Transcript
Hillary Walsh:
If I actually think that my business is going to help change people’s lives-
Sonya Palmer:
When you find your calling, you owe it to the world to go all in.
Hillary Walsh:
… I am being very selfish if I do not insist that it grow as much as ethically possible.
Sonya Palmer:
In 2021, women made up of over half of all summer associates for the fourth year in a row, yet equity partners and multi-tier law firms continue to be disproportionately white men. Only 22% of equity partners are women. We would like to see that change.
Hello, and welcome to LawHER, the show where we celebrate the trailblazing attorneys and entrepreneurs who are changing the game for women in the legal field. Be inspired by their stories, learn from their mistakes, build community, and look forward to the future they’re helping build for the next generation of women in law. I am Sonya Palmer, your host and VP of operations at Rankings, the SEO agency of choice for personal injury lawyers. This is LawHER.
When all you have is the calling, helping people is enough. Hillary Walsh, founder of New Frontiers, began her immigration law firm with very few resources. In the early days, she pretended to be her own receptionist and would drive over three hours to avoid a $20 filing fee. Four years later, her firm has grown to over 90 employees and she helps hundreds of families through the immigration process.
Today we discuss how she learned the ropes of immigration law while in Korea before the remote work revolution, and how four years of pro bono work helped to hone what she truly wanted to practice. We go over the tools and policies she used to maintain culture with a fully remote team and why a system as simple as a sticky note may be better than the next shiny platform. We also get into how women can align work cycles with menstrual cycles to unlock their superpowers and be more productive. Hillary explains how the adversity of her teen years helped shape her into the lawyer she is today. Let’s dive in.
Hillary Walsh:
My foster care experience and my juvie experience were pretty short lived, but you spend any time in those environments and they make a big impression. I learned lots of bad words. I got to learn about sex things that I had never heard of before. You’re really exposed to this whole other thing when all of a sudden you pack in a bunch of kids who for whatever reason are in state custody.
So that was a very important experience for me, but the thing that was a big takeaway for me in how I’ve used this to help me in my life now 20 plus years later is just having a lot of gratitude and appreciation for going through that experience so that I can better connect with my clients because I’m an immigration lawyer. I’ve never been through the immigration process before. My husband is the son of an immigrant. I don’t have any personal experience with this, so it’s always really cool for me to be able to look back on that part of my life and say, “I can’t put my feet in your shoes, client, but I can put my shoes next to yours, and together we can connect over this.”
The other day I had a client who her son’s in a detention center and facing imminent removal and she’s super stressed out about him. We’re trying to find a way to be able to help her. And she was describing that he was just a horrible teenager and that he really should have probably gone to some type of lockup. And I was like, you know, you get to kind of chuckle and say, “I got to go to lockup.” So you never know. Her eyes about popped out of her head. And you kind of just get to look at people and be like, don’t you just love that we’re going to break each other’s expectations of each other right now?
Sonya Palmer:
I do think that when anyone goes through a difficult situation that’s somewhat unique, it can grant empathy for other people in difficult situations. But also then to recognize that there’s a difference that you do not completely and fully understand what exactly they’re going through.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah, absolutely.
Sonya Palmer:
I really love that.
Hillary Walsh:
I think that so often we try to be vulnerable and have empathy for people, but if we can’t really relate with where they’re at, we feel like we can’t get there. And I think that’s a big disservice. Or worse, I think we start comparing our experiences and we get into this weird competition of who had it worse. Because one person has had it difficult, doesn’t mean that I haven’t had it difficult too. There is no competition. I don’t actually want to win the competition of who’s had it harder.
Sonya Palmer:
Exactly.
Hillary Walsh:
But you can have a lot of appreciation when you stop looking at what someone does or doesn’t have, and instead look at what are our commonalities, what’s the end goal here?
Sonya Palmer:
The worst thing you’ve ever experienced is the worst thing you’ve ever experienced. Within varying degrees, it’s still the worst pain that you’ve gone through, no matter what it is.
Hillary Walsh:
Totally.
Sonya Palmer:
And to recognize the differences between different people like that is good.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah.
Sonya Palmer:
It’s very cool.
Hillary Walsh:
Absolutely.
Sonya Palmer:
Did you have a moment in that where you knew practicing law was where you wanted and needed to be?
Hillary Walsh:
No. My family, we grew up, I always say that we were working people and I still find myself as someone who I’ll go into different spaces and think in my life, I can’t believe I’m here as a professional instead of as the person who’s here supposed to be cleaning it. I remember my first job when I was a commercial litigator. Passed the bar, I had been wined and dined by some of the top law firms in Las Vegas where I went to school, and I got a job at one of these really awesome law firms. And they have these super famous clients who are like gajillionaires. And I remember going into the bathroom and thinking, I feel like the only reason I ought to be here is to scrub these toilets. And then sitting down on the toilet using it and walking around with that feeling of, I wonder if someone’s going to figure me out.
I say that to say I hope that everybody gets the privilege of getting to be in a space where they once felt like they were the hired hand. I grew up, mom and I cleaned houses and mowed yards to have extra money, really just to have enough. And so my experience when I’m 15 years old in foster care, interacting with the judicial system for the first and only time in my youth, never once crossed my mind that I was going to be back and be an attorney in those courtrooms one day. Never once.
Sonya Palmer:
Wow.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah. It was just like, you see a movie as a watcher, as a viewer, you can see, oh, I know where this story is going. This is going to impact things later. But in the moment, there wasn’t even the slightest thought that went through my mind that this was going to be my day-to-day in the future.
Sonya Palmer:
I’m even more excited to continue this interview because I don’t hear that very often. So many times when I talk to lawyers, female lawyers are like, “I knew when I was six.”
Hillary Walsh:
I mean, I loved John Grisham books. And I was talking to my husband the other day. I loved John Grisham books. But I lived out in the middle of a field in Kansas. And when I’m talking a field, I mean as far as the eye can see, it’s a wheat field either direction. You might have hedgerows where the farmland ends or whatever and goes into the next person’s property. But I remember loving John Grisham books. I remember being obsessed with the Underground Railroad and learning about freedom, and freedom is my life’s calling, that’s my word. And I think those seeds were planted in this little farm girl’s heart and then grew with more nurturing later on.
