Written by Tom Gilbertsen, Member of the D.C. Bar Lawyer Assistance Committee
As folks were pushing back from the conference table after a recent litigation section meeting at my firm, a senior partner asked us to hold on for a second. He then shared with us the story of his good friend – a partner at another leading firm in town – who recently committed suicide.
“This is a tough profession, and I know we’re all tough people,” my partner said. “But we need to be mindful of each other. When you see a colleague who seems to be suffering, go ahead and knock on that closed door. Walk into that office. Ask how they’re doing. Speak up.”
That guidance is pitch-perfect, especially in a profession that presents heightened risks of suicidal behavior. Although suicide is the fourth leading cause of death for adults aged 25-54,[1] it is the third leading cause of death among lawyers of all ages. In one state study, 11% of attorneys surveyed said that they had thought about suicide at least monthly within the past year.[2]
The law can be a labor of love for many, but the personality traits driving our success as lawyers also drive increased suicide risks. Lawyers tend to be perfectionistic, aggressive, see the problems in a given situation (pessimistic) and often exhibit a low interest in feelings and unwilling to seek help (or admit to the need for help). Makes sense right?
That’s why people hire us: to get things done perfectly, aggressively, without help. It should come as no surprise that lawyers as a group display a high need for autonomy, but we score much lower than the general population for traits such as resilience and sociability.[3]
So the flip side of the coin, according to a number of studies, is that successful lawyers tend to isolate in the face of difficulty, which exposes our community to heightened risks of suicidal behavior. And while attorneys suffer heightened risks for suicidal behavior in the best of times, recent times have been anything but the best in our profession.
Last year the American Bar Association presented an important program called “Recognizing the Warning Signs of Suicide in Your Clients and Colleagues,” which remains available for free at the ABA website.[4] In addition to sharing research about the heightened suicide risks in our profession, the program identifies several warning signs and risk factors about which all of us should be aware.
There are a number of “perpetuating” risk factors -- unchangeable aspects of a person’s family history or own medical, developmental and emotional illness or traumas (history of abuse, neglect, family violence, previous suicidal behavior) that increase the likelihood for suicidal behavior. And there are “predisposing” risk factors that increase a person’s vulnerability to suicidal behavior, but which can be changed or alleviated through intervention – such as psychiatric illness and substance abuse.
Approximately half of all those who die by suicide are legally intoxicated at the time of death. Among the behavioral observations that a person’s suicide risk may be increasing are (a) indirect references to one’s own death or arrangements being made; (b) expressing shame or guilt or threat of exposure; (c) recent significant medical care with anxiety-provoking diagnosis; (d) expressions of hopelessness, being “trapped,” or anger; (e) dramatic mood swings; (f) complaints of sleeplessness; (g) increasing use of drugs, including alcohol; (h) withdrawing from friends or family; and (i) anxious, agitated or reckless behaviors.
While any one of these risk factors or behaviors might not raise alarms alone, we should be concerned when they present together (“co-morbidity”) in a colleague or loved one.[5] Most important is the guidance my colleague offered: “Speak up.”
A list of suicide hotlines in the Washington, D.C. area may be found at www.suicidehotlines.com; another resource is the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention; additional information is at www.afsp.org.
The District of Columbia Bar’s Lawyer Assistance Program (LAP) is a vital resource for attorneys in crisis, offering free and confidential counseling and referral resources. The LAP staff can be reached at (202) 347-3131.
Here are five tips from the Lawyer Assistance Program on how you can work toward a better work-life balance:
1. Achieving a better Work-Life balance doesn’t just happen. It requires changing your behavior and setting new boundaries. Take a walk at lunchtime - a change of scenery, moving your body and breathing fresh air will give you more energy. Leave work in the evening when you are tired. Working long hours after the dinner hour brings diminishing returns - your productivity will decline with each passing minute. If you must work longer hours, do so only when an urgent project demands it, and not as a rule.
2. If you have an urgent project and must work more than 8 hours in a day, make it a priority to take time for both a lunch break and a dinner break and a stretch or a walk. Remember the old saying about traveling on an airplane and using the air mask if the oxygen gets low? You must put the air mask on yourself first and then assist others who may need help with their mask. If you do not take care of yourself, you will not be able to be your best at work or at home.
3. If you are not taking care of yourself and your needs are at the bottom of your priorities, please do yourself a favor and take stock to figure out why. You may be depressed, or have low self-esteem, or you may place priority on your ability to care for others and as a result, you let your own needs go unmet. There is a reason you do this, and it will benefit you to find out the reason and start changing.
