Grow Your Firm with Freelance Lawyers

Okay, so welcome everybody to the Center for Practice Management's Learning Objectives webinar from the North Carolina Bar Association, and we are thrilled to welcome Kristen Tyler from Lawclerk. She in fact is the co-founder of Lawclerk, which she's going to explain to you what it is. I think it's a really interesting and unique way of both lawyers getting work and getting help. It's kind of a marketplace for that, so I think it It's a really interesting product and she can tell us a little bit about the background. Kristen is a lawyer and has been practicing law for more than 10 years and she practices in estate planning and probate. So without further ado, I also, for the attendees, if you want to ask any questions, yes, I will definitely ask her the questions for you. So one thing is, A question that's already come up, and I'm confident that Kristen's going to address it, but is there an ethical restriction to engaging law clerk services at a flat fee and then charging for the service at an hourly rate based on the time? So I think she's probably gonna go through some of this and then will definitely chat the questions to me, and then I'll also open it up after we stop the recording and let you ask her questions as well.

As well.

So, Kristin, please go ahead.

Particular area of law you practice in, and it's a great way to just, you know, clear out those logjams from your to-do list. And so we will absolutely dive into some of those things. So for those of you on the call who are solo attorneys or who have founded a firm, you know that when you first start your firm, you do all the things. Okay, you are, you might very well be answering the phones, you're doing the marketing, you're, you know, putting together all of the engagement agreement forms, or, you know, you're hiring, you're also lawyering, you know, there's the lawyering that has to get done too. And so it's an exciting and exhilarating time when you start your firm, and definitely that's the perfect time for you to do all the things in your firm and understand how every aspect of your firm works. Make sure it's set up the way that you want it to move towards success. Okay? But as time goes on and you take on more and more clients, then we find that, you know, I love this meme. It says you can do all of the things some of the time and some of the things all of the time. But the fact of the matter is you can't do all of the things all of the time, especially if you are focused on growing your firm, helping more clients, hitting revenue goals, whatever goal you're working towards. At some point you're going to need some help to get there. And so that's where outsourcing can be a valuable tool. So I'm going to get back on my soapbox for a minute if you'll indulge me. And I want to challenge everyone to stop thinking like a lawyer, stop thinking about legal, you know, think about one of the— a celebrity, someone famous who, you know, maybe a singer who has achieved high levels of success, someone who's really skyrocketed and is just who's at the top of their game. Maybe that's, whoever that is to you, just envision that, okay? For me, a person that comes to my mind is Beyoncé. She's an amazing singer, incredibly talented, beautiful, just, I mean, she is all the things. But what I want you to challenge yourself to think about is whoever you have in your mind, whether it's Beyoncé or someone else, imagine how far they would be in life if they insisted on doing every little thing themselves. Okay? What if Beyoncé insisted on writing every single song, singing the backup lyrics? If she insisted on editing the recordings? If she insisted on designing the COVID art for the CD? Do they even make CDs anymore? If she insisted on negotiating the deal for all of her contract venues and, you know, had to proofread and okay the ticket stub for the ticket sales? You get where I'm going. You know, someone like Beyoncé, yes, early on she did her own hair and makeup and wrote her songs and booked her own deals. But as she got more and more successful, In order to reach her bigger goals, she surrounded herself with a talented team, trained them, and together they worked towards, you know, world domination and tons of success. So I think that we can all, you know, learn a lot from whoever your favorite entertainer may be, whether it's Beyoncé or someone else. And I want to challenge you today to think a little bit outside of legal and channel your own inner Beyoncé and ways that you can take your success to the next level. Okay, so as you know, we're going to talk about outsourcing today. Why outsourcing? Why does it make sense for a lawyer, for a business person, when they're trying to grow their business? Um, it can help you grow your firm, it can help you make more money, it can help minimize your own stress. I mean, who here could go for a little less stress these days? I mean, sign me up for whatever gets me there. And it can also help you access deep expertise when you even. So there's a lot of great reasons to consider outsourcing, and hopefully we can open your mind to some of those today. Okay, so within your law firm, you know, there's some traditional roles that you may be thinking about staffing. Whether you're a true solo entirely on your own, you're thinking about your first hire, you know, maybe then your first hire is more of a receptionist or an office manager type role, someone to help with marketing. You know, obviously later on you're looking at adding paralegals and attorneys to get substantive work done. And that's really where I'm going to focus on today is just freelance lawyers and that substantive legal work. But just keep in mind that there are more and more resources coming online every month for all of these different roles, whether you do need help with answering the phones or typing or marketing or any of these roles. There are virtual outsourced options for all of these. If this is something that intrigues you and you like the flexibility and the affordability of staffing your law firm this way. So just know there's a ton of resources out there. I know Catherine and everyone at the Center for Practice Management can help you find those if you're struggling to find one that's a good fit for you. But they're out there. Just go hunt them down. Okay. So when looking at hiring, let's think about hiring an associate attorney. Okay. You've grown your firm, you're taking on more cases, and you've determined you need help from another lawyer. You know, there's a lot of analysis that goes into, am I ready to hire an associate? Am I not? You know, it's a big commitment. It's expensive. And a lot of lawyers I talk to worry about, well, are they really busy enough to take on that responsibility of a full-time hire and the payroll and the overhead that goes with it. And so with every option for hiring, whether you're hiring a full-time, part-time, a traditional in-the-office hire, or a virtual associate hire, you know, there's pros and cons. So let's look at some of those quickly. You know, with the in-office traditional associate hire, you know, the pros are it's nice to have another lawyer around. That can meet with clients or go to court. It's nice to have what I call a coffee buddy that you can sit around with and talk strategy, bounce things off of each other when you're talking about different approaches for your client. Of course, there's cons. There are pros and cons to everything in life, right? You know, with that traditional associate hire in the office, it's adding to your overhead. You not only need office space for them, equipment, insurance, bar dues, continuing education, et cetera, et cetera, not to mention health insurance and all of those things. It's more