Jump to section
The new law clerk starts Monday. You blocked an hour to show her around, then a client called, a motion moved up, and the hour became a hallway tour and a stack of files with a sticky note that said "have a look." Three weeks later nobody knows whether she is thriving or drowning, and she is too polite to say. That gap is not a people problem. It is a planning problem, and ninety days is plenty of time to fix it.
A good onboarding plan does two things at once. It gives the new person a path from watching to owning, and it gives both of you honest checkpoints so the question "is this going well?" has an answer instead of a shrug. Below is a plan you can adapt for a legal assistant, a law clerk, an articling student, or a junior lawyer. Adjust the pace to the role, but keep the shape.
Days One to Fifteen: Learn the Files Before Taking On Urgent Work
The temptation in week one is to put the new hire on whatever is most urgent. Resist it. In these first two weeks the job is to understand how your firm actually works, not to close a file under pressure while still confused about your naming conventions.
Give them read access and a reading list. Real closed files in their practice area teach more than any manual. Have them shadow you or a senior person on live calls and take notes they will share back. The goal is pattern recognition: how a matter opens, how it moves, where things get logged, who signs what.
- Set up every login on day one, not day four. Nothing kills momentum like waiting for access.
- Walk them through how you track deadlines and limitation periods, and where a missed date would be caught.
- Show them three closed matters end to end, including the billing, so they see the whole arc.
- Introduce the people, not just the org chart. Who to ask about trust, who to ask about the registry, who to ask about a jammed printer.
Tip. Write down the small stuff nobody thinks to explain: how you name documents, where scans land, which template is the current one. A one page "how we do things here" saves a new hire a hundred interruptions.
Days Sixteen to Forty Five: First Owned Tasks
Now they do the work, with supervision. Hand over discrete, bounded tasks with a clear definition of done and a named person to check it before anything goes out the door. Owned means they carry it from start to finish, not that they are alone. A first owned task might be preparing a routine document, managing intake for a new client, or running a file's calendar for the month.
This is the stage where delegation habits form, and where they most often go wrong. If you take the task back the moment it is imperfect, you have taught them nothing except that ownership is a trap. If you never look, you have taught them that quality does not matter. Aim for the middle: review closely, name what to fix, hand it back. Our piece on delegating to a law clerk goes deeper on drawing that line.
Keep a running list of what they have taken on. A shared matter list, or a task view in whatever system you run, beats a mental tally. If your firm keeps files, deadlines, and billing in one place, this is where a tool like A1 CMS earns its keep, because the new hire can see the whole picture instead of stitching it together from email.
Days Forty Six to Seventy Five: Widen the Lane
By the halfway point the new hire should be handling their first tasks without you hovering. Now widen the lane. Add a second practice area, a harder client, a matter with more moving parts. Introduce the parts of the job that only make sense once the basics are automatic: managing a difficult client conversation, spotting when a file needs a lawyer's eyes, juggling competing deadlines without dropping one.
This is also when your one on ones start doing real work. Not status updates, which a shared list already covers, but the actual coaching conversation. What felt hard this week? What did you avoid because you were not sure how? A well run one on one, covered in this guide, is where you catch the small confusions before they become bad habits.
The point of widening the lane is not more work. It is more judgment. You want them making the calls they will make on their own in month four, while you are still close enough to catch a wrong one.
Watch for the quiet plateau. Some hires stall here, comfortable with what they know and reluctant to reach. If you see it, name it kindly and set a stretch goal. Feedback given now, plainly and early, is a gift; our note on feedback that helps is worth a read before you have the conversation.
The Last Fifteen Days: Real Responsibility
The final stretch is a dress rehearsal for the job they will actually have. Give them a file or a workflow they own outright, where you are the backstop rather than the checker. Let them run a client meeting, prepare something that goes out under their name, or manage a matter through a full cycle while you stay one step back.
Your job in these two weeks is to be available and to resist rescuing. If they hit a wall, coach them to the answer instead of handing it over. The measure of a good ninety days is not that they never get stuck. It is that when they get stuck, they know how to get unstuck, and they know it is safe to ask.
Note. If the role involves trust accounting, court filing, or anything with a hard compliance line, "real responsibility" still runs through a second set of eyes. Autonomy on judgment does not mean skipping the controls your law society expects.
Checkpoints You Both Sign Off On
Milestones only work if you both look at the same ones. Set three formal checkpoints, at day fifteen, day forty five, and day seventy five, plus a proper review at ninety. Keep them short and honest. Each side answers the same two questions: what is going well, and what is not yet where it needs to be.
| Checkpoint | What "on track" looks like |
|---|---|
| Day 15 | Knows the tools and the workflow; can find files, deadlines, and the right person to ask. |
| Day 45 | Owns bounded tasks start to finish; review catches fewer issues each time. |
| Day 75 | Handles harder matters and clients; exercises judgment on when to escalate. |
| Day 90 | Runs their core work independently with you as backstop, not checker. |
A checkpoint you both sign off on replaces a vague feeling with a shared fact.
Write the outcomes down, however briefly, and make sure both of you agree before moving on. If a checkpoint is missed, that is not a failure of the plan; it is the plan working. You caught it at day forty five instead of at a difficult performance conversation nine months later. And if you do find yourself heading toward that harder talk, our guide on a difficult performance conversation will help you have it well.
None of this requires a formal program. It requires deciding, in advance, what "going well" means and checking against it out loud. Ninety days from now you can have a new colleague who owns their files with confidence, or a person who never quite got their footing because nobody set clear expectations early. The difference is mostly whether someone laid out the plan before day one. For more on building a team that stays, browse the rest of the people and hiring writing, or see how the first week sets the tone for everything that follows.
