Have You Accidentally Trained Your Team to Ignore You? 

“My paralegal says she’ll get me the draft by Friday. Monday morning comes, and I don’t have it yet.” 

“I keep finding typos in my associate’s briefs. I’m mentioned it twice.” 

“We have a process for our client intake. Half my team skips it when they are slammed.” 

I’m Stephanie Everett, founder of Lawyerist Lab, and these are common complaints from lawyers we work with. They feel ignored.  They’ve set the standard, and yet it feels like everyone is just going about their merry way.  

Once you’ve set the expectations with your team, you must be willing to hold that standard.  

Setting the Standard Is the Easy Part 

Naming the standard is a five-minute conversation. But holding someone to it, week after week, when they’re likable and busy and have a decent excuse every time, is the part that takes actual leadership.  

Most owners are pretty good at setting standards and pretty bad at holding them.  They don’t even realize it, because in the moment, letting it slide always feels reasonable. 

“They’re swamped this week.”  

“It’s just discovery responses, not a client-facing deadline.”  

“I don’t want to be the person who nitpicks a Monday morning.” 

Each of those is true in isolation. Stacked up over eight or ten weeks, they add up to a standard that exists on paper and nowhere else. 

What Enforcing a Standard Sounds Like 

It’s not a lecture. It’s definitely not a surprise performance review six months later. Enforcing a standard is a short, specific conversation, close to the moment the deadline was missed, that names exactly what happened and what needs to change. 

There’s a model I teach in Lawyerist Lab and in my book, Be a Next Level Leader: The Four  Cornerstones of Law Firm Leadership, called OIR: Observation, Impact, Request.  

It’s simple:  

First, describe what happened. Imagine a video of the scene replaying and name the undisputed facts. Never assume the person’s intent. Saying “it seems you don’t care” invites debate and defensiveness. Naming “you agreed to deliver the draft responses to me by Friday, but I didn’t get them until Monday” is a fact.  

Next, name the effect it had. “I had set aside time to review them and give them to the client for their review. The delay compressed all of our deadlines.” 

Finally, state the result you need instead. “In the future, we need to meet the deadlines we set. If you see that you aren’t on pace to hit a deadline, I need to know as soon as possible. What can you do differently in the future?” 

  That’s not harsher than “you need to be more reliable.” It’s just specific enough that there’s nothing left to guess about. 

What Happens When  You  Let Standards Slide 

Here’s where letting a standard slip gets costly, and it rarely shows up where you’d think to look for it.  

The real cost is what your senior associate is quietly absorbing. Every Monday, she’s the one doing the cleanup: reviewing what should’ve already been done, flagging what’s missing, redoing pieces that came in rushed.  

 She’s also keeping score. She’s noticing that the standard applies to her Friday deliverables and not to anyone else’s and that pointing it out hasn’t changed anything. The first couple of times, she mentions it. After that, she stops not because it stopped bothering her, but because she’s decided it’s not worth being the person who is always complaining about a coworker. 

A year later she leaves, not over one bad week, but because she spent that year concluding that reliability doesn’t get rewarded here, that being the one who follows through just means you inherit everyone else’s slack. And she’s not the only one drawing that conclusion. Whoever’s left is watching how you handled it and deciding how seriously to take the next standard you set.  When One Conversation Doesn’t Fix It 

Sometimes it does. You have the OIR conversation once, the pattern breaks, and that’s the end of it. Most performance issues, caught early and named clearly, resolve right there. 

When they don’t, the answer isn’t to repeat the same conversation and hope this time lands differently. There’s a four-step path we walk through in our book:  

1. A direct conversation  

2. A follow-up conversation if the first one didn’t stick,  

3. A formal written plan with a defined review period, and, if none of that produces change,  

4. An exit.  

Nobody wants to get to step four. But getting there isn’t the failure.  

Staying stuck on step one for a year having the same hallway conversation on repeat—that’s the failure. 

Consistency Is What Makes a Standard Real 

The fastest way to break trust in a standard is to enforce it selectively.  

If you address a missed deadline with one person and wave it off for another, your team doesn’t conclude the standard doesn’t matter to you. They conclude it never really existed, and that what actually determines the outcome is who you like better. 

This gets harder, not easier, with your best people. It’s tempting to give your highest performer a pass because everything else they touch is excellent. Do that enough times and you’ll find your best people are the ones testing the boundary the most, simply because they’ve learned there isn’t one. 

What to Do This Week 

Pick one standard you’ve been letting slide. Start with the one that has been bugging you for weeks.   

Write the OIR down: what you observed, the impact, what you need instead. Then have the conversation. This week, while it’s still a five-minute course correction instead of a six-month resentment. 

Your team already knows what you’re willing to tolerate. This week, show them what you’re holding them to. 

Isn’t holding people to a standard the same as being a hard-nosed boss? No, and this is where a lot of owners get stuck. Holding a standard consistently is what makes you fair. It’s the inconsistency, letting some people slide and not others, that actually damages trust with your team. 

What if the person is going through something legitimately difficult right now? You can extend real support, an adjusted timeline, extra check-ins, and still name the standard clearly. What doesn’t help anyone is letting the standard slip because naming it feels uncomfortable in the moment. 

How do I know if one conversation is enough, or if I need to escalate? Watch what happens after that first OIR conversation. If the behavior corrects and holds, you’re done. If it improves for a couple weeks and slides back, that’s your signal to move to the next step rather than repeat the first one. 

What if I’ve genuinely never said the standard out loud? Then that’s your starting point, not a performance conversation. You can’t fairly hold someone to a standard they were never actually told about. 

Does this apply to attorneys the same way it applies to staff? Yes, and it’s often more overlooked with attorneys, because owners assume a law degree comes with an understanding of the firm’s specific standards. It doesn’t. Your standard for client communication or billing narratives is yours, not something your team absorbs from osmosis. 

What if I hold the standard and the person still doesn’t meet it? That’s exactly what the four-step path is for. Working through it in order means that if it ends in an exit, everyone involved, including you, knows it was fair. 

Can Lawyerist Lab help with this if I don’t have an HR function at all? Absolutely.  Your Lawyerist Lab business strategist can help you on everything from mapping out the conversations you need to have to practicing it so you feel prepared.