Master the Art of Legal Task Delegation: 8 Steps for Your Law Firm

Legal task delegation is a mandatory part of any law firm’s growth—not an if, but a when. And when you hit that point, it should be a cause to celebrate! If you have more work and tasks than you can handle on your own, that’s a sign that you’re doing something right.

This process is worth adopting and refining in your law firm. That’s why we’ve broken legal task delegation down into eight simple steps. No need to deliberate; let’s learn how to delegate!

The importance of task delegation in law firms

In any law firm, strategic task delegation allows teams to boost their productivity and profitability by ensuring everyone’s time is being spent in the most efficient way possible, in terms of both time spent on a task, and in terms of ROI of time spent overall.

Delegation for legal teams is more than just assigning extra tasks to whoever is available. It’s about understanding your team’s strengths and weaknesses and matching each task to a complementary skill set. It’s not about offloading extra work; it’s about giving tasks to people who can do them better than you could, while still providing support and oversight to your team as a whole.

Task delegation strategies for law firms add another variable to consider: Certain tasks require oversight from lawyers for both ethical and compliance reasons. Balancing all of these aspects can be overwhelming, but the benefits of delegating legal tasks effectively truly speak for themselves, from improved team morale to heightened day-to-day efficiency!

These skills will empower you to identify which tasks to delegate, match them to the right team members, and then set your team up for success by providing them with objectives, training, support, and feedback.

Step 1: Identify which legal tasks to delegate

Before you assign tasks, you’ll need to categorize and sort them first. By accurately identifying the most relevant distinguishing factors between various tasks, you’ll be able to build a repeatable workflow that sets the table for your next step. Consider clear, binary factors like:

• How complex or straightforward is it? Does the task require a specific skill set or legal expertise that requires a lawyer, or is it a recurring task with an existing workflow that paralegals, or legal assistants could handle?
• How urgent is it? Are clients or other parties waiting on its completion? Is there a non-flexible deadline that must be met, such as court deadlines?
• Will it need legal or ethical oversight? Can every part of this task be achieved by one person without breaking your firm’s commitment to compliance and ethics? If someone else needs to vet or oversee parts of the project, does it still save time?

Step 2: Match tasks to people

With your tasks sorted and flagged, you can take a similar approach to the team members in your law firm. Delegating tasks effectively means finding the people who complete them in the most effective way possible. Find the right team members by considering:

• Experience and skill levels: Has someone done this exact task before? Do they have relevant skills from their careers before joining your firm? Does this task require the highest-skilled team members for timeline or complexity reasons?

• Workloads and context-switching: Does someone have too much or too little on their plate? Is this task very similar or very different from the other tasks they’re currently working on? Can any of these steps be streamlined with legal workflow automation?
• Clarity and communication: Does everyone in your law firm share the same understanding of how and why tasks will be delegated to them? Are there consistent standards for minimum turnaround time with newly assigned tasks?
• Growth and opportunity: Are tasks being delegated to team members with varying experience and seniority levels? Can deadlines be managed so lower-urgency tasks are assigned to team members wanting to learn those skills?

Step 3: Set clear objectives and expectations

You have your tasks to delegate. You have your team members to delegate them to. The next step is about outlining your scope and goals for each task, which will get everyone on the same page about timelines, success factors, and possible points for feedback. Make your legal task delegation goals clear by communicating the following:

• Measurable goals within clear ranges. Make sure your criteria for task completion are clear and trackable. Goals like word count targets, quotas for total tasks completed, or examples of similar finished work can give your team clear factors to aim for.
• Deadlines for single and multi-stage tasks. If a task will be sent to another team member for review, make that part of the timeline. If a task is due by EOD, but needs to be reviewed and approved first, the actual deadline might be more like 1pm.
• Communicate what failure looks like, too. Providing your team members with a hypothetical worst-case scenario, or an example of how you do not want the task to be approached, can help set a floor and a ceiling for your overall expectations.

Step 4: Provide adequate training and resources

The difference between setting your legal team up for success or failure with legal task delegation comes down to the amount of training resources and onboarding they receive ahead of starting a task. Your team will relish the opportunity to learn new skills and grow; they will resent being thrown into the deep end and being told to figure it out for themselves! While onboarding them, ask yourself:

• Can someone serve as their mentor? Has that person expressed a desire to gain more leadership skills? Would adding this task to their schedule create a ripple effect? Do your team members prefer to learn from coaching, or on their own?

