How to Hire Great Family Lawyers - #35

Hiring great family lawyers is the leaders' most important task if the firm is to grow.

Nothing is more important.

At Sterling, our formula for hiring Family Law Lawyers:
1 - Must share our core values
2 - Don’t mind being measured
3 - Has drive and ambition
4 - Has high level of empathy and people skills
5 - Coachable to adopt proactive practice habits

What is not important and has little to no correlation to client success:

• Grades
• Law school
• Family law experience

If you catch even a passing whiff of an entitlement attitude during any stage of the hiring process, immediately end the interview and thank the candidate for their time. 

Entitlement attitude looks like:

• A lawyer who feels they are above or better than non lawyers in any way
• Can’t get their hands dirty helping other lawyers
• Expects to make great money without working for it

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Follow me on: LinkedIn - YouTube - X - Instagram - TikTok

I’m here to share my law firm’s secrets, tactics, and strategies of how we have grown from 0 to 25 attorneys and over $15m in revenue in our first nine years.

Yes! It’s true--even if you compete directly with us. I want to tell you the gritty truth on what worked, what failed, and where we are aiming next.

Here’s why.

My teammates and I envision transforming how family law clients are served.

And we can’t transform the practice of law all by ourselves. We need more lawyers growing their practice, kicking butt / taking names, and winning along with us.

So, follow me and ring that bell up top to get all my latest disclosures.

You can subscribe to "The J. Sterling Hughes Show" Podcast. I go into a ton of detail in the podcast.

My YouTube channel is @JSterlingHughes.

When I’m not spilling the goods on our firm's story, I am Winona’s husband, and our six kids' daddy. ❤️

I also love me some fishin’ as often as I can. It’s also occasionally fun to catch a fish too!

Transcript

Jeff Hughes: 0:00

I'm super excited to talk to you about today what I consider probably the most important factor for law firm success, and that is the people that are within the firm and, in particular, the lawyers. Since we are law firms, let's talk about the folks that are making it happen from a standpoint of client service and generating revenue for a firm. Well, hello and welcome to the Jay Sterling U Show, where we share the secrets and strategies of how we are building a rapidly growing law practice. You know, over the past nine years, we have grown from zero attorneys to 25 and doing over $15 million in revenue, and I have nothing to sell you. My purpose here is to document what's working and what's not working in our practice, with hopes that you can take that and you can recontextualize that in your practice and shorten your success curve. I'm Jay Sterling and I'm your host, and I'm super excited to talk to you about today what I consider probably the most important factor for law firm success, and that is the people that are within the firm and, in particular, the lawyers. Since we are law firms, let's talk about the folks that are making it happen from a standpoint of client service and generating revenue for a firm I'm going to share with you today everything that we have learned, the most important principles we have learned over the past nine years on how to hire outstanding, amazing lawyer teammates. As I was prepping this and thinking through all of the mountain of data that we have accumulated on our hiring and what we have experienced along the way, one story kept rising to the surface, and that concerned hiring a specific lawyer for one of our teams. To set the context for you, she was well known and is well known in the community. She's an outstanding family law lawyer, had a great reputation, was in a terrific firm, and I reached out to recruit her and I was fortunate enough to get her attention. We had a number of conversations and we were really excited about this prospect of bringing on this attorney to our team. In fact, she did join our team and it was a lot of celebration to get her to come on board. Everyone was really excited about having someone of a marquee name, kind of a name brand, in the community.

Jeff Hughes: 2:28

Well, after she started, it became clear that it was just not a good fit. We were at that time, and still are, a very scrappy, aggressive law firm, really trying to grow and make a name for ourselves. When you're scrappy and you're really trying to hustle, like that, someone who is not geared and wired that way, it starts to clash. She had a little bit of a sense of not willing to get her hands dirty, not willing to do some of the things that we expected of our lawyers and our teammates, just wasn't a good fit in any respect. On top of that, it turned out she wasn't doing that well with clients either, and it certainly wasn't doing well within the way we compensate and work within our system and with our clients.

