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Managing Staff as a Solo Attorney

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At some point, small and solo law firms will have to deal with hiring or managing a team outside of themselves. While managing staff as a solo attorney presents a unique set of challenges, it is ultimately a sign of success: your business has grown and is thriving. However, time is of the essence: it takes work to build out your team, and you may be banking on time you can’t afford to spend on recruitment, training, and management.

In this blog, we highlight strategies solo attorneys can leverage to ensure that they are able to build out their operations without compromising their efficacy in day-to-day activities. Hiring staff doesn’t have to equate to a temporary reduction in billable hours.

3 Tips for Managing Staff as a Solo Attorney

Hiring In-House vs. Leveraging ALSPs

Before making the decision to hire your team, weigh your options. Does the role you’re hiring for require full-time support? While it may seem best to hire for the positions that you’re looking to manage, utilizing alternative legal services providers may be more effective in terms of cost and time management.

Hiring a full-time employee can be a huge time sink. The recruitment process is broken down into fielding job applications, reading over those applications, and the interview process. This time-intensive process can distract you from your billable work, and doesn’t guarantee immediate results.

Recruiting an employee is only the beginning – once hired, they will need to be trained in on your existing methodologies and systems. Depending on the role that you’re recruiting for, this can range from a matter of hours to ongoing training lasting weeks.

Hiring employees is expensive and challenging – ALSPs offer a range of services that can be deployed as-needed. Recruiting and training comes pre-packaged with alternative legal services, allowing you to leverage them as a plug-and-play solution to staffing needs.

Alternative legal services, such as contract paralegals and virtual receptionists, offer a scalable, simple solution to your issues. They should be considered if:

  • Your workload fluctuates enough not to necessitate a permanent hire
  • You need to scale your operations quickly
  • You do not have the time or resources to hire staff yourself

Setting Expectations and Keeping Accountability

Exiting the pandemic work environment, the American workplace has changed for virtually all professions, lawyers included. As more employees return to the office, it is critical not only to set expectations for behavior for new hires, but existing team members as well.

Are you managing a hybrid legal team? If so, you’ll need to carefully delineate communication requirements, as well as best practices for issues like internet outages and time spent during the work day. These expectations should cover not only time during work hours, but time outside of work. The home office is convenient, but has also pressured workers to operate well outside of their normal business hours.

Setting expectations from day one can significantly mitigate risk and improve performance when managing staff as a solo attorney. On one hand, you’re ensuring that their working hours are spent productively. On the other, clear work boundaries ensure that employees don’t feel overworked, a culprit in high turnover.

With more employees working remotely, it is more important than ever that you have implemented systems to track and monitor their performance, as well as respecting their time outside of the workplace.

Open Communication

When hiring new employees or leveraging ALSPs, keeping open communication channels is essential for aligning goals and ensuring needs on both sides are met. With virtual or remote workers, this issue is even more essential.

Establish systems or routine meetings to communicate needs throughout the week. Whether this is as simple as a daily checkup, or more standardized meetings periodically set throughout a month, checking up on workflow keeps companies aligned. It also ensures that your employees’ needs are being met. Ensure each meeting has an agenda set beforehand, and don’t schedule meetings to be longer than absolutely necessary.

Amata Law Office Suites Makes Managing Staff as a Solo Attorney Easy

Managing staff as a solo attorney can be a tricky business, and often isn’t something taught in law school. Private practices often require the assistance of other team members to manage their daily workload, and without the right systems in place, these tasks can become complicated.

At Amata Law Office Suites, we offer a range of services catered directly to solo and private legal practices. For those looking to build out their team, we offer alternative legal services such as virtual receptionists and contract paralegals that can be deployed and scaled as-needed.

As pandemic restrictions end, it is more important than ever to find systems that work with your legal practice. Contact us today to learn more about how Amata helps support Chicago lawyers with a full range of services.

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Law Firm Efficiency: 4 Ways to Maximize Your Productivity

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The most productive law firm is one in which lawyers are spending the maximum amount of time practicing law, and minimizing the amount of time performing ancillary tasks that, while important, do not result in billable time. Regardless of a lawyer’s expertise or successes in the courtroom, the main financial commitment of a lawyer depends on spending time with casework.

This is, of course, easier said than done. A lawyer may want and intend to practice as much law as possible during any given day, yet certain tasks are essential to their business. Ongoing training, client acquisition, marketing efforts, and other activities fuel your activities.

In this blog, we analyze the best methods for remaining as productive and efficient as possible without neglecting other duties crucial to your practice.

Four Routes to Law Firm Efficiency

Track All of Your Time, Not Just Billable Hours

As a lawyer, it can be tempting to only track the amount of time you spend working for clients. After all, this is where revenue comes from, and is arguably the most important part of the profession from a financial perspective.

While billable hours account for your profit, other time spent throughout the day can help illustrate where the rest of your efforts are spent. This can help lawyers gain a better understanding of your most productive periods of the workday, as well as where time could be better spent.

By understanding workflow on a granular level, lawyers can fine-tune their process to maximize revenue and learn their weaknesses.

