recorder, you probably don’t have much job security
as it is. Technology is advancing at a rapid pace,
and the keys to keeping up are twofold: always keep
learning and always know who you are. As long
as there are humans, there will be conflict, so it’s
unlikely the legal system and conflict resolution
mechanisms will go away anytime soon. The role
lawyers, paralegals, and others in the legal field will
play in 50 years is very likely to change – just like it
has from the days of legal office support staff, whose
jobs consisted largely of typing legal documents
on typewriters with no “cut and paste,” no way to
insert a sentence into the paragraph before, and
no internet search or email to get a quick bit of
information. The more you actively embrace your
own strengths that align with the needs of the firm
and the more you are able to shed the menial or
routine tasks, the better able you will be to continue
to grow, both personally and professionally.
While I do not have a crystal ball, my prediction is
that as some of the more mechanical aspects of the
practice of law become more robotic, efficient, and
potentially impersonal, some of the most valuable
traits that both lawyers and paralegals will bring
to the table are the human touch – compassion,
understanding, intuition, and even art and
creativity. Whatever your gift is now, that’s the thing
that will translate to whatever the future may bring.
Scaling Up and Down To Meet Clients’ Needs
Outsourcing can help with your own job security if
you can master the art of knowing how to scale up
or down as clients’ needs and caseloads fluctuate
and become the point person to manage that.
Imagine that you are the only support staff person
working in a two-attorney firm and one of the
attorneys lands a client whose case involves a huge
data crunching project that (even if you were a total
math whiz) on your own could never have enough
hours in the day to get done. What if instead, you
just tell the attorney, “Sure, we can handle that!”
and then you call upon your trusty list of 20 data
entry vendors halfway around the world who get
it all done in a week? Think of how impressed
the client will be that this “small firm” is able to
turn around these kind of results in such a short
time period! Don’t you feel a huge weight off your
shoulders knowing you’re not the one facing a huge
mountain of data entry to do? It’s also likely that
the firm will spend less money on the remote help
than it would have to pay you for the same amount
of time spent or work done. Some of that cost
savings can be passed along to the client, making
the firm more competitive and likely to get repeat
business from the happy client, which again weighs
in favor of your job security!
Delegate, Don’t Abdicate
In the popular business book “E-Myth Revisited,”
author Michael Gerber describes a common
temptation of abdicating responsibility rather
than delegating it. Imagine you have a certain
kind of task that is a huge burden or annoyance or
that always gets back-burnered, even though it is
important, such as a large volume of manual data
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entry that needs to be done for a case. If spreadsheets aren’t your cup
of tea, you may be tempted to dump a pile of .pdf documents into some
distant person’s lap and say “Have at it! Crunch this data!” However,
without establishing proper parameters, guidelines, and directions,
this is likely to be a disaster. Then, you’ll throw your hands up and say
“Fine! I’ll just do it myself!” and plod through it and resent the whole
outsourcing experiment. The key to outsourcing is for you and/or
the attorney to work through exactly what needs to be done. Ideally,
someone in-house would work through the structure of the spreadsheet
at a minimum — what should the column headers be, what kinds of
results are you looking to obtain, which information in the source
documents does (and does not) need to be entered, etc. Then, allow for a
test run so that you can spot check and make sure all is going as hoped,
or, if not, you can step in and correct the course, or if it’s bad enough,
change the direction entirely. After that, your main job is to check in and
assume the quality assurance role. Is progress being made in a timely
fashion, are complications arising, etc.? Outsourcing is not like a rice
cooker where you just throw stuff in, push a button, and return to the
finished product; it’s more like a stew, where you have to do a lot of prep
work and then come back to stir and assess from time to time.
Be Cognizant of the Financial Impact of Outsourcing
With effective outsourcing, the financial impact of outsourcing certain
functions can result in both lower costs to the client and more profit to
the firm. However, if done wrong, outsourcing can be a financial drain
on the firm’s profits. Let’s look at an example, using a standard billable
hour model. To make the math easy, let’s say your attorney’s hourly rate
is $300, your paralegal rate is $100, and the billable “admin” rate is $50 –
but the clients are never charged for work that is considered “overhead”
(that is, general work that isn’t attributable to any particular case). You,
the paralegal, are expected to bill at least 75 percent of your time spent
in the office, so for an average eight hour workday, that is six hours
of billable time, which comes to $600 for the workday. However, if for
two of those hours you are really only doing “admin” work — scanning
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