Organization

As a Legal Office Assistant, you have to be on top of both your own work and the output of
the rest of the office. Even for the most seasoned office managers, this can be a tall order,
especially during those stressful days when you seem to be putting out fires left and right. But
with a few simple techniques, you’ll find those days will become less and less frequent,
giving you the chance to breathe between tasks. Use these six office management tips to stay
on top of everything you need to do:

1. Organize your workspace

Before you organize anything else in the office, first you must organize your own space. It’s
simple, but it’s powerful, especially once you’ve wrangled all your pens and paper clips and
relegated papers to a neat pile or two. You’ll notice that you can find everything, be it a
spreadsheet or a stapler, much easier, which will increase the time you have for getting the
important things done. This goes for your desktop as well—make sure each of your folders,
documents, and photos have a clearly defined home to avoid any confusion down the line.

2. Tackle your inbox

Cleaning up your email is a bit like eating broccoli: If you’re new to it, you’ll probably loathe
it at first. But then one day it becomes a little more enjoyable, and before long you find
yourself craving it. Give yourself a bit of time during the day to set up your inbox for success.
Use labels to easily sort messages, unsubscribe from any mass emails you might receive, and
get rid of old emails that just act as clutter. Once you lay the groundwork, it’s easy to keep
your inbox squeaky clean and, more importantly, efficient. You’ll never miss an important
email again.

3. Rethink reminders

Everyone in an office environment needs reminders every once in a while, but at a certain
point, they stop being helpful. A survey conducted by Udemy found that nearly 3 out of 4
workers (70 percent) admit they feel distracted while they’re working, with 16 percent
reporting that they're almost always distracted.

If your desk is plastered in fluorescent sticky notes, you’ll stop seeing them and eventually
lose track of what you need to do. If your phone buzzes every five minutes with a new
reminder, you’ll learn to tune them out over time. The best way to get around this is to
employ these tools sparingly. Use sticky notes for only the most important daily reminders or
notes, then get rid of them once they’ve done their job. Set a few reminders on your phone,
but relegate the rest of your long-term duties to your calendar. In moderation, they’re much
harder to ignore.
4. Establish clear communication

The cornerstone of a legal office assistant organization in any environment is communication

in all of its forms. Make sure your co-workers know how to get in touch with you, whether
it’s via your newly cleaned email, a private chat on Slack, or even just chatting face-to-face at
your desk. Check in with everyone individually or at a team meeting to let them know how to
best reach you during the day. While you won’t always be able to help with everything they
might need right away, streamlining this process will lead to more structured and better
communication down the line, which can completely change the tone of a workplace.

5. Outline your expectations

As much as you might want to sometimes, there’s no way you can do everything in the
office. But by establishing clear responsibilities, goals, and deadlines, you’ll still be able to
keep tabs on each task like you’re doing them yourself. Create a master calendar of goals and
share it with the entire office. Set up individual meetings to make sure everyone is on track to
meet their expectations. By delegating work and making sure that everyone is doing their
part, complicated tasks will only become easier to plan and accomplish.

6. Standardize your workday

It can seem like no two days are the same for office managers, but a huge part of office
organization is learning to make your days as uniform as possible. Set aside the same time
each day for certain tasks, whether it’s 15 minutes for catching up on emails, half an hour for
meeting with individuals, or a few hours for ongoing projects. Eat lunch and take breaks
around the same time each day. The goal is to train your brain to focus on the right thing at
the right time, which will improve your time management and prepare you to conquer the
work ahead of you.

Improve your office’s workflow with these 6 easy, effective methods:

1. Organize your workspace

2. Tackle your inbox

3. Rethink reminders

4. Establish clear communication

5. Outline your expectations

6. Standardize your workday

Filing
Learning how to organize office filing systems is crucial for any business that handles a lot of
invoices, receipts, and other documents. Paperless offices sound great, but the reality is that
many small businesses still need to store easily retrievable paper documents.

It's important to know what files are most important, who needs to access them, and how they
can be retrieved easily and efficiently.

Factors to consider when determining the most appropriate Filing System.

(1) Assess personal and office habits: Think about which employees need access to files,
where they work, and what will make the most sense based on their work stations. If
you are the person who is most in need of access to papers, think about how you use
your workstation. If that filing cabinet to your right instinctively makes sense, that's
probably a good starting point. If it is someone else, get their input—what works for
one person won't always work for another.

(2) Decide on a filing system: What you do as a business will determine, to a certain
extent, whether you choose to file numerically, alphabetically, or some other way. o
you file paperwork by category, such as expenses, financial, marketing, etc.? This is a
critical step, as it will determine how you will lay out your filing system. Do this
before you buy anything for your filing system.

(3) Calculate storage needs: If you have a large number of files that you access daily, they
should be at your fingertips. If you access them less frequently, you might not need
them at your workspace, but you still might need them close by. There may be a
combination. Some files might be needed daily while others can be filed in long-term
storage further away. Allow for growth when looking at filing cabinets—buy
something to accommodate twice the files you think you will have now. This will
limit the number of times you will have to reorganize your filing system.

(4) Invest in a good labeling system: Being able to read file labels sounds obvious, but
clarity in labeling will save you more filing time than you can imagine. Most
companies who make labels provide templates that integrate with the most popular
word processing software. You may want to consider one of the small label-making
systems that also can print out individual mailing labels. Items that perform double
duty are usually a wise investment.
 (5) Purchase file folders: The best investment is to purchase colored hanging folders with
plastic label tabs and plain manila file folders. Colored hanging folders are easily
available and easily recognizable. For example, if you put all of your client files in
yellow hanging folders, financial information in blue folders, and anything related to
marketing in red folders, you easily can see roughly where you should be searching
for a particular file.

