The Work Lawyers Should Stop Doing Themselves

By Steve Fretzin and Jaime Nacach

Why better delegation is not just about getting work off your plate, but creating more time for clients, business development, leadership, and the life you actually want.

Lawyers have a strange relationship with time. They know exactly what an hour of their time is worth, sometimes down to six minute increments, yet many still spend enormous portions of their days performing work that does not require a lawyer.

Scheduling meetings, managing calendars, organizing documents, updating systems, handling routine client communication, posting content, managing intake, and dozens of other administrative tasks quietly consume hours every week. Then lawyers wonder why there is no time left for business development, strategic thinking, leadership, or their families.

My conversation with Jaime Nacach, founder and CEO of Virtual Latinos, reinforced something I talk about constantly with my coaching clients: delegate and automate everything you reasonably can. In fact, I would put it among the most important concepts I teach lawyers because once we actually track what attorneys do throughout the day, it is eye opening how much time is spent on repetitive work they should not be doing.

The challenge is that successful delegation requires more than hiring somebody and dumping a list of tasks on them. You have to understand what should come off your plate, determine who is best suited to handle it, train that person effectively, establish expectations, and build enough trust that you are not constantly looking over their shoulder.

When done correctly, delegation is not an expense. It can become one of the best investments a lawyer makes in the growth of a practice.

The First Delegation Question Is What Should You Stop Doing?

Jaime opened our conversation with a Steve Jobs quote: “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.” That idea applies perfectly to lawyers because time management is not simply about becoming more efficient at completing everything on your list. Sometimes the solution is recognizing that certain things should not be on your list in the first place.

Jaime uses EOS in his own business, and one of the exercises that resonated with him was creating a list of things he should not be doing. That can be an incredibly valuable exercise for lawyers as well. We are usually focused on what needs to get accomplished today, this week, or this month, but we rarely stop and ask whether we should personally be responsible for all of it.

Maybe you should not be managing your calendar. Maybe you should not be posting your own social media content. Maybe you should not be handling routine intake, formatting documents, updating your CRM, organizing files, or dealing with every administrative email that enters your inbox.

The point is not that this work is unimportant. Some of it is incredibly important. The question is whether it requires you.

If you are a lawyer whose time is worth hundreds of dollars an hour, spending hours every week doing work that could be handled by someone else is not saving money. It may be costing you substantially more than you realize.

Don’t Hire One Person and Expect Them to Do Everything

One of the biggest mistakes Jaime sees, particularly among solos and smaller firm owners, is assuming they need to find one magical person who can handle everything.

That instinct makes sense because the lawyer is often doing everything themselves. They are practicing law, handling clients, managing the business, dealing with administration, working on marketing, overseeing finances, and trying to bring in new business. When they finally decide to hire help, they naturally look for another person who can wear all of those same hats.

The problem is that the person who is excellent at administrative organization may not be the right person to run your social media. Someone who excels at intake and client communication may not have the skills to execute a sophisticated marketing campaign. A great executive assistant may not be a bookkeeper, paralegal, designer, or CRM specialist.

Jaime recommends beginning with the category of work consuming the greatest amount of time that does not justify the lawyer’s involvement. For many solos, that means administrative work, intake, scheduling, client communication, and related tasks. Once that work is successfully delegated and the lawyer becomes comfortable managing someone remotely, additional responsibilities can be transferred or another person with a more specialized skill set can be added.

This is where lawyers need to stop thinking in terms of “I need an assistant” and start thinking in terms of functions. What work needs to be done? What skills does it require? How many hours does it realistically take? Who is the right person to own it?

Those questions lead to much better hiring decisions.

Before You Hire Anyone, Track Where Your Time Is Going

One of Jaime’s strongest recommendations was also one of the simplest: before you begin looking for help, sit down for an hour and write down everything you are doing.

That is exactly how he approached hiring his first person. He categorized his activities by type, estimated how much time each consumed, and used that information to identify what could be delegated. Jaime explained that many people become excited about hiring help but then get stuck because they have never clearly identified what they actually want someone else to do.

I see the same thing in my coaching practice. When lawyers track their days, they are often surprised by how much time disappears into activities that have very little relationship to their highest value work.

Start by looking at a typical week and categorizing your time. What requires legal judgment? What requires your personal relationships? What contributes directly to business development? What requires leadership? What is administrative? What is repetitive? What could be automated? What could be performed by someone else with the right training?

You do not need to delegate everything tomorrow. You need visibility first.

