FAQs For Hiring Attorneys

Put LAWCLERK to Work for You!

Step 1‍

‍Step 2‍

We give you a Dedicated LAWCLERK Advisor to answer all your questions and help you put LAWCLERK to work for you.

Step 3

Get work done! It's quick and easy! You can start by posting your work to the marketplace and our talented freelancer lawyers will apply to you or you can build a team of your hand-selected on-demand lawyers to work with on repeat.

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To post a project

Pick a project. Do you need an appellate brief, MSJ, opposition, reply, memo, lease, contract, purchase agreement, discovery responses, blog, or anything else drafted?
You will be provided a document library to share documents with the Lawclerk, as well as the Lawclerk's phone number and email, and a secure and encrypted communication portal so that you can discuss the work you need done.The Lawclerk will get to work and provide you with an initial draft (if requested).You can review the initial draft and request revisions just like if the work was completed by an associate or paralegal in your firm.Your credit card will be charged the flat fee price you set when you select the Lawclerk you want to work with, which funds will be held in escrow until you approve the final work product.When you get the final document, you will also get a time card so you can bill the Lawclerk's time to your client if you choose.100% Satisfaction Guaranteed!
Log into your account and click "post a project."
Provide a brief description of what you need drafted, your deadlines, and the flat fee price you will pay for the work.
Freelance attorneys (we call them "Lawclerks") with applicable experience will apply to you.
Review the applicants' resumes, writing samples, and reviews from other attorneys of the applicants and select the Lawclerk you want to work with.
You will be provided a document library to share documents with the Lawclerk, as well as the Lawclerk's phone number and email, and a secure and encrypted communication portal so that you can discuss the work you need done.
The Lawclerk will get to work and provide you with an initial draft (if requested).
You can review the initial draft and request revisions just like if the work was completed by an associate or paralegal in your firm.
Your credit card will be charged the flat fee price you set when you select the Lawclerk you want to work with, which funds will be held in escrow until you approve the final work product.
When you get the final document, you will also get a time card so you can bill the Lawclerk's time to your client if you choose.
100% Satisfaction Guaranteed!

To build a team:

Log into your account and click "build a team."
You have the ability to make your name visible on the team post or post anonymously. Our recommendation is to have your name visible as Lawclerks are more inclined to apply to teams when they can see your profile.
Next you'll want to name your team. Ex. Discovery Team or Employment Law Team.
Your Team Description is up next. We recommend adding as much informantion as possible. The more detailed and precise you are in who you are looking for, the more attractive your post will look to potential applicants. Identify: (i) the type of experience you are looking for - be specific (number of years of practice, trial experience, etc.); (ii) the type of work you anticipate giving to the Lawclerks on your team; (iii) any useful or interesting information about your work or firm; and (iv) if you know, the frequency with which you anticipate assigning work.
Finally, note the areas of law. Once you've completed these steps and clicked next, your team will officially be posted to the marketplace. This sends out a notification to all of our Lawclerks who have identified an interest in your areas of law.
To view your team applicants, you simply need to open your team from your dashboard and begin reviewing their bios, resumes, writing samples, and reviews.
Simply click on "accept" to add an applicant to your team.

Growing Your Practice and Profits with Freelance Lawyers

"Using my team of freelance lawyers “has allowed me to grow and scale my practice in ways I never imagined. Having a team of highly qualified lawyers available to spin up at a moment’s notice has been an absolute game changer for my firm!"

– Robert Wright, Intellectual Property Attorney

There are only 24 hours, and if you want to do something crazy like sleep or see your friends and family, then there are far fewer hours to work. This means that to grow your firm and profits, you need to leverage the time of other lawyers.

Traditionally, this was done by hiring full-time associates whose revenue from their billings were traditionally divided 1/3 to pay the associate, 1/3 to cover their overhead expenses, and 1/3 for your profit. This means that if you bill your associate’s time at $225 per hour, $75 of that $225 should be allocated for their pay, $75 should be allocated for overhead, and $75 should be realized as your firm’s profit. But this only works if your associate is busy full time and if you collect all of their billed time, which is rarely the case. When your associate is not busy full time and when you collect less than 100% of their billed time, the 1/3 that is supposed to be your profit ends up being consumed to pay the associate’s salary and benefits.

