Who should a solo lawyer hire first: assistant, paralegal, intake or associate?

Run the audit before you pick a title.

For the next two weeks, log your hours into four buckets: phone calls and new-client inquiries; document assembly, e-filing, calendaring and billing paperwork; drafting and research that a lawyer has to review; and work only a licensed lawyer can do.

Whichever bucket is biggest — minus the last one — names your first hire.

Each bucket maps to a role.

Phone time points to an intake specialist or reception.

Document and deadline load points to a legal assistant.

Reviewable drafting and research point to a paralegal.

Turned-away client work — matters you decline for lack of lawyer hours — is the only bucket that points to an associate, and our playbook for hiring an associate attorney covers what that seat demands.

Price in the hours you will spend supervising, because the ethics rules budget for them.

ABA Model Rule 5.3(a) — the ABA's model version; states adopt their own — requires partners and lawyers with comparable managerial authority to make reasonable efforts to ensure the firm has measures giving reasonable assurance that nonlawyers' conduct is compatible with the lawyer's professional obligations, and Rule 5.3(b) puts a separate duty on any lawyer with direct supervisory authority over a nonlawyer.

Comment [2] to the rule says supervision should account for the fact that nonlawyers lack legal training and are not subject to professional discipline — a new hire becomes productive after training and review, not on day one.

Responsibility has teeth too: under Model Rule 5.3(c), a lawyer is responsible for a nonlawyer's conduct that would violate the rules when the lawyer orders or ratifies it, or when a lawyer with direct supervisory authority over the nonlawyer's work knows of it in time to avoid or mitigate the consequences and fails to take reasonable remedial action.

Our guide to Model Rule 5.3 for nonlawyer staff walks the clauses and has a state-versions section that flags what our research did not verify.

And if you want the whole employer sequence around this decision — defining the role, screening inside the ethics rules, pay, onboarding — our guide to hiring for your law firm covers the steps in order.

The four candidates differ in what they take off your desk and how much comes back to you for review.

Legal assistant.

The administrative frame around your matters: document formatting and assembly, e-filing preparation, calendaring and deadline support, client correspondence, time entry.

Because the work is administrative, your training goes to your systems, preferences and deadlines rather than legal doctrine — and the role keeps your hours from draining into paperwork.

The legal assistant hiring guide covers the seat in full.

Paralegal.

Substantive case work performed under your supervision: drafting pleadings and discovery for attorney review, research summaries, organizing document productions.

This is the hire that turns your review time into finished work product — and the seat where the Rule 5.3 supervision plan from the first section earns its keep.

See how to hire a paralegal, and how candidates describe the work on the paralegal jobs board before you write the description.

Receptionist.

The phones: answering, screening, routing, the calendar.

If the problem is missed calls rather than a missing desk — after hours, the lunch-hour court run, the line you cannot pick up while on another call — compare an answering service vs receptionist before you commit to a desk.

Virtual help.

The same two jobs done remotely, through a vendor, a freelancer or your own remote employee.

The duties attach to the arrangement either way: Comment [2] to Rule 5.3 covers assistants whether they are employees or independent contractors.

Our guide to virtual legal assistants covers the three engagement structures and the vendor questions to ask first.

One hire can hold two hats: an assistant who also answers the phones covers both buckets at once.

Choose by the bucket, not the label — a posting that says "legal assistant" and hands the person the phones is really an intake hire, and the supervision plan should say so.

A paralegal turns a signed case into a completed file; an intake hire turns a caller into a signed case.

Those are different leaks, and the first hire goes to whichever one is costing you clients.

If prospective clients call and you hear yourself saying you will call back — or you find missed calls from numbers that never rang again — your leak is intake, whatever your business cards say.

The pattern has a name in two practice areas.

A personal injury caller with a fresh claim may be comparing firms, and a criminal defense caller may already have a court date on the calendar; in both, the call you miss is a retainer another firm may sign.

If that describes your phone log, the intake seat — not a paralegal and not a second lawyer — is the one to fill first.

The ethics rules contemplate exactly this hire.

ABA Formal Opinion 506 (June 7, 2023) says a lawyer may train and supervise a nonlawyer to conduct prospective-client intake — gathering initial facts, running an initial conflict check, obtaining the signature on the fee agreement — provided the prospective client is always offered the chance to talk to the lawyer.