than just the salary that you have to meet every 2 weeks. You know, another con I hear from so many lawyers— I bet Catherine knows too— that you have to pay these associate attorneys even when it's slow. I, I can't tell you how many lawyers the past few years I've talked to who say, yeah, I haven't been able to pay myself in 2 or 3 months because I had to pay my associate. Uh, you know, and that's a real problem. Of course, I hear stories of drama. We, we get drama even in our own firm. We have 16 lawyers in our firm now, and inevitably there's turnover. You know, there's always the risk that you hire a new associate, you train them, you share your expertise, only to see them leave to go join your competitor or to open up their own shop and be your direct competitor a few years down the road. So, you know, those are some of the factors that lawyers think about when they're analyzing if, again, traditional associate hire makes sense. Now, on the virtual side, of course, cons there too. You know, it can be intimidating to try something new, to work with someone remotely in a way that's different. It can also be a challenge to know how to find the right freelancer. Hopefully we can solve that one today. But the pros of having a virtual associate or virtual freelance lawyer, whatever you want to call it, it means the same thing, is that you're only going to pay them when you actually have work for them to do. You're often able to tap into someone that has years of experience, sometimes even more experience than you, and you can draw on that without having to get them up to speed by training them yourself. And of course, deep subject matter expertise. Every single week we see lawyers connecting with other lawyers that have decades of experience and deep expertise to really give their case a boost. So, you know, you got to do this analysis yourself, but these are some of the factors to think about and consider. Now, obviously, when it goes to working with a virtual freelance lawyer, there's some misperceptions out there that I hear from lawyers. Let's see if we can't bust a few of those down. I can't tell you how many times I've been working at a legal conference somewhere, you know, in the before days when we could still go out in public, and a lawyer would say to me, well, who are these freelancers and why can't they get real jobs? And I hope you see my air quotes there around real jobs. What is a real job in the law? I see lawyers doing so many different interesting things with their law degrees, so I really don't think there's any such thing as a real job. You could do anything with a law degree, but from my perspective, after having the opportunity to get to know hundreds of these freelance lawyers— and we now have just under 3,000 freelance lawyers in our network, so there are thousands of them— you know, these freelancers are, for a variety of reasons, choosing very intentionally, choosing a different career path. Um, yes, some of them are taking a break from working in an office to stay home with children or with elderly parents or other sick family members. We have some of them who are military spouses. They get moved around every few years. We have a lot of freelancers that are solo attorneys themselves, and they turn to freelancing when their own practice ebbs and flows, as it does. You know, any lawyer knows that. We also have some really interesting freelancers who have built up their own book of business doing freelance work. They don't want to deal with clients. They don't want to go to court. They only want to do the research, the analysis, and the writing. Good for them. Um, and one of the last categories of freelancers that really gets me excited is we have got a whole, I don't know, dozens of freelance lawyers who are actually either retired or semi-retired. These are people with decades of experience. They have a deep passion for the law. And again, they just, they would rather do some research and writing than go play golf or fish every day. So why not collaborate with them and draw off their expertise and you know, their mentorship. Another misperception I hear is, oh, it just takes too long to delegate. I'll do it myself. Okay, raise your hand, like literally in your office by yourself, raise your hand if you've ever heard yourself say that. I mean, I say it once a week. Okay. Like I, we all struggle with this. Like I'll just do it myself, whether it's something you ask your spouse to do or your kids or someone at your office. All too often we take it on ourselves because we think it will just be faster. But in reality, let's let's say you have a motion for summary judgment that you need to write. And you know, you're busy, you've got other things going on too, so you keep putting it off. You know, if you would delegate that motion for summary judgment, maybe it takes you half an hour to an hour to give a freelance lawyer the documents and the instructions they need to go do the written work. So maybe you invest an hour to get them up to speed, but then it takes them 10 or 12 hours to write that motion. Okay, that's 10 or 12 hours that you're saving yourself. And yes, you'll have some time at the end to review it as well. But at most, maybe you're having around 2 hours or less to set them up for the work, to review the work, whereas they're spending 10 to 12 hours of the substantive work, research, and drafting. I mean, that frees up 10 to 12 hours of your time to go to court, meet with other clients, etc. So really challenge yourself when you find yourself thinking it takes too much time, because chances are it really doesn't. It's just You know, it's the first few times it can feel like it's taking too much time setting up the freelancer for success, but it really doesn't. The last misperception is I've talked to a lot of lawyers who say, well, you know, my clients want me to do all their work, so I gotta do all the work. The reality of that is that your client trusts you to be the captain of their case, to be their quarterback. They want you to oversee the strategy, to be there for all of the big events of the case, whether it's a settlement conference and mediation, you're negotiating a deal, you're going to trial, whatever. They want you there for those big things. And they trust in your judgment and skill to know when it's appropriate to delegate other parts of the work to trusted team members. And that includes freelance lawyers. It's interesting to me, we have some lawyers on our network who have now been working with freelancers for years and their clients actually request them. They're like, hey, can you get that same freelance lawyer to write this motion that wrote the last motion that we won, you know? And so that's really interesting. But the client trusts you to quarterback the case and to staff it appropriately using your judgment. So hopefully that gives you some food for thought if you've ever found yourself thinking any of these misperceptions. So there's lots of benefits of freelance lawyers. Obviously I've hit on some of these already, so I'm going to kind of breeze through these, but let's review some of these. Make more money. And I will go into the ethics slide later on. I'm not skipping over it yet, but absolutely making more money is a big benefit of working with freelance lawyers rather than hiring the traditional associate. You're going to keep your overhead much lower. You can be nimble to staff up when you need it without having to lay off people when you, you slow down. And, you know, there's really an overabundance of lawyers out there who are highly trained, highly specialized. Now, right now, we're seeing a lot of lawyers coming out of Big Law that have really sophisticated expertise, and you can collaborate with them on an as-needed