New Approaches to Outsourced Labor

By Ben SchmidtThis article was originally published in Law Journal Newsletter on May 1, 2022

Employees are the lifeblood of an organization. Companies, including law firms, are rightfully attempting to navigate what the past two years have meant to the labor force and make sense of the changes to the landscape so that they can successfully manage their businesses.

Included in this mix are outsourcing service providers. Over the past year, Mattern has had a front seat view to the broad labor issues facing our country writ small in the field of outsourced services for law firms. Service providers have had significant issues attracting, hiring and retaining talent to work for them on-site in law firms. And in turn, law firms have experienced serious issues having foundational functions executed upon, like mail delivery, reprographics work, records, and so on.

Recent labor market news and statistics tell us that the trends we saw in 2021 will continue for the foreseeable future. Recent job openings reports showed approximately 11 million openings with 6.9 million unemployed Americans in the same reporting period, which means there were about 1.5 jobs available for each person.

Reports also showed that there were only 6.5 million hires, thus despite the glut of positions, employers are having trouble filling the positions. Further, there were 4.2 million quits (also known as voluntary separations) in October, a trend that continued a streak of 4 million plus quits each month since July. And to round out this murderer’s row of stats, of the nearly 5 million people who have left the workforce since the start of the pandemic, nearly 70% are older than 55, which means somewhere around 3.5 million people may never return to the labor force.

What we have seen is that providers address these issues by focusing on salaries and increase investment/focus on recruitment and hiring apparatuses — the Human Resources function. While it is admirable that service providers are attempting to address their talent pool gaps via these two areas, it is worthwhile to consider whether it is enough to make a difference.

To consider whether salaries and bolstering the HR function is sufficient, it is probably a good idea to look at the things people are discovering about what makes today’s employee tick. A few themes have emerged as front-runners.

Discover the “Top 4 Areas Impacting Labor” here on American Lawyer, click here.