Hire another lawyer or another paralegal?

Hiring decisions at small firms are usually anchored to the last hire. “We hired Sarah eighteen months ago, she worked out, let's hire another Sarah.” That sometimes works, but it also sometimes adds £80k of cost to a problem that was actually a £40k paralegal problem.

Three questions, in this order.

1. What's the actual bottleneck?

Run a week's shadow log on your busiest fee-earner. Where do their hours go? Three patterns map to three different hires:

• Hours full of low-leverage admin and form-filling. The fee-earner is doing work that doesn't need their rate. Hire a paralegal — or even a senior administrator. Adding another lawyer here just creates two people doing paralegal work.
• Hours full of fee-earner work, but on too many matters.They're doing the right work, just spread thin. Adding capacity at their level (another lawyer) works.
• Hours full of supervision and matter-routing. They're a senior person spending half their week on junior people's work. Hire a senior associate or salaried partner to absorb the supervision load — not a junior, which adds to it.

Use the workload visibility playbook to confirm — if one fee-earner sits structurally above capacity for 6+ weeks, that pattern is real. If it's intermittent, the issue is probably allocation, not staffing.

2. The honest break-even calculation

Per role, fully loaded (salary + employer NI + pension + software + workspace + benefits + supervision time):

Paralegal — typical fully-loaded annual cost

£35–55k. Targets 1,400–1,600 billable hours/year at a £100–150 billed rate. Direct contribution: ~£140–240k. Net positive from month four with average matter throughput.

Junior lawyer (1–3 PQE) — typical fully-loaded annual cost

£75–110k (more in London). Targets 1,300–1,600 billable hours/year at a £180–250 rate. Direct contribution: ~£250–400k. Net positive from month six, but eats senior supervision time for the first 9–12 months.

Senior associate (5+ PQE) — typical fully-loaded annual cost

£130–180k. Targets 1,200–1,500 billable hours/year at a £250–400 rate. Direct contribution: ~£350–600k. Reduces partner supervision time. Most reliable contributor of the three; biggest mistake firms make is hiring at this level only when they should have hired here three years earlier.

Run your firm's actual numbers through the Utilisation Calculatorto see where you're bleeding capacity, and the Matter Profitability Calculatorto see whether the matter mix can actually absorb another fee-earner's billables at your standard rates.

3. Where will the work land?

The trap firms fall into is hiring without a clear plan for what work goes to the new person. The ramp is what kills the ROI on a junior hire — six months of light utilisation while nobody's sure what's safe to delegate.

Before signing the offer:

• Name the matter types they'll handle. “All conveyancing under £500k value” or “all small commercial contract work”. Specific.
• Name the partner they'll work to.Not a list. One person who owns the new hire's ramp.
• Plan the first three matters.What lands on their desk in week one. If you can't name them, the ramp will be slower than you think.

The decision in one screen

Tight summary by primary signal:

Hire a paralegal when:

• Fee-earners spend > 25% of their time on tasks below their level.
• You have stable, predictable matter types with clear delegable steps (probate, conveyancing, NDA review, straightforward employment).
• Same-day time entry compliance is the bottleneck — paralegals tend to record time more reliably.
• You can't justify a £100k commitment yet.

Hire a junior lawyer (1–3 PQE) when:

• Capacity is genuinely full at the fee-earner level (≥6 weeks of structural over-capacity).
• You have a senior person who can supervise without losing their own billable focus.
• Your matter mix has enough mid-complexity work for them to ramp into.
• You can absorb the 6-month ramp on the bench.

Hire a senior associate / salaried partner when:

• Partners are doing supervision, BD, and admin instead of billable work — and that's the bottleneck.
• You're considering equity partnership in the next 18–24 months and want to test fit.
• You have client work that requires senior judgement which is currently being done by partners at partner rates that could be done at associate rates.
• You can afford the cost without changing fee rates — most firms underestimate this and end up squeezed.

The trap most firms fall into

Hiring a junior lawyer when the actual problem is paralegal admin. The junior gets bench time because the firm doesn't have a structured ramp — and ends up doing paralegal-level work for a year, at junior-lawyer cost. Three years later everyone wonders why the bench was empty when they could have had two paralegals for the same investment.

The honest test: if your fee-earners' time logs show them doing work below their level, that's a paralegal gap. Fix that first. Then hire the lawyer.