Our founder, Brett Trembly, joined Tyson Mutrux on the Maximum Lawyer Podcast for a conversation about what actually changes when a law firm owner stops trying to do everything personally. Not the motivational version. The operational one: which hire comes first, why so many good hires fail in the first month, and what AI is genuinely about to change in a small firm.
Why working harder stops working
Brett has told this story before, and it still lands. His daughter was in surgery. He was in the waiting room, on his phone, chasing a report that work was not getting done at his firm. Around the same period, he was on the beach with his laptop open, trying to stand up a brand-new practice area while the practice he already had was underwater.
His read on that moment is blunt. He was not pivoting from strength. He was pivoting because he could not make the thing he was already doing work.
“You can’t work your way out of the ceiling.”
Most firm owners hit that ceiling and respond by adding hours. There are no hours left to add. The only lever that moves is who else is doing the work.
Delegation is not a weakness. It’s a strategic advantage.
Should an executive assistant really be your first hire?
Yes, and Brett has not moved off that answer in five years.
The title matters less than the function. Call the role an executive assistant, an admin assistant, or a receptionist with admin duties. What matters is that someone other than you is handling email, calendar, follow-up, and the hundred small things that quietly consume a billable day. Every hour you spend on administrative work is an hour you are not spending on work only you can do.
Brett described what happens when that hire is a strong one. A good executive assistant learns the firm, then helps you vet your next hire, then trains the one after that. One of his partners has had the same virtual executive assistant for six years. She started as a personal assistant. She could nearly run the firm now.
That is the compounding return most owners miss when they evaluate a first hire purely as a line item.
The mistake that kills good hires
Here is the pattern Brett sees constantly, and admits to making himself. A firm waits too long to hire. Then it finally hires. Then it hands the new person a phone or an inbox and goes back to court, because it is busy, because that is why it hired in the first place.
Then it blames the hire.
Sometimes the placement genuinely is not right. Often the firm never gave the person a real chance. Brett’s practical fix is unglamorous, and it works: record yourself explaining things once, then point people back to the recording instead of re-explaining. Onboarding takes six to twelve weeks. By the end of that window, you should know.
That is exactly why GSU built structured onboarding into placement rather than leaving it to the firm. The Skills Foundation Program runs through a Staffer’s first quarter, with live sessions covering virtual work essentials and role-specific applied practice. After that, Staffers move into Mastermind Forums, monthly, facilitated, peer-to-peer cohorts where people in the same role share what is actually working. A legal assistant is not learning from a PDF. She is learning from a room of peers solving the same problems across roughly twenty firms.
Where AI fits, and where it doesn’t
Brett’s position is more specific than the usual take. AI will reduce headcount in some functions, and it will make the remaining people substantially more productive. Both are true at once.
His example is intake. He has seen firms with more than a dozen people answering phones badly, burning the marketing spend that generated those calls. A smaller team running a well-designed system with AI support can outperform that. But AI intake will also break, and break often, which is why he expects firms to need an intake manager watching the system rather than a large intake team feeding it.
Asked whether he would rather have an average human or a voice AI answering the phone today, Brett picked the human — for now, and with a caveat. The right answer depends on who is calling and what experience your firm is deliberately building.
Listen to the full episode
See which virtual assistant role your firm needs first or book a discovery call.
Catch us at MaxLawCon. Get Staffed Up is a premier sponsor of MaxLawCon in Atlanta this October 2026. Come find our team.
Contact Get Staffed Up, LLC for more information. Call (800) 921-4987 or email freedom@getstaffedup.com.
