Eavesdrop on in-house lawyers over coffee or cocktails and you’ll hear some version of, “How do you keep track of everything you have to do?”

Legal teams know they need better systems to reduce stress and stay on top of an endless flow of tasks. 

The problem: email overload, untamed to-do lists, and a barrage of business requests keep them from calming the chaos. What we all need is a reliable system to capture every commitment and sustain efficiency.

In this guide, we share six principles for managing your legal work. As a bonus, we also asked our enterprise and startup lawyer friends for their tips too!

These aren’t just feel-good ideas – but clear, manageable concepts our team applies to stay ahead (and sane) within a fast-growing startup.

We don’t advocate for complex methodologies that will leave you begging for the good ol’ days of Post-It notes. Because, the point isn’t to have a fancy process. It’s to be able to say, “At 10:45 am tomorrow, I know exactly what I’m working on and why.”

Principle #1: ‘To-do’ lists are failing you.  

Research tells us that to-do lists don’t work. Many of us resonate with this. 

To-do lists lack context and promote cherry-picking the easiest tasks – we all want the psychological payoff that comes from crossing an item off our list.

While basic checklists have their place – namely, getting ideas out of your head – they don’t support complex projects with sub-tasks and dependencies.

“Too many lawyers have action items like, "Update Privacy Policy” on their to-do list. This is simply not actionable as written. No wonder we default to email and spend energy on small, less-important, but easily actionable stuff.” - Jonathan Greenblatt | VP, Legal at LinkSquares

To-do lists are static and tied to an individual. For projects requiring collaboration, it’s difficult for everyone to work off the same list. These lists also tend to lack interactivity, making it difficult for legal to show updates on in-flight work or for business partners to make requests.

Lawyers may ultimately use a to-do list to guide their activities for the day. But it’s the output of a dedicated process to collect, manage, and organize projects - not the place for inputs, gathering, and updating.

Principle #2: Plan in projects, execute in tasks. 

In project management 101, a task is a basic, granular activity th at can be actioned relatively easily. 

A project is an overarching collection of activities requiring coordination between multiple parties. Projects have an end goal beyond their own completion, and create unique results, services, or products.

In legal departments, task-first tendencies are endemic. 

The reason? 

Chaotic activity intake. When requests are coming from everywhere, project planning falls to the wayside in order to prioritize the latest requests. By ensuring effective coordination, it becomes easier to pinpoint the tasks linked to requests, leading to a more cohesive and streamlined project.

“In-house legal teams are bombarded with requests . These arrive in email, Slack, text, and in-person meetings. Once we corral the inputs we can organize our days,” shares Greenblatt. 

Working through tasks may work when dealing with smaller scale, independent activities. Otherwise, legal teams need to start with a plan that reflects project scope and includes resource monitoring, stakeholder identification, and task and progress management.

Principle #3: Start with request management. 

Legal leaders tend to be brute force, get-stuff-done champions for progress.

While our doggedness results in getting a bunch of urgent stuff done. It also means that we neglect building good intake systems and other important, but less urgent work. 

Step one of the Getting Things Done® practice requires establishing collection discipline. Start capturing anything that requires your attention. This means managing the task or request flow with a reliable collection system – even if you are not doing anything about the ask yet. 

Better intake eliminates the “tyranny of the urgent” and the tendency to react to what’s top of mind.

"Out of complexity comes simplicity - streamlining and centralizing where your legal team intakes requests allows everyone to have clear visibility into all tasks pending action and enables the team to prioritize accordingly." - Ashlyn Donohue | Director, Legal at LinkSquares

Ideally, legal teams automate legal request intake including everything from contract review to long term projects. This allows a real-time record of requests – an essential component of the GTD workflow. To do this effectively, legal teams need to architect where and how requests arrive.  

Principle → Action

Collect & Capture

• Identify every area (“bucket”) where legal requests come in. 
• Describe the area and brainstorm ideas on how you can shape the intake paths to make managing ideas, asks, and needs easier. 
• Don’t just figure out how to connect buckets like email, text, physical drop-offs, Slack, and other collaboration tools. Add ideas for how you can reduce, narrow, and automate buckets.   

Principle #4: Before you work, process. 

Once collection is on auto-pilot, you get to process. GTD pros frame this as defining the actionability of each item collected. 

