How to Build a High-Performance Legal Team: Recruiting, Hiring, Training, and Compensation

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find seconds in command. You know

any seconds in command, Jeff?That.

Would be me.

Now-.

It's exactly where I want to be.

Yeah. When I think of number

two, I always think of Jeff.

Thank you, Ben. I appreciate that.

We have vision spark to credit for

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Welcome everyone to Elawvate, Build and

Grow Your Law Firm. I'm Jeff Wright,

Chief Operating Officer at Gideon Asen,

and as always joined by Ben

Gideon, founder, owner, partner.

How are you today, Ben?

Doing great, Jeff. How are things? Just

finished our first quarter retreat.

At a good first quarter retreat.

A hectic first quarter and heading

into probably a hectic but good second

quarter.

A hell of a good first

quarter though, I have to say.

A hell of a good first quarter. Yes.

The litigation team is

hitting on all cylinders,

so it's exciting and

everyone is busy as hell.

It's probably the best way to do it. I'm

looking forward to our podcast today.

For me, this is an exciting topic.

I think an important one as well.

Title of the podcast today

is How to Build a High

Performance Legal Team:

Recruiting, Hiring, Training,

and Compensation.

I think part of the reason why I like

this is you know Ben and some people that

have been listening.

I was in the banking world for 20

plus years and probably met with

thousands of business

owners over that time.

And when I always asked business owners

what their biggest challenges were,

it was always one of two answers.

It was either accounts receivable,

which we're not going to talk about today.

I don't think we have the magic formula

to get insurance companies to pay us

quicker or hiring the right people.

Those were always one or

two from every business owner

and here hiring the right people

is arguably one of the most critical

things that we do and talk about as a

senior management team.

I mean, that falls into two

broad categories in my view,

lawyers and non-lawyer staff and you

could divide up non-lawyer staff even

further than that.

But I do think there's

certainly lots of overlap in the

principles behind the hiring of

each of those two different broad

categories.

We really want to focus in today on the

lawyer side of that equation because

after all, I mean,

the ability to provide high level legal

services by a law firm is going to

depend to a significant extent on the

lawyers. Just no other way around it.

I guess what you've been on your own,

I guess for lack of a better term,

at Gideon Asen for roughly five and a

half years now and I'm sure along the

way you didn't start probably with

a very good process for hiring,

my guess is out of the gate.

That's true. We hadn't thought a lot

about hiring as a process initially.

I think that, I mean,

our first lawyer that we hired

that was not Taylor or I,

the two founding partners,

came to us and approached us about

wanting to have a job at our firm.

We weren't even recruiting

or affirmatively looking

to add lawyers at that

time. And that's Meryl Poulin,

who we've now made a third

partner in our business,

but she was persistent in wanting

the job and ultimately that

persistence led us to relent

and agree to hire her.

We weren't recruiting. We weren't actually

looking to hire a lawyer or to grow.

Every lawyer after Merrill has

been the product of wanting or

feeling that we needed to add

another lawyer to our team.

And that sort of has evolved

from our initial process was

to look around at the landscape

of our home state and kind of

figure out who we, Taylor and I, or Meryl,

knew as lawyers that we

thought highly of or had good

reputations,

maybe had some overlap or transferable

skills with what we did. And then we

would approach people to see if they

were interested in working at our firm.

Again, we weren't really actively

advertising or recruiting for a lawyer.

We were cherry-picking individuals based

on someone we thought might be a good

fit.

That isn't a bad strategy actually

because you're employing some criteria

and not just going out to the marketplace

at random to see who comes in.

You're finding someone you

know you think you would like.

The problem that we've ultimately found

with that strategy is we ran out of

people that fit that description that

we knew in our home state, Maine,

which is a small state,

and that were both available or

potentially available and that we

also were targeting as somebody

that we were interested in.

So then what do you do?

We're out of answers.

How did you shift from the roadblocks

of being in a small geographic

area and probably having pretty specific

criteria on what you and Taylor were

looking for? So how did you shift from

the local recruiting to find talent?

I mean, Jeff,

the real shift we had in a mindset

of what a good hiring process looks

like came in the process

we followed to hire you.

I'll turn it around on you in a

second. I could just say that also,

like many things you do as a new business,

it wasn't an intentional

strategic choice that we made.

It was born out of circumstances.

