118: Raquel Gomes from Stafi shares insights on staffing solutions for Law Firms

The pain point was, I want business owners, and especially women, to be able to have everything that they want from life, a flourishing business, profitable business, but balance that time that they can do the things that they love, they enjoy, spend time with their family, be able to take go on those vacations and things that are very hard for lawyers. Lawyers are one of the professions that work the hardest, so that's the that was the main pain point that I wanted to solve.

Welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms, podcast featuring the latest strategies and techniques to drive traffic to your website and convert that traffic into clients. Now here's the founder and CEO of 10 golden rules. Jay Berkowitz,

well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time you're listening to this podcast. Welcome to the 10 golden rules Internet Marketing for law firms podcast. We've got a great guest today, Raquel Gomes from Stafi, and I'm just going to talk for two minutes about our live event. We've just released the information for tgr live 2025 and if you a regular listener to this podcast, you've heard some of the great recordings from 2024 we had Justin lovely, the AI attorney Bill Biggs, one of the best culture experts for law firms. And we had some great content around technology, of course, all kinds of stuff about internet marketing for law firms. And we're going to do it all again on March 10 and 11th. 2025, so go to 10 golden rules. Check out speaker lineup. We got a great hotel. It's right on the ocean in Delray Beach, and we'd love to have you be a part of it March 10 and 11th, 2025, anyways, without any further advertising or promotion. Raquel, welcome to the 10 golden rules podcast.

Thank you so much for having me here. It's a pleasure. Jay. So

we met up recently at a conference, and Raquel was and her team were telling me all about staffing, which is a really, really awesome and extensive staffing organization for law firms. And you know, look the couple things that really matter in this space, one is, everybody's having trouble hiring these days. And you know, costs are going crazy, and you know, inflation and everything. And Raquel and her team can get you, you know, attorneys and really experienced people who are near shore and save your firm a ton of money, and get you awesome results, and get people who really want to work? Yeah, I'm not going to tell raquel's story. I want her to tell us her story. First tell us a little bit about you and your background, and then tell us about how you founded the company. Okay,

awesome. So, I was born and raised in the south of Brazil. I was the youngest of five siblings, daughter of an entrepreneur father and a mother who put her family first, and career second. I studied psychology in Brazil, and I moved to the US to do an MBA in international business, and I started a career in large corporate America in the high tech space as a sales rep. I climbed the corporate ladder and became a successful executive. Then I got pregnant, and I was traveling every week home, being a home only on weekends. And it's funny, I remember being at the at the door of the plane to check in and to board in line. How about how pregnant I was? I was like about eight months pregnant, still traveling, and I don't remember now, what's the cut out date when you can still fly. I don't remember if it's like four or five months, but I remember I was such a workaholic that I was there and I was lying how private I was in order to be able to travel and go to work. So I used to be to live in that mindset that I had to be a workaholic in order to be successful, and the thought of delegation wasn't part of my vocabulary. My dad was a workaholic, and he sacrificed a lot of his personal time and family time in the name of success. So I had that example at home. I got to my breaking point when my newborn daughter, Sada was born. She was three months old, and both myself and my husband, we had to go on a work trip. My husband also had a big, large VP role, as in operations for large corporate America, and we didn't have anyone to leave our daughter with. And to my surprise, my boss was very disinterested. He simply ignored me, and that's when I knew that something had to change. Then I took a break, and right after the break staff, you was born.

