The Growth Trap Law Firms Need to Avoid

By Steve Fretzin and Scott Rahn

Why sustainable law firm growth requires knowing when to hire, when to adapt, and sometimes when to say no to more business.

Growth sounds like something every law firm should want. More clients, more revenue, more attorneys, more offices, and more opportunities usually look like signs that everything is moving in the right direction.

But what happens when a firm grows faster than its people can handle?

That was one of the most important questions that emerged during my conversation with Scott Rahn, founding partner of RMO Lawyers. Scott has spent years building a highly regarded private wealth disputes practice, but what interested me most was not simply how his firm has grown. It was how intentionally he thinks about protecting the people, culture, relationships, and reputation that allowed the firm to grow in the first place.

There is a dangerous assumption in law that if good work is available, you should take it. If another client is willing to hire you, bring them in. If there is another million dollars of potential revenue sitting on the table, find a way to capture it.

Scott challenged that thinking.

Sometimes the smartest growth decision is saying no.

Relationships May Be the Best Measure of a Successful Career

Scott began our conversation with an old Lee Iacocca quote about reaching the end of your life with five real friends and knowing you have had a great life. It was particularly meaningful to Scott because he and his law partner, Sean, are celebrating 25 years of friendship. They met as summer associates before becoming lawyers and have now spent more than a decade building RMO together.

That opened up a broader discussion about something lawyers can easily lose sight of as careers become increasingly focused on titles, revenue, rankings, and professional accomplishments.

Relationships matter.

That is obviously true in business development, where strong professional relationships create introductions, opportunities, information, collaboration, and clients. But it is equally true inside a law firm. The relationships you develop with partners, associates, staff, mentors, and colleagues have an enormous impact on whether the firm becomes somewhere people want to stay and grow.

Scott’s own career illustrates that point. His path into private wealth disputes began because someone gave him an opportunity. A mentor handed him a probate matter, told him it had its own unusual rules, and essentially said, “You’re smart, you’ll figure it out.” Scott did, and that opportunity helped shape the practice he eventually built.

That is how careers often develop. Someone gives you a chance. Someone introduces you to a client. Someone teaches you something. Someone recommends you when you are not in the room.

The lawyers who understand that tend to view relationships differently. They are not merely collecting contacts. They are building a professional community that can support them for decades.

Different Generations Don’t Need to Think the Same Way

One of the central themes of our conversation was the challenge of managing a law firm when multiple generations are working alongside one another.

Gen X lawyers, Millennials, and Gen Z attorneys did not grow up in the same environments. They were influenced by different technology, different economic conditions, different parenting styles, different cultural expectations, and very different ideas about the relationship between work and life.

It is easy for older attorneys to look at younger lawyers and conclude that they simply do not want to work as hard. It is equally easy for younger attorneys to look at senior lawyers and wonder why anyone would make work the center of their entire existence.

Neither stereotype is particularly useful.

Scott’s point was that people arrive at the firm with different experiences and priorities. Leadership requires understanding those differences rather than complaining that everyone does not think exactly like you do.

The objective should not be to turn every 27-year-old lawyer into the 27-year-old version of the managing partner. It should be to determine whether that lawyer’s values, work ethic, goals, and expectations align with what the firm needs and what the firm genuinely offers.

That conversation should begin before the person is hired.

Culture Problems Usually Start With Hiring

Scott was extremely clear about where protecting a law firm’s culture begins: hiring.

RMO has grown significantly, and like most successful businesses, the firm has learned lessons along the way. One of the biggest was understanding how disruptive the wrong person can be inside an organization.

A candidate can have an outstanding résumé, excellent credentials, impressive experience, and all the technical qualifications you need while still being completely wrong for your firm.

Scott described RMO as being protective about the people it allows “in the halls.” The firm’s values are clear, and leadership tries to remain consistent about hiring people who share those values, particularly around how they treat clients and one another.

This is something I see in business development too. Lawyers frequently become so focused on the immediate opportunity that they ignore whether the opportunity is actually right.

A firm desperately needs another associate, so it hires the person who looks great on paper even though there are warning signs about culture. A partner wants more revenue, so the firm accepts a difficult client that everyone knows will become a problem. A lawyer wants a referral relationship so badly that they overlook the fact that the other person’s values and reputation do not align with their own.

Short-term need can create long-term problems.

The more difficult the hiring market becomes, the more tempting it is to compromise. But putting the wrong person into a healthy team does not solve your staffing problem. It may create an entirely new one.

