Course · Interpersonal Skills
Hiring and Keeping People
Decide when to hire, choose well, start people properly, help them to grow, keep them and part with respect when you must.
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A law firm or legal department is mostly people, and its quality, its profit and its peace depend on how it hires, develops and keeps them. Yet most lawyers who become managers receive no training in it. This is the second course of the Legal Management series. It covers the full life of a working relationship: deciding whether to hire and what it really costs, defining the role and recruiting fairly, selecting with structured interviews, work samples and a scorecard, making a clear offer and onboarding the person well, managing performance with goals, feedback and delegation, keeping people by understanding why they leave and what makes them stay, and ending employment, by resignation, dismissal or redundancy, fairly and with care for clients. It comes with a Hiring Scorecard and a Retention Check, and ends with a capstone people plan for an invented firm. Employment law differs by country, so the course teaches principles and the questions to ask.
The Curriculum
Why people decisions matter: the true cost of hiring, the roles in a legal team and when to hire→
The true cost of a hire, the roles in a legal team, planning from workload and budget, employee or contractor or outsourcing, and the legal framework. Practice: What Does a Hire Cost? and Hire, Contract or Outsource?
Defining the job and finding people: the role, the advertisement, the sources and fairness→
Job analysis, must-have and nice-to-have, an honest advertisement, where to find people, a wider and fairer field and a record of the process. Practice: Improve the Advertisement and Fair or Unfair?
Selecting well: structured interviews, work samples, references and a scorecard→
Structured interviews, work samples, references, the common biases, deciding with a scorecard and making the offer. Practice: Better Question or Worse? and the Hiring Scorecard.
Offers, onboarding and the first ninety days: starting people well→
Offer and contract, pay by a rule, preparing for day one, a ninety-day plan, supervision duties and probation done properly. Practice: Plan the First Day and Spot the Onboarding Gap.
Developing and managing performance: goals, feedback, training, careers and underperformance→
Goals, one-to-ones, feedback, training, career paths, fair promotion, delegation and dealing with underperformance. Practice: Feedback That Works and Handle the Conversation.
Keeping good people: why they leave, what makes them stay and how to ask→
Why people leave, the drivers of staying, stay conversations, the strains of legal work, culture and wellbeing, and the Retention Check. Practice: Reasons Managers Assume and the Retention Check.
When employment ends: resignation, dismissal, redundancy and leaving well→
Resignation and handover, the principles of fair dismissal, redundancy, documents and records, client files, references and what you learn from each departure. Practice: Fair Process? and Handle the Resignation.
Capstone: Capstone: a people plan for a small firm→
Define the role, score the candidates, plan onboarding, assess retention for three people, prepare a performance conversation and write a one-page people plan.
What It Covers
“You will learn to hire with evidence, to start people well, to notice and ask before they leave, and to deal fairly with the hard cases.”
- Seven modules and a capstone that follow the whole working relationship: planning, recruiting, selecting, onboarding, developing, retaining and parting.
- Evidence-based and fair: structured interviews, work samples, scorecards, bias awareness and attention to the law on discrimination.
- Two working tools: a Hiring Scorecard that ranks candidates and flags must-have failures and close calls, and a Retention Check that turns your view of someone’s working life into the conversations to have.
- Written for legal practice: supervision duties, client files and confidentiality, regulators and the strains of legal work.
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Or give this as a giftOther Scrolls in This Chamber
Across the Table$15 →Interests, walk-away numbers, offers, trades, pressure tactics and professional limits, with practice rooms and calculators.
Cooling the Room$15 →How conflict escalates, mapping a dispute, de-escalation, hard conversations, choosing a process, mediation, power, culture and ethics, with practice mediations.
The Client Conversation$15 →Trust, the first meeting, fees and scope, updates in plain words, advice and decisions, bad news, boundaries and ethics, with practice meetings.Module 1 is free to try. Sign in, pass each module quiz and the course average, and your Certificate of Completion is emailed to you automatically. This course teaches method and technique with invented people and figures; it is general education, not legal advice, and professional rules differ from country to country.
Common questions
- Does it cover employment law in my country?
- No. Employment, discrimination, pay, dismissal and redundancy law differ widely and change. The course teaches the principles and the questions to ask, and urges advice before any step that ends or changes employment.
- Is it only for managing partners?
- No. It suits partners, heads of legal teams, senior lawyers who supervise others and anyone about to manage people for the first time, including in-house.
- Can the tools decide who to hire or who is at risk of leaving?
- No. They are aids to judgement. The scorecard supports a fair, evidence-based process, and the Retention Check is a prompt for a conversation, never a basis for a decision about a person.
- How does it relate to other courses?
- It follows Starting a Law Firm, draws on The Client Conversation and the interpersonal skills courses, and uses the break-even logic of the firm-finance tool and the process methods of the Legal Engineer Program.
- Is it legal or HR advice?
- No. It is general education using invented people and organisations. Take advice from an employment lawyer or a qualified HR adviser for any real decision.
- How do I get the Certificate of Completion?
- Sign in, pass each module quiz and keep a course average of at least 75. The certificate is then issued and emailed to you automatically.
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