basis to get the kind of help you need when you need it. And bring more money into your firm. Freelance lawyers are absolutely another revenue stream. They are not an expense. I've mentioned it a few times already, but expertise. We, you know, we see time and time again where unique issues come up in the law and you need to just tap into someone's mental bank and find out an answer. You know, when I was at the bigger firm years ago, I had this widely available to me. I could walk down the hall and ask our employment lawyer a question. I could walk down the hall and ask our IP lawyer a question. I could walk down down the hall and ask our gaming lawyer a question. When you go to a smaller firm, you don't have someone down the hall with all of those different specialized areas of expertise. But through the beauty of working with a freelance lawyer, you know, we see time and time again where just a couple weeks ago we had a lawyer in Texas and said, I need to talk to a lawyer in Florida with employment law expertise to talk about a few questions that my client, who's a corporation, that they're facing. They were able to collaborate. We saw a family law lawyer recently who was doing a divorce that involved one of the assets was an airplane, and they hadn't dealt with an airplane in a divorce before, and they had some questions about aviation law and, you know, the rights with the ownership of the plane and the hangar, etc. So you can really find people through a freelance lawyer network so that it's like the equivalent of walking down the hall to ask a question of a lawyer with a certain area of expertise.. You just do it online instead. Flexible staffing, number 3 benefit. You know, if you happen to practice in a certain type of law that has seasonal busy periods, well, maybe you do immigration law and there's certain times of the year that you're busy because a certain type of visa is— you can only apply that time frame and you got to get all your clients' applications in or you're going to miss that window. Or maybe, you know, tax law or whatever it may be, or even just you know, you have 2 or 3 huge trials a year and you need help with all that last-minute trial prep, you can staff up with freelance lawyers when you need them without the overhead the rest of the time when you're not as busy during those non-peak times of the year. So that's an interesting benefit as well. Number 4, okay, who here, another show of hands, I wish I could see your hands, who here does not like the billable hour? You know, a lot of lawyers that I talk to more and more are trying to move away from it. And if you're trying to include alternative fee arrangements, flat fees, minimum fees, whatever it may be, having the flexibility to work with freelance lawyers on a flat fee basis as well can, can help you build that business model. And it can really differentiate you in your market, make you more competitive to clients who, you know, frankly, clients are getting more sophisticated too, and they like those flat fee and minimum fee type arrangements. So that is definitely something to keep in mind if you're trying to make yourself more competitive in the market by offering different financial arrangements. Freelance lawyers fit nicely into that. This ties into benefit number 5 of lowering your, your costs and making you more competitive, so I won't, I won't harp on that. I do have one story though about the competitive nature of this. So we work with lawyers everywhere, but one of my favorites is a man who is in the DC metro area, Silver Springs, Maryland. He does federal employment litigation plaintiff side. He had a potential client come into him who was shopping around a case. It was a whistleblower case, and 4 lawyers before my guy had told this potential client, look, you don't have a case. Either, you know, there's this old case law, it says XYZ, I'm sorry, but you don't have a case. Sorry, just go back to work. Too bad. Well, then this potential client met with my client, and instead of just telling him, you know what, your case is a dud, he said, you know what, let me, if you would invest $500 with me flat fee, I will hire a freelance lawyer to go in, do some additional research to make sure there's not something else out there that would alter these facts for you. And so that's what he did. He paid the $500 flat fee. The attorney instead hired a freelance lawyer through Lawclerk to go research it. They actually found an unpublished opinion that had just been decided. It hadn't been published yet. That had a significant impact on the potential facts of this case. The attorney took on the case, and he reported they had a very favorable settlement from the employer within about 4 months. So, you know, this made him more competitive. It helped him, you know, he would probably not have invested his own time to go do that research because he's very busy with his caseload. But by collaborating with a freelance lawyer to get that basic research memo done, they found that there was a shot, they went for it, litigated it, and got a really good result for the client, which is really exciting to me. So it can definitely help you compete if you, you want to try to, you know, challenge and take on cases like that, but you struggle to find the time to do the legwork yourself to find out if they're a go or not. Okay. Okay, so the big question we always get is, is outsourcing ethical? Absolutely, it's ethical. Um, and I know that doing outsourcing in a virtual way might seem different, but think about it. For years, people have, or attorneys have outsourced various roles within a law firm to an actual law clerk coming out of school or a paralegal or an associate. Now we just have a technology tool that makes it easier for you to collaborate with people all over the country with deep expertise. When you think about the ethics rules, and again, this is not an ethics CLE. If there's interest in that, we can come back and do a more in-depth ethics CLE, but the key things to keep in mind are these rules, okay? Competency. All right, you should not take on a case and outsource the work if it is really far outside your core area of competency. Okay, I'm an estate planning lawyer. If I have a potential client come to me with a murder case, I'm not taking on a murder case. I'm not going to take and outsource the motions and the research and the briefing. That is so far outside of my lane, my, my— so far outside of my core area of competency, I have no business taking it. I need to refer that case on or co-counsel. But you do need to stay within your zone of competency when you're doing work, even if you're outsourcing it. Okay, number 2, confidentiality. Absolutely, you need to be mindful of working with freelance lawyers, maintaining your clients' confidences. Now, through our platform, every freelance lawyer is required to sign a non-disclosure agreement for every piece of work. Of course, they have their underlying ethical duty as well, so they are all lawyers. But we also have some of our clients who ask for for an even higher level of confidentiality agreement, non-disclosure agreement, whatever, for each piece of work. And that's fine. If you need to do that for your own comfort level, you can absolutely do that. And those are some options there. Next rule, involving supervising of other lawyers. So, you know, I think that sometimes we see lawyers that come on, they outsource a piece of work, and then they just want to like forget about it. They're like, you handle it, I want to be done with it. And you can't do that. You need to still be involved in overseeing that freelance lawyer's work. Making sure that they are, you know, if they're going to communicate with clients or the court, that they're properly