What I Wish Law Firms Knew About Operations, featuring Miki Wong (Episode 1)

Most firm owners don’t lose sleep over operations because it’s complicated. They lose sleep because every decision still runs through them. The first episode of CollBox‘s fireside series, “What I Wish Law Firms Knew About…,” takes that problem apart with a guest who has spent years solving it from the inside: Miki Wong, Fractional COO and founder of Otium Advisors.

Hosted by CollBox co-founder and CEO Matt Darner, the conversation is a candid, practical hour on what operations actually is, why “make it faster” is the wrong goal, and how the firms that feel calm got that way on purpose. If you run a firm and some days you just want someone to come make the decisions for you, this one’s for you.

Meet Miki Wong

Miki didn’t come up through law. She came up through music, singing professionally, before she discovered she loved solving business problems even more than performing. That path led her into operations at a large California family law firm, where she found her real calling: taking the most chaotic parts of running a business and turning them into something stable and reliable that, in her words, “runs hopefully without you.”

She has since spun that expertise into Otium Advisors, her own fractional COO firm. The name is the whole philosophy. Otium is about living by choice, with the leisure and freedom to do the things you actually want to do, rather than being run by chaos. Miki works with founders and managing partners to build “the business that they want and not the business that’s running their life.”

There’s a reason she’s the inaugural guest. Miki was one of CollBox’s very first legal customers. She researched CollBox, vetted the team, brought them into her firm, and helped land one of CollBox’s earliest clients. Her belief in the work helped set the company’s course in legal years ago, which makes her the fitting person to open a series about the experts every firm owner wishes they’d met sooner.

The big idea: operations is just decisions you’ve already made

Ask ten people what operations means and most will start listing tasks. Payroll, intake, billing, delivery. Miki reframes it in one line that reorganizes the whole conversation: “Operations is just a bunch of decisions that are already made.”

The point is that a system isn’t software or a flowchart for its own sake. It’s a set of decisions you make once, in advance, so your team can act without waiting on you and without reinventing the answer every time. Client comes in, does this case fit our criteria, yes or no. Balance hits a certain age, what happens next. Make those calls ahead of time and the day-to-day stops feeling like a series of small emergencies.

Miki’s approach also flips how most owners think about efficiency. Rather than chasing “how do we go faster,” she starts with “how do we make someone’s life easier.” That sounds soft until you see the results: when a change is built to help the people doing the work, they adopt it. When it’s imposed on them, they quietly route around it. Bringing the team into the process, and giving them genuine agency, is what makes operations stick.

The moments worth replaying

A few threads from the conversation that firm owners tend to feel in their bones:

The reactive trap. Miki walks through the scenario every firm knows: a client owes $15,000, hasn’t paid in months, and there’s a trial coming up. With no process in place, the firm panics, and panic leads to bad deals made just to end the stress. The antidote is deciding your follow-up thresholds before a balance ever gets that big.

Survival first, then upgrade. When she diagnoses a firm, Miki’s first question is always “is there a problem that puts the business at risk?” Often that’s accounts receivable, where firms quietly bleed cash they have already earned. It is an industry-wide problem, too: the average firm carries roughly three months of revenue in lockup, unbilled or uncollected, according to Clio’s Legal Trends Report. Solve for survival before you optimize anything else. As Matt put it, the goal isn’t a business with no problems, it’s better problems: “let’s just upgrade our problems.”

Running the business vs. the business running you. Once decisions are documented, roughly 80% of situations can be handled by the team against a known guideline, and only the real edge cases escalate to the owner. That escalation path, Miki says, “is what really makes the difference between you running your business and the business running you.”

You are not alone in this. Some of the most honest moments come when Matt and Miki talk about how isolating firm ownership can be, and why “business therapy” with founder friends is a survival tool, not a luxury.

About the series

“What I Wish Law Firms Knew About…” grew out of a feeling Matt kept having as he met operators, advisors, and experts across the legal world. Over and over he’d think: if the firms I talk to just knew this one thing this person is an expert in, life would be so much easier for them. The series is his way of making those introductions at scale.

Each episode is a live, conversational session with a guest who’s genuinely great at a corner of running a firm that most owners never get formal help with. It’s not a pitch and it’s not a webinar in disguise. It’s the kind of conversation you’d want to be a fly on the wall for, made public.

Episode 1 setting the topic on operations, with the guest who helped start CollBox’s legal journey, is a fitting place to begin.

Where to find Miki

You can learn more about Miki and Otium Advisors at otiumadvisors.com, where you’ll find her calendar, and you can follow and connect with her on Linkedin.

Watch the episode and catch the next one

Watch or replay the full conversation with Miki here.

And if the AR side of this conversation hit home, that’s the problem CollBox was built to solve. Start with a free Law Firm AR Report Card to see where your firm stands.