Center Stage
A podcast featuring interviews with small business owners and industry experts to help you solve the marketing and business development challenges that come with running your own firm.
Center Stage
How Law Firm Owners Can Take Back Their Time feat. Colleen Young (with special guest, Joe Bravo)
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⏳ Most law firm owners don’t need more hours in the day. They need to stop doing everything themselves.
Colleen Young and Joe Bravo from Get Staffed Up break down one of the biggest hidden problems in solo and small law firms: attorneys spending their time on the wrong work. From scheduling and administrative tasks to mishandled intake, they explain how many lawyers unknowingly become the bottleneck in their own firm.
In this conversation, they share how the right hires, the right delegation, and treating intake like a true revenue role can completely change the trajectory of a law firm. If you’ve ever felt buried in work while your firm struggles to grow, this episode will show you what it actually takes to reclaim your time and build a practice that runs better without you.
You can get in touch with Colleen and Joe here:
If you want to strategize your firm's marketing, speak with our team:
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Copyright © 2026. Spotlight Marketing + Branding
It's different for every attorney, right? But when you start feeling the weight and the smile goes off your face and it's no longer fun to practice law, that's when it's time.
SPEAKER_02Welcome back to Center Stage Podcast. My name is Danny Decker, and we have two great guests for you guys today. I'm really excited about this conversation, joined by Colleen Young, who's the CMO at Get Staffed Up, as well as Joe Bravo, who is the senior community coordinator at Get Staffed Up. So, Colleen and Joe, welcome to the podcast. Thank you guys both for being here.
SPEAKER_01Dude, we're going to set the bar high too and say that, you know, now you've talked us up, man. Now I now I'm feeling the pressure.
SPEAKER_02Now I'm feeling pressure. Love it. Well, we're gonna have we're gonna have a great conversation. So let's just start here. You know, obviously uh we've been connected at Spotlight, we've been connected to Get Staffed Up for quite a while. You guys have been on the show before. So I don't think you are uh strangers to our audience. But that said, uh for those that have not heard of Get Staffed Up, um, Colleen, do you want to maybe just give a quick overview? What is Get Staffed Up? What do you guys do?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, happy to get staffed up, and and I want, you know, attorneys across all disciplines to understand we're a resource, right? Um, we specialize in modern staffing solutions. So eight administrative positions that you can help uh build your law firm with strategically. Um we use talent from Latin America and South Africa. Um we are your go-to for anything that you need help with with respect to those administrative positions, right? There's a lot of attorneys out there, Danny, that, as you well know, they need help growing their law firm, but they've never hired anyone before, right? And hiring is a skill. So one of the things we do at Get Staffed Up is we can do a custom requisition. You tell us what you need, and we will go out and look for the ideal executive assistant, marketing assistant, legal assistant, case manager. So that's that's kind of it in a nutshell, right?
SPEAKER_02Love it. And and Joe, you're the senior community coordinator. So what exactly does that mean? What do you spend your time doing? It gets staffed up.
SPEAKER_00You know, I'm one of the lucky ones that gets to spend time with everybody. Um, because I'm in the community space, I get a chance to interact uh face to face with our future or potential new clients. I get to interview and talk to people like you uh because we've also had like past history. I I know that Spotlight branding also had uh a staff from get staffed up at some point. I was able to meet some of them. I'm I'm able to talk to people at events, network, help organize, sponsor dinners, you know, everything just to put on a good ambience so that we can have an honest conversation. So again, I'm one of the lucky ones that gets to have that face-to-face time. And in a virtual staffing company, and there's a lot of us, I am one of the few that has the chance to meet them. I I've met Colleen in person, which is something that I love. I met you and your team in person as well. Uh funny enough, I haven't met the ones that came from Mexico, but I do have a close relationship with your director of operations, which I know she's fantastic. So that's kind of what I do. I weave myself into different relationships so that we can have great conversations.
SPEAKER_02Love that. Love that. And and and you're right, Joe. We have been, you know, at Spotlight Marketing Branding, we've been uh clients of yours and big fan of really building a team, you know, using using that model, right? We have about 25 people on our team and a little more than half are here in Charlotte and half are in Latin America. And um, you know, we couldn't be more thrilled with the the talent that um that you guys have helped us find. It's it it's fantastic. Um so, you know, that said, Colleen, I'll turn back to you with this question. As a law firm, you know, we have a lot of solo small firms, including true solos who are who are listening to this show and are maybe just starting to feel the pain of having too much work on their plate and not being able to get you know everything done every day. And and you mentioned you guys have kind of eight different roles that that you staff. So what is the first role that you know a solo off from thinking about making their first hire should should look to fill?
