Strategic law firm outsourcing can help you streamline your business

For entrepreneurial lawyers transitioning from start-up to growth mode, strategic small law firm outsourcing can help you maximize your impact.

When you first launched your practice, you likely handled everything from case work to billing on your own. As your law firm grows, however, you need to invest your personal time where it will have the most impact.

Doing it all alone will not only set you up for burnout, but it can impede your firm’s growth. So, how do you approach outsourcing in a way that makes sense for you?

Prioritize your time

As the professional service provider in your firm, you want to ensure that you devote your time to tasks with the most impact on clients and profits. While you won’t be able to step away from all business or administrative functions, you do need to let go of the ones that take too much of your focus or time.

Clio counsels:

“Think about all the mundane routine tasks that can be done by outside help. You can leverage the strength of other experts to save time, cut costs, and reduce your workload. This allows you to focus on what you do best. In other words, bringing in new business for your firm and offering top service to existing clients.” 

As an independent lawyer, you should set priorities for your time that honor client needs and your personal need for work-life balance. Set a cap on the number of hours you want to work each week.

Spend one or two weeks tracking exactly what you do each day, from billable client work to struggling with IT issues. Once you have a clear vision of where your time goes now, you can begin to identify areas for improvement.

Outsource some functions

After your audit, have you discovered that you spend too much time:

  • Writing briefs
  • Filing paperwork
  • Invoicing and billing
  • Answering general inquiries from clients or prospects
  • Posting to social media or maintaining your website/blog
  • Trying to solve IT or other technology issues

You are not alone. A recent survey showed that:

“70% of [lawyers] think they work too many hours, and 82% believe they spend too much time on nonbillable tasks like administrative work and email management.”

Once you know which non-billable tasks suck the most of your time, energy and attention, consider how to outsource those. A virtual assistant could handle general inquiries and basic website maintenance. An external marketing firm can write your blog and social media posts. An independent bookkeeper surely loves dealing with numbers and billing far more than you do, right?

Choose one or two areas where outsourcing might help you regain your valuable time.

Hire wisely

When outsourcing doesn’t make sense, hiring might. Onboarding a paralegal or additional attorneys might make more sense for your firm in its current stage of growth.

Again, take time to review your area of greatest need before you hire. If you need the most help with administrative tasks, consider hiring a legal assistant. If you really need more brainpower for case work, focus on hiring skilled attorneys.

Importantly, don’t wait until you have a crisis to hire. You want to give yourself enough time to fully assess potential staff for culture fit and more. Hasty hiring tends to lead to poor alignment and frustration.

Collaborate with others

Hiring permanent staff is not the only solution to manpower issues. You can work with legal professionals, including other lawyers, on a contract or informal basis.

Bottom line, when your small law firm begins to grow, you need to think beyond your personal capacity. In order to scale to a mid-stage law firm that can take on more or bigger clients, you need other people.

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