Lawyers often experience peaks and troughs in their workload leaving them beholden to deadlines when demanding cases land on their desk. Being able to handle the pressure of multiple cases and prioritising them is a large part of making a success of your legal career. Managing your slower and busier times effectively is vital if you are not to drown under the immense case work. Here are some tips to make sure you stay on top of a heavy workload:
Cultivating your to-do list
Prioritising cases correctly is imperative not only to make sure you don’t miss deadlines, but also to de-clutter your mind to allow you scope to finish all of your work. Knowing the difference between a soft and hard deadline is something that comes with experience, but once you realise what clients and jobs take precedence you will find prioritising your time a lot easier.
Delegating laborious jobs
The time-consuming nature of legal work can make your to-do list seem akin to a life’s work, which makes the ability to delegate portions of it vital. If you need letters typing up or correspondence completing then using your legal secretary or support staff can take the weight out of many workloads leaving you free to concentrate on items that need your careful consideration.
Managing in-house relationships
Law firms are notoriously busy organisations where each and every member helps the other out where necessary. Let’s not be unrealistic, you will constantly have partners popping their head round your door asking for your help with something. This makes managing your different relationships important, so you can be honest and ask whether this needs doing immediately or can it wait while you finish something that is on a deadline.
Once you put your own procedures in place to measure and maintain your productivity, you will find your workload becoming more manageable in hectic times and your team will come to rely on you as well as know when and when not to bother you.
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