This year has been a busy one for me, and I’m not alone. Every elder law and special needs attorney I know is busy. The demand for our services is always increasing, the supply of our time ever scarce. Admittedly, being too busy is a good problem to have – but a problem nonetheless.

A Packed Agenda is a Wellness Problem

When your calendar looks like the master caution panel on Apollo 13, it’s stressful. It takes time away from family, community, and personal interests. It also makes it seemingly impossible to complete the many projects that would benefit our section or the public, such as writing articles for our section’s ​Elder Law and Special Needs Journal of Wisconsin or this blog, or putting together training and resources to help more attorneys take up this practice area.

In my case, it has forced me to take a break from a project that is important, meaningful, and rewarding to me: publishing Medicaid fair hearing decisions.

I’ve always had busy seasons. But this year has been unrelenting. So, I decided to ask other elder law and special needs attorneys on the section’s elist what they do to manage their workloads. How do they say no ​to potential clients? How do they maintain some semblance of balance? I hoped to find new ideas and seasoned advice.

What Most Elder Law Attorneys Do

What I found, however, was nothing new or unexpected: most elder law attorneys’ workloads are limited only by the number of appointment slots on their calendars. They have a certain number of appointments on certain days of the week. Some appointment slots may be set aside for current clients or urgent matters. Many lawyers reserve Monday or Friday for non-client work or close early on Fridays. But apart from those restrictions (to which exceptions are often made), the only limit is how many months a new client is willing to wait for a consultation.

More than one lawyer, for example, told me they fill up months in advance with four meetings a day (sometimes five), three or four days a week. As long as the new client is willing to wait, on the calendar they go. Many also strictly limit court appointments or contested matters. “I still feel like I am drinking through a firehose, though,” wrote Elizabeth Ruthmansdorfer.

I expected this book-it-out approach to be the predominant method of managing workload, but I must admit I was hoping to find more variation. If your only limit is time, your time will always be taken to the limit.

I, for one, am neither able nor willing to have four or, egad, five ​meetings a day. I expect that makes me an odd duck among elder law attorneys. But what I want is a calendar with white space; an agenda with plenty of breathing room. Although that means the number of my clients will be limited, I know I’ll have the flexibility to meet their needs as well as my own.

Four Alternatives

The way I see it, there are four alternatives to the book-it-out approach to managing your workload:

1. You can hire staff and grow your firm until you can reasonably take on all the clients who want to hire you.
2. You can narrow your practice even further into some sub-niche of elder law.
3. You can raise your fees.
4. You can say no to clients who want to hire you.

To avoid digressing, suffice it to say that options 1-3 have their limits. Most attorneys, myself included, will do some hiring, some niching (most commonly declining contested matters and court appointments, as mentioned), and some fee-raising. But hiring is difficult, costly, and takes a lot of time before it pays off – time you already don’t have. Niching too far will leave your clients out in the cold, unless you have partners to cover the gaps. (For a while I attempted to do only crisis Medicaid planning, but those cases were too commonly entwined with estate planning and guardianship issues to maintain that boundary.)

Raising fees is OK to a point, but many of our clients are hesitant to sign up for another large bill, even if it’s justified and needed. I do not want my fees to be a barrier to someone who needs my help – more than they must be, anyway.

How to Say No

That leaves us, eventually, with saying no. And saying no is a tricky thing. I have learned, for example, that saying no must come at the point of first contact. Once the client has invested their time and probably their money in a consultation with you, it’s hard to tell them: You need my help but I will not give it to you. Good luck. It’s hard to say you can help them but they’ll have to wait three months, while money is being lost or rights violated all that time. It’s hard to refer them to another lawyer who is probably too busy also.

That’s why the no must come up front, at the point of first contact: the phone call, the email, or the website. The message is simply: My caseload is full. I am not taking new clients at this time. You can refer to other attorneys in your area or a resource like ​the National Academy of Elder Law Attorneys website, where clients can search for nearby elder law attorneys. You can keep a waitlist for non-urgent matters.

What I do is put that message at the top of my website and in my voicemail greeting. My assistant kindly refers callers to other firms in my area or to naela.org. Because I use Calendly to allow potential clients to schedule an initial 15-minute phone call from my website, I can also block off my availability so no new calls can be scheduled until I’m ready to take new clients.

When to Say No

The tricky part, and the one I’ve had the most trouble with, is deciding when to stop taking new clients.

It’s a moving target. If you stop taking new work too soon, revenue will suffer. If you wait too long, you’ll be overloaded for months before you start to see an effect. To get the timing right, you can take three approaches:

1. Keep track of the revenue you expect from your current cases and stop once you have enough for the next two or three months.
2. Have a work-in-progress limit – don’t take a new case until you’ve closed the file on an old one.
3. Take regular, planned sabbaticals.

I have taken the first approach for the past couple of years, though I am clearly still fine-tuning it. I think keeping track of anticipated revenue is probably essential to having the confidence to turn down new business. It is made much easier in my case by charging flat fees for nearly all the work I do. But the fact is that you can never anticipate the timing of work perfectly, or even with all that much accuracy. The case you expected to take a lot of work this month gets delayed, or the client you thought wouldn’t hire you does, or you get a referral or an interesting case you just can’t turn down.

As for the second approach, I have never figured out how to make it work for me. I’ve thought plenty about limiting myself to X number of Medicaid cases and Y number of estate planning matters, but inevitably there will be imbalanced months or delays where my cases are waiting on something or someone else. Also, this metric is not directly related to revenue – one estate planning case may bring in twice as much revenue or involve twice as much work as another.

So, more recently, I have been exploring the third approach of taking planned sabbaticals. This has the benefit of working more naturally – a period of intense work followed by a season of rest. It has a definite timing you can plan around.

Elizabeth Hoffman Stevens, for example, takes a sabbatical every summer to spend more time with her children:

“For about half the summer,” she wrote, “I schedule meetings with and do work for established clients but put off new clients. The rest of the summer I don’t take any meetings. I answer emails and return phone calls, but that generally means that I tell clients I can meet with them in the fall.”

I am taking the same approach this holiday season, specifically to catch up on publishing those fair hearing decisions and work on other professional projects.

My Current Approach

That’s about where I’m at now. I do not want to hire additional staff, raise my fees, or narrow my practice even further, so I have to know when to start sending new potential clients elsewhere. I do that first of all by tracking my anticipated revenue for the next few months, ensuring I have enough work to meet my needs; and second of all by taking planned sabbaticals, one for this holiday season and probably another next summer.

After talking to other elder law attorneys, this is the best approach I’ve found for me. Do you have a different system – perhaps a better one? Tell us about it in the comments section below.

This article was originally published on the State Bar of Wisconsin’s Elder Law and Special Needs Blog. Visit the State Bar sections or the Elder Law and Special Needs Section webpages to learn more about the benefits of section membership.