Organization is one of the most important aspects of advocacy. After all, losing a term or a commitment, besides being embarrassing, can generate damages to clients and damage the image of the firm. Therefore, having an efficient agenda is essential for lawyers to fulfill their demands. It is not just a whim, but a necessity.
Today, most professionals face the same challenge when it comes to the organization of the law firm. In many of them, information about clients, financial matters, the progress of processes and other activities are usually segmented into different spreadsheets or electronic folders.
As a result, the lawyer loses a lot of time from his routine to find this information. As the professional’s day is already naturally troubled, the risk of losing commitments, deadlines or even forgetting important activities is much greater.
Challenge: organize the routine in the agenda for lawyers
The daily life of those who work in a law firm brings together a number of different activities. It is not uncommon to find in a lawyer’s schedule appointments such as: serving clients, reviewing invoices, holding a hearing and preparing a defense – all in a single day!
Those who have read a bit about productivity know that multitasking is a big issue for those who want to be efficient and productive. In practice, many times, those who perform several different tasks in their daily lives may end up producing less.
Therefore, a good tip to organize yourself in advocacy is to gather tasks of the same nature on separate days.
Of course, some activities, such as meeting procedural deadlines, for example, do not depend on the lawyer’s will. Therefore, they seem more complicated to fit into the routine.
However, when the professional plans ahead, he can also organize himself for the future. This way, he avoids more and more activities that need to be executed at the last minute.
Thus, thinking the routine and avoiding last minute tasks is a way to be not only more productive, but also to improve the internal environment. This is possible, first of all, with a good strategic planning, besides the use of adequate tools.
When we think of an agenda for lawyers for this organization, it is necessary to take into account the particularities of the legal routine. In this sense, electronic or paper models can offer more or less advantages.
What is the best type of agenda for lawyers?
There are basically two types of agenda for lawyers: the traditional paper agenda, and the digital agenda. You have probably heard of or even used both models, right?
Although very present in the routine, the doubt about which to use is still common. That’s why we dedicated this topic to talk about each of them and their possibilities of use.
Paper Agenda
Quite known by professionals, it is the one found in stationeries. In it, it is possible to register appointments daily and scratch them as they are made. Although it is a very simple method and still widely used by lawyers and offices, the paper agendas offer some disadvantages. The first is the sharing of tasks and commitments. For those who have a secretary or need to share control of processes and deadlines with the team, this type of schedule for lawyers is very limited.
Digital Agenda
The digital option, as is the case with Google Calendar, the example we will use in this content, is a resource that offers more possibilities. A digital agenda has more advantages for the lawyer than a paper agenda. This is because it allows sharing tasks, appointments and deadlines with other professionals, besides allowing automatic notifications.
Why use a digital lawyer’s calendar?
Forgetting commitments is not necessarily the lawyer’s fault. After all, dealing with a routine with so many different activities without the right resources makes it practically impossible to remember everything!
That’s why automatic notification is an important feature for this kind of professional, since it minimizes the risk of activities being forgotten.
Another advantage is the visualization of the routine. With this type of lawyer’s agenda, in one click it is possible to visualize the tasks of the day, week or month, besides separating by colors appointments and notes that have different natures.
Google Calendar still has the advantage of having a notepad, an activity list and a free videoconference tool integrated into the tool. To organize the team and share tasks, without a doubt, this feature has much more applicability than a traditional paper agenda.
Finally, another important utility of Google Calendar is that it allows the user to have more than one calendar in the same tool. This means that you can have a schedule for lawyers with their professional appointments and another with private appointments. Thus, it ensures more balance between work and personal life and higher quality of life.
How to use the digital calendar in an intelligent and productive way?
Although digital diaries are more interesting for everyday life, they can still represent a challenge for the lawyer. This is because they are not integrated with office routines.
In other words, if the attorney accompanies cases in one spreadsheet, keeps the financial one in another, and records meetings with clients in a third file, all tasks and information need to be included in the electronic calendar manually.
Even though the vast majority of lawyers have the resources to plan, information is not integrated. Therefore, whenever the professional searches for data or needs to cross information, he ends up spending a lot of time. Not to mention the risk of losing commitments because certain data are not gathered and everything needs to be entered into the agenda manually.
Integration of digital agenda and legal software
To use the digital agenda intelligently and productively, the lawyer can choose to connect it to legal software. The best system options in the market bring this option, making the lawyer no longer need to spend time writing down deadlines for processes.