What I’ve discovered as an entrepreneur over the years is that most of the time, we simply react to what’s in front of us. Something happens in the business, we respond. We get busy, we hire help. We get overwhelmed, we try to plug a hole.
But reacting is very different from building something intentionally.
Some time ago, I shared an idea that building your law firm is a lot like building a city.
Imagine you had two plots of land, each 20 miles by 20 miles.
On the first plot, you build the city reactively. A family moves in, so you build a house. Then the family grows, so you add a grocery store. More people move in, so you start adding roads wherever they seem to make sense. Infrastructure appears only after the need becomes obvious.
There was never a real plan. There were no guidelines for where the roads should go. No long-term thought about traffic flow. No vision for where schools, neighborhoods, or industrial areas should exist.
Many East Coast towns developed exactly this way as they became more populated. I grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a lot of towns in that region evolved reactively.
Now imagine the second plot of land.
Instead of reacting, you plan everything before a single building goes up.
You know exactly where the roads will be. You know where the schools are going. You know where the grocery stores, industrial parks, and residential neighborhoods will exist. You know how traffic will flow and how much capacity the infrastructure must handle.
When growth happens, you don’t panic. You simply widen the roads because the space was already planned for it.
If you’ve ever been to Gilbert, Arizona, you’ve seen a city that was built this way. It’s a planned community. It had the advantage of studying cities like Scranton and learning from their mistakes.
The result? Left-turn lanes. Right-turn lanes. Wide roads designed for growth.
Compare that to the chaos of older cities where you’re trying to turn left across traffic and you almost have to trick the other driver because the road wasn’t designed for it.
Now think about how many law firm owners build their firms. Most firms look a lot more like Scranton than Gilbert.
You didn’t necessarily start your firm with a grand design. You opened for a variety of reasons. You started generating leads. Then clients. Then some profit.
So you reinvested into more marketing. Then you hired support staff based on what you thought was right or what someone told you was the right thing to do.
Before you know it, you’ve bolted on piece after piece until your firm becomes a collection of reactive decisions.
And eventually that “bolted-on” structure starts to create chaos.
You feel it when the team isn’t aligned. You feel it when the wrong person gets hired. You feel it when you realize the firm depends on you far more than it should.
That’s why I believe we should be building our firms by design, not by reaction.
No matter where your firm sits right now, you need a framework.
Because, at least right now, growing your law firm still requires humans. Which means if your firm is going to grow, you need a system to attract, vet, and lead quality people.
Over the last several years, our company has done more and more staffing for law firms. What started as consulting with occasional staffing has evolved into a full staffing operation with consulting and training alongside it.
As we began placing more people inside our clients’ firms, we started looking under the hood. And we noticed something interesting.
Most of the time when a staff member failed, it wasn’t because they were a bad employee.
It was because the firm didn’t have good systems.
Before we could even place someone successfully, we had to step back and help the firm identify the systems they had, and more importantly, the systems they needed.
Once those systems existed, the right people could finally thrive.
But just because someone interviews well…
Just because they pass a skills test…
Just because they seem like the perfect candidate…
Does not mean they’ve made the team.
It means they’ve earned the right to try out.
And that tryout is called onboarding.
The onboarding process serves two purposes:
- First, it sets the employee up for success by giving them the tools they need to win.
- Second, it allows the firm to evaluate whether this person is actually the right fit.
Too many law firm owners treat hiring like the finish line. But hiring is only the beginning of the evaluation.
In fact, the early stages of bringing someone into your firm are designed primarily to eliminate the wrong people.
Our framework breaks this process into seven stages: deciding, recruiting, onboarding, training, managing, leading, and scaling.
The onboarding phase sits right in the middle of that early vetting process.
In most cases, you should know within 7 to 14 days (certainly within 30 days) whether someone is going to fit inside your firm.
That requires clarity.
You must define what acceptable performance looks like. You must define what exceptional performance looks like. You must establish non-negotiables.
For example, maybe during the first 14 days there is no personal time, no unannounced absences, and communication expectations are crystal clear.
The rules will vary depending on whether the employee is remote or in-person, in the U.S. or abroad. But the principle remains the same: clarity removes ambiguity.
From there, the onboarding process becomes structured.
New hires receive a defined schedule, just like a class schedule at school. They attend training sessions, meetings, and shadowing opportunities. They are assigned mentors. Communication expectations are clearly defined.
They begin to immerse themselves in the culture of the firm. They learn the vision. The values. The rules of engagement.
Maybe in your firm, being late to a meeting means doing push-ups. That may sound silly, but it’s a quick way to acknowledge a mistake, correct it, and move on.
Culture matters.
Then we begin verifying their skills in a controlled environment. We assign limited tasks. We observe compliance. We evaluate their responsiveness and initiative.
Are they leaning forward? Are they taking ownership? Or are they waiting to be told what to do?
All of this is documented and scored.
Because the truth is, onboarding is just as much about filtering behavior as it is about teaching skills.
Eventually you reach the final evaluation stage.
You review the scorecards. You review the feedback. You review the behavior.
If everything looks good, the employee moves forward.
If not, you make a difficult, but necessary, decision. And this is where many law firm owners struggle.
Most owners don’t fail because they fire people too quickly. They fail because they hold on to the wrong people too long.
I’ve made that mistake myself.
I knew someone wasn’t performing well, but I was busy. I needed help. So I let the behavior slide.
But every time you ignore those early warning signs, you introduce chaos into your firm.
Plus, your best employees don’t enjoy working alongside donkeys. When you allow poor performance to linger, it doesn’t just hurt the firm. It hurts your best people.
If you want to create your future instead of constantly managing chaos, you must build systems that determine who belongs on your team.
Strong recruiting.
Strong onboarding.
Clear expectations.
Even then, the evaluation isn’t finished. The training phase that follows is still a vetting process. Some people will make it through onboarding and still fail in training.
When you design a system that eliminates a candidate, we shouldn't be surprised when the system works and eliminates a candidate.
That's what the system is designed to do.
Does that suck? Yeah, because if you're doing recruiting in-house, then you have to go back to the recruiting phase.
But better to go through the recruiting phase again than to hire the wrong employee and keep them too long. That costs the company way too much money.
If you want to build a better law firm, start by building a real onboarding process inside your hiring system.
Stop relying on hope.
Because hope is not a strategy for building a team. And if hope is still the strategy you’re using to staff your firm, sooner or later, that hope will turn into disappointment.
