Demetrio Rico:
Delegating is not giving someone a task and then micromanagement after that. Delegating is, "Get this done." And then knowing that you can look away and they'll get it finished.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the legal marketing company the best firms hire when they want the rankings traffic in cases other law firm marketing agencies can't deliver.
We just wrapped up the first ever PIM Conference and I want to say a huge thank you to all our incredible speakers and to everyone who came. Seeing this podcast come to life was amazing. Over the next few weeks, we'll have some highlights that I can't wait to share with you. Until then, let's meet today's guest.
You're out there hustling, running your firm, investing in marketing, connecting with clients and watching your firm grow. But as your caseload expands, so does your need for top-notch staff, and finding the right people for the right seats fast, that's a whole other ballgame. What if I told you there is a solution that not only solves your hiring headaches, but also helps you allocate your capital more effectively? A way to complement your existing staff without breaking the bank. Enter Stafi, a company that's revolutionizing how law firms handle staffing. They're taking college-educated, bilingual VAs who can tackle everything from call handling to managing legal calendars. These aren't your run-of-the-mill virtual assistants, they're thoroughly vetted, trained, and come with a 30-day onboarding process to ensure they hit the ground running.
Stafi isn't just about filling seats, they're about strategic growth. Their subscription payment model means predictable costs and their range of roles from legal assistants to paralegals means you can scale your support as your firm grows. Today you'll hear from Demetrio Rico, COO at Stafi, a sponsor at PIMCon. Demetrio has been in the telecommunications space for over 20 years. He explains why he co-founded Stafi. Let's dive in.
Demetrio Rico:
Working in very large corporations, companies with over 400,000 employees, you learn about processes and how important they are, and about scaling. I had a team of 200 people. Out of those 200 people, maybe 30 of them were in the US and Canada, everyone else was spread around the world, so there's talent everywhere and they don't have to be next door.
In telecommunications, I mean, when I had a call with someone from AT&T or Verizon, we had it like this, 15 years ago. It's just that nobody else wanted to do video. And I think what happened is that over time and because of COVID, our children were doing video. And if an eight-year-old can do it, then why can't we?
Chris Dreyer:
I think it's really set the tone that all the tech improvements in the legal space, the depositions on Zoom and it's just Zoom in itself and Microsoft Teams has kind of interconnected us and people are more open to virtual talent. What sets Stafi apart from the other virtual assistant companies in the space?
Demetrio Rico:
I think that we have a lot of focus on not just providing ahead and saying goodbye and hoping for the best, but really making sure that we pair people, the right boss with that right lawyer, with that right representative. And we have these four areas of work that we think about. We have a long consultation to really understand what that person needs because sometimes lawyers, they think, "God, I got a lot of law work to do. I need another paralegal. I need another legal assistant. I need another lawyer." And it's like, maybe, maybe that's what you need, but then maybe you need someone to take off the silly task that you're working on in all the time and you work on strategy and let us work on the tactical stuff.
Lawyers are incredibly intelligent people but they're very technical, and what they're technical about is law, about language. And so, we want to round those things out with the other things that have to get done in that law firm.
Chris Dreyer:
Tell me about the qualifications of the people you hire because someone could kind of moonlight and do that HR role or you got leaders of the firm and you kind of make these quick hires, but tell me about the qualifications and the people that you hire.
Demetrio Rico:
Most people when they hire someone, they interview maybe one or two people, three before they make a hire. Most people don't do a real background check, they don't call companies beforehand, they don't check credentials. They just kind of get a good gut feeling. And that's not the way to hire.
We look over 1,000 resumes a month, we interview over 100 people, we hire around 20. And out of those 20 that we hire, we end up really putting them through a training process that lasts two to three weeks. First two weeks on tactical things that we want them to make sure they know how to do. And then, we put them to work inside our company. And so, if they can work inside our company for around a week with one of our people, then we know that they're ready to be set. So, to us it's very, very important that we set the right person to the right job.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. One of the things you mentioned was communication and all your hires are bilingual, which gives firms in areas of larger populations, certainly the Spanish speakers, the upper hand. So, tell me about the communication and that process.
Demetrio Rico:
So, we have two services. One is a dedicated service. So, let's say, Chris, you needed an EA to help you book appointments or call out to people. That's a dedicated person that all they do is that. They can be part-time or full-time. So, say they have four hours a day or eight hours a day just dedicated to you. And we don't want them to have two jobs. So, it's not like part-time with you and part-time with somebody else. It's just someone that does something else or going to school. They still want to work, but we want them dedicated to you and we don't want them thinking about anything freelance. They're not allowed to do freelance.
