Episode 314 | Hiring Your Way to Freedom: Building Systems That Scale Without You
Welcome to the wealthy woman lawyer podcast. What if you could hang out with successful women lawyers, ask them about growing their firms, managing resources like time, team, and systems, mastering money issues, and more? Then take an insight or two to help you build a wealth generating law firm. Each week, your host, Devina Frederick, takes an in-depth look at how to think like a CEO, attract clients who you love to serve and will pay you on time, and create a profitable, sustainable firm you love. Devina is founder and CEO of Wealthy Woman Lawyer, and her goal is to give you the information you need to scale your law firm business from 6 to 7 figures in gross annual revenue so you can fully fund and still have time to enjoy the lifestyle of your dreams.
Intro:Now here's Davina.
Davina:Welcome back to the Wealthy Woman Lawyer podcast, where we help ambitious women law firm owners scale their practices from 6 figures to multiple 7 figures while creating the freedom and impact they truly desire. I'm your host, Attorney Davina Frederick. Today, we're diving into what might be the most transformative topic we've ever covered on this show: How to hire your way to freedom by building systems that allow your law firm to scale without you being the bottleneck. Now, I know what some of you are thinking, Devina, I can't afford to hire anyone yet, or I don't have enough work justify hiring, or my personal favorite, no one can do this work as well as I can. And if those thoughts are running through your mind right now, then this episode is especially for you.
Davina:Because here's what I've learned after working with hundreds of women law firm owners. The ones who successfully scale to 7 figures don't hire when they can afford it. They hire to create the capacity for growth. They don't wait until they have too much work. They hire strategically to handle the work they want to attract.
Davina:Most importantly, they understand that hiring isn't just about getting help with tasks. It's about building systems that multiply their impact, create leverage, and ultimately give them the freedom to work on their business instead of being trapped in their business. Today, I'm going to show you exactly how to think about hiring strategically, which positions to hire first, how to create systems that ensure quality without micromanaging, and how to build a team that can execute your vision while you focus on growth strategy. Because when you get this right, hiring doesn't just help you handle more work, it transforms your entire business model. Let me start with a story that perfectly illustrates the difference between reactive hiring and strategic hiring.
Davina:I was working with a business attorney. Let's call her Lisa. Lisa had built her practice to about $450,000 in annual revenue, but she was drowning. She was working seventy hour weeks handling everything from complex negotiations to routine contract reviews, and she was exhausted. Lisa's approach to hiring was what I call desperation hiring.
Davina:She'd wait until she was completely overwhelmed, then frantically try to find someone to help. She'd hired three different paralegals over two years, but none of them worked out because she had no systems in place and no clear expectations. Lisa would say things like, I tried hiring, but it just created more work for me. And by the time I explained how to do something, I could have done it myself three times. Sound familiar?
Davina:The problem wasn't that Lisa couldn't afford good help or that good help didn't exist. The problem was that Lisa was thinking about hiring reactively instead of strategically. Here's the difference. Reactive hiring is about finding someone to help you do what you're already doing, typically long after you should have hired someone to help you. Strategic hiring is about creating capacity for what you want to be doing.
Davina:Reactive hiring says, I'm too busy. I need help. Strategic hiring says, I wanna grow my revenue by 50% next year. What team do I need to make that possible? Reactive hiring focuses on immediate pain relief.
Davina:Strategic hiring focuses on long term leverage and growth. Let me break down the strategic hiring mindset. First, you hire for capacity, not just current workload. If you wait until you're at 100% to hire, you've waited too long. You should be hiring when you're at 80% capacity, so you have room to grow into the additional capacity.
Davina:Second, you hire to elevate your role, not just to get help. Every hire should move you closer to working exclusively in your zone of genius. The activities that only you can do and that generate the highest value for your business. Third, you invest in systems before you invest in people. This is crucial.
Davina:Most attorneys try to hire first and create systems later. That s backwards. You need documented processes before you can effectively delegate. Fourth, you hire for the business you want, not the business you have. If your goal is to become a 7 figure firm focused on high value corporate work, you don't hire someone to help with small business contracts.
Davina:You hire someone who can handle the corporate work pipeline you're building. Finally, you think about return on investment, not just cost. Every hire should either increase revenue, decrease costs, or free up your time to focus on higher value activities. If a hire can't demonstrate a clear ROI, you're not ready to make that hire yet. Now, one of the most common questions I get is, Devina, who should I hire first?