Stop Hiring Only for Credentials

When I asked Scott what he looks for in candidates, his first answer was almost comically simple: are you a good person?

It sounds obvious until you consider how many hiring processes barely address it.

Law firms tend to focus on law school, grades, experience, writing ability, practice knowledge, portable business, and technical competence. All of those things can matter, but Scott is also looking for whether someone cares about other people, their community, their reputation, learning, improvement, and doing excellent work.

For a litigation practice like his, he also wants people who like to win. But his definition of winning is broader than getting a verdict. Winning might mean reaching the right settlement. It could mean advising a client that new facts have changed the case and continuing to litigate would be a waste of money. The common thread is wanting to produce the best possible result for the client.

I would add another consideration, particularly for firms trying to develop future partners: does this person want to grow?

Are they interested in becoming more than an excellent technician? Do they want to develop relationships, learn business development, mentor others, contribute to the firm, and potentially move from associate to partner and someday equity?

There is no universally correct answer. Not everyone wants the same career. The important thing is knowing what your firm needs and asking enough good questions during the interview process to understand what the candidate actually wants.

The Most Expensive Client May Be the One You Shouldn’t Take

The conversation took an interesting turn when I raised the current challenge of finding strong associates. What happens when a firm has plenty of business available but cannot find enough of the right people to service it?

Scott’s answer was something many law firm owners will find difficult.

Say no to the work.

That does not mean casually turning away excellent clients. It means understanding your firm’s actual capacity and refusing to accept more work than your people can handle while maintaining the level of service your clients expect.

Scott compared firms that continually consume more work to overeating. Eventually, you get indigestion.

In a law firm, that indigestion looks like attorneys working unsustainable hours, paralegals becoming overwhelmed, communication slipping, deadlines becoming harder to manage, client service declining, and good employees questioning whether they want to remain there.

The additional revenue looks attractive until you calculate the true cost.

If accepting another $500,000 of work contributes to losing several excellent employees, damaging important client relationships, and weakening the firm’s reputation, was that really growth?

Scarcity Can Turn Growth Into Greed

Scott made a point during the episode that I think every managing partner should consider.

Sustainable growth requires an attitude of abundance.

If your firm has built a strong reputation, does excellent work, develops relationships, and serves clients well, you have to trust that opportunities will continue to come. That allows leadership to evaluate new work based on fit and capacity rather than reacting to every opportunity as though it might be the last one.

Scarcity creates the opposite behavior.

A firm becomes afraid to turn anything down. Leadership sees revenue sitting on the table and feels compelled to grab it. Eventually, the firm overcommits its lawyers, overpromises to clients, and begins operating beyond what its existing resources can reasonably support.

Scott described it as something that can almost become greed driven by fear.

That is where growth becomes dangerous.

I spend a lot of time teaching lawyers how to generate opportunities, build relationships, and bring in business. But good business development also involves qualification. The objective is not simply to get more work. It is to get more of the right work.

The same principle applies at the firm level. Growth should strengthen the organization, not slowly destroy what made it successful.

Burnout Creates a Vicious Cycle

Once a firm begins overcommitting, the consequences can compound quickly.

You take on too much work because you are worried about turning away revenue. Your best people work harder to keep up. They become exhausted or frustrated and eventually leave. Now you have even fewer people available to service the work you already accepted.

Then you have to recruit in a difficult hiring market while the remaining team absorbs even more responsibility.

That is a vicious cycle.

The irony is that the firm may have created the staffing problem while trying to solve a revenue problem.

This is why employee wellbeing is not merely an HR initiative. It is a business issue.

A healthy firm needs enough work to create opportunity and profitability without continually operating at a level that requires extraordinary effort just to survive. There will always be demanding periods, major matters, trials, transactions, and unexpected client emergencies. The problem occurs when the emergency becomes the normal operating model.

Your strongest people may tolerate that environment for a while. Eventually, many will decide they have other options.

Work-Life Balance Requires an Honest Conversation

We also talked about younger lawyers who want meaningful careers but do not necessarily want their careers to consume their entire lives.

Scott’s response was refreshingly practical. Start with a conversation.

Ask candidates what they want. Ask what matters to them. Understand their priorities. Be honest about what the firm expects and create enough trust that the candidate feels comfortable being equally honest.

Sometimes those expectations will not align, and the right decision is not to hire the person.

Scott also made the point that RMO is not looking for someone who wants to live at the office and bill an extraordinary number of hours. The firm believes in work-life balance, although he joked that “work” does come first in the phrase.