So the person that we had assigned

the role to temporarily serve as our

chief operating officer came to us

completely out of the blue and gave her

notice and said, "I'm

leaving. I quit basically,

but I'm going to give you some time before

I leave to find my replacement." And

I have to say that was one of the

worst days of our lives in this

business because even

though it wasn't perfect,

we felt like we had a workable leadership

structure in place for our firm. We

were finally kind of getting some

things right, making some headway,

keeping our head above water a little bit.

And then all of a sudden that

whole structure was coming

crumbling down with the

leadership team and the

senior person leaving.

So at that point we just decided, look,

we need to find a different way to

recruit high level candidates for the

top positions in our firm.

And that's when we went to VisionSpark

and developed a process that

led to hiring you. It was through

learning how we did that process.

We were then able to replicate that in

other hiring decisions we made after

you. And we have really in all of our

hiring since you followed a much more

deliberative and robust hiring process,

particularly when it

comes to hiring lawyers.

Yeah, 100%. And the nice thing was,

because I obviously saw

it from the other side,

but I think it started with a

well-defined job description,

which I assume you probably wrote a

draft and worked with VisionSpark on.

And then from there it was

really an in- depth process

between VisionSpark and interviews here,

proprietary tips assessment

on the type of personality

that you're getting to see if

it was going to be a good fit.

And I know it's something we're

probably going to talk about later,

but a lot of people hire off of

skillset or off of what they see on the

resume and forget about the personality,

forget about the culture fit.

And that's something that we've kind

of put first on our list is to look at

personality and culture fit

and kind of skillset second.

It seems so obvious, but we weren't

doing it before that process,

which is before you go out to the

market to hire somebody for any

position, but particularly

for a lawyer position,

you want to clearly define what the

role is that you're hiring for and

not just functionally what that role is,

but what are the characteristics you're

looking for in the person to fill that

role? What are the

personality traits you want?

What are the skillsets they need to have?

Because how can you possibly identify

the right person for the role if

you haven't clearly defined what

the role is? In the CEO search job,

we spent a lot of time clearly defining

what that role was going to be.

And part of that came out of our

failed experiment with our prior COO

where we hadn't done that and it wasn't

clear to anybody in the office what role

that person was serving,

which is why despite having a

COO that predated you, Jeff,

that person didn't really manage the

business the way you do. We were still

managing it actively as the owners.

People were still coming to us with all

of the day-to-day operational issues and

problems because we

hadn't defined that role.

And in fairness to the

person who had the role,

she didn't know what the role was because

we hadn't defined it for her either

and we also hadn't given her the right

backing support or authority to fulfill

that role. So it all

kind of goes together.

That process of really working

up the job description in a very

detailed way, which as you alluded to,

also includes a list of our core values.

So every job description we

publish and advertise for

not only says functionally what

that role requires, what skills,

capabilities, training,

experience, but it also says,

what are the character traits and

values we're looking for in that person?

And not only does that process

allow us to identify the right

candidate for the job, it actually

probably even more importantly,

it allows candidates to

self-select to apply for the job

because what we find is people that

our job descriptions are really also

advertisements for our firm in a way,

and they're also motivational

documents that for the right people are

inspiring to read.

They speak to people.

We've had many people apply for jobs that

say, "I wasn't even looking for a job,

but when I read your job

description, it just spoke to me.

It made me recognize the value I bring and

that these people share that value and

I want to work for a place like that.

The place where I am now

doesn't see the value in that,

but this place does." And so we've had

a lot of people that apply for jobs that

self-select as applicants.

And at the flip side,

I imagine there are many people we don't

know them because they haven't applied,

but they're self-selecting in the

other direction and not applying.

So not wasting our time because

when they read the job description,

they recognize they

would not be a good fit.

You and Taylor have entrusted

me where I'm kind of the,

I don't want to say the gatekeeper

or the first line of defense,

but regardless of the position, whether

it's an attorney position, paralegal,

administrative assistant,

I'm the one that manages the

process of getting it out there.

And then I vet the resumes first,

I do the preliminary phone calls

and I've had calls with attorneys,

first phone calls that have

gone an hour and a half.

