Matthew: One of the downsides is that it’s new. So, it’s a new way of operating. It’s a new approach that I think most lawyers might not be either familiar with or comfortable with.

And, you know, on our assessment, for example, one of the questions relates to communication. And, you know, we created a scorecard, we’ve got from one to five. You know, some of the answers at the level one, are a little bit tongue in cheek, but like, I think level one on communication is, you know, when I communicate with staff, I yell from my office and expect them to come to me.

Well, you know, if that’s true, then working with somebody who’s remote is not going to work for you, right?

Steve: It’s awesome. That’s great. Okay, keep going.

Matthew: So, you know, level five on the communication would be, you know, we have a cloud-based platform. We use Slack or similar, you know, Microsoft Teams to communicate. We use, you know, it’s not always in real time, but we’ve got a good team and we know that when we post a message that somebody will respond to it.

So, the risk, the downside is, if you as an attorney are uncomfortable with that, and if you’re in a one or even a two category, there’s going to be some growing pains or a learning curve involved with how you communicate with your team.

So, I would say that’s one of the downsides or one of the risks.

Ed: The talent pool in the Philippines is phenomenal. Just generally speaking, this is not our group, just generally speaking across the country, 70% Filipinos in the Philippines have degrees and there’s a 96% literacy, for example.

But we’ve even been seeing even more dramatic things. For example, majority, if not all of our candidates have at least a bachelor’s degree. Many of them are professionals. They’re teachers, they’re nurses, they’re attorneys. They went to law school, for example.

And so, we put a premium on this search. We disk profile them, for example. We have them create a video, a resume, right? And so ultimately, based on an assessment, our team will review and analyze, and we will present three candidates.

Essentially, the customer has the ability to interview all three of these candidates, right? And we’ve been quite successful. So, they’ll choose one or more. Sometimes we have a customer that ended up choosing two. And then that transitions over to the placement. And that’s the long-term placement. And that contract is for a minimum of one year.

Matthew: There are a number of platforms out there. Upwork is an example where you can find different workers of any capacity. There are other VA companies out there. But Upwork and related websites or similar websites are really kind of the “Wild West” in that You know, you never know what you’re going to get.

You can do a lot of homework, you can do a lot of posting, but that takes time. And as you know, time is money. And so, you know, doing it yourself, I think there’s some definite downsides there.

You know, we’ve had a lot of success. And the way that we find people is, we have a VA who’s based in the Philippines. Anytime we get a request from a client, once the client hires us, and they want us to search for somebody, we get the criteria for that client.

“What are you looking for? Give us the job description.”

Then we have a person in the Philippines who posts the ads, collects the resumes, makes the initial cut on who’s qualified, who’s not.

And so, she is the boots on the ground person. And we’ve done this numerous times where we’ve got our process, we have our systems down. And so, I would say trying to do it yourself, it’s going to take time. There’s a learning curve involved.

It’s good to rely on knowledgeable people or knowledgeable companies like ours.

Ed: So, I think one of the things that distinguishes us from our competitors is that we will only place someone on a full-time basis. So, I would say that’s another big thing. People will come and say “You know, I want someone to do this” and if it’s a project perhaps, right? but that’s not us, we’re really looking for a long-term successful fit.

And so, we put a premium on the search phase. There are two phases: there’s the search, and then there’s the placement. And again, I can’t thank Atticus enough because we’ve used a lot of the principles that we’ve learned from Atticus and baked them, embedded them into this process.

Ed: We always get stuck in the, well, I’m not ready, there’s not enough work, right? We learn capacity creates revenue. And I think a major error is to think that they have to have all of this work ready for them in order for them to pull the trigger.

And I challenge them that they have to work themselves into it, because this is a novel way of working, right? You’re not going to get a remote worker who is going to be 100% on day one. And so, there’s training, there’s many things that they could do to get up to speed. And it’s sort of, like this phase where they have to figure out exactly what they would like to do.

Sure, there are things that are obvious, right? Like checking emails and scheduling and drafting and things like that. But I would say one of the number one errors is that they’re waiting for that perfect time to use a remote worker.

Matthew: The immediate benefit was I got back my time. I was probably spending two hours spending time on emails. And, what I’ve realized is that there are typically two types of people who, two different ways people manage emails. There are searchers and then there are sorters.

So, you’ve got searchers, they leave every email in their inbox. And sorters will have hundreds of different subfolders and sort to those subfolders. So, I’m a sorter. And it took me an inordinate amount of time to go through all of my emails, make sure they get to the right folder, and so on and so forth.

