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The Effective Lawyer teaches ambitious trial lawyers how to grow their skills and create a prosperous law firm. Using lessons learned by accomplished attorneys from around the country, we discuss lessons learned through their trials and tribulations. Our discussions cover a vast range of topics sought out by attorneys looking for advice, from depositions to how to market your law firm.
The show is hosted by Jack Zinda, Founder and Senior Trial Lawyer at Zinda Law Group. In less than 15 years, Jack and his team have grown Zinda Law Group from 3 attorneys to over 30, spanning several states and handling a variety of personal injury cases from gas explosions to truck accidents.
Jack and his guests share their knowledge and skills that they’ve acquired through the process of building one of the most successful plaintiff’s law firms in the country.
In each show we cover a new topic that an ambitious attorney would want to better understand, while providing practical skills to improve their legal practice.
For more information, visit https://www.zdfirm.com/the-effective-lawyer
00:00
Speaker 1
Welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zenda and I'll be your host. Hey, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Effective Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, Jack Zenda, and today I'm going to be talking to you about how to attract great attorneys to work at your firm. As we all know, having good lawyers to work at a law firm is the key ingredient for success. You know, I always say, if you have great cases and great attorneys, you're going to get incredible outcomes. And I found the last few years that has gotten more and more difficult. And a lot of questions that keep popping up to me from my friends and colleagues is where do I find great associates?
00:54
Speaker 1
They're going to do a good job and they're going to stick around. And I want to give you some of the tips and tactics that we have found to be effective in the post Covid era and especially in the last couple years to get that great talent to work at our firm. So the first thing you want to identify is what type of attorney do I need for my practice? This sounds like common sense, but you really want to drill down what makes a great lawyer at my firm. Do I work better with attorneys without a lot of experience? Do I work? Do I want attorneys with a lot of experience? What are the tasks and things that I'm going to have this person do? So in our practice, there could be two or three different roles we're looking for.
01:33
Speaker 1
One is a potential attorney to come in as an associate and do primarily research, drafting, behind the scenes work. And then I might have an attorney that's going to come in as a litigator who's going to be taking depositions, going to court, trying cases, going to hearings from day one. Those are two different skill sets with different sets of experiences that I'm looking for. So we will actually create a scorecard where we list out what are the things we're looking for in a candidate. So we might say drafting, research, advocacy, which for us is going to hearings, deposition, and then we might have a column for ability and then a column for experience. And so then I'll start saying, okay, what types of people would have these things that I need?
02:19
Speaker 1
So if it's an associate, it might be someone with less experience that can handle the research and drafting. And if it's a litigator, it might be someone who has more. Now, you want to be careful on identifying what makes a good culture fit for your firm. Some firms have more of an island approach where, you know, attorney comes in, they basically to do whatever they want and the law firm just cares about the result. The other might be more process oriented where the way the attorney does things really matters to the law firm. So you want to know what type of firm you are, because that's going to attract a different type of person. So step one, figure out what type of lawyer you want.
02:52
Speaker 1
Step two, create your scorecard and then think about what is the background of the people that you're looking for. What law schools, what geographic locations, what types of law will you want them to have practiced before. Our firm, for example, we are a personal injury law firm, so you don't necessarily have to have only practiced personal injury to join our firm. But we definitely want to see civil litigation experience if we're looking for a trial lawyer. So we're going to mark down civil litigation experience. You know, it could be defense work, it could be commercial litigation. Then we're going to mark down, okay, what types of experience went. We want to have taken at least 10 depositions, spoken to at least five or six expert witnesses. So these are actual things that I want the person to have done.
03:33
Speaker 1
And then when people are applying to the job, you can actually ask these in screening questions to eliminate people that you may or may not want to hire. So now I've got my blueprint. I know what type of lawyer I want to hire. So now I'm going to go look and find some ideal candidates. You can do this by getting on to LinkedIn or going to your state bar website or going to AVO or other places where directories of lawyers are found. And this isn't necessarily someone who's going to come work for me, but if I could pick anyone in the world, who would I pick? And I'm going to get a list of five to six people that match those qualifications. So now I've identified what I'm looking for, examples of the type of person.
04:14
Speaker 1
Now the next is how do I get these people to apply and attract them to my firm in a really competitive landscape. So next you gotta figure out, where am I gonna post these job openings that I have Some places that we found really be effective is indeed LinkedIn has been really helpful to us. Also posting it on your own website can be extremely helpful and beneficial. Social media, we have gotten a lot of candidates by posting on our Facebook page or Instagram that we're hiring. And then finally, use your existing staff, use your attorneys, paralegals, legal assistants, and ask them to Tell people that we have an opening. We actually offer a financial bonus if someone brings someone to come work at the firm and they stick around for six months and it's pretty substantial.
04:59
Speaker 1
And we've gotten quite a few great hires that way. People love to work for their friends and they get a financial bonus out of it. So it's a win. So now I've looked at, okay, what type of person, I need some examples. I know where to post it. Now I gotta think what is the compensation that I want to pay this person in order to attract them to come to my law firm? And compensation doesn't all have to be financial. It could be, you know, experiential, they're getting certain levels of experience. It could be, you know, work life balance, maybe you're allowing a completely remote environment. Maybe could be some sort of bonus or extra comp, like better health benefits, disability, maybe have gym benefits, things like that.
