How Freelance Paralegals ACTUALLY Work with Law Firms Remotely | Systems, Collaboration & Workflow Explained

Speaker A: How do freelance paralegals actually work with law firms? Welcome back to the paralegal business podcast. Jaclyn Foster here. Chances are you're probably overthinking the actual mechanics of how attorneys and paralegals running businesses work remotely and co collaborate together through the work. Really, there's two sides to running your paralegal business. There's the back end, which are your contracts with your law firms, invoicing those firms, the timekeeping, the payment, the client relationship management, slash lead, follow up all those things, marketing, the bookkeeping, the admin, Then there's the front end. And we're going to talk specifically about the front end today, which is how does collaboration work? Where do attorneys assign the work, where do the files live? How do you track projects? How do flat fee workflows work? How do you communicate? How do you stay organized across multiple firms? How do you not create chaos when running your business? And thankfully, products like law Office AI built with the freelance paralegal in business. Collaboration with law firms in mind does exist and makes all of this, both the back end and the front end, incredibly seamless. But more on them later. First, what we need to do here today to show you how you're probably really overthinking it is discuss two different kinds of paralegal businesses. Because when somebody comes to me and asks, well, how does the collaboration work? Do I get uh, access to their files? Do they send me stuff? Do they give me a seat in their case management system? Like how does it work? It's always going to be a depend scenario. So of course, first and foremost it's your job as a paralegal running a business to determine the model of business that you are going to run. More importantly, uh, the services and how you're going to package the services in a way that supports the model that you've chosen. Now this is what we go through in an entire 21 day pathway inside the paralegals and business society. Because you need to have those layers first to understand exactly what kind of business you're creating, how it's marketable, how to price it, how to offer it, sell it, scale it, so on and so forth. But to just speak about the different types of services here in terms of, so we can get to the question of how are we operating with these law firms? And let's talk about those two lanes and how the operation is just a little bit different. So we have two categories of services that are most common in the paralegal business world. We have direct support services where you're fractionally integrating into a law firm, supporting them with ongoing case management. But as I want to draw a distinction to scoped deliverable services, those the scoped services are more going to be your. Here is what you get in exchange for this dollar amount. Discovery packages, demand packages, medical record summarizations, estate planning packages, research packages, anything packaged up. Now they're both, they both can be productized. So I'm scared to use the productized word, even though the productization is really like how you're making anything look like a product. Right? You could create direct support services, create monthly packages. Boom, you've productized a service. So first let's talk about the direct support services and how that typically looks when you're offering them to law firms. Because you are going to be coming in and supporting a case for an hourly exchange, whether that's uh, 20 hours per month, you sell them in packages, 40 hours per month, 80 hours per month, whatever that is within those packages under direct support, you are doing a variety of things for each case. And because, because of that, the most effective way for you to collaborate with that firm is integrate as closely as you possibly can into their existing systems where the files already live, where the task lists already live, where the conversations are already happening. Because if you're outside of that delegation, strain is going to be very real for that, uh, attorney and for that law firm, it's going to take them 10 extra steps to delegate one simple task to you. So with that in mind, you might be working for two to four attorneys at a time as a solo, uh, paralegal running your business. And you do need to manage your workload across all these attorneys going and bouncing into different systems. Now there's different platforms you can use, such as Shift just comes to mind where it helps you keep all of the profiles. And every time you click a profile, the appropriate tabs come up and logs you in and whatnot. You can use hacks like that. You can create different Google Chrome profiles for each firm and have your bookmarks know exactly where you need to go. That's where I say a lot of paralegals overthink how they're actually going to work with their law firms. We get in our own minds of do I have to have some fancy schmancy remote in desktop feature? Do I have to offer some crazy client portal? How do I work with them? Um, gets to be too much in your own mind. And I was very lucky that before I started my paralegal business, I had been subcontracting for two years prior to that. So from 2018 to 2020 I was subcontracting under another agency. And why I call myself lucky for that is because I got to see that fractional remote work was not that complicated. Yes, I had firms over the years want m me to remote into their desktop at their office. I had firms that just integrated me directly into their case management system. I had firms that just created a Dropbox file for us to work within. And that was like our dedicated place. But the point of it was everything was really attorney preference and how they could seamlessly delegate to you. And that is the most important thing you can take away from all of this is that you want to maintain ease of delegation for that firm hiring you in a fractional capacity. Now, before we get into talking about the scoped deliverable services where you're going to create packaged productized deliverables for your firm, I do want to pause for a second and talk about today's episode sponsor, Law Office AI. Law Office AI is a great tool for both the free front end and the back end. I don't partner with platforms lightly. I screen them, probably heavier than they screen me before we partner together, especially in the legal tech space because most tools completely ignore how paralegals and remote legal support teams actually operate within a law firm. But when I met the founder and developer of Law Office AI and he told me that they intentionally built the platform to with freelance paralegals and remote collaboration in mind, I literally got chills and I was like yes. And we spent hours together discussing because to me that was the moment I knew this industry has officially shifted and Law Office AI is at the absolute front of it. Law Office AI handles the entire operational side of running legal work. Contracts, invoicing, timekeeping, document signing, contact management, task organization, among so many other things. And this is things law firms and paralegal businesses, whether you're direct services or you are scoped out deliverables like we're about to talk about need in order to operate that front end, that logistics of the business side of working together. But what really stood out to me for especially the scoped out deliverables, the productized services, was the collaboration side that they built out. Things like flat feet, project tracking, limited scope workflows, search centralized case details, remote attorney collaboration, AI powered case summaries to get you up to speed faster and perform your