In “The 80/20 Principle,” Ernie Svenson demystifies technology and introduces tools that improve your workday. This edition: It’s not always a job for tech support. Why a “fractional integrator” for law firms could be your best next hire.
I hired Sarah Persich to help with a Zapier automation workflow. I knew what I wanted: two apps talking to each other.
She asked why I wanted them talking. Then she asked what happened before that handoff, what happened after it, and who touched it along the way.
By the end of the call, it was clear the connection wasn’t my problem. The process feeding the connection was my problem. We built the automation eventually, but that wasn’t the part that mattered.
And so this is not a Zapier story. It’s a story about a job nearly every small firm needs done, and nobody owns.
Somebody Already Named It
Gino Wickman named it in “Traction,” his book on the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS). Every company, he says, runs on two roles: a visionary and an integrator.
The visionary is usually the owner. Big picture, goal-oriented, drawn to shiny objects — this tool, then that one.
The integrator is the person who brings it back down to earth. Who asks how it would work with the team you have, and then makes it work.
Sarah calls herself a fractional integrator because she does this for several firms at once instead of one firm full-time. She spent years inside a law firm learning its systems — including a case management migration or three — before she started doing it for other people’s firms.
(Read Brooke Lively’s article on EOS here.)
Why Your Law Firm Doesn’t Have One
For small law firms, the reason is probably twofold.
With fewer than 10 lawyers, you can’t justify a full-time hire for it. So the intake, the handoffs and the tracking quietly break down, and nobody owns them.
The bigger reason is that you can’t hire for a job you can’t name. Post an opening for an operations manager and you’ll attract people who will run the systems you already have. That’s a different job. It doesn’t include telling you that the systems themselves are the problem.
You’d Think AI Would Solve This
I expected the role to get smaller with the advent of artificial intelligence. If AI can create automations, read documentation and troubleshoot error messages, why pay a person to handle integrations?
Because the integration was never the most important part. Deciding what should connect to what, in what order, and what “working” even looks like for your firm — that’s the critical part, and AI won’t do it for you. It’s a systems question, not a tech troubleshooting issue.
Sarah put it plainly when I asked her about this: A client comes to her wanting two tools integrated, and once she digs in, “it might not be an automation issue. This might be more of a systems-related issue that you’ve got to work these kinks out first.”
10 Minutes of Work, Months of Setup
Here’s the example that made this concrete for me.
Sarah works with a firm that handles a high volume of leads and records its intake calls. (Louisiana is a one-party consent state, so the recording was already squared away.) Before any AI showed up, she’d done the unglamorous work: building a scorecard, defining what a good intake call sounds like, training the team on handling objections.
Then her client dropped an AI agent called Viktor into the firm’s Slack.
Sarah handed it the criteria she’d already written — is the person building rapport, handling objections, gathering the information — and asked it to listen to the call recordings and grade each team member against them.
It came back in about 10 minutes with a rating for every person on every call. She figures that would have taken weeks by hand.
That’s the part people repeat. Here’s the part they skip: The 10 minutes only worked because the scorecard already existed. Point the same agent at a firm with no definition of a good intake call, and 10 minutes later you’ll have a report that measures nothing.
The firm gets that report daily now. It grew from there — flagging leads that never made it into the case management system, then tracking follow-up attempts.
The Bottom Line: Name the Job First
You don’t have to read “Traction” or adopt EOS to get the benefit here. You just have to notice there’s a job in your firm that nobody has, and that it isn’t a technology job.
When you can name it, you can hire for it. And for small firms, you probably want to hire a fractional integrator, not a full-time one. Fractionally, for a few hours a month, you get someone who has seen how other firms handle the same operational friction points that you’re constantly struggling with.
After you have that fractional integrator in place, AI can handle any mop-up work. So the lesson is: Solve the big problem first before you resort to using AI.
More From Ernie Svenson and the 80/20 Principle
AI Note-Takers for Lawyers: The Recording Risk You Need to Fully Understand
AI Training for Lawyers: Why One Skill Beats Nine Prompts
Your Law Firm’s Knowledge Is Trapped: A Chatbot Can Let It Out
How Using AI Skills for Law Firm Workflows Can Turbocharge Your SOPs
Why I Switched From ChatGPT to Claude (And What Finally Pushed Me Over)
Loom for Lawyers: Why You Should Be Creating Shareable Videos
Top 8 Tech Tools for Solo and Small Firm Lawyers to End the Chaos
AI Tools for Lawyers: Why You Shouldn’t Stick to Just One
Our Fingers Can’t Keep Up With AI
Image © iStockPhoto.com.
Sign up for Attorney at Work’s daily practice tips newsletter here and subscribe to our podcast, Attorney at Work Today.
