This is a talk I gave on the morning of November 7, 2023, at the Indiana Trial Lawyers Association's 59th Annual Institute. Fifteen minutes, four speakers, 7:30 in the morning, a room of trial lawyers who had mostly not finished their coffee. It is written for lawyers. If you are hurt and looking for a lawyer, none of this will help you and the rest of the site will.
I have reproduced it as I gave it, which means it describes how I worked in 2023, at a different firm, carrying a caseload I do not carry now. Where that matters I have said so rather than quietly updating it. None of what follows is research. It is what nine years of injury files taught me about my own working day, which is all I claimed for it that morning.
Matthew Kavanagh · Kavanagh Injury Law, P.C. · Indianapolis, Indiana
I started my career on the defense side, working for insurance companies, defending motor vehicle and premises cases. I moved to the plaintiff side in 2019 and have not looked back. At the time of this talk I was at Stewart & Stewart in Carmel, carrying somewhere between 125 and 150 open personal injury files at once. That number is from 2023 and it is a concurrent roster, not a career total, and it is not what my own firm carries today. I include it only because it is the reason anyone asked me to stand up and talk about this.
Before anything else, the disclaimer I opened with, which I meant more than any other slide in the deck. The most important thing in time management is finding what works for you. We all learn differently and we all operate differently. What is a system for one lawyer is a tax on another. Everything below is what I found effective. None of it is a rule, and I would be suspicious of anyone who told you otherwise.
I put a Benjamin Franklin line on a slide, because it was 7:30 in the morning and I needed one thing everyone would agree with. Lost time is never found again. That is the entire argument. The rest is mechanics.
Lawyers talk about being busy as though the scarce resource is hours. It is not. Most of us have the hours. What we do not have is uninterrupted stretches of them, and those are the only kind that move a case.
I gave the room a picture for this that I still think is the most useful thing in the talk. Call it the bathtub. To work a file properly you have to fill your head with it: the mechanism of injury, who treated and when, what the adjuster said in March, which expert is soft and which is not, where the coverage sits. That takes a while to fill. Then someone puts their head in your door, and it drains. When you come back to the file twenty minutes later you do not resume. You refill. The cost of an interruption is not the interruption. It is the refill. That is why a day that looks productive on a timesheet can move nothing.
I have not measured any of this and I am not going to dress it up as though I had. It is an observation from the inside of a busy plaintiff practice, offered to a room full of people running the same kind of practice. But ask any litigator who has put in a ten hour day and cannot name one thing that actually moved whether the refill is real.
What makes this worse for lawyers than for most people is that our interruptions arrive from the people we are least willing to put off. The client with a question. The adjuster returning a call you chased for a week. A partner in the doorway. Almost none of it is unreasonable, and almost none of it needed to happen in that particular minute rather than at two o'clock.
The reason to care is not productivity for its own sake. It is that a plaintiff practice punishes lost attention in specific and expensive ways. Deadlines are jurisdictional or close to it. A statute does not care how your week went. Discovery responses come due whether or not you had time to read the file. Clients who do not hear from you decide, reasonably, that nothing is happening.
So the list I put up was practical rather than aspirational. You sleep better. You catch deadlines because you saw them coming rather than because a calendar alert saved you. You give the case development itself real attention instead of triaging around it. Your clients hear from you on a schedule rather than when they escalate. And your workload stops arriving as one undifferentiated pile.
The other half of that list is the part lawyers are worse at saying out loud. You get time back that is not work. Time with your family, time on something you actually like doing. I said in the talk that time is our most valuable asset. That sounds like a poster. It is also, in a contingency practice, literally true: it is the only input you have that you cannot bill, buy back, or borrow against.
Write down what you are going to do. Make the list the night before or first thing when you get in, before anything else has a chance to claim the morning.
It can be three large things or fifteen small ones. What matters is that the deciding happens once, in a quiet moment, rather than forty times across a day when you are already behind and every decision is made under pressure by whoever contacted you most recently.
The trap is that the list feels most optional exactly when it is most valuable. On a slow week you do not need it. On the week where three things blow up at once, it is the only thing standing between you and a day spent entirely on whatever was loudest. That is the week people skip it.
Prioritizing is mostly one question asked honestly: what genuinely has to be done today, and what only feels like it does. Most lawyers I know, myself included, are bad at this in a particular direction. We treat responsiveness as urgency. An email that arrived recently feels more urgent than a brief due Friday, and it almost never is.
The technique that worked best for me was assigning shapes to days rather than trying to do everything every day. Some days are for calls, client meetings, and staff. Other days are for the work that requires the bathtub to be full: thinking about a case at the strategic level, writing a brief, actually reading discovery rather than skimming it.
