It’s 5:30 a.m. and no one is up.  You figure if you get up early you can get ahead of the emails and do some productive work.  It’s lunch time.  You figure if you eat at your desk you can get ahead of the emails and do some productive work.  It’s 6:30 p.m. and you just got home from the office.  You figure if you fire up your laptop for an hour you can get ahead of the emails and do some productive work.  It’s 10:30 p.m., the kids are asleep, your spouse is watching “Game of Thrones” and you figure it’s the perfect time to get ahead of the emails and do some productive work before you go to sleep.  It’s the weekend, you… Okay, I’ll stop.  I know you get it.  Just about any in-house lawyer worth their salt has been/is locked in this cycle.  The problem is you never get ahead of the emails and you never have enough time to do productive work.  If you could delegate some of your work, you might be able to break free of this vicious pattern.  That sounds nice, but a big part of the problem is that most lawyers suck at delegating.  Why is that?  It’s primarily because no one ever taught us how to delegate.  They just told us to delegate, which is about as helpful as telling us to “invent rocket fuel.”

I was an “okay” delegator as an in-house lawyer.  I got better over time because I slowly figured out the “how” of delegation.  Even now, as I look back, I realize I committed most of the classic errors and there was a lot more I could have done to better delegate work (and doing so would have made my team/department stronger and me less stressed).  Simply put, becoming good at delegation will allow you to be more productive and get your work done within a reasonable set of hours every day.  Since I know you also want to watch “Game of Thrones” now and then, this edition of “Ten Things” will discuss “how” to delegate:

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