Latest / Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love / Episode 357 | Is Discomfort Holding You Back from Hiring? Here's What to Do About It

Transcript

Episode 357 | Is Discomfort Holding You Back from Hiring? Here's What to Do About It · Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast, Helping you create a profitable, sustainable law firm you love

• 0:01
  Intro: Welcome to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast. What if you could hang out with successful women lawyers, ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more. Then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Devina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love. Devina is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and her goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams.
• 0:47
  Now here's Devina.
• 0:49
  Davina: Let me describe a conversation I have with women law firm owners. Almost every week, she is successful. Her firm brings in strong revenue. Her clients are happy, and her calendar is full. She knows she needs help, and she knows that help probably needs to be another attorney.
• 1:07
  Then she says some version of the same sentence, Devina, I just feel uncomfortable hiring another lawyer. When I ask her what makes her uncomfortable, the list comes pouring out. She does not know how the hiring process should work. She does not know what to offer for a base salary or how bonuses should be calculated. She is not sure how to manage another attorney.
• 1:30
  She does not know whether now is the right time. Underneath all of it is the biggest fear of all. What if this person costs me money instead of making me money? If any part of that list sounds like you, this episode is for you. Welcome or welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer Podcast.
• 1:48
  I am your host, Attorney Devina Frederick, two time author of books on law firm marketing and management and founder of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, a company that guides women law firm owners in cultivating the mindset, the strategies, and the systems to scale their firms to and through 7 figures in gross annual revenue without burning out in the process. I am so glad you are here with me today. Today we are talking about the discomfort of hiring attorneys. We will look at where that discomfort comes from, what it costs you to let it make your decisions, and why feeling uncomfortable does not mean you are not ready. We will also cover perfectionism, the mistakes every firm owner makes along the way, and the power you have in every hiring decision, even when the market does not hand you the perfect candidate.
• 2:41
  This is a leadership episode. It is about the mindset a firm owner needs to build a team because the mindset comes before the hire. Let's start by naming what is underneath the discomfort because a feeling you can name is a feeling you can work with. The first source is a lack of clarity about the hiring process. Most of us never learned how to hire.
• 3:05
  We learned how to research, write, argue, and advise. Nobody in law school taught us how to write a job description, evaluate candidates, check references in a meaningful way, or structure an interview that reveals who someone is rather than how well she interviews. When you do not have a process, every hiring decision feels like a guess, and guessing with tens of thousands of dollars is uncomfortable for good reason. The second source is compensation. What is a fair base salary in your market?
• 3:39
  How should a bonus be structured so that it rewards the right behavior? What happens if you offer too little and lose the candidate or offer too much and squeeze your margins? Money conversations are uncomfortable for many women, and compensation for another attorney feels high stakes because the numbers are large. The third source is management. Managing a legal assistant is one thing.
• 4:02
  Managing another lawyer, someone with the same license you have and possibly strong opinions about how things should be done, feels different. Many owners worry about whether they will be too controlling or too hands off and whether they will know how to give feedback to a peer. The fourth source is timing. When is the right time to hire? Should you wait until you are completely overwhelmed or hire ahead of the need?
• 4:29
  Many owners wait until they are drowning, and then they hire in a panic, which is the worst possible state of mind for an important decision. The fifth source is the economics. This is the one that keeps owners up at night. Will this associate pay for herself, or will she become a cost the firm has to carry? Every firm owner has heard a story about the associate who never got up to speed, never generated enough revenue, and drained the firm's bank account for a year before leaving.
• 4:59
  Here is what I need you to hear about all five of those concerns. Every one of them is solvable. Each one is a question of systems, structure, and clarity. And each one has an answer. There are proven ways to run a hiring process, structure compensation, manage attorneys, time your hire, and design the roles so the associate generates more than she costs.
• 5:21
  The discomfort you feel is not a sign that hiring is wrong for you. It is a sign that you do not yet have the system in front of you. That distinction matters because when you believe the discomfort is telling you something true about yourself, you stop. When you see it as a gap in information, you can close the gap. Before we go any further, let me let you off the hook.
