The Hiring Mistakes Small Law Firms Make 

You just lost another one. Maybe it was the paralegal who seemed sharp in the interview and fell apart under deadlines. Maybe it was the assistant who was lovely to work with and impossible to hold to a process. Either way, you’re back where you started, telling yourself the same story: I’m bad at hiring. I keep picking the wrong people. 

You’re not bad at hiring. You’re skipping the part of hiring that happens before you ever look at a resume. 

Most hiring failures in small firms get filed under “bad fit” or “wasn’t the right person.” That diagnosis feels true because it’s the last thing you noticed. But by the time a hire doesn’t work out, the failure already happened weeks or months earlier—in a job posting nobody thought through, a process built on gut feel, or a decision made because you were drowning and needed a body in the seat.  

I’m Stephanie Everett, founder of Lawyerist Lab, and there is one thing I know it’s this: the person you hired isn’t usually the problem. The absence of a process is. 

Why You Need a Hiring Process 

Most firms think a hiring process is the paperwork around hiring: post the job, screen resumes, do a couple interviews, make an offer. That’s the mechanics. It’s not the process. 

A real hiring process exists to answer one question before you ever meet a candidate: what does this specific role require someone to do, and how will I know if a person can do it? Without that question answered, every interview is just a conversation. You’re not evaluating fit. You’re evaluating whether you liked talking to someone. 

That distinction is the difference between a role that gets filled and a role that gets filled correctly. 

Most Law Firms Owners Make the Same Hiring Mistakes Without Knowing It  Mistake # 1: You’re hiring for chemistry, not fit 

How many times have you heard you should hire someone you’d enjoy grabbing a drink with after work? Please stop doing this. 

Here’s why it persists. Liking someone in an interview feels like useful information. But it is probably just comfort. And that signal may be the wrong one. 

Your goal in hiring isn’t to find your next friend. It’s to find the person who fills a specific role, operates inside your team’s framework, and shares your team’s actual values—not your taste in conversation. A candidate can be someone you’d never grab a drink with and still be exactly right for the job. A candidate can be someone you’d love to grab a drink with and still be exactly wrong for it. 

Mistake # 2: You never tested whether they can work inside your systems 

One of our Lawyerist Lab members, Cari, had done the hard part. She’d documented every process her team was supposed to follow for managing cases. Clear steps, clear expectations, all written down. And her assistant kept ignoring it. 

“She just keeps ignoring the process and ignoring me when I ask her to follow it,” Cari said. She felt disrespected. But the assistant wasn’t being defiant. She was a genuinely good person who could not operate inside defined structure. She wanted to do things her way. Cari’s systems and this assistant’s working style were oil and water. They were never going to mix. 

That mismatch wasn’t a character flaw in the hire. It was a gap in the hiring process. Cari needed a way to find out, before an offer went out, whether a candidate could actually work inside the framework her team runs on. She never built that test. So she found out the expensive way, months in, after the documentation was written, the training was done, and the frustration had set in on both sides. 

If your firm runs on a specific way of working, and most well-run firms do, your process has to check for that directly. Liking a candidate in the interview tells you nothing about whether they can operate inside your structure. Only a process built to test for it does. 

Mistake #3: You’re hiring reactively, out of pain instead of planning 

This is the hire that happens the week you’re underwater. Someone quit, or a case blew up, or you just can’t keep doing everything yourself anymore. You post the job Monday, you’re desperate by Wednesday, and you hire the first person who seems competent and available by Friday. 

There’s no structured interview. No scenario that tests how they’d actually handle the job. No real evaluation of fit, because there’s no time for one. You’re not hiring. You’re triaging. 

The cost of that hire usually shows up three months later, in redone work, in a client relationship that got handled wrong, in the hours you spend re-training someone who was never a fit for this role to begin with. Firms that hire reactively don’t save time. They borrow it, at a rate that comes due later with interest. 

Why You Need a Hiring Process  

Every one of these mistakes gets blamed on the person who was hired. None of them actually start there. They start with a role that was never clearly defined, a process built on instinct instead of design, and a decision made under pressure instead of on purpose. 

Fixing your hiring outcomes isn’t about getting better at reading people in an interview. It’s about building the process that tells you the truth about a candidate before you’re six months into finding out the hard way. 

Three Ways to Build a Hiring Process 

Do it yourself. If you have the time and the appetite to build a real process — defined role requirements, a structured interview, a way to test for systems fit — you can. It does take some deliberate work up front. Best for: owners with bandwidth to invest in building this once, well, and reusing it. 

Lawyerist Lab. Inside Lab, you get the frameworks and coaching to build a hiring process that fits your firm, plus the support to work through it in real time with people who’ve seen this pattern across hundreds of firms. Best for: owners who want to build this properly but don’t want to figure it out alone, and who are working on hiring alongside the rest of their firm’s operating system. 

Our Hiring Process service. For firms who need this handled, we’ll build the job posting, design the process end to end, and conduct the first round of interviews for you, for a flat fee. You get a fully built process and a shortlist of candidates who’ve already been evaluated against it. Best for: owners who know exactly what the role needs to accomplish but don’t have the time to build and run the process themselves right now. 

What to look for before you commit to any hire 

Your next hire shouldn’t be a bet. It should be the outcome of a process that already told you the answer. It is worth investing the time to get this right.