The Law Firm Staffing Model That Predicts 80+ Employee Hires

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Your law firm staffing model decides when you hire—and most firms in the US run on a feeling, not data. Here's how to fix that.

Track caseload per attorney, attorney utilization, your hiring funnel, and treat it as a major financial decision. The model will then tell you when to hire.

It's the same system Sterling Lawyers used to scale into an 80+ employee firm. 

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📄 CHAPTERS  

0:00 - The Law Firm Staffing Model That Ends Hiring by Feel

2:37 - Why Hiring Too Early or Too Late Kills Your Margin

4:41 - Capacity Utilization & the 4-Tier Attorney Model

7:49 - New Grad vs. Senior Associate: Ramp-Up & Hiring Timeline

10:12 - The Simple Hiring Metrics Any Firm Can Track Today

12:18 - Build the Model as a Team & Trust the Numbers

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Transcript

0:00

Hiring? Too early and too late are the biggest higher mistakes in family law. We avoid both at Sterling. Here's how we treat hiring as a financial problem and how Todd Clauer our CFO, uses data to predict every single hire. Welcome back to the Sterling Family Law Show. The show for family law firm owners who want to grow their profits, multiply their cases and set a clear roadmap on what they need to build so they can have the firm of their dreams. our episodes break down proven business growth, digital marketing, and revenue first strategies to help you scale smarter and not just be busy all the time. I am Tyler Dolph, CEO of Rocket Clicks, which is a business growth consultancy that works exclusively with family lawyers because we were built out of our very own family law firm, Sterling Lawyers, that has grown to over 30 attorneys across two different states. Today we have Todd Clauer who is the CFO of Sterling Lawyers, as well as Sterling's co-founder, Anthony Karls. We're going to break down how we think about hiring and what metrics you need to track in order to have a great hiring funnel. All right. Todd, welcome back to the show. Today we are talking about hiring. And as you know, we work with lots of family law firms. And we get this question all the time. When do I hire? What should I hire for? When should they start? And we're going to rely on you as our resident expert, because when we're at Sterling and we're thinking about making a higher, we come to you first because we see that law firms kind of they do hiring wrong in two different ways. They either hire too late or they hire too early. And most of that happens because it's based on a feeling, right? Oh, it feels like we're really slammed. So we should make the higher right now or it feels like everyone's idle. And so we got to do something about it. Tell us how you think about this at Sterling and and what what are some of the processes you've implemented to help us make better hiring decisions from from all aspects? Yeah. Thanks for having me back on. It's it's definitely a big challenge for every business, right? Really? Regardless if it's a law firm or anything. Right? It's. When do you hire. Right. When do you hire the right person? And, you know, you hit on the 2 to 2 key things. Right. Hiring too late or hiring too early. And there's a myriad of reasons why you don't want to be in either one of those buckets. But it is mostly people say it feels like I need to hire somebody. Anytime you say that, it's really tough. As a finance guy, I don't like feelings, right? I like to say I don't have any feelings, but, you know, it's really got to be supported by data. And, you know, one of the key things for us, as we've kind of continued to grow on a stirring, is feelings are always a component of it, but we have to have data to support it. And what we use is the data. The waterfall. Right. It's the waterfall that we've built that Tony's built over time here that we continue to use day after day after day after day. And if you get those metrics right on that waterfall, it will enable you to say, hey, when am I going to hit a point where I'm over 100% or probably even over 90% productive or, you know, efficient with my people, and you have to plan on that in advance. There are still two issues, right? You still kind of look at who am I hiring, right? Am I going to hire an experienced attorney or am I going to hire a new attorney right out of law school? Right. Both of those might lead to a different timing, right, of when we're going to hire. But the key thing is trusting the waterfall that we've built, that you've built for your firm that says, here's what I'm going to get those phase. Here's what I'm going to get my caseload up to be so high that I can't handle it with my existing Tony, talk to us about some of those metrics. What was the reasoning behind building those in the first place? And then what metrics do you use? And do you and Todd talk about as we're thinking about hiring? The main metric that we Todd's talking about is how do we take. How do we take our waterfall numbers and then build out a capacity, capacity utilization rate. Essentially what what it boils down to. So once you kind of get your base waterfall down, you can then start to understand what that flow will look like into the future. And then you can build a consumption model. So how how long do these cases stay on average. And then how what does that do to my capacity