Fireside Q&A: How To Find Your Second in Command

So , if you're out at the GLM Great League Marketing Summit in Orlando in October , you have already heard this talk , but you didn't , because this was a breakout session and so not everybody would have been in this talk . But this is the Q&A session . We do a little bit of discussion from the group about what problems they're having , so that's interesting .

If you have not been in one of our summits and you have not been around the Great Legal Marketing Tribe , this is a great episode to kind of get a flavor for the kinds of questions that smart lawyers are asking .

And , by the way , if you still don't have your free set of notes from the Great Legal Marketing Summit in 2023 , I want to make that offer to you again . If you just go to wwwglmsummitnotescom , trade me your email address , I will give you 186 pages of professionally developed notes from our 25 speakers . Sorry , 25 hours of content across 18 speakers .

It's really good stuff Help you grow your practice , help you acquire more clients , help you make more money and , of course , help you spend more time with your friends and your family . So again , wwwglmsummitnotescom . And now on to the Q&A . Alright , I promise you we would spend some time on problems that you all have .

So who has a problem or an issue or an opportunity that they want to bring up for the group ? I can't see names we have . You have throw boxes somewhere . Yeah , okay , can you do me a favor and just pick up ? Can you toss that blue box to her ?

My husband is the number one , so we work together in life and in work and it's going very smoothly and it's fine , everything's good , except that I was asking you , because you're related to your number one here , what happens when you we have a lot of things that we agree on and we have a lot of things that our visions are not the same all the time , and

so that we're wondering how you handle it in a family relationship and a work relationship .

We have been really fortunate to not have to work past too many of those right , because we're really good at identifying what's in my box , what's in your box , both with him and with my wife , who's our HR professional , right , and I view my wife really as my integrator when it comes to my life and when it comes to the firm HR and I go I don't have any

opinion on that Like whatever you think is best is good , and so I think maybe for you , the suggestion that I would have is like clearly identifying the roles in there and just being really deliberate . On it's Ed , right .

So if she tells me that idea sucks , then I say yeah , okay , probably does , and we move on .

I think they're certain , especially if y'all disagree , like when is a safe space to tell him like I don't really disagree with that and it's the end of place where he can receive it well and y'all can Okay .

Okay , when we're traveling the world , I want to go to these 75 countries would be execution . And so if it's vision , then I think the visionary gets to create the vision . Now you have to sign off on I'm , I'm with the vision , but the visionary is the one that casts the vision right . If it's execution , that's really your area .

You say I don't want to go to those 75 countries , I don't want to travel by train , like whatever . That is right , but does that help ? Okay , cool , jim , you had a question .

Okay , well , you know , I've had a heck of a time trying to find somebody for that role and since I'm not supposed to use recruiters or Advertise on indeed now and just it's probably somebody I know , how in the heck do I find somebody like that ? I mean , it's almost like let's try this .

To talk with people and get a sense of are they going to be a royal pain in the ass and I tell my people just to do that . I don't know if that's a good example .

But the more that we have stories that we can say about our team members who were able to execute on this , this and this , because they were helping us with the vision , the more likely you are to attract people that are excited to work for you right . And so a lot of that is we've got to create the environment .

We've got to tell stories about the environment first before we can expect people to want to come into work . And so what I would do , jim , is craft that Like I'm looking for office administrator .

Here's what I love about my last office administrator she helped me with this , I helped her with this blah , blah , blah , and I would send that to everybody who's in your universe all other lawyers , especially people in our world , people on the other side of the V , right , like I tell my team all the time if you were dealing with a paralegal or an office

administrator in somebody else's office who you think would be a good fit here . Bring them over , like , start telling stories about us . To get them over , right , I would just put out into the universe what it is that you're looking for , with a good story about why it's awesome to come and work for you and see if somebody knows somebody . I think it's .

Yeah , I wouldn't be shopping on Indeed or with recruiters because I think it's a long , short-term solution and I think that you know it's people that don't have jobs that are looking on Indeed , right , all right , okay , can we just toss a microphone ? You can throw those . Just throw that at her , she'll catch .

So I work for Filevine . Before , I never even imagined working at a tech company , but I received a message on LinkedIn and we started communicating and I decided to you know , look more into it and it turned out to be the perfect place for me , although I wasn't working at I wasn't looking for a job at- the time .

So LinkedIn is magnificent at being able to reach people . As far as you know , leads or looking for cases , but also looking for employees , looking for other colleagues , business ideas , yeah so .

Nobody cares that you won best lawyer in Cleveland for the 25th year in a row . Nobody cares , right ? I've been using LinkedIn for the last year to tell stories about my team , clients , business . I don't talk about myself hardly at all . Right , Couple selfies every once in a while .

But building up that base so that you have somebody's attention before you need it , before you need to go out and say , here's what I'm looking for , because it's much easier to fish in a pond when you're looking for somebody . When you've been putting that bait into the world for the last year , Nick Got the mic .

Like started out as an admin answering the phones and making copies , you know , got a degree nothing to do with legal , and she was an all-star , did everything great . She was young , so you know all the stereotypical millennial stuff just didn't happen and I just kept having to promote her because of how good she was .

And now she's our main estate planning paralegal and I just promoted her to be kind of director of operations and now she's in charge of literally everyone besides me . And it was my , when I hired her , a 24-year-old admin with no experience , kind of staring me in the face . The nice thing about that was she already got it , she already understood .

I didn't have to , like , interview someone and , I guess , try to convince them that we're awesome . Right , it was . She already knew it and it's hey , you're amazing , I already know you , I know what you do , I know you believe in this , so I want to give you more responsibility . So I don't know if your firm's that big or has someone like that .

But if I wouldn't have got creative , I would have . You would never think the person answering your phones a year and a half later should be second in command . So maybe that's there . And then my separate question kind of goes on to that . I have a paralegal who is an attorney . He's part-time but he just has paralegal stuff .

He wants to kind of be in charge because he's in his 60s . He has the resume ahead of everyone , but I don't really want him doing anything but probate legal work . I'm also looking to bring on my first associate . I'm the only attorney and the guy I'm looking at is a good technician , get work done . I don't necessarily see him as being my second in command .

From that standpoint . It's this 26-year-old lady , even though you would think the full-time associate would be it . So I'm kind of setting myself up for failure or hierarchy issues , you know , for people who , I mean , both of them have resumes better than me . Okay , and it's hey , you're great , you're an attorney , you're wonderful . Do the legal work .

I'm a 26-year-old girl who has a college degree and something else , but she's going to tell you what to do operations-wise , but she's the one . The only thing is she's not an attorney , right .

Young girl running his firm number two , not a lawyer , managing two lawyers who aren't Mike . It's the exact same thing , but it takes a certain type of personality and you're a 60-year-old paralegal who's a lawyer , which I didn't totally understand . That person's going to have to deal with it or move on right .

Your job , nick , is to do what's best for you and for your firm , and it sounds like what's best for you and your firm is the 26-year-old . If it's at the cost of the good technician 60-year-old , there's other good technicians in the world .