Ambar Balderas: People-First Operations and the Future of Legal Leadership

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. Today’s guest is Ambar Balderas, director of operations at the Debt Defenders by cement law firm. Ambar is an operations executive challenging challenging law firm norms by reengaging how leadership, growth and accountability work in the industry. With a background that spans legal, technical and operational expertise, she designed systems that scale with intention, empower teams, and eliminate waste. A first generation Mexican American and self-made leader who rose from legal assistant to executive and bar brings resilience, adaptability and people first leadership to everything that she does. Her mission is clear modernize law firms from the inside out and build organizations that work smarter and serve better. Amber, welcome to the show.

Ambar Balderas: Thank you for having me. That hyped me up.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay, good. I’m glad.

Trisha Stetzel: I love to create these beautiful introductions because we don’t often do it for ourselves. So that is my gift to you.

Ambar Balderas: I appreciate that very much.

Trisha Stetzel: You’re welcome.

Trisha Stetzel: All right, so tell us a little bit more. I know I gave your professional bio, but tell us a little bit more about Amber.

Ambar Balderas: Yeah. So just as you said, I’m a first generation Mexican American woman, um, Chicana born and raised in Houston, Texas. Uh, first in my family to graduate college. Um, Um, even though I’m the youngest of four. First to become a homeowner. So I’ve been navigating a lot of aspects of life that, um, I haven’t had the privilege of having someone with experience to help me through, um, came from a pretty difficult background financially. Uh, but despite those hurdles and despite some personal setbacks within the family, you know, graduated second in my class, um, got appointed to the Naval Academy, um, first one in my family to fly in a plane. Um, so that was surreal. Um, and, uh, life, life took me a different direction. Um, I’m in the civilian sector now. Uh, but I kept trekking through and rose in the ranks in the legal industry, um, at a very young age. Um, I, uh, got to the position of being basically an executive in a law firm. Started a law firm from the ground up. Um, for did that for about five years. We became multi-state. Um our average case value was, um, upwards of seven figures. And, um, after my time there, uh, continued to do so. Now for the Debt Defenders as their director of operations.

Trisha Stetzel: You’ve had such an amazing career, and you can’t be more than 20. I’m just saying.

Trisha Stetzel: I get that a lot. I get that a lot.

Ambar Balderas: Um, I accelerated really quickly, and it’s actually, um.

Trisha Stetzel: The.

Ambar Balderas: Age factor is something that is a blessing and a curse. Um, I know I don’t appear to have that look of authority and experience, um, but I’ve been doing this for eight and a half years, and I’ve been doing it very, very successfully.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. That’s wonderful. Congratulations on all of your successes and being the first of many in each of those areas that you described. And thank you for your service. Yeah.

Ambar Balderas: Thank you.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. One of the things that, um, I and I talked about it in your bio or when I introduced you, Amber, is the scaling, right? So, um, most law firm consultants get scaling wrong, or this is what, um, what I understand from you. So from your perspective, what is it that they miss and what actually works in practice when it comes to scaling.

Ambar Balderas: So law firm consultants, it’s a very smart business, right. To be a law firm owner you have to be an attorney. There are a few states that I know of that are changing that I believe Arizona would pioneered that. Um, but for decades and decades and, you know, century that’s been that you had to be an attorney to be a law firm owner. Many law firm owners don’t go to business school. Don’t take those business courses. Right. And it’s it’s definitely an area that is a smart business move. However, not every law firm fits that traditional mold, and law firms have been set up in this traditional structure for a very, very long time where it’s assumed that to be in leadership, to be a high or key decision maker, you must be an attorney. Um, I believe that that does a disservice for both your attorneys and your support staff, for your attorneys. It’s sort of, um, pressures them into striving for that partner track, which isn’t fulfilling or serving for everybody. Some attorneys want to be an attorney. They don’t want to be a manager and that’s fine. I understand that’s what you went to school for. Um, while some support staff have the the not just the, the know how of how to get a case from the very beginning to the very end, but the intricacies of dealing with all the different court systems, all the different filing systems, case management systems, they actually do the frontline work, right? I always call them the backbone of the firm. If things wouldn’t happen, if we didn’t have the support staff, and it does a disservice to them because those people who do have those aspirations and do those have do have those natural leadership qualities.

