Goal Planning for the New Year

As the new year approaches, my friend, Allison Shields of LegalEase Consulting, has a great post about setting goals for the new year. (For the record, I think Allison is a great consultant and those of you looking for a consultant, especially those in New York, should talk to her.)

Allison's premise is that you should choose three goals and try to accomplish those during the next year. As Allison said, "After all, with practicing law, do you really need more than three projects or tasks to focus on in a year? " Which then leads to the obvious question, how do you choose three goals?

Here is how I come up with my goals, in a step by step plan:

1. Write down everything I would hope to accomplish during the course of the year. And, I do mean everything. This is a brain storming session.
2. Put each goal into an area. In other words, some goals are marketing goals, others are legal skills, some might be staff development, and some might be financial.
3. Within each category, put the goals in order of importance.
4. Review the top two or three goals in each category and then put those into an order to accomplish them.

Let me give you an example. For me, my goals might be the following:

• increase referrals from source A
• improve voir dire
• improve brief writing
• publish two articles
• Improve collection of receivables

You get the idea. I then break them down into categories. So, getting referrals and publication are marketing; voir dire and brief writing are trial skills; collection of receivables is financial. Within these, I might decide that publication is more important that improving referrals and that voir dire is more important than trial skills. But, my final ranking would probably be:

1. Improve brief writing (after all, a good brief may avoid trial!)
2. Improve voir dire (this gets me better results!)
3. Publish articles
4. Improve collections
5. Improve referrals

So, even though I want to publish articles, I understand that this goal is behind my trial skills goal. I believe that this method allows you greater flexibility, and greater understanding of your needs. This, in turn, allows you to set goals to help your firm!

------Jonathan

Comments

[Allison Shields]

Jonathan-

Brainstorming is a great way to get going on goal-setting or determining what your intentions are for the upcoming year (or any time, for that matter).

Once you come up with those goals, it can help to explore the feelings associated with each goal - your reactions to those goals or intentions can help you determine which are the most 'important' or which ones get you the most motivated (and therefore are likely to produce better or faster results).

Envisioning the specific outcome from each goal or intention is also a good tool for determining the priority of goals, as well as a way to measure whether you've accomplished them.

Finally, sometimes goals can be linked together - for example, one of your goals is to improve your brief writing. Improving your writing will also help you with goal #3, publishing articles. And if you have an interesting issue to brief, you might be able to turn that brief into an article with relative ease.

Allison