Law Practice Today

Whenever this situation is raised with human resources people, or office managers, they all nod knowingly. Here it is: an attorney comes running into the office manager’s office saying, “I’ve had it this time. You absolutely must fire my secretary.” Just about everyone in management or HR at a law firm will have dealt with this common scenario. A review of the secretary’s personnel file is necessary to determine the best mode of action.  The results are often the same.  The very lawyer complaining of the allegedly bad conduct gave the very same staff person a rave review at their last performance appraisal.  So the task falls to the manager to tell the attorney barring any additional written review materials or warning that it is very unlikely that they can justify terminating the employee.  The upset attorney sulks away and nothing further is done.
Thankfully, the vast majority of support staff does a terrific job for their supervisors and make a significant contribution to their bosses’ practice.  But there will be a limited number of problematic employees and their supervisors. This article outlines some practical steps to help you avoid having this type of incident in your office.

 

Situation Specific Behavior

It’s hard to imagine that attorneys, those who drive hard bargains in contracts, lawyers who argue motions fiercely in court, professionals who negotiate zealously on behalf of their clients, would be so uncomfortable giving negative feedback to support staff. But it happens all of the time. Even more difficult to imagine is that someone much more likely than the general public to know the implications of firing a staff person without cause would put their human resource managers in such untenable situations. But it happens all of the time. A reasonable explanation is this: Attorneys argue, negotiate, and advocate within a specific role. It is why they are hired, and is done within a specific context. They are doing so based upon subject matter for which they are remunerated as experts. This is certainly not what happens when they are working with a member of their staff. This falls more into the category of messy human relationships – an area in which some attorneys may be comfortable and others may not. It’s one thing to argue in court on behalf of a client in a subject area where you are both familiar and interested. It’s another to call your secretary into your office to tell them that their tardiness is a problem for you and your firm – and probably even more daunting to deal with their response to your critique; in the immediate moment and in the days to come.

 

Small Employer Issues

Up until this point, I have been talking about dealing with a situation where the employer has a human resources director, office manager or other firm administrator. What happens when you are a small employer and it is just you and your support staff person, or a place that has no senior administrative staff? Talking recently to an attorney in a small firm as to why they didn’t fire their secretary/receptionist, he responded, “It’s hard to find good legal support staff. If you have someone who does at least some things well you have a tendency to give them a break on some of the other areas. It often takes six months to a year to train someone to work with your specific practice, and you know the pain that it will cause if that person leaves. The interim process is difficult, you don’t know if there will be a better person in the market, and you will then need to spend time to train someone new; all of which is very time consuming.” The result, I suggested, was that risk avoidant lawyers were keeping employees that were doing subpar work. And the thinking was this, better to keep the not very good person that you have than to start over with someone new. My friend agreed. This is one of the great dilemmas for small employers. The time that it takes to hire a new person and train them is significant. If they head off in the wrong direction, the time that it takes to work on their skill development, or to change their behavior is also significant. Once you determine that the person isn’t able to do the work to your satisfaction, there is the additional commitment to building a case for their dismissal. And then the discouraged employer believes the entire cycle begins again.

 

Sourcing, hiring and supervising the right people

Perhaps one of the issues involved is finding and hiring the right person. The age of plentiful, skilled, and long term support staff may be over. As my friend said, ‘It’s easier to hire an associate than it is to find a good legal secretary. Lawyers are plentiful – great legal secretaries are not.” Part of this has to do with the demographics. Historically most support staff were women. But now that more women are attending college (in numbers greater than their male counterparts) and more opportunities are available for women in higher paying positions, fewer are considering being a legal secretary as a career goal. In addition, new people entering the workplace are less likely to stay at a single job for a number of years. One of the complaints that I hear often from those hiring legal support staff is that they change jobs frequently. While we used to hire people with longevity in mind, this is not necessarily an available option. This concern is likely to grow as people who served as legal secretaries for more than twenty years retire from the workforce. In addition, junior lawyers are often unlikely to use their legal secretaries the way they were utilized in the past. Many attorneys do their own word processing and legal secretarial work may be less interesting than it once was. One solo practitioner with whom I spoke indicated that his solution was to hire college students for support positions in his firm. Although he knows that they will not stay beyond three or four years, he offers them flexible schedules that work with their academic commitments, and finds employees eager to work in a law firm environment, who are quick studies when it comes to learning new skills. He loses out on longevity; but because he is more likely to know the departure date of his employees (they feel free to tell him when they will be leaving after graduation) it is likely that his departing employees will stay to orient his new employees; vastly cutting down on the time he has to spend training new people. While it isn’t a perfect system, it offers an interesting alternative to a traditional hiring process.

In additional to traditional sources for finding staff, be it the newspaper, the bar association, or an agency, Craigslist is also proving to be a new resource to utilize when looking for new employees. Based upon a very low cost advertising system, employers can post job descriptions of whatever length they choose and candidates will e-mail them directly. And you know that you are getting an employee sufficiently tech savvy enough to use this tool.

 

Hiring for Attitude

In a recent interview regarding his new film, Wall - e, the director Andrew Stanton discussed his work with Pixar, the well known computer animation film company. He indicated that when he was hired in 1991 to work for Pixar he had never before touched a computer, which comes as big surprise to people in the industry. But he indicated that he wasn’t hired for his computer skills – he and his prospective employer knew he could learn those skills in three months. He was hired for his ability to create characters, to pace a story, and to conceptualize. It was a great example of what to hire for; and what not to hire for. When it comes to hiring support staff, although you may want the person to have a specific background and particular skills, hiring for attitude, and aptitude may be more important than hiring for one particular skill that could be learned in a matter of months. So when you are considering new people; or when you are thinking about the people with whom you may have had some difficulty in the past, you may discover that the ability to deal with the public, a positive attitude toward work, the ability to get along with a diverse group of people in the office, and a commitment to developing new skills may be more critical than knowing some of the technical elements of the job. Teaching attitude is more difficult than a particular software program.

 

Letting someone go

I wish I could say there was a magic technique that worked for insuring that attorneys would build the perfect case for employee discipline or dismissal. There is simply no magic formula for getting people to do things they know they should do. But one thing that may help is getting support from the top down. Ask the managing partner or committee to make it a priority. If you are the person in charge, don’t let these things slide. If you begin to hear rumors regarding a support staff person’s performance go directly to the person’s supervisor to see if they are the source of the comments or aware of them. Ask them to begin to create a record, and follow up to see that it has been done. If you’re the supervisor – ask yourself; are we better off with this person, or with someone who has a better attitude and likelihood of success?