4. Setting new boundaries between work and home will feel uncomfortable at first, until you get used to it. It is like breaking in a new pair of shoes. It is difficult for us to change, but they say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This applies to the problem of an imbalance between work and home. You will need to change your behavior in order to get different results. If you say you want more balance, you must follow up with action.
5. Place a priority on your relationships with friends and family, especially those who have known you for a long time. Nourish your relationships with people in your home life, and carve out time to be with them. Go on a “technology fast” and instead of spending time on Facebook or Twitter, connect the old-fashioned way by arranging a date to get together with a friend for face-to-face time during a lunch break or on a weekend.
For the small firm lawyer, our success is hidden in the way we spend our time. While time may seem like a limitless commodity, the irony is that the only moment in which we can manifest action is now. How we use and manage now is key to our success. We can do nothing to affect the future unless we effectively manage the now. The past of course is history but it can be a way we evaluate our process. Stay in charge of now.
Rather than check e-mail when you first get into the office (or get out of bed), schedule precise time periods in your day for e-mail review. Your first moments at work should be in thought about how you will effectively move through your day. A great tool to employ is a concept map (aka mind map). It’s a thinking tool useful for problem solving and strategy. Concept map your day first thing. Organize your priorities. When you master concept mapping,create one for your week, month and year. Chances are you will become a militant mapper and won’t make any decisions without having employed this useful and creative tool.[1]
2. Have a plan, a goal, a purpose
A small firm is a business and it must have a plan. The plan contains a mission statement and steps to accomplish your goals. The plan tells your story. It describes how you message so that people with the problems you solve can find you. A small firm without a plan is like a ship adrift in the Sea of Whimsy. Every action you take as a professional problem solver must be rooted in your plan.[2]
3. Create systems for the repetitive tasks
Every small firm has repetitive tasks like opening a new file, creating the fee agreement, or declining a representation. Create checklists and systems for repetitive tasks to ensure that they are performed correctly and efficiently. For the solo lawyer, the checklist will become a part of the firm office manual as staff are brought on board. Checklists and systems create efficiency and focus. A terrific tool for creating forms and checklists to help manage repetitive tasks using Microsoft Word is: http://www.theformtool.com/
4. All action must manifest The Plan
Once you have a working draft of your business plan and a precise mission statement for your firm, print the mission statement and tape it to your computer, your phone, and other places where you will see it and be reminded of your professional purpose. Every moment of your professional day should define and be a part of this mission statement. If your firm is engaged in family law and you have a well thought-out mission statement, know that the traffic case a friend is asking you to handle is outside your mission statement. Those frolics and detours from your mission statement take a toll in risk, inefficiency and anxiety.
5. Own the first two seconds of any engagement
In any professional engagement, such as a conversation with a prospective client, an exchange with opposing counsel, or in your introduction at a networking event, ensure that your words are rich with content immediately. Speak for emphasis in short, clear statements. Know where you are going and why.
Use a few easy words rather than many challenging words. Speak to communicate and then stop talking when you have accomplished your goal. A subtle and common addiction of our profession is our attachment to the sound of our voices. Before you speak, think through the goal of the communication.
In the first sentence or two, cover the necessities of who, what, when, where, why & how. You will never have a more focused audience than the person who is listening during the first seconds of your delivery. Start hot.
6. Track your time, track your projects
Create a system to track how you spend your professional time. Create a separate system to track every project you undertake in your firm. Both can easily be done with spreadsheets.[3] Using our 168 hour time management spreadsheet, you can record two or three times a day how you are spending your professional time. Some time will of course be for professional problem solving for clients for which you hope to be paid. Some time will be for firm administration, some for marketing, and some for learning.
Our professional life is aboutwhat we spend our time on. Our profit is determined by the number of productive hours we have in a day. By honestly tracking our time on a regular and consistent basis, we become informed managers of time and we realize that time is precious and the only moment in which we have impact is now.
When you realize how much time you truly spend on a high maintenance client who pays reluctantly or not at all, you tend to make better decisions at intake. Using our Case & Action Manager spreadsheet gives you a simple database for every project in your office. Enter every prospective client, actual client, marketing project, and firm management issue and track progress. Docket dates, set goals, target deadlines and record delegation where appropriate. Nothing slips off the radar.
