Stop Doing These Things to Maximize Productivity at Your Small Law Firm

Your small law firm regularly operates on tight deadlines to ensure tasks and cases are completed on time and on budget. Keeping up with all the deadlines and competing demands on your time requires you to get serious about productivity and to cut unnecessary “time sucks” out of your days. Could you benefit from getting a few extra hours back in your week? Here are three things you might be able to cut back on.

Regular Meetings

Employees spend about 40% of their workweek in meetings and dealing with other “interruptions”. For a busy small law firm like yours, there’s simply no time to waste on unnecessary meetings. Instead of having several one-off meetings each week as things come up, try to combine topical agenda items into one weekly meeting. By compiling an agenda beforehand that captures questions and discussions likely to come up throughout the week, your firm will be more likely to stay on task and get through each item, and you’ll minimize some of those daily interruptions that can derail your work.

Manual Activity Reporting

Monitoring firmwide metrics is crucial to the health of your firm. However, asking your employees to manually track how they’re spending their time is not productive for anyone. Smokeball Activity Intelligence acts as your firm’s own metrics tracker and automatically reports on firmwide progress and tasks completed without requiring any extra effort from you or your staff.

Wasting Too Much Time on Email

Do you find yourself spending hours on end buried in email? While communicating with clients through email is inevitable, internal emails can be an even bigger time suck, and they’re totally unnecessary. Inter-office chat systems like Slack are great for quick questions or quick check-ins with your team members. Instead of refreshing your inbox waiting for your remote co-worker to finally respond to your outstanding email, send a quick Slack message and keep moving with your day.

Time is your most valuable resource. Make sure you’re being selective about how you spend your days, and cut back on the tasks that aren’t helping you reach your goals. If you’re interested in learning more about how your firm can better track its productivity, take a look at this blog post: Three Metrics Every Small Law Firm Should Track Monthly.