Of all the supplies and resources in your law firm, human beings are the most valuable ones; they are also sometimes the most difficult ones. That’s why a great law firm needs a great human resources department to find, staff, and successfully interact with a large and diverse team. Social and technological changes make human resources a constantly shifting arena with unique challenges, and a smart law firm owner will seek out new sources of information and insight to improve.
That’s why law firm human resources departments can benefit from a MasterMind group like the one Brain Trust Legal runs. By tapping into the vast resources of other successful and motivated law firms from across the country, you’ll see a valuable cross-section of how other firms are handling and succeeding in their own human resources challenges. Continue reading below for just a few of the many insights you’ll glean from the BTL MasterMind program.
In this age of technology and increased access, many law firms have struggled with finding qualified and reliable team members who want to join their team for the long haul. Traditional methods of finding team members simply aren’t as effective as they used to be. So where does a growing law firm look to find great firm recruits?
Variations on the traditional route can still work in places like social media and online, but there needs to be more effort to ‘sell’ your firm. Many people see employee recruitment as separate from marketing, but it’s not. Hiring new team members is all about effectively marketing your firm, except you’re marketing it to potential team members instead of clients. Showing clear benefits and individual firm personality will set your firm apart.
Another consideration to make is potentially poaching new team members from other places, such as government jobs or other law firms. If you’re able to find them and can afford to pay them, finding skilled people already doing the job you want them to do can save time and trouble with the training process. This can run the risk of getting other firms upset with you if their team members become yours, but you can decide if that’s a risk you’re willing to take to have a great team.
In a word: automation. While not every step of the onboarding and training process can be automated, and some definitely should not be, there are many opportunities for your law firm to provide excellent training material and onboarding processes that can be built into automations that provide everything they need without the extra lift required of current staff.
For example: from the moment a team member joins your firm, you can utilize programs like Bamboo to automate much of the paperwork and onboarding necessary to get your team member up to speed. You can build checklists that walk team members through processes, so not only can the team member keep track of their progress, but your HR team can track it as well.
For individual departments and positions, training courses can be created that show team members everything from processes and expectations to meeting times and locations. Programs like Trainual are designed with exactly these tasks in mind, and there’s little that you could need to train someone on that a program like this isn’t able to create effectively through text explanations and audio & video recordings.
Making evaluations effective in your law firm is challenging because your methods should be the same across multiple departments and with multiple different supervisors handling them. Because of that, there are five elements to always keep in mind to create a truly effective evaluation process. The evaluations need to be:
Consistency is the most important factor, and in more ways than one. First, they should be consistent in their content from person to person and department to department. However, it is equally important that the evaluations themselves happen consistently. It does no good to have a process in place that is used so rarely or forgotten so frequently that it has no impact in the long run.
Being clear is a necessity in evaluations because if you expect a team member to make changes and improvements, they need to have clarity and understanding on what is expected of them. Avoid “office speak” and be as direct as possible without being rude or unpleasant in providing your team members a road map of expected change or improvement. After all, you can’t punish someone for not doing something that was not clear to begin with.
An evaluation should also always be constructive. That doesn’t mean positivity where it is not merited; it means that observations should provide something that can be done to improve, rather than just pointing out what was done that was not good enough. An evaluation that is largely negative is not only hard to sit through, but it makes it difficult to plan for improvement.
While an evaluation may take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour, the actual meaningful takeaways should be brief and easy to remember. Piling on heaps of information and conversation during an evaluation can lessen their effectiveness because the most important elements are clouded by all the other elements.
And finally, evaluations should be complementary. To be clear, that’s not complimentary, meaning you give someone compliments. That’s complementary, meaning that it should go both ways. Team members should be empowered to bring up questions and concerns about anything on their minds, from supervisors to overall firm design, without fear of recrimination. Having an open door policy about company feedback is the best way to get great new ideas and observations from your team, as well as to make sure they feel seen and recognized as vital parts of the firm.
There’s nothing more important for the long-term health of a law firm than for its team members to be skilled, happy, productive, and excited to remain with the company as a career. To accomplish that, you need an outstanding human resources team and a bold vision to achieve. That’s why the Brain Trust Legal MasterMind program is an ideal fit for law firms aiming to achieve that goal.
Getting honest, candid, detailed information from other firms across the country who are willing to share both their successes and their struggles is exactly what helps a law firm improve. From new initiatives to shared policies to real-time brainstorming during in-person and Zoom meetings, the BTL MasterMind provides many routes to the destination you’re seeking. To learn more about the MasterMind program and find out if there is open availability in your area, you can call (855)743-1636 from anywhere nationwide to speak with a BTL team member.
