One of the hardest skills to develop as an in-house lawyer is knowing how to prioritize your work. It certainly was for me. In the in-house world, everything is urgent, and everything is important, and everyone needs their project done yesterday. We have all heard this “the sky is falling” plea from the business yet deep down we all know it’s bullshit. Not everything is urgent nor important and people need things done in a hurry usually because they screwed around and waited until the last minute to dump it on you – so now it’s your problem and not theirs (and you are the bad guy if it’s not finished on time). This has been true since lawyers first crawled out of the primordial ooze to go in-house. And it will be true long after everyone reading this has left the stage. Which means you have two options: bitch about it or try to fix it. While bitching about it feels good for a few minutes, it does not advance the ball much, i.e., you are still left with too much to do and not enough time to do it. So, my plan (after a little bit of bitching) was to figure out how to solve this ancient conundrum. And as usual, I failed a lot but over time I figured out that the key was learning how to prioritize properly. If I could learn to do that, I could spend most (but not all) of my time working on the right things at the right time. For me the “a-ha” moment was realizing that setting priorities in a vacuum is problematic. For in-house lawyers, prioritization requires a holistic approach with input from lots of sources other than your own inner monologue. Sounds hard, right? It is. But that should not discourage you from trying to crack the nut. If you have 15 minutes or so, you are in luck! This edition of “Ten Things” takes on the challenge of discussing how to prioritize your work:
