The Lawsmiths of Southern California: Information for Contractor Attorneys

In giving the information that follows, we have tried hard to set forth honestly and fully the realities of "temp" lawyering. We see no value, and much harm, in telling you "blue sky" fairy tales about fabulous hourly rates, or ongoing part-time assignments that just exactly fit your lifestyle wants and needs, or other such piffle. We founded this industry, and we feel a continuing incumbency to try to keep it fair and honest to whatever extent lies within our limits.

What The Lawsmiths Does For You

The Lawsmiths is, in essence, a registry for attorneys seeking work as independent contractors. We maintain a sophisticated database of experienced, well-qualified attorneys willing--under the right circumstances--to work on an hourly basis as independent contractors; we then market the availability of that strong central resource to law firms and corporate law departments all across the State. The Lawsmiths of Southern California, Inc. handles all California Counties from San Luis Obispo south to the border (our sister firm, The Lawsmiths of Northern California, Inc. handles everything north of that area).

When you register with us, by faxing us your resume, all germane data about you and your background is entered into that database in a standardized form, and automatically comes up for consideration when we run any given set of job-requirement parameters against the database. (That means that once you have submitted your resume, there is nothing gained by making follow-up calls: we don't need to be reminded that you're out there, the hard drive remembers things better than we do.)

There are some very important things that you should know about how we operate:

We do not ever send out your resume, disclose your name, or refer to your particular qualifications in discussion with any law office without having first discussed the possible assignment with you and gotten your approval to proceed.

We should absolutely, positively not have to say that, much less emphasize it, but we have heard too many horror stories about other organizations to leave it unsaid.

Typical Hourly Rates

As an independent contractor, you can set your hourly rate at whatever you choose. We, however, will always advise you--based on our experience and our discussions with the particular law office in question--of the rate or rate range we think it likely that that law office will accept. You will never receive less than $45 an hour for any assignment you obtain through us (any dollar figures we use here are always the net to you). Attorneys rightly classed "heavyweight"--much deep experience in a given field--may at times make up to $80 an hour, though that is an unusual rate; we have seen rates higher than even that, but only quite rarely.

Those are, approximately, the extremes. Regrettably, most projects involve rates nearer the low end; that is because when outside help is needed most law offices, most of the time, will arrange or rearrange their workloads so that the least-critical (read least-demanding) work goes to the outsider. It is only when a law office definitely needs to hire strong expertise, rather than simple overload help, that the higher rates are seen.

Typical Projects

Project durations do not come in a smooth spectrum: they tend to divide into two distinct categories. The first is the "one-off" project--a specific thing that needs doing once. Such projects can be simple research, or motions or pleadings to draft, and suchlike; their normal duration is in hours, rarely a week's worth, and when they're done, they're done. Such tasks can usually be done away from the office contracting the work out.

Please take note that we do not any longer handle--and have not for some time now handled--simple appearance-only requests. If all you want to do as a contractor is appearance work, we are not the right place for you. (Projects we do handle can, of course, involve your making appearances--we just don't accept requests for help that are just a simple appearance.)

The second category is the ongoing assignment. Such assignments may involve work on one particular matter, but more often they are simply overflow work--you are temporarily just another attorney in the law office or legal department. They almost always run for at least several weeks, and not infrequently for several months (or even a year or more). Typically--but not invariably--they are "full time," which for a contractor will mean 35 to 45 actual work hours a week (for contractors, billable hours and physical hours had best correspond closely--if there's no work handy, go home, or at least stop the clock, because the office can't eat your idle time on overhead). Sometimes, though, such assignments can be quite intensive, with heavy hours requirements. Either way, they almost invariably they require 100% of the time to be spent on the law office's premises, although there are occasional partial or complete exceptions.

How The Lawsmiths Bills Your Time And Pays You

While law offices will normally require you to keep their internal time records on their individual forms, we bill your time exclusively on the basis of simple form Timesheets that we issue you when you take on a project and which you keep in parallel with the law office's internal forms (or transcribe from such forms). Our billing cycles are two weeks in duration, running from a Sunday through a Saturday, inclusive. Our Timesheets just show 14 per-day lines, a cycle-total line, and two signature lines: one for you and one for office approval. You complete such a Timesheet every 14 days, total the daily hours, sign it, and get an authorized person in the law office to sign off on the hours as "approved."

What constitutes billable time is entirely between you and the law office. It is always best to resolve any potential questions (travel time to outside locations, for example) before you put in the time.

