In the finale of the two-part Brand Building in 15 Minutes series on recruiting and retention, Legal Operations Consultant Grace Ko shared the importance of organizing HR efforts and other internal structures for turnkey recruiting and long-term attorney retention.

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The Brand Building in 15 Minutes webinar series gives attorneys, marketers and legal administrators practical tips for efficiently executing marketing and business development efforts in a bite-sized timeframe. The program topics focus on process-driven best practices that raise law firm profiles.

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Video Transcription

Jocelyn Brumbaugh (00:00):
Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us today. This is our latest installment of brand building in 15 minutes, where we take law firm’s biggest marketing and operational challenges, and we help you make meaningful change on them in just 15 minutes. I’m Jocelyn Brumbaugh. I’m the founder of Builden Partners and I’m very excited to have you here with us today to help you tackle recruiting and retention for law firms in this post pandemic world. So you will remember that on last month’s brand building, I talked about how your marketing infrastructure can be your firm’s secret weapon when it comes to recruiting. If you miss that, you can head over to Buildenpartners.com and look for the Brand Building tab, and you can find that recording there if you missed it or if perhaps you need a refresher, and you should know that this is our last brand building of 2022.

(00:57):
But do not despair because once you’re on Buildenpartners.com, you can find all of our Brand Building recordings from the past year and you can become an expert in things like website redesign and filling the marketing gaps and how to get business out of conferences, all sorts of things in just 15 minutes. So we are thrilled to have a member of our senior team here with us today. Grace Ko is our legal operations consultant, and she is here to talk about changes you can make to your HR and operations practices to better attract and retain top people. Grace, take it away.

Grace Ko (01:35):
Thank you Jocelyn. And thank you everybody for joining us on this part two of our series where we’ll pick up from Jocelyn’s webinar last month on recruiting and retention. So now it’s time to refocus on our HR challenges. So for those that joined us at our first brand building that introduced the legal ops arm, these are the five critical areas of law firm operations and these will be familiar to you. Again today we’ll zero in on the HR aspects and also touch on a little of the firm related financial aspects. So let’s dive right in. So you’ll remember that Jocelyn mentioned in part one, the big issue of mid-size law firms and just not attracting applicants at all. The challenge for mid-size firms is not being that known commodity like big law is. I want to reiterate the importance of focusing on your presence. Keep your website and LinkedIn pages updated, post about news and recent wins.

(02:46):
Make sure your attorney profiles are up to date and make sure that your employees are connecting to your firm so their networks start to gain familiarity with your firm. Think like a job seeker. What is important to you other than a job description, right? It’s your culture, it’s your successes, your wins, and it’s the people that they might know there. In the fourth quarter talent is just always more difficult to attract since people are staying at their current places of employment for year-end bonuses and just a general slowdown in the job market around the holidays, so it might be time for you to redefine what the ideal candidate looks like. You might need to reconcile what you want versus what you need, and your biggest obstacle might be convincing your hiring partners of this. So think about some strategies to sway them and maybe it’s appropriate to move to first year candidate or a more junior candidate who are cheaper, more trainable, and definitely will fill in the holes of what you might need.

(04:05):
But even more critical is retaining your current talent so that you do not need to jump into the shallow job hole. All law firms are hiring, which has been true for all of 2022. So you need to revisit your engagement strategies to stay competitive. Bloomberg just released the results of its attorney workload and hours survey. They cited burnout as the biggest personal challenge that attorneys have faced in the first half of 2022. The main reason that attorneys want to stay at their current firms is for job stability and the top reason that they leave is for better compensation. So if you’re not able to increase your salaries, we previously touched on some non-monetary incentives. I think the biggest one is remote work opportunities. Firms that are trying to get back to a full-time in office scenario are having trouble because we’ve just lived through the past two years where employees and staff have proven that they are productive and able to work remotely, at least on a hybrid situation.

(05:17):
So if you’re able to continue that, you’ll be more marketable. Definitely continue with the real world experience and learning opportunities. I think mid-size firms are better able to provide those opportunities than big law is, so focus in on that strength. And pro bono time, it’s incredibly important to these younger generations to give back, so if you can provide those opportunities even better. Again, smaller size firms are better able to add some leniency to their billable hours requirement, so just get creative. And again, we also need to find those strategies to help the attorneys better cope with stress management. Train your managers to identify the signs of burnout and act on them. We also need to find strategies to combat quiet quitting. This is a new term that refers to those employees who are putting in no more effort than absolutely necessary. So we all need to focus better on employee engagement.

(06:27):
There are plenty of engagement surveys out there out there that you can use to find out what’s most important to your employees. Better yet, I like to use more one-on-one conversations to really dig into issues and have really productive conversations. Whether I do that during an annual performance review or just an ad hoc conversation, any conversation is a good opportunity to learn things from your employees. And hopefully you are conducting exit interviews when employees leave you. And you can use all these tools to identify those common threads. And more importantly, develop strategies to resolve issues. Find ways to reward your high performers and continue to find opportunities to connect your employees to the firm. I really like using lunch and learns and tasking staff to present and share their ideas and things that they’ve learned. It definitely helps keep them engaged, and it connects them to the firm, and to each other. But most importantly, be honest about the things you cannot change and be transparent with your existing employees and people that you are recruiting. As we approach year end, it is an opportune time to review any unused budget items. Is there money in your recruiting budget? And can you increase your offers that you’re putting out there?

(08:08):
If new talent is scarce, can you apply those monies to higher discretionary bonuses? Maybe add more contribution to your employees’ benefits? All these opportunities to continue to encourage employee engagement will be of benefit to you. And while we’re on the finance track, let me just hijack a little bit of time to quickly touch on collection efforts, as you know finance is near and dear to my heart. Start revisiting this now. Start yesterday. Use all of your available contacts, your billing partners, your client contacts, litigation management contacts, even in the e-bill system context. If you’re running into technical problems, make sure you’re organized to understand where your receivables are lagging and redouble your efforts there. So today we’ve touched on two of the five critical areas of legal operations. The other three include your structure, culture, technology, and vendor review. If you’re looking for an outside set of eyes on any of these areas, give us a buzz. The post COVID world has definitely brought on some novel challenges that require us all to revisit operations to better position our firms for this new normal. So the Legal Operations Audit follows Builden’s signature process driven approach. We would conduct interviews with key stakeholders and review all your policies and procedures with an aim to uncover quick wins and identify some longer term recommendations to help firms plan, source, and implement some solutions with the ultimate goal to integrate updated administrative processes that promote efficiency and cost savings.

(10:03):
So, thank you so much for your attention.

Jocelyn Brumbaugh (10:06):
Grace, that was awesome. Thank you so much. Lots of great tips crammed in there. And again, since this is our last brand building of the year, check out Buildenpartners.com and the Brand Building tab if you’d like to revisit any of the things that we talked about this year, or even the year before that.

And then remember, you can send a note to Hello@BuildenPartners if you’d like to be added to our newsletter. If you like a lot of legal marketing tips crammed into a small space, which I know you do because you’re here, sign up for our newsletter and we’ll make sure to put those directly into your inbox. And that’s it for us for 2022. Looking forward to seeing you all in January. Thanks so much.