Stop Calling Them VAs: How to Build a High-Performing Remote Legal Team, with Raquel Gomes

Episode Notes

Transcript

Zack Glaser:

Hey y’all, it’s Zach and welcome to The Lawyerist Podcast, one of the many ways that we help lawyers build healthier firms, better businesses, and more sustainable lives. Today I talk with Raquel Gomes about common pitfalls attorneys make when hiring staff, how to prepare for that hire and how the term VA can be holding you back from building an incredible team. She’s the CEO of Stafi, which is a virtual team company, but really she’s got a background in psychology and runs a virtual distributed global team herself. So stick around and check out what she has to say.

Raquel Gomes:

Hire, I’m Raquel and I am the co-founder and CEO of Stafi.

Zack Glaser:

Hi, Raquel. Thank you for being with me. I appreciate you being on the podcast with us. I think we’ve had you on before, but if not, people that are common listeners to the podcast or labsters, I’m sure they’ve seen Stafi or heard you talk or seen you around as well. So thank you for being on the show.

Raquel Gomes:

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Zack Glaser:

Today I want to talk about, because this Stafi is a staffing service, I want to talk about the five mistakes that law firms make when hiring VAs.

Raquel Gomes:

Let me stop you right there.

Zack Glaser:

Okay.

Raquel Gomes:

First of all, let’s not call them VAs. Let’s call them remote offshore staffing.

Zack Glaser:

Okay. So jump in. We’ll get into mistake before a mistake one. Why though? Why remote offshore staffing?

Raquel Gomes:

Because VA is you’re dehumanizing the person when you’re calling them a VA and language really matters. It’s really important in order to be successful in this journey of growing your law firm through remote offshore staff, it’s really important that you treat them as well as you treat anyone who works for your law firm on site. And that’s really the formula for success and we’re going to go into the five mistakes and all of that, but that’s the beginning of it. So treating them as a human, treating them well, investing in them and just incorporating them into your law firm just as you would with onsite staff. So that’s why it’s important to call them differently.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. I really like that because obviously in my wording, I didn’t mean anything.

Raquel Gomes:

Of

Zack Glaser:

Course. But it makes sense. When we say remote offshore talent or offshore staffing or something like that, now we’re talking about incorporating this into our office instead of saying, “Well, this is my virtual assistant.” A mission is

Raquel Gomes:

Isolating

Zack Glaser:

Them. Right. And so I guess if we would boil it down, if a law firm is going to treat this like cheap labor instead of a team member, then they’ve really already kind of failed before they even get started.

Raquel Gomes:

Exactly. And like you, it’s not like people have bad intentions when they say VA. It’s like a terminology that was created and kind of took off. But in a way, language really matters. So if you call them VA, you’re almost making them disposable.

Zack Glaser:

That makes a lot of sense.

Raquel Gomes:

And that’s what makes law firms fail when you see them that way, when you treat them that way, then it’s when things don’t work out.

Zack Glaser:

Well, okay. So I think that’s a great lead into this because I think a lot of the five mistakes that we get into here also kind of boil down to that in a lot of ways of just not really thinking everything through and thinking of it as a real hire. And frankly, I think people do a bad job of thinking through all of their hires in the first place, but let’s jump into mistake one. What’s the first mistake that people make when hiring offshore talent?

Raquel Gomes:

It’s really hiring reactively instead of strategically like waiting too long to hire and being desperate when you want to bring someone. So you want to bring anybody into the mix and you don’t take the time to truly define the role. So defining the role is the first step for success when working with remote staff, offshore remote staff or remote staff or in- person staff.

Zack Glaser:

Or in person. I mean, I think, yeah, this can go for hiring anytime, right? Yeah.

Raquel Gomes:

Anytime. Yeah. And defining the role really comes from auditing where your time’s going and taking the time to define, okay, where am I spending? Which tasks am I doing daily that are taking me away from being the true CEO of my law firm? It’s just making me very busy. A lot of times when you’re busy, you think you’re productive but you’re not.

Zack Glaser:

I feel that. Yes.

Raquel Gomes:

Right? So you have to start delegating, delegating all the busy work and it really starts with auditing your tasks, identifying your tasks, and then you can define the role.That would be the first step for success.