Avoid Multitasking

Although it is sometimes impossible to avoid, multitasking is a less efficient way of getting results that you need. Blocking off time to perform a single task, as opposed to trying to accomplish multiple things at once, can help ensure that the most immediate and demanding jobs get done first. It also makes it easier to track your time performing certain tasks.

Alternative Legal Service Providers

Lawyers, particularly solo or private legal practices, must wear many hats throughout their career. Sales, marketing, management, secretarial work, and other fields all fall under the umbrella of the lawyer at some point or another.

With only so many hours in a day, how can a lawyer expect to fulfill all of these tasks? Hiring alternative legal service providers, or ALSPS, can often serve to rectify lost time. While these services incur expense, the amount of money saved by utilizing these services by netting higher volumes of billable hours eclipses the payment required.

A primary advantage to utilizing ALSPs is that they require no training and can scale with your business as needed. Smaller legal practices are often strapped for cash and time, and don’t have the resources required for recruiting and training employees. ALSPs offer a plug-and-play approach – their models adapt to your business.

For instance, consider virtual receptionists. Traditional avenues of hiring a receptionist require you to conduct interviews, find a candidate with proper experience, and train them into your business. This also requires paying them a salary and benefits, as well as carving out a work space for them to operate. This takes a great deal of time and money. Hiring virtual receptionist services from an ALSP, by contrast, makes this process considerably easier. Their messaging can be customized for your business, they can handle your onboarding pipeline even after regular business hours, and can even be temporarily turned off.

Contract paralegals serve a similar as-needed ancillary function. Smaller law firms often have to manage the ebb and flow of unpredictable workloads, and may not require a paralegal on staff full time. ALSP paralegal services allow for assistance as the need arises.

Solo and private legal practices often cannot manage their workload alone. Alternative legal service providers offer a range of services that can help lawyers focus on accruing billable hours first.

Sharing Information with Other Lawyers

While many lawyers operate small practices, they are never alone. Networking with lawyers can give you a sense of how they run their operations. This is made easier than ever when you’re working in the same office environment as them.

Amata Law Office Suites offers more than just office space for lawyers. We provide a community where lawyers can work side by side and access the expertise across a wide variety of specializations. More, we offer alternative legal services in-house. Virtual receptionists and contract paralegals are all a part of our services, making us the premiere legal office experience.

Are you looking to make your practice more efficient? Contact us today and learn more about our services.

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Should Your Law Firm Strategy Include Alternative Legal Service Providers?

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Alternative Legal Service Providers

A law firm strategy can help orient your business around your bottom line – and can even tell you when hiring alternative legal service providers is a viable strategy.

Lawyers operate in a stressful environment – the work they do is of the utmost importance to their clients. This work is measured by billable hours. As every lawyer knows, there is hardly enough time in the day to accomplish everything they need to do.

Orienting their goals with a law firm strategy can help ensure the success of solo and private legal practices. It can also open doors towards where time is wasted, and where money is best spent. As billable hours are the primary generator of revenue, alternative legal service providers like contract paralegals and virtual receptionists can help you put money back in your pocket.

When you’re developing your law firm strategy, should you include alternative legal service providers? We investigate the value of evaluating your strategy, and finding the places where you money is best spent.

What is a Law Firm Strategy?

While lawyers serve a vital function in our society, the models of solo and private practices demand that operators first consider themselves as a business. Revenue streams are the ultimate driver of success for a business – for lawyers, this means netting billable hours.

Solo and private legal practices, however, cannot rely on billable hours alone to drive revenue. If a lawyer spends their entire day focusing on a case, other things such as incoming leads that need to be qualified or ongoing education fall to the wayside.

A law firm strategy can help align your goals as a lawyer with your needs as a business.

In short, a law firm strategy includes various aspects that will help define your business and determine what parts you must grow to avoid a feast-or-famine cycle of operations.

  • As a business, legal practitioners need a clearly defined mission and values, a target demographic, and a record of past successes.
  • Set fair pricing models that are attractive to customers while meeting your bottom line.
  • Study trends that show to clients you are continuously educating yourself about changes in the law, and how this is incorporated into your business.
  • Develop key performance indicators (KPIs) to gauge the health of your legal practice.
  • Perform a competitor analysis to adjust model on a quarterly basis.

By developing a law firm strategy, you are ensuring that your business is not only attractive to clients, but you will also gain a greater perspective on the successes of your business. What do you need to change in order to keep up with the pace of your competition?

Should My Law Firm Strategy Include Alternative Legal Service Providers?

A large legal practice consists of multiple levels of employees – this includes ancillary services such as paralegals and secretaries that are able to keep the flow of business aligned with the current workload.

Solo and private legal practices may not have the same resources at hand to meet their daily tasks. For this reason, alternative legal service providers have become an attractive option for law firms on a tight budget.

Unlike in-house staff, ALSPs operate on an as-needed basis. Rather than paying a salary with benefits, this staff comes fully trained with customized messaging and specialization for your business. They can be billed hourly, by the minute, or even by the second.

Virtual Legal Receptionist

A virtual legal receptionist functions much in the way a receptionist operates in-house. They take incoming calls, help qualify prospective leads, and present you with the best options so that your time isn’t wasted.