05:40
Speaker 1
And you want to think about would my ideal person be attracted to these types of things? You also want to be careful in not underpaying people that you're going on and try to get. You're not going to attract a talent with C compensation. And I see a lot of attorneys make that mistake where they will go for the most inexpensive person they can find. But they're a train wreck when they get in there and they're wondering why it's not working out. I have a philosophy that says, you know, one A player is worth two B players and one C player is worth negative two A's. Which that means if I've got a C on the team, they're just going to be devastating to the whole firm, the whole outlook, especially as a lawyer where they can do a lot of damage.
06:18
Speaker 1
So I would probably pay, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40% more for someone if they're going to be an A player. Because remember that ratio, right? One A's equal two B's. You're going to be much better off doing it that way. If you'd like a copy of any of the things you heard about here today, or to set up a time to talk one of our team members about a case, please go to Zendalaw IO and we have amazing resources, downloads, guides and you can set up a time to talk to us if you want to talk about how we handle things or any case in particular. So now I've got the type of position, I know where I'm going to post it, I know the compensation I'm going to post and I know what's going to attract these people.
07:07
Speaker 1
Now I need to write some really compelling ad copy for my job posting. You need to think outside the box. Don't post like just a generic piece of advertising. You want to post something that's going to attract the right people. You know, we've done some interesting things like saying, you know, superstar trial lawyers wanted, looking for a challenge, join our firm things, they're going to get their attention. And then we put our core principles in the job posting itself. That one is going to select people that are attracted to that, and two people that aren't attracted to these core principles are not going to apply. For example, one of our core principles is we all take out the trash.
07:44
Speaker 1
So if you're someone with a huge ego who doesn't want to do the little things or is too big to help out in certain areas, you know, you're going to see that and be turned off and not want to apply to our firm. On the flip side, someone who's okay with that, who actually that excites them, they want to work at a place like that, is going to say, yeah, that is my type of place. That's where I want to work. Okay, so now we've got all these things put together and we get the job posted the next we need to make sure we have a way to funnel the resumes and candidates through our system effectively.
08:12
Speaker 1
Okay, you can use a system like Bamboo or which is a hiring practice management system, or you could just use an Outlook email and just filter it by where the emails are coming from. But whatever you do, you need to have a system. You need to check it at least every day. Because if you want to hire great people, you have to be on top of it. You have to be paying attention to as the candidates come in and make sure you're screening through those resumes. I personally like to print out the resumes. I can get through printed resumes about three times as quickly as I can if it's digital. And every morning I have my assistant bring me the stack of resumes.
08:47
Speaker 1
I go through them, mark them up, and say which ones I wanna move on for an actual interview in the process. Another piece that you wanna keep in mind that I forgot to mention before is don't forget about you doing regular recruiting. Reaching out to people that you think might be a good fit for the role, even if it's not now, you may need them in the future. And then as you come across people that you think may be a good fit, but maybe you're not hiring Keep them at a database so you can reach out to them later. Start building that relationship now. So when you reach out to them, it's not a cold call. You're actually, you have some sort of relationship and why you reached out to them to begin with.
09:22
Speaker 1
And make sure you're storing it away so you can find it later on. I found a lot of the things that come up in this that make it not as effective is a lack of organization and having intentionality of how you approach these things. So storing the candidates information can be really key to go back and get them later on. Okay, so we've covered a lot of ground so far. We've covered, okay, what type of candidate do I want, where do I place it, how do I filter them? The next thing you gotta figure out is how much can I spend to get this candidate? Because it may cost you money in the form of a headhunter or in the form of paying indeed. Or LinkedIn for their ad placements.
09:53
Speaker 1
So we'll put a target acquisition cost for who we're gonna hire and make sure we stay within that budget in the timeframe that we're gonna do that. After that, you wanna get to the screening process. Okay. And our process involves three different steps to screening. The first is it's going to be an initial screening where we get some baseline information and we'll do that via a video conference. And it's usually about 15 to 20 minutes long. And that's to see, you know, do they understand what they're applying for and do they meet the bare minimum qualifications. And what do we think from a first glance that has saved us hours and hours of time. Instead of doing a full hour and a half interview with someone that you realize usually in the first 10 minutes it may be a bad fit.
10:35
Speaker 1
The next step is we do some sort of testing of the candidate. It could be reviewing work product, it could be some sort of aptitude test. And we review that information before they move on to the in person interview, which is usually about an hour and a half. And we use the top grading methodology, which you can read the top grading book for more insights on how that interview process works. It works great. And then we'll do a third culture interview with a hiring manager or someone in the firm who's going to help decide if this person should join the organization. And so through that process we're able to get great people and hopefully we've been able to get people that are going to be with us for a long time.
11:15
Speaker 1
I think as a CEO or someone who is involved in running a practice. If you're growing, you should be spending a decent amount of your time in the hiring recruiting process or have a really trusted lieutenant who's just awesome at it. I have learned the hard way shortcutting this can lead to disaster and can lead to a bad culture where people are upset because there's a lot of turnover. And so I think the more time you can put into this, the better off you're going to be. So just to summarize, what we cover today is one. Make sure you identify the right type of candidate you need. Make sure you draft compelling ad copy that's going to attract the right Type of person. Finish out Figure out compensation, how much you're going to pay them. Doesn't have to all be financial.
12:00
Speaker 1
Post the job in different spaces like LinkedIn indeed, and other places like that. Figure out how much money you can spend on the job and then six. Make sure you have a thorough screening process to get through everybody to make sure you get a great person. Hope this has been helpful. If you need any questions or need help down the road, please feel free to reach out anytime. We're always here to help. Thanks.
12:28
Speaker 2
Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast at zindalaw.com as always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod.
12:41
Speaker 1
Thanks.