Efficiently Managing Your Schedule Using Technology

As a successful practitioner operating a law practice, your day undoubtebly consists of completing activities to move your cases along, spending time expanding your network and fostering new business opportunities, and providing effective counsel to your clients as well as many other discrete tasks that need to be completed in order to satisfy the demands of your profession. Not to mention, you have a social life outside of the work that you do. Here’s the catch, you only get 24 hours to get all of this done. And knowing that you will spend between 5 to 8 hours sleeping is problematic. That leaves you with a grand total of 16-19 hours to complete all of your legal work, meet with clients, appear in court and spend time with your family. Through my career, working with lawyers across the US for the last ten years, I have derived one universal truth by studying the topperforming lawyers and their habits. The key to their success is that they have all found ways to maximize the value they add to their firm while minimizing their time spent on non-billable activities.

An obvious but often forgotten truth is that, a law firm just like any other business type, is a for-profit entity. This means, as a lawyer, it is imperative that you seek out every productivity advantage available in order to make the most out of the limited time and energy that you do have available. In the last installment, I discussed how effectively leveraging automations across your law firm’s software stack will maximize your output and create new revenue generation opportunities for you. This time around, we’ll discuss the paradox of managing your schedule. An activity that in theory should unlock momentous productivity increases for lawyers, but oftentimes creates a huge administrative burden and severely limits your productivity when managed manually.

In 2020, Paragon Tech conducted a study where 100 lawyers across the U.S. were asked to track the average amount of time required to schedule a meeting between three separate parties. This simple, fairly routine task in a law firm setting, took each attorney an average of one hour to book the meeting. This is composed of the time it takes evaluate one’s calendar and to correspond via email to book a meeting time. By leveraging smart technology platforms, like a calendar scheduling tool you can expect the time spent on a simple task like scheduling a meeting to be reduced to under 5 minutes. You will eliminate the time wasted managing your schedule manually and simultaneously improve the experience of those you schedule meetings with.

If you already manage your own schedule, implementing my method for managing your schedule will be an effortless transition. If you have someone at your law firm like a paralegal or an administrative assistant managing your schedule on your behalf, you will simply need to make a few tweaks in order to effectively allow another party to manage your schedule using these technology tools.

Selecting the right tool for your firm is straightforward as long as you make the proper considerations. There are 4 things that you will need to consider to make the selection.

1. Do you have the need to schedule meetings between multiple participants who are both outside of your firm? If you do, then I would almost always recommend choosing a platform like FreeBusy, which is known for its intuitive, yet robust multi-participant calendar polling features.

2. Are the individuals you typically schedule meetings with tech savvy? If the individuals you typically schedule meetings with are relatively unfamiliar with technology and need an extremely easy platform, a tool like calendly will be your best bet. I possesses one of the most intutive interfaces that is both easy to use, but also visually simple to comprehend.

3. Do you frequently work betweenacross time zones and have the need to schedule meetings with individuals in those time zones? Acuity and Calendly both boast extremely robust automatic time zone conversion features that make it incredibly simple to operate across time zones and schedule meetings efficiently without the need to keep track of multiple time zones.

4. Do you have a CRM/legal practice management system, and if so does it allow Integrations between third-party platforms? If you do, Microsoft Bookings or FreeBusy support the most integrations, allowing you to receive follow up reminders and alerts in your CRM platform. If you do not currently use a CRM, HubSpot is a great option for calendar scheduling. The additional benefit is that you will be able to use its robust CRM to act as a lead generation pipeline for your firm at no additional cost.

While I recommend that you manage your own schedule to maximize your productivity, all of these tools listed above can be leveraged by an assistant to manage your schedule on your behalf. Note, you should expect a 25% decrease in productivity gains if someone else is managing your schedule for you due to the additional back and forth that needs to happen between you and that individual to book each meeting.

Operating a modern-era law firm requires that you as a lawyer be extremely focused on decreasing your time spent on nonbillable activities in favor of increasing your ability to perform billable work. A surefire way to accomplish this is by leveraging the benefits of technology to streamline your calendar management process. I encourage you to give one or two of these tools a try by signing up for a free trial and testing out its functionality. By leveraging a calendar scheduling tool, you will reclaim your time and allow yourself the privilege to do more fulfilling work and better serve your client.

Jay McAllister, Paragon Tech