Copyright (c) 2010 Benjamin Glass

Effective time management is a skill that all successful lawyers must master if they want to increase their free time to enjoy life outside the office. Many analysts try to place a dollar value on what an hour of your work time is worth, but in reality, all you need to realize is where you spend your time and whether or not those tasks are important to your law practice.

Review How You Spend Your Day

Take a day in the life of you and really look at what you do. Keep a log book of how you spend your time, what you're doing and how long you're doing it. You don't need to get down to the minute, we're just doing this for a general idea of where you spend your days and improving your time management.

Once you've recorded your daily activity, take some of your free time (if you have any) and look at where you're wasting time. Did that quick phone call from a client turn into a 20-minute chit-chat session? Are you spending over half an hour and only reading and replying to 2 e-mails with more still waiting? You'll be surprised at where you are losing your valuable time during the day!

Determining What's Worth Your Time

Every lawyer will have a different idea of what cases and tasks take priority in their law firm. The best place to start is by focusing on the case with the most time-sensitive work to do. Don't try to prioritize the case that has the most work if it's not going to trial for several more months, grab the case that's coming up next week.

Also consider the value of the case and the difficulty of the work. If it's a small value case and you've got a paralegal or two on your staff, hand that one off to them and focus more on the complicated, big settlement cases. Your legal marketing should be driving these types of cases to your desk, so you should be making them your priority.

Your Time Management Helps You Achieve Your Goals

Reaching your goals involves creating a great legal marketing plan and adhering to good time management. You should be doing everything with a purpose, and that purpose should be to increase your productivity and success of your legal practice. Take a look at the big picture when deciding what you're doing for the day, if your goal is to land that million-dollar settlement in the Smith case, that should be your work priority.

Good legal marketing will get you the clients and cases you want, and your implementation of good time management will help you continue to work on them while still making it home in time for dinner.