In this video blog post I talk about the conversations that I have frequently had with lawyers who are thinking about starting their own law firms. These conversations happen with lawyers with a wide range of experience, from just out of law school, to leaving medium to large firms, or government employment one, two or even three decades into their legal careers.

Today I’m concluding my story about hiring my first law firm employees with the final part of this chapter… hiring my fiancée. Before I talk about why having my fiancée work for me didn’t work out, here’s how I skillfully deployed impulsive thinking disguised as genius to justify the hire.

Today I’m going to pause my story about hiring my first law firm employees to address something unexpected.

On Wednesday, I wrote something that turned out to touch more of a nerve (and was more controversial) than I had imagined or intended. In a blog post about my early experiences hiring law firm employees,

Today we’ll talk about my next hire, my first true experienced law legal assistant, and how that made my life and my practice so much more scalable, but also, as a solo practitioner made me vulnerable.

As a frazzled attorney with the burden of seemingly more weighty things (my next trial, keeping my clients out of jail, and saving their families and careers) it was easy to engage in magical but flawed thinking. I believed saying “You’re hired” would solve my problems and wouldn’t create new ones.

I had clients and revenue. My practice was growing rapidly. I had a real office (not a starter office closet) and a building with parking occupied by lawyers. The building provided a shared receptionist. She answered my phones, which were routed through a rats nest of analogue wires that somehow connected the right lines to the right rooms.

What I really needed was to start thinking like a business owner rather than a solo operator. Businesses hire employees, and I would need to do so if I wanted to sustain what I had built, let alone grow.