By utilizing messaging specifically for your business, callers won’t know that you’ve hired a contract legal receptionist. Time spent qualifying leads can instead be spent on more pressing tasks that can be billed, putting more hours in your day.

Contract Paralegal

A contract paralegal is, much like any other paralegal, a specialist trained in on tasks that matter for your business. Unlike an in-house paralegal, you can hire them on as-needed.

When there aren’t enough hours in the day to keep up with clients, a contract paralegal can help keep your operations running smoothly. They are generally paid on an hourly basis.

When Building Your Law Firm Strategy, Consider Alternative Legal Service Providers

Alternative legal service providers can supplement your business model to keep operations running smoothly, particularly for solo and private legal firms that don’t have the budget to hire out a full team. Once you’ve determined that you need ALSPs, however, the challenge of finding a partner becomes paramount.

Amata Law Office Suites is more than just an office space – we provide ALSP services like contract paralegals and virtual legal receptionists in-house for the lawyers that call our buildings home. Small legal practices need all of the tools for success they can muster, and we can provide. Contact us for more information about our services.

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Billable Hours: Less Distractions, More Time on Clients with ALSPs

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Without the resources of larger law firms, solo and private legal practices struggle to put in billable hours – can ALSPs help?

According to a recent study published by Clio, only 29% of a lawyer’s workday is spent on billable time. In a typical 8-hour workday, that means less than two and a half hours are focused on client work.

Where does the rest of that time go? The brunt of a lawyer’s workday (nearly half) is spent on administrative tasks such as sending bills, continuing education, and office administration. The rest of the time is spent finding new clients.

These tasks are all crucial to the function of a legal practice. Yet it also isn’t the most efficient means of time spent. Lawyers depend on billable hours to keep their business running smoothly. How can this time be earned back?

Solo and legal practices need to consider every possible avenue to help ensure that their business is both functional and profitable. For practices of this size, hiring isn’t always an option – alternative legal services providers, or ALSPs, offer an attractive alternative.

Breaking Down Your Workday

To understand how ALSPs can benefit your workday, consider what tasks unrelated to billable hours are taking up the most of your time. While smaller practices have a degree of freedom unavailable to larger practices, it also requires you to think on your feet and wear many hats. Unfortunately, this also leads to interruptions and distractions.

A study at George Mason University concluded that distractions not only hinder our ability to complete tasks, but also affects the quality of the work that we do. Disconnecting from interruptions is no easy feat. While working on work for a client, a lawyer might find themselves having to take calls, answer emails, or other related tasks.

The obvious solution to this might seem to be hiring new employees that these tasks can be delegated towards. Yet this comes with two costs: time and money. Solo practices might not be able to afford hiring a full-time employee, even if they are in desperate need of a receptionist to process new clients or paralegals to take up that slack. More, time is needed to train them in on the work.

For this reason, many have turned to ALSPs to perform these tasks on a case-by-case basis. Paralegal service providers and live legal receptionists can help alleviate the workload of lawyers so they can focus on client needs first.

Fractional Delegation of Tasks

The needs of prospective and current clients are rarely uniform – more often, client needs come in feast or famine cycles. For the instances where prospective clients need to fill out documentation or paralegal services are required, in-house staff can provide a tremendous boon. In other cases, they might be idling or performing tasks that are outside of their expertise.

ALSP service providers come with all of the training that they need, without the burden of maintaining them on staff full-time, and can be billed as-needed rather than as salaried employees with benefits.

Paralegal Service Providers

Contract paralegals operate much in the same way that any paralegal operates, although their specialties might be more specific or specialized for various fields of law. They are typically billed on an hourly basis.

Before utilizing concierge paralegal services, consider how they will fit into your practice. Is a paralegal service provider optimized to your practice, or do they fit more specific niche roles? A conversation with a service provider should give you all of the information you need to make a sound decision.

Live Legal Receptionist Providers

Receptionists are the gateway between attorney-client legal relationships – as the first contact, it is vital that they are both efficient and professional. Virtual receptionist services can provide this even outside of typical business hours, as well as bilingual receptionists for lawyers whose clientele might vary.

While virtual receptionists for lawyers are often billed by the minute, our legal receptionist services are more precise: we charge by the second. With customized messaging for your practice, our receptionists function as a direct extension of your business.

More Billable Hours with ALSPS Equates to Greater Profit Margins

ALSPs offer a slew of benefits to solo and private legal practices – professionalism, scalability, cost-savings, and more. As a private legal practice, you need a trusted partner that can provide these services as your business evolves.

More than just an office space, Amata Law Office Suites provides these as part of our services targeted at our community. We operate on your time, helping you put time back in your pocket and accrue more billable hours. Contact us today to learn more about our legal support staff.

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What is an Alternative Legal Service Provider?

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If you’ve spent any time looking to expand or improve your legal offerings, you may have come across the term “alternative legal service provider.” For many practices, these services, commonly referred to as ALSPs, have become the new norm. They increase firm IP – for example, by adding expertise from contract paralegals to the matter – and do so at an affordable cost.