licensed at that jurisdiction. Under our system, we're set up so that our freelance lawyers never do those things. They never should be talking to your clients or opposing counsel or the court. They should only be working in the background under your supervision, which is how the ethics work well with supervision. And that ties nicely into the last rule. I put UPL. That's the unauthorized practice of law. So if you, let's say you need a lawyer, you need to delegate to have a lawyer go take a deposition for you. Obviously taking a deposition would cause that lawyer to engage in the practice of law. That would mean that you need to have a freelance lawyer who is properly licensed in that jurisdiction to go engage in the practice of law and take that deposition. Now we, that's not one of our services by the way. Lawclerk is geared for all of the written work. We are geared for research, helping with discovery, helping with writing motions, letters, agreements, pleadings, etc. We are there for all of the written work done in the background under your supervision. And that's how we can avoid any unauthorized practice of law issues, because our freelancers are not to be talking to clients, opposing counsel, or the court. Hopefully that makes sense. But the big bifurcating line there is when you are looking at the kind of work you need to outsource, whether or not that work would require the freelancer to engage in the practice of law or not. And then obviously you would have to take the appropriate course of action on what the answer to that question is, so. But the big million-dollar question within ethics is can lawyers make money with outsourcing? And this was the question that we had at the very onset. I love that that was the first question out the gate. And the answer to that question is a all capital letters YES, okay? The key rule to keep in mind is Model Rule 1.5, Reasonableness, okay? This is the rule that we all have to abide by no matter what we're doing when we're billing clients, that our fees have to be reasonable to the client. There's a whole onslaught of ethics opinions and case law that back this up. This, this ABA Ethics Opinion 0-420 expressly says that attorneys may bill the services of contract lawyers, aka freelance lawyers, to their clients at prevailing market rates. So long as the rates satisfy Rule 1.5's reasonableness requirements. So reasonableness is key. If you want to know more in depth on this topic, we have a white paper on this specific ethical issue on our website. It's like 100 pages long. It's in the attorney resources section of our site. I'll show you that in a minute. But, you know, you got to remember, this is the same business model that have allowed larger firms to make a ton of money off of their associates. You know, they are— maybe they're paying the associate the equivalent of $45 or $55 an hour, but they're billing them to the client at $160 or $200 an hour. You know, it is a source of revenue, and you can do the exact same thing with a freelance lawyer in a virtual remote work way and still generate that work, that revenue for your firm. Okay, so let's look at an example of the math to see how this works. Here's my friendly math kitty cat to help us out. Let's say we'll go back to that motion for summary judgment. Okay, maybe you need help to write a motion for summary judgment, and you find a freelancer through LawClerk to do that work. You post the project for a $1,000 flat fee. All right, um, they're going to do the work. They are still, through our system, required to keep track of their time spent working on that. They do that for a couple of reasons. Number one, it helps you figure out if you paid a good flat fee for that work so you can change your pricing in the future accordingly. It also gives you the data to bill the work to the client if you were billing on an hourly basis, which despite the fact a lot of lawyers are moving away from the billable hour, the billable hour is still the dominant economic model for lawyers and law firms. So we know that the vast majority of lawyers out there are billing hourly. So you pay the freelancer $1,000, they do the work, they tell you they worked 8.5 hours. Let's say that based on your jurisdiction and practice area, you determine a reasonable market rate for their work is $200 an hour. Maybe that seems low. Maybe that seems high. You get the drift here. So you can bill that freelancer's work to your client. 8.5 hours times $200, you're going to bill the client $1,700 for the drafting of that motion. Keeping in mind you paid the freelancer $1,000, that means you are bringing an additional $700 of revenue, of profit into your firm. Plus you're going to have your own time, obviously meeting with a client to maybe gather some information, about that motion, reviewing it, editing it before it's filed with the court. So you're still going to have your time there, but this can be a significant source of additional revenue, you know. And this is just one project. Imagine if you did this twice a week. Imagine if you did this 4 times a month for 12 months a year. This could be really serious dollars coming into your firm without you burning the midnight oil. Plus, it's allowing you to get a lot of work done if you've got the, you know, mile-long to-do lists and some logjams there, this is a good way to delegate that work, get it cleared up, get the work done so that you can take on new work from clients. And I did see a flash. I think we might have a question in the chat. Catherine, I don't know if I can see those or not, if they're timely right now. Oh, okay. So question from Dennis. Lawyer must be admitted to the local state bar to be billed, I assume. The answer is no. As long as the freelance lawyer is working under your direct supervision, that opens up the doors that you could hire a freelancer from anywhere. So let's say you're in North Carolina and maybe you find a freelance lawyer through Lawclerk who happens to be in Florida or in New York, but they have a deep area of expertise in your area of law. As long as they are working under your direct supervision for that written work— again, we're talking about research, drafting, those types of things— you can absolutely collaborate with a freelance lawyer out of your jurisdiction and still bill them to your client at a reasonable market rate. But it's based on your market rate, not the New York rates. So keep that in mind. Okay, so I think this might be a good time to do a break from the PowerPoint and let's go, let's go here. Sorry, let's go see how it works. Okay, so I would like to take you over to our demo site. Give me just a moment here. We're going to X out of there. We're going to come over here. So hopefully now you are seeing my web browser, and right now I'm on our home page. It is lawclerk.legal, okay? Not lawclerk.com. We, uh, some— we don't own that one yet, but we're working on it. Uh, lawclerk.legal. So a ton of resources on here. If you like, I would direct you up here. Hopefully you can see in this dark navy bar at the top, Attorney Resources. We just resources there. There are some different documents here. We've got our Ultimate Guide to Outsourcing. We have got some tips on revising your engagement agreement to provide for the use of freelance lawyers on certain types of work. We've got a delegation worksheet. Probably my favorite here is if you go through— if you have a specific practice area that you work in, come down here. You know, we've got these sample projects by area of law. So if you do appellate work or bankruptcy or family law or estate planning. We have put together these packets for each of these different areas of law, and we're continually adding more, a couple more every month. They're just really