Time Management Hacks for Law Firm Owners: Explode Your Productivity and Kill Stress (Ep. 132)
Are you running your law firm like a one-person show and finding yourself constantly overwhelmed? You’re not alone. Many law firm owners fall into the trap of being everything to everyone—handling client work, admin tasks, marketing, and more. But the real secret to scaling your firm and creating lasting wealth isn’t working harder—it’s building a team strong enough to run your business without you.
On this episode you’ll discover a clear, actionable roadmap to building a high-performing team that frees up your time, accelerates your growth, and protects your financial future.
Step 1: Create Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) That Actually Get Used
Before bringing on new team members, you need clear playbooks. SOPs sound dull, but they’re transformational. Why?
Eliminate guesswork. When tasks are documented, team members know exactly how to get things done—no more reinventing the wheel.
Simple onboarding. New hires get up to speed quickly.
Consistency. Every client receives the same high-standard experience, strengthening your brand and encouraging referrals.
Tip: Don’t worry about hundred-page manuals. Use screen recording tools to document yourself doing tasks, summarize steps in a Google Doc, and keep checklists updated. Make your SOPs living documents—easy to access, easier to update.
Step 2: Hire Strategically for Growth, Not Just to Fill Gaps
Hiring should be about buying back your time and elevating your firm—not plugging holes. Start with strategic hires, such as an executive assistant who frees up your plate. Avoid “haphazard hiring” (bringing in someone just because you’re busy). Instead, map out your dream team for the next 2-3 years and hire roles that move you closer to that vision.
Where to find A-players:
Ask your team for referrals, look for talent in high-performing firms, and consider reaching out directly to top prospects—even if they’re not actively job-hunting.
What to look for:
Prioritize attitude over skills. Skills can be taught; a proactive, solutions-oriented mindset can’t. Use personality and behavioral assessments to ensure a strong fit, not just with the job but with your overall team dynamic.
Step 3: Test Before You Hire Full-Time
Resumes and interviews don’t always tell you how someone will perform. That’s why the “Test First” approach works:
Assign a paid sample project or task before a full-time offer.
This shows you their skills, work ethic, and fit within your firm.
For instance, if you’re hiring someone for marketing, have them develop a mini-campaign and see how they approach the work.
Bonus tip: Ask candidates to submit a short video sharing why they want to join your firm—this helps weed out those who aren’t truly invested.
Step 4: Lead for Results, Not Micromanagement
Your leadership style shapes your firm’s culture. Move away from simply delegating tasks and start delegating outcomes. Give your team ownership of results—such as increasing client retention or growing your referral base. This creates an environment where team members want to step up and excel, rather than just check boxes.
Encourage Feedback:
Great teams thrive on open, timely feedback. As the leader, invite honest feedback from your team and offer constructive input yourself. This not only improves performance but also signals that you value growth—for yourself and your staff.
Step 5: Make Team-Building an Ongoing Process
Creating a high-performance team isn’t a “one and done” effort. As your firm grows, your team and culture need to evolve, too.
Document a new SOP this week.
Identify your next critical hire.
Ask for feedback—and actually listen.
Small, intentional steps drive massive change over time.
Resources:
Connect with Darren Wurz:
Transcript:
Darren Wurz [00:00:00]:
The secret to buying back your time isn't working harder. It's building a team so strong your firm can run without you. Welcome to the Lawyer Millionaire podcast, helping law firm owners grow their businesses and their wealth. I'm your host, Darren Wurz. Too many law firm owners get stuck in the weeds trying to do everything themselves. The result? Burnout, missed opportunities, and stalled growth. But with the right team in place, you can transform your firm into a business that scales without you carrying all the weight. Before we dive in, a quick reminder.
