Should you seek LNC subcontracting jobs? The answer to that question will depend on your confidence, comfort, and courage.

Benefits of LNC Subcontracting

When you subcontract, someone else handles billing, negotiations, and getting work. That someone else is usually a more experienced LNC who can support and mentor you and proofread your reports.

After your initial marketing to find the people ready to subcontract LNC cases, you need not constantly search for work. Not needing to market to get work is a significant advantage.

1. You did not market for that case.
2. You didn’t have to attend conferences.
3. You didn’t have to send out mailings.
4. You didn’t have to connect with clients.

Once you are connected to the hiring LNC, if that person is pleased with your work and has a steady flow of cases, you’ve passed the marketing hurdle.

Many LNCs, like Karen Taylor, breathed deep sighs of relief. They’re doing the work they love and don’t have to deal with marketing. It’s hard to put a price on that.

LNCs interested in subcontracting is not necessarily only new and inexperienced. One of my best subcontractors was an experienced critical care nursing expert witness with a Ph.D. She loved getting cases from my company because she did not want to find cases on her own. Plus she did not want to do the invoicing or the billing. She wanted somebody who would proofread her reports and organize records for her. And she was perfectly content to be in the subcontracting role.

Experience

Subcontracting also is a great way to get skills. Kristin Stiner puts it this way: “You’re starting a new business, and you may say, ‘Maybe this is not the pay that I want exactly, but it’s the experience that I can get.’ I started and took small cases where I could review the documents, make information for the attorney, and say, ‘What does this information mean? What does this terminology mean? Can you please go through this chart and tell me what these abbreviations are because there are tons of abbreviations in charting?’

“These are little things you could do to hone your skills and gain experience and confidence. I know it’s very hard, especially nowadays. Everybody wants to ensure they’re getting paid for their experience and education. But if you cannot start, and you’re not getting a case and not getting what you want, take something small; get that experience.”

When Ashley Moreau started her LNC business, she eagerly accepted subcontracting cases. “When I started working as a legal nurse consultant taking cases, I wanted the extra practice at doing the cases. I took all kinds of subcontract cases related to nursing homes. I wanted to learn different ways of doing things. Everybody has their paperwork forms, and I wanted to learn different formats to efficiently take those cases. I took a lot of subcontract cases, and I have no regrets about any of them. I learned a lot.”

Mentoring

You can also get some mentoring from the legal nurse consulting company. Mentoring might be limited because you should have reasonable computer skills if you are working in this field. You cannot expect a legal nurse consulting company to teach you how to copy and paste, save files, or some of the nuances of working with a computer. If the legal nurse consulting company is spending a lot of time teaching you what you should already know, you may find it difficult to get repeat business as a subcontractor.

It can be quite reassuring in the beginning, if you are new to the field, to have somebody looking over your work product, pointing out areas that need to be changed, which you don’t get when you submit your work product directly to an attorney. And only to find out too late that you’ve missed something significant, misunderstood the format or what the attorney was seeking.

Many people who are new need and appreciate that oversight. You must accept feedback without getting defensive, angry, or frustrated. If you turn in a work product that doesn’t meet the LNC standard, then the LNC should go back to you and say, “This is what needs to be changed.” And that’s part of the learning process.

The Stimulation of Different Cases

If you’re doing single cases, the work is not repetitive, and if you’re an expert witness subcontractor, each case is unique. Repetition, too, has its advantages because the work becomes easier. You know what to look for, how to find it, and how to use the formats.

As a subcontractor, you get experience. Somebody else is paying you to learn. You are experiencing what it’s like, mainly if you are new to legal nurse consulting. You become familiar with the process of analyzing records. It becomes more comfortable; it becomes easier and more rapid.

Disadvantages of Subcontracting

Payment

The rate of pay you receive will vary wildly. Expert witnesses are at the top of the pay scale, and LNCs who work on significant volume mass tort cases receive the least. The person who provided the work to the subcontractor will mark up the hourly rate to receive money to cover the LNC’s overhead.

You will get a percentage of the LNC bills, but it will be lower than you could charge if you were billing the attorney directly for services. You may have an opportunity to negotiate your rate with the LNC.

In some situations, the LNC will provide a retainer to the subcontractor but, more typically, does not. The subcontractor will often wait for payment until the LNC is paid, which could be weeks to months.