There is a better way! By using freelance lawyers, you can have the benefits of leveraging their time without the overhead, commitment, and lost profits of full-time employees.

Using the same metrics, if you pay your freelance attorney $75 per hour and you bill your client $225 per hour for their services, your profit will be $150 per hour because you do not have to worry about paying salary and benefits when they are not working.

Let’s take a deeper dive into some real life examples of how to leverage the time of freelance lawyers to make more money.

Our first example assumes you need a complicated motion in limine drafted (perhaps a Daubert motion). You could draft it yourself and consume days of your valuable time or you could have an experienced freelance lawyer draft it for you, thereby leveraging their time and allowing you to focus on meeting with potential clients, marketing, and growing your business.

Let’s look at the economics. If it takes your freelance attorney 20 hours to complete the complex motion and you bill their time to your client at the reasonable market rate of $225 per hour, the total billed to the client is $4,500. If you paid the freelance lawyer $2,000 ($100 per hour) to prepare the motion, your profit is $2,500, plus, you saved yourself 20 hours that you can better spend on developing your practice!

If you litigate, whether in family court, state court, or federal court, discovery is a necessary evil. Even if you do not hate doing discovery, there is no chance you think drafting or responding to requests for documents, interrogatories, or admissions is the best use of your time. This is the perfect type of work to outsource. First, instead of procrastinating until the end of the discovery period, you can keep the other side on their toes and control the pace of the case by quickly propounding your discovery. Second, you can leverage the freelancer lawyer’s time to make a profit for you while you spend your time focusing on your business and clients.

If it takes the freelancer lawyer 10.4 hours to draft your initial requests for documents, interrogatories, and admissions and you bill their time to your client at the reasonable market rate of $225 per hour, the total billed to the client is $2,340. If you paid the freelance lawyer $780 ($75 per hour), your profit is $1,560, plus, you saved yourself 10.4 hours, you didn’t have to draft the discovery, and you won’t be scrambling to get your discovery done as the discovery window closes.

Can you make a profit if you bill on a flat fee basis? Yes! Say you charge $1,000 to prepare a lease or a trust and it takes you three hours to prepare it. This equates to a $333.33 hourly rate. If, instead of drafting it yourself, you pay a freelance lawyer $400 to prepare the lease or trust and you spend one hour reviewing and finalizing the lease or trust, your effective hourly rate is now $600.00. This is nearly double your effective hourly rate when you just do it yourself.

Download our Ultimate Guide to Legal Outsourcing: Growing Your Practice and Profits Through On-Demand Virtual Associates to learn more!

Download NOW

The Skill and Experience of Lawyers Looking to Freelance Will Amaze You!

You may be wondering what lawyer wants to freelance. Let us share some astonishing facts with you that hopefully will resonate as you think about your colleagues over the years. 57% of lawyers in private practice stop practicing within five years. These are attorneys that went to law school, passed the bar, possibly had a state or federal clerkship, and then worked for a firm or the government for years. You have so many brilliant colleagues that were excellent attorneys but found being a firm or government lawyer incompatible with also being a parent and ultimately left the practice of law. These talented men and women are rejoining the legal force as freelance attorneys because they can work when their kids are at school, nights, and weekends, without the commitment of full-time employment.

Here is another staggering statistic, at the 250 largest law firms, there is less than a 30% chance of making partner. This is often called the “big law up or out” system. These highly skilled lawyers without the necessary million-dollar book of business to become partner are leaving big law and many are hanging their own shingle and freelancing as they build their firms or developing freelance careers as they are keenly appreciative of its flexibility after big firm burnout.

This may shock you, but millennials are now 25 to 39 years old. While a remarkable over generalization, this is an entire generation of attorneys, many with more than a decade of legal experience, that are more concerned with work life balance than previous generations. Many of these talented lawyers are building freelance businesses for themselves so that they have total flexibility in their schedules, the ability to work and travel, and ultimate control over the type of work they do and their workload.

A new trend is also developing with retired lawyers choosing to freelance. Whether motivated by the need to “stay in the game,” a love for the law, or financial considerations, attorneys with decades of experience are offering their sage advice on a freelance basis.