Ambar Balderas: Well, they kind of get shunned, right? The ceiling is there because they don’t they can’t take it there without that title or, you know, the degree. Um, that’s not to say that attorneys can’t be in leadership, right? Like some do have those qualities and that desire, but many don’t. Um, and so, um, because of these norms, the, the advice that is given is often very cookie cutter, right? It it caters to that traditional structure and it doesn’t really allow, um, an openness or an innovative way to look at and tackle different issues. Um, and because of that, they multiple things can, can go wrong. Um, they often I like to joke, they often isolate their prey. So in conferences they’re typically catered to the law firm owners. Well who are law firm owners, attorneys. So you don’t have that The non-attorney brain going there, right? Um, at these conferences, they’re presenting vendors, tools, software, you know, their preferred partnerships. Um, in these beautiful. I mean, they do such a great job, these beautiful sales pitches. And it’s such a cool presentation. Um, and it builds up that hype. But you need individuals who are, um, more, uh, keen to have that, like research and development mindset. Have that curiosity. Ask the right questions. Really make cost benefit analyzes, and make sure that whatever is being advised to you actually fits to your culture, to your workflows, um, to your to your people, to your practice area. Um, because gone are the days of the general practitioner that serves the town right. A lot of law firms are forming very niche practice areas. And while some might be similar, um, they’re they’re just so different from each other.

Trisha Stetzel: Mhm.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. As you were talking, I was thinking about a concept from a book, E-myth Revisited, about the three eyes of a business owner, and as an attorney or a practitioner and a business owner, you wear all the hats in the business and I love that. Uh, what you’re talking about is really turned that norm on its year around. Instead of being the hat wearer of everything in the business, you can actually have a director of operations or someone who’s really tuned into the business while the practitioner goes and does what they’re good at. I love.

Trisha Stetzel: That. Exactly. Yes.

Ambar Balderas: And then they feel fulfilled because they’re doing what? What they’re passionate about, and you’re actually being more efficient because you’re utilizing the time in the way they can provide value to your company the best. So I mean, it’s just, um, it’s so funny that you think it’s such a simple idea of like, could we set it up differently? And it sounds so simple, but, you know, when you’re when you’re tackling those, like, decades long traditions, it can be a hard thing to, to kind of overcome.

Trisha Stetzel: Absolutely. And especially in the attorney space, there is so much tradition there. I’d love to dig around a little bit more in this modernization where you can scale up and you can hire people to do the things that the attorney shouldn’t be doing, so they can go do their job. So what does that look like deeper in in terms of leadership and the culture and the daily operations of an organization that is built different?

Ambar Balderas: Definitely. So first and foremost, you have to make sure that the structure still respects the expertise of your attorneys. I mean, in the legal industry, there’s no getting around it. You cannot perform law without your attorneys. Um, however, what what I’ve done is leverage the paralegals, the senior paralegals, you know, the individuals who have really been the ones to take their attorney there. Right? Help them get to those points of of being of winning those trials or, you know, winning a settlement after settlement, whatever the case may be. Um, and having them manage the team, manage the support staff, give the advice of what’s going to make what can we do to make our lives easier? Because if our lives are easier than our attorneys, lives are easier If we’re faster, more efficient, and not losing quality, then we’re being the best we can be for our attorneys. Um, and it really starts with culture because, you know, um, I think you need to be cognizant of the fact that, you know, there might be some attorneys who aren’t going to like that structure. So being very transparent about, hey, are you okay with the department manager of whatever legal department you’re in? Being a non attorney, being transparent is key.

Ambar Balderas: Um, and I find that more and more of the newer generations of attorneys that are coming out of law school are completely okay with it. Um, so that’s been that’s been nice, a nice shift, a little bit easier to build the team up like that. Uh, but yeah, really leveraging those senior support staff who have worked Every single angle of a case from beginning to end is so key, especially if you’re a high volume firm. Um, that is especially essential in those in those moments. Um, and then you still have your attorneys there who are overseeing and check box, check boxing, um, all of the things that are required. Right. Anything that’s legal opinion, legal strategy, legal advice must come from the attorney. Um, the beauty about that structure is you can then scale a little bit easier because. The, the it’s almost like a filtering system of what needs to get to the attorney. The attorney no longer has to go through every little approval process just to get a case moving. You remove that bottleneck. And it is only when that legal opinion strategy advice is needed in which they’re being pulled in for that, you know, high value assessment.

