Anonymous User wrote: ↑Thu Oct 20, 2022 8:01 am
Anonymous User wrote: ↑Wed Oct 19, 2022 9:24 pm
Anonymous User wrote: ↑Tue Oct 18, 2022 5:58 pm
This is not another quiet quitting thread. I'm a midlevel in a specialty area of litigation at a V25. I generally like what I do and don't mind working long/odd hours (never fallen below 2600). But as I become more senior I find it harder and harder to manage my workload. As a junior, I would get "assignments" from seniors/partners that I could always say no to if I was truly under water. I have no problem doing that, and my colleagues trust me when I say I'm too busy.
But I now find myself responsible for larger parts of cases (either on my own or managing a small group of juniors) for which there are simply not enough hours in the day/week/month to do it alone (or at least to do them right). I have no problems saying no to new matters, but it's the ones I'm already on that I'm struggling with. Nobody tells me what to do to meet a deadline (or even that it's mine to meet) - it's on me to make sure it gets done. I used to be able to power through anything put on my plate, but I simply can't do it all and I have a hard time asking for help.
There's an obvious answer here: I need to get better at : pushing work down, managing juniors, staffing matters, and planning ahead. So I'm wondering if anybody has some anecdotes/tips that helped them learn these skills faster. What does "saying no" look like to you as you become more senior and take on more responsibility?
Dude - what? You're taking on more work even when pacing 2600 hours?
I generally just start to say no when I'm starting to pace at 200 hours/month. I figured 200 is my breaking point where I can sustain that for like several months in a row without feeling terrible but anymore and I just can't.
I think my point was that it's not so simple. I'm not "taking on more work." I haven't said yes to a new case in months. The problem is that I have responsibility for a case (or certain parts of a case), so anything that comes up on that is presumptively mine to deal with. Nobody says "can you help with X" - they just expect me to do it. I can't say no when nobody asks.
Ohh gotcha, sorry about that. You mean you take on work, that work explodes beyond what is reasonable, and then you don't know what to do with it.
I'm a mid-level in a different practice area (M&A), so this advice may not work, but I honestly just pick and choose my battles. If I'm overwhelmed, and there's two matters going crazy at the same time, I focus on the one with worse staffing.
For example, if I have a really good second year under me on a deal, I'll just stop paying attention/step away and pray that they can step up.
Probably not the greatest management tactic because it means you're overburdening your star players while the underperformers skate by because they have my supervision; however, I have no real solution for this. It's actually kind of a vicious cycle because that added experience makes the good junior even better/more advanced and then I can pile on more.
I also go for consistency in staffing. If I've worked with you before and know you can handle certain processes adequately, I'm just skimming over your work product.
All first-years are kind of a crapshoot of varying ability levels, but I've found that the ones that ask the most questions develop into the best. I've had juniors that were phenomenal in the beginning - great attention to detail, clean work product, etc. - but they didn't take initiative, ask questions or reach up for more substantive work and their skills stagnated. Whereas, I've had others that weren't so great to start but they were eager and interested.
It's annoying to deal with them in the beginning when they're not very good and asking you a lot of questions, but I've found it pays off to make that initial investment.
If I'm really underwater and can't handle it, I'll talk to the partner and let them know why I'm underwater/why this deal is turning out to be a lot more work than we initially thought and ask for more staffing. More staffing isn't always the answer, but there's enough discrete elements in m&a that if I get more staffing, I don't need to run the whole show (for example, we can have one mid-level run the SPA/merger agreement and another mid-level run process for diligence/disclosure schedules).
Idk how applicable this is to your firm/litigation where staffing may be tighter and there may be less discrete tasks like this, but I think if you can you should delegate as much as possible when busy. If someone below you screws up, it'll probably come back to bite you, and you just sorta eat that. I can choose to not sleep and have no social life forever, or I can choose to have an uncomfortable conversation every rare occasion with a partner or client on why things didn't go right. I choose the latter every time.
Edit: Adding to the above regarding delegating to juniors. The most harmful thing you can do to yourself is cut your juniors out of the conversation. Some lawyers I know do this because they're embarrassed to show their juniors they may not know something or they screwed something up. You're really only harming yourself because if they're getting tasks in a vacuum with no context or history, they're going to turn in shitty work that you have to spend time fixing. I keep my juniors CC'd pretty much on every communication unless a partner has explicitly told me not to. If I get a one-off email from a partner or client, I forward it to my juniors as an FYI.