My remote paralegal has too little work. What should I delegate?

Your remote paralegal has finished their assignments, but you still have documents to review and clients to update. Before you decide you're paying for too many hours, check whether the work is reaching them consistently. When each assignment depends on someone remembering to send it, a capable paralegal runs out of work on quiet days and gets bypassed on busy ones, because doing it yourself feels faster than explaining it.

A family law firm in Sonoma County went through this. During a stretch of staff turnover, its paralegal spent her first months on phones and admin, and the firm said so plainly: "we were definitely under utilizing her." Once it moved her to paralegal work, "she's been doing great."

1. Find out why the work is running out

Running out of work has more than one cause, and each has a different fix.

2. Choose responsibilities by practice

Start with routine work that repeats, begins from inputs you can list, and ends in something you can check. Add more complex work as the paralegal shows they can handle it, always with your direction. Recurring work includes anything a case event sets off, such as an RFE, as well as weekly work.

The attorney stays responsible for the paralegal's work, and keeps the legal judgment and the signature.

3. Give every responsibility a starting point

A written guide explains how to do the work. It doesn't tell your paralegal which file needs attention tomorrow morning. For that, each recurring responsibility needs a trigger. When a matter reaches the right stage in your case management system, the task is assigned to the paralegal with a due date and a reviewer, and the paralegal checks that queue every morning and flags anything missing or blocked. Assigning by hand works as well as an automation, as long as each task has an owner, a priority and a place where everyone can see it.

4. Write each responsibility on one page

The one-page guide answers the questions your paralegal would otherwise have to send you. The example below covers medical records for a PI file, from the first request to the last record. The follow-up schedule is an example, so use your firm's.

Once you've written two or three, your paralegal can draft the rest for you to correct and approve.

Give clear time-entry instructions too, covering substantive legal work, administrative work and training. At the Sonoma County firm, the paralegal's billable hours were low, and the firm traced it to its own guidance. Her attorneys now tell her, as they assign work, "this is something that you can bill for so make sure you get your time in." Whether an entry can be charged to a client depends on the work itself, your engagement terms and the rules that apply to you. The ABA's guidance for lawyers on paralegals separates substantive legal work, which may be billed, from clerical work, and every fee has to be reasonable (Model Rule 1.5). The attorney reviews client charges. In a contingency practice, billable hours say little about workload, so look at completed work, open requests, rework and the time you spend reviewing.

5. Settle the remote basics before the first assignment

Decide a few things before the first task goes out. Give your paralegal their own login for each system you approve, so you can always see who did what. Agree where documents may be stored and how they're sent, run a conflict check, set the hours they should be reachable, and name who they go to when you're in court. The duty to protect client information applies whatever the setup (Model Rule 1.6). How closely you supervise depends on the person's experience, the work and the jurisdiction where they work (Model Rule 5.3, comment 3). The ABA's opinion on outsourced work says clients should be told when people outside the firm work on their matters, and should consent before those people receive confidential information (ABA Formal Opinion 08-451). Your state's rules govern.

6. Add responsibilities as they become reliable

A typical first month adds one responsibility at a time. Move to the next step when the last one is coming back right, not because a week has passed. An experienced paralegal on familiar work may move faster, and an unfamiliar filing may need close review well past the first month.

A weekly workload meeting doesn't replace the review a particular piece of work needs.

Engelman Law, a personal injury practice, shows how a role can grow as the attorney gains confidence in the work. By her second month, the paralegal, Rosella, was running discovery with co-counsel and taking client calls. At her one-year review, Britany Engelman said: "Rosella is very capable of taking things and just having a list of assignments and working on them and getting them done on her own."

7. Know what's yours and what Interstaff handles

With a managed placement from Interstaff, the work splits like this:

You don't have to work out the role alone. Interstaff's talent manager can sit down with you to list the role's tasks, write day-to-day and monthly guides for them, and then walk your paralegal through the guides.

8. If there still isn't enough work

Every practice has slow weeks. A standing list keeps them useful: drafting the next one-page guides, turning your best past filings into templates, chasing overdue records and documents, and cleaning up files so they can be found later. If the list still leaves hours empty, the answer is fewer hours: size the role to the work you actually have.

Your next step this week: choose one responsibility from the "start with" column, write its one-page guide, and agree on its trigger and its review with your paralegal.

If your list shows you need a different skill set or a different number of hours, see candidates before you interview. Profiles show each candidate's weekly availability, and the rate where one is listed, and you can shortlist without logging in.