Trisha Stetzel: So I do have some attorney friends and teams that listen to my show. And I know right now the attorney is thinking, gosh, I don’t have to manage people. That sounds amazing, right? They a lot of attorneys go to school and believe that this amazing practice that they’re going to build is not about managing people. It’s about working the law and doing working those cases. Yes, exactly. And it’s so I can see like this relief. Oh, there’s a solution to that. I don’t have to manage people.

Ambar Balderas: Yeah, exactly. And um, as I mentioned it, if, if anything, what what that kind of system or building team building does is it just expands your, your options. Right? You know, you don’t have to pigeonhole yourself into. I can only look at my attorneys for these positions. You can look at everybody, and whatever makes the most sense is what you can go with without having to restrict yourself in any way. If that’s an attorney, awesome. You know, there probably are some attorneys who who get energized by that, but they no longer feel pressured to to or feel like they need to be perceived as if that’s what they want.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. They get to choose. That’s really amazing. So, Amber, I know that there are folks listening who would love to connect with you. So what is the best way to connect with you?

Ambar Balderas: Yeah, the best way is going to be LinkedIn. Uh, just search for my name there. Um, Amber Balderas. I’m sure you have it neatly on the on the screen. And, um, I’m easy to find. You’ll see these glasses.

Trisha Stetzel: Perfect. Yes. You guys, as always, I will have the link in the show notes so you guys can just point and click if you’re listening. Her name is spelled a m b a r b a l d e r a so that you guys can find her on LinkedIn, just in case you’re listening and not in a place where you can point and click. So, Amber, if it’s okay, I would love to go into this space of technology. It is changing so fast and AI is all around us. So with so many tools, AI and other, those things that are helping us automate in the market, how do you evaluate what’s worth adopting without chasing all the shiny objects that are out there?

Ambar Balderas: That’s a that’s a great question. Um, you know, my undergraduate degree is in management information systems, uh, which is sort of a hybrid of business and computer science. And my master’s, um, which I’m working towards right now is a master’s of science and information science. Um, so I love tech. You know, um, I have a motto that we just talked about this morning in my team chat, which was automate what can be automated. Like anything that can be automated should be automated. I’ve always been big on that. Um, now there’s an asterisk. Asterisk to that, right? Uh, because there’s strategy, implementation, all of that, that goes with it. Um, speed doesn’t mean fast. It means readiness. Right? Um, but with with that, we have to acknowledge that technology is such a fast, fast growing, evolving beast. And kind of how I was mentioning earlier with, um, the attorneys how they get, um, singled out in these conferences and given these amazing presentations, like, these tools look really cool. They, they look like, um, and they are sold in the fact that this you need the solution. It’s going to make life easier. Look how awesome this thing is. Um, that being said, though, that’s why you need someone in your team that can ask the questions, right? That can, uh, take a pause and really look into the use case for your company.

Ambar Balderas: Um. With AI, for example, there is a lot of hype with AI, but one of the things I’ve done recently is that a town hall with my firm where I talk about AI hallucination, I talk about AI model collapse. Um, I talk about, um, AI, you know, plagiarize ation, um, and different elements that, um, That all those companies that hype it up to try to sell their tool aren’t really addressing. In fact, I had a meeting very recently with a vendor trying to sell an AI conversational tool for a direct mail campaign. I had these questions because I know about these these, um, these, um, areas that need great improvement. Um, and his answer was really a non-answer. And that’s sort of where we’re at, right? There’s so many people wanting to get on the hype train, get on the money train. What’s a quick tool we can make leveraging these llms large language models, um, so that we can sell that to. And again, speed isn’t really how fast you you go. It’s how ready you are. Like, sometimes the best thing you can do is take your time. And so you really need to be cautious right now because there’s so many people wanting to get on that money train. And not everybody’s an expert. Um, really look into, um, some of those, some of those, um, areas where AI is consistently proving to degrade itself, um, as the different, uh, evolutions get rolled out.

Ambar Balderas: Um, that way when you ask those questions, you can discern whether this company, whatever tool you’re demoing, has really thought through that process. I know for the legal industry, especially AI, hallucination is a big no no. You know, we we can’t, uh, which AI hallucination would be like, um, it making up a fact, making up a case law, making up, um, an event. Um, and there’s been attorneys who have gotten in trouble for citing hallucinated case law in documents they file in court. Um, so be cautious. Um, there’s also been, uh, things like, uh, companies who have implemented AI, you know, organizational wide, be it with email purposes, document purposes. And the AI can be tricked to give confidential information to a third party source. Um, so someone who is aware of the spate of technology and the speed, but also sort of cautious in knowing that there are, um, there are just too many people who really want to chase that shiny dollar when they’re selling you something. Um, is so important to have someone like that in your team. Um, so it It’s a wonderful, um, it’s a wonderful tool, but it just needs to be done. Well, right?

