Practical Tips To Reducing The Workload For Criminal Defense Attorneys: Defense Team Communication

Big firms have systems that they use to communicate information among many people. The largest criminal firm you regularly have experience with as a sole practitioner is the local district attorney’s office. You see the deputy DA regularly putting notes in his or her file – mostly digital notes. As defense attorneys, we have to communicate significant information efficiently to our criminal defense team. In many ADC appointments, for example, we have a paralegal, an investigator, and a social worker. Your team needs current information about court dates, discovery and your theory of the case communicated in a timely manner. As sole practitioners, we often do not have readily accessible systems to store and disseminate legal information.

There are some inexpensive steps you can take to duplicate information systems without a lot of additional effort. The first step is to figure out how you work. My preference has been to make written investigation requests for my investigator, written to do lists for my paralegal, and written instructions for the social worker. The writings, which are often just email messages, foster accountability (yours and theirs) and are easy to find, easy to update, and easy to review later to refresh my memory as well as my team’s. Moreover, the emails are saved on my server so I can collect them later for post-trial investigations and the like. That is why I prefer e-mails over texts.

One trick I have used is to label my written instructions with monikers so I can find them later. All my e-mails to the team have my client’s name in the subject. Additionally, I add “IRQ” to the subject line for investigation requests, “2DO” to the subject line for instructions to the paralegal, and “SWRQ” to my instructions to the social worker. These are monikers that are unlikely to be frequent in other e-mails. These monikers allow you to search by investigator e-mail address, client name, and IRQ to quickly find all the instructions you have given that particular investigator to do for that particular client.

You can take messages sent to you from a client, perhaps asking for a copy of certain discovery, quickly relabel the subject line as “2DO [client name] forward McIvoy report to client,” forward it to your paralegal, and assign the task with all the information the paralegal needs to get the work done. Later, you can search in your sent items for “2DO Michael Jones jen@coloradolawyers.net” and pull up all the assignments to Jen (my trusted paralegal) for Mr. Jones’ case. In Outlook, you can even set up rules so that your sent 2DO messages to a specific paralegal are placed in a separate folder so you can find and review them easily.

These monikers help your team. I regularly copy my employed paralegal (not an independent contractor) on all my professional messages. It allows her to have information she may need when a client calls or she covers something when I am in trial. My paralegal gets a lot of e-mails from me. The “2DO” moniker helps her sort the important messages – assignments she needs to pay attention to – from the hundreds of messages that that do not need attention.

The most important part of managing a criminal defense team is to have regular meetings. Video meetings are my preference because they take less of my team’s time. My paralegal and I try to have regular meetings every week to discuss deadlines and assignments. Meetings with investigators and social workers are less frequent and regular, but still need to occur. It is very empowering to your team to have regular meetings because they help shape your defense of your clients. These folks want to help you succeed and serve your clients. Take time to get items reviewed your team wants you to review. If you devote enough time, a video meeting can be more of a working session where you and your team members get a lot of work done collaboratively in a short time.

Sharing discovery is more hodge-podge for me. With some small cases, I just e-mail the entire discovery to the investigator. Larger cases require Google, DropBox or OneDrive sharing. You can share a limited amount of data on these services for free. Unfortunately, given the large variety of preferences your team may have – they are often independent contractors – you end up with paid accounts to multiple file sharing services. The largest cases require you to share on file share services and regularly update hard drives for other members of the defense. It is impractical to share 4TB of data on DropBox, for example.

Make sure you give some thought to the ethical issues that arise when you put discovery on DropBox or another cloud-based service. You are required to keep client files for specified periods under Colo. R.P.C. Rule 1.16A; sometimes indefinitely. If you put annotated discovery on a cloud server, do you have to keep that service forever? What about other work-product like investigator and social worker reports? My suggestion is that you keep work-product on your server and only share information with the cloud that you would not mind sharing with the government or a third party. These are the kinds of issues you should discuss with all your team.

A more comprehensive system I have been prototyping is to put digital notes into a OneNote notebook. You could easily keep notes in e-mails you make to yourself – hopefully with a moniker that allows you to find them later, perhaps “NOTZ.” E-mail notes to yourself can be copied to the members of your team that need them. One reason I shy away from e-mail, however, is that it seems all too easy to copy the wrong person.

OneNote has the advantage that it is a fairly wide-open platform that allows you to link contact information from Outlook, Word documents, .pdf, and other information. If I can get it perfected so it adds value to my practice, I will write another article on OneNote once I get that system perfected.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: ©Matt Werner. Matt represents a diverse set of clients who need a seasoned and hard-working trial attorney. He makes himself available 24 hours/day, seven days/week for his clients when they need urgent advice. You will find him to be a knowledgeable advocate for you. Matt has been with Alpern Myers Stuart LLC since 1998.