time-intensive to put together. Um, so check these out. If there's one that's missing that you would like to see, let me know. We'll put it together. We'll add it to our list. We've also got some podcast episodes, and if you like learning by video like this, I'd also encourage you to check out these webinars that we've done. These are each about 20 minutes long, so they're short, but like we have one on family law, immigration, bankruptcy. I also have one— I need to get them added on here— we did estate planning, we did criminal law, and we have more coming up. So we have a lot of video resources if that's a good way for you to learn. Okay, um, so Locklearf.legal. Let's say you were interested in giving this a try. The first thing you would do is you would click join, so you can see that up here. And this is going to take you through a really easy signup process. There is no fee to sign up and there is no monthly fee. So we're not going to add to your monthly overhead just to be a part of the Lawclerk Network and have it available to you when you need it. No fee to sign up, no monthly fee. So I really, like, one action item I would challenge you, if you've been thinking about outsourcing and getting some work, take 4 minutes today to sign up for your account. It really takes, it takes more like 2 minutes, but I'm going to tell you 4 to be safe. And you can see here that you can click if you want to hire or you want to work. No fee to sign up for either way. And if you're on here, if you're interested in doing some freelance work, we would welcome that. We continually need more freelancers on our site. So if you're interested in that, by all means, please join us and sign up. I will give you a heads up. I'm looking for something. That the last step of the signup process, in order for us to make sure it's only attorneys on the site, because this is an attorney-to-attorney service, which is the other way that we keep everybody in compliance with ethics rules. Because if you're going to consumers directly, the ethics rules are completely different, much more complicated. But this is attorney to attorney. So to make sure it's really an attorney signing up, the last step is we need you to take— get your phone and take a selfie of you with your driver's license. So you hold your driver's license next to your face, take the picture, and then it gives you the number to either text it or email it. A couple times a month, as you can probably imagine, we have a consumer who tries to sign up, and this is our way to make sure that there's no consumers on the site. It's all lawyer to lawyer. So once you sign up, I'm going to do the demo from the hiring side for all of you who may be busy and looking for a way to outsource and get some help. And every time I go to the top of the screen, the thing comes down. Okay. So once you sign up, this is what you're going to see. We call this your dashboard. Okay? And this is a demo site that we've built in order to show this. So there's nothing confidential here. And so this is where you would manage different project, different pieces of work in different phases. I currently in my personal dashboard for my— as I do still practice on a limited basis in my estate fund practice because I love my clients, I've got 3 projects going. I had a freelancer prepare 3 deeds for some California land a client owns. I had a freelancer, um, who previously did a research memo for me is now writing a petition to the probate court based on her findings on that research memo. So I've got that petition going. What was my third one? Oh, I had a client who, you know, the Raiders just came to Las Vegas. And I have more and more clients who have now bought the seat license, which is an asset. It's like a really valuable asset, actually. And so I hired a freelancer to go through the seat license agreement to look for any transfer restrictions and prepare an assignment document. The particular freelancer also happened to find that it was required to get the written, written permission from the Raiders to put the seat license into a trust. So the freelancer also drafted a letter for me, a a sample letter I can now use for many clients to come. Anytime I have a client that has Raiders season tickets and the seat license, I can use this form. So I was really happy to get that form prepared by someone because I just didn't really want to spend 5 hours reading through the seat license myself. So anyways, I am not only a co-founder, I am a user of Lawclerk. What is the old Hair Club for Men commercial like? I'm not only the president, I'm a user. Same here, I'm a user, and it's saving me a lot of time and headache every week. But So when you go to post a project, let's, let me show you how that looks. You're going to come over here to this top left rectangle with the plus sign. I call this the get started button. And you'll see that there's a thing about building a team. We'll talk about that in a minute. But for now, let's go create a new project. So to stay on our same example, let's go with the motion. Oh, you can see I have my razor's on there. Motion for summary judgment, just to follow along with what we've been talking about. We probably have about 65% of our work is litigation-based and about 35% is transactional. So if you have a transactional practice, there are absolutely applications for you here. I just default to the litigation examples because that's my tendency. You get to set how long you want to take applications from the freelance lawyers. I usually say a day or two is good. You are going to post the project deadline. So let's say your goal is you want to file this motion by November 6th. If that's when you want to file it, you want to file it on that Friday, then I would say I want it in my office done by the 4th. And if that is my actual deadline, I would say yes, I want an initial draft, and I want that— ooh, I want that by the Friday before so that I have peace of mind of knowing my freelancer's on track to be done, and I can look at their work up to that point, give some feedback about what I think they need to expand on or what I think they should cutback. You're going to put in a flat fee price. My guideline there is estimate the number of hours. Oh, I have a different one for you. You know, maybe you think this is 10 to 12 hours of work, and you know, a good rule of thumb is we see a lot of lawyers paying around $100 an hour. Obviously, if it's more sophisticated, if it's a time rush, you're going to pay more. But we see people paying everywhere from $75 an hour to $200 or $250. But, you know, for a majority of work, $100 an hour is an easy way to do the math and come up with a flat fee. I am going to put up a code at the end. I'll type it here too now, though. Um, North Carolina Center for Practice Management 2020. What that's going to be is when you post your next project of $300 or more, when the project is completed, we're going to send you $100 back as a rebate. Okay, so I'm going to put that up again at the end if you want to write it down, and would definitely encourage you to take advantage of that and get something off of your to-do list. So next up, in order to help us find you the best freelancer, you can apply— you're going to find the area of law that applies best. So maybe this is a business litigation case. I'm going to check business, and I'm going to come down, and I'm also going to check litigation. Okay, what that does is, of our just about 3,000 freelancers, not all of them have experience in business litigation, but a lot of them do. So it helps us funnel down to find the best applicants for you and just narrow that for you before you start reviewing them. We're also going to check the project type. Obviously, a motion would be a pleading, but