Why Are Smart Law Firm Owners Building Executive Teams Without Hiring a Single Full-Time Exec?

Welcome to the Dominate Law Podcast. I'm your host, Don Adesha. And today's conversation is about what happens when a law firm reaches the point where too much still depends on the owner and how the right leadership, delegation, and support can create room for the firm to grow. This episode is proudly sponsored by Equa Marketing, helping law firms strengthen how they are found, understood, and trusted online. Equa is offering law firm owners and managing partners a complimentary 60-minute marketing strategy meeting valued at $900, where a senior strategist will review your search visibility, website, competitors, and biggest opportunities for growth.

You can book yours at www.dominatelaw.com. Joining me today are Christopher Early, founder and CEO of Early Law Group, who has firsthand experience scaling a growing law firm, and Molly McGrath, founder of Hiring and Empowering Solutions, who has spent nearly three decades helping law firms strengthen leadership, hiring, and team performance. We're talking about letting go, building ownership inside your team, and knowing when fractional leadership could be the next step your firm needs.

Let's get into the conversation. OK, my first question goes out to you, Molly. From a leadership and talent perspective, what are the clearest signs that a law firm has outgrown its current leadership and staffing structure? I love the key word that you have there, which is structure, which really goes hand in hand with the people. First sign is that the owner has become the most expensive employee in the law firm. I talk to law firms every single day, and what I often hear is when I talk about, tell me about your leadership team, they say they have an office manager who's also the paralegal, also the intake coordinator, also the billing manager, wearing way too many hats.

A true, true leader is able to lead the people, process, production, which are the only roads, in my opinion, to profitability. Or even worse, I will hear the structure is the attorney's spouse or their sister's cousin's neighbor who is willing to help out but does not have the knowledge and the skill set to truly lead and lead the firm. So a true leader understands that people is the most crucial asset in the firm. And without that, the visionary, the attorney never gets that entrepreneurial freedom that is required to scale and that they're desperately dreaming of and that they deserve.

And they're not able to sustain. So the structure looks like they're getting delegated back up to people coming to them with buckets of problem versus proposed solution because they have the wrong person in the seat. And so they don't have the confidence or the competence to really be able to come with proposed solutions, communicate in a clear, concise, strategic way that gets the attorney out of that, what I like to call that defer and deflect vicious cycle.

And so another clear sign that the structure is not working, which I think sometimes is even more dangerous, is that revenue is growing, but everybody feels worse. Like we cannot finger point the why. We really don't have what I like to call that forensic law firm strategist in there. And so the signs are that the structure is not working is every decision ends back up on the attorney's desk. Right. And the team is constantly saying we need the owner.

The owner cannot take a vacation without things slowing down, especially revenue and good employees are consistently overwhelmed because the roles are too broad. They're wearing too many hats. And, you know, the attorney gets in this trap of feeling like they need better people or they may need more leads or we need. And, you know, you know, the drill that goes there. And often it's not a people problem. It's really a leadership problem because the structure is not having the right person in that seat.

I'm curious as to how do you know when a person is wearing enough hats? Because like we know when it's too many. When is it enough? When are they just at the point of good capacity? I'd say utilization. So enough hats, meaning that they have the capacity. They're being utilized adequately. Adequately. Without overwhelming. You know, the first easy hack for that is look at their calendar, look at their time chunking and looking at how they are running their day, so to speak.

So if I'm a paralegal and the intake coordinator or the case manager, but I still owe the file, we all know how long it takes to write a brief. We know how long the average intake in a law firm is 12.5 minutes. So when you look at you're doing 16 intakes a day, you really can follow the map. And, you know, overwhelm, stress, capacity, all these I feel like are feelings and emotions. Show me the data. Show me their calendar.

Show me what each step of the process takes from lead generation to closing a matter. And you should be able to chunk that out in your calendar. If they can't and it doesn't all quote unquote fit, then, you know, we have a capacity issue. OK, appreciate that. So we are really looking for that efficiency in the right spot of things. Efficiency and clarity, right? You should be able to, you know, for when my law firms that I work with, I can look at their calendar.

Each thing is color coded based on whether it's money, it's marketing, lead generation, case management, post engagement, pre engagement, operations, administrative assistance. So it is about efficiency. You can be as efficient as you want to be. But when your energy money is energy. And so you can be as efficient as you want. But if your energy is off and it is compromised and you're able to draft that, you know, document in 2.5 hours or what have you.

