Virtual Assistant Vs Employee: What’s the right support for your legal practice?

Whether you’re running a large law firm or you’re an independent, client care comes first. This means ensuring the majority of your time, or the time of your legal team, is spent on case work. The highest level of legal expertise is what firms, both small and large, niche and full-service, need to provide. However, like any business, the work delivered is the part of the iceberg that’s most visible. What supports it may be beneath the surface, but it is essential to the structure. Administrative support, paralegal support, onboarding, time-management, research, minute-taking and transcribing, filtering through enquiries; these amount to a magnitude of tasks paramount to a law firm’s deliverables. How you manage there, therefore, will influence your organisation’s ability to deliver, thrive and grow.

Large law firms may have a whole in-house team in place, but consultant solicitors, independent, small and mid-sized firms, won’t have the resources or need to house whole departments, but do have a few options to choose from, and these will typically include:

• An employed (part-time or full-time) assistant

• An employed (part-time or full-time) paralegal

• A virtual assistant

• A virtual paralegal

Let’s look more closely at those options and what differentiates them:

Employee vs Freelancer for law firms

An employee works for your practice under a contract of employment. They are on your payroll, entitled to statutory rights from day one, and subject to your direction and control over how, when, and where they work (can still be virtual). The practice takes on legal obligations in return, including those of tax, pension, insurance, and ultimately the responsibilities that come with being an employer.

A freelance virtual assistant is self-employed. They form a contract with you to deliver a service, set their own working arrangements, and are responsible for their own tax and national insurance. You are a client, not an employer. The relationship is defined by a services agreement rather than a contract of employment, and this is usually a rolling contract that can be ended, usually with less notice, at the client’s discretion.

Assistant vs Paralegal for law firms

When deciding between a general assistant and a paralegal, there are key differences, and, therefore, it’s important to consider both your immediate and potential future needs.

A legal secretary or PA handles the administrative and operational backbone of a practice. This may include diary and email management, client correspondence, document formatting, billing, filing, and keeping the day-to-day running smoothly. This role does not require a legal qualification, but legal knowledge and familiarity with practice management systems will add value.

Paralegals carry out substantive legal work. This might include drafting documents, conducting research, managing matters, and supporting fee earners directly on client files. This requires a stronger legal foundation and, depending on the tasks delegated, sits within the SRA's supervision framework. Paralegals can be employed or freelance. Jam Virtual Support offers both assistant and paralegal support. With over a decade of legal experience and over 5 years of legal education, we are able to provide a fuller service to consultant solicitors and law firms who may require either a PA or paralegal, or both.

What’s The Right Support For Your Legal Practice?

When looking at what support is going to work for you, you’ll need to consider first whether you need an assistant or a paralegal. In some cases, both occupations within the same person, whether in-house or outsourced, may be the ideal solution. Next though, it’s worth exploring the pros and cons of outsourcing vs employing someone into your business. So, let’s go over some key considerations:

Cost

Initially, the salary of a permanent employee is usually lower than that of a freelancer or virtual assistant. However, when you look at the overheads, the gap begins to close and can even go in the other direction. When taking on an employee, you must also consider -

• Recruitment costs: job boards, agency fees

• National Insurance: 15% on earnings above £5,000 (from April 2025) — on a £28,000 salary, that's roughly £3,450/year

• Holiday pay: statutory minimum 28 days (including bank holidays) — represents roughly 10.8% of salary cost

• Sick pay: Statutory Sick Pay is £116.75/week (2024/25 rate)

• Pension: minimum 3% employer contribution plus scheme set-up cost if you don’t already have this in place, and potentially admin fees, even if you do

These are serious considerations for a full-time employee, but even more so for part-time employment. Virtual assistants and virtual paralegals may have a higher hourly rate, but are responsible for their own NI payments, pensions and are not entitled to sick pay or holiday pay. For firms seeking to grow and nurture working relationships and talent, the overheads of employment are both a legal and moral obligation, as well as a credible investment. However, for some small firms and independents, especially those that require flexibility and may experience periods of fluctuating workload, such overheads can become a burden. In these cases, the higher hourly rate of outsourcing becomes more affordable because there are no hidden costs associated with hiring. There's also the question of risk. If an employee isn't the right fit, you can't simply terminate the arrangement overnight, especially if they are past their probationary period. There are notice periods, potential redundancy considerations, and the risk of disputes. With a virtual assistant, if the relationship isn't working, you can simply give the required notice (often no more than 30 days).

