In the old days, that particular partner (and it is almost always a partner) would get a new secretary each day, rotating in from the steno pools. How do today’s office administrators handle the abusive, persnickety or just downright rude attorney?

One secretarial manager claims only to have encountered this once in her long career. Her answer? “He’ll work without an assistant.” She said that type of behavior is not tolerated. I think her firm is in the minority.

Debbie (not her real name), another office administrator in a large firm, has several war stories to tell. “I was at one firm for over seven years and during that time the managing partner had seven secretaries,” she recalls. “It takes a lot of investigative work to figure out what the problems are and if the secretary or the attorney is at fault.” (There are bad secretaries, just as there are rude lawyers.) She advises that office managers keep detailed notes of what happens between the partner and each new secretary.

She also insists on full disclosure when interviewing new secretaries for a position with a difficult partner. “It’s important to give the candidates examples of what the attorney says or does that can cause tension,” she said. “That way, some candidates can say right away, ‘Thanks but no thanks.’”

The Match Has To Be Right

It takes time to find a candidate who is willing to work with a difficult attorney. “Often it’s a question of finding the right fit,” Debbie continues. “One secretary might find an attorney difficult to work with while another doesn’t have an issue.” An extremely disorganized attorney, for example, would need an extremely organized secretary. But the fact that the attorney is disorganized may not emerge during an interview; in these cases, the attorney may need to work with several secretaries before finding one who doesn’t mind working for a disorganized boss.

Finding the right personality fit is tricky. Where do you draw the line between a lawyer who is persnickety (demanding that the secretary redo a label on an envelope because it’s crooked) and one who is rude (plunking documents on the secretary’s desk and saying, “Copy these now and bring them to me” without bothering to add “Please,” “Thank you,” or “Are you in the middle of something?”)?

Some long-time, thick-skinned secretaries just shrug their shoulders, claiming all that goes over their heads. “You can’t take anything they do personally,” says one. “Otherwise you won’t last.”

Sometimes, it just isn’t possible to find the right person. “We had one attorney,” Debbie says, “who, after a parade of secretaries, only wanted the top secretary in his firm who worked for someone else. She was an excellent secretary who had been with the firm a long time. We transferred her to his desk. He was extremely disorganized and would not accept any attempts to help him become more organized. Instead, he accused the secretary of losing his documents. Eventually, she quit in frustration. Because the attorney would just not admit his bad points, our hands were tied.”

Very often, the partner in question simply wants a private secretary, but almost no sizable law firm will grant that wish any more. Inevitably, the other attorneys assigned to the troubled desk are suffering along with the beleaguered secretaries. Those attorneys end up doing most of their own work in the face of constantly changing secretaries.

Good secretaries also become worn down by attorneys constantly questioning their skills and integrity. Many eventually realize that in order to preserve their own self-esteem they have to move to another firm.

Put Procedures In Place To Deal With Abusive Attorneys

Some attorneys go beyond “difficult” and become truly abusive. They may tell off-color jokes, make derogatory remarks, constantly tell the secretary how stupid s/he is, or shout obscenities

“When the attorney is so abusive,” Debbie says, “it’s time to get the management committee involved. An associate once came to me in tears because of a humiliating off-color joke the partner told in front of both her and his clients. He was sent to sensitivity training.”

More often than not, driven by fear of retaliation, office administrators let the behavior slide and resign themselves to employing an endless succession of secretaries. If the abusive attorney is the managing partner in the firm, there is, sadly, little recourse.

In Debbie’s firm, if a member of the staff complains of abuse or harassment by an attorney, the office administrators are required to report that behavior to human resources. “But sometimes the secretary just wants to vent, and begs me not to tell anyone,” she adds.

How do you keep up staff morale under those circumstances? While there is no easy answer, here are some steps to take in the face of such abuse:

1. Document what was said or done.

2. Report it to the office administrator or management committee.

3. In firms large enough to have a separate Human Resource Department, review the anti-harassment and anti-discrimination policies of the firm and file a complaint accordingly.

4. If the abuser is the managing partner, for example, and the threat of retaliation is real, sometimes the only recourse is to find another job.