SPEAKER_01You know, when we look and talk with the solos, right, across any discipline, one of the things we do is we ask them, make a list, right? And it sounds so simple, but make a list of everything that you do during the day. And once they start doing that, we say, okay, now how many hours a day are you spending on your calendar? And literally it's hours. How many, how many hours a day are you spending answering emails, scheduling appointments, right? And you know, we found, Danny, that most of the time the first position that we recommend is an executive assistant. And frankly, it is just because, you know, the attorneys are taking away their billable hours and focusing on, you know, honestly, the things that are $10 an hour tasks. You know? So and and I would be remiss if I didn't give Joe a shout out, right? Because Joe, Joe has worked with me now for almost three years and and he survived. So if there's anybody, because some people are like, Do you s how do you survive working with her? Joe is the most outstanding example of what talent in Latin America. Joe's an attorney by trade. Um, we were fortunate enough to have him start with get staffed up, but that is an example of the talent, right? And Joe has gone above and beyond. So when you're asking me, you know, what's the first position, we'd say executive assistant. Um, and and not that Joe plays that role, but Joe is like my keeper. Like when Joe and I travel, he's he's my keeper. And I can I have peace of mind because I have Joe, which is on my side. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Amazing. Love that. Very cool. So, Colleen, we were having some conversation just a moment ago before we before we hit record, kind of about the impact that AI is having in the in the legal space, right? And and obviously, you know, I I imagine that's near and dear to your heart just because a big part of what you guys do at Get Staffed Up is help unlock productivity for uh for your for your clients and whether that is is helping them by literally providing staff members, or or I imagine you also have some thoughts on how AI can can can change productivity. So, so let's talk, let's let's kind of step in there for a minute. How are you seeing attorneys um deal with and leverage AI, you know, as we record this? It's February 19th and 2026.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, as soon as as soon as like February 20th hits, everything's outdated, right? So I'm not proud of this, but I gotta say it, right? When I started marketing, it was like on stone tablets, right? I've seen, I'm that old where like, and I've seen the evolution of marketing. And and one of the things that I can remember is when the internet first came out, right? Everybody was like, we want to go online and we want to go to a search engine and we want something, but we don't know what we want, and we don't know what to type in to get what we want back. And right now we're seeing a lot of attorneys struggle with that same thing when it comes to AI. There are so many different forms of AI and attorneys really need to focus on the generative, right? And and what really they can do with the generative AI to get content for various things, right? Um, so like I'll have attorneys ask me, hey, what do we type into Chat GPT as a prompt to get what we want? And my first question to them is do you have a marketing plan for your law firm? And they'll say, Well, no. And I'll say, okay, do you have a team that you are using outside of your firm to help you with a marketing plan? And sometimes the answer is yes, and sometimes the answer is no. And frankly, I encourage a solo to use an outside marketing firm, right? Because they didn't go to law school to be marketing people. But the key to using AI alongside an outside marketing firm, in my opinion, is you sit with that outside firm and you say, okay, when it comes to Chat GPT, when you guys get me the strategy or I help you build the strategy through AI with a prompt, right? How do I execute? Because I probably haven't gone to get staffed up yet and got my marketing assistant because I just started with my executive assistant, right? So what I'm seeing is, okay, they don't know how to write a prompt. They don't know which AI to use, right? And then I always say, well, okay, if you're not going to use an outside source, because I I understand that, go right into Chat GPT and literally type a prompt. I need a marketing plan. The marketing plan I want to consist of social media, um, you know, Google ads and other content that I can do on social media and have it bring out and really describe their audience, right? And I'm sure you've seen this, Danny, in your experience. There are so many lawyers that are trying to practice every type of law and be everything to everybody. And one of the things when you use AI is you really have to be concise and you really have to know where you want to focus, right? So if you do 15 different things in your criminal defense uh practice, focus on one that's going to generate the revenue and work with AI to build the content for that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. No, that's really smart. And you know, I would step back to the sort of the very first issue you raised, which is, you know, there are a lot of attorneys and really folks in general too, not just attorneys, who just really aren't sure how to use AI tools yet. And and one of the pieces of advice I got very early on was like, hey, stop thinking about it like a search engine. Think of it as like a really smart person and just ask. So if if you don't know how to use AI to do XYZ, literally just ask it. Like, start by asking and it will tell you. And that is a really great place to start. I also like what you talked about just in terms of content creation. And you know, one of the things we have leaned into very heavily over the last year at Spotlight Marketing and Branding is AI search is now becoming a very legitimate marketing channel for law firms. The the data on this is crazy. Um, Google, Google organic search declined last year for like the first time ever. And not only because of Chat GPT, but one major trend that is happening is people are now going to ChatGPT and they are asking for recommendations. They're looking for law firms using ChatGPT Grok, Gemini, Perplexity in cases where three years ago they were using Google. So that is one of our big focuses as we work with with law firms this year is helping law firms position themselves so that Chat GPT recommends them because um it's it's the data is just it is impossible to ignore. It's happening really, really fast. Joe, do you have any thoughts on that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's just that you know, I keep remembering the newsletter that you sent, and I keep remembering all the different caveats, all the different things that you share there. For example, knowing that Chat GPT was able to accomplish what Google took 10 years to accomplish. That's data that we got from you. So just by getting your newsletter, I know exactly where you're coming from because you do share this publicly. You let everybody know this is what's happening, this is what's in trend, and this is where you need to focus on. It's just beautiful that not only do you give that out for free, but you also work with your clients, and we also work with our clients so that you can position yourself better. The thing about AI is you gotta know how to use it. It's a tool, you know, exactly what you said, you gotta use AI tools, which is kind of like a new thing. And I'm just like giving a shout-out to that uh newsletter, you know.
