About Lawtrades

Lawtrades connects companies — from startups to Fortune 500s — to world-class legal talent on demand, providing an alternative to in-house legal teams or expensive law firms. Legal professionals use Lawtrades to quickly find work opportunities and get paid seamlessly. As a marketplace, Lawtrades has become a leader in flexible legal staffing by creating a tech-enabled platform that provides better worker experiences and makes it easy for companies to hire world-class legal talent. 

The challenge: Manual processes were expensive and created a bad worker experience.

Lawtrades pioneered a new way of working and hiring that helps companies find more flexibility and gives legal talent more opportunities. To innovate in a deeply traditional legal industry they created infrastructure for individual legal professionals not large law firms. Leveraging technology is core to how they enable legal talent, and yet they used a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) and manual processes to handle their own back-office operations. This led to some negative outcomes including:

• High Payroll Costs: Scaling up their workforce meant Lawtrades had to scale up payroll staff, leading to unsustainable costs.‍
• Slow Onboarding Processes: Manual onboarding required excessive time and resource allocation, slowing down the time-to-work for legal professionals. ‍
• Fragmented Worker Experience: Workers had to navigate multiple tools for onboarding, time tracking, and payments creating an inefficient and frustrating experience.

The solution: Automated onboarding and pay that gives talent the Lawtrades experience

Zeal enabled Lawtrades to streamline onboarding and payroll, making the process faster and more seamless for both their team and legal professionals. Workers can now complete onboarding in under five minutes and get paid directly through the Lawtrades app—no third-party portals required.

Automated onboarding and pay

Previously, onboarding and payroll required a full-time team of three specialists. With Zeal, Lawtrades now manages the process with just one part-time staff member, significantly reducing overhead costs. To do so, Lawtrades used native automations and custom workflows resulting in:

• Automated onboarding: A single, unified flow collects personal details, bank information, and compliance data.
• Seamless payroll integration: Timekeeping data is automatically submitted to payroll, reducing off-cycle payroll runs.
• Automated payroll runs: Payments are processed on a normal payroll cycle without manual intervention.
• Proactive payment verification: Workers receive pre-payment email confirmations to ensure banking details are correct.

Fast implementation, scalable results

Despite choosing an implementation plan that involved lots of API-based customizations, Lawtrades went live with Zeal in just three weeks. By using Zeal’s white-label onboarding components, APIs, and admin dashboard, they built a fully branded, customized payroll system quickly and efficiently.

A better experience for talent

• They leveraged the white-label onboarding components and APIs to have a fully branded, custom build. They use the admin Dashboard to handle exceptions that their automations don’t handle.

The Impact: A better experience for legal professionals 

With Zeal, Lawtrades has removed onboarding friction, ensuring that legal professionals can start working and get paid without delay. The first payment is often the ‘aha moment’ when workers develop trust in the platform—turning new users into repeat earners. And their scale shows it. Lawtrades has more than 5,500 legal professionals on the platform, who have worked more than 300,000 hours and been paid more than $33M.

What's next?

With automated operations and streamlined onboarding, Lawtrades is growing quickly and working on new ways to improve the worker experience. After switching from a PEO to Zeal they were able to pay workers 2x faster and are now exploring ways to make pay even faster, including instant pay. They are also considering providing workers with a mobile pay app that provides real-time earning visibility and new ways to access their pay. With Zeal handling automation, Lawtrades can focus on scaling both sides of their marketplace.

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