Expertise and Career Progression

In-house, you have the option to hire a junior staff member or someone with more experience. An experienced assistant or paralegal will be on a higher salary but will have acquired expertise and experience, meaning they’ll need less training and supervision. Junior staff members, often at the start of their career, will need support from either you or other employees, so that they may learn in the role. Since working as a paralegal is such a common pathway into becoming a solicitor, finding someone who isn’t on that trajectory may be challenging. For those paralegals aspiring to become solicitors, they’ll be seeking employment that’s able to support them in following that career path. Freelance virtual assistants or paralegals will usually be former employees with acquired experience and/or training. To benefit their clients, they know they need to be able to slip into their role as seamlessly as possible. Though they will require instruction, and you will want to agree on expectations around deliverables, they should be able to undertake tasks without training or supervision. Working with multiple clients exposes VAs to different ways of working, various solutions and structures, and this means they may even suggest ways to improve your workflows or introduce new systems and processes to improve efficiency.

When deciding between an in-house employee and a virtual assistant, you need to ask yourself whether you want someone to come into your business to fulfil a need or are looking to bring someone on board to grow with your firm. Employees will expect a plan for their career progression. They may seek extra training and promotions as they develop and make a positive impact on the organisation. As a potential employer, you should consider if this is something that would work for you and, if so, if you can provide it. Because if you can’t, this often results in high staff turnover, something that is both costly and inefficient.

A virtual assistant is not an employee and therefore won’t be looking to you for a career growth plan. Their progression tends to look different. VAs are focused on deepening their expertise, taking on more complex work, and becoming an increasingly trusted part of a client's team over time.

Flexibility and Availability

For many small firms and consultant solicitors, this is where the case for a virtual assistant becomes hardest to argue against.

An employee works contracted hours. Outside of those hours, they’re unavailable, and rightly so. If your workload spikes, you cannot simply ask them to absorb it without considering overtime or additional pay, as well as the impact on their well-being. If they are off sick or on annual leave, those tasks and responsibilities assigned to them will still need to be taken care of. Cover must be arranged, or, as is more likely if you’re a small practice without a wider team, you may have to take on that burden yourself.

A virtual assistant, by contrast, is built for flexibility. Many legal VAs work across multiple clients and can scale their availability up or down in line with your needs. If you have a particularly demanding period, such as a transaction completing, a hearing approaching, or a sudden influx of new instructions, you can increase hours without the procedural or financial weight that comes with changing an employment contract. Then, when things quieten down, you scale back. Simply put, you pay for what you use.

Cover is also far less of a headache. VA support services, like Jam, will often have other team members or experienced contacts they can rely on in the case of unexpected absences. However, flexible working hours often mean VAs are able to reorganise their schedules to ensure all deliverables are met, working around anything that might have interrupted their usual workflow.

Where employees can have the advantage is continuity. Someone working in your practice day-to-day builds an understanding of your clients, your preferences, your way of working, and the nuances of your matters. Virtual assistants, however, are often more used to adapting. Working across multiple clients means rapidly tuning into different ways of working is second nature, whereas an employee, used to former systems and preferences, may take longer to adjust to new ones.

Virtual Assistant or Employee?

You may find that either solution could work for your business financially, or in terms of flexibility or finding the skills you need to progress your legal practice. So, the last thing to consider, and perhaps the most important, is how accountable you want to be.

As a client, you are obliged to pay invoices in a reasonable time period and agree to a service contract that sets expectations and responsibilities on each side. It’s a simple arrangement that offers flexibility for you. Deciding to employ a person, however, is a far bigger commitment, and it should be. You’ll not only be responsible for a person’s salary, but also their career progression, safety at work, workplace wellbeing, learning and development, and you should also be able to provide them stability through employment. The role of an employer requires a genuine readiness to take on additional responsibilities, not just financially, but in terms of time, management capacity and long-term investment in another person’s professional development. Some small law firms, or those at an earlier stage, aren’t as able, as their legal casework is too all-consuming to allow for training or supporting junior staff members. Fluctuations in workload, common in some legal practices, can also make even distribution of work impossible, resulting in times when an in-house employee will be completely overwhelmed working additional hours, and then times when they have very little to do. In these cases, a virtual assistant or paralegal is a considered and practical choice that allows you to access experienced, professional support without locking yourself into the fixed costs and obligations of employment. Besides, for many, outsourcing to a virtual assistant becomes a long-term arrangement in its own right. One that can offer the same familiarity, trust and reliability you'd expect from an in-house assistant, while retaining flexibility and securing expertise that enables you to focus on growing your firm, rather than administering it. Seeking a virtual assistant or paralegal for your legal practice? Learn more about our packages.