Building AI-Powered Virtual Assistant Teams to Scale Law Firm Operations

0:00 Introduction: Building AI-Powered Virtual Assistant Teams

1:30 Why Law Firm Growth Creates Operational Challenges

6:00 Gabriel’s Journey into Virtual Teams

9:00 What Lawyers Should Delegate First

11:00 Why Most Virtual Assistant Hires Fail

14:00 Hiring by Function Instead of Generalists

17:30 Building Specialized VA Teams

20:30 Creating Accountability Through Functional Roles

25:30 Systems Before Scale

30:00 Building SOP Libraries That Last

36:20 What Is an AI-Enabled Virtual Assistant?

40:00 AI as Leverage on Top of Leverage

45:30 Protecting Client Data While Using AI

47:00 Why Prompt Libraries Become Intellectual Property

50:00 Training AI-Enabled Teams the Right Way

54:00 Creating a Virtual Law Office Culture

1:00:00 Essential Technology for Managing Remote Teams

1:03:30 How to Start Building Your First VA Team

Jason Marsh (00:00)
On today's show, Gabriel Maroos, law firm founder, international business attorney, and expert on leveraging VAs with AI to help law firms operate more efficiently. We'll be talking about how to build high-impact virtual assistant teams that are fully AI-enabled to improve productivity, eliminate operational bottlenecks, and give law firm owners the freedom to focus on higher value work.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (00:27)
an AI enabled virtual assistant, it's basically a virtual assistant who's been trained and who's competent in using AI tools and using it in her function, we remain consistent in terms of our function. We we're not trying to have one person do everything just because there is AI.

you have an admin assistant being becoming a much better, efficient admin assistant by using AI tools that help her become that better admin assistant. Same thing for a marketing

Jason Marsh (01:01)
Welcome to the Alpha Lawyer podcast, a show dedicated to exploring what makes law firms thrive. I'm your host, Jason Marsh. Join me as I interview some of the smartest thought leaders and accomplished law firm owners in our space. Together, we'll dive deep into law firm operations, marketing, technology, finance, and everything else you need to build an incredible firm that allows you to live your best life.

Jason Marsh (01:28)
Hello, welcome back to the Alpha Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jason, and joining me today is Gabriel Marous Hey Gabriel, it's great to see you. So it's great, man. And so for a lot of law firm owners, as we know, growth creates a whole new set of challenges, right? The firm gets bigger, revenue goes up, but at the same time, the demands on the owner.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (01:37)
Hi Jason, how's it going?

Jason Marsh (01:51)
Those also go up, right? More clients, more staff, more problems, just overall more complexity. And so, a lot of firm owners, they know they need help, but like many small business owners, we start to struggle with exactly what to delegate, who to hire to do what, how to then train those people, and ultimately start building an organization that can grow and not be completely dependent on them. And now at the same time, AI is creating a whole new opportunity as well.

And not to say AI replaces people in all things, but you have the perspective that, AI can make good people dramatically more productive. And as you put it, and I love this, it's called what you call leverage on top of leverage. So today I want to get into how law firms can build leverage through virtual assistance systems and now use AI. Also want to talk a little bit about why VA hires fail.

Why firms should think about hiring by function instead of hiring by role or generalists, and ultimately and importantly, why systems need to come before scale. Okay? And before we dive into all that, I just want to introduce you to the audience. Gabriel, he's a law firm founder, an international business attorney, an entrepreneur. He's also the founder of VA Professionals, a company that helps law firms build and manage remote teams. But long before Gabriel

was helping other firms build remote teams. He was doing it inside his own practice for over a decade now. He's been building and managing VA teams in the Philippines. He's refined hiring and delegation systems, ultimately creating leverage through people, processes, and technology, right? All the key things. So today he now helps other law firms apply those same principles.

So, Gabriel, a as I was preparing for this this conversation, right, this idea of leverage, which I love, so it keeps coming up. But I want to talk about how as a firm grows, right, success, it just creates its own new set of challenges, right? So you've built a successful law practice and I know you eventually took a decent sized in-house team and migrated that over to, you know, leveraging ⁓ a virtual team. And so I want what what led you down that path?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (03:49)
Yeah.

Very, very good question and thank you for having me on the show. I've been following what you've been doing. great, great work. So the Genesis, it's it's go goes back a a few years back really, even before COVID. somehow all have ideas that we don't really pursue or until the the opportunity really really comes up.

And for a long time I was always thinking to work from home longer and I would never go to the office five days a week. but of course back then it was difficult to get clients to follow because clients were attached to coming to the office. fast forwarding

COVID happened, like everybody knows. And that definitely changed everybody's mindset and attitude towards the remote work and towards the remote everything. but even before that, about twelve years ago, I wanted to try, just very small.

So at the time I hired a one virtual assistant. I recall the first one was from the Ukraine. Then that didn't work so well. I tried then from India, didn't work so great either. Ultimately I heard about the Philippines and I tried the Philippines. I tried two people and one worked very, very well. so she was already with the firm twelve years ago and that was many years before COVID.

And at the time I think we were running a staff of ten people in an office in New York City. When COVID happened, as we all know, everybody went home. And for two months nobody was working except my VA in the Philippines, which was very interesting in and of itself. ⁓

Jason Marsh (05:40)
So so what happened

there? Your your in house team, they go home, right? We remember this time, we all started working from home and some you're saying your team just went home and didn't even stop doing work. They just sat at home.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (05:47)
Yeah.

Yeah,

well we we we had the first month we definitely had to stop. ⁓ so it was important for everyone to go to take care of their family pr first priority first, being safe and taking taking care of family. Everyone had to get used to this life. At first we didn't think it would be for that long. And then after a month I figured, well, we need to get back to business, otherwise there's no firm to get back to. so at that point, I asked the team if they would join back.

remotely, zoom, all that. some were ready to go, others not so much. At the time you may recall, everyone was getting paid to stay home anyhow and that was important at the time, but I had at that time even the VA from the Philippines was still working full time. So at that point I thought, well, if no one can come back or very few people can come back, why not

increase the team we had in the Philippines. The one person we had in the Philippines. So I talked to her and she said, Well, Mr. Moros, I'll be happy to help recruit more people. People are looking for work in the middle of COVID. And that's kind of how it w all worked out. And by the time mm

Jason Marsh (07:01)
So so let me ask you this. When

obviously, you had the in house team, eventually that slowly went away. But as you hired VAs just in the be what were some of the biggest problems you were trying to solve at that point that you felt like a VA could help you handle?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (07:18)
So that's the the concept of being as a small firm and we all go through this, when you have your entire team at the end of the day going home, nothing gets done, obviously. So the idea for me at first hiring a VA remotely for even twelve years ago, was to have some level of work getting done overnight while we all go home.

