This was an enormous blind spot for me, but I can tell you without any question that the hardest part of running a law firm, at least in the six years that I have done it, has been hiring. And I had this absolutely wrong. This was such a blind spot for me. I come from the big law world where we’re doing on- campus interviews and we’re talking about Ivy League graduates, and these people want to work so hard that they will bill 12 hours a day and then mop the bathroom floor. They want a job so much. And so I thought I was a pretty decent manager. I thought I was pretty good at interviewing. And when it came time for me to start to hire office managers and secretaries and associates for litigation and associates for transactional matters, I thought, “I’m good at this. ” I’ll do an interview, I’ll look at a resume, some writing samples, I’ll see what their experience is, check a couple references.

And if I feel like I want to get a beer with them and I’d be able to keep them around and enjoy working with them, then it’s good to go. And I also thought that a lot of people from the big law world that I worked in would see my firm as a wonderful refuge from all of the trouble of working in the big law firms and that all these very qualified people were going to flock over and join my firm. And I was totally wrong on all this stuff. So far, nobody from my big law world has joined my firm, no lawyers, no staff. I did not see that coming. And so I had to go out in the marketplace and try to find qualified people to hire. And there’s lots of qualified people out there, but boy, oh boy, hiring them and making sure you get the right people in is something that was unexpectedly complicated.

My track record on finding the right people has been mixed. I have a number of employees who are so good. I hope to work with them until I hang up my spurs as a lawyer, but there are other people. And these are people that I’ve known for more than 10 years, people that I litigated against, people who are senior to me, people who’ve tried 50 cases already in front of the State Supreme Court. These people I thought would have the ability to sort of fit their skills into the way that we do things around here in our philosophy. And boy, oh boy, was I wrong. I had other people who … I had some people who wanted to work really hard, but were not able to do a great job at it. I had other people who I thought would do a really good job if only they would work hard, but they wouldn’t work hard because they were distracted by things that were more interesting to them.

And so I have made more mistakes in hiring than I care to recount. And the sort of candidates that I was used to like, you don’t get. If you’re at an AmLaw 100 firm and you’re a partner, your interview is a lot different than when you are a small law firm. And so I’m intentionally not doing a lot of videos about hiring. I’ll probably get to it, but I don’t consider myself to be anywhere near an expert when it comes to this. I will say that the more that I’ve hired people, the more that I’ve realized that I don’t particularly enjoy managing people. And I hoped to grow the firm to a point where there would be a level of management in place between me and some of the people that were doing the production work. Achieving that level of scale of firm is something that I’ve sort of decided I’m not interested in because it’s become apparent to me that size of firm and profitability are not correlated.

Some of the most profitable firms out there in terms of people taking home a lot of money are some of the smaller headcount firms. And even though I thought I’d have a dozen lawyers in the firm by the time that I retire, and I’m still not certain that I won’t be there, that was the vision for the firm that I used to hold now. I think we’re talking about a smaller group of extremely competent lawyers that are able to bill out at a very high rate. That is going to be the least amount of hassle for me, that is going to be the most lucrative way for me to run the law firm. And right now that is the way that I’m thinking about it. I will also say at the risk of venturing into the how you go about hiring people world, the only bit of advice that I will give in these interviews, and I hope to get further down this path in the future when I consider myself to be really good at it.

I have a lot of experience that’s valuable and I have a lot of battle scars. I’ve got the good and I’ve got the bad. So I’d say I know quite a bit about it. But until I’m really expert at it, I don’t know that I’m going to dive too deeply into hiring, but I will say this, the one thing that really changed everything for me, and it kind of marks the before and after a moment where I screwed up a lot of hires versus when I got it right, was when I started to use personality assessment tools to determine who would be a good fit for my firm. And I got to tell you that as an interviewee that was the recipient of a bunch of those tests back in the day, I had a pretty negative opinion about them. I was thinking, these are weird questions.

What does this have to do with anything? Why are they putting me through this? But you would be astonished the science behind these things and what you could tell about people’s skill sets, about how they work, about how they want to be coached, about where they’re liable to be good, where they’re liable to be weak, and what you can understand about your own style as a manager and as a lawyer and how well it’s going to interface with different employees, it is enormously important in my view for you to have more insight into what makes these people tick than you’re going to get just through doing an interview and seeing whether you like them and seeing whether you think they’ve got good experience. Even if they’re coming from a lateral firm where people have similar experience, I’ve not hired any lawyers in my firm that didn’t get paid six figures.

We don’t do … I have fixed salaries where my lawyers get paid the same regardless of what they bill on any given week or month. Is there profit sharing in the form of bonuses? Yeah. Do they get raises? Yeah, they do. But a lot of firms will say, “Just pay a small wage and then incentivize them based on their billable hours.” I never wanted to do that because I wanted to hire people and I wanted to be able to train them and I didn’t want them to be indignant about when I was pulling them off billable work. And I wanted to have the freedom to slash my invoices to clients in whatever way that I felt was appropriate to make sure that the clients got the right size bill. And I never wanted any lawyer to feel like they were getting screwed out of compensation because I was making those decisions.

So it was always salary, whatever the level of productivity was. And so I have always done a good job of compensating them. I’ve always paid them, as I mentioned, six figures. And so to me, there’s a lot of reason why I think people would want to really throw themselves into the work in the way that I would’ve if it were me, but different things make different people tick. And I have gotten some screaming red flags to the personality assessments and I’ve run away from people. But I will say that the last two lawyers that I’ve hired really hit the sweet spot of exactly what I was looking for in personality assessments. And the longest tenured lawyer employee that I have was the first one that I started using personality assessments on. I saw what it was that I wanted, and then this person came along with almost exactly that profile and they’ve been with me for a number of years and I hope they stay with me until I stop practicing law.

So don’t underestimate the challenge of hiring and managing. Size of your firm is not correlated to profitability. I wouldn’t want to have a large firm for vanity reasons. I’m all about the bottom line, not the top line. And when you do start to make hires, I would spend a lot of time getting to know the personality assessment tools out there and getting all the insight you can into what makes you tick and what makes them tick to make sure that you’ve got a good match before you like me go and make six-figure investments that might not have always panned out as ideally as you hope that they would.