• 5:46
  If hiring another attorney makes you so uncomfortable that you do not want to do it, that is your choice. You get to make it. Nobody is going to force you to build a team of employees, and there is no rule that says every successful law firm must have associates on the payroll. You can run a firm with contractors. You can bring in contract attorneys and contract paralegals when you need help, pay them for the work, and avoid the commitments that come with employees.
• 6:13
  Plenty of firm owners do exactly that, and some of them are very happy with their choice. So, if you are listening to this and feeling pressure, release it. This is your firm and your life. I would be doing you a disservice, though, if I did not tell you the other side of that choice. A decision to never hire employees is also a decision about your revenue ceiling and, over time, about your profitability and your wealth.
• 6:40
  Contractors are valuable, and they have a place in many firms, but contractors are not building your firm with you. They are not invested in your culture, your systems, or your long term growth. They may have other clients and other priorities. You cannot train them the same way. You cannot count on their availability in the same way, and you cannot build a leadership team out of them.
• 7:04
  When the work depends on people who are only partially committed to your firm, your growth will also be partial. Think about the time horizon here. Most of the women I work with have been in practice for many years and plan to practice for many more. A decision you make now about whether to build a team does not only affect this year's revenue. It compounds across a decade or more.
• 7:27
  The difference between a firm that adds one strong associate this year and a firm that never adds one is not one associate's worth of revenue. It is the difference between a firm that can keep growing and a firm that stays tied to the capacity of its owner. That gap shows up in your take home pay. It shows up in what you can invest and save. It shows up in whether you can ever step away from the firm and in what the firm is worth if you decide to sell it someday.
• 7:57
  A firm built on the owner and a handful of contractors is very hard to sell because the value walks out the door with the owner. So, yes, you are off the hook. You can choose not to hire. Just make that choice with your eyes open knowing that avoiding discomfort today may cost you financially for years to come. Now let's look at the other side of the risk because I will not pretend that hiring is risk free.
• 8:24
  Making the wrong hire can damage your finances too. A poor fit associate can cost you salary, benefits, training time, client goodwill, team morale, and months of lost momentum. So the goal is not simply to hire. The goal is to hire well and to correct course quickly when a hire does not work out. There are three things that protect you.
• 8:47
  The first is following a good hiring system that lets you evaluate prospects effectively. A system takes the guesswork out of the process. It defines what you are looking for before you start looking so you are not swayed by charm or a polished resume. It gives you consistent ways to compare candidates so you are making decisions based on evidence. It brings structure to a decision that otherwise runs on gut feeling and hope.
• 9:15
  The second is having a strong training plan in place with clear benchmarks at the thirty, sixty, and ninety day points. A training plan tells your new associate exactly what success looks like and when she is expected to reach it. The benchmarks also protect you. They turn a vague sense that something is not working into specific measurable information. At thirty days, you know whether she is learning your systems.
• 9:43
  At sixty days, you know whether she is applying them. At ninety days, you know whether she is on track to carry her share of the work. Without benchmarks, many owners spend a year wondering whether a hire is working. With them, you know in a matter of weeks. The third is being willing to fire quickly when you determine someone is not a good fit.
• 10:05
  This is the one most owners struggle with, and it is where many hiring mistakes become expensive. A wrong hire caught at sixty days is a manageable setback. A wrong hire you keep for eighteen months because you hoped she would turn it around is a costly one. There is a phrase I return to again and again with my clients. When they show you who they are, believe them.
• 10:28
  If an associate misses deadlines in her first month, that is information. If she resists feedback, ignores your systems, or treats your team poorly, that is information. Many of us are trained to give people the benefit of the doubt, to look for potential, and to assume things will improve. Those are lovely qualities in a friend. In a firm owner, they can become very expensive.
• 10:50
  The early weeks of employment are when people are usually on their best behavior. If what you see then concerns you, it is unlikely to improve without a significant change. When you combine a strong hiring system, a training plan with clear benchmarks, and the willingness to act quickly, hiring stops feeling like a gamble. You still take a risk, but it is a managed risk with limits on how much it can cost you. Let's talk about the discomfort itself because it deserves some attention.
