- Cost Comparison
- Paralegal
Offshore paralegal services are harder than the SEO retainer
One firm pays $12,000 a month to skip a job it already does.
Most US law firms pay an agency for marketing and employ nobody in-house to do it. That is the common setup, not the exception. One firm told us it pays up to $12,000 a month for SEO, website management and Google Business Profile management. Against the cost of hiring that capability locally, the number holds. Against an offshore hire it does not, and a firm supervising offshore paralegals is already running the harder version of the job that retainer removes.
Why offshore paralegal services get hired and marketing gets rented
The split is not about capability. It is about which function a firm is willing to build. A paralegal arrives into something that already exists: a queue, a reviewer, a matter with a deadline on it. A marketing specialist arrives into nothing. Somebody has to decide what the role produces, then read what it produced. An agency sells a finished answer instead of that decision. I do not know why so few firms build the function anyway, and I have stopped assuming the reason is cost.
Whether that is shifting is measurable rather than arguable. Indeed Hiring Lab publishes posting volume for occupations over time, so a firm can check whether anyone in its own market is hiring the role in-house. Most retainers are not revisited that way. They get renewed.
What $12,000 a month prices out to
Up to $12,000 a month for SEO, website management and Google Business Profile management. Price the same capability on a US payroll and the retainer starts to look like restraint. Salary, payroll tax, benefits, a manager's hours, the ramp before the hire is any good at it. A managing partner who runs that comparison and signs is not being careless. The math is right. The comparison is the wrong one.
A mid-level SEO specialist in the Philippines sits between $1,300 and $1,500 a month. An expert-level specialist sits between $1,500 and $2,000. That is a full seat, on one firm's goals, five days a week. The comparison a firm chooses decides the answer before the math starts.
Same invoice. Different verdict.
Where the retainer and the hire stop being comparable
Cost is the smaller half of it. An agency divides its attention across a roster of clients and delivers a packaged scope, and that scope was written to be deliverable to everybody on the list. It arrives on time. It lands in the middle. A full-time hire works one firm's goal every day, which is a different kind of attention and produces a different result.
There is a second thing no rate card shows. Firms with a dedicated Filipino specialist frequently end up with someone working past the hours agreed. I would not budget on that and I would not ask for it. It does tell you what an owned seat looks like next to a rented one.
The management job a paralegal hire already proved
Standing up an in-house marketing function means learning how to structure it and then how to manage it. That is real work, and a firm buying an agency is buying its way out of it. The retainer removes the work of structuring and managing a marketing function, and hiring in-house puts that work back. Nobody should pretend otherwise. But a firm running offshore legal support has already built the harder version of that: written criteria, a review queue, agreed schedules, somebody who actually reads the output before it leaves.
The one objection that survives is grading. A partner can tell a bad memo from a good one on sight and cannot do that with a technical audit. That gap is real. It is also one person, one dashboard, one goal, checked on a schedule, which is less structure than a single matter carries.
Build the seat.
People also ask about this
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