The point is not that work should dominate life. It is that meaningful professional success requires effort, discipline, productivity, and responsibility. At the same time, lawyers should be able to have families, relationships, interests, and lives outside the office.

The firms that navigate this successfully will probably be the ones that stop debating whether the younger generation is right or wrong and instead get much better at discussing expectations.

A Great Employee at 80% May Be Better Than Starting Over

Perhaps the strongest leadership lesson from the episode came when Scott talked about how people’s lives change.

The lawyer you hired at 28 may have completely different priorities at 35. They may get married, have children, care for an aging parent, deal with a personal challenge, or simply decide they want something different from their career.

That does not automatically mean the employment relationship has to end.

Scott suggested treating different stages of a career almost like experiments. If a strong employee has been providing 100% and their life changes in a way that means they can now provide 80%, why not have a conversation about whether that can work?

As Scott explained, 80% of a truly outstanding performer may still be considerably more valuable than replacing that person with someone who delivers much less.

This seems obvious when you look at it mathematically, yet many firms still treat employment arrangements as binary. Full time or gone. Partner track or off track. Traditional schedule or no deal.

There are obviously situations where flexibility will not work. Client needs, practice requirements, economics, and team responsibilities still matter. But the conversation itself costs very little.

Losing a proven employee without even exploring alternatives can cost quite a lot.

Retention Begins Long Before Someone Resigns

Law firms frequently begin thinking about retention when an employee walks into a partner’s office with another offer.

By then, it may be too late.

Retention begins during hiring by bringing in people whose values and expectations align with the firm. It continues through leadership, communication, professional development, reasonable workloads, opportunity, recognition, and honest conversations about what employees want from their careers.

It also requires accepting that those answers can change.

A strong associate may initially be intensely focused on becoming partner and later want more flexibility after having children. Another lawyer may begin without much interest in business development and discover several years later that they want to build a book. Someone else may eventually decide they want to start their own firm.

Good leadership cannot prevent every departure, nor should it try.

The goal is to create an environment where good people have reasons to stay and enough trust to have difficult conversations before making decisions.

Your Reputation Depends on How You Treat Your People

Scott connected culture and client service in a way that deserves more attention.

When firms overload their teams, the damage does not stop internally. Eventually, clients feel it.

Calls take longer to return. Communication becomes rushed. Details are missed. Attorneys have less time to think strategically. People become less patient. The quality of the client experience begins to decline.

That is where a people problem becomes a reputation problem.

Business development relies heavily on reputation. Lawyers build relationships, create trust, demonstrate expertise, and convince clients and referral sources that they can deliver. If the firm accepts more work than it can effectively service, all of that business development effort can be undermined by the experience that follows.

Saying no to a matter today can sometimes protect considerably more business tomorrow.

That is not anti-growth.

It is disciplined growth.

Scott’s Biggest Mistake Became One of His Best Career Moves

At the end of the episode, I asked Scott about his biggest mistake.

He pointed to leaving his first law firm for a BigLaw environment that turned out to be a terrible cultural fit. The litigation group was apparently known internally as the “snake pit,” which was not information that made its way into the recruiting process.

Scott realized quickly that he was unhappy. About a month into the job, a friend asked how things were going and Scott admitted, “I think I hate it.”

But something unexpected happened.

Scott eventually moved into the firm’s trusts and estates department, where a senior attorney mentored him, pushed him into sophisticated planning and administration work, and taught him skills that later influenced the practice Scott runs today. What initially looked like a significant career mistake ultimately became an important part of his professional development.

There is an important lesson there for both lawyers and law firms.

Not every bad fit is a wasted experience.

Sometimes the wrong environment teaches you exactly what you do not want. Sometimes it introduces you to a mentor. Sometimes it exposes you to a new practice area. Sometimes it forces you to clarify your values.

The important thing is learning from the experience rather than simply enduring it.

Build the Firm People Want to Stay In

Law firm growth should not be measured only by revenue, headcount, offices, or matters opened.

A firm can be growing financially while deteriorating culturally.

The more meaningful question is whether the organization is becoming stronger as it grows. Are you attracting the right people? Are your best employees staying? Are clients receiving excellent service? Are leaders developing the next generation? Are workloads sustainable? Is the firm’s reputation becoming stronger? Are attorneys building careers they actually want?

That does not mean lowering standards or avoiding hard work. Successful firms require people who care deeply about what they do and are willing to put in the effort required to become excellent.

But growth that continually burns through good people is not sustainable.

Scott’s approach comes back to something remarkably simple: know your values, hire people who share them, take care of your clients and your team, communicate honestly, and do not allow fear of missing the next dollar to destroy what you have already built.