And I would say half of our

discussion is about our culture,

about our environment,

about our core values and our

goals and what it's like to

work here. And I think it's important

for them to hear that from me,

to hear from them what their thoughts

are on that before we get into

they have med mal or they have personal

injury or they have plaintiff side

experience. Yeah,

50% of the conversation is not

something you can get off a resume and

it's important to your point earlier,

I think people lose sight of that.

Yeah. And I think the other thing people

who are recruiting lose sight of is

that just like everything else we

do trying to attract high quality

cases and new clients or

trying to persuade a jury,

the process of recruiting

staff and attorneys is a sales

process.

You have to sell people on the

benefits and value of working

for you. And there's nothing, as

you alluded to at the very outset,

there's nothing more important than

having the right people in the right seats

on your bus to use that analogy.

And how do you get the right people?

Because it's a competitive

marketplace for talent. I mean,

every law firm wants the best

lawyers and why would they come here

instead of going across the street?

You have to make your case. And for us,

it's a combination of things we

offer people for the right person

and we can get into what that

is, but for the right person,

it's a very attractive opportunity

that they can't get anywhere else.

And so it's not a hard sell for us,

but it's only not a hard sell if we're

effectively communicating what those

opportunities are because

people don't know.

How would they know unless we tell them?

So it's a really important

part of the process. I mean,

think about what most job

announcements are even for lawyers.

We're hiring a litigation attorney,

competitive salary needs three

to five years experience,

send applications too. Well, I mean,

that doesn't get you jazzed up and

excited to apply for that, does it?

There's nothing about that that sets

that opportunity apart from any other

opportunity. That's not how we

present our job opportunities.

Yeah.

We usually have two paragraphs of firm

description and culture and core values

and I mean the whole first,

there's nothing about experience on I

think the first page of our job postings

that comes at the tail end and we do

that for a reason because we put what we

feel are the most important

things first in there.

We get to the experience after.

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Maybe you could just describe a little

bit how we've just hired another

attorney.

We had attempted to go more old

school by mining the local talent

pool. That didn't work

out for us. We recognized,

and one of the things we learned from

hiring you is the need to cast a wider

net. Now, although you're from

Maine and live here on the ground,

we had many applications for your job

from outside of Maine all over the

country, actually.

You want to just talk a little bit about

transition and how we were looking for

a lawyer this time that

broadened that net a little bit?

Yeah, 100%. So like you

had mentioned, I mean,

when you and Taylor first started hiring,

you tapped the local pool of people that

you knew and proactively reached out

and networked.

We tried to do the same thing with

our most recent attorney hire and

we had a number of

interviews, good candidates,

just not an individual that we

felt was the exact right fit

and decided to go and try

and track down a recruiter.

I interviewed I think three different

recruiters and the one we landed on

Chris has been fantastic.

And I think what we liked about

him most is when we met with him,

he asked about our culture,

he asked about the firm,

he asked what our day-to-day is like

and how people are going to fit in

and we cast a wide net and we were

lucky enough to get a candidate

from well outside of Maine and they're

starting in May and we couldn't be more

thrilled, but we took a lot.

One of the things,

and we could probably talk about

it more, is patience. I mean,

it took us in the neighborhood of five

months from our initial posting to

making an offer and having an acceptance

to bring that right candidate in.

And I don't know if firms

or businesses that don't

have a well-defined hiring

system would have the patience to

wait for the right candidate.

We would've loved to have had somebody

in here three or four months ago.

We have plenty of work. Trust me,

every attorney here would be more than

happy if we brought somebody in earlier,

but the wait is worth it. I

think the patience and not,

you can have the urgency

but you can't rush it.

Yeah.

So I would say we have toyed with the

idea of using legal recruiters in the

past. Legal recruiters have,

there's pros and cons to it and

I think individual recruiters can

be very different from one another.

Depending on what kind

of law practice you have,

recruiters can be more or less valuable.

One of the challenges in using

recruiters for a plaintiff contingent fee

practice where a lot of the

lawyer compensation is based on

incentive-based bonus

structures as our firm is,

is that many recruiters base

their fees on a percentage of the

lawyer's first year starting salary.

And what they really want to be

doing is finding transfer partners

at large firms or senior associates

at large firms that command

a high base salary because that's

a big payday for a recruiter.

The kind of position we

were recruiting for A,

doesn't have a high base salary,

although with incentive based pay,

there's very good opportunity for very

high compensation for the right person,

but the recruiter doesn't benefit

directly from that. We're also asking

recruiters to find a candidate for

what would be a more difficult to place

position in an out of the way small,

rural state at the end of the country.

