Locum Tenens for Law Firms: Who Covers Your Cases When You're Gone?

The Vacation You Can't Actually Take

You are standing in the ocean, or at a relative's wedding, or three time zones from your office, and your phone buzzes. It's opposing counsel, or the court, or a client who just got served. You tell yourself you'll only glance at it. An hour later you are drafting a response from a hotel lobby while your family waits at dinner. The trip is technically a vacation. It does not feel like one.

This is the reality of solo and small-firm practice, where the firm has exactly one point of failure: you. There will be emergencies, and you'll need someone to handle them. The same constant connection that lets you run a lean practice is also what makes it impossible to step away — unrestricted access to your work is great in lots of ways, but it also lets the work intrude. A deadline does not move because you left town. A filing window does not pause. A client crisis does not check your calendar first.

And this is not a niche problem. Most lawyers in private practice work solo or in small firms, which means a large share of the profession is carrying the same quiet risk: the practice runs as long as one person stays reachable. So the question this piece is built around is a practical one, not a sentimental one. When you're gone — really gone — who covers your cases?

What Medicine Already Figured Out: Locum Tenens

Doctors faced this exact problem and built a market around it. The term they use is locum tenens — Latin for “holding the place” — and it describes hiring a substitute physician to fill in for a regular physician during their absence. When a doctor takes leave, goes on vacation, or steps away to recover from surgery, someone vetted and credentialed steps into the role. The patients keep getting seen. The practice keeps running.

What makes this more than an informal handshake is that the federal government built billing infrastructure around it. Under Medicare's Q6 arrangement, a practice can bill for a temporary substitute physician's services for up to 60 continuous days, with the work attributed under the absent physician's billing identity. Congress went further and gave the concept statutory footing: the 21st Century Cures Act formally used the term “locum tenens” to describe these fee-for-time arrangements. The coverage isn't a gray area. It has a name, a code, and a rulebook.

The vetting is intermediated, too. Physicians typically work through a staffing agency that handles the logistics, negotiates the rate, and provides malpractice insurance coverage — so the covering doctor arrives credentialed and insured, not as a favor called in at the last minute. None of this is fringe. The US locum tenens staffing market generated roughly $4.6 billion in 2024. Medicine looked at the problem of the irreplaceable practitioner and decided it was solvable. Then it built the machinery to solve it.

Law's Non-Solution: The Reciprocal Handshake

Set medicine's machinery aside and look at what most law firms actually rely on. There is no named role, no clearinghouse, no vetting, no insurance product built for the gap. There is a colleague. The standard answer to "who covers your cases when you're gone" is a reciprocal arrangement with another solo — you watch my practice when I'm out of town, I'll watch yours. It is a favor, not a structure.

What makes this striking is that the ethics rules already gesture at something more deliberate. Comment 5 to Model Rule 1.3, the duty of diligence, anticipates exactly the scenario the handshake glosses over:

To prevent neglect of client matters in the event of a sole practitioner's death or disability, the duty of diligence may require that each sole practitioner prepare a plan ... that designates another competent lawyer to review client files, notify each client ... and determine whether there is a need for immediate protective action.

Read that closely. The rule contemplates a designated, competent lawyer and a written plan — not a vague understanding that someone has your back. Comment 5 points toward structure; practice has mostly stopped at sentiment. The fix is not complicated: a backup arrangement should be documented in writing so expectations are clear on both sides. A handshake that lives only in memory is, as that guidance puts it, skating on thin ice.

The handshake works until it doesn't. The covering lawyer turns out to be slammed with her own trial calendar. She has a conflict with your client she didn't know about. She practices in a field where your matter is foreign to her. Or — most common, and most quietly dangerous — she agreed in principle but never once opened the file. Any one of those failure modes turns a coverage plan into a coverage gap at the precise moment it matters.

