Do this FIRST, before you delegate tasks at your law firm
One of the biggest mistakes I made when delegating and hiring others at my law firm was what I call the technique “throw them in the pool and see if they’ll swim.”
I remember when I hired a case manager for my law firm. She was experienced in our area of law. I thought I could just give her email and phone access, then throw her in and let her figure it out. After all, she was experienced right? She quite 48hours later.
This was a shock to my ego. We had a great working environment. What went wrong? I didn’t clearly define what her roles and responsibilities would be. She may have had the knowledge and experience to do the job, but she had no idea how we, our firm, did the job. She had no idea about firms processes and procedures. And truthfully, we didn’t have very many at that time.
After I got over the bruised ego, I asked myself, “Ok what went wrong? How can we learn?” And I realized I needed a better onboarding system. I needed to clearly define the roles and responsibilities for that person. And I needed them to be documented. I couldn’t keep training and answering people’s questions, only to have that person leave or hire another person for the same role, and have to repeat the training and Q&A process all over again.