5 Ways Attorneys Can Improve Efficiency

Chances are you’re looking for ways to improve efficiency at your firm. It’s an ongoing battle for most lawyers. Work efficiency is an important key to success, regardless of your industry.

If you’re wondering how to improve your work efficiency, here are some tips:

1. Understand What Efficiency Is and Is Not

Working efficiently does not mean you are cutting corners. It doesn’t mean you are leaving stuff untouched or skipping steps.

It does mean you are streamlining the time it takes to complete a given task. Working efficiency doesn’t come easy to most people. It takes practice and over time, with effort, it gets easier.

If you’ve been putting work efficiency on the backburner or you don’t understand how it can help your firm, now is the time to consider what you can do to make your workdays and workflows more efficient.

2. Track All of Your Time

As an attorney, you’re already used to tracking billable hours.

Improving efficiency requires you to extend this practice further than you already have.

Tracking all of the time you spend working, whether you’re dealing with billable hours or not, is a great way to recognize if you’re squandering time.

Unlike billable hours, you won’t need to track all of your time indefinitely. Instead, commit to doing it for a week or a month. Then go back and review what you’ve recorded. You’ll get a great overview of how you spend your time and whether any of it can be spent more efficiently.

To learn more about the benefits of time tracking and how it can help work efficiency, check out The Benefits of Tracking Your Employees’ Time.

3. Create a Top Three

Productivity experts often recommend creating a top three list each day. These are three non-negotiable tasks you must complete for the day. They are your top priorities and everything else comes behind them.

Although you might not be able to commit to three tasks per day, you should at least have a single top priority task. No matter how off-track the day gets, you get this task done. Determine what that task is first thing in the morning and by the end of the day, you’re guaranteed to have checked it off your to-do list.

4. Consider Mono-Tasking

Long gone are the days of multi-tasking to improve efficiency. Nowadays, successful professionals recognize how important and effective it is to give 100 percent focus to one task at a time.

For many people who have been multi-tasking for years, this is a tall order.

If you struggle with mono-tasking, start with an hour each day to practice it.

Choose your most important task of the day (see above) and focus on accomplishing it for just one hour. Set aside everything else, shut your office door, and silence your phone. At the end of the hour, you’re either finished with it or you’ve accomplished a significant chunk of it because of your focus.

5. Know When to Outsource

One of the easiest and most appealing ways to improve efficiency at your law firm is to outsource tasks to others.

Two types of tasks are well-suited for outsourcing:

• Potentially automatable things you do all of the time
• Things you don’t consider yourself an expert in doing

A good example of something a law firm can outsource is marketing. All firms need to market their services, but many are too busy with client work to dedicate the time needed to create a successful marketing strategy.

If you’d like to discuss outsourcing your marketing efforts or you’re looking for other ways to improve the work efficiency of your law firm, we can help. Contact Legal Web Design to discuss your options.