There are many other life circumstances that are conducive to freelancing. Military spouses, for instance, are well-suited for a freelance career as they must frequently move. Attorneys that have opened their own practices and are working on developing their book of business often supplement their income by freelancing. And law school professors make additional money during their summers off.

The “gig economy” has reached legal and the number of highly-skilled lawyers looking to work on a freelance basis is exponentially increasing as they realize they can put their education and training to work in a way that is conducive to their families and lives.

Hear directly from our Lawclerks:

Additional Questions

LAWCLERK spent thousands of development hours building its robust integration with Clio! Attorneys using Clio for their practice management software will benefit from the ease of features that can be linked between their LAWCLERK and Clio accounts. The integration allows attorneys to streamline functions like calendaring, tasks, documents, billing and more.

Greg Garman, LAWCLERK Co-Founder and CEO, says “The integration allows Clio’s 150,000 legal professionals to seamlessly integrate with the LAWCLERK marketplace and its nationwide network of freelance lawyers for a more efficient and profitable law firm.”

Connecting your LAWCLERK and Clio accounts takes just a few clicks. Log in to your LAWCLERK account and click on the menu bar in the upper left-hand corner of your LAWCLERK dashboard and select “Connect to Clio” to start the process. This 38 second video shows just how easy it is to integrate your LAWCLERK and Clio accounts.

Once you’ve set up the integration, you’ll be able to post a new project to the LAWCLERK marketplace and sync it to a Clio Matter. Syncing a LAWCLERK project to a Clio Matter will enable you to streamline deadlines, tasks, documents and billing. You will select the Clio Matter in step two of posting a new project. This video gives you step by step instructions on how to post a project that syncs with Clio.

After you’ve posted a new project on LAWCLERK, the project is automatically created as a Task in the associated Clio Matter. Here’s a guide how to access and view the Task in Clio.

If your project involves many documents, this integration is going to save you a ton of time. You can now import documents directly to the LAWCLERK documents library from your Clio Documents file to provide the Lawclerk with the information they need to complete the project. Here is a quick video tutorial.

Once work is completed on a LAWCLERK project, the Lawclerk uploads their preliminary or final document submissions to the LAWCLERK document library and those document files can be exported to the Documents files in the associated Clio Matter. Click here to watch our video.

Perhaps the coolest feature of the integration is that it allows the Lawclerk to enter their time spent working on a project directly in the LAWCLERK dashboard. These time entries are then automatically synced to your Clio Matter for billing purposes! Check out this video to see how to view your Lawclerk's time records at any time using the integration.

Projects and Teams

Posting a Project Takes Less than Two Minutes!

After you have registered as a posting attorney, it is time to get work done! The first box on your dashboard reads “Post a New Project or Build a New Team" - click this box. From there, select "Post a New Project" and complete the following easy steps:

Name your Project. Name it something that reminds you what the project is about. For instance, you may name it “Memorandum on Fraudulent Transfer Law.” As the project name is visible to our registered Lawclerks once the project is posted, do not include any confidential information in the name.
Set your "application period." This is how long you will accept applicants before awarding the project to a Lawclerk. Please note that you may assign the project to a Lawclerk before the stated “application period” expires.
Next, set the “project deadline.” This is the date and time by which the Lawclerk must complete and submit the final work to you. We recommend that you always request an initial draft, which is accomplished by clicking “yes” in the “initial draft deadline” box and setting the date and time for the initial draft. You can then markup the initial draft for the Lawclerk to revise as necessary - just as you would with an associate or paralegal in your office.
Next enter the “project price.” This is the flat fee price that you will pay for the completion of your project. As a reminder, your credit card is only charged if you assign a Lawclerk to complete your project, which flat fee is held in escrow until you approve the final work product.
You can then select the “area of law,” “project type,” and "skill level" from the dropdown menus. Note that you may select more than one area of law and more than one project type. Lawclerks are given the opportunity to be alerted when projects in their area(s) of specialty are posted. As such, you will want to include all applicable areas of law to garner interest from the most qualified Lawclerks in the applicable area(s) of law. The last information needed is the “skill level,” which serves to let the Lawclerks know how complicated you believe the project to be.
On the next screen, you will be asked to provide a project description. You will want the description to be detailed enough so that the Lawclerks have sufficient information to determine whether they have the skillset and are interested in completing your project for the flat fee you have set. As the project description is viewable by the Lawclerks, it is important that it does not contain any confidential information.
Sample Project Description:
I need a Daubert Motion to exclude an expert. I represent defendants in a fraudulent transfer case. Plaintiff has disclosed an expert who simply restates Plaintiff's facts and performs simple calculations and creates charts. Ultimately, the report is misleading as a result. I would like a Daubert motion to exclude the expert. The Lawclerk will have to review the report and deposition transcript, and draft the motion with references to both.
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‍You will also need to provide project details that enable the Lawclerk to better evaluate the economics of your project, such as the: (i) expected length of the document you are seeking the Lawclerk to prepare; (ii) estimated number of hours to complete the project; (iii) number of discovery requests to respond to; or (iv) other information that will allow the Lawclerk to better determine whether she wants to apply for the project at the flat fee price you have set.
The last step is to review and affirm the rules governing the use of Lawclerks.