Davina:And the answer depends on your practice area and business model, but there's a general sequence that works for most law firms. Your first hire administrative support. This might surprise you because most attorneys think they should hire a paralegal or associate first, but your first hire should almost always be someone who can handle the administrative tasks that are consuming your time but not generating revenue. I'm talking about scheduling, basic client communication, document formatting, filing, data entry all those tasks that need to be done but don't require a law degree. Why start here?
Davina:Because administrative tasks are the easiest to systematize and delegate. There's less risk if something goes wrong, and it immediately frees up hours of your time to focus on revenue generating activities. I worked with a family law attorney who was spending fifteen hours a week on scheduling client intake calls and administrative tasks. She hired a virtual assistant for $15 per hour to handle these tasks. That freed up fifteen hours of her time to focus on business development and complex cases.
Davina:Result? Her revenue increased by $8,000 the first month, more than enough to cover the assistant's annual salary. Your second hire once you have administrative support in place, your next hire should be someone who can handle routine legal work under your supervision. This might be a paralegal, a legal assistant, or in some practice areas, a junior attorney. The key is hiring someone who can handle the routine, systematic legal work that doesn't require your level of expertise document review, research, discovery assistance, routine motions, work that's important but not the highest and best use of your time.
Davina:Your third hire, business development support. This is where most attorneys make a mistake. They think business development is something only they can do, But there are many aspects of business development that can be systematized and delegated. This might be a marketing coordinator or, my personal preference, an outside vendor who handles your content creation, social media, and lead nurturing, or a business development assistant who qualifies prospects, schedules consultations, and follows up with referral sources. I had a client who hired a part time marketing coordinator for $25 per hour.
Davina:This person managed her LinkedIn content, newsletter, and communication with referral sources. The result? Her referrals increased by 60% because she had consistent professional communication going out regularly and she wasn't trying to remember to do it herself. Your fourth hire, associate attorney. Notice that hiring an associate attorney comes fourth, not first.
Davina:By the time you hire an associate, you should have systems in place for administration, legal support, and business development. This allows the associate to focus on legal work while being supported by your existing team. Here's the key insight: Each hire should make the next hire more effective. Your administrative support makes your paralegal more effective. Your paralegal makes your associate more effective.
Davina:Your marketing support makes everyone more effective by ensuring a steady pipeline of qualified prospects. But here's what most attorneys get wrong. They try to skip steps. They try to hire an associate to handle everything from legal work to client intake to marketing. That doesn't work because you're asking one person to be three different roles.
Davina:Truthfully, an associate attorney should not be responsible for marketing or bringing in cases. That is the role of the law firm and the shareholders. Associates should be focused on doing excellent legal work, not everything else under the sun. This brings us to the most important part of strategic hiring building systems that ensure quality and consistency without you having to micromanage every detail. Let me tell you about Rachel.
Davina:Rachel built her law practice from $300,000 to $1,200,000 in three years. But the real transformation wasn't just the revenue growth. It was that she went from working sixty five hours a week to thirty hours a week while her business tripled. How? Rachel understood that systems are what enable scaling without sacrificing quality.
Davina:System one Standard Operating Procedures For every single task in her business, Rachel created a detailed SOP not just handle client intake, but a step by step process what questions to ask, what documents to collect, how to enter information in the system, when to schedule follow-up, what to communicate to the client. Rachel's Client Intake SOP was 12 pages long. It covered every scenario, every question that might come up, every exception to the rule. Sound excessive? Her team was able to handle client intake with 95% accuracy, even without her direct involvement.
Davina:System two Quality Control Checkpoints Rachel didn't just create processes and hope for the best, she built in quality control checkpoints at critical stages. For example, before any document was sent to a client, it underwent a three step review process: a paralegal review, a senior paralegal review, and a spot check by an attorney. This meant Rachel wasn't reviewing every single document, but she was ensuring quality through systematic review processes. System three Communication Protocols One of the biggest fears attorneys have about delegating is that client communication will suffer. Rachel solved this by creating detailed communication protocols.