work faster, timeline creation, faster onboarding. It genuinely feels like a real operating system for the modern legal work that I advocate for every single day. And not just another AI Tool. And yes, I absolutely think law firms themselves should be looking at this platform too. So if you're a paralegal, haven't jumped into business yet, check it out for your own firm currently. And if you're just ultimately looking for a smarter way to organize your legal operations, collaborate with firms remotely or build a more scalable paralegal business, definitely go check out Law Office. Because we partnered together and they are sponsoring this podcast episode. They put together an extended trial access for you. AI am linking them up below, but back to it. So scope Deliverable services. And now you'll understand why I felt like, okay, yeah, law office A.I. uh, is a great platform for both sides of the paralegal businesses that I coach and I mentor paralegals through Scope Deliverable services needs to be more maintained in your control. Why? Because you have to protect your profit margin on the deliverable you're sending out. Let me use a really simple example to explain what I mean here. As a paralegal, you could start a business drafting estate plans for law firms when they hire you. If your systems are, I'll jump into your case management flow. Give me access to your case management system or where you file all your documents and I'll go and sift and I'll look through everything I need through your notes to get it drafted. And then it becomes this conversation of, okay, you reach out to the client and clarify if Molly was actually supposed to get that 30 acre parcel or if it was supposed to be Sally. And all these back and forths until the final product comes out and you have delivered it. The more involvement you have with the variables of running a matter, a case, the unknowns, the things go haywire, clients go rogue, they won't respond, things get delayed. The more of that that get baked into your engagement, the less you are stretching that profit or stretching the value of that plan. If you're solo and you're offering these direct services as a solo, you're the only person drafting, reviewing, working with the attorney. Your time is money, even in a flat fee capacity. So you want to enable yourself to protect your time and your involvement within that flat fee and really ensure that you are scoping out the level of work and the level of involvement that you have. For instance, you're likely not going to want to be chasing clients unless you can figure out a very systematized way, like a client onboarding conversation, um, a client touch base conversation. Right. I've seen some paralegals do that most of the time. You should not be chasing clients for information, you should not be sifting through 800 documents and attorney scribble pads to try to gather the information and that you need to draft the estate plan. You should not be sifting, uh, through and having to let them know, hey, I don't have the deed to that property to draft this in. You should have a process within your business that says you upload into my system, into my portal that I control, that I am a one click entry point. I get in there and I am asking for the full client sheet, every piece of information I need to know. You've already done an onboarding. You know exactly their style, how they want the estate plan to come out as so on and so forth. And once I have everything I need, then I will begin drafting and provide you with the final document within X amount of time. That's how we operate, that's how we scale. Right? Because that is the next thing I want to talk about. You might be able to wing it and figure it out as a solo paralegal. And you're like, well, that sucks, that took me 10 hours longer, but whatever, like, I, uh, I'll just take the client. But if you ever want to scale. And by the way, it's not fun to do that either. Like your sanity will whittle away over time. Trust me, I say that from experience in learning these lessons because again, I never share anything here. That is theory. It is all experience based. You will run yourself so, so chaotic in your mind. You will feel drained, you will feel emotionally burnt out. And that's not why we go into business. We go into business for better income, better, more freedom and better quality of personal life. The works. Right? And that we love our careers. So why would you put yourself through that? But if you were to also scale into a team model or bringing in additional paralegals, your profit margins are that much more precious if you don't have a system in place. And you need to continue to pay your paralegal the rate that you told them you would pay them. Say it's per hour and you're giving them a per hour rate. But because of your chaotic, we just accommodate every attorney in the way they want to work with us. That hourly is going to be all over the place. You can't track it, you can't predict it, you can't really get a solid base on your pricing over it because it's all over the place. Right. Um, further, if you're like, oh, I can solve it, I'll just flat fee my paralegal too. Okay, well your paralegal you have your flat fee to is going to be able to take on less and less and less work the more you complicate the process. So if you're doing direct services to attorneys, doing a multitude of things throughout a, uh, multitude of cases, operating as a paralegal and extension of their team, but in a fractional capacity, you really need to focus on integrating into their systems as much as possible to lessen delegation fatigue for that attorney and make things a lot more seamless with that. You do need to operate the first front end of your business as well. With seamless onboarding contracts, client relationship management lead, follow up timekeeping, uh, the works, right? If you're operating in a more scoped out direct like flat fee deliverable, you really need to control those processes and you'll need to find the best management system that you can that easily allows attorneys into work with you. Make it still simple for attorneys to work with you. Don't make them jump through all sorts of crazy links and hoops and 17 different systems. And that is what honestly sold me the most on law office AI. You have one monthly charge, one fee for your overarching functionality of the process. So if you have not started a paralegal business yet and you want to explore, head over link in the description to my free paralegal business rate and revenue calculator. You're going to start explaining exploring what you could possibly make and scale to whether you add contractors scale into a team model. Stay solo, operate as a consultant. You'll see that there's so many varieties of business combinations in that calculator that factor into your rate. If you really enjoy that calculator, you can only imagine what I have waiting for you inside the paralegals and business society. I'm going to help pull out your unique stuff strengths, your skill sets over a 21 day pathway. And by the end of it, you'll have such crystal clarity on the type of business you are running. Your services, your value proposition, your branding, your pricing, everything in between, how you operate the works because it's a building blocks process. If you are a paralegal already running a business and you just like hanging out here, you have a place inside PIBs too. Remember I scaled my business to a half of a million dollars. I sold it, this is what I'm doing full time. So I'd love to help you get to a higher revenue potential and continue scaling that business into what you hope and dream it will become. So come join us. I would love to see you inside. And until next time, have great days ahead of you.