as you can probably understand, we have some freelancers who only want to do research or only want to do doc review or only want to do transactional work, whatever it may be. This again helps us narrow down the funnel of applicants for you. Skill level, you know, I always tell people just go for a 4. That way you're going to scare somebody off who is debating if they have the right expertise for you. And last, you have the option to either post the project to the marketplace, or if perhaps you've done a few projects already and you found a couple of freelancers you like, you can also send that work directly to someone on your team, okay? And I'll, again, I will talk about teams in a minute, but the whole idea with teams is you can build as many teams as you want for different areas of law, different types of work. That way, when you find a freelancer you really like who does a great job, you can go right back to them in the future without having to review applications. So let's say I was going to go back, you know, maybe Lisa on my tax law team was the right one for this one. Obviously, for a motion, I probably would have a different team, but you get the idea. The second step of posting the project is where you're going to write a couple of sentences or a short paragraph about the scope of work. You don't want to go into anything confidential here, but you want to give enough flavor for the work so that the freelancer knows what they're getting themselves into. Maybe you want to explain like, hey, I actually, I need you to research this issue and then write the motion. Or I need you to review these, you know, this expert report and this deposition and write the motion, whatever it may be. But give an estimate of, you know, kind of about how much time you think it's going to take and what you expect from them in that work. If you happen to use Clio as your practice management software, we do have an integration with Clio. That allows you to sync it to your Clio Matter. So let's go find a fun one here. You know, maybe this is a, I will go McDonald's defensive claim for hot coffee. What this does is this allows you to sync within your Clio account any tasks, deadlines, documents, and also the time and billing entries. Makes it super streamlined and easy if you happen to use Clio, as I know a lot of lawyers do. The next step, step 3 up here, would be agreeing to the terms of service. Which includes that confidentiality agreement. In step 4, you input the information for the built-in conflict check with the freelance lawyer that they go through before they're matched up with you. So I'm not gonna advance this through 3 and 4 because I get yelled at if I screw up the demo account, but you get the drift. So let's go back. So let's say you've posted a project. So this project is posted. What does that look like when freelance lawyers apply? Let's go look at our applicants. So here you can see we have a number of applicants for this project. Project. We've built in a few ways for you to sort them. You can sort by their location, you can sort by their rating, you can sort by how many projects they've completed. You know, for me, I, I look a lot at people who have completed a lot of projects. It shows to me that they're a dedicated freelancer, they know how to effectively get work done and meet deadlines working in a remote virtual environment. And so that's one of the factors I do look at. You can see here on Tasha's profile, that she also included a note. That's a feature that some of our people can use. She said, I've requested— this is a project for discovery requests, and she says, I've drafted innumerable requests for documents, and I'm skilled at writing them. So, you know, whereas Lisa here did not leave a note. So that's a cool way to also find a unique tidbit about that freelancer and why they are uniquely qualified for that work. So you can click in here now. You could go through all of their profiles, but in each of the profiles you're going to see that they've provided a resume. If you click it, it's going to pop up so you can just boom, take a look at it. Um, I'll click it quick so you see that. Um, you come over here, a writing sample, boom, that's going to come up so you can— okay, it's a demo site, so give me some slack here. But they are required to provide a writing sample, which obviously if you're hiring someone for a motion for summary judgment where they have to be persuasive, concise, you know, focus on relevant issues. You want to make sure that they're a strong writer. But then last, but certainly, certainly not least, if you scroll down, you can see her reviews from the other work she's completed on these. She's done 13 projects. On the live site, we have a lot of freelancers that have done well over 100 projects now. So they have a ton of ratings and reviews. You can really see what their track record is. Our rating scale is exceeded expectations, met, met or did not meet expectations. And a note about this did not meet expectations. This happens in less than 1% of projects. I'm sure that you can imagine in a network of literally thousands of lawyers that there are going to be disputes that come up about was the work right, was it whatever, did it meet expectations. That's inevitable when you're dealing with thousands of lawyers across the country. What I want you to know is that it happens in less than 1% of cases. And when we do have problems, because, you know, life happens, people have— people get sick. We had a freelancer once in Minnesota slip and hit his head on ice, and he was in a coma in the hospital for 3 days. We couldn't get a hold of him, you know, like things happen. But when they happen, we have your back, okay? We have a satisfaction guarantee on every single project. So if something goes wrong, we're going to do everything we can to make it right for you. We're going to get your money back to you. If we have time, we're going to hustle to find another freelancer in our network to come in and complete that work for you, whatever we need to make it right. We really are committed to that. And so I want that to be encouraging to you as you're maybe taking a leap into outsourcing with a project or with a system like Lawclerk. So let's say you've gone through all the applicants and you decided, oh, I like Tasha. She looks like she's going to do good work on this. You would click Assign. That's going to be the first moment we charge your credit card for the flat fee price that you set for that project. But we hold those funds in an escrow account until you come back at the end of the work and you tell us the work's done and that you're happy with it. And that's when the funds are released, freelancer gets paid, you get your work. So that is the workflow. And obviously, before she would officially be matched up with you, she would also go through that conflict check. Now, once you're matched up here, here's one in process. This is what it looks like when you're working with a freelancer. So you can see on the left side of the screen, there is a communication panel where you could say something like, hey, can you get on the phone at 3:00 PM today to discuss? So you can chat messages back and forth. You can also upload documents through the repository. But a cool feature that we just launched a few weeks ago is now you can also start a meeting. So if your freelancer is online the same time as you, which right now her little dot here by her picture is red, that means she's offline. But she was, if she was online, you could start either a video call or just an audio call rather than having to exchange phone numbers and do that that way. But that's been a really cool feature that a lot of our longtime users love now. They just are always hopping on