7. Handle the hot button issues
For the small firm, there are many hot button issues, but the two most critical are handling money and managing client communication. Drop the ball on either and you could be looking at a disciplinary complaint. On an annual basis, nearly one-half of the docketed disciplinary complaints handled by the D.C. Office of Bar Counsel are against small firm lawyers.[4]
You may be handling advance fees properly and routinely depositing them into your IOLTA, but what about your credit card transactions? Are they compliant with D.C Rule of Professional Conduct 1.15? Is the earning mechanism in your fee agreement consistent with actual practice? Are there clients you avoid? Are there phone calls too painful to return? Do you have trouble delivering bad news? Guidance on handling money is available on a free and confidential basis from the D.C. Bar.[5]
Client communication really lends itself to a system. Start by describing how it will be handled in the fee agreement. Return calls the same day if possible but no later than the next day. Consider scheduling return calls during defined periods of time (three or four a week) and schedule the return call with the client. This system has the beauty of not interrupting your working periods and allowing you to prepare for several return calls at a set time.
8. Know and avoid the distractions of doom
This may be a person or a place you go to escape either in your mind or down the street. Perhaps your distraction of doom is procrastination. Whatever it may be, in the end, it’s a habit and it’s consuming and you regret it, but you repeat it. It sucks the time and life from you.
For some, the internet, e-mail or social media has become a distraction of doom. For others, it happens when they venture into D.C. Superior Court to file a case and don’t make it back to the office to work because of the distractions of the courthouse. If you have one of these distractions of doom, deal with it. Some of us can kick the habit and change the behavior. But for some, it takes a little extra help. Help is available from the Lawyer Assistance Program of the D.C. Bar, a free and confidential service.[6]
9. Evaluate regularly
Once a week or once a month, pull back and see how you are doing. Revisit your plan. Think about your mission statement. Then look at the last several new clients you have taken on and check the time management spreadsheet for how you are spending your time. Are you on message and manifesting your plan? And what about you? How do you feel about your professional enterprise? Are your clients in a better place as a result of your effort? Take regular stock and make adjustments as needed.
10. Refuel
Being a small firm lawyer can be an exhilarating, creative experience and it is nearly always a demanding and challenging enterprise. It is often very hard work. Lawyers have a high incidence of burnout, depression and substance abuse.6
More often than not, our clients need us and depend on us at very difficult moments in their lives. They can be demanding and irrational. Sometimes they turn on us despite our best efforts. Our health is important to us and to our clients. We need time away, time to refuel, and space to recover. If we don’t take care of ourselves, we won’t be effective at solving our clients’ problems.
Incorporate, within your plan, time to recharge and come back strong. Each day and week should hold some moments for us to refuel. On a regular basis, every quarter or six months, take some extended time for rest and relaxation. A network of supportive colleagues can be very helpful for the small firm lawyer.
_______________________________
[1] If you would like a lesson in concept mapping, please contact Dan Mills, assistant director, D.C. Bar Practice Management Advisory Service (PMAS), (202) 737-4700, ext. 3212, [email protected] or Rochelle Washington, senior staff attorney, PMAS, at (202) 737-4700, ext. 3217, [email protected]. The PMAS is a multifaceted Bar program designed to help Bar members improve and enhance management skills in the practice of law.
[2] E-mail Rochelle Washington or Dan Mills for a small firm plan template in Microsoft Word format.
[3] E-mail Rochelle Washington or Dan Mills for the 168 hour time management spreadsheet and the Case & Action Manager spreadsheet (available in Excel or Numbers).
[4] Less than 10% of the D.C. Bar’s 100,000-plus members are small firm lawyers.
[5] Call Rochelle Washington, Dan Mills, or the D.C. Bar’s legal ethics counsel at (202) 737-4700, ext. 3231 or 3232; e-mail [email protected],or visit us on the new www.dcbar.org.
[6] The free and confidential services of the D.C. Bar’s Lawyer Assistance Program include counseling and guidance for District of Columbia lawyers, judges and law students who are experiencing problems such as addiction, mental health symptoms, or stress, which interfere with their personal or professional lives. Call (202) 347-3131, e-mail [email protected], or visit us on the new www.dcbar.org.
If you
charge on the basis of recorded time, whether you do it by writing down what
you do, entering it by keyboard or touch screen into a data base, or dictating
it for transcription, make the entry immediately after you complete the work
and not later that day, during the week or at the end of the month. The entry must be made while the effort is
fresh in your mind. Make the entry as
though your client was sitting across the desk from you and you were explaining
what you did, why you did it and how it helped the client.[1]
If you
are not in the habit of making time entries immediately after performing work,
this may be a difficult transition for you, but it is a necessary one for
several reasons. The conventional wisdom
is that you will record more accurately all of your time if it is entered
immediately after the work is performed.
