Making a good case

Hiring has become a regular practice at Buckingham Doolittle & Burroughs LLP, where the number of employees has increased nearly 20 percent in the last three years to 400 attorneys and support staff.

Nick George, president, CEO and chairman, says, there’s more to all that hiring than simply scheduling interviews.

“Other than the fact that they’ve got to be a good lawyer, we really look at their integrity and personality. If somebody is not a nice person — they’re hard to work with, they’re high-maintenance — we really don’t want to hire them,” he says. “We spend so much time in our work life with each other that you’ve got to get along, and everybody’s got to be pretty easygoing. There’s enough stress in the law business, so we try to keep away from adding more to it.”

Smart Business spoke with George about how he finds and hires good employees and helps them grow professionally.

How do you attract quality employees?
No. 1, your business has to be in the condition that people would like to work there. I don’t know the exact statistics, but the average tenure of any employee at BDB is probably close to 10 years. We try to find people who are of high integrity and are active in their community.

That’s one of the things that we really stress — you have to be involved in the community. You have to be on some kind of nonprofit board because we’ve found that the type of work we do is very closely related to the community we live in. It takes time to generate clients and work, and it’s a matter of building relationships.

A wonderful way to build relationships is to get involved in different civic projects, meet people that you would have otherwise never met. They’re going to see the kind of person that you are. They’re going to see the kinds of decisions that you make — how you conduct yourself — and they’re going to remember that. And when they need a lawyer, they’re going to think, ‘That (person) was super — great mind, easy to get along with and not argumentative.’ So it plays a big part.

Our founder was Lisle Buckingham. If you look at all the Akron civic organizations, somewhere Lisle Buckingham’s name is in there. He either started it or was very active in it, and it’s been what we’ve done since our inception. It’s proven very well for us.

How do ethical standards come into play when hiring employees?
We do a background check and check references. That’s the best way you can do it. You have to talk to other lawyers. Talk to where (candidates) worked before. We do this not just for our lawyers but for our support staff.

A lot of our support staff we find from referrals from other support staff people. If they refer somebody and we hire them, we give them a $500 check … because we’ve found that our best support staff has come from referrals from other support staff members.

How do you keep attorneys from leaving the firm?
Retention is one of the biggest issues facing law firms today. Lawyers will work in law firms … and get paid a lot of money but all they do is work 12 to 16 hours a day, six or seven days a week.

When they get burned out, they decide, ‘This isn’t for me,’ and they start looking for a better quality of life.

We try to establish a relationship with senior lawyers and younger lawyers when they first come in the door. After they’ve been here awhile, we let the associate choose who they would like to be their mentor.

Every associate has a supervising attorney in their practice area. Sometimes, a lawyer has a personal problem. He may not want to talk to the person who is his supervising attorney.

He may want to talk to someone who completely has nothing to do with his work but is more like an older friend, and that’s what the mentoring program is for. We had our mentors trained, and we instituted the program two years ago. It’s been very successful.

That’s critical, because you invest a tremendous amount of money, and if somebody’s here a year or two, and they’re gone, you’ve lost money. It is an investment. I’ve heard numbers from anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000 a year investment on an associate. That’s why after a couple of years, you hate to lose them.

Then you have the whole problem of bringing somebody else in, training them and going through the whole process. The mentoring program is very important. That’s the No. 1 thing to keep associates. You have to mentor them, and you also need to provide professional training so they know they’re growing and get them to handle the kind of cases so they can continue to grow.

Money’s important. You’ve got to pay the market, and it gets a little gray. Cleveland lawyers are going to be paid higher than Akron lawyers, simply because of the cost of living. Canton lawyers would make less than in Akron, and so forth. You’ve got to keep your compensation at the market level.

How do you provide opportunities for professional growth?
From the attorney level, we do in-house training of our associates. We have a firmwide associate meeting every other month. We’ll have senior lawyers in the firm put on a program, such as how to deal with clients who are hard to deal with, how to deal with billing issues, a lot of the practical things that they don’t teach you in law school.

Under Ohio law, lawyers are required to have so many hours of continuing legal education every 24 months, so we give them money to go to seminars.

Our support staff is required to have so much training each year, especially computer training. We offer a lot of classes throughout the year, and they have to attend enough to get the credit hours they (need) for their internal training.

We also encourage and support any lawyers who want to get in their respective bar associations or other legal-related associations.

HOW TO REACH: Buckingham Doolittle & Burroughs LLP, (800) 686-2825 or www.bdblaw.com