Digital White Papers

80 WWW.ILTANET.ORG | ILTA WHITE PAPER LITIGATION AND PRACTICE SUPPORT Organizing and Modernizing Legal Support Services relationships or locations. It is becoming increasingly important to accomplish tasks beyond the billable legal work in the most cost- effective and practical manner without sacrificing quality. Traditional secretarial tasks like word processing, transcription, printing and photocopying have been supplemented by more technical work like ediscovery and efiling as technology has advanced. Assistants are also expected to routinely handle critical client-facing communications and foster client relationships while balancing aorney support including travel, expense and time reporting. Not only is it unrealistic to expect one individual to handle all those tasks competently and efficiently, but hiring generalist legal secretaries in and of itself is becoming more of a challenge. The next generation of legal assistants are being trained in more narrow specialties. Mounting cost pressures combined with demands for beer service have resulted in a trend toward centralized support structures that focus on allocating work to those staff members trained to handle it. When done correctly, this results in a marked increase in both cost- effectiveness and efficiency. This change may include centralization, specialization or outsourcing back-office functions. Abandoning the Status Quo All aspects of your daily operations need to be lean and efficient, and legal support services are certainly no exception. Traditional, time-wasting delegation techniques such as email, paper forms and voicemail that have long been a hallmark of legal support services no longer cut it. Efficiency necessitates a new delegation strategy that ensures specific tasks are automatically sent to the people who are the most adept (and cost effective) at handling them via a centralized, organized and transparent system. To remain competitive and focus on the work that is truly valued by your clients, you need to place your current legal support services under a microscope to understand exactly what your costs are, what value they bring and where you stand to see the most gain from increasing efficiency. This includes geing the right work to the right staff and keeping your high-value staff working on customer or aorney-facing tasks. Doing this requires a workflow system that provides transparency and reporting that clarifies who is doing what and whether the current workflow is effective. An old adage says you cannot manage what you cannot measure, and today's firms are woefully underinformed in how effective their non-billable staff are performing. When you put the work into the hands of the people who

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