SPEAKER_01Love that. Same. And I gotta tell you, again, um, I don't know if Yin's guys remember, and I just said Yin's guys, so my Western Pennsylvania is showing. But one of the things that we used to try to do back in the day is if you, you know, get in the newspaper and be above the fold, then Google came along, and Google was like, you know, you gotta be in the top three and the on the first page of Google. And like you can tell now, it doesn't, you just gotta be in those AI search results because nobody, nobody is moving that cursor down past those AI search results, right? And the more attorneys can get relevant content, testimonials, and anything that is educational on their sites and in their content, it's gonna help them get up higher in that AI search result, right? 100%. You know, and and that's like I can't stress it enough. Dude, that's a skill that like savvy marketing people can do for you. Just let, if there is any recommendation to attorneys, please just let every attorney right now at the NEAs, you well know, is being told be the face of your brand, especially if they're a PI attorney, right? Be the face of your brand, be the right, and we've got attorneys being pulled to be on social media and doing all this filming and doing all this. Joe sees it all the time, it shows. Like, like it looks like a line of reporters with all the attorneys trying to do their own content. And that's great, but but you and your role and everything, you guys know what type of content you need to generate to get into the AI search results, right? So, you know, why beat your head against the wall, right? Use the really smart person, right? And and get up higher on those by having great content.
SPEAKER_02100%. So one of the reasons I love you know working with you guys and love the relationship we have with you guys is is transitioning slightly into the intake conversation here because, you know, as you maybe can imagine, as as a as a marketing agency, right? We have 200-ish law firms that we work with all over the country. And, you know, we do we do a number of different services. We do a lot of content marketing, we do AI search optimization. We also run lead generation campaigns for for clients using Facebook ads and sometimes Google ads, right? And so lead generation is part of what we do. And one of the, you know, over the years, um, one of the most important handoffs that I believe has to happen to make a law firm really unlock growth is that handoff between marketing and sales. And when a lead is generated, um, what does the intake process look like? Like we can't afford to wait a week before somebody at the law firm reaches out to that hot lead that just came in, because by then they've already hired somebody else, right? And so when we work with law firms and and they're interested in lead generation, the first question we ask them is what does your intake process look like? And there's a surprise, maybe not surprising to you guys, but surprising to me initially, it's it's surprising how many law firms really don't have anybody in that intake role. And that is, in my opinion, just one of the biggest missed opportunities, right? When you don't have anyone doing intake focused on intake, you're just missing out on a huge amount of opportunity. So I'd love to turn it over to you guys. You know, how do you approach filling that intake specialist role specifically?
