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While it may not always be possible to completely detach from one’s work, there are ways to better manage client needs to set boundaries for communication, says Elias Tabchouri.
In the age of coronavirus, whereby most lawyers are working from home and/or doing court appearances virtually, it is critical to ensure emotional and intellectual separation between work time and downtime, even if this is not always physically possible to distinguish between those spaces.
In a recent episode of The Boutique Lawyer Show, Mr Tabchouri – who is the principal of Macquarie Law Group – said that there are “little things” that one can do train one’s clients to respect boundaries.
“You do have to actually train your clients, otherwise it can be all-engulfing. Running a law firm, running their own business, it takes over your life, and you can’t let it do that,” he warned.
“There’s no magic bullet here: it’s about managing it so that it can be as good as it can be. The first thing I did – and it was the best thing I ever did – was changing my voicemail. I got rid of the voicemail that said, ‘Hi, it’s Elias Tabchouri, please leave a message and I’ll get back to you’. I decided that was crazy because I’ve been left with all these voicemail messages and so you have to go through them and then you have to return all the calls and then, a lot of the time, you’d return a call and it’s nothing, it’s something that you could have dealt with very quickly.
“What I learned was to leave a message saying, ‘Hi, it’s Elias Tabchouri, sorry I can’t get to your call, please send me an SMS message’. Now, if someone rings you on a mobile phone, you can slip up a bar with messages like, ‘Sorry, I’m in court, please SMS me’. ‘Sorry, I’m in a conference, please SMS me’, or even ‘Sorry, I’m with my family, please SMS me’.”
Clients can be trained, Mr Tabchouri stressed, into realising that perhaps their query is not as urgent as they thought, and such conversations can be conducted in written form rather than verbally.
“You start to train your clients to say, ‘You know what? I don’t need to speak to Elias all the time, I can SMS him with a query and he gets back to me straight away and that’s great, and that thing is done’,” he said.
“This allows me to resolve an issue and still have time with my family. It’s almost intellectually dishonest for me to say to you that you can just switch off and turn back on to the next morning. It just doesn’t happen like that, it just can’t.
“However, he added, you can create boundaries which make it easier to manage.”
In the same episode, Mr Tabchouri argued that in order to create a successful business, boutique law firm leaders have to be at the coalface and do the hard yards.
To listen to the full episode with Elias Tabchouri, click below:
Jerome Doraisamy is the managing editor of Lawyers Weekly and HR Leader. He is also the author of The Wellness Doctrines book series, an admitted solicitor in New South Wales, and a board director of the Minds Count Foundation.
You can email Jerome at:
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Jerome Doraisamy