• 11:22
  Discomfort is normal and natural. With anything new, hiring your first employees will feel scary. Hiring your first attorney can feel uncomfortable even if you have hired staff before. That feeling does not mean you are doing something wrong. It means you are doing something you have not done before.
• 11:41
  Growth lives just outside your comfort zone. If it lived inside it, you would already have it. Think back to some of the uncomfortable moments that brought you to where you are today. Remember studying for the bar exam. Remember the months of preparation, the anxiety, and the uncertainty about whether you would pass.
• 11:59
  That was deeply uncomfortable and you did it anyway because you wanted what was on the other side. Remember the moment you decided to leave a steady job and start your own law firm. You gave up a regular paycheck, benefits, and the security of someone else being responsible for keeping the lights on. Many of the people around you probably thought you were taking an enormous risk. You felt the fear, and you did it anyway.
• 12:28
  Think about the first time you appeared in court, signed a major client, or negotiated a difficult settlement. Each of those moments was uncomfortable at the time. Today, many of them feel routine. We feel uncomfortable many times in life. If we want success and achievement, we have to feel the fear and do it anyway.
• 12:49
  Hiring your first attorney is one more moment like that. It is uncomfortable because it is new, and it will stop being new the more you do it. Here is a reframe that helps many of my clients. Discomfort is a sign of growth, not a sign of danger. Your nervous system cannot always tell the difference between something risky and something unfamiliar.
• 13:12
  It sends the same signal for both. Your job as the leader of your firm is to look at the situation with clear eyes and ask whether this is dangerous or just new. Most of the time, hiring an attorney with a solid system in place is just new. There is another force at work here, and it shows up especially strongly in high achieving women. That force is perfectionism.
• 13:37
  Many of us have spent our lives being rewarded for getting things right. We were the students with top grades, the associates who caught every error, and the lawyers who prided ourselves on never missing a detail. That habit served us well in our legal careers. It does not always serve us well as business owners. Perfectionism tells us that if we cannot do something perfectly without making mistakes, we should avoid doing it at all.
• 14:05
  So we put off the hire until we are sure we will get it right, which means we put it off indefinitely because certainty never arrives. In law firm ownership and leadership, you will make mistakes. You will make many of them. That is not a flaw in you. It is the nature of building a business.
• 14:24
  You will hire the wrong person from time to time. Someone may present herself beautifully in interviews and then turn out to be someone very different once she starts. You may wait too long to let go of an employee who is clearly the wrong fit. You may make a compensation offer you later realize was too generous or not generous enough. Every firm owner who has built a team has a list of hiring decisions she would make differently today.
• 14:51
  The firm owners who succeed are not the ones who avoid mistakes. They are the ones who forgive themselves and keep moving forward. When a hire does not work out, they process their emotions about it, learn what they can, and make the next decision with more wisdom. The sooner you can process those emotions and move forward, the better off you will be. Experience makes all of this easier.
• 15:13
  Your fifth hire will feel very different from your first. You will recognize warning signs sooner, ask better questions, and trust your judgment more. But experience requires repeated action. You cannot think your way into experience. You get it by making decisions, seeing what happens, and adjusting.
• 15:34
  That means the path to becoming good at hiring runs through hiring. The perfectionist wants to become an expert before she starts. The successful firm owner starts so that she can become an expert. Let's talk about who to hire because this is another place where many owners get stuck. If you are a solo law firm owner ready to hire your first associate attorney, my most common advice is to hire an experienced associate.
• 16:03
  The reason is simple As a solo, you are likely already stretched thin and you probably have very little time to train someone from the ground up. An experienced attorney can step in, take on work more quickly, and start relieving the pressure on you sooner. That is the ideal. The market does not always cooperate with the ideal. The unemployment rate in the legal field is less than 1%.
