In this episode of Classroom to Courtroom Podcast, we tackle the fresh attorney's dilemma: transitioning from law school to effective practice without prior experience. Discover The Success Cycle a three-part strategy designed to make practicing law both effective and enjoyable. 

Join us to learn how to create your To-Do List, execute tasks proficiently, and bill efficiently, setting you up for a successful career in law. Perfect for new lawyers and law students aiming to smooth their path into the professional world. Tune in!

Scott Benton: Hi, everyone. It's Scott Benton, I'm the host of the Classroom to Courtroom podcast. How are you? This is a podcast where we are talking about the transition from going from law school into your professional career into a law firm, going from the classroom to the courtroom, so to speak. And everything that it takes in between those two stages, something that we believe law schools don't teach you.

And it's something that law firms really aren't in the business of teaching you.

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In this case, how are you going to solve your Catch-22 dilemma that you're in when you've just graduated law school? You've passed the bar, you have your ticket as a practicing attorney but you've never worked as an attorney before. And one of the issues that you're going to confront is, how exactly to practice as an attorney? How are you going to practice as an attorney, given that you've never actually done that before. Or Maybe you've been a clerk at a law firm or you've been a summer associate somewhere but you haven't really been given a stack of cases for what you're responsible for because you're not an attorney, generally in those situations.

But, there is going to come a point where you're the attorney. That's what this is all for, right? You're going to law school, you're studying for the bar, you're passing the bar and now you are applying for jobs in law firms. Now, there's a thing that happens a lot of times when people who are looking for their next legal job or their first time position as an attorney is, they go into these interviews and they'll say to the interviewer that, I need training. That comes up all of the time. And the truth is that you need to know how to practice as an attorney before you get that first job. But, in that Catch-22 scenario, you don't necessarily have that experience. No one's really taught that to you before, so we need to know how to go and get that information.

Now, what is The Success Cycle? It is a three part process that you are going to use that sort of overlays every single activity that you do on a case as you are working on cases as an attorney. Now, you're obviously going to do this as well. If you're a law clerk, if you haven't gotten your bar results back yet or maybe you're doing a summer internship or something like that. But basically, there are three parts to the work that you're doing and it is contained in The Success Cycle. And the three parts of The Success Cycle are this.

So, you finish a task and you immediately go into MyCase or whatever platform your firm is using. In order to bill clients and record time and you're going to go into MyCase, for instance and you're going to record the time for the tasks that you just completed. Okay? So that's it, that's the whole thing, it's very simplified. The Success Cycle is going to speed up your efficiency. It's going to make you good at what you do. Because, once you've built for that time and you've learned how to write your time entries and that's a whole other level. podcast subject that we're going to get into at a later time. How to write your billing entries so that your clients understand them.

I mean, They know that you're going to require training. They already have that assumption. It doesn't need to be stated because, every law firm has its own systems. A business, remember, is just a system of systems. So you need to learn those systems and from law firm to law firm, those systems are going to be vastly, vastly different. So yes, they're going to provide you training. That's a given. You don't need to make that statement and you don't need to feel like, because it's your first attorney job that you're not going to know how to work as an attorney. Yes, you didn't get trained and how to do that during law school or while you were training for the bar.

Their problem that they're trying to solve is, having people come in to deliver those high quality legal services and that's exactly what you're going to do. And how are you going to do it? You're going to do it with them. The Success Cycle. Very, Very simple, it's going to make your job fun and enjoyable and it's going to make you efficient. It's going to make you get up to speed very, very quickly. Because, what are you going to do? You're going to do three steps. You're going to do number one, you're going to get your case, you're going to figure out where the case is and you're going to put together your To-Do List. Once your To-Do List is done, you're going to start to deliver those legal services.

And that's exactly what these podcast episodes on Classroom to Courtroom are going to discuss. They're going to talk about some nuance or some variation of those three steps. Sometimes, it's going to be a broad overview of just practicing law, sort of a 30,000 foot view of The Success Cycle, that kind of thing.

But for the most part, we're going to go deep down the rabbit hole on each of these steps and we're going to discuss every little component that we can possibly discuss. Where it comes to To-Do Lists, performing your tasks as an attorney and delivering and rendering high quality legal services and then billing for those services.

So don't forget to share, like and subscribe. And we hope you'll join us next time on our next episode of Classroom to Courtroom. And in the meantime, we hope that you'll join us for making the world a better place. One client at a time. Thanks so much, take care.