Twenty Frustrating Things Lawyers Do While Delegating

by Dina Eisenberg

Solo lawyers who want to scale their law practice must delegate. Yes, as a lawyer you have the brainpower to do pretty much whatever you set your mind to do. That’s the problem. You are doing too many things that are outside of your genius zone, which is practicing law, in case you forgot!

Delegating is the best way to increase your capacity to get administrative work done while leaving you time to focus on providing excellent legal services for your clients.

Hiring a virtual assistant or legal assistant to aid you with non-legal work makes the difference between having a satisfying, profitable experience as a lawyer and being overwhelmed and battling to make ends meet. However, many lawyers strongly resist creating or delegating to a virtual team.

What prevents lawyers from delegating more? That answer is difficult to pinpoint. Maybe lawyers resist delegation because of a deep sense of responsibility to personally deliver only the highest quality work.

Maybe the issue is an inability to ask for help. We tend to be the problem-solvers, so it can be difficult to be vulnerable or admit to a weakness by asking for help.

Maybe the reason more lawyers don’t delegate is the impostor syndrome, the fear that someone will discover you’re not the lawyer you say you are. Many lawyers, even amazing lawyers like Jeena Cho, admit to struggling with confidence.

I am on a mission to encourage lawyers to design their law practice to fit your life and create a better law experience for yourself and your clients. I don’t believe lawyering should be so hard.

Delegation is a crucial skill for solo lawyers and small law firm owners. You simply don’t have enough hours in the day or energy to give your full attention and talent to every task your law practice requires. Nor should you. You are a lawyer not a [fill in the blank].

Delegation makes good business sense. However, that’s not the key reason to begin to outsource. Failing to create systems, process and have a team you can rely upon puts you, your law practice and your family at risk. How many days could your practice stay afloat without you—7 days, 30 days or maybe not even 2 days?

Delegation is not hard to learn. There are some behaviors that will get you a better result than others, though.

1. No clear vision 2. No deadline set 3. Sending mixed messages 4. Giving contradictory instructions 5. Giving no or very little lead time 6. Expecting rush service 7. Dumping and running 8. No ongoing communication 9. Not available for questions 10. No direction given for problem-solving 11. No authority given to solve problems 12. Not prioritizing the work 13. Having no preferences 14. Long, confusing explanations 15. Missing information to complete project 16. No systems for collaborating 17. Won’t use collaboration tools 18. No easy way to share documents or progress 19. Forgetting to follow up with the project 20. Only commenting on errors but not the good work Of course, this list is not exhaustive. But, the list does give you enough data to determine whether your delegation style is effective or not. If you’d like to talk more about outsourcing or delegation, I’m happy to.

Planning Rules. Take 10 minutes and think about why you are delegating that project and what the end goal is for you. Answering the why question helps you to stay motivated because you know at the end you’ll achieve something you desire.

What does success look like? It’s surprising how many times clients say ‘I don’t know’ when I ask what success would look like for them. Hello?! How can your talent satisfy your wishes and preferences when you don’t know what you want. Failure to set expectations is always the beginning of a bad situation.

Be Vulnerable. As a lawyer, you know that it’s very difficult to help someone who does not want to be helped. You have to be vulnerable for delegation to work. Tell your team about the things that you can’t or don’t like to do. The six most powerful words you can say are: I don’t know. Help me, please. They’ll see you as someone confident and courageous! n

Dina Eisenberg is the award-winning entrepreneurial lawyer who prepares solo and small firm lawyers to delegate, automate and design a law practice that fits. Is it time to delegate? Take a quiz to find out at: www. outsourceeasier.com/take-the-quiz.