Not to get too Freudian on you all, but, sometimes one of the upsides to blogging and I suppose a lot of writing in general is that it encourages a degree of self-analysis and introspection. This last post (and perhaps some quiet time last week in the UP) and specifically the notion of a law practice broken down into thirds has got me thinking about two sort of macro-level viewpoints that often hold me back from greater success as a small law firm manager. And I’m guessing I’m not alone.
First is the pull or conflict between the “worker bee” mindset versus the business owner/rainmaker/CEO mindset. I’m nearing the 5 year mark of my own firm’s existence and I have not yet fully conquered the “worker bee” syndrome. Meaning I still have a twinge of guilt when I’m NOT getting very specific, currently profitable, legal work done. And what results is that the 1/3-1/3-1/3 model gets out-of-whack big time because I feel like I must be spending more time on the substantive legal work “third.” Inevitably what happens is my breakdown becomes something like 70% substantive legal and probably 15% each for marketing and business administration. Thus I’m too focused on present legal work versus creating future legal work & creating a better legal services business in the future. This is a big deal. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with the “worker bee” syndrome in general but if you know that’s kind of who you are then your/my place might be as another firm’s associate being the ultimate 2200 billable hour worker bee…ouch, that stings.
Second, and less specific to lawyerland, is the old ACTIVITY versus ACCOMPLISHMENT struggle given emphasis by the late Peter Drucker. This is rather self-explanatory but can be particularly challenging for the small firm attorney depending on your staff constraints. I currently utilize one, part-time legal assistant so on the days that she’s working most of my “activities” get shifted off of my plate…scheduling, logistics, reminder telephone calls, buying office supplies, simple banking, mail sorting, etc., etc. I’d include checking e-mail more than say 2-3 times a day in the category of “activity” w/o any substantive accomplishment too. And lets be clear, what I’m labeling as activities are different than sort of utter time wasting procrastination. The things I list above are things that must be done, however, they are not profitable accomplishments that are putting dollars in my pocket…they’re sort of tangential. A typical error would be me putting off spending several hours on drafting some critical legal document for a client and instead spending that time doing non-substantive activity-like busy work. Some easy fixes are proper delegation of work to staff and limiting your e-mail usage each day. The bigger mindset change is developing the mental discpline to differentiate between the important and the urgent. Or like former (future?) Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz used to preach using the W.I.N. acronym:
What’s
Important
Now
April 3, 2010
[...] if you don’t face the problem it can be a practice killer. Here’s an older post, Do You Make These Mistakes, describing the conflict between the “worker bee” mindset conflicting with the business [...]