Trisha Stetzel: It should be vetted by someone who knows what they’re doing, particularly in the industry, knowing what all of the, um, the bad things that could happen if something goes wrong. Right. Uh, or if it creates AI hallucination. I learned something new today. Thank you for.

Ambar Balderas: Sharing. Yeah. So, yeah.

Speaker5: Go ahead. Sorry. I was going to explain.

Ambar Balderas: Model collapse really quickly, just since that’s the other technical thing I mentioned. But basically, um, you know, AI was trained on, I mean, a probably seemingly infinite amount of data that had already preexisted in the internet from humans. Um, well, now with, with all of this AI use and because a lot of the LMS or large language models built into their own AI that learns from its own repetitions. And because now a lot of the content in the internet is AI generated, so it’s learning from itself in that that medium as well. It basically degrades itself. Um, and I think that’s another thing. I guess a final thing to point out is like, if you hear content creators or read an article and they talk about the success of something to do with AI without acknowledging any of the human component or element that went into it, there’s you need to ask questions about that. So like if, for example, um, there was a recent article that talked about, um, how AI uncovered something about some kind of medical disease that 50 years of medical science and and research couldn’t get done. That is not a. That’s a disingenuous way to say that, because it recognizes a pattern that humans didn’t see in the existing 50 years of research that the humans did. So very important. Like it’s very fast paced, but you just everyone needs to take a second and really think about how the information is being presented to you.

Speaker6: You have such a vast array of.

Trisha Stetzel: Experiences where you’re very technical, and you can bring this, all this technical technicality into a space of humans and building culture. And I love that. That is beautiful. So thank you for sharing all of that as we get to the back end of our conversation today. Amber, I would love to know, as a first generation Mexican American Mexican-American woman who’s built. You built your career in spaces where most people didn’t notice you or they weren’t looking at you specifically. What message would you share with other leaders about resilience, equity, and even creating systems that truly empower the people or the humans that are in these organizations?

Ambar Balderas: Yeah, that’s a really wonderful question. You know, it it is difficult, um, when you look around and not very many people, you know, look like you, um, speak like you have your accent or even just share the experiences that you had. However, you know, it’s important to push through. It’s important to hold your space, hold space for your hard work and your success. And I get it. I have imposter syndrome. Don’t we all? But you have to just breathe and hold that space with confidence. Um, I think for me, what I. What I try to make sure to do is remember that I’m good at putting these puzzle pieces together, and I do so with while ensuring that I’m getting a lot of feedback from my team, making sure that all of my ideas don’t just work in, in, um, don’t just work ideally, but also work in practice. Um, but I just try to focus on understanding that I know I’m good at what I do, and I know I’m good at helping people make their job easier, be the best that they can be in their roles And just taking it one step at a time. Um, and of course, always resorting back to being data driven, um, you know, communication, that’s the hardest part. But as long as you’re showing in, in those reports and in your data and your and in your dashboards, your success, that speaks volumes in itself.

Trisha Stetzel: Um, I love to sit here and talk to you for like, another 90 minutes, but we can’t because we’re at the end of our time. Um, you’ve said some really thought provoking things, and I appreciate you bringing so much knowledge and care to the conversation that we’ve had today. I really enjoyed it. Amber.

Ambar Balderas: Awesome. Thank you so much, Tricia. It’s been a wonderful experience. I hope I did well.

Trisha Stetzel: You did fantastic. So tell folks how they can reach out to you one more time.

Ambar Balderas: Yeah. Um, for anybody who’d love to reach out, I mean, I would love to connect, bounce ideas, hear your stories. Um, please follow me or connect on LinkedIn. It’s at Amber Balderas a m b a r b a l d e r a s.

Trisha Stetzel: Beautiful. Thank you again. I’ve really enjoyed our time together today.

Ambar Balderas: Thank you as well. Have a good day.

Trisha Stetzel: You too. All right, my friends. That’s all the time we have for today. If you found value in this conversation, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, veteran, or a Houston leader ready to grow. Be sure to follow, rate, and review the show. It helps us reach more bold business minds just like yours and your business. Your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.