October 12, 2023

How Every Law Firm Can Find, Hire, and Train Rock Star VA’s

17 minutes

Do you need virtual support for your law firm? In this podcast episode, Daniel Maxwell, an attorney with Amicus Settlement Planners, discusses the benefits of hiring and training virtual assistants (VAs) for law firms.

Daniel talks about how hiring internationally located individuals as VAs can help businesses grow and prosper. Many people have fears with hiring VAs, especially ones that live halfway across the world. Daniel says business owners need to move from problem centric thinking to solution focused thinking in order to get over these fears. Thinking about how a VA will help your company instead of what potential issues exist will lead to success. What makes outsourcing work to VAs in other countries beneficial is that people can be working at different times of the day. Daniel shares how he will provide a list of tasks to his VAs before he goes to bed and they are complete when he wakes up.

For many business owners, the question can be where to find the best VAs. Daniel shares the three ways to find VAs: hiring direct, using a freelance marketplace or using a VA staffing firm. It is important to not get stuck in this step. Choose a route to find a VA and follow through. If one method does not work to your liking, try a different one later on. Daniel stresses the importance of hiring a VA for one task. Not all VAs will be able to do everything and that is totally fine. For example, if you need help with invoicing, hire a VA solely for invoicing so they can focus and master that skill. If there are other tasks that they can do down the line, allow them to branch out.

Something to add to your recruitment process is having potential VAs complete a test task. This task should be similar to the work that person would be doing if they were to come on board with your firm. This will narrow down potential hires and sift out those who are not the right fit. It is also important to have a good standard operation procedure (SOP) for VAs to follow so everything is done in the way it needs to. Some examples include access to software or templates to complete work or a video demo on how to complete a task. This all helps VAs become familiar with how you run your firm and decreases the chance of a VA not knowing what to do.

Communicating with your VAs regularly is important. Pick a standard channel, whether it be email, Slack or Asana. Communicating new tasks is also crucial to ensure the VA understands how things work. When you are providing a new task, record a video demonstration so the VA can refer back to it.

Listen in to learn more on hiring VAs!

1:20 Daniel addresses the fears and concerns that may be holding law firms back

6:07 The different options for finding and hiring virtual assistants

9:09 Tips on filtering and hiring virtual assistants

10:14 The importance of having standard operating procedures (SOPs)

14:07 The benefits of investing in virtual assistants

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

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