Congratulations, that's awesome. And so what was the insight? Like, what, you know, a lot of great, successful companies solve a problem. Did you identify the problem? Or,

yeah. So as the co founder and CEO of staff is so Stafi was born to how long? Law Firm owners, and back then, we didn't focus as much on law firms, but business owners to grow and scale their businesses without having to pay the price by sacrificing their lives the service that we offer. They're tailored to small firm. Law Firm owners who have a hard time knowing where to find great talent. They don't know how to they don't know how to properly vet and screen someone, and oftentimes they rely on only one interview and they are left to look. They also don't have the time or resources to properly on board, coach and train the new staff member, nor to provide ongoing mentoring and training. But the pain point for me was I was a workaholic. I had no balance in my life, and I thought that in order to be successful, I had to work non stop. I had no balance. I didn't know how to delegate. I thought that I had to do everything myself. That's when I realized I went through a lot of self development, self development and inner work. And the pain point was, I want business owners, especially women, to be able to have everything that they want from life, a flourishing business, profitable business, but balance that time that they can do the things that they love, they enjoy, spend time with their family, be able to take the go on those vacations and things that are very hard for lawyers. Lawyers are one of the professions that work the hardest, so that's the that was the main pain point that I wanted to solve.

That's fantastic. We were both talking for a minute before this interview, and you were explaining that the benefits is, like, you know, save time, save money, do things that the workaholic lawyers shouldn't be doing anymore. And I said, Oh, my goodness, that sounds exactly like the book I'm reading. Dan Martel's, buy back your time, yeah. And that's basically the principle that you're you solved in the real world, which is, you know, get folks to do the things that your time is much more valuable. And it's like so many law firms have figured out that they can get folks near shore offshore, doing a lot of the legwork on cases, doing a lot of the paperwork, writing the draft of demands and medical chronologies and everything like that. So how much of it is actual legal work? How much are y'all sourcing the, you know, the other jobs, like the legal assistance, paralegals and even, you know, marketing and intake?

So we source paralegals, marketing intake, all of that, executive assistants, project managers. The majority of the roles are probably the paralegals and the intakes. All of our paralegals their lawyers in their home country. They went to school for as many years as a US Attorney. Went to school for they also have years of experience applying law in their home country. So what a lot of people don't know is that these are high end professionals that we are supplying. And on top of that, there is this large vetting screening process that that you know, goes into play. Only 1% of all of the applicants are hired. Those that are hired, they go train house, university intensive training that they have to graduate with 90% or more to get them ready to work for us, based law firm, and yeah, and after we assign them, we have a whole coaching system, right? We're very boutique in that way. We support them day in and day out. We coach them to make sure that they're adding value to the law firm, but also they're getting continuous mentoring, continuous training, and we can talk about that all later, but we're very hands on.

That's awesome. I love it. What's the basic math like? And a lot of times I hear this concept, which is, you can hire one of the top attorneys graduating from you can tell us which countries but the first, give us the math. You know? You can hire a graduate attorney, yeah, top of their class, yeah. Maybe making how much money in us, dollars in their home country as a lawyer, and how much more can they make working for a US firm as a paralegal, in US dollar?

So the exact numbers, well, the service for from, from an attorney's perspective, when you got a lawyer with years of experience applying the law, you're playing you're paying for $2,800 a month, all in so there's no employment tax, there's no benefits. They are fully vetted, screened, trained and ready to go. And we do a perfect matching. Whenever we meet with the attorney, we have an initial strategy session where we go over all of the tasks that can be delegated within a law firm. We've identified 68 tasks that fall into four different areas of work. We divide the law firm into four different areas, marketing client facing legal and administrative. So we've built an in house software platform. Where we take you through, and it's great, because the majority of attorneys come to us saying, oh, I need another attorney, or I need a paralegal. And do you really right? So we take that time, that one hour, for them to think that through, do a deep dive, and we go over all of the tasks, and based on that, we define, okay, what's the perfect match for you, not only from an experience background, but also what personality, what soft skills this person needs to have to be successful in their role, to thrive, but also to stay so. For example, if you want someone who is client facing, it's very important that the person has a type of personality that thrives from human interaction, right? They have to be on the phone all day. They have to also be highly empathetic. That's very important, because lawyers are in the business of helping people, helping others. So you want to hire someone who is an extension of your brand, who's going to represent you in the way that you would represent yourself. So that's why there's a very common mistake the lawyers do is like anyone can answer the phones. That's a very no no. That's that's very I take that very seriously that you should be very careful about who you put to answer the phones, because that's the first impression that someone has with your brand, right? They're going to have an idea on how it will be to work with you. So you want to be you want to make sure that the person has the right skill sets for the role.

