The Empowered Paralegal

A post on ABAJournal.comtoday reports on some very pominent people who have stopped using cell phone, “giving them more power over their time and eliminating distractions that interrupt their work and their relationships.” I like this idea as a matter of time management and have written on the need to institution phone rules, cell or land-line, for both time and client management purposes. Of course, completely doing away with the boss’s ability to contact you as a paralegal is not a good attorney managment technique. The key is to manage the phone (and email) rather than let it manage you.

This post is really about another aspect of the ABAJournal.com report though:

A Los Angeles-area college dean, Jonathan Reed of the University of La Verne, said ditching his cell phone helps him pay attention in meetings and frees him up to talk to strangers. “A cell phone signals that my whole world is me and it excludes everyone else,” he told Bloomberg. He recalls a recent trip where he saw two men in a restaurant sitting with beautiful women, and both were on their cell phones.

“Do they have someone better on the other line?” he wondered.

I have noticed a growing tendency on the part of legal professionals, including attorneys, to leave their cell phones on while meeting with clients.  Aside from being just plain rude and unprofessional, this is disasterous for client management. When the cell phone is left on and caller ID is being checked, the implication is that there is someone out there who is more important to the legal professional than the client who is right in front of them. Clients note the distraction and wonder if they are being billed for the time taken to check the caller ID. In general, they feel disrespected – and rightfully so. It also prevents the legal professional from being able to sell the idea that when they are with another client, they focus only on that client and, therefore, cannot take their call. The client knows this isn’t true, because the legal professional is willing to take other calls while with them. What this tells the client again  is that they are simply not important enough to garner the professional’s attention while the professional is with them or to be a distraction to the professional when the professional is with another client.

Civility does seem to be on the wan. The courts have started to take action against the lack of civility given by one attorney to another in the courtroom and the litigation process in general. Legal teams who want to keep their clients ought to start by being civil to those clients.

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A recent viewer of this blog was brought here by the search, “Is being a paralegal stressful?” The search also brought the viewer to a number of forums and other discussions indicating that it can be, and often is -even to the extent of causing some practitioners to abandon the career. I hope, though, that the searcher read far enough to understand that being a paralegal need not be excessively stressful. Certainly there are aspects of the job that can lead to “paralegal unhappy.” While stress cannot be eliminated from any profession, it can be managed making the rewards of the profession far outweigh the stress toll.

The key is to manage your work and your career, rather than let them manage you. As is often stated here and explained in The Empowered Paralegal: Effective, Efficient and Professional:

• The effective, empowered paralegal manages the calendar well. Missed deadlines result in dissatisfied clients, malpractice claims, and attorney disciplinary procedures. It is essential that both the attorney and the paralegal be aware of upcoming deadlines and have a system in place to meet those deadlines without last-minute pressures that increase the likelihood of mistakes.

• The effective, empowered paralegal manages files well. The best crafted deeds, contracts, wills and pleadings are worthless if they cannot be found when needed. None of them can even be created if the necessary information cannot be located in a timely manner, or was never obtained in the first place. It is essential that the both the paralegal and the attorney have a system in place, and use that system, for organizing, identifying, indexing and tracking files and the materials contained in the files.

• The effective, empowered paralegal manages clients well. The client is part of the legal team. Without the client there is no need for either the paralegal or the attorney and no money to fund the law office. However, the client is the member of the team who knows least about the law and her role in the team. It is essential that the paralegal and the attorney keep the client informed about what is being done for her and why, and what she needs to do for the outcome to be successful.

• The effective, empowered paralegal manages the paralegal’s relationship with the attorney well within the legal team. Both the paralegal and attorney must know, and respect, their roles and those of the other; their abilities and those of the other. It is essential that the paralegal understand what the attorney expects of him and the attorney understand what the paralegal can and cannot do for her.

• The effective, empowered paralegal knows and applies the principles of professionalism and thereby gains recognition of his status as a professional.