Again, it's not the low hanging fruit.

So what you will get is a lot of

recruiters who will say, "Yeah,

sign me up." And they'll put out a blast

email to everyone they know and if they

happen to get a candidate, they'll

put them your way and get paid on it,

but they're not really willing to beat

the Bushes and do real work to try to

develop a candidate pool for you.

That's what the VisionSpark folks did

when we hired you. They did real work.

They developed a candidate

pool. They cast a wide net.

They took affirmative proactive

steps to recruit people,

not just see who came in the

door through sort of mass

advertising or blast emails or something.

So we had to go a different route.

The person we have been

using as a recruiter, Chris,

he has a different structure.

So we're paying him a flat fee.

So it's not based on a

percentage of salary.

It is contingent on him finding

us a candidate that we hire,

but that fee guarantees that he's going

to be paid for the work that he does.

And then we had some creative and

I thought quite effective ways at

trying to identify candidates

who might be good for both

qualified for what we're looking for,

but also where there was a higher

likelihood that they might be willing to

accept a position at a firm in

Maine. So using social media, AI,

you can now mine Facebook, LinkedIn,

other social media for people who

have family in Maine or New England,

have maybe went to high school or college

in Maine and left or law school in

Maine. So somebody who has some connection

to either the state or the general

area and then also maybe in a

practice area that is either the

same or has transferable skills that

would make them a good candidate.

So because the likelihood of somebody

in Los Angeles who has no connection to

the Northeast and no connection to Maine,

giving up their high paid job in an LA

firm and going 3,000 miles across the

country to work for us pretty low.

But the candidate we ended up

finding who had great credentials,

former US attorney working

for the Department of Justice,

good educational background,

other strong academic skills,

this person turns out, has

parents who live in Maine,

has a daughter who's about

to start college in Maine,

himself grew up in

neighboring state of Vermont.

So there was a lot of

areas of overlap where that

possible transition from out of state

here potentially could make a lot of sense

for him.

So again,

if you're strategic about it and you

know what you're looking for and we

understood that we needed

to have that connection,

you start to narrow the pool using AI

now that can screen through all of this

data instantly,

you're able to develop a

pool of candidates where

there's a higher probability

that you might be able to recruit

somebody effectively from that pool.

And then you need somebody like Chris

who's willing to just call these people

and that's what Chris does. He got

on the phone and just called people,

had a connection to Maine,

had the right credentials,

seemed to have the right

level of experience.

And you might have to make 50 or 100 calls

before you get one or two people that

are interested. But if you get the

right one person, you've done that job.

And in this case we did.

I don't even want to say

cautionly optimistic. I mean,

it was a heavy lift that we asked for him.

Find us a litigation attorney that

wants to relocate to Maine like you were

saying. And I think from

the time we signed with him

to the time he found us the

candidate and we had a signed job offer

letter was right around two and a half

months and I was blown away

at how quickly it happened.

I was skeptical.

We've just posted for another position

and we went right back to him.

I did want to talk about our

previous hire before our most recent.

I think it goes back to

knowing what you want,

having a very well-defined job

description and having the patience.

Our hire in January,

Stephanie, who came on,

had previously applied for

another non-litigation attorney

role here and we interviewed her, very

good credentials, great interviewer,

extremely intelligent, good attorney.

We realized, yeah,

we love everything about her, but

this isn't the right role for her.

And so we decided,

and actually Ben was the one that really

had the epiphany because the rest of us

were a little enamored with her

background and everything. And Ben said,

"She could be successful here just

not in this current role." In addition

to doing the upfront,

I always have to call the candidates

and turn them down as well,

which isn't the best part of my job.

And I told her that we loved everything

about her and this just was not the best

role for her. We wound up hiring another

candidate, which worked out great,

but I left it with her that, "Hey,

if we have another role that we think

suits your skillset and you're available,

would you mind if I reached out? " And

I don't know, I would say what, six,

roughly six months later we are hiring

a litigation attorney. We reached out.

She's been here since January and her

first five months have been a very event

filled for her here in a good

way. She's got a lot on her plate.

We're more than thrilled to have her.

All of that stemmed from

knowing what we wanted,

having a very defined idea,

very defined job description,

and then us working together to

make what we feel is well-informed

decision.