there. You know, it doesn't require any Zoom links or anything. You just talk instantly through the platform, which is really great. You'll also see they keep track of their time records so you can check in. Obviously this is a new one, so she hasn't started work yet. But you know, there's a lot of different things here too. You can also see that you could come in and edit the project. So if ever, let's say you're working on a project with a freelancer and you've set a flat fee price and the freelancer uncovers a whole new slew of issues that need to be added into the motion or whatever. If they're at, if they're, the scope of the work dramatically increases and you're like, oh my gosh, yeah, I need you to handle that too. You can come in and you can increase the flat fee price. You can't take it down, but you can, you can increase it. Or we have a lot of attorneys who are so pleased with the work that they want to give essentially a bonus. And so you can adjust the fee up and down. There is some flexibility with that. Now back out to the main dashboard. This is where you're seeing all of your projects in progress, but you can also see teams. So like I said, if you wanted to go out and find and recruit a some teams of virtual freelance lawyers, you can do that. One of my favorite stories is one of our top users is a woman in a pretty small town in Wisconsin. I think it's about 15,000 people, and she has a general practice. So in any given week, she's going to be dealing with issues of family law, criminal, bankruptcy, maybe a little real property. She needs a deed, maybe she needs an estate plan, etc., etc. So she deals with a lot of different areas. What she's done is she's come in and built a team of about 2 to 5 freelancers for each area of law. So now when she gets a new divorce case in, a family law case, she goes right to someone on her family law team and says, hey, here's my notes from meeting with the client. I need you to prepare the complaint for divorce. And while you're at it, also go ahead and draft the initial discovery requests. And because she's worked with these people so many times now, they have, you know, they— she's provided them sample forms. They've really developed a lot of efficiencies. So she's got a team for each of those different areas that she practices in. And I think in all, she has around 14 virtual associates amongst those different teams. So think about this. This is a woman, a solo, small firm, small town. She's got a deep bench of 14 virtual associates who are each very uniquely experienced and qualified in their different areas of law. You know, there's no one magical associate she could go out and hire. That would have that level of knowledge and expertise, especially if she's hiring someone fresh out of school. I mean, she doesn't have to train these people. She can give them minimal instruction and they just run to get the work done. And I think it's such a cool example of how you can use this Teams feature. Now, maybe you're specialized in just one area of law. You do all, you know, bankruptcy work or something. You could even make Teams for different skill sets that you need. So maybe you have a research team, you have a discovery team, you have a motion writing team, you have an appellate team. I don't know, you know, you could do different types of work within your one practice area if you have just one practice area. But there's a lot of different creativity. We even see people that build teams to help with marketing. If you are trying to keep blogs up on your website current but you struggle to write them yourself or you don't feel like you're creative enough, we— that's another thing people outsource is to get blogs or client handouts. So as long as it's some sort of written work, really the sky's the limit for what you can delegate. So that's kind of the demo. And I'm getting towards the end here. So if anybody does have questions, please go ahead and drop that in the chat. I'll go back to my slides. I have a few remaining slides just to wrap it up and take us home. But again, I would really, really encourage you, take a few minutes today if you were at all curious about giving this a try, pick a simple project, give it a try, set up your account so you have it ready to go. Okay, so a few steps for success. Number 1, I think you get— I have a 5-year-old girl at home, so I've seen the movie Frozen just a few times. So in the wise words of Queen Elsa, you just need to let it go. If you have been, you know, needing help for a while, debating if you should hire or outsource, there's very little to lose with outsourcing. Give it a shot. My educated guess based on conversations with hundreds of lawyers is that you're probably going to wish you had done it sooner. So I would really encourage you to get out of your way and let it go. Delegate something and see how it works for you. Number 2, plan ahead. I always encourage lawyers, please, please try not to wait to the last minute. It just never sets us up for success. When you're trying to do something in a rush, especially if it's the first time or one of the, you know, second or third time you're outsourcing, you know, you really want to give the freelancer as much time as possible to do their best work because then you're going to be happier with the results. So try to avoid waiting till the 11th hour before you go into Lawclerk and post some work and delegate it. Number 3, whether you're using Lawclerk or a different platform, do your due diligence to find a talented freelancer. Okay, I hear stories of people that try to find freelancers through their own network. Or believe it or not, through Craigslist. I don't know how you go find a freelance lawyer on Craigslist, but I've heard these stories. I think that no matter where you're, you're trying to find that freelancer, you want to look at their resume, writing sample, some references, maybe even Google them to see what comes up. But you know, the great thing about Lawclerk is we provide all of that information for you at the tip of your fingertip. Click it, it's there. You've got their resume, their writing sample, you can see their reviews and ratings. It gives you a great insight to their talent level and the type of work they could do for you. Number 4, you want to limit their role. I think that to limit the role of a freelancer to only working under your supervision in the background gives a lot of lawyers peace of mind if you are at all concerned about losing some control on your case. You know, you don't want to have a freelancer who you don't know very well making arguments to the court or talking to the clients. You want to handle those tasks, but it's a smart move to free up the substantive legal work that's very time-consuming, to delegate that to a freelancer who's working in the background under your supervision. So limit their role. It's going to make you feel like you're more in control, and again, make you more confident when it comes to delegating. Number 5, set clear expectations. Again, you know, I think that investing a minimal amount of time at the onset of work to answer questions, provide clear expectations about what you want out of this this delegation is going to make you much happier at the end of the work. Now on the flip side, I think you also need to manage your own expectations. I talk to too many lawyers who, not too many, but I talk to some lawyers once in a while who they say, well, I had to spend 45 minutes editing this motion that I got back. Well, of course you did. What did you expect? It's unreasonable to expect to get a piece of work back that you've delegated to a freelancer expect to get it back 100% perfect, ready to file with the court, is unreasonable. I always tell lawyers, you know, you