What should a law firm employee handbook include?

The duty starts with the firm, not the staff member.

ABA Model Rule 5.3(a) 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 lawyers' professional obligations.

Model Rule 5.3(b) puts a separate duty on any lawyer with direct supervisory authority over a nonlawyer.

A confidentiality policy that every staff member reads and acknowledges is the kind of firm-wide measure Rule 5.3(a) describes, and the handbook is where it lives.

Comment [2] to the rule lists who counts as an assistant: secretaries, investigators, law student interns and paraprofessionals, whether employees or independent contractors.

The same comment says lawyers must instruct them on the ethics rules, especially confidentiality.

In handbook form that instruction gets concrete: what counts as client information, how it may move (email, file sharing, phones, home offices), what staff may say about matters, and who they may discuss them with.

Vendors belong in the same section.

Comment [3] extends the duty to nonlawyers outside the firm, naming investigative and paraprofessional services, document-management companies, outside printing and scanning, and Internet-based client-data storage among its examples.

Your policy should say which outside services may touch client information and who approves a new one.

The rules this section cites are the ABA's model rules; each state adopts its own version, so confirm the wording of your state's rule with your state bar's ethics counsel.

Conflicts procedures sit alongside confidentiality.

Comment [4] to Model Rule 1.10 says a nonlawyer's conflict — a paralegal's or a legal secretary's, for example — is not imputed to the firm under Rule 1.10(a), but such persons ordinarily must be screened from any personal participation in the matter.

A handbook policy gives that screening a routine: new staff disclose the matters they worked on before, and the firm records the screens.

Intake is part of the picture too.

ABA Formal Opinion 506 (June 7, 2023) says a lawyer may train and supervise a nonlawyer to run an initial conflict check for a prospective client, provided the prospective client is always offered the chance to talk to a lawyer.

One scope note keeps the policy honest: under Model Rule 5.3(c), a lawyer is responsible for a nonlawyer's conduct that would violate the Rules if done by a lawyer when the lawyer ordered or ratified it, or when a partner or supervising lawyer knew of it in time to avoid or mitigate the consequences and failed to take reasonable remedial action.

Written policies and documented training are how a firm shows its measures were in place.

What happens when someone leaves is the neighboring question — our guide to staff agreements covers non-competes and non-solicits for law firm staff, and Model Rule 5.3 walks the full supervision duty.

Timekeeping rules do double duty: they protect the bill and they protect the firm on wages.

On the billing side, ABA Formal Opinion 512 holds that a lawyer billing hourly must bill only the time actually spent, even where generative AI made the work faster.

The handbook should ask the same discipline of every timekeeper — record the time actually spent, close to when it was spent — and state how AI-assisted work is entered and who reviews the entries.

Classification is the overtime half.

For lawyers, federal rule 29 CFR 541.304 treats an employee holding a valid license to practice law who is actually engaged in practice as an exempt professional, and the salary requirements do not apply.

For paralegals and legal assistants the default runs the other way: 29 CFR 541.301(e)(7) says paralegals and legal assistants generally do not qualify as exempt learned professionals, because an advanced specialized degree is not a standard entry requirement for the field.

The same regulation carves out a paralegal who holds an advanced specialized degree in another professional field and uses it on the job — the DOL's example is an engineer hired as a paralegal on patent or product-liability matters.

Two DOL points belong in the policy's fine print.

Job titles do not determine exemption status; the specific duties and salary must meet the regulations, per DOL Fact Sheet 17D.

And the salary floor matters: 29 CFR 541.600 sets the standard salary level for the executive, administrative and professional exemptions, which DOL's salary-levels page listed, as of October 2, 2026, at $684 per week ($35,568 a year), with the highly compensated employee total at $107,432 a year.

For some eDiscovery and IT roles, the computer-employee rules allow an hourly route instead: not less than $27.63 an hour to meet the compensation test, though the role's duties must still meet the computer-employee test.

States add their own layer.

California, for example, requires overtime at 1.5 times the regular rate for non-exempt employees for hours over eight in a workday and over 40 in a workweek.

Your handbook should state which roles the firm treats as exempt and non-exempt, how overtime is approved, and how it is recorded — and employment counsel should confirm the classifications before the handbook does.

Our guide to exempt vs. non-exempt law firm staff walks the full comparison.

Generative AI is the newest reason this section exists.

ABA Formal Opinion 512 (July 29, 2024) says managerial lawyers must establish clear policies on the firm's permissible use of generative AI, and supervisory lawyers must make reasonable efforts to ensure the firm's lawyers and nonlawyers comply.