Yes! Our freelance attorneys (we call them "Lawclerks") are all U.S. attorneys that are duly admitted to one or more state bars and in good standing.

With LAWCLERK Teams, you can build your on-demand team of virtual associates.

Attorneys take different approaches in creating their ideal on-demand virtual associate teams. Some attorneys create teams by types of work, while others build their teams based on practice area.

For instance, a small firm with a national education practice has developed one team of Lawclerks they work with to prepare substantive demand letters, another team to prepare their litigation briefs, and a third team to handle their appellate briefs.

Conversely, a solopreneur in the rural Midwest that practices both family and criminal law has developed a separate team of Lawclerks that specializes in each of these practice areas. By doing this, she always has her go-to attorneys with the experience she needs for a particular matter. In fact, she will often have the same attorney on her team handle the bulk of the written work for an entire case – from propounding and responding to discovery, to drafting the briefs, to preparing her hearing notes.

By creating your LAWCLERK Teams, you can ensure that you have the skilled workforce you need to scale your business, whether that is taking on a higher volume of cases or taking on larger cases, without the expense and limitations of a full-time associate.

To post a team, simply follow the instructions below or watch a small webinar by co-founder, Kristin Tyler:

From your dashboard, click on the box with the huge plus sign that reads "Post a New Project or Build a New Team" and a pop-up will appear. From there, click on "Build a New Team."
You have the ability to make your name visible on the team post or post anonymously. Our recommendation is to have your name visible as Lawclerks are more inclined to apply to teams when they can see your profile.
Next you'll want to name your team. Ex. Discovery Team or Employment Law Team.
Your Team Description is up next. We recommend adding as much information as possible. The more detailed and precise you are in who you are looking for, the more attractive your post will look to potential applicants. Identify: (i) the type of experience you are looking for - be specific (number of years of practice, trial experience, etc.); (ii) the type of work you anticipate giving to the Lawclerks on your team; (iii) any useful or interesting information about your work or firm; and (iv) if you know, the frequency with which you anticipate assigning work.
Finally, note the areas of law. Once you've completed these steps and clicked next, your team will officially be posted to the marketplace. This sends out a notification to all of our Lawclerks who have identified an interest in your areas of law.
To view your team applicants, you simply need to open your team from your dashboard and begin reviewing their bios, resumes, writing samples, and reviews.
Simply click on "accept" to add an applicant to your team.
Note, you can always turn on and off your acceptance of applicants for your teams.

Put LAWCLERK to Work for You!

Additional Questions

Projects and Teams

Payment & Billing

Did we miss your question?
Contact our Care Team at:

(888) 479-5728 or support@lawclerk.legal

Marketplace

useful links

Support

Company

about LAWCLERK

Put LAWCLERK to Work for You!

Additional Questions

Projects and Teams

Payment & Billing

Did we miss your question? Contact our Care Team at:

(888) 479-5728 or support@lawclerk.legal

Marketplace

useful links

Support

Company

about LAWCLERK

Did we miss your question?
Contact our Care Team at: