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Are you out there?
VIRTUAL ASSISTANTS COULD BE THE BEST THING TO HIT COST-CONSCIOUS, TIME-PRESSED LAWYERS SINCE, WELL, REAL ASSISTANTS. DEBORAH HODGSON REPORTS
Moving to the Bar can be a costly proposition. You’ve got the rent, computers and other technology, and the fees for chambers. But far more expensive than anything is the cost of hiring a capable and dedicated secretary.
Even if you share services with other barristers, it can be tricky. Too much work? You find your tasks at the bottom of her priority pile. Too little work to give him? You’re resenting each and every one of his cigarette breaks.
That was Cameron Dick’s quandary until he met Kristen Edwards, his virtual assistant. Dick now records his client interviews onto a dictaphone, and straightaway emails the digital voice files to Edwards, who does the typing, usually overnight, from her home in the outlying Brisbane suburb of Rochdale. “It’s quite unique. She provides great flexibility,” says the Brisbane-based junior barrister. Edwards, head of her own company, First Legal Solutions, is happy too. “I like the flexibility and the fact that you’re your own boss,” she says.
Legal ‘virtual’ assistants (VAs) like Edwards belong to a growing community of clerical workers who take advantage of constant advances in technology to offer on-demand services at a distance.
You post the work; they do it at your convenience and you pay only for the hours they spend on it. They work from home, so you don’t pay for the office space. They fill in the hours between jobs servicing other clients, so you don’t pay them to have coffee.
Many virtual assistants in Australia charge below $30 an hour, making it a significant saving over hiring a full or even part-time assistant. Even when there are surcharges for weekend work, they often amount to far less than paying secretaries to come in at double time-and-a-half.
That’s why they’re a gift, say assistants, not just to sole practitioners and barristers, but also to larger firms, where they can help with overtime and overloaded secretaries. “When I worked in large firms there’d always be the inevitable urgent email on a Friday afternoon: who could stay back?” says virtual assistant Belinda Hazzledine of Beljef Secretarial Services. “If you stayed back, you felt you never caught up on rest. But if only they had someone off-site, they could pay them to work over the weekend or in the evening to get the job done while the staff were resting.”
The rise of VAs has gone hand-in-hand with advances in technology – not just mobile email but also digital recorders and DSS voice files. Most often, the assistants are mothers working from home.
Hazzledine used to be a legal secretary for Allens Arthur Robinson and loved it. Even occasionally working till 1 or 2 am on an important commercial matter didn’t faze her. But when her second daughter was born, she no longer wanted to travel the 38km into Melbourne every day from Victoria’s Patterson Lakes. And the occasional midnighter now exhausted her.
Hazzledine had heard of virtual assistants via A Clayton’s Secretary, a network of legal and other VAs, and she finally decided to try it. Now, a year later, she has ten clients, two of whom are lawyers, while the rest need secretarial help in working with lawyers.
Hazzledine is not making as much money as she did as an on-site secretary, but her wages are comparable on a pro rata basis. And for the mother of four year-old Hailey and two year-old Emma, there’s no going back. “I’m so much happier, as there aren’t the hours of travel,” she says. “And if there is no work to do, I don’t have to sit around in the office. I can hang out the washing or read a book.”
The flexibility of many VAs is heaven sent for a time-pressed lawyer. Edwards often does clients’ work after hours at no extra cost. Many others prefer to work at night for family and child-care purposes, so overnight turnaround can be as easy as asking for it.
For similar reasons, VAs based in Australia are attractive to overseas clients. With the time difference, secretarial tasks can be completed on the same date they are received. Kathie Thomas, who runs A Clayton’s Secretary, received the network’s first legal client, who was based in Picardy, France, in 1997. He’s still with them.
The client, an American lawyer, used to courier his dictation tapes to Paris to have them typed into accurate English, but tapes often went missing or got damaged. After sending them back to Los Angeles electronically for a while, the lawyer began thinking that perhaps he should send them to the cheapest place in the world. He compared prices and found the Melbourne-based Clayton’s.
“He has now referred us to new clients in France, South Africa, and back to Sydney,” says Thomas. “One of the best things for him is that because of the time difference he can send his work at the end of the day, and we complete it while he sleeps.”
Thomas founded A Clayton’s Secretary 12 years ago, when internet use was on the way to becoming universal. She now has members in 12 countries, and the network is experiencing a growth spurt. Member numbers have almost doubled in the last four years, and clients are now contacting the network seven days a week, as opposed to every other day.
The idea of VAs has been even faster to spread in the US than here. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but the International Directory of Virtual Assistants has several hundred registered American VAs listed, with just five in Australia. However, that’s a mere fraction of those out there. Thomas estimates about 400 are in Australia, based on membership of her chat forum, and the website Staffcentrix counts approximately 5,000 businesses describing themselves as VAs, world-wide.
In the US, the trend is towards increasing specialisation. “I have a colleague who only does holistic health work,” says American VA Lynn Carroll, of Carrollegal in Colorado. “That will happen in the legal field too. It makes sense for legal firms here; instead of hiring someone at entry level and having to train them, they can afford a chunk of the time of a VA who is already trained and can hit the ground running.”
There’s a VA online training course, at Virtual Assistant U, and as of this year, an annual International Virtual Assistants Day and conference. “It’s going to just take off,” predicts Carroll.
Of course, for a lawyer, the virtual world is never going to seem quite as reassuring as instructing your secretary face-to-face, particularly when you’re dealing with sensitive client information. But VAs are increasingly able to handle many levels of confidentiality. “Of course, what you transmit through the internet can be easily tampered with,” says Edwards. “So I had a special software program written for me, which I use to encrypt Word documents. My client gets a password to decode it, over the telephone.”
And as for face-to-face immediacy, Hazzledine says it is rapidly evaporating anyway. “At AAR I worked for a partner and a deputy executive, but they were hardly in the office,” she says. “We’d communicate by phone, email and fax, and I’d find myself thinking, ‘why can’t I sit at home and you fax me there?’”
Increasingly, savvy lawyers will ask themselves the same question. g
27-Jun-2006
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