Personal injury attorneys could always use a few extra hours in the day. While lawyers can’t slow the Earth’s spin for a longer day, personal injury lawyers can improve their firm’s productivity by embracing the rise of paralegal outsourcing services, including virtual paralegals.
Many of tasks like answering phone or creating summaries of client interviews can be delegated to a virtual paralegal who works for a legal outsourcing services company. Using remote paralegals who are experienced legal professionals located in other time zones will help personal injury law firms save money, reduce your workload, and even create extra hours in your working day to bill those hours. Virtual paralegals services have many legal intake solutions, including no lengthy and expensive hiring and training process, the ability to work on-demand, reduced overhead costs, and more.
How virtual paralegals and outsourcing legal services help personal injury law firms
What exactly encompasses legal outsourcing services? It refers to the practice of law firms or legal-related businesses contracting with outside law firms or legal support services companies. These outside entities have a roster of employees who can be contracted out to law firms and legal-related businesses to help them meet their needs. Legal outsourcing services companies will take care of their employee’s human resource needs and assist law firms with contracting the best paralegal for their law firm needs.
Also, legal outsourcing services often include hiring virtual paralegals who can be located anywhere in the U.S. and even globally. Law firms can save a lot of time and money by having a virtual paralegal as an option. With the embrace of technology, law firms can hire online paralegals much easier than traditional recruitment routes as well as saving time and money by not having to train paralegals on legal issues, administrative, and other office tasks. Here are the top three reasons to contract with paralegal outsourcing services.
Save money with efficient remote paralegals
During busy times, remote paralegals can be responsible for certain tasks management (with lawyer supervision) at significantly lower rates than a lawyer would bill. This delegation makes your workload more manageable, giving you more time to focus on getting results for your clients. It also eliminates expensive overhead costs associated with on-site staff, such as renting an office space, buying office furniture and equipment, and providing health insurance and other benefits for employees. Another benefit of hiring paralegals online is that a virtual paralegal would not have to deal with the interruptions lawyers and on-site staff routinely face in an office. Rather, they can concentrate on the tasks at hand in their remote office.
Additionally, a personal injury law firm may not need a full-time paralegal, especially when there isn’t much substantive and administrative work. By using virtual paralegal services on-demand, attorneys can save money by not having to hire a paralegal in-house for full-time or even part-time. Lawyers can eliminate the need to worry about keeping paralegals busy, having to lay them off, or paying their salaries when money is tight. With virtual paralegals whom a legal outsourcing services company employs, law firms also avoid costs associated with a paralegal’s vacation, sick time, retirement incentives, and health insurance payments. Rather, the paralegal outsourcing services company takes care of those costs for their virtual paralegal employees. Your personal injury law firm can save a lot of money and increase profits in turn by contracting for virtual paralegal services.
Wider paralegal legal talent pool with outsourced paralegal services
Paralegals are legal professionals with a wide range of skills and experiences. They are very versatile employees and can handle different kinds of tasks for an attorney. Some paralegals even have specialized training, such as in personal injury law, family law, or criminal law. For law firms, it can be challenging to find the right paralegal with the background and specialization required for your law firm. It takes a lot of time and resources to train a paralegal in-house and get them up to speed on certain areas of law. Often law firms have to recruit from a pool of paralegals within their local area, which limits the talent pool. Even if law firms conducted a larger search for a paralegal who may be willing to relocate. But waiting on a paralegal to relocate takes even more time and money away from your law firm. Not to mention, other law firms will be competing for those top paralegal candidates too.
Legal outsourcing services that are virtual, like those Lexvia offers, can help you find the right fit for an on-demand personal injury paralegals’ skills, experience, and qualifications from a much larger geographic area. These companies can provide your law firm with virtual paralegals who have extensive experience in specific law practice areas or have training on specific technologies, such as e-filing or legal document software. With such paralegal outsourcing services, your personal injury plaintiff law firm’s specific needs are supported by giving you flexible, tailor-made legal outsourcing solutions.
Scalability – more staff or less with a single email
Personal injury practices are subject to ebbs and flows—more so than most other law firms due to the nature of the cases. Sometimes, a personal injury law firm may intake a major personal injury case. They may need to hire additional legal staff for that particular legal case. However, the law firm cannot keep them on payroll permanently due to the lack of cases bringing in assignments and income. With these temporary hires, the law firms will have to release them once the need for their services during the evidence review or litigation processes has ended. Law firms don’t always want to hire new permanent staff members, whether full- or part-time when they know their workload will decrease drastically in a few months.
With remote paralegals or virtual paralegal outsourcing services, expanding or shrinking your personal injury law firm staffing levels is easy. Additional staff is only a brief email or phone call away, and they are ready to help you quickly handle any major spikes in litigation workload within a few days or even hours. Similarly, another short email or phone call reduces the workforce size without causing significant disruptions or lay-offs when demand goes down.
Legal services outsourcing and embracing cloud-based legal management
If your personal injury law firm practice is seriously considering contracting for legal services outsourcing, then you should also consider moving towards a cloud-based legal management platform. By embracing technology, your law firm’s documents, files, software, and other legal tech apps in the cloud can be accessed by your employees from anywhere at any time. A cloud-based matter management software helps improve legal management by enabling better communication, accountability, collaboration, and insights across the firm to get data in real-time. Legal management software aligns with the personal injury litigation process, so personal injury attorneys can know where a given case is during the legal process with the simple click of a button.
While you’re in “outsourcing sign-up mode,” sign up for a free demo of CloudLex’s next-gen cloud-based legal platform. Our legal practice management software is widely used by both on-staff and virtual paralegals, working for the plaintiff-side personal injury law firms in the US.
