5 Ways to Get Back Your Time Now
If you own a solo or small law firm, there’s a good chance your day feels like it belongs to everyone except you. A client needs an answer, a staff member has a question, an email comes in that seems urgent, and another meeting gets dropped onto your calendar.
The problem usually isn’t that you’re not working hard enough. It’s that you’ve built a practice where too many things and people depend on you.
Every new client, email, meeting, or interruption starts to feel like something only you can handle. Eventually, the firm begins revolving around you instead of you designing the firm.
If that sounds familiar, getting back your time starts with changing the way work flows through your practice. Here are five ideas worth implementing this month.
1. Hire Someone to Protect Your Calendar
Most law firm owners think of an executive assistant as someone who schedules meetings, confirms appointments, and handles administrative tasks. A great executive assistant can do much more than that.
They can become the guardian of your calendar by protecting time for focused work, client preparation, strategic thinking, business development, and the other activities that actually move your firm forward. Without someone helping manage access to your time, your calendar can quickly become a collection of other people’s priorities.
The goal isn’t to make yourself unavailable. It’s to become more intentional about when you’re available and what deserves your immediate attention. A protected calendar creates space for you to lead your firm instead of constantly reacting to it.
2. Stop Explaining and Start Recording
Think about how many times you’ve explained the same process to someone on your team: how to open a new matter, prepare for a client meeting, organize a file, use a piece of software, or handle a common client question.
If you find yourself giving the same explanation again and again, stop explaining it live and record it once.
Tools like Loom or Camtasia lets you quickly record your screen while you explain how you want something done. That recording becomes a training asset your team can use repeatedly. The next time someone asks how to complete the task, you don’t need another 20-minute conversation. You can point them to the recording.
Over time, those recordings become part of your firm’s internal knowledge base, which means you’re no longer repeatedly transferring the same information from your head to someone else.
3. Get Critical Information Out of Your Head
One of the biggest limitations in a small law firm is often the owner’s memory. You know where the documents are, what happened with the client, why a particular decision was made, and what should happen next.
That may work when the firm is very small, but it becomes a serious bottleneck as the practice grows. The goal should be to create a business where progress doesn’t stop simply because you’re away from your desk.
If important information exists only in your head, it’s time to document it. That might mean creating written procedures, checklists, templates, internal notes, or a searchable knowledge system your team can access without asking you. Essentially, you need a user’s manual for your practice.
A helpful resource for thinking about this is Tiago Forte’s book Building a Second Brain. The central idea is simple: stop relying on your brain to store everything and build a system that allows you to capture and retrieve information when you (or your team) need it. The same principle applies to your law firm. Get a copy here.
4. Teach Your Team to Think Before They Ask
Another hidden time drain in many firms is employees who bring the owner every problem with the same question: “What should I do?”
That forces you to stop what you’re doing, learn the situation, evaluate the options, and make the decision. Instead, coach your team to bring you three things: a summary of the situation, their recommended solution, and a request for confirmation.
The conversation then becomes: “Here’s what happened. Here’s what I think we should do and why. Are you comfortable with me moving forward?”
That small change can make a big difference. You’re teaching your team to think instead of simply delivering problems to your desk. Over time, they become better decision-makers, gain confidence, and need less day-to-day direction from you.
5. Let AI Handle the First Draft, Not the Final Decision
Artificial intelligence can help lawyers reclaim significant amounts of time, but the biggest opportunity isn’t replacing legal judgment. It’s reducing repetitive first-draft work.
AI can help summarize case materials, organize information, draft internal documents, outline correspondence, create checklists, or assist with preliminary research. That doesn’t mean blindly accepting whatever AI produces. Attorneys still need to review the work, verify important information, protect confidentiality, comply with applicable professional obligations, and exercise independent judgment.
The advantage is that you’re no longer starting with a blank page. AI can give you something far more valuable than speed: more time to think strategically about your clients, your cases, and your business.
Start With One Change
You don’t need to overhaul your entire practice this week. Start by identifying one recurring interruption or one task that repeatedly requires your involvement, then ask yourself: “Why does this still need me?”
Maybe the answer is hiring support. Maybe it’s recording a process, documenting information, coaching a team member, or using technology to handle the first draft.
Getting back your time happens when you stop treating every demand on your attention as an unavoidable part of owning a law firm. The more you build systems, people, and tools that can operate without your constant involvement, the more time you’ll have for focused work, better decisions, your clients, and the life you’re building outside the office.
Want More?
Want more information and ideas on how to manage your time, get more work done, and make more money? Then download my book on time management to transform your work week.
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Take Back Your Time!
Does your solo law practice make you feel like you’re on a hamster wheel that you just can’t seem to get off? Does it never seem like there’s enough time to get everything done, so you keep on working later and later (and on weekends)?
Do you dream of coming into the office at 9am, working productively on your cases and getting stuff done, then leaving at 5pm to be with your family? All while making a nice living to provide for them?
Then you need to take the right step towards achieving that by downloading my Ultimate Guide to Taking Back Your Time. Ruthlessly implementing the tools it discusses will have an immediate impact on your time and your practice!
