The assistant who checks every citation

The situation

Hathaway Parker is a litigation firm in Los Angeles. The work is document-heavy: long briefs, dense citations, every page reference checked before anything goes out. On top of that sits the calendar, the contact records, the court filings — the steady administrative load that has to run on time, every day, or deadlines slip. The firm needed help that could hold both the detail work and the daily cadence.

What changed

Interstaff placed Maria, a bilingual LATAM legal virtual assistant, into the firm. The placement followed Interstaff's standard model: a workflow plan first, then a trained legal operator who already understood document review and intake, then a managed service layer running performance and communication behind the scenes.

By the one-year mark, Maria was running the firm's calendar and reviewing its briefs — making grammatical edits, confirming each citation pointed to the correct page, and flagging what needed a second look. She also handled the steady stream of smaller work: adding contacts to the management system, drafting short documents, downloading court filings as they came in. The firm and Maria work on Microsoft Teams in constant back-and-forth — not handing off and hoping.

The result

At Maria's annual review, the firm singled out brief review as her standout contribution — the grammar, the citation accuracy, the catches before filing. They described her as collaborative, responsive, and proactive: prompt to requests, quick to ask for clarification, and notably good at taking direct feedback. A year in, she's still the one the firm hands its briefs to.