as a result. Because I know certain tiers of attorneys. What, you know, in our system we have four four tiers of attorneys, roughly with the new newbies coming in. We have our senior associate. We have and we have our partners and our senior partners. And they all have utilization scores that they could they can pull from a case perspective. And then we can judge, you know, what's coming through the waterfall. And how does this based on that going out into the future with our current town pool. How does that change our utilization rate? It's really it's really that it's using the base waterfall and then building forecast into the future so you can and taking that forecast down into team member headcount and utilization. So you can really understand how to make a make a really good educated guess because it's still a guess. But it's going to inform HR on like all right. We know it takes x, y, z amount of time before we get a person in the seat. And then we know based on onboarding that person, here's how long it's going to take to get them to a productive team member. You know, quote unquote. So those are all timings. And you're just trying to like, you're trying to do it perfectly. You're just trying to. Get a better guess, like get a much more better, much, much better driven projection. And then you're like, you know, the tabs on a way better job at like making this better because he comes from a very different perspective. I built the waterfall from a marketing and sales vantage point. He's leveraging it for how we run, how we actually run firm. So it's it's just been very informative across across all the different disciplines of the business. And just the more you use it and the better you and obviously come up bigger model, bigger and better models than I have. So it's just it's it's been continually getting refined over time, which has been a benefit. But it's just like we we've picked the system and now we've we just continue to refine the system. Because I think, Todd, for a small law firm owner, they're really thinking about a couple questions. One, can I afford them? Do we have enough leads in our system to be able to pay for this new hire? And then two, how long is it going to take them to ramp up so that they can start taking cases? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. That's why it's so important to understand what your hiring model needs to be, which is, am I hiring that new person right out of school? Because that ramp up period is going to be long, right? Because they don't know. They don't know how to build. They don't know how to work with clients, all that stuff. Right. So it does take time. Now that's also a I'll call it a cheaper hire, a more, you know, a more reasonable hire from a dollars perspective. That said, you go to the opposite extreme and you go hire a senior associate or even a partner level. They've been there. If they've done that, they know how to do it. They know how to work. They're probably bringing clients with them. All that stuff. Right. Makes a huge difference. But it does take longer to find that person. Right? Because they don't just grow on trees. They're not just sitting out there with their shingle out saying, okay, hire me, hire me, hire me. Right. You know, a key thing that we that we focus on, part of what Tony was talking about is what we've been able to do is to show our attorneys, too, that we have this work. Right. So burnout is always a key thing, right? You don't want anybody to get burned out because then they're going to leave, and then you're behind the eight ball already because you didn't hire in advance for that. So if we can show them and as we show them that, hey, this is what we're doing, this is when we know we need to hire somebody, right? It builds confidence with the team. Right? So that's super important as well. Use the model, pick a model, use a model and stick with the model. Right. You know, so so so back to the timing, right? I mean, timing is super important. And do I want to make that investment? You know, I go back to a to a book that I read way back in the day. It was called The Tipping Point. Right. And it's like you're always going to have to take a chance and spend a little bit more in a short period of time, because you have to. So your, your utilization, your profitability may go down a little bit, but it's only going to go down so it goes up faster. And that is something that you have to be willing to do. And you know, you get to a point where you start trusting the numbers and that risk is lower and lower and lower. And I know we talk about our waterfall a lot and it's very sophisticated. And we built it over a lots of years. But if you don't have the perfect waterfall, there are some basic metrics that you can start tracking to get better insights into when you should hire and what that hiring schedule can look like. What are some of those kind of just high level metrics that a maybe a new firm owner can start to track? Yeah, I think it really starts from the bottom. You have to understand how many cases can an individual attorney handle. And then you kind of just work up the funnel, right. You get to the phase. So that means I got to bring in so many cases a month, right. And if I have to bring in so many cases a month, it's how many consults do I have to have? It goes back to how many sets do I have to have? How many leads do I have to have? How many quality