Speaker 1: Hi everyone, my name is Nate Law from CoachLaw.biz and I want to talk to you today about what I've learned in being effective with my use of tasks in Clio. Like and subscribe to learn more about running your small law firm effectively. Now let's jump into how we can use tasks in Clio to make our lives all a little bit easier. Now a word of caution before we get started. Anytime you're using new technology or some new facet of technology, use it sparingly at first to use it effectively. Don't just implement everything all at once. Follow through with using that new technology several times effectively in one case or matter or with one client before you start implementing to everything else. You're going to find a lot more success when you do it that way. All right, let's go. So the first question you're going to ask is, is this a task for myself or is this a task for others that I'm delegating? If it's just a task for yourself then it's pretty easy because you set the parameters. You know what types of things you like to use to set tasks for and so it's pretty simple. So we're in Clio manage right now and here we are in tasks and we're going to take a look at just a task that we've made for ourselves as a law firm owner. Maybe it's pay bills. So right now we've already created this one but we'll create another one just to show you what that looks like. So you go over here to new task, type in whatever the new task name is going to be and you can give it a priority. Be sparingly with how you do that. Type in the description. You can assign it to yourself. That's what we're doing on this example. You can create a type or assign it a type. So these are just pre-made. So Clio comes with several different kinds of task types that you can assign. You don't have to assign it. Sometimes it helps if you want to assign or if you want to search later then you can assign it to a category and then that way the filter allows you to search through certain task types if you're working on that. But that's a more advanced thing that you can utilize as you go on and decide what you need. The task status, just leave that pending for right now when you start out. Once you start making steps on it or you know use it for other people in your office you can kind of change that as it goes. For tasks for myself I may or may not include the time estimate. Not really necessary if you know already how long it takes you to pay monthly bills for instance. So then because it's kind of a task for myself more on the business side as the owner or as an administrative person putting on that admin hat I'm not going to assign it to a matter and I'm going to select a due date and maybe it's you know the first or the end of the month and so we can assign it that date, save task, and you're done. And that's going to immediately show up here but you see the one we just created is showing up at the bottom because it's showing up by due date. You can also you know change that and have you know have it organized a different way but that's how it's going to show up there. And then also you've got a completed tab up here so here's the outstanding. These are going to turn red if you go past that date so after May 9th. If I don't follow up on this one thing that I want to follow up on it's going to turn red and then you're also going to be able to filter and search for that there. On the other hand if it's something for others, someone on your team, someone else within your firm, then you've got to have a sense of how they get notified of that, what that looks like, and where the follow-up is going to come from. So that's the part that complicates this more and where people get bogged down into just dumping this you know stuff into technology but then not following through and really understanding how the program works and how you and your team are going to use that together. Okay now let's go delegate a task. Let's create a new task for an assistant, a team member, and talk about some ways to make sure that that's going to be effective. So if we're going to send out a request to a legal assistant to get some discovery ready, we can enter certain directions here. We don't need to be specific for this. We need to make sure we assign it to that team member. And so we've picked our team member here. We're going to leave this as is. You can make it a private task and restrict visibility to anybody else. I'll give you some reasons why that's probably not going to be helpful. Now if we check the notify assignee, this is the assignee, when task is assigned it's going to show up in their notifications up here. And so one thing to keep in mind when we're delegating in tasks through Clio is how is our team member going to be notified? Are they going to pay attention? And what's the best way to make sure that they are paying attention? So when you're talking about communication in tasks in Clio, knowing what types of things are going to be assigned as a task is really important. Generally a rule that I use is that anything that needs to get done today or in the next 24 hours, I'm not going to make it a task. One, that's too much work. I'm going to do a quick email. There's something urgent. I'm going to get attention done. Usually tasks are going to be used as a project management system. You can use Asana or some other whole different program, but why do that when you've got Clio and it's robust enough and it's already connected to all of your cases and all of your people. So that's just my soapbox on that, but you need to make sure that you don't just create this task for this person and hope that it gets done on time. You want to be able to see some progress. You want to know that they've looked at it. So first of all, assigning them the notification so that pops up for them. Of course, notify me when the task is complete. I want to know when it's done. And again, task type is optional. Leave task as pending. Now, the other important thing is attaching it to a particular matter. So if we're going to pick test client here, Sarah test, we're going to pick a due date, all the usual things. Now, here's the other thing to keep in mind when you're working as a team and you may have multiple people working on the same matter. If you assign a task to a matter, that's good because when someone goes into that matter, they'll be able to look at the tasks associated that and see where things are and what the next step is. If you don't assign a particular matter, then it's only going to be this task. It's only going to be in this person, the assignees task list and nowhere else. So if another assistant or attorney needs to work on the case and come in and look at it and see, okay, where are we at on this case? You know, if someone is out on vacation or there's some emergency that pops up or something like that for a client and you're not available, or this person is not available, then you're going to miss out on is having, you know, that kind of progressive communication in there about where you're at on a particular tasks or what task or what still needs to happen on a case. You can put a time estimate in there. That's a little bit more important maybe for when you're delegating as opposed to making a task just for yourself. But once all of that info is in there, you're good to go. You save it. And again, that's going to show up on their task list. So this is my personal task list, not theirs, but it'll show up right there. It'll be organized by due date again, and you'll be good to go. So lastly, whether you use Clio or any other kind of software or case management system, calendaring system to make sure that you put all of your tasks that need to be done into a trusted bucket, whatever you use, I just wouldn't use it for things that are, you know, like I said, kind of in the 24 hour range or that need a quick turnaround. And I wouldn't use it for things that have to happen on a particular day, but anything in between those things, I would use it for that. And so if you want to see an example of what the task looks like in a particular matter, then we'll go into that matter. And up here, you can go to the tasks tab, and then you'll see the one that we just created. And again, this is a way that if this is made public, the task doesn't just show up in this person's or your task list. It shows up in the matter. So anybody can see what the status is. It's a great way to start working together as a team on things. You can also see the completed tasks in that matter. There's none right now. We just created the one, but you can see what's completed in that way. If someone is looking to see very quickly whether or not something's done so they don't have to do double work, they can check it. It's a great way to save time and make sure you're not doing double work. Just make sure that how the notifications is set up for you and your team members works and that you're going to pay attention to those reminders. And then that way you can not only get it done, but people can check on the progress of that and see where it's at and make sure that everything gets done exactly how it needs to be. Okay, now if you want to set up regular reminders for yourself, then the other thing to do in a task is to go down here and get into the reminders. And if you're somebody that pays more attention to email, great. You can send yourself an email reminder 10 minutes, three days before, however many you want. You can add as many of these reminders as you want. So depending on the task and its importance or how many steps that you've got within that task, you can set as many of those as you want. And so you can do that for whether it's for yourself or for someone else. And with that, another question that you need to ask is, are there email notifications turned on? So some people will get an email if they're assigned a task in Clio. So if they're assigned a task, then they'll get an email if their email notifications are turned on. But they have to make sure they do that. The other downside to this is if you don't have internal team members, but you only have contractors who do not have access to your Clio Manager, Clio Grow, then obviously the tasks are not the way to do it. You're going to have to do that via email or a shared calendar through Outlook, Google, whatever shared calendar or other shared software you have. So hopefully you can use this information on a Clio task to get some stuff outside of your brain and to be able to focus on your day-to-day important things without losing all of the important things that you've got to get done on your many cases. So good luck, implement this, and keep working to make your firm better. I'll see you next time.