Jump to section
Picture the Monday sync. Eight people around a table, coffees cooling, and one associate reading updates off a screen while everyone else waits for their turn to do the same. Forty minutes later, nothing has been decided. Nobody wanted the meeting. Nobody cancelled it either. That standing invite is not communication. It is a status routine we keep running because cancelling it feels rude.
I want to make an unpopular argument: most of the recurring meetings in a law firm carry information that a written update would carry just as well. They exist because someone, once, felt out of the loop, and a calendar block was cheaper than a hard conversation about accountability. The block never came off the calendar. It just steadily consumed an hour a week, per person, forever.
The real cost of a standing weekly sync
Run the arithmetic once and it stops feeling harmless. A weekly hour long sync with six people is six billable or productive hours gone every week. Over a year that is roughly three hundred hours, most of it belonging to people whose time you charge out at real rates. And the meeting hour is the cheap part. The expensive part is the fracture.
Lawyers do their best work in long, uninterrupted stretches: drafting, reading, thinking through a problem without a timer ticking. A meeting at 11 a.m. does not cost you one hour. It costs you the morning, because you cannot start anything deep at 10 knowing you have to stop at 11, and you need a runway to get back in after. This is the hidden tax nobody puts on the invoice. If you want the fuller version of that math, we made the case in our piece on decision fatigue, and it applies squarely here.
Warn. A meeting that only shares information is a broadcast, and broadcasts do not need an audience trapped in a room. If nobody has to decide anything, you are paying senior people to listen to a memo out loud.
Three questions before any invite goes out
Here is the default I would put on the wall in every firm: no meeting without a decision to make. Before you send an invite, answer three questions honestly.
- What decision are we making? Name it in one sentence. If you cannot, this is a written update, not a meeting.
- Who actually needs to be in the room to make it? Usually two or three people, not eight. Everyone else can read the outcome.
- What has to be read or done beforehand? If people arrive cold, the first fifteen minutes are wasted catching them up, live, at everyone's expense.
Notice what these questions do. They convert a vague sense of "we should probably touch base" into an explicit test. Most standing meetings fail the first question outright. That is not a failure of the team. It is a signal that the work belongs in a document.
A meeting should produce a decision. If there is nothing to decide, send a written update instead. Devon Reyes
The async default that partners resist
When I suggest replacing syncs with written updates, the pushback is predictable and it comes from the top. Partners will say they think better out loud, that tone gets lost in writing, that a five minute conversation beats a long email thread. Sometimes that is true. Often it is a preference for being talked at over doing the reading.
The honest reframe: async is not silence, and it is not slower. It is a shift in where the thinking happens. A well written update forces the author to actually decide what matters before anyone else spends time on it. A meeting lets a half formed thought consume six calendars. Written first is not colder. It is more considered, and it leaves a record you can search in six months when the file resurfaces.
Start small. Turn one recurring meeting into a shared status doc that people update by end of Thursday, then keep a short standing slot for the genuine decisions that surface. You will find the slot shrinks on its own. We walked through a version of this transition in the Friday reset ritual, and a good firm dashboard works the same way: information is available when someone needs it, rather than gathered and read aloud on a fixed schedule.
| Old default | New default |
|---|---|
| Recurring sync on the calendar | Shared doc updated by a deadline |
| Everyone invited, just in case | Only the deciders in the room |
| Agenda is "updates" | Agenda is a decision, or no meeting |
| Meeting ends, action items vague | Decision logged, owner named, done |
Protecting deep work without going silent
The risk of cutting meetings is overcorrecting into a firm where nobody talks and juniors feel abandoned. That is a real failure mode, and it is worse than meeting bloat. Async only works if the written channels are alive and someone is actually reading them.
So pair the cut with a promise. Block protected hours for deep work, firm wide, and mean it. But keep a fast lane open: a quick call is always fine when something is genuinely blocked or a client is anxious. The rule is not "never meet." The rule is "meet on purpose." Give newer lawyers a named person to bring questions to, so the absence of a standing meeting never reads as the absence of support. If you are building this into how the firm runs, our notes on SOPs people actually use pair well with the deep work habit, and this whole approach sits inside the broader firm operations playbook.
Tip. Whatever tool holds your matters and deadlines, wire the status into it so people can see where a file stands without asking. A shared view of open matters and their next steps in something like A1 CMS quietly removes the reason half your check ins existed.
What to do when a client wants the meeting
All of this changes the moment a client is in the picture. A client meeting is not overhead. It is the relationship, and sometimes the point of the meeting is that the client feels heard, not that a decision gets made. Do not apply the internal rule to them. If a nervous client wants fifteen minutes to hear your voice before a filing, give it to them. That is the job.
What you can do is shape it. Send a short agenda beforehand so the time is used well, confirm what you will decide together, and follow up in writing so nothing lives only in memory. A client who came in for reassurance leaves with a record, and you leave with a clear next step. That is a meeting that earned its place.
So try the experiment this month. Take one recurring internal meeting off the calendar and replace it with a document. Watch what happens. My bet is that almost nobody misses it, the work does not slow down, and you get a morning back. Meeting bloat survives because cancelling feels like a slight and keeping feels like diligence. Flip that instinct. The most respectful thing you can do with a colleague's time is refuse to spend it on a meeting that a paragraph would have handled. Curious where the rest of this thinking lives? It is all on my author page.