should expect to get it 80 to 85% of the way. There should still be some minor edits, some additional facts that you want to add into it based on your long history with the case. So manage your own expectations as well, and that's going to make a much more enjoyable experience with outsourcing. Last but not least, if you've been waiting for a sign to give outsourcing a try or to delegate some work, Here's your sign over here. Do it now. Um, what are you waiting for? There's no time like the present. And again, you can start out with something simple, um, to increase your comfort zone with delegating and outsourcing, but you really owe it to yourself to get the help that you need to continue to grow your firm and to avoid burnout. So I really want to encourage you to give it a shot, get out of your own way. I think you'll wish that you had done that sooner. Again, here is my email. I'll go check and see if we have any questions now, but here's my email if you have one-on-one questions. Also know that as soon as you sign up with Lawclerk, you will be matched with what we call a dedicated Lawclerk advisor. This is a complimentary service. Every hiring attorney is matched up with an advisor. They are essentially your concierge. They are there to work one-on-one with you to help you post your first project, answer any questions, make sure you're finding the best applicant for for your work. So really lean on your advisor, and they can do a lot of what I've been doing here in this webinar today. They can do that one-on-one with you, and they can also draw on the best, best practices that they see other lawyers across the country use to help, you know, educate you about those and set you up for success as well. So here's that rebate code I mentioned earlier on. If you want to jot that down, this is North Carolina Center for Practice Management 2020, so NCCPM 2020. This is good for a $100 rebate when you complete, when you post and complete your NICS project of $300 or more as a hiring attorney on Lawclerk. So jot that down, you might as well take advantage of it. And also, if you'd like to know more about us, we would love for you to connect with us on social media. Of course, we're on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. We've got a ton of YouTube videos. And if you can see my little sharks in in the background here. I'll show you one. We have a little Instagram account for our little unofficial official mascot Sharky. It's on Instagram. It's @sharkontherun. We have a lot of fun with that. And if you happen to have a shark, tag us in your pictures. We would love to see that. But I really appreciate you joining me today. I hope that this helped answer some questions and maybe bust some misperceptions that you may have had about outsourcing and specifically how to outsource via Lawclerk. Um, come visit us, lawclerk.legal, and I really hope you'll give it a try. So let me go take a peek here. I thought I saw maybe a chat pop up with a question.

And Kristen, I have a question while you're looking.

Sure. Um, and we could—

I think it might be a little bit more detailed than— and, and they could contact you directly, but for everybody else, it, it's probably something they're thinking about. What are the malpractice issues— malpractice insurance, excuse me— and potential liability issues that arise in these relationships? For instance, if the contract attorney commits negligence, perhaps it's a case that's been reversed or overruled, do you respond to the potential liability issues? It may be addressed in the contract you— with the hiring attorney.

Have any feedback on that? Sure, yeah. Um, so the answer to that is because the freelancer's role is limited, they are only working— they're not engaging in the practice of law for your client. They're working in the background under your supervision. That means you are still the primary attorney responsible for the ultimate work product that goes out the door. So any, um, negligence or problems would be on your malpractice policy. Now, I always encourage people, if you're nervous about this, call your carrier. Ask them about any nuances with your specific policy. We have not encountered any that restricted, and in fact, the carriers we've talked to all are very welcoming of law clerks. They want to tell their lawyers about it because all too often they see lawyers getting themselves into trouble. Sorry, that's my dog barking. Hopefully you can't hear him. But these carriers see lawyers getting themselves into trouble when they get overextended. They fall behind on missing deadlines, missing calendar entries. And so if you are dangerously close to that situation and you need help, the carriers we've talked to desperately want you to get that help. And they love that there's now an option like Lawclerk that makes it even easier for you to connect with a freelance lawyer and get that help to hopefully avoid problems. So that would be my two cents on malpractice. Um, looks like— let me skim this question. We have a question from Holly. Um, if you're looking for help with tasks like— oh, I love this— kind of some administrative tasks. This is a great example, Holly. She asked about tasks like marketing, setting up a CRM, setting up different software in your law practice. We absolutely see lawyers collaborating with freelance lawyers for administrative work like this. I think this is a great example. Thank you for bringing this up. Um, how would you estimate that? So what I would do is I would just phase it out. And especially if you want to be fair, um, We do also— I hesitate to mention this— we are in the super early stages of beta testing kind of a monthly subscription model where instead of doing the flat fee price per project, you could say I need help from a mid-level attorney on family law litigation for up for, and I want 15 hours a month of their help. So we are testing that. If you're interested, email me, ktyler@locklearthlegal.com. But what I would say, if you want to do some different delegation of administrative tasks like this, start out and just be very upfront. Like, hey, I need help to get my blog updated and I need help with the CRM. And I am posting this for maybe, you know, $500. And I think this is up for, you know, 10 hours of work. And let me know when you've completed 10 hours of work and I can increase the fee or post a second project. But just do it in phases. Be very upfront, especially if you find someone who does a great job on this. You can collaborate and say, hey, like, I need you to work on the CRM another 20 hours this month. I'm going to post a project for this many dollars. Let me know if that's agreeable. You can have those conversations with the freelancer, and that's absolutely something your advisor can help you work out as well. But I think this is a smart move to delegate some of these really time-consuming administrative tasks. So thank you, Holly, for that question. Catherine, are there any more questions, or are we wrapping it up?

So I do not see any other questions, and Kristin has been very kind to share her email address. And if you didn't write it down, I did record this, and I'll put it in YouTube, and we'll send a link to everybody, and then it'll go in the library as well. And— sorry, I I tried the temporary unmute. It's really temporary. That's fine. Y'all can get in touch with me if you don't remember how to get in touch with Kristen, and I'll relay the messages to her, and we'll send out the link to the recording. So we're very excited to bring them into CPM Connect, and yeah, we'll let you get back to your day because I know you're all busy, right?

Yeah, have a great day. Hopefully you can offload a few things on your task list and delegate them. Have a great one, guys.