In Part 1 of the Fíonta 15, we were lucky enough to sit down with our client, Jeffrey O’Brien, of O’Brien Immigration in Berkeley, California to discuss how Salesforce forms the backbone of his company and his nonprofit initiative, The Immigration Project (recently renamed Mobile Pathways).
Transcript
Karin Tracy (KT):
Hi. My name is Karin Tracy. I am the VP of Marketing here at Fíonta, and we are really excited to welcome Jeffrey O’Brien of O’Brien Immigration to our episode of the Fíonta 15. Hi, Jeff. Thank you for being here. Wonderful. I understand you’re from Southern California. Do you want to tell me a little bit more about your background?
Jeffrey O’Brien (JB):
Sure. I was born and raised in Los Angeles, went to school down there. Came up to Northern California for law school. Along the way, I actually went to Germany where I was an undocumented immigrant in Germany, so to speak. It was the first time in my life where I started to see a perspective, the other person’s perspective, on how life was like. So, ultimately when it came around to career choices, I became interested in helping people who are here in the United States. That ultimately lead to immigration law.
KT:
That’s fantastic. What an interesting backstory there to have really been on the other side of the table there. It gives you, I would imagine, a perspective that your clients really appreciate.
JB:
Yeah, a very worthwhile perspective, because living in America, you obviously never have that sense of uncertainty of a job or the ability to stay in that country. Until you have that, you may not understand exactly what some of our friends, and neighbors, people who live amongst us are feeling like.
KT:
Absolutely. You founded O’Brien Immigration back in 2009. You told me a little bit about what attracted you to immigration law, but what propelled you to create your own firm around immigration law?
JB:
The idea that there are so many people in the United States who need help, there are people all around the world that need help, but what I’ve found is that the problem that a lot of immigrants have is the cost of attorney services. The reason is that attorneys are very expensive, but immigration, in particular, is very labor intensive. So, a lot of hours need to go into each client’s case. The immigrant community is very underserved. In order to help them, you need to … well, I decided that I need to become as efficient as possible in my business practices to be able to bring down the cost and actually consider myself a low bono.
Low bono means that we’re charging very little or as little as we can get away with, which allows us to expand our client base. In order to do that, you have to take non-traditional steps for attorneys, I would say. Those non-traditional steps are really trying to figure out how to utilize technology in the practice.
KT:
What are a couple examples of the burden of immigration law? You mentioned that the process is long, there’s lots to do. How does that vary from other law practices?
JB:
Well, unfortunately, the people we work with, namely, the government is very inefficient. So, if you look in our file room … I mean, you can see some of the files behind me, but that’s probably 1/20 of the files we have. The reason we have so much paper, unlike most industries these days, is because the government only accepts it on paper. So, we may have to submit a 400-page document to the government that’s all on paper.
KT:
Oh, wow.
JB:
A lot of that is routine tasks. They’re documents that you’re submitting over and over, and some of them are forms. The forms, the United States Government doesn’t accept 99% of the forms online like every other business would. So, they provide a PDF form online that you can download and then fill out by hand. The forms can be ten pages, they can be 20 pages, you can 40, 50 pages worth of forms that you have to fill out online…or download and fill out, and then attach your evidence, and then submit this entire huge packet back to the government.
KT:
Oh my goodness.
JB:
So, in a lot of ways, we don’t have an opportunity to be efficient, because it’s just so time-consuming.
KT:
Goodness. There is a great blog on your website that I spend a lot of time reading. It’s a similar interview style with you. Pretty high up on the page, you mention that the firm uses Salesforce extensively. I believe that you started with the understanding that you had to be really committed to technology in order to make this low bono process or system work. Were you familiar with Salesforce before you started the firm?
JB:
No. No, I was using what probably most attorneys use … solo practitioner, so when I started I was just myself, which was basically an Excel spreadsheet. I know attorneys who have been practicing for many, many years who still use an Excel spreadsheet to manage their data. I had a little problem. All my invoices were run out of Excel as well, and I had a formula glitch that basically screwed up every single invoice I had. I decided at that point I needed to become more professional. So, I looked around for software. There is a lot off-the-shelf immigration software, but I ultimately went and looked more closely at Salesforce because of the customizable abilities that they offer. So, that’s how I ended up there.
KT:
Did you start small and then start customizing? How did you approach this what could be a pretty herculean project?