But your energy is off and you're not present. You don't have the focus. Guess what's happening? Typos, errors, you know, unfortunately, sometimes exposure to malpractice suits, you know, the drill. So it's not just about efficiency, but really being able to have that focus management, because without that time management's a failed paradigm. No, that is an interesting insight right there. Let's explore it throughout the conversation.

Thank you so much for a banger of an opener, Molly. Chris, as a law firm owner who has scaled a growing practice, when did you realize that personally managing everything was beginning to limit the firm's growth? So years ago, so I started practice. Basically, I had no business training, went to law school. It came out and I sort of hung a shingle. And I didn't really know for about 15 years was actually running a business as opposed to a practice of law.

And so I had sort of this mindset shift. So I encourage the business owner, right? Your mind dictates the direction of your behavior and your outcomes, right? So when I sort of, when I fixated on I'm a business owner, and everything flows from that sort of vantage point, everything sort of grew. But I made every mistake in the book. Today, I'm making mistakes. We're all making mistakes. But I think what we've been decent at over at this firm is like, looking at quote, unquote, failures as opportunities to grow, right?

Little things like getting a resignation. You could either beat yourself up or this like springboard to our next level of growth catapulting you into another level. I have seen great growth at my firm scaling the firm through a fractional COO, right? We've really embraced the fractional. We have a fractional COO, a fractional CFO, considering hiring a fractional HR professional. I want to share this. I was at a conference yesterday, this past week, Monday and Tuesday in Arizona, mega personal injury conference.

And the speaker said, you know, the smaller you are, the faster you can be. And I know when you start adding people, you get, you sort of, the flow can get sort of jacked up and clogged up. So there's a tendency grow, grow, grow, higher, higher, higher. But actually things can slow down. And Molly hit the nail on the head, your revenue will grow, but the owner will take less because you're feeding so many people. And the output can be delayed because you have so many moving parts.

The more the owner can streamline things, become lean and mean and highly profitable, that's good. But there's a temptation, higher, higher, and that can really eat up your profit. Another thing I want to share is that I've learned from people much smarter than me. Every time your firm doubles in size, something breaks. And so you have to always be breaking things to advance forward, to keep growing your firm in a healthy way.

Little things like, well, massive things like organizational charts, accountability. I liked the question earlier about efficiency. How do you know when a team member is, like, fully utilized? Well, I use a scoreboard, like, you know, key performance indicators. If Sally's job is to make 10 widgets a month, I don't need 7 or 17, I need, like, 10, because that is what we have decided is a good measure of high productivity from that position.

So that's how we sort of measure productivity, efficiency. Then we've decided, OK, then we need to hire another person to complement that team member, or we don't need to hire someone at this time. So little things like that sort of is what I, what I circulate in my head as I grow my firm. Chris, was there ever, like, a moment, exact moment in time? I'm looking for a bit of a story here where it just dawned on you that, OK, I'm a bottleneck.

I am the bottleneck here. Too many to list, to be completely honest with you, because it's a constant thing. You sort of, it's, you sort of know it when you see it. You know when you're, you know, I literally have countless stories about that, right? But I think he used to identify earlier than later, you know, I'm the bottleneck, and I think you should be ahead of the curve on that to hire sometimes before you actually need that next person to grow your firm.

But to be super intentional, like, what kind of firm are we building here? Do we want to, do we want a five-person firm, a 500-person firm? Because like I said, your thoughts will determine your behaviors, right? Behaviors determine outcomes. So getting really crystal clear. What's your vision? Encourage the practitioner, the owner, the firm. Create a vision. Where are we going to be in three years, five years? You literally, that will dictate everything you do.

And so that's been super helpful for me. But I've really divested myself, Don, of like so many things. And to be upfront with you, I'm trying to divest myself of the job. So I'm just completely irrelevant, because that's a true business. When the law firm owner can go away for two months, things not only are good, but things are growing. So I encourage the owner, be less, less dependency on you is key for scaling, I find.

Can I touch on that bottleneck question, too? Please, go ahead. Kind of a personal story for me and a revelation. To Chris's point, when you start growing and what have you, expect for everything to break. For me, when I know I'm the bottleneck, when people keep coming to me or start coming to me, or I had freedom and then they're coming back to me, and I'm resenting it. And the greatest definition I've ever heard of resentment is self-abandonment.

