Now that my daughter is away at college and living in a tiny dorm room, she complains that the room she had at home was too big. Her room at home was so big, she says, she could go for a much longer period of time before the mess began to annoy her. By the time it reached that point, there was so much to do, the idea of actually cleaning it up seemed overwhelming. So she ended up just leaving it messy.
My wife is at the opposite extreme. You have never met someone so organized, and this is, I believe, one of the secrets to her success. She has a tiny study at our new house that is so neat and tidy, it is hard to believe someone actually works there, much less someone involved in some pretty complex litigation. She has a very small desk, the same desk her father used to have as a boy. She has a desk chair and an easy chair. She has a little table where she keeps her incense. And, well, that’s about it.
My wife’s office downtown is bigger and just as organized. When her office manager left this past fall, the first thing my wife did was run around and reorganize the entire office. She said she couldn’t even begin to think about looming deadlines until everything was just the way she wanted it.
Although I don’t have empirical evidence to back this up, I believe there must be a direct correlation between the quality of a lawyer’s services and the degree of orderliness in the lawyer’s office. To back this up, I offer my own, unscientific observations from my days at the public defender’s office.
As I have mentioned before, we used the horizontal system of representation at the public defender’s office where I worked. This was by necessity, not choice, in order to deal with the extraordinarily large caseload we handled. Instead of one lawyer representing the client from the beginning of the case until final disposition as in “vertical” representation, defendants in the horizontal system are represented by a different lawyer depending on the stage of the process. One lawyer represents them at preliminary arraignment. Another lawyer represents them at preliminary hearing. And still another lawyer represents them at trial. If the case is continued, it might be yet another lawyer at the next listing.
This meant that if any lawyer dropped the ball during this process (failed to properly memo or mark a file, file a motion, follow up with investigation, etc.), it was left to the next lawyer to clean up the mess. And we all knew which lawyers we wanted to follow in this sequence and which lawyers we didn’t want to follow.
Almost without fail, the lawyers you wanted to follow were the one with the clean, organized offices. Their desks were bare. Files were neatly labeled and organized on the shelf next to them. The lawyers you didn’t want to follow were the ones with files and papers stacked in piles all over their offices.
Unfortunately, this is a lesson I have had to learn again and again – at law school, in studying for the bar, at the public defender’s office, in starting my own practice. The very first thing I do when I begin to feel stressed is to get to work. The very first thing my wife does is to get herself organized. She is a much better lawyer than I am or ever will be. I think there is a lesson to be learned there.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Wow, it sounds like I could have written this post. Including the part where my lawyer wife is more organized than I am!
When I opened my criminal defense practice last year, I quickly realized where my strengths and weaknesses were, and tried to find ways to maximize the former while mitigating the latter. As for the organization part, I hired an organized assistant to work on a part-time basis. Far and away, her salary is the most useful expenditure I make every month.
I really need to get organized, but I tell myself I’m moving my office anyway, so why not just wait until then. I do find, though, that I work much better with a clean office, so I think you are on to something there.
It pains me to disagree with you, but on this topic I couldn’t disagree more. I find it hard to think in a clean office. I feel like I need the clutter to work properly; much in the same way that I really like to have loud music when I’m writing a brief – it overwhelms some part of my brain so that part can’t be a distraction.
Sure, I’d rather inherit a file from a compulsively neat person. But I don’t think that relates to the quality or kind of lawyering you get.
I recall one lawyer I know who has impeccable files. They’re gorgeous – models of organization. Each folder is labeled with it’s own printed label, and there’s a lovely color coding system for each subfolder, depending on what it contains. I am confident that at least twenty percent of his billable time is in establishing and maintaining his file system. Yet, as another lawyer says of them, paraphrasing the Dirty Dozen, “They’re pretty alright, but can they fight?”
I think I’d rather have a lawyer working on his cases than working on his files.
Though, like they say, your mileage may vary.