So she was very helpful in that in that regards, whether it's preparing documents, putting things together, so that by the time the office team would come to the office, there would be work already done. I know big law firms have that set up already. They have twenty four sevenths situation, but as a small firm, I could not afford that. So that was the initial idea. Having her

complete the physical team so that she could do work while they are sleeping.

Jason Marsh (08:13)
So I wanna go more to the root of the challenge here, right? and that's just ultimately that, all of us as entrepreneurs or business owner, law firms owner, you get to a point you simply just can't do everything yourself, right? Like you can't continue to grow just by simply working harder yourself. So you have to start to find ways to delegate. And so that's kind of the piece that I wanna get into here a little bit, and then we're gonna talk about more how we can solve that and the way that you've done it, over the last decade.

not just for yourself but for others now as well. but what are some of the tasks that lawyers should know these are the things you need to get off your plate first. You need to stop doing these things first. What are some of those things?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (08:53)
So without s telling you specifically the thing, I think it's more of a category. You have to think of tasks that must be done, as small as they may be, that if they don't get done, the business doesn't run, but anybody else can do. Right? So that's the first part. Being able to those things. They must be done, they're small, and

anyone can do anyone else can do them.

Jason Marsh (09:19)
So so is that the idea

of like, administrative stuff? Like I've seen kind of the delegation ladders that people talk about, right? admin, that's always kind of the bottom thing. It's like the lowest value stuff, and and ultimately it's the easiest stuff to hire and train for. So you start there and kind of where do you go after that?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (09:35)
Mm-hmm.

Right. The low hanging fruits, I guess, would be the admin kind of work. checking your emails, your calendar, confirming appointments, follow ups with clients, making sure that people show up the day before appointment, those kind of things. So these are very administrative in nature. They must be done in order to increase the likelihood of people showing up.

that's where you confirm your appointments so that you don't sit around waiting for no reason. but you don't have to do them yourself. And honestly, you don't have to have someone at the office do that. Anybody else can do that as long as they have a a phone connection and an email connection. As simple as that. So that

Jason Marsh (10:17)
So all right,

so then let's talk about that and just this idea of virtual assistants and using, those people to help you build leverage that you can do more, as a firm leader and focus on more of the higher value stuff, of course, the stuff that maybe only you can do or at least that has the most value and things you enjoy. and I think a lot of lawyers and entrepreneurs in general, at some point, I'm in this group as well, but you've tried to hire a VA at some point.

And have had a bad experience, right? Sometimes a hire doesn't work out. Sometimes they struggle, you struggle to delegate it. or I know in some of my experiences, either I didn't hire the right person or I just didn't define the role and what their responsibility I just threw it all to them, get it done. And of course that's a recipe for failure. so when a when a law firm is thinking about hiring a virtual assistant or one that's ha actually had it fail.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (10:43)
Ha ha.

Yep.

Jason Marsh (11:06)
In your view, like what are some of the basic biggest reasons that that VA hire went wrong?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (11:13)
I like to say that I probably made all the mistakes any attorney would make ever make with a VA over the last twelve years that I worked with VAs. And the biz biggest mistake is not knowing from the start what you expect from them. And expect that they would come if solve all your problems. that's why I know we we'll talk about this later. That's why I absolutely say

Don't think of your VA as a generalist. You have to think about a a specialist. they just can't, these are just people like you. They can't do everything. so first is on you as an attorney to know what is it that you want them to produce. And in order for you to know that, you have to know what are the things that you don't want to do. So first, and when I we have new clients, we tell them first, think about

The things you no longer want to do that can be done and that must be done. Can be done by someone else and must be done. yeah, so in terms of the first mistake is not knowing, not setting the expectations properly. Your own and in order to then communicate your expectation to your VA. If they don't know what you expect, you'll get just that. Anything.

Jason Marsh (12:29)
Yeah. No, that makes complete sense, right? If you if you don't give people the roadmap or where you want to go, how are they possibly gonna get there? Again, I've made this mistake a lot of different times. So I wanna we're gonna get into the functional the function based aspect of the team. But but before we get into that more specifically, just generally, why is hiring a generalist versus a specialist the wrong approach when a when you're talking about a VA?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (12:34)
Yep.

So

right, someone who's been practicing for almost thirty years, over thirty years at this point, I know the old way of doing it was you had a very good assistant. We used to call them secretary, we used to call them legal secretary, all kind of names, but that person would do everything for you. They would draft papers, they would answer phone calls, and they were just awesome. They

I would argue some of them were better than a lot of associates coming into the law firm brand new. and you would pay them an enormous amount of money because they would stay with you for fifteen, twenty, thirty years to practice. But that's one person. And whenever you lost that one person, you essentially lost your firm, your practice. so that makes sense that

Jason Marsh (13:36)
Yeah, I can imagine.

Yeah, you have a person like that who's incredible, right? They have all the historic and institutional knowledge of the firm. They just know how everything works. And then one day they leave or, something happens and they're not with you anymore. And you have a massive gap and more importantly, a massive problem that you maybe don't even know exactly how to solve because you didn't fully understand all of the things that person was really doing.

so how does that change now when you hire a a VA, right? is there an ideal like first role or place to start with that person? 'Cause that's fundament this is the thing. It's the VA is a fundamentally different person than someone you might hire here in the US and have in-house and and sort of what their approach to work is versus a VA, right?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (14:15)
Right, right.

Right. Absolutely. So building up on that concept, if you were to hire a VA, a generalist VA, just imagine how difficult it is if you were as a physical person in your office, imagine it's a VA that does everything and anything you ask them. This is not a personal VA for your house. just do call babysitting or set up ⁓ make arrangements, whatever. you want someone who's gonna help you run your business.

that's why and again I tried that before. That's why I know. Just didn't work. that's why essentially at the end I realized it has to be by functions. When I s what do I mean by functions? You have an admin function, you have a marketing function, you have a account payable function, you have a billing function, you have different functions. So much so that

And we might talk about this in the later on, but so much so that when you have a VA, I would advise anyone not to create an email with the VA's name. Jane at Maruslaw.com, for example. No, no, you have admin at Maruslaw.com. So that at any time, if that person is to be replaced, the function remains. The person may change, the function remains. Same for marketing.

Same for legal, same for payables, same for billing, as you can see, all the different functions of a law firm can be filled by a particular VA that can be replaced. And in order for that yeah, go ahead.

Jason Marsh (15:51)
All right. So so I I yeah, I like

this this concept, right? So just a couple quick practical questions because this is what comes to mind for me. All right. So I'm gonna create a bunch of emails for for the different roles or the functions in the firm, right? So admin at, marketing at. But is can you make it so while that is the actual email address, like when I receive or the client receives an email that maybe

Has that person's actual name showing up, even though when you look at their email, or what does it say in the who it's from? It says, admin at your firm's name. Like that doesn't sound like it would work. How do you handle that little little

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (16:25)
It's very right, it's it's very easy. It

it it does work to the extent that your email arrives to the recipient, admin at JSON dot com. But the subject line says something and the signature line, the signature block, which is the most important part, the signature block can be individualized. Right? So

Jason Marsh (16:49)
I see. Okay. Yeah.

so that's helpful. that makes yeah, that and individu yeah, it's personalized, so it's not just like some at this point somebody might be like

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (16:59)
No, no. Right.

