Help! I need a new legal assistant!

by PAUL MCLAUGHLIN
Practice Management Advisor
The Law Society of Alberta

When you lose a valued legal assistant, you can quickly begin to feel like a race car driver in a car with no accelerator – you know you have the power to get things done, but no matter how hard you push, nothing happens. As work starts piling up, panic sets in. You feel you have to get things moving, now! 

When this happens, short-sighted thinking may tempt you to hire the first person who comes along, but if you do, odds are that you will pick the wrong person. Hiring an assistant is one of your most important practice management decisions, so you are well advised to make the time to find a person with the right combination of knowledge, skills and attitude.

To weather the immediate crisis, try using a temp from an agency or hiring someone on a contract basis. You may also have to temporarily scale down the amount of work you produce. Use the time you free up for recruiting.

Preparing for interviews

The key to hiring the right person is preparation. Start by reviewing the performance evaluation criteria for the position. If you don’t have evaluation procedure, now is the time to establish one.

Here are some general performance objectives for a legal assistant:

quality of work– always or almost always produces error-free work that looks good

quantity of work– produces a high volume of work within a reasonable time

integrity – always acts with integrity; shows deep commitment to client confidentiality

attitude – displays enthusiasm, commitment to job and to client’s interests, loyalty and fidelity to employer’s interests, diligence, dependability, confidence, pride in work product

interpersonal skills – gets along well with others, including you, your clients, and other lawyers and support staff in the office; displays co-operativeness

problem-solving approach – tries to find solutions to problems independently, but knows when to ask for help; displays initiative, creativity, independence, forward planning, organization, assertiveness without aggressiveness, adaptability, decisiveness

A successful hire: one
where the employee
has an excellent
performance review after
a year on the job

Questions that produce good information

Having identified the characteristics you want in your new assistant, the next step is to develop a set of questions designed to get you the information you need to predict how candidates will perform after you hire them. It’s tricky because you’re dealing with people, and people can be very unpredictable.

Say you want to know how candidates will get along with co-workers. You could ask, “What would you do if you got into conflict with someone else in the office?” Open-ended, hypothetical questions like that don’t usually provide particularly good information because interviewees figure out what you want and feed it back to you.

The best way to predict how someone will act in the future is to find out how they acted in the past, so you would get better information if you asked, “Tell me about a situation where you got into conflict with one of your co-workers. What started the problem? Whose fault was it? What did you do to resolve it?”

As the interviewee tells the story of a specific event, listen very carefully. Is the person telling the truth? What knowledge, skills and attitudes did the person bring to bear on the problem? Will the person make a positive contribution to your organization if a similar situation arises?

This “behaviour description” approach to employment interviews is not foolproof – even the best interviewers can be duped at times – but it is the best way to identify the candidate who has “the right stuff” for your position.

It’s worth it

If you take the time to plan and implement a proper recruitment strategy, you will have a much better chance of finding a stellar legal assistant who will make your work much easier and your practice much more successful for many years into the future. 

« back to "From The Practice Advisor's Office"

© 2004 Law Society of Alberta | Site development by Media Dög Productions Inc.