Davina:Her team knew exactly when to communicate with clients, what to communicate, and how to communicate it. They had templates for common scenarios, escalation procedures for unusual situations, and clear guidelines about when Rachel needed to be involved personally. System four: Training Programs Instead of trying to train people on the fly, Rachel created comprehensive training programs for each role. New hires went through a structured onboarding process that covered not just what to do, but why they were doing it and how it fit into the bigger picture. System five: Performance Metrics Rachel tracked specific metrics for each role.
Davina:Administrative staff were measured on response time and accuracy. Paralegals were measured on document quality and turnaround time. Marketing support was measured on lead generation and conversion rates. This wasn't about being controlling it was about having objective measures of success so everyone knew what excellent performance looked like. Now, here's what made Rachel's approach different from most law firm owners.
Davina:She invested time upfront in creating these systems rather than trying to build them while she was hiring. Most attorneys try to do it the wrong way. They hire someone and then try to figure out how to train them and what to have them do. That's like trying to build the airplane while you're flying it. Result of Rachel's systematic approach, her team could handle 80% of the work that came into the firm without her direct involvement.
Davina:She was free to focus on the most complex legal work, business development, and strategic planning. Her profit margins actually improved as she scaled, thanks to her systems, which made everything more efficient. Here's the framework I recommend. Step one: Document everything you currently do. Yes, everything.
Davina:For one week, write down every task you perform, no matter how small. Step two: Categorize tasks by complexity and importance. Which tasks require your specific expertise? Which tasks are routine and could be handled by someone else with proper training? Step three: Create detailed SOPs for delegatable tasks.
Davina:Begin with the most routine and systematic tasks, Work your way up to more complex processes. Step four: Build in quality control measures. Determine what needs to be reviewed, when, and by whom. Step five: Create training materials. Don't expect people to learn by osmosis.
Davina:Create structured training that sets them up for success. Now, let's address the elephant in the room. The biggest obstacle to successful hiring isn't finding good people or affording them. It's overcoming your own need to control everything. As attorneys, we're trained to be personally responsible for everything.
Davina:We're taught that our attention to detail is what prevents disasters. So the idea of letting someone else handle important work can feel terrifying. I call this the control trap, and it's what keeps most law firm owners stuck as expensive employees in their own businesses. Let me share the most common control related fears I hear and how to overcome them. Fear number one, what if they make a mistake?
Davina:Here's the truth, they will make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes, including you. The question isn't how to prevent all mistakes. It's how to create systems that catch mistakes before they become problems and learn from them when they happen. I worked with a personal injury attorney who was terrified to let her paralegal draft demand letters.
Davina:Her solution? She created a detailed template and checklist, had the paralegal draft the letter, then built in a review process. The paralegal's demand letters were actually more thorough and consistent than the ones she had been writing herself because they followed a systematic process. Fear number two, clients expect to work with me personally. This is often an assumption, not a reality.
Davina:Most clients care about results and communication, not whether every task is handled by the named partner. The key is positioning your team as extensions of your expertise. Instead of saying, my assistant will handle this, say, Sally, who is part of our client success team and specially trained in our processes, will take care of this for you. Fear number three, it's faster to do it myself. This might be true in the short term, but it's never true in the long term.
Davina:Yes, it takes longer to train someone to do a task than to do it yourself once. But if it's a task you'll do 50 times over the next year, that training investment pays off dramatically. Fear four: No one will care about my business as much as I do. This is absolutely true. No one will care about your business as much as you do.
Davina:But that doesn't mean they can't do excellent work within their role. The solution is to stop expecting employees to care as much as you do and start creating systems that ensure excellent performance regardless of their level of emotional investment. Fear five: So what if they leave? This fear keeps many attorneys from investing in training and development. But here's the thing, if you don't train people because you're afraid they'll leave, you guarantee that they can't contribute at a high level while they're there.
Davina:Besides, it is really reasonable in today's society to expect someone to stay with your firm for twenty or thirty years. People are gonna come and go, and you will be alright if they do. You'll still be there doing your thing and growing a successful business. Don't let a fear of the unknown hold you back. The solution is to create systems and documentation that aren't dependent on any one person.
Davina:When everything is documented and systematized, someone leaving is inconvenient, not catastrophic. Here's the mindset shift that changes everything. Stop thinking about delegation as giving up control, and start thinking about it as multiplying your control. When you have systems in place, when you have trained team members following documented processes, when you have quality control measures built in, you actually have more control over outcomes, not less. You control the systems, the processes, the standards, and the results.
