In our hour of need

An academic colleague once said to me: ‘I can’t imagine how depressing it must be to break your life down into six-minute units.’ It is an odd system to be sure; every unit of your working life needs to be recorded, justified and billed for, while the number of six-minute units you can crank out determines your career prospects. 

Lawyers, essentially, live by time, so making best use of the time available is an important skill. That skill, presumably, is what this work is intended to showcase. 

The chapters cover various approaches to maximising time. Most are generally useful: advice such as delegating less important but more urgent tasks, how to prioritise work and avoid procrastination, and what to do if you feel overwhelmed are useful for anyone at any stage of a career. And, of course, there is the great panacea of the 2020s – AI. This will miraculously save hours of time on administrative tasks and improve everyone’s work-life balance. 

There is nothing groundbreaking about the book. Most of the advice is sensible, with old ideas well-packaged. It is so general that it is difficult to know precisely which audience this work is for – whether newly qualified or early career lawyers, or more experienced practitioners needing to up their billing hours. 

The utility of the advice is also very much dependent on sectors. Having worked in high street firms on a shoestring budget where any kind of administrative support – let alone paralegal support – was minimal, the ability to delegate urgent but unimportant tasks would have been moot.

Cynicism aside, the skills the book addresses are useful generally to a profession where time pressure, targets and the resulting stress are endemic. 

On a final note, a 2016 study by the lawyers’ welfare charity LawCare found that 28% of lawyers suffered from depression, 19% from anxiety and 21% from problematic drinking. All these figures are substantially higher than for the general population. Perhaps anything that helps make a challenging career that bit easier to manage can only be a good thing. 

James E Hurford is a solicitor at the Government Legal Department, London