And so, the immediate effect is that I’m getting back, I would say, probably an hour and a half, two hours a day of not having to deal with that.

Matthew: I think the first mistake is waiting too long. That, you know, we as attorneys, we like to cogitate on problems a lot and, you know, think it through in minute detail. You know, our friend Jan Copley said unstructured dithering, right? So, we want to analyze it to death or analysis paralysis.

And so, people can wait too long before they act. And I’ll tell you a story about that, Steve. So, we just finished reading in the Dominate Your Market, Buy Back Your Time. And one of the big lessons or take away from that book is hire an executive assistant to check your email to manage your scheduling. And like I suspect a lot of other people, you know, I’m very attached to my email, but I found myself spending an inordinate amount of time during each day, you know, checking email, going back, checking email again. And it’s almost as if it’s like an OCD fixation.

I was aware that I needed to hire an executive assistant, but I had, you know, I had a mental block against it. And I was talking with my Atticus coach about it. And I said, this is crazy. I own a staffing agency. I’ve got a list of a dozen VAs that I could hire tomorrow and get them staffed up and ramped up and trained to manage my email. And, you know, I realized that it was just the analysis paralysis part of it. And so, I you know, pulled the trigger, hired an executive assistant, did the training. And within a week, she was managing all of my email, managing all of my calendar. 

Steve: Okay, so let’s talk apart. Let’s take apart the term virtual assistant. Because when I hear that, I hear different things. So, for you, it’s really paralegal, legal assistant. Do they help with scheduling? What do they do? What tasks do they do for you guys?

Matthew: So, they can do anything and everything. And so, you know, I’ll… Talk a little bit about how I use VAs in my practice. And then Ed can talk about how he uses VAs, which is a little bit different. So, I have drafting paralegals based in the Philippines, and they draft estate plans for me.

After I meet with a client and we design their plan, I send them the design sheet, and they have access to my drafting platform. They draft the documents, and then they notify me that the drafts are completed, and then they schedule a time on my calendar to review them. I also have two VAs in the forward-facing intake department.

And so, if you call my office today, my intake department is staffed by virtual assistants in the Philippines. They do the initial intake with prospective clients, gather the information, they enter it into our CRM, they schedule the initial meeting.

So, they are fully integrated in our firm, just like any other employee. Our team has eight people on it, four are based in the Philippines, four are based in the United States.

We also have our marketing person, and he’s in the Philippines. He does 100% of our digital marketing for us.

Steve: That’s fantastic. So, we have four U.S. people, four people in the Philippines, a full-time marketing director in the Philippines.

Matthew: Correct.

Steve: Perfect. Ed, how about you?

Ed: I was really infatuated with this 24-7 law firm, right? And so, I have four virtual assistants, and they support for paralegal, legal assistance, in California and so the way I originally developed it was when it was three o’clock California pacific time right, and my local California team was unable to finish a matter or a deadline for example that was due the next day at three o’clock that would be sort of the time where they would delegate to their corresponding virtual assistant in the Philippines, right? And so, this idea that there should never be anything late so long as there’s proper training, right? And so, we have them do anything from drafting to scheduling, anything where my local team has trained them appropriately so that we have this concept of a 24-7, right? 

So, they leave at 5, and when they get to their desk at 9 to 10 the next day, everything should be done. And that’s worked out quite well for my practice. I’ve been able to scale, work on several projects for example, where we are seeing a lot of cases come through the door in a very short period of time.

Steve: So, you’ve started the business. Ed, talk to me about the name of the business and what was the inspiration behind it.

Ed: The name of the business is Traba Legal. Traba Legal. And so, for Filipinos, obviously there’s an overarching Spanish connection just from the history of the Philippines. So, a lot of the Tagalog words, Filipino words are actually Spanish words. So, we took it from Trabajar or Trabajo, which means work. That’s the history between the word trabajar and trabalegal.

Steve: So, it’s Traba Legal. And what’s Traba Legal about? What are you trying to do?

Ed: We are essentially pairing our attorney colleagues with virtual assistants in the Philippines. And let me just add by, you know. The slow progression of how it came out, you know, I was at that time, not at “Dominate Your Market”, I was in the version right before that, which is the “Practice Growth Platform”, right? And I was talking about this, and this is way before I met Matthew, and a lot of my colleagues in that group were essentially asking me to help them set it up. And so basically, I was doing it for free. And I did it a couple of times with some of our very famous Atticousins. And then I thought, you know what, why am I doing this for free? This is one of the things that Atticus encourages us to create some of these novel ideas and businesses. And so that really was how I wanted to ultimately turn it into a business.