So the question was, $2,800 right? The top graduate attorney with legal experience to work paralegal, because they can't do law in your state, they didn't pass the bar. Right? Experienced lawyer doing your paralegal work correct? So for $2,800

you get a lawyer who's a paralegal, plus all of the support that we provide, the coaching that we provide. We have mindset coaches who are in house, psychologists who are working with them weekly to make sure that they are okay, emotionally, mentally, you have, they have a safe space to talk about anything that they need to elaborate on, because I'm a psychologist myself, and mental health is a priority to me, and I know how tight linked it is with productivity, how well you're feeling or not. We also have senior paralegal coaches that serve as escalation point, and also they can, they mentor them, they train them so that whenever they have questions and things like that, it doesn't go to the attorney. You know, it's everything that we have in place is to save the attorneys time. We also have task task coaches. They help the VAs with prioritizing time, with time management. They also help, help everyone put together mini manuals for the law firm, so that we're documenting processes, not only to ensure that that person can do their job well, day in and day out, but the attorney whenever they want to hire more people, those doc those processes are documented, because that's a pain point that small attorneys have, processes are never documented. So we help them with that. We also have all sorts of coaches. We have IT support to make sure, by

the way, small attorneys and small digital agencies,

right? Everyone?

I'm joking, but we've, we're running the EOS you're familiar with, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, yeah, yeah, to the book traction. So we're using that EOS formula, and we've documented all of our processes in the past 24 months. Yeah,

and that, and that's a living organism, right? You have to continue to change them, because they keep evolving. So it's You're never done. It's a never ending story. But back to the pricing. So for the paralegals, which are lawyers in their home countries, 2800 if you want an intake or an executive assistant to do administrative tasks or a marketing assistant. That's 2600 if you want a marketing specialist, depending on what you need, you need video editing or whatever, that's a little bit more. So it varies. But for a lawyer, it's 2800 that's

great. And what countries are you predominantly sourcing from?

We don't all over Latin America. We, you know, we don't limit or discriminate countries. We focus on talent. So it's open to all of the countries. But the ones that we hire the majority or of our people from are probably Argentina, Brazil. Brazil is Portuguese speaking. So somewhere want that Brazilians are smarter,

right? Brazilians are smarter.

I'm Brazilian, so I cannot say that.

I know that's why I always joke that the Canadians are smart, good looking, good hockey players, but I'm very biased, yeah, because I'm originally Canadian,

I love hockey. I know I saw that, so that's

awesome. So one of the questions I always like to ask everybody is, What's your why? You know the Simon Sinek TED talk? What? What gets you up in the morning? What makes you really excited about the business today? It's really

to help law firm owners who struggle a lot with having joy and having joy. To create and having time to be the CEOs that they should be. They are the company they're they are the owners, and to help them achieve that, giving them, give them the time back that they need in order to leave all these things that I just mentioned, it's, it's really my, my, why

is it as literal as getting the right people very cost effectively that gives them that time back? Or is do you do some coaching on mental, you know, mindset and whatnot? So I believe

that most small law firm owners, they struggle with trusting and being in delegating. They don't have a team. They are they have a small team. Sometimes they are solo, but they cannot hire all the infrastructure. Put all the infrastructure in place to be able to leverage virtual staff from Latin America and grow their businesses exponentially. They need in order to do that, you need to have these coaches in place. You need to be able to check in with people that people feel lonely when they're working from home. You know? You need to be able to check in. Are you okay? What's going on with your life? People need attention special. Everyone needs attention, right? When you're in the office, you're chit chatting, you're you're seeing people, you feel connected. So it's really important to set up a culture that make that sure that people are connected. If you want to leverage virtual talent, who are amazing talent, that you can hire three for the price of one, right? So it's hard for them to have that structure in place. And we have put that structure in place so that it's not that we are we are far beyond providing a matching with a great talent. We're providing all of the support in the back end to make sure that that person is okay, that that person is learning. They're continue. They're continuous, continuously being trained. We have a university you have access to 80 plus courses that you can sign them up anytime you want. We train them in sales, we train them in intake, we train them on everything you can possibly imagine. You know, there's legal courses as well, depending on the type of law you you you work with. So

it that's a huge thing. Develop all of that training content.

We have a great team. I have a great COO, and he has a lot of experience with your learning. He comes from large corporate America. I think that our experience, we both come from large corporate America. We really learn how to grow and scale businesses, and that not only serves for us as staff here, we're rapidly growing, but we help and coach our clients as well. You know, we do everything we can for our clients, we that's where you ask me, mine, why I'm passionate about my clients. Not only increasing their revenue, but I'm passionate about them having joyful having joy every day. Hey, can you go for a walk? Can you go dancing? Can you you can you do a gym class? Like, what are you doing for your mental health? Because I'm telling you the moment that I started incorporating joy into my everyday life, I'm so much more creative, I'm so much more calm in at peace. I'm better with my team, and I I'm just more happy. I'm happier. Sorry for my

Give me three quick, simple tips for that attorney who is stressed out, who doesn't have joy in their life.

Oh, okay, it's my It might sound a little but I would say, don't grab your phone the first thing you do in the morning, wake up, take some five deep breaths. You're doing bad. Take those five deep breaths, then go look at yourself in the mirror and appreciate your awesomeness. You know, not with critical eyes, but hey, you're here. You're human. All that you have achieved, no matter where you are, it's all thing thanks to you. Um, I would say sometime in nature, I like to do like, 1015, 20 minutes, depending on on, you know, go and put my feet shoeless, in the ground, in the grass, sit down. Don't be looking at your phone. Like just, I know sometimes you're anxious, sometimes you're doing a lot of things, but it's very important to slow down. But those are the things that bring joy to me. I do breathing exercises before I do personal training every day. So it all depends, like when you get better at delegating, you free up your tanks, you can do that stuff. Guess what? Eight years ago, I couldn't do personal training every day, and I am now I do, guess what? Years ago I couldn't take month long vacations in Europe. Now I do so when you get smarter and you in you and you know how important it is to delegate as much as you possibly can, then you free up your time. And then I create. I come up with new lines of businesses. I, you know, I have these ideas and I I'm Connect. Them with my gut feelings, because you have to be in a state of mind to connect with your intuition too. And when you do, and you have a gut feeling, and I go after it, guess what? It's very successful. So all of these things are very important. That's what I want for all of my clients.

That sounds great. You're in Europe for a month vacation, and you come up with a new line of business. Tell us one of those stories. What is that line of business? And how did it come about? How did you execute it?

So we just launched in person staffing as well. So we're helping law firms who need lawyers, attorneys, paralegals, but they wanted to be US based because they need specific knowledge, you know, like a personal injury comes to us. Hey, I need someone who has litigated for five years. I cannot find that in Latin America, then I'll find it for you in the US and the whole thing. So we brought someone to lead that department. She has 20 years of experience recruiting in the within the legal space. And the cool thing is that all of the vetting and the screening that we do for our virtual staff, we do psychological tasks, those type of things we're also going to be doing for to when we recruit in person, which I know it's a differentiator that other people are not doing, and we're even going to go one step. So we launched the service today. Okay, it's been in the works. It's been launched today. Um, and what I was going to say is that we are going to provide the mental health and the wellness coaching. It's going to be available to all of this, attorneys or paralegals that you work, that you hire from the US, they can also get that support, because that's something our clients have come to us and said, Hey, do you offer this for me or for my other staff? And unfortunately, not. We offer all of that for our virtual staff that it was there that is working for you, but we're extending that to the in person. It's not in person, it's us based staff. We're extending that service as well to them when you work with staffing.

So the virtual staff was more grounded than the in person staff, so now they want your help. But do you remember where those insights came? Like, was there a particular glass of Chianti? Or,

I'm telling you, alcohol free is the best? Alcohol free is when I have when I'm in a state of joy, in a state of there's a name for it. I can remember right now, when you're in the zone, you just eat at home, and then something happens in front of you, and you're like, Ah, I was interviewing someone for for a VP role client success, to add people to our team. And you know, I've, I've had this idea before, because I've had clients come to us and and asking for, hey, I wish you did what you do for in person staff, because I love what you do. I love how you how you mentor the the people, right? And then I'm like, You know what? I just made a decision on my own, you know what? How about we start a new department and you do this and this and that. We have 174 law firms that we can call. You know, they love talking to us, and they need in person staff. And I did that. I made a decision. I didn't consult my partner and but he loved it. He's like, That's amazing. You you shoot from your hip. I

just thought, because you said you came up with these inspirations on vacation, I thought you remember the moment. So you and I are in a unique situation where we work with a lot of attorneys and law firm owners, and we get a chance to see their operations. And a lot of times, when I look from the outside in, it's easy to see some things that they can improve. What are some basic systems recommendations that you would say most law firms don't see because they're in the in the daily muck.

I think having working on having a good intake process, it's something a lot of them lack, and I highly recommend that you put that in place. We help them when, when they work with us, but that's something I see also.

Can you give me, you know, three or four things if your intake is not up to up to snuff, and we see it all the time, and tell our clients, you know, you guys, we have a client right now. They had 51 leads last month, and they only signed two or three cases. They should have signed eight or 10. What are three or four things that they should put in place to improve intake?

It's a good question. Um, I think one of them is, don't hang up the phone. If that's a qualified lead, don't hang up the phone without having that person on schedule already. Whatever your next step is, is your next step. You need them to sign the document, send that document while you're on the phone, confirm is there, and get those that signature is the next step, getting payment for a consultation with the attorney. Get that done. Never, don't, don't, ever call back. Do. That's a no no, like the next step needs to be done during the phone call. I think that's number one. Let me think about another one. I think you need to have strategies to overcome objections. Whatever the objections are, maybe try to understand what is it they're trying to accomplish? What is their goal? What is important to them? And use that for whatever reason, whatever you you need to achieve. Like, let's say, is getting payment work on that. Like, let's say, Oh, they have a dream to become a US citizen. Nothing. How much would you pay for that? That's a dream that imagine your life. How would your life be if you have that isn't that priceless. We're only charging $300 for consultation to change your life. You know you get that? Yeah, that's great. Have different strategies. I also would say, Don't ever say I'm gonna, I'm gonna send a contract for you to sign. No, it's like a document, a facilitating is there's a name I forgot, no, but it's a facilitating document or something that we use authorized authorization, authorize the paperwork. So things like that, you need to to to put in place. But I also have those questions. You need to know how to qualify a client that you want versus a client that you don't want, right? So have those questions. Don't make it too long and qualify them and then get to the next step and then overcome the those objections. That's great. I

love it. Well, Raquel, we've done a great job. We got to the quick one liners at the end, and I've been asking questions on this podcast for 15 years. Hopefully I can answer you know, you're with some famous people who've answered these questions over the years. Okay, I always joked that I interviewed Gary Vaynerchuk before he had a podcast, and he worked in his dad's wine store, and now he has one of the biggest social media podcasts in the world. And I interviewed Jason Calacanis when he was doing a startup and he didn't have a podcast, and now he has the number one podcast in the world. Oh, wow. So you're in, you're following famous footsteps. So, oh, look at that. What? What apps or techniques do you use for personal productivity? Okay,

