You know you need more help.
Maybe your attorneys are carrying too many matters. Your paralegals are stretched thin. You keep absorbing work because there is no one else to give it to, and you know this cannot continue forever.
So you decide to hire.
Then comes the part nobody has time for.
Someone has to define the role, write the job description, post it, sort through applications, screen candidates, schedule interviews, check references, follow up, and eventually make an offer.
And that someone is usually you or another person on your team who already has a full-time job.
That is where hiring often starts to go wrong.
The More You Need Someone, the Easier It Is to Make a Bad Hire
Build My Great Team has worked with solo and small law firms for years, and we have seen this pattern repeatedly.
A firm waits to hire until everyone is overwhelmed. By then, the goal quietly changes from finding the right person to finding someone who can help.
The role isn’t as clearly defined as it should be. Interviews get squeezed between client meetings. References feel like one more thing standing between you and getting help.
Then a candidate seems pretty good.
They can start soon.
Everyone is exhausted.
You hire them.
A few months later, you realize you solved one problem by creating another.
We have seen the consequences often enough that we wrote Hire Slow, Fire Fast: A Lawyer’s Guide to Building a High-Performance Team to help law firms create a more thoughtful hiring process.
The principle behind the title is simple. When you are already desperate for help, slowing down long enough to hire well is difficult, but getting the wrong person out of your firm six months later is much harder.
Recruiting Is a Job, Even If Nobody at Your Firm Has That Job
Most small law firms don’t have an internal recruiter.
Instead, recruiting gets handed to the owner, office manager, or another employee who has probably hired only a handful of people in the past few years.
Now they’re expected to figure out whether a candidate has the experience they claim, whether they’ll work well with clients, whether they’ll fit with the team, and whether the firm is moving quickly enough to keep them interested.
Meanwhile, their regular work hasn’t disappeared.
That’s the part of hiring that’s easy to underestimate. It isn’t just the hours spent reviewing résumés or conducting interviews. It’s trying to fit an entire recruiting process into a week that was already full.
Good Candidates Aren’t Waiting Around Forever
There is another side to the hiring process that law firms sometimes forget.
The candidate is interviewing you, too.
A good candidate may be talking with several firms. If it takes two weeks to schedule the next interview, if nobody follows up, or if the process feels disorganized, they may accept another offer before you’ve made a decision.
That doesn’t mean you should rush.
It means you need a process that can move without requiring you to personally push it forward at every step.
What If You Only Had to Meet the People Worth Meeting?
Imagine skipping the job postings, application reviews, initial screening, and scheduling.
Instead, you spend your time talking with a smaller group of candidates who have already been screened for the role.
You still make the decision. You still meet the candidates. You still decide who belongs in your firm.
You just don’t have to run the entire search yourself.
That’s why we created Build My Great Team.
Our team helps law firms define the position, find and screen candidates, coordinate interviews, check references, and keep the process moving. You stay involved where your judgment matters most, choosing the right person for your firm.
If you need to hire but don’t have the time to manage the search, learn how Build My Great Team can help.