A Lawyer’s Tips to Staying Productive and Happy in the Holidays
Category : Law Firm Management
The holiday season is once again approaching, along with the hubbub and disorder that inevitably accompany it. This time of year can be stressful enough with travel plans, gift shopping, and seeing your crazy relatives; the last thing you need is for work stress to pile on and turn you into a total Scrooge.
To help keep the holidays organized and productive—and maybe even joyful, I wanted to share a few tips that have been useful to me in navigating this time of the year.
#1 Send Holiday Cards
This is a no-brainer. Everyone likes to be remembered, and holiday cards are an easy and relatively inexpensive way to show your former and current clients that you are thinking of them. A few things to note:
- Make sure the cards do not refer to one specific holiday. The world is culturally diverse, and holiday greetings are meant to show appreciation and good will—not to inadvertently offend the recipient. Cards that express “Holiday Greetings” or “Best Wishes for the Holiday Season” are the way to go.
- Make sure it’s paper! E-cards don’t exactly elicit the same fuzzy feelings as paper greeting cards.
- Get them out early—right after Thanksgiving is ideal. That way your card will be sitting on shelves—garnering awareness and appreciation—for a good while, and you can focus on other things.
#2 Get Your Finances in Order
Don’t wait until year-end to get down to tax planning. Meet with your tax advisor or financial planner now—while they can still affect this tax year, as well as help you plan for next year.
And don’t neglect to prepare your budget for 2016. Without a plan in place, you may end up making decisions that cost you dearly, like foregoing cases because of a lack of resources or bringing on co-counsel for cases your firm would otherwise be able to handle itself. Tax planning and budgeting might not be glamorous, but they’re well worth it in the end.
#3 Office Continuity
Don’t get blindsided during the holiday season by technical malfunctions or other office emergencies. Make sure you have a business continuity plan and disaster recovery plans in place, and that your employees understand the plans and their roles should an unexpected event occur.
Additionally, set in place the routines to keep your data safe and your machines running:
- Reboot your devices in order to prompt software updates and to safeguard against losing files in the event of a crash
- Back up your server and computers to remote or cloud storage
- Check that anti-virus software is up to date
- Update your passwords
#4 Network at Holiday Parties
Lastly, the fun part—go party! The holiday season provides an abundance of opportunities to connect with people, and the best part is that if you go in with the right mindset, you can have fun while you’re doing it. You never know when you’re going to meet a referral source or someone in need of a good lawyer, but you certainly won’t know if you don’t go.
There’s no need to turn into a Scrooge during this time of the year. Follow these tips during the holidays, and you can finish 2015 in celebration and start strong in 2016!
G. Thomas Harris has practiced law for more than 45 years and operates the Harris Law Office, offering law services in Kansas and Missouri. Specializing in family law, he saw the potential savings—of time and money—in developing software that could quickly generate and customize the volumes of paperwork that accompany any law practice.
His product, JurisDOC, provides document assembly software that makes it easier and faster for law firms to generate pleadings and other legal documents. Check us out at https://jurisdocpro.com or start your free trial here:
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