I don't use apps. I'm the type of person that I'm working, and when I'm not working, I'm really enjoying my time. I'm present with my daughter, with my daughter, with my husband, and present with myself when I'm by myself in nature or doing breathing exercises or reading a book. So I cannot recommend apps, but what I recommend is hire a virtual assistant. That's life changing. I have three virtual assistants dedicated to me, and that is how I replicate myself. So that's a trick. You hire virtual assistants. They're good. They're gonna buy you so much time. That's my trick,

and you love it. I have my first full time virtual assistant. I've had people, you know, doing mail and work for me scheduling for 10 years, but I have a full time VA. How do I use that and how do you recommend other people? Okay, fine. Gosh,

I use, I use them for personal things. I use them for if they need to call my daughter school, if they need to send a payment to my daughter's school, if I if they need to call my insurance company because they're not paying my medical bill. Um, they schedule. They I recently, what was it? Oh, my roofer. They even fight for me, like I had someone come to my house and they charged me $190 and they did nothing. And that infuriates me. Okay, they came here to fix because we have two bags from Sleep, sleep number, I don't know if you know, it's like very high end bread brand, and we have those bread those bags, but they're not working the remotes. And then, which we call this service, they come here. All they do is they inflate. I said, I cannot believe this. I cannot believe this. And then I trained them to fight for me. So I explained the situation. They fought for me, and they got the refund. So those are the types of things that infuriates you when you need people

I love that don't make me mad. I'll stick all three of my VAs on you. Exactly. Okay, best business books. Um,

so the success principles by Jack Canfield. I think it's an old, oldie, but very, very good. That's one I recommend,

great and logs podcasts and youtubes. What do you subscribe to? And when it hits your feed in the morning, you always listen to that. When you whatever doing, you switch

over. Honestly, I'm a bad person for you to ask me that, because usually. I'm listening audibles, or I'm reading a book, unless a good friend of mine, they recommend podcasting things that interest me, self development, health and wellness, like I listen to one about fasting, and now I started doing every other day I fast, and it's incredible. It's the most incredible thing. I don't have aches and pains because I have Lyme disease. I used to have Lyme disease. I'm cured now, but it's highly inflammatory. Lyme is very inflammatory. You have a lot of pains. I couldn't work out for a year. The fasting got me to the finish line of curing myself offline, I would say I don't have any pains. I'm highly energetic. It's hard, it's hard, but those are the things that interest me, and they send it to me here and there. I don't feel like I have time to you know, it's not my thing, so I don't watch you. I barely watch everybody listening

will subscribe to the Tim golden rules of internet marketing for sure when you're hearing this, yeah, just a favor. And you know, we have tons of great guests, like Raquel, just click subscribe on iTunes or Spotify, or if you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe, and it helps us get great guests too, because absolutely look at how many subscribers we have, so thank

you, and it's phenomenal.

Who's your NFL team or sports team?

You might want to delete all of this because I'm so boring. I don't have an NFL I don't watch any games. I am a soccer fan, so my team is called inter probably nobody here knows about my team. Is from the south of Brazil, where I'm from Porto Alegre. And I don't watch many sports. I barely watch any TV. I feel like my time is either working or creating or enjoying life. Sorry. What's

a great introduction for you? Like, if, if we're hearing this, or we're thinking like, Who's Who's the person who can benefit from your company?

It's small. Law Firm owners who are struggling with who want more time to strategize, to grow their business, take their business to the next level, want more time to be able to go on vacations, who feel like they lack support, who are struggling with hiring, who have turnover who are stressed burnout, those are the best introductions for us.

And where can people get in touch with you? Well,

you can go to our website, www, dot, Stafi S T, A, F, I

I S T, A F, I

S T, A F, I dot, C, C,

dot, C, C, awesome. Raquel, this was great. Thank you so much. I learned a lot, and it was a lot of fun. Thank you. I

had fun too. Hope everybody has fun.

Thank you for listening to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms. Podcast. Please send questions and comments to podcast at 10 golden rules.com that is podcast at t e n golden rules.com you.