law office marketing, management and economics. You will be able to find out if you are somewhere at the low end of the scale in the "Stone Ages," or somewhere on the high end, being "On the Cutting Edge."

The topic for this week is an office memo manual. I promised I would tell you how to put together an office manual without having to sit down and actually write one from scratch. I think you will find this suggestion of how to put together an office memo manual will be very helpful to you. We all have certain procedures that we want everybody in our office to follow. Often times, we find it necessary to put these procedures in some type of a memorandum to the staff and to the attorneys to be sure that everything is being done in the proper way. My experience tells me that more often than not, these memorandums get buried somewhere, and in the hustle and bustle of every day law practice, they are soon forgotten, lost and not followed. Every time a new person is added to your office, you have to start over from scratch trying to bring them up to speed with regard to all the systems and procedures you utilize in your office.

Why not start an office memo manual? All you need to get started is a three ring notebook and a set of alphabetical dividers for the three ring notebook. Try and gather together all of the memos tyou have generated regarding office systems and procedures and begin to sort them by topic, three hole punch them and file them alphabetically in the office memo manual.

Always file the memos by the base word . Examples would be "filing, timekeeping, mailing procedures,"etc. I recommend you do not even try to update these memos right away, simply get them filed. After you have the memos in the three ring notebook, you have a very good beginning for an office systems manual.

There will always be time to update these memos one at a time. I suggest that you simply start at the beginning alphabetically and start to update the memos one memo per week. Pretty quickly you will have a very up-to-date office procedures manual.

Try to get in the habit of every time that an issue comes up with regard to an office system or procedure, that you make up some type of a short memo with regard to that system or procedure, and promptly label it and file it in the appropriate place in the three ring notebook.

Always be sure that the memos are dated and anytime you get a new memo that supercedes an old memo, be sure the old memo gets discarded. Before long, you have not only a complete systems and procedures manual, but one that is completely up-to-date.

There is no limit to the types of subjects you can put in this booklet. You can include lists of holidays, policies with regard to sick time, vacation, compensation, etc. Believe me, somebody in your office is the proverbial string-saver, and you will probably be able to find a complete set of all these memorandums that you produced over the last three to five years in somebody's file drawer.

One of the real benefits in having such an office memo manual is that you can give this manual to all your new employees and simply have them review it over a period of time. Any good human relations person would tell you to have a place in the back of the manual where each person that has reviewed it signs off on the fact that they have indeed reviewed it. It would be a little hard for any new employees to say that they did not know about the policies if they signed off on it, dated it, and there were copies of the memos with dates on them prior to the date they signed indicating they have read everything in the manual.

The alternative to having some type of an office memo manual is to have good intentions about writing an office manual, but then "the road to Hades is paved with good intentions." It simply never gets done.

The other alternative is to have no organized system of any kind to file your office memos and therefore, they are misfiled, lost or not filed at all.

Even if you only end up with a handful of memos in this three ring notebook, it is a start. As with most of the systems I have suggested to you, the absolutely biggest stumbling block is getting started!

I suggest that what you do is to simply ask whoever in your office who is the most likely person to have such memos available to get them for you, and the next time you are watching your favorite sporting event or your favorite show, sort them, label them, three hole punch them and put them in the appropriate place in the book. You will get great satisfaction from being organized, and you will be on your way to having the easiest possible office memo manual that you will ever be able to put together. As I have said many times before, get started! Now!

We only have two things left to talk about with regard to suggestions on "tips" for "administration." Next week we are going to talk about making a list of office benefits and a list of office holidays. Additionally, we are going to talk about the philosophy behind having certain benefits as well as taking certain holidays so that you can see it is much better to have a system that you have evaluated and done on purpose with regard to office benefits and holidays than it is to simply have it be done "willy nilly." I think you will find some of my philosophy on why we have certain benefits and why we have certain holidays to be very beneficial in your own office.

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.