In today’s legal landscape, operating a brick-and-mortar office might not be the best choice for your business, especially as you scale it. In this episode, Holly Draper and Carrie Tapia will discuss the advantages and challenges of operating a thriving virtual law practice. They will offer advice on how to start and grow your virtual firm and share their insights gained over years operating in this format. 

In this episode you’ll discover:

• The advantages and challenges that operating a virtual firm presents 
• How to maintain office culture when there is no office 
• The necessity of process development and training to ensure efficient and effective representation. 
• Practical advice for starting and growing your practice 

Mentioned in this episode:

• Virtual Law Firm
• AI
• Processes
• Firm Culture
• Scaling

Transcript

Holly Draper: Investing in technology and training for technology from the jump, it can really be helpful, especially in an era where AI is going to rapidly change how law firms function, how lawyers function. If you’re looking at starting something now, you have got to be investing in AI, and systems that you can use that are going to hopefully grow with you and make your practice better, and more enjoyable, for you.

Announcer: You are listening to the Texas Family Law Insiders Podcast, your source for the latest news and trends in family law in the state of Texas. Now here’s your host attorney, Holly Draper.

Holly Draper: Welcome back to the Texas Family Law Insiders Podcast. I am Holly Draper. I am the CEO and managing partner at the Draper Law Firm, and today I’m joined by my partner Carrie Tapia, and we’re going to discuss something we get asked about constantly, and that is how to run, successfully, a remote law firm. So, welcome Carrie. Thank you for joining me today.

Carrie Tapia: Happy to be here.

Holly Draper: So, we’re going to kind of start with what does it mean for a law firm to be remote? You know, I think a lot of people consider their firms hybrid if they are just letting people work from home. Being remote should have certain guardrails and systems and things that make it different from your traditional law firm that has a brick-and-mortar office.

Our firm has been, really, remote since before remote was cool. But COVID changed the ability for everyone, I think, to truly work well remotely. You know, with Zoom we used to periodically have to go into an office to meet with people. It was either meeting with people in person or meeting with them via [00:02:00] telephone call, but Zoom has really changed what that looks like. And now it’s extremely rare that we would ever have to meet with somebody. In an actual office.

So, we’re going to kind of go through some common FAQ’s about operating a remote law firm. If you’re already remote, or you’re considering a remote office, hopefully this episode will be helpful for you. Carrie, why don’t you start us off?

Carrie Tapia: Yeah. So, one question that we receive frequently is, should you have an office, even if you are remote? And the answer is yes, you have to have some type of physical location to receive physical mail. The way that we do it is we have an office at a work-share type location in McKinney, and that’s where most of our mail goes to.

And we also have the ability to use their conference rooms at any of the locations related to that company. And then we also have a mailbox in our Tarrant location where we just receive mail.

Holly Draper: And I mean, I would disagree and say, no, you do not have to have an office [but] you have to have an address. You have to have somewhere that can receive mail.

I know there are places where you can have mail sent and somebody there will check the mail for you, and scan it to you. I personally don’t love that idea just because of confidentiality issues, but not too much goes via snail mail anymore. But, occasionally, something does come that way. So, at our office, one of our remote locations, you know, it’s a suite. But, there is no suite. It’s just a mailbox number, right? If somebody shows up there looking for us, we’re not there, and we have somebody from our office that lives nearby who will go check the mail regularly and then distribute it out electronically to whomever it needs to go to on the team.

Carrie Tapia: Usually OAG notices and court notices. That’s about the only thing we get in the mail.

Holly Draper: And not many court notices anymore..I think, uh, Dallas County might be the only one we see mailing them, and that could be going away. Or we’ll get dismissal notices sometimes… like dismissals. Docket notices, not necessarily that your case was dismissed.

Court people with authority, if you’re listening to me, stop sending stuff by mail. Email everybody. It’s the 21st century. It’s 2026. Let’s move on from snail mail. Let’s let it go the way of the fax machine. But, until that day comes, you do need a physical [address] and you also need a physical [address] when we’re talking about something like Google.

Carrie Tapia: Mm-hmm.