That was a great example of another

really successful hiring process that,

again, took a long time.

We had to be patient that the right role

wasn't available when she originally

applied and then became available. That's

another example though of somebody,

her background for the last 13 years,

she was the general counsel

for the largest primary care

medical practice in our state

and working closely with doctors,

working on medical malpractice

litigation, but from the provider's side.

But she had a background.

Her dad was a plaintiff's

lawyer in another state.

She started her career as a

plaintiff's lawyer at another firm.

She definitely had the

fire in the belly for it.

I think she was excited to get back into

the litigation world on our side of the

table. And so she was not

somebody looking for a job.

She had a very good job,

a highly compensated position.

I don't think she would have applied to

plaintiff's firms generally.

She applied to our firm because she

saw something about this practice that

appealed to her. And from the

job description, actually,

I think she said that she read the job

description and it really spoke to her in

a way that motivated her to ...

It was a considerable life change

from a very comfortable corporate

position with complete job security to

working as a plaintiff's trial lawyer.

So it kind of makes the point

we were trying to make earlier.

I wanted to go back and just talk a

little bit about the kind of context of

lawyer hiring to begin with.

So when firms are thinking about

hiring lawyers to scale and grow their

practice, which is the subject matter

of this podcast, there's really,

I think,

two models you can follow to hire

attorneys to accomplish that goal. One

is that you can hire seasoned

lawyers that have all of the

knowledge, skills,

and experience to completely

shoulder the burdens of

independently performing the legal

services you're hiring them to perform.

In other words, they don't

need any additional ... I mean,

they might need training on your

internal procedures or systems,

but they come in as fully fledged lawyers

in whatever field that you're hiring

them for.

The other alternative is you're hiring

people that are not fully fledged

lawyers that are still

learning or still need to learn

skills or develop capabilities in

order to fully grow into that role.

And those are very different. I

would say there's probably a third,

which is hiring baby

lawyers, we call them,

the ones that are brand new right out

of law school who don't really have any

experience at all,

aren't really tried or tested doing any

legal work yet. We basically exclude

that last category.

For a firm of our size,

we're now up to with our

new hire eight lawyers.

We just can't afford to have anybody

who doesn't have at least a critical

mass of usable skills that can contribute

immediately to the work we're

doing. It just doesn't work for us.

We're not hourly rate firm that's

leveraged off of billables.

So for large firms that

are where every new

lawyer unit is a profit generating

source, that works, right?

They can hire the new associate,

bill them out at 250 or 500 bucks an hour.

It costs the firm a hundred

bucks an hour to employ them.

That's a good business model,

but doesn't work for us.

So depending on what kind of firm you

have, you might hire baby lawyers,

you might not. We're not likely

to hire baby lawyers in our firm.

So it really leaves us those two options,

the fully fledged lawyer capable of

doing everything independently versus a

lawyer who still needs to grow.

In our particular line of work,

there aren't many people that qualify

as the fully fledged independent,

capable lawyer that not only are that,

but also that you would want to hire

or that would be a good cultural

fit for your practice because

particularly in the plaintiff's world,

very few people ever matriculate

to be that type of lawyer because

it's hard and few people get

to that level in their career,

but the people People who do tend to

have extremely large egos, number one,

I'd probably count myself among some

of those, but they have large egos,

they have big personalities,

they're demanding.

If they're successful in what we do,

they're already highly compensated

wherever they are, a different firm,

their own firm, whatever. The cost of

bringing someone like that in is A,

you would have to pay them an arm and

a leg probably because they're already

doing quite well wherever they are.

B,

you would have to tolerate their

ego and their demanding nature

and personality.

They're not likely to be team players

in the sense of subscribing to a new

culture or new model that you want to

impose on them because they've figured out

something that already

works for them. Now,

there could be exceptions

to that for sure,

but you can't really count on finding

somebody like that in my view that's going

to be a good fit and allow you to scale

a business where your goal is to have a

profitable business. I mean,

frankly, from a partner standpoint,

to be profitable for me as a partner,

I don't want to give away all of my

money to some other large ego plaintiff's

lawyer if I don't have to. If the

right person came, we'd consider it.

