A small firm rarely has a dedicated office manager, so the partners absorb the admin themselves. New enquiries wait for someone senior to reply, engagement letters are formatted between meetings, time entries are filled in from memory days later, and the invoice goes out late or light. The work is not difficult. It is simply being done by the most expensive person in the building. Here is how a practice hands it to one point of contact, and keeps every substantive question with the qualified professional.
Intake and scheduling
A prospect who emails on Tuesday should not still be waiting on Friday. Your assistant responds to new enquiries by email and phone using your approved wording, sends and chases the conflict check and intake forms, books the first meeting into the right diary with reminders, and logs every contact and next step in Clio, Karbon or your CRM.
Documents prepared from your templates
Engagement letters, proposals and reports should look the same every time. Your assistant prepares them from your templates, formats reports and statements to your house style, routes documents through DocuSign or PandaDoc and chases the signatures, then files the signed copies in SharePoint, Google Drive or Dropbox with clear naming, so the client portal and the matter files stay tidy.
- Engagement letters and proposals prepared from your templates
- Reports and statements formatted to your house style
- Signatures routed through DocuSign or PandaDoc and chased
- Signed documents filed and named where the team can find them
Billing support and receivables
Unbilled work and unpaid invoices are the quietest leaks in a practice. Before billing, your assistant reviews time entries for gaps and missing narratives, prepares draft invoices in Clio, Karbon, QuickBooks or Xero for the partner's approval, sends the approved invoices and payment reminders on the cadence you set, records payments received and flags overdue or disputed accounts to the partner in charge.
We never give advice in your name. Any question about the substance of a matter, a return, a policy or a design goes straight to the qualified professional at your firm.
Practice admin and client updates
The rest of the week is meeting notes, deadlines and keeping clients informed. Your assistant takes meeting notes and tracks actions to completion, sends clients status updates and document requests on schedule, tracks CPD hours, renewal dates and filing deadlines in one shared calendar, and drafts the client newsletter and LinkedIn posts for your review.
What to hand over first
Firms that get the most from support start with the work that has a template and a deadline:
- Enquiry responses, conflict checks and intake forms
- Appointment scheduling and reminders
- Engagement letters and signature routing
- Time entry tidy-up and draft invoices
- Payment reminders, deadline tracking and client updates
An NDA is signed before any access is shared, and if your firm has its own confidentiality agreement, that is signed too. You set the permission level in your practice system, client files never leave the systems you approve, and overlap hours match your working day in the US, UK, Canada or Australia. Hours flex up during tax season or a busy quarter and back down afterwards.
See professional services support
It begins with a free 30-minute call to go through how enquiries, documents, billing and deadlines move through your practice today. No setup fees, and we start on a small set of tasks and add more as you are comfortable.
Give your fee earners their hours back
We will map which intake, document and billing tasks could leave your desk first. Request a free call.