If you wait until the end of the day, week or month, your memory will
not be as good and work will be missed.
While
capturing all work is important, a more important reason for contemporaneous
entries is that the content will be better and the time entry accurate and
fair. The content will be better because
the work is fresh. The opportunity to “talk”
to your client in the entry will more likely lead to a better explanation of
the work. If something took you longer
than it should have because you were distracted during the work, your entry is
more likely to be fair and accurate if made immediately after the work is
performed. So as you are entering time
and activity, visualize your client and explain what you did, why it was
necessary and how it helped when appropriate.
Review
the invoices before they are sent to the client and conduct the review from the
mindset of your client. If you see
entries that would puzzle, annoy or offend you as the client, make the
necessary changes. Have trusted
non-lawyers working in your firm review the invoices with you.
The
PMAS is a multifaceted Bar program designed to help Bar members improve and
enhance management skills in the practice of law. Daniel Mills, assistant
director for PMAS, Regulation Counsel, and Rochelle Washington, senior staff
attorney, PMAS, can be reached at 202-737-4700, ext.
3212 and 3217, respectively, or at [email protected].
[1]
Evaluating the many and varied software applications that make time and billing
more manageable is beyond the scope of this article. Which application is best is a fact sensitive
inquiry.
Little
needs to be said to the solo or small firm lawyer, new or old in practice,
about the challenges of billing and collecting fees. This is a pertinent issue because although we
may love practicing law, we would also like to earn a decent living. In the coming weeks we will be providing a seven
part blog series titled Best Practices in Billing where we will share
information compiled as part of our Practice Management Advisory Service (PMAS)
with the D.C. Bar.
The authors of this
blog series--Daniel Mills,
assistant director for PMAS, Regulation Counsel and Rochelle Washington,
senior staff attorney, PMAS--together
have over 35 years of direct experience building and managing solo and small
firms from the ground up. We understand
the plight of the lawyer who has performed what s/he believes to be a good, if
not exceptional, job for a client only to find that the client takes issue with
the bill or just won’t pay you for all you have done.
Rochelle Washington:
Billing is a huge issue for the solo and small firm practitioner because
we know that if we don’t collect from our clients, we usually don’t have
recourse without repercussions.
Yes, we
said it. We know that if we pursue our
clients legally for the fees we earn, we could end up with a bar complaint or
counter-claim that we don’t have the time or resources to deal with. In an effort to avoid that path all together,
we intend to provide you with ways you can make the billing and collections
process easier both for you and more importantly for your clients. We believe that sharing our combination of
insightful practical experience and knowledge gained during our solo and small
firm careers will prove useful.
GET PAID UP FRONT
The
best way to ensure that we are paid for the professional problem solving that
we do is to take on only clients who pay us and preferably up front. We are advocates of the Zips Dry Cleaners model for the law firm: no
inventory, nothing perishable, and payment up front.[1]
Daniel Mills: When a prospective client asked me why I had
to be paid up front, I would say it is so I only have one thing to worry about
and that is solving your problem.
Otherwise I have two things to worry about. I never had to explain the second worry.
There
are two essentials for the process of being paid for professional problem
solving. The first is that we create
incentive for our client to pay us either now, before we do the work, or as we
do the work. The second is that we have
a highly functioning system for informing and educating the client about the
problem solving we are performing and that asks for payment. This is also known as the billing
process. The process should avoid
angering or annoying the client. It
should also make it easy for the client to pay.
There
are two truths about being paid for problem solving that are important to
acknowledge now. The first is that there
is a moment in time when the client really needs us. At this moment, the need is at its highest
level. Over time the need usually wanes
and with some it vanishes all together.
The second truth is that clients read what we send them about what we do
and what they owe us. They may not read
much else but they read the bills. If
you can time the request for money to the height of the need for your services,
you are likely to get paid. If the need
vanishes all together or worse yet, if it is replaced by indifference,
resentment, confusion or anger, you are not likely to get paid.
Next Week: Matching value and need.
The PMAS is a multifaceted Bar program designed to help Bar
members improve and enhance management skills in the practice of law. Daniel
Mills and Rochelle Washington can be reached at 202-737-4700,
ext. 3212 and 3217, respectively, or at [email protected].
