Litigation support and legal secretarial support get used interchangeably sometimes, but they cover different work, and a firm scoping outsourced help gets a better result knowing which one it actually needs.
What does litigation support cover?
Substantive case work: chronologies, schedules of loss, disclosure review and trial preparation, requiring an understanding of the matter itself, detailed fully in the litigation support article.
What does legal secretarial or administrative support cover?
Diary management, formatting, correspondence handling and file administration, supporting the fee earner’s workflow without requiring case-level judgement, covered in the administrative legal support article.
Why does the distinction matter when scoping help?
A firm drowning in disclosure needs litigation support. A firm drowning in diary and correspondence admin needs something else entirely. Scoping the actual bottleneck correctly, as set out on the How It Works page, is what makes an engagement work.
What are some concrete examples of each type of task?
On the litigation side: preparing a chronology from the underlying documents, drafting a schedule of loss, running a first pass on disclosure, or assembling a bundle ahead of a filing deadline. Each of these requires understanding what the document actually says and why it matters to the case.
On the secretarial and administrative side: managing a fee earner’s diary, formatting correspondence to house style, updating a case management system, and handling routine client communication logistics. None of this requires case-level judgement, but all of it needs doing accurately and on time, work detailed in the administrative support article.
Can one outsourced arrangement cover both?
Yes, and many firms need exactly that mix. A Team of Three package can be scoped to include both litigation-facing and administrative tasks, split according to what a firm’s caseload actually needs rather than forcing a firm to choose one category exclusively.
The key is scoping this explicitly at the outset, in our article on choosing a provider, rather than assuming a generic “paralegal support” package covers both by default.
How does pricing differ between the two types of work?
It doesn’t, under a fixed-fee structure. Packages are priced for the capacity itself, not the specific task mix, so a firm isn’t charged extra for litigation-facing work over administrative work. That simplicity is part of the point of a flat-rate model over hourly billing.
What changes with the mix is how a firm briefs the work, not what it costs.
How does a firm identify which one it actually needs?
Look at where the backlog actually sits. If litigation deadlines are the pressure point, that’s substantive case work piling up. If correspondence and diary management are slipping, that’s an administrative gap. Most firms know intuitively which one is biting, even if they haven’t labelled it precisely before scoping outsourced help.
The contact page is a good place to talk through the specific bottleneck before committing to either.
Does the level of supervision differ between the two?
Both sit under the same supervision principle: the instructing fee earner directs the work and remains responsible for it, consistent with Mazur v Charles Russell Speechlys LLP [2026] EWCA Civ 369. What differs is the depth of review each task needs. Substantive litigation work tends to need closer sign-off, since case-level judgement is involved; administrative tasks are usually checked more lightly, since the risk profile is lower.
That distinction is worth building into how a firm briefs each type of task, rather than applying identical review depth to both.
How does this split show up across different practice areas?
A firm running employment tribunal work often needs heavier litigation-support capacity around hearing dates, with administrative support running steadily underneath. A private client practice might lean the other way, with more correspondence and file administration relative to substantive drafting. Neither pattern is fixed; it depends on the caseload.
Firms handling AML and compliance checks often find that work sits somewhere in between, procedural enough to resemble administrative work but requiring enough judgement to need a litigation-support level of attention.
What happens if a firm scopes the wrong type of support initially?
The engagement underperforms, not because the provider is doing anything wrong, but because the wrong problem is being solved. A firm that needed disclosure capacity but scoped diary management support ends up with a tidy calendar and the same document backlog it started with.
This is why the scoping conversation at the start matters more than almost any other step. Getting it right the first time avoids a wasted trial period entirely.
Can the mix change over time as a firm’s needs shift?
Yes, and it’s expected to. A firm might start with mostly administrative support and shift toward litigation-facing work as caseload composition changes, or the reverse. Adjusting the mix is a scope conversation with the existing dedicated team, not a reason to restart the engagement or renegotiate from zero.
Is one type of support easier to trial than the other?
Administrative work is often quicker to judge quality on, since the standard, formatted correctly, filed correctly, diary managed accurately, is easy to check against. Litigation support takes a little longer to evaluate properly, since a chronology or disclosure schedule needs a fee earner’s own review before its quality is clear. Neither is harder to trial well; the timeline just differs slightly.
The guide to choosing a provider covers how to structure a fair trial for either type of work.
Does a firm need to pick one type permanently at the outset?
No. Most engagements start narrow, a specific bottleneck addressed first, and broaden once the fit is proven. A firm might trial drafting support on one matter, confirm the quality bar, and then add administrative capacity once the relationship is established. There’s no requirement to commit to the full scope from day one.
That staged approach reduces risk on both sides and tends to produce a better-scoped final arrangement than trying to define everything upfront.
What’s the practical takeaway for a firm scoping this for the first time?
Name the actual bottleneck before naming the solution. “We need a paralegal” is less useful than “our disclosure reviews are three weeks behind” or “our diary and correspondence admin is falling through the cracks.” The second framing points directly at whether litigation support or administrative support, or some mix of both, is what actually solves the problem.
The back-office operations article covers how firms typically discover which mix fits once they’ve started looking closely at where time is actually going.
Where should a firm start this conversation?
With a specific example of the backlog, rather than a general description of feeling stretched. The Pricing page sets out the fixed packages, and the contact page is the fastest way to get a concrete recommendation on which type of support, or mix, actually fits.
Does the cost difference between hiring for each role in-house matter here?
It does, and it’s often where firms first realise outsourcing solves both problems at once. Hiring separately for a litigation-focused paralegal and an administrative assistant means carrying two salaries, two recruitment processes, and two management relationships, set out in full in the cost comparison article. A single dedicated outsourced team scoped across both task types often costs less than either in-house role alone.
Is there a risk in blending the two types of work within one role?
Only if the mix isn’t scoped clearly. A person switching constantly between substantive case work and routine admin without a clear split can end up doing both less well than someone with a defined focus. A well-run dedicated arrangement assigns the mix deliberately rather than leaving it to drift, so both categories of work get the attention they need.
That deliberate split, decided upfront rather than discovered by trial and error, is what separates a well-scoped engagement from one that quietly underdelivers on both fronts.
How quickly can a firm get clarity on which type it needs?
Usually within a single scoping call, once a firm can point to where its own backlog actually sits. That’s a shorter conversation than most firms expect, and it’s the same first step covered on the How It Works page for any new engagement.
Come to that conversation with the backlog, not the job title, and the rest tends to sort itself out quickly.
Not sure which type of support your firm actually needs?
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Frequently Asked Questions
Can a firm combine litigation support and administrative support in one package?
Yes, most packages, particularly Team of Three and Complete Back Office, combine both depending on the firm’s actual mix of work.
Which type of support suits a firm buried in disclosure specifically?
Litigation support, since disclosure review requires case-level judgement rather than general administrative capacity.
Is it possible to switch the balance of support once an engagement has started?
Yes, scope can be adjusted as a firm’s caseload and bottlenecks change, agreed in writing as with any change to an existing package.