In addition, it is possible to manage happiness. (See Planning for Happiness: The Happiness Project Finally, keep in mind the role of humor and a sense of humor in managing stress. Depending on your sense of humor, you may find some help with Paralegals on Trialor in Paralegal Hell,or both. I’d be interested in hearing of other sites and other ways paralegals work humor into their days.

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Most paralegals are charged with file management and other “clerical” tasks. In some small offices, even the attorneys must take on such tasks. The professional paralegals handles these tasks effectively and efficiently as part of their role in the legal team. Many paralegals are also charged with tracking and billing their time.  A recent case from the Nebraska United States Bankruptcy Court posted by Leagle.com deals with the relationship between the performance of clerical tasks and billing of time (among other issues). Here’s what the court has to say:

In addition to the matters discussed above, there is an issue concerning a law firm charging for secretarial or administrative functions, which, traditionally, have been treated as overhead and either not charged at all, or not charged at professional or paraprofessional rates.

There has been little guidance on this issue from courts in the Eighth Circuit. Most of the case law around the country suggests that “ministerial tasks” (typing, file organization, document preparation, searching or filing documents on PACER, etc.) performed by a professional or paraprofessional should not be allowed as a separate charge because it is part of the office overhead which should already be built into counsel’s hourly rate. See In re Dimas, LLC, 357 B.R. 563, 577 (Bankr. N.D. Calif. 2006) (“Services that are clerical in nature are not properly chargeable to the bankruptcy estate. They are not in the nature of professional services and must be absorbed by the applicant’s firm as an overhead expense.”). There is some older authority, however, for the proposition that the court should look at the “sum total” of the services rendered in determining whether a specialized service was performed which benefitted the estate, even if it was a clerical task performed by a professional. In re Interstate Restaurant Sys., Inc., 61 B.R. 945, 949 (S.D. Fla. 1986).

With regard to billing for clerical work, the Supreme Court said, in a case involving the award of attorney fees under the Civil Rights Act, that:

It has frequently been recognized in the lower courts that paralegals are capable of carrying out many tasks, under the supervision of an attorney, that might otherwise be performed by a lawyer and billed at a higher rate. Such work might include, for example, factual investigation, including locating and interviewing witnesses; assistance with depositions, interrogatories, and document production; compilation of statistical and financial data; checking legal citations; and drafting correspondence. Much such work lies in a gray area of tasks that might appropriately be performed either by an attorney or a paralegal. To the extent that fee applications under § 1988 are not permitted to bill for the work of paralegals at market rates, it would not be surprising to see a greater amount of such work performed by attorneys themselves, thus increasing the overall cost of litigation. Of course, purely clerical or secretarial tasks should not be billed at a paralegal rate, regardless of who performs them. What the court in Johnson v. Georgia Highway Express, Inc., 488 F.2d 714, 717 (CA5 1974), said in regard to the work of attorneys is applicable by analogy to paralegals: “It is appropriate to distinguish between legal work in the strict sense, and investigation, clerical work, compilation of facts and statistics and other work which can often be accomplished by non-lawyers but which a lawyer may do because he has no other help available. Such non-legal work may command a lesser rate. Its dollar value is not enhanced just because a lawyer does it.”

Missouri v. Jenkins, 491 U.S. 274, 288 n.10 (1989).

Many of the time entries in this fee application for work performed by the employees identified as paralegals appear to be, functionally, clerical. File setup, scanning, setting up appointments, would be considered, according to the authority cited above, clerical in nature and not billable. I will, therefore, discount the amount claimed as paralegal time. I suggest that in the future Mr. Skrupa, and other law firms using a similar billing system, review the functions performed by the “paralegals” and bill, or not bill, accordingly.

The court thus recognizes the value of paralegal professional services, but requires that clerical task time be built into the paralegal’s hourly rate, just as it is for the other professional on the legal team – the attorney.