Davina:You just don't control every individual task. Let me share two transformation stories that show what's possible when you get strategic hiring right. Case study one, the estate planning attorney. Michele started working with me when her practice was generating about $350,000 annually. She was handling everything herself, client meetings, document preparation, administration, marketing.
Davina:She was working sixty hour weeks and felt like she was on a hamster wheel. Michelle's transformation happened in phases. First, she hired a virtual assistant to handle scheduling and basic client communication. This freed up ten hours per week. Instead of using this time for more legal work, she used it for business development.
Davina:Next, she hired a paralegal and created detailed systems for estate planning document preparation. She spent six weeks documenting every step of her process, creating templates, and building quality control checkpoints. Then, she hired a marketing coordinator to handle her content creation and referral source communication. Finally, she brought on an associate attorney to handle the routine estate planning cases while she focused on complex estate planning and business development. The result?
Davina:Within a year, Michelle's revenue grew to $875,000 But here's the amazing part she was working thirty five hours per week. Her team was handling 75% of the day to day operations while she focused on strategy, complex cases, and growth. Michele didn't just scale her revenue, she scaled her freedom. Case Study two: The Business Litigation Firm. Casey's litigation practice was stuck at about $600,000 for three years.
Davina:She kept thinking she needed to hire another attorney, but she couldn't find the right person. Meanwhile, he was drowning in discovery management, document review, and case administration. We took a different approach. Instead of hiring another attorney first, Casey hired a litigation paralegal and a case manager. She spent eight weeks creating systems for case management, discovery processing, and client communication.
Davina:The litigation paralegal could handle 80% of the discovery work under Casey's supervision. The case manager handled scheduling, deadline tracking, and routine client communication. This freed Casey to focus on the high level litigation strategy and business development. Within eighteen months, his revenue grew to $950,000 Only then did he hire an associate attorney, but by that point he had systems in place to make that associate immediately productive. The key insight from both stories, they didn't just hire people to help with what they were already doing, they hired strategically to create capacity for what they wanted to be doing.
Davina:As we wrap up today's episode, I want you to understand something fundamental. Hiring isn't just about getting help. It's about creating leverage that allows you to scale beyond what's possible with your personal efforts alone. The attorneys who successfully scale to 7 figures don't do it by working harder or longer. They do it by building teams and systems that multiply their impact.
Davina:But here's what's crucial Strategic hiring requires strategic thinking. You can't just throw people at problems and hope they go away. You need to think systematically about what roles you need, when to hire them, and how to set them up for success. Your homework from this episode, I want you to do a time audit for one week, track how you spend every hour, then categorize your activities into three buckets. One, things only you can do, high level strategy, complex legal work, key relationships.
Davina:Two, things you should delegate but haven't yet. Routine legal work, administration, basic client communication. Three, things you shouldn't be doing at all data entry, scheduling, basic research. This exercise will show you exactly where your first hire should focus and how much time it could free up for higher value activities. Now, if you're listening to this and thinking, Devina, I know I need to hire strategically, but I don't know where to start.
Davina:I need help identifying the right sequence for my practice, creating the systems that will set my team up for success, and overcoming my control issues so I can actually delegate effectively. Then, I want to invite you to schedule a strategy session with me. I work privately with ambitious women law firm owners who are ready to stop being the bottleneck in their own businesses and start building teams that create real leverage and freedom. Together, we'll identify the specific hiring strategy that makes sense for your practice, create the systems you need to delegate effectively, and overcome the mental blocks that keep you trapped in the day to day operations. This isn't about hiring just anyone to help with anything.
Davina:This is about building a strategic team that allows you to focus exclusively on the activities that drive growth and create the freedom you started your practice to achieve. If you're ready to hire your way to freedom and build systems that allow your business to scale without you being the limiting factor, go to website and schedule your consultation. We'll spend time together analyzing your current situation and determining whether private coaching is the right fit to help you build the team and systems of your dreams. Remember, the most successful law firm owners aren't necessarily the best lawyers. They're the ones who build the best teams and systems.
Davina:And that's exactly what we're going to help you do. Until next time, this is Devina Frederick reminding you that your freedom is on the other side of strategic hiring. You just need the right plan to get there.
Intro:If you're ready to create more of what you truly desire in your business and your life, then you'll want to visit us at wealthywomanlawyer.com to learn more about how we help clients create wealth generating law firms with ease.
