332: The role your firm needs but can't name

A few weeks ago, one of Sarah Persich's clients dropped an AI agent into their Slack workspace. Sarah gave it the criteria her client's intake team is supposed to follow on calls — build rapport, handle objections, gather the right information — and asked it to listen to the recorded calls and grade every person against those criteria.

It came back ten minutes later with work that would have taken weeks by hand.

The tool is Viktor. We spend a good chunk of this episode on it, because it runs inside Slack or Teams and it's proactive. It doesn't wait to be asked.

But the tool isn't the whole story. Sarah calls herself a fractional integrator, and it's a role many small firms need without knowing what to call it. Which means they never go looking for one.

We talk about where Zapier still fits, why connecting Claude to your email and calendar matters more than it sounds, and where I'd draw the line on giving AI access to your browser.

Chapters

00:00 The tool that graded weeks of intake calls in ten minutes
02:17 From law firm employee to the "automation lady"
03:34 Why an automation request is usually a systems problem
07:04 What a fractional integrator does, and where the name came from
09:29 Where Zapier still fits now that AI has caught up
13:21 Claude, MCP connections, and the browser access red flag
17:31 Why connecting email and calendar is the real shift
19:31 Meet Viktor, the autonomous agent living in Slack
21:31 Grading every intake call and catching leads that slipped
25:48 Acting without approval, proactive nudges, and what it costs
31:22 Why firms under ten lawyers need this role, and how to reach Sarah

Resource Links

• Automation Lady
• Zapier
• Make
• Granola
• Filevine
• Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
• The 80/20 Principle (my techlaw newsletter)
• The Inner Circle (my online community for lawyers)

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