Right Answers
Here are the answers to our most frequently asked questions. If you have a question that's not covered in this section, click here and email it to us.
Q: What should my firm look for in a legal placement company?
A: Not all legal placement firms are created equal. It is important that you choose a company with a reputation for service, confidentiality, and professionalism combined with broad knowledge of the legal market. Ad Hoc is known in the legal community as a company that places the highest priority on service.
Ad Hoc ensures that its placement professionals have extensive knowledge of the legal marketplace by hiring only attorneys, paralegals, and legal secretaries with significant practice experience to recruit, interview, qualify, and assign candidates. Our experienced placement professionals know what you are looking for in candidates and have the experience to understand the needs of your organization.
Q: How is Ad Hoc different from other legal placement companies?
A: Ad Hoc provides service that is second-to-none in the staffing industry. We founded the company on a quality assurance process which places the highest priority on the individual requirements of our clients.
Key to the process is our commitment to responsiveness and a spirit of cooperation which encompasses everything we do. We go above and beyond to make certain that our clients are matched with candidates that suit their needs as quickly as possible.
In fact, Ad Hoc's staff is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to fill both planned and emergency vacancies with precision and efficiency.
Q: What kind of legal professionals can Ad Hoc provide for my firm?
A: Ad Hoc continuously recruits highly qualified attorneys, paralegals, secretaries, litigation support staff, nurse legal consultants, contract administrators and other administrative and clerical personnel. We can provide support for all of your firm’s business needs…both temporary and full-time.
Q: Can Ad Hoc payroll a candidate my firm or corporation has already interviewed but cannot hire directly? What is the charge for such services?
A: Yes, Ad Hoc routinely payrolls employees for law firms and companies alike. We bill a service fee that encompasses the direct costs of providing employee benefits, plus a nominal charge to offset our administrative costs. Our fee is no more than that of any company whose core business is that of payrolling employees, and often times, even less.
Q: How can my firm benefit from using temporary legal professionals?
A: Hiring temporary legal professionals offers many advantages over hiring full-time employees. By supplementing fixed employee ranks with temporary professionals, law firms and corporations can dramatically reduce legal budgets while maintaining high quality legal representation.
Creative, flexible, efficient new career strategies satisfy employees' needs while providing you the resources you require to remain competitive.
Ad Hoc's temporaries bring the right set of skills to each project at the right cost. Temporaries can be available for placement with only a day's notice and can be quickly released for reassignment.
Using temporary professionals through Ad Hoc also assists you achieve efficiency in full-time hiring. Recruiting and hiring personnel is a large commitment of time and money. An extensive and expensive search doesn’t necessarily yield candidates who are the best fit for your team.
Using temporary employees can allow you to “audition” professionals: a good match is much more likely when you have the opportunity to actually see how a candidate will work within your organizational environment.
Q: What are the backgrounds of Ad Hoc lawyers, paralegals and legal secretaries?
A: Ad Hoc’s team of legal professionals represents a microcosm of the legal profession, with a variety of backgrounds and practice tenures. Our candidates are available as temporaries for many reasons, chiefly:
- Lifestyle choice balancing career and family responsibilities.
- In transition as law firms/corporations restructure and downsize.
- Legal specialists whose expertise requires a broad base of work.
- Retired professionals seeking occasional projects requiring their experience.
- Those dividing time between law and other career or travel.
Regardless of their background, our personnel are highly qualified. We are happy to provide you sample resumes upon request.
Q: Why does Ad Hoc treat its lawyers as statutory employees rather than independent contractors?
A: The industry which provides temporary professional services is still relatively young, having been established in the late 1980’s. Since the industry’s inception, the IRS has approved both the independent contractor and statutory employee relationship adopted by employment service companies vis-à-vis their labor.
However, conservative observers believe that as the industry matures, the IRS will grow wary of the independent contractor relationship, favoring instead a statutory employee relationship.
To ensure our temporaries and clients against future potential tax problems, Ad Hoc has chosen to take the more conservative route of treating all its professionals as statutory employees.
Q: Does Ad Hoc provide full-time professionals?
A: Absolutely! Ad Hoc has one of the most experienced teams of recruiters in the industry. We recruit top notch legal professionals seeking full-time employment - from senior attorneys with books-of-business to executive and legal secretaries, litigation support staff, and entry-level clerical staff.
Q: How do I know that Ad Hoc will send me professionals that suit my needs?
A: Ad Hoc takes time to get to know our clients, their organizational culture and approach to business. We go out of our way to make sure that we understand exactly what you are looking for in a candidate.
After we thoroughly understand needs of our clients, we carefully assess the academic and professional backgrounds of our candidates, pre-interview our candidates to evaluate whether or not they will fit within our clients’ businesses, and screen our candidates through background checks.
Q: Does Ad Hoc check professional references and perform other background investigations?
A: We sure do. We ask a candidate’s former supervisors specific questions related to the candidate’s ability to perform specific job functions. Where applicable, we verify licensing and specialization credentials.
We perform not one, but two criminal background checks before ever placing a candidate in a temporary or full-time position. If you like, we’ll perform educational verification, drug testing, credit checks, and legal conflicts checks.
We undertake every step you would reasonably expect an employer to undertake when considering an applicant for a position.
Q: What kind of insurance does Ad Hoc carry to protect my law firm or corporation against liability? What about malpractice insurance?
A: To protect our clients who utilize our temporary personnel, Ad Hoc carries general liability, employer liability, workers' compensation and automobile insurance with broad coverage amounts.
At no cost to you, we can add your firm or corporation as an additional insured party under our policies. Very few, if any, legal placement companies provide errors and omissions insurance or malpractice insurance to their temporary employees. Most of the attorneys we represent carry their own malpractice insurance.
In almost all cases, the professionals we place in temporary positions are covered by the malpractice policies of the law firms at which they work, and are covered by the errors and omissions policies of the corporations where they work.
