Over the past several years, finding and retaining dependable office personnel grew into my firm’s biggest challenge. The hiring process became more protracted. Employees turned over more frequently, which really hurts in key roles like intake specialist. To keep the practice thriving, I needed to rethink how I operated my law firm.
There were options for outsourcing or offshoring work overseas, but many resources are on the other side of the international dateline. That had me a little concerned. How could we stay in sync? And would the personnel thousands of miles away really be a part of my team? I value team connection and devote a lot of time to building our culture. I didn’t want to lose that value or risk hurting client relationships dealing with the logistical challenges.
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Having grown up near the U.S.-Mexican border, I gained a lot of experience with Mexican and American businesses working together, often tightly integrated. That led me to do research on professional services firms turning to nearshore personnel, and I decided to dip my toe in the water and see if nearshoring was the right choice for my firm.
I reached out to a contact in Mexico who worked in staffing and asked about hiring a remote paralegal for a U.S. law firm. I was surprised by Andres’s response:
“Why would you hire a paralegal when you can hire a lawyer?”
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When most people think of outsourcing, offshoring, or nearshoring, they think about saving money. I just wanted a good person in the job. Though I intuitively knew a legal assistant based in Mexico would be cheaper than one living near my law office, I wasn’t focused on cutting costs. I needed to stabilize my firm’s workforce and end the cycle of constant hiring and training.
It never dawned on me that an experienced lawyer working in Mexico would jump at the chance to work remotely as a paralegal for a US law firm. When you have a lawyer doing intake, they can dig deeper and speed up the case evaluation process. This revelation led me to rethink what nearshoring workers could mean for my firm.
Nearshoring turned my biggest challenge into an amazing opportunity. We did more than solve a problem. Nearshore team members transformed my practice by:
- Reducing turnover and stabilizing the team
- Improving our responsiveness to clients
- Increasing continuity for client relationships
- Expanding the breadth of readily accessible expertise
- Extending the hours of availability beyond the standard eight-to-five
- Offering bilingual legal services
The benefits are real, but there can be a steep learning curve. It can take significant time and effort to develop best practices for finding, training, and retaining workers.
Is Nearshoring the Right Move for Your Firm?
Though the term is most often used to describe large manufacturers who keep suppliers in close proximity to manufacturing hubs, we have co-opted the term nearshoring to describe our team of professional workers in Mexico.
For my firm, nearshoring provides access to skilled personnel with legal knowledge, cultural affinity, and language proficiency.
Clients love it. I have been able to be more responsive by expanding the number of knowledgeable, experienced client-facing personnel. I am able to scale my operation because my nearshore team members can handle a lot without my direct involvement, freeing me up to focus on the higher-profile clients and growing the practice.
From the start, I have been successful because this was about more than cost cutting. Our nearshore workers are team members, just like the staff in Florida. They know each other, participate in social events, and have great communication with the rest of the team. But the ability to bring more educated, highly skilled, and experienced personnel to more roles has been the equivalent of rocket fuel for my practice.
Now, Andres and I have teamed up to provide nearshore workers for others. Regents Remote Services connects firms with highly educated, well vetted, nearshore team members. Our high-tech, modern office in Monterrey, Mexico is bustling with teams working for clients all over the US.
What I Get From My Nearshore Team Members
Over the course of just a few years, I was able to turn my biggest operational challenge into a huge opportunity. At a high level, incorporating nearshore team members has offered my firm benefits such as:
- Increased flexibility: Nearshore team members offer me the option to reduce costs hiring like-for-like but more importantly provide me with the opportunity to hire like-for-better. I can add team members who elevate my firm’s level of service and differentiate my practice from the competition.
- Diverse talent pool: Hiring a lawyer rather than a legal assistant was just the beginning. Nearshoring staff has offered us access to a more diverse pool of candidates with specialized skills and educational backgrounds. In addition to lawyers, we have been able to hire doctors, teachers, video producers, graphic designers, and other skilled people who bring so much to our work.
- Multilingual support: A lot of our clients would prefer to speak Spanish. Native speaker employees help us better serve a broader client base.
Nearshoring can transform your practice the way it has mine, but it takes effort and commitment to make it work. In future blogs, I will discuss what it takes to integrate nearshore personnel into an operation, how to overcome obstacles, and provide additional use cases highlighting how nearshore team members can benefit your practice.
But of course, if you want to dig deeper into how nearshoring would work for your particular needs, don’t hesitate to reach out.
About the Author
Jason M. Melton, Esq.
Co-founder of Regents Remote Services
With 20 years of experience working in law firms, Jason Melton co-founded Regents Remote Services in 2020. Built on his own success near shoring assistants for his law firm, Regents provides virtual employment solutions for American corporations by connecting them to college educated workers in Mexico. Melton is co-founder of the Florida law firm Whittel & Melton as well as past president of the National Academy of Motorcycle Injury Lawyers.