Darren Wurz [00:00:36]:
Our Lawyer Millionaire Book Club is in full swing, my friend. We're reading Buy Back youk Time by Dan Martel and hosting a live zoom discussion with law firm owners just like you on Friday, September 19th. Don't miss your chance to grow your business and your network. Visit community.lawyermillionaire.com to join us. All right, well, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm excited that you're here. And we're going to be talking about the fourth. This is the fourth episode in our series on the book Buy Back your Time.
Darren Wurz [00:01:09]:
Today we're talking about hiring and building a high performance team. So just a quick recap. In episode one, we introduced the idea of buying back your time. We talked about the time audit and how you kind of figure out what your time is worth. In episode two, we introduced the replacement ladder and talked about why your executive assistant is your number one hire. And we gave you some tips on that. So go back and check out that episode. And then last episode, we talked about some time hacks to really supercharge your productivity.
Darren Wurz [00:01:42]:
Things like time blocking and all kinds of other really cool things from Dan Martell's book that you can put into practice. Really practical advice for you. Okay, well, this is the culmination. You know, you can delegate all you want, but if you don't have a team in place to put that delegation into action, you're not going to get anywhere. Right? So in this final episode, we're going to go beyond delegation to show you Dan Martel's blueprint for scaling through a team so you can focus on where you belong, that visionary role, not in the admin tasks, not buried in client work, but being the visionary for your firm. Now, this is the most important maybe part of this series because we want to help you evolve from that solopreneur to that team builder. And this is how you know you can't grow beyond your personal capacity without a team. Delegation is going to buy you time, but it's the team that's going to multiply output and impact.
Darren Wurz [00:02:42]:
And so many people struggle when it comes to the team.
Darren Wurz [00:02:45]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:02:46]:
It sounds great in theory, but delegation is hard. And, you know, I see so many law firm owners struggling to hand things off. So we're going to talk about the fundamentals of building that high performance team that gets you out of the weeds. The right team with the right culture, my friend, will make all the difference. This episode is going to transform your business. If you take what I tell you today and you put it into practice in your business, you. You will grow your business. I guarantee it.
Darren Wurz [00:03:18]:
You're going to double your revenue, triple your revenue. You're going to 10x your revenue by following these steps. These five steps are going to be your roadmap to creating a scalable culture and system that grows with or without you. Okay, so enough jabberwocking about it. Let's get into it. Step one. Step one in building your high performance team is creating your SOPs, your standard operating procedures, or as Dan calls them, your playbooks. Now, I know SOPs are not sexy, okay? You may hear the word, hear the term SOPs, or standard operating procedures, and cringe and think, oh, I got to sit down and write these things.
Darren Wurz [00:03:58]:
Oh, my gosh, it may be the last thing that you want to do. And trust me, I get it, because I have felt the exact same way. I've been in your shoes and thought, who has time for SOPs? I've got client work to do. I need to be working on sales and marketing. But here's the reality. If you don't do this step first, you're going to get nowhere with your hiring, and you're going to get nowhere with your team.
Darren Wurz [00:04:22]:
Okay?
Darren Wurz [00:04:23]:
Your SOPs or playbooks are livable or living accessible guides that are going to codify how things are done. Without your SOPs, your team is going to be guessing at how you want things done, and there's going to be no consistency among team members. As you grow your team, each person is going to be reinventing the wheel every time. So you've got to create your playbooks. Three big things that playbooks are going to do for you, and there's many, but three big ones, it's going to eliminate what we call tribal knowledge. Okay, what is tribal knowledge? Tribal knowledge is that knowledge just lives in your head.
Darren Wurz [00:05:00]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:05:01]:
No one knows it. It isn't documented. It's prehistoric.
Darren Wurz [00:05:05]:
Right.
Darren Wurz [00:05:05]:
Prehistory. What does that term mean? It means before things were written.
Darren Wurz [00:05:09]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:05:10]:
That's where we get all these myths and Legends, right? Because they were stories that people passed down from generation to generation, word of mouth, and they weren't written down.
Darren Wurz [00:05:21]:
Right.
