The Office Manual

Office Manual

A firm’s written policies and procedures, arranged by task so the person doing the work can find the step they need. It names the person who keeps it current, carries a date and a version number, and gives one answer to each question it takes up. A manual that describes trust transfers one way in one section and another way in the next leaves the staff to guess which the firm meant.

Policy and Procedure

A policy states what the firm will or will not do, such as that no staff member tells a client what a case is worth. A procedure says who does what, in what order, and what record shows it was done. A procedure is written well when two people following it reach the same result and a partner can check afterward that each step happened.

Written Trust Plan

Rule 5-1.2(c)(1) requires every firm with more than one lawyer to have a written plan for supervising its trust account and complying with the rule, given to each lawyer. The plan names each signatory, each lawyer responsible for the monthly and annual reconciliations, and each lawyer who answers the firm’s questions about the account. It is the only plan the Rules Regulating The Florida Bar require in writing, and it must be updated and issued again whenever it changes materially, as when a signatory changes.

Supervisory Measures

Rules 4-5.1(a) and 4-5.3(b)(1) have the partners make reasonable efforts to ensure the firm has measures giving reasonable assurance that its lawyers and its staff act within the lawyers’ professional obligations. The comment to Rule 4-5.1 gives examples of such policies: detecting and resolving conflicts, tracking deadlines, accounting for client money and property, safeguarding the firm’s use of generative AI, and supervising inexperienced lawyers. Neither rule requires the measures in writing, and the comment says informal supervision and periodic review ordinarily suffice in a small firm of experienced lawyers.

Protecting Client Information

Rule 4-1.6(e) requires a lawyer to make reasonable efforts to prevent the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of client information, or unauthorized access to it. Its comment says a breach is no violation when those efforts were reasonable, judged by factors such as the information’s sensitivity and the cost of more safeguards. The Bar’s Committee on Cybersecurity and Privacy Law recommends, in terms it calls voluntary and non-binding, that every Florida lawyer or firm prepare an incident response plan and maintain it each year.

Retention Schedule

A table of the firm’s records, each with how long it is kept and the rule or firm choice behind the period. Rule 5-1.2(f) keeps trust records, reconciliations among them, six years after each representation ends, and Rule 4-1.5(f)(5) keeps a contingency fee contract and closing statement six years after the statement is signed. Florida sets no general period for the rest of a closed file, so the firm chooses one, states it in its fee agreement, and applies it to every matter.

Continuity and Backup

Rule 1-3.8(d) requires each Bar member practicing in Florida, apart from government work, to designate another member who has agreed to serve as inventory lawyer. A court may appoint an inventory lawyer to protect the clients when a lawyer dies, disappears, is suspended, or cannot practice, and no partner or other responsible person can step in. Staff need the same cover: every task one person does alone needs a named backup who has done it from the manual.

Technology Stack and Budget

The manual’s list of the systems the firm runs on, from practice management and documents to billing, trust records, and communication, each with what it holds, who administers it, and who may sign in. The first-year budget prices each system at the plan the firm actually needs and counts the tools the Bar gives its members at their stated terms. Each system also needs an exit: what comes out, in what format, and how the records the rules require outlast the vendor.

Part 1: Gather What the Firm Already Has

Temko & Eden, P.A. A three-lawyer firm on Beach Street in Daytona Beach. It still carries the names of its late founders. Dana Whitfield, the managing partner, handles civil litigation and real estate closings. Luis Ortega, a partner, handles family law and probate, and Kim Nguyen, an associate, handles personal injury. Marcy Cole is the legal assistant, Ron Pike is the bookkeeper and office manager, and you are the firm’s paralegal.

An email from Dana Whitfield, Monday, November 30, 2026. Luis and I agree that too much of how this office works lives in people’s heads and in memos from this year. I want one manual. Start with who we are: the chart, each role, who supervises it, and who covers it when that person is out. Then intake and conflicts, time and billing, and the trust account, with our trust plan in it. Then files and retention, the calendar, and filing and service. Then security, including what we do when something goes wrong, and how we talk to clients. End with the technology we use, what it costs next year, and how we would get our records out of each piece. Where two of our procedures disagree, pick one and tell me why. Where we have none, draft one for Luis and me to approve. The next person we hire should be able to read it in a week and do the job.

Collect everything you posted in this course and sort it under Dana’s ten sections. The firm map from Activity 1 opens the manual, and the intake workbook and conflict flag from Activity 2 feed intake and conflicts. Time and billing draws on your prebill audit from Activity 3 and the invoice and collection file from Activity 4. The trust account section starts from your trust plan and reconciliation in Activity 5, your memo to the file in Activity 6, and the wire rules your Activity 11 reflection proposed.