Zack Glaser:

And so defining that role, the flip side of that is getting into really defining or building a job description, right? What are we actually hiring here for?

Raquel Gomes:

Right, exactly.

Zack Glaser:

Okay. And again, that’s not just offshore talent, that is really hiring in the first place. Okay. So we don’t want to hire from a place of desperation, but I think people still do. What’s mistake number two then?

Raquel Gomes:

The number two is doing it through vetting and screening assessment. I think most law firms, they rely on only one or two interviews when making a decision and is a decision based on their instinct and not in analytics. So would really recommend not skipping any steps into doing through vetting and screening process, which should definitely include assessments, behavioral, personality, skills, soft skills, assessments, because there’s a lot of people who interview really, really well and they show

Zack Glaser:

Their

Raquel Gomes:

Best behavior and their best self in an interview. So you’re being seduced by the hire

And you’re hiring them because, oh, that person’s fun. You think, oh, I like that person. I like their energy. But in reality, you’re not hiring a best friend.You’re hiring someone who can execute on the tasks that you need to let go, that you need to delegate. And so there’s a lot of people that interview really well, but there’s half of the population who don’t interview well, but they’re incredible assets. And I’ve seen this over and over again. So super, super important to support your decision with assessments and the assessments and the results of the assessments, they’re going to be aligned with what the role needs. So for instance, if you need someone that is client facing to do intake, you need them to have good social skills. You need them to be

Zack Glaser:

Able

Raquel Gomes:

To show empathy on the phone. You need that type of personality that can be okay with being on the phone for extended periods of time. Sometimes 90% of their day, seven hours a day is being on the phone if you’re working for a high volume law firm.

And you need to assess those things because someone can be very pleasant when you interview and you’re like, “Oh my God, this person’s going to be a great intake.” They can even do a role play and you can do a live role play with them while you’re interviewing and it’s going to be, “Oh, they did great. They did amazing. I want this person on my team.” But then this person burns out in the first month because they cannot keep up with being on the phone seven hours a day. So those need to be assessed so you’re not having high turnover. The same thing when you need a paralegal, you need someone who is very great, high executor, very organized attention to detail is key, but social skills is not that relevant. So you need to be able to

Zack Glaser:

Test

Raquel Gomes:

Those things.

Zack Glaser:

They don’t necessarily need to be able … I think this is an interesting flip side of this. They don’t necessarily need to be able to interview extremely well. They need to get the job done. And for all of these people, they need to get the job that again, we’ve described really well. They need to be able to get that job. Absolutely. I want to hang on to this for a second because I feel like this is a place where Stafi really, you guys have a lot of experience and what are the types of things that y’all do to actually vet people? Because again, this isn’t something that I think a lot of lawyers are extremely skilled with of like, “Okay, well, let’s have people take a personality test or something like that. ” What are some of the things that y’all do to do that?

Raquel Gomes:

So we do the assessment as the first thing to see which role they’re a best match for. And then we do English assessments, oral and written. We do multiple interviews. Of the interviews is led by our in- house psychologist because also depending on the traits that are showing in the assessment, we need to challenge a few things to see if they have the values that we want. We don’t want to hire people who are arrogant. For example, people who are blamers, they blame others, they’re not learners, things like that. The other thing is, so I mentioned, so the interviews, the assessment, the English … Okay, we call five years of employment to see if that person would be rehired.

Zack Glaser:

Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah.

Raquel Gomes:

And we call universities to validate degrees just to make sure all the information that has been provided is true and accurate. What

Zack Glaser:

Else are we doing? Those last two are things that I know that as attorneys, we know we should, but I think there’s a lot of people that won’t make those last checks, those actually calling references, actually calling or connecting. And y’all are kind of pre-doing this. You’ve already done this because you have a roster of people that are here and you’re matching with other firms. So this isn’t something where you’ve necessarily doing it in real time, you’ve done this.

Raquel Gomes:

Right, right. And the thing is that it takes a lot of time to do it and also you have to constantly be following up because it’s not like references are going to pick up the phone the first attempt or that you’re going to be able to talk to the right person in the university. So it takes persistence and being on top of it, but it’s important that you do it because you don’t want to hire people who lied on their resume, right?

