Over the past two months, we’ve discussed how to decide what to delegate to a freelance lawyer and the importance of clear communication to a successful engagement with a freelance lawyer. Two additional best practices can help you maximize the benefits—to both yourself and your clients—of working with a freelance lawyer.

Share Relevant Information

Keep in mind that, unlike an associate in your office, a freelance lawyer hired for a project-based engagement will not (and should not) have access to all of your case files.* Therefore, at the beginning of every engagement, it’s important to identify all documents in the file that the freelance lawyer will need to complete the work, and either provide them to the freelance lawyer or provide the freelance lawyer with a list of relevant documents and access to the entire file. Similarly, if you have written policies and procedures; workflows; and/or templates that an associate would be expected to use when working on a particular type of project or case, you should share those resources with any freelance lawyer hired to work on the same type of project or case. Finally, be sure to timely respond to questions that arise during the course of the engagement.

Allow Sufficient time for Review and Revisions

When delegating work to a freelance lawyer, build in enough time before the “hard” deadline (e.g., the date the summary judgment opposition must be served and filed) to adequately review the work product and (if necessary) send it back to the freelance lawyer for revisions. If initial assignments are clear; you communicate as necessary during the course of each engagement; and you provide constructive post-engagement feedback, a freelance lawyer’s written work product generally shouldn’t require major revisions (and certainly shouldn’t require such revisions after the first few engagements).

*Under appropriate circumstances (e.g., a freelance lawyer working 30 hrs/wk for two months while an associate is out on FMLA leave), you may give a freelance lawyer broader access to your files.

Last month, we discussed how to decide what to delegate to a freelance lawyer. Once you’ve made that decision and found a freelance lawyer to work with, it’s time to actually delegate the work.

Communication is the key to a successful engagement, and to building a productive ongoing working relationship with a freelance lawyer. Clearly communicate deadlines. Explain the goals for each project and, where appropriate, how the project’s goals help achieve the client’s objectives in the matter as a whole.

At the beginning of your relationship with a freelance lawyer, it’s a good idea to err on the side of providing more initial guidance and ongoing oversight than less. For example, if the freelance lawyer is drafting a brief, this guidance may include specific legal arguments to raise or facts to focus on; once the relationship is more established, more general instructions may be sufficient. If you give instructions orally, ask the freelance lawyer to confirm them in writing so you can ensure that the freelance lawyer understands them.

The first few times you work with a freelance lawyer (especially on large or complicated projects), you should require the freelance lawyer to provide brief regular status reports before the final work product is due. Reports may be triggered by the completion of discrete tasks (such as completing legal research before drafting a brief); the passage of time (perhaps once a week for an appellate brief); or the expenditure of a certain amount of time on a project (perhaps 10 hours into drafting a summary judgment motion that the freelance lawyer estimated would take 30 hours to complete). Once you’ve established a relationship with a freelance lawyer who has demonstrated the ability to complete projects to your standards in a timely and efficient manner, you may find it unnecessary to monitor the freelance lawyer’s progress as often (if at all).

Finally, giving the freelance lawyer feedback at the end of the engagement (such as by providing the freelance lawyer with the final version of a brief the freelance lawyer originally drafted) will help improve the freelance lawyer’s performance on the next engagement.

You’re up to your eyeballs in work, spending late nights and weekends at the office. You know that working with a freelance lawyer can help you avoid burning out and increase your firm’s profitability, but you don’t know how to get started.

As the King of Hearts said in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Begin at the beginning.” For our purposes, the beginning is deciding what to delegate. You may choose to delegate a project for a variety of reasons.

Professional satisfaction is an important aspect of a successful practice. You may enjoy trying cases and taking and defending depositions, but dislike brief-writing. Or perhaps you prefer client counseling and negotiating settlements to drafting discovery demands. Delegate tasks that you don’t enjoy doing.

In a survey about solo and small firm management that Thomson Reuters conducted earlier this year, 37% of all small firms (up to 29 lawyers) and 39% of solos identified improving internal efficiency as a top firm goal. Many lawyers resist delegating work because of efficiency concerns that may take two forms. First, some lawyers fear that it will take more of their own time to supervise a freelance lawyer and/or to fix poor-quality work product than to do the work themselves. Second, some lawyers are afraid that a freelance lawyer will spend more time doing the work than it would take them to do the work themselves.

Both of these problems can be addressed by working with an experienced, qualified freelance lawyer. Like a partner or a senior associate, an experienced freelance lawyer will need less supervision, and will produce a higher-quality work product, than an inexperienced one. And experienced freelance lawyers are generally as efficient as—if not more efficient than—the lawyers who hire them. Of course, just as a senior associate’s salary should be higher than that of a junior associate, highly qualified and experienced freelance lawyers charge more than less qualified, less experienced freelance lawyers. By the same token, you can charge more for work performed by an experienced freelance lawyer than an inexperienced one, just as you can charge more for work performed by a partner or senior associate than a junior associate.

Finally, there’s time. Given two projects that are equally urgent—both of which you would enjoy doing and can do efficiently—sometimes you just can’t do both in the time you have. Allowing yourself to get burned out is bad for your physical and mental health; your personal relationships; and, ultimately, your clients (after all, if you’re running on fumes, you won’t be doing your best work). Give yourself a break—before you break.