A Year-End Review & Refresh for 2022
Ready to hit that refresh button for 2022? In this episode, we talk about improving yourself as a trial lawyer by doing this year-end review to refresh and get better for 2022. Planning can be super exciting because it serves as a fresh start. You get to have a whole new fresh calendar and fill it up with fun things, make plans, and set intentions.
As you’re preparing for the new year, use this time to look at the trial schedule and case projections. Look at where cases will be in 2022 – how many will be ready for mediation and how many are ready for filing. Calculate the estimated expenses and schedule out those expenses.
Even if you took just a few minutes to look at what happened in 2021, this would still put you in a better position to get ready for 2022 to hit that refresh button. Go through your calendar, your memory bank, and your photographs to get more details as you’re setting new intentions for 2022. One fun thing about 2022 is that, in Chinese astrology, it’s the Year of the Tiger – and so, you either go big or go home.
In this episode, you will hear:
- The benefits of year-end review and planning
- A guide to doing your own year-end review
- Strategies for setting intentions and goals for 2022
- How to develop the not-so-easy habits
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Supporting Resources:
If you want to download a free habit tracker you can go here: https://jensincero.com/downloads/
Jen Sincero has a book on creating habits called Badass Habits – I highly recommend it!
If you want to learn more about Lexlee Overton check out her website: www.MindOverLaw.co
Episode Credits:
If you like this podcast and are thinking of creating your own, consider talking to my producer, Danny Ozment.
He helps thought leaders, influencers, executives, HR professionals, recruiters, lawyers, realtors, bloggers, coaches, and authors create, launch, and produce podcasts that grow their business and impact the world.
Find out more at https://emeraldcitypro.com
Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: [00:00:00] As we are about to jump into 2022, I want to take a quick departure from our usual content to talk about a great internal review you can do before starting a brand new year. So let’s look at it and get started.
Welcome to Trial Lawyer Prep. What if you could hang out with trial lawyers and jury consultants? Ask them about connecting with clients and juries more effectively. Then take strategies, tactics, and insights to increase your success. Each week, Elizabeth Larrick takes an in depth look at how to regain touch with the everyday world, understand the emotional burden of your clients and juries, and use focus groups in this process.
Elizabeth is an experienced trial lawyer, consultant, and founder of Larrick Law Firm in Austin, Texas.
Hello, hello and welcome. This is Elizabeth Larrick and you’re listening [00:01:00] to an episode of Trial Lawyer Prep. This podcast is designed and created to help trial lawyers. And today we are going to depart from our usual content of connecting with juries and clients. To talk about improving you as a trial lawyer in our businesses and as people.
So why the departure? Well, this episode is going to drop right before 2022 and I love year end planning. I mean, I really enjoy it. So I just thought, let’s do a little episode really quickly to pass along some of the things that I do as a year end review to refresh and get better for 2022. So here in planning for me, super exciting because it’s like a fresh start.
We get to have a whole new fresh calendar and fill it up with fun things, make plans, set intentions, looking at the trial schedule, what it’s going to be for trial, looking at case projections, where will cases be in 2022? How many will be ready for mediation? How [00:02:00] many will be ready to be filed?
Calculating, okay, well how much are those estimated expenses? And Looking at, all right, well, when will these things settle? All those things are really, really helpful for year end review and beginning planning so that you can look at those things and schedule out those expenses. But before we jump to making those amazing plans for 2022, we need to stop and do a year end review.
Now, this is not my idea. I was taught this idea by a mastermind that I was in with Lexlee Overton. Shout out to her. And it’s great. It’s fantastic. And so what we do is just look at, Hey, what happened in the past 12 months? So I take out my calendar, look through my phone and scroll through pictures, look through social media just to see, hey, what happened in the past 12 months?
And was it good? Was it positive? Was it bad? Was it negative? How did I handle it? Um, and I’m going to talk a little bit about what could be improved. What do we need to do? Just a big high five and a big party [00:03:00] about, because things turned out really, really well. One of those things that was a negative, but really not under anyone’s control was the snowmageddon that we had here in central Texas in February.