There will always be another matter.

Replacing a great culture is much harder.

Key Takeaways

• Relationships with partners, colleagues, mentors, clients, and friends can become some of the most valuable assets of a legal career.
• Different generations do not have to think alike, but firms need honest conversations about values, expectations, work ethic, and career goals.
• Culture protection begins during hiring. Technical qualifications matter, but values and character can be equally important.
• A strong résumé does not compensate for someone who is fundamentally wrong for the organization.
• Firms should be willing to decline work when accepting it would compromise client service, culture, or employee wellbeing.
• Scarcity thinking can cause firms to overcommit and damage the reputation they worked years to build.
• Burning out strong employees can create a cycle of turnover, recruiting challenges, increased workloads, and further departures.
• Retention requires ongoing conversations because employees’ lives and priorities change.
• A proven high performer working at reduced capacity may be far more valuable than losing that person and starting over.
• Sustainable law firm growth means strengthening the organization while growing revenue, not sacrificing the organization to produce it.

A Quote to Remember

“How disruptive it can be to let the wrong person into the organization. So it has to start at hiring, and you have to be very clear about who your people are, who you’re looking to hire, and be very consistent.” — Scott Rahn

Frequently Asked Questions About Sustainable Law Firm Growth

How can law firms grow without burning out their lawyers?

Firms need to align new business with their actual capacity. Growth should include appropriate staffing, realistic workloads, clear priorities, strong management, and the willingness to decline work when taking it would compromise client service or employee wellbeing.

What should law firms look for when hiring attorneys?

Technical ability and experience matter, but firms should also evaluate values, character, work ethic, curiosity, commitment to learning, client orientation, communication, and whether the candidate’s career goals align with what the firm can realistically provide.

How can law firms protect their culture while growing?

Define what the firm’s values actually mean in practice and incorporate them into recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, leadership, performance management, and promotion decisions. Growth becomes dangerous when firms compromise those values simply because they urgently need another person.

Should a law firm ever turn away good business?

Yes. If the firm does not have the capacity to handle a matter at the level clients expect, accepting the work can damage employees, client relationships, and the firm’s reputation. Saying no can sometimes be the better long-term business decision.

How can law firms improve associate retention?

Retention begins with hiring the right people and continues through reasonable expectations, professional development, meaningful work, communication, flexibility when appropriate, opportunities for advancement, and regular conversations about what employees want from their careers.

How should law firms handle generational differences?

Avoid relying on stereotypes and talk directly with people about what they value. Different generations may approach work, technology, communication, advancement, and work-life balance differently, but individual expectations matter more than broad labels.

Can flexible work arrangements help law firms retain strong lawyers?

They can when the arrangement works for both the lawyer and the firm. Scott’s point is that a strong employee operating at 80% capacity may still create substantially more value than losing that person entirely. The right solution depends on the role, client needs, economics, and circumstances.

Why does employee burnout affect law firm business development?

Business development creates expectations that the firm will deliver excellent service. When lawyers and staff are overloaded, responsiveness and quality can decline. That can weaken client loyalty, referrals, reputation, and future business.

What questions should law firms ask candidates during interviews?

Beyond experience and technical qualifications, firms should explore what motivates the candidate, what they want from their career, how they define excellent client service, how they approach teamwork, whether they want to develop business, how they learn, and what type of work environment helps them perform at their best.

How should managing partners think about law firm growth?

Growth should be evaluated across multiple dimensions, including revenue, profitability, talent, client service, culture, reputation, and sustainability. More revenue is not necessarily healthy growth if the cost is losing good people or damaging client relationships.

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About Scott Rahn

Scott Rahn is the founding partner of RMO Lawyers, where he leads a premier trust, estate, and probate litigation practice focused on resolving high stakes inheritance disputes, breach of fiduciary duty claims, financial elder abuse matters, and other private wealth disputes.

Drawing on extensive trial, arbitration, and mediation experience, Scott represents heirs, beneficiaries, trustees, and executors across California and internationally, with an emphasis on resolving complicated disputes involving both sophisticated legal issues and difficult family dynamics.

Scott has been recognized as Trusts and Estates Litigator of the Year by the Century City Bar Association and has been listed in the Chambers High Net Worth Guide and Lawdragon 500. He is President Emeritus of the Beverly Hills Estate Planning Council and a frequent media commentator on wealth transfer and estate disputes.

Connect with Scott Rahn

Website: https://rmolawyers.com/team/scott-rahn/

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