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5 ways we can help you to reduce your business costs
When it comes to rising business costs, law firms are being impacted in specific ways. Often these influence their operations, client behaviour, and overall financial health.
In our experience, smaller law firms and sole practitioners are more vulnerable to these pressures. This is likely to be because they often have less financial cushion and fewer resources to manage increased costs and reduced (or shifts in) demand.
As Virtual Assistants specialising in supporting the legal sector, here are 5 ways in which we are actively helping law firms to reduce their business costs.
Right person, right task
As with all businesses, law firms are time poor and senior staff don’t have the capacity to take a step back and evaluate who is doing what within the firm. This can result in people doing work for which they are over-qualified when their time could be spent better doing other things. Sometimes there can be culture of ‘we’ve always done it this way’. This stands in the way of improving productivity. Also, fee earners often tend to struggle to delegate, which can cause bottlenecks in workflow.
We take an overall look at our client businesses from an objective viewpoint. We help to restructure workflows to not only increase productivity, but also to maximise chargeable time.
Specialist experience
Most Virtual Assistants have specialist experience in a particular area. At Business Owl ours is in the legal sector. All of our Virtual Assistants have legal experience. This means that in addition to carrying out the more generic but time-consuming business tasks, we also provide support specific to law firms.
We know what makes a law firm tick – the legal sector has its quirks and unless you’ve been there, you don’t know! We are experienced in using specific software and in following particular processes.
We aren’t employees
Our clients pay us for our time and nothing more. As we aren’t a member of staff, clients aren’t responsible for paying our National Insurance contributions, holiday pay, pension, training costs or for providing us with a desk and equipment.
Most small to medium-sized businesses do need employees. They take on a Virtual Assistant not to replace staff, but to lighten their load and to concentrate on specific areas where additional or specialist support is needed.
Being legally trained, confidentiality comes as second nature to us.
Objective view of company policies
Once again our objectivity comes into play here. We review company policies such as travel and expenses to ensure a balance of fairness to the employees and cost-effectiveness for the business.
Regular reviews
We’ve honed and refined our research skills and seek ways to streamline using different, potentially cheaper software packages, suppliers etc. By having someone experienced at everything from costing office supplies to working on tenders, a business can save themselves a significant amount of money in the long term.
Previous clients have only been half joking when they’ve said that our Virtual Assistants are worth their weight in gold.
In summary
By working with a Legal Virtual Assistant experienced in implementing the above strategies, a law firm can effectively manage and reduce its operational costs while improving its standards of service and efficiency.
This article was written by Jen Workman, Virtual Assistant and Founder of Business Owl. We are expert Virtual Assistants based in North Yorkshire.
This is a brief introduction to give you an idea of how a Virtual Assistant can save you money. To find out more, please contact us for a complimentary chat on 07970 955535 or at jen@businessowl.co.uk.