Truly a astronomical event. Never experienced anything like that here in central Texas. And definitely for me personally going a week without water or power and just thinking about for this coming week. Winter season, how can I prepare better for that for business wise? How do we operate if we don’t have any power and how do we put things in place to get ready if that happens, but also personally, how do you plan better?
Have water, have power, do those small things just to make sure you have a little bit of comfort while you’re surviving those things. Fantastic way to look at your struggles from this past year. And that’s something you need to work on. Or is it something you keep repeating? Sometimes we have struggles, or we have difficult moments, and they don’t repeat.
They’re [00:04:00] just one offs. Maybe you can look at, with the comfort of time, no, that’s an event that happened, it was really kind of stinky, but this is how I handled it, is that going to come up again for me? Or is that something that, okay, that’s just a one off, we can just move on? Or does it keep repeating and maybe I need to look at that and figure out how to improve handling that situation or working through it or whatever the issue may be.
For example, for me, bookkeeping, this is definitely going to be an intention for me for 2022, which is finding someone to help me with this piece of my business. It’s been something that’s been on my mind. It’s been on my plate. I’ve handled it, set time aside for it. And kind of did it along the way, but I really want to find someone who I can trust to do that for me and sit down and they can teach me more about what’s happening because I feel like if I have more information, I can make better decisions about case planning and case expenses.
Also, part of the year end review would be where was their success? [00:05:00] How can we get that to repeat? Maybe you had a lot of cases come in the door and maybe you’ve got a really great referral source that you need to high five and send them a gift. Or maybe you need to look at, was there a trial success and a verdict?
And how can you repeat that in your next trial setting? For me personally, it was doing trial work this past year with a couple of folks up in Tennessee and having a fun time, it being challenging and using all of my brain. How can I repeat that? Another area to look at for your review, which would be the general categories, finance, thinking about business wise, how can you do better?
What did you spend your money on? Really, not questions that we always look at as trial lawyers, but even if you don’t have your own business and you’re still associated or working up to your partner, it’s still really important to have that conscious thought about how much money is being spent on cases and how to do a [00:06:00] better job or how to save a little bit of money here and there.
It’s really important just to have that consciousness, to know what’s going on in the budget, to keep tracking. And there’s always ways that we can do things better without spending more money. Okay. Or, what I like to think of too is, okay, how can we rearrange things and spend money on stuff that would really help us improve?
And like I said, for example, mine is bookkeeping. I’m going to find someone to help me. I’ve got to make sure that I’ve got all that availability in my budget. Another area is just looking overall at the business. How did your business do? Did it grow? And maybe if you didn’t grow, but did you improve on something?
How your office executed something? Maybe it was customer service was Much better. Maybe you guys were able to draw more detail to the client journey and how they’re gonna travel through a case maybe you worked on getting reviews. All those things that you can look at to see how do we do and how we can set goals for next year.
The other categories that I like to look at are just personal. [00:07:00] Were there any personal changes? And then health. How was health overall? I know that being through a pandemic, health has come so much into the forefront of our conversations about how we view things because it is so fragile. And even though we are here, it’s December 2021, there’s still so much unknown and uncertainty, and we have to take it careful.
And if, if we don’t, People still have to quarantine and take time away and do testing. So that has really become something that I’m super grateful for. And also much more aware of, especially as we move into 2022. And again, if you don’t have practices or policies about what to do. For working remotely, highly suggest that you do that.
There are tons of resources online if you’re not really sure or hit up your local trial lawyers association, because I know there are people who have created processes and policies for how to help lawyers get through that time. Meaning if you have an employee that’s sick, or if you get sick and you have to work remotely for a period of time.[00:08:00]
All right. So after you’ve done your fantastic year in review, and again, you could spend 10 minutes doing this, just going through your calendar. You could spend an hour doing this, going through your calendar and your memory bank and your photographs. The more detail that you get into it, the better you may be for setting your new intentions for 2022, but that’s totally up to you.