When I start pitching in, and I'm helping out, or I know the answer, so I'm doing it, or what have you. But my role is to be the visionary. And when I start to resent that, and I'm like, why the hell are they coming to me? I'm paying them. This is their job description, like ding, ding, ding, winner, winner, chicken, dinner. When I'm starting to get frustrated about that, or they're coming to me, or things are winding back up on my desk.

It's really an indicator for me that I'm becoming the bottlenecks. I don't think it's like a one and done. In my opinion, it tends to continually rise as you hit each level of growth. The saying of more people, more problems can be true sometimes. And just to piggyback on that, I agree 100%. I read a book, I forget the name of the title, but they talked about don't take the monkey. So when a team member comes to you with a problem, don't take the problem.

Molly, what do you think we should do with it? Or Don, do you have any solutions? You want to train your team to not come to you so that when you're on vacation at the beach, people aren't hitting up you on email and text. And what should we do? It's like, they know you're at the beach. They're going to handle it themselves. So that's how I operate this thing. Don't come to me. Figure out yourself. That's why we have a nice organizational chart.

We have accountability. And I used to, for years, do that. Answer Molly's question, even though I should have said to Molly, please go to your direct report, your supervisor. In that situation, that's been really helpful for me. So that really frees up the practitioner to do things that really move the needle. So you're not the bottleneck and the firm can keep growing, growing. Amazing, amazing. Thank you very much for that.

Molly, resentment being one of those signals for when you are the bottleneck. Let's work on that. Now we found out the problem. How can we solve it? So how can firm owners delegate meaningful responsibility without simply giving someone more work while continuing to retain all that decision-making authority? Such a good question. You know, the D word is a trigger word for me. I talk about that in my last book, Fix My Boss.

I think using the word delegation, and I see that all the time everywhere, and I hear that from law firm owners and leaders every day, that it can be a slippery slope because delegation is not about giving people more work. I think a lot of times when people interact with that work, they're really using it like a task manager. And delegation really means giving somebody the permission, the responsibility, the authority, the clear outcome, and the accountabilities.

And often, you know, lawyers will tell me all day long, I delegated that, and then I find out the employee has to come back to me six times, six different ways for permission. That is not delegation. That's task assignment, in my opinion. And one of the frameworks I use and teach in my law firm, Admin Boot Camp, is the levels of delegation and being incredibly clear, you know, I need you to go do this. I don't need you to come back.

I don't need you to gather more information. I don't want you to come back and make a recommendation, or I do. I want you to do this and then come back with a proposed solution, not a bunch of data and information where I'm still going to have to sift through it. And that's not true delegation, because if it's not clear, the employee, the law firm leader is still guessing. And delegation doesn't really give you freedom, right?

You're just getting something off your list for a minute, unless you're incredibly clear. Take this and 80% it for me and then come back with a proposed solution and what you recommend that we do, because I see attorneys, myself too, I'm a business owner, get frustrated because they didn't do it the way I wanted it done. And then that's a whole other conversation about taking them back and just doing it. You know, don't take the monkey in that regard.

And the biggest point here is you can't hold somebody accountable for an outcome if you never gave them the authority to produce. So if every $200 decisions requires a $500, $600 an hour attorney, then you've created a really, really expensive, frustrating, exhausting approval process. So, you know, for me, you know, I always recommend that you, the owner has to stop using the D word in that regard. Take this off my plate, but check with me before you do anything is usually the message that the employee hears.

And that's not freedom, it's dependency. And then the term team really learns very quickly that the safest thing to do is go back and ask the owner, especially in the law firm, right? Especially if you're not giving it to attorneys. Even I see this with paralegal running a law firm is, you know, there's a whole set of standards and rules around that. And if you have someone like an administrative assistant, executive assistant, I hear from them all the time.

They're so bunched up in fear of making a mistake, which is incredibly responsible because it's a law firm and there's real cause and effect to that. And, you know, sometimes it becomes a frustration for the owner because they feel like they can't delegate or they delegate, but then they get back, you know, a pile of missed expectations. The job's not done, it's back on my plate and the whole vicious cycle. So I really encourage firms to really stop delegating unless it is a one and done.

Go take this 80 percent and get it back to me, but really change your relationship and your mindset around that word and be incredibly clear that there's not a one and done. I want you to absolutely have permission, responsibility, authority, as long as the outcomes are clear, but you also have the accountability attached to that. So instead of, okay, delegate, what would you use? Because we got a lot of delegates in our conversation tonight.

Yeah, I mean, I like the word ownership, take ownership of it versus delegation. There are very different outcomes in regards to that, and it might be something that is new for you, giving them, you know, takeover billing or, you know, case management or whatever it might be. It might be a newly created bullet point in their job description, weekly time chunking in their time template. But again, the goal is you are going to own this at the end.

This is what it looks like, walks like, talks like, behaves like on a daily basis, hourly basis, weekly basis, but have you come back and give me a proposed solution. And I think that's a part that's missing from a lot of delegation. It feels like a one and done or feels like a task. When my opinion is business owners as attorneys, especially where they're so time strapped, what they want is for somebody to step up and lead and take ownership of it and come back with like a presentation.

Like you're, I always tell my team members, when you go back to the attorney and you present, like you are giving it to the board of directors and you are needing the next, you know, funding for this business. You got to show them the beginning, the middle, the end and the why of what you did, why you did it and the impact and the outcome for the attorney to feel like you have their back and their front. And also for the ultimate goal, which, you know, who writes our paychecks?

Not the boss, not the attorney, the clients. Yeah. I just want to just add to that. I like you dropped a couple of times, 80%. And I just want to touch on that. Like we're not looking for perfection in our firms, right? Done is better than perfect. I think that's really important what you highlighted, 80% a couple of times. Like many law firm owners, obviously lawyers, like kind of type A perfectionist, like business punishes perfectionists, like business rewards.

People just kind of get stuff done. Good is better than perfect, right? I have a sticky note on my computer that's always sitting there. It says micro delegate with a deadline. I learned that from a brilliant high level PA entrepreneur. Like if I'm giving you Don something, I have to be crystal clear. Like what's in my head? You have no idea. I have to like communicate to you really, you know, simply. So you really get it and can, like Molly said, own it.

I'm a big fan of giving a deadline. Like Don, I need XYZ done. Can you get to me by end of day tomorrow? If you can't Don, just let me know. You know, we and my firm like to over communicate. We talk about over communication all the time. So Don knows what's going on. Chris knows what's going on. Everyone is on the same page. But I struggle with delegation. I've scaled my firm not with despite my inability to delegate effectively.

Because I think high level delegation is like an art form. I think it's like a super sophisticated business owner skill set that is not easy. It's an art form. And your ability to master delegation will dictate your level of happiness and success in business because you can get stuff off your desk. You can really never take the monkey, right? That you'll never need to. I want to share in my firm a real small kind of sneaky hire that has had a massive impact on my entrepreneurship has been an executive assistant who's like really freaking smart and good.

That's like that I can give stuff to her and I don't have to think about it. She's going to get it done. I like to give stuff to people. I don't have to follow up. High level executive assistant, it doesn't have to be an expensive hire, it can be short money. High level, like really smart, humble, hungry, executes executive assistant. If you're not, if you don't have an assistant, they say you're the assistant, right?

So little things like that. But I think law firm owners get in trouble because they build these firms, right? Molly, they build a firm and everyone keeps coming to them for problems. I hired you, Molly, to figure it out. Why do you keep coming to me? I must not have been clear with the job that I hired you for, right? So that's a devil's in the details. That can really, really suppress an ambitious law firm owner's growth.

Hire, hire, hire, but more people are banging your door down looking for information. You got to get that off away from your door and desk as much as possible. So you're only doing a few things every day. Everyone else is doing everything else. That's been very helpful. I love that. I wrote that down on a sticky note. Now it's on my computer. Micro delegate with the deadline. I love that. And one thing you said of like, I'm not expecting perfection, but get it done to this point.

And one thing for team members listening to this, throw your attorney a bone and help them out and clarify and verify with them just to clarify what does done at this point look like for you? That'll be a super, super like recipe that you have in your back pocket where your attorney will, you know, say, oh, sometimes attorneys get accused of not trusting us. Well, they don't trust us. They're control freaks or whatever, what have you.