• Where does your firm keep its informational resources? Is there an internal wiki or database for team members to gain knowledge about workflows and processes? Is it up-to-date? Could you use legal collaboration tools to connect relevant team members?

• How have other team members learned these skills? Does this task require skills that are not covered in your firm’s onboarding process? Should this only be delegated to someone once they’ve received formal training?

Step 5: Monitor progress and share feedback

Once a task is delegated, it’s important to keep the lines of communication and support open. By outlining how (and how often) you will be checking in on a task and providing feedback, you’ll create a schedule of accountability for all parties involved. Here’s how to stay consistent and clear:

• Make a check-in schedule (and stick to it): Regular meetings or updates with team members help ensure every task is heading in the right direction and encourage transparency and communication. You can show trust in your team by sticking to the plan—and resisting the urge to add surprise inspections into the mix.
• Pair feedback with proof points and plans: When delegating legal tasks effectively, you recognize when a task is done incorrectly, versus being done differently (does this legal task need to be completed a certain way to avoid penalties or affecting the outcome of the case?). Avoid this pitfall by tying any feedback to objectives, expectations, and relevant examples. Then, have a productive talk about how the task can get from Point A to B.
• Model open communication techniques: The biggest barrier to addressing challenges is acknowledging them in the first place. By showing your ability to have healthy, honest conversations with your team members, you’ll encourage them to highlight and own any parts of the task that don’t meet your shared standards.

Step 6: Maintain accountability and ethics

Over time, you’ll face new challenges when it comes to delegating legal tasks effectively. Chief among them is a simple fact: Everything your law firm works on is bound by ethical standards and accountability procedures. And no amount of strategic legal task delegation can remove that responsibility from the lawyers in your firm. Prepare for this reality by asking yourself:

• Was a lawyer assigned to supervise this task at the outset? If not, how can that become a core part of your process going forward? Do your team members have tools to flag a task that needs a lawyer check?

• What is the best way to keep lawyers involved without creating bottlenecks? Just like in Step 2, figure out how each lawyer prefers to provide oversight for tasks. Do they want to have a meeting? Should you use legal calendaring tools to block out time in their calendar as a reminder?

Step 7: Leverage legal technology and tools

At this point, everything is in place. You’ve built the foundation to grow law firm productivity through legal task delegation. Your goal now is to use the array of technology and tools at your disposal to delegate faster, smarter, and on a wider scale. If you’re not using legal software solutions and automated tools to make your life easier, consider these ways to improve your workflow:

• Don’t delegate, automate: Since delegation is about finding the perfect marriage between task and team member, it’s also about identifying the tasks that are time-consuming, but not skill-specific. Repetitive or recurring admin work is a great way to train legal workflow automation tools to mirror how you do the task and then repeat it!
• Keep it simple for clients: When it comes to client-facing tasks, it never hurts to reduce friction wherever you can. By using legal client portal software, client intake tools, and legal client questionnaires, your firm will be even more accessible (and your team will have fewer tasks directly assisting clients with admin).
• Schedules, sorted: By using legal calendaring tools and task management software on a shared platform, you’ll reduce confusion and help your team build workflows that work for them.

Step 8: Review, refine, and evolve

Congratulations! You’ve absorbed some great best practices for task delegation in law firms, and you’ve made them into a reality for you and your team. But the best systems and processes aren’t static; they grow and evolve to meet new opportunities and address old challenges. Future-proof your workflow with these habits:

• Set a regular date to audit your whole process. You know what works best for your firm—once a year is the absolute minimum, so go from there. Create a clear rubric outlining what you’re looking for, and document your findings.

• Create multi-tier goals for success. The first step is having a legal task delegation strategy in the first place. But from that point, challenge yourself (and your firm) to find realistic milestones in terms of productivity and effectiveness to work towards.

• Never stop learning. You built this workflow with your law firm in mind, but so did all of your colleagues across the legal industry! It’s never too late to grab a good idea (or two) from others, and plan to integrate it into your next update to this system.

Final thoughts on legal task delegation

A strategic and thorough approach to legal task delegation helps everyone on your team feel like there’s a stable system keeping them protected and focused as they continue to do great work. It turns out that “feeling like my job isn’t in a state of constant chaos” is great for team morale! Yet not all task delegation strategies for law firms are created equal. Which is why you followed these steps.

Most importantly, you learned that the right tools can make building this process even easier. And with Clio’s task management software, those tools (and more) are accessible and approachable for you and your team to make the most of. 

We published this blog post in March 2025. Last updated: March 19, 2025.

Categorized in: Business