Darren Wurz [00:05:21]:
When mankind started to write things down, boy, that changed the course of history.
Darren Wurz [00:05:28]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:05:28]:
So we've got to start writing things down. The second thing is going to accelerate onboarding. When you bring on a new team member, they're not going to be guessing at what they need to be doing. They're going to have a written playbook on what they need to do. And as I mentioned, it's going to ensure consistency across people and tasks. You know why that's important? It's important for your brand, it's important for your employees, but it's really, really, really critical for your customers. If your customers know that they're always going to get the same experience when they come and work with you, they're more likely to refer business to you. Ah, we all want those referrals, don't we? Okay, so here's what you're going to do.
Darren Wurz [00:06:04]:
Dan makes it really, really simple and he's got a great framework for building these SOPs. And you're going to record yourself doing a task, okay? You're going to get a program like Loom or some other screen recorder. And we all live on our computers these days, so, you know, easy to do, right? You're going to screen record yourself doing a task, okay. Maybe it is updating a contact in your CRM. Okay, let's just use that as an example. You're going to record yourself doing the task, okay? The reason that's really important is because your screen, your recording is going to catch you doing it and catch all the little tiny details that you may forget. And in the video you're going to talk, you're going to talk through the process and why you're doing things. The video is going to be the main part of the sop, okay.
Darren Wurz [00:06:57]:
And that makes it really, really easy to update because the next time it needs to be updated. All someone needs to do, the next person who's in charge of this task, all they need to do is re record. Now, there's a few other steps, right? Dan has names for these, but the first is the camcorder and the second is the course where you're going to have a list of the big steps in the process. Now, the reason I love this framework is that instead of you needing to sit down and create a five page procedure for how someone updates a CRM record, right? Instead you're simply going to have a list of steps, maybe five to 10 steps, real big, high level steps to go through to accomplish the task. The video is going to capture the details so you don't need to script out all the details in nitty gritty detail. That makes it far more easier for people to understand and it makes it far more people, more likely for people to actually read it and follow it. And it makes it far more easier, far easier to update it in the future. Okay, so you have your course, you have a cadence of how frequently this task should be done.
Darren Wurz [00:08:15]:
And the last part of that playbook is going to be a checklist. Here's how you know this was done. And what's the definition of done?
Darren Wurz [00:08:24]:
Right.
Darren Wurz [00:08:24]:
Here's how you know this was done. Here's the things to check to to make sure it was done properly. So really, really simple process. You're going to put all this in a Google Doc and you're going to store it in a folder and your SOPs are going to be living documents that can be easily updated. Now how easy does that sound?
Darren Wurz [00:08:45]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:08:45]:
It's so much simpler than creating a 200 page employee policies and procedures manual that no one is ever going to read. Let's be real. Okay, all right, that's step one, your SOPs. Step two, understand who you're looking to hire and where to look, my friend, you want a players and you want to know how to get them. Okay, now let me caution you, you're not. You want to hire strategically. You don't want to hire someone just because, oh, we need someone to do this task. You want to hire someone who's going to elevate your business, not someone who's just going to come in and perform tasks for you.
Darren Wurz [00:09:31]:
Okay, now remember, in our replacement ladder that first hire should be your executive assistant. And you're looking for someone who's going to help you buy back your time, not just add more work to your plate. Always look for roles that will help elevate you to a higher level of leadership in your firm range rather than simply fill in gaps in capacity. Oh, we need more help in this area or in that area. We could use somebody to help us update our social media. That's called haphazard hiring. No haphazard hiring allowed. Hire strategically.
Darren Wurz [00:10:04]:
Hire a marketing manager, right, who is going to be in charge of your marketing efforts and is going to have very specific targets that they need to meet and outcomes that they need to achieve, not simply perform a list of tasks. You need talent and there is talent out there. I'm telling you right there's talent out there that wants to work for you. You've done the hard part. You've created the brand, you've created the following. You've established the business, right? You've built the machine. Now you need the talent, not just task doers. Okay, next in who to hire and what to look for.
