Virtual assistants for law firms

Plans depend on hours, desks and coverage. Get a staffing plan within 1 business day. For orientation, published US virtual assistant pay averages $19.45 an hour (PayScale via Wishup, 2026), and managed offshore assistants are typically quoted at $640 to $2,400 a month full time. A dedicated legal assistant is priced per person for a block of hours, so a heavy litigation month does not change the bill, and there is no per-minute meter on intake calls.

No. A paralegal virtual assistant from AssistBPO handles the administrative side of legal work: intake, calendaring, document management, e-filing prep, records requests and billing entry. Substantive paralegal work that requires legal judgment, such as drafting pleadings from scratch or research you rely on, stays with your licensed staff. Where a task sits in between, such as assembling a motion from your template with attorney-provided content, the assistant does the assembly and the attorney reviews every word before filing. ABA Model Rule 5.3 makes the supervising lawyer responsible for nonlawyer assistants, and our process is built to make that supervision easy.

No, on both. Assistants relay facts from the file, such as the next hearing date or which documents are still outstanding, and route any question about what a client should do to the attorney. They never sign pleadings, engagement letters or filings, and never submit a filing where the rules require an attorney to do so. E-filing packets are assembled and staged in the portal, and the attorney reviews and submits. The unauthorized practice of law rules in your state set the boundary, and your team lead keeps a copy in the assistant's playbook.

Every assistant is an employee of the group, background-checked, under NDA, and trained on the confidentiality duties your state bar extends to nonlawyer staff under ABA Model Rules 1.6 and 5.3. Work happens on managed devices with MFA and no local file storage, inside your own Clio, MyCase, NetDocuments or Microsoft 365 accounts, so nothing leaves your systems. Access is granted per user and can be revoked in minutes. If a matter must be walled off from a particular assistant because of a conflict, the team lead sets the restriction in your system before any work starts.

Clio Manage and Clio Grow, MyCase, Lawmatics, PracticePanther, Smokeball, CosmoLex, Filevine and Litify for practice management and intake; NetDocuments, iManage and SharePoint for documents; the state and federal e-filing portals your firm uses; Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace; RingCentral and Dialpad for phones. If your firm runs something else, your team lead records the process during onboarding and the assistant learns it in the first week, always inside your own user account with the permissions you choose.

Only people who contacted your firm first, such as a web form, a chat or a missed call, and only with lawful consent and do-not-call scrubbing. We do not make live solicitation calls to strangers, because ABA Model Rule 7.3 and your state bar's rules restrict it. Follow-up messages carry the firm's name, avoid outcome promises and include any disclaimer your state requires on written communications to prospective clients. Your team lead keeps your state's advertising rule in the playbook, and every new template is approved by an attorney before use.

Your hours. Most firms take a 9 to 6 desk in their own time zone, so intake, calendaring and billing entry happen while attorneys are in court or with clients. Firms with heavy intake add an evening and weekend answering desk so an injured caller or a family in crisis reaches a person; the desk leaves a morning handover note with each call and every consult booked. Deadline-heavy weeks can be covered by the trained backup at short notice, and the team lead adjusts hours in the weekly review.

The assistant captures, codes and formats; the attorney decides. Notes, call logs, calendar entries and email threads are turned into time entries with the client's task codes and your billing guidelines, such as minimum increments, block-billing bans and narrative style. Prebills go to each attorney for review, and edits are applied before invoices leave. The assistant chases missing time each week and flags unbilled work, but never adjusts rates, writes down time or touches trust funds. Your bookkeeper handles the accounting side; the assistant keeps the time and billing records feeding it accurate.