We were lucky to catch up with Olivia Casellini recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Olivia thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Have you ever had an amazing boss, mentor or leader leading you? Can you us a story or anecdote that helps illustrate why this person was such a great leader and the impact they had on you or their team?

The best boss I’ve ever had is actually now my business partner, Sam. When I was a second year law student, I accepted an internship at a small law firm and met my now-business partner, but at the time he was one of my supervisors. There are so many reasons why he’s been a great mentor to me: he’s an invaluable source of legal knowledge, he’s always encouraging when I express doubt in myself, he checks in on me when he knows I have a stressful project or I’m not feeling well, he’s open to critical feedback, he keeps his word and acts with integrity. I have so much respect for him and I’m really lucky he took a chance on me all those years ago.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a California-licensed attorney for small businesses, nonprofits, and creatives. I focus primarily on employment law and contracts, although our practice does handle other transactional business matters for out clients, from entity formation and compliance to trademark and beyond.

I didn’t always want to be an attorney (I wanted to be a zoologist or veterinarian when I was a kid but then figured out math would be involved in either course of study, yuck), but I have known my entire life that I wanted to make the world a better place. That intention informs how I practice law. I believe that, by supporting my clients and empowering them to navigate their legal matters with confidence and clarity, I can help be a small part of the good that my clients are doing. ⁠

Any thoughts, advice, or strategies you can share for fostering brand loyalty?

Keeping in touch with my clients is easy in this digitally connected world—if I’m not emailing them directly about a legal update they should know about, I’m sending out email newsletters to our entire book of clients or posting on Instagram. I think the more challenging part is making everything digestible for my clients.

As an attorney, so much of what I’m reading through and interpreting day-to-day is legalese and other industry jargon. I could copy and paste all of that legalese and jargon into my client communications, but that wouldn’t be very helpful! A huge and important aspect of my job is translating that legalese into something that my clients understand, so that they feel empowered to make informed decisions.

Relatedly, I think that taking the time to break things down and make sure everything is really clear fosters brand loyalty with my clients. Not every attorney is going to do that (although I wish they would), and I do think it sets our law firm apart. Education is at the forefront of what we do. We take pride in creating all kinds of informational materials for our clients. We offer free, no obligation consultations and we often host free legal workshops for the public. The bulk of our practice’s clients have come to us by word of mouth from happy clients, so whatever we’re doing must be working!

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

When it comes to managing a team, I think it’s important to invest the time in getting to know your teammates and build genuine relationships with them. My team is small (3 core team members), but we like it that way because it’s allowed us to really get to know each other. Knowing that we each have our own strengths and areas for improvement makes us a stronger unit and makes it really easy to delegate appropriately.

It’s impossible to ensure every employee will always have high morale, because we all go through hard times in life; I’m not about toxic positivity or pushing down emotions, and I don’t encourage my teammates to engage in that. But I do think that the fact that we’ve invested in creating these strong relationships with each other means that when one of us is having a hard time, the others are there to lift that person up. We care about each other sincerely. In my experience, having that support and care from your team means morale doesn’t stay low for long. It always comes back up.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.inbetterwetrust.com
• Instagram: www.instagram.com/inbetterwetrust
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/oliviacasellini
• Youtube: www.youtube.com/@BetterAPC

Image Credits
Stacy Keck Photo LLC (for all images)