Holly Draper: I’ve had a lot of people question the ability to have a Google listing without a true brick-and-mortar office. I’ve got two Google listings and zero, true, brick-and-mortar offices, so you want to make sure that the virtual office that you’re choosing is something that gives you your own unique address. I think that is really a critical distinction for Google to recognize it and consider you as a legitimate place of business.

People often ask, or they think it’s a, a state of mind. A lot of people think that clients want you to have a brick-and-mortar space, and when I was first getting started, I used to feel like, you know, if I am going to compete with the big boys, I am going to need a fancy brick-and-mortar office. Especially in a post COVID world, that is simply not true.

Every once-in-a-while, and I’m talking a one less than 1% probably of our clients, demand an in-person meeting or they want an in-person consult. Basically, our position and our policy is that if you are the type of person who needs to meet in an in-person office, you are not the client…we are not the law firm for you. And some, especially probably younger lawyers, or people who are newer to setting up their firm, are afraid to do that. But, I can tell you, our firm has been very successful with that model. And you can be too.

Carrie Tapia: I think a lot of clients actually prefer it because then they can just hop on Zoom for a quick hearing-prep meeting with us, or whatever the situation may be that we need to speak or meet, and they don’t have to take the afternoon off of work or something like that. Very rarely does a client need, truly need, to meet in person. And if there’s a reason that I agree, like, “Yes, this should, we should meet in person”, then we have, we can set that up. But it does not come up very often at all. It comes up much less than I think people think it does.

Holly Draper: Yeah, it’s extremely rare. I think another factor that plays into that is so many high-income earners now work remotely. And so it doesn’t, you know, if we’re looking for who is our ideal client and are they going to have a problem with us not having a brick-and-mortar location for meetings? Definitely, they don’t.

Okay. So, another question; people want to know how we stay connected with our team when we are remote.

Carrie Tapia: So. All of our files are on Dropbox, and so everybody, the team obviously, has access to all of our case files on Dropbox. We also have other tools that are saved on Dropbox. We use Slack constantly. Every case has its own channel on Slack, and the people that are on the team for that case are on that channel on Slack. That’s how we communicate about cases throughout the week. We also have other random slack channels such as general, where we talk about the weather, or a Fun Friday channel where we plan what we’re doing for Fun Friday, and just kind of things like that to keep us connected.

We also have regular, in-person, events. As I mentioned, Fun Friday. We do that quarterly. We’ll have a Christmas or holiday celebration every year, and if something exciting happens, sometimes we’ll throw in an extra happy hour to celebrate and get together.

We also have regular communication with the team on Slack and in our docket meetings about bandwidth to monitor everybody’s workload and make sure that they’re not spinning their wheels on something. I often tell people to over communicate. It can be a transition to switch to mostly communicating in writing on Slack versus, you know, yelling at each other down the office or however people communicate in an office building. So, I often tell our new-hires, over-communicate. Tell me more than you think I need to know. And if I don’t need to know something, then I can tell you that we can kind of taper that back. But I can’t hear you crying down the hallway if you’re overwhelmed or upset or frustrated. So, you have to speak up and let us know what’s going on.

Holly Draper: And we also, kind of tacking on a little bit on the slack… every team member has a check-in channel with firm management, and we try to check in on everybody more often than you probably have to do if you’re in a brick-and-mortar because you’re not seeing them every day. You’re not as tuned-in automatically to how they’re doing. Are they stressed out? Are they… do they have… are they twiddling their thumbs? Things like that. So, you know, definitely, communicating a lot is absolutely key. I don’t think you mentioned the Zoom meetings. We have a, we zoom a lot. Every week, every team for the way that we staff cases. We have an upper-level attorney, a junior-level attorney, and a paralegal on every case, and each team will have Zoom meetings every week. We’ll talk about all the cases. We’ll talk strategy. We’ll make sure everything is on track. We’re not missing deadlines… all of those things. But then we will, you know, if there’s something going on, whether it’s related to a case or whether it’s related to a personnel issue or whatever, we’ll often just say, “Hey, can you pop in my zoom room?” Or we’ll put a meeting on calendars so that we just have that time to pop into Zoom, talk about whatever it is, and those things really help keep us connected and I think they work really effectively.