The other service that we do, and it's mainly for immigration and for PI, is intake and reception. And so, you're right, everyone's bilingual at least. So, Spanish and English, or Portuguese, Spanish and English. They take phone calls. So, they rep the company. And look, there's a lot of companies out there that do this. Smith.ai is one of them, and Ruby, and there's a bunch of companies that do this. What makes this different is that we want to close deals. We want to make sure that when they're calling our client's firm, we are doing everything we can to bring that person to be a qualified lead. Because there's a lot of money being spent, as you know, in marketing, and then the firm's not closing and then they're like, "Well, I don't know if we should do any more marketing." It was like, "Well, that's because you're not closing the deals. We got to close the deals." And that's what's very important.
When we first started thinking about doing this, we tested the different companies out there to see how they did. And they answered the phone. They're all great at answering the phone. I can't say that I had a bad experience there. But if I was on the call with them and I said, "Hey, you know what? I got to go. Can we talk later?" They would let me go. They didn't ask for my name, they didn't ask for my phone number, they didn't want to get back to me. And that's what I think makes the difference.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I completely agree. And the follow-up is this ... Especially on the form submissions and things like that. You mentioned the VA, right? So, you've got a VA, you mentioned the intake side. What are some of the roles the staff you provide specifically for a personal injury law firm?
Demetrio Rico:
The way that we see it, you can kind of divide the work into four areas. So, one area is the legal work. And in that legal work there's all sorts of components. Someone with that mindset, that understanding of law and that understanding of language to be able to do that kind of work. And then, what we do is we'll sit down with a lawyer or the person that's going to manage them, the EA, whoever it is, and go through those items and then make sure we have a very well-defined tasks that they have to do, and that's how we manage the person. So, we'll have a call with a lawyer once a week in the beginning, then monthly to just make sure the work is getting done.
The other area of work is admin, like you said. I mean, there's lots of things that you and I do, that everyone does to some degree that can be taken off our shoulders so that we can concentrate on the more strategical stuff. So, just management of email, management of things that have to be sent out, your schedule. Sometimes there's things to do for your kids too. Picking the right camp. Like, okay, that can take six hours picking the right camp. I'd rather have someone look at the different camps and say, "These are my top three choices in a list." So, that kind of thought process is very important.
My wife is the CEO of the company. I'm the COO. And she's very focused on helping women law firms. There's a lot of emphasis on helping women who are also mothers and also do other responsibilities that sometimes we don't have to do or we don't feel like we have to do as men. And so, there's a big focus there, just to try to help there.
The third thing is anything that's client-facing. Anything that represents the firm either through email or through WhatsApp, any kind of the mediums, or just on the phone. And so, that, to us, is very important. And that kind of person feeds talking to people. Right? Obviously, someone like you, you love doing these podcasts, getting information out there, sharing with other people. Not everyone does that. Some people hate doing that.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. Most of the time I love it. Sometimes I hate it. Let's just be transparent. So, a couple questions on that. One thing that a lot of people think of is on the intake, like the accent, just being transparent, I'm going to ask the questions that people think, are these 100% fluent? For the intake, have you seen a negative impact on conversions from an accent? Let's address that, because I know some of the individuals are thinking about that.
Demetrio Rico:
Sure, I love it. I love that you asked that. Those are good, hard questions to talk about. I think that there are some countries that you can have someone that speaks English, knows the English language better than you and I do, but their accents are just so heavy. Those people just don't fit in that role, unfortunately.
We have this client out of East Texas, which is a special part of this country, and they have an intake, but she learned English in the UK, so she has a British accent, but that was okay. That was an okay accent to have. So, she has a British accent. She's from Argentina. And then, there's people in other parts of Latin America that have no accent. I mean, half the time when you're talking to a call center out of one of your telecommunications company or a bank, you're talking to someone that doesn't live here and you don't know they don't live here because their accents, they sound like an American. So yeah, they have to have a very fluid accent.
During training, we also address that and help that. The hardest part, to be honest with you, is not their accent, is understanding sometimes accents from other cultures. So, sometimes a Jamaican accent or an Indian accent, they haven't heard it enough. So, we have trainings for that, to understand how some of ... And those are clients of the law firm that are calling in, that you have to help as well.
Chris Dreyer:
All right. Let's talk about leverage and putting your capital to work. Allocate for the most impact. When you leverage international VA's, you're not just saving money, you're expanding your talent pool globally. You're getting highly skilled professionals at a fraction of the cost, allowing you to allocate those capital savings into other growth areas for your firm. But how does hiring through a company like Stafi actually compare to hiring in the states? Demetrio explains the pricing model.
Demetrio Rico:
And it varies by state. Some states are easier to hire than others. There's some states that, I mean, great for us, but I think it's crazy the kind of laws that are in some states and on the West Coast specifically. But it's a flat fee and it's $2,600 a month. And you get this person and you get seven coaches that are sitting behind that person to make sure that they're doing the job as it's supposed to be.