Zack Glaser:

No, we do not want to hire people that lie on their resume, but that’s exactly- You don’t want to hire

Raquel Gomes:

Liars.

Zack Glaser:

Okay. So we’ve got mistake number one is hiring without defining the role. Mistake number two is weak vetting. What’s mistake number three?

Raquel Gomes:

Not having predefined solid onboarding process. A lot of law firms, they hire someone and they think that person would just figure things out with time or they’re just going to shadow people around. While shadowing is highly valuable and there’s a lot of people in the assessments, which is interesting, it shows how someone learns. Does someone learns with more data and SOPs and reading

Zack Glaser:

Things

Raquel Gomes:

By step or is that person a learner will learn with experience and shadowing? So those are the also information that we’re capturing from the assessments that are highly valuable. So having a weak onboarding really leads to the motivation, feeling demotivated and turnover. 30% of new hires, they quit within the first 90 days on the job because of lack of clarity. So that’s a really relevant data.

Zack Glaser:

Yes, that makes a lot of sense. But I like, again, I have my assumptions coming into this and my assumptions are generally, let’s have SOPs and let’s make sure that people can work from SOPs. But what you’re also saying is like, yeah, for some people and some people do really well with shadowing, some people probably do really well with both. Yeah,

Raquel Gomes:

Absolutely.

Zack Glaser:

And I can see how this, the onboarding system actually, again, all these things connect. This goes back to mistake number one of having the role clearly defined because if you know what the heck they’re supposed to do, what you’re hiring for, then we can say, “Okay, well, how do we teach this new person, this new hire, how to do this? ” Yeah.

Raquel Gomes:

And I know that a lot of law firms, they don’t have the SOPs and they’re small and they don’t have the time to create the SOPs. Usually we hear that. And what we suggest is that when we’re hiring this person, you record everything. So whenever you are teaching them something, just record, record and record and have that person turn those recordings into SOPs if need be. So that’s a workaround. Also for intake and non-attorney sales, I highly recommend role play. Role playing and shadowing and listening to how you would take an intake call or how someone else, like listening and role playing, give them two weeks before. That’s between one and two weeks depending on the type of person and how they learn. But usually people that are good with client facing, they need to see it, feel it, touch it in order to be able to learn and perform.

Zack Glaser:

That makes sense. That makes sense. Okay. Okay. I’m just going to keep recapping these so people keep them in their head. We’ve got hiring without defining the role. We’ve got week vetting, we’ve got no onboarding system. I see rushing to hire being number four here behind

Raquel Gomes:

You.

Zack Glaser:

So rushing

Raquel Gomes:

To hire is actually number one

Zack Glaser:

Because- Is part of number one? Okay.

Raquel Gomes:

You should give yourself at least a month to be able to get that right person in the right seat. If you’re going to be like, “Oh, I need to hire someone tomorrow,” most likely you’re going to fail.

Zack Glaser:

Okay. So that one works- We

Raquel Gomes:

Can talk tomorrow. You will. I don’t know who you …

Zack Glaser:

They may be somebody that lied on their resume. Take your

Raquel Gomes:

Time because we need to make sure that we’re

Zack Glaser:

Successful

Raquel Gomes:

With the placement.

Zack Glaser:

So hiring without defining a role, which is also rushing to hire is number one. Then we’ve got week vetting is number two. Number three, no onboarding system. What’s number four for us?

Raquel Gomes:

So number four is really integrating them into your team. So remember we talked about the whole terminology of VA. There’s

Zack Glaser:

A lot of

Raquel Gomes:

Law firms that they hire an offshore or nearshore remote staff and they isolate them. They simply send them tasks whenever they need them and that person is going to feel very excluded, totally demotivated. They’re going to lack understanding the big picture. They’re not going to feel part of the team. Remember, they’re humans and humans need to feel motivated. They need to feel integrated. They need to feel part of something meaningful in order

Zack Glaser:

To

Raquel Gomes:

Stay with you. I’m saying this from experience. So staff is about 11 years old. So we work right now currently 450 law firms in the US, but internally we have a hundred staff and from this hundred staff, I believe only four of us or five of us are in the US. So our entire team is in Latin America and I make this work and we have employees that have been with us for 11 years and it really takes integrating them. There’s different things you can do, but number one is include them in all forms of communication, have regular team meetings. Obviously if you’re a solo, you’re meeting with this person regularly, meet with them daily. The technology that we have, use video. If you use Teams, Slack, whatever you use to communicate, add them to those communications, have them meet with other team members, have them collaborate with other team members.

