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The Effective Lawyer teaches ambitious trial lawyers how to grow their skills and create a prosperous law firm. Using lessons learned by accomplished attorneys from around the country, we discuss lessons learned through their trials and tribulations. Our discussions cover a vast range of topics sought out by attorneys looking for advice, from depositions to how to market your law firm.
The show is hosted by Jack Zinda, Founder and Senior Trial Lawyer at Zinda Law Group. In less than 15 years, Jack and his team have grown Zinda Law Group from 3 attorneys to over 30, spanning several states and handling a variety of personal injury cases from gas explosions to truck accidents.
Jack and his guests share their knowledge and skills that they’ve acquired through the process of building one of the most successful plaintiff’s law firms in the country.
In each show we cover a new topic that an ambitious attorney would want to better understand, while providing practical skills to improve their legal practice.
For more information, visit https://www.zdfirm.com/the-effective-lawyer
00:00
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda and I'll be your host. Hey, welcome to another episode of the Effective Lawyer podcast. I'm Jack Zinda, and today we're going to be talking about the question I probably get the most of is time management. And we collected a bunch of questions we've gotten over the last couple years regarding time management. One to answer those and share some of my insights over the last few years.
00:42
Speaker 2
Jack, can you walk us through a typical day for you? How do you structure your time to ensure you're maximizing productivity?
00:48
Speaker 1
Okay, that's a great question. So I think structuring your day is one of the most critical ways to maximize productivity. I know when I first started practicing law, I would come into the office and I would just have this hurricane of things that would come at me. I would have 10 phone calls, I'd have some pleadings that I had to review, discovery that an upset client would call. Then maybe I'm negotiating a case. And before I know it's 3:30pm and I feel like I've gotten nothing done but take messages and take calls. And so I read a really great book called Getting Things Done. And one of those concepts is you want to focus on what's important first.
01:27
Speaker 1
And so what I started doing is putting together my ideal schedule during the day and then each week mapping out what I was going to do and then putting into slots. Not just appointments, but actually work appointments. So, like, what are the things I'm going to work on and when? And then really keep those as times that I force myself to actually work on that topic. So if I say from 8 to 9, I'm going to prepare for deposition, I, I don't take client calls. I don't do other things. I don't have interruptions. I treat it like it's a meeting. And that really helps me stay focused and stay structured. The second piece is you've got to really understand what you're going to be working on and what's going to move the needle most.
02:07
Speaker 1
So if you have a schedule, then it's like, okay, what's going to help either a case or help my firm the most? And really make sure you prioritize the. Prioritize those ahead of time.
02:17
Speaker 2
What has been the biggest time management challenge that you faced as a lawyer and a CEO, and how did you overcome that?
02:23
Speaker 1
The biggest challenge I've faced with time management was definitely probably two times in my life one when went from five employees to 20. And that's a big jump. It doesn't sound like a big jump, but when you're five people, you kind of know everybody. You know the team, you know what everyone's doing. When you jump to 20 now, you have a lot more people. And we didn't have great management systems in place and didn't have great training in place. And that unfortunately led to more turnover than we'd like. And it led to me doing way more jobs than I could do with the time I had allocated. I was, you know, training people, managing people, hiring people, working on my cases. And at the point we didn't have enough cash flow to hire a bunch of managers to help with that.
03:07
Speaker 1
So that was part one. And the way I solved that problem was just section by section bringing on managers to assist and realizing I need to hand off some of those items that I was doing myself and put together good systems to make sure people were working with different teams. The other time was when I had, or my wife had our first, our son Jackson, and then when we had our second son, James. And when you go from like not having kids to having kids. And it was also at a point where the law firm was growing a lot. And so trying to balance being a dad, being a husband, and then being a lawyer and then running the practice was extremely stressful.
03:45
Speaker 1
And there was a lot of late nights and then also with the kids not sleeping, that just added another, you know, amount of stress into the situation. I would say that was probably a three to four month period before I got my bearings. And I've noticed in life that's what usually happens, you know, something that changes, you don't even realize it sometimes and you're kind of in a chaos. I kind of visualize my work life as either it's calm sea or it's a hurricane. And when it's a hurricane, what I find is helpful is to lock yourself into a conference room with a whiteboard and just put up everything that you have to do and everything that you're responsible for. So I would put up on the board, you know, dad, husband, manager, cfo, cmo, the cases I'm working on.
04:25
Speaker 1
And then I would just think, okay, for each of these, what is it all that I have to do? And then I would list out for each role what I needed to do. And then I'd say, okay, is there anybody I can hand this off to? Could someone else handle this instead of myself? And then clarify who I wanted to do it and by when or eliminate it, and then what's left I would try to put into those time slots we talked about. So I prioritized it. Now, I have found very few people can really force themselves to do this without a coach or without some additional help because we usually overestimate how much we can get done in a day.
04:58
Speaker 1
So you might say, well, it's going to be hard, but I think I can do, you know, these two depositions, then, you know, get to the baseball game, then also get the marketing plan done and go to bed at 11pm and then it's 11pm and you've done like one of those. And so that's what I find is usually the biggest drawback is people are unrealistic about what they can get done or they're poor prioritizing what they should get done. You know, a lot of times people want to work on the thing they know the best or the simplest problem to solve, but that may not be what is most important.