I'm like, ask the question behind the question, clarify, verify, show them you're present. You're deeply curious. You're invested in the outcome. And when they give you direction, your job is to really do a debrief to communicate to them that you're present and that you really, truly get it, want it, and have the capacity for it. So if you can reflect that back to them and clarify, if they say something, you know, go in 80% this real quick, Chris, I just want to clarify.

All right. I'm going to come back next Tuesday for a standup meeting or what have you at that point. What does 80% look like to Chris? I mean, I love when employees do that. Would you not say, you know what? I'm going to give you a raise just for asking that question. Absolutely. Love it. Totally. Get that clarification in and then verify. Now, Chris, I was also curious with your example of, you know, you found it a bit hard to delegate your responsibilities, but you did so.

Your EA, fantastic, he might be a great case over here. Now, why was that one so hard? Was it trust, skill, something like, you know, your identity was involved in it? Why was it so hard to delegate? With the executive assistant or delegation in general? Yeah, that's the case we got. Example I'm going with, if you have a better one. Well, how you do something is how you do everything they say. So let's look at an executive assistant.

She has total access to my email, access to, you know, eyes on financials. Like everything's open, right? Because I can't limit her access to information, expect her to win and crush it at a high level that I need her to unless she's, you know, and obviously we have controls here. It's not like, you know, I'm still the owner, right? And so we have controls in place and good technology to make that all clean. But like, you have to let go.

Like if someone takes one thing away from this, like let go to grow, they say, right? They say, let go of the vine, like stop being a control freak, like let go, be really intentional about what you're doing here, what you're building here. You know, my why is my family. Like what's good for me and my family? You know, we want to take vacations and have a good life and not have me need to work crazy hours. Okay, you get an executive assistant, you hire a fractional COO, right?

Like these are hires that are tactical and very driven towards getting us that outcome for me and my family, but also for my team members, like what's important for them, right? So that's not accidental. My core values are behind me on my wall here. I want my team members to always see that, the clients to see that. Our core value is really important. And so when someone comes to me with an issue, not only is like, well, how would you suggest we do it?

I try to tie it to a core value that can really accelerate accountability, ownership, like Molly said, I like the ownership word a lot. Because like the more owners you can replicate in your firm, the more you're going to grow. Assuming that's what you do want to do is grow, right? Replicating owners. So you're not the only owner. Everyone else is invested, feels like an owner, acts like an owner, talks like an owner.

That's how you can really grow and separate yourself. Because I don't want to do a lot of stuff each day. I want to do what I love. I'm learning everything. I've done a disservice to my team member who I hired because they should be somewhere else where they're thriving and not like suppressed and not trusted. Like that's not cool to me. So hire good people, trust them, create scoreboards, accountability, get out of your own way, get out of your perfectionist mindset, let it go 80%, right, Molly?

And let it rip. And good things happen, but it's never perfect. It's going to break, that's okay. And I love your core value in italic right there, which I think really sums up a lot of what we're talking. We're proactive, right? And Chris is never going to let go. He's never going to trust or what have you if he doesn't have an executive assistant that does show proactive. So he's present, his wife, his family. You know, he's using the beach or maybe he's at the soccer game and he's fully present.

He's not have smoke coming out his ears on his phone, just fired up because someone asked something up. But the example too, like it's not just about the vacation because some people might be listening and be like, what the hell is a vacation? But that's not my core need right now. But let's talk about trial prep, right? So, you know, you don't give an executive assistant full access to your American express card and authority to pay for expert witnesses to pay for whatever or what have you.

And they have to come in and drag you out when you are just like at the brink of a mastermind move and it takes you off your game. Another example of truly being able to delegate in such a concentrated effort. I love your core values, Chris. And the core that we're proactive stands out there. And I would bet my bottom dollar that the second that he gives access and authority to the executive assistant, but he walks out of a trial or walks out of a client meeting, right?

Because money is energy. You're responsible for the energy. You bring in the room and you leave in the room. And if you don't have executive team who are proactive and problem solvers and solution or what have you, and they hammer him with something that is not devastational, they need to know before he walks into the courtroom or a conference room for a client. They're going to smell it. They're going to feel it. And that occurs.

Well, just real quick. I love that soccer field metaphor. That's literally how I design things. I want to watch my daughter play soccer at four o'clock knowing there's 20 people in the firm. Someone.