Sonya Palmer:
I saw when we were preparing for the interview that you volunteered at an orphanage in Uganda and befriended street boys. Can you take us there?
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah. Oh wow. My husband was dropping bombs and fighting in a war in Iraq at the time.
Sonya Palmer:
Wow.
Hillary Walsh:
It was Operation Iraqi Freedom. And we were stationed in Japan. In northern Japan, there’s an F-16 base there called Misawa, and we were stationed there. All the active duty members deployed to Iraq, and I had nowhere to go. I didn’t want to go back home and hang out in Kansas. Had really nothing there calling me back. And so I was like, well, I’m going to go do what people who are searching do, they go volunteer. And we hope that we’re going to give something, but really what we take away is this huge life-changing experience for ourselves. And that’s what I was able to… I didn’t intend for that to be what happened, but that’s exactly what happened.
There were a lot of… You can imagine it probably maybe from movies or from news articles, you can kind of see the imagery in your mind, but they were young boys, teenage boys to probably 10 or 12 years old, that very narrow age group, life before manhood. And they’re skinny. Their kneecaps are bigger than their thighs. And sometimes that’s true just because it’s pre-puberty, but it was that other type of skinny that was from being malnourished. And wearing stained, ratty clothes that are just hanging on gaunt bodies. And these curious, playful but slightly dead inside eyes. Very curious about mzungu, which is white person. And very eager to play games. I mean, I’m not much of an athlete by any stretch of the imagination, but there were other missionaries and volunteers who were there in the city and would go out and play soccer with these boys.
Education in Uganda is not free. In the United States, you have public education and so we’re so privileged for that, but that’s not an opportunity that’s available to kids in Uganda. You have to pay for school. So it is a huge privilege. And usually boys will go to school and girls will stay home and work. So any time we got to see street boys or anyone who was once outcast get a sponsorship to be able to go to school, it was a huge opportunity for their future.
And it was amazing. My brother-in-law went with me, my husband’s little brother went with me as my alleged bodyguard, but he’d never really been outside of the country, so I was his bodyguard. But he’s a filmmaker. And he interviewed and just probably a hundred hours of footage of talking to these boys about their experience fleeing the Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda where horrific human rights violations probably still happen, it’s just something we don’t hear about as often. But it was definitely a huge issue then.
So it was amazing. It was really amazing. I don’t know if I can take you there any more, but red dirt, red African dirt, and a lot of barefoot boys, and a lot of hunger for more in their life and in a literal sense as well.
Sonya Palmer:
Talking about education, you graduated from Boyd School of Law. What was that like? What was graduation day like?
Hillary Walsh:
The best memory I have of graduation day is my grandmother Karen, who’s now deceased. We flew her in. And she was a salty character. My mom and dad were proud, but nothing like Granny was. And I think that having her there. And my husband was proud too. And it was kind of surreal for me. I was the first person in my family to go to college, much less to get a law degree. And my granny just really believed that… And my mom and dad too, have always spoken a lot of hope over my life and just believe that, and I believe this about you and I believe it about me and I believe about every person I meet, that we have a calling on our life. And to get to do something that’s never been done before in your family is always pretty thrilling. And you feel like you’re maybe taking a step in the right direction.
But getting to see my granny who had been married… I don’t actually know how many times Granny was married. It’s not something you really want to ask. “Was it five times, Granny?” She was married many times.
Sonya Palmer:
Good for Granny.
Hillary Walsh:
Yes, Granny was a hottie. And unfortunately, she also married very abusive men. And so her hands were all twisted from having been broken during domestic violence incidents where she wasn’t able to get care. Like really gnarly shit. To look out and see my granny looking back at me, the proudest lady in the whole auditorium, and probably the most obnoxious as well, and knowing where she came from and that’s my lineage, it makes you pretty dang proud. Just when you think someone’s going to count you out, this is what you get to do instead. And that’s America, baby. It doesn’t get better than that.
Sonya Palmer:
It is. And what an amazing memory to pull from. Being a lawyer is hard. I’m not a lawyer. It’s very hard. It’s a very tough profession, so what an amazing memory to pull from in times of struggle and stress.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah. Granny is with me in a lot of things. Sometimes when I’m salty, I find that she’s still with me in that.
Sonya Palmer:
Good. I want to talk about opening a firm. So you worked in commercial litigation before immigration law. How did you first get into commercial litigation?
Hillary Walsh:
I graduated in 2012 and it was a tough time for attorneys, in Las Vegas at least, to get jobs. Just the market was really rough. 2008 was the big kind of initial bottom out of the housing boom in the West. And by the time that I graduated and entered the workforce in 2012, there wasn’t a huge demand for lawyers. I also had the belief that if you worked in a nonprofit setting, you weren’t going to make any money. You need to be bilingual. Lots of things where I never even… It’s crazy because I look back on my life and I just believed what everybody told me. I also had in my head that I really wanted to be a law professor and that somehow it would look better if I… Because I tried to get a clerkship. I interviewed and did the song and dance but never was invited home. I never got a job clerking for a judge.
So I was really trying to position myself well and it seemed like working in a prestigious firm would be a better option. I also would make some great money. So I pursued that, and lo and behold, after I got hired, they realized, we only hire people who were on law review. And I’m explaining to them, “Yeah, I know how to use the Bluebook but what are you talking about?”
And they look at me and they’re like, “Wait, how do you not know the answer to this?”
And I’m like, “Well, I didn’t do law review. I don’t want to torture myself.” And it was one of those things where you look back and you’re like, well this was just meant to be. I didn’t lie. It was not on my resume. They just made the assumption, and you see what you want to see, I guess. But it was a wonderful experience in the sense of learning how hard commercial litigators have to work. It’s hard, hard work.
Sonya Palmer:
Yes. Yes, it is. So then, what was the transition to immigration like?
Hillary Walsh:
It was forced. It was by force. My husband got orders to Korea. We were stationed in Las Vegas and he got orders to Korea while he was deployed to Afghanistan. So I passed the bar in October. I found out I was pregnant the same day I found out I passed the bar. After eight years of infertility, so it was crazy.
Sonya Palmer:
Wow.
