As we saw in Lawyers, Law Firms, and Delegation, effective delegation and supervision play a critical role in keeping law firms running and lawyers developing. The key word, though, is effective. Unfortunately, not all law-firm delegation and supervision is very effective, because it’s often missing the four elements that we’ll cover shortly.

I. Defining Effective Delegation

We’ll start by defining effective delegation. On your screen, you can see the definition that we’ll be using...