Why the Coverage Gap Persists

The gap is not a failure of conscientious lawyers. It is a failure of infrastructure. Malpractice insurers increasingly expect a designated backup who can manage the practice during an unforeseen absence, and many will recommend a hold-harmless provision to formalize it. But the demand stops at the policy language. There is no marketplace that supplies vetted short-term lawyers, no standardized way to engage one for a week, no plumbing for splitting fees or opening a temporary file. So the requirement gets satisfied on paper by the same handshake the prior section described, and the underlying problem stays unsolved.

Improvising coverage is also genuinely hard, for reasons that have nothing to do with goodwill. A covering lawyer has to be briefed on the matters they might touch, and that briefing alone triggers a cluster of ethics questions that are awkward to resolve on short notice:

• Conflicts (Rule 1.7): the covering lawyer's own client roster has to be cleared against yours before they see a single file.
• Confidentiality (Rule 1.6): sharing enough to be useful means disclosing client information to an outsider.
• Competence (Rule 1.1): the substitute has to actually know the practice area, not just hold a license.
• Fee division (Rule 1.5(e) and 5.4): paying a non-partner lawyer for the work has its own constraints.

None of these are insurmountable. They are simply hard to clear in an afternoon, which is exactly when an emergency demands them cleared. When nothing is arranged in advance, the absence stops being a logistics problem and becomes a crisis. In Texas, that crisis has a name: under the Rules of Disciplinary Procedure, a court can assume jurisdiction over a practice and appoint a custodian attorney when a lawyer has died, become disabled, or otherwise cannot protect clients. That is the fallback the profession has built — reactive cleanup, after the harm, instead of coverage before it.

What Real Coverage Infrastructure Looks Like

Strip the medical model down to its working parts and you get a blueprint that translates cleanly into law. The thing that makes locum tenens reliable is not goodwill or a thick contact list. It is that licensing, malpractice insurance, scope, and pay are arranged in advance through an intermediary that handles the logistics, negotiates the rate, and provides malpractice coverage. The coverage is engineered before anyone needs it. Mapped onto a law practice, real coverage infrastructure has four parts:

• A vetted network of coverage attorneys — licensed, conflict-screenable, and known to be competent in the relevant practice area before the call comes.
• A defined written engagement scope — what the covering lawyer is and is not responsible for, for how long, and with what authority.
• Built-in conflict-checking and confidentiality handling — so a covering attorney can step in without creating a new ethics problem in the act of solving an old one.
• Pre-agreed compensation — settled in advance, not negotiated in the middle of a crisis.

The thesis is simple: reliability comes from structure, not from who you happen to know. Even inside the informal handshake model, the defensible standard is to document the arrangement in writing so expectations are clear on both sides, with a hold-harmless provision. That instinct toward documented scope and allocated risk is the same instinct that, scaled up, becomes infrastructure.

That is the model Promise Legal is building. Our hub-and-spoke approach is designed as ongoing continuity infrastructure for solo and small firms — coverage when you are out, and succession when the time comes — framed as a standing relationship rather than a one-time transaction. The point is to have the structure already in place, so a coverage need is a phone call, not a scramble.

Where This Leaves Us

Medicine built machinery. Law mostly built sentiment. When a physician steps away, a credentialed substitute steps in under a contract everyone understood in advance; when a lawyer steps away, clients too often depend on a colleague's goodwill and a few hurried text messages. We have dressed up a structural obligation as a personal favor, and the favor holds right up until the moment it doesn't.

The rules were never silent on this. Comment 5 to Model Rule 1.3 tells the sole practitioner that diligence may require a plan designating another competent lawyer to protect clients in the event of death or disability. The duty already points where the profession has been reluctant to go.

Every solo practice is one absence away from a problem. The question that opened this essay was never rhetorical: who covers your cases when you're gone? Answer it now, on paper, while it is a plan and not a crisis. Coverage built in advance is infrastructure. Coverage improvised after the fact is just luck, and luck is not a continuity strategy.