One of the things that I wish that I did when I started my law firm, when it was early days, when I had more time than money, was to try to write down the things that I was doing on a repetitive basis to try to come up with a standard operating procedure. So how are invoices generated? What do we do to run conflict checks? What is the procedure for sending out engagement agreements, things of this nature? Because when it was just me, it was easy for me to just kind of rock and roll, but at some point I started hiring people. And if I had taken the time at the very beginning, before I got busy with all the clients that showed up after I was in business for a while, just to document how we do things around here. It doesn’t have to be anything more than writing it down on a piece of paper.

I think I would’ve had a much easier time onboarding employees. A lot of the most successful small law firms have very detailed standard operating procedures, hundreds and hundreds of them. And when you bring somebody new on board, they don’t go into someone else’s office and say, “How do we respond to a subpoena around here? The religion of these firms is, did you check the standard operating procedures to see if there’s one that explains exactly what you want to do? ” And so after I onboarded employees for the first time and I had to train them, it became apparent to me that I had missed my opportunity in the early going to create these standard operating procedures. And I had to go back, which was inconvenient because at that point I had lots of billable work and it wasn’t a good use of my time. But after a year or two of running my firm, I kind of got religion that anything that is a repetitive procedure that gets done more than once, like issuing summons when I file a new lawsuit or anything along the lines like that, like sending bottles of wine out to clients around the holidays, whatever it is that’s going to happen more than once, the religion around my firm for a very long time was we are going to write it down and then we are going to standardize it.

And some of this is how we kept the back half of the office, but I also use these as training tools where there are certain kinds of contracts where there is an extraordinarily comprehensive, how should we go through like an owner architect agreement if we’re representing the owner? What are the things to ask yourself that were very useful for training new lawyers? And so standard operating procedures, depending upon the kind of firm that you have, could be just back office stuff or it could be more substantive getting the work stuff done. And then after I decided this is very important, we actually used a web-based system where people are able to log on and see what procedures there are. And so I was able to slot in new employees and it was easier every time that I hired somebody new to onboard them because I kind of went through all this with them by pointing them in the direction of your first day here, I want you to go through and take the class on these 25 standard operating procedures, which is like, how do you log into your computer?

How do you use the password keeper? What’s the different software that we use? Why is it essential to use a VPN in certain circumstances? I used it to explain what is a good time entry? What are the five elements of a good time entry? And so now I’m very serious about making sure that when people are going to bill my clients like time and I’ve got to do the invoicing at the end of the month, I expect to see outstanding time entries that do not need a lot of revision at the end of the day. There was a standard operating procedure for this. And so if you would’ve caught me a year ago, I would’ve said, yes, absolutely. Every single thing that you can standardize in your firm ought to be standardized. And I don’t know that I am ready to move off that entirely right now.

I will just say that the software that we use for SOPs at this point, I’m probably going to discontinue because the interface is a little bit more clunky than having this information in an LLM where you could almost like upload a very smart lawyer who I have had the pleasure of getting to know a little bit named Jay Ruane describes something known as a master prompt for AI where it’s kind of like a running list of instructions that might be a hundred pages long, a Word document that explains everything about your firm and what you do and how you look at things and what your procedures are. I think that now I’m probably going to be moving away from that SOP software and probably trying to get it together into something like a master prompt because I think it’s going to be easier for people to query like, is there a procedure on this?

How do we think about it? What do we do? So we’re in this sort of foot in two boats period right now where with AI coming about and the ability to train it on your systems, probably going to get away from what I used to think about as standard operating procedures, but I will tell you that the burden of onboarding my last associate attorney for both operational reasons and substantive training, as compared to the attorney who was right before him, is like night and day. It took me an enormous amount of time and effort to train my lawyer hire that was two hires ago as compared to the one that I’ve most recently hired about eight months ago because we have these standard operating procedures, the container that they’re kept in is liable to change over to something that’s AI, but anything that you’re going to do more than once, whether it’s opening the door, making coffee, sending out bills, making a run to the bank, do yourself a favor.

In the early stages of your firm when you’ve got more time than money, just grab a notepad and write down what the steps are. You can worry about making it pretty later. You’ll be happy that you did when you have more employees coming on and you’ve got lots of client work to take care of that you don’t have to go explain to people. You don’t have to go explain to your second and third employee everything that you explained to your first employer when you brought them on board. So some form of standardization of procedures I think is essential.