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Sending a Law Firm Offer Letter That Actually Closes Deals
•Anthony Karls
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Your law firm offer letter process is broken and it's costing you the attorneys you actually want. Here's how we fixed it.
We walk through the full offer process: stakeholder debrief, in-person comp alignment, and the sign-on bonus strategy that closes salary gaps. This is where most firms lose hires they already won.
The Post-Interview Debrief That Validates Your Hire
Why Hiring Is Sales: Present Your Offer Face-to-Face
Counteroffers and Roadblocks That Kill Your Best Hires
Salary Negotiation Mistakes That Start Attorneys Off Disgruntled
Sign-On Bonus Strategy to Close the Compensation Gap
Onboarding Preview: Keeping That Culture Battery Full
as a reminder, hiring people is the same as sales. our agency, when we're selling our final, meeting with the prospect is to review the contract in person. Because I want to see facial expressions. I want to understand, like where their hesitations as we're going through the terms and conditions. And the same is true with the offer letter. Right? Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show. I am your host, Tyler Dolph. I'm also the CEO of our family law firm, only marketing agency that was born out of our own law firm, Sterling Lawyers, that has grown to over 27 attorneys. Today we are concluding our hiring series. This this episode is entitled The Offer Letter, but it is not as easy as simply just sending the offer letter. There is a lot that is involved and we break that down for you here. And it's not the, the episode could be, like, one minute, send the offer letter, wait to get signed back. But there's actually much more involved, than just simply sending the offer letter. So. So if you give us a just a timeline. Right. So you you have this final interview after the final interview is over, what's our process to get that sign to offer a letter at the end? Yeah. So obviously you're going to want to debrief with the stakeholders, the hiring manager, your head of people operations, any other key leadership team members who are involved. You're gonna want to validate the hire. You know, we've we've a saying we've bandied around internally, if it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no. Like, you want to be really confident by this point, but you've had an operational interview, you've had a culture interview, you've got a final, you've got a really good chance to get aligned with this person on what they're stepping into from a value standpoint. So you should be able to, within just a few days, make a decision on whether this is the right person for the role and whether you want to move forward. And at that point, what you don't do is just out of an offer letter. What you should do is schedule a follow up conversation, with the person who's going to be leading this to talk through what it looks like to take next steps to join your company, because you want to lock down expectations, timelines, give them space to ask any questions, and make sure that you are fully in agreement as you move forward. Yes. I as a reminder, hiring people is the same as sales. And at our agency, when we're selling our final, meeting with the prospect is to review the contract in person. Because I want to see facial expressions. I want to understand, like where their hesitations as we're going through the terms and conditions. And the same is true with the offer letter. Right? 100%. Yeah. And for the, family law firm owners that are listening, it's the. We probably don't have all the rules at JP rattle off depending on the size of our firm. So, like, you're really working with, you know, if, if, if they're going to be working with a paralegal. So if it's smaller firm, it's probably you. And like, what's really going to work at working with and what's the what's the peer that they're going to have internally, the attorney peer that they're going to have that you really respect. If, you know, if you have a managing partner, they should be the one signing off on it. In this process as well. So like there's the players are going to look different, but it's literally the same process. You're going to want to get perspective, you know, up sideways and down in terms of like how how the team feels about the person coming in, especially for an attorney because they're, they're going to they're they're integrated in so many different ways in a law firm, which is different than an agency. You know, we hire a paid search person, you know, they're really kind of just functioning with their department, with their own peers. There's not a whole lot of like, interaction with sales, for instance, there's, you know, it's it's pretty limited in terms of where their scope. So it's important to like include other people in the firm in the vetting process because like that's you're building a culture and you're either going to create a potential issue or you're going to reinforce what you're what you're trying to build with that, with the feedback from your team. Hundred 100 percent. Let's transition into hiccups or, roadblocks that we have encountered during the offer process. Either maybe they got a counteroffer from their current, you know, firm, or they want to extend out the timeline to when they transition or they, you know, the the compensation. There was a misalignment. J.P., give us some of those roadblocks in how how to get over. Yeah. So obviously there's a there's a bunch of factors to consider here. If they're currently, working somewhere with their currently employed, hopefully you found out early in the process why they're leaving. And what you talk through with them is how the pain that they're experiencing today, whether that's around compensation, growth, opportunity, culture is being addressed in this move. You want to reinforce that, you know, hey, you told us that one of the things you're really looking for in your next position is and we've talked about how do you feel like that's going to be solved? Yeah. Do you feel like this is like you want to hear them own the fact that they're moving towards something they want, because that's going to help them if they get a counteroffer, to help them say, no, I'm committed. This is the right decision. So that's a, that's a big one that helps get rid of some of those roadblocks you talked about around counter offers. Timelines. You do want to have an expectation of when this person needs to start. And given appropriate notice. I will say that it's generally a good sign if the person you're hiring is employed currently and is giving a substantial notice to their current employer, that's a good sign they're going to do it for you, too. So that's not necessarily a red flag. If they're saying, hey, I want to give two, three, four weeks. I'd love to start with you in 30 days. That's pretty reasonable. If they're giving you, you know, 60, 90 days or something like that, it's probably worth digging into. Is there something else going on? Another thing you could consider is like talking about timelines and bringing them on. Is there something in that starting period that is going to create a hiccup to their onboarding? Oh, I've got a big two week vacation plan to Tahiti to celebrate my 20th anniversary a week after I start. All right. Well, I don't really want to start you and then have you