Jeff Hughes: 3:14

Interestingly, right about that same time, in the same office, we hired another lawyer and she came in with one year of post law school experience and it wasn't even in family law. It was in an entirely separate area of the law from what we do in family law. Of course, when she started she didn't know anything. She worked really hard and just began to mature and grow within our system and when that first lawyer left, after probably I think, three, maybe four months, she was with us in total, which is a very short tenure she left and went back to her old firm, but this other lawyer, this younger lawyer that had no experience coming in, was having an inordinate amount of success really learning and growing in her capabilities, and today advanced this, four or five years later she's one of the top leaders in our firm and is the leader of that particular office, and it was just interesting to see these two striking dynamics where you had a very experienced, name brand lawyer versus a non-experienced, unknown lawyer and how they succeed within our system. And so I began to break that down and begin to look at all of the past lawyers who have joined our team and, in particular, those that have left, and trying to understand what happened and why, and even, to some extent, trying to go back and reverse engineer that hiring process, and it became clear to me that we have some real, significant patterns that have emerged over time. So I'm going to share with you the patterns that I have seen, based on the data that we have accumulated over the years, from whenever we began in June of 2014. Since that time, we have hired 68 lawyers, and today we have 25 of those lawyers that are on our team.

Jeff Hughes: 5:03

So that means 43 lawyers have come and they have gone from our practice, and the reasons are this 14 of those lawyers we actually terminated. They were not a good fit and so we asked them to leave. When I say someone is not a good fit or we've terminated them, let me just expand on that for a second. Someone that's not a good fit in our firm, that is not an A player in our firm, could very well be one in another firm and often is in another scenario. So this is unique to us. You know you've heard that it's not you, it's me. Well, sometimes it is us and they're just not a good fit for us. So whenever I point that out, please understand that it's different with everyone. So someone that could be terrible another firm could be exceptional in our firm, and vice versa. So of those 43 attorneys, 14 of them we terminated.

Jeff Hughes: 5:52

Five of them chose to get out of law entirely. An example that would be one attorney left to join the FBI. Seven of them said look, I like you guys, I like the people that I work with, but I just don't like sterling law, I don't like the processes, I don't like how you do it, I don't like fixed fee. Whatever the case may be, they chose on their own to leave and they gave us the reasons and it seemed like that was. You know, everyone's going to tell you nice things when they leave voluntarily. But they were pretty candid and say, hey, just don't like what you all do and that that made total sense to us.

Jeff Hughes: 6:23

Six of them just left because they did not like family law and those typically had very short tenures here and they weren't in family law before they were maybe an insurance or some other type of an area of law and just did not like the stress that comes with family law and the empathy for fatigue that you can feel in family law. And eight of them left for a better opportunity elsewhere. Five of those eight, in my view there are folks that we were just pretty bummed out, disappointed that they left. They were just complete losses on our end. We there were great, exceptional players on our team, a players and they left and went somewhere else for a better opportunity for them and we wish they would have stayed. So of the 43, I can tell you that five of them we were like boy that was. They're such a great fit. We really wish they wouldn't have left, and that doesn't mean other is that left on there we wouldn't have. They're wonderful, wonderful people. They just didn't have that same level of performance like these five attorneys did. So that's the data relative to our past hiring and what we have learned and experienced.

Jeff Hughes: 7:25

So let me just walk through with you and I'm going to share with you what we do to select and hire exceptional attorneys into our system, how we go by doing that, and there's really some general principles that we follow and a really widely used process that we follow, but we also have some very specific things that are unique to us. So, first off, our whole selection process. We don't call it hiring here, we call it a selection process. Our whole selection process is based on a book by a guy named Jeff Smart and that's with a G screws is spelling up his parents messed up there. It's G E O F F versus. You know the traditional and the correct spelling of Jeff have J E F F right. He wrote a book called who, the a method for hiring, and it's been really our textbook for how we go about our selection process. And it's a series of different meetings and interviews that take place, starting first with a culture screening kind of screening, just basic cultural issues to get a feel for where that individual candidate is at. Then it goes into another interview where there's lots of really set questions, issues around patterns of thinking and past work. History Then those next interviews goes deep in culture and how they think and how they work with other individuals and there's a whole series of reference check criteria that you need to follow to do that. So that has worked very, very well for us and we've implemented that in Cross-Iron Tire firm. Everyone follows that particular system and we've got some really good documentation around doing that and sticking with it consistently.

