Looking to Hire the Best Fit for Your Law Firm? Be Willing to Pay a High Price.

The following is adapted from my new book, Fireproof.

When I first hired my secretary, I offered her $50,000 for what was normally a $35,000 job. Other lawyers thought I was crazy, but if you want to hire superstar employees, you need to be willing to pay the price. 

Hiring her turned out to be a slam dunk for my law firm, because whatever “extra” I paid her returned to the business tenfold in the higher productivity, better case management, and more efficient processes that she brought to the table. 

To show you the necessity of paying your employees well, I’d like to share the story of how I found and hired my secretary, and how she subsequently elevated my business. Let’s look at how being generous with your employees’ salaries can pay back dividends and set your firm on a path to long-term success. 

Money Attracts Top Talent

In the early days of my law firm, I was staggering from one case to the next, doing all my own writing and scheduling and taking calls. It was clear that I desperately needed a great assistant, but I wasn’t sure how to find the perfect fit. 

I met with my business mentor and father-in-law, Steve Radom, and asked for his advice. He suggested I start by making a list of all the qualities I wanted in a secretary. In a few minutes, we had quite a list. Someone who could do pleadings with minimal supervision. Someone who knows what interrogatories to send out. Someone who could manage my schedule. 

We were looking for a superstar, and I was secretly convinced there was no way we could find someone to fill the bill. 

“Now, if you could find someone with all these skills, would you be willing to pay them $50,000 a year?” Steve asked. 

The going rate for a legal secretary at the time was around $35,000, and I thought Steve was crazy. But he got me thinking about how someone with all the qualities and skills I wanted would free up a lot of my time and allow me to go out and find more clients and make more money. So I put an ad in the statewide law journal offering $50,000.

To my surprise, in 48 hours, I had 200 résumés from some of the most amazing people you can imagine. One of them was a woman named Laurie Sackett. She had every qualification I was looking for and a few I hadn’t thought I needed but did—she was a perfect fit for my law firm.  

Great Talent Is Worth Every Penny

I hired Laurie, and she worked for me until she retired eleven years later. She was the perfect manager and helped me grow the firm in the coming years. She was my secretary, my office manager, and the mother hen of the office. She was worth every penny I ever paid her.

When you pay your employees well, your firm benefits in several ways. Your employees are more loyal to you, meaning you suffer less disruption from turnover. They’ll also be willing to work harder to keep their job versus someone who’s only paid enough to do the bare minimum. A generous salary attracts the top talent in the field, meaning you lower your chances of hiring someone who won’t perform well. Lastly, hiring the top talent means other firms aren’t, giving your firm a competitive advantage. 

If offering a high salary means finding the right person for the job, you should think of it as an investment—one that will likely pay you back tenfold over the years as that person helps to drive your firm toward success. 

Setting Salaries

Hiring Laurie never would have happened if I hadn’t offered the $50,000 salary. She hadn’t been looking for a job, but her firm had a cap on secretary salaries. She hadn’t received a raise in five or six years, so my ad caught her attention. But you might be wondering how I landed on $50,000. Just how much should you pay your employees?

The amount you offer depends greatly on the responsibilities you are placing on any individual role. However, as a starting point, you can use third-party resources to determine the salary ranges for your market and then try to pay in the 50th to 80th percentile. 

Offering incentives and bonuses can be a great way to keep employees focused and show that you value them. However, they should never be a substitute for a good, competitive salary. Start by paying your employees well, and add from there if you’re able. 

Use Salaries to Your Advantage

There are a lot of things about hiring people that you can’t control, like whether people lie during interviews or if they slack off once they secure the job, but salaries are not among those things. 

Use that control to your advantage: find the best people and make sure you are paying them better than most. If not, you are vulnerable to losing your best people and will likely never attract excellent talent in the first place.

Invest in paying your people well, and they will return your generosity tenfold with more loyalty, better performance, and a greater personal stake in your firm’s success. 

For more advice on running a highly profitable law firm, you can find Fireproof on Amazon.

Mike Morse is the founder of Mike Morse Law Firm, the largest personal injury law firm in Michigan. Since being founded in 1995, Mike Morse Law Firm has grown to 150 employees, served 25,000 clients, and collected more than $1 billion. A household name in Michigan, Mike gets over 20,000 calls per year requesting his services. John Nachazel is the COO of Mike Morse Law Firm. A pioneer in the practice of applying business metrics to law firms, John’s precise insights and financial forecasts have been instrumental to the firm’s growth. John has an MBA from the University of Michigan and twenty years of sales and marketing experience.