But again,

it's not something we're

seeking to necessarily find

and there's no great model

of individual out there that is a natural

fit for that. So that really leaves

you with that last category,

which are lawyers that are

in that transitional phase,

that they have a certain number of skills,

but they're not fully fledged first

chair trial lawyers that have been trying

numerous cases to verdict

successfully over their careers.

And when you're bringing

in a lawyer like that,

what you're looking for is are they the

right piece in the puzzle that is the

full set of capabilities you're

trying to build out in order to do the

legal services work?

We've built out teams.

So when we're looking for

a lawyer to add to a team,

we're not just assessing what is

that individual lawyer's skillset and

capabilities,

but are they the right fit to

compensate or to supplement

the other skillsets of the other members

of that team and the other personality

traits of people that are on that team?

Now,

will they be a good fit personality-wise

to work together collaboratively with

their other team members?

And part of that process is we

have started to implement this,

what you alluded to before, Jeff,

the TIPS psychological assessment,

which assesses in an

objectively validated fashion,

both intellectual capabilities

and baseline IQ type

qualities and also personality

traits. And I have to say,

I'm the kind of person

who would be, I think,

inherently skeptical of that type of test,

but I've actually found it extremely

valuable in helping us to assess

candidates. I don't know what

your thoughts are about it.

Obviously,

I've never taken that particular test

because it was designed specifically for

this firm,

but I've had to take personality tests

in the past and I think you hit it on the

head with the word skeptical.

I was like, all right,

it's worth about as much as the paper

it's printed on. But it's not the case.

And I think what's great about it is I

was the first applicant or my role was

the first role that the firm

used it for. After that,

Ben and Taylor had every attorney

here take it and we've developed a

really good baseline of

what we're expecting our

applicants to score and what

ranges. There's categories on there,

like Ben had stated of intelligence,

but it's also things along the line of

working with how urgent are they and how

their communication style is and

things like that. And amazingly,

all our attorneys here really fit within

the scales like one to 10. And all the

attorneys here aside from one or two

that may be outliers in some categories

fall within three points of each other.

If we see candidates come in that are

real outliers in those categories that we

deem important,

it's enough to raise enough of a

red flag for us to have more in-

depth discussions around those areas

and come up with some additional

questions to try and dig into

it. I think it's been invaluable.

I mean, one example is we tend to have

a high level of urgency in our firm.

People like to move quickly

on things and get stuff done.

It could be very hard if you have a team

of people that are urgent and action

oriented for somebody to lack

that sense of urgency or that

sense of action because you've just

become frustrated with the person.

They're not working at the

pace that the practice moves.

And that's one of the things the test

analyzes is someone's level of urgency.

Another thing I've found useful

is when you do a job interview for

that hour you're spending with somebody,

they're putting on their best

performance. We all know that, right?

They're projecting themselves in a

certain way and it's very hard to

get a real sense for what they're

really like because this may be

atypical of how they typically are,

but they're just able to do it for that

hour that you're in the interview. One

example is we interviewed a lawyer who

was very personable, conversational,

did a good job, was a good interviewer,

but scored a one out of 10

on introversion and basically

meaning that this lawyer is

a painfully shy introvert,

which means they're the kind of person

who their instinct is always going to be

to close the door, to work

alone, not to reach out,

not to ask questions.

And it's just hard for somebody like

that to collaborate effectively in

a team environment because they

just are really introverted.

If we were hiring that person for a second

chair research and writing job where

their job was to be down in a dark

room in the basement and just be doing

research and churning

out memos or something,

that might be a good personality trait

for that. But we weren't hiring for that.

We were hiring for them to be a co-counsel

collaborator as part of a litigation

team working hand in hand with another

lawyer on valuable cases. It didn't

mean that that one answer on a personality

test disqualified that individual,

but it causes you to take

notice and then to follow up

and to ask questions about that

and to really drill down on,

is this going to be a problem?

And you're not going to learn

that from your job interview,

just not because even that introvert

is going to be able to get out of their

introversion for an hour and

pretend to be gregarious and

communicative with you in a job interview.

So it's just very hard to figure

some of that stuff out without this.

I remember vividly one

of the questions on mine,

it was something along the lines of,

what was one of your proudest

moments as a supervisor?

Something along those lines. I

remember talking to the recruiter,

I had answered it and

everything and she goes,

"You know there's right and wrong answers

to that question." I was like, "Well,

how can there be right and wrong answers?

