Whither law firm support staff?

Anyone paying attention to the blawgosphere has heard about Virtual Law Partners an attempt at a new-ish (depending on who you ask) model for a virtual law firm. You may have heard about it at Law.com, or on one of many blogs.

I’ve read the comments, heard from the well wishers, the doubters, naysayers, and generally curious, and proclaim myself… somewhat undecided. Although I am in favor of anyone willing to go out on a limb and try something new, and I think this endeavor could tell us a lot about the future of legal services.

Lawdragon also has some more info on this virtual law office and other models.

I will say one thing in all the discussion that I’ve found particularly disturbing is the seemingly immediate dismissal of much (maybe even most) staff overhead as an unnecessary expense.

The Wired GC makes an interesting comment along these lines in today’s post about Virtual Law Partners:

The business model is bracing for VLP lawyers and clients. The lawyers get to keep more of the revenue they generate. This lets them make more or work less, or a combination of both. And the clients get as good or better service, without paying more for things they don’t want (over-staffing) or need (expensive offices in high-rent cities).

As Legal Research Plus noticed, there is no librarian. And although I will focus on library services, I would argue that it’s not necessarily true that the client gets good or better service without adequate law firm support services. Of course I am biased because I am a librarian in a law firm. But I like to think that I am able to prove my value to attorneys, staff, and clients all the time. On multiple occasions attorneys have been praised by clients by the value I have been able to add to services provided to clients, in some cases delivering my services directly. But it’s more than that. I also think I help attorneys do their jobs more efficiently and effectively and thus improve the bottom line for attorneys and clients, and have been able to quantitatively prove it as well.

And this is strictly client work. This does not even take into consideration the role librarians can play in business development, competitive intelligence, marketing, and other parts of firm information management.

To their credit they have a paralegal on staff already, and seem to be looking for other “legal specialists” which could include paralegals, librarians, marketers, recruiters, or other legal professionals who might be able to add value to the firm. They could also outsource this work as necessary which could be another way to go.

And there is a difference between overstaffing and appropriate staffing. A virtual law firm may certainly change our notion of what is appropriate/adequate staffing levels for law firms. But I’m not sure that they will be able to keep staffing levels as low as they are hoping if they’re going to add partners at the rate Craig Johnson suggests in an interview at The Wired GC.

The bottom line is that I would warn anyone creating or jumping to a virtual professional services firm to be careful not to minimize the role support staff have played in their success.

On a larger level of analysis I am interested to see how this proceeds. From staffing, billing, marketing and other perspectives they seem well placed to explore some new boundaries for law firms.