Darren Wurz [00:10:44]:
Define your future structure. Define your future structure. Before hiring, map out where you want the team to be two to three years from now. Two to three years from now, what are the roles that you're going to need?
Darren Wurz [00:10:57]:
Right.
Darren Wurz [00:10:58]:
Again, no haphazard hiring.
Darren Wurz [00:11:00]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:11:01]:
Think strategically long term about what the team looks like. This dream structure is going to give you clarity on the roles that you actually need today to move forward to get to that future. And remember to use Dan's replacement ladder logic and the sequence of hires. Start with the role that frees you the most admin and then move into operations and then into marketing and then into sales and then into leadership. Now where are you going to find these people? Well, you've got to get creative. And you know what, you should always, always be hiring. You know, I find it funny when people on LinkedIn put, you know, now hiring on their profile picture. If you're a business, you're always hiring because you're always looking for talent and you may need to get a little bit creative about where you find that talent.
Darren Wurz [00:11:55]:
You may need to ask your team members if they know people, if maybe they worked with somebody at another business who was a really top a player that they really enjoyed working with and might be a great fit for your, for your business and your culture. Or your next a player might already be excelling at another high performing company. Likely they are. Likely they're not just sitting around looking for jobs. It's likely they've already been found and poached.
Darren Wurz [00:12:20]:
Right.
Darren Wurz [00:12:21]:
You need to seek them out, you need to recruit them.
Darren Wurz [00:12:24]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:12:24]:
Not just general job posts. And you put a general job post out there, you're going to get hundreds and hundreds of applicants and it's going to be very difficult to sort through. Not that you shouldn't be doing that, but you should be looking at the high performance companies and looking at the people there that are excelling. Those are your A players. You need to recruit them. Okay, now how do you know who's the right fit for your team? I recommend prioritizing attitude over skills. Attitude over skills, my friend, you can teach someone skills, you can't teach someone attitude. That's something they learned from their parents, from their upbringing.
Darren Wurz [00:13:02]:
That's A part of their DNA. You need someone with skill, with the right attitude and you can give them the skills that they need during interviews, especially for leadership roles. Ask candidates also about their long term plan. It's not just about who's going to be a good fit for my company now, who's going to be a good fit for my company 10 years from now, right? Ask them where do they want to go in life? Where do they want to live? Where do they want to work? What are their personal interests and hobbies? What do they want their family to look like? What responsibilities do they want? What passions do they have? Aligning the role that you have to their personal vision is going to create powerful buy in. You want somebody who fits your organization long who term.
Darren Wurz [00:13:53]:
Okay?
Darren Wurz [00:13:54]:
You should also be leveraging personality and behavioral assessments tools like the Colby Index, the DISC assessment, the Predictive Index or cliftonstrengths. These are going to help reveal natural strengths and decision making styles and fit with your team.
Darren Wurz [00:14:11]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:14:12]:
You're looking for complementary fits with you and with your team. You don't want somebody that has the same strengths and weaknesses as you. You want somebody that compliments you.
Darren Wurz [00:14:21]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:14:22]:
If you're disorganized, you want somebody who's extremely organized. You want someone that's going to complement your weaknesses. That's really, really important. This is also going to help you determine where you should place people. Because it's not just about getting great people. You want to get the right people in the right seats where they will thrive.
Darren Wurz [00:14:43]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:14:44]:
Also, you can use these personality and behavioral assessments with your team. Make it a team building exercise. This helps provide a share language for collaboration and for conflict resolution. But be careful. Personality and behavioral assessments are just one helpful tool. Don't rely solely on them for determining who you're going to hire.
Darren Wurz [00:15:06]:
Okay?