Whether that nonlawyer may answer a caller's specific legal question is a separate call each time, because Model Rule 5.5 bars lawyers from assisting unauthorized practice.

For the seat itself, see how to hire a legal intake specialist.

For the personal injury version, our guide to intake staffing for personal injury firms goes deeper.

Compare the candidates on three cost lines.

First, base pay — the number on the offer letter.

Second, the employer costs that ride on top of it: your payroll taxes, any benefits you offer, and the software and space the seat uses.

Third, the supervision and review hours the role adds back to your desk.

We print no multiplier for the second line because our research found no primary-source benchmark for a fully loaded cost figure for law-firm staff.

Treat any rule of thumb that multiplies salary by a fixed percentage as a guess, and calculate the line yourself from your payroll registrations, your benefits decisions and your actual software seats.

For the line you can check, the government series is the benchmark: our paralegal salary, legal secretary salary and attorney salary pages carry the current federal wage data with the occupation code and release named.

Measure an intake hire's pay against signed retainers rather than a wage table — it is a revenue seat, not a billing seat.

How you classify and pay the seat — salary versus hourly, and overtime — is a wage-and-hour question with federal and state layers; our guide to paralegal overtime rules covers the paralegal side, and employment counsel should check your structure before the offer letter goes out.

Paying your first hire as an independent contractor instead changes the compliance picture, not just the invoice — see the last question below.

Your first employee changes what you are: an employer, with registrations and paperwork on their own clocks — some deadlines land before day one, others within days of it.

The federal baseline comes first.

Verification paperwork is universal.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requires every employer to complete and retain Form I-9 for every person hired after Nov.

6, 1986 to work in the U.S. for pay, and Section 2 — the employer review and attestation — must be completed and signed within 3 business days of the employee's first day of work for pay: start someone on a Monday and Section 2 is due by Thursday.

E-Verify is the adjacent decision.

It is an Internet-based system that checks Form I-9 information against Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration records, and federally, participation is voluntary — the statute (IIRIRA sec. 402, note to 8 U.S.C.

1324a) says DHS may not require participation except as specifically provided.

The defined exception runs the other way: federal contractors with contracts awarded on or after September 8, 2009 that include the FAR E-Verify clause (48 CFR Subpart 22.18) must use it.

Some states impose their own mandates for some employers; our research did not verify that state list, so check your state's requirement directly.

Your size decides which federal anti-discrimination laws reach you.

Title VII, the ADA and GINA cover private employers with 15 or more employees who worked at least 20 calendar weeks in the current or prior year, and the ADEA's age-discrimination coverage starts at 20 or more employees on the same workweek test.

IRCA applies sooner: employers with 4 or more employees are barred from citizenship-status discrimination and discrimination in the employment-eligibility verification process, and employers with 4–14 employees are also barred from national-origin discrimination under IRCA.

Protection extends to applicants and former employees, not only current staff.

State laws often reach smaller employers, but our research did not verify state thresholds — confirm with your state's fair-employment agency.

The state layer is where first-time employers get surprised.

Workers' compensation is not covered in our research vault, so confirm what your state requires of an employer your size with your state's workers' compensation agency before day one.

And if your first hire lives in another state and works remotely, that raises the other state's withholding and unemployment-insurance registration questions; our research did not verify the multi-state registration steps, so confirm with that state's workforce agency.

Last, write the rules down before you need them.

A first handbook can be short — hours and time entry, confidentiality, leave, who approves what, how intake calls are handled — but it should exist on day one, because policies improvised case by case are hard to apply consistently.

Pair it with the supervision plan from the first section: who reviews this person's work, what stays with you, and what they may never do unsupervised.

The setup rules above are federal baselines with state versions layered on top, and the ethics rules in this guide are the ABA's model versions. Confirm the Form I-9 and E-Verify requirements with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Title VII, ADA, GINA and ADEA coverage thresholds with the EEOC (citizenship-status and verification discrimination under IRCA is charged with the Department of Justice, whose IER — formerly OSC — handles those charges), your state's workers' compensation, registration and anti-discrimination requirements with the state agencies named, and your state's adopted ethics rules with your state bar's ethics counsel — and take your payroll and classification setup to employment counsel before your first employee starts.

Employer information, not legal advice. The thresholds described here are the federal versions documented in our sources; state requirements and your own situation may differ, so confirm with the agencies and counsel named before you act on any of it.