Downsizing

I have downsized.

Oh, I don’t mean my paycheck, although for the time being while I’m getting my business going, that’s true too. (Just you wait . . . I’ll be back making the medium bucks again any time now!)

No, I mean I’ve downsized in terms of the size of the offices I work with, and the size of the cases I work on. It’s still a novelty!

In BigLaw in recent years, I tended to work on mega-cases. There were armies of attorneys to respond to, scads of money at stake, and boatloads of documents to manage, and filings and deadlines to track. There were always ten plates spinning at once.

Which isn’t to say I don’t have ten plates spinning at once now – often I do. But they’re my plates, not the plates spun off by the decisions of others, which I must nonetheless keep in the air somehow.

No, the offices I work with now as a virtual paralegal tend to be small. I work with solo practitioners, for the most part. They may or may not have on-site staff, and they may or may not have permanent office space.

Because my clients have smaller offices themselves, they tend to handle matters that are somewhat less document intensive than those I've handled in the past. They tend to use different technology than that which I had become accustomed to in recent years. I work more with PDF document compilations, and less with Concordance databases, for example. I prepare document productions in the hundreds (or maybe low thousands) of pages, rather than in the tens of thousands.

But these are minor differences - differences of detail rather than substance.

In fact, now more than ever I am often called upon to figure out the most efficient way to accomplish a project with available resources and my own two hands and the small-office technology at my disposal, with no Litigation Support personnel to fall back on for getting a project done. This satisfies my practical nature.

Case size and technology may have downsized, but professionalism certainly has not. With my attorney clients, the quality of the work is just as painstaking, and the expectations of excellence are just as high as they were when I worked at larger firms. This satisfies my perfectionist nature.

There is a different “office” dynamic as well. (Yes, in an odd way my attorney clients and I do make up an "office.") There are fewer layers of approval to work one’s way through than in large offices. I find that communication is more direct, and the sense of partnership I feel with my clients is more pronounced. This satisfies my collaborative nature.

So you see, in my world, downsizing has been a very good thing!

Driven: Part 4, or Believing Isn't Necessarily Seeing

OMG it's been f-o-r-e-v-e-r since I posted last, where have I been?

I've been here!

Pretty, eh? 

Plus when I haven't been frolicking in the desert, I've been Crazy Busy.

Enough of that, onward with the thoughts I've been thinking while reading Daniel Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

The farther I read in this provocative book, the more I realize that it has vast implications for virtual paralegals such as me, and  for all other freelance or telecommuting workers.

I’ve seen a lot of articles suggesting that trust is a barrier to telecommuting or remote working relationships. That managers, supervisors, and business owners who hire contractors worry about the work getting done when no supervisor is present to watch it happening.

This is the exact opposite of what I experience, and I'm guessing it is the opposite of what all of my virtual colleagues experience too.

The notion that a remote working contractor, such as a virtual paralegal, won’t work when not being watched operates on the old assumptions that people don’t really want to work, and must be driven to by carrots and sticks. An assumption that doesn’t really bear out when people are interested in what they’re doing, and have a deep personal investment in what they're doing.

In fact, the very reason that many freelancers want to be self-employed and want to work remotely is that autonomy is very important to us, and it is also highly motivating. The control I wield over when and how I work is an integral part of my drive to excel.

I've commented in previous posts about the way in which carrots and sticks can warp our natural motivation to work hard. Studies show that in a work environment where workers know they are being monitored to assure they’re performing, they may actually slack if monitoring stops. The goal can shift from performing the work to appearing busy for the ever watchful boss. So I can see how managers – lawyers in my case – could become programmed to believe workers require monitoring to get them to perform.

But a self-employed person, someone owning her own business and responsible for her own income, benefits, livelihood and well-being, is really operating outside such an environment. She has strong motivation to perform and to exceed expectations that has nothing to do with being monitored.

Now I’m not suggesting that it’s impossible for a remote working professional to slack off and charge clients for not working – obviously there are unscrupulous folks around. I'm simply saying that for me, the motivation to do my best and most efficient work stems from my love of what I'm doing, from the exhilarating sense of pride I feel from owning a business that provides services to clients, and from the knowledge that it's the value I provide that keeps clients coming back, whether they can see me working or not.

Driven: Part 3, Or, What do YOU call work?

If it’s work then it can’t be play, and if it’s play then it can’t be work.

Or can it?

Think about this. Imagine a little kid who loves to draw. During play time at preschool, she draws because that’s what she loves to do. Then imagine she’s told that as a reward for drawing during play time, she’ll get a pretty blue ribbon. And for a while at school, she gets the ribbon every time she draws. And then one day there’s no ribbon.

What do you suppose happens?

