Hello again everyone. I have been working on my annual “cool tech” post, but it’s not ready for prime time as I am still sifting through things. The amount of tech out there (cool or otherwise) is amazing. And since I want to give you my best recommendations, I am going to work on it for another week or so. Instead (and because I am a big believer in keeping to a regular publishing schedule), I thought I would put out a current index to all of the “Ten Things” posts from post number one in November 2014 to last month’s post about things to think about before hitting send. There are a lot of posts and this edition of Ten Things lists them all (which is kind of the point of an index but I digress):
delegation
Ten Things: What to Do When You Are Feeling Overwhelmed at Work
I have been practicing law for a long time. And even now, 30+ years into the game, there are still times when I find myself overwhelmed by everything on my plate. And it’s just as shitty a feeling now as it was as a young associate at a big law firm or as general counsel dealing with – literally – bet-the-company litigation. Fortunately, getting older comes with some advantages (besides the prospect of getting 50% off if I go to IHOP at 4:00 pm for dinner). The biggest (non-IHOP) advantage being that I have developed a lot of different ways to cope with feeling this way. And that’s good because one thing I hear a lot from the in-house lawyers I speak with is that they are having an increasingly hard time dealing with the incredible amount of work that keeps rolling down the hill – like a boulder crushing Wile E. Coyote when his ACME products backfire for the nine thousandth time. Okay, that sounded better in my head, but I know you get the picture because you’ve all been there (and some of you may even be there as you are reading this).
Given the increasing number of in-house lawyers edging ever closer to burnout, I thought I would spend some time talking through what you can do when feeling overwhelmed at the office. I am going to focus on some practical, short-term solutions to help you get out of the muck and onto solid ground in the near term – as that is typically the most pressing need.[1] What I am going to set out is all tested and true, and some combination of these ten things will very likely help you.[2] How much they will help depends on how far you are willing to go to gain some control over the situation (and I know that is not always easy to do). But hear me out and stick with me. Today’s edition of “Ten Things” takes you through what you should do when you feel overwhelmed at the office:
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Ten Things: Things You Can (and Should) Delegate
I have written a lot about delegation, both in the blog and in my last two books, Showing the Value of the Legal Department and The Productive In-House Lawyer. Specifically, I write a lot about why delegation is important and how to do it. This past week or so it has dawned on me that I have not really spent any time talking about what to delegate other than a few asides thrown in here and there. That is an oversight I would like to correct. Like many of my blog posts, one of the first things I do is search to see if anyone else has already written on the topic. I really couldn’t find anything written on what in-house lawyers should delegate. This generally means I have a pretty wide-open field to play in, which I plan to take full advantage of![1] I decided to do what I almost always do and that is reach back to my past and think about the things that were delegated to me as a young in-house lawyer (some), things that I asked to have delegated to me (a lot), and things that I delegated to my team once I was in a position to do so (plenty but should have been more). All of what you read below is pretty specific to my in-house experience – though I suspect they are universal to any in-house lawyer in any legal department anywhere in the world. So, fill up the coffee mug and get ready to go deep into the world of delegation as this edition of “Ten Things” takes on the task of setting out things in-house lawyers can (and should) delegate.
Ten Things You Need to Know as In-House Counsel® 