immediately out for two weeks. That's going to make it really hard for me to get you ramped up quickly. Like you want to try to uncover those things. Any concerns that are going to come up in the first 30, 60 days, you know, vacations, trips, surgeries, anything going on that they know about and can tell you you're trying to, like, pull that out. And then, of course, like, I'm going to set aside compensation because that's its own whole conversation. But you do want to be aligned on expectations in terms of the whole compensation package that you're discussing. And again, this gets back to like, you know, understanding what they're leaving, what they're looking for in their next opportunity, what they're coming from. So those are some places you can kind of backfire on you that we've seen it and how we try to get ahead of them, how you want to be proactive in solving those. Hey, family law firm leaders. My partner, Tony Karl's just released his book where he lays bare our precise blueprint for growing sterling lawyers from 0 to 17 million. This is the blueprint that we still use daily. And Tony explains it in very simple terms. The truth is, this is not simple to do. Success requires and demands hard work. But if you have the patience and the work ethic to do it, your family, law firm will succeed. if we're going to if we're a transition in the compensation piece, I think there's some important things here. It's real easy to start a team member. And with a bad taste in their mouth because you you aggressively negotiated with them on their salary, and now they're they're disgruntled already, and they haven't even started working with you. Because if they're running away from something that is painful and you've just given them a different version of that pain through, like an aggressive negotiation, you know, that's that's typically not a good, good thing. Like, it might feel good that you won the the negotiation, but you're probably setting yourself up for, for, conversation that's going to probably come out of nowhere, in a relatively short period of time. know, we typically take the tact. We're, we're very transparent on our compensation level and what expectations are at different levels within our business. So, you know, in the law firm, you just need to be super clear with what, what your compensation model is, how that impacts their salary, how it impacts their bonus potential, what the expectations are, what are the timelines to get there from an expectations perspective, what are the consequences of not hitting that in terms of how that how that changes? Because what you want to see from them is this is why you want to present this. You want to see from them. What are the what are the nonverbals you're getting from them? Because, you know, maybe you post a position at $120,000. They're negotiating for 160. And, you know, now you have a $40,000 gap that you got to figure out. What are you going to do with, to retain this talent that you really want and if you're super transparent upfront about here's how, here's how the monetary part of that practice works and what the expectations are as it pertains to this, you know, really doesn't matter what your salary is, if there's very clear alignment on performance expectations from a production perspective, because typically attorneys have very high that it or vested interest in what their, what they're bringing to the firm from a, overall revenue perspective and how that impacts their overall compensation. So, like, if that's a very clear and transparent on how that how that works, it might not be an issue. But if you're if you're not hiding it or it's not clear or it's kind of ambiguous, there isn't good tracking. There's not there's not good reporting. Your you very well might be setting yourself up for a frustrating coaching conversation that is going to feel like it's coming out of nowhere for the team member. So it's like being very transparent and not, my personal perspective is I don't take a tact of negotiating. I let them set their own bed and then set very clear expectations of what that that means in terms of what they're getting ready to lie down. And, because I don't I don't want people to come in and feel disgruntled at the front end. And typically, if you get to this point and you haven't started having this type of conversation already, you're already behind the eight ball. That should be one of the things that you're you're asking about in the culture interview, in terms of salary expectations. So that way you're you're setting yourself up well for this conversation, not because you're trying to figure out how to negotiate and position yourself, but you're you're already coming to the place of. All right. I went through three different interviews. I like this person. They fit a range that I was a okay with. And now I'm going to make that a real offer. And like, here's what that real offer means for the candidate. That's great. What have you done? In the past, if there is a, misalignment on salary, they want 160 the jobs at 120. How have you, close that gap? So there's there's obviously a lot of ways that you can close the gap. One way is, one if so, if the gap is that big, I wouldn't do this. So if we were to like shrink that gap to 10,000, one of the things that I would highly consider is, creating part of their salary as a sign on bonus that's paid out over the first year, of their employment, especially if it's an attorney and their, their base compensation is based on their production from a revenue perspective, because it's going to be very easy for them to exceed that if it's clear what their performance objectives are, if they don't hit it now, there's an easy level down, from as that annual rises to the next year because they that was a, it's a sign on bonus that's paid out over the course of that first year. So like there's some safeguards there. If it was 40,000, it's a pretty large gap. I would say. That needs to be more of a career conversation in terms of like, here's here's where we are. This is how we think about responsibility. This is what would need to be achieved from a business perspective. To get there, you know, how do we work, how do we work through that? And that would be more of a collaborative conversation in terms of how are they going to help the business get to the place for that type of compensation for a, for an individual team member as possible. So like how basically it's not how are you gonna help us grow the business conversation so that we can we can make this right. And like if we don't hit these objectives, this is what, what the consequence will be, blah, blah, blah, those types of things. love it. Yeah. So it is simply not just sending the offer letter. It is walking them through, ensuring that everyone is aligned on what is expected. What is expected, as well as, you know, how they're going to impact the firm. I think we should do another episode on onboarding, because that's just as important, right? Everyone comes in with their culture, battery all the way full. And if you can create a good 30, 60, 90 day onboarding plan for your employees, you're going to ensure that that culture battery stays full and that they don't have any buyer's remorse and leaving their old firm and coming two years. Gentlemen, really appreciate your time. Really enjoyed this series. Looking forward to the next one.
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