Just hearing the words “law firm” already associates a lot of administrative tasks and sleepless nights at the office. It doesn’t help either that law firms are struggling with staff shortages this year in spite of competitive pay.
A big factor playing a role in the legal industry’s dilemma on staff shortages is the rise of flexible work arrangements like remote working or working from home. This might come as a surprise but the first step in dealing with this problem is to learn what virtual assistants can do for your law firm.
Professionals in the legal field are now giving high value to company culture, opportunities for promotion, and a healthy schedule. This is a challenge for law firms who are not only competing against other law firms for hiring employees, but also in other industries like tech, health care, data science, and more.
The answer to this challenge is very simple: why not hire a legal virtual assistant? There are many benefits to hiring legal virtual assistants that are often overlooked. Legal virtual assistants have their own office space at home and can be paid on a special arrangement with reduced tax and employee benefits.
To learn if hiring a legal virtual assistant is the best decision for your law firm, let’s talk about:
We’ll also give you tips on how to achieve an effective remote team of virtual legal assistants, and get some inspiration on what makes a team of virtual legal assistants successful.
Virtual assistants for law firms are skilled independent contractors or freelancers working remotely from another location. These virtual assistants can be hired per hour, project, part-time, full-time, or outsourced from an agency like Remote Dynamics PH.
Most virtual assistants are trained with years of experience in administrative office work, but a pool of skilled professionals is also available for specialized work in industries like e-commerce, real estate, advertising, law, and more.
Virtual assistants for law firms can handle legal assistant and legal secretary tasks such as research, contact database management, calendar management for meetings and court dates, drafting documents, transcription, data entry, and email management.
Since a legal assistant is different from a legal secretary, you are free to set qualifications and customize the workload of a virtual legal assistant to achieve a more effective and efficient workflow process within your law firm.
A virtual legal assistant can handle office management and law-oriented work. Depending on how much workload your law firm needs to re-assign, you can focus on transferring office management-related tasks only, or also reach out to candidates who can offer professional legal support and assist during trials.
A legal assistant is responsible for tasks that are more oriented to professional legal support. They are more commonly known as paralegals.
A paralegal can create court and trial documents, conduct supporting research, and verify case costs and balances with clients and attorneys. They must have an associate degree in paralegal studies to provide help with law and legal procedures needed by lawyers in a law firm.
A legal secretary is more focused on administrative work that can keep a law firm on top of daily, weekly, and monthly goals. Some of these tasks include filing and backing up legal documents in a company software, communication between client and attorney through phone calls and emails, and calendar management on meetings and court dates.
Since these tasks are purely operations management in nature, a degree in paralegal studies is not required. If you still wish to be trained, there are online schools that offer courses on legal terminology and research techniques.
You can choose to concentrate on reassigning legal secretary work to a virtual legal assistant or add in a few tasks from paralegals that can be accomplished remotely. When creating a virtual legal assistant job description, be clear and realistic on the tasks and qualifications you want to set.
Here are the top skills that virtual legal assistants must have:
You can ask yourself these questions to know if it’s time to get help from a virtual legal assistant:
If you answered yes to any of these questions, then it’s time to hire a virtual assistant for your law firm.
Hiring virtual assistants is cost-efficient for companies. Since virtual assistants work remotely in a home office, you won’t need to pay for extra office space and utility bills for electricity, water, or internet.
A remote team of virtual assistants is also an investment in expanding your law firm and clientele. Handing over time-consuming and repetitive paperwork to virtual legal assistants opens opportunities for lawyers to bring in more clients and win more trials.
In a survey of 2,915 U.S. legal professionals, lawyers are said to spend 48% of their time on clerical tasks. This is almost half of their work hours consumed on organizing data instead of building strategies to win cases!
By hiring virtual legal assistants, lawyers can allot 48% on higher-value tasks such as understanding client cases, hearing witnesses, preparing arguments, and attending trials.
The right candidates can be found on reputable job search websites and virtual assistant agencies. Some of these platforms are Upwork, Indeed, Onlinejobs.ph, LinkedIn, and Remote Dynamics PH.
Be sure to set clear instructions on your qualifications. You can test the skills and aptitude of a virtual legal assistant by creating a paid sample work. The sample work should reflect the skills and knowledge you want within the law firm.
So, what are the roles and tasks of a virtual legal assistant in a law firm? Here’s a list:
Setting qualifications and expectations will help law firms and virtual legal assistant applicants meet the right goals.
Communication tools dedicated to increasing your law firm’s productivity are essential in managing a remote team of virtual legal assistants. These applications make it easier and more effective to communicate tasks the way they need to be done.
A few communication tools you can utilize for your law firm are Slack, Zoom, and Loom.
In Slack, you can create specific channels for each trial or admin work that needs to be accomplished. It is easy to add and tag people in each channel, and files are accessible for download. You can review even the chat history as well if you need to look back on updates through the search button.
Zoom is an effective platform for conducting meetings between your clients. The meetings can be created in advance and integrated into Google Calendar to ensure that your clients are being reminded about the meeting. The maximum time limit for each meeting is 45 minutes, but you may extend the time by purchasing the premium version.
Loom is great for recording videos. Since law firms use platforms that are data sensitive, tutorials may need to be created to help virtual legal assistants learn how to navigate company software at their own pace.
These tools will have more impact if combined with a personal approach. Virtual legal assistants are still people — consider how they fit your work style and be open to suggestions if they have experience in a more effective tool or process.
It can save time if you prepare an FAQ or frequently asked questions to orient the remote team about the company and be patient with adjustments. The objective of these virtual legal assistants is just the same as yours — to grow and improve your law firm with the best business practices.
Securing the right candidates with highly professional backgrounds and acquiring competent tools for virtual legal assistance are just some of the components of building a successful remote legal team. The factor that completes the process is great leadership.
When hiring virtual legal assistants, be prepared to manage projects and training to be consistent in the quality of work your law firm requires. Get to know your virtual assistants and conduct weekly meetings to align everyone in the team on tasks that work great or demand improvement.
Cultivate open communication with your team of virtual legal assistants to ensure everyone is valued. Top talent produces top output with motivation, positive team rapport, and healthy communication.
Interested in building a remote team for your law firm? Contact Remote Dynamics PH at info@remotedynamicsph.com to get virtual assistance recommendations suitable for your company!
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