Time Management Tips for Young Lawyers: Reflections from my First Year of Practice

  • 10 septembre 2019
  • Justyna A. Waxman

The transition from being an articling student to an associate is far from easy. The articling experience for many of us largely involves being delegated discrete tasks that support senior lawyers in carrying out their work - whether it involves preparing research, drafting documents and letters, interviewing clients or appearing on simple, uncontested matters.

In addition to the continued pressure to deliver excellent work product to assist our superiors, we can no longer rely on the “I am an unqualified articling student” crutch as associate lawyers: all of a sudden, we are responsible for managing files (or at least portions of files) on our own, and clients are looking to us to advise them on legal strategy and next steps in advancing their matter. To excel in this environment without crumbling under the stress, good time management practices are key.

Here are just a few strategies to think about that have helped me immensely during my first year of practice as a family law associate (which may be helpful in many settings, even outside of private practice):

1. Learn how to delegate

As articling students, we are not trained to delegate – most often, the time-consuming work is delegated to us and we are expected to get it done. Disengaging from this mentality as early as possible is critical to our success. As much control as we want to have over our work product, there will never be enough time in a day to micro-manage the execution of every task that must be done to advance a client’s matter or that is assigned to us by senior lawyers.

Very few articling students have the luxury of an assigned assistant or staff member during their articles. I, like many of my colleagues, was assigned my first legal assistant when I started working as an associate lawyer. Training myself to outsource routine, administrative tasks to my assistant (dictating or writing out the content of letters in e-mail format, for example) in the first few months of practice was one of the best things I have done for my productivity.

If you have the ability to delegate work to summer or articling students, take advantage of it for those time-consuming tasks that you can confidently supervise (preparing and summarizing legal research, for example).