Especially for partners going solo or opening their own private practices, ALSPs provide a path forward. Hiring staff in-house isn’t always an option for the firm, especially not with the expertise their clients expect. ALSPs allow the firms to provide more competitive pricing without sacrificing quality and efficiency.

What is an ALSP, and how can it benefit your legal practice? In short: ALSPs take over the burden of tasks attorneys need not perform or provide additional expertise to assist a firm in a given matter or for long-term engagements through use of contract attorney and contract paralegals. This saves the attorney time, money, and boosts their firm’s IP, all at once.

Defining the Alternative Legal Service Provider

An ALSP is defined as any service that could normally be provided in-house by a law firm that is instead performed by an outside entity. It is not a law firm; it operates as an outsourced model that law firms can leverage to perform tasks that are too costly or time-consuming to perform in-house.

ALSPs offer a specialized service at-scale to meet with the demand of legal practices. With specialized tools, processes, and even technology at their disposal, an alternative legal services provider offers high quality service at affordable prices. As a result, ALSPs can outperform on the same tasks that are normally undertaken in-house.

The Thomson Reuters 2019 Alternative Legal Service Providers report found the top five services firms use ALSPs for are:

  • E-discovery
  • Legal research
  • Litigation and investigation support
  • Document review/coding
  • Non-legal/factual research

As the legal profession pivots from practicing in traditional law office space to operating from shared spaces, hybrid offices, and even the fully virtual law office, ALSPs provide expertise and efficiency for attorneys and law firms.

An Alternative Legal Service Provider Benefits Any Size of Legal Practice

A 2017 study by Georgetown Law School reported that over half of all law firms are using alternative legal service providers in some capacity.

While larger practices have been leveraging these services for a while to increase firm efficiency and lower overhead cost on work produced, partner law practices, solo attorneys, and boutique law firms can all leverage ALSPs to compete.

Private practice law firms are most likely to use the following types of ALSPs (as defined by Thomson Reuters):

  • Independent Legal Process Outsourcers (LPOs) – perform project or matter based work on behalf of the law firm
  • Managed services providers – usually handle on-going work for the law firm; like a contracted in-house legal team
  • Contract and staffing services – provide temporary staffing to the firm, from legal admins to skilled workers like attorneys and paralegals

For partner and solo practices that operate on limited resources or do not have the budget to hire full-time staff, an ALSP can also alleviate time spent on recruitment, training, and management of employees. Additionally, providers offer fully qualified employees that can immediately benefit your legal practice.

Alternative Legal Services Provided by Amata Law Office Suites

Solo and partner practice law firms rely on flexibility and adaptability to achieve success. At Amata Law Office Suites, we understand that time isn’t the only thing on your mind – quality of work and budgetary concerns come into play. We are committed to providing you with the services you need to accomplish the goals of your clients and focus on the practice of law, at a rate that assists your firm with running profitably and with expertise that contributes to your firm IP.

Our Legal Support Team Services

Expert Paralegal Support

For client matters, legal projects, and billable work, the Amata paralegals are some of the best in Chicago and led by Tisha Delgado, Chicago Paralegal Association President and litigation and e-discovery expert. Our paralegals average 27 years of experience each and have developed expertise in specific areas of law. As a team they provide support such as locating defendants and witnesses; preparing third-party subpoenas; Westlaw and LexisNexis legal research; document review; e-discovery and data collection assistance and more.

Additionally, they are knowledgeable on the inner workings of the courts, allowing them bring an efficiency to tasks like document processing that proves burdensome to many attorneys.

Better yet, their time is entirely billable by the firm back to the client and offered at cost-effective rates.

Legal Admin Support

For time-consuming tasks and attorneys looking to focus their own time on billable work, the Amata legal admin team steps in. They assist over 700 Chicago attorneys with client billing inputs, calendar management, mail processing, Microsoft office assistance and more.

Their assistance allows attorneys and firms to focus on the practice of law and relieve stress by outsourcing this non-billable work to a trusted partner at an affordable rate. Legal admin support is charged by the minute, not the hour, at Amata and fixed-fee items like court runs are also available.

Live Legal Receptionist Services

For solo attorneys, partner legal practices and boutique law firms, client intake processes are crucial for continued business and time-management. The Amata Live Legal Receptionist team brings proved process to firms just starting out or looking to improve call-management and client-intake efficiency.

Greetings, transferring processes, screening, and client-intake are customized specifically for the law firm. The team is also available at extended hours. While the typical workday is from 9-5, prospective clients don’t always operate on the same schedule – the Amata legal receptionist services operate from 7AM-10PM CST.

Amata Law Office Suites also offers office space for like-minded lawyers to collaborate and work. We provide our lawyers with comprehensive solutions to many of the problems they face on a day-to-day basis. Alternative Legal Services are offered as part of our model and allow solo or private law firms the resources they need to achieve success in their law practices.

Contact us today to learn more about how Amata can help you. Email [email protected]

Discover our legal support staff for lawyers in Chicago.

When to Hire Law Firm Staff

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portrait of focused group of lawyers working in office

Solo and private legal practices often find themselves asking the perennial question of when to hire law firm staff.

