After all contract attorneys are often required to work in excess of 80 hours a week. Given this situation it is not very wrong for the attorneys to think that compared to them the agency actually does nothing at all. In fact at times the legal temps do not get to see the agency for weeks at a stretch.
However, it would be necessary to point out that the problem in this case lies with the very attitude borne by the contract attorneys towards the legal staffing agencies. In actual practice, if it is to be viewed at terra firma level, one has to admit to the fact that the staffing agency also puts in its share of the work in all the right places. It has to bear a number of variant costs and liabilities along with a number of risks that are potentially high ones.
The Legal Staffing Agencies actually take care of a number of things that often go unnoticed. Some of them are:
- The agency bears the responsibility of picking out the most apt and skilled legal professionals in the booming job market.
- It is the agency that conducts the references along with the background checks.
- All the interviews are carried out by the Legal Staffing Agency.
- As far as interfacing the law firm in concerned, that too is taken care of by the agency.
- And last but not the least it is one of the most gigantic responsibilities of the agency to ensure that the professionals are aptly paid.
However hard they work, all said and done, the agency still runs the risk of not getting their paycheck from the respective law firm in a timely manner. Now that some light has been shed on the issue of the efficacy of legal staffing agencies, it may be possible that the contract attorneys would be able to understand the kind of responsibilities that the Legal Staffing Agencies cover on their end.
Often contract attorneys are found stating that it would have been better if the law firms would straightaway pay the staffing agency a clear cut amount for all the work they do. They don't really favor the idea of the amount being slowly and steadily adjusted out of their pay checks. What they seem to forget or overlook is the fact that it was not for the agency to have been working in the first place, they would not even have managed to land the job they are in at the present. Then again, it is only because of the law firm that they are often not able to watch upon the inimitable and safety valve presence of the agency. Actually the law firms seek a flawless operation where the whole thing is working at a high level with the contract attorney functioning as an employee of the law firm. They would rather do away with the administrative headaches in the first place.