Jason Marsh (16:59)
questions here. So

let me ask you this then, right? Because you do have all these functions, right? We all, need to have these functions dealt with. and in talking to you before, you had said like one nice thing to know is you don't have to hire all of these people full time from the get-go, right? Because maybe as a, you know, accounts receivable or billing or whatever you don't need a full-time person. and so you've suggested that you can start

Part-time with the VAs before jumping into a full-time hire and then just managing it as you need it. So how does that work?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (17:31)
Yes.

Absolutely. What I see being the most useful for an admin assistant, for example, it's probably four hours a day. four hours a day, then six, then eight full time, but four hours a day. for it again depends on the function. If it's a marketing assistant, you don't need four hours a day at first. You can start with two hours a day. billing, it might be two hours or four, but it really depends on the function.

but you can sell now you can mix and match, right? Now you have four hours of admin, two hours of marketing and two hours of bookkeeping, for example. And now you have a a good person here right there, that's a full time employ employment right there for eight hours a day.

Jason Marsh (18:11)
So that's potentially a person that can you can train them. They can do the admin. You certainly can three different people. Okay. ⁓ okay.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (18:16)
No, these are three different people, like three different three different VAs, right? Because again,

the concept is you are working with specialists. And hiring specialists, of course, makes it so that you get a better product, better deliverable, faster, most more more specific to what you need. But then you combine that with three different professionals.

So have one professional, one I call them professionals. We call them VAs, that's what people know them as. I call them fellow professionals. So you have a professional admin, you have a professional marketing assistant, a professional bookkeeper. These are three different distinct individuals fulfilling a specific function in your organization.

Jason Marsh (19:01)
Yeah, and it's good because the things you've just talked about, admin, billing, marketing, bookkeeping, especially, like these are all things that are massive time sucks. And so if you can find an individual that is quite good at each of those things separately, regardless of how much time it takes where you are today and where you might be down the road, I think that's really encouraging to know that that you can do that. And so, when it comes to

building out accountability within your practice and like any of us, how does this function based structure affect that in a more positive way than having somebody that's, hire one VA that's responsible for all the things we're talking about?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (19:31)
Okay.

well a good point would be if you lose one, if you lose your marketing assistant, you're not losing your admin assistant. You're not losing at the same time your bookkeeper. Now you have to go back and fill a function that's say for two hours of marketing assistant. So you you can still get work done. But because now that part of the puzzle just needs to be replaced.

But if you had one person to do all three, now you have to go back into the marketplace and hope to get one person who can fill all three. That's a different challenge. It's one challenge to get a marketing assistant to fill in that plug, another to get one person replacing all three at the same time.

Jason Marsh (20:23)
Yeah, that really does solve a big problem because you talked about kind of that old school almost unicorn like, admin that could do it all back in the day. And I'm sure these people still exist, but yeah, when they leave, it's a massive gap in your operation and replacing it is very difficult, if not completely impossible. And so yeah, when you break these roles down into functions, yeah, replacing one

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (20:40)
Very difficult.

Jason Marsh (20:47)
function rather than, someone that does everything would be a lot easier. what about cross training? Do you do that so so some functions have some knowledge of what other people are doing, maybe to create redundancy? I know you've talked about that, even within your nicely broken down functions to have redundancy there too. So if somebody leaves, then you you're you have a backup there as well.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (21:10)
So very good question, Jason.

What we do is we've trained two people for each function. Once again, because of the the savings you have obviously

You as the law firm, you may not be able to pay. You don't need to pay for two. But I'm talking about our company, VA for professionals, we always train a reliever. We call that a reliever. So a second chair. You have the first chair, they are the main account handler, and if that person gets sick, that person is out for whatever reason.

you have the second chair coming in, the reliever comes in. So we always train f two, two people for every function. and for me when I when I was doing for the firm, I realized that for my legal assistant team, for example, the optimal was having three. Having three. that was based on the value sorry. Right. Well

Jason Marsh (22:03)
That's a deep bench. ⁓

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (22:09)
was based on the volume of work we needed to get things done. but at the minimum we had two at all time. same thing with the admin assistant, same thing with the marketing assistant. So of course we don't expect that an attorney would come and hire two, so we just offer the second. no charge for them, but we get to train the second the reliever, the second chair for them so that

Jason Marsh (22:33)
I see. So okay,

so so in this scenario, we're just talking about your service VA professionals for professionals that okay, if you somebody hires let's just say an admin VA, you're gonna train a second person in that same role behind the scenes that somebody doesn't necessarily have to pay for. Because that was gonna be my question. now I'm hiring two people for each role and paying basically double the amount just in case somebody's sick. so I think that's that sounds really nice.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (22:37)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Correct. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Jason Marsh (22:59)
But let's talk about and I want to get into, systems and then we're gonna get into even more fun stuff after that. But but before we do, just in terms of envisioning, what what does a well structured virtual team look like for you, particularly as a firm is growing?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (23:02)
Sure.

Okay. So essentially I I talked about the primary functions, right? We talked about admin, we talked about marketing, we talked about account payables, then we have billing, then you have legal for legal assistance. that's right there, that's the body of your team already. If you can have that one person or one

part-time person for each one of these functions, you are well on your way to have this whole thing work well. now you talked about earlier about accountability. So everyone needs to work together, but how do you do that? Well I find that I tried at some point to have people work at night as I talked about earlier

to deliver things in the morning, but then when we started scaling up, that became very difficult to manage. So pretty quickly I realized they needed to work at the same time as I was working. now every VA works EST time from eight AM to five PM.

Jason Marsh (24:12)
Okay.

and talk a second about why that is important.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (24:21)
Well, as attorneys you need to have people respond very right there on the spot. we we are in the business of quite often dealing with people's lives, people's well being, emergencies or at least urgencies of some kind of nature. it's not always feasible to expect an answer twenty four hours later. You want people who can respond to you very quickly. So I found that over time

It was a lot more productive to have all the VAs, even the bookkeeper, work real time with us from eight in the morning EST to five PM EST.

Jason Marsh (25:00)
Yeah, and I would imagine that's important even if it's not so much you need something, but if they need something, they have a question, there's some feedback you need to give them. You can do that in the course of a normal business day. And as you're saying, it's not I'm gonna send an email, I'll talk, I'll get the response tomorrow, and then I'll respond and back and forth. And so yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so the next I want to talk about systems now. So I've of course you hear from a lot of successful operators and entrepreneurs. When you

Have bad systems. I don't care how many people or how much technology you're using, the wheels are gonna come off. The systems have to come before all of that stuff. It's really the idea is that the systems operate the business, right? And the people operate the systems, and of course the technology alongside of that. And so I think a lot of firm owners think, sometimes they have a staffing problem, and really the problem is they don't they have a systems problem. And so

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (25:42)
Yep.

