Plugging the brain drain: retaining talent in your law firm

Have frank and open conversations

If you wait until an exit interview to ask how someone feels about your firm, it’s too late by definition. You’ll find out then what you could and should have known, and could have fixed if you’d asked before losing a team member.

It’s not comfortable to ask or answer the questions ‘What would make you leave this firm?’ or ‘What do you dislike about working here?’ but they’re the kinds of questions that create trust and help you prevent attrition.

Support active collaboration

Assuming you’ve hired collegial team members, all you need to provide to maintain strong collaboration is practical support. Once that collaborative culture is embedded, you have the benefit of more efficient work, but also a more closely bonded team.

A support system frees time and energy for discussion, review, and consultation, by reducing the demands of administrative tasks. That strengthens collaboration, whatever the working arrangements, but it’s especially useful when teams are working at a distance, so they can have the reassurance of automatic task designation and clear workflows.

For example, Insight Legal’s case management software includes client onboarding, task lists with prompts and reminders, correspondence templates, contact management, and document storage, which eliminate a lot of administrative burdens and allow more space for collaboration.

Dedicate more time to onboarding and development

Again, a hybrid workplace seems to be a basic expectation, but it also means that face-to-face contact can be less frequent and predictable, and the onboarding process for new staff can become detached and impersonal.

The same goes for the pastoral and developmental aspects of running a firm. Mentoring young careers and monitoring team members’ wellbeing is much harder when you don’t share a physical space so often.

A nurturing style of leadership is highly effective at inspiring loyalty, but in the modern workplace it requires more strategy, planning, and time, whereas before hybrid working it could be more spontaneous and ad hoc and still succeed. It’s another case in which practice managers and partners will need to save time elsewhere to offer teams the attention they need.

Insight Legal, for example, will process and present practice management information, so that when it comes to strategic decision-making, partners don’t have to spend time building a picture of the firm’s trajectory — they simply have it in front of them. By passing that kind of bureaucratic burden on to software, partners and managers can use the saved time to dedicate more attention to people-based leadership.