Law Beez provides on-demand freelance lawyer services to law firms of all sizes, as well as in-house legal departments. Law Beez is here to help lawyers grow their law firms by giving them the tools needed to easily outsource their legal work to freelance lawyers. Whether your goal is to catch up on a backlog of work, keep a balanced workload, or decrease overhead and increase profit margin.
Whether you use the term “freelance lawyer” or “contract attorney”, it's all the same. A freelance lawyer assists other lawyers, law firms, and in-house legal departments on a fixed or hourly, project, contract, or part-time basis. They act as independent contractors and in a “lawyer on-demand” capacity. Freelance lawyers that work through Law Beez only work with other lawyers and do not take on end-clients directly.
You must be a licensed attorney in good standing. Only licensed attorneys can use the services of Law Beez. We are not available to any of the general public.
We've spent a lot of time making sure we get this right. Our registration process is extensive and intense. In fact, freelance lawyers are required to jump through several hoops to make it into our hive. This starts with a full verification of identity, state bar status and history. On top of that, before we accept a freelance lawyer into our hive, each lawyer is interviewed to ensure they align with our Law Beez client expectations.
Easy. All you have to do is register for an account, and then you can view our hive of freelance lawyers.
The first step to accessing our hive of freelance lawyers is to register for an account. Beyond that, we have an easy to use and easy to follow process that you can check out here
Great question! The attorneys in our hive range in level of experience. Many of whom have left big law and are doing freelance work to supplement their income. There are semi-retired lawyers, newly admitted lawyers and everything in between. And then there are Military spouses who are required to move from state to state every couple of years. Since 2015, our parent company Attorneys in Motion has worked with an organization called the Military Spouse JD Network, which helps lawyers who are married into the military continue to practice law.
There are no monthly fees. You only pay the flat-fee budget that you set when you post a project, and your card isn't charged until you hire a freelance lawyer.
It depends on what you need. Whether it's motion writing, document review, demand letter writing, legal content writing, trial briefs, discovery, etc., our hive of freelance lawyers is ready to help.
There are quite a few limitations and there are good reasons for them, most of which are for the purposes of maintaining ethical compliance.
For starters, the hiring attorney must have sole professional responsibility for the work product of the freelance lawyer and must supervise the performance of services for each project to ensure compliance with the Rules of Professional Conduct.
In addition to that, the freelance lawyer will have no contact with the hiring attorneys' client, opposing counsel, witnesses or any other persons potentially involved with the project, either by way of telephone, email, facsimile, social media, in-person, and/or zoom and other like platforms.
Finally the hiring attorney must retain sole responsibility for determining the fee charged to his or her client. The freelance lawyer must not have any influence or involvement in that process.
This is an important one and here's how it works:
The hiring attorney is required to complete a conflict checklist upon posting a project. Once the hiring attorney is interested in a candidate, the conflict checklist is sent to that freelance lawyer. After the freelance lawyer reviews the checklist and answers the questions, the hiring attorney will receive a notification to review the answers. If no conflict is found, the hiring attorney may proceed with the hiring process.
In addition, Law Beez has a confidentiality agreement with all of its freelance lawyers within our Terms of Use, which is signed by all freelancers within our platform. This applies alongside their usual professional obligations and, as licensed attorneys, they are ethically bound by their duty of confidentiality.
The simple answer is yes, absolutely! Your success is our priority, which means that all things related to ethical compliance are at the top of our list. You can read more here
Posting a project is easy and only takes a few minutes to do. Since your project is visible to our hive of attorneys, you'll want to make sure that you don't include anything confidential upon posting your project.
If you choose to upload documents, know that they will not be visible to the freelance attorney until that freelancer is hired. At that point, the document tab will become available for that individual.
An important detail to note is that you have the option to choose whether you want your name to be visible to the hive of freelance lawyers or to keep it hidden until you hire an attorney.
Lastly, upon posting your project, you will be prompted to create a conflict checklist. This will not be visible to any of the network until you are interested in hiring a freelance lawyer. At that time you, will be prompted to release the conflict checklist to the freelance lawyer that you are interested in hiring.
Now that we have that out of the way, there are a few steps to posting your project. Here's an idea of what that includes:
You'll want to set it for a period that offers enough time to get through the hiring process and that makes sense for your project. However, you can hire a freelance lawyer at any time.
Have you ever heard of Parkinson's Law? It's the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." That being said, you might want to consider creating a deadline that gives you plenty of time for revisions and/or any other necessary changes with plenty of time to spare.
In order to calculate your fixed-rate budget, you'll first want to estimate how many hours you think the project will take to complete. Next, multiply a fair hourly pay rate by the number of hours. If it is a complicated project, it will need someone with highly specialized knowledge and/or experience; or, if the project is on a short deadline, you will want to increase the budget accordingly. We have a budget guide available to you from your account.
To break that down for you, estimate the number of hours, and multiply by the hourly rate. For example, if you think a project will take 5 hours to complete for an average case, done by a mid-level attorney, you may want to estimate the rate at $85 per hour. Thus, 5 hours multiplied by $85 equals $425.
$85 per hour
x 5 hours
$425 project budget
You can view the full budget guide once you are logged into your account from the budget page.
You can edit your budget from the menu on the project page of your dashboard. If, for some reason, you need to increase the scope of work after you've hired an attorney, you can add an extra budget or increase the budget from the “deliverables” tab located on the project details page.
Each project includes a secure and encrypted messaging portal specific to that project. This makes messaging easy to access and track.
Any time a message is sent, a new freelancer applies to a project, work is submitted and/or any other important notifications come in, you'll receive an email notification alongside an alert on your dashboard.
For every project, you are provided access to a secure and encrypted document library that is only visible to your freelance lawyer after you've hired him or her. Documents can be viewed from the project details page through your dashboard. Again, documents cannot be viewed by any freelance lawyer until he or she has been hired.
Once a freelance lawyer records an entry to the project timecard, you will receive a notification alerting you of the new entry. This gives you a “real-time” view of your project progress. Time cards can be viewed and downloaded from the project details page through your dashboard.
Canceling is easy. Here's how to do it:
If you have not hired a freelance lawyer, your cancellation will simply process and cancel. However, if you've hired a freelance lawyer, you will be prompted to open a dispute. Simply enter the required information and the dispute process will begin.
While it is uncommon, if for some reason, you are not satisfied with the quality of work product, you can open a dispute. In order to open a dispute, please follow the instructions below:
For your protection, we use Authorize.net to handle all payment processing. In accordance with payment rules and regulations, no credit card information is stored by Law Beez. We are fully PCI DSS compliant.
When you register for an account, you will be prompted to provide a credit card before you can post a project. However, your credit card will not be charged until you hire a freelance lawyer. There is no charge to post a project.
Law Beez takes care of all tax reporting so that you don't have to. We issue IRS Form 1099 on or before January 31 of each year, only to anyone who has received $600 or more from Law Beez for that tax filing year.