That's right.

Jason Marsh (25:54)
And again, I've experienced this if processes are unclear and inconsistent, or in some cases they're just in my head and I haven't shared it with anybody, just adding more people is just gonna magnify the issue, right? Adding more technology that's for scale, right? All these things are for scale. And so if you have a problem with your systems, it's just gonna create more problems more quickly. what systems do firms need?

before you really start thinking about scale. And I imagine you could do this concurrently. Okay, I need help. I need to hire a VA. But know that you need to put systems in place right alongside that. And maybe a VA can help you do that to a degree. but what are some of the most common system failures you see inside a law firm that people need to fix right like today before they even start hiring a VA?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (26:38)
Let

I'll start with the most sensitive one, collection. Billing and collection. I found that the greatest return on investment for me when was really when we brought in a full time bookkeeper, billing and collection virtual assistant. And she really helped us now we have

Jason Marsh (26:46)
Ha.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (27:06)
a team of people now which she supervises, she really helped us ta staying close to the money, essentially. sending the bills out and I'm sure since your audience is primarily attorneys, a lot of attorneys will recognize themselves in that. If you don't send the bills out, nobody will pay or very few people will come knocking at the door to pay. and unless your bills are out, the money's not coming.

And we are so busy getting the work done. Great work. Most of us are good, good lawyers. But if we don't send the bills out, they won't get paid. And one thing a side benefit of having VAs, I've found, is it forces you to think about your business in terms of functions and systems. It forces you to think about it from outside because now you have to teach someone. And also

as you rightly pointed out, the VAs can help you do that. It's very easy. You you tell them, Okay, this is how I do it. Now go do it and document it.

Jason Marsh (28:07)
what are some ways of doing that, right? I've looked, there's certainly tools that can help sort of record your screen. I mean, I've tried it in a million different ways. I mean, I think the way we've ultimately settled is we create like an SOP, which is basically in a spreadsheet, a list of steps, and then each of those steps there's a playbook for, or maybe it's the reverse that I think we call it a playbook and then the SOPs to how to do each of those steps. But I know you've talked about

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (28:15)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Jason Marsh (28:31)
just using a tool like Loom to say, Okay, this is, how we're gonna document what we're doing here and then that's how you transfer the knowledge and create the system. what are some of the tools and approaches you take to creating these systems so that when you do hire a VA, they know what the heck they're supposed to be doing.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (28:48)
Right, right. So even before I mean AI is everything now, and everywhere, now there are tools you can really just do the thing and the the AI gives you the SOPs to go with it. But I do find that over the years, what worked very well was train once and forget it, right? So what we would do, we would train and record everything.

So that's another reason why we I think we talked about how I require all our teams, our VAs are within Zoom space. because anytime we want to train them on something, we record it. And we call we save it in a training library. So you have a training library for admin assistant, a training library for marketing assistant, a training library so on and so forth.

So now the next time you hire someone new, you don't have to sit with them again and teach them exactly what you taught the last person. Now you have them sit for two days if need be, watch all those videos, train yourself, and get to work. So creating documenting everything is key. whether it's videos and now with AI tools, you can have the SOPs generated just by watching you do it.

whatever it is. The tools may change, but the principle remain remains the same. Document, train once and forget it.

Jason Marsh (30:11)
And so you mentioned you record it and just for people just to be clear on what that means, you're talking about you're recording your screen, you're recording yourself. I use Loom as a little picture of me on the bottom talking, but essentially it's me doing the task. And then as you say, you stick that in a library now and label it all properly. So somebody wants to understand how to do something, they don't need to come to you, they can go watch it, even if it's, you know.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (30:19)
Correct.

Mm-hmm.

That's it.

Jason Marsh (30:34)
you know, hundred videos, I can watch them for two days, or if they have a question, they can check the library, watch the and and Loom, I I suppose is a good tool. there's other ones out there. And as you say, these these tools may change, but the approach is to document. And is there a way for you as you delegate create accountability for doing this, is there a way to do all of that without micromanaging people? Because I think this is

The next thing. You've hired somebody, you've created some sort of system of what they're supposed to be doing. But then of course it's not going to be perfect the first time. And how do you handle that? that's the problem I've always had, right? Especially if you're somebody who has, high, not saying I'm a high achiever. I'm not, but there are people that are high achievers, they have very high standards. how what is the balance there? What you should accept.

And just move on versus I'm gonna micromanage the hell out of this. Yeah, I I'm always I struggle with that honestly sometimes.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (31:23)
Yeah, yeah.

Well, that makes two of us. I call myself a re a recovering perfectionist, and that's been the case for twenty years. you're never out of it completely, but you do have to appreciate and realize the fact that it's better that someone would do it ninety percent as well as you would do it, maybe even eighty percent as well as you would do it, but get it done versus it's remaining on your desk and never getting done. So once you once you

Jason Marsh (31:32)
Yeah.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (31:54)
reconcile yours yourself with that fact, you understand that the extra twenty percent you could have added to the perfection of the task, most of the times it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, most of the time doesn't matter. Now that said, talking about how do you supervise, I believe in reporting systems, and

Jason Marsh (32:05)
Right.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (32:15)
I found that no more than five to six people reporting to me directly. it's manageable. So when my team became bigger than that, we had we created a position as an for an office manager. It was her job to have all the people reporting to her. and also for the law firm, it's kind of easy, I think, to structure things such a way. You have the admin side of things when I t talk the business.

management part of it, the admin, the marketing, et cetera. And then you have the production side, the legal side, where you have your legal assistants, your associates. And those two you can have one person overseeing that once you start having associates. And on the other you have someone else and then you are essentially having those two people reporting to you. ⁓ So

Jason Marsh (33:06)
And so

essentially you could build teams within these functional roles, right? Now you've you've stopped, you said, okay, let me try to document, create a system. I'm gonna hire a VA to implement that system. And now that role, say it's your marketing role, you're really busy, you're doing a lot of marketing, that person can now have other people helping them achieve a greater number of tasks, and those folks answer to them. And then that person, I guess, at the top of the, you know, the the the orch, you know, that portion of the org chart is the one that answers to you.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (33:11)
That's right.

Correct.

Correct. And at the end of the day, it's always comes down to the person you hired, right? The person. So that's why you want to be super, super careful about that. Who do you hire? in my experience there are a lot of very competent young or even ex experienced people in the Philippines. They it's a young population, very well educated. everyone we hire

has at least a two year college, at least a two year college for any position, and most of them have a four year college degree. So once you hire the right people, now you empower them to take lead, to take the lead on the team, for example. Let's say you even have two people in your admin team, one of them can take the lead. It doesn't matter that you have only two.

