Stand in the Place Where You Are: Meet Less, Get More Out of It
No one likes meetings; and, that includes lawyers who manage other attorneys, or staff. I hear about it all the time: too many meetings, too much wasted time.
Well, there are at least a couple of ways that law firms can reduce meetings and meeting time.
The first is to lean into technology, to reduce the need for certain meetings. If you can delegate work effectively, and add workflows to softwares, you won’t need to hold as many status meetings (or, you may be able to eliminate them entirely) – because, you will always have a window into upcoming, completed and overdue tasks, via dashboards visible across a number of task management softwares. Do it right . . . and, you’ll never have to host a case review meeting ever again.
The second thing you can do is to change the kind of meetings you have. Instead of holding endless, agenda-less meetings, opt for perhaps the most stripped down-meeting option available. That would be the standup meeting. Standup meetings are meetings in which everyone stands up – that’s why they’re called that – and which feature a rotating host. During each ‘standup’ meeting, everyone answers two questions: (1) what’s the most important thing you’re working on today; (2) is there are an issue you have that you can’t solve yourself. The answer to question (1) may allow supervisors to redirect, based on daily priorities. The answer to question (2) means that bottlenecks won’t linger – as they often do in law firms – because issues are solved daily, in an all-hands-on-deck meeting.
So, if you hate meetings, you may not be having the right ones, or doing enough to prevent unnecessary ones.
. . .
Let’s ‘meet’ to talk about your law practice; here’s how:
To request a consult, visit the Rhode Island Bar’s law practice management page, and start running your law firm like a business.