I just encourage, even if you took just a few minutes to look at what happened in 2021, you’re still going to be in a. better position to get ready for 2022 to hit that refresh button. So let’s turn then for setting some intentions, setting maybe some goals and working backwards. If you’re here in December of 2021, how can we um, plan now backwards to get to where we want to be for 2022 December.
For me, one of my biggest intentions is going to be this podcast. Making sure that I give y’all the best content that I can to focus [00:09:00] on bringing in fantastic people for interviews and figuring out how to improve how to get the podcast out to more people, how to grow an email list, just really making sure that I’m doing the right thing.
The best job I can with this podcast, one fun thing about 2022, it is the year of the tiger in Chinese astrology. And so the year of the tiger is really go big or go home. And I love that. I always love having a little bit of a theme. And I think that’s so helpful because if you felt like maybe 2021, wasn’t really getting started and we had setbacks health wise and Delta variant that maybe 2022 is the time now is when it’s going to happen.
Well, Chinese astrology is here to support you. Might as well go big or go home. So whatever you decide to do, I always find that tracking helps us hit our intentions to hit our goals. You can use a weekly journal. Even if it’s a paper journal, there’s tons of apps that really help [00:10:00] you set reminders. I would also say that making your goal link to a habit that you already do.
For example, one of the things that I wanted to start doing a few years ago was, uh, I It’s a gratitude journal. So one of the things I was doing in the mornings was meditating. So now you know what, I’ll just meditate and then boom, gratitude journal right after that just already set the side, the time and good to go.
And it obviously has helped and worked because I’ve been doing it for several years now and don’t really have to think about it. It’s already second nature. Now, what about some other habits that are not so easy, like for me, bookkeeping. I have to set that on the calendar. I have to really make sure that I block time, uh, set time, set day, and I will sit down at Outlook and program the whole year.
Make sure that no matter what happens, that time is blocked out on my week and I’m definitely going to take care of that task. Because again, that’s not something that’s supernatural for me. I have to do it, otherwise I will ignore it. So I do encourage using Outlook or Calendar [00:11:00] Reminders, I should say, whatever calendar app that you use.
And one of the things too, with setting up extra time for depo prep, deposition prep could be when you’re preparing your client or when you are preparing to take a deposition. Every time I set a deposition, I make sure that when I put that on the calendar, I also set aside however much time I think I may need to get ready for that, even if it’s setting a time prep for the client, but also my prep time in there.
It’s an automatic. When I set my calendar up, I do that. When my assistant sets it up, it’s also the same thing. If you set this calendar, then you got to set another calendar date for preparation for that time. And that’s really going to help just get everybody in the process of spending a little more time to do our jobs a little bit better.
How can we improve on that time? Another great thing as far as looking at 2022 and business wise, talked a little earlier about looking at that trial schedule, looking at case projections, how many cases are going to be filed, how many are going to roll into needing a [00:12:00] mediation, and Going to the calendar and setting a deadline to do a focus group for opening, setting a deadline to focus group for jury selection to practice, or for those mediations, setting a deadline to do a focus group for the mediation presentation.
All those things that can be kind of set on the calendar to remind you to do it. Because once we get started with 2022, all the best laid plans, things can kind of shuffle out of order. And as long as it’s marked on the calendar for me, that means nothing else will go in that spot. So I’m a huge proponent of blocking time to make sure that I have time to do things.
Hopefully you have. Set some great intentions for 2022. I know that that’s what I’ll be doing during this week as we March into January 1st. I hope that you enjoyed it. Thank you again for listening. If you found this helpful, please share with a friend. Be sure to subscribe. Subscribe on your podcast app.
And when we be back in 2022, we’ll be jumping into some content to help you start off with the best [00:13:00] foot. We’ll be looking at what you should do as a trial lawyer to prepare for deposition preparation. And then also setting up a focus group plan, meaning, all right, if you’ve got a pretty large case, how do we set up two, three, maybe four focus groups and setting goals, but also what type should you do?
What are we leading up to? Maybe it’s trial, maybe it’s mediation, but tackling those two topics right off the bat in January, and then moving into some awesome interviews as well. So take care and happy new year.