Revolutionizing Immigration Law with Filevine
How Sanabria uses AI-enhanced technology to improve efficiency and enhance client service.
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Year Founded: 2017
Location: 14 locations across Florida, Maryland, Virginia, and Washington DC
Practice Areas: Personal Injury, Immigration, General Practice
Eric R. Suarez is a Partner at Sanabria & Associates, PLLC where he leads the management, performance, and training for the attorneys of the firm across all the firm s departments. Eric also oversees the operations of the firm's immigration department, which spans over 100 team members across 8 offices.
The Challenge
Antiquated systems leave immigration lawyers straining under piles of paperwork, leading firms to lose valuable hours across redundant tasks, and making it difficult to scale.
Sanabria has a mission to help as many immigrants as possible, with free legal consultations and full-service advocacy. Their dedication to client well-being has driven rapid firm growth: the firm now provides 4,000 free consultations every month, represents over 13,000 clients, and practices in 10-15 different courts each week. However, at this volume, conventional practice management techniques no longer work efficiently. The firm’s in-house server slowed down as it struggled to process their documents. The firm lacked the ability to easily pull reports on key issues, such as which clients were delinquent on their payments or what attorneys were billing. “We outgrew all of our systems — especially our case management system,” explained Partner Eric Suarez. In order to modernize their firm and continue delivering high-quality legal services to a rapidly-expanding clientele, the firm implemented Filevine’s case management, document assembly, and ImmigrationAI® software.
Hundreds of templates are now organized in one automated system autopopulating with a click of a button.
Document automation saves staff 15 minutes on every motion.
USCIS forms that used to take an hour to complete are now completed in a fraction of the time.
How Sanabria uses Filevine to save time, improve client outcomes, and build collaboration.
With Filevine, Sanabria has enhanced efficiency and improved client outcomes. They do this by focusing on 3 techniques that Filevine enables:
- Use advanced, AI-enhanced document generation tools with smart template libraries to more efficiently and accurately generate documents.
- Regularly analyze performance reports to track improvements and hone legal strategies
- Connect all departments with the same central case management software, smoothing the way for collaboration and improving client outcomes.
Advancing Immigration Law with AI-Enhanced Document Automation Tools
One of the greatest obstacles for high-volume immigration firms is the sheer number and complexity of the documents they handle. As firms scale, the risk of mistakes and inaccuracies grow, forcing lawyers and staff to sink more time into making sense of the chaos.
To disrupt this cycle, Sanabria turned to Filevine. ImmigrationAI® and Filevine Document Assembly have allowed the firm to create polished and accurate documents faster than ever before, creating more peace of mind for lawyers, staff, and clients alike.
The firm uses ImmigrationAI® to populate USCIS forms with information pulled directly from client documents. The result has been significant time savings and greater accuracy.
“ImmigrationAI® is key for us. The biggest draw of Filevine is the integration of AI into the immigration forms. I think that’s outstanding, to be able to have a process in which we don’t have to ask clients about each and every one of those pieces of information, separately from the documents that they’re already giving us. It’s a big deal.”
Filevine Document Assembly allows the firm to scale their document workflows, generating complex documents automatically from dynamic templates. Suarez estimates this saves 10-15 minutes on every motion filed. With 500 motions filed by the firm each week, that’s 83-125 hours saved weekly.
“ImmigrationAI®, in conjunction with Filevine Document Assembly, has made it easier for our team to access the templates we already had — we had hundreds of templates that we were able to combine and put into the system now. It’s really cool, and has helped our paralegals save time.”
With Filevine, Sanabria is creating the standards for the future of immigration legal practice.
“Integrating AI into our work is where the legal field is going. I’m glad that we can be part of a process with Filevine that lets us begin to set that trend for the immigration field. The immigration field for years has been bogged down by paper filings and other things that are very outdated. Filevine is modernizing our firm. That’s a big deal for us, because it’s going to make a huge difference and impact on our clients, on our staff, on our productivity level. I’m very excited about being part of that.”
Getting the Big Picture with Advanced Reporting
To improve their firm’s performance and achieve better results for their clients, Sanabria takes advantage of Filevine’s extensive reporting features.
Top 7 metrics that Sanabria tracks with Filevine reports:
1. When was our most recent contact with each client? Clients without recent interaction receive immediate attention.
2. What are the upcoming deadlines for court dates and filings? Staff can prioritize their day’s work accordingly.
3. What’s the latest update on immigration proceedings? Staff use this to keep clients informed.
4. How many hearings do we have with each immigration judge, and how are we performing with each? Different legal strategies may emerge as more successful with various judges.
5. Which clients are delinquent in paying us? Lawyers can stop costly work until an agreement with clients is reached.
6. Which cases are moving too slowly? Paralegals can see how many of their cases are stalled and put extra attention into determining next steps.
7. How much is each lawyer billing? Firm leaders can reward top performers and catch red flags before they become a bigger issue.
Building Cohesion Across Departments and Practice Areas
The firm’s human resources team and legal ops team also operate through Filevine. The customer service team also has access to information on Filevine, allowing them to provide accurate updates to clients. Where secretaries were previously relying on email and informal conversations with other team members, they can now communicate securely and effectively within Filevine.
"Our HR team loves it. They’ve been keeping employee records there within their HR project. Our ops team is using it to keep track of upcoming project deadlines, our leases for our offices, and what equipment is given to each employee. It’s exciting to have everybody under one roof for project management across the board.”
In addition to immigration, Sanabria also has departments practicing criminal, family, workers compensation, and personal injury law. They use Filevine to support each one of those practice areas, ensuring easier collaboration and communication across all practice areas.
“That was one of the big drawing points, is we can have all of our systems, all of our firm’s practice areas, and all of our departments on one system. Everybody’s on Filevine.”
This collaboration is crucial for clients who are dealing with multiple legal issues at the same time.
“It’s important to maintain communication across the board, and make sure everybody’s marching to the beat of the same drum. And the only way you’re able to do that is to have one system in place to help everything that you manage."