05:32
Speaker 1
If you'd like a copy of any of the things you heard about here today, or to set up a time to talk one of our team members about a case, please go to Zendalaw I.O. And we have amazing resources, downloads, guides, and you can set up a time to talk to us if you want to talk about how we handle things or any case in particular.
05:56
Speaker 2
Have there been any specific tools or technologies that you've been relying on that have helped you manage your time more effectively?
06:04
Speaker 1
So that's a great question. What sort of tools of technology have helped me manage my time more effectively? The first thing to know that I think this is a little bit of a red herring when it comes to time management. I've used probably, you know, five, 10 different systems and I'll go into different examples of that in a second. It's honestly more about the practices and the routines of staying organized that matter. So. And I find people tend to lean into technology hoping that will be a silver bullet, but they don't actually execute in using the technology the right way. So there's dozens that are out there. One that I like a lot is called Asana. It's a great project management tool that allows you to set up projects, set up routines, set up schedules, and it's very easy to use.
06:50
Speaker 1
There's also a great app called Evernote that is great for capturing information. Kind of a similar like process there's Todoist, which is really effective. There's Monday, which is another great project management App. And probably, if you want the App Store, there's probably like a hundred more. And I use Asana. But actually, what I find most effective is I have a book that I use that is kind of an outline of plenty. My week, my month, my year, and my quarter. I find that's the most effective, actually, because what I do is each quarter I'll. I'll make a list of my goals, both professional and personal, and there's a quarterly section for it. And this is by an author named Michael Hyatt, who wrote a book called Best Year Ever. And it's taken from a lot of different. Other authors as well.
07:31
Speaker 1
He didn't come up with all these concepts himself, but he kind of pulled them together in a format you can use. And then each week I map out what I'm going to try to accomplish for the week, and then each day, what I'm going to try to accomplish each day. And there's something about writing it down and it gets you away from your computer because, you know, technology is a huge distraction. And I find myself surfing the Internet all the time if I jump on Outlook or jump on a browser. So I like to use a pad and paper a lot to make sure I stay focused and stay on target.
07:58
Speaker 2
Looking forward, how do you see your time management practices evolving as the firm grows and as the legal landscape changes?
08:06
Speaker 1
So the ways I see time management evolving, both for myself and for other people, you know, in the legal profession is I think there's going to be a much bigger lean into using AI and other things to eliminate routine tasks. And as my practice continues to grow, I've got to continue delegating more. And that's something that is very difficult to do, especially if you enjoy doing something, if you're really good at it. So when I started my practice, I would work on 50 cases at a time. And I love practicing law, and I can usually gauge my happiness in the practice by the percentage of I'm getting to practice. I tried to keep that pace up for a while, but when went to, you know, 8, 10, 15, 20 lawyers and, you know, 100 staff, it was impossible.
08:52
Speaker 1
So I had to make some tough decisions. So, you know, eventually I got it down to where, say, okay, I'm going to work on three cases at the time, at a time, but I. But it'll be the largest cases in the firm, the ones that give me the most pleasure and joy to work on. I'm going to pick another team to work on those with so they can handle the little Things that I don't have time to handle another legal team within the firm. And then I'm going to give advice on another 15 cases. So I still get to strategize, but I'm not responsible for that particular case day to day. And then figure out how I'm going to put the rest of my time between being a CEO, helping with marketing, other different things I have to do.
09:27
Speaker 1
But this is a constant evolution and I think once a quarter you need to sit down and really inventory what you should be working on.
09:33
Speaker 2
You've mentioned a lot of great books and tools that you would recommend to people that have really helped you. What additional advice would you give to young lawyers who are struggling to manage their time effectively?
09:43
Speaker 1
Yeah, I mean, I think one thing is reading books to me is really helpful to get you thinking about it, even if they're really simple basic books about that. Like I mentioned, there's a great book called Getting Things Done by David Allen. There's Michael Hyatt's books on staying organized. There's the seven Habits of Highly Effective People. That's another great book. And absorbing the information is really helpful to get you thinking about it and getting ideas of how you can manage your life and yourself. The other thing is I think it's really helpful to get some sort of coach or someone to help you with this. One, you usually don't see the obvious yourself. And two, accountability. Having someone you're meeting with is going to hold you accountable for actually executing on these things can be worth a ton. Now coaches vary in cost.
10:30
Speaker 1
You know, you could get, you know, a virtual coach that's just via chat. You could have an in person coach, you could have a phone call with someone. But just that concept of having someone holding you accountable for a system makes a huge difference. And if you look at the ROI that you're going to get on that compared to how much money you lose by being disorganized or not having a good system to get everything done, it more than pays it for itself. 8, 9, 10 times over.
10:57
Speaker 2
Awesome. I think those are all the questions we have on time management. Thanks for your time, Joe.
11:01
Speaker 1
Well, I hope this was helpful. I hope some of these tips that I gave today on time management help you in your practice. If you have additional questions, please feel free to reach out to me on social media or email. You can go to our website at zdfirm.com we're on Instagram, Facebook and all the other social media apps. And until next time, thanks. Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast zindalaw.com as always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.