You landed that case, the one with the prestigious client who could bring the firm a good deal of future work. Your firm’s attorneys are ready but this engagement will require hours of researching memoranda and creating reports and the client doesn’t want to pay the hourly rate of a lawyer for these kinds of activities. Realistically, you only have time to directly address the issues that need your expertise anyway.

A paralegal is key to your success. Hiring full-time staff would solve the problem, but do you have the time to find the right people? And can you justify the cost?

Contracting paralegal and legal admin services from an alternative legal services provider (ALSP) like Amata Law Office Suites could save you time and allow you to present impressive costs for high-quality work, ensuring this client continues working with your firm. And potentially getting you some referrals for work well done.

When to Hire Law Firm Staff, and When to Outsource From an ALSP

Time Management

Hiring the right paralegal for the project involves vetting the candidate’s expertise in the area of need. Are you confident you can find the right person for the job? Time is money; every hour you spend recruiting a capable paralegal is a billable hour lost. Once you make the right hire, onboarding that person also takes time. A full-time individual needs to become acquainted with everyone in your practice, your current clients as well as other support staff.

By contracting with an ALSP like Amata Law Office Suites, you’ll find professional, previously vetted, support staff (secretarial and paralegal services) ready to partner with you on an as-needed, pay-as-you-go basis. Developing relationships with Amata’s professional paralegals ensures you have the best person available for the client’s needs when that client returns with another project.

Monetary Considerations

Cost of Experience

Employing full-time certified paralegals and/or legal admin staff increases both your direct and indirect costs.

Direct expenses like…

  • salary
  • payroll taxes
  • employee benefits (such as insurance)

And indirect costs that increase as staff increases such as…

  • office space
  • equipment
  • software licenses

If you want a solid member to join your team, it’s going to mean much higher salaries as well. The Amata paralegal team, for instance boasts an average of 27 years of experience (as of 2020) and they specialize in certain areas of law. Expertise means they can excute items quickly and accurately for your clientelle, but that costs more money than an entry level paralegal. For solo and private practice firms, taking on the salaries that accompany this level of support and experience is not an option.

Since ALSPs charge for work done, however, you can receive this experience at a cost that is affordable. Plus, an experienced team can execute documents quickly. It may only take a staff member fifteen minutes to complete the work you need, which means you’re only billed for those fiftenn minutes. And you can bill your clients back for the work.

Cost of a Bad Hire

But the after-hire expenses represent only part of the cost. The U.C. Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor and Employment estimates recruiting costs for a new employee can range from $2,000 to $7,000. Ongoing expenses include the employer’s portion of FICA, 7.65% of the employee’s annual salary, healthcare coverage, unemployment insurance, and retirement benefits.

And what is the cost of a bad hire? The U. S. Department of Labor recently listed the average cost of a bad hiring decision at a minimum of 30% of the individual’s first year salary. In legal work, your service is your brand; a bad hire can turn away clients and leave you repairing a damaged reputation. It can also bring more of a headach to you as you try to manage inexperienced staff, versus having an experienced staff member who is only an asset.

Hiring Takes Work!

Unless you practice employment law (and are already well versed), you, as an employer of full-time staff, must now also stay current on HR policies. The legal requirements change from time to time; medical benefits need explanation and annual review, sexual harassment training is required by certain states. Plus, personnel problems can arise. Managing a larger staff adds complexity. You can avoid this work by contracting an ALSP like Amata Legal Office Suites to handle work instead of hiring yourself.

Before you decide to hire a full-time paralegal, legal admin, and/or receptionist, consider how your firm can benefit from contracting with an ALSP.  Gain the trust of that important client while saving time, money, and work by contracting with Amata Legal Office Suites. We provide impressive office spaces, and well-vetted paralegal and legal admin services. Contact us today for more information about our services.

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What to Look For in the Best Virtual Receptionists for Law Firms

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Vietnamese young female receptionist talking on phone

There are three traits the best virtual receptionists for law firms have in common, and we’ve listed them below. Before you go skim those bullets, however, let’s explain why your private practice law firm needs a legal receptionist in the first place. It comes down to two words which clients expect: immediacy and professionalism.

Regardless of the type of law that you practice, when a person calls a lawyer, they believe their needs are urgent. Getting a voicemail instead of a person is rarely acceptable. You may think “those are not the clients I want” but even your top-tier prospective client wants to talk to a human on the phone when they call. It’s the high-quality customer service people come to expect from a profession like law. You risk losing great clients by negating this simple request.

Yet for solo law firms and many private law firms, the expense of hiring a secretary or receptionist can be difficult to justify. Then there is the time involved with interviewing, onboarding a new employee, and training them on your firm’s processes and clients. Facing this mound of tasks, and fearing the receptionist will not provide enough value to outweigh the additional overhead costs, many firms choose to opt-out of such a hire.

Live Legal Receptionist Options

Thankfully, another option is available: virtual receptionist services. A virtual receptionist acts as an extension of your law office, without the costs of hiring, training, and retaining an employee.

