Particularly as a plaintiff attorney, time on desk is decisive for the success of my practice. Reducing it means I am not just a good lawyer; I am a good businessperson.
I want to be a good lawyer, and I want to run a great business. Joining PILMMA around 8 years ago was a commitment to myself and my firm that we would grow as both.
We have been looking at ways to reduce time on desk ever since. Sound processes help us reduce the overhead that delays cases.
- Respond to inquiries promptly and efficiently transform them to clients
- Manage case documents quickly
- Don’t let research and trial prep delay cases, keep ahead of the court schedule
These are processes that frankly should not be falling to the lawyer. To be successful, we need to have both good systems and enabled staff.
Let me emphasize: we need both. Just one and not the other won’t do.
More than Good Systems
Your law firm is not a fast food restaurant. At least, mine is not. I love setting up systems and protocols, just like Ray Kroc and McDonald’s. But, we can’t just write a bunch of scripts and hand them to any old staff.
I expect the staff supporting our practice to have empathy with the clients. To have enough “court sense” to not just do what I ask them but to see ways to do it better.
I want my support teams to be long running employees, growing in their confidence and taking on new challenges. If I have high turnover from staff that are not invested in the firm, I am going to be training constantly instead of moving cases along.
Systems to Support Enabled Staff
We can’t just find great people and point them at the phone, either. My rock star employees need good guidance to be successful. They need to know the environment we work in, what our goals are, and what to do next. Perhaps most importantly, they need to know they have people to contact for help, support, and advice.
Start with the System
If you feel you need to elevate your support teams and systems, I recommend you focus on the processes first. Otherwise, you may frustrate new superstar employees and lose them to other opportunities.
You can elevate your process with your own smarts and attention. Examine what you have in place and ask how you can improve it. Maybe you have been assiduous from the start and your processes for intake, research, and case management are perfectly appropriate. But a good look will likely inspire you to find ways to improve. At the very last, document processes so your staff can reference them as needed. You don’t want them relying on recollections of conversational instructions.
Hire Right
I think hiring is one of my own personal superpowers. The key is onboarding. To get the best out of people, you have to invest time getting them familiar and comfortable. Critical to my goals, this helps retain them and give them the confidence to help improve our business. For my staff, I schedule 3-4 weeks of onboarding.
There are firms that rely on a new hire’s previous experience and set them loose on the job after a couple days, doing a “sink or swim” style of onboarding. I think this is a huge mistake, guaranteeing that the firm is on a constant hire-and-train cycle instead of tuning their machine and reducing time on desk as a team.
Getting the Team Humming
When you get your staff and systems on track, it is really something else. You can spend more time on your part of the system—being a lawyer. You can see that time on desk metric shrink. This is when the work starts feeling really good. I love working with a team and seeing us all contribute to the goal.
Remote Options for Hiring
For my firm, even when we had the processes, we could not maintain workers in our local area. As a result, we expanded our search and I started using staff that lived in Monterrey, Mexico. Since my office is in Florida, we had to get even better at process and communications. It has been absolutely the best move I could have made. In fact, I turned it into another business.
Regents Remote Services provides virtual employees for your law firm. We have an office in Monterrey where your staff will work. Regents are experienced professionals set up to be long-term, committed staff that grow with your company. Reach out. I am happy to talk about how Regents might fit into your firm.