Hillary Walsh:
And then a year… I’m trying to think because I had already had the twins. A year later we got orders that Sean was going to, my husband was going to get stationed in Korea. So me and the twins were home working, breastfeeding. That was my life.
And while I was on maternity leave, right before Sean deployed, I read Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In, and it really encourages you to lean into what you feel like is your purpose or your calling or whatever it is that you know ought to be doing, just take the next step forward toward it. And for me, I knew I was meant… I thought meant to be an asylum lawyer. So helping people with asylum issues. Now, I do very little asylum but a ton of… All I do is immigration. So you find your way.
But when I got to Korea and couldn’t find a job anywhere, this was in 2014, so this was before working remote, before we were able to do things like jumping on our computer to have teleconferences, before that was normal, I could not get a job. I also had just gotten pregnant again. So I was going to have three kids under the age of two in Korea and it just wasn’t going to work out. So I started taking volunteer jobs for doing immigration appeals for folks here in Arizona who were detained in detention centers and couldn’t find counsel to do their appeal. And that is how I learned immigration law, was for free with people who trusted me to do their work from Korea at night while my baby slept.
Sonya Palmer:
Wow. And then how did you know it was time to open your firm then?
Hillary Walsh:
Well, I did about four years of pro bono work for this particular nonprofit here in Arizona.
Sonya Palmer:
Four years. Okay.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah, I mean, I just kept taking the appeals. And it wasn’t constant. I was writing law review articles. In the back of my mind, I was still really thinking I want to be an immigration clinic professor. I was narrowing down what type of professor I wanted to be. So I wanted to keep doing the appeals. I started doing articles, kind of like an academic thing. I did a couple of those in my free time. And when I asked my husband, “Can we move to Phoenix? I really want to work at this nonprofit. I’ve worked with them, now I want to work for them. This is what I want to do with my life.”
So we got orders here, which is not… You usually can’t write your wishlist and actually get anything granted, but it was granted. And we moved here. And they were like, “Look, you have to be able to speak Spanish. Our client base speaks Spanish.” And I still had next to no Spanish capability. So I felt so deflated and demoralized.
And I talked to another lawyer by chance. Truly serendipitously, I talked to a woman named Zaira on the phone and she said, “I really think you should reach out to this guy named RJon Robins. I think he can help you grow the firm that’s in the back of your mind. I think he can help you grow a business. If want to do this instead of going out and chasing these other jobs that you may not have the qualifications for.”
And I was like, “Okay.” So I called and the rest is history. I opened up my firm and hustled. I pretended to be my own receptionist so that I would have to transfer people all from my iPhone.
Sonya Palmer:
Very smart.
Hillary Walsh:
You fake it till you make it.
Sonya Palmer:
Oh, you do.
Hillary Walsh:
You do what you got to do. And here we are almost four years later, maybe it’s a little bit more. Yeah, four years later and we have, I think, 97 employees. It’s just amazing.
Sonya Palmer:
97? And during the pandemic. Congratulations.
Hillary Walsh:
We grew during the pandemic. I think we did over a hundred consultations in March 2020, and not a single one of them hired that month. Maybe they did later. I don’t think they did. It was so stressful growing during the pandemic, but we did it anyway.
Sonya Palmer:
Funding a firm in the early stages can be a touchy subject, but when women hear examples of how they funded their firms in the early days, it makes that leap a little bit easier. Hillary explains how she stretched her money and why childcare was her largest expense.
Hillary Walsh:
I didn’t have any money and didn’t really use any money. So number one is, we think that it takes money to make money. And I think it does take money. I had a husband who had a job. If I were out on my own and at the time I had, I still have four kids, and I didn’t have a spouse who had a great income, I really would be in a totally different situation. But in my experience, where I had a spouse who had an income, and the biggest expense for us was paying for daycare. That was my biggest business expense was childcare because my kids were not all school age.
And I used WiFi. I didn’t have WiFi. We had just moved here from England. We were getting resettled. We only had one car. It was wild time. But I used my laptop. And then to be able to get internet, I used my T-Mobile hotspot or whatever from my cell phone. I used Google Scholar instead of Westlaw. And I had one client who I was representing pro bono out in the detention center and I just kicked butt and took names working hard on his case. And he referred me my first paying client.
And I still look back on that and that client is still a client of mine four years later, because, you know, immigration law takes forever. I look back on that and it really is remarkable how things work out. We also we had hired How To Manage A Small Law Firm to help me start the firm, and that was just on a credit card. It was not cash. It was credit card, and it was like, I’ve got to pay this thing off. I’ve got to find clients and I’ve got to find a way to pay this off. But I didn’t have any other money come my way.
Sonya Palmer:
I think work ethic and what you touched on at the very beginning where you were your own receptionist. So being able to wear every hat in the beginning and learning all those different positions and then moving forward as you bring in new cases.
Hillary Walsh:
I couldn’t afford or I didn’t have the budget. Anytime you can’t afford something you just get a new credit card or something like that, I guess, until life catches up to you. But I was very budget conscientious and I didn’t want to spend the $20 on postage to mail something to the court, so I drove three hours round trip to hand file it myself. And it was just like every dollar counts right now and I’m listening to mindset books and Think and Grow Rich and The Science of Getting Rich and these different books that are just instilling in your mind that everything is possible. And that’s what I spent those three hours doing was consuming that rather than spending 20 bucks I didn’t have. And I don’t know if that was the right decision or not, but it was the decision I made. And I look back on that and I still, I hear the audio version of The Science of Getting Rich and I’m immediately back in backwoods Arizona in the desert driving to the detention center.
Sonya Palmer:
I think clearly it was the right decision. I love Think and Grow Rich. I think everyone should read it. I probably read that book at least once a year.
Hillary Walsh:
I have to admit I’ve never read the entire thing. You get through parts of it. It’s kind of like, I grew up in a Christian faith and so you really obsess over certain parts of like, let’s say, the Bible or other holy texts, or not that Think and Grow Rich is on par with the Bible, but you get the drift, and you’re like, at some point I should really read this whole thing. And I have yet to read the whole Bible. I’ve yet to read really any whole text. But man, there’s some really good gold in there.
Sonya Palmer:
Yeah, I don’t think you have to read the whole thing to be able to extract value from it. Both Think and Grow Rich and the Bible.
Hillary Walsh:
Yes, yes. For sure.
Sonya Palmer:
Let’s talk about running and managing your firm. I know you have a focus on remote workers. One of the things that we often hear is that female attorneys are generally slow to hire, wanting to do everything themselves or just not wanting to spend money. You have, how many did you say, 96 people on staff, not counting attorneys?
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah.
Sonya Palmer:
Did you ever hesitate to hire or did you know that that was something you really needed to do?
Hillary Walsh:
Well, I had to hire again out of necessity because I do not speak Spanish. And my client base who was calling, they didn’t want to talk to the receptionist, who was Hillary, because she couldn’t speak Spanish either. So I was forced to hire very early on, and that person is still with the firm four years later. She’s in law school now and she’s going to be back and one of our lead attorneys here in no time. So, hopefully law school does not break her like it breaks so many of us.
Managing people is the biggest personal growth aspect that I’ve had because I don’t know about other people, I’ve never been in their body before, but for me, I have to be very aware of, am I hormonal right now? Is that why I feel this way? Or is this person actually screwing up and objectively they’re out of line? And am I giving them the benefit of the doubt, or am I hyperfocused on what they’re not doing right?
My husband often tells me that I’m way too hard on myself. If that’s how someone else who knows me the best is viewing me, I’m probably being too hard on the people who work in the firm. So, balancing those things. We run on a four week cycle, women do. And balancing the ever-changing landscape of running a business against the backdrop of knowing what are my superpowers and what are my limiting factors this particular week and then still being able to make decisions rather than getting stuck in paralysis, is a personal growth. It’s a lot of trust you have to have in yourself and then a lot of grace you have to give yourself, if you look back and you’re like, that wasn’t the best decision.
Sonya Palmer:
I run a team and often I’ve had to recognize that my initial reaction is not my real reaction. I need 10 minutes. That sort of initial whatever that is. If it’s disappointment or even sometimes joy, excitement, it’s not going to be my real reaction which is going to show up. But I have seen recently, you mentioned hormonal and the cycle, where there is actually for women who are entrepreneurs trying to work within their cycle, because we see it as a burden and hormonal is a bad thing, but there’s actually some new evidence that there are some weeks that you’re actually better than you normally would be and how to harness that hormonal change. So, [inaudible 00:29:35].
Hillary Walsh:
The thought leader on that is Kate Northrup.
Sonya Palmer:
Perfect.
Hillary Walsh:
And I just had her on my podcast, which is The Grateful Leader, and interviewed her.
Sonya Palmer:
I will check it out.
Hillary Walsh:
Yes, please do. Because she talks about it and her energy is just so fantastic. But the week we’re ovulating, that is absolutely the week. The way the universe made us is we are forward-facing, we want to talk to people, we feel beautiful, we actually look more beautiful, our skin is more clear, and all of that impacts we need to be forward-facing that week. We have more energy to give to others that week because of the way that we are created biologically. How cool is that?
Sonya Palmer:
Yeah, it’s amazing.
Hillary Walsh:
The weeks when we have PMS, those are weeks that are wonderful for data planning, for forward thinking for next month, for the next quarter. But those are times where we’re… It’s like fall. Kate describes it as like literal seasons. Summer, you’re hot, you’re out in a bikini, you’re drinking a cold drink and it’s super fun. I want to see all the people, would be at all the beach parties. Then we go into fall, that’s our next week, is fall. What do we do in fall? We want to be cozy, we want to have a cup of tea, read a good book, jot down some strategic planning. And then winter, we need to go even further inward. And then we have spring, where we start to come out again. And that’s every four weeks.
So within each cycle, within each four week cycle, we have a very distinct season that can be used for marketing purposes, for numbers, for every role that you play within your company as a female entrepreneur, you can do that. Kate actually has a really cool planner that helps outline these things.
And then she also does it within the context of if you don’t bleed, some women are on birth control or perhaps they’re older and they’ve gone through menopause and so they just don’t bleed, whatever the case may be. So you may not know exactly what your cycle is.
Sonya Palmer:
Where you’re at.
Hillary Walsh:
You can use the moon as a guide for this. And I just love it. And I love going to law firm conferences. And Luis Scott, who connected the two of us, I went to his company, 8 Figure Firm, I was at a conference for them, and I mentioned to a group of men who were talking about all their amazing female employees. I mean, no doubt about it, women get shit done. And I was like, “Have you guys ever thought about how all of your amazing female employees, how they could avoid burnout if you were to help give them tools to see how they could structure their block calendar based on their cycle?” And all of them were horrified at the idea that anyone would talk about this.
It is so much easier for me to talk about it because if I’m talking about it, then it really opens up a conversation. Where if my husband were to walk in and be like, “Let’s make your block calendar based off your period,” it might be kind of like, “Oh, my god. You have three heads.”
But you can have a conversation with, if you have a right hand who’s a woman in a male owned company who can incorporate this. And Kate’s book is called Do Less. And anyway, I’ve been on a Do Less kick for two years now and it’s just fantastic. And it works. It absolutely works.
Sonya Palmer:
I love that you were an expert on this, because it’s just stuff that I’ve… Knowledge of it, and have been able to turn me onto Kate. Because yeah, I’ve just started seeing it. And I think you don’t have to like the block calendar, because where it might feel scary. I mean, even just an awareness and to be able to make subtle shifts where there’s less meetings those weeks.
Hillary Walsh:
For sure.
Sonya Palmer:
And then let’s schedule more meetings and things like that. Just subtle things that could be done to help tweak it.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah, that would be as much as I would like. I don’t even want to be away from my business for two weeks every month. And not that I need to be. But I know that if I have to give a lot of energy to something and I have the ability to calendar it, I’m going to keep that as a little note in the back of my mind of, I know I’m going to feel like a million bucks when I do it if I do it here. Is it possible at all for us to do it here?
Sonya Palmer:
So you started your own firm. You’ve grown. How do you maintain culture remotely?
Hillary Walsh:
Well… We have Slack. We have a love-hate relationship with Slack because I hate being in Slack. It’s like our new social media because you can just be in Slack all the time if you want to, but it also totally can be a time suck. There’s no amount of questions that you could answer or not answer if you wanted to spend a lot of time in Slack.
Sonya Palmer:
Yes.
Hillary Walsh:
But we do, I started doing this in the pandemic when we had less than 20 people on team, a monthly meeting. Actually, it was a weekly meeting, because I needed everybody to feel safe. We’re okay. We’re in this together. I need you guys as much as you need me. We’ve got to hunker down. And then we shifted to a monthly meeting.
And last month, for example… So gratitude is a really big part of my life in how I can enjoy it more. And there’s a really cool guy named Chris Schembra who is kind of the gratitude guy. And we had him on the podcast and then he graciously offered to host a gratitude team meeting for us. He often hosts them in person, like they’re gratitude dinners for corporate or personal events. But he was like, “I’m going to host a firm-wide gratitude team meeting for you guys, and you’re just going to walk out there feeling like you’re singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.”
I was like, “All right, Chris, whatever.” I had been in one of his gratitude dinners before and found it to be fantastic. “I trust you, let’s do it.” And we’ve got people in France all the way to Hawaii, all sorts of Mexico represented in every… I mean, many, many, many states across every… Definitely every time zone across the United States. And around the world, we’ve changed our energy by all tapping into gratitude.
And it’s those types of things that I think I would love for it to be in person, but there’s something extra sweet about being able to be in my little office here in Arizona and being able to recall that feeling that I had here. I don’t have to go somewhere or be at some event, I can just be here in the same chair I’m in all the time. And I can recall, that was a beautiful moment that I had with these other two employees. And whether they’re with the firm for 20 years or 20 more days, we’ll always have that. And that feeling was really beautiful. And I think that’s part of the culture building that you can do even if your staff is very much remote.
Sonya Palmer:
I have found it to be true for myself. We’re a fully distributed team, fully remote, and I used to love to go to coffee shops and do all this different stuff, but I have found now I want to be in my office. And I think it’s largely because of what you just said, some of the experiences and the things that I’ve had here, it’s more residual. It lasts longer than if you were to go, like I said, to a meeting room and experience it there and then walk away from that place, you go home or go back. It happened here, and I think because of that, it sticks a little bit longer and I feel it longer. So I think that’s very, very cool.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Sonya Palmer:
And then you mentioned Slack, you meet a very large group of people. What are some of the other tools and systems that you’ve used to run your team?
Hillary Walsh:
Well, this is inappropriate but we can all chuckle about it. I feel like platforms are like entrepreneur’s porn where it’s like you watch the demo and you’re like, “God, I’m going to pay for more.” And then they have the sales call and you’re like, “No, just show me the good stuff.”
It is irresistible. Platforms are irresistible and you’re always looking for the next coolest thing. At the end of the day, sometimes you just need some freaking sticky notes and you can go really… RJon taught me this and we still do it in the firm today. And when we think with sales people, like your goal for the month, but let’s say we want to help 15 people become US citizens this month. So we want 15 people to hire for naturalization. I need to put on my little sticky note, 15 NATS, NATS, NATS, NATS, NATS. And that’s on my goal board. And then when I hire one, you move it over. And by the time the month is done, you’re going to see right where you are.
And it keeps you so crystal clear focused on your individual goal, on my what is my one thing that I’m going to do today? I know I have a NATS consultation today. Are they going to be one of my 15? And then you go into it with this curiosity and expectation of there’s 15 of you out there, I need to find you. Are you the one? Those are no cost other than the sticky notes themselves, and they do look a little ratty in time. Depending on how long the 15 NATSes take, they might be unsticking from the wall.
But we use more platforms than I really wish that we did. We’ve become too platform heavy. But I think that Slack and Asana are truly the two ways of the future for us, because we used to task each other in… I’ll message my lead attorney, “Hey, can you do such-and-such?” Oh, I asked last night, “Can you go to such-and-such CLE, if you’re available?” Well, that’s great. If I put it in Slack, that’s great. She might see it, but if she gets 15 other Slack messages, it’s going to get lost.
So I have to put it in Asana, and then it’s just there. If it’s a task, “Please register for such-and-such if you’re available.” And then you put a deadline, you see what the priority is, the who will do what by when is right there in Asana. And it’s free. If you don’t have a whole bunch of people in various boards, Asana is also a free resource. Slack is not. Slack actually gets pretty expensive. But those are two things that I think are great tools that can keep you on track and are relatively low cost.
Sonya Palmer:
Wholeheartedly agree. My team would probably tease me because I am somewhat of a stickler for not allowing tasks in Slack.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah, you have to.
Sonya Palmer:
We use Trello.
Hillary Walsh:
Yes.
Sonya Palmer:
Go to Trello. Get the card. It makes everybody’s job better and life easier.
Hillary Walsh:
Does Trello integrate with Slack?
Sonya Palmer:
A little bit. I think I’ve just found for our team that if you don’t do that, a lot of their jobs, and sometimes my job, just ends up being Slack all day long.
Hillary Walsh:
Exactly.
Sonya Palmer:
All I do is I communicate in Slack. And I didn’t want that, I want them to be able to go put their heads down and actually do their work.
Hillary Walsh:
We have instituted an open door firm-wide, where each person who gets a lot of questions, they just have an open door. Like if we were in a physical office, right now my door is closed because I don’t want anyone to interrupt our conversation. It’s similar. My door is closed except for this hour. And then a Kristen David nugget, which is to have a fires section. So I have my open door at one time and the opposite time of the day I have a fires section. And you have to tell people, if it cannot wait until tomorrow, if someone says, “Bar complaint,” if someone says, “I’m immigration judge so-and-so,” these are all fires. And so that’s when I will address fires. But do not come to me if the building is on fire thinking we’re going to knock on my door and you’re going to come in and tell me about it, you’re just going to call 911, because I don’t need to be involved in that decision. So open door, one part of the day, and fire section the other part of the day has been a big time saver for everybody firm-wide.
Sonya Palmer:
I’m going to steal that from you.
Hillary Walsh:
Do it. It costs you no money.
Sonya Palmer:
Yeah. We operate similar but different where it’s sort of like we will put our statuses up if we’re busy. So we’re doing this. I have my little microphone up to show that I am in an interview.
Hillary Walsh:
In the podcast.
Sonya Palmer:
But I like the idea of instead of just when I’m busy, just like an office hours. Here’s when I’m actually available to you. No [inaudible 00:42:51].
Hillary Walsh:
Yes. And then like, no messing around. You have to be like, I am on and I am only with them. I put my cell phone off. It’s like, you’ve got me. Versus, if you just stick your head in and I’m in the middle of something, I might be giving you side eye, I might be totally in my own zone on things and I’m going to give you some kind of quick off the top of my head answer, which is very unhelpful probably. But I’m going to be with you. I’m going to answer your questions. I’m going to be pleasant. I’m going to be well fed. I’ve got my water. And I know that every single day I’m going to do this.
And then the other component is they have to come in with two solutions. No one can come with questions. They have to come with, “Here’s this opportunity and here are the two solutions that I think I have. I recommend blah blah blah blah blah, because of this reason. However, such-and-such is also a good option, it’s just not as good of an option because of such-and-such reason. Is it okay if I proceed with option A?”
And then you’re like, done, done, done, you know?
Sonya Palmer:
Yeah. It’s a great exercise, because I find nine times out of 10, what they thought was the right solution is the right solution.
Hillary Walsh:
Totally.
Sonya Palmer:
They’re just a little unsure and they want pat on the back. So it empowers them that what they thought is actually correct. And then the next time, they don’t even bother asking. They just go do it because they feel good.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah. And then some of that open door can end up just being a message during your open door in Slack that says, “This is my plan. We good?” And they don’t even have to talk to you. Not that you want to avoid them, but they don’t want to get FaceTime and have to yak with you if they can just make a move.
Sonya Palmer:
I can talk about operations and stuff like that all day, so…
Hillary Walsh:
Well, it is not my strength. It is definitely, I think for me, I love solving problems but I hate spending… It’s like I love painting. I’ll paint a wall, but when it’s time to cut in and actually do the tedious part, so make a plan and then freaking implement on it instead of just winging it, that takes discipline, a whole other level of discipline to finish it and then wash the brushes afterward and put your stool away. I need help with that, so I’m glad I have Enneagram Ones all around me to make sure it gets done.
Sonya Palmer:
What is your Enneagram?
Hillary Walsh:
I’m an Eight.
Sonya Palmer:
I’m an Eight too.
Hillary Walsh:
Yes. That’s awesome. Yeah. I find-
Sonya Palmer:
A for Eights.
Hillary Walsh:
I’ve not ever not worked well with a specific Enneagram, by any means, but when someone says that they… Or we have them take the Enneagram thing, the test or whatever, and they say that they’re a One, I’m like, “Yes, we need more of you because you’re so systems driven.”
Sonya Palmer:
Organized.
Hillary Walsh:
Yes.
Sonya Palmer:
Are you familiar with EOS?
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah, we are.
Sonya Palmer:
Traction.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah, we are.
Sonya Palmer:
Okay. I was going to say you talk like a Visionary.
Hillary Walsh:
Oh, okay.
Sonya Palmer:
Needing like an Integrator.
Hillary Walsh:
I’m familiar with it.
Sonya Palmer:
Paint the picture.
Hillary Walsh:
I’ve read the books. Exactly. I need the rocket fuel with the Integrator, for sure, otherwise I’m just like rocket fuel spilling on the ground and we’re getting nowhere.
Sonya Palmer:
Yeah.
Hillary’s firm recently went through a rebrand. She explains why using her name was a disservice and how the new name helped establish credibility with her client base.
Hillary Walsh:
I started my firm as the Law Office of Hillary Gaston Walsh, which sounded very official. And I joke that I was still using my maiden name. It is my legal middle name as my maiden name, but I was like, we’ve been married for 10, 12 years, we have four kids together, I’m going to go ahead and just start going by Hillary Walsh. I think we’re in it for the long haul. But I worked… This was something when I was working still with RJon a lot, and this I think could be a female issue. Again, I don’t know, I’ve never been in anybody else’s body, but I could not sell very well when I would say things like, “I’m the best at this,” because it was the Law Office of Hillary Gaston Walsh. But who is Hillary Gaston Walsh? Well, she’s the person talking to you right now.
And so it was like this, you’re taught, or I was taught, not to brag and you should be humble even if you’re the GOAT at writing appeals or whatever, it’s still impolite to say that. And I had a huge hang-up with it and it was really, really hard in that first four months or so that that’s what I was calling my firm. And this was in April of 2019 that we came back and we started calling it New Frontier Immigration Law. So it’s been really since mostly the beginning. And now we even call it Nueva Frontera, which is the literal translation into Spanish of New Frontier.
Because I found, you know, this is just ignorance coming from not speaking Spanish, I didn’t realize that frontier is a trickier word to say in Spanish. And so we were interviewing one of my clients who we got her a visa. She’s a victim of human trafficking. We got her a visa and her son a visa. It was just an amazing story. We’re interviewing her and we asked her to say something to the effect of, “Blah blah blah blah blah New Frontier.” We wanted her to, on video, say something with the firm name in it for promotion purposes.
And she got that kind of like, “I’m not comfortable saying that.” And I realized I literally have picked a word that’s difficult for my client base to say. So we are New Frontier and then Nueva Frontera. It’s same logo, everything looks the same except now depending on what your preferred language is, it’s going to be easier for you to resonate and connect with it.
Sonya Palmer:
It was nice. Very good.
Hillary Walsh:
And it has been so helpful because now I can say we’re the best at this. Like if I were talking to my brother or my sister and I were trying to decide which law firm to go with, I can tell you from an objective perspective, also the owner of the firm so how objective am I really? But I can tell you in all truth of the matter that I believe that we are the best at this, and I know that we will do our best at this, which is totally different from a concept of New Frontier compared to Hillary Walsh.
Sonya Palmer:
You love educating and have served as professor for both family and international law. As an educator, what do you wish more students knew before either starting law school or starting to take your classes?
Hillary Walsh:
Well, I think that deadlines matter. I now teach immigration law and family law. And the amount of people who will… And these are all online classes, and we’ve been online for a while. I got my degree in 2009 from Troy University when I was living in Japan. We’ve been online for a long time, folks. And internet not working when it was time for me to submit my assignment is like today’s the dog ate my homework, and it makes me crazy.