The downside? With hundreds of virtual receptionist services available on the market, finding the right option for your firm and budget takes some research and they are not ‘one-size-fits-all.’ Below, we consider three traits that the best virtual receptionists for law firms have and what makes them different from other receptionist services.

3 Qualities of the Best Virtual Receptionists for Law Firms

Professionalism (That Matches Your Own)

Yes, we covered this a bit already, but in a day and age where so many services are on offer, we think it’s pertinent to repeat. Receptionists serve as the gateway to attorney-client legal relationships. They are likely to serve as the first impression of your company. When a legal buyer is looking for options, professionalism serves as the number one selling point.

Hold them to the same rigorous standards by which you hold yourself. They must be competent, efficient, and able to get the right answers when onboarding new clients so that your time is not being wasted with bad leads.

Keep in mind live legal receptionists are also an extension of your law firm’s brand. While virtual receptionists may serve a variety of clients throughout the day, their messaging should be personally customized around your firm’s needs and the image you want the firm to convey. This sets the groundwork for what clients can expect moving forward.

Before signing up with a provider:

  • Ensure you can customize everything you’d (from hold-music to the greeting to the “they are not available” language) to match your firm’s brand. Also ask for them to handle this set up at your direction, instead of having you do it yourself in the software backend.
  • Ask if you can test their services to ensure professionalism. If there is a free trial period, that’s even better! The last thing you want is to commit to a provider who mishandles your calls.
  • PRICING TIP: Figure out how they bill for time spent on the phone. Many providers round up to the full minute, instead of charging you only for time used.

Efficiency (That Improves Your Firm)

Taking on more overhead, even if it’s via a cost-effective option, should result in an improvement of your firm. Otherwise, save the money!

The best legal answering services will eliminate bottlenecks in your onboarding pipeline by:

  • talking with new and potential clients,
  • vetting them based on your firm’s standards, and
  • filling out the correct forms (if you like those and/or have a CRM) or
  • sending you a streamlined email with complete information

Many people point to the billable hour as reason enough for a receptionist: every minute spent on the phone with a prospective client equates to less billable hours for existing clients.

At Amata, we like to look beyond the billable hour, however: every interruption takes you away from practicing law. No matter how your firm’s fees are structured, you will find legal answering services are vital to assisting you and your firm’s attorneys with managing time. Better managed time leads to less stress.

Before signing up with a provider:

  • Verify their systems can handle the exact client intake, call screening, and call-routing procedures your firm needs, no matter how complicated.
  • Never worked with a receptionist before? Ask for guidance! A high-quality answering service will be able to assist you and your firm with setting up the right processes even if you’ve never had any in place before.
  • PRICING TIP: Ask if they have fillable form options available or if you have to provide your own. If they are available, check if there is a limited amount included in the base-program and get pricing if you need more.

Availability (Without Excessive Fees)

The hours that a legal practice is open don’t always coincide with the hours when clients and potential clients will be contacting your firm. Like you, your clients and potential clients are at work during business hours and they may not be able to call until closer to dinner time. Virtual receptionist services can help resolve this problem.

Unlike employees you hire in-house, the best virtual live legal receptionists operate outside of the normal 9-5 business hours to account for the needs of legal buyers.

Before signing up with a provider:

  • Ask who is answering the phone. Many people outsource to other countries after the regular 9-5, but if you have certain language demands you’ll want to make sure someone who can meet them is always available to answer calls. In Chicago for instance, Spanish is very common and may not be known by overseas receptionists.
  • PRICING TIP: Go over the billing for extended hours as many answering services consider it a premium service. What’s the additional cost to have extended hours? Is it fixed fee or variable? Additional line items can quickly add up.

By hiring a legal answering service you are giving your clients access to the professionalism they need, at an immediacy they will appreciate (and help your firm stand out among the crowd), without overtaxing your own work day.

The best virtual receptionist for law firms is available when clients need them, and legal practices should only be billed for the time for which calls are taken, as opposed to a full-time receptionist who is either salaried or billed hourly.

What Makes Amata The Best Virtual Receptionist for Law Firms

Amata Law Office Suites is more than just an office space – for over 20 years, we have offered live legal receptionist services to help support and grow solo and private law practices by holding ourselves to the highest standard.

Amata’s Live Legal Receptionists use customized greetings and onboarding messaging to seamlessly fit into your law firm. We bill for the time our services are used and never round up. With extended operating hours from 7AM to 10PM, your law firm can be optimized around billable hours and client needs, at affordable prices.

Contact us today to learn more about our live legal receptionists, on-demand expert legal staff, office space, and more!

Discover our virtual offices in Chicago.

How a Virtual Legal Receptionist Can Benefit Your Private Practice

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Great legal practices are often defined by their high quality of service. Not only via their attorneys’ legal acumen, but through the strong attorney-to-client legal relationships they build. Timely responses, seamless communication, and the ability to take calls after hours show a client you are putting them first.

This is also where many private practices fail in running their law firm as a business. The attorneys answer all of the firm’s incoming calls. Before you get on the line to give a first-rate legal consultation or assist a client through the legal process, consider having your potential client speak to someone else: a legal receptionist.

