Time Out: Gaining Time by the Minute

February 23, 2021 - Law Practice Management

There’s nothing like daylight savings time to get you to observe how dramatic a small shift in time becomes. Push back one hour, and all of a sudden it’s instant winter. People are like, ‘Wow, when did it get so dark out?’ And, hot chocolate sales start to rise.

Saving time as a business owner can have a similar effect on you. But, instead of greeting the coming of winter, you’ll be saying things like, ‘Wow, I just got home, and it’s not even dark yet!’

For law firms, just like for any other business, change starts small; and, it’s the same thing when it comes to better managing your productivity. There are some immediate changes you can make to your law firm that will incur massive incremental value. So, if you buy a second monitor for your desktop, laptop or tablet, you’re eliminating many of the several seconds you spend opening and closing windows every day. Over the course of months and years, that time adds up, and you can fill it with more high-leverage activities. Outside of the realm of hardware, consider how creating workflows based on case types would save you time. If you know that every single time you onboard a particular case type that you do the same ten things, create a workflow for those tasks, and set up your case management system so that all those tasks are automatically populated every time you start a new case of that type. That sure beats creating ten separate tasks each time.

As a law firm manager, especially one who bills on an hourly basis, every hour of administrative time you reduce is an hour you can bill.

So, what are you waiting for?

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If you’re looking for ways to add hours to your day, we can help.

The Wyoming State Bar offers free law practice management consulting services through Red Cave Law Firm Consulting.  To request a consult, visit the Wyoming State Bar’s law practice management page, and start running your law firm like a business.