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How Work Surveys Can Help You Manage Your
Team While Enhancing Their Career Development
Ojen Sirin, InhouseGo2 Blog ( www.blog.sandw.com/InhouseGo2)
As in-house law departments
become larger and more robust,
keeping track of which member of
your staff is working on a deal or
matter can become complicated.
In addition, project management
is essential for both in-house and
outside counsel to work efficiently
and cost-effectively. A simple and
effective way to manage this is to
create a weekly work survey for
your in-house lawyers to complete.
Whether your department is small
enough where your lawyers are a
“jack of all trades,” or you have a
larger legal department where your
lawyers are subject matter experts,
a simple work assignment process
can benefit you and assist with
career development. As the person
charged with attorney professional
development at my firm, I can attest
that this simple tool has helped our
associates become more proficient
in their craft. It allows me to see
where their strengths and weak-
nesses are in their skill development
on a weekly basis. When they need
to better hone a specific skill, I can
help them my giving them an as-
signment that will do that. This tool
has also helped our partners better
produce efficient and excellent
work, as they know that the associ-
ates working on their matters have
the required skills to be valuable not
only to the partner, but also to our
clients.
The benefits to implementing a
work assignment system to your
in-house team are as follows:
1. Organization
It will help you better track
which team member is work-
ing on which project. If you
have a large legal team, it will
provide the tools to assist you
in determining which attorney
is working on each of the open
matters on your team, and what
the weekly status of those mat-
ters are. You can even use it as
an effective tool when following
up with your outside counsel, or
in giving status updates to the
executives of your company. It
will help you with overall project
management.
2. Professional development
One of the challenges that legal
executive leaders face in companies is keeping the in-house
legal team engaged in the work
they are doing and ensuring that
their legal careers are progressing. Putting together a formalized work allocation system will
allow you to see what kind of
matters your staff is working
on more clearly. For example,
if one attorney is only getting
specific types of matters to work
1 How Work Surveys Can Help You Manage
Your Team While Enhancing Their Career
Development
Ojen Sirin
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