A clerical task remains a clerical task whether done by a file clerk, a paralegal, or an attorney. Law office might want to take this into account when structuring the office. Since clerical tasks are not separately billable by a paralegal, it might make more sense to hire a file clerk as part of the office overhead and free up the paralegal time for professional work that can be billed separately. In The Empowered Paralegal: Effective, Efficient, and Professional, I discuss delegation of clerical tasks as one aspect of paralegal time management. There I attempt to assist paralegals in making the argument for hiring persons to whom clerical tasks can be delegated. This case supports that argument.

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As discussed in The Empowered Paralegal, time and work management requires analyzing the work you do and the way you use your time to do it. Once the work is analyzed, it can be prioritized and managed. Sometimes tasks are best managed by being eliminated.  (Yes, some of what you are doing may simply be a waste of time with no real purpose. It only feels like most of it is.) Often, tasks are best managed by being delegated to others, even if this means convincing your employer to higher an “other” such as a high school student willing to do filing after school for a couple of hours. Delegation only works, however, if done properly.

All this is just a lead-in to an article you should read by Vicki Voisin, The Paralegal Mentor. It appears in the most recent issue of her newsletter, “Paralegal Strategies.” Vicki not only lists, but explains, five important steps to successful delegation. Here are the steps:

1. Plan.

2. Decide to whom you’re delegating.

3. Give clear directions.

4. Follow Up.

5. Reward success.

Head over to www.paralegalmentor.com and sign up for the “Paralegal Strategies” newsletter for the full article.

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ABAJournal.com posts on a Law.com article with suggestions on how attorneys can “streamline the flow” of information deluging them each day, especially information delivered electronically. One of the suggestions is to delegate initial email reading to others. And who in the office can be trusted with the confidentiality issues while exercising sound judgment, knowledge of law and understanding of both office and legal process?

Shifting of initial attorney email reading to paralegals makes sense, but only if it is not going to overload and overwhelm the paralegal. Doing so will only pass the deluge down to the paralegal who, one presumes was fully occupied already. Of course, a deluge rolls down hill, so perhaps the paralegal will shift initial reading of their email down that hill! I prefer the use of email rules and other technological solutions before simple task shifting.

I also prefer some of the other suggestions of the Law.com article better. Suggestions such as eliminating unnecessary information flow at its source. And I certainly agree that a team approach to solving the information overload problem is best (although the article using the team approach in a different context than I intend here.)

In The Empowered Paralegal I focus on eliminating and controlling not only information overflow but other distraction based on my conclusion that multi-taskers, even young multi-taskers, really do not work as well as uni-taskers, and certainly not as well as multi-taskers think they work.  So, it is nice to find some confirmation of this in the Law.com article:

A recent study of 100 students concluded that people who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who prefer to complete one task at a time. The heavy multi-taskers couldn’t help thinking about the tasks they weren’t doing. These high multi-taskers are always drawing from all the information in front of them. They can’t keep things separate in their minds. One researcher reportedly stated that heavy multi-taskers are “suckers for irrelevancy. Everything distracts them.”

Thus, my goal of having only one file on the desk at a time. If you can stand a bit more information check out the Law.comarticle for more tips on controlling electronic information deluge.

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ABAJournal.com reports on a law associate who was reprimanded by a senior partner for failure to check his email.

… He didn’t check his e-mail.

As a result, he missed a senior partner’s instruction that he should send out a draft document for client review before calling it a day. Partner A. William Urquhart notes the mistake in an e-mail he sent the next morning to firm attorneys, which is reprinted in Above the Law, and exhorts the troops to pick up the pace as far as electronic message review is concerned.

Lawyers should be checking their e-mail hourly, unless they have a very good excuse for not doing so, Urquhart says, such as being in court, in a tunnel or asleep.

“One of the last things you should do before you retire for the night is to check your e-mail. That is why we give you BlackBerries,” he writes.