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Um and I'm gonna let Joe speak to this too, because he he's he sees everything firsthand when he's you know at events and things like that. But but not only has marketing changed over the years, but sales has changed. And the big conversation now with sales, and and and I can't say it strong enough, intake is sales. Right? It's intake because you're hoping that you're getting inbound, you know, from your leads, from your marketing. But but intake is a sales job. Okay, and we've even seen it get staffed up. It used to be right that again, man, this podcast, I it's great, but I'm showing my age like way too much. It used to be that people would do direct mail, okay? And and that went by the wayside because everybody got email, right? And and then email was email marketing, email marketing, email marketing. And now email marketing, there's so much clutter, right? That our sales team has said, you know what we got to get back to, and it's picking up the phone. It's picking up the phone and calling people. So I'm a solo attorney and my practice is starting to grow. The last thing that I have time to do is outreach, right? Like I've got to focus on strategy, I've got to focus on networking with the right people to get clients, right? What I can't focus on is doing outbound calling. So for us, the intake process is okay, you've got leads, the leads need followed up on with a phone call. Like gone are the days of, well, we're just gonna send that lead an email and see how they react, right? It's it's it's now we've got to pick up the phone and call people and really take that lead from being what I call a warm lead and expanding to making sure for the attorney they're gonna do a paid consultation with you, right? And that they are ready to buy, right? Whatever type of practice area that you're practicing, you know, obviously with you know, PI criminal defense, there's an immediate need. They're calling you for an immediate need. And if you don't answer the phone with your receptionist, then you've lost that, right? But when it comes to like divorce and family law, estate planning, totally different. Because as an estate planning attorney, I know my target market is shopping around. So if I don't have somebody responding or outbound calling to a different demographic, other than the traditional demographic of an estate planning attorney or what we think the demographic is, then your intake is broken already. Right? But Joe, you see it from such a different point of view, which I think is fantastic. And that is okay, attorneys are coming to you asking about intake, and they do they even understand intake?
SPEAKER_00Well, what I've seen is uh, and let me take a step back and talk about how I used to see it when I joined the company. When I joined GetStuck, I had no idea what this was. All right. I had no idea what that position would specifically entail. It took me a little bit to understand, like, okay, it turns out intake deals with such things as conversion rates. That if you have a free consultation, you want to have a 100% uh turnover rate there because you you you want to get all of those people who want to have that free conversation with you talking to you. But you also need to weed out the ones that are not, you need to weed out the people who are just like looking for anything other than doing business with you, and that's why intake is such an important position. And sometimes what I've started to realize is that the attorneys that I speak with sometimes they understand that and they come in directly saying, Okay, if I want to hire somebody that does intake for me, I need them to have a sales snack, you know, taking it back to what Danny just said, it's such an important sales position because you gotta be able to qualify who the right person is to talk to the attorney, to talk to somebody that's already billing more than $10 an hour. And the funny thing about doing this from offshore, if you don't mind me saying this, but also works with any position anywhere, you know, when you staff yourself up with anybody, is that you're able to focus. The attorney gets is able to focus their time where it really matters, and when people from offshore or other systems take care of this, then it's a fair trade. I can tell you that because I live that. It's something that I can do now boiling it down to me becoming an intake specialist for a firm is more than a decent job and more than a decent opportunity. And a lot of people, at least from offshore, we have no idea what this is. But once we face it, once we come across this and we have the the the skills for that, then it's just smooth sailing from there. And I'd like to just mention real quick something about AI there because also there are a lot of AI systems that are being used for intake, but I'm starting to notice they're being used for intake overflow or to gatekeep the time of either the receptionist or a great inter intake person who's gonna be able to identify who's the right fit for the firm. Now, sometimes lawyers know that the people that I meet that that want to get stuffed up with intake specialists, sometimes they know this is exactly what they need to expect from their intake specialists, but many times they don't. So a little bit of a guidance, uh a little bit of guidance, a little bit of onboarding on what you should you should expect and what are the metrics that this person or this physician needs is also something that comes in handy.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a great point too, because it goes back to the way an attorney uses AI and and how they should be strategic about it, right? Like I did medical marketing prior to coming to get staffed up and I worked. for um a medium sized orthopedic uh practice so our target market was 60 plus okay and when you're dealing with a target market like that sometimes the online chats and the ai bots are not what you need right and if you're uh making stuff up right if i'm an estate planning attorney here in michigan and i have two demographics two avatars right one being uh 65 plus and one being you know 50 plus there's gonna be a huge difference in the way I need to handle my intake right and you know you you may need that more personal touch for an older demographic so you know a lot of people are like oh my gosh ai is gonna replace you know such and such and such it's it's not it's a tool to help you with things right and that AI can help you with the 50 plus and saying okay here's the qualifications right now I've got a qualified lead right now it goes to the human with your intake specialist and and for those that are 65 plus they still need an intake specialist because you need the body on the phone after your receptionist talks to them, qualifies them, then you're giving it to your intake specialist who's going to help take it the extra mile.
