February 24, 2023

 Paula Forbes

Staffing law departments ALSPs flex legal resourcing law organisations

Many law organisations face challenges when it comes to optimising resource management: balancing workloads, ensuring adequate staffing, forecasting demand, and controlling costs. These are in addition to the always-present pressure to increase productivity and efficiency (while maintaining employee well-being) and comply with new and existing regulations. Plus, client expectations evolve as technology advances. How can a law organisation meet these competing demands?

Technology Is Not a Panacea 

Technology has a critical role in resource management, but it is not the be-all-and-end-all. . Numerous helpful tools exist: systems for time and attendance tracking; practice, project, and matter management; scheduling; resource allocation and planning; and more. Each has an important role to play. However, adopting and deploying new technology typically requires time and financial investment, stakeholder buy-in, change management, training, and more. Gains in resource management from technology do not come overnight. How, then, can a law organisation make strides as quickly as possible?

What ALSPs Provide

Alternative legal services providers such as Elevate offer myriad capabilities beyond what technology can deliver. We deliver benefits based on a combination of factors:

• The capability to provide  law professionals on extremely short notice for the length of time required
• Time-tested and proven resource analysis and planning methodologies
• Deep experience successfully matching forecasted needs to niche talent

These and other factors address resourcing challenges common to law departments and law firms alike.

Just-In-Time Resourcing

A powerful advantage of leading ALSPs is their ability calibrating staff size and expertise to match peaks and troughs in demand. This ensures you have additional resources when and where you need them to meet increases in demand and reduce costs as various needs dissipate. A flexible approach avoids the overhead of hiring full-time employees and eliminates the risk of under-utilisation when work slows. Ideally, the provider in question is adept at providing its talent projects with other customers when not engaged with a specific client – this maintains the knowledge base necessary for quickly ramping up in response to surges in work. For law firms, ALSPs can backfill individuals within the firm and provide secondment support to clients.

Skills Analysis and Capability Planning

Proper resource management involves understanding the expertise you have, what you need, and what you are likely to need in the future. Ad hoc approaches are inadequate, and ‘reinventing the wheel’ wastes precious time. A sound methodology identifies skill gaps and enables you to get in front of emerging demands, thereby avoiding disruptions. There is tremendous value-add from an ALSP that has established processes for skills mapping and demand cycle analysis based on geography, industry, and matter type.

Matching Specific Needs to Suitable Talent

ALSPs with a deep bench of talent – particularly mid- and senior-level practitioners – offer the added advantage of seamlessly meeting the needs identified by capacity planning activity. This is especially true when you require specialised skills for a finite period. A provider with a robust pool of niche and diverse talent allows you to speedily engage needed expertise beyond what your existing internal network can supply.

Other ALSP Advantages

An ALSP can deliver other significant benefits: data analysis on staffing allocation, benchmarking that draws on information from across the ALSP’s customer base, a global presence that matches customer needs, a strong brand that attracts superior talent, training capabilities to upskill practitioners who already work with your organisation and know its culture, operations, and needs, best practices and low-cost delivery centres for ‘run-the-business’ matters, and more.

Budget and profit pressures have made resource management critical. To do it effectively, leaders of law organisations should explore how engaging a service provider can deliver immediate results and lasting benefits – fiscally, strategically, and otherwise.