Is an Office Manager In Your Firm's Future?

By Terri Olson

One question I hear frequently is "Should I hire an office manager?" Often this is phrased as "Is my firm big enough to need an office manager?" Before answering that question, let's look at what an office manager can or should do.

While the position varies from firm to firm, generally the office manager will supervise the billing and accounting functions (and in smaller offices, perform them personally); run any needed reports; coordinate the hiring, evaluation and termination of employees; track ,and sometimes advise on, employee benefits; track sick and vacation leave; receive proposals from vendors for new computers and general office equipment; coordinate and order supplies; coordinate and request repairs; manage custodial services; supervise and discipline employees; coordinate work delegation and the work load; and act to resolve employee conflicts and complaints.

Please note that the terms "office manager" and "administrator" are not really interchangeable. Usually "legal administrator" designates a person with considerably more authority than the typical office manager. The law firm administrator will keep up with hours billed and general productivity of the attorneys, may have sole responsibility for hiring and firing staff, may sit in on partners' meetings, and may even be an attorney. This article is directed at those smaller firms that have not, to date, had anybody besides the attorneys responsible for day to day operations, and are considering a change.

There is no magic size at which a firm automatically needs a manager; there are sole practitioners who can keep a manager busy full-time and offices of eight or nine attorneys that would be hard pressed to find tasks for that person to do. If there is a number I would point to, it relates to the number of staff rather than the number of attorneys. One of the chief duties of an office manager is to supervise non-lawyer staff, and if you have more than three or four support staff on board, you're probably already finding it difficult to provide work, assign priorities, resolve conflicts, track benefits and manage vacation schedules for all of them.

If you already keep careful track of time in your office, and you know what portion of the working day is spent on the above, you're way ahead of the game here. You have the necessary data to see how many billable hours are being lost to administrative work, and from that it's fairly easy to see whether an office manager is a cost-effective proposition. If you do not have this information, I suggest that you attempt to track it, rather than relying on "gut instinct" in deciding whether to hire someone to handle these tasks. After compiling a few months worth of information, you will be in a much better position to see whether you can really afford to hire a new person.

Also think about whether, practically speaking, it will be possible to delegate certain tasks to another employee. This doesn't mean that the administrative work in your firm needs to be done by a lawyer, but it's harder than one would imagine to give up a job that through personal inclination or habit, one has always performed. A good example is the attorney who spends half his or her time disemboweling computers, or the one who enjoys running and reviewing the accounting reports. It's one thing to say "From now on, these duties are to be performed (or supervised) by the office manager," it's another thing to be prepared to enforce that decision.

I don't mean to sound cynical, but the attitude of the typical law firm toward an office manager can often be summed up as, "Please come in and do whatever is necessary to shape us up and make us more productive—as long as we don't have to change anything we're used to doing in the process." Do not hire an office manager unless the attorneys in your office have all committed to a willingness to change in order to make the new system work, and unless the manager has been granted a fairly generous level of authority and autonomy to get things going.

I say this because, unfortunately, the office manager position in a law firm can be a problematic one. The transition from having no manager to having your first manager is especially difficult. Lawyers complain to me that "The office manager isn't really saving us that much time;" the employee complains to me that "The lawyers never let me do anything." Turnover (both voluntary and involuntary) in these positions is high, as is job dissatisfaction. In order for the person you hire to be valuable to you, he or she needs to be qualified, flexible and, above all, given the authority to act. At a minimum, a good office manager should be able to authorize the purchase of minor office items, place advertisements for and do initial interviews for support staff, track employees' compliance in the areas of tardiness and absenteeism and discipline them for infractions, delegate work and shift work loads, and write office account checks up to a specified amount; all without the prior approval of the attorneys in the firm.

That being said, having full-time administrative support in the form of an office manager can be a blessing. Next month, we'll look at how to hire a good one and how to make sure that he or she becomes a productive member of your team.

Terri Olson is the former Director of the Law Practice Management Program.

This article was originally published in the Georgia Bar Journal, June 1999, Vol. 4 No. 6