I am teaching six continuing legal education seminars in the next three months, with a couple more under discussion. My presentations tend to be engaging (I don’t have the patience for boring presentations even when I am giving them), informative, and well-attended. Register early!

• June 6th at noon. The Paperless Office, 1 hour webcast, $75. Register with MCLE.
• June 10th at 9 a.m. Offensive Defense: An Introduction to Protecting Consumers from Unscrupulous Debt Collectors, 1 hour webcast. Register with MCLE.
• June 12th at noon. Motions to Vacate Default Judgments: When and How You Should Do It, 1 hour live seminar. Register with VLN.
• July 18th at 1 p.m. How to Get Things Done (with Merlin Mann), 2 hour webcast. (MCLE has not yet posted this seminar.)
• July 22nd at 9 a.m. New Lawyer Experience - Starting a Law Firm, 2 hour webcast. Register with MCLE.
• August 8th at noon. Social Networking for Lawyers, 1 hour webcast. (MCLE has not yet posted this seminer.)

From Unclutterer comes a great post by Zen Habits author Leo Babauta on creating a minimalist workspace. Most of the attorneys I know life among piles of paper. While some defend their “system” of “organization,” most just don’t seem to know how to escape from the paper jungle they created for themselves.

So the first step is for you to consider your requirements for working, and what’s essential to your workflow. If possible, streamline and simplify that workflow and those requirements. Then, once you’ve got that down to a minimum, see what the minimum setup would be for those essentials and your workflow. Eliminate everything unnecessary.

. . .

It’s interesting to note that what you think your requirements are might not be the minimum. They might just be what you’re used to doing.

[photo: Zen Habits]

I consistently preach the gospel of procedures. Nothing works without good procedures. You can have the most cutting-edge computer, the best software, and the best intentions, but if you do not have solid, tested procedures in place, none of that fancy tech will do you a darn bit of good.

Behind David Allen’s excellent Getting Things Done (GTD) system is the idea–essential to a law practice–that everything we need to do should be tracked in a trusted system. In the GTD philosophy, that system is a set of lists with everything you have to do, from taking out the trash to scheduling order deadlines.

This kind of organization is essential to a solo or small law practice, but many attorneys still walk around with much of their “to-do list” buried in their brains. That is completely unhelpful. A “tickler” is helpful, but only if that tickler leads to a solid system where anyone can determine what needs to be done on a particular file.

Here is how I organize my practice.

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