Well, Daniel Pink* describes a study done some years ago (at 37-38) with a group of kids who liked to draw. Some were promised a reward for drawing and others were not. The kids who didn’t get ribbons continued to draw during play time because they liked to. But the kids who were promised ribbons for drawing quit drawing when the ribbons stopped coming.

Why?

The reward had turned play into work.

Or think about this. Remember Tom Sawyer and whitewashing the fence? Tom tricked other kids into whitewashing his fence for him, because he made the chore seem exciting.

He turned work into play.

Or think about this. Wikipedia. An online encyclopedia completely written by volunteers. Or open source software, such as FireFox. A free web browser developed primarily by unpaid programmers. Is what they do work? Is it play? What’s the difference?

What qualifies a task as "work"? Is it as simple as getting paid? Or does it have more to do with how we feel about it? What makes a task fun, and what makes it drudgery? Do we define work as unpleasant, and unpleasant tasks as work?

Once we realize that the boundaries between work and play are artificial, we can take matters in hand and begin the difficult task of making life more livable.

~Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety

Pink says that contingent rewards – if you do this, then you’ll get that – can result in a loss of interest in the project because the interest shifts solely to the reward. And that can be counterproductive.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? It strikes me as having huge implications for me as a self-employed (self-motivated) freelance paralegal. And the implications may be even greater given that I primarily work remotely such that my attorney clients can’t see me working.

About which, more in the next post in the series!

*This post is the 3rd in my series of musings on Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, from which the examples discussed in this post derive. Daniel H. Pink. New York: Riverhead Books, 2009.

5 Reasons Law Firms Hire Virtual Paralegals

I read an article today on Software (tweeted by @donnaseyle) called Business | 5 Reasons Law Firms Hire Virtual Legal Receptionists, by Ben Anton, which was a dead-on description of why virtual receptionists are so beneficial. It prompted these thoughts of my own.

Here is my assessment of why law firms – and solo practitioners – benefit from hiring virtual paralegals.

Time is at a premium in any business, but this seems particularly true in the small or solo law office. While there may be the same amount of work as in a larger office, there are fewer hands to do it. Moreover, particularly in this economy very small offices are not in a position to add to their payroll by hiring a full time paralegal to help them bear the load.

So using Anton’s article as a springboard, here are five benefits lawyers and small firms can receive from hiring a virtual paralegal:

1. “Increased happiness and job satisfaction.” Successful law practice involves a wide spectrum of tasks – from very substantive legal research and analysis, to drafting legal documents, to managing and organizing client and production materials and communicating with clients. Hiring a paralegal to assist with document management and simple drafting tasks, for example, can free a busy attorney up to perform the substantive research, briefing, and client communications most suited to his or her training and expertise. This makes everyone happier.

2. “Increased efficiency.” Virtual paralegal services can make a lawyer more efficient. The ability to delegate tasks to his or her paralegal, be it suitable procedural research, drafting of simple pleadings, or assisting with discovery or trial preparation, enables a lawyer to handle a larger client case load and still assure competent representation of each client.

3. “Lower labor costs.” Hiring a virtual paralegal can be much more cost efficient than hiring a full-time, in-house paralegal. A virtual paralegal is only paid for time actually worked. No more paying for down time or overtime. In addition, the small office saves the benefit costs associated with employees. And finally, there are no costs for work space, supplies or equipment.

4. “A better office environment.” When lawyers, and any staff they do have, are freed to perform those tasks they are best at, while a virtual paralegal takes care of all suitable paralegal tasks, the work load is eased for everyone. Moreover, we all know that deadlines loom at times and create mountains of work that must be gotten through, regardless of the limited number of hands on deck or hours in the day. A virtual paralegal can help shoulder the extra work load during those crunch times.

5. With a virtual paralegal, lawyers have an added tool at their disposal for assuring that each task in each of their cases is being handled, and nothing is falling through the cracks. This enables lawyers to assure that each of their clients receives the attention and excellent legal services he or she deserves. It enables lawyers to be as responsive as possible to all their clients, which provides a competitive advantage in today’s competitive market.

Many benefits are to be gained by solo practitioners and small law firms by employing a virtual paralegal to assist with the work load, including improving case management, creating more efficiency, and of course, saving costs. This does indeed make for happier lawyers and ultimately, happier clients!