When you try to do both kinds of work in the same day you do neither of them well. You cannot go deep on a summary judgment response in the gaps between returning calls, and you cannot give a client your attention when half your head is still in the brief.
Time blocking is the same idea at a smaller scale. You allocate specific blocks of the day to specific work and you treat the block as though it were an appointment, because functionally it is one. You would not take a walk-in during a deposition. The block deserves the same protection.
What blocking really does is force a decision you would otherwise avoid: how long is this actually going to take. Most of the reason work spills is that nobody ever estimated it. Once the block exists, you either finish inside it or you learn something true about how long that kind of task takes you, and both outcomes are useful.
This was the hardest one for me and I suspect it is the hardest one for most people reading this.
Start by finding out what you are actually comfortable handing off, which is a smaller list than you think and a longer list than you are currently using. Calendaring. Filing documents. Routine motions. Standard letters. Records requests. None of that requires your judgment, and all of it consumes attention that does.
Then three things, in order. Give clear instructions and expectations, so your staff knows what finished looks like rather than guessing. Actually let them do the work you assigned. And let them make mistakes without being overly critical about it.
That third one is where delegation usually dies. A task comes back at eighty percent, the lawyer decides it is faster to do it himself, and takes it back permanently. But eighty percent on the first attempt is what learning looks like. If you take the task back you have bought one afternoon and sold every future one.
I will name the real reason lawyers do not delegate, because it is not distrust. It is that explaining a task takes longer than doing it, once. That is true, and it is a trap, because it is only true once. The second time it is a fraction of the cost, and by the fifth it is free. Delegation never pays on the instance you are looking at. It only pays on the ones you are not.
My rule was to keep no more than two or three files physically on the desk, and to choose them deliberately: the ones near settlement, or the ones I thought I could get resolved that week. Whatever I needed for that day's meetings or calls sat there too. Everything else was away.
The point is not tidiness. A desk covered in files is a desk that interrupts you on its own. Every time you look up you are reminded of nine other matters, and each reminder is a small drain on the tub. Two or three files on a desk is a statement about what this week is for.
The single most destructive habit I had was answering every email the moment it arrived and picking up the phone every time it rang.
I did this for years and I thought it was a virtue. It reads as responsiveness. What it actually is, is letting other people set your agenda in real time. Every new message pulled me off whatever I was doing, and by the definition in section two, each one cost me the refill and not just the ninety seconds.
So I turned off the notification entirely. No sound, no banner, nothing that tells me mail has arrived. I told the room in 2023 that it was a total game changer and I would say the same thing today. It is the highest return change on this entire list and it takes about fifteen seconds to make.
The thing that makes it work rather than making you unreachable is the second half: set specific times in the day when you handle email and return calls, and hold them. You end up just as responsive on any timescale a client or an adjuster actually experiences. Nobody has ever noticed that I answered at 11:00 instead of 10:20. What changes is who decided when 10:20 was going to be spent.
Do not implement this list. If you go back to your office and try to install ten habits at once you will keep none of them, and you will conclude that time management does not work for you when what did not work was the rollout.
Take one thing a week. Start with the small ones, because the small ones become automatic and the automatic ones are the only ones that survive a bad month. Turn off the email notification this week. Do nothing else. Next week, write the list the night before.
One piece of that is easy to miss. Tell your staff what you are doing. If you simply stop answering email instantly, without a word, that reads to everyone around you as unresponsiveness or as something being wrong. Said out loud, it is a boundary people will respect and, in my experience, quickly start copying.
And come back to the disclaimer. Find what works for you. If the list is a burden, drop the list. If blocking makes you feel managed by your own calendar, do not block. The only part of this I would defend to anyone is the diagnosis rather than the treatment: the thing you are short of is not hours, it is unbroken attention, and almost nothing in a law office is designed to protect it for you.
That talk was given at the end of 2023. Since then I left to open my own firm, and one section of it broke immediately.
Delegation assumes there is someone to delegate to. When you are the whole firm, the paragraph about handing off calendaring and routine letters becomes a question about tooling rather than about staff, and I have spent a good deal of the last year on exactly that. I am not going to pretend that is the same problem solved a different way. It is a different problem, and I was talking in 2023 from inside a firm with people in it.
What survived intact is the diagnosis. The interruption cost is real, protecting attention beats managing hours, and the fifteen seconds spent turning off an email notification is still the highest return change I have ever made to how I work.
Matthew Kavanagh
Kavanagh Injury Law, P.C.
9465 Counselors Row, Suite 200, Indianapolis, IN 46240
Delivered November 7, 2023 to the Indiana Trial Lawyers Association, 59th Annual Institute, Indiana Convention Center.