My Attorney Blog

I try to increase my contract attorney leads by registering with as many agencies as I find reasonable. I’m currently registered with more than 15 different places, but the thing I’m finding is that only about half regularly contact me and provide me with valuable job leads. The others might call or e-mail me once every few months, which is far too infrequent for me to have and maintain an on-going working relationship with them.

There are several newer agencies that have just recently popped up that I haven’t gotten around to visiting yet. I probably won’t get to them immediately until they have established themselves for a while first. There’s no point in taking time out to hand over your professional and personal information including social security number until you can reasonably expect employment leads as a result of your efforts.

I have noticed that a few of the newer staffing agencies have been regularly posting contract attorney leads on the various listservs, which is a good indicator that they are getting a steady stream of job orders to fill. If they can keep it up for a few more months I will likely pay them a visit to register.

However, there’s been a few startups that I haven’t heard from in a long time. I suspect either business has dried up or perhaps they’ve already established a small in-house list of dedicated temps that they regularly call on for projects, and I’m not one of them. It’s okay. I will eventually develop a relationship with all of them when the time is right. At the moment I am fairly comfortable with the 6 primary agencies that I regularly work with. However, since the market’s been drying up recently, I may soon increase my list of preferred agencies. I know of at least one new agency that entered the staffing business having already developed a solid prior relationship with one of the major law firms. It may be time to take advantage of their connections.

It’s never too late to start thinking about investing in a retirement plan. If you haven’t already done so, you should start maxing out your IRA or ROTH accounts every year.

Did you know that contract attorneys can participate in their legal temp agencies’ 401k plans? I didn’t know they offered these tax deferred retirement plans until a few months ago. Since then I’ve been trying to learn more about them.

Just One 401k Example

There are many of them out there but I’ll just use Compliance Legal Staffing’s 401k plan as an example. Like most of the 401k plans offered by other temp agencies, initial eligibility requires that you work for a certain predefined number of hours for the agency. Compliance is owned by its parent company Vedior. Vedior requires that you work 1,000 hours with them before you can qualify for their retirement plan. Through automatic payroll deduction, you can contribute between 1% and 30% of your eligible pretax income into the plan, which is run by Fidelity NetBenefits.

The good news is that Vedior does match a portion of your 401k contribution, but the match doesn’t vest for several years. According to the plan, Vedior will match 100% of the first $750 that you contribute and 50% of the next $1,500 that you contribute annually. This brings us to the bad news. The maximum annual match is only a measly $1,500. But hey, it’s free money!

If you sign up and work with several temp agencies over a number of months and years, you can strategically max out the matching contribution limits of more than one agency’s 401k plan. I think that would be a pretty smart way to take full advantage of company matching and the tax deferred benefits of 401k’s.

I seem to be hearing about a new legal staffing agency coming online every week. Perhaps only a year or so ago, the contract attorney market was dominated by a modest number of staffing agencies. They pretty much had their way with recruiting and exercised significant leverage with their temps, knowing that there were only so many agencies temps could go to find work.

Now, I am pleased to see the power shift. The bread and butter law firm clients are obviously still at the top, but in between the law firms and the contract attorneys is an expanding number of staffing agencies, each vying for applicants. I encourage you to apply to as many staffing agencies as you can to maximize your opportunities. The smaller staffing agencies may have more difficulty finding work for you initially but in time they will grow. They will also be more inclined to offer you a higher wage rate and will also likely be more grateful that you’ve chosen to work for them. Competition is definitely good for us!