Virtual assistant - update

Just thought I'd post a nugget about how we're doing with our new offsite legal assistant...it's about three months since we brought Diane on board.

I think it's too early to really gauge much of a tangible ($$) payoff just due to the training involved but it's definately made the practice of law more pleasurable for me. Right now all Diane and I are doing is sharing a computer essentially acting as a server.

How are we using her?

• Client billing;
• Real estate transactional (non-legal work);
• Client marketing;
• Client service phone calls;

Obviously the top two things mainly are generally examples of lawyer time being freed to do more lawyering, which is great. But the second two things I'd say are purely additive and simply are things we weren't doing (or were doing rather ineffectively). The marketing encompasses a number of things including starting a client newsletter, follow-up calls to potential client contacts and sending out various mailings such as articles that lawyers write. The client service calls are just the "massaging" of clients that lawyers hadn't been doing...reminders about court, quick call/e-mail about case status or just follow-up calls about things that a client needs to be doing.