Jason Marsh (34:22)
And then what what

let me ask you this and then I want to get into what I think is the best part of the the show here, creating AI enabled virtual assistants. But but I love this. but before we get to that, just the last question in terms of hiring a VA, what are some of the ways or some of the approaches you use in addition to making sure they have at least three years of college? it's that you're hiring somebody that's good. do you give them some work?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (34:30)
Ha ha.

Jason Marsh (34:47)
up front that you pay them for, a small project just to test out. Obviously people can interview well, but then maybe their work product sucks. what are some of the tactics you have to ensure and that you're giving yourself the best chance of hiring, the best quality VA that you're not gonna have to then, let go and cycle through another hire.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (35:02)
Right, right. So first you have to think about the tech the technology part, right? without good technology, good connectivity, it's not gonna work. And you have to be aware of the fact that not everywhere in the Philippines has good connection, good internet connection and stable connection. so you have to be mindful of that. and also make sure that they have the right equipment. That's one. That's the technical part.

In terms of the work, yes, you absolutely wanna you don't wanna give them the keys to the kingdom before they are able they have shown the ability to produce work. So you will give them a project, a project and see how how they handle it, how do they ask questions? How they quite often sometimes it's cultural. they they wanna please, they want you to be satisfied and they won't ask you questions. So there's this aspect this element.

In the US, in the West, we are very upfront, we ask questions, we question everything, but they won't always do that. So you have to be prepared for that, making sure that they understood the task in order to make sure that they deliver what they want, what you want them to deliver. So you have to be mindful of the cultural differences, of course, but a s intelligent person in the US is the same as an intelligent person in the Philippines or anywhere else.

If they get it, they'll produce it.

Jason Marsh (36:24)
Yeah, so I wanna get into now what you've called AI enabled virtual assistants. And the other part that I love is is leverage on top of leverage, right? That's taking your your VA, you're leveraging that person. But now this this conversation gets a lot more interesting once you then layer some AI on top of it, right? And of course, AI is everywhere and everything these days. And and I think a lot of times people think

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (36:30)
yes.

That's right.

Jason Marsh (36:48)
about virtual assistants and AI is just completely separate topics. But what you're talking about is that the real opportunity now is when you combine the two. And as I've said, you describe that as leverage on top of leverage. I love that. So what is and what does ⁓ an AI virtual assistant actually look like? What is that?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (36:58)
Correct.

an AI enabled virtual assistant, it's basically a virtual assistant who's been trained and who's competent in using AI tools and using it in her function, right? Not to be once again, we remain consistent in terms of our function. We we're not trying to have one person do everything just because there is AI.

No, you have an admin assistant being becoming a much better, efficient admin assistant by using AI tools that help her become that better admin assistant. Same thing for a marketing

I remember three, four years ago when this AI thing became a real thing, people started telling me,

I think it was maybe two years or two and a half years ago, people saying, Well, the VA thing is outdated, it's passe, it's done because AI can do their job.

Yes to a point. Yes to a point. Unless you want to be doing AI generation of everything all day. Your marketing, your admin, your bookkeeping, your account payables, do it yourself every day, all day. Good luck with that. Now you see you still have a space, a spot for somebody else you're gonna delegate that responsibility. And if you're still thinking in terms of function,

That person is your VA. Now empowered and enabled with AI to produce greater amount of work, more precise, more accurate from the beginning. So those who are I have friends who are talking making fun of me sometimes, say, AI will replace all your VAs. Well, who's laughing now? Because

Jason Marsh (38:51)
Yeah,

right. Cause you make a great point, right? Sure, like AI can do a lot of stuff, but somebody's gotta manage the AI. It's not completely autonomous yet. certainly certainly not my experience. AI still can produce a lot of garbage. but more than that, I think is when you have someone human being that's managing an AI in a particular function, as you put it, they get much better at it than you're gonna ever get at, all that stuff. And so they're just again, we're talking about

creating systems and then using leverage to scale. And so the first thing is a maybe AI or but it system person technology. You layer all those things in together and you do it in the right order and the right way. Now you now you're on to something. You're not creating more problems for yourself. You're now really getting to a place where you're creating the solutions. And so

how do you set that up? Is it are you giving them and I've heard, I spoke to Ernie, the attorney, of course, last week and talking about, replacing traditional SOPs with, either prompts or now skills, specific skills, meaning skills that defined as they're defined within Claude. how are you approaching that with your VAs and marrying those two in a very highly functional way?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (40:01)
Yeah, so I I think of AI as an additional staff member, to be honest. As an additional staff member. so granted you may not need where you needed ten VAs for a function, you may not need ten VAs anymore, but you will still need VAs. so how do you how do you do that? And I agree with Ernie. I remember talking to Ernie about some of that before, and it is

your library of prompts becomes your IP, right? your intellectual property. Your library of prompts. So now if you develop a prompt that gives you the proper outcome, now you can just give that prompt to your VA and she produces the same outcome the previous one was producing. Now

We use that for a marketing team, for example, and I can tell you, it's not everything out there that AI comes out with that's ready to go. For example, I what was it? More recently AI created a picture of this one person at the desk. because it was the the theme was for an attorney, you had a gavel on the desk. How many lawyers work with a gavel on their desk? Right.

Jason Marsh (41:11)
Yeah, that'd be weird.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (41:15)
Right, that would be weird, right? ⁓ so AI thought it was appropriate to put a Gavel on the desk because was marketing for an attorney. So you do need to have someone to look at that. But the the prompt generated something that was very good, but that still needed to have the VA take a look at it.

Jason Marsh (41:36)
Yeah, that's a great point, right? Because again, AI is helpful and and it accelerates a lot of what we can do, but it it's not perfect. I know, I use AI all day, but I'm editing, I'm redoing the prompts or I'm having it, fix things and you need a human being to have the again, the judgment to see that there's a problem, or that there's a gavel on a lawyer's desk, something doesn't quite make sense there. We need to keep working on this to get it to the finished product.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (41:54)
That's it.

Jason Marsh (42:02)
let me ask you this, just within a firm, what are the tasks in your view that become dramatically more efficient when now AI is injected into the workflow?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (42:12)
Wow, that's a good question. Well, I don't want to say every yeah, I don't want to say everything, but I do think that no everything. if you have a VA that's enabled by AI, she's powerful to you. marketing for sure, whether it's the content, the visual support, those kind of things. admin

Jason Marsh (42:15)
I mean you mentioned marketing. Clearly that marketing

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (42:35)
as well because there are automations you can put in and and and and have her do more work in less amount of time. I see it also even for the legal assistants in terms of research. we see it maybe less for now at least with the bookkeeping function. the numbers go in and that's kind of what it is, but progressively it's coming.

so the low hanging fruit I think in terms of AI enabled VA, it's really marketing, admin and legal assistant in that order, I would say. Yeah.