On the flip side of that, we have client success team that is working with the lawyer to make sure that the things that are getting done are getting done. So, it's easy to say, "Hey, I need this person to handle calls better. I need this person to have a better output." But sometimes it's hard to delegate and train and spend the time with the resource, and that's what we want to do for that lawyer.
We just want the very simple instructions and we're going to go execute on that and make sure that that rep does exactly what that lawyer wants us to do. There's no employment tax and there's no other benefits that you have to worry about. They do get time off during the course of the year, after they spend a certain amount of time with us. There are times that our law firms will say, "Hey, I want to give them a bonus for their hard work they've done." Sometimes we let that pass through. Sometimes we think that we shouldn't and say, "Look, let's wait until they get another role."
Sometimes the rep looks great on paper, looks great during the interview, they did everything great, but in real life we come to find out they're not so good and we have to fire them. We are the ones that usually do that for the customer. So, we're the ones that say, "Look, I think Joey, he's okay, but we have seven other people doing this exact same thing and they produce 25 documents and he's producing 12. We think it's time to maybe consider somebody else." So, lawyers are really nice people sometimes. They want to give people another chance and another chance, and that's okay. Our success is tied to theirs.
Chris Dreyer:
So, you mentioned KPIs and utilization. Are you guys behind the scenes, time tracking and doing those types of things? How do you objectively measure if someone's quote, unquote, "cutting the mustard" and doing a good job versus that other individual?
Demetrio Rico:
We have 65 tasks that we have defined, that we've grouped. And they have to, on a daily basis, tell us what they've done and what they're going to do the next day based on that stuff ... They don't have 65 things to do. Let's say there's 10 that they work with on a daily basis or on a weekly basis. We assign priority to those tasks and we assign importance. So, between importance and priority and knowing those exact things, that's how we measure the KPIs.
And like I said, because we have so many people doing the same things in these different groups, we also have a feeling of knowing where things are at. But to us, it's imperative. We want to grow our law firms' clients' practices.
Chris Dreyer:
Wonderful. Wonderful. Let's talk about a different one. Let's talk about the speed. Speed of implementation and integration, right? So, if I go put up a job with my HR, assuming I don't have a recruitment list, which you always need to be recruiting, and assuming I got to go start from scratch, I got to go source the resumes, I got to put them through this process. And then you weed them out and you test them, your application, your personality assessment, and that takes a long time. How long does it take, say you've identified, we've talked, and you say, "Hey, I want a VA"?
Demetrio Rico:
We have kind of an inventory process. We have an idea of how many people we're going to place. So, we have people going through the process all the time. And as a business, and I ran professional services for large organizations, you want to have people on the bench, but they're costing you money. But we always have people on the bench.
Unless you were very specific, it's like, "I need someone that knows these types of cases in this state." That's going to take me a couple of weeks. I might never find them. But for paralegals, legal assistants, EAs, marketing assistants that are just executing on work that the marketing company does a strategy that they're just doing the work itself. Any of those roles, within a week, no more than a week, could be two or three days.
Chris Dreyer:
Great. Let me ask you a couple questions. I'll do a double question here. First, a PI, what's the main roles that you're typically being used for? And then, second, of the firms that hire you that don't succeed ... Right, there's joint accountabilities. I run a marketing agency, if they don't pick up the phone, doesn't matter how many leads I generate. What are some of the issues that causes them to not be successful utilizing a company like yours?
Demetrio Rico:
Let me answer the first part for PIs. I love PI firms because they're very marketing focused and they're very business focused. More than other firms out there, they're the ones that are the most business focused, and in some ways they're the easiest ones to work with. They just want to see results. And I like that. Where other ones have other concerns and are looking at it maybe in other types of ways.
But it's just a matter of talking to that person and seeing where they're wasting their time or where they're spending too much money on something that could be done better. If they're running a marketing campaign and they're having trouble closing, then that's the area that I want to focus in. If they are focusing on, they're closing and now they need someone to do the work, then that's where I want to be. Or, if it's administration where they just want to time manage that person on their team better. Sometimes you have a conversation, you say, "Listen, you're not really the person that needs the help. You have an office manager that seems to be answering the phones and this and that. We need to take some work off of her more than anybody else. I think this is where your pain point is at." So, it varies a lot.
Chris Dreyer:
So, great answer to the first. The second part is, of the firms that work with you, there's joint accountabilities. What are the issues that cause them not to succeed?
Demetrio Rico:
I think the strongest one is that lawyers are perfectionists and they want everything to be exactly the way that they want it. And in a business as you grow, it's impossible. I mean, I'm like that too. You have to get over it. Delegating is not giving someone a task and then micromanagement after that. Delegating is, "Get this done." And then knowing that you can look away and they'll get it finished. They're never going to get it finished exactly the way you wanted them to. It's not going to happen. You got to be okay with 80%. And look, certain tasks like a completion of a legal document that's going to be put in front of a judge. That has to be 100% right. But almost everything else, it's okay if it's not perfect. I think that's probably the main thing.
