How do you know when you firm has gotten large enough to hire a person to manage your firm’s network? How large does your firm have to be to justify hiring an office manager? What kinds of skills should your staff have? What does it take to be a technologically literate lawyer today? What computer skills do you expect your new associates to have? How do you compare them to other firms?

Over the years, I have met many lawyers who have different theories of how to staff their offices and what skills they require. The extremes range from the traditional staffing of one secretary for each attorney to firms that pride themselves on being "lean and mean." Many firms began as smaller firms and grew gradually. Starting with a lawyer or two, most firms had one or two secretaries and may have shared a receptionist with other law firms in their suite. As the number of lawyers increase, most traditionally staffed firms simply added more secretaries.

The advent of the personal computer in the early 1980's brought with it new theories about the appropriate ratios of staff to lawyers. Despite many surveys and consultant hours studying law firms, their sole focus seemed to be on the numbers rather than the skills. While most people advocated and recognized the need for training on these new systems. Few people had the requisite skills and most lawyers valued legal secretaries who knew more about handling the paper work associated with the work than the function keys required to change the margins.

The other dynamic in play at the time was the notion that "lawyers shouldn't use computers." Many practitioners considered it demeaning or secretarial duties to work directly on a keyboard. While this attitude has changed over the last two decades, there are still remnants of it lingering. There are still some lawyers who refuse to learn about computers and there are younger lawyers who enjoy the opportunity of delegating tasks to staff rather than performing them themselves when it would be more efficient for everyone concerned.

The best example of this latter problem is the lawyers who still refuse to use their firm's timekeeping and billing program to enter their own time records. Recording your time on paper and requiring a staff person to translate and transcribe it is counterproductive, at best. On top of the extra work of getting the time entries into the computer billing system, the resistant attorney makes more work for himself or herself by having to proofread the entries more carefully since they are at greater risk of being wrong.

In fairness to these lawyers, many of the leading law firm billing programs have made the same presumption about who will be entering time records. These companies need to address this issue and provide a more intuitive and easy to use time entry screen than they currently do.

As the economy expanded in the last few years, attracting technologically proficient employees to work in law firms instead of investment banks and Internet start-ups became more challenging. Even smaller firms were too busy to properly train their personnel when upgrading to new versions or new environments and trying to keep more demanding clients satisfied. Most firms upgraded from underused DOS versions to Windows without examining what new features were added that would improve their document production and general handling of office work.

To make matters worse,  many firms hire recent law graduates, assuming they are technologically literate. In my experience, many new lawyers are more comfortable with computers than their predecessors. However, most young lawyers are self-taught when it comes to doing word processing. While I realize it is dangerous to generalize, self-taught word processors, whether they are lawyers or secretaries, often use the wrong function or do things the wrong way and make additional work for the next person working on the document. For example, while it may look the same in the printed version, using tabs or spaces to center or indent text will result in clean up if the text is subsequently edited.

Many of the older software programs that law firms had been relying upon for critical functions such as billing and contact management were not designed to work properly once January 1, 2000 passed. As a result, in the second half of 1999 and partially into early 2000, law firms upgraded their software in record numbers. Again, with the last minute rush of these upgrades, training was often neglected or shortened.

If you are considering hiring additional lawyers for your firm, how do you determine whether they have the requisite technical skills to help your firm better service its clients and attract new ones? Consider how important computer skills are to your partners when you are hiring new attorneys. Has it been ignored? Do you know how to evaluate a lawyer's technical skills? Have you developed computer competency standards which each lawyer must master? When you are hiring new support staff, what criteria should you use to evaluate their skills? What about bringing in lateral hires or new partners? Have you never even thought about these issues before?

Before hiring new lawyers or staff, it is worthwhile to examine what your current employees are doing and how those positions can be improved. Rarely, do law firms take the time to examine how work is being performed. Over the last three years, I have spent a lot of time implementing case management systems such as Time Matters in law firms. In doing so, my first task is to examine the flow of information within the firm. We start with the initial contact of a prospective client with the firm. Do the clients generally walk in the door to your storefront office, do they call because of a yellow pages ad or do they call because they are referred by a previous client. From the initial contact, you need to examine what happens next. In some firms, they come into the office for an initial consultation with an attorney while others send a general information letter and brochure to them. By closely examining each step of a typical client engagement from initial contact through a satisfactory outcome, you will surely find places where your procedures, forms and other uses of technology can be improved.