What’s Debbie’s advice for secretaries? Working for a difficult attorney will always be a challenge, she concludes. But secretaries can lessen the challenge by setting ground rules early on and letting both the attorney and the office administrator know when the attorney has crossed the line.

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A performance evaluation is simply a report card measuring an employee’s achievement during the year in the context of what is expected of them. Support staff view it as a waste of time, stating that evaluations don’t make any difference in their bonuses or raises. Attorneys don’t want to take the time to do an evaluation, let alone do it correctly. Many loathe upsetting a working relationship with a secretary, regardless of how dysfunctional it is, by expressing dissatisfaction with her performance.

Why Is Performance Evaluation Important?

“Imagine being pulled over for speeding when there is no posted limit,” says Ken Katzeff, HR consultant. “You ask the cop why he is giving you a ticket if there are no posted signs. This same analogy can be applied to performance evaluation. If management establishes expected levels of performance, these levels then form the basis for defining what an employee needs to do in order to improve—the speed limit.”

If there were no performance evaluations, management would have a hard time knowing which employees are working hard, hardly working, or doing nothing much at all. They also would not know how the working relationship between staff and attorney is being managed.

Why Do Staff Think Performance Evaluations Don’t Work?

One secretary frustrated with the system says, “In our firm, any category on the form other than ‘meets expectations’ requires a written explanation. My attorney just checked ‘meets expectations’ on the entire evaluation so he wouldn’t have to take the time to write anything. Is that fair?”

“Very often management has not set standards at the beginning of the performance cycle,” says Katzeff. “By the time the end of the year comes, it’s too late to tell staff what those standards are. The evaluation form is just a vehicle for performance management, which often doesn’t exist.”

How Can We Fix The System?

In order for a performance evaluation to be an effective tool, it must be part of the larger performance management process. Goals and objectives have to be set at the beginning of the year. The expectations for meeting those goals have to be specific and clear to both attorneys and support staff. The setting of goals and objectives, outlining specific steps for meeting them, and stating what the reward (or lack of) will be, is a simplified definition of performance management.

For example, management may say to a secretary, “In order to achieve an outstanding rating on a performance evaluation in the category of technical skills, you must know the advanced functions of Word, such as generating a table of authorities or executing a complicated mail merge.”

The attorneys must understand that part of their job is managing staff and not just making money for the firm. They must be able to provide direction to their staff, evaluate performance and offer feedback.

How do you convince attorneys that managing staff is just as important as managing their clients? “The attorneys have to believe that they have an obligation to support the support staff,” says Katzeff. “They have to be asked the question, ‘Can you do your job effectively without any support?’”

A few attorneys will probably insist that they can do it alone. But those who can’t have to understand the ramifications of a poor performance management system.

If employees aren’t properly supervised, what happens? Their performance will suffer and eventually they will quit. Constant turnover puts a strain on the cost of running the firm as well as how efficiently the attorneys are able to run their practices.

How Can We Set Goals For High Performers?

This is a nagging question, always asked by the most experienced legal secretaries. They know they are high performers and consistently score “exceeds expectations” on their evaluations.

Let’s step back to see how they progressed through the performance evaluation system. In their early jobs perhaps they typed 60 words a minute—now they type 90. They had rudimentary knowledge of Word—now they are skilled in all the advanced functions. They worked for young associates and had little responsibility—today, they work for senior partners and assume a great deal of responsibility. Their goal now is to maintain that higher level of performance. But that level must be recognized and rewarded.

The expectations of maintaining a high level of performance must be outlined, just as they are for lower level employees. For example, if a firm acquires new software, these high performers may be called upon to learn it first and teach it to others. They may be given four attorneys to work for instead of three because management is confident of their ability to handle the extra responsibility.

The best reward is, of course, money—a higher salary or a bigger bonus. In reality, however, most firms cap bonuses and salaries for support staff. To reward employees in this case, remember that money isn’t the only motivator. Remind them how important they are to the firm. “Research shows that performance slips if employees don’t feel appreciated,” says Katzeff.

A simple “thank you” goes a long way to making a secretary feel appreciated, especially coming from an attorney who never expresses gratitude.

The organization as a whole benefits from a good performance management system. Administrators learn from evaluations about gaps in training, if there is tension in an attorney-secretary assignment, and where communication is breaking down between attorneys and the support staff.

“The most important thing to keep in mind,” concludes Katzeff, “is that if there is no performance measurement, the quality of effort goes down, costing the firm time and money.”

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While working for a litigation support company, I once had a boss whose determination to improve the bottom-line was so single-minded and narrowly focused that he failed to realize the company was suffering as a result. As president of a division of the parent corporation, I participated in regular but painful executive meetings. My anguish was compounded by the fact I had to fly 2,000 miles across the country to attend these anxiety-ridden “let’s-beat-up-the-managers” conferences, sometimes trekking through heavy snow storms and icy runways to be there. At one meeting, a shaking vice-president took a big gulp and bravely pointed out to this so-called billionaire, this self-centered Chairman of the Board with the iron fist, that employees were consistently working 90 hour weeks, not paid overtime and stressed to the max. His response? “Drive the horses harder.”

“They’ll drop at the finish line,” I retorted. It was out of my mouth before I stopped to think. (Yep, true story.)

We all like to think that when we’re the boss we’ll run our firms the way we always imagined a well-oiled team is supposed to work: we’ll give lots of positive feedback, maintain an open-door policy, and eschew harsh criticisms. We imagine ourselves well liked with an adoring staff, and tell ourselves we will make few bad decisions. Promotion to the top of the career ladder—here we come!

Hel-loooo!!! Are we all on the same page here?

Are You A Bad Boss?

In A Survival Guide for Working with Bad Bosses, author Gini Graham Scott writes that employee perceptions can be difficult for a boss to judge because employees are naturally—and understandably—reluctant to criticize their employer’s behavior, even when asked to do so. “Getting reliable feedback from your employees will be very hard,” Scott says. “Even if they like you, even if they trust you, they are still dependent on you for a paycheck and most won’t risk that to tell you the truth.”

In large firms, the effect of a single bad boss is mitigated by the firm’s sheer size. There’s always someone else to go to, a committee to complain to or a different department into which to transfer. The smaller the team of employees, the greater the impact employee disaffection with the boss can have on day-to-day functioning. Tension between the team leader and staff can dramatically hurt the entire firm through reduction of employee productivity. And those in law firms know what that means: fewer billable hours—the real career buster of most revenue-generators.

In their book, First Break All the Rules, authors Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman analyzed the results of a Gallup survey of 80,000 managers and one million employees. Their straightforward conclusion: Bad bosses hurt their companies. The worst effect of bad bosses was to drive good people away. “So much money has been thrown at the challenge of keeping good people—in the form of better pay, better perks and better training—when, in the end, turnover is mostly a manager issue,” the authors write.

To avoid becoming a bad boss, watch your staff’s behavior. Rapid employee turnover is the number one sign of management problems. If you notice that your firm has a revolving door of paralegals, secretaries and other staff with whom you directly interact, that may be a sign that you are difficult to work for.

Bad Bosses Come In Four Varieties

There are four types of bad bosses, explained below, along with some advice for avoiding the traps they set.

#1: The Micro-Manager

This boss won’t let her employees do their jobs. She generally requires employees to obtain permission for every little action. Some problems stem from the fact that many paralegals are promoted from within. They have built up their territory, established procedures and spent a good deal of time running the office themselves. So when the firm expands and more paralegals or staff comes on board, they resist letting others make the decisions they’ve been making themselves for so long. While it’s understandable that no one wants a newcomer to rock the boat, you limit the possibility of expansion if you don’t let anyone else do the work.

The best way to avoid falling into the Micro-Manager trap is to hire the best paralegals, legal assistants and other staff you possibly can and let them do their jobs. When you have confidence in your team, you’ll be able to focus on your own job and not hover over others. However, if you aren’t confident that your staff will make good decisions, you probably haven’t hired the right people.

#2: The Mini-Manager

Can’t make decisions? Put off making decisions that are not directly related to assignment areas? Not interested in anything but productivity and quality? If you answered yes, you’re a mini-manager, which is the opposite of the micro-manager. Employees depend upon their boss for quick decisions that directly impact their work and ultimately impact their personal lives. If as a manager you drag your feet, especially on critical issues such as raises, reviews, seminars and scheduling vacations, employees tend to get just plain angry because they conclude that you don’t care. Once your staff realizes that nothing is urgent for you, their work will reflect the same lack of urgency. Timely decision-making and paying attention to decisions affecting home life all factor into your reputation as a boss. Don’t hang your staff out to dry simply because you can’t or won’t make a decision outside the scope of the assignment. Find the time, resources or support to make your staff’s issues matter.

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The lifeblood of a law firm is producing documents. Those of us in the technology field know that attorneys will reach out to tech support the very moment their ability to produce documents is hampered in any way. Whether by eMail, snail mail, or courier service, making sure those original, executed contracts get certified by end-of-business today is paramount. Attorneys could help themselves and everyone they work with by becoming more familiar with document production software instead of bragging that they know Microsoft Word© “just enough to be dangerous.”

Many concepts in word processing software are easily understood and, once you apply them, can save your team hours of effort and frustration. Read on for a brief lesson in the easiest way(s) to prevent problems with your documents.

Copy At Your Own Risk

Taking excerpts from outside documents (a “source document”) and bringing them into firm documents (your “destination document”)—or even taking excerpts from internal documents—can wreak havoc unknowingly. If you learn how to modify just a few habits you can stop creating major headaches for your staff.

When you copy paragraphs (or even just some text) from a document or a website (or even a text-ready PDF), you are copying more than just the words. You are copying formatting information for the text and the paragraph in which it resides, and this may unintentionally over-write settings in your destination document. There’s no need to change the way you copy text from a source document, but inserting or pasting the text into your destination document should be considered a precarious proposition.

Paste It “Special”

Pasting the copied text should always be done using a special process. If you just dump it in, it will dump more than you intend. A best practice is to navigate to your destination document and place your cursor in the location you want the text to be inserted, but instead of using keystrokes (like “Ctrl + V”) or a right-click menu to paste the text, use the drop-down menus on your toolbar. Under the “Edit” menu, select something called “Paste Special” or “Alternate Paste,” which often has an indicator (like an ellipsis…) to show that there will be more choices to come.

In the pasting options window which opens next, choose anything which includes the word “unformatted.” Accept your choices and paste the “source” text by clicking “OK.”

This tip is especially important when pasting entire paragraphs because bringing external paragraph formatting (or Styles, covered in a upcoming Tech Tip) into destination documents can also bring major problems, like unwanted changes to your paragraph numbering.

Inserting text using this method will allow the new unformatted text (from a source document) to pick up the old default formatting from its surrounding text (your destination document), which is what everybody wants. As an added bonus, the document will not become unwieldy going forward.

Why Bother?

It’s true that pasting text or paragraphs using these recommended steps may take a little longer, but after you familiarize yourself with the menu locations and selections, you’ll soon become expert (using keystrokes can make the process almost as fast as the old way).

It’s worth taking the time to master this new technique because:

• word processing professionals will gain countless hours of productive time previously wasted re-formatting documents
• your document is more likely to remain stable and bug-free
• your paragraphs will be numbered the way you intend
• your document will look the way you want it to

Insert Numbered Paragraphs Using A Special Feature

Now that you know how to help keep your document squeaky clean, here’s a bonus tip to thank you for reading this far. Whenever you’re appending text by typing it in directly or adding space in which to paste text, use caution, especially with numbered paragraphs. A best practice is to click into the existing paragraph directly above your insertion, but at the end of the paragraph, after the last period. Hit enter to get an additional paragraph, but if the paragraph numbering is wrong, don’t try to fix it. Just insert three asterisks (***), or some such symbol that your word processing professionals can easily find, and let them adjust the numbering scheme.

Avoid trying to fix the paragraph’s auto numbering (when you cannot select the numeric characters, they appear on the page automatically) or trying to turn off the auto numbering so that you can input the number manually (when you can select the characters). It’s best to leave the auto numbering alone, even though it’s wrong, and input manually the correct number beside it. Adding repeated symbols (***) will alert your secretary who can correct the auto numbering for you.

Exercising caution when working with numbering or when pasting content is worth the investment. Make these techniques a part of your routine and the members of your team will appreciate your efforts to keep documents clean and well-functioning.

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Today, four trends are reshaping the paralegal field. Ignore these at your peril: if you don’t educate yourself about the latest innovations in legal, social and business practices, you’ll be left sitting on the dock as the ship pulls away.

1. Learn About Social Networks

Even if you don’t understand what all the excitement is about (particularly if you are past 40), web-based social networking is hotter than ever. Sites such as Facebook, My Space, Linkedin, and other Web 2.0 communities have enabled millions of people to amass a rich network of old and new friends. With the click of the mouse, you can learn more about them than you could have shared in years.

Once you create a profile that includes your date of birth, home town, high school, college, employer, political views, and marital status, you start inviting people to be your friend. Other people invite you to be their friend, too, including people you don’t even know. On business networking sites such as LinkedIn, business “friends” write references for you and people are introduced to potential clients, employers and colleagues. You can even send a virtual martini to a sales prospect to break the ice.

Originally designed for college-age kids, Facebook now boasts that more than half of its 43 million members are of post-college age. Members post pictures of their pets, children and loved ones along with information about their personal lives, hopes, wants, dreams and desires.

Be advised, though: by participating in social networks, you’re giving employers and potential employers the opportunity to learn about you and check your references. No employers investigate only the references a potential employee supplies; today, even Googling is but one small component of background checks. Whatever you post on your site becomes available to those who want to learn about you. Make sure that you don’t post more about yourself than you’d feel comfortable having your employer know.

2. Offshoring Creates New Opportunities

Mention offshoring and most paralegals and attorneys storm out of the room. But outsourcing does not appear to be fading away. Hiring attorneys in India or the Philippines is a hot trend. Lawyers from large and small firms outsource assignments to workers in other countries. According to a recent article in Business Week magazine, DuPont’s legal department, always a legal trendsetter, figures 70% of the labor in a typical insurance or liability case can be outsourced.

U.S. law firms often bill around $150 an hour for document-processing by paralegals; offshore providers charge around $30 an hour—because an attorney with five years of experience can be hired for around $30,000, including benefits, in the Philippines, whose legal system is similar to America’s. That’s half what a veteran U.S. corporate paralegal earns, and one-fifth what a first-year attorney can fetch in New York.

According to a recent article in The International Herald Tribune, clients are pushing law firms like Jones Day and Kirkland & Ellis to send basic legal tasks to India where lawyers tag documents and investigate takeover targets for as little as $20 an hour. The average Indian lawyer working in an outsourcing organization earns $8,160 per year compared to $160,000 for a first-year associate in a major U.S. law firm. These outsourcing firms or Legal Process Outsourcing (LPOs) are part of a trend that will move about 50,000 U.S. legal jobs overseas by 2015, according to Forrester Research in Boston.

The National Federation of Paralegal Association’s Position Statement on the Outsourcing of Paralegal Duties to Foreign Countries, claims that paralegals in India earn from $6.00-$8.00 per hour. This represents a huge bargain for U.S. firms if the quality of the work is on a par with what is being accomplished here.

Companies with corporate legal departments in India include DuPont, Cisco Systems, and Morgan Stanley, according to ValueNotes Database, a company based in Maharashtra, India. The Indian legal services industry will more than quadruple to $640 million by 2010 from $146 million in 2006, ValueNotes said.

Although not every firm will outsource work and certain ethics issues remain to be resolved, the trend will likely continue, following the trajectory of what happened 10–15 years ago when coding was outsourced to the Philippines. Then, too, everyone was concerned that paralegal jobs would be lost, but the field continued to grow and assignments became more sophisticated.

Paralegals claiming outsourcing will never affect them may have their Bates stamps buried in the sand. Corporations will continue to demand that small businesses and individuals lower their legal fees. Firms, especially smaller ones, cannot necessarily hire additional personnel every time a new or different case comes over the transom. Outsourcing gives every size firm an opportunity to capture new work without additional overhead.

Does this mean that paralegal jobs are going away? Not necessarily. It does mean that paralegals have to work smarter and aim for higher level assignments. Leveraging your knowledge, skills and technology abilities is the key to planting your feet firmly on the firm’s travertine floors and keeping salaries up.

3. Regulation Is Here To Stay

If only Enron, WorldCom, Computer Associates, Qwest, Comverse, Adelphia and others hadn’t generated so many business scandals and provoked a cry for a crackdown on white-collar crime, we probably wouldn’t have the Sarbanes-Oxley Act with its rigid and onerous reporting requirements. According to Forbes (October 29, 2007), the number of FBI corporate fraud cases pending has risen 70% since the act’s passage in 2002. It’s not going to be repealed; in fact, it’s considered one of the most important changes in business this country has seen, and is taken so seriously that several privately held corporations have adopted a “Sarbanes-Light” approach to governance in the event they eventually do go public or merge.

With the fear of prison and the scalps of white-collar defendants fresh in their minds, corporations began to hire compliance experts—including paralegals—to help keep the corporation in line with government regulations and out of the sight of the SEC. Compliance paralegals are generally hard to find. Few, if any, paralegal schools offer a certificate in the practice specialty, yet the position continues to grow. In all likelihood, the trend for stricter adherence to regulation, tighter accounting procedures and higher corporate morality is not going away. Paralegals gravitating toward this area are likely to find exciting, well-paid positions.

4. E-Discovery Creates Exciting New Positions

Unless you completed your first day in paralegal school only yesterday, you know about e-discovery and the changes it has brought to every practice specialty imaginable. Electronic discovery—how people and businesses conduct themselves, what they write in an e-mail, say in a voicemail or put in a blog or website—has changed the face of the legal field. This also means that the number and type of assignments for paralegals has increased and changed, particularly in the discovery and risk management arenas.

A brand new position, the e-discovery manager, has emerged. This person’s first responsibility is to reduce costs by managing vendor selection. E-discovery managers also enable organizations to proactively prepare for litigation. A screw up in e-discovery, such as removing metadata during document productions, can result in sanctions or a court issued adverse inference. Managers also create a consistent process for e-discovery projects that includes data collection, processing and review.

According to Inside Counsel magazine, an organization can expect to pay e-managers between $100,000 and $300,000 a year. There’s no reason why this position cannot be handled by paralegals with expertise in the field.

Paralegals Will Be Increasingly Subject To Regulation

At least 12 states have passed or seriously debated legislation regulating paralegals. Laws such as California’s Business & Professions Code 6450 came into effect because people with little or no training were delivering inappropriate services directly to the consumer.

These regulations mandate educational background and establish mandatory continuing education requirements, changes that ensure that paralegals stay current on the latest changes in the law, ethics, procedures and techniques.

These educational and regulatory trends are expected to continue. As a result, paralegals will be smarter, better educated, and earn higher incomes. Trends are a fact of business life. How should you handle them? As John Naisbitt, best-selling author of Megatrends and Megatrends 2000 was known to say, “Trends, like horses, are easier to ride in the direction they are going.”

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Many people brag about their Luddite sensibilities when they’re actually too intimidated to adopt new technologies. Some claim they are more productive than their technology-savvy counterparts when in truth they harbor a general distrust of new technology they secretly wish they could overcome. “I’ve had my cell-phone for five years; I don’t need to type messages on it, thank you,” or “My associates create all the presentations; I just dictate content” may each be valid claims, but if you’re curious about leveraging technology in your favor, it wouldn’t hurt (or at least it shouldn’t) to reach out to a staff member already in place to support you.

Find Your Voice

Before reaching out to Information Technology, “find your voice” by considering the means of communication as well as the job description for the person you contact. If you want to schedule a training session to sharpen skills in a presentation software (like PowerPoint), then asking your assistant to leave a voice mail with the Regional Director of IT might be greeted with more urgency than warranted. Conversely, if your software is frozen and your deadline is in twenty minutes, sending an eMail to desk-side support’s shared eMail account probably won’t garner the quick results you require. Be sure to reach out to the right person on the team and to include a suggested time frame or deadline so recipients can gauge their responses appropriately.