leads do I have to have? I mean, you're right. I mean, not everybody's going to have a 50 set, you know, model, right? It could be five. It could be three. Pick the metrics that you can manage that you can report on that you can affect. And that's how you're going to be better right. That's the only way you can do it is start with what you've got and then grow it right. And you know, Tony's done a fantastic job of kind of building this. And I know, you know, just the amount of data that we have helps with that because it gives you a better and better sense of, hey, this is going to happen. Oh, I see a blip. Well, what happened there? Let's go investigate that. Right. But it all boils down to what's that? Caseload per training. The case. And then also the length. Those two. If you’re looking to hiring. It's like how long do they stay and what's the low volume number. We created a case load volume number. It's different than just raw cases. But we started with just cases. The number used to be 40. That was the that was the old number. The new number I don't like. We now have a scoring model for cases as they're in as they're going through stages in our fixing system. It's a little more advanced than just raw cases. But you can just just do rockets because that's where you have to start. You don't have anything else. Starting is the hardest part. Starting is the hardest part. 100%. Any lessons learned, Tony, from the early days in kind of the why behind putting a model like this in I mean, don't assume it's going to be 100% correct because it's not going to. And if you're not the biggest, I would say the biggest mistake I made with the waterfall is that Todd and Jeff have done a good job with in the firm is the team, understands about the team, didn't understand it when I was running it because it was just I wasn't good at teaching it and I understood it so well. It was hard to like. It's hard to be there and like, like, why don't you get it? Why don't you understand? So like Todd, Todd and Jeff have done a really good job with that. Getting the team involved and having them see it, you're going to get you're going to be able to leverage those feelings that a lot of people typically use for hiring. And you're gonna be able to start quantifying them by reviewing the model. And like Tom holds forecast update meetings frequently so that we can review. Here's what we here's what the model said. Here's what it says we should be doing. Where are we at? Should we tweak it? Which adjustments should we make all those types of things. And it's it's a team. It's a team game. It's team sport. And like that would be the biggest mistake is like doing it yourself and nobody understands it. And then you have to build the confidence with the team with Todd, Todd mentioned. And you're going to have more of those feelings. Be like, you know, red running on high RPM feelings versus like, okay, see what's happening and see what's coming. We're got we got a plan for this because a lot of times people have all those extreme feelings because there's no point, there's no clarity. So like they're just telling their own story. So that would be a big I don't know. That was probably the biggest lesson learned is like do this as a team, continue doing it, continue meeting and do it as a team. Yeah. I think to build on that a little bit. I think we at Sterling are lucky enough to have, like I said, so much data and we have such a long history and we know what those metrics are and we know what those things are. But to Tony's point, what we did is we said, hey, the the attorney group, we don't need to share 200 metrics with you, right? We're going to pick eight and those eight or what are going to be able for you to support and you to understand. And that's going to show that you have the pulse on the business and that we know what's going on in the background. Right. And it builds that trust. I mean, we literally had a conversation the other day. One of our MPs said, hey, I see, you know, it feels like. Right. She started with, it feels like we should be hiring, but should we really be hiring? And we had a really, really good conversation of, hey, here's what the metrics are showing us, right? Here's what we think. Here's why we believe that yes, now is the time. So it's really cool to see people own that and start saying, hey, I'm relying on this. And it's is this the right thing? Right? Because that's the right question. 100 guys I love this. I appreciate your time. You know, the the lesson here is to stop making hiring decisions based on feel, leverage data, build the data into your firm so that you can actually know when to hire. And so now that you know the key metrics that you need to start to predict your next hire, it's time to learn how to run the entire hiring forecasting process start to finish. We call that our four step hiring head Start. And that is going to be featured on our next episode. So if you're not subscribed to our channel, please make sure to do so. And then if you want the complete system, live with a working model that you can apply to your own firm. Register now for the free webinar that we are going to have. And we're going to bring Todd back and Tony back for that webinar on June 26th. The link is in the description below. Sign up today. Because spots are limited and we are going to take a deep dive into this system. Thanks again for being here and we will see you all soon.