I’m preparing, I’m doing a TED talk at the end of the month, and I have to have this dang thing memorized, and I’m supposed to rehearse it with my speech coach later today to make sure that I have it memorized. I don’t have this dang thing memorized. All of us are procrastinating on something to some extent. But deadlines really matter, and right now I just constantly see that students, they don’t respect deadlines like I would think someone who’s in a law program would, and that is going to be a big wake up call.
But from what I can tell, other professors are not super strict and they will give extensions. And I posted a few months ago on my personal Facebook and was just like, “I have a no extension policy for my class.” And other professors, some of whom are professors at my alma mater law school really were very bothered. And basically a lot of people felt like I was being an asshole because I had no empathy and no gray area. So I changed my policy because if enough people feel that passionately about it being unreasonable, then let’s not just be unreasonable for the sake of it. But it still grates on my nerves and I just kind of cluck my tongue and tsk tsk and I think that this shouldn’t be the way it is.
But that would be the number one thing that I think that students today could make a real shift. If they’re doing that in their professional… And you’re paying thousands of dollars. I remember when I was a student, I got Ds and Fs in undergrad. I didn’t care that my student loans were paying for it, like whatever. I had my life going on. But it is a self-respect issue. Respect yourself enough to turn your stuff in on time. Don’t make up some BS thing about my internet went out at 11:59 on Sunday when this assignment was due. No, it didn’t. None of us believe you.
But I have lied. I think I’ve even killed my grandma off now. She’s already deceased. But I think I even killed grandma off at some point to get extensions on assignments. We’ve all been there, but as the older person in the room, I’m just like, you’re not fooling anybody. Just turn it in on time next time, please.
Sonya Palmer:
I think it’s admirable that after collecting feedback, you did change your mind. Not necessarily caving but recognizing that maybe there was something else there. But I also, I taught briefly and I have no problem granting grace, but I don’t always understand it. So you’re late, there was a train or something, but you should have been working on this two weeks ago. You should have been thinking about this a month ago. And I think there’s a lot just self-reflection about what makes a person a procrastinator, the anxiety and stuff that comes from that, that can be addressed if people will own it.
Hillary Walsh:
Right.
Sonya Palmer:
Like you said, there’s these excuses. And I think that a lot of times people believe them. They believe that their internet went out, it was a little slower. They believe these things because if not, they have to take ownership, take accountability. And that’s really hard. And if they would then, like I said, you can address this much bigger, which procrastination is borderline mental health at this point. There are some things that create that. And if they would just be honest with themselves, they could probably solve it and save everybody a lot of grief.
Hillary Walsh:
And that’s, I think, really the underlying theme was like, look, students are going through enough. There was one of my… I don’t know if we were classmates or if we just graduated from the same school and became Facebook friends in that way, but that was one of his inputs was like, “Why make students lives harder? You could just be nice. Why make it harder?”
And I’m like, “Yeah. And then one day they’re going to be lawyers and they’re going to lose their license because everybody was nice to them and then the bar sanctions them because they didn’t meet a deadline.”
But granting extensions is half of the job. Asking for and getting extensions is half the job of being a lawyer. So might as well just teach people this is what good cause is. Good cause is not my internet went out at 11:59 on Sunday, and it is whatever else and things related to these types of themes. And then you have to go through and analyze. And I just always give everybody the extension because I don’t want to have to be like, “Well, I just didn’t think this was good cause and here’s why.” I don’t want to deal with it. You muster up an excuse, I’ll say it was good cause. But it is a challenge.
Sonya Palmer:
As educators, you are responsible for more than just making sure they turn things in on time and then to actually help prepare them for the career that they will have someday.
Hillary Walsh:
I will say though, students… I mean, when I was early twenties, a lot of these students are pre-law and they work in full-time jobs and they’ve got kids and they’ve got all this stuff going on, it is remarkable what young people are doing. I mean, the couple of people who are being annoying with the assignment deadline stuff, I’ll teach 40 or 50 students in a class and there’s always like four. But the rest, it is truly amazing to see the work product that they’re coming up with. And I’m so thrilled that they’re entering the legal field. Because these are smart kids. I mean, smart young men and women. I still, in my mind, think I look their age, but they don’t agree.
Sonya Palmer:
I agree.
Hillary Walsh:
But in any event, they’re so outstanding.
Sonya Palmer:
They are. What are some other things you’re optimistic about? Any bright points that you see in the future?
Hillary Walsh:
I’m really optimistic that I think that through conflict, connection can be made. And so my hope is that perhaps we’ve seen the worst of our internal conflict within our country. Maybe we can finally start to hang out a little bit more in the middle. Hang out, brush against some other people who they were hanging out on the right side of the middle earlier, but whoa, we all find ourselves in the same room now. And the same for the people on the left. And we start bumping into each other more and having more collisions, in the best of senses, like cultural collisions. They talk about this in Culture Code a lot.
And maybe then we can start to put our shoes next to more people’s. We don’t have to put their shoes on our feet to be able to connect with them. So maybe the room in the middle of the house is just getting bigger and the front porch and the back porch are still full of people. It’s like at a family reunion. Everybody, let’s just hang out in the kitchen. Let’s hang out in the kitchen. And I am optimistic about that and very full of hope that that might be, if we just get sick enough of fighting, then that might be where something really good comes from it.
Sonya Palmer:
I maintain there’s far more that we have in common than what separates us. Are you reading anything right now?
Hillary Walsh:
Yes. I always have a stack of books. I’ll see what I got on my… I’m reading, this is called The Purpose Driven Church. It’s by Rick Warren, the guy who wrote The Purpose Driven Life.
Sonya Palmer:
Ooh, Rick Warren.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah. And it’s all about growing a church.
Sonya Palmer:
Interesting.
Hillary Walsh:
And obviously I’m not growing a church, but mine is very much related to it. I feel like I’m growing a spiritual experience that I’ve been called to do. So it’s kind of like my own church. And although I don’t really identify as Christian or as a person of religion, I definitely am a very spiritual person and I think there’s so much good stuff that we get from the Bible and from what Jesus taught. And so, Rick Warren’s book is really good. And man, it just… Like, I usually fold pages in half when it’s like I need to go back and read whatever it is that I really liked.
