Managing Your Manager - The Lifestyle Lawyer
This blog series has been prepared following The Support Staff Community’s Managing Your Manager seminar on 7 November 2019.
Managing Upwards
Harvard Business Review describes managing upwards as “the process of consciously working with your superior to obtain the best possible results for you, your boss, and the company”.
It effectively means being aware of and working in a way that supports your manager’s working style and professional goals, which may mean adapting your own working style to suit them.
Learning how to “manage your manager”, or manage upwards, will make your working life a lot easier. By managing upwards, you will build a more meaningful working relationship with your manager which will lead to improving your communication and processes.
On the other hand, working against your lawyer's style and in a way that does not support them will only create friction within your working relationship and make your day to day working life more difficult.
There are many different working styles and personalities that you may come across during your career in legal support. As a legal support professional, you may often be working for lawyers that have characteristics that present certain challenges. To work effectively with your lawyer, it will be helpful to identify these characteristics and learn how to manage them.
In this post, we will be identifying the Lifestyle Lawyer and addressing some of the challenges that come with working for one of these types of lawyers.
The Lifestyle Lawyer
How to recognise them:
The lifestyle lawyer is someone who is frequently absent from the office. They will often be late to work in the mornings, take long lunches and leave the office early (you might even find them on the golf course during these times). You might find that you will be doing a lot of expense claims on behalf of your lifestyle lawyer for “networking” lunches and coffees.
How to manage them:
Challenge 1: So many expense claims!
If you submit expense claims on behalf of your lifestyle lawyer, make sure that you do these regularly as they will quickly add up! Become familiar with your firm’s reimbursement policies and know what your lawyer can and can't claim for, as well as the correct codes to use, to ensure that claims are processed efficiently once you have submitted them and don't need to be returned.
Challenge 2: Their absence
As your lawyer is often out of the office, they will need to feel as if they can rely upon you, even when they are not there. You should continue working as if they were still there and avoid taking advantage of the time that you are unsupervised by slacking off.
If anything urgent arises which your solicitor will need to deal with whilst they are out of the office, you should alert them via email and follow up with a telephone call if necessary (I.e. if it is time sensitive or if you have not received a response to your email within a reasonable timeframe). If you have been unable to reach your lawyer and something is urgent, you should seek the advice of another lawyer if possible.
You should cover for your boss as much as possible, but never in a way that would jeapordise your own job. For example, it would be inappropriate for you to go around telling the office (or clients) without prompting that your lawyer is often taking long lunches. However, if the managing partner is looking for your lawyer and asking where they are, you should never be expected to lie on their behalf.
Challenge 3: Client management
You will also need to fine-tune your client management skills. You should always avoid telling people calling for your lawyer where they are - clients and other solicitors will notice if they are regularly told that your lawyer is "out at lunch" every afternoon. Simply telling the caller that your lawyer is unavailable and offering to take a message will usually be sufficient.
Challenge 4: Setting boundaries
Make sure that you set boundaries with the lifestyle lawyer – it is not fair of them to frequently come back from long lunches after 4.00pm and allocate a lot of work to you that they expect to be done before close of business. Learn how to say no in a way that is respectful but enforces your boundaries.
Stay tuned for further blog posts addressing other lawyer types, such as the anxious lawyer, the absent lawyer, the micromanaging lawyer and more!
