Gar Keller's and Jay Papasan's 2013 bestseller, "The ONE Thing" continues to catch readers' attention this time of year. Subtitled "The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results" draws in professionals who (like most) spend the last week of the year contemplating how to make their work - and thus their lives - better in the coming year.
The premise of the book is fairly simple - whatever you are doing, you should look for the single thing that, if done, will improve everything else. It argues that identifying one primary target allows you to focus on making an improvement that will disproportionately impact the rest of your work.
While this is an obvious truth, people who seek to implement it often face two problems: identifying the one thing and executing a plan to improve it.
Identifying The Thing
Identifying one thing that will change your life, work, etc. isn't hard because we cannot identify a need. With a little free time, every attorney can come up with a list of things that would improve their work. Increased staff training, increased staff, more standardized forms, increased budget, better scheduling practices, etc. The list is long.
However, when we drill down to decide which one thing can impact everything else in our work, it is hard to argue against the incredible value of automation in the practice of law. Whether it is creating a checklist of steps for a paralegal to follow for uniform process or automated documents that prepare large portions of our pleadings and other legal instruments, automation offers lawyers fewer errors, faster results, and better client outcomes; all while saving us precious time.
With that said, it is important that we remember that automation does not stand between us and our clients as a cold and disconnected process machine. Instead, it makes parts of our practice move quickly and seamlessly so that we can be MORE focused on our clients, and do the work we enjoy doing - thinking, communicating, and working with the people we serve - rather than spending all of our time grinding in the minutia of our work.
Execution
The "ONE Thing" of automation may become the obvious choice to a practitioner, but executing the vision is a very different concern. As soon as we think of automation in the legal world eyes glaze over as we think about trying to decipher the options for automated document preparation platforms, new office management applications, and other technology that is well beyond our comfort level.
The good news is that there are people for that. There is a world of professionals who know how to do these things and have a mission of helping legal professionals add them to our practices.
Obviously, there is an entire segment of consultants whose work is focused on helping law firms add systems to improve their practices. There are also a number of turnkey options that will quickly have a positive impact on your work. This is the intention of EstateAssist.
For years, Ohio attorneys and paralegals have cobbled together a patchwork of tools to handle their probate work. Using old and outdated software, updated pdf forms from court web sites, Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, and even paper check registers, we bounce back and forth trying to get our work done. In doing so, we waste valuable time and energy, and increase the likelihood of errors that accompany hundreds of instrument transitions each day. Maybe worse, we are retyping the same information over and over.
It is an absurd design - especially in an area of our practices that is 1) more able than most to be systematized and automated, and 2) often billed at a flat rate, making efficiency an immediate gain to our firms.
EstateAssist exists to bring an end this inefficient mess and save you and your staff time and money. It is a cloud-based app designed to hold, track, and automate all of your probate work. With the goal of entering everything only once, it will hold your interested persons and their contact information, your estate account register, your receipts and disbursements, your case notes, and your tasks. More importantly, it will take your data and automatically prepare all of your pleadings on both standard state forms and local probate court forms.
If you practice probate law, or want to start, EstateAssist is the "one thing" that will change your work in 2024.
Sign up today to start saving time and money.
Want to learn more? Visit our Youtube channel at EstateAssist - YouTube.
Questions? Feel free to email us at support@estateassist.app.
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