New Lawyer’s Guide to Avoiding Mistakes: The Vacation of Least Disruption
*Kelsey A. Barnes
Vacation time for lawyers is both critical to our well-being and unfortunately, disruptive. Young lawyers at our firm often struggle with how to plan their vacation time, deciding how available to be during vacation, and how to adequately prepare their files for their vacation. If taking vacation as a young lawyer is making you nervous, consider some of the below practical tips for taking vacation time and ensuring that there is adequate coverage for your legal practice while you are away.
Strategically plan your vacation time
While easier said than done, scheduling your vacation time away several months in advance (or even earlier) and during a time when you are generally less busy can largely reduce the stress and disruption that results from being away.
A lawyer’s busy period will vary based on their specific practice areas, so reach out to more senior lawyers if you are not sure when would be a less busy time of year to try to take your vacation time.
Blocking off your vacation time in your calendar in advance will help you avoid having Court or time-consuming matters scheduled while you are away. As a young lawyer, having your vacation time scheduled in advance will help you determine what work you can take on prior to your vacation. and whether you may need to respectfully decline certain work.
Try to ensure that you do not have any appearances, important meetings, or closings immediately after your vacation. Travel is often unpredictable, so try to schedule yourself an extra day or two to catch up on your emails, prioritize your work, and provide some wiggle room for unexpected travel delays.
Arrange for back-up on any active files
If you are the lead lawyer on an active file, you will need to ensure there is another lawyer available to jump in and assist while you are away. It is important to brief the lawyer on what may come up while you are away and how you think it could be handled if you are unavailable. As a young lawyer, you can take comfort in the fact that another lawyer should likely be able to assist on matters that come up while you are away if you provide them with the necessary background before your vacation.
Your assistant can also help navigate client matters while you are on vacation. Consider having outgoing emails forwarded to your assistant during your vacation so they can alert another lawyer to anything unexpected or high priority that comes in while you are gone.
Communicate your vacation time and boundaries
Communicating your vacation time to your clients, staff, and any covering lawyers in advance will generally reduce the likelihood of issues arising while you are away. It is important to let more active clients know when you will be away and who they can contact for assistance, if needed, during that time. Internally, the lawyers you work closely with and your assistant should all be aware that you are away and they may need to provide back-up support until you are back in the office.
You should ensure that you set an out of office reply for both internal and external emails and phone calls that are received in your absence indicating when you will be returning and who can be contacted in your absence for general inquiries.
If you do not intend to respond to emails or voicemails while you are away, include that in your out of office message and stick to it as much as possible. Once you become involved in communicating, clients and lawyers will expect that you continue to do so while you are away.
Decide whether to take a laptop or other work with you in advance
Your workplace may have a policy or procedure regarding taking your work computer or other work with you on vacation. Generally, this involves some security risk to the workplace and your duty of confidentiality to your clients. Therefore, strongly consider whether taking a work computer or other work with you on vacation is necessary and reach out to your IT support to ensure that all security concerns can be addressed if you are going out of country.
Vacationing is hard work. Adequately preparing for your vacation can assist you in actually enjoying your vacation and reducing any disruption to your ongoing work obligations. While the guidance in this article may seem onerous, it is important to properly plan for your vacation in order to reduce the risk of client matters being left unattended while you are away and to reduce your stress while vacationing.
* Kelsey A. Barnes is an associate lawyer at McKercher LLP who maintains a practice in insurance and corporate/commercial litigation, estate planning and estate administration.
This post is for information purposes only and should not be taken as legal opinions on any specific facts or circumstances. Counsel should be consulted concerning your own situation and any specific legal questions you may have.