It is ABA guidance — the rules your state has adopted control — but it puts clear AI policy inside the supervision picture rather than leaving it to IT.

In a handbook, that policy is written down.

Three positions from the opinion translate directly into handbook language.

Training: supervision includes training subordinate lawyers and nonlawyers on the ethical and practical use of the relevant generative AI tools and their risks.

Client information: informed consent is required before inputting information relating to the representation into self-learning generative AI tools of the kind the opinion describes.

Vendors: the opinion applies outsourcing-vendor diligence — reference checks, vendor credentials, security policies, confidentiality agreements and the vendor's conflicts checks — to generative AI providers.

An approved-tools list, a consent step and a named owner for vendor review give each position a home.

Our guide to the AI policy covers what Opinion 512 asks of employers.

Remote work lives here too.

ABA Formal Opinion 498 (March 10, 2021) says the Model Rules permit virtual practice and that the supervision duty extends to subordinate lawyers' and nonlawyer assistants' compliance with virtual-practice policies.

A remote-work policy that says where client files may sit, which devices and networks may touch them, and who approves exceptions gives that duty something to supervise.

A short social media section rounds the technology policy out: what staff may say online about firm matters and clients, and who handles press or review questions.

Our research for this page did not cover the rules that govern employee social media use, so have employment counsel review that wording before it goes in.

The professional obligations around client money sit with the lawyers; the staff who touch the account carry out the firm's procedures under supervision.

That is the combination Rule 5.3 describes — firm-wide measures plus a supervisor's reasonable efforts — and written trust procedures in the handbook are how a firm shows what its measures are.

A state-adopted version of the trust accounting rule shows what those procedures serve.

Ohio's Rule 1.15(a) requires client funds to be kept separate from the lawyer's own money, in an account designated as a client trust account, an IOLTA account, or a similar fiduciary title.

IOLTA programs operate in all 50 states, D.C., Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands; under them, client funds too small or short-term to earn net interest for the client go into a pooled interest-bearing trust account, and the interest funds civil legal aid.

Records and reconciliation are where staff work concentrates.

Ohio requires trust-account records to be kept for seven years after the representation ends or the funds are disbursed; retention periods differ by state.

Ohio also requires lawyers to perform and keep a monthly reconciliation of the client ledgers, the general trust ledger and the bank records — the practice known as three-way reconciliation, though the term itself is not in the rule.

Those are Ohio's rules, cited here as one state's adopted version; your state's rule controls, so confirm the details with your state bar's ethics counsel.

What the handbook adds is the firm's own mechanics: who is authorized to deposit and disburse, who reconciles and on what schedule, how a discrepancy is reported and to whom, and what happens to account access when a staff member leaves.

The handbook assigns tasks — it does not transfer the obligation, which stays with the lawyers.

Which employment rules reach the handbook depends on size and place.

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; the ADEA's age-discrimination coverage starts at 20 or more employees, with the same calendar-weeks test.

Those thresholds are the EEOC's coverage rules, and the anti-discrimination and anti-harassment policy is where a firm states how it complies.

Two coverage details are worth getting right: protection extends to job applicants and former employees, not only current staff, and independent contractors are not covered by the federal anti-discrimination laws the EEOC enforces — though deciding who is a contractor is complicated.

Recordkeeping has its own floor: private employers must keep personnel and hiring records, including applications from people not hired, for one year from creation or the personnel action, whichever is later.

If the firm runs background checks through a screening company, the handbook's hiring section should mirror the federal sequence: a stand-alone written disclosure before the report is ordered, the person's written permission, and — before an adverse decision — a copy of the report and A Summary of Your Rights Under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Reports are disposed of securely.

On the applications side, medical questions wait until after a conditional job offer, and the FTC/EEOC guidance warns that criminal-record exclusions which significantly disadvantage a protected group and do not predict job performance can be unlawful disparate impact.

State and local rules add requirements past this federal floor, and that is where the honest limit sits.

Our research did not catalog state and city requirements — fair-chance laws, credit-check limits, paid leave, notice posting — and state law may reach smaller employers than these federal thresholds.

Your state labor agency and state fair-employment agency can tell you which written policies and notices your state requires, and employment counsel should review the handbook against them.

An employee handbook is one piece of the employer stack; our guide to hiring for your law firm covers the rest.

Employer information, not legal advice. This page describes ABA model rules, one state's adopted rule and federal employment rules as our sources state them; your state's versions control. Confirm your firm's policies with your state bar's ethics counsel, your state labor agency or employment counsel.