Darren Wurz [00:15:07]:
But it's really, really important to make sure you have the right people. You know, steps like this can help you avoid costly mishires. Hiring the wrong person can be very costly for your business. Lastly, in who to hire, look for a player traits. Here are some a player traits that can help you filter out the duds initiative. Does someone take initiative? Are they a go getter or this? Are they going to go and get things done without me needing to prompt them and ask them? Desire for excellence. That speaks for itself. A bias for solution.
Darren Wurz [00:15:41]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:15:41]:
Are they solution oriented? Are they the kind of person who doesn't just look at problems but is always thinking how can I fix this? How can I make this better? Are they transparent and honest? And up front, do they have a sense of urgency? They want to get things done and get things done now and get things done fast. And lastly and very importantly, do they have customer empathy? Do they really truly care about your customers and your clients? Okay, so remember, define your future ideal team structure. Hire the role that buys your time. First, target talent. Talent in creative areas, maybe in other high performing teams and other high performing companies. Prioritize attitude and alignment over just skills and use those personality assessments. Look for those non negotiable a player traits. Step three.
Darren Wurz [00:16:31]:
Step three. When you find the right candidate, how do you hire them? Dan Martell suggests the test first hiring method. And I think it's brilliant.
Darren Wurz [00:16:41]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:16:41]:
So often we hire people just based on their resume and their interview. But how do you really know how someone's going to work? How do you really know their capability until you've actually worked with them? So give them an opportunity to work with you. Assign them a small paid project before you commit to bringing them on full time.
Darren Wurz [00:17:00]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:17:01]:
Give them something to do as a test assignment, as a test project and pay them for it. And use that as a determination for if they're going to be the right fit for your team. There's a lot of great benefits to this. It's going to confirm their skills, help you understand their work ethic. You're going to be able to detect any red flags early and ultimately this may help you prevent costly bad hires. For example, you might give a give a marketing hire a mini campaign to execute ahead of your full time offer and see how they do.
Darren Wurz [00:17:32]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:17:33]:
I think that's brilliant. Now you're also, as I mentioned, you're going to get probably hundreds of candidates. And how do you screen. Another suggestion from the book Buy Back youk Time is to ask them to upload a video of themselves explaining why they want this job. Most people aren't going to do it because they're lazy, but some people will. And the people who will, those are the ones you know, really want the job and really have the go getter attitude that you're looking for. Step four. Once you have the right people on your team, you want to create the right culture.
Darren Wurz [00:18:05]:
And you create the right culture through what Dan calls transformational leadership. Essentially what this means is delegating outcomes instead of tasks. Okay, so often when we bring people onto our team, we give them a list of to do's. That's the wrong approach. That might be the right approach in the beginning, but you need to shift towards an ownership mentality. Give someone an ownership of an outcome. Don't just give them a task. Don't just say task oriented.
Darren Wurz [00:18:35]:
Leadership is micromanaging. We don't want that. We don't want to micromanage. We don't want to tell people how to get things done. We want to tell people what to do and then be surprised at their results.
Darren Wurz [00:18:46]:
Right.
Darren Wurz [00:18:46]:
Don't tell someone exactly how to run your email campaign. Give them a job. We want to get a certain number of new potential client bookings through our emails.
Darren Wurz [00:18:58]:
Okay.
Darren Wurz [00:18:59]:
We want to achieve a 10% increase in our open rate in our emails. Go figure it out.
Darren Wurz [00:19:04]:
Okay?
Darren Wurz [00:19:04]:
Transactional leadership tells people what to do, but transformational leadership defines the outcome and entrusts the person with execution. People excel when you give them ownership and accountability. People get burned out when you give them tasks. It's really, really important to understand that people are motivated by having ownership over an outcome. They really are. So delegate those outcomes, not just tasks. And lastly, but very, very importantly, embrace a culture of feedback. The F word feedback.