Jason Marsh (43:13)
and those are all hugely important roles in the firm and again can suck up a lot of time somebody trying to do those things themselves. So now when you take, okay, I've got I've got a person and now they're AI enabled, is that person now able to do even more work, than what was an individual VA was able to do, they can do the work of theoretically multiple people.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (43:34)
Yes, but not only more work. I think it's more it's better work. Not just quantity but quality as well. And I think it also what I've seen with my VAs, it really engages them in their job, their function even more. I've re I've I've seen that with the marketing assistant. I've seen that with the legal assistant. when their interaction with the AI.

That's giving them new things to think about, angles that they didn't may not have thought of, makes them better professionals themselves. I mean, me as an attorney myself, I think I'm a better attorney with the help of AI, simply because I've done this for a long time, but still you don't think of every possibility just because you've done it for 30 years. Now you have this tool that allows you to think about it from a different angle.

And now you can go even further than the AI now simply because you have that new perspective. So I do think that it's not simply speed or just quantity, it's really quality if you marry the two, the human judgment as you put it, and the context contextual learning that people are able to do, and then the sheer power of the AI has access to so much information.

Jason Marsh (44:44)
Yeah.

Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. So, all right, let's talk about tools for a second. what tools, do you recommend your virtual assistants, should be using on a regular basis every day? Are they free tools, paid tools, legal specific, all of that stuff? I've I've had conversations, with other folks about AI and the different types of tools and being concerned about, data privacy, all these type of things. So what are the tools that you that

people should be using at least to start with and and maybe how should they use them and be mindful of, sticking proprietary or client information into those tools and, having an issue with that.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (45:30)
Probably all of the

probably all the above, but this is my the way I the VAs for the firm and we train the VAs for the company as well. everything that we put in into the AI platform this never has the name of the client, specifics about the client. This is important. I find it important at least. ⁓ so correct.

Jason Marsh (45:50)
So you anonymize all all of the information

you're putting in the

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (45:54)
Correct,

correct. whether you call the person, the client Mr X or Mr Gabriel Marous will not impact the outcome, right? So Mr X, misses this, everybody is anonymized and I think that's the most important part you should do. ⁓

Jason Marsh (46:17)
Yeah, and that seems like a very simple solution because I've heard, you know, lots of different ways of dealing with that stuff. But yeah, I think the simplest thing is just don't put any identifiable information into your prompts and such. so you've talked about prompts a little while ago and and how they essentially become a form of intellectual property when you're in your firm. And I know systems historically, those have been something along those lines in a firm or a business that has really good systems and places.

in place versus one that doesn't is a more valuable firm. And so what do you mean by that when you say these prompts are a form of intellectual property?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (46:53)
Well, it's something that you produced. You produced in the course of your business and whether you want to take it with you when you sell the business is a whole different co question. but for sure the buyer would see value in in your firm by having already those things in place. Because as I said before, if you have AI enabled VAs with the proper prompts

you can substitute the VAs and get the same outcome, same product. So that's why to me a

Jason Marsh (47:23)
Yeah. And I think that's that's what people

want when they're buying a business. They wanna know when they buy that business, that business is gonna be able to function and produce the same amount of profit without the current owner, with you as an owner than it did before. And that seems like a very good way to ensure, that's happening.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (47:40)
For sure. I mean, as we were talking about earlier, how a law firm with a very experienced person, if you sell your practice and that person goes with you, it's a different market value altogether than if that person stays. So here you're no longer talking about an individual, you're talking about a library of prompts for specific functions.

And anyone coming into that function is handed that library of prompts for that function, you can just imagine how quickly they become useful, how quickly they become they are able to help you with your practice. It's just a matter of changing people.

Jason Marsh (48:20)
And so earlier we were talking about SOPs and you essentially create these video libraries on how to do every single task. Is this replacing that effectively to say, okay, it's nice to have the video library and all the SOPs and how to do everything, but as you say, if you can develop a set of prompts that give you consistent outcomes, do those prompts then basically say you don't even have to bother watching these videos, just utilize these prompts?

to get the outcome we're looking for in this particular task.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (48:49)
So to an extent, yes. However, you always want there's more than just the prompt. There's the the mindset, the attitude of the VA. of whoever you hire. you never you don't really hire for skills, and especially now the skills can be taught quite easily and quickly. You hire for attitude and for intelligence. can they learn? ⁓ they went to school for two years, four years. They can learn. Now

Do they have the right a attitude? Yes. Okay, now you can teach them. So to me is it is important to still have that some of those recordings, just to give them the way you think about things. not so long ago I s I read an article, I forgot where, but the article was talking about how AI has the negative impact on young attorneys because young attorneys are able to find a solution

But without the practice of getting to the solution. Right? and there's a much more learning to be done in arriving to the right solution, knowing this doesn't work, this doesn't work, than having the right solution. So I think it's somewhere around that. It's kind of the same idea.

Jason Marsh (50:00)
Yeah, it's it sounds like yeah, to to have those SOPs and the vide at least gives you a lot of context around what you're doing because if you don't have that, then you're just almost like a robot interacting with another robot trying to get an outcome and not and and probably, as you're saying, that's the way somebody's gonna miss that there's a gavel on an attorney's desk that shouldn't be there. They're just not gonna understand that that's not gonna be there. So I can see how

The SOPs don't disappear completely. They provide a lot of context and then the technology, the AI, just becomes a tool to help get things done a little bit a little bit easier.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (50:31)
Correct, correct.

I wanna say something that I think is important, especially for us attorney attorneys. I tell my staff all the time, by virtue of you working with the law firm, you are I consider you an attorney. Not because you went to law school, not because you passed the bar, but because I need you to think as an attorney.

And I think the way you develop that in on your team is really by giving them context, allow them to understand how and why did you come to that solution so that they can perpetrate that concept or that attitude with the rest of the team. Because you hopefully you hire one, but you have many more after that. And if all they have is a library of prompt, you're missing the context.

and the culture of a law firm. Sorry about that, go ahead.

Jason Marsh (51:22)
So yeah,

yeah, no, that's great because that's a perfect lead in to the next kind of thing I want to get into, and that's training and supervision of a virtual office, right? It's not, yeah, you're hired, here's your prompt library, get to work, it better be good. you've been building and managing these remote teams for years, and I know that you've developed a very intentional operating system around how to really do that so that people are feeling they're part of

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (51:47)
Yeah.