JB:
Right. I think ignorance helped me in this case, because I didn’t really understand enough about Salesforce to see what I was getting into. I’m glad that I was ignorant, because we’ve been able to grow the technology as the firm grows. When I initially started, I had something that you may not have even heard of, it’s called Group Edition. They were having a sale, and so instead of $25 a month for Salesforce, it was $15 a month. They said that I was grandfathered in, so I would have that for the rest of my life.
$15 a month sounded great, but it wasn’t very long before I noticed a couple of things. One, Group Edition … I needed to expand it because it has limited functionality. Number two is that there’s so much more than just that very basic thing I was looking for, and I did not understand that at the beginning. I was just looking for a place to put dates, basic records, contact information, phone numbers. Then once I started really kind of exploring it, I understood that Salesforce can create tremendous opportunities, which I attribute to the success of the growth of the firm is being able to understand the opportunity-
KT:
Wonderful. How have you customized and grown with Salesforce as your practice has grown larger?
JB:
We started off with using contacts, the contacts object for everything. I really-
KT:
Those are sort of a giant Rolodex for you at the time.
JB:
It was a giant Rolodex for $15 a month. It was great. So, I realized that there was something that … I don’t have a background in technology, but I realized that other companies couldn’t be using it like that. There must be something more to it. So, I hired a company out here in San Francisco, and I asked them to help me understand my business processes and then help me understand how Salesforce can then take those business processes and make them something that we all can use here. They first introduced me to creating new objects and creating new related lists, and then I could start to understand and then I could start to plug-in the business processes so that … Because I’m so familiar with how each step of the business works as the solo practitioner to begin, I have to know how every aspect of the business works. That’s really helped me understand then how to translate those practices into what we need for Salesforce.
KT:
Wonderful. It must have been quite a team effort, I would imagine, with your leading the structure and the architecture of the business practice and a Salesforce team helping you figure out how that all slots in and what needs to change.
JB:
It was a long process. I mean, I would argue that it’s still going on, because immigration law is continuing to change, to evolve. There’s lots of practices that we can still go into. So, it’s certainly not finalized by any stretch of the imagination, which is great that we’re using something like this that we can customize.
KT:
And that comes out with continual improvements as well.
JB:
They can monitor that. Yeah, exactly. It’s so nice knowing that I have professionals continuing to update a professional product.
KT:
Yeah, absolutely.
JB:
Then, of course, there are apps too. Those apps allow even greater expansion of Salesforce. For example, we have not only just what Salesforce offers, and create different objects, and workflow rules, and process builders, but we also have several key apps that we use that are also transformative for the business. It’s nice also knowing that there are teams of people managing those apps. I can give you one example that I think is fantastic for us. It’s called TaskRay, and it’s a project management program. The reason that that’s important in immigration is because basically every case is a project. The thing that we really weren’t able to do until getting this app is to get kind of a bird’s eye view of where the project is at any given point in time. Actually, I don’t believe that that exists in the off-the-shelf immigration software. So, I think that you can only get this if you have something like Salesforce and this app called TaskRay.
So, it allows us then to take the cases that we have … We now have 12 employees, about half are attorneys, and we can take the thousand or so cases we have and drill into any of those cases and understand the case with a bird’s eye view.
KT:
What’s the duration of a typical case for you?
JB:
That’s a good question. That’s a question that kind of strikes at the heart of why immigration law is so challenging and also why it’s so important to have something customizable. The reason is because we work with about probably 20 different types of cases. One of the main types of cases we work with is what are called defensive cases where we are defending people in court. Those cases … the immigration courts are so backlogged, and they have shifting priorities. What that does for a typical length of a case is it takes it from six months, which is what it was when I started 2009-’10, and now the cases are between three months and eight years.
KT:
Goodness.
JB:
I went to a case last week that was filed in 2011. I have another upcoming one that was filed in 2009. You can just imagine the problems that it causes for everyone. It causes stress on the court system to manage this number of cases. The other problem is that the government shifts its priorities. So, if the case I had that was filed in 2009, that it’s upcoming for me, was scheduled in 2011, ’12, ’14, ’16, ’18, ’21 and then it went back to 2018. So, when you ask what the average length of a case is-
KT:
I can see why you laughed.
JB:
It’s completely nebulous.
KT:
Goodness.
JB:
Yeah, there’s no way to tell you. Then going back to why that’s important for Salesforce is because we’re tracking dates. We need to be prepared whenever our case is ready and then the government is calling us. So, to be able to shift it and attract those kinds of things is critical. If we don’t do those things, we’re actually ineffective and we’re not doing our job.