Everyone's going to have a different

sense of pride and different things." She

said,

"A lot of people answer that the proudest

moment as a supervisor is team blew

out their sales number,

finished 110% to goal or whatever."

And she said the correct answers,

the answer you put down, Jeff,

one of your proudest moments was a staff

person that you really believed in and

you coached them up and they actually

wound up leaving where you were

working and they got a relatively

high profile job. You were

so proud that you were part

of that because you helped

kind of mentor them along

their career. And she said,

"That's the right answer,

not something else that someone else put

down." And the fact that these people

are trained to read into things like

that is the type of insight to your point

you don't get from an hour interview or

even on the third interview you're not

going to get. It's interesting

and it's helped us tremendously.

I don't want to say we've been lucky,

but we've made very smart hiring

decisions based on a lot of

factors.

It's like everything else you do. I mean,

we go back to the episode we did

on decision making generally,

but we try to apply that rigor

to the hiring process. Again,

it's something I think lawyers fall

into the trap of we're all so busy

doing our legal work that all the

other surrounding things you have to

do to build a business are

kind of second thoughts.

We apply a lot of rigor to the casework

we do to the legal services we provide.

But I think traditionally lawyers don't

necessarily apply the same rigor to

other parts of the business. The fact

is that you said we've been lucky,

but I don't think it's lucky.

I think we make our own luck by

having a rigorous process and

insisting on following it and

not compromising our standards,

knowing what we're looking

for and continuing to work

at it until we accomplish

the goal. So it's really no different

than any other aspect of what we're doing.

But I mean, think about the hiring.

What is more important than who you're

putting in those seats in your office,

especially in the seats that are going

to be client facing and are going to be

representing you as a law

firm in front of the courts,

in front of your clients every single day.

There's nothing possibly more

important than that decision.

So if you're going to invest

any time and rigor in something,

it ought to be in hiring the

right people to work for you.

The cost of a wrong hire is it's

almost immeasurable. I mean,

it's not just monetary, it's

the time, it's the training,

it's everything else. And to your point,

it has to be one of the biggest priorities

that firms have out there and it has

to be done right.

We had some other things that

we were going to cover today,

but I think we're out of time,

but just to preview them because they're

natural segues from our discussion

today, they're actually integral

in what we were just talking about.

You can't separate the hiring process

from the other things that we'll cover.

And those two other things are training,

lawyer training again specifically,

because again,

if you're not hiring the fully formed

lawyer that can operate completely

independently,

then there has to be a program for

training that lawyer once they arrive.

So that's one topic that we will

cover in a subsequent episode.

We've been giving a lot of thought to

that lately and we've developed some

interesting and novel approaches that

we're going to be rolling out at our firm

actually next month or

actually later this month.

And then the training and then the other

part of it is compensation because you

really can't separate hiring from

compensation in order to attract and

retain high quality lawyers.

You have to have a

mechanism for compensating

those lawyers because after all,

people who work hard and do a good

job deserve to be well compensated.

It's a competitive marketplace.

How do you structure compensation in a

way that provides the right incentives

for the lawyers,

doesn't overpay people who are

underperforming or underproducing,

pays people appropriately and generously

if they are performing and producing

well,

continues to incentivize people as they

mature and grow into your practice over

time and doesn't cause your best

talent to head for the door at some

point and leave and open up

a law firm across the street.

So there's a lot that goes into that.

And I should say we're a firm where

we currently don't have any equity

partnership track.

So that creates an additional challenge

because you have to be able to attract

and retain top talent without offering

them equity partnership in the business.

We will cover all of those topics

which become fairly detailed in a

subsequent episode.

I can't tell you how many hours we spend

on attorney compensation plans behind

the scenes to try and get

it right. Hundreds of hours.

And we'll get to it in our future episode,

but that came out of trial and error

having problems with earlier iterations of

our compensation plans.

I think we've got something

that will work well long-term.

We've got it pretty much right, but

it still may require some tweaks,

but I think we've put so much thought

into it that hopefully by sharing that

we'll be able to help others get to the

right point without spending as much

time and creating as many problems as

we did along the way. So with that,

I guess we'll call it a day. Thanks, Jeff.

All right. Appreciate it, Ben.

Thanks for listening to Elawvate,

Build and Grow Your Law Firm.

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