5 Easy Tasks to Hand Off to a Freelancer
Now that you are confident about hiring a freelancer, you are asking yourself: What can a freelancer do for you? In a nutshell, literally everything an assistant outside your door can. Here are 5 things that a freelance legal assistant can do for you to help decrease the non-billable hours you spend on administrative tasks:
Handle your correspondence
Hand off managing your inbox. A freelancer can clean out all the spam and junk email cluttering up your inbox and flag the action items. Assign them the responses to simple requests such as client, or potential client, emails that inevitably come in requiring a bit of hand holding and administrative guidance; responses to job seekers; the emails worrying about procedure and how long this will take; the emails asking for meetings with a potential client to discuss a case; the emails about where to find parking for the office or the courthouse.
Docketing and calendaring
Getting all the standard deadlines into your calendar — either using your existing docketing system, or just getting the dates onto your calendar — with all necessary reminders, and triggered motions practice deadlines, and meeting scheduling take an enormous amount of flexibility and bandwidth, none of which is billable. Let a freelancer do this.
Travel arrangements for you, witnesses, and the client
It can be a challenge to handle all the travel arrangements, hotel blocks, car services, etc. for depositions and trials. Coordinating them so that you have a detailed itinerary of when everyone arrives and you don’t find a witness late for a deposition or have a cancelled flight sprung on you is time consuming. Let a freelancer handle this.
Transcription
Scan your notes and send them to your freelancer to type up and organize in your case files. Send them a voice recording from your dictation software and have them type it up and do the same.
Time Entry
It takes a lot of non billable time to get time entry in for your monthly invoicing. Give your time entry to a freelancer and get back to billable work.
That’s it: 5 tasks to hand off to a freelancer immediately. What are you waiting for?
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Alison Pacuska is the president of Pacuska Professional Services, a boutique consulting firm focused on top-tier administrative and legal assistant services with a focus in Intellectual Property. http://www.pacuska.com/
