The rules your practice forgets it made

Rashan Hodge, who started Marling, and I ran into this long before we built anything. The decision itself was rarely the problem: usually somebody said the new way out loud, or wrote it down somewhere. What actually got us was quieter. A week goes by, everyone's busy, and the old habit is still easier than the new rule. Nobody's being careless. They just forgot, under pressure, that anything had changed.

That's the expensive part: not a lack of information, but a lack of anyone checking whether it's still being followed. A decision made once and never revisited has a shelf life. Without anyone deciding to, everyone drifts back to doing it the old way.

A practice runs into this too, just at a larger scale and with less time to catch it. Nobody's job is to notice the drift back to an old habit. So it goes unnoticed, until somebody gets it wrong in front of a client.

How Rashan and I work now

There are two of us. What we do instead is simple: the rules about how we work get written down once, and then something keeps checking that they're still true.

A small example. When the Shared Memory feature shipped, it didn't have that name — in fact, it didn't have a name at all. I was out at dinner when the conversation turned to sharing memories, and I knew straight away that Shared Memory was the name we were looking for. I didn't have my work laptop with me, so that decision went where most decisions go: inside of my head, tucked away for later.

A few days later, Rashan asked me to review the getting-started guide for new customers, and the feature still didn't have a proper name. Of course it didn't — I'd never shared it. At that point I made sure it was written down where both of us work from it, and now a check runs before anything ships to ensure every Marling surface is calling this feature by the right name.

Writing it down was only half of it. A written rule still depends on somebody remembering it exists, and on nobody quietly drifting back to how they used to say it. That's why the name and the check arrived together. Writing it down gets you day one. The check is what gets you day ninety.

What your practice can have of this

We do this by hand, because there are two of us and it's manageable. A practice can't. There are too many people, and too much drift for anyone to catch it all by hand.

This is what Shared Memory is for. Every desk in the practice is already talking to Marling, drafting letters, answering quick questions, checking a policy. Each night it reads back over those conversations looking for how the practice actually runs: house style, document conventions, who handles what. Never a specific patient or client. Whatever it finds gets shown to someone at the practice to approve or dismiss, one at a time. Nothing changes until somebody says yes.

What happens after that is the part that matters on day ninety. An approved rule becomes part of what every assistant is told before every conversation. It isn't filed somewhere findable, or written into an onboarding document nobody opens. It is in front of whoever is working, every time they work. The new hire never has to be told, and nobody has to remember to tell them.

In practice, that's things like:

• Intake summaries follow the SOAP structure and stay to one page.
• Referral letters go out as PDFs on letterhead, never in the body of an email.
• Fees are never quoted in letters. The front desk handles all fee conversations.
• This partner is always the responsible attorney on engagement letters.

None of these are complicated rules. They're the kind of thing everyone senior already knows, and everyone new gets told, usually more than once, because the first time rarely holds.

You only have to say it once. Day one was never the hard part. What changes is day ninety — the quiet moment the old habit would have won, and doesn't.

If that sounds like your practice, you can sign up on the home page. We're working with a small group of founding practices who use Marling in their real work and tell us what to fix: hello@marling.io.