Distractions are an enemy to the progress of your law firm. Sadly, in a world where the average person can barely concentrate on their computer for more than 40 seconds without being distracted, distractions are everywhere. Even worse, a single moment of distraction could stall the completion of a task by hours. Profitability of your law firm can see strong increases if you reduce the number of daily distractions.
As for time-sensitive cases, minor distractions can reduce the chances that your firm will win a case or find compelling evidence. Attention spans aside, some distractions could even result in your business wasting resources on unworthy tasks. The trick is to research on ways to both limit daily distractions and business-shifting distractions.
Here is how to overcome distractions in your law firm:
Searching for documents, contacts and information relating to a matter can be hazardous to your productivity. This is not simply because the act of searching across multiple areas for the information you need is inefficient, but also because it can lead to distractions. It is not uncommon to go searching for a document and find yourself distracted by another piece of information you find. You then go off on a tangent for anywhere between five minutes and an hour before you've realised you haven't found what you were originally searching for. By having one source of the truth for matters, you can easily locate what you need and get on with practising law.
Getting distracted is pretty easy if your office environment is untidy or improperly arranged. Your staff members might be working on a case and end up spending hours looking for specific documents instead of using the documents themselves. Make sure key items are easily accessed but not too in the way, or store files using a practice management system (PMS) that makes documents easily accessible.
You can also paint your office in attention-friendly colours, and train employees on the best ways for keeping their space in the office organised. Doing so can lead to your team being more focused for longer periods of time while combating times of day where productivity is low, for example straight after lunch.
Without a well-outlined schedule, it is tough to prioritise tasks. Learn to create schedules that help prioritise the different tasks you have to achieve. These schedules should include details on the deadlines of the different tasks, the requirements as well as the priority.
It would be wise to share schedules among staff members who will be working on the tasks at hand. As a result, everyone will be on the same page on what needs to be done, and at what time. Lastly, fight the urge to procrastinate tasks as they can steal time from other tasks in the future, especially once the procrastinated tasks approach their deadline. Everyone has been their before, sometimes the thought of finalising a task can seem too much to bare, it's overcoming situations like these that can help your legal practice thrive. You might find it useful to break complex tasks into small and easily-achievable milestones instead of procrastinating them. If you feel that you can't overcome the procrastination, go for a 10 minute walk to resent your brain, you'll come back more productive than ever.
In the early days of your legal practice, you might still be trying to find your feet in the industry. The best way to optimise your resources is to not let yourself get distracted by cases that sit outside your area of expertise. By using automation tools to qualify leads you can quickly determine if a potential client sits within your area. Once they have passed this base level of qualification listen to potential clients, if they are a good fit for your firm, take on their case, if they don't then refer them on to someone who can better help them. You set yourself up with much greater odds to succeed by knowing what you're best at and working that area.
Not every job is worth your time. Some jobs might call for you to utilise too much time and resources, which results in the outcome being quite low in exchange for what was required to finish the job. The trick is to assess the quality of your leads. Ideally, no job should cost you more to handle than what it results in, both in terms of time and cash spent. It will only act as a distraction, taking the time you would have used working on other quality jobs. Remember, a PMS like LawMaster can help you to better identify if a case has been successful with its intuitive Dashboards that help you to track your performance.
Time is an invaluable asset for your law firm. The faster you can deal with quality jobs, the faster it will be to cater to more clients and increase the profitability of your business. Contact LawMaster today to see how we can help improve your firm's efficiency by at least 30%.