Jeff Hughes: 9:07

I get to point out this is the hiring process and nothing is foolproof. Even in your best day it's like you're throwing darts at a dartboard in your blindfolded so you don't have. This isn't foolproof, but this is at least making the odds a little better that you're going to find someone that's an excellent fit for your team. So in our firm what we do is we have in our interview process what we're looking for are does this particular candidate fit in with our firm's values? This is what you would call table stakes, right, the basic things that need to be in place for this person to have a chance to be a great fit with us and for us to be a great fit for them if we're our firm to be a great experience for this particular team that's considering us.

Jeff Hughes: 9:49

Our values are first, we want to finish everything we do with integrity. So we ask a number of questions around that and we're looking through the whole process for anything that would be indicative of not really subscribing to that. When we say finish with integrity, what we mean is every single thing that we do. We want to finish it through the end with integrity, even the small things, down to the smallest things, up to the biggest things. Second is we want to have teammates that enjoy serving others, and so we feel like the best leaders, the most effective leaders, are those that serve others. So we're looking for teammates who have a natural bent towards service and taking care of others. We're in that business. We're taking care of clients who are going through the worst experiences and a lot of times in their life. Up to that point, we want to be there to help guide them through that in the most servant-minded way.

Jeff Hughes: 10:39

Our third value and this is ranked in order of what we consider to be the most important, the third one is competing with a warrior spirit, and we can't control what a judge may do, but we can control our level of preparation and our level of effort and that's what we mean by competing with a warrior spirit is doing everything within our control to do our best to get the best outcome from our client. And the fourth value that we really focus on is embrace and drive change. Since our very inception we have been really big on innovation and disrupting what we felt was like an antiquated way of practicing law and so having a set of values, with one of them being around embracing and driving change in an area that we felt like change was coming and we wanted to be the catalyst for that particular change. So those are our four values. So if someone is demonstrating that they would have a really hard time with accepting change and they're really set in their ways, they're generally gonna struggle with us. Same with all of the attorneys that have come in to our firm that have had a lot of hourly experience and especially hourly experience in family law. The majority of those I would say somewhere around 70% of the attorneys that have come into our firm that have had family law experience that have been predominantly hourly family law they have not made it in our practice because our practice demands a very proactive pushing the case through rather than letting the court and other attorneys and clients pull the case through. We wanna get it over for our clients. Number one thing that clients want they want their case over, and so we have to be proactive to make that happen.

Jeff Hughes: 12:16

Another thing after the table stakes of our values, another thing we look for is does this candidate mind being measured? We measure a lot within our practice and someone who resists that type of atmosphere. They wanna just kind of Be comfortable and not be exposed in any way around their performance. They don't like being measured, they chafe against that. They're not going to make it. In our practice. We're competitive and a friendly, hopefully always a healthy way within our practice and we just enjoy and we like the idea of measuring our performance. If you can't measure it, you can't manage. It is how we look at that. So they have to have a willingness to be measured and what they do.

Jeff Hughes: 13:02

And the second thing is really hard to identify. But if you can find little clues that lead to this, it's a big win and that's we look for candidates that have a lot of drive and ambition. That sort of Mentality and that mindset of wanting to get better, wanting to improve, wanting to be exceptional, is a hallmark of a great teammate and if we can find that, we want that all day long, because if you've got drive and ambition you can overcome a whole lot of other problems and inadequacies in your practice, because that drive and ambition will push you to Close those gaps that you have, that you're missing in your overall tool chest that you have to serve clients with. So things that don't matter to us. We can care less about grades. We don't care about what school you went to, who your daddy is None of that matters. We have not seen a correlation whatsoever on Grades. What law school you went to, who you know, all that sort of stuff that doesn't matter at all. In fact, those are usually Something that cuts against that drive and ambition piece of it. If those things you know, the school that you went to or your grades you got give you a sense of entitlement and they promote that within you, then it's just that's really typically a bad thing, you know.

Jeff Hughes: 14:21

Back to the drive and ambition piece of it, I look for anything that I can find that demonstrates that this candidate, this potential teammate that we're Walking through the selection process with, if they have resilience and grit in some area of their life. They could be stories that are significantly or wholly unrelated to law. If they have drive and ambition and they just have this burning Will to win, that's someone I want on my team all day long. So, specifically as it relates to our firm, what we look for in our hiring and selection of outstanding attorneys and this is kind of the bullseye attorney case if you're looking at a kind of a again a dartboard or a target, this would be the center of that target. These are the attorneys that we just would love to meet. So 80% of that avatar that profile some is an attorney that has a high level of personal maturity. That comes with age a lot of times, but they have to have a high level of personal maturity that gives them the capacity to be very, very empathetic With clients. We have to have that. We're in the business of serving people going through really hard times and you've got to have a very strong empathy muscle.

