Managing Workflows for Junior Lawyers

Junior lawyers of all sorts, you probably have a supervising attorney and there is a good chance he or she is BUSY. Here is something I learned as a young associate to manage this and stay sane. When I was a junior associate, I had lots of cases with one of the busiest partners in my office. I had questions and needed his approval on strategy and work product. He was happy to give me that guidance, but it was hard to nail him down because he was so busy. So I started sending him a brief weekly update. I listed all our cases with a one-sentence description. I listed the upcoming deadlines in bold. I added one or two sentences providing a status update. Then I highlighted it. Green meant everything was on track, my update is just FYI. Yellow meant, “I need your input or approval on this”—it is how I noted a question* or a suggested a next step if I wasn’t sure. Red meant “I need your specific attention on this now!” It was for things like the draft I sent last week that needs his sign off so it can go for client approval. And I re-attached to that email any document that I had sent him for review. It worked like a charm. His confidence in my ability to manage cases grew because he saw all the things I was handling well. I wasn’t sending 25 urgent emails that cluttered his inbox and added to his workload. He had all the information he needed at his fingertips and didn’t need to hunt. And I would get a prompt response with his answers to my questions. He was happier because I made it easier to do his job. I was happier because I wasn’t stressing that a partner wasn’t responding to me or I had urgent matters that needed attention that felt out of my control. Being a rockstar associate usually comes down to making a partner’s life easier. I don’t know if there is a supervising attorney on earth who wouldn’t appreciate an associate proactively checking in, providing succinct status updates, and making it simple to give approval, assignments, and guidance. *Bonus tip: when you have a question or problem, propose a solution! You may have thought about this in a different or better way than the partner. And learning to start predicting the correct next step is how you grow!

As a junior lawyer, I was told to "take ownership" of the work but didn't get much guidance on what it actually meant. Here are 6 actions that junior lawyers can take to do this: 1️⃣ Correspondence When you're copied into email chains with clients, offer to do the first draft of the document / task / email response instead of waiting for it to be delegated to you. You can also ghostwrite draft emails* (from instructing lawyer to client), instead of sending internal emails (you to instructing lawyer) that they'd need to redraft for the client. Include notes where you have questions / assumptions. 2️⃣ Project management Keep track of key dates and the next actions that would follow your immediate task and check if you can help out with those next actions too. If you're not sure, just ask! "Thanks for getting me to help out with this task. I'd love to stay involved in the matter but I haven't worked on this sort of project before. Would you mind walking me through the next steps and where somebody with my experience could assist?" Also, if you're waiting for a senior lawyer to review your work and it's approaching a deadline, give them a reminder. "Hi, just wanted to remind you that we need to send out that advice on Friday. I sent you a draft on Tuesday. Please let me know if there's anything I should amend, or if you'd like me to send it again." 3️⃣ Provide solutions, not problems If you identify a problem with a task / matter, take some time to think about a potential solution instead of just passing the problem to your supervisor. "As I was [doing this task], I found that [Step 2] wasn't working because of [reason]. I think we can still achieve the same result if we do [potential solution]. Do you think that would work?" 4️⃣ Be prepared to challenge instructions The ultimate goal is to achieve the client's desired outcome, not to perfectly follow instructions that may be flawed. If you see an issue with your instructing lawyer's (or the client's) instructions, speak up and be prepared to offer an alternative. 5️⃣ Understand the business side of things Doing the actual work isn't the whole job. Take some time to learn about the budget for the matters, your hourly rates, what to write in your billing narratives, how each client likes to communicate (phone calls, emails, client portal uploads), and who the client needs to report to / get approval from. 6️⃣ Communicate leave and coordinate handovers When you take leave – communicate in advance, check with your team to see if there is coverage, and give your team proper handovers for matters that might continue during your leave period. Sending a calendar invite for your leave period and preparing handover notes* can also be helpful. * I've written guides on the asterisked things. Let me know in the comments if you'd like a link. 📌What else do you think junior lawyers can do to demonstrate that they're "taking ownership" of their work?

Here’s something I wish I had started doing as a law firm associate: using checklists for project intake. Too often, when a project is handed over, details get missed, and questions go unanswered, leading to confusion, frustration, write-offs, and avoidable mistakes. Part of the problem is that senior lawyers usually aren’t trained in assigning work effectively. That’s how you end up with emails being forwarded with directives like: “pls handle” or "pls fix." A checklist can help a junior lawyer who is unclear on a request gain clarity. It can also help a senior lawyer become more thoughtful and consistent in how work gets delegated. Atul Gawande writes about this in The Checklist Manifesto (one of my favorite business/productivity books). Gawande is one of my favorite authors, generally. He is an orthogonal thinker in the best sense of the term—someone who looks across disciplines, borrows ideas from other fields, and applies them in practical ways. He writes as a surgeon, but his insights apply well beyond medicine. One of his core points is that in complex environments, problems arise because complexity overwhelms the human brain. Important steps get skipped, assumptions go untested, and small omissions create bigger problems downstream. That idea applies just as much to legal work as it does to surgery or aviation. A simple checklist can make legal project intake cleaner and reduce the odds that important details slip through the cracks. Here are a few helpful prompts: When? Make sure you are clear on the deadline. If there is a filing deadline or a date by which something has to go to a client, when does the assigning lawyer need to see a draft? Clarify what is meant by “ASAP” or “COB.” Who? Who is the audience? Is it an internal memo? Is it going to the client? Is the client a lawyer or a business person? This matters because it helps ensure the work product strikes the right tone and includes the right level of detail. What? What are the client’s work product preferences? Lots of detail and citations? A short list of practical conclusions? Also, what is the scope of the assignment? Spend a few hours and report back on initial findings, or go deep and try to reach a final answer? Why? Why does this matter? What is the context, and how does what I am doing fit into the bigger picture of the representation? Are there other issues I should be on the lookout for? Clarity comes from asking good questions. A checklist helps make sure those questions actually get asked. Create a checklist for the types of projects you commonly work on. It is a simple habit, but it can make a significant difference. You will feel more organized, work will move more smoothly, and fewer details will slip through the cracks.

