Being an attorney is a rewarding career — but at times it can get overwhelming and can convince you to pull out your hair!
One of the biggest stresses for attorneys is organizing their workspace. With poor organization, you’ll double the amount of work and you won’t provide a great service to your clients.
So what do you do? How can you ensure greater lawyer productivity through organization?
Here are the best organizational tips for your legal practice:
1. Organizing Files
The first step is to ensure you organize your client’s files and paperwork. You should first invest in legal exhibit tabs here.
These are tabs that help you organize your paperwork within a file or binder. This makes it much easier to quickly grab the necessary documents when you’re having a meeting with your clients.
You should also create an organizational system for storing your files. You might want to consider the Dewey Decimal System to organize your files by your client’s name.
2. Minimalism In Your Legal Practice
Another approach is to consider having a minimalist approach for your legal practice.
With this approach, you want to have as few physical or digital possessions for your law firm. You should spend time at least once per month on de-cluttering your legal practice.
You want to print as few documents as possible. If you need to provide documents to clients, send them an email with a PDF instead. You should only print out documents if a facsimile isn’t permitted.
Make sure you also de-clutter your digital files. You should delete emails that aren’t needed in your inbox any longer.
You want to ensure that you also backup files on external hard drives and flash drives. Once a month, you should look at these drives and delete any files that are no longer needed.
3. Delegate Tasks
Another method for remaining organized in your legal practice is to delegate your tasks.
By delegating tasks you’ll get to focus more time on the aspects of your work that only you can do!
For example, you should hire a dedicated accountant or accounting service to handle your firm’s financial obligations. If you give yourself this responsibility, it’ll only add to your stress and decrease productivity.
You should also look to hire legal assistants as soon as possible. Ensure that they focus on simple but time-consuming tasks so that you don’t have to. These can include making photocopies, filing out forms, or emailing clients.
You also need to hire a receptionist to handle your appointments and other office-related tasks.
Follow These Organizational Tips
If you follow these organizational tips you’ll have no problem with improving your lawyer productivity.
Your first step should be to invest in organizational supplies such as index tabs for your files. Make sure you also create a system on how to properly organize your files and documents.
You should also practice minimalism in your legal practice. Have as few physical and digital possessions to boost your productivity. You’ve also got to delegate tasks so that you can focus solely on your legal work.
You can find more tips on how to build a legal practice here on our blog!
