In today’s competitive market place, are you looking for ways to reduce costs and provide faster turnaround to your clients? Do you operate with a budget in mind and find getting help on a temporary or full time basis is too expensive? Do you have difficulty finding competent help when you need it?
Continue reading "Working in the 21st Century with Virtual Paralegals" »
The Center for Competitive Management has scheduled a 75-minute audio conference for Tuesday, May 12, 2009, at 2:00 p.m. E.S.T. concerning the pros and cons of hiring and managing Virtual Assistants. Traverse Legal Attorneys Enrico Schaefer and Brian Hall will be two of the expert faculty who will present real-life examples from both the law firm and the virtual worker perspectives.
Please visit the following link to register for the conference: Virtual Paralegals and Legal Assistants: How to Maximize Cost Savings & Increase Client Value.
Small and medium sized firms always hire just as needed. Not only are Large law firms not hiring, they’re actually laying off attorneys and downsizing. That means that there is a lot of legal talent, both young and old on the street looking for work. Doesn’t it seem like it is time for law firms to consider virtual workers and lawyers to consider contract work?
As you know, our law firm has had tremendous success with its virtual worker program, working through a basecamphq.com extranet system. What you may not recall is that we launched a job board for both virtual workers and employers looking for independent contract workers at the Greatest American Worker Job Board.
We have been extremely impressed with the response. Thus far, 141 job seekers have added their resumes and 37 employers are looking to hire. Note that posting for both employers and employees is, at this point, free. There are some amazing resumes available online. You might want to register here and check them out.
I am proud along with my partner to be presenting a webinar for the Center For Competitive Management (CCM) titled “Virtual Paralegals and Legal Assistants: How to Maximize Cost Savings & Increase Client Value”. This should be a fascinating presentation based on our firsthand experience in employing virtual law clerks, paralegals, and lawyers over the last four years, including our very first virtual law clerk who recently joined our firm as a partner last year. Here is the course description:
Every week, we receive dozens of resumes from individuals who want to be virtual law clerks, virtual lawyers, virtual paralegals and general virtual staff. Clearly, there are a tremendous number of incredibly talented people out there who are offering their service as virtual contractors.
The Greatest American Lawyer Blog is proud to announce that it has purchased and launched a free virtual worker / job posting board at http://virtualworkers.greatestamericanlawyer.com/. Virtual workers can upload their resumes in order to seek employment from law firms, corporations seeking to supplement their in-house legal staff and other people and entities interested in contracted workers.
If you are a virtual worker looking an employer match, feel free to create a profile and upload your resume here.
If you are an employer who is seeking virtual workers within the legal services industry, upload your job posting here.
At Traverse Legal, we believe that virtual workers will be a significant part of the labor pool for law firms, lawyers and other companies looking for legal professionals. To all my fellow bloggers out there, we would appreciate if you would announce and link to this new service as we continue to promote the virtual worker model as THE BEST singular alternative for law firms and in-house legal staff to solve the problem of knowing when to hire that next worker, the constant fluctuation of workloads and obtaining specialized workers within niche practice areas.
We have created two new categories for virtual worker issues. The first category is a listing of virtual workers who have submitted their background information and websites to us. That link can be found here.
The second is a blog category which includes all of our virtual worker posts. That link is found here.
If you are a virtual worker and want to get listed, go ahead and contact us. We just purchased some job posting software which we will be implementing over the next month or two. This will allow us to have a job board for both virtual workers and prospective employers right here on the Greatest American Lawyer Site!
Since we are going to be having some upcoming posts on virtual workers, we thought we would recap our best posts on virtual workers over the last 3 ½ years. As you know, there are tremendous benefits to incorporating a virtual worker into your law firm business model. Here is our bullet list of favorite posts:
As you all know, I'm a big fan of virtual workers. Every month, we get dozens of emails and unsolicited résumés from virtual paralegals, law clerks and even lawyers who wish to work for our firm. There is no question that there is a ready supply of virtual workers for the legal services market.
In an effort to help promote the benefits of virtual workers and especially virtual paralegals, we will start a new message category called "Virtual Paralegals for Hire." If you are a virtual worker who wants the Greatest American Lawyer blog to promote you and your website, just send us an email at Greatest.American @gmail.com and we will feature you here.
Virtual workers offer a tremendous advantage to law firms. They work as independent contractors on a flex schedule. If you don't have work for them to do, you don't have to send them work. If you get busy all of a sudden or need a quick turnaround, you can tap into your virtual worker pool and kick things out quickly and easily. Every law firm struggles with the question of when to hire that next staff member. While you will certainly pay more on an hourly basis for a virtually, you will not be strapped with the overhead of office space, employee benefits, health care, and a permanent employee (by weekly paychecks). Give it a try. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.
I previously posted about new skills required of the workforce in the technology age. I remember at my old law firm, we decided to abandon our Word Perfect/Corel Suite of applications when we got into a new computer lease. We were spending approximately $14,000 dollars in additional license fees by having both Word and Word Perfect on every computer. The commercial cases all involved word documents. Our clients were using word documents. But when it came time to tell the staff that we were switching, many of the workers rebelled. Despite the fact that we offered substantial retraining and resources to ease the transition, many of the workers were stuck in the Word Perfect mud.
Forgetting the fact that Word Perfect does offer a better "reveal codes" function, this was a relatively minor technology change in the grand scheme of things. Yet, you would have thought the world was coming to an end.
Those workers, who rebelled, would not qualify as good candidates in the technology age. A worker in today’s world must be flexible, be constantly willing to change with innovations being deployed by their company, and always be open to try new things.
At our firm, we deploy new technology and refine processes almost on a weekly basis. Our workers are the best kind of workers for the technology age. They know that there will be challenges in using and incorporating new technologies. But they are up for the task. Perhaps flexibility and open-mindedness are the most important traits for a true technology age worker
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