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Building a Law Firm With Virtual Assistants
Law school was all about practicing law, but now you’re on your own and running a business. The practice of law as a solo practitioner is closely intertwined with business practices that you may not have picked up during those long readings on contract law or at moot court trial competitions. Getting great results for your clients will only get you so far. If you don’t find economical ways to manage your practice, you will have fewer opportunities to represent clients in legal matters.
A recent article in American Bar Association Journal urges attorneys to “keep innovating beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.” The year of the pandemic saw flexibility in law firm management with at-home work agreements and more digital document management and sharing. If industry leaders have their way, the legal profession will continue to embrace changes to the way it does business.
For the first time, in 2020 many law firms embraced the virtual office in various work-from-home models. Although the pandemic is easing, the economy and convenience of the virtual office are here to stay, and that includes virtual assistants.
Think of virtual assistants as members of your legal staff who work remotely. They might be located anywhere in the country, and they have the skills to help you build and maintain your legal practice. Some of the economic benefits of virtual law assistants include, but are not limited to:
You don’t have to provide a virtual assistant with office equipment, a desk, or a space to work.
You don’t pay a virtual law assistant for vacation time.
You don’t provide a virtual administrative assistant with health insurance or paid sick time.
You are not expected to set up a 401k or contribute to retirement for a legal virtual assistant.
Staffing your law firm, of course, is not just about saving money. You want to provide your clients with the best legal representation possible. By freeing up your time to meet with clients and do the legal work, a virtual assistant can improve the efficiency of your office and the quality of the representation you provide.
What a Virtual Law Assistant Can Do
A virtual assistant can do everything from fielding phone calls to managing documents to keep your office running while you’re in court. If you had a virtual administrative assistant handling incoming emails, screening new client inquiries, scheduling and confirming meetings, and booking your travel arrangements, you would get a lot of hours back in your week that you could turn into billable hours.
A virtual assistant for law firm tasks could be specially trained to understand your practice and complete internet research, legal research, document creation, document management, investigation, and client follow-ups. A law assistant could be selected with the skills needed to accomplish any task in your practice that you would otherwise delegate to a paralegal or legal secretary.
Virtual assistants are also easier to manage than in-person staff. They are experts in organization and technology who live by deadlines, so they can definitely meet all of yours. Working from their own remote locations, virtual administrative assistants do not have the interpersonal distractions that can slow down work in a traditional law office. There are no dress-code violations or attitudes to work around. You schedule the work, they get it done.
Building a law firm with virtual law assistants will reduce your stress over the financial concerns of bringing on staff. It will free up your time to help more clients, and it will eliminate many of the difficulties of managing staff on a daily basis.