When hiring or bringing in new people to their firms, lawyers often fail to consider or evaluate the individual's technical skills. It's illuminating to see what lawyers or their firm administrators think are important when listing job openings in New Jersey Lawyer. The ads typically include "must have strong academic background and good writing skills." I can't recall ever seeing a job opening for an attorney position that included mention of computer skills. While I can understand the importance of good writing skills and maybe good grades in law school, I continue to be amazed that lawyers looking to hire new associates don't even mention computer skills.

It's no better when they are hiring new secretaries or paralegals. For these employees, the ad might read "Knowledge of pick-your-word-processor a plus." More often, these days, the support staff ads will specify "proficiency in Word (or WordPerfect) a must." The ads for paralegals fall somewhere between those for lawyers and secretaries with copy such as "strong computer skills required" without specifying which applications they must be familiar with. This is almost like asking for someone who can speak a foreign language but not caring which one!

Maybe, I am more attuned to this issue based on my own frustration of being a young associate in a firm where the attitude was clearly expressed that "lawyers shouldn't put their hands on keyboards." On the other hand, it seems to me that too many lawyers don't consider computer literacy even worth mentioning as a requirement for a new hire. Among my clients, I have some who recognize the need for their lawyers to be computer literate. They brag about being "lean and mean" as in not requiring as many secretaries as the firm down the block to support their lawyers' work. The focus on the ratio rather than the work that needs to be performed is equally misguided. The firm may be using their people inefficiently by not having lower paid people to assist with the more mundane tasks that are part of providing service for clients.

Consider the lawyer who hangs a shingle and decides to forego the expense of having an assistant. Sounds good, doesn't it? And it is until all those annoying calls from telephone solicitors need to be answered because there is no one but you to pick up the phone and you don't want to take the chance that the call may be from a prospective client. Okay, you say, splurge for caller ID so you can ignore those types of calls but how can you tell the difference between someone who is shopping around for price versus someone who recognizes the value of your legal services? A good assistant can help you filter out the price shoppers and have you spend your time meeting with more lucrative potential clients or better yet, spending your time doing work for your paying clients.

Still not convinced to get an assistant? How about stuffing your bills into envelopes at the end of the month? Is that a good use of your time? Lawyers have no formal training in time management. One complaint I hear frequently from their staff is that their bosses will spend the day on the phone and hand editing or rush jobs to their staff at 4:00pm. Better planning and managing of deadlines would go a long way to making your life less stressful and making the job of working for you more desirable.

Bigger firms that pride themselves on low lawyer to staff ratios may be counterproductive in their thinking if the lawyers end up having to do work that would be better done by a lower level person. The decision of when a firm is large enough to justify having an office manager or network administrator is not a clear one. Again, it depends on many factors including the nature of the firm's work, the ability and functions of the existing staff and the volume of work. There are larger firms with only a few clients and small firms with large court dockets and complex schedules. The best tactic is to look at your own firm, figure out who is doing what, who could do those tasks better, how can they be done better and do you have the right people to do those tasks.

Before upgrading your computers, hiring new personnel or implementing new software, take some time to rethink the overall staffing and functioning of your office. If the lawyers are computer literate and entering their own time records, some calendar items and can prepare basic documents, the role of an assistant is different than someone working for a lawyer who doesn’t use their computer for client-related work. In computer-savvy offices with enough support staff, the firms can do more proactive work on behalf of their clients and do more outreach to attract potential clients.

Examine the basic functions that need to be performed in your office. Start with preparing simple letters and fax cover sheets. Can everyone in your office prepare a short letter to existing clients and contacts or are they reinventing the wheel each time? Does each person have their own format, templates and macros or does your firm have some uniform procedures for basic documents? Technology upgrades are a good time to re-examine your firm's procedures and use of technology. Are people in your office using the programs correctly? Does everyone know how to set up headers and footers, use tabs and indents instead of spaces, use automatic numbering so that paragraphs can be moved around when the document is edited? Short training sessions on specific topics such as these or tips and tricks e-mails around the office can help to ensure everyone in your office is preparing documents in a consistent format. You may find that your staff are spending unnecessary time cleaning up documents done by the lawyers or other secretaries simply because people were either self-trained, untrained or never told that the way they were preparing documents was wrong.

If, after all of this, you determine you need more help in your office, consider using one of the many skills assessment tools available. There are commercial products such as Prove It! which test specific knowledge of word processing, databases, spreadsheets and so on as well as many self-assessment tests that can be found on the Internet at no charge. Be sure to check for references and include questions about the applicant's technical proficiency.

In my experience, lawyers should be looking to hire people who complement their skills rather than have the same temperament and talents. Adding more skills and viewpoints to your office will allow you to better serve your clients.