Dec. 10, 2025 – Where do you reclaim time in a profession that never stops? What should you automate, delegate, or structure differently to protect your attention? And how can AI actually help without overwhelming you?

Fatimeh Pahlavan, an attorney with Ogden Glazer + Schaefer, offers a refreshingly humane roadmap for lawyers who feel stretched thin. Not by squeezing more into a day, but by designing a practice that protects your limited attention for the part of the job that matters most – your judgment.

“Your brain is not a storage system. Your brain is a processing tool,” says Pahlavan.

That reframing, especially for solo and small firm practitioners who wear multiple hats, is key to taking the necessary steps to restructure your practice, automate more processes, and free up more time for the work that matters most.

Structure as Care, Not Constraint

Pahlavan describes herself as someone who was once “very resistant to structure,” but now sees structure as a source of freedom. “I tend to find that freedom actually lies at the heart of structure.”

When lawyers create systems for predictable parts of their practice, they reduce the mental overhead sitting on their plate every day.

For example, responding to client inquiries often feels unique each time – but it doesn’t have to. Pahlavan notes that by creating processes and templates, she avoids having to “use my brain space to invent them afresh every time.”

This kind of advanced work – investing in reusable language, checklists, or response patterns – becomes a gift to your future self. It also yields “a higher output more consistently” with far less stress and far more predictability.

Protecting Attention for Judgment

An important consideration, says Pahlavan, is that technology only matters when it serves the core function of protecting a lawyer’s attention.

“It allows us to preserve the vast amount of our brain space to be occupied by more complex client queries and matters.”

Email, she says, is a major culprit where lawyers lose their time and attention. “It’s very common for attorneys to feel as if they live in their inbox,” she explains. By the end of the day, “you realize that you haven’t gotten to the work that you intended to do because you’re constantly corresponding through email.”

Other areas ripe for improvement include repeated legal arguments or documents you produce frequently. In her trademark practice, for example, many responses rely on the same legal frameworks. The facts change, but the principles don’t. Capturing those frameworks means lawyers don’t start from scratch each time.

Where AI Fits: As Scaffolding, Not a Substitute

Pahlavan’s approach to AI is grounded, practical, and cautious. When combined with templates or frameworks, AI can help lawyers apply known patterns to new client facts.

You can “take that general framework… and then take a summary of a client’s particular circumstances and engage with AI,” asking it to apply the pattern to the facts and produce a draft.

That draft, while not final, shortens the distance between a blank page and a fully considered response. As Pahlavan notes, “It may require some collaborative effort between you and the algorithm… but again, what you will get is a consistent level of quality of work.”

The human judgment remains yours. AI simply helps you get to your starting point more efficiently.

Small Habits, Big Ripple Effects

Even the smallest structural decisions – naming files consistently, maintaining a tidy workspace, or keeping your daily tools within two clicks of a mouse – can dramatically reduce friction.

Pahlavan points to research suggesting “most human beings are capable of about four hours of focused work a day.” When administrative clutter eats into that time, lawyers begin their substantive work already exhausted.

She distinguishes between legal work and what she calls the “work about work.” If client facts, documents, or instructions are scattered, you might spend 50 minutes hunting before you begin the real task. But if everything “is saved in a single place and tagged in a consistent way,” those 50 minutes become five – and your attention stays intact.

Delegating to Your Future You

Pahlavan acknowledges that many attorneys resist delegation because they’ve developed patterns and knowledge that seem difficult to transfer. But she reframes delegation as a systematic process of memorializing what you know.

“You have this universe of knowledge in your head,” she says. The challenge is translating that into something “accessible by other human beings consistently” – which could be a colleague, an assistant, or your own future self on a busy day.

One practical approach: Begin by writing down everything you repeatedly do in a certain type of matter. Even a rough, disorganized version can be refined later. If you choose to use AI, you can ask it “to revise for the specific purpose of being able to teach another person what you know.”

That same knowledge can seed future drafts, future workflows, and future decisions — reducing your mental load and making your practice more resilient.

Where to Start When Everything Seems Overwhelming

While it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or frustrated by reexamining your processes, Pahlavan underscored the importance of taking time to identify what you do “over and over and over again” and capture it in one place.

That one act more than any other can help you move information out of your head and into a trusted system. It also reduces the moments – familiar to every attorney – of waking up and thinking, “Did I do that thing?”

As she puts it: “Find a way to put it outside of yourself so that you can free that capacity to do the creative lawyerly work of processing.”

The Takeaway

Designing a calmer, steadier legal practice doesn’t begin with advanced technology. It begins with clarity. With patterns. With structure that supports judgment, not replaces it.

From templates to tidy file systems, from AI-assisted drafting to thoughtful delegation, Pahlavan’s message is ultimately one of compassion: Give your future self a running start, not a constant chase.

Pahlavan presented on this topic at the State Bar of Wisconsin’s 2025 Wisconsin Solo & Small Firm Conference.