• 16:29
  That means experienced attorneys who are good at what they do are usually already employed, and many of them are not actively looking. It may be difficult to find the exact person you want. You may also find that the experienced attorney you want is beyond what you can afford for your first hire. There is nothing wrong with hiring a newer attorney who needs more training. Many successful firms have been built on attorneys who were hired early in their careers and grew with the firm.
• 16:56
  A newer attorney may bring energy, flexibility, and a willingness to learn your way of doing things without unlearning habits from another firm. The key is that you have a solid training plan in place and that you are willing to put in the time and effort to develop her. That is where the training plan and the thirty, sixty, and ninety day benchmarks we discussed earlier become even more important. With a newer attorney, the plan is not optional. It is the structure that turns potential into performance.
• 17:28
  We can all envision the exact right person. We can picture her experience, her personality, her work ethic, and how she fits into our culture. Sometimes that person does not apply. When she does not, we have to work with the applicants who are available and make the best decision we can with the information we have. This brings me to the most important point of this episode.
• 17:50
  There is no right or wrong answer in your hiring decisions. There is only what works for you and your firm and what does not. Hiring an experienced attorney is not right, and hiring a new attorney is not wrong. Building a team of employees is not right, and working with contractors is not wrong. Each choice carries its own trade offs, and you are the one who gets to weigh them.
• 18:16
  If a candidate does not meet your expectations, you do not have to hire her. You do not have to settle because you are tired or overwhelmed, and you do not have to say yes because someone is the only applicant this month. You have agency, you have the right to say yes, and you have the right to say no. That might sound obvious, but I see many firm owners lose sight of it. They start talking about hiring as something that is happening to them.
• 18:44
  They say the market is impossible, the candidates are terrible, and employees always disappoint them. When we lose sight of our ability to choose what we want and what we don't want, we begin to feel like victims. A victim mindset is one of the most limiting mindsets a firm owner can carry because it hands control of your firm's future to circumstances. A leader sees it differently. She recognizes that she is choosing every step of the way.
• 19:13
  She chooses whether to hire, whom to interview, whom to make an offer to, and how to structure that offer. She chooses the training plan and the benchmarks. She chooses whether someone stays when the benchmarks are not met. Every one of those choices is hers. When you remember that you are choosing, the discomfort becomes more manageable.
• 19:34
  You're not leaping off a cliff and hoping for the best. You're making a series of decisions, each with checkpoints and each with the option to change course. That is what leadership looks like in practice. Let's bring this together. If hiring an attorney feels uncomfortable, you are in very good company.
• 19:52
  That discomfort usually comes from a lack of clarity about the process, compensation, management, timing, and economics. And every one of those concerns can be solved with the right system. You are free to choose not to hire employees, but make that choice knowing what it may cost your revenue, your profitability, and your wealth over the coming decade. If you choose to hire, protect yourself with a strong hiring system, a training plan with clear benchmarks at thirty, sixty, and ninety days, and the willingness to let someone go quickly when she shows you she is not the right fit. Expect to make mistakes.
• 20:32
  Forgive yourself when you do, and keep moving forward. Remember that the perfect candidate may not apply and that you have agency in every decision you make. If you are ready to scale your firm from 6 figures to seven, and you want help building the hiring compensation and training systems that make attorney hiring feel clear instead of uncomfortable, we would love to help. At Wealthy Woman Lawyer, our team works with women law firm owners to build firms that grow beyond the owner's personal capacity, with associates who pay for themselves and leaders who can run the firm without the owner in every decision. Schedule a practice growth assessment call by visiting wealthywomanlawyer.com and clicking the apply button at the top of the page.
• 21:20
  On that call, we will look at where your firm is today, what is holding it back, and what it would take to grow to and through 7 figures. Thank you for spending this time with me today. If this episode resonated with you, please share it with another woman law firm owner who has been putting off her first attorney hire and leave us a rating and review wherever you listen. Until next time, keep building the firm and the life you deserve.
• 21:48
  Intro: If you're ready to create more of what you truly desire in your business and your life, then you'll want to visit us at wealthywomanlawyer.com to learn more about how we help our clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.