That kind of segues us into talking about systems and, and I know when I started my firm, I started this firm back in end of 2008, and I didn’t know what I didn’t know and had really no idea how you are supposed to set up systems in a law firm. What those look like. And I guarantee you that I’m not alone. So if you’re listening to this and you either have your own firm or you’re thinking about your own firm, or you’re involved in management at your firm, systems are incredibly important.

Whether you are remote or hybrid or in person, what those systems look like can vary based on which of those scenarios applies to your firm. But in a remote firm, having systems is even more important, because you really want everyone…You know, you have a new team member coming on and joining you, and they can’t just sit next to somebody all day and watch what they do. So, by having documented systems that people can… they have to go through the see them, see what they look like. If, ideally, you have a new person come in…[for example] the person who did your intakes is gone. You have a new person come in. They should be able to look at that system and pick up right where the last person left off.

I started working with a business coach back in 2020 and she really helped me learn about systems and figure out what we need and how to get them written down and all of those things. If it’s not something that you already have, it’s definitely something that you need. Especially, even if you’re a true solo, if you want to grow you’re going to have to have systems so that you don’t have to be the one doing everything. Common examples of systems that firms like ours have, you know: Intake. Onboarding and offboarding of clients. Onboarding and offboarding of employees. Deadlines. Calendaring. Communications. Billing. Remote work policies. What technology policies, things, you know, how, what can you do on your computer? What can you not do on your computer? What sort of security do you need? Because we’re not all on the same server or in the same building. So. Those are common.

There’s probably a lot more than you realize there are. When you start creating systems, it, it can be overwhelming and you realize, oh my God, this is a huge, huge project.

Carrie Tapia: It helps with training as well. So, those are more on the administrative side. We also have systems in place for various stages of the case, such as hearing preparation, inventory and appraisement exchange, discovery exchange, trial preparation, mediation preparation. So, having those systems in place helps people be able to know what’s expected of them and help out on a case and make sure that we’re meeting all the client deadlines as well.

Holly Draper: So how do you create systems? That is the number one question when people start thinking about systems. And creating systems is about putting the process on paper, oftentimes, with video showing how to do something.

When I first started creating systems, they were generally Word documents saved in Dropbox, in our systems folder. Now we’ve evolved from that. We use something called Trainual, which is, um, I think it’s really cool. It’s an online system where you can create all your systems, send them out to people, send you know, the paralegals, the systems that are relevant to them. And it’s systems, policies, procedures… all kind of fall under this umbrella.

Announcer: This episode of the Texas Family Law Insiders Podcast is sponsored by the Draper Law Firm, providing family law, appellate representation for non-parent custody cases, jurisdiction issues, property division, standing conservatorship, possession, and access, termination, parental rights, and grandparent access.

For more information, visit draper firm.com or call 469- 715 -6801.

Holly Draper: If you are the person who does the thing that you’re trying to create a system for, which when you’re a solo, that’s you video yourself. There are things out there that screen record. You know, talk through it as you’re videoing what you are doing, and then write those steps down on paper. Um, or you know, virtually if you’re using something like Trainual.

There’s other systems out there, system hub Notion. Um, systemology, which is a really good book to understand systems. They have a system, system you can use. If you’re small, you probably don’t need them yet. You know, we started with just our basic Word documents, but now we’re plugging them in as we’re growing and getting bigger. If you are not a solo and you have other people on your team, it is really helpful to have others on the team help you create your systems. You know, the person who’s been doing the billing for the last three years probably can very easily get that down on paper, do a video explaining how to do it. Then, maybe, have someone else try and do it based on that system and see where the holes are and get them plugged in.

With Trainual, there’s a way people can leave comments on something. So when I send it out to people and they think. This is their area of expertise and they notice something is missing or something is wrong, they’ll chime in with a comment and we’ll get that fixed. Or if somebody new is doing it and they don’t understand it, we say, please leave us comments. Because if you don’t understand it, the next person might not understand it either, and we want to make sure it is very user-friendly and understandable. And we’ll also, you know, we have a new person come on board. Say, if you don’t find it in Trainual and it’s something you need to know how to do, tell us. Because we will use this opportunity to create a system for whatever it is.

And systems can be something super short. Like we have one about how to put on base labels on documents, or how to put an exhibit sticker on A PDF to something significantly more detailed and complex. You know how to do an inventory appraisement, how to exchange. Do discovery responses, things like that. And by having systems, that’s really what can allow law firms to scale because you can add more people and not have the immense amount of work of training them. The work is already done and they just have to go through those systems and trainings the way.

