how i stayed organized in the chaos of biglaw
a little planning goes a very long way
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Hi Cece, could you please share how you stay organized as a big law lawyer? I'm having trouble keeping organized and track of all my clients and work. Would greatly appreciate any tips you can share :-) Thanks so much for all of your valuable content - I always recommend your content to law school students and other fellow big law associates!
I am all about keeping things simple, especially when the rest of work can be quite chaotic. I would love to have a beautiful bullet journal, but Biglaw just isn’t made for that kind of life—so I instead created a streamlined, modified bullet journal method for myself.
My organizational strategy for work requires:
A weekly planner—where you can see the entire week on two pages laid flat (very important!!), with relatively large space for each day, as well—like this one (the Muji planner I used to swear by is no longer available in the U.S. but is available on Etsy)
Your company’s calendar program (Outlook, probably, or Gcal or iCal)
Your company’s timer (like the one in Intapp that I believe is used by many Biglaw firms)
One legal notepad or notebook per client (if transactional) or per client/matter (if litigation)
Below, I’ll explain how I use the above tools to stay organized at work. I’ll be using the diction of Biglaw, but you can apply the same principles to most corporate work environments, as well. (Matter means Project, and you can of course have multiple Projects per Client. Partner is your boss/supervisor/internal stakeholder.)
the weekly planner is your holy grail
At the start of each week (Sunday or Monday morning, depending on when you like to set aside time to plan for the week), make a bullet list of all your open matters, like so:
Then, mark in each daily row/column of the weekly planner any deadlines for the matters:
Next, work backwards from those deadlines to place those matters on the day-of and days before the deadline. These are the primary matters and tasks of each day. You have to get them done before you log off for the day.
Afterwards, you can leave a space or line to denote where secondary matters and tasks go (work product you’d like to make headway on but don’t have any pressing deadlines). I’d leave some extra room above the space/line/demarcation in case fire-drill assignments pop up, as they always do (I forgot to do that below, sorry). Try to be realistic when moving matters from the overall matters list to the days of the week—but it’s also okay if you overshoot, because you can just move them to the next day.
During the week, as you work, place /’s over the bullets of the matters you’ve started working on; cross it the other way with X’s over the bullets of the matters once you’ve completed them. Make a half-slash to form <’s over the bullets of the matters that need to be moved to the next day.
At the end of each day (or the beginning of the next day), move all of the > matters to the next day.
As I became more senior, I also incorporated use of the monthly planner views so I could calculate when to assign tasks to junior associates that would still build in time for one round of review with them before I send it to the partner.
So all of that orients you to what you need to get done every day and week. The best-laid plans go awry, of course—especially when other people enter the picture. To address that, we need to turn to the company calendar.
time-block your company calendar to ensure you have time to work on the primary tasks each day
Time-blocking is exactly what it sounds like: blocking off time in your calendar. On Sunday/Monday (whatever your beginning of the week is), after the initial weekly planner review, I try to time-block the primary tasks into the rest of the week on my work calendar.
I only time-block primary tasks because, well, fire drills are a fact of Biglaw, so I want to ensure that other associates/partners trying to schedule time with me see that I do have availability. Primary tasks and fire drills battle each other for primacy (and who wins really depends on the client/partner/particular circumstances), but both primary tasks and fire drills win out over secondary tasks. If something is really urgent, you can tell whoever is asking that you can move things around (i.e., move your time-block around or shorten it) to accommodate.
I also encourage you to time-block time for yourself every day, whether that’s for cooking dinner, spending time with your kids, working out, playing guitar, whatever. I usually blocked out 7-8:30pm every evening to exercise, which was compatible with my teams and workflows. I did have to barrel through or cancel that self-care time sometimes, but more often than not, I could keep my self-commitment.
use timers to track your time instead of trying to reverse-engineer your timesheet later
Companies who need to bill time will provide some sort of timesheet, which will usually have a built-in timer. Although you have your time-blocks in your calendar application to look back at estimates of how much you worked on primary tasks and calls for certain matters, it won’t capture all of your work time. For that, I create separate timers for every matter I have and click them on/off throughout the day.