SPEAKER_02I think that's great. You know one one point I want to be sure we make because this is something I see a lot is I I am a big believer that there really needs to be a dedicated intake person. And what I sometimes see not sometimes often see is you know when we have a conversation with the law firm about what their intake team looks like it's somebody who has intake bolted on to their their other responsibilities, right? So it's like, oh yeah, this paralegal also does the intake or this this office manager also does the intake and what really inevitably happens I've seen it pretty much every single time that I've dug in is that for that person, intake falls to the bottom, right? Because let's be honest, like if that's not your main focus, it's not the most fun thing in the world to return calls, right? And so what typically happens is it ends up getting pushed to the bottom of the to-do list, which as we all know means it just doesn't get done. Right. And so when we dig into it we find, you know, wow these leads that came in you know three days ago have not been followed up with and it's like goodness gracious like we're spending we're spent you're spending money we're spending time we're generating these leads and um you know and then it's like we got to the five yard line but then dropped the ball before we got into the end zone. And it's it's it's so so all that to say, you know, I love that you guys actually source intake specialists for law firms and and I think it's really important for everybody listening, you know, if somebody at your firm is not dedicated to the intake role um there's a really good chance that you're missing out missing out on revenue. So love that you guys do that. Listen this has been a really great conversation time flies. We're gonna have to have you guys back on again to because we've really only scratched the surface but here's where I want to leave it for today. I'd really love to hear both of your take on this question. So you know again we have a lot of true solos listening to this show who don't have anybody on their team yet and and so what is the time right and Joe I'll ask you first what at what point what are the signs that it is time for a solo to make their first hire well I I love that the other asked that question because I've heard it from many many attorneys in the past um I think the time is now the thing is you're focusing on doing everything yourself.
SPEAKER_00So taking it back to this marketing intake conversation how much are you spending how much are you investing on marketing to not have those leads attended you know you're you're you're wasting money there you're losing opportunities because those are future clients that nobody's speaking with and they already spoke with someone else and because you're doing everything yourself that's when you start to realize well what happens if I bring somebody on board which I know is the toughest hire because if you're true solo then this and and people love that and don't get me wrong I I know people who really enjoy being a one person army okay but you're also truly alone and the moment you bring someone else in and you start delegating you know if you first you start tasking and then you start delegating then turns out you can focus on making it rain and you can focus on making your business or turning your business turning your law firm into a business because this is not something that was taught at law school and I know many attorneys have heard that over and over you know they never taught me this at law school they never taught me how to run a business at law school and turns out that for you to grow your business you need to add people to it. You need to bring someone else in so you can focus on what's important and trust them with also very important responsibilities but not something that should be worthy of your time when it comes to lawyering you know you be the lawyer and let someone else take some of the burden off and you'll start seeing more money coming in.
SPEAKER_01That's yeah yeah and I I think for me it's like you know I was thinking about you know an attorney and they graduate law school they go to either a large or medium sized law firm and they're for about they're there practicing for about five to seven years. And it's that seven year itch where they're starting to say you know this is not what I thought it was going to be right and and they strike out as a solo and they hang their shingle and it's about six months into it and they start to realize uh uh oh I'm working 80 hours a week again that's why I left the big law firm I'm working 70 hours and and I'm wearing so many different hats right and I'm looking at my bottom line revenue and it's not where I want it to be and that that touches on Joe's point right that that first hire is very scary because you think to yourself how am I going to pay this person? What if I what if I can only keep them for a few months and then what right um and and that's what I meant by get staffed up can be your partner right we're gonna sit down we're gonna have a conversation we're gonna say okay where are you where are you at with your firm? And they're gonna say well I'm pulling my hair out right now and it's not enjoyable and I thought it was going to be something different when I started my own firm. What are you doing? Well I'm I'm doing my emails and then I'm trying to answer the phone and then I'm trying to do some marketing because I'm supposed to be the face of my brand and then I'm trying to go to this conference and then I'm trying to get new clients and that's where that list comes in right and that that writing that list and doing that little evaluation with an external partner can be really helpful.
SPEAKER_02So it's a timeframe it's different for every attorney right but when you start feeling the weight and the smile goes off your face and it's no longer fun to practice law that's when it's time that love that love that well amazing thank you both for being on the show this was really helpful I I think uh I think it was a great conversation we do need to bring you back for a part two before I let you run um Colleen for folks that want to learn more about you guys how do they do that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah getstaffed up dot com and and you know send us a quick email you can send a quick email to me calling young uh calling.yo at getstaffed up dot com again treat us as a resource it's it's we're here to help we've got years of staffing experience right ask us the questions we'll we'll help you wonderful thank you guys both for being on the show yeah thanks thank you thank you then