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The postings closed on a Friday. By Saturday morning I had forty-one applications for one legal assistant role, and I had promised the partners a shortlist by Monday. I made coffee, sat down, and realized I had two bad options: skim fast and let my gut do the sorting, or read carefully and lose the whole weekend. Neither felt fair, and neither felt smart.
What I did instead took an afternoon, gave everyone the same honest read, and produced a shortlist I could defend out loud. Here is the pass I built, and the mistakes it saved me from.
The Pile That Almost Broke My Weekend
My first instinct was the one most of us have. Open the folder, start reading, and wait for a resume to jump out. The trouble is that the jumping is the problem. Whatever grabs me on a tired Saturday is rarely the thing that predicts a good hire. It is usually a familiar firm name, a school I recognize, a tidy layout, or a candidate who happens to write the way I write.
I also knew the volume would wear me down. By resume twenty-five I would be a harsher reader than I was at resume five, which means the people at the bottom of the alphabet were about to be judged by a more tired, less generous version of me. That is not a hiring decision. That is fatigue deciding who gets a callback.
So before I read a single application, I stopped and did the boring work first. If you want the short version of the whole philosophy, my colleague wrote a tight companion piece on screening resumes fast and fair, and it pairs well with what follows.
One Scorecard, Same Questions for Everyone
The single change that fixed the most was writing the scorecard before I opened the pile. I pulled the four things the role actually needed, wrote them down, and refused to add a fifth halfway through because someone dazzled me.
| What I scored | What counted as evidence |
|---|---|
| Handles document-heavy work | Real examples of managing files, deadlines, or filings, not just the word "organized" |
| Writes clearly | The cover note itself: plain, correct, no fog |
| Reliable under a calendar | Tenure that makes sense, gaps explained without drama |
| Comfortable with our tools | Any exposure to legal software, billing, or a client portal |
Each got a plain yes, maybe, or no. That is it. A scorecard is not bureaucracy. It is a commitment that candidate one and candidate forty-one are being assessed against the same criteria, and that I have to write down why, in a word or two, before I move on.
Tip. Build the scorecard from the job description, not from the first strong resume you see. If the role was scoped well, this is easy. If it was not, that is a sign to fix the posting, and a good job description that filters saves you hours here.
What I Learned to Ignore on Page One
Half of screening well is deciding what not to react to. I keep a short list of things that feel like signal and are mostly noise.
- Design. A beautiful template tells me someone found a beautiful template. A plain resume from someone with three relevant years beats it every time.
- Buzzwords. "Detail-oriented team player" is furniture. I look for the sentence underneath it that shows the detail.
- Length. Two pages, one page, I stopped caring. I care whether the relevant page exists.
- A single typo. If the writing is otherwise sharp, I let one slip go. I am hiring an assistant, not proofreading a factum.
What I do react to is evidence. Give me a line that says you ran a lawyer's calendar through a trial and I will read the whole thing twice. Specifics survive a fast pass. Adjectives do not.
Specifics survive a fast pass. Adjectives do not. a note I taped to my monitor
The Names and Schools I Stopped Looking At
This is the part I am least comfortable admitting. On my first slow read I noticed I was warmer to candidates from firms I knew and cooler to names I could not place. That is bias, and it does not care how fair I think I am.
So on the first pass I read for evidence and covered the letterhead. Not literally with tape, though you can, but by training my eye to score the work described before I scored the logo attached to it. Where I could, I read the experience section before the header. It is a small trick and it changes what floats to the top.
The point is not to pretend a candidate's background does not exist. It is to make sure a recognizable name is not doing the deciding when a clear record of the actual work should be. Internationally trained applicants and career changers get buried fastest by name-and-school reflexes, and some of my best hires came from exactly that group. If you are building a genuinely fair process, the wider people and hiring playbook is worth reading end to end, and so is the case for a paid working interview once the pile is narrowed.
Note. Fair screening also means keeping notes you would be comfortable showing a candidate or a law society. A one-line reason per decision is not bureaucracy. It is your defence if anyone ever asks why.
The Maybe Stack Is Where the Good Hires Hide
Here is the finding that stuck. My clear yes stack was small and, honestly, a little boring. Strong on paper, safe, familiar. My no stack was easy. The action was in the maybes.
The maybe stack held the person with a two-year gap that turned out to be caregiving, the applicant whose experience was in a different practice area but obviously transferable, the one whose cover note was plain but whose bullet points were flawless. On a gut-driven Saturday, every one of them gets skimmed and dropped. On a scorecard, they earn a second, slower look, and that is where three of my four interviews came from.
So I gave the maybes the time the yeses did not need. I reread them for evidence I might have missed on the first quick pass, and I let the scorecard, not my mood, decide who moved up. Once I had my shortlist, I could invest properly in the next stage, whether that was a structured conversation or, later, reference checks done right.
The whole pass took an afternoon, not a weekend, and the reason it was fast is exactly the reason it was fair. When everyone answers the same questions and gets scored on evidence, you stop rereading to reassure yourself and you stop letting one dazzling resume reset the bar. Speed and fairness were never really enemies. They were both asking me to decide what mattered before I started, and to write it down. A calendar full of good hires, and the systems that keep them, whether that is your intake, your practice management, or the tools in A1 CMS that hold it together, all start with that one honest afternoon.