I’m not in a position to opine on whether the senior partner was correct in reprimanding the associate (although he could and should have done so privately rather than using it as a “teaching moment” for the entire firm and using the associate’s name.) I am aware that this is a price associates pay at many firms for the salary they receive.

I am hopeful, however, that paralegals can avoid similar demands. At the very least, paralegals should talk frankly with their attorneys about such expectations and make it clear that there are limits to the extent to which the office can reach into non-office hours.

In general even at the office, email and email checking have to be controled and managed lest it become an overwhelming source of stress, distraction and wasted time. Even if you must check email at regular intervals, you need not read every email or respond to everyone you read at each check interval.

Establish what the attorney’s expectation are and then establish rules for meeting those expectations while managing all emails not related to those expectations. 

Many email programs have a “Rules” function even if it’s called something else. Since the most popular program is Outlook, I’ll focus on it.  The goal is to immediately move all email other than that which requires your immediate attention out of the “Inbox.”  Since we don’t want it in the “Inbox,” we need to create a place for it to go. The good news is we can create several such places.

In Outlook 2003, for example, click on “Inbox,” so that it is “selected,” i.e., highlighted.  Then click on “File” in the toolbar. This will bring up a menu that includes “New Folder.” Click on “New Folder.”  You can name this folder whatever makes sense to you. Are many of your “I don’t need to deal with this now” emails from the paralegal down the hall? Name the folder after that paralegal.  Or simply name it “24 hours” indicating you will deal with the email within the next day.  You can have other folder for other people or other folders indicating the relative importance of the email.

Now we get to the fun part. You can, and should, create Rules that govern your email.  In the “Tools” menu  click “Rules and Alerts.” Now you can create a rule governing how your email will work.  All emails from particular persons or with particular subjects can be directed never to enter your “Inbox” at all! You can read them and respond to them when you want and if you want.   You can create a rule directing emails to your “Junk Mail” folder, but be careful with this one. Establish regular intervals for checking the “Junk Mail” folder to be sure only junk is going there.

You even have choices on email that is important. For example, every email I sent my paralegals was, of course, important. I expect each one to be read and, if appropriate, to engender a response.  However, my paralegals chose how to deal with that expectation. My emails can go directly to the “Inbox” with an alert announcing their arrival, or they can go to a folder with my name – a clear indication of just how important they are.

Then there are emails in the middle. Now that offices run on email communications, it is often necessary to communicate by email. But you don’t have to communicate with the sender every time they chose to communicate with you. If you create a folder and rule for each sender with whom you want to communicate regularly, you can check that folder periodically. Outlook lets you know how many new messages you have from that sender.

If you create folders and rules for emails from people you want or need to communicate, you need to let them know. For this communication personal contact is better than email. Before you speak to them, figure out what will work for you. If you are going to check their folders when you start the day, at 11:00 a.m., 2:00 p.m., and at the end of the day, let them know what you are doing and why.

It’s best not to make this personal. Discuss it with your attorney first. Then let each person know you are establishing these rules for everyone so you can control your day.  While they may not like the fact that they will not receive immediate attention, they will at least know why they are not receiving immediate attention. Be prepared though, for them to do the same. They may decide to create a folder for you and only check it at times that makes sense in their day.  That’s O.K. The more people doing this in your office, the better it will work.

If you work with this for awhile, you’ll discover more ways to control your email. In fact, many of the concepts used to control email can be used to control other interruptions.

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Attaining goals requires more than wishful thinking. If I want to get to Memphis, I can set off in that general direction and wander around in hopes that one day I’ll make it there, or I can plan.

