Collaboration: Breaking Each Task Down into its Many Parts

Picking up on last week’s post,  let us start with a basic assumption – there’s nothing ad hoc about how successful law practice groups collaborate.

It takes real planning and repetition to create an optimal, collaborative work-flow routine.

Now, by practice group, we don’t necessarily mean anything highfaluting.

In a solo practice, it may simply be a lawyer and a single assistant.  Or a single lawyer and outsourced collaborators. A larger group model, operating as a stand-alone boutique or as one corner within a larger firm structure, might involve a senior …

We all have them – those days where it feels like your imagination shrugs its metaphorical shoulders, gives you an apologetic half-grin, and heads to Fiji. You’re stuck – you can’t engage with your work, or generate new ideas. Douglas Adams described it best: The Long, Dark Tea-time of the Soul. Here are a few tips to help you endure.

• Set the bar low – this isn’t going to last forever, so don’t be your worst enemy. Populate your to-do list with tasks that don’t require a lot of creativity, but still make you feel like you’ve accomplished something.

In the top left corner of most PC and Mac keyboards is the humble and underused Escape key. It is labelled Esc on PC keyboards and esc on Mac keyboards.
On both PCs and Macs, pressing the Escape key usually cancels or aborts the current operation. To put it another way, the Escape key is the “get me outta here” option for many things. These include closing an open dialog box, getting rid of a button-less splash screen and closing a menu that you clicked on.
In most browsers, hitting the Escape key will stop a page from downloading. This …

Collaboration: An introduction.

It’s a pleasure to commence my SlawTips collaboration with David Bilinsky by focussing on…

What else?

Collaboration: Law firm, style.

And by that I simply mean assessing how your practice group works together, and seeing whether adding some planning, systems and efficiencies might increase the sum of your group’s parts.

We’ll be looking at this in a bit of depth over the next few weeks.  For now, an introduction.

Allow me to pose some serious questions at the outset.

How does your law firm optimize its intra-firm collaborations? Does your practice group really work together? Do …

The fastest path is one that you have already traveled. The sign posts are familiar and likely the vehicle as well. You will know how to get where you are going and likely how long your trip will be. This is as true for legal research as it is for your daily commute.

Look to your prior work product. While each client has a unique situation, there are enough similarities in the issues that they bring you that you will be able to use your experience for the best research outcomes.

Keep and search your work product (research memos, opinion …

Are you frequently late for meetings and appointments? “My lawyer made me wait” is an all too common client complaint. Being late all the time is something that will really annoy clients – and other lawyers too.
For those of you that get lost in the demands of a busy schedule, there is a simple trick you can use to avoid being late for things: When setting a meeting or appointment, remember to set a reminder or alert as well.
Most calendar programs have a feature that lets you add a reminder or alert to each meeting or appointment entry. …

I would like to take this moment to introduce my new joint columnist, Garry J. Wise of Toronto.  As you gentle readers would know, my long-time collaborator and friend Laura A. Calloway recently resigned from this column due to growing work demands.

A bit about my friend and new collaborator:

Garry J. Wise was called to the Ontario Bar in 1986, and practices with Wise Law Office, a Toronto litigation firm that focuses on Employment Law, Family Law, Estates Litigation and Civil Litigation.

He is primary contributor to the award-winning Wise Law Blog, which features daily legal news updates and …

Today’s Tip is a follow-up from a theme that I see running through recent Research tips.

The theme is about WHO. Who can you go to for a quick answer, who do you trust to be your source for information, who is the person that inspires you or inspire your confidence.

I posted yesterday at Slaw about being inspired by Stephen Abram recently. Perhaps Stephen is one of the people that inspire you as well. If you are looking for a great place to be inspired, consider attending the Canadian Association of Law Libraries Annual Conference in Montreal May 5-8, …

Photos uploaded to Facebook don’t always appear how you want them when they are displayed on your Timeline. Photos, and especially wide photos, will be cropped so they fit in a square box on the Timeline. This may cut off a part of the photo that you want displayed.
Don’t fret – there is an easy way to fix. Place your mouse over the update containing the photo you want to adjust. Click on the “Edit” icon (the pencil) in the top right corner of the update. You will see a “Reposition Photo” option. Click on this, then slide your …

In my last post, I dealt with the issue of procrastination as being the first hurdle in terms of task management.  In this second part of the post, we are dealing with all the interruptions that happen to you once you have started on the path to accomplish a task.

Now that you finally have your job started, how do you manage the inevitable interruptions that are keeping you from finishing?  To do this, you must take control of your boundaries and space. People have long noticed the difficulty in dealing with interruptions:

“Life is a series of interruptions interrupted …