The Best Place to Hire Freelance Contract Lawyers

Over the years, LAWCLERK has helped thousands of attorneys get the assistance they need by connecting them with freelance contract lawyers (aka freelance lawyers).

Outsourcing legal work can help you:

• Improve your law firm’s profitability. 
• Save time for focusing on tasks that are your highest and best use. 
• Venture into new practice areas and borrow deep expertise in an unfamiliar subject matter. 
• Decrease overhead.

These are only a few of the benefits of hiring freelance lawyers; for more, read our article, The Pros and Cons of Hiring Freelance Lawyers.

But once you’ve made the decision to collaborate with a freelance lawyer and start delegating legal work, how do you know where to find the best possible talent for the job?

We’ll answer that in this post.

Why LAWCLERK (Our Freelance Lawyer Marketplace) Is the Best Solution for Delegating Legal Work

LAWCLERK is the only freelance lawyer marketplace that complies with the ethics rules of all 50 state bars. Because of this, ours is the largest network of experienced legal freelancers, representing almost every area of law.

Currently, we have over 3,600 freelance attorneys on our platform, and having access to a larger talent pool will increase your chances of finding exactly who you need to get the job done. This is further supported by the fact that 12 lawyers on average apply to every Project posted in the LAWCLERK marketplace.

Additionally, we provide a Dedicated LAWCLERK Advisor to each hiring attorney who signs up. Your Advisor has a wealth of knowledge. Our top customers regularly utilize their Advisor’s skills to help efficiently use our marketplace and find top talent.

Your Dedicated Advisor is your no-cost concierge, and they will not only get on a call to get to know you and your firm — they’ll also find out which kinds of cases you need assistance with and help you fully leverage the LAWCLERK platform. They can also assist you in detail with:

Posting Projects

Posting projects is a bit of an art, especially if they’re for more complicated tasks such as appellate brief writing. Providing sufficient details about the scope of work and expected final work product can be key to getting the right applicants to apply.

Your Dedicated Advisor can help you get started, but once you’ve posted a few Projects, you will likely need less of their help on this.

Setting the Price

It’s understandable if you’re not sure what to pay a freelance lawyer for any given Project at first, as this is one of the most common questions hiring attorneys have.

Your Dedicated Advisor can talk you through this via a call, including estimating the Project scope (length and complexity) and then setting a price that’s appropriate for that scope.

In general, after estimating the approximate hours required for the project, you’ll want to pay somewhere around $75 to $150 per hour to come up with a flat fee (and obviously more for rush work or particularly complex Projects).

Selecting Applicants

Often, a “bonus” of using LAWCLERK is that our clients don’t know which attorney to hire, because so many qualified applicants have applied to their Project. In that case, your Dedicated Advisor can act as a sounding board to help you choose the right lawyer for the task.

However, there are many other ways your Dedicated Advisor can assist you with using the LAWCLERK platform to hire freelance lawyers. Watch the video below for more details about how this relationship works and why it can seriously improve your outsourcing success.

Other Ways LAWCLERK Can Increase Your Success in Outsourcing

You’ll be able to vet each applicant before hiring them by viewing their profile, which includes a bio, resume, and writing sample.

That said, we think the most telling thing about the freelance lawyers on the LAWCLERK marketplace are their ratings and reviews, based on prior Projects they’ve completed for other attorneys and law firms.

We also designed LAWCLERK to improve the success of outsourcing via our Teams feature:

With Teams, you can tag your favorite freelance attorneys from a prior Project, add them to a specific Team, and then continue to work directly with them — no applicant sorting required.

We consider Teams the “secret weapon” of those LAWCLERK clients who most effectively and regularly use our platform to delegate work.

Below, we explain a few use cases in which this feature might come handy.

Use Case #1: All Your Practice Areas Can Have Their Own Team

One of our clients is a general practitioner, but she regularly deals in the bankruptcy, criminal defense, estate planning, family, and real estate areas of law.

Because of this, her practice has been greatly supplemented using the Teams feature to build out a Team of two to three freelancers for each area of law.

Each Team has specialized knowledge, and when a new client comes to her needing help in one of those five areas, she can send the work directly to a member of the relevant Team to get started on it.

Regularly using the same freelance lawyers also ensures they have prior experience with her specific needs, including writing style, templates, and forms. The benefit of this is that over time, the freelancer may only need baseline instructions to get started on new Projects. This further allows her to save time and apply it toward tasks that are the highest and best use of her time.

And, because she doesn’t have overhead tied to these Team members like she would with in-house associates, she can pay them only when she needs them. This is a key benefit of using LAWCLERK that was built into the platform; read more about it in our founding story.

Use Case #2: Fill Out Teams Based on the Skill Sets You Need, Using Your Favorite Lawyers

While the prior example utilized many different areas of law to build out Teams, for those with narrow practice areas, it can be helpful to build out Teams based on specific skill sets.

This could include letter writing, document review, contract drafting, discovery, or even appellate brief writing, among countless others.

When you need one of these tasks done, you’ll already have your favorite lawyers standing by to produce one of these documents, and you’ll know the work will be dependable because you’ve already worked with these lawyers before. They know your tone, style, and form, which can also help them complete the task faster.

For more details about how to build Teams of virtual lawyers on LAWCLERK, see our video below:

Expect to Use LAWCLERK Regularly? Use Our Virtual Associate Subscription Service 

Because many of the lawyers and law firms who use LAWCLERK saw an opportunity to continuously use the help of freelance lawyers, we created a Virtual Associate Subscription Program.

This allows those hiring attorneys to more deeply integrate freelancers into their practices for regularly recurring work each month.

Choose the level of experience you’d like the lawyer(s) to have and how many hours of work you’ll be sending them each month:

The structure is flexible, as you can sign up in increments of 10 hours (up to 120) per four-week period, and there’s a 30-day cancellation notice, so there’s no long-term commitment.

To learn more or sign up, visit our Virtual Associate Subscription Program page.

What’s the Best Way to Price Projects?

Project pricing comes up often in questions from new LAWCLERK users.

Because every Project is different, pricing will vary. The following video includes some helpful strategies for pricing:

Additionally, this table gives a general overview of some of the flat-fee pricing ranges usually seen on LAWCLERK:

If you’re still not sure how to price your Project, as we mentioned earlier, your Dedicated LAWCLERK Advisor can assist you with this.

Which Tasks Can be Delegated to Freelance Attorneys?

Because there are many different kinds of legal tasks that you could delegate to freelance lawyers, we created a document with over a hundred ideas to get you started, categorized by practice area.

Customer Success Stories