Don’t Be Intimidated

Be specific in your request. If appropriate, communicate any apprehensions you may hold. If you said to me, “I liked the last version just fine and don’t know why we had to switch, but now I feel like it’s taking me too long to perform the same tasks,” I’d understand that you’re resistant to the upgrade and that you might respond best to a “Was/Is” session, during which I demonstrate how tasks used to be performed and how they’re performed now.

If you’re aware of your learning style, say so, and include details: “I can’t sit through a class; I learn by doing. Can we work for fifteen minutes at most? I won’t retain anything if we try to cover too much.” This would alert me to the fact that you’re concerned about content overload and might lose attention if I demonstrate tasks instead of asking you to perform them.

But your interactions with IT might be of a broader nature. Perhaps you are requesting a new intranet-reporting tool or want to implement a collaboration software. Here’s where things can get complicated.

Know The Game

If you’re in a smaller firm, chances are you manage IT resources in a consultant relationship to control costs. It’s likely you are wearing many hats—as the end user, hiring manager, and contract negotiator. Without getting into the complicated process of cost analysis, software selection, and systems upgrades, I’d like to focus on your approach, perception, and communication with IT professionals.

I imagine the relationship between an IT department and its consultants as one in which you’re “dating” someone who’s exceptionally attractive: given the smallest reason to move on, your “date” can easily find another company to “go steady” with instead. As a free agent, your IT consultants can call many of the shots, and you should be cautious and clear about your staff’s needs, hard deadlines and cost limitations. Approach a consultant relationship as one that needs nurturing, plenty of communication, and carefully managed expectations.

If you are responsible for reviewing a project proposal, ask the IT consultant what sorts of problems have cropped up unexpectedly on similar projects and what unseen costs were involved (“Can we project costs of dependent upgrades?”). Perhaps you could take steps together to more fully vet your systems to expose any weaknesses before the project suddenly demands additional outlays (“How reliable is our testing environment in exposing risks?”). Explain that you don’t like surprises because they often delay completion, adding costs. Explore a bonus structure only if target dates are met and costs kept in check.

Ask the consultant about project adoption after completion. Here’s an area where planners sometimes overlook additional costs resulting from reduced productivity or time spent with support staff troubleshooting issues (“What hidden costs of adoption can we avoid?”). Perhaps the consultant can recommend changes either in training or in support documentation which could help your team properly integrate your IT project. You may prefer the consultants stay on an extra week to assist in any transition.

ITs In The House

If your IT department is in-house, then team rules apply. Since you’re on the same team, assume that each of you wants what’s best for the firm, what’s best for your department and for each other (in that order). Keeping this in mind will help you frame requests for IT input and can remind you that your request may not be first in line due to other’s priorities or cost-reduction efforts. I consider this area to be “fair game”—in other words, it’s appropriate to ask your IT team members what else is on their plate and what sorts of sudden issues springing from other projects could impact your project’s timeline and costs (“How do your other projects impact my request?”).

Ask about opportunities to join forces with other planned upgrades (“Is there a chance for my project request to exploit any synergies?”). For example, there may be a time when remaining flexible and postponing a software rollout could provide a cost-savings for the firm, which can put feathers in quite a few caps come budget review time.

Maintain The Relationship After The Rollout

Opportunities exist after the rollout, too. Maybe you don’t have the luxury of an in-house technology trainer but need to improve the efficiency of your support staff after reducing their numbers. Let them know you appreciate the additional duties they may have recently taken on by setting up targeted training sessions for them. Perhaps once each quarter they could attend a “lunch-and-learn” led by a software guru; or you might prefer to schedule a one-time visit by a needs assessment specialist followed up with individualized efficiency training. This approach is sometimes easier for busy staff members to swallow since many of them look at required training sessions as a chore, not a bonus, and feel the one-on-one session is more respectful of their busy schedules.

Here, the same questions remain regarding scope and scale, costs and expectations. It’s important to manage not only the expectations of the service provider but also of the staff that is undergoing the software rollout or training/coaching, plan. Be sure that your IT staff communicates implementation notifications and training opportunities according to an agreed-upon approach. The tone and tenor of all communications should only include positive terminology (not “It will not be difficult to submit receipts,” but “It will be much easier to submit receipts!”), and it should be clear that general skill sets are not being questioned (not “Brush up training is encouraged,” but “This new interface will require specific training.”). Users who believe their skills are in doubt are much less receptive than users who believe they’re seizing an opportunity to sharpen their competitive edge.

