Monday brings the kick-off of the seventh annual Clio Cloud Conference, and among the companies that will be exhibiting there is LAWCLERK, a legal services marketplace where solo and small-firm attorneys can hire freelance lawyers for short-term projects.

In advance of the conference, LAWCLERK is today announcing new duplication and notification features designed to make it easier for attorneys to post duplicate or recurring projects. It also announced new dashboard notifications to provide attorneys with at-a-glance, real-time project updates.

As I’ve explained here before, law firms use LAWCLERK to solicit freelance lawyers to help with specific projects. Firms post project descriptions, freelancers apply, and firms choose from among the applicants. Just ahead of last year’s Clio conference, LAWCLERK added a “Build a Team” feature that allows firms to designate favored freelancers for future work assignments.

The duplication feature announced today allows attorneys to quickly replicate assignments to a set of freelancers by posting multiple projects with the same or similar instructions at the push of a button. Instead of having to copy and paste instructions for each project, an attorney can replicate them easily.

LAWCLERK suggests several ways attorneys can use this feature:

  • A law firm that specializes in a particular area of law can quickly post projects that involve regularly recurring work.
  • A lawyer wanting to spot-check an issue, argument or brief could use this feature to poll a variety of freelancers.
  • A lawyer faced in discovery with thousands of pages to quickly review could divide and conquer the project by batching them out to different freelancers.

The new notifications feature is now part of the LAWCLERK dashboard. Alerts and icons alert hiring attorneys and freelancers to new messages and notify an attorney when a freelancer has uploaded an initial submission.

Company Sees Notable Growth

In a recent telephone conversation, Gregory Garman, the lawyer who cofounded LAWCLERK in 2016 and serves as its CEO, told me that the company has seen 400% year-over-year growth since its commercial launch in January 2018.

Already, the platform has more freelance lawyers than the largest U.S. law firm has associates, he said. On average, freelancers who receive work through the site earn from $60 to $100 an hour.

In some cases, the same lawyers who hire a freelancer through the site when they are busy will also take freelance work when their business is slower.

“We want to be the backbone to enable solos and small firms to be more competitive,” Garman said.

LAWCLERK does that by enabling attorneys to bill more hours, but without the overhead of added staffing. Instead, lawyers are able to staff their matters flexibly based on needs and hire freelancers who have expertise specific to the project.

“Lawyers are trusted advisors to their clients,” Garman said. “We give the lawyers someone they can trust — someone who will own the problem for them and give them the best that can be done.”

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.