Jason Marsh (51:49)
a company and a culture and they understand what their jobs are and how to a get their own questions answered. So how do you think, in terms of managing your virtual team is different for you than, maybe some other people might think about it. And I know you have some techniques and I wanna talk about more of those things.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (52:05)
Yeah, here's the fun part. I mean personally I'm not I don't like HR, but most people I don't think do. But those who don't can relate with that. For me,

And your HR, your team, is all about making sure that they catch the idea from the beginning. so that you don't have to recreate the wheel every time. So how do you achieve that? How did we achieve that in the virtual space for my law firm? I can speak for to that point. It's really trying to recreate in a virtual world the world the physical world. So for example, we had an office with

10, 12 people, you had a reception, a receptionist. Someone walks into the office. Well, you talk to the receptionist. Then you go to this conference room to meet with the with the client, etc. etc. Zoom, in Zoom, for example, and whatever you use, it's up to you. But we use Zoom because we find that we can really recreate that space. So in Zoom, when you arrive in the main room, we call that the lobby.

So you always have someone, an admin assistant will go as soon before they accept you, they go they will go in the lobby, then allow you in, welcome you to Maruslaw, for example, whatever your firm's name is, and say, Welcome to the firm. I know you have an appointment with Mr. Jason. I'm gonna move you to conference room number one. That what is that? Just just a breakout room. But just by virtue of you doing that.

That makes the client feel, ⁓ wow, I was expected, I'm welcomed, and there's a process that makes them feel good. So then move they move them into a conference room, then you meet them there in the conference room, you have your meeting, and then someone comes and say, Well, after this, this is what's gonna happen. You'll get a summary of our of our meeting. All of that happens in a virtual world, but

With the mindset of recreating what we would have done in a physical world. Now, in terms of the work, we all work.

Jason Marsh (54:12)
Yeah, so I like

that. That sounds really compelling. Client facing, they show up in the lobby, they go into a conference room. As you say, it very much mimics what they would experience in the real world. especially people that are a little bit older, probably the ones that are paying for your legal services. that I think adds a level of connection and quality to what they're doing. So how does that work now on the on the other side in terms of the internal, the team working together?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (54:17)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

sure.

Mm-hmm.

Right, right. The perfect good question. So we have this virtual office space, just like we are here, let's say all fifteen of us we're in that space where we can see each other. We are all muted and if a call comes in so we can actually see each other. And we have one office clerk physically at the office, for example, because there's still old fashioned mail to be open and scanned and once it is scanned

virtual team takes over. But she jumps in just the same. She is in that virtual space. She can talk to her colleagues and say, Hey, I have a call coming in, or let's say the admin assistant has a call. I have a call coming in for you. what extension should actually do? They can see each other and they can interact. Now if they need to have to talk about something specific

we have a breakdown of conference rooms. We have the bookkeeping conference room, the legal conference room or whatever. That's just a series and in fact on Zoom, you can preset that and every time you open your Zoom, all those conference rooms open as well. So you don't have to do it every morning. we have the same link all for several months at the time.

the office manager opens the Zoom room in the morning. Everybody checks in at eight o'clock. We work in that people showing up for work. That's right. Everybody comes in at eight o'clock. we have five minutes just checking in with everybody, everybody's okay. Now everybody gets to work. Now we have meetings, we go to our separate conference rooms.

Jason Marsh (55:55)
Yeah.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (56:10)
And then at the end of the day we come all together or whatever the situation may be. Whenever the point is this, whenever they don't need to interact meetings or whatever, everyone comes into a general room where we see each other. And that's the key. for me is thirty years that I've been doing this, a lot of what I've learned was by osmosis, being in a around older attorneys, around super paralegals,

secretaries who knew better than I did. I learned I picked up on all of that. So it's hard to recreate it, but this comes the closest I have found, because some conversations the new person can pick up on a few things here and there. We don't have all conversations all day long in the general room. Otherwise we'd be disruptive to the work. But if it's just hey, Mrs. So and so just called

can you call her back. Now you someone heard that. Everybody heard that. Whether it's the marketing team, anybody, they heard that. So that keeps some level of togetherness, collegiality where everybody's working together. And I think that to your point earlier, culture, maintaining the firm culture, that goes a very long way versus having people working separately virtually, never seeing each other, just exchanging

Deliverables here and there. That's not a firm.

Jason Marsh (57:30)
Yeah, it really does personalize things quite a bit because yeah, you mentioned two things that I think, we've we've lost a lot of. I mean, the remote work stuff is nice in a lot of ways, but yeah, those little things you learn from just having a conversation with somebody that you're not gonna have if you're just trading deliverables back and forth. And then also the culture aspect of it. So just so I understand, are when you're

You show up to work in the morning, you log into Zoom, and while you're working throughout the day, you have a screen where you can see everybody on your team, head down, working, doing whatever they're working. And now so that sounds like a yes. And then to go a step further, if you had a question for them or if they need to get a hold of you, you're you're there and they can do that. is that essentially what you're describing? Like, hey, I wanna I I wanna ask Tom. he's working in, accounts payable. I wanna

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (58:10)
Yeah. Mm th that that's ex

Jason Marsh (58:16)
billable or whatever it is, I need to question about him. now do you just go right at him and interrupt him in his workflow or

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (58:20)
No, no, you no, I would

just I would just tell him hey, I want to talk to you about building, can we go to the building room? so especially for building, not everybody needs to be part of that process. No, no, no. No, no, no, no, no.

Jason Marsh (58:28)
I see. So then you're not having that conversation while everyone else is going, All right, ⁓ you so you you just and and then you two go off, you have the conversation,

you come back into the main room or

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (58:39)
The main room.

That's right. That's right. We call that the ML office. Maruslaw, ML office. Everybody's there. and only a few two people, actually the office manager, myself, and one more person, the admin assistant, the primary one, can be a co-host. So not everybody can move everybody. you have some people have the power to move people around. And to your point earlier, yes, even I I come in.

I check in at 8 o'clock with everybody. I get an opportunity to see how everybody is, how everybody's doing. For example, there was an earthquake recently, a Sunday ago, in the Philippines. I was able to check in with my people immediately. I know which one were not able to to check in, what happened to them. Immediately I know. So I check in every morning at eight o'clock. everybody takes their lunch break from twelve to one and then I check out.

me later, but most of them check out at five o'clock. So it really I think it makes it easy for people to see that you are in this together with them, you're leading by example and then you are available. if you need to work, we say, production time, or I move myself to a breakout room where I don't want you to bother me. For two hours, heads down, this is focus time.

But the rest of the time, you're there. They see you there. And that goes a long way.

Jason Marsh (1:00:01)
It's an interesting approach and so you mentioned you use Zoom to do all that and of course that's the tool for that. there any other key tools in terms of managing your team, helping them understand, what they need to be doing and how to do it and so on, like things that are core to the operation.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (1:00:18)
Nice. So I use Slack. I've used Slack for as long as it's been available, I think. so you have to be able to communicate going back to the VA thing. You have to be able to communicate with your VA real time. Right? and there's the communication and there's also keeping things so that you can go back a few weeks if need be.