If you spend excessive hours, miss deadlines, or submit inadequate work, there is a risk that you will not get paid. You will feel cheated and angry, but you have little recourse.

Distractions from Marketing

Not having to market is an advantage of being a subcontractor. Not being able to market is a disadvantage. What do I mean?

If you do a lot of subcontracting, what hours do you have to spend building up your business? You’re not thinking about marketing, not investing in your web presence, and not building a mailing list of attorneys because you’re focused on the cases right in front of you. (This is also a risk when you’re an independent LNC working on your cases since it’s very easy to put aside marketing because you’ve got a pile of cases. But ultimately, those piles of cases start diminishing. And if you’re not building new relationships and reaching out to new prospects or asking for referrals, you could end up with an empty in-basket.)

For example, suppose you take a job working on a project involving many plaintiffs/claimants. These large volumes may involve allegations of environmental contamination, defective products, pharmaceutical cases, and more. You’re dazzled by visions of steady pay.

Negative Aspect of High-Volume Cases

The negative aspect of these large-volume cases—a problem for independent contractors and subcontractors—is that your steady work can evaporate overnight. A judge can assist attorneys in settling a product liability suit; all cases disappear quickly.

I know a legal nurse consultant who ran a business offering LNC reviews of pharmaceutical cases, and in one day, three large contracts were resolved, and all the work disappeared.

I talked to legal nurse consultants who got a phone call on Friday, saying, “The cases are over. Thank you very much.” They did not have any other source of income; they were stranded

You can become very dependent on the person who is feeding you cases. If you are like that subcontractor who got the call on a Friday and relied on the subcontracting for his only income source, you have put yourself into a terrible bind. You are spending (in that scenario) all your time subcontracting and not any time building up your business.

When building up your business, you are marketing to attorneys, meeting with attorneys, writing blogs for attorneys, and exhibiting at attorney conferences where you can earn two or three times more than you would if you were subcontracting. But if you don’t put those hours in, you remain in that work.

You become dependent on the LNC if you are not careful and expect the work to continue. If you’re working with only one LNC, which I discourage, your income depends on how well that LNC manages the cases and what’s happening with the litigation.

Not Building a Client Base

While getting experience and income, you are not building a base of attorney clients. The attorneys receiving the work product from the person who hired you may have no idea who you are and what you can do. Ethical constraints, which I describe later, prohibit you from directly soliciting work from the attorney.

You do not receive recognition for your work unless the LNC tells the attorney, “I’m working with subcontractors,” and your name is on that report. But if that work is turned in under the name of the LNCs business, your name may not appear. And you will not get any credit for being the person who put that report together.

Your work product belongs to the company that hired you and may be changed or edited. The LNC will look at your work product and likely edit it. That is outside of your control.

When The Steady Job Becomes Boring or Shaky

When you work on large volumes of product liability cases or other kinds of cases, you may encounter the issue of boredom due to repetitive work. Those are cases where you might be asked to pull the same information out of a set of medical records. LNCs with experience working on these cases often complain about the repetitive aspect of data collection.

As you can see, subcontracting has pluses and minuses. It might be right for you at one stage in your LNC development and not worthwhile at a different state. Keep an open mind to see how it might meet your needs.

Get your copy of the book at this link: LNC Subcontracting: How to Boost Your Business. Subcontracting’, click here.

Whether you’re a new LNC looking for experience or a busy LNC with a growing business, this book will answer your most urgent questions about subcontracting. Grab your copy today.

Meet Karen Taylor by watching her podcast here.

Get to know Kristin Stiner through her podcast, #496, Aspiring Detective Turned LNC. Watch Kristin’s video at this link

Get to know Ashley Moreau through her podcast, #494, How to Rapidly Build an LNC Business. Watch Ashley’s video at this link: Meet Ashley Moreau

Pat Iyer is president of The Pat Iyer Group, which develops resources to assist LNCs in obtaining more clients, making more money, and achieving their business goals and dreams.

Pat’s related websites include the continuing education provided on LNCEU.com, the podcasts broadcast at podcast.legalnursebusiness.com, and writing tips supplied at patiyer.com.

Get all of Pat’s content in one place by downloading the mobile app, Expert Edu at www.legalnursebusiness.com/expertedu. Watch videos, listen to podcasts, read blogs, watch online courses and training, and more.