(6) Simple Is Best

The KISS principle—Keep It Simple, Sweetheart!—applies to setting up a filing system that

is easy to use and easy to grow with. Broad subject categories will allow you to easily add
new files as you grow and will eliminate the need to upgrade or reorganize your filing system
regularly.

Keeping it simple also will make it easier to integrate your paper and digital files as part of
your overall document management system.

(7) Going Paperless

If you are trying to green your business and make the shift to a "paperless office" you can
scan expense receipts and store them with your other digital accounting information. Some
cloud-based accounting software applications facilitate this by having mobile apps that allow
you to take a mobile phone snap of an expense receipt and record it on the fly.
Types of Filing
Quick access to your important business records increases productivity and can also help you
survive a tax audit. Two of the most important considerations for designing a file cabinet
system for documents are your daily and long-term information needs. However, your
document filing system should not be so complicated that no one if your office can use it
properly.

Alphabetical Filing System

Filing your documents alphabetically is a simple and time-proven system. The name of each
file folder corresponds to the name of each document. Many businesses use hanging file
folders with tabs or sturdy preprinted file drawer dividers to separate the folders under each
alphabetical heading. One drawback of an alphabetical system is that it is often necessary to
have an index to keep track of a large number of documents.

Category Filing System

Use your business divisions and functions as the foundation for a category filing system.
Consider starting with four or five main functions, such as personnel, finance, administration,
marketing and customer data. With a categorical system, you can include sub-topics such as
current personnel and inactive personnel. You might subdivide your finance category into
expenses and income, or receivables and payments.

Date-Based Filing System

Filing your documents by date lets you find information created at a specific time. Yearly file
sections are the foundation of a date-based filing system, and each month of the year is a
subsection of this system. With this method, businesses commonly keep the newest files in
the front of both the yearly section and the monthly sections. When you use this system, you
must establish a system to track which documents correspond to what month and year.

Numerical Filing System

Businesses that mainly generate numbered documents, such as invoices, often create a
numerical filing system that stores files using the assigned document numbers. With this file
system, a crucial element is labeling each file cabinet drawer with the sequence of numbers it
contains. This system might also require an index for quick access.

Combining Multiple Filing Systems

The common drawbacks of simple alphabetical, chronological or categorical filing system

might hamper retrieval of your documents. To achieve the desired efficiency, businesses
often combine elements of two or more filing systems. You can improve a categorical system
by creating alphabetical or date subsections. Subtopics or categories that fit the main
functions of your business might improve the efficiency of a chronological filing system.
Steps to Filing
Fixing The Problem

What causes the downfall of a filing system? Chances are it wasn’t much of a ―system‖ to
begin with. More likely, it was just a random assortment of individual files that really had no
connection to each other.To create a truly effective filing system, you need to start with a
plan. Simply slapping a label on a folder won’t cut it.

Creating File Categories

Look at your current filing system (or that pile of paper that you’ve been meaning to file for
months) and start sorting your documents into broad categories. ―Finances‖ might be one;
―Deeds‖ could be another. At this point, we’re not focusing on the detail of your filing
system. Quite frankly it doesn’t matter if it’s a credit card bill or a bank statement right now.
We’ll worry about those distinctions later on.

Subcategorizing

Pick one of your ―major category‖ piles and let’s sort through it again. This time, think about
breaking your paper into smaller subcategories. For example, your ―Deeds‖ pile could be
divided into:

Deed of Conveyance

Deed of Assent

Deed of Assignment

Be specific; don’t just say that they are ―Deeds‖. Determine which account they belong to
and break each out into a separate pile. We don’t want any files ―bunking‖ with other files –
everyone gets his or her own separate folder.

Color Coding

Each major category of paperwork should be assigned a different color (your choice) – and
then we’re going to put each of its subcategories into an individual hanging file folder. In the
example above, ―finances‖ might be green, and each of your accounts gets a separate green
file folder. It seems like a small thing, but color-coding your system will save you a huge
amount of time in filing and retrieving papers.

Being able to look in your file drawer and see distinct bodies of information broken out by
color just makes SENSE to your brain. When you know that your financial section is green,
your house section is blue and your car papers are in red, you don’t even have to think
because your hand just naturally goes to the right part of your file drawer.

Label Making

Now that everyone has their own colored folder, we need to label each file. When creating
your labels, move from general to specific. Your goal is to keep related files in close
proximity to each other. Do this again and again for every grouping of files until you have
labeled every file in each major category.

Filling Your Drawer

All you have to do now is put the files within each major category in alphabetical order, and
then put the major categories themselves into the drawer in alphabetical order.Place the
colored folders in hanging box bottom folders to keep them upright in the drawer. The 2/5 cut
tabs show above the hanging files, and the tabs are in a straight line for easy reading.

Whenever you need to find a document or put something in a folder, just look first for the
correct major category (easily identified by both the labels and the color). With the right
filing system it’s easy to put your hands on the correct file without a lot of searching.

N.B.

Regardless of which system you implement, consider creating an archived documents area to
separate current and frequently used documents from those you are retaining for reference.
For business security and disaster recovery, you might also want to keep the originals of
important legal, contract, and tax documents in a secure offsite storage facility. To facilitate
quick reference, scan these documents. Restrict unauthorized access to your digital versions
with passwords and encryption.