Runyan: A callout to small firms: Use time to make time

Good news for all small-firm practitioners! Time may finally be on our side, according to Thomson Reuter’s “2023 State of U.S. Small Law Firms Report.”

It concluded: “Small law firm lawyers may have finally broken out of the recurring, frustrating pattern they’ve been in for years in which they have struggled to devote more time to practicing law and less time to dealing with burdensome administrative tasks.”

Translation: We are spending more time practicing law and less time administering the practice of law.

Unfortunately, reading deeper, we learn the “increase” in practice time gets us to a whopping 61% of our worked time as billable time. I guess I shouldn’t feel so alone when that twelve-hour day only translates to seven billable hours. We can’t make more time, but how can you make the best use of your time?

For anyone looking to take better control of their day, I wholeheartedly recommend John Maley’s Time & Practice Management for Lawyers and his tips to streamline your practice and make you a better lawyer.

I first heard John speak of his processes as part of the Bar Leader Series, and you can find his discussion on demand through the IndyBar’s web site.

Beyond that, I lean on a few principles from my multiple careers before law school to focus my time and focus myself.

Lessons from the military

When I was a special agent in the Air Force, I worked (many layers) under a brilliant general officer with a strong and perceivably well-earned reputation as a micro-manager.

Legendary stories circulated of this boss calling units and asking whoever answered the phone about the cases any given special agent was running.

During a walk through a Saudi Arabian desert, the senior enlisted adviser, in law professor-Socratic method style, opened my eyes to the fact that our boss actually wasn’t a micro-manager.

As he asked me about the legends I had heard, I realized none of the stories included the boss telling agents how to run their cases. Instead, the boss wanted to know about the case himself, and that’s why he spent his time asking the agent about the case—what’s the plan, what’s the next step, and how did that step move he plan forward? He wanted to know the details of what was happening around him. Hehe wasn’t a micro-manager; he was a micro-knower.

I try to apply the micro-knower approach to my role as our firm’s managing partner now, particularly by setting the expectation for regular updates from my teammates. This consistent team-updating standard I have implemented helps fulfill several professional expectations.

First, under Rule 5.1, partners and supervisors have an obligation to ensure subordinate attorneys are complying with the Rules of Professional Conduct.

Second, we all have scores of deadlines and to-dos swirling through our heads. Much like the way preparing a good checklist provides focus, regular updates allow me to clear my head of the unnecessary worry associated with ever-arising issues across the firm. The checkpoints provide confirmation that the teams have a handle on their issues.

Third, as firm leaders, talent acquisition is always on our minds, and hiring is obviously critical to administrative time in many ways.

The hiring process itself—the advertising, interviewing, negotiating, onboarding, training, etc.—requires an exhaustive time commitment. And the only way to know whether the candidate has the necessary complementary skills, experience, and cultural fit, is by knowing what you have and what you need.

Finding that gem is another issue, but the point here is that you can’t find it if you don’t know what you are looking for. Developing and maintaining micro-knower status facilitates the focus needed to tackle the above obligations successfully and efficiently.

Lessons from the corporate world

Separately, after the Air Force, I spent a short amount of time as a project manager for Honda on its new model team. I witnessed implementation of the “Kaizen” (continuous improvement) model firsthand.

Scores of books have been written on Kaizen’s steps and principles, but the first key principle I took away was the “Gemba walk:” (1) Go see how it’s done (“it” being whatever process you are reviewing), (2) ask why, and (3) show respect.

My old Air Force boss had implemented this principle to a “T” without ever referring to Kaizen (and it sounds a lot like “management by walking around”).

At its core, it means go to where the work happens, talk to the people that do the job, and understand how the process can be improved.

We recently used this process at Kroger, Gardis & Regas. One of our practice teams implemented a unique service for clients in a specific industry, which created correspondingly unique billing challenges.

We essentially “did our best” for the first nine to 12 months, and then a cross-functional team went through the processes (time-recording, billing, review, etc.) and created tools to automate them as best as possible.

Using a cross-functional team was vital. We needed the input from the timekeepers as well as the staff who had to implement these new back-end processes in order to generate client bills.

As we implemented, we kept a second key Kaizen principle in mind: small but steady improvements can eventually lead to major productivity gains. As Voltaire said, perfect is the enemy of good. See also Naval Ravikant on X (formerly Twitter), November 22, 2022: “It’s not 10,000 hours, it’s 10,000 iterations.”

Typically, in our line of work, the output must be what we consider perfect. The transactional document, the brief, whatever the case may be, must be perfect. Any error or misstep on our end could cause clients hardships ranging from minor to devastation. This initiative however, did not demand immediate perfection.

As we established our new specialized billing process, we knew it wasn’t perfect, but it was better than what we had. By creating and implementing our new billing system, we saved time on repetitive tasks, reduced errors through automation, freed up valuable administrative time, and simplified new employee training.

We established something better, celebrated the win, and put the newfound time to use focusing on making the process “more better.” Rinse and repeat.

Ultimately, the concepts of being a micro-knower and pursuing continuous improvement allows me to clear my head and the entire team to take ownership of the process, both of which enable me to spend more time on the actual practice of law.

Maybe next year I get to 62% of worked time as billable time.•

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Steven E. Runyan is managing partner at Kroger, Gardis & Regas LLP.