25 Things

This is admittedly a rather odd, random post for this blog, but it was inspired by a wonderful, fairly recent post by one of my favorite bloggers-writers-inspiring people, Barbara Winter, called Things I Haven't Told You, and perhaps it was a bit of an odd random post for her as well.  But I had fun coming up with it!  So I'm going to go ahead and "pooblish" it (as Havi would say)!  Here goes, 25 random things even friends and family may not know (or remember) about me, in pretty much the order they popped into my head:

1. I once cooked a complete Indian (as in the country, predominately N. Indian, if memory serves) meal for a chef of a well known Seattle restaurant.  Quite scary!
2. Game of darts anyone?  As a kid, I was the unfortunate recipient of a dart to the face, a result of standing in the wrong spot at the wrong moment.  No lasting scars, happy to say.
3. I do not own a DVR or Tivo and have no plans to buy them – in fact, I plan to discontinue Cable altogether in the near future - just have never wanted to give TV quite that much importance.
4. I hate sit-coms and reality shows with equal vigor.
5. When I was a mere youth of 23 (or 24), I managed around 20 people for a month or two in a massive database and mailing project.
6. I have lived in the greater LA area on two separate occasions in my life, approximately 20 years apart.
7. I have been interested in wine tasting and (modest) collecting for almost 25 years.
8. I used to be very unhappy about being sent to bed just when the Flinstones was coming on TV (this was prime time, not re-runs my friends - boy am I dating myself).
9. When I was very little, my parents nicknamed me DeeDee in hopes of avoid the Daffy-Duck teasing.  It didn’t work, and the DeeDee nickname never stuck.  And, I eventually developed some affection for those references and bore the nicknames of Daphe, Duck and Duckling rather happily.  (DON'T call me that now, unless you are my brother.)
10. I have never enjoyed going to bed early or getting up early, and I probably never will.
11. When I was young, Music Man was my favorite movie musical, and I used to know all the lyrics to all the songs.
12. I took ballet lessons until I was about 7 (I had no talent to speak of) and later regretted that I quit.
13. I studied piano for about 15 years.  I didn’t play half badly.  (Now I haven’t played for a very long time, but hope to pick it up again someday.)
14. Apart from babysitting, my very first job was as a helper at a neighborhood pre-school.  Adorable kids, but I’ve hated the smell of Lysol ever since.
15. I’ve never worked as a waitress or in any other capacity in a restaurant, and given my love of cooking, I think it would have been helpful.
16. The above doesn’t include fast food however; I did spend a summer working at a Taco Bell.
17. Once I had a dream about a rather involved sort of team game not unlike hide and seek (the rules of which I’ve long since forgotten), and proceeded to organize 7 friends to play the game one weekend.  I don’t remember much about the game, but I recall we all had a good time.
18. I came to my love of opera via Wagner, which is unusual – most people start with Puccini or Mozart, I think.  (I love those composers too, of course.)
19. I travelled through Europe for 8 weeks with a college girlfriend when I was 22; it was a wonderful and in many ways a formative experience.
20. I loved to read as a child and would become so engrossed in my book that my mother would have to call me multiple times (from 10 feet away) before I heard her.
21. My 3rd grade teacher was the first to complement my writing skills when she assigned a little short story assignment.
22. However, I have always been so intimidated by writing fiction that I dropped out of my college creative writing class – couldn’t handle the stress of it.
23. I camped and hiked my way through the Four Corners area alone for a month when I was 38.  One of the incredible highlights of my life!
24. When I was in college, I wanted to be a student forever.  Philosophy-Lit major – yeah baby, loved it! 
25. I dabbled in at least three graduate areas of study (or four, depending on how I count) and ultimately didn’t complete any of them.  And I’m OK with that.

Got your own list of things most people don't know about you?  Share some in the comments!

What Matters To You?

I was recently left a bit breathless by a very arresting blog post by Peter Bregman called “Don’t Regret Working Too Hard.”  The springboard was an article suggesting that as people near the end of their lives, their two most common regrets are not having lived a life true to themselves, and having worked too hard.  From this, Bregman suggests that one might address – or perhaps prevent - these regrets by figuring out what really matters to us, and trying to spend time working on those things, rather than on things that are not meaningful to us.
 

As a CEO, Bregman took his post in a different direction than I can as a small business owner with no employees, but his chief point still brought me up short.

So the question is, what matters to you?

That is a critically important question to explore.

After all, I don’t want to spend any time – now or later – regretting that I worked too hard, or regretting that I missed out somehow on being my best self, doing what I most wanted to do.  And for me, it isn’t so much about working too many hours, but rather, working on projects I don’t value.

On one level, this idea is reaffirming to me, because I’m aware that I started down this path of owning my own business for precisely this reason.  I became aware that what really matters to me is having a work life that isn’t so alienated from my “non-work” life.  Having more autonomy, more control over the texture and quality of my days.  Being my own boss, reaping all the fruits of my own labor rather than primarily enriching others. 

So in that respect, I am indeed spending my time working on what matters to me, and that is a gratifying thing to realize.
 

My challenge going forward is to never stop asking myself what matters most to me, and to continue to find ways to spend my time doing just that.

What matters most to you?