Files and retention comes from the naming convention and closing plan in Activity 7, with the template and signature record from Activity 8. The calendar section is your Activity 9 procedure, and filing and service is your Activity 10 checklist. Security draws on your Activity 11 incident report and the metadata and minimization work in Activities 8 and 10. Client communication starts from the call in Activity 2 and the portal message in Activity 7. The technology section starts from the stack in Activity 1 and the recommendation memo in Activity 12. If you missed an activity, its page and files give you what that section needs.

Part 2: Make the Pieces Agree

You wrote these pieces weeks apart, for different problems, and some of them will contradict each other. Before you revise any section, paste all of your source material into one document, each piece under a heading naming its activity, and run the Consistency Auditor on it. Settle every conflict and gap it lists. Where a rule decides the answer, name the rule. Where the choice is the firm’s, say so and give Dana your reason in a sentence.

Then make the language agree too. Use one word for each thing in every section: if the trust plan says “signatory,” the wire procedure does not say “authorized signer.” Record each change on the Revision Record, the manual’s last page: the section, the activity the text came from, what you changed, and why. The Revision Record is how Dana checks that the manual still matches the rules and the work behind it.

Part 3: Write What No Activity Wrote

Some of what Dana asked for has no source in the course. The first section needs each person’s backup, the lawyer who reviews the paralegal’s work, and each lawyer’s designated inventory lawyer, left blank for the lawyers to fill in. Security needs rules for passwords, multifactor sign-in, devices, and the use of AI tools with client information. It also needs an incident response plan scaled to a three-lawyer firm, using Recommendation 25-1’s sample plan as a list of the parts. Client communication needs what staff may and may not tell a client, how fast the firm answers, and who tells a client when something has gone wrong.

The technology section pairs each system with its first-year cost at the plan the firm needs, the member benefits the lawyers can claim, and the way out. Add a paragraph on keeping the firm running when the office cannot open, such as after a hurricane, from the Bar’s business continuity resources. For any section, the Section Outliner can give you a skeleton of questions to answer, but write every sentence yourself. Run the Rule Anchor Checker on each section that cites a rule, and fix or relabel every sentence the rule’s text does not support.

Last, write the first-week guide, one page placed right after the table of contents. It tells a new hire what to read on each of the first five days, whom to ask about what, and which tasks wait until a lawyer has trained them.

Part 4: Test It on a New Hire

Run the New Hire Walkthrough with the whole manual. It plays a paralegal on the first day who knows only what the manual says, asks about what is unclear, and tries three tasks from the manual alone. Revise every section where it stopped, guessed, or found two answers, and log each revision on the Revision Record.

Then record a walkthrough of three to five minutes, with your screen and your voice, as if you were showing the manual to that new hire on their first morning. Open the table of contents and the first-week guide. Then take one procedure from start to finish, saying who does each step and what record it leaves.

Part 5: Assemble and Post

Build the manual as one document, in this order: a cover, the table of contents, the first-week guide, Dana’s ten sections, and the Revision Record. The cover carries the firm’s name, the version, the date, and the person responsible for keeping the manual current, and the table of contents is built from the headings. The manual runs 12 to 20 pages, not counting the cover and the table of contents. Export it as a PDF.

Create a new thread in the Project discussion forum with a headline-style subject line that names the change you think Temko Eden most needed. Attach the manual and the walkthrough, as a video file or a link that plays without a sign-in. In the post itself, write two or three sentences on the conflict between two pieces that was hardest to settle, and how you settled it. This submission is worth 100 points. To earn the remaining 20 points, reply to at least four different classmates. In each reply, compare one of their procedures with yours on the same task, and say which a new hire could follow more easily, and why.

Part 6: Share Chat Link

Include one AI chat link with a 1–2 sentence explanation of what the conversation shows and why you chose to share it.

Consistency Auditor

Structured output makes the model hold every piece against every other, a comparison people do badly across twenty pages of their own writing. Quoting each answer with its heading lets you find every conflict in your own text, and the firm’s decision stays with you.

Section Outliner

A finished section pasted as an example is few-shot prompting: the model copies its form, so the new outline fits the rest of your manual. The blanks and the “Check the rule” marks keep the firm’s decisions, and the legal research, with you.

Rule Anchor Checker

Grounding the check in text you supply means every “supported” arrives with words you can find in the rule yourself. Models misread and misquote rules, so treat each quotation as a lead to confirm in the rule’s own text, and each unsupported sentence as one to fix or relabel as the firm’s choice.

New Hire Walkthrough

Role-play under one strict limit, the manual and nothing else, turns the model into a literal reader who finds the gaps a writer skips over. Each place it stops is where a real new hire would have guessed, and guessing is what a manual exists to prevent.