(Note: This step goes hand-in-hand with our next principle, Organize.)  

For actionable items, you need to describe outcomes and next actions. For non-actionable items, you have three options: trash them, flag as actionable in the future, or save as reference. 

The decision process transforms unclear inputs into defined work.

Processing is not doing, it’s deciding what needs to be done. Legal leaders should answer key processing questions for every item that traverses the intake path – 

1. What is it?
2. Is it relevant and actionable by you?
3. What’s the desired outcome? If multi-step, include it on a projects list.
4. What’s the next action? Write it on the appropriate actions list.

Give yourself processing time every day to assess new inputs (including against existing demands). But, the only “doing” time recommended during processing are those items that will take less than 2 minutes to complete.

Once you’ve decided that a) the input needs actioning, and b) needs actioning by you, it is time to define an execution path.

Principle #5: Organizing

You’ve collected and processed inputs. Now, define success. 

This requires deciding how you will finish and proposing a sequence of events, sub-components, dependencies, and deadlines. Identify the next action step and when you’ll do it.

Initially, every project will be novel. You’ll go through a fresh exercise of understanding outcomes, defining stakeholders, and assigning tasks. But soon, you’ll understand the demands of certain recurring projects. No need to constantly rethink these; create an organizational or project management template for rinse-and-repeat effectiveness.   

And no, flagging emails or slicing your browser window into hundreds of tabs isn’t organization. Scalable organization means outlets or “containers” for every input, including those that you need to act on, save, share with others, or trash.

You should end up with a home for everything that is incomplete. We like to use organizing categories like next actions, waiting for, and someday.    

Incorporate technology here to support organization and execution. Some questions to think about: 

1. Where will project tracking live?
2. Where will you track your next actions?
3. Can you sufficiently organize both projects and tasks?
4. How can you incorporate your calendar for time-specific actions?
5. Where will relevant information, notes, etc, live?

Avoid static tools (like a manually-updated spreadsheet) or system hopping that hurts efficiency. Automating and centralizing manual and disparate task management processes, plus incorporating note and storage capabilities, serves legal better.

“By automating and centralizing the manual and disparate task management processes, my team can serve the needs of the business better." – Danielle Sheer 

Principle #6: Reviewing & Engaging

Regular review is the secret sauce of productivity workflows. 

Don’t compromise here! Frequently look over, update, and revise lists. Break this up into small, daily reviews and larger weekly ones. 

“Maintaining effective intake channels, task lists, and workloads is like gardening: without regular care, you'll end up weeding, pruning, and raking to get to the heart of the matter at hand. Regular treatment with DWM (Daily, Weekly, Monthly) reviews, that are tailored to address and meet the fluctuating needs of the legal team and business ensure everything is well-maintained for success.", guides Ashley Jones, commercial counsel at LinkSquares. 

Vigilant review keeps tasks from falling through the cracks. But it also helps you maximize available time. For example, a thirty minute break between meetings isn’t enough time for deep work, but could be repurposed for bite-sized tasks on an existing project that you’re aware of.  

Below, we highlight some best practices around review cadence:

• Review past calendar entries: Review the calendar entries since the last Weekly Review for pending items and transfer that information into the active system. Capture anything that may require action or triggers an idea.
• Review future calendar dates: Review calendar entries for the coming weeks to avoid surprises with short reaction time. If necessary, capture anything relevant to prepare for upcoming events.
• Review your actions lists: Delete completed actions and review other buckets/containers to see what needs to move over.
• Review the Waiting For list: Record all delegated actions and eliminate from the list everything you have already received. Also follow up on actions still in progress (check the status of a delegated issue, add an item you would like to discuss in a scheduled appointment with someone, etc.)
• Review the Project list: Evaluate the status of the projects one by one and make sure you have at least one ongoing next action for each of them. Look at all supporting materials related to ongoing projects that have interest and potential to trigger new actions.

Conclusion

These principles offer a reliable way to get valuable work done and make the most of your time. 

Plus, you’ll reduce stress by eliminating the mental burden of trying to remember everything. As many of us know the hard way, our brains are great at processing information, but poorly adapted for storage.

The right tools and processes can transform your work and the experiences of the teams that depend on you. These shifts have transformed our day-to-day work as lawyers and legal operations professionals – we bet they’ll change yours too.