The first step is to identify goals. This requires some thought and specificity. A goal that simply says, “I want to be happy,” “I want to be successful,” or “I want to be financially stable,”  while understandable, is too vague to be helpful. What will it take for you to be happy? What is success for you? In the academic arena success if often measured by attaining tenure. But even “I want to make tenure” is too vague of a goal. What does it take to make tenure? For many it requires (1) excellence in teaching, (2) service to school and profession, and (3) Scholarly research and publication. These serve better as goals and it gives some framework – one goal, “success” has become three specific goals, each of which can lead to a specific plan for attainment. There are specific ways to measure and improve teaching excellence. Service to school and profession can be accomplished in specific ways, and so on.  So to achieve each of these components of the tenure goal, we can

1. Make a list of the component parts necessary to meet the component part of the goal. What are the school’s specific requirements for teaching, publication and service.
2. Record essential time requirements on your calendar. Record not just the dates on which you need to have accomplished the goal, but also the dates on which each essential component must be accomplished.
3. Make a plan for accomplishing each component on your list. If necessary, break these tasks down into smaller components with their own plan. Again, a plan is more than a vague statement of intent such as, “I will study hard.” What specific acts constitute “studying hard?” What time needs to be allocated to each one of those tasks, in what order should they be done, what materials are needed, what other people must be involved (even if their involvement is simply that I have to see they are taken care of first, e.g., hungry kids.)
4. Record the date on which you must START each part of your plan in order to complete it on time. Build in time for the unexpected.
5. Establish reminders for each for each start and end date. It’s not enough to mark the calendar. We all need “ticklers” to remind us as we go along. In fact, we sometimes become complacent about deadlines because they are on the calendar. 
6. Review your entire calendar and integrate the new plan into the overall management of your life. Look at events before, during and after the deadline.  If the new event will chew up time you had planned to use completing a task for meeting another deadline, you may need to change one or both plans.

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This weekend I returned to  a post on ABAJournal.com entitled, “For Happy Life, Do What You Want to Do; Lawyer Explains How.” It caught my attention because during the course of my career I’ve run into a lot of unhappy attorneys. As the post notes about attaining happiness, “It isn’t easy to do so, though, especially when money and prestige pull you in one direction and your own interests take you in another.” As students in my class know, I put a high premium on setting goals, making plans and maintaining key principles, such as those advocated by Gretchen Rubin in her book The Happiness Project and her Happiness Project Blog.

The process of setting goals, making plans, managing time and workload, seem themselves like a lot of work. As noted by Rubin, it can also be scary at times, “It’s painful to acknowledge a dream, because as soon as you acknowledge it, you also acknowledge that you might fail.” After one goal setting and planning exercise in my professionalism course, a student noted that acknowledging her goal for three years down the road and starting to plan for it, felt like a commitment and realizing what she had yet to do to achieve that goal was somewhat overwhelming.

Yet, I think that if you being a professional paralegal is what you want to do, implementing the techniques of professionalism will lead not only to professionalism but happiness. Much happiness comes from achieving goals and you are much more likely to achieve goals if they are clearly identified and there is a plan for reaching the goal. If you want to get to NYC, you are far more likely to get there is you set a date and map out a route than if you just wander aimlessly in the general direction of NYC.

Goal setting and planning when combined with time, calendar and workload management have another benefit. You can plan for, and free up time for, the other “good things” in life, whatever those things are for you – time with your family, time away from your family, blogging or just no pressure knitting. In any case, take a few minutes to check out Rubin’s blog and The Happiness Project Toolbox.

That’s all for me today. I’m heading out to work in the garden and go to an Ole Miss soccer game. Hope to see you there or wherever you want to be doing what you want to do!

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The New York Times“Career Couch” yesterday had some sound advice for anyone who works in an office with colleagues. The article is entitled “When A Colleague Doesn’t Pull His Weight.” However, its first question and answer asks us to consider the possibility that we are mis-judging the situation when we feel that a colleague is not pulling his weight:

When we compare our own work with that of others, we can easily overvalue ourselves and undervalue them, said Ben Dattner, an organizational psychologist in New York and founder of Dattner Consulting. That’s partly because we know much more about our own work, he said, and partly because most people have a self-serving bias, believing that they’ve made greater contributions than others recognize.