The other thing, I think there's a fear that people are not doing their job. So, they're working remote, you don't see them. We had a client that they wanted the person on video the whole day. So, this lawyer wanted the guy to be on video and I was like, "It's kind of weird. You don't need to do that. Let's just look at the output and see how much he works and if there's an issue, we'll address it, but we don't need to do that." So, there's a little bit of that. And that's why we've been very clear on creating these KPIs on the work that has to get done and making sure that the work is happening.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. A lot of times we're talking people, we're talking, there's the cost, but we want them skilled. Right? You have this vetting process. And you mentioned the coaches and I want to circle back to that. So, I believe you have a psychologist and some coaches, and what are you doing on the back end to level up and make these superior talent?
Demetrio Rico:
We have this mission on helping our law firm clients grow their businesses and have a better life in general, have more personal time, be able to scale. There's a secondary mission that we have, which is to help these people that are living in another country, they have a master's degree, they've practiced law, they've worked for a company in their country locally, and they're just not getting recognized and there's no upward mobility. So, we want to make sure that they're successful because we think if they're successful and they're happy with what they do, then the whole chain works.
And so, yes, we have a psychologist that's available to them in PI. I mean, sometimes we have to take information from clients that have had gruesome accidents, or things that are just not the happiest moments of a person's life and they got to take all that stuff down. Sometimes they have to translate it into another language. There's all this work that they're very embedded and invested in these things. So, we have a team of psychologists that they can work with. Just at any time they want to call, talk to somebody, they're available to them. We do check-ins with them as well.
Then we have a tactical coach. And what these coaches do is they make sure that if something's been assigned to them that this person's never done before and it wasn't covered in training, they can get feedback and help them do it, build a spreadsheet, work a document, things that are just more operational process oriented.
And then, we have IT support for security and cybersecurity and all those things. Making sure that the computer is safe. There's a lot of support mechanism there. We also have, not mandatory, but there's classes. So, for people that don't speak Portuguese and they want to learn Portuguese, there's that. There's a class that we do for accents, to improve their American accent and dialect, just to sound better. And Spanish. A lot of the Brazilians will take the Spanish class. A lot of the Spanish people will take them. And almost everyone loves to improve their language one way or another. So, we're always adding classes. We don't charge them for it. We don't make them do it. Unless there's an issue, then we force them into the classes for their job.
Chris Dreyer:
Demetrio, this has been amazing. So, one final question for our listeners. How can they get in touch with you and where can they go to learn more?
Demetrio Rico:
So, we're very easy to find. Stafi, S-T-A-F-I.C-C. W-W-W-S-T-A-F-I.C-C. I'm glad to have a consultation. Our team will talk to you and see where you're at. And if it's not for now, maybe it's for the future. I find it as a very good exercise because you will see for yourself where you're at, where you are today, where do you want to go, and what your path is to get there.
Chris Dreyer:
Thanks so much, Demetrio, for his insights. Let's hit the takeaways. Delegation is key, but it's not just about offloading tasks, it's about strategic delegation. Demetrio hit the nail on the head when he said, "Lawyers need to be okay with 80% perfection on most tasks. You need to focus your energy on the 20% that moves the needle in your firm. Everything else, delegate it."
Demetrio Rico:
You have to get over it. Delegating is not giving someone a task and then micromanagement after that. Delegating is, "Get this done."
Chris Dreyer:
Scale and confidence. Consider the speed of implementation. Stafi can help you get vetted, trained VAs within a week. That's light speed compared to traditional hiring. In this game, speed kills. The faster you can implement new systems and bring on new talent, the faster you can scale.
Demetrio Rico:
We always have people on the bench. So, if you said today that ... Unless you were very specific, it's like, "I need someone, these types of cases," any of those roles within a week, no more than a week.
Chris Dreyer:
Level up. Don't sleep on the importance of continuous improvement. Stafi offers their VAs optional classes to improve their skills. Are you doing the same for your team? Investing in your people's growth isn't just about leadership. It's good business.
Demetrio Rico:
Yes, we have a psychologist that's available to them. Then we have a tactical coach and we have IT support for security and cybersecurity and all those things, making sure that the computer is safe. Not mandatory, but there's classes, and almost everyone loves to improve.
Chris Dreyer:
Huge thank you to Demetrio for coming on the show. For more information, check out the show notes. Before you go, do me a solid and smash that follow button to subscribe. I'd sincerely appreciate it. And you won't want to miss out on the next episode of Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. All right, everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I'm out.
