She Wants to Be a ‘Col. Sanders’ in Legal Job Field
When Louise Hackett was a teen-age bride whose young Marine husband was off fighting the Korean War, she thought it a stroke of luck that she landed a job fresh out of high school as a legal secretary.
Little did she know then that her on-the-job training in her Northern California hometown of Yreka not only would support her and her young son after her divorce five years later, but would also launch a multimillion-dollar business that is about to go nationwide.
After more than 30 years of providing office help to attorneys, as factotum, job trainer and job counselor, Hackett wants to become to paralegal employment services what Ray Kroc was to McDonald’s restaurants.
Hackett’s corporation, Legalstaff, may be the first in the nation to franchise employee placement agencies that cater exclusively to the legal community.
Legalstaff is the outgrowth of Legal Personnel Services, Hackett’s 15-year-old placement service with offices in Sacramento, Mountain View and San Francisco that grossed $1.4 million in the first 10 months of this year. The business provides law firms with permanent and temporary legal secretaries, paralegals and attorneys.
Hackett said franchising will allow her to tap an unmined market without the heartaches of finding the right managers and job counselors for new branch offices. She’ll also earn about $25,000 for every franchise she sells. Her maps would cross-section cities by every 1,500 law firms, making Los Angeles and Washington worth more than $100,000 each in licensing fees.
“I want to eventually run around and play Col. Sanders . . . have my picture taken with the (franchise) owners on their 10th anniversary, or whatever,” she said in a recent interview in her downtown Sacramento office.
Hackett, 55, was a founder of the former Pacific College of Legal Careers, a two-year Sacramento business school that she sold in 1984 to Barclay Colleges.
Although Legalstaff Corp. is barely a year old, she said she expects to sell 100 franchises within three years, a growth estimate she called “very controlled.” Already, she said she’s received 50 responses nationwide to her ads in the Wall Street Journal. She said she expects negotiations for the Los Angeles franchises to close by the end of the year.
Hitching onto national trends toward a litigious society and service economy, Hackett said her specialized matchmaking service also meets the unique needs of the tradition-steeped legal profession.
The nation’s lawyer population is expected to burgeon to 1 million by 1990, aggravating a chronic shortage of qualified legal secretaries and paralegals.
Hackett said her service saves attorneys’ expensive time in finding loyal office help who are the linchpins of a trade that produces volumes of paper in often arcane language under court deadlines.
For workers looking to change law firms, she said, the service offers discretion. “It’s very difficult to change jobs (as a legal secretary) because there are no secrets, you see,” she said. “You put the word out that you’re looking for a job and the boss gets unhappy.
“You have to be discreet about it because attorneys are very territorial.”
Because her business competes with other placement agencies for job applicants, Hackett said, the service is free to job seekers. She charges law firms the equivalent of one month’s salary for every worker she places successfully.
Hackett ventured into the personnel business in 1973 after working for law firms in Yreka, Eugene, Ore., and Sacramento in the Capitol office of Gordon Cologne, a state assemblyman and senator from Riverside before his 1972 appointment as a federal appellate judge.
She said the idea of a legal placement service occurred to her six years earlier when she helped a lobbyist open a law office and couldn’t find a temporary secretary to fill in while she studied for mid-term examinations at Cal State Sacramento. She eventually earned her bachelor’s degree in English and master’s in business administration at Sacramento.
When she opened her doors, she was immediately swamped with calls from 52 law offices but received only five applications from job seekers. That prompted her soon afterward to open her school to train legal secretaries and paralegals.
Her second husband, Lewis Hackett, eventually followed her into the law field. The government analyst-turned-attorney has his office next to hers.
Louise Hackett said franchising was a natural step for her business. “I wanted to grow. I didn’t want to put a lid on it. It’s not exciting for your staff if your business isn’t growing. I haven’t noticed anyone around here getting bored.”