Carrie Tapia: So another question that we frequently receive is “how do you know if people are actually working?” Um, and that is, you know, something that we keep track of pretty closely. What we found helps is if you set, um, clear expectations. So one of our expectations is contemporaneous billing, and then we monitor that daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly to make sure that all targets are being met. We mentioned earlier that we, the check-in channel for each person, and if we notice on there that their hours are too high or too low, we check in and say, you know, what’s going on? Do you need more work? Or do you have too much work? Um, and things like that to make sure that the work is being spread out.

We also work on having accountability without micromanaging, you know, and we’ll get into a little bit about hiring, but we’re hiring people that are able to be autonomous and make sure that they’re getting their work done and do not need a lot of micromanaging. Um, so that is helpful as well.

Holly Draper: Over time, you know, we’ve been remote for years and we’ve had a lot of employees come and go over the years. It has been very rare that we had somebody that wasn’t actually working. You know, I can think of maybe once, one or two specific examples of people that did not work effectively as remote workers. But most people do. I think, um, you know, and this kind of leads us into the next topic of hiring in a remote firm.

I think you can tell. I can tell when I am interviewing someone whether they are going to be a good fit for a remote law firm or not. Typically, attorneys are. Not everybody wants to be remote. Not everyone likes to be remote. Um, some people find it too isolating and they want to be around people, but most attorneys I think, can work really well in a remote environment. Where we’ve seen problems has been more paralegal or staff level where they’re not as autonomous. They’re not used to being as autonomous, and if you’re not there to pop in their door regularly, there are no guarantees that they are working.

So how can you screen candidates for those types of issues?

Carrie Tapia: We do our, um, interviews via Zoom, as well. And so, you can tell how somebody is on Zoom. That’s how that they’re going to be working for you. Because we were working on Zoom and so we ask behavioral questions about how they typically handle deadlines, how they typically handle any perceived conflict within their firm or people that they’re working with. And we ask these questions to try and weed out those that would not be a good fit for working remotely.

We also look for red flags in both the hiring process and as a new hire. If it’s someone that seems that they need constant reassurance, they struggle with written communication or they blame lack of direction if they’re being confronted with not completing something, then they’re probably not going to be a good long-term fit for remote office.

And again, as we said earlier. Remote employees thrive on autonomy. We need people that are self-motivated. We need people that are self-directed to an extent and have the drive inside of them to be a good employee and a good attorney paralegal, receptionist, or whatever their role may be. It does take some internal drive to be able to work remotely because no one’s looking over your shoulder to make sure that you’re sitting at your desk doing what you’re supposed to be doing at any given time.

Holly Draper: Yeah. And on my list of questions that I ask in interviews, you know, I always ask about any experience people have working remotely and for them to tell me about that. What was that like or what is that like in their current role? Uh, usually people who are younger and went to school during COVID, either college or law school, whatever, high school, um, have a lot of experience with remote and, but somebody who maybe is not so tech savvy and has been in the traditional game for a really long time, might struggle more with it. So you want to ask the right questions to find out how they feel about it, what kind of experience do they have.

I know some people who will not hire someone that does not have experience working remotely. That’s not our philosophy generally. But I think asking those questions is important. And asking things like if I assign you to. Respond to discovery. Tell me what steps you’re going to take, and seeing if they know what the steps are, if they do, they talk about. Constantly getting information from a supervisor or do they know like, these are the steps I’m going to take to get it out the door.

You know, somebody who’s self-motivated has good communication skills, good about follow up and comfortable with technology. If you are not comfortable with technology, I mean, a remote firm is going to basically be paperless, and you may print something out once in a blue moon because you’re taking it to court, but you are not keeping paper files. You are, everything is happening online and you’ve got to have a certain level of comfort with technology.

Moving on to culture, this is a question that I would say we get asked frequently when we are interviewing people who are considering coming here. They want to know about the culture, like how do you create a culture?

