Building Bears, Building Cases: Flavia Santos Lloyd’s Playbook for Extraordinary Ability and Everyday Grit
1st September 2025
Date
Interviewee
Flavia Lloyd
The baby was fifteen days old when Flavia Santos Lloyd carried him into a homeless shelter. She was undocumented, out of options, and—by her own admission—never meant to be a lawyer. “I don’t like lawyers,” she says with a laugh that lands somewhere between candor and defiance. But that unlikely moment became the hinge of a life that kept opening.
Flavia first came to the United States on an F-1 visa in the 1990s, determined to learn English for a year and then return to Brazil. She studied Portuguese and Russian; academia seemed the plan. An international office helped process her paperwork—she never even stepped into a consulate interview—and the rest, she says, unfolded “in a very backwards sort of way.” She overstayed. She married. She had a child. And when the math of survival meant rent or filing fees, the filings had to wait. She didn’t know fee waivers existed. “If it wasn’t accessible to me—someone with a bachelor’s degree who spoke English—imagine someone without those basics,” she says.
When her work authorization came through, Flavia answered a newspaper ad—this was before job boards—and wrote a cover letter that cut through the rules: don’t look at my résumé, talk to me. The firm did. Over the next twelve years she became receptionist, secretary, paralegal, then paralegal supervisor. “I trained new attorneys,” she says. Clients celebrated approvals and thanked God and the partner’s name on the letterhead. “They never thanked me,” she adds—not bitterly, but as a simple fact that eventually nudged her toward law school. “I was doing the drafting, the research, the work.” Becoming a lawyer was less a pivot than a recognition.
Flavia insists she never planned any of it. “The only things I plan are my deadlines and my bills,” she jokes. After leaving the firm, she joined a bar-prep company in California, teaching law students how to pass the bar while still practicing immigration law on the side—essentially two full-time jobs. As a single parent to a lacrosse-playing son who collected injuries and ER visits, she craved flexibility. “So I opened my firm to work less and have freedom,” she says. “Which means now I work more.”
The punch line lands because she’s already done the hard part: owning the contradiction. The lesson came quickly—if she wanted to scale beyond herself, she had to become a business owner, not merely a better lawyer. “Completely different skill set,” she says. She taught herself to read a P&L and forecast cash flow, to map a tech stack and calculate what it actually costs. “I had to go to management school,” she says, and you believe her: vertical integration, horizontal integration, controls—terms that don’t show up in case law but define whether a firm survives.
Growth followed—dozens of employees at its height, then a deliberate scale-back to navigate a choppy market. Her headquarters is in Newport Beach; pandemic-era physical offices in Beverly Hills and San Diego gave way to a hybrid model, with regular trips to Cambridge and a production hub in Orange County. The point isn’t real estate. It’s discipline. “Pivot up, pivot down,” she says. “Understand the business.”
Making the extraordinary accessible
If the first movement of Flavia’s story is survival, the second is craft. She now focuses her boutique practice on extraordinary-ability work—O-1s and related pathways—while never straying far from the human stories that made her. She delights in non-traditional profiles. “I like my ‘Build-a-Bears,’” she says—the artists, performers, and specialists who don’t arrive with Stanford letterhead but do arrive with talent. One client, an eyelash-extension professional, came in with the beginnings of an O-1. Flavia handed her a checklist. “She followed every single thing,” Flavia says, and won the case. The portfolio later helped the client secure funding in another country. The message: extraordinary ability is measurable, buildable, and—if you know the standards—attainable.
That precision matters because the system can be treacherous. She tells a story about a man now in detention after following instructions from a USCIS call-center agent: “He did what they told him, showed up for the interview, and was arrested on an old removal order he didn’t know about.” For Flavia, this is the indictment: a system that is “exclusive, not inclusive,” where access and accuracy often depend on education, resources, and luck. She’s pro-DIY in principle and realistic in practice. “Be careful with forums and WhatsApp groups,” she warns immigrants navigating on their own. “There’s so much misinformation.”
The counsel behind the counsel
Flavia’s advice bifurcates neatly: one part for lawyers, one for clients. For lawyers: over-communicate. She earned that conviction at the front desk, fielding calls from anxious people who felt ignored. “You become a therapist without the qualifications,” she says. For immigrants: own your process. “Your profile is unique,” she says. “Your cousin’s timeline isn’t yours.” Use new tools—yes, even AI—wisely, but vet the source and understand the stakes.
Underneath it all is a constant refrain: education is freedom. If she were wealthy, she says, she’d be a full-time student. She’s obtaining an LLM at the London School of Economics because learning is the engine that carried her from that shelter to a Newport Beach headquarters. “It sounds very Pollyanna,” she shrugs, “but it’s true.”
Flavia doesn’t sugarcoat the moment. “It’s a difficult time for immigrants,” she says plainly. Yet she refuses despair. The next few years may be hard; she believes the center will hold. Meanwhile, there’s work to do: checklists to build, cases to frame, expectations to set—whether for the PhD from Stanford or the tattoo artist with a world-class portfolio.
She still laughs at the irony—how someone who “never wanted to be an entrepreneur” ended up teaching herself finance so she could serve clients better; how a young woman who might not have passed a consular interview became an advocate for hundreds. But the arc makes sense if you follow her rule: plan your deadlines and your bills, and let the rest be courage.
Somewhere, a new parent is staring down a fee they can’t afford. Somewhere, an artist is one criterion short of “extraordinary.” Flavia has lived both. Her story suggests they don’t have to be the end of anything. With the right guidance—and a stubborn belief that learning changes what’s possible—they can be the start.