Barry Seidel is a longtime lawyer in Queens, New York, who, in addition to handling probate and other matters, is filling a niche for per diem lawyers in his borough. In the 1990s, when he was handling personal injury cases, Seidel says he realized “what a hassle it was to go out of my county for relatively ministerial tasks outside Queens. I also noticed how attorneys coming to Queens were equally inconvenienced.”

He took stock and recognized how much time he spent traveling to the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan for various court appearances, and decided there had to be a better way to practice law. Around the same time, Queens had just uploaded case information in computers accessible only inside the courthouse.

Seidel decided to tap into that information by hiring a law student to delve into those computer files to mine the names and contact information for lawyers who had filed a request for preliminary conferences for personal injury cases pending in Queens. Seidel’s idea was to offer his services to attorneys traveling to Queens for those conferences so they could save the time, money and aggravation associated with making the trek there while ensuring their cases proceeded uneventfully.

“Preliminary conferences were a good place to start because if I connected with attorneys early in a case, it was likely I would get other Queens’ court appearances,” Seidel says. After mining attorney information from those computer files, Seidel sent 1,300 letters to lawyers to offer his per diem services. Of those, he says he was hired for 275 new court appearances at $75 a pop.

“That was an incredible rate of return. Most ended up using me for all of their court appearances in Queens” after that, Seidel says. Seidel sees several pros to practicing law on a per diem basis. Among them are:

• Lawyers, not laymen, are your clients
• The involvement of a per diem attorney in a legal matter is limited
• No long-responsibility for the entire case
• The more often an attorney makes an appearance in a particular courthouse, the more familiar they become with court personnel and peculiarities

However, practicing law on a per diem basis does present its challenges, too. For example, a lawyer who is not tech-savvy can become overwhelmed easily, Seidel says. For a per diem lawyer whose caseload is as demanding as is Seidel’s, it is imperative to be extremely organized.

The attorney’s calendar must be exact and their invoicing system must be constantly monitored to ensure that lawyer-clients are paying their bills. There is also the need to ensure lawyers hiring Seidel provide him with the documentation he needs to present the case in court.

Seidel says one aspect of per diem lawyering he finds unsavory is when he works for an attorney he perceives as “not that competent. That makes it a bit unpleasant.” Another negative occurs “when a case has an untenable position but you are being asked to support it and argue it in court,” Seidel says.

Samson M. Freundlich not only knows Seidel, he worked for him as a per diem attorney many years ago. Freundlich, the president and CEO of Per Diem Services, Inc., located in New York and New Jersey, was a newly minted New York lawyer in 1999.

Unfortunately, he was seriously injured by a drunk driver that June, resulting in a long and difficult recovery. Still, he needed to work, so he accepted per diem cases from Seidel. After several months, Freundlich decided to branch out on his own, and his company was born.

Whereas Seidel generally limits his per diem offerings to Queens, the reach of Freundlich’s endeavor includes not only the entire state of New York but New Jersey, too. The overall vision for both entities differs, as well. “We help firms grow because they know they can keep their cases moving along without losing in-office time and they don’t have to train us because we are experienced counsel,” Freundlich says.

In order to work for Freundlich’s company, an attorney must possess a minimum of ten years of litigation experience. According to Freundlich, practicing per diem law with his company offers attorneys flexibility and an injection of work and cashflow.

“Some attorneys want to start their own firms so this is a way they can supplement their income,” he says. But it isn’t just lawyers who allow themselves to be hired on a per diem basis. Paralegals are getting in on the act, too. Dov Zalman, general manager of Paralegals Per Diem, LLC, says his company offers paralegals to law firms and attorneys on a per diem basis.

If one of the business’ paralegals is hired by a corporate law department or a government entity, they must be supervised by a licensed attorney, Zalman says. According to Zalman, the duties handled by a per diem paralegal vary greatly. They can be as simple as case filing to drafting pleadings and appeals to complex legal research, and everything in between.

In fact, a per diem paralegal can even be hired to make emergency appearances to inform a court that the attorney-of-record is running late. While Paralegals Per Diem began in Colorado in 2014, it has expanded to New York City and Connecticut since then. An expansion to California is in the offing, too, Zalman says.

Tami Kamin Meyer is an Ohio attorney and writer.