Hiring and Managing Legal Assistants Part I: Have a Plan
At some point, almost all solo practice attorneys and small law firms will realize that they need to hire a legal assistant. Legal assistants are not just a luxury for attorneys in large law firms. They can be an integral component in your plan to grow your practice. Actually, getting a competent legal assistant may be one of the best decisions an attorney in a solo practice or small law firm can make.
Attorneys who are regularly involved in litigation need a legal assistant who can answer calls and basic questions from important clients while the attorney is out. But even attorneys who spend much of their day in the office can benefit from the help that a qualified legal assistant can provide.
Think about how much time you spend drafting correspondence, responding to basic inquiries, answering the phone, sorting the mail, updating your website and more. A legal assistant can provide you with additional time in your day to cultivate potential clients and to take on additional work.
Furthermore, a legal assistant can perform fact checking and can edit your work. They can research previous cases and legal articles pertaining to your firm’s most critical cases. They can also draft contracts and handle all of your billing for you. In other words, an attorney’s legal assistant can be a partner. The two of you can work together to achieve the goals of your law firm.
Hiring a Legal Assistant Takes Time
If you want to hire an assistant who is competent, quick to learn, and who complements your style, you will need to allow yourself an adequate amount of time to figure out what you need, review resumes, and conduct interviews. This cannot be stressed enough. By the time that most attorneys realize how much they need a legal assistant, they don’t have the time to conduct a proper search.
Do yourself a favor and honestly assess the needs of your firm before you’re in over your head with work. You can do some of the work of hunting for a legal assistant even before you think you will actually need one. In other words, get everything set up so that when you decide that you want to start looking for help, you already know where you will look, how much it will cost, and what skills are important to you.
Know What You Want
Think very specifically about what duties you would like to hand over to your assistant. Imagine what the ideal day would look like if there was someone there to help you. A good legal assistant should work with an attorney like a team member, not a subordinate. Remember, you’re not just looking for someone to answer the phone and make copies, you want a legal assistant who will be smart enough and savvy enough to actually take regular projects off of your to do list. You may need someone polished enough to meet high level clients and other counsel.
Decide whether or not you need someone who has been to school to become a legal assistant. Many attorneys have just as much luck hiring someone with a strong administrative background as they do hiring an assistant straight out of school. If you want someone who already has a strong understanding of what it means to be a legal assistant, then this is the route for you. If you want someone who has proven project management and administrative abilities, then you may be able to cast a wider net as you search for the perfect candidate.
If there are certain areas where you know you’re weak, look for someone who has previous experience in those same areas. For instance, if you know that you have no interest in marketing, consider hiring an assistant with a marketing background. You can teach them about the law and they can help you understand the nuances of marketing your law firm.
Once you’ve decided on what your legal assistant’s job duties will be. Ask yourself what skills and attributes your legal assistant will need in order to complete those tasks. Use this information to create a job description. No assistant wants to have to guess to find out what you want from them. Be as detailed and as clear as you can be.
You Get What You Pay For
If you want quality, you have to pay for it. This may be hard to swallow, but remember that what you pay your assistant will more than be made up for in the additional business you can take on because you’re not tied down doing tasks that could be handled by an assistant.
Conduct some research to find out what the going rates are for legal assistants in your geographic region and in your field of law. Don’t plan to pay the minimum. If you do, then you’ll hire someone, train them, and then throw them a going away party because they’ll use their new skills to go someplace that pays better.
Make a decision about benefits
Find out how much it would cost to offer health insurance benefits to your legal assistant and find out what your state requirements are. Benefits can be costly. Look for associations of small business owners or small law firms that offer medical benefits to their members.
If you simply can’t offer benefits because of the cost, know in advance that you may have to pay a little more to get someone who will be willing to go out into the open market to get their own health benefits. Although, you may be able to find someone who gets their benefits through a spouse’s job and does not need them anyway. Lastly, decide how much paid vacation and sick time you would like to offer.
A legal assistant can free up your schedule to allow you to focus on growing your firm. To learn how to interview and then how to manage your legal assistant, read the other two articles in this series: “Hiring and Managing Legal Assistants Part II: The Hunt” and “Hiring and Managing Legal Assistants Part III: Working Together”.
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