Sonya Palmer:
Smart.
Hillary Walsh:
And he started a church in Southern California, kind of like circling an area on a map, moved there with his wife, they’re not from California, and started a global movement, and this is how he did it. Someone in like a Dan Kennedy… Which is funny to think of Dan Kennedy and Rick Warren in the same sentence. But someone in a Dan Kennedy group recommended this book. And it’s great for marketing, it’s great for belief, and really believing. And for me, it’s just like if I actually think that my business is going to help change people’s lives, I am being very selfish if I do not insist that it grow as much as ethically possible.
One of Rick Warren’s things in his church, he told people, new congregants, “Before you can join this church, before you sign up and say, ‘I want to be a member of this church,’ I want you to know that unless you’re here to help bring more people to Jesus, you cannot join this church. It’s the wrong church for you, you need to go to the other church down there. If you want to have your seat that you always sit in every single Sunday and you want to come in here and drop your money in the bucket and then go, this is not the right church for you. We are here to help grow this church.”
And it’s like, I now say that in job interviews. “If you want to have consistency and structure and da-da-da-da, this is not going to be a good fit for you. If you are driven to help as many people as ethically possible, then we’re going to be in the right boat rowing together.”
And you see somebody and they’re kind of like, “This lady’s crazy.” Yes, I am. So, it’s good stuff.
Sonya Palmer:
It’s growth mindset.
Hillary Walsh:
I’ve got Think and Grow Rich. Ooh, this one’s good. Poetry on Fire. It’s funny, I think I’m going through a religious time in my life right now as I reflect on what I’m reading. But this is Psalms in a very beautifully written… The translation is called The Passion Translation, and it’s Psalms, and it’s just really beautiful, powerfully written Psalms. And those are just like, that’s the good stuff of the Bible. The mindset stuff of the Bible, I suppose.
Sonya Palmer:
Very much. Yes.
Hillary Walsh:
GOD Works Through Faith, which again, has Christian undertones. Well, really it’s got the cross on the front. So I don’t think it’s undertones.
Sonya Palmer:
General with an undertone.
Hillary Walsh:
It’s an undertone shoved down your throat. No. But I mean it’s in here talking about Marcus Aurelius and the subconscious mind and how if you really believe something, you act like it’s going to happen. Really. When I was a kid growing up in the church and you hear about praying without ceasing, and I’m like, am I just supposed to sit here and pray and pray and pray and pray and pray? And really, that praying without ceasing when Paul was talking about that it is, I’m going to pray and my actions will also be part of my prayer. Like, “God, I believe that you are going to help me.” My leg hair is standing up and I’m feeling it in my leather SPANX. I’m just letting you know. Because I feel it.
But if I really believe that I was born on purpose, for a purpose so that I could be an immigration lawyer today, part of which was during the Trump administration, which was crazy, if I really believe that I’m supposed to help as many people as possible, then I’m going to just have to be really uncomfortable and my actions will have to be part of the prayer that I can continue to do this. And that’s super exciting.
Sonya Palmer:
It is.
Hillary Walsh:
And the last book on my thing, I don’t know if you’ve read this one.
Sonya Palmer:
No. You’re good.
Hillary Walsh:
Never Lose a Customer Again by Joey Coleman.
Sonya Palmer:
Yes.
Hillary Walsh:
Those are all good ones though.
Sonya Palmer:
Yes.
Hillary Walsh:
And it’s just always, I think I’m constantly reading. What are you reading?
Sonya Palmer:
I am reading… I can’t remember the title of the book. The Overstory, I think. It’s about a father and son who kind of go on a journey. It’s about climate change.
Hillary Walsh:
Oh, okay.
Sonya Palmer:
But it just breaks things down in such a simple way and just makes it feel personal. It’s just become this big thing. I’m on a fiction kick right now. I’m reading Station Eleven, which was a series that was also on HBO. Sometimes I have to do fiction to kind of reset my brain.
But it’s interesting, I also grew up in the church. And I liked what you said about pray without ceasing. Because you’re right, it was not about sitting there and praying. It was that no matter what you’re doing, you’re also praying. You’re doing the dishes, you’re going for a walk, you’re driving your car, you’re praying without ceasing.
I’ve been reading C. S. Lewis again. Mere Christianity. He does Screwtape chronicles. He also did… He has a science fiction trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet. Because there’s wisdom, there’s guidance. I agree, like you mentioned Marcus Aurelius, meditation, stoicism, there’s a lot in common with Jesus on that. A lot in common. So yeah, I’ve kind of reached back into that as well.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah. I mean, the wisdom in it.
Sonya Palmer:
And I’m always sampling from some business book.
Hillary Walsh:
Yes. It transcends. I don’t need to be put in a box of saying I’m a believer or not believer or anything like that, I can say, “This is wise and I believe it. And I am living proof of it. Isn’t that so cool?” And I don’t think that God or the universe created people to come to the United States believing and acting with faith that they were going to make a better life for themself only to get here and live such a limited life where you’re in fear all the time that this could all be taken away from me because I don’t have papers. So it is all connected.
Sonya Palmer:
That is not the American dream.
Hillary Walsh:
Yeah. That’s not the American dream. That’s not God’s plan for your life. I’m sorry. It’s just not God’s plan for your life for you to get deported and never see your kids again. And if it is, then I’m going to do everything I can to make sure that we connect your family again somehow.
Sonya Palmer:
Work to your strengths and with the rhythms of your body. Find wisdom in the text you read, both sacred and secular, knowing you don’t need to adopt any labels in the process. Once you find your calling, you have to be willing to go all in, even if there is no funding.
A huge thank you to Hillary for sharing her story and unbelievable insights with us today. You have been listening to LawHER with me, Sonya Palmer. If you found this content insightful, inspiring, or it just made you smile, please share this episode with a trailblazer in your life. For more about Hillary, check out our show notes. And while you’re there, please leave us a review or five star rating. It really goes a long way for others to discover the show.
And I will see you next week on LawHER, where we’ll shed light on how another of the brightest and boldest woman in the legal industry climbed to the top of her field.