A legal receptionist helps facilitate a client-centered approach for private practice law firms and keeps the business of the practice running smoothly, taking over client intake and helping with time consuming tasks.

However, hiring a full-time legal receptionist is a difficult expense to justify for solo and partner practices. Finding the best legal receptionist is a resource-intensive activity that involves hiring and training that many lawyers don’t have the time to do. Overhead for dedicated personnel – paychecks and employee benefits like healthcare – can also be well outside a lawyer’s budget.

Hiring a virtual legal receptionist is a great way to provide receptionist support while keeping overhead low. You can provide attentive service, manage your time, and stay competitive by passing your cost-savings onto your clients.

What is a virtual legal receptionist?

A virtual legal receptionist is more than just an answering service. They are live professionals, who handle calls almost exclusively for law firms. Live legal receptionists answer calls with customized greetings unique to your firm, can help you qualify leads, fill out client onboarding forms, and send all information to the appropriate personnel. Moreover, they operate outside of the traditional 9-5 business hours, allowing your clients and potential clients to be taken care of by your firm, even if you’re at home enjoying dinner or deep in work for another case.

Many solo practitioners, partner law practices, and boutique law firms are hiring virtual receptionists, saving themselves the hassle and cost of hiring a full-time employee. This allows attorneys at the firm to work more billable hours and do what they do best: practice law.

As a solo or private legal practice, you need every asset available to keep your business ahead of the competition.

How can you benefit directly from an attorney virtual receptionist?

More Leads

Every prospect that calls your law firm is a potential client, but many variables go into whether they are a good fit for your firm. Do you specialize in the type of law they are looking for? Does the workload their case require match the resources at your firm? Have they worked with a lawyer before? These questions can be nuanced, and require a specialized type of receptionist to produce the best results.

Virtual legal receptionist services are specifically designed to benefit attorneys. While they may not work in your office, they work with you to craft greetings, information collection forms, call-handling procedures and more, all aspects designed around your law firm’s processes. They’ll provide callers a great impression of your law firm from the first call, and you’ll know whether a contact is a good-fit or if you should ready a referral before you return their call.

In the legal profession, every case you take on is important. Smaller legal practices need not only case volume to keep the doors open, but quality cases. A virtual legal receptionist can help qualify these leads on your behalf.

Professional Image

Timing matters for legal buyers. If a prospective client calls your law firm and reaches an answering machine they are likely to look elsewhere for prompt and immediate service. Even if you’re a hard-working attorney who happened to be in court at the time.

A virtual receptionist at a law firm helps callers immediately and shows prospects that their legal problems matter to you. This makes them less likely to dial another firm.

For a stressed out legal client, punctuality and professionalism trump all and first impressions matter. Make sure your first impression is conveyed through the receptionist services that you use and not your voicemail.

Time Management

As a legal professional, your schedule is likely to be complex and unpredictable. A virtual legal receptionist will help you navigate your time commitments without sacrificing the high-quality and personal service you pride yourself on offering to clients.

For lawyers and attorneys who operate on billable hours especially, every minute counts. You should be in charge of your day, not your telephone.

Amata Law Office Suites: The Best Virtual Receptionist for Law Firms

Amata Law Office Suites is more than just a shared legal office space – we offer a full range of services designed directly around your needs, such as mail processing services, on-demand paralegal and notary services, and live legal receptionists.

As the world moves towards digital solutions, our idea of what a traditional office space looks like has changed. Virtual receptionists for legal services offer an optimal, professional, and cost-effective solutions to communicating with existing and future clients.

How can Amata help your practice? Contact us today to learn more about our range of legal services.

Discover our legal support staff for lawyers in Chicago.

Expanding Your Team Nationwide? This Law Firm Shares How It Hung a Satellite Shingle in Chicago

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As a leader in multiple industries, from health care and technology to food manufacturing and transportation, Chicago is known for its diverse economy. It also offers a robust yet “close-knit” legal community. All of these factors make the third largest U.S. city a top choice for law firms of all sizes to open a satellite office and build prospective clients. In fact, four of the world’s 10 largest law firms have Chicago branches.

But starting a firm in a new city is no easy task. According to commercial real estate company SquareFoot, the average cost for office space in downtown Chicago is $48 per square foot, while Law.com says firms typically allocate 300-400 square feet per employee. That means space for one attorney in a satellite office would cost no less than $14,000. There are plenty of other costs to consider as well, such as additional computers and insurance.

Earlier this year, Veteran Legal Group, a California-based firm representing armed service members and their families, wanted to expand. The firm needed an attorney to take on an influx of veteran disability claims and recruited Chicago-based attorney Edward Farmer, who has specialized in veteran disability law for the past 10 years.

“Chicago is a big-size market,” Farmer said about the Windy City’s appeal to Veteran Legal Group, adding that the city lacks stiff competition in veteran disability law. “There aren’t many attorneys who do what I do.”

Farmer has built his Chicago presence through Amata Law Office Suites, the city’s first legal community of more than 700 attorneys and seven Class-A offices in downtown Chicago. When Veteran Legal Group began searching for Chicago office space, Farmer steered the team toward Amata, where he operated a solo practice from 2017-2020.

