Hiring from Desperation: What You Should Do before You Hire

Most law firm owners hire hastily, not because they love risk, but because they're buried. So they hire to escape the pressure instead of solving the real problem. But when you slow down, and you get everything on your plate visible, you realize what you actually need is clarity, not another expensive hire. And that's what we're talking about today.

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Hey everyone, welcome back to this week's episode of The Law Firm Owner Podcast. I am Melissa Shanahan. And today I want to share something that came up while I was teaching a class for AILA. And it was just a short aside, but it's one of the most expensive mistakes I see law firm owners make. It's hiring from desperation. That feeling of, I just need help. Anyone. Right now.

I have seen this play out again and again. The owner is buried. They're spinning in the cyclone of work. They finally decide to hire, but instead of solving the real problem, they end up creating a new one, an expensive one. Because when you hire from desperation, you usually hire at the wrong level, and you stay stuck doing that same kind of work that got you in overwhelm in the first place.

When you're overloaded, your brain wants relief. It tells you that hiring someone senior, someone who can come in and just handle it, is what is going to solve everything. So you start imagining what it would be like to have an attorney come in and just handle the things that you're doing as an attorney. They could take it all off your plate. It feels strategic. It sounds like leadership, but it's often a reaction to pain, not a solution to the real problem.

And here is what's actually happening under the surface. You haven't slowed down long enough to get visibility into what's truly on your plate. You can feel the weight, but you can't see it clearly. That's when owners make their most costly hires because they're trying to make the feeling go away. They're not trying to fix the root cause.

Every firm owner carries invisible work: the tiny, constant mental load that never shows up on a job description. It's the client updates, approvals, follow-ups, context sharing, quick decisions that happen 15 times a day. It's not the big stuff. It's the constant, low-grade drain of details that you've been quietly managing for years.

And when you don't take the time to get that out of your head and onto paper, you can't delegate it. And you can't see who you actually need. And that's why so many owners end up hiring someone at the wrong altitude. They bring in a senior hire, hoping to clear space, but those people aren't set up to do or manage that invisible, unorganized load.

So you end up with an expensive person doing high-level work while you are still drowning in the lower-level tasks, drowning in admin work. You traded one kind of overwhelm for another, and now you're managing an underutilized hire while still doing tasks that someone at a third of the cost could have taken off your plate.

Now, before you hire anyone, slow down and do a simple but powerful exercise. Write out everything that's taking your time and attention. All of it. Every recurring task, every small decision, every five-minute thing you've taken on and always have had on your plate because it was just easier to do it yourself. And how much of it doesn't actually require your expertise? That's the clarity you need before you hire. Because when you get clarity first, capacity decisions become very obvious.

You may realize that what you need is not a $100,000 hire, it's a $50,000 coordinator who can take 60% of your workload, the admin workload. And that one insight could save you hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of frustration in the coming years.

One exercise I work with clients on is getting out of their head all the things that they handle, right? And we put them into two buckets. One is delegation, the other is replacement.

Now, I learned this from Dan Martel's DRIP Matrix. If you've read Buy Back Your Time, you will have read about the DRIP Matrix. The DRIP Matrix also includes two other categories, which are production and investment. But most of the time, owners haven't done the work to figure out even the delegation and replacement level tasks. So I'm not entertaining the investment and production level tasks.

So, this is an exercise you could do. You could sit down and write down everything you do and keep notes as you move through the week, because you're going to forget some things. You're not going to think to write some of these things down that you actually do. But as you start to deposit all of these things, they should go into delegation, which are things that are delegable.

Yes, they will need training. Yes, they will need an SOP, but the replacement-level tasks are higher-level tasks. That is where the legal work comes in, or maybe sales and marketing replacement. You do not hire for replacement level until you have finished hiring for or passing off everything you're doing that is in the delegation category. So that hopefully helps you and gives some context for how I work with people on this.

Hiring from desperation is like hitting an escape button. It feels good in the moment because you believe you're solving the problem, but you're really just escaping it temporarily, and you're creating more problems for yourself down the road.

Hiring from clarity, on the other hand, is a strategic move. It's calm, it's deliberate, it's built on facts, not feelings. You know exactly what work needs to come off your plate, how much of it there is, and what level of role makes sense to handle that work. So you're no longer guessing. You are designing your next move with precision, and that's the difference between building capacity and buying comfort, which is what people tend to do in the moment when they need relief.

One other thing I'm going to mention here about this in particular is that I mentioned for years to come, it's an expensive mistake, not just in the moment, but for years to come because this bloats out your firm. If you start hiring and paying too much money for tasks that shouldn't cost that much to complete, that's the precedent you're setting.

So whether you are having an attorney do paralegal work or whether you hire to replace the legal work, but you are still handling delegation work, either way, this is a very bloated situation that you're going to grow on. It's not a good foundation. So those are things to think about, and this is reasons why you want to slow down.

Now listen, this isn't just for you as the owner. Right now it may be, but this principle can apply to your team as you grow the firm and as they grow in their roles. As your firm matures, your team members start taking on more and more responsibility. They're handling higher-level work. That's exactly what you want.

But the same pattern can creep in for them, too. If they don't stay aware of what's still sitting on their plate that could be delegated, then they'll eventually hit their own ceiling, and they'll become a bottleneck, just like you once were or just like maybe you are.

Part of your job as a leader is to help your people stay focused on what only they can do. And your job as a leader is to prepare the next layer of hires to handle the delegateable work. That's how firms scale cleanly. Each layer of business stays focused on higher-level work while the supporting structure underneath expands to absorb the rest.

So this clarity before capacity exercise isn't just a one-time thing for you. By the way, you will have to do this for yourself over and over and over again because you'll have to figure out and get clear on what's the next layer to hire for in the smartest way possible. And the smartest way possible is to buy back your time, and you buy back your time in the least amount of investment or cost to get that work covered.

This exercise is not just a one-time thing for you. You're going to need to repeat this every quarter, sometimes every six months, but you also will need it for your team. So it becomes a muscle for you guys. And you want to continue to think in these ways before hiring.

You want to make it so that everyone learns to ask, "What's on my plate that doesn't need to be on my plate?" Happy to handle it, but it doesn't need to be on my plate. That's how you build a firm that grows without constantly hitting operational walls.

So here's the shift. Before you hire, get everything that lives in your head, all the things that you do, out of your head and onto paper. Separate what only you can do from the work that someone else could do.

Now, like I said before, one of the easiest ways I found to do this is to separate all the things you do into delegation and replacement. And then ask yourself, if I had help with these lower-level responsibilities, what would that free me up to focus on? And that, whatever answer that is, that is how you build leverage. It's not by guessing at a job title; it is about buying back your time and defining the load that needs to move first. And once you've cleared that work, then you can see your next level of need very clearly. When you make that next hire, it will be from a place of power or empowerment, not from a place of panic or desperation.

You don't need to rush to your next hire. You need to see your business clearly enough to make the right hire. Hiring from desperation almost always leads to regret. Hiring from clarity leads to freedom. And as your team grows, the same rule applies. Keep everyone focused on what only they can do and prepare the next round of hires to take on the work that's ready to move down.

So before you hit that escape button, please pause. Take an hour to list every task, every decision, every ounce of invisible work that you're carrying. And the truth that shows up on that page will tell you exactly the kind of help you actually need and how to hire in a way that truly moves the business forward. Because the goal isn't just to get help, the goal is to get free.

Thanks for tuning in, everyone. I'll see you here next Tuesday.

Hey, want to watch the video of this episode? Head over to Velocity Work’s YouTube channel. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

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