Just make them part of … If you plan on offsite, invite them. We just came back right now from an offsite in Columbia. We flew 20 people from all over Latin America. Last week we were in Medine. I just got home on Sunday,

Zack Glaser:

Saturday. Oh, I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to leave Megin.

Raquel Gomes:

I know.

Zack Glaser:

I love that place.

Raquel Gomes:

I know have you been?

Zack Glaser:

I have. It’s amazing. But I could talk to you about that as well. I know. So green. So green. Absolutely. Yes. Yes. Okay. So y’all had a retreat that I envy in Regin.

Raquel Gomes:

Big training. So we’re training them and continue training them. Yeah. So those things are important and people … And I know sometimes as a business owner, you’re in go, go, go mode, but the staff needs to feel part of.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Well, and I’m going to kind of reiterate this because I’ve worked with multiple Stafi hires on our team currently working with one right now and I talk with him every single day and he is a part of all of our meetings, our team meetings and- Hi, you’re doing good job. Yes. And it is something where he’s our team member and kind of flipping it from the other side of this person needs to feel motivated as well. I need to understand that this person is my team member and that we’re working this person who was hired to do a job into the integration of our team. And so now I can rely on him. And I know what he’s good at. I know how he works. I know how he likes to be managed, all of those things. So I want to put a big star next to this number four of integrate the person into your team because I think it’s huge.

Raquel Gomes:

Yeah. And the return that you will get from your hires, it will depend on the type of investment that you put in 100%. And I think this is across the board, but with offshore, I think it’s even higher just because they are not physically in the same place and you need to have that relationship as if they were in a way. So that’s why making use of video if you’re traveling, but making sure there’s a lot of collaboration is super important.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Actually, it’s funny. And again, I’m probably hanging on this point too much, but it’s funny because we are a fully dispersed digital team, but having offshore talent is easy for us to integrate into our team, but also it makes it easier for me because I travel around all the time and this is a person that is used to me showing up with different backgrounds, like different backgrounds in my camera, but I meet with everybody from my phone when I have to, from my computer when I have to, all of those things. So it is kind of like part of the ethos here in our company. Yeah. Yeah. So

Raquel Gomes:

It’s easier for you, but we work with a lot of law firms that they have a main office and everybody’s office. So it’s harder for them, but that’s why our team is with them every step of the way and we’ve created an onboarding methodology and then after the first 45 days where we’re meeting with the client weekly, we’re meeting with the client monthly, we’re like reminding, we’re like giving them homework. We’re like there because it’s really important to have that strong foundation for long-term success.

Zack Glaser:

That makes sense. Okay. What is mistake number five then?

Raquel Gomes:

It’s really giving up too soon whenever there is a challenge I would say that’s the last mistake and continuing to invest mentoring coaching that staff

For long-term success. So again, going back to the investment part, we just met with our team and we offered this training where everybody got together. There’s some social aspects, there’s training aspects. I think it’s harder maybe for law firms depending on the size, but that the coaching mindset coaching has an importance here, specific job coaching. I mean, it’s harder when you’re a smaller law firm to have all those things in place because they are costly, but you can always designate a staff member to be the person, like the go- to for questions, but also someone who can coach that person in best practices and things like that. In our case, we have our coaches that are assigned to every staff that is assigned to a law firm so that we provide, we have psychologists that provide the mindset coaching. We have paralegals with years of experience in the different areas of law depending what area of law our clients practice.

So that’s an advantage you have when you work with us, but it’s something that is important. Someone has to be that coach, that mentor to the staff whenever they have questions, they have to feel like there’s someone who’s approachable that they can come in and they can talk about things like whatever it is, what things they’re feeling or questions and things like that.

