Using automation to scale successfully with Erica Herman: A Visto Case Study

Introduction and background

If you’re a smaller firm ready to scale, or a big firm spending a lot of time on manual tasks, this story of how Erica implemented more automation into her immigration law firm might resonate with you and help you unlock your firm’s full potential.

Erica is an immigration lawyer based in Toronto, Ontario, and although she is a relatively newer lawyer, she started her law firm – EH Law Group LLP – and quickly began to feel the growing pains of a busy firm. She offers a range of immigration services including corporate immigration (largely focused on LMIAs/work permits), study permits, permanent residence, PNPs and more.

Challenges: lots of operational work and growing her team

The good news is that within a few months of opening her firm Erica had a steady stream of clients – great! The bad news was that for the first few months of her practice, she got so busy with new files that she had to work overtime (and then some!) to provide extremely high quality services, and positive outcomes, for those clients.

With so many applications to prepare and submit, she found she was quickly spending all of her days (and nights):

• preparing, sending and explaining document checklists to clients
• managing a slew of documents, PDFs and more in her Google Drive folder that needed to be organized well
• manually filling out forms and sending documents back and forth for review, e-signature and more

This was all on top of the standard work of growing a law firm in Canada like taking consultation calls.

She also quickly decided to hire an assistant to help with everything, but she didn’t want to hire too many staff, too quickly. This would take a lot of time (interviewing, training, onboarding) and her fixed monthly expenses would go way up, adding extra stress. She needed a better solution.

Solution: more automation and streamlining of operations

Luckily she had a call with Josh, the CEO at Visto, who showed her how the platform works. More specifically, he took her through the ways that Visto:

• auto generates checklists for clients, so all you need to do is click “Invite” and the software does the rest
• fills out IRCC temporary visa application forms with 1-click (1295, Family Info, Use of Rep, etc.), so there’s no need for copy/pasting onto forms
• makes it easy to collect all supporting documents in one place, review them, and then do an automated merge, compress and rename of the entire application with just 1 click!

Implementing Visto

Josh and Erica had a training call to get her account setup and make sure she was comfortable with the platform, then she got back to work. Since the platform doesn’t require much setup, she started inviting new clients to Visto within 1 business day.

Not only did she start preparing applications much faster, it also made it easier to onboard new staff because everything was all in 1 place (on Visto!) and streamlined so she didn’t have to teach staff what documents or forms to ask for from every new client (since you can save custom checklists for any type of application and re-use them easily)!

Now that she’s been using it for a while and has prepared more than 30 applications for clients using Visto (and adding more each month), she looks back on how she used to do things “the old way” and shudders at the thought. By comparison, Erica thinks that automating more of her processes helps her save approximately:

• 20 minutes per application not having to copy/paste onto forms (for applications like work permits and study permits)
• 10 minutes per application not having to prepare and send custom checklists to clients
• 30 to 60 minutes per application not having to merge, compress and rename all of the PDFs her clients send her, especially for more complex applications with lots of supporting documents
• 10 to 20 minutes per application being able to send updates, notifications and documents for e-signature with just 1 click (instead of constantly drafting and sending emails back and forth)

On average, about 1.5 hours of time saved per application!

Asked to summarize her overall experience, Erica says:

“As an immigration lawyer it can get very busy, and I need to find the time to focus on my clients and their needs. I love the fact that Visto automates the tedious and time consuming admin tasks that used to take up a significant part of my – and my staff’s – workday. I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking to save time in their busy practice!”

– Erica Herman, Immigration lawyer and managing partner at EH Law Group

Conclusion

If you’re like Erica and your firm is still doing lots of manual tasks that could be automated, definitely consider a platform like Visto that can help streamline your operations so you can focus more on client work and less on admin work.

To learn more about the platform and book a demo, make sure to check out our page here.