I learnt a valuable lesson recently with a staff member we employed, only to discover how little work the staff member was doing.  That lesson is to always check out the references of the person.  I think there is a tendency, particularly within the legal profession in South Africa, for people to always believe it is going to cause offence or difficulty, to phone the previous employer for a reference.  Instead, we tend to automatically assume that the attorney or secretary is highly regarded in the workplace, well trained and worthy of hiring.  Often, what you get instead, is somebody else’s lemon – somebody that they could not wait to get rid of and that person leaves a trail of destruction, from one firm to another with each firm snapping them up and deciding not to phone the previous employer to find out whether the person is a good employee or not.  

I think due to my writing of my Legalnewsletter which attorneys can join at www.legalnewsletter.co.za, people have automatically assumed over the years that my staff members are all top class and well trained and so I have certainly lost staff on that basis too.  In one notable case, the employment agency phoned me up after about a week to say that the new attorney was furious, that the person they hired from my offices was incapable, had no idea of litigation and had no idea what a serious injury was either.  They asked if I would be so kind as to just give them a letter for the attorney who had hired her confirming that the secretary concerned had been trained in those fields.  I explained, in no uncertain terms, that firstly the staff member had been taken away from my firm without anybody phoning me in the first place, and that I was certainly not going to now, to try and protect the agent’s commission, give an endorsement.  I explained that the secretary concerned had worked in my bill of cost department, and had never worked in litigation and had never been trained in anything to do with litigation or serious injuries, because that is not the department in which she worked!  It is amazing how often people will exaggerate their role in their CV and prospective employers simply see a name, assume that everybody that comes from that firm has been well trained or is a superstar and snaps them up.  The reality is that every business has its weak employees and the better employees are normally well looked after and are not looking around for jobs.  

In any event, in my most recent reminder of this, we discovered to our bitter cost, when the staff member responsible for checking up references waited until the person had done a considerable amount of damage in a relatively short time, before she phoned up the previous employer.  The previous law firm in no time at all told us that they would never hire the individual ever again and as luck would have it, that individual is now off to a new law firm where they oversee even more files than they were at my firm!  An advocate friend of mine told me that the previous firm was probably laughing at us – and I said to him while it was true, the person concerned had spent 7 times longer at that firm than they did at my firm – so I am not sure how loud they would be laughing!