Many law practices can feel like they're running in a state of barely-controlled chaos. Calls, emails, chats, deadlines, broken promises, internal reviews — all competing for attention at once. A decade ago one of my longest-term clients, Jeffrey C. De Francisco, JD LLM, decided he wasn’t willing to live that way anymore. Instead of working harder, he started working differently: adopting Agile methods, making work visible, and working with his team toward consistency, predictability, and accountability. In this week’s podcast episode, Jeff and I look back on that journey — what worked, what we learned, and how small, incremental changes turned into a lasting cultural shift that has Jeff's firm more profitable than ever without him working nights and weekends. Mostly. If you’ve ever felt caught up in the chaos of your own practice, Jeff’s story is proof that there’s another path. 📷 About the photo: I'm not supposed to pick favorites, but Jeff's magnet board is one of the best law firm boards I've ever worked with. A few things to note: (1) There are actually 3 different workflows represented on this wall: Estate Planning, Estate Administration, and Business. (2) Each column on the board represents a workflow stage for a matter type, and the essential deliverables for that stage (the "Definition of Done") are clearly spelled out in the paper sheets above each column. (3) The magnet cards have different colors to represent matter sub-types within each workflow. E.g. Taxable estate plans have one color, while non-taxable plans have another. Those cards also contain some key information about each matter. (4) The rows on the board (we call them swimlanes) represent urgency. The very top row contains matters that absolutely must make progress this week, while the bottom row shows cases that are "on ice" for one reason or another. (5) The red tags hanging from certain cards represent individual commitments from team members to make progress on that matter that day. Each team member had between 4 and 6 of those tags, marked with their initials and labeled 1-6 to show priority. They only got so many tags to prevent themselves from overcommitting. Each day in a short standup meeting, a team member would place their no. 1 tag on their highest-priority matter for that day. Then their no. 2 tag, and so on. If a particular matter was high priority AND needed a lot of work, they might put multiple tags on that matter to show it. By the end of the standup everyone knew what was planned to get done that day, and the team had worked out any interdependencies. Then, in the next day's standup, each person celebrated the progress they'd made, before shuffling their tags to show the next day's commitments. Since this setup (and partly thanks to the pandemic), Jeff and his team have gone digital, but a lot of the practices we developed on this board are still part of their daily routine.

I love working with less experienced people. They're curious, motivated, humble and eager to please/learn. But there's a problem: If you expect polish without putting in the reps, you’re not developing talent, you’re crushing it. Managing a more junior person is a delicate balance of "great job, you're improving!" and "this isn't it.". Here's some advice if you're in that situation. How to manage a Junior person 101: - Set your expectations to "they're learning, I'm teaching." - More instruction/briefing - More training/coworking - More iterations - See things early - Slower pace to “get there” - Give deadlines & level of effort expectations - Tell them in advance, you're going to correct, critique, and support them and they should expect it because you want them to grow and thrive. Here's a primer for how I align with them when giving a mission: 1. Delegation: are you watching me, am I watching you, or are we doing it together? Review early & often together, ask them to set up those syncs. 2. Impact: here’s the problem, here’s the behavior to change, here’s what I don’t want (bad outcomes to avoid), here's what number moves if it's done right. 3. Timing/effort: here's when I need to see something / when we need to have an impact. Don't spend more than {x} amount of time compared to the ROI. 4. Briefing: give examples of things to research (tools, competitors, product experiences, or out of the box examples). Ask them to think holistically about downstream impacts, scaling, user pain points, and other non-functionals (security, compliance, systems-thinking, integrations, partnerships, costs, revenues, monetization, roll-out, etc). 5. Debriefing: Ask them to come ready to explian flow/JTBD, differentiation & delight opportunities as well as risks. Set expectations for impact & strategic alignment points (when does the user feel/do something that we want, why is it an improvement over their status quo.) Give examples of the formats you want to see things in so they know what YOU need to know. When giving adjustment feedback: - You must prepare: ask to see before you talk about it so you can balance the negative and positive elements to convey. Don't burry them in critiques. - Tell them when it's not hitting the mark, but be specific about why. I like this: "We're not yet at the level we need, here's what we're going to do to get there together" -> note all the 'we' talk. YOUR job is to give the plan. THEIR job is to follow it. - Reassure them that it's going to take time to develop skills, and to be patient with their own pace. - Keep track of what is going right. Notice it. Say it often. You are their scaffolding, act like it!