Working With Support Staff - A Guide for Lawyers
Lawyers are one of the lucky professionals who have a personal assistant to assist them in their day to day work. Properly utilised, a personal assistant will be your office angel - making your working life easier and saving your butt when needed.
Unfortunately, many lawyers do not know how to properly utilise their assistant. Junior lawyers and graduates are often catapulted out of law school and into a situation where they are expected to immediately understand how to manage an employee, without having been given any management training! Even senior lawyers can often struggle with maintaining an effective relationship with their PA, which can result in high conflict and regular staff turnover.
Following these simple common-sense guidelines will assist you in developing a good relationship with your assistant that ensures the best results for you and your practice.
Meeting With Your PA
When you are first allocated an assistant, you should meet with them to discuss any responsibilities of their role, and expectations that you have of them. You should go through any duties that you may like them to be responsible for that may not necessarily have been explained during the interview or handover process. Think about the way that you prefer things done that might be different to other solicitors, such as:
How do you like to settle work - do you want it to be sent to you via email, or printed to settle in hard copy?
Do you take all of your calls, or would you prefer your assistant to take messages at first instance?
Do you want your PA to assist you with printing and saving documents and correspondence? How do you want this to happen?
Do you like to be copied into all outgoing correspondence?
It may also be a good idea to meet with your PA regularly to touch base about ongoing work - maybe at the start of the week or the start of the day. By scheduling a check-in meeting, you will have a good idea of what each of you are currently working on. This will also avoid the need for you to check in constantly with your assistant about different tasks, which could be considered as micro-managing.
On that note...
Avoid Micro-Managing
Although it will sometimes be difficult to let go of control over certain tasks, it is important that you remember that your assistant has been hired because of their qualifications and skills in order to do this job.
You may be tempted, especially when you have allocated something urgent to your PA, to check in on the progress of a task. Unless the delay has been unreasonable, you should always avoid doing this. There is nothing worse as an assistant than being interrupted during an urgent task to be asked how much longer it will take. Not only will the task be done a lot sooner without these interruptions, but the more pressure that an assistant has upon them to complete a certain task under unreasonable timeframes, the more likely it is that there will be errors in it.
Give us Work!
Never be reluctant to allocate work to us - that is our job! If an assistant isn't being given enough work, they will often become bored and dissatisfied with their job, so it's important to keep us busy!
Junior lawyers who haven't had an assistant previously may wonder what kind of work they can allocate to their assistant. I have prepared the below guide to assist with this:
For junior assistants:
Typing of letters and documents from dictation.
Organising conferences.
Sending letters and emails to clients.
Taking messages from clients.
Filing
Printing and saving correspondence and documents
Organising travel and reimbursements
For mid to senior assistants:
All of the above, plus:
Drafting simple correspondence, including from firm precedents.
Taking instructions from clients to pass on to lawyers
For paralegal assistants
All of the above, plus:
Drafting Court documents
Drafting correspondence
Research tasks
Be aware of the work that you can't give to your assistant or paralegal including giving legal advice, and appearing in Court.
You should limit the personal errands that you give to your assistant. Whilst we are often happy to help with these kinds of tasks every now and then, if we are regularly given meaningless personal errands and tasks we will start to feel like our time is not properly being utilised and quickly start to become dissatisfied with our job.
Giving Instructions and Allocating Work
Giving Clear Instructions
When you are allocating work to your assistant, you should ensure that you give clear and full instructions in order for your assistant to complete the job. Think about what information you would need to complete the task and ensure that all of this is passed on to your assistant. It is frustrating for both an assistant and a lawyer for your assistant to be constantly bombarding you with further questions to complete a task or even worse, completing a task incorrectly because they have not been given all of the information required.
Allocating Work
On the topic of giving instructions, try to allocate work consistently through one mode of communication. Often, lawyers will have a million tasks to complete and so they might be tempted to fire them off to their assistant as soon as they think of them. This may result in an assistant being allocated work via email, in person verbally, over the phone, via dictation, and via a firm's instant messaging service. Receiving instructions through all of these different mediums makes it incredibly difficult for both the lawyer and the assistant to keep track of what work has been allocated, and what has been completed.
Give us Feedback
No employee should get to their performance appraisal and be surprised by the feedback that they receive. Ongoing feedback should be provided to your assistant during the course of your working relationship.
Giving Good Feedback
When your assistant is doing a good job, you should let them know! One of the main motivators for assistants to do a good job is to be appreciated for their work, and if an assistant feels they are not appreciated then they will often feel dissatisfied in their role. A simple 'thank you' or 'great work on this' goes a long way. If your assistant has gone to extra effort, you may even want to take them out for coffee or for lunch to thank them (the cost of these can often be reimbursed or claimed on tax).
Call us out When We're Not Doing a Good Job
Feel free to call us out when we have not done a good job as well. If you don't raise issues as they arise, it will be difficult to correct these at a later date. A good assistant will be happy to receive this kind of feedback, so that they can learn from their mistakes and grow from them. If you do not raise these issues, they will continue to frustrate you and the working relationship will often deteriorate.
Play Nice With Others
Your assistant will often be shared with other solicitors. You should respect that your assistant is often managing a workload that is generated from someone other than you. You should never criticise when your assistant cannot undertake something straight away because they are attending to something more urgent from another solicitor, and you should respect any re-prioritisation of work by your assistant to account for urgent work allocated by other solicitors.
If this does occur, you should simply ask for an estimated time of delivery on your pre-existing work. If there are a strict deadlines for your work to be completed which your assistant cannot meet, you should both ascertain whether there are any alternatives to ensuring that both tasks can be undertaken on time, such as having another assistant help with the task.
A good assistant will prioritise work based only on the urgency of the said task and never based on the seniority of the person who has allocated it, nor on which supervisor they prefer to work for. Sometimes, work that has been allocated by someone more junior than you will have to be completed before your own work. It makes our jobs as assistants working for numerous people unnecessarily difficult when conflicts arise because someone more senior is demanding their work be completed earlier, without regard to the actual urgency of the task.
Trust and Respect
Finally, it is essential for a productive working relationship with your assistant that you trust and respect your PA. If you show your assistant trust and respect, they will show it to you in return.
The most effective solicitor-PA relationships are where the solicitor and the assistant each work together as a team. Your assistant will become an integral part of your practice, and you should treat them with the trust, respect and appreciation that they deserve. If you do, they will reward you with loyalty and hard work, which is a win-win for everyone involved.
