Writing Your Own SOPs

Eight procedures from another firm will not fit yours exactly. This guide teaches the underlying skill, so your firm can document anything: the method, the eight steps, the worksheet, and the reasons documentation efforts usually fail.

Section one

Why documenting your own beats adopting someone else's

Reading a procedure written by another firm is useful. Writing your own is what changes a practice. The reason is not that your firm is unusual — most law offices do broadly similar things — but that a procedure only works when it describes what actually happens in your office, with your software, your staff, and your case types.

There is a second reason, less obvious and more important. The act of documenting a process forces someone to look at it closely for the first time. Most of the value shows up during the writing, not after: you discover that two people both think the other one calls the client, that nobody owns the step between signing and file opening, that a form is being completed twice.

The skill is not complicated and it is not writing talent. It is observation, sequencing, and the discipline to name one owner per step. Anyone who has done the work can learn it in an afternoon.

What follows is the method the Foundation uses to produce every guide in this library, reduced to eight steps and a worksheet.

Section three

The worksheet

Nine fields. Fill them in and you have a usable first draft. An office manager or associate can complete this for one process in an afternoon without any background in process documentation.

Write to the newest person

Assume the reader started on Monday and knows nothing about your conventions. Name systems explicitly, spell out abbreviations, and never write "as usual."

Use the imperative

"Date-stamp the document" not "documents should be date-stamped." Passive voice hides the owner, which is the one thing a step cannot afford to hide.

One action per numbered step

If a step contains "and then," split it. Compound steps are where half the action gets performed and the other half forgotten.

Put timings in the step

"Within one business day" belongs in the step itself, not in a general standards section nobody rereads.

Name the actual software

Not "the case management system" but the product you use, and the specific field or folder. Genericism is comfortable to write and useless to follow.

Keep it to two pages

A procedure longer than that is usually two procedures. Length is the most common reason a document goes unread.

Section five

Which process to document first

If the pain question does not give you an obvious answer, these four are where most firms should start, in this order.

Client intake. It touches every client relationship the firm will ever have, it is the process most often run from memory, and the improvement is immediately visible in revenue. Start with lead management.

Client communication. The change clients notice fastest and the one that most affects how the firm is perceived. Read the communications policy.

Mail and document handling. The shortest procedure to write, and the one where an undocumented process carries the most risk. See physical mail.

Billing. Once the calendar is fixed, cash becomes predictable and most fee disputes disappear. See client billing.

Too much at once

A firm decides to document everything, produces four procedures in a burst, exhausts itself, and abandons the effort. One process at a time is not a compromise; it is the method.

Written by someone who does not do the work

The owner writes what they believe happens. Staff read a description of a firm they do not recognize and conclude the document is decorative.

The idealized version

The workarounds are omitted because they are embarrassing. But the workarounds are the process, and a document that pretends otherwise cannot be followed.

No owner named

Steps written in the passive voice, so every step belongs to everyone. These are the steps that go unperformed on busy weeks.

Never actually adopted

The document is written, saved, announced once, and never referenced again. Adoption means it is used in training, referred to in meetings, and followed when it is inconvenient.

Amended constantly

Edited every time someone hits friction, so nobody knows which version is current. Collect the friction, revise once, publish a version.

Never reviewed

Correct on the day it was written and quietly wrong eighteen months later. A review date is not administrative tidiness; it is what keeps the document true.

Section seven

Getting the team to actually use it

A procedure is adopted when following it is easier than not following it. Four things get you there.

Write it with the people who do the work, not for them. The person who runs intake should be in the room while intake is documented, and their objections should change the document. A procedure someone helped write is a procedure they defend rather than resent.

Make it findable in one place. A single location, known to everyone, where every current procedure lives. Documents scattered across drives, inboxes, and someone's desktop are functionally unwritten.

Use it in training. When someone new starts, the procedure is how they learn the task — not a colleague explaining it verbally while the document sits unread. This is the fastest route to a document that reflects reality, because a new person will find every gap in it within a week.

Follow it when it is inconvenient. The moment the owner improvises around the procedure on a busy day, the team learns that the document applies only when things are calm. That is the day documentation stops working, and it is almost always the owner who causes it.

Next

Work through this with someone who has done it

Every attorney and law student who qualifies is paired with a free mentor: a firm owner, an operations expert, a finance expert, or a marketing expert. Bring this guide to the first call.

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