A Secretary versus a Transcription Service
A cost-benefit analysis for legal firms

Of all the staff in a law firm, secretarial support tends to be a legacy workforce. What we mean by this is that recruitment of secretaries has tended to be by individual (looking for chemistry fit with the person they are going to be working for, even if that person has since left).

In the boom years, the demand for secretaries to fill posts in law firms meant that the role of a legal secretary eroded to mean simply a secretary working in a law firm, rather than a secretary with specialist knowledge and skills. The days of sewing affidavits are long gone! Not only has the demand for legal secretarial skills reduced, so has the demand for secretaries. With improved IT, the banks of typists who once bashed out e-mails as quickly as their fee earners could dictate them have gone.

What’s more, there are few career paths for ambitious legal secretaries, who instead tend to become paralegals, take on additional qualifications or move on as soon as better jobs or a training contract present themselves.  In addition, secretaries who have loyally stayed in a post for a long time have often developed co-dependent relationships with partners, who are not as IT literate as their younger colleagues.

Times have changed and just as the role of lawyers and the part they play in the firm needs to be assessed, so does the role of the secretary. It is a given that secretaries can type (so can most lawyers these days) but is typing their core strength?   

Here’s the first challenge: Do your staff fit the bill?

What are your priorities?

​If you were designing this role from scratch, where would you start and what would your priorities be? Just like any other overhead cost, secretaries must either be critical to the business (without them the business could not exist) eg professional indemnity insurance or else positively contribute to the firm’s profitability. Firms can and do exist without secretaries, so consequently it must follow that the reason that they are employed is to improve profitability. We suggest that secretaries can be productivity enablers – people who can both increase revenue of the business and profitability. If they are not in that box, then either you have the wrong secretaries or you are using them in the wrong way.

​The role of the secretary has changed over time. In a modern law firm they will be partly:

  • Typist

  • Receptionist

  • Client manager

  • Lawyer manager (expert upwards delegator/influencer)

  • Document checker

  • Project manager/hub

  • Stationery/procurement expert

  • Induction trainer for new fee earners/support staff

  • Fee earner/paralegal

  • IT/photocopier engineer

  • Meeting Organiser

  • First point of contact

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How much does each secretary cost per hour?

Roughly $31. This is calculated as follows (figures taken from a case study):

Cost of direct employment – $50,000 (average salary, plus insurance, training, recruitment costs, etc) although this will be more in Auckland and less in some areas. We divided this figure by 228 working days (assuming 4 weeks holiday, public holidays and no sick days) and 7 hours per day per week (assuming one hour for lunch and no coffee breaks). This gives us $31 or so.

It does not take into account time lost through days off sick, time spent at the printer, chatting or making coffee. If we assume an activity figure of approximately 80% across the year – ie. your secretary is actively engaged in productive work for 80% of the time – then the per activity hour cost increases to $38.

However, this $38 does not take into account the indirect costs of employment – office, IT, equipment, heating, lighting, support (HR, IT, etc), additional benefits, bonus, maternity cover, sickness cover, insurance, etc, which amount to an average additional cost of $2,000 per secretary. The total cost per hour is therefore closer to $45.

Then, there is the opportunity cost – could the resource (money or space) be used for something else? If you had a spare $50,000 employing a secretary, what is absolutely the best thing you could do with that money for your business? If your secretaries are not properly trained what is the cost of that to your business? Do you know?

We think that if you are deciding to spend $50,000 per secretary per year in direct and indirect costs, that you should at the very least be clear about what the return on investment is.

Outsourcing your typing requirements is 100% recoverable; adding value to your business through focus and industry expertise.