Once you know where your time is going, the opportunities become much easier to identify.

Training a Virtual Assistant Requires an Upfront Investment

I admitted something to Jaime during the episode that I have said before: I do not particularly enjoy managing people. I do not want to babysit employees or spend my day checking whether everyone is doing what they are supposed to be doing. I currently work with virtual team members, and what I really want is for them to understand their roles, manage themselves, and tell me what they need from me to be successful.

Jaime’s response was important because there is no shortcut around the initial training. If you want someone eventually to operate independently, you have to invest enough time upfront for them to understand how you work.

His approach with an executive assistant was surprisingly straightforward. Jaime had the assistant shadow him while he worked. He would share his screen over Zoom and narrate what he was doing, including how he handled documents, why he responded to emails in a particular way, what he was thinking, and how he made decisions. Initially they spent several hours together each day. Over time, those sessions became shorter and less frequent as the assistant learned how Jaime operated.

Eventually, Jaime reached the point where he barely needed formal meetings with his executive assistant because the assistant understood him well enough to handle the work with minimal direction.

That is the goal.

The mistake is expecting independence before creating understanding. Lawyers sometimes hire someone, send a few emails with instructions, and become frustrated when the person does not immediately think the way they do. A better approach is to recognize that a few weeks of deliberate training can potentially save hundreds of hours later.

Shadowing Can Be More Effective Than Writing a Giant Manual

Lawyers often overcomplicate training because they think they need to create a massive standard operating procedure before they can delegate anything.

Documentation is valuable, but Jaime’s shadowing approach offers another option. Let the person watch you do the work while you explain your thinking. Record the process when appropriate. Turn repeatable tasks into checklists and procedures as you go.

The advantage is that the assistant learns not only what you do but why you do it.

That distinction matters because remote professionals eventually encounter situations that are not perfectly covered by an instruction manual. If they understand your priorities, communication style, decision making, and expectations, they are better positioned to handle those situations independently.

Training someone this way may initially feel inefficient because the entire point of delegation is to save time. The reality is that you are investing time today to buy back significantly more time tomorrow.

Accountability Should Be About Results, Not Surveillance

One of the most interesting parts of our conversation involved accountability.

I shared an experience with a virtual assistant who was supposedly working 40 hours a week. When we reviewed the person’s actual responsibilities and estimated the time involved, the work appeared to add up to closer to 20 hours. That raises an uncomfortable but legitimate question for any employer: if I am paying for full time work, how do I know I am actually receiving it?

Jaime’s answer was that while his company can provide time tracking, most clients are ultimately more concerned about whether the work gets done. Rather than obsessively watching hours, he recommends establishing clear projects, goals, KPIs, deliverables, and scorecards that show whether the employee is accomplishing what is expected.

That does not mean hours never matter. If you are paying someone for 40 hours and giving them only 20 hours of work, there needs to be a clear expectation about what happens with the remaining capacity. Jaime shared an example of telling an employee that if the assigned work is complete, he expects the person to proactively ask what else they can take on rather than quietly enjoying the unused time.

That is a much healthier model than constant surveillance. Define the role, establish expectations, identify measurable outcomes, maintain communication, and create a culture where people take responsibility for their capacity.

Communication Is One of the Fastest Ways to Measure Trust

Remote work creates another challenge because you cannot simply look across the office and see whether someone is there.

For Jaime, one of the strongest indicators of whether a remote working relationship is healthy is communication. If someone is supposed to be available and repeatedly disappears for long stretches, does not respond to messages, misses deadlines, or begins delivering work below the expected standard, trust starts to erode.

That does not mean every remote employee has to sit motionless in front of a computer from nine to five. Jaime allows flexibility within his team, including different schedules and the ability to work from different locations. The tradeoff is that expectations around availability and communication need to be explicit.

This is especially important because assumptions are dangerous in remote relationships. The lawyer assumes the assistant knows something is urgent. The assistant assumes it can wait. The lawyer expects proactive communication. The assistant waits to be given another assignment.

Neither person necessarily has bad intentions. They simply never agreed on what good performance looks like.

As Jaime put it, “Expectations are very important, especially in a remote setting because people are not next to each other.”

Delegation Isn’t Just About Saving Time

The conversation became particularly interesting when Jaime described two different reasons to hire someone. You can hire a person to make your life easier, or you can hire a person to help the business make more money.

The first category is easy to understand. A virtual assistant handles scheduling, intake, document management, case management, routine communication, or other work so the lawyer gets those hours back.

But what happens with those reclaimed hours?

For a lawyer, an extra five hours a week could become billable work worth thousands of dollars. It could become five hours of business development that produces new clients. It could become time spent strengthening existing client relationships. It could allow a managing partner to focus on strategy and leadership rather than administrative work.

It could also mean leaving the office earlier and having dinner with your family.

All of those have value.

Jaime shared the story of a lawyer who saw virtual talent not merely as a cheaper way to complete work but as a way to improve the economics of the firm. If certain work can be performed appropriately at a lower cost while still creating value for the client and firm, delegation can potentially affect profitability as well as capacity.

The important point is that the return on delegation should not be measured only against the assistant’s hourly cost. Measure it against what the lawyer can accomplish with the time that comes back.

Reclaimed Time Has to Be Used Intentionally

There is one catch. Delegating ten hours of work does not automatically improve your business if those ten hours disappear into more email, unnecessary meetings, social media scrolling, or random low value activity.

You have to decide what the reclaimed time is for.

If your biggest need is revenue, perhaps that time becomes billable work. If your practice needs growth, protect some of it for business development. If you are overwhelmed as a managing partner, use it for strategy and leadership. If you have been working 70 hours a week and barely seeing your family, maybe the return on investment is getting home earlier.

This is why delegation and prioritization have to work together. The objective is not simply to clear your calendar. It is to move your time toward the activities that matter most.

For lawyers trying to build books of business, this is especially significant. One of the most common things I hear is, “Steve, I don’t have time for business development.” Sometimes that is absolutely true because the attorney’s calendar is filled with client work. But sometimes the lawyer does not have time because they are performing hours of administrative and repetitive work that someone else could handle.

Those are very different problems.

Delegate, Automate, Then Elevate

Jaime and I also discovered that we share another philosophy: delegation should work alongside automation.

Before founding Virtual Latinos, Jaime had a background in marketing and technology and was an early user of tools such as Zapier to connect systems and eliminate repetitive manual work. He described “delegate and automate” as a philosophy that helped him build his business, and he believes AI will make that approach even more important.

I completely agree.

Before assigning a repetitive task to a person, ask whether technology can eliminate some or all of it. If it cannot, determine whether someone else should own it. The lawyer should remain focused on the areas where their expertise, judgment, relationships, leadership, and personal involvement create the greatest value.

This will become even more important as AI improves. The goal should not be to eliminate talented people. Jaime actually described wanting his executive assistant to use AI to reduce manual work so that the assistant can move into higher value responsibilities.

That is the progression lawyers should be thinking about: automate what technology can handle, delegate what someone else can own, and elevate yourself and your team toward work that creates greater value.

Jaime’s Biggest Mistake: Perfection Before Progress

At the end of the episode, I asked Jaime my favorite closing question: what was your biggest mistake?

His answer should sound familiar to just about every lawyer.

Trying to perfect everything before launching it.

Jaime explained that his marketing agency delivered strong service, but he spent too much time perfecting the website, flyers, emails, and other materials instead of spending enough time selling. He believes that contributed significantly to the agency’s failure. When he launched Virtual Latinos, he deliberately took a different approach. He knew it would not be perfect, expected people to provide feedback, and decided to launch anyway and improve as he went.

That is a tremendous lesson for lawyers because perfectionism shows up everywhere. Someone wants to start posting on LinkedIn but spends six months deciding what their first post should say. Another lawyer wants to build a networking strategy but keeps refining the plan instead of meeting people. A firm wants to launch a new initiative but cannot move until every possible detail has been analyzed.

There is a difference between being thoughtful and being stuck.

Sometimes you need to put something into the world, see what happens, gather feedback, and make it better.

Better Delegation Creates More Than Efficiency

The biggest takeaway from my conversation with Jaime is that delegation should not be viewed merely as a way to save a few hours.

Done correctly, it changes what a lawyer is able to focus on.

Instead of spending the morning buried in administrative work, you can focus on your most important client. Instead of spending Friday afternoon formatting documents and updating systems, you can meet a referral partner. Instead of working until eight o’clock because the entire firm depends on you for everything, you can develop a team capable of operating without your constant involvement.

There will always be a learning curve. You have to identify the right work, find the right people, train them, communicate expectations, measure results, and build trust. That takes effort.

But refusing to delegate has a cost too, and for many lawyers, that cost is far greater.

The lawyer who insists on doing everything may save some money in the short term, but eventually they become the bottleneck. Their capacity stops growing because there are only so many hours in a day.

The better question is not whether you can do everything yourself.

It’s whether you should.

Key Takeaways

• Start by identifying recurring work that consumes significant time but does not require your expertise as a lawyer.
• Do not expect one assistant to be great at administration, intake, marketing, social media, bookkeeping, and every other function your firm needs.
• Track your time before hiring so you can clearly identify what should be delegated and how much capacity you actually need.
• Invest time upfront in training. Shadowing can help a remote team member understand both what you do and how you think.
• Accountability should focus on clear expectations, completed work, deadlines, goals, KPIs, and communication rather than constant surveillance.
• Remote working relationships require explicit expectations about availability, responsiveness, workload, and proactive communication.
• Delegation can create financial value when lawyers redirect reclaimed time toward billable work, client development, business development, or leadership.
• Combine delegation with automation so people are not wasting time performing repetitive work that technology can handle.
• Decide in advance how reclaimed time will be used or it can easily disappear into other low value activities.
• Do not allow perfectionism to prevent progress. Launch, learn, improve, and keep moving.

A Quote to Remember

“Expectations are very important, especially in a remote setting because people are not next to each other.” — Jaime Nacach

Frequently Asked Questions About Delegation and Virtual Assistants for Lawyers

What tasks should lawyers delegate first?

Start with recurring work that consumes meaningful time but does not require legal judgment or the lawyer’s personal involvement. Depending on the practice, that may include scheduling, calendar management, routine client communication, intake, document organization, CRM updates, administrative work, case management support, or elements of marketing.

How should a lawyer decide what to delegate?

Track your activities for at least several days and categorize the work by value and required expertise. Look for repetitive or administrative activities that another trained person could perform effectively. The goal is to protect the lawyer’s time for legal judgment, clients, leadership, relationships, and business development.

Should a lawyer hire one virtual assistant to handle everything?

Usually not. Administrative work, marketing, social media, intake, bookkeeping, and specialized legal support require different skills. A lawyer may begin with one assistant focused on the largest category of work and add specialized support as the firm’s needs grow.

How do you train a virtual assistant?

One effective approach is shadowing. Allow the assistant to observe your workflow while you explain what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how you make decisions. Over time, turn recurring activities into written processes, checklists, templates, or recorded instructions.

How can lawyers hold virtual assistants accountable?

Set clear expectations around responsibilities, deadlines, responsiveness, deliverables, goals, and workload. Depending on the role, firms can also use KPIs or scorecards to measure performance. Time tracking can be useful, but completed work and quality are often better indicators of whether the relationship is succeeding.

What are warning signs that a remote employee relationship is not working?

Repeated communication gaps, missed deadlines, unexplained periods of unavailability, declining work quality, lack of proactive communication, and incomplete responsibilities can all indicate a problem. These issues should be addressed quickly before trust deteriorates further.

Can virtual assistants help law firms make more money?

Potentially. The financial benefit can come from more than lower labor costs. If delegation allows a lawyer to redirect time toward billable work, client development, new business, leadership, or higher value responsibilities, the economic impact may significantly exceed the cost of the assistant.

How do automation and delegation work together?

Automation should eliminate repetitive work that technology can perform reliably, while delegation moves appropriate work to other people. Lawyers can then focus their own time on areas where judgment, expertise, leadership, and relationships create the greatest value.

How much time should lawyers spend training a virtual assistant?

There is no universal number, but lawyers should expect a meaningful upfront investment. Jaime described initially spending several hours a day allowing his executive assistant to shadow him before gradually reducing that interaction as the assistant developed greater independence.

What is the first step if a lawyer wants to hire a virtual assistant?

Before contacting a provider, spend an hour identifying and categorizing everything you would like to remove from your plate. That list makes it much easier to develop a job description, determine the required skills and hours, and find the right person for the role.

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About Jaime Nacach

Jaime Nacach is a Mexican-born entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and technology enthusiast best known as the founder and CEO of Virtual Latinos. He created Virtual Latinos in 2018 to connect North American businesses with pre-vetted, bilingual virtual assistants and remote professionals from across Latin America.

Drawing on his background in digital marketing, business development, and technology, Jaime focuses on helping entrepreneurs and businesses scale through strategic delegation, automation, nearshore staffing, and stronger operational systems.

Connect with Jaime Nacach

Website: https://www.virtuallatinos.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaimenacach/

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