Jeff Hughes: 15:36

About 15% of what we look for is professional work experience. So what this shows up as is can you write well, can you communicate well? Are you professional? You're not doing, you know, unprofessional, immature things and how you present yourself and how you do things. That's a big part of it and really the last piece of it's just family law experience. That's about 5% of how I would weight it. It's just not that important and majority of the time We'd rather not have some with family law experience because we want to train them in our way and how we do it. You know about half the attorneys that are currently on our practice a day when they joined had zero family law experience, and they have. Many of them have done exceptionally well With that over a very short period of time, not requiring years of work and reps to get there. So that's our bullseye.

Jeff Hughes: 16:21

What we also look for is anything we can find that that person is coachable and that they have a proactive Mindset and not a sit-back and wait mindset. Our profession this is how it works in our profession, where typically most cases are dragged along by the court, by the court's schedule, by Factors outside of the attorneys. Very few attorneys are really proactive and pushing cases through that's consistent with the hourly model, so that's not a surprise there. In our case, we want to give that client the best experience and what that dictates is that client wants to be out of the legal system as Quickly as possible. They do not want to be mired in the legal system. They don't enjoy it. It's super stressful. Let's get him out of that. So our cases tend to get over with quicker as a result of our approach to things and we need attorneys that buy into that, that service model of speed, letting that client move on with their life, helping them move on with their life.

Jeff Hughes: 17:20

Another great thing is a professional work experience in a non-hourly environment. So if an attorney joins us and they have, you know, a past experience, being in a non-hourly environment is better for us than being in an hourly environment. So personal injury attorneys, many criminal defense attorneys that have joined us that aren't hourly so much there, a lot of times they do fixed fee and it's certainly like a state planning. Any B to C or business or firm to client sort of practice area tends to work really well, so long as they haven't been too tainted, I would say, by the hourly mentality that goes along with that. A couple warnings that we look for is like I've mentioned I've hinted on a little bit here is if you have a ton of family law experience, that's usually a bad sign for us. It's going to be really difficult for that attorney to make that turn into being proactive along the way.

Jeff Hughes: 18:11

Name brand attorneys, as I mentioned, have a really hard time being successful with us and attorneys that have an entitlement mindset and a lot of times it shows up and they're not willing to get their hands dirty on certain things. They just won't stoop to a level that they haven't been asked to do in years and they're not going to do that for us. They're not going to provide the support to the teammate that a teammate needs or whatever the case may be. They're not going to follow our process. They feel like they have their process and they don't want to deviate from that because it's worked for them. So I changed. That doesn't work in our world either. Those things are real struggles for us that we look for. Those are warning flags that we shy away from.

Jeff Hughes: 18:48

If I were going back and starting all over again and beginning my practice, I would put the who method, the A method for hiring, in place and get that book, learn it and start there. Then I would watch over time as attorneys that we have hired, teammates that we've hired, begin to develop Where's the performance coming in and try to understand what you look for in the front end, because what I've shared with you today is just what happens in that initial series of selection meetings that we go through. We're limited in our knowledge. At that point we don't know, but as time goes on, obviously the data points increase on a teammate and you get a lot more feel for who they are as people, who they are as coworkers and that sort of thing. So I would get that system in place with the who method and then begin to develop your own formula for your practice, much like our formula for our practice that I've shared with you here and, most importantly, around.

Jeff Hughes: 19:39

This is stay disciplined on it. Don't deviate. Get the process, continue to hone and refine that process. Don't deviate because I think this candidate is so wonderful I don't have to do reference checks. Don't do that. Continue to follow the process, and our process demands reference checks at the end, even if we feel like we're checking the box, we still need to do those reference checks because you never know what should turn up. And the most important thing that a leader can do in a practice is develop the people around them, select the right people, recruit the right people around them, because those people make the firm. They make it when, or they make it stifle and lose. So that's how we've done it. That's how we've hired exceptional attorneys into our practice. We're continuing to hone that and refine that as we go forward. But I've shared with you our specific formula and our general formula today and I hope that's helpful to you.