This is the dream of every millennial. Working online, without being restricted to one place. You can travel the world, and spend a few hours each day working on your laptop, maybe from a tropical beach while you sip margaritas.
Why not. I have done it. Between 2016-19, for 2 full years, I lived in beachside villages in Goa. I often worked from beach shacks, while I continued to work as the CEO of iPleaders. After some time I also managed to assemble a team in Goa where we all worked from a co-working space, which looked like this:
This was not the first time. While I was studying law, I began to do a lot of freelance work on the side. When I would get a major freelance assignment, that would require a lot of concentration, such as writing a book as a ghostwriter, I would travel to Goa and work for 10-15 days from the beach.
This is the dream of every millennial. Working online, without being restricted to one place. You can travel the world, and spend a few hours each day working on your laptop, maybe from a tropical beach while you sip margaritas.
Why not. I have done it. Between 2016-19, for 2 full years, I lived in beachside villages in Goa. I often worked from beach shacks, while I continued to work as the CEO of iPleaders. After some time I also managed to assemble a team in Goa where we all worked from a co-working space, which looked like this:
This was not the first time. While I was studying law, I began to do a lot of freelance work on the side. When I would get a major freelance assignment, that would require a lot of concentration, such as writing a book as a ghostwriter, I would travel to Goa and work for 10-15 days from the beach.
Many law firms around the world have begun to outsource some work to trusted freelancers. The cost advantage is key here. This quora thread talks about nomadic lawyers working for various law firms using certain remote work software.
Isn’t that cool? However, this would work if you have already worked for some law firms and have the CV to get a job in a law firm in the first place. Also, only a few law firms will have the resources or the mindset to hire remote working lawyers.
So you need to be very careful about who you approach for this kind of work.
Demand for legal content writing is extremely high because it is very hard to find good content writers in law. Such writers are also very, very expensive. Many people offer to do content writing, but most have no experience or capability. They just assume that they can do it, but the output is not up to the mark.
Lawyers and law firms need content writing for their website, blogs, newsletters, regular client updates and alerts, brochures, profiles and so on. Asking full-time lawyers to work on these things is very expensive, and also most lawyers are not necessarily good at creative writing. They write prosaic, boring, unreadable content.
And this opens a great opportunity for good legal content writers. The challenge is, however, business development. If you are traveling around the world, you cannot go and meet the lawyers personally to solicit business. This means you need to rely on an online system to find clients on a regular basis.
This is a bit of a task initially, but as you begin to do good work, you will get plenty of referrals.
I regularly hire content writers, and if someone could give me an article like this current one, according to what I commission and if I need not edit, I would be happy to pay INR 2000 for the same. Are you the right person? Say hi on Linkedin and let me know.
Law firms need marketing support. There are plenty of full-fledged law firm marketers these days, but if your prices are competitive, you can do this while traveling the world as well.
Most of the work involves content marketing, submissions for conferences and law firm awards, connecting with media professionals to get coverage for a law firm or its partners and getting lawyers quoted in the news.
Some big law firms also have opportunities for academic research and writing, which can be done remotely.
It is also possible to work with law firms to help with their branding, website updating, revamping of the logo, managing podcasts, and youtube channels. One can also help with managing social media pages of law firms.
Content writing is often combined with law firm marketing by legal digital nomads.
This is not the most popular but certainly very well paying. I have done this as a law student to earn money. Many famous and rich lawyers will pay a lot of money for ghostwriting their books for them. Books increase any lawyer’s vanity quotient and standing in the practice. Plus it really helps a litigator to have published a few books when they are looking to become a senior advocate.
You can approach lawyers with a lot of money and less time and offer to help them as a research associate. This is just euphemism for ghostwriting. You would have to write the entire book most probably and make several iterations to suit the requirements of the lawyer, so please quote accordingly.
Writing a book can easily take hundreds of hours, so you are justified to charge a few lakhs. And if you have the CV, lawyers will pay. It helps if you have already published one or two books from a respectable publisher because then the lawyer can easily trust you.
The legal publishing industry is big. Plus, there is a digital legal media that is growing fast. They need writers, editors, social media managers and coordinators. They find it hard to hire and retain people and are very open to working with lawyers remotely if the quality of work is good.
This is indeed a great opportunity. At LawSikho, we are always looking for topnotch writers who can write in-depth long-form articles about the legal industry and various aspects of a career in law.
For example, I am working on a book on how 30 young lawyers under 30 years of age successfully built their own law firms. I am looking for freelancers to help me with this project. In the past, we paid freelancers to do interviews for Superlawyer.in, and we are still open to doing it again.
Good legal publishers hire editors all the time as well. You could convince them to do the work online, remotely. As long as you deliver on time, they are not likely to have too many objections.
These days there are tons of software, products and services being sold to lawyers and law firms. Who knows how to sell these things better than lawyers? There is a huge latent demand for lawyers who are willing to do lead generation, prospecting, business development, and telesales activities for companies trying to sell various products and services to lawyers.
Legaltech companies and legal media should be your top target, followed by legal event organizers.
Being a law YouTuber has begun to become mainstream. There are now a lot of legal YouTubers in India and abroad with really serious following, running into lakhs.
They get a lot of calls for advice and opportunity to refer work to other lawyers which they can monetize. They can also do promotional collaborations with brands like LawSikho, and help us to reach out to larger audiences, and earn a fee in the process.
They can also earn ad revenue from ads on youtube videos if the views are in large numbers. YouTuber has become a real profession, and it is totally location independent!
You can also earn by making youtube videos for an established channel.
Social media engagementDo you have any idea how much a lawyer or law firm in the USA or UK will pay you to manage their Twitter, as long as you keep attracting more clients to follow them organically? Turns out the amount is quite significant.
Unfortunately, if you are not in the same city, helping them with Instagram may not be an option, unless they send all the photos and updates to you while you just manage the account.
Do you know at LawSikho we are looking for a killer meme maker who can help us to market our courses through memes? Let me know if you can think of anyone.
Online training and coursesThis is what we do. We are pretty much a company with two offices currently, in Delhi and Kolkata, about half of our workforce works remotely, and most of them are lawyers.
It is not all that different for other online legal education companies. This is one industry across the world that has really embraced remote work.
If you want to work with us in online course development, or as an evaluator, please let us know.
Merchandising for lawyersImagine t-shirts and mugs with legal memes. How about notebooks and planners that are customized to appeal to lawyers? How about cool fridge magnets and car stickers that make lawyers feel the swag?
They are just not there in India. You can find them in the UK, but isn’t it shocking that nobody is doing it in India? If someone wants to do it seriously, we are here to collaborate with you. Let us know.
But seriously, why isn’t anyone doing this yet, given how big an opportunity this is?
