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How to Run Your Law Firm from India (With a Four Month-Old)

In this presentation, I talk about the vision behind our law firm, Sound Immigration. We strive to provide world-class service to our clients while allowing our attorneys the freedom to pursue lives of deep personal meaning. For me, that means having the opportunity to explore this big, beautiful world of ours with my family. For other attorneys it might mean having the flexibility to play that extra soccer game with their daughter.

A big thank you to my friends at Clio for having me out to Chicago last year to speak at the outstanding Cloud Nine conference. For those who aren’t familiar with Clio, it’s the leading cloud-based law practice management software. We use Clio here at Sound Immigration to work securely with clients all across the globe.

How to Manage Your Law Firm from India With a Four Year-Old from Greg McLawsen on Vimeo.

 

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Greg is recognized as the leading national authority on enforcement of the Form I-864, Affidavit of Support. Greg represents low-income green card holders in lawsuits to recover support from their sponsors. Practicing family-based immigration law, Greg also focuses on helping married and engaged couples with U.S. immigration.

This Post Has 6 Comments

  1. Hi Greg,

    I was forwarded here by a rep at Clio, which we are considering using. The biggest problem I see in initial exploration is poor task mgmt and internal communication functionality. The Clio rep agreed and suggested I check out your video. You talk about using Trello with Clio via Zapier but don’t really discuss how this works. Do you have to have both open (ie. use Trello for task mgmt and Clio for tracking matters, billing, etc)? I feel like what we seek is quite straight forward, for example: A assigns a task to B; B needs to confirm something in the task with C; C suggests reviewing a file and attaches the file for B to review; B modifies the document and re-assigns the task to A for final review. These kind of situations are common place in our firm and, in my experiences, collaborative businesses in general. Often they are more complex but with the same basic needs. Clio does not offer this kind of function. When I consider using multiple apps, the key is that they operate through one platform. Requiring each person in the firm to use both Clio and, for example, Trello at the same time, with some loose integration, feels like just adding work and complexity.

    If you have any guidance or suggestions, it is very much appreciated.

    All the best,
    Whelm.

    1. Hi, Whelm: We operate our firm using an Agile project management approach. Trello is our digital kanban board that we use for all case-related project management. We use Zapier to dump Trello board activity into Clio’s note function. Trello workflows can be templated either through sample template cards – from which task lists are copied – or else through Zaps. For internal team communication, we use Slack, which we could (but don’t) integrate with Clio through Zapier. Slack is basically our digital water cooler. If you’re not comfortable playing around with tools like Zapier then our approach definitely wouldn’t be a good fit.

  2. Greg

    Been reading and watching a lot of your content over the past few days. My compliments. Hope you don’t mind a few practice management questions relating to this presentation from an old Immigration dog trying to learn a few new tricks.

    1. Are 100% of your forms prepared by the outsourcing company? Do you even have a forms program in house and if so which one and is integrated with clio somehow?

    2. I would be very interested in more details regarding how you found the company you use for outsourcing. I had numerous bad experiences about a decade ago when I tried several different companies. I’m sold on the concept but time and time again the execution was lacking. Do you have any recommendations for specific companies and/or tips for locating a competent and responsive one that is likely to stay in business. My previous experiences left me very frustrated.

    3. Do you use a CRM? If so is it too synced up with Clio? If not, how do you follow up with potential clients or referral sources who are not yet ready to pull the trigger?

    1. Thanks, Ken.

      1. Yes, all initial form drafts are prepared by out outsourcing company. They’re later revised and reviewed by our US attorneys following a quality assurance protocol. We no longer have a forms program, since I really didn’t care for the UX of any on the market. The top goal for us is a great client experience, so if the forms program pisses our clients off I don’t care how efficient it is.

      2. I found our company though my involvement in the Seattle Legal Technology and Innovation meetup group. I met a rep for the company at one of our mixers. That helped create a level of trust that made it possible to work with them. Sorry – I know that’s a hard one to replicate.

      3. Yes, we use Lexicata which integrates with Clio. It has a number of tools baked into it that make the follow up process far, far more consistent than we had been in the past. They are a young product and still have some obnoxious bugs, but I would recommend them with that caveat.

      Tashi delek from Bhutan!

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