“What you get for the price is much better than setting up an office from scratch,” he said. “You have the support of the staff … If I was here by myself, my workload would be five times as much.”

In less than two weeks, Farmer had his office arranged and started practicing with his new firm. In addition to a furnished office, he has access to Amata’s experienced paralegal team, live receptionists, copy machines and WiFi, all of which are necessary for communicating with his out-of-state team.

Amata also provides a built-in community of 700-plus legal colleagues, a support system that can be lacking for attorneys working out of satellite offices. Farmer is currently the only Veteran Legal Group lawyer in Chicago and therefore has little in-person interaction with coworkers. But he credits Amata for his relationship with Jim Thompson, a now-retired personal injury attorney, who informally mentored him while Farmer was starting his previous practice. They are still friends today.

As Veteran Legal Group continues to grow, Farmer expects another attorney to join him at the Chicago branch. When the time comes, he said the firm will simply need to lease another office. Amata will take care of the rest and allow them to focus on hiring the right attorney.

“It’s a great place for lawyers to work,” Farmer said. “I really believe that, especially if you’re in a private practice.”

Marc J. Bern & Partners LLP, a New York-based firm specializing in personal injury law, medical malpractice and more, also has a Chicago satellite office through Amata.

Call us or visit our website and take an online or in-person tour of one of our seven Class-A spaces to learn how our legal support services can help quickly set up your satellite office and establish your Chicago presence.

Discover our virtual offices in Chicago.

Mellisa Grisel: Unbundled Legal Services Provide a Bright Future for Law | THE 1958 LAWYER Podcast

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Few attorneys build their law firm against the billable hour. Mellisa Grisel is one of those. Atlas Legal Services, LLC, was made to offer flat fee “unbundled” legal services and provide affordable assistance to the under-represented. A set-up that not only helps the average citizen navigate through legal processes but, she argues, will be a huge component in the future of law.

Key moments:

  • “Unbundled” legal services explained and why they work (04:16)
  • How new service concepts play out in a real-life firm (16:26)
  • Technology’s role in the “unbundled” service setup (21:57)
  • What Mellisa Grisel wants to see changed in the legal profession (30:32)

Follow “The 1958 Lawyer” on Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | Stitcher

MEMORABLE QUOTES

“I didn’t really have other business models to work off of [when setting up my firm] so I had to do a lot of trial and error. But then you’ll see bigger firms who have the funds to do faster trial and error. They are moving some of their practice to flat fee services and they’re really starting to follow the money.”

“[Lawyers] don’t have to just be the hammer in the courtroom. They can the facilitator…. besides moving towards flat fees, I think it’s awesome moving towards collaborative law.”

“The entire frame of legal services, the provision of legal services, needs to change to provide access to justice.”

“I’ve had judges personally thank me for taking on clients on a limited scope basis because the judges couldn’t tell the litigants ‘hey, you need to bring me all your evidence tomorrow, get your bank statements in line.’ They can’t give that person advice.”

Mellisa Grisel

CONNECT WITH MELLISA GRISEL

Mellisa Grisel began her firm, Atlas Legal Services, LLC., right out of law school because she wanted an innovative way to provide legal services to people who may not have gotten legal assistance otherwise. Atlas is able to provide à la carte (otherwise known as “Unbundled”) legal services to people who may only need or may only be able to afford certain steps in their legal case.

This way of providing service is ideal for people with family law cases like divorce, child custody, adoption, litigation regarding unpaid bills, services that were never performed, personal property, and also landlord-tenant law. Atlas is quite literally designed to help small landlords who need help with a tenant – be it collecting unpaid rent, drawing up a lease that complies with local laws, or if it comes to it, eviction.

Atlas Legal Services: www.atlaslegalservices.com

Call Mellisa: 312-291-4643

LEARN MORE ABOUT LIMITED SCOPE REPRESENTATION

Have comments, questions, or concerns? Contact us at [email protected]

“The 1958 Lawyer and his 1938 Dollar” still defines the business of law…
It’s time for a change.

If you’re a lawyer, you’re familiar with the ABA article “The 1958 Lawyer and his 1938 Dollar” which gives our podcast its title, and its inspiration. That article was the start of the billable hour for law firms…And the last major change to the business of law, 70+ years ago now. Well, it’s past time for another change.

This podcast is all about bucking the status quo of the business of law. Your hosts Ron Bockstahler and Kirsten Mayfield run Amata Law Office Suites, providing law firms an alternative to the traditional fixed-cost business model that places unwanted stress on attorneys to work long hours that often-times lead to burn out, broken relationships and in many cases substance abuse. Each week they’ll discuss alternatives to the 12 hours days, endless rotation of clerks and paralegals, and the expensive offices leased to impress clients who rarely show up in person anymore. They’ll interview successful lawyers who are doing law differently, and finding a work-life balance while still running a successful firm.

Do you want to find a better way to run your law firm? It’s time for the next big change in the business of law, and you’ll get it here on The 1958 Lawyer.

More episodes of The 1958 Lawyer podcast

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