Why a 3-Person Law Firm Outperforms Bloated Teams

A lean team where you invest deeply in each person will outperform a bloated roster every time.

That belief is not theoretical for me. It is something I have arrived at after watching how companies, professional services firms, and even law firms actually operate once you look past the surface.

I am not really sure why so many companies and founders are so hell-bent on hiring people. Headcount has somehow become a proxy for credibility.

The bigger the team looks on LinkedIn, the more “serious” the business is supposed to be. But when you scratch beneath that image, the reality is often very different.

I once spoke to a founder whose company appeared to have close to 100 employees on LinkedIn. On paper, it looked impressive. In reality, around 90 percent of those people were unpaid.

Titles existed, roles existed, but accountability, ownership, and real incentives did not. I am still not entirely sure how that situation sustained itself, but I have seen versions of this play out repeatedly across startups and scale-ups.

This is not limited to tech companies. The same dynamic exists in the legal space.

Large teams create bloat. Bloat creates distance. And distance shows up as inefficiency, misalignment, and diluted responsibility.

Clients are charged premium fees, but the work is often pushed down to junior or inexperienced team members who are still learning on the job.

To be clear, I am not against charging high fees. Expertise should be paid for. What makes no sense is charging for experience and delivering inexperience instead.

That disconnect is one of the reasons I built my firm the way I did.

I run a commercial law firm focused on SaaS, Fintech, and IT. We do not do litigation. We do not try to be everything to everyone. And most importantly, we are intentionally small. The firm is run by me and two other people. That is it.

This structure is not a limitation. It is our strength.

Because we are lean, the people clients speak to are the people doing the work. The advice is not diluted as it moves down a hierarchy. Decisions are made quickly.

Context is not lost in internal handovers. We move fast, stay aligned, and grow together because there are no artificial layers between strategy and execution.

Interestingly, founders we work with genuinely like this model. They know who they are dealing with. They know that the person billing them is the person applying judgment, experience, and accountability to their matter. There is clarity, and there is trust.

I am not arguing that every business should stay small forever. Growth can be necessary and healthy. But hiring for the sake of appearances, fundraising optics, or ego rarely creates real value. Capability does. Ownership does. Experience does.

For us, choosing not to scale headcount aggressively forced us to scale depth instead. Better systems. Better judgment. Better relationships with clients. That focus has shaped our culture and our positioning far more than a long list of job titles ever could.

The lesson for others is simple: stop treating headcount as a signal of success. Whether you are building a startup or a professional services firm, invest deeply in a small number of capable people before you invest broadly in many.

If you are charging for expertise, make sure expertise is what actually shows up. Lean teams are not a weakness. When built intentionally, they are a competitive advantage.