Keeping an upbeat tone, providing incentives like free lunch or door prizes to help increase attendance, and following up after project adoption will all contribute to smoother technology transitions for you and your team.

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Do you find those instructions crystal clear? You do? How about these directions:

Please prepare enough bluebacks for the service list and office copies for these papers, but don’t copy them yet. I’m expecting final comments today by 5 and then we’ll finalize them. If I don’t get comments in time, we’ll serve the papers tomorrow by hand and overnight courier. Thanks.

That is the same set of directions re-worded in plain English, with the addition of the oft neglected phrases “please” and “thank you.”

Secretaries And Support Staff Often Feel Confused

Whether a recent law school grad or a thirty-year veteran, many attorneys have difficulty communicating with secretaries and support staff. Some secretaries complain that they’re given incomplete instructions; others receive no instructions at all—the attorneys they work for assume they’ll know what to do. Other times, a secretary will complete a task or project according to the directions she heard, only to have the attorney say, “This isn’t what I wanted.”

Lorraine Flores, a veteran secretary in New York, recalls receiving instructions that she says, “Einstein wouldn’t be able to figure out. It’s just the way it is in this field. There are attorneys who will put something on your desk and walk away, assuming you know exactly what to do with it. There are attorneys who will tell you everything, including how to lick the envelope and precisely where to put the stamp. You just have to adjust to the personality.” She advises that attorneys give the secretary the benefit of the doubt if she doesn’t get it right.

“Most lawyers are under constant time pressure—pressure to get something off the To Do list, so that s/he can move to the next item on that list,” says David Wirtz, a shareholder at Littler Mendelson in New York. “For a partner, this causes carelessness in terms of communications both with associates and support staff.”

I asked if he found it helpful for secretaries to repeat the instructions back to the attorney. “If I’m time-pressed,” he replied, “or if I think the direction is clear, my first reaction would be annoyance, even though I would recognize just after my mouth opened that this is infantile, since the repeat is presumably motivated by a desire to get it right for me.”

Address The Problem Head-on

To improve communication, support staff should acknowledge that they have to initiate a conversation. But raise the issue so it doesn’t sound like a complaint. A secretary can say, for instance, “I’m having some trouble getting you what you need.”

In addition, have some specific examples on hand of instructions that went awry because of vague directions, so that the lawyer has a sense of what you’re talking about. If the lawyer reacts defensively (and many will), try to avoid an argument and consider revisiting the topic a week or two weeks later. It’s quite possible that s/he has thought about what you’ve said in the interim, says Mr. Wirtz.

Small Changes Can Make A Big Difference

Attorneys can improve communication with their staff in several ways:

1. Be specific. Don’t complicate the instructions by saying, “Maybe we’ll need more later, or “Make five copies, but make extra for the file.” If you want 10 copies, say, “I need 10 copies.”
2. Ask your secretary or paralegal to repeat the instructions back to you. It’s your last opportunity to correct her before the task is done.
3. If the task is done incorrectly, don’t say, “This isn’t what I asked for.” Instead, say, “This was not done as I asked. This has happened before, what can we do to make the instructions understandable?”
4. It’s OK to be a perfectionist, but let your staff know in advance what’s expected of them.

Four things not to do:

1. Leave “mystery documents” on a secretary’s desk without indicating who the author is (if you work in a multi-lawyer office) because you assume she’ll recognize your handwriting. This is a huge waste of time.
2. Give long complicated directions and then say, “But don’t finalize it—I’m still working on it.” Save the complicated directions for the end of the project.
3. Yell and scream regardless of the magnitude of an error. It never accomplishes anything (except staff turnover).
4. Be overly demanding and obnoxious all the time. Your work will always end up at the bottom of the pile. This is especially true for associates.

Finally, keep in mind this sage advice from an unknown source: “If you take no action to ensure you are understood, you will be misunderstood.”

Post from: The Complete Lawyer

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