Law Office Manager

December can leave a law office with plenty to finish and fewer working days to finish it. Use November to confirm coverage, remove billing obstacles and prepare for absences. This checklist can help you identify what needs attention before attorneys and staffers begin taking holiday leave. Give each task an owner so the follow-through is shared. Calendars and coverage ☐…

Your firm has approved an AI subscription. Now someone needs to find out whether it can help with the work—and that requires time already spoken for by clients, deadlines and daily office responsibilities. For a law office manager, the next funding request may be harder than the software purchase. You are asking the firm to invest paid working time before…

A candidate arrives for a job interview carrying an iced coffee. Does that suggest poor judgment? A casual attitude toward an important meeting? Or simply a preference for cold coffee? Your answer may reveal more about your expectations than about the applicant’s ability to do the job. Office managers need to assess professionalism, reliability and judgment when hiring. But those…

The attorney has approved the language. The names and numbers have been checked. The document looks ready to send. But who checked what the recipient might find beyond the finished page? An outgoing file can contain comments, tracked changes, author information or other material that does not appear in the normal reading view. Microsoft provides document inspection tools to help…

At the staff meeting, you explain a new scheduling procedure and ask whether anyone sees a problem. Nobody says much, so you move ahead. Later, you discover that several staffers spotted the same difficulty immediately. They discussed it among themselves, but nobody brought it to you. Before deciding they should have spoken up, consider another question: What made staying silent…