Client Guide

notes and pointers for my law clients

Top Three

  1. If you want a phone call, e-mail me to schedule it, even if you want to talk the same day.

    I love calls, but apart from negotiation on the phone, most of my work takes hour-plus slots of uninterrupted focus for dense reading, writing, and research tasks. Scheduling calls gives me more big, clear time slots to get heavy lifting done for clients each day.

  2. Send a separate e-mail with a helpful subject line for each deal, project, or topic.

    I am here to help you, and will read whatever you send me. I routinely take notes from and add to-do list items from long e-mails. But I will very often get three things done faster if you send me three different e-mails.

  3. If you spot a way we can improve how we work together, don’t hold back. Let me know.

    I wrote a whole webpage about this. It’s only fair.

Tasks

Most tasks coming my way from clients fall into these rough categories:

Quick Asks

Small-scope questions and request that I can handle offhand, usually in just a few minutes. Questions about legal topics I know well. Requests for documents in my records. Status reports on projects.

I try to handle quick asks as soon as possible, as they come up, even if I have other kinds of tasks on my to-do list for the day. My goal here is to prevent people waiting on me, and to prevent mounds of small asks piling up. If they pile up, it’s often as much work to keep track of them as to do them. An e-mail per topic really helps here.

This sometimes frustrate clients who see me answering unrelated questions when a much larger task is acknowledged first priority. Don’t fret. I’m likely pushing toward a free time slot big enough to get your bigger need done.

Shallow Tasks

These require some focus or concentration, and often original reading, but come in under half an hour or so. Quick reads of, or tweaks to, contracts and proposals. Small updates to forms and public policies already fresh in mind. That sort of thing.

I also try to clear these immediately. But I will postpone them to defend a morning, afternoon, or evening time slot needed for a larger task.

Deep Tasks

These require me to unplug from everything else and focus exclusively on one project for a substantial amount of time. Reviewing and turning drafts of long or complex contracts. Grappling with new developments in law or regulation. Researching a specific question of law. Writing a concise statement of high-level advice or strategy.

Most deep tasks take an hour to an hour and a half, but I’ll spend three or more locked in without a break on heavy work. Often, the more hours I can spend in a row, the fewer hours overall a task takes.

I typically schedule deep tasks to large slots of time—morning, afternoon, or evening. Then I have to “defend” that slot from encroachment and interruption. Some deep tasks take a whole working day or more. I try to work these as scheduled. However, “emergency” or highly time-sensitive items occasionally ruin my plans.

From experience, I’ve learned that if I do two deep tasks in a day—say, one full-morning job and one full-afternoon job—I can’t keep up quality for a third in the same day. The evening is then good for quick and small tasks only. Same if I do a single large job spanning morning and afternoon or afternoon and evening. My chances of an oversight or wrong analytical turn improve significantly I can postpone the next big job to the next day.

Mornings, afternoons, and evenings free of commitments and interruptions are the air and light of my practice. I fight to preserve and defend them, often from the very clients I’m working hard to help, so I can get heavy lifting done. Realistically, I only get a handful of deep-task slots per week to spend on all my clients.

Appointments

There are other types of tasks that get calendared, including negotiation calls and counseling conversations. These can be some of my best and most important work, but take prior preparation and disqualify large time slots from assignment to deep tasks.

If I schedule a call mid-morning on a Tuesday, I’ll need the start of that morning to review notes and prepare to make good use of the time. If it’s a really involved call, like a negotiation, I probably won’t be able to do a deep dive on a contract before lunch. Moreover, if I have to dial into a meeting on a Wednesday afternoon, I can’t do a big job that takes two slots in a row—morning and afternoon, afternoon and evening—on that day.

Proofing

A quick note on re-reviews, proofreading, and “working on my own work” generally.

I can’t competently proof my own writing shortly after finishing a draft. I need to set my work aside for some time—to focus on other, unrelated projects or clients, or on private life—in order to see what's actually on the page, rather than what I remember putting there.

This primarily affects turnaround times on large contracts, where my client has received a lengthy proposal on a form I’ve never seen before. I may complete a review, issue summary, and markup of a fifty page proposal on Monday. If it’s sensitive, I’m really going to want to set it aside for a day or two and return to it again before finalizing. That review will be another large job, which means blocking off and defending another uninterrupted time slot.

I don’t usually tell clients when I’m doing this, because even though they almost always understand intellectually, it’s inherently frustrating waiting on your lawyer while they intentionally avoid thinking about your deal. It’s also awkward admitting that I’m essentially incompetent to do so until I’ve forgot about the job for a while.

Other Resources

I’ve published some other guides and tips that might come in handy: