This week on the show we have Devon Rood Slovensky, owner of Slovensky Law PLLC, a Family Law practice in Roanoke VA. In today’s episode we’ll discuss quality control when it comes to hiring a company to handle your calls, outsourcing your mail, challenges of being a female firm owner, and when to call good enough.
https://slovenskylaw.com/
Hacking’s Hack:
Read the book “In Praise of Slowness” by Carl Honore
https://www.amazon.com/Praise-Slowness-Challenging-Cult-Speed/dp/0060750510
Tyson’s Tip:
Hire out for things that you know you won’t do. Contract it out.
Devon’s Tip:
Take time to engage with your clients, it makes a huge difference with client relationships and case anxiety.
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Transcripts: “Lego Block Outsourcing” with Devon Slovensky
Devon Slovensky
I want to keep high quality paralegals and Associates in the office. I don’t necessarily want to be bogged down with training and supervising somebody scanning the mail. The receptionist at Smith can do such a better job at maintaining the emotional tenor that’s necessary to answer the phone than someone else who’s bogged down in the work of the firm and needs to be a little bit more emotionally neutral when it comes to just getting a task done.
Unknown Speaker
Run your law firm the right way. This is the maximum lawyer podcast, podcast your hosts, Jim hacking and Tyson nutrix. Let’s partner up and maximize your firm.
Jim Hacking
Welcome to the show. Welcome back to the maximum lawyer Podcast. I’m Jim hacking. And I’m Tyson nutrix. What’s up Jimmy? Oh, Tyson, I just was talking to our guests about my awesome trip to Morocco. It’s funny, we didn’t share any of the photos or anything on social media while we were gone because we didn’t want people to know that we were on another continent. And I’m just sort of tweeting them out or sending them out little by little. And everybody thinks I’m still there. So it’s been sort of funny.
Unknown Speaker
Your photos I told you before they’re awesome. And in part of it is it’s that awesome new iPhone, but the pictures are just so cool.
Jim Hacking
Yeah, the colors were amazing. We went to this one town called chef, Chef Shaolin, which is known as the Blue City. All the buildings are. The colors just came back really nicely.
Unknown Speaker
I think that’s the thing that I liked the most about the colors of the picture. It was just so cool. And I think it’s, I was a little envious. I was a little jealous, though. So one of the things you made me jealous. So pretty cool.
Jim Hacking
It’s a really easy trip. It’s only a six hour flight from New York City. So it was totally doable. We, we had a great time. And it was good. Good to get away. But our guest today is Devin Sliwinski. She’s an active member in the Facebook group. She has lots of good advice for people. So I reached out to her last week to see if she was interested in coming on the show. And she graciously has. So Devin, thanks for being here with us.
Devon Slovensky
Thank you for having me. I’m glad to be here with you, Jim and Tyson, you guys have put together a really great group and it has helped my law practice tremendously.
Unknown Speaker
That’s awesome to hear. I every time I hear that, it makes me feel great. So that’s awesome. So tell us a little bit about yourself about your firm and how you got to the
Devon Slovensky
door. So I came here through a pretty unintended path. I was a legal aid attorney, I came out of law school at a time when the economy was really down. That was not necessarily the first thing I wanted to do. But I got a job as a legal aid attorney here in Roanoke, Virginia worked there for three years. I decided, you know, I thought we’d there could be some new ways to help serve lower income folks. So after putting a lot of thought into it, I started a nonprofit organization that was designed to help lower income folks get access to legal services. And I did that for a little while. And on the back end of that I thought you know, not everything I want to do is going to be nonprofit oriented. So I started another law practice on the side that I never intended to do a whole lot with actively and that was Sliwinski law, the nonprofit ended up taking 15 months instead of average three to get it’s 1023 approval, it’s IRS 501 C three approval, and we ran out of funding in the meantime. So I decided I was going to make a go with Sliwinski law was never my intention off the bat. But here I was I had got back from a trip to London and had to make some tough decisions. And I decided I always wanted to be an entrepreneur. And that was the thing for me to do. So I’ve learned a lot about family law and law school and decided that was going to be my gig, I spent a lot of time reading up on technology and putting systems together to try to run an effective law practice. And that’s how I got where I am now.
Jim Hacking
So when did become the main focus.
Devon Slovensky
So I got back from a six week trip to London in about December of 2017. I was there with the American Inns of Court. When I got back from that that’s when I had to make those tough decisions that I went full time with Lipinski law after settling down the nonprofit December of 2017.
Jim Hacking
So what did it look like when you started in 2017? And what does it look like now?
Devon Slovensky
Back in 2017, it was me with no money in the bank because we had gone through everything trying to put the nonprofit together. It was me in a little tiny office by myself. Just hoping I could get clients to knock on the door and waiting for them to come running. And now I’ve gotten to a point where we can’t handle all the people coming in. I have gone through waxes and wanes and stuff and I’m a little bit more on the contractor of that right now and that really ties into a little bit of what I want to talk about today about building a more robust law practice. And I think that’s a big part of it too is being a little bit less reliant on employees and using your contractors as much as you can and understanding you know, the places for each for each of this type of person. So, you know, we went from almost no revenue to a decent amount of revenue in a certain amount of time.
