Managing a law firm, staff, clients, and deadlines is enough to drive anyone mad.
You probably don’t have time to do anything, let alone train a new employee!
That’s why we compiled this list of seven tasks you should delegate to a virtual paralegal right now:
- Manage and/or Organize your Practice Management Software
- Calendar Management and Monitoring Deadlines
- Coordinate electronic document signings
- Conduct factual and legal research
- Draft Documents
- eFiling, Scheduling Hearing, and Submitting Proposed Orders
- Billing
These tasks require little to no training on your part and they will help get you organized so that you can free up some time to get to know your virtual paralegal and begin to delegate more substantial tasks to them.
1. Organize your Practice Management Software
Opulent Landholdings’ Attorney Services has virtual paralegals who are experienced in a variety of practice management software. We can help you keep track of your client’s case information, allowing you, your clients, and your staff to easily collaborate on cases and streamline workflows.
2. Calendar Management and Monitoring Deadlines
According to the American Bar Association (“ABA”), roughly 13% of malpractice claim errors are related to improper calendaring (See The Most Common Legal Malpractice Claims by Types of Alleged Error).
In order to help avoid this, every law office should have a master calendar that the attorney, legal secretary, paralegal, and other staff can easily access. This calendar keeps track of all the important events for the firm, including court appearances, important filing deadlines, appointments, meetings and conferences, and vacations and personal days for staff members.
A virtual paralegal can help you to maintain this and other calendars and provide a set of eyes outside the office, helping to decrease the probability of a missed deadline.
3. Coordinate Electronic Document Signings
Opulent Landholdings’ Attorney Services has vast experience with coordinating virtual signatures. From real estate closings to contracts and more, we can help to coordinate the signing smoothly and professionally, making it one less thing you need to worry about.
Our professionals are familiar with several eSigning software including DocuSign, eSign, Adobe Sign, and more.
4. Conduct factual and legal research
This is a great first task to help get to know your virtual paralegal. Their different viewpoint and lack of knowledge of the way you work may result in information you may not have found yourself or if someone in your office had done the research.
5. Draft Documents
Virtual paralegals can assist attorneys with every step of the document drafting process including creating, drafting, editing, filing, organizing, storing, and delivering documents.
Although it may take some time for a paralegal to adopt your writing style and draft more complicated motions and pleadings, a virtual paralegal can jump right in helping you draft several types of documents with little to no training needed. These documents include:
- Routine discovery requests
- Routine discovery responses
- Correspondence
- Notices
- Corporate formation documents
- Real estate closing documents
6. eFiling, Scheduling Hearing, and Submitting Proposed Orders
Opulent’s virtual paralegals are based in Florida and therefore are familiar with Florida filing systems, including the Florida ePortal, CourtMaps, JACS, JAWS and CORE, as well as Federal filing systems, including PACER.
7. Billing
Opulent Landholdings’ Attorney Services can assist you with the most important part of your business – getting paid! That’s what keeps your firm’s engine running!
We can take those post-it-notes you have shoved in a drawer somewhere and utilize your practice management software to update client bills on a regular basis, send out invoices, and work with your collections service to monitor both trust and operating accounts.