Zack Glaser:

That makes sense. But it’s kind of like not giving up too soon, but also making sure the flip side of that is investing in your people. That makes a lot of sense. Well, so you touched on some of this in talking about the coaching and making sure that we’re pushing this forward. Obviously you’re with Stafi. What makes Stafi different from some of the other places that I might go to to get offshore talent or get help or things like that?

Raquel Gomes:

Yeah, I think my background is in psychology. I’m a psychologist and I think because I view the human being as I have this holistic approach of seeing someone, I know how important it is from the way we assess them before we match them, we offer the same assessment to our clients so we can better understand and communicate with them and we can better match client with personalities as well. But also in the implementation, we are super hands-on with our clients throughout the whole entire onboarding and after onboarding as well, which makes them feel very supported. It’s different than just, “Hey, I’m going to give you someone. This is a great match. Now it’s all on you. ” We’re there every step luck to make sure that we’re guiding them, that we’re supporting them. And then the whole methodology around coaching

Our staff. So anyone who’s assigned to the law firm has at least two coaches assigned to them who are meeting with them regularly to make sure anything mindset related, sometimes people feel anxious, they feel nervous, they burn out. There’s a lot of law firms that deal with clients that go through a lot of trauma and that can cause burnout. So we’re taking all of that into account and that is a major differentiator as well because we’re there not only supporting the law firm owner, but we’re there supporting the offshore remote staff to make sure that they’re doing okay. They are keeping motivated, they’re keeping productive. So there’s two sides to this in order to be

Zack Glaser:

Successful. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. Okay. Well, before we wrap though, you’re also building something new for immigration firms, right? Oh

Raquel Gomes:

Yeah.

Zack Glaser:

What is this and who is it for?

Raquel Gomes:

All right. So immigration case outsourcing, we launched it six months ago. Right now we are working, we have a hundred clients already going

Zack Glaser:

Through the service.

Raquel Gomes:

It’s being highly successful and we created this service just because of everything that immigration lawyers are going through. There’s a lot of changes, a lot of restrictions, a lot of burnout. And we saw a lot of law firms having to let go of staff, but still having a huge workload to deal with.

Zack Glaser:

Still the same amount of work, yes.

Raquel Gomes:

How are you going to do it? How are you going to make it? How are you going to pay your bills? How are you going to survive? How are you going to thrive? So immigration outsource is a very flexible service that they come to us, we take the production. So they hand us the cases. We work on the cases. We have a team of lawyers and paralegals working in- house, putting together from document collection to putting together the forms, the packages, and handing it a full executive package to the lawyer so they can review and file and we charge a flat fee that is very inexpensive to the attorney.

Zack Glaser:

Okay. And we

Raquel Gomes:

Handle humanitarian, family-based. I’m sorry, family based, employment-based type of cases. There’s a wide variety. You can go into our website, you can check and it’s very flexible because we don’t require any minimum. You can send one case today, one case in six months. So there’s no minimum requirement or minimum contractual term.

Zack Glaser:

Okay. And they can just go to getStafi.com to learn more?

Raquel Gomes:

Yeah.

Zack Glaser:

Okay. So we’ve talked about the mistakes that people can make here, but let’s assume that people are going to get this right now. If a law firm does get this right, what’s the upshot? What changes for them?

Raquel Gomes:

Wow. You get a top performing team that allows you to step into the true CEO of your own law firm, a team that you can delegate to that you can rely on and isn’t that a dream, the dream of every business owner?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, I love that. You get a top performing team that lets you execute your vision. That’s wonderful. I mean, that’s what we’re looking for, right?

Raquel Gomes:

Execute

Zack Glaser:

Your

Raquel Gomes:

Vision and live life.

Zack Glaser:

Ah, yes. Yes, exactly. Well, Raquel, thank you for being with me and sharing all of your knowledge on this. If people want to learn more about Stafi, where can they go?

Raquel Gomes:

Www.getstafi.com. So Getstaffi, G-E-T-S-T-A-F-I.com.

Zack Glaser:

Awesome. Well, thank you once again for being with me and we’ll drop that link in the show notes.

Raquel Gomes:

Yeah, thank you so much. What’s fun?

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