1 The Washington Post, May 31, 2009, G1-3;
www.321zips.com
Active and judicial D.C. Bar members now have access to Fastcase’s comprehensive online law library.To access Fastcase, users must use their dcbar.org login credentials atwww.dcbar.org/fastcase/login.
For login questions, please send a message to [email protected] For Fastcase–specific questions, please send a message to [email protected].
Wouldn't it be nice to find cases and statutes quickly and easily? Fastcase does just that by offering a variety of searchable databases.
One of Fastcase's features is the ability to search statutes across multiple jurisdiction, allowing you to survey a topic across its statutory collection.
Example
If you are looking for statutes about how custody relates to the best interest of the child, you might take the following steps:
Select Search Statutes from the Search menu on the homepage.
In the grey search bar near the top of the page, enter the following: Child custody and "best interest"
Click the Select All button under the list of current statutes.
Select Search
You will then see a list of all the statutes that reference custody and best interest of the child. The results will be listed by relevance (the sections containing the most detailed discussion of the issue and will be listed first).
You may now click on the title of a section to view it individually.
Note: Filter your results by jurisdiction if you find the results too broad; in this instance if you were only curious about Missouri cases, you would locate the "Filter by:" box in the top left corner of your screen, and select Missouri from the drop-down menu.
You may then print your desired results, add them to your print queue, save them to your library, or email them to your colleagues.
FOR D.C. BAR MEMBERS
Fastcase is a DC–based company that combines the best of legal research with the best of Web search, to provide active or judicial members with a powerful tool for finding the law. The Fastcase service for active and judicial members includes free access to D.C. and federal codes and regulations; users may add unlimited access to the full Fastcase law library for just $195 per year, an 80 percent discount off the standard cost. Enterprise licenses are also available for law firms and organizations.
In a recent article, the Washington Post asked"What if Hurricane Sandy, and its massive storm surge, had tracked 300 miles further south, making landfall near Virginia Beach instead of Atlantic City?"
In such a scenario, assuming the storm continued tracking inland to the south, the storm’s wind and waves would have piled water into the Chesapeake Bay, forcing a massive surge up the Potomac River, inundating low lying areas of Washington, D.C.
A 2011 study in the journal Risk Analysis analyzed the impacts of rising water levels in Washington, D.C. painting a grim picture of the aftermath. The study focus was on scenarios of gradually rising sea levels from climate change over the course of decades to centuries but noted a landfalling coastal storm could temporarily swamp portions of the city today, just as Sandy marooned parts of New York City.
While some people believe that the Washington Metropolitan Area may never be affected by such natural castrophic events, Hurricane Sandy might have been the wake-up call for businesses and other organizations to review current contingency plan(s).
“There are hundreds of events that could happen in a hundred different places and ways in this city,” says James Leary, executive director of Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP told the Washington Lawyer. “If a water main breaks and floods our offices, we have a relationship with three other law firms that would allow us to use their offices so key meetings can go on. You can’t have an action plan for every single one of these kinds of events. What you can do is put into place contingencies that could work in any number of situations.”
According to the Washington Lawyer,
The first step to putting those contingencies into place is deciding who will be at the table to write a new disaster plan or rewrite an old one. Though there may be some resistance to losing billable hours, the wider the group of decision makers, the better off the law firm.
As the disaster-prep team builds its recovery manual, the most important section of the document will be the section addressing the concerns and needs of the firm’s employees. They are the lifeblood of any operation, and an emergency of any magnitude can have a dramatic impact on their lives.
After a crisis, any effort to shift the law firm’s activities will be smoother if firm managers have outlined relocation plans in the disaster recovery manual. As the planning group looks at relocation, it’s important to remember that new space will determine, in part, the success of the firm.
If employees are the engine of the law firm, then the information that passes between them and the clients is the fuel. It’s a fuel that no one can afford to leave unguarded. These days, with the growing dominance of electronic records, keeping track of documents is becoming easier than ever, but it’s not foolproof. As work continues on the recovery manual, the law firm’s disaster planning committee needs to be diligent in generating a strategy to protect the firm’s most vital documents.
At the end of the day, disaster planning is less about emergencies and more about the long-term viability of the law firm. Any bump or hiccup along the road has the potential to trip up even the most powerful, forward-thinking firm. Without a plan to guarantee that mission-critical operations continue, it will be difficult for even the savviest management team to ensure the firm’s continued success.
