Reading three CLE articles on Time Is Our Greatest Resource will give you the vocabulary. The actual capability comes from a different place — years of cases, a few mentor relationships, and the willingness to sit through hours of the kind of work that doesn’t feel like progress.
This piece is for guardians ad litem who already have the basics and are deciding whether to make Time Is Our Greatest Resource a focus area.
For guardians ad litem, Time Is Our Greatest Resource affects the child’s best interests in ways that need to be surfaced for the court. The GAL’s role is to evaluate the impact on the child and articulate findings in a way the court can use, not to make decisions about the underlying Time Is Our Greatest Resource questions. Effective GAL reports keep this distinction clear.
How Time Is Our Greatest Resource engagements begin
Document the intake. Either contemporaneous notes you keep in the file or a follow-up summary email to the client. Time Is Our Greatest Resource engagements involve enough small decisions across long timelines that working from memory six months in produces errors.
The right intake length for a Time Is Our Greatest Resource matter is usually 60 to 90 minutes, conducted in person or by video. Shorter intakes miss the depth required for the engagement to be properly scoped; longer intakes overwhelm the client. Many practitioners follow up the intake conversation with a written summary the client confirms before the engagement letter is sent. For deeper reference, see IRS Publication 504 (Divorced or Separated Individuals).
What happens in the middle phase
Communication discipline during the middle phase prevents most of the problems that show up at the deliverable. Practitioners who send the client weekly or biweekly written updates — even short ones — maintain trust and surface issues early. Practitioners who go silent during the analytical work leave the client to imagine what might be happening, which is rarely productive.
The pacing of the middle phase depends heavily on third-party responsiveness. Some Time Is Our Greatest Resource engagements can complete the middle phase in 30 days; others stretch to four months because a critical document custodian is slow to respond. Practitioners who actively chase third-party documents — rather than waiting for them — keep matters moving meaningfully faster than passive practitioners.
The deliverable
The deliverable for a Time Is Our Greatest Resource engagement is the work product everyone will reference for years afterward. It needs to be defensible (your analysis can withstand scrutiny), readable (the client and any non-specialist can understand it), and complete (it addresses what the engagement was scoped to address). The deliverable usually takes 20-40% of the engagement hours; underestimating this consistently produces matters that run over time.
Walk the client through the deliverable before they take it to the attorney or court. The presentation matters; the same report explained well lands differently than the same report dropped over email without context. The walk-through is also where the client’s last questions surface; addressing them in real time prevents follow-up cycles weeks later.
Matter-specific considerations
Matters with unsophisticated clients require more explanation, slower pacing, and more deliverable walk-through time than matters with sophisticated clients. Practitioners who run the same engagement structure regardless of client sophistication produce uneven outcomes; calibrating to the client is part of professional judgment.
Time Is Our Greatest Resource engagements vary along a few predictable dimensions: client sophistication (institutional client vs. unsophisticated individual), case complexity (single straightforward question vs. multiple intertwined issues), opposing-side cooperation (cooperative vs. adversarial), and timeline pressure (negotiated timeline vs. court-imposed deadlines). Each dimension affects how the standard engagement pattern needs to adjust.
Practitioners who want to make Time Is Our Greatest Resource a meaningful part of their work should commit to the long timeline. The first year produces little visible return. The third year shifts. By year five, the work and the referrals look noticeably different.
How VennBoard fits in
If you’re building a focus on Time Is Our Greatest Resource, the case-management infrastructure matters more than most practitioners think going in. VennBoard is built specifically for family-law-adjacent practitioners and handles the document organization, the multi-party coordination, and the engagement-management that makes long-arc matters manageable.
Practitioners interested in seeing VennBoard’s case-management infrastructure for Time Is Our Greatest Resource work can learn more at VennBoard.com.
Further reading
Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement
ABA Family Law Section resources