Carrie Tapia: Right. So we do acknowledge that we still have to build a firm culture and that it doesn’t just happen. Maybe as organically as it would happen if we were all in the same building. So we’re very intentional about that. As we said earlier, we have regular video meetings in addition to our docket meetings. Um, if there is something that maybe needs to be discussed, we’ll say, Hey, you know, let’s hop on Zoom. Let’s have a conversation. We also have regular check-ins with team members, um, new hires. We have a partner meet with them quarterly just to make sure that they know what’s expected of them. They don’t have any questions. Just give them that platform to. Get feedback.

We also communicate almost constantly on Slack and I written communication can be difficult when you’re, especially when you’re talking about building, building a culture, because sometimes people have the tendency to read into something that was not intended by the person that typed it. I tell people frequently, try to just take it for the words that it says, don’t project tone or intent or anything like that. And don’t get offended based off of a message in Slack that somebody might have just sent really quickly and was not intending… However, it is that you’re interpreting that message. And if you do have a concern, bring it up. Don’t just let it fester. Bring it up. Ask to hop on Zoom, ask to have that conversation.

We also have clear values and expectations as that goes back to the systems piece of it. Um, we have all of those expectations and our values spelled out really clearly, and they go through all that on the train. And so there should not be any surprises about what is expected of people.

We try to celebrate wins publicly. We have a general Slack channel where we try to drop things in there, like, oh, so and so did a great job at this trial, or so and so, you know, killed this depo, or whatever the case may be, to give people that, that feedback publicly. We also, as we said, have lots of in-person events, holiday parties, happy hours, Fun Friday. And then we recently implemented an opportunity for employees to give anonymous feedback to management about what is and isn’t working about various aspects of the way that we’re running the firm right now, so that we can continue improving. And that was very recent, but it does seem like that was very much appreciated and we got some very helpful feedback from that.

Holly Draper: Yeah. Well, it can be hard as. A manager or a law firm owner to get feedback, particularly on management level things. So, finding a way to allow people to give feedback, especially anonymously. If you can…, the smaller you are, the harder that is. And obviously certain types of feedback, it’s obvious who it’s coming from. Um, but. People are more likely to give honest feedback if they believe that it is anonymous.

And I think both of us were surprised by some of the feedback. Yes, yes. Both positively and negatively. Uh, and realize that, okay, this is how you get better. This is how you grow and make this, you’re giving employees some ownership into what’s happening in the firm and making it better, because everybody wants it to be a great place to work, and by taking into account feedback like that, it really can help make everybody better, make the firm better.

Carrie Tapia: Right. And you’re listening to this and you think that you don’t need that because you have an open-door policy. I thought we did too. And so I think, I still think we do for the most part, but I think that giving them that additional platform to give feedback was very helpful.

Holly Draper: Yeah, I agree a hundred percent. Last topic, kind of wanted to go through that. I know a lot of people out there might be thinking about going solo, thinking about starting their own firm or thinking about ditching the office. You know, what would we do differently if we were starting from scratch? I mean, I would say. Document your systems from the beginning. Even if you are a true solo, most people don’t want to stay that way forever, and they want, you know, whether it’s even just somebody answering the phones or a paralegal or whatever, document the way you want things done from the beginning, then it’s not such a huge job when you try to do it later.

If you are not a solo, one of the hardest things to learn as a boss is to fire faster if things aren’t working. And that’s probably even more true in a remote setting if it is obvious that someone actually isn’t working. You know, we have an expectation that people are logged in between nine and five unless they mark themselves out. But if we can’t get ahold of them ’cause they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, be ready to pull the trigger.

And you know, investing in technology and training for technology from the jump, it can really be helpful. Especially in an era where AI is going to rapidly change what, how law firms function, how lawyers function. You know, if you’re looking at starting something now, you have got to be investing in AI and systems that you can use that are going to hopefully grow with you and, you know, make your practice better and more enjoyable for you.

Hopefully we gave you some good tips today about working remotely, having a remote law firm, what has worked for us, and things that we’ve learned along the way. So, you know, thanks for hopping on with me today, Carrie, and thanks to our listeners as always, for being here, listening and/or watching us.

If you enjoyed this podcast, please go subscribe and leave us a review to enjoy future episode.

Announcer: The Texas Family Law Insiders Podcast is sponsored by the Draper Law Firm. We help people navigate divorce and child custody cases, and handle family law and appellate matters.

For more information, visit our website at www. draperfirm.com