Miscellaneous

One thing that I think a lot of modern young attorneys need to think about is delegation. Coming out of law school, most of us did our own typing, all our own research, making our own copies, basically everything. When I opened my solo practice, I was doing all of those things plus general and trust accounting, answering the phone, and everything else that goes along with running a small business.

Since joining NPET, the partners pushed me to delegate as much as possible to staff. I got pretty good at it. I had an assistant that I trusted without question, a pretty good system of time management and really got into dictation. After the partners decided to expand, I was assigned a different assistant, I was eventually moved to Iowa City and had all new equipment to deal with. Now, I know that the assistant I have now is just as good as my old one, but I’m in Iowa and she’s in Cedar Rapids.

I got to thinking about this because I was dealing with trial exhibits yesterday and a lot of stuff I ended up doing I know I should have delegated to my assistant. But, when we’re 20 miles apart, that tends to be a little difficult. So, I ended up making copies, compiling opposing pro se party’s copies and going to the post office to mail them. Now, I face the question of whether to continue that work, or haul everything up to Cedar Rapids and let my assistant create a trial binder for me.

I’m torn, but I think I’ll try the latter. I have other things to do and I’d rather carry 10 pounds of paper out to my car (I try to get as much exercise on the job as I can) and then into the Cedar Rapids office, than spend another two hours putting everything together.

Getting back to the original point, though, with the advent of computers over the last 10-15 years, I think a lot of young lawyers are pretty tech-savvy and are able to and used to doing everything themselves. It can be difficult to hand things off to other people when it feels like it will just be quicker if I do everything myself. Believe me, if you have good support staff that’s located in the same office as you, it’s better to let them do it. As far as my situation goes, the jury is still out.