Legal Workforce Management


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Have a Focused Search to Get Better Results for Your Lateral Hires

Seventy-five percent of all placement requests are for associates with two-to-four years of experience, largely because firms want lawyers with few rough edges and no immediate expectation of partnership. But the simple rules of supply and demand dictate that having focus is essential, if you want to improve your firm's chances of success. Another necessity: Spell out all expectations to save yourself the aggravation that comes with having to go back and explain to your hiring partner or committee what went "wrong" with a search. Start by asking partners to thoughtfully consider what they want before they ask you to begin the search for a lateral. To help you get them more attuned to actual needs, below are guidelines detailing minimum level requirements you need from partners before you make the first call to a headhunter:

Ensure you hire stars

Far too many legal-hiring organizations fail to hire stars because their hiring process actually prevents superstar candidates from ever getting in the door. By reviewing the following list of suggestions for organizing and streamlining your approach to hiring, you should be able to maximize your chances of hiring the star candidates who may have eluded your recruiting efforts in the past.

Enhance Your Lateral Hiring: Delegate to Your Search Firm!

Law firm recruiting managers are called upon daily to handle a myriad of responsibilities for their firms, including coordinating fall recruiting programs at law schools, planning and managing summer-associate programs, managing lateral hiring, professional development, and conducting partner and associate evaluations. Some of these professionals also handle human resources and marketing functions. These professionals are highly skilled and most often overworked.

Doing Risk Management When it Comes to Your Lateral Hires

When can hiring a lateral be detrimental to your law firm? All firms consider the impact the potential lateral hire will have on the firm's professional liability insurance and take the following precautions:

Different Styles of Law Firm Recruiting

When it comes to recruiting, law firms get as much out of their efforts as they put into them. As a result, is it a surprise to hear partners complain that their firms are not attracting as much top talent as they once did.

Behavioral Interviewing Techniques to Help Your Law Firm Get Great Laterals

Has your firm been hiring new associates who seem to meet your criteria in the hope that they'll learn and improve and still be with the firm when its time to make partnership decisions? Rather than hoping, now may be the time to identify the competencies your law firm needs. Then you can teach lawyer/interviewers to uncover the desired behaviors that will create a legal workforce that can develop those competencies and is reliable, productive, and stable.

Be Sure About Your Law Firm’s Business Objectives Before Hiring Laterals

In many firms, lateral hiring resembles a revolving door: Lawyers come in, spend three or more years with the firm, and then depart. Indeed, when it comes to integrating laterals, most law firms do a good job of detailing the programs, policies, and paperwork needed to cover the administrative aspects associated with joining a new firm, but they fail to describe the business objectives they have for the lateral.

Basic Rules Regarding Recruitment and Compensation of Lateral Partners

Few areas have more potential for internal criticism and strife than determining the appropriate compensation level for lateral partners. And even large firms that recruit tremendous numbers of lateral partners can have a hard time figuring out how to attract and compensate these new owners. The difficulties in compensating lateral partners vary depending on the compensation system employed at each firm, so the tried-and-true tactics outlined below should be helpful to law firm leaders who need ideas for recruiting and compensating lateral partners:

Avoiding Mistakes When It Comes to Lateral Acquisitions

In 2001, the NALP Foundation for Research and Education released its groundbreaking study, The Lateral Lawyer: Why They Leave and What May Make Them Stay with an eye on revealing: 1) the primary and secondary influences on the decisions of lawyers to change jobs including the role of practice interests, financial incentives, work/life balance priorities, work environment characteristics, and professional and career development needs; 2) the perceptions of laterally hired attorneys about how their new (current) employers are meeting their expectations for assimilation, marketing of the lawyer to clients, compensation and more; 3) The relative degree of loyalty or anticipated longevity of lateral lawyers as they report their own expectations for tenure; and 4) How law firms recruit and hire lateral lawyers, including the role of referrals, self-initiated contact, search consultants; law firm lateral hiring criteria and selectivity; and lateral hiring incentives.

Changing Views on Partnership: How Law Firms Are Handling the Declining Interest In Reaching the Top

With many associates placing less of an emphasis on reaching equity partnership, law firms are responding by creating new tracks that still allow for career advancement to keep them interested.

Capitalizing on a Law Firm's Growth—Is Bigger Better?

Many law firms have grown dramatically over the past few years. The challenge for any firm that has experienced fast growth is to be able to capitalize on the firm's new platform. The larger and more diverse and dispersed a firm becomes, the more attention must be focused on managing it. The reality is that growing a firm requires substantial investment in effective management to ensure the firm gets an acceptable return on its investment in growth.

Business Planning for Practice Groups

To prosper and grow, law firms of all sizes must create strategic business plans for their individual practice groups. A good strategic plan may be as simple as three to five goals with action plans designed to implement them.

Top 7 Rules for Law Firms Conducting Call Back Interviews of Law Students

Participating in the call-back interview process is different than being an on-campus interviewer. Most firms spend more time training the attorneys who interview on campus than the larger number who participate in the firm's in-house interviews. While on-campus interviews are initial screening interviews, in-house interviews are a mix of initial screening interviews with students who have sent unsolicited resumes to the firm, call-back interviews resulting from on-campus interviews and second visits from students who have received offers and want to visit additional attorneys before making a decision.

Top 10 Reasons to Hire Interns or Summer Associates

Here are the Top 10 Reasons to Hire Interns or Summer Associates:

Why Employers Use Talent Tracking Software

Talent management software is gaining importance because getting and keeping good talent has become critical in corporate performance.

Three Employee Appraisal Myths v. Reality

The use of performance appraisals as a tool to improve performance management may be overrated or misunderstood. Hard research shows performance appraisals have negative effects on employee populations more often than having positive outcomes. As a result, employers and human resources departments are having a fresh look at this essential tool of human resources management. This article takes a look at three major myths of performance appraisal that lead to its misuse.

Hiring on Responses to the Most Common Interview Question

When it comes to interview questions, maybe the most common one posed to candidates is “What’s your strength?” or “Tell us about your strong points,” and similar questions of the same nature. Asking common questions that a candidate expects is one of the greatest interview strategies and it helps to take better informed decisions as answers can be compared against well-researched and standard sets of responses. In this article we are going to explore how employers use the question “What’s your strength?” for making hiring decisions.

What Makes the Public Hate Prominent Attorneys

Baseball star Alex Rodriguez recently hired a prominent New York defender who has been called the city's "Most Hated Attorney." But isn't defending the indefensible part of a lawyer's job? Does the public and media vilify successful attorneys more so than they do other successful people in different fields? If so, why?

The Trap of Equating Human Resources to Inanimate Resources

One of the major impediments in managing people and upping productivity lies inside the mindsets of managers and employers, which in turn is a product of the cultural and literary environment of the workplace. Managers and employers are logically worried about productivity, output, resources and etcetera, because they’ve got a business to run, and maintain work processes that help run the business meet its targets.

The Five Parts of a Project Executive Summary

Project executive summaries are extremely important because they help top project management find both relevant key information and employee achievements quickly. Since each business project is unique, project executive summaries tend to be somewhat unique every time. However, like every other thing in life, there are good rules to follow while checking project executive summaries. The project managers need to check whether a compelling executive summary report addresses the concerns of the project stakeholders through its essential five parts – the focus of the project proposal, goals, summary, key findings, deliverables, and appendix (if any).