VAMPIRES! 
By CHAKWIN

It seems only reasonable at a time of year when Spring is coming and Halloween is as far away as it can be to write about terrifying monsters, the vampires that can devour your practice and your life. Turn the lights up, get the garlic out, and read on...

One of the many hats I wear is that of a kind of legal mercenary - I try cases and do depositions and appeals for other lawyers and law firms. This has given me some very interesting looks into many legal practices and introduced me to the spooky world of legal vampires. The vampires that I am about to write about are found in personal injury practices where payment for legal services is based on a contingent fee, but make no mistake, they have relatives in every form of legal practice and, as we shall see, elsewhere.

More often than it pleases me to say, I have been asked to try a case, taken the file apart, looked through many records, medical or technical literature, and found that there is no "there" there - that this case has survived for years with no viable theory of liability or with no hope for a meaningful recovery. During its lifespan, it has devoured time (for preparation of pleadings, court appearances, depositions, etc.), money (the cost of depositions, medical and other records, court fees, various incidental expenses), shelf space, and - worst of all - attention. And while this shadowy never-alive, not-dead, nightmare of a non-case has waited to be recognized as the imaginary being that it is, it has sucked time, attention, and money-the lifeblood of cases - away from other, perfectly viable, cases that are living in a state of anemia and trying to hold out long enough to mature and pay off. Perhaps worse, it has created a corresponding phantom of eventual vindication in the mind of a client who is unlikely to be pleased to learn that the lawsuit which has occupied at least part of his mind for years has no merit, never had, and was a complete waste of time.

Sometimes I speak to the lawyers who asked me to take on these vampire cases and I find, over and over again, that there are two processes that created them: a failure to see them for what they were early on and a failure to set up a process to see them and act on them after the initial intake.

The first is easier to understand: a busy or naive practitioner may not make the time to screen every case carefully at intake - liability may be tenuous but huge damages make a case attractive; a plaintiff may be an exceptionally sympathetic person; the case may come with the promise of other, better referrals; the lawyer may not have the money for an early expert review; the facts on which the lawyer relied in taking the case may have been distorted, and so on. So it is that the vampire glides into the house.

The second is the more serious problem. Once the case has come to live in the practice and demands its "fair" share of the nourishing time, attention, and money that the practice must provide for the cases, it has to be looked at carefully to make sure that it is a real, true case, not a hungry phantom because what it devours is not an investment, but a simple waste, and the true cost of the waste is not just the nominal value of the investment in the phantom case, but also the opportunity cost of losing the irreplaceable time and attention that the phantom stole from the real cases.

The lesson from this is stark and simple. If you are in this type of practice and do not make it your business to know what kind of cases you have and whether or not they are true cases, you are living with the risk that they will eventually devour your real cases, your practice, and, finally, you as a professional.

Since this column is not a column about contingency fee practice management, the thinking doesn't stop here. If your practice is an hourly billing practice, you may look on the above with an indulgent smile and express relief that this couldn't happen in your practice. Well, maybe it could and maybe the consequences could be equally unpleasant. Imagine representing a client on an hourly fee basis for a couple of years in a litigation and then having to tell him that the case has to be settled on the eve of trial because there is no claim/defense. Would it surprise you if the client wanted to know what he had been paying you to do for the past several months or years when, if there was no legal merit to the matter it should have never been brought or should have been settled ages ago? Every practice has some version of this scenario.

So does every life. Is part of you still hurt about a parent who ignored you or beat you as a child? Is part of you trying to prove that the popular kids in high school made a mistake when they made you part of the outer circle instead of the inner circle? Are you letting people who don't have your best interests at heart make decisions for you that you should be making for yourself? Are you dealing with an addiction? Is there something keeping you from taking care of yourself as you know you should?

accommodation in StockholmIn a recent column, I wrote about a system of self management that includes a weekly review of all of your outstanding projects. Such a system applied with true attention to a legal practice would stake the vampires in short order. If you followed my suggestion and tried this out for a few weeks, you will have learned this and, I hope for your sake, become an enthusiastic convert.

If you have taken this step, it is time for you to consider the next level of surveillance and insight into the world in which you live: in addition to the projects in your work and the projects in your life (one list, remember?), consider expanding the list to include the projects of your self: ask yourself each week about times when you felt powerless, times when you felt drained by another person or situation, times when you felt out of control of an important part of your life. You can reclaim this power, as we will discuss in future columns. For now, the best thing to do is to become aware of the process of losing it and to see what insights this awareness brings.

Here's a reminder and update: My columns on organizing paper and organizing yourself around things that must be done were based on the work of David Allen. David's book, Getting Things Done, has just been published and is available through the major on-line and brick-and-mortar booksellers as well as through his website, Davidco.com . The book is a superb exposition of his powerful and sensible approach to the problems of getting things done without going crazy: it is lucid and personable and, as a welcome bonus, beautifully designed. I recommend it without reservation. In fact, I think that any busy person would be foolish not to invest the few dollars and few hours required to buy and read it and to integrate its solid wisdom into his life.

- CHAKWIN