When you have an approved Timesheet, you fax it to us and we immediately (usually within minutes) fax out a corresponding Invoice to the law office; all such Invoices are plainly marked as net 10 days. We have a computer tracking system that automatically sends out reminder notices or--in the very rare case of an office running truly late--prompts us to take personal action. (You can also--as many do--ask the law office to fax the signed-off Timesheet direct to us as soon as they have approved it.)

To preserve your independent-contractor status, which is vital for you, we cannot pay you any money we have not received on your behalf from the law firm--we are simply your billing and collection agent for your professional fees. But when we do receive a check from a law firm, we always, even on weekends, cut and mail the corresponding proceeds check to you on the same day.

Here, we tell you frankly what qualifications you need for it to make sense for you to submit your resumé to us.

Absolutes

To register with us, you must be a current member of the California State Bar. We appreciate that veteran attorneys newly relocated from other states can do useful work even while awaiting their formal California membership, but our client law offices have made it plain to us over the years that they would rather not--especially when disrupting their routines by using an outsider temporarily--be bothered sorting out what such an attorney can or cannot do for them. Sorry, logical or not, fair or not, it's an absolute requirement.

Second, we require an absolute minimum of three years of actual attorney practice experience. If you got your J.D. four years ago but spent two of those years as a fashion model in Paris (yes, we really ran into that once), that's two years of experience and not enough. Be aware that if you have less than five years' experience you will be in an uphill competition with the rest of our rather experienced portfolio unless you happen to be developing a niche specialty or have other special qualifications. That is not to say that we cannot or never do find work for third- or fourth-year attorneys--only that it is a little less likely that we will.

Some Realities

We have already alluded to the experience issue. We may as well also be up front with you about background qualifications. We never refuse or discard any resume from anyone. But if you are not from a top-25 or so law school, you will not usually be a front-runner for any project. Moreover, if you are not from a top-50 or so law school, you will--to be brutally frank--be a last resort.

We do not claim that that is fair or right. We do claim that law offices tend to be very picky about such qualifications and--there being today such a tidal wave of well-qualified attorneys seeking work as contractors--they can afford to be. It's largely a buyer's market. We want to help everyone. But if we have a task for which the suited candidates are of equal practice duration and comparable geographic proximity, but are from U.C.L.A., Boalt, Stanford, U.W.L.A., and LaVerne--well, which three would you put forth?

(But, if you are in an out-of-the-way location, don't give up. You may well be Hobson's Choice whenever anything out your way comes up.)

Where you got your experience will matter somewhat as well. Five years at a big downtown law firm will usually play better than three years and then two years at small P.I. plaintiff firms. We say that not to discourage (or disparage) anyone, just to keep you aligned with the realities of the marketplace.

What To Send

Obviously, we first and foremost need your resumé. Additionally, it helps considerably if, in a cover letter or note, you give us at least a rough idea of your time availability; the simplest way is to say something like "full time" or "on average, 15 to 20 hours a week" or "only discrete off-site projects" or the like. We of course fully understand that any such estimate is necessarily a blurred snapshot of a moving target.

If there is information about you or your background that you think we or a prospective user of your professional services ought to have but that is not on your resume, by all means summarize that information in an additional writing (neatly enough that we could send it on to a law office as we receive it) and include that in your transmission. If, as some do, you have multiple resumes (slight differences in presentation of varied experience, so as to emphasize skills for differing potential purposes), send them all, but explain just what you intend each to accomplish.

Please do not send us any writing samples or course grades.

How To Send It

We very much prefer to receive resumes by fax. Please transmit them to us (toll-free) at: 1 (888) 995-6010. Because that line is typically tied up doubling as out much-used internet access, we urgently recommend that you fax resumés to us in the morning before 11:00 a.m. After that, you may find the line perpetually busy. Please send us your fax with your fax machine or software at its fine resolution (sometimes "High Resolution") setting.

If you're using a physical fax machine (as opposed to "printing" a computer-file resume to fax software), please take the time to be sure the pages are each quite square and centered in your scanner--pages at an angle look ugly, and while we can correct many defects in faxed documents, that is not one of them.

If you want or need information beyond what you find here, you can telephone us at 1 (800) 995-4080 any weekday (between 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. please) or you can email us from right here.

(Please do not send your resume by email; while most word processors can decipher documents made by most other word processors, we vastly prefer the fax image of a resume. If you want to email us a plain-text resume, we can accept that, but a formatted fax is very much preferred.)

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