Darren Wurz [00:19:40]:
Dan talks a lot about feedback in his book and why it's so critical. Feedback isn't optional. It's foundational to high performance teams. High performance teams embrace a culture of feedback. They're willing to give feedback, they're willing to ask for feedback. And this is how you get feedback. This is how you give feedback as well. You start by asking for it, be open to it.
Darren Wurz [00:20:02]:
I know as a, you know, as a high achieving business owner, it can be difficult to receive feedback, but believe it or not, you and I don't know everything and we are not perfect. Feedback is so, so helpful. One of my team members gave me feedback last week. They told me, you know what, you give a lot of shout outs in our, in our weekly meeting, but there's this one person that you haven't given very many shout outs to and I think they need more shout outs. You know what, I received that and I said thank you for that feedback. I accept that.
Darren Wurz [00:20:35]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:20:36]:
And go check out Dan's book. He gives you a very nice framework for how you ask for feedback and how you give feedback.
Darren Wurz [00:20:46]:
Okay?
Darren Wurz [00:20:47]:
And that can make it easy to do and avoid the hard feelings that sometimes come along with feedback.
Darren Wurz [00:20:53]:
Okay?
Darren Wurz [00:20:54]:
Best practices are make your feedback specific, timely and growth focused.
Darren Wurz [00:20:59]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:20:59]:
Don't just give vague feedback, but make it very specific and make it about the company and about the goals of the company and encourage it. You as the leader are the one that has to encourage it. And you start by inviting your team to share their feedback with You, I know it can be scary, but go do it. You're going to create a high performing culture if you embrace feedback. Okay, so let's wrap it up. Here's our five steps, right? Number one, create your sops and playbooks. Number two, who to hire and where to look.
Darren Wurz [00:21:35]:
Right.
Darren Wurz [00:21:35]:
Remember, you're looking for those A players and you got to look in creative places. Number three, use the test first hiring method. Don't just hire people off the block. Give them a specific project to do and see how they do. Number four, transformational leadership. Delegate outcomes, not just tasks. And lastly, embrace a culture of feedback. The real gain here is not just buying back your time.
Darren Wurz [00:22:00]:
This is how you grow, my friend. This is how you create a stellar class A company. And it's how you are going to create freedom and growth for yourself. Okay, so we've gone through this arc here. We talked about auditing your time, that replacement ladder, and hiring your executive assistant. We gave you some great tips on optimizing your productivity. And in today's episode, we talked about building that high performance team that's going to retain, retain, retain and attract talent and scale your business. So critical.
Darren Wurz [00:22:32]:
So my challenge to you this week, friend, stop trying to do it all yourself. Document one, sop. Identify your next hire and ask your team for feedback this week. I dare you. I dare you. Go into that weekly meeting and say, okay team, give me some feedback.
Darren Wurz [00:22:50]:
Right?
Darren Wurz [00:22:51]:
And they may not be willing to share at first because they may not be used to it, but if you let them know and understand and feel that it's a safe environment to give feedback, you're going to be happy that you did. Small steps like these are going to help you build a high performance team. And remember, building the right team doesn't just free up your time. It's how you scale your firm and create lasting wealth. And here at the Lawyer Millionaire, that's exactly what we do, right? We're all about helping you create a better, more high performing business so that you can ultimately create more wealth for yourself. Now, if you liked today's episode, I do have a free resource for you. You can grab our high performance team checklist to put all of today's lessons in action. I've taken everything from today.
Darren Wurz [00:23:39]:
I've put it into a nice checklist for you. It's linked in the show notes. So just go on down to the show notes and you'll find the link there. And don't forget to join our live book club Zoom discussion of the book. Buy back your time happening on Friday, September 19th at 3pm Eastern. You can save your seat by joining the Community. If you're not yet a member, just go to community.lawyermillionaire.com now who is the lawyer millionaire? My friend, it is you. Own it and live it.
Darren Wurz [00:24:14]:
I'm your host, Darren Wurz. Thanks so much for joining me. I'll see you next time.