I have found that it's not necessary to pay to get the paid option of Slack if people are mindful not to increase expenses. Three months back is more than enough. More than enough. so with your VA you will be communicating on Slack. then in our case, our VA company offers a Zoom space where you can jump in, talk to your VA at any time of the day while they're working for you.

and then talking about the server. This is important, right? so server wise, it has to be cloud based, obviously. Most people nowadays use O three sixty five, right? So Microsoft OneDrive. that works very well. You can give access, remote access, limit access, so a good server, Zoom.

if you're using a VA with our company, you get into our Zoom that we provide. Slack. I prefer Slack over email exchange because email we already get too many of those. And if if the the staff, the VA just has a quick question, you would just wanna get to use Slack.

Jason Marsh (1:01:44)
And Slack do you use

that largely like a project management tool? In other words, okay, there's a section for billing, there's a section for marketing, and then of course we have, a history of all the different things we're working on. and so I just want to be clear, like, if you need to speak to someone verbally, you can use that quickly in your Zoom, but the rest of the communications going on, project specific, matter specific in a tool like Slack, something that, you can break

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (1:02:08)
there is a logic to the madness. We're still going back to functions. So even our slack is based on functions. So you have marketing, you have admin, you have legal, you have billing, you have all the same. And depending on the what the channel is, we have those people who should know part of that channel.

Right. So whenever you have a conversation about billing, you don't need the entire firm to be involved. Right? So just the same. like I said, it's always it's remain consistent. It's about functions, function, function. And that everything is built everything is built around it. The systems are built around that. The VAs are trained based on that logic. And AI is added to compound the effect, leverage over leverage, as you saw we were talking about, of

Jason Marsh (1:02:49)
Yeah, that that's a

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (1:03:03)
having functions.

Jason Marsh (1:03:05)
I love that. Functions, functions, functions, and then build out everything you need around that, the people, the technology, et cetera. So okay, so we've we've covered a lot of different things here today. We were talking about leverage, I think, overall, but using virtual assistants into systems and to AI enabled teams and all basically, kind of the future of law firm staffing here. But but for somebody that's listening to this who wants to take some action, maybe

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (1:03:12)
Correct.

Jason Marsh (1:03:30)
Never hired a VA before, hasn't had the best experience. Obviously, they're probably dabbling with AI a little bit. but what's the next thing? what's the the first step they should take, let's say this month?

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (1:03:41)
Start small. Start small. I have seen people try and fail because they thought they would revamp their entire firm over the matter of two or three months. So start small and think long term. it didn't get to it didn't take you a week or two weeks to be where you are. It won't take a couple of weeks for you to be out of it.

And if you as a as an attorney is thinking about finding solutions, it's because you already have the pain point, right? You already have the pain point, whether it's VAs, whether it's AI, but you are thinking about it because you're experiencing the pain. It didn't take you two weeks to get to that pain point. It won't take two weeks to get out of it. So it's not a quick fix, it's a long term solution, long term outlook. So start small.

I like to think as you said from the top, admin is the low hanging fruits where returning phone calls, checking your calendar, calling clients before appointments, follow-ups, these are the low hanging fruits. So that you don't have to do that somebody else can do, that someone else can do for you from anywhere on the planet.

So that's l a starting small. Then be committed to it for a long time. When I say a long time, it should be at least three months. You think about it long term. and then after that, progressively you start adding. You add duties to the same person, to the admin assistant. Let's say you start with four hours. and you can get your own. I'm not saying that for that you get my company or whatever.

But I think it's the general advice, really. You find your own VA, delegate small, commit to a long term, and then progressively you add tasks to that one VA because you will develop a way of working with them. They will understand you how you communicate. Make sure you have a platform to communicate with them. We talked about Slack, we talked about Zoom, we talked about having a server to exchange information. You may

especially for an admin, I would for sure make sure that they are part they have a an extension on on your voiceover IP phone system, so that when they call clients or return phone calls on your behalf, it's not a Filipino number showing, but your office number showing, right? so start small, commit to the long term and progressively add to the same function first. And once you have a full

grasp on those four hours, if you want to try to add someone else, then you can start thinking about that. So that's the way I would approach it.

Jason Marsh (1:06:17)
Yeah, that's some great advice. So okay, I'm here with Gabriel Maroos. We've been talking about how law firms can use VAs, systems, and then AI to create leverage on top of leverage. But the whole goal here, right? Eliminate bottlenecks and ultimately build more scalable firms that can do a lot more than just what we can do ourselves. And so if you want to connect with Gabriel, you can do it at his law firm, Maruselaw.com. also you can learn more about his company VA.

Professionals at VA for Professionals.com. and before the show, Gabriel was saying if anyone wants to inquire about his service, if they mention this podcast, he's willing to offer a very deep discount for their first month. So go ahead and check out what Gabriel's doing over at VAFrofessionals.com if you need that kind of help. but anyway, all of this stuff I'm gonna include links to it in the show notes and Gabriel

Before we jump off here, any anything else you want to add? Have we missed anything here today? We've we've covered quite a lateral ground.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (1:07:12)
Well

yeah, we covered a whole lot. but I would say that to my fellow lawyers out there, I'm happy to just talk to you guys. If you want to just connect with me even on LinkedIn, find me. We can chat. I'm happy to especially when it comes to attorneys. I've gone through it. I'm happy to share the tricks, the things I've learned.

And when I talk to other people from other podcasts as well, they do that and they find it is valuable. Even if you never use my VA for a professional's company, I'm just happy to share with you what I've learned over the years. And I think if you didn't learn anything from this ⁓ podcast, you might learn something when you talk to me as well. So

Jason Marsh (1:07:56)
Well that

that's kind of you. That's a very generous offer. I'll make sure to include your your LinkedIn in the in the show notes as well so people can connect with you there. 'cause I know you're a busy guy. I mean, I've I had trouble, just connecting with you. So so that again, that's kind of you to offer. ⁓ no, no, no. so in any case, I'll make sure all this info you can get a hold of Gabriel. you can learn more from him. if you if you need to learn more about VAs and, wrapping those VAs and some AI prompts.

Gabriel J. Marous, Esq. (1:08:09)
Sorry about that.

Jason Marsh (1:08:21)
I definitely like the sound of all that. But this is Gabriel Marous, everybody. That's gonna be it for today. we've got a lot of cool episodes coming

so stay tuned. And yeah, we'll we'll see you guys next time. Thanks.

Jason Marsh (1:08:32)
Thanks for listening to the Alpha Lawyer podcast. I'm your host, Jason Marsh, and I appreciate you joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, leave a review, and share it with other lawyers who might benefit. You can find more resources and insights on building a thriving law firm at alphalawyer.io or the Alpha Lawyer YouTube channel. Until next time, keep building the firm of your dreams so you can live your best life.