Time Management for Attorneys: A Lawyer's Guide to Decreasing Stress, Eliminating Interruptions & Getting Home on Time

Mark Powers & Shawn McNalis

Format: Paperback
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Are you overwhelmed by a chaotic and exhausting work schedule? Are you concerned about how stress and chaos impact your personal and professional life? Would you like to attract better cases, improve the functioning of your law firm, and have more time for your family? If so, you are not alone.

In spite of their outward appearance, many otherwise highly-skilled lawyers are adrift in a sea of chaos that is their legal practice.

This is especially true amongst small firms and solo practitioners. Often, very bright, well respected individuals are overwhelmed by the combination of legal work and managerial duties that come with being an owner or partner. Many are so overwhelmed that it becomes difficult to effectively integrate new skills that could help them achieve better case outcomes or implement marketing efforts to obtain better cases, despite how much they desire those goals.

There is a solution. Atticus, the nation’s leading law practice consulting firm, has produced a book called Time Management for Attorneys. It distills over twenty years of experience consulting with many of the top law firms in the country, helping them conquer the most important elements to achieve success and an improved quality of life. This book, and its accompanying forms CD, will help you implement changes that can positively impact your practice and your life outside work. The book covers issues such as:

  • Setting personal and professional goals, as well as effective steps to achieve them
  • Improving case selection and dropping bad clients
  • Changes in the way you schedule tasks
  • Systemizing your office
  • Managing interruptions
  • Delegating tasks
  • And more

The accompanying CD contains forms that will help you implement the concepts from the book into your practice and personal life.

Since Atticus consults with firms in all varieties of law, this book applies to all lawyers, regardless of area of practice. Atticus consults with several of the nation’s leading plaintiff firms (including Trial Guides authors and customers), and the concepts in this book apply equally to those attorneys doing contingent fee work as well as hourly billing.

Mark Powers

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Shawn McNalis

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Paperback: 142 pages; 1st edition (2008); ISBN: 978-0615187457
Publisher: Atticus®, Inc.
  1. About the Authors
  2. Preface
  3. Acknowledgments
  4. Introduction

  5. Proactive Strategy One: Create a Personal Vision Statement
  6. Proactive Strategy Two: Create a Professional Vision Statement
  7. Proactive Strategy Three: Set Strategic Goals
  8. Proactive Strategy Four: Select Clients Wisely
  9. Proactive Strategy Five: Schedule Like Tasks Together
  10. Proactive Strategy Six: Systemize Your Office
  11. Proactive Strategy Seven: Manage Interruptions
  12. Proactive Strategy Eight: Practice Delegation
  13. Proactive Strategy Nine: Take a Vacation

What Legal Leaders Are Saying

Time Management for Attorneys is a must read, particularly for lawyers who feel like they are caught on the proverbial treadmill. I have worked personally with the authors for almost fifteen years. I benefited from three years of weekly coaching with Shawn McNalis and this book contains everything that I have learned in those years of coaching with Shawn. In my thirty years of experience as a trial lawyer, I have witnessed most lawyers being led around by the nose by their practices, chasing billable hours and living a life tied to the time sheet. Mark Powers and Shawn McNalis show lawyers how to prioritize their lives and maximize the use of their time. They actually show lawyers how to work less and make more! They also show lawyers how to create practices that serve them instead of the other way around. This book can be read in a matter of hours and can then serve as a resource for making life-improving changes. I owe an improved business life and a full family life to Mark and Shawn. Buy it, read it, and reread it.

— Mark Chinn, Jackson, MS

I have taken a number of time management courses over the past twenty years, and this book is the first one that has tied all the different concepts together and made them specific to attorneys. When I find myself getting in trouble is when I get away from the concepts explained in the book. Time Management for Attorneys is mandatory reading for my associates and a valuable gift for referral sources. If there’s an attorney, friend, business partner or referral source that you care about, give them this book. The best way of becoming successful is making those around you successful.

— Richard West, Esq, Orlando, FL

We all have the same amount of time, and enough of it. It is just that some of us utilize time much more effectively than others, argues Mark Powers and Shawn McNalis in their new book Time Management for Attorneys: A Lawyer’s Guide to Decreasing Stress, Eliminating Interruptions and Getting Home on Time. The title of the book is to some extent a misnomer, because it is much more than a book about time management. It is about adopting and adhering to personal and professional statements as to how you want to live your life both inside and outside of the office. It is about focus management and energy management, performing similar and repetitive tasks within the same block of time and performing challenging tasks at a time of day when you are at your best. The authors also set forth a roadmap for unshackling you from the technician’s life at your desk, helping to turn you into an entrepreneur. This process all begins with careful client selection and educating your clients to need you, while being willing to deal with other personnel in your firm. Successful delegation, the creation of “designated hitters,” and making of “preemptive strikes,” are some of the tools taught by Powers and McNalis that will create significant free time for you to work on and grow your business. And yes… don’t forget to use that new found time for family, hobbies, volunteering, recreation, spirituality, and God forbid, a long vacation.

— Eric Goidel, New York, NY