SILQ Virtual Assistant: admin support for the solicitor or barrister who is the whole firm

SILQ’s own pitch is month-to-month, no lock-in, built in Sydney for the practitioner who doesn’t have an IT department. Which means its typical user is a firm of one: a sole-practitioner solicitor or a barrister whose entire practice, matters, timers, file notes, invoices, trust records, lives in a browser tab. The software is genuinely good at holding all of that. What it cannot do is be the second person. Someone still has to open the matter properly, write up the day’s time, draft the memo of fees, and send the awkward third reminder to the instructing solicitor who has gone quiet. When you search “SILQ virtual assistant”, that someone is currently you, and it’s costing you billable hours to be them.

The daily rhythm a VA runs in your SILQ

Morning, before your first conference or appearance: the file gets a pass. Overnight correspondence filed against the right matters, new instructions opened as proper matters with the client, the other side and any instructing solicitor entered as contact records rather than free text, and cost agreement or disclosure documents generated from your SILQ templates and queued for your review. None of this is glamorous, and all of it compounds: every document SILQ auto-fills later is only as accurate as the matter data entered on day one.

The diary runs alongside. Directions hearings, mentions, callovers, mediation dates and limitation dates go into SILQ’s calendar with reminders staged well in advance, and every single entry comes back to you for confirmation before it’s treated as true. Your VA diarises; you confirm. A practice of one has no partner to catch a missed date, so the calendar gets treated as the most dangerous file in the system, because it is.

In between, the file itself. SILQ’s document management keeps everything against the matter, so the VA generates letters and standard documents from your templates with the matter record doing the data entry, files incoming correspondence and briefs where they belong, and types up file notes from your dictation or the scrawl you left after a conference, so the electronic file is the file. One quiet advantage worth naming: SILQ is hosted on Australian AWS servers and has been built in Sydney since 2002, so when you think through the confidentiality of giving anyone access, the data itself stays onshore even though the assistant doesn’t. The trust module, the InfoTrack hooks and the billing conventions all assume an Australian practice, because that is the only kind SILQ serves.

End of day is where a SILQ VA earns the fee, and it’s the job almost every sole practitioner does worst: time capture. SILQ gives you timers and time entries, but timers only record when someone remembers to start them, and nobody billing in six-minute units remembers reliably at 4:50pm on a hearing day. So the VA reconstructs the day from your file notes, sent emails and diary, drafts the entries with descriptions a client will actually pay rather than “attendance re matter”, reconciles any timer you started before a phone call and forgot about, and keeps WIP true. Do the arithmetic on your own charge-out rate: if the write-up recovers even half an hour a day that would otherwise go unrecorded, the VA has covered their own cost before touching anything else.

Weekly, money. Draft invoices built from accumulated WIP with disbursements attached, prepared for your authorisation and never issued without it. Then the debtor side: outstanding invoices worked on a chasing cadence you’ve approved, with anything that smells like a fee dispute or a payment arrangement escalated to you before a single word is agreed in writing. Searches ordered through SILQ’s InfoTrack integration land their disbursements on the matter automatically, so the VA’s job there is ordering them against the right file and checking nothing is missing at billing time, rather than reconstructing disbursements from a credit card statement at the end of the month. And because SILQ syncs invoicing out to Xero or MYOB, the VA checks the sync actually happened, so the receivables your accountant sees match the receivables SILQ says you have.

The barrister edition is its own animal

SILQ started life on the barrister side of the profession and still ships a separate barrister edition, the one that gets compared with BarBooks. The workflow a VA runs there is recognisably different from a solicitor’s practice. Billing goes out as memoranda of fees to instructing solicitors, not invoices to lay clients, which changes the tone and the chase: the follow-up is professional-to-professional, the delays are usually the solicitor’s client not paying them, and the escalation point, when to mention it to the clerk, when to raise it with you, needs a written rule. A VA on the barrister edition typically runs fee capture from your conference and appearance notes, drafts the memos for your sign-off, tracks which instructing firms are slow payers so you can see the pattern, and keeps the diary honest across courts. Most barristers need fewer hours than a solicitor’s practice, often 5-10 a week rather than 15, and the engagement should be sized that way rather than padded.

The honest bit

Four things to price in before you decide.

First, SILQ will not capture your time for you. The timers are manual, and there’s no magic that turns a day in court into fee entries. The write-up is human work, which is exactly why it’s the core of this engagement, but if you were hoping the software plus a VA means you never think about time recording again, you’ll still be the source: the VA can only write up what your notes, emails and diary actually show.

Second, the candidate pool. SILQ is Australian, legal-specific and aimed at small practices, which makes VAs with real SILQ hours genuinely rare. We’ll say that plainly on the discovery call rather than fudge it. What exists in reasonable supply is offshore staff with Australian legal admin experience on LEAP, Smokeball or Actionstep, and SILQ’s matter, WIP and billing concepts translate directly. The 5-7 day supervised ramp exists precisely to close that gap inside your account, on your matters, before anything runs solo.

Third, SILQ is a practice management system, not your general ledger. Trust records and WIP live in SILQ; the business books live in Xero or MYOB via the integration. If you want the same person doing actual bookkeeping, bank reconciliation and BAS preparation on the accounting side, that’s our bookkeeping tier at $25-35 AUD an hour, and it’s a different skill set from the admin VA, sometimes a different person.

Fourth, the seat. SILQ is priced per user, month to month, so the VA needs their own login and that’s a real line on top of the hourly rate. Take it anyway. Shared logins destroy the one thing you most want from practice software when a question is ever asked later: a record of who did what. SILQ stamps entries to the user who made them, and in a regulated practice that attribution is worth many times the seat cost.

What stays with you

This is a legal practice, so the line gets drawn in ink. Trust money first: receipting, payments, transfers and reconciliations are restricted to authorised people inside the practice under the legal profession legislation in every state and territory, and your VA never effects a trust transaction, never holds trust authority, and never touches a reconciliation, in SILQ or anywhere else. SILQ’s trust accounting being certified by the NSW Law Society speaks to the software’s compliance; it says nothing about who may operate it, and the answer to that is not an offshore assistant. The VA prepares, you authorise, every time.

Also permanently yours: anything a client or an instructing solicitor could take as legal advice, undertakings, settlement figures, fee decisions and write-offs, cost disclosure judgement calls, and the final confirmation on every court date and limitation period the VA diarises. If a client email contains something that needs a lawyer’s brain, the standing rule is that it comes to you untouched, with the admin around it done. The broader supervision and confidentiality picture for offshore support in a practice sits on the law firms page, and if your practice runs property files, the conveyancers page covers that workflow’s version of the same lines.

What it costs and where to start

SILQ admin sits on our admin tier, $12-17 AUD an hour excl GST, with heavier specialist legal admin at $18-25. Sole-practitioner solicitors typically run 10-15 hours a week, around $500-1,100 a month; barristers often need less. Placement takes 7-10 business days, with 5-7 days supervised inside your SILQ before any solo work, a refundable $500 deposit that credits to your first month, a 30-day recalibrate-or-replace guarantee, and 14 days notice to walk away, terms that sit naturally next to the month-to-month deal SILQ itself offers. The full pricing breakdown, including what the on-costs of a local hire would have been, is in the VA cost guide.

If you want to test the fit, book a discovery call with Jenn, who takes every call herself and has placed 87+ VAs into Australian businesses since 2024. Bring last week’s WIP and your aged receivables. Ten minutes in, you’ll know whether the hours are there, and they usually are, because you’re currently doing them at midnight.