Speaker 1: Let's talk about one of the best ways to grow a small law firm. When it comes to growing a small law firm, hiring help and delegating substantive legal work as soon as you can is a winning strategy. But understandably, a lot of attorneys can hold back from hiring the help they need when they need it because it's a little intimidating. There's a lot of good reasons to be concerned about making a full-time hire. Salaries, all the overhead expenses like insurance, benefits, etc. etc. They all add up and I've met far too many attorneys who tell me they end up paying their associate more than they pay themselves. That's just wrong when it comes to law firm business models and it's one of the reasons we set out to build LawClerk to give solo attorneys and small firms a better option to get the help they need to grow and build their small law firms. Principle number one, hiring freelance attorneys results in higher profits for your firm. Too many attorneys view outsourcing as an expense when in fact it's a revenue center and here's why. The ethics rules, opinions, and case law across the country all say that an attorney may bill the time of a freelance lawyer to their client at a reasonable market rate. That's the key right there, the reasonable market rate which comes to us under model rule 1.5. What's reasonable is going to be different in Mississippi versus Oregon and it's going to vary by practice area whether you're a corporate bankruptcy attorney or an immigration lawyer. So you and you alone will need to set what is the reasonable market rate. But how does this come into driving revenue into your firm? Let's do a little math here. Let's say for example that you're in litigation and you need to prepare a motion for summary judgment. You look at your calendar and see that you've got client meetings, court, all sorts of things coming up and it's going to be really hard for you to carve out time to draft that motion. So instead of you trying to burn the midnight oil, you log into your Lockwork account, post it as a project. Let's say you find a freelancer and you set the flat fee price for this motion at a thousand dollars. Okay, you give them the information they need to draft that motion and at the end of the work they come back and report that they've billed eight and a half hours. Let's say for easy math you determine that the reasonable market rate is $200 per hour. So if they worked eight and a half hours, that means you could bill the client $1,700. Keeping in mind that you paid the freelancer $1,000 to get the motion written, that's driving an additional $700 into your firm on just one project. Now imagine if you did one project like this every week for a month and if you did one project every week for a month like this over the course of a year, that's going to drive significant additional revenue into your firm while also allowing you to get a large amount of work done. That is a win-win for any attorney trying to grow their small firm. Principle number two, limiting overhead is essential to managing a profitable small law firm. One of the biggest traps that many attorneys fall into as they're starting their own law firm and trying to grow it is doing the things the way that big law has done them. They are going out and hiring too many staff, too many employees full-time. They're renting large expensive office spaces to try to impress clients. They're subscribing to too many services or resources regardless of whether they're actually going to use them or need them because they think they need them because big law has them. And all too often this can result in a solo or small firm ultimately going out of business because they can't keep up with the overhead. It is literally eating them alive and they'll end up going back to work for someone else. The good news is that there are a lot of other options out there that allow solo attorneys and small firms to find the resources they need in affordable ways without driving up their overhead. And one of those is turning to the talented work of freelance lawyers when you need assistance with substantive legal work rather than making full-time hires. At LawClerk, we help attorneys focus on higher margins and lower overhead. And we do that by encouraging you to work with freelance lawyers both on a project basis and a subscription basis. Principle number three, the legal industry produces an overabundance of talented freelancers. I meet a lot of attorneys who are a little bit leery about working with a freelance lawyer because they're concerned about the quality of work that these freelancers will do. They don't understand that there is really truly an overabundance of legal talent out there. Law schools have turned out a lot of lawyers over the past 10 to 20 years, and many of them are looking for alternative career paths, including freelance lawyers. Another example is look at the big law system. You know, big law, you're either up or you're out. And because of that up or out model, they also result in turning out a lot of very experienced, very smart, very hardworking attorneys into the market who are then reevaluating their career paths and oftentimes turning to freelancing. The truth about freelance lawyers is that they are amazing. They come from all walks of life. We have found that on average, the freelance lawyers in the law clerk marketplace have at least 11.6 years experience out of law school. So these are not newbies. These are lawyers who have worked their own cases, uh, handled a lot of client meetings, evaluated many, many legal issues, and you can put their knowledge and expertise to work for you in that outsourced freelance capacity. Law clerk has freelance lawyers in all 50 States. Our thousands of freelancers have experience and pretty much every practice area you can think of, including horse racing law and maritime law. Um, they come from a lot of different backgrounds, of course, big law, like we talked about, but they're also solo, solo attorneys who turned to outsourcing when their own practices slow down. We have attorneys who are taking time off from a full-time job to stay home with family members, whether that's young children or elderly, uh, sick elderly family members. And we also have military spouses who, you know, get moved around over a few years and that can make it challenging to find a job in a law firm in freelancing as a great option for them. Most excitingly to me, we have a really large and growing segment of either retired or semi-retired attorneys who have decades of experience. And the cool thing about that is that you can turn to them not only for their expertise, but for mentorship, as you are progressing in your own career and looking to get help as you grow your firm. So anytime you find yourself wondering about the talent base of these freelance lawyers, know that there is an overabundance of legal talent out there, just waiting for you to tap into it. Principle number four, you can delegate all types of legal work from simple to complex tasks. When you launch your own firm and you hang up that shingle, it's natural that you're probably going to be the one doing all the things that could include answering the phones, doing client intake, marketing, uh, client development, and oh yeah, the legal work too. Um, but as time goes on and your firm hopefully continues to grow, that's not going to be sustainable, especially if you have ambitious plans to grow your small law firm. That's where outsourcing becomes an invaluable tool. You can outsource any sort of task and we're talking about substantive legal work here. This could be something as simple as a demand letter, a research letter, all the way up to more complicated tasks like, um, appellate briefs or, uh, help with trial prep. In fact, help with trial prep is a really great example of ways that our freelance lawyers can come to the rescue when you need that help. It always seems like the days leading up to trial zoom by in a blur and there's never enough time to prepare motions and eliminate, respond to motions and limited organized exhibit books, um, come up with question outlines for, uh, witnesses or jury instructions. The list goes on. There's a lot of that work that you can outsource to a freelance lawyer. So whether you have simple tasks that you need to get off your plate or more complex work turned to outsourcing, if you want to grow your small law firm and keep your overhead under control.