Texas Young Lawyers Association

Too Many Bosses in the Firm? Can Your Support Staff Manage the Work?

November 01,2003

As a new or young associate, you likely share a secretary or legal assistant with multiple other attorneys. Even as a partner, you will likely share key support staff with one or more other lawyers in the firm. Does the firm have a systematic way of managing the workload of shared support staff?

Most firms have a pecking order: partner requests take precedence over associate requests, and impending deadlines have precedence over matters that are not due today. What happens when the secretary is given more than one "priority" assignment by more than one attorney?

Simple measures can be taken to ensure that the attorneys' needs are met without undue burden and frustration on the part of the staff.

1. Create a logsheet for each staff member to use to keep a running list of assignments. These do not need to include intricate details about the assignment, rather it should list only the task, assigning attorney, date assigned, and date due.

2. Do not put support staff in the position of determining which assignment should be given priority. If conflicting deadlines have been given to a staff member--e.g. two attorneys have a major document that must be prepared and filed by 5:00 pm--the attorneys should determine between themselves the higher priority item and/or ask for backup support.

3. Clarify the reporting hierarchy. There should be one main attorney to whom the support staff should report. This person would be designated as the key problem solver for the staff member. This gives the staff member someone to go to if there is a problem that the attorneys are not aware of or cannot resolve.

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