Hello and happy new year! I can’t believe it’s already 2020. Welcome back to a whole new year of profitability and productivity tips to help you make the most of your law practice.

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I’m Karen Dunn Skinner. I’m an attorney and a legal process improvement expert.

If you followed us through December, you’ll know we gave you one new practice challenge every week. I’d love to know how those worked out for you - please let me know!

Now it’s a new year and it’s resolution time. If you’re like me, you may find resolutions a challenge. Today I want to give you three New Year’s resolutions you can keep. If you do, you’ll make 2020 a great year in your practice.

1.  No more unwritten rules

Write down one of your processes every week. Pick something that happens regularly in your office. The next time it happens, write down the steps. You don’t even have to try to make that process better (yet). You’ll get a lot of benefit just by having the steps written out so that you and your team can follow them again and again…without even thinking about it. Stay tuned, because we’re going to be doing a free training on this in the next few weeks!

2.  Speed up replies to standard emails by making quick templates

Take a look at your inbox. I’m sure there are requests in there that you get regularly. Don’t waste any time writing out the same response over and over again. Instead, make a template. One quick way is to use signature blocks. Did you know you can put anything you like in there? And you can format it just like a regular email.

So the next time you write a stellar answer to a standard question, copy and paste it into a new signature block. You can always tweak it if you need to when you’re sending out the email, but you’ll be starting with your best draft and saving valuable time.

3.  Make tiny changes

Waste can be hard to spot in your practice, because it’s usually your “normal.” But once you learn to see it, you can never “unsee” it. Take a few minutes and work through our Eight Wastes Workbook or read through our blog series on waste. You’ll start to see the waste in your work. You’ll probably develop a long list, and you may decide you need to make big changes…but don’t start there.

Don’t get overwhelmed. Instead, start with the smallest thing on your list. Pick one tiny thing you can change. Maybe it’s the position of the phone on your desk or the pens that don’t write smoothly. Whatever. Fix that one little thing and then, next week, move on to the next little thing.

We’ve got lots of exciting training and tips coming in 2020 to help you build a more productive and profitable practice.

We’ll be doing our Matter Management Masterclass again in February. Participants in the last masterclass tell us it was super-valuable and they were able to put the tools to use immediately to give them much-needed visibility into their practices.

And big news: We’re launching Practice Accelerator, a foolproof formula for reducing your costs, improving your revenue, and delivering even better service to your clients…without spending any more time in the office.

And that’s it for this week’s tip. Join us next week for my once-a-month writing tip. I’ll be talking about purging the puffery in your legal writing.

You’ll find links to a lot of the things we’ve talked about today in the notes to this episode, including a New Year’s gift from us to you: $50 off any of our courses.

Thanks a lot everybody! See you next week.