Putting together a collaborative family law practice means more than hiring great associates, top-tier paralegals and outstanding support staff. You need a team. Your law practice needs to work together, almost like you’re a family yourself.
Teamwork and collaboration may sound like buzzwords used in an expensive management conference course, but they’re really simple concepts. Even small firms with a handful of workers can benefit from developing their teamwork skills, especially as you expand into new geographic and practice areas.
Everyone Knows Something Different
Even in a family law practice, one attorney may know more about divorce, one may specialize in custody and visitation, and a third may focus on support issues. Not everyone is good at mediation and facilitating discussions—we all know attorneys who are outstanding in court but who can’t negotiate without shouting.
Teams draw strengths from everyone’s knowledge and experience, from the attorneys and partners to the secretaries and receptionists. In a good team, everyone feels free to contribute their knowledge, and everyone’s knowledge is valued.
Problems Get Solved Quickly
Teamwork and brainstorming became a source of innovation in the early days of Silicon Valley. When teams get together and bounce ideas off one another flaws and errors are noticed sooner and issues get resolved quicker. In a law firm, the more a complex case gets discussed, the faster the managing attorney can bring a solution to the client.
These discussions should involve everyone in the office. You never know who has the key to a complex problem. It could be that the client wasn’t willing to share an embarrassing detail with the attorney, but she mentioned it to the receptionist who brought her coffee in the waiting room. Once the attorney knows, resolving the client’s problem is a snap.
Everyone Feels Involved
We’ve all worked for businesses where workers did their jobs and left at the end of the day. Or where meetings consisted of silence broken by one or two people offering meek suggestions. In a supportive workplace, all your employees feel valued and free to offer advice. In a truly collaborative workplace, the attorneys go to the secretaries for advice and vice versa.
Just as important, everyone does everyone else’s work. Attorneys should be able to answer phones and run copies while the secretary is on break. The receptionist should get the same respect as the senior partners. How does this ideal law firm come into existence? You have to make it happen from the ground up.
Hire the Right People
That’s easy to say, but who are the “right people”? Before you can find the right people, you need to know what you’re trying to do with your family law practice. For instance, if you’re starting (or expanding) your amicable divorce/mediation practice, you need attorneys with mediation and divorce knowledge. You’ll also need support staff—paralegals and legal assistants—with similar knowledge.
It may be best to begin with people you already know. Start with others like yourself, who have similar ideals and goals. Develop interview questions that reflect your ideas on teamwork and collaboration.
Include Your Staff with Interviews
If you already have staff and are expanding, have your existing staff members participate in the interviews. To develop a working team, your new workers need to fit with the old ones. Just as a machine can’t work if you jam a new cog into the gears, a team can’t function if you force a badly-fitting worker into the flow.
Bear in mind that you may find a really outstanding attorney or employee who just doesn’t mesh with your current staff. In that case, you might have to find another outstanding attorney, and let that one go.
Establish Rewards and Limits
Once you have your team assembled, or you’ve started the process, you must have some guidelines and rewards in place for your team members. According to Indeed.com one of the primary reasons employees leave a job is lack of recognition. If you’re trying to build a cohesive, supportive team, you need to let them know you appreciate the work they’re doing.
More pay is good, but a small or startup firm can’t always give everyone the bonus they deserve. Some ways to reward a good team when you can’t offer a monetary reward include:
- Increasing responsibilities. Within the scope of their abilities and legal liability, let employees stretch their wings. Encourage your junior attorneys to take harder cases. Suggest your legal assistants become paralegals. As your people earn your trust, show that you trust them.
- Remembering that positive reinforcement goes a long way. Don’t fall prey to the psychological ploy of telling someone a positive thing about their work as a prelude to telling them something negative. (“You really did a great job writing up that dissolution agreement, the client was really happy. Now let’s talk about that motion the judge denied last week.”) Not only are workers onto this, it weakens any positive reinforcement you may give. Instead, focus on the positive. Save the negative for a different discussion.
- Having fun. You needn’t have pizza day every Friday, or reward the whole office for doing their jobs. But everyone should enjoy coming to work and being in the office. Family law can be a grueling, sometimes depressing, line of work. An attorney should be able to take a break after a bad custody case without feeling like she might lose her job. If you sense the emotions in the office are trending downward, it might be a good time for “movie and popcorn” day in the conference room.
Final Thoughts
Making a working team takes as much luck as it does forethought. People have to come together and make it work, but also the right people have to be there at the right time. And you, as the one working to assemble your team, are the one that must recognize the perfect time and people and put the finishing touch on your group.
Our Provider Network can help you over any rough spots. If you think you’ve got a working team, ask us what we think. If your team should be working but isn’t, we can look and see where the gears aren’t meshing. Join the Providers in the Divorce With Dignity Network and we’ll work on your team-building effort with you. Schedule your complimentary Success-Strategy Consultation today!