“How much time you perceive someone is working is not necessarily a valid reflection of the effort they are expending or the results they are achieving,” he said. “They may have terrific time-management skills, stay late or work weekends.”

They may also have legitimate personal reasons for their behavior — for example, the stress of dealing with an ill relative, problems with a spouse or the foreclosure of a home, he said.

To avoid overreacting, ask yourself why you are so angry. “Did you miss a deadline because of this person?” said Rick Gibbs, a senior human resources specialist at Administaff, a human resources outsourcing firm in Houston. “Did you have to stay late because he left early? Your goal is to establish the impact on your performance.”

I’ve emphasized the comment regarding time-management skills above because time management is such a large part of the discussion on this blog and in The Empowered Paralegal. I agree with much of what the Career Couch says in this column. When I first started applying time-management skills and techniques after attending a time-management workshop, I found myself with time at the end of the day rather than a pile of unfinished work. I’m certain office colleagues would have wondered what was going on except for the fact that I was continuously marveling aloud at how much can be accomplished through time management!

It is, of course, a different situation if work is not being done, especially if the colleague’s failure to complete work on time delays your work. The Times article has several good suggestions for dealing with that situation. However, I would like to examine this a bit more not from the standpoint of the slacker, but from the standpoint of the person who, through the utilization of sound time and workload management techniques is able to complete their work efficiently and effectively. There are many questions to ask, many of which relate to personal integrity and work ethic.

What is the purposes of efficiency? What are the benefits and who gets them? If I can complete a “full day’s work” in seven hours and it takes the paralegal next door eight, do I get to “slack” for the extra hour? These questions cannot be answered fully here and there is good reason to doubt that there are firm “right” answers to them that apply in all circumstances.

Certainly the primary beneficiary of sound time and workload management is the person who engages in the management. It relieves that person of stress. A “good life” is one of balance between work and non-work. Time and workload management provide the possibility of reaching that balance.  That balance requires that work not be overwhelmingly stressful. It also requires that there be non-work personal time.

However, both personal integrity and work ethic should dictate that the non-work time not occur on the job. You will not be viewed as a professional if you do only what you are told to do, no matter how efficiently you do it.

I’m not suggesting that you don’t do what you are told to do by your attorney, but if that is all you do – put in your time, do what you are told efficiently and wait for the next task to be assigned filling in time by surfing the internet, you will not be considered to be professional. Take the initiative. Suggest ways you could be helpful. When your assigned work is done, don’t just pass the time – let the attorney know you are ready for the next assignment. Just being there is not enough. Make yourself useful.

If you truly have “down time,” learn something. Find out how to do something you do not already know how to do that will be useful to you in your capacity as a member of the legal team. Use this time to participate in professional associations, rather than just be a member of one. Offer to help others who are busy. Avoid distracting other staff by talking about topics unrelated to whatever they are working on.

The goal is to be viewed as a terrific time manager who is efficient and effective while minimizing stress, without being viewed as a slacker. You can have it both ways.

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Chere Estrin of the Estrin Report and Know: The Magazine for Paralegals has an interesting article on Examiner.com entitled “In Search of the Rest of Your Career.” It is well worth reading in its entirety, but my attention was drawn to her statement,

I am emphasizing career-changing rather than changing careers. This means taking charge of your present career and changing it around to best suit your needs rather than switching careers all together.

This attitude is the essence of empowerment. Empowerment does not come from the outside. It comes from within. It is not granted, it is earned. The empowered paralegal gains that power  and the confidence that comes with being professional, and by being a competent, effective and efficient member of the legal team.  The primary benefit that accrues when a paralegal learns to manage time, files, workload, clients and their relationship with their attorney is that the paralegal can take charge of these essential elements of their profession. The paralegal controls their time rather than time controlling them, and so on.

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