Stop 6 of 8 · Daily
Deadlines and Dev's checklist
Turn the Clio calendar export into the week's deadline sheet, a per matter checklist for Dev, and a morning routine that runs without being asked.
The thing a solo practice actually loses sleep over
Elena has around thirty open matters. Every one carries dates: option exercise windows, estoppel response periods, cure periods, notice deadlines, limitation periods, filing dates. They live in Clio, in her Outlook calendar, in the leases themselves, and a few of them live only in her memory of a conversation in March.
The dates are not the problem. The problem is that a date typed into Clio eleven months ago has no source attached, and neither Elena nor Dev can now say whether it was calculated from section 14.2 or from a guess.
The export, weekly
Clio exports the matter calendar as a CSV. Elena pulls the next 60 days with matter numbers in place of client names and uploads it. Where a practice management connector is available to you, ask it directly instead and check support.claude.com for the current list. Either way the ask is the same, and the column that matters is the last one.
Attached is my matter calendar export. Give me a table of everything due in the next fourteen days, sorted by date: date, matter number, what is owed and by whom, and the source document or rule the entry names. Add a final column, Traced, and put no in it wherever the entry names no source. Then list separately every date in the next 60 days that ends an option, a renewal window or a limitation period, because those cannot be redone. [upload the calendar export]
Read the attached agreement and pull every date obligation into a table: the obligation, who owes it, the trigger event, the number of days, whether the count is calendar or business days, the calculated date if the trigger is known, and the section and page. Flag every row where the document is ambiguous about how days are counted or when the clock starts. [upload the agreement]
Dev's checklist, per matter type
The second half of Monday is Dev's list. Not one checklist, one per matter type, because a lease renewal and an employment termination share almost nothing.
For each matter opening this week, write my paralegal Dev a checklist for that matter type. Six to ten items, in the order they should be done, each one a concrete action with the document or system it happens in: Clio, Word, Outlook, OneDrive, or Westlaw for anything that needs verifying. Matter types: [name the matter types opening this week]. Mark any item that must be finished before a date on the deadline sheet.
The routine that runs at half past seven
Elena schedules the deadline pass so it has run before she opens her laptop. A routine runs unattended with her connectors, so the instruction has to say what it may not do.
Read my Outlook calendar and my matter deadline calendar. One page: everything due today, everything due in the next seven days, anything that arrived in yesterday's mail that starts a clock, and every entry with no source document or rule named. Sort by date and use matter numbers, not client names. Send nothing, reply to nothing and change nothing.