One of the most incredible things about running a small law firm in this day and age is the opportunity to use the assistance of people all over the globe to help run your law firm in ways that would not have been possible 10 years ago. I have for four or five years now been working with two virtual assistants in the Philippines who have perfect English, who learned how to speak English, watching the same Scooby-Doo and Bugs Bunny cartoons that I watched when I was a kid, who have the same kind of computer that I have that have blazing fast internet. And because of exchange rates, their absolute dream job is to assist United States-based businesses. And because of exchange rates, they are incredibly inexpensive. And it has just been one of the most wonderful things ever to find that there are really smart, talented, hardworking people that are able to do a whole variety of things that I need to be done, that are an affordable option for me, that I can interface with remotely and on a secure basis.

And it’s just been a phenomenal thing. I use virtual assistance. These two people who I am mentioning to you right now, these are real people. I can see them on social media. I see the posts about their kids. It just so happens that they’re on the other side of the globe. The guy that edits my videos is in New Zealand. The people that do my firm’s social media posts are in North Carolina. My phone is answered by people in Seattle, Washington. People that optimize my website are in Washington, DC and Florida. And so there is really a global marketplace now. And I use a whole bunch of other talent that I hire through online platforms to help me in a whole bunch of different ways. At the beginning of this video, there is an intro with the logo that kind of spins at you and you hear the music.

And there’s the outro. I leveraged overseas talent to create those for me. And when I left the large law firm, I had 15 years worth of slide decks and I needed to have them reformatted into slide decks with my current firm branding. And I used people that I’d never met and I paid them through platforms where there’s an intermediary. So I’m not just Venmoing money out into the universe. And so in addition to having these people take the content from my old slide decks and move them over into my new branding, I had somebody who’s a specialist in PowerPoint, take my branding information, take the fonts that I use, the colors that I use, the logo, and to create a hundred-page slide deck template with every kind of shape and size slide deck that you could possibly use. And once I had that Shell, then I was able to hire somebody else at a little lower rate to create versions of all of my PowerPoints with the new branding.

And so I do not think that it is necessary if you are starting a law firm in this day and age to think about having to employ somebody at the front desk to answer your phones for you. I do not think it is necessary that you need to employ a video editor in your office. I do not think that it is necessary that you absolutely have a paralegal. My virtual assistants in the Philippines, they do litigation paralegal type tasks for me. They make sure that the electronic pleading folders that show every document from the first complaint and the first summons of the lawsuit, that they are uploaded and they are properly titled so that I can sort them in order and they’re checking every day to make sure it’s up to date because we’re pretty digital. We don’t keep a lot of that stuff around here in paper.

And so most of what you need to have done, whether it is creating a website or optimizing a website that already exists, or helping you to make your YouTube channel better, or helping you with paralegal tasks, or answering your phone, or doing video editing, or really like anything that you can think of under the sun. There are marketplaces out there where you are able to hire people on a project basis, you’re able to hire people on a more ongoing basis. And then I’ve got friends in the industry that have services in particular that are going to match you up with longtime virtual assistants, like the two wonderful people that I’ve been working with for the last four or five years. I don’t think that this is totally relevant for people like me that are business to business, that are not high volume, but a lot of people that have come from the big firm world might be surprised to learn that smaller firms that are not like mine, I’m going to take one, two clients a week and I’m going to be thrilled with it.

But like other kinds of firms that are high volume firms that are doing DUIs and estate planning and that sort of thing, it’s not uncommon for them to have five or six full-time employees in South America that are answering their phones and doing intake for them. It is not all that unusual to have intake people in other parts of the world that are tending to be awake when we’re asleep because they want to make sure that their phones are answered twenty four seven, 365. And so you do not necessarily need to hire a lot of employees if you’re starting a law firm right now. And as a matter of fact, it’s one of the biggest changes that I’ve seen, at least in my mentality over the last quarter as I’ve sort of been gazing into the future and thinking about AI, even though I have hired seven full-time employees that have been physically present with me in the office over the last six years, some have come, some have gone, some are here, some are not.

I don’t think that the future of my law firm really is going to involve a lot more hires because of the way I’m able to leverage AI and because of the way that I’m able to leverage this office, this overseas talent. So it’s a wonderful time for you to get some of the support that you’re used to, secretarial, paralegal word processing, some of this other stuff that maybe you’re better off paying for than spending your time on. You should be doing the things that no one else can do, getting the clients doing the legal work. So make sure that your eyes and ears are open to this possibility because it is almost certainly the case that anybody that is going to be leaving a larger law firm and starting their own firm should be thinking about who are the three or four or five people that are going to round out your team on a project basis, on a part-time basis, or maybe even a more sustained basis that our overseas talent, those marketplaces are out there and there are ways to find those people.

And it is just another reason why it’s much easier to run a small law firm than it’s ever been before.