- Hiring Process
A recruiter can staff clinics and still miss legal work
A talent roster naming a physical therapy clinic is a published test.
To find quality offshore staff, most firms hand the search to a recruiter whose screen has never once looked at legal work. Narrower is not smaller. It is the gap between a screen built for your work and a screen built for everybody's. I have watched firms read a talent roster as a bench when it is really a published copy of the test. A roster spanning a physical therapy clinic, a sales floor and a front desk is fine work. Just not yours.
What does a general staffing agency actually test for?
English, reliability, software, phone manner, average tenure per employer. That is the grade sheet, and every line on it is real and transferable. None of it is specific to a matter. The screen has to work for a physical therapy clinic on Monday and a sales floor on Wednesday, so it grades what both of them share. My own view is that this is the honest thing for a general agency to do. The screen is built for the whole roster, and your firm is one name on it.
Legal work does not travel on shared traits. It travels on a chronology built from a real file, a cite check that catches the wrong reporter, a caption that matches the court's local form. A screen only reaches work that has a right answer before the test begins, and someone has to know the answer. A recruiter screening for clinics does not know what a rejected filing looks like. I do not think that is a competence problem. It is a scope problem, and no amount of care inside the wrong scope fixes it.
So the burden of proof sits with the screen, and a general screen has never met it. The test run before the shortlist decides the shortlist, and nothing after it recovers what the screen never looked for.
Can you train an offshore assistant into legal work later?
Post the role. Take the strongest generalist on the bench. Teach them the legal part after they start. People learn, and a sharp administrative hire picks up docket vocabulary faster than most partners expect. Building a chronology has never required a license. Firms do this every year and some of them do it well. It is not a stupid plan.
It just moves the test from the agency's desk to yours. The agency screened for general competence and you now screen for legal competence, except you are doing it after the offer, across a twelve-hour offset, with a paralegal or an associate as the instructor. Supervision of non-lawyer work was already owed. Instruction is new. The firm pays for it at the rate of whoever is doing the instructing, and that rate was set for billable work.
Training is cheap when the trainer is free. Yours bills by the hour.
Ask what they test.
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