In the past couple of decades, the legal industry has witnessed consolidation in the global legal market, coupled with technological advancements. Industry leaders have a recurring item on the agenda: How to grow revenues over containing costs.

To unlock this much sought-after profitability, firms are now looking at outsourcing secretarial services. After all, the current attorney to secretary ratio has changed from 4:1 to 5:1. Once firms complete their cutbacks due to the current pandemic, this ratio is likely to level off at 8:1.

In the post-COVID legal world, smart law firms will have to embrace process efficiencies, combining all these three elements—distributed workforce, technology, and expertise. In this article, we share a few reasons why outsourcing secretarial work can help you tap into profitability without staffing disruptions. Bonus: You also get pointers on how you can choose the right partner to do your legal admin work.

Top Three Reasons to Outsource Secretarial Services

1. Business requirements

Business demands have grown exponentially during the pandemic since most lawyers are working remotely and juggling work and private lives at the same time. A standard 8-hour workday doesn’t translate into eight hours of output for most attorneys. This means they put in the extra hours to meet deadlines. Consequently, secretarial support also needs to be flexible to meet these ebbs and flows in business demands, without one eye on the clock.

2.Time and cost

Finding the right secretary or office manager that meets all your requirements is a time-consuming exercise. On top of that, you need to factor in salary costs, IT support, and the need for ramp-up time for this new resource. For most understaffed law firms, these are luxuries you simply cannot afford. Finding a secretary or PA that ticks all your boxes takes time and involves salary costs. Besides, these resources need training and managing, which begs the question—do you have the time? If you need someone to come on board and hit the ground running from day 1, outsourcing is the way to go.

3.Efficiency

An understaffed secretarial services team will impact the support you provide attorneys and directors. As a result, work will be backlogged and the overall quality you deliver will suffer. You need a partner who is consistently on the top of their game, making sure your attorneys have all the support they need to create quality work.

What you should look in a partner when outsourcing secretarial services

1.Scalability:

Round-the-clock support is critical while choosing a partner. You want to team up with a vendor that has the in-house expertise to support your busier days without a hiccup.

2.Specialized skills:

Every law firm has its set of unique requirements, and your vendor should be able to offer customized secretarial services to meet these demands. Outsourcing specialists are well-equipped to address the needs of law firms and clients. They also have in-house experts who can support law firms’ word processing capabilities, legal document formatting and fixing, MS word styling and macros, creative design, document proofreading and editing, template creation, converting handwritten text to an editable format.

3.Account management:

Your ideal outsourcing company will offer highly experienced and reliable account managers who uphold high service delivery standards to thrive in a competitive space. There should be clear-cut service level agreements (SLAs) to measure performance and ensure that their teams are reliable and committed to their clients i.e. you.

4.Security-conscious:

Since your outsourcing partner will be dealing with highly confidential information, choose a vendor with domain expertise and demonstrable experience in working with high data security measures in place.

Cenza’s word processing services directly address the specialized needs of law firms and their clients by providing superior service, from proofreading to indexing and building tables of authorities and contents for pleadings and briefs. We create a customized and centralized word processing solution to fit each firm’s unique culture. ISO certified for security and passed Am Law 50 in-depth security, data protection, and infrastructure audit

If you’re looking to outsource legal admin work, get in touch by filling out this form.