Unseen Risks And The Great Reshuffling

May 17, 2022

The last few years have been extremely stressful, especially on the labor market. First, we had to rush to learn how to work from home. Employees were dealing with juggling work and childcare, eldercare, sudden and prolonged illness of themselves and family members, death, and a pervasive sense of unrest. As the pandemic dragged on and we learned how to cope, many people found that they wanted to reassess their work and their work-life balance, or simply that their support nets for childcare had unraveled. Enter the Great Resignation or the Great Reshuffling, as an estimated 44% of global workers are looking for a new job.

Law firms are not immune to the trend. Employees, including both support team staff and lawyers, are leaving long held jobs for a variety of reasons. Some firms are even doing “stay” interviews to allow employees to openly discuss ways the firm can support professional goals, provide support and resources, and create an environment to thrive and succeed. It has been a struggle to fill positions in many industries, and legal is no different.

Considering these realities, many firms have shifted to more remote work and are moving to more cloud-based technology. However, firms need to also consider and evaluate their processes as much as their technology. The firm’s business continuity is threatened by the fluid workforce trends. How? There are two primary risks to consider – the lack of task assignment and reporting and the lack of process documentation.

Task Management

How does your firm assign tasks? Are requests made via email, orally, or by leaving a sticky note on someone’s desk? This is a risky situation for a variety of reasons. It is difficult or impossible to know who has been assigned what, to follow up, and to prioritize competing deadlines. If an employee or an attorney becomes ill, must stay home to quarantine due to COVID exposure, or simply quits with two weeks’ notice, does your firm have a way to determine what has been assigned to this person, what they have assigned, or how to triage outstanding tasks and re-assign them? If the task is reassigned, will the person now responsible have the context and detail necessary to complete the assignment? Can you run a report to see what tasks are in jeopardy of not being accomplished on time?

The good news is that most firms already have many tools at their disposal to effectively manage assigning and tracking tasks. The biggest hurdle will be updating the process and adopting change. Identify the tools you have, or start with a new one, provide training for your team, and consider ways to incentivize people to track assignments formally.

Task Management Tools

MS Outlook

If your firm uses Microsoft Outlook with an Exchange server (hosted, on premise, or through an MS 365 subscription) then you already have a lightweight task-management tool. You can create tasks from emails by dragging an email to Tasks or creating a Quick Step to “Add to Tasks.” The Outlook To-Do Bar shows tasks in a panel alongside your email.

You can add a new task from scratch, add a due date and reminders, assign it to someone, categorize it, add notes and instructions, attach or link to documents, send status reports and create recurrences. You can view all your tasks and those you’ve assigned and drill down under “Current View” to see the list, which tasks are overdue, which ones are upcoming, and which tasks have been assigned.

For those with a Microsoft 365 subscription, tasks from OneNote and To Do will also appear in your task list in Outlook.

Microsoft To Do

If your firm has a subscription to Microsoft 365 you have the To Do app. Built on the popular Wunderlist app, MS To Do helps compile tasks from across the Microsoft ecosystem including Outlook, Planner, SharePoint, OneNote and almost anywhere you can assign or be assigned a task. You can also manage tasks, created task templates, create tasks lists and groups, assign them to others, and more. To Do has become the central hub for tasks in MS 365, corralling personal and assigned tasks in one place.

There are plenty of other simple task tools, including those in Google Workspace, Todoist, and many more. The free, single-user versions will generally not let you assign and track tasks, so unless the only person in your firm is you, seek the business versions.

Practice Management

If your firm is using a case/practice management system whether on-premises, like Time Matters or Practice Master, or a cloud-based product like Clio, My Case, or Practice Panther, more than likely you have the ability to assign tasks related to a matter, create task workflows, track deadlines and far more. Explore the tools your firm is currently using to see how to take advantage of these features. Practice management applications do far more than just track time!

Project Management

If you want to take your task management to the next level, consider adding a project management tool to expand your tracking, assignments, integrations, and apply advanced methodology to begin to systematize your task management. You can begin by exploring MS Planner, which is part of the MS 365 business packages, or other tools like Asana or Trello, or even legal project management applications. You can learn more about project management by reading this article from NCBA CPM and watching this on-demand NCBA CLE with Alicia Mitchell-Mercer.

Process Documentation

Another significant risk arises when staff and lawyer departures lead to gaps in knowledge. If your firm relies on one person to open a matter, perform intake, run conflict checks, generate pre-bills, send invoices and collections, close a matter or any one of many processes that are crucial to workflow in the firm, have you considered what to do if that person left or needed to take an extended absence? Does anyone else in the firm know how to start and finish these processes? Do they have the necessary access to technology and login information? Firms should document from start to finish how to accomplish essential processes so there in no disruption that would cause delay in activities essential to moving a case or matter forward.

Documentation can also extend to legal work. You may find that new talent you hire may lack specific experience that can be taught, such as estate administration, real estate matters, or litigation. For instance, you may find a bright new hire with abundant experience who lacks a few essential skills. Do you or anyone on your team have the time to teach them? Onboarding and training often fall by the wayside in a busy law firm, leaving the new hire to sink or swim. It can lead to frustration on the part of the new hire and supervisors. If some of the team works remotely, then the old way of shadowing someone or being able to pop over to someone’s desk to ask quick clarifying questions will no longer be effective. The more a firm can document processes, workflows and standard operating procedures, the more it can survive and thrive when the workforce is disrupted.

Consider creating a firm “cookbook” that documents how tasks are accomplished. There are many tools on the market that can help firms with this endeavor. It can be as simple as a shared OneNote notebook, a mind map, a shared document, a wiki, or you could try tools purpose built for process documentation like Sweet Process or Process Street.

Newer tools on the market may also be appealing.

Loom has become extremely popular over the pandemic and the rise of the remote workplace. Loom lets you use your screen and webcam to capture quick videos to document “how to” and training. You can get started with the free plan and upgrade to the inexpensive business plan ($8 per creator per month). Team members can document how they do something with the screen recorder, narrating the steps. The training videos are helps in a private team library.

Notion is a new and buzz-worthy collaboration workspace. You can create everything from an employee directory to a firm intranet to office manuals to policies. Notion’s goal is to make sure that your daily work and knowledge live side by side – so you never lose context. The tool is extremely malleable, so much so it may be a little intimidating. There are thousands of templates you can use to make it a little easier to understand how this product can help with process documentation – and more.

Scribe “turns any process in to a step-by-step guide, instantly.” Scribe lets you record and annotate a process and share it with team members. Ideas include how to run an open matter report, how to add a new client to your system, how to generate a non-engagement agreement and more.

One thing to be aware of is that processes are constantly evolving. Find a tool that is easy to use and easy to update. Process documentation will also help your firm assess where there are too many steps, redundancy, inefficiency, and re-keying. You can take that information and apply it to process checklists, which you can then use in your task management. You may also find ways to automate tasks, so they aren’t as dependent on a person to run them. Automation can be helpful in preventing risks, such as having a project slip through the cracks or delaying progress on a matter.

Conclusion

Prepare your firm for the future. Reduce risks associated with poor process documentation, haphazard task management, siloed information, and other issues that plague businesses both large and small. The pandemic and resulting remote workforce plus shifts in staffing have highlighted the need to do a better job at documentation, which will also result fewer missed deadlines, better onboarding and training, and a commitment from leadership to improve the firm.

Catherine Sanders Reach serves as director of the NCBA Center for Practice Management.