At the end of the day, I see how much time I’ve accrued for each matter, adjust them upward or downward depending on if I realized I left one running accidentally or forgot to turn it on for a call, and then transfer those times to my timesheet. (The timekeeping app also usually auto-transfers timer time into your timesheet, though.)
I usually did my timesheet at the very end of the day, while listening to music at my desk, before I called my taxi/car home. If you’re a morning person, though, do it the next morning before the flurry of calls/emails usually begins.
take notes for clients and client/matters on separate notepads
Think of each matter like a separate class. You usually use separate notebooks for classes, right? Same applies to matters. I write the client/matter number on the top of each notepad so I can easily identify which notepad I should be using to take notes on or bring to a meeting. It also helps you know which notepad to refer to when partners/clients have questions about what came before.
If you prefer digital note-taking, that’s fine, too—just have a different Word document/Google doc/whatever word processing document you prefer. I like to use one notepad per transactional client (because I find referring to what we did in a previous transaction to be helpful) or one notepad per litigation client/matter (because the length of litigation often means that one matter will already take up multiple notebooks). But you can try it out and do whatever makes the most sense for you! Notebooks are an extension of your brain—you don’t need to fit your brain to a note-taking system. ◆
The [/] [X] [>] system goes crazy thanks for sharing! Wish I could have used this when I was earlier in my career, back then I just threw my body on the line and worked 80-100 hours per week whenever I was behind (not great, learnt a lot in life experience and work experience but still not great).
It wasn't until later that I realised if I got most of the things (~80%) done without dropping balls on the must urgent tasks and hitting utilisation I would've been fine. Firms like the one I worked at just needed employees like me to hit certain ROIs and big client deadlines and the rest is just window dressing:
Using a junior as an example:
Cost to firm:
$40/hr in salary + $40/hr in benefits, admin cost, office lease etc = $80/hr
Revenue to firm:
$350/hr in charge out rate x 70% utilisation rate = $245/hr
ROI = ~3:1
In my current industry blocking tasks out in my calendar (and making those calendar blocks as detailed as I needed) is sufficient in staying organised without needing any additional systems (my main deliverables nowadays are meetings and writing needed to be done before those meetings).
On your previous blog post, really appreciated the honesty with which you wrote this:
Even now, I question whether the price on my values has meaningfully increased or merely adjusted for inflation. I am still so scared of making the wrong choice, of ruining my life.
It struck a cord with me because this was my perspective six months ago, one I have slowly stepped out of every day watching people starve to death in an inflicted famine that my government funds. One day I asked myself what the point of anything I do will be if I don’t do anything about this - how can I view my life as sacred, or any life as sacred, when I stand by as the very sanctity of life is insulted so obviously and loudly - and seeks to conscript me in it through my tax dollars and silence. I was afraid of making the biggest mistake of my life too — I like you work in a field where the stakes are high — but in retrospect I see that the biggest mistake for me would have been to do nothing at all. My fears, and I suspect your fears, came from a place of cynicism - that the world would turn its back on me if I received backlash or lost professional opportunities, and so threatened the economic privilege I held. But what I learned is that my willingness to stay uninvolved was feeding and making that mindset true in my life - it would always be true as long as I stayed the same - for how could I think otherwise when I myself was turning my back on people at very real risk of being exterminated. What is the point of the ambition I seek in this world when this world is okay with a six year old dying a prolonged death trapped in a car as her family is sniped around her? Truly what does it mean to be human, and what is the value of our humanity - this is the question being asked of us right now.
Whether we like it or not we have the power now to influence the course of history and I fear we are answering the question to ourselves either way, either through our silence or involvement. I received a fancy education that gave me fancy opportunities but with that comes a cost, I think - the understanding of the implications of what is happening, and who that makes us to history. I suspect you see it as clearly as I do, because your blog post reads exactly like the conversations I was having with friends 6 months ago.
Whether we allow fear or radical hope to guide us right now is something that will follow us for the rest of our lives; at some point we have to account for our own actions to ourselves. And most compellingly, scarily, the younger generations now seem to have, bravely, chosen the latter and will be reminders to us for the rest of our lives of what we could have done.