How Remote Paralegals Can Improve Law Firm Profitability

Do you often wish for a few extra hours each week to focus on billable work? Are you constantly juggling administrative tasks and client-facing duties, with non-billable work usually taking precedence? You’re not alone. The relief from these overwhelming tasks is within reach.

Many attorneys wish each day lasted 28 hours instead of 24. However, while you can’t add time to the day, you can use smart strategies to increase your availability for billable hours. A remote paralegal can handle important administrative work while you focus on more critical matters. And what’s more, because a paralegal isn’t an attorney, they don’t have the same hourly rate, saving you money right off the bat.

Not sure what tasks a remote paralegal can perform that might improve your law firm’s profitability? We’ll discuss some of the most impactful below.

Remote paralegals: The supervision & security requirement

The rule with paralegals (remote or otherwise) is that an attorney must properly supervise them because paralegals cannot practice law. When you add the remote factor into the equation, you must also ensure their work is secure, such as encrypted email and secure software. With those two bases covered, you can benefit from the services offered by remote paralegals.

How paralegals empower law firm profitability

As an attorney, you should spend your time doing just one of two things: practicing law or lining up new clients through consultations and interviews. Everything else within your practice should be delegated to someone else. Delegating tasks to a remote paralegal can help in many ways.

Enhancing client communication

What’s the single most common complaint from legal clients? Failure to return phone calls or answer emails within a reasonable time. If you’re trying to do everything yourself, it’s natural that communication like this would be relegated to a lower priority than many other tasks. 

However, to build a profitable law firm, you must always ensure consistent, professional communication with leads and existing clients. This is one area where a remote paralegal can enable better profitability. With the right partner, you’ll benefit from 24/7 call answering and prompt email responses. This can include answering calls from leads, providing general information about the firm and its services, answering questions, and even providing updates on client matters.

This service allows you to focus on billable work and improves client satisfaction and retention over time, which we’ll touch on next.

Improving client satisfaction

Client satisfaction is one of the most important drivers of success for your firm. You can count on satisfied clients to do a couple of things:

1. They’ll recommend you to their friends, family, coworkers, and others.

Referrals are the gold standard for creating a stream of leads. Not only does it cost you nothing, but referred clients are more likely trust you because they trust in the person recommending your services. That overcomes several hurdles in building a solid attorney-client relationship.

2. They’ll stick around.

What’s better than a continual stream of leads? A stable portfolio of repeat clients who use your services multiple times. With repeat clients, you benefit from an existing relationship, familiarity with your processes, and trust in your abilities. 

A remote paralegal can help improve client satisfaction in several ways. One is simply ensuring that someone knowledgeable and able to answer both basic and more in-depth questions is available. A remote paralegal can take the time necessary to speak with clients and leads that most attorneys cannot afford.

Real-time call intelligence is available at all times

How often do you pick up a phone call without knowing who's calling? How much time do you waste searching for basic information, such as the caller's name, the purpose of their call, or their interaction history with your firm? This not only eats into your billable work time but also creates a negative impression of your firm for leads and clients.

A remote paralegal can help you overcome this challenge by offering robust call intelligence directly within your CRM. Detailed, real-time call data can be easily accessed through your interface, providing you with information about the caller's attitude, past interactions with your firm, the urgency of the call, and much more.

Not only does this save you time, hassle, and energy while improving the client experience, but it also allows you to make better business decisions. Those decisions will even more profoundly impact your ability to build a profitable, thriving law firm.

The partner you need to improve profitability

Working with a remote paralegal can offer some pretty dramatic improvements. You can free up your time to focus on billable work while having a qualified expert handle more mundane but equally important tasks.

Smith.ai’s experienced, professional law firm answering service can help you free your time to do what you do best while we handle the rest. From 24/7 call answering to call intelligence and metadata entered directly into your CRM to empower better decision-making, we deliver the solutions you need and can grow with your firm as those requirements evolve.

To learn more, schedule a consultation or reach out to hello@smith.ai.