S8:E24: AI, Intake, and the Hiring Crunch: What’s Really Holding Firms Back

In this episode of The Law Firm Blueprint, hosts Jay Ruane and Seth Price break down the technology and talent issues currently defining law firm growth.

The conversation starts with AI in intake. The hosts note that AI intake is progressing rapidly, possibly faster than AI in legal services delivery. Seth discusses testing AI receptionists for overnight coverage, acknowledging that while the technology is imperfect (sometimes speaking in French, randomly) , it’s better than a missed call or bad human intake. Jay emphasizes that a sales component remains critical in flat-fee and consultation-based practices. Jay then shares his big AI takeaway for the week: a free AI call analysis prompt that uses transcripts to score intake performance, helping his firm achieve 90%+ compliance on call metrics. They also note the growing risk of relying on third-party integration tools (like Zapier) as platforms like Google release native workflows (like App Scripts).

The second half tackles the legal hiring crisis. Seth is struggling to fill open positions because viable, experienced candidates are often locked into government jobs with 10-year debt forgiveness programs. This forces firms to return to the “Jay Ruane style” of hiring people right out of law school. Jay and Seth discuss the high-risk factors associated with this move, including the “3-year itch” programmed into new lawyers to seek change. Most critically, they debate if failing the bar exam is a statistical red flag; Jay shares that none of his clerks who failed the bar made it past two years with his firm, often leaving for government loan forgiveness programs. They conclude that firms must hire slowly and focus on core values, rather than hiring out of immediate need.

Links Mentioned

Blushark Digital Website

LinkedIn

Claude AI

Plaud AI Recording Device

The Law Firm Blueprint Facebook Group

Transcript

Jay Ruane  00:00

Hello, hello. Welcome to this edition of the Law firm Blueprint. I’m one of your hosts, Jay Ruane, and with me as always, is my man, Seth Price. Seth, how you doing this week?

 

Seth Price  00:15

Doing well. Doing well. Got back from really neat trip to Israel. Got to, you know, nice moment of little serenity for a moment and or just a minor blip and gets me back.

 

Jay Ruane  00:28

Oh, that’s fantastic. That’s fantastic. Well, you know me, I don’t really travel much. I mean, I do travel. I just don’t travel as often as you do. I mean, I don’t think anybody travels as often as Seth Price does, but. I’ve been hard at work, you know, focusing on how I can make my firm better. I want to talk to you a little bit about AI tools, because last week, I posted an AI book prompt in our Facebook Group that really took off lot of engagement, a lot of people liking it. Got a bunch of DMS. And so I’m going to release another AI prompt this week, and I want to talk to you a little bit about AI intake, because as somebody who’s got a ton of people doing intake across multiple practice areas, and I’ve got my practice area. I’m starting to see a lot of tools out there dealing with AI and intake. Either AI receptionists who are answering her screening calls or AI services that can listen to your calls and give you feedback. It seems like AI and intake has really taken off. Maybe a lot more so than AI and legal services delivery. What do you think?

 

Seth Price  01:35

You know, look, we are testing like crazy, and I know you were an early adopter. Let’s divide the question right two different sides. There’s AI, sort of intake the instead of a human speaking. There’s AI, and there’s a handful of companies on a handful every day I get another one to test, and. They’re getting there. right. A lot better than we looked at it a year ago. And you know, we’re testing right now and again, using the J ruin six month rule. I’m not gonna I’m not excited about any of them, but there are enough that we’re willing to give overnight time to. I am not seeing it, you know. Look, I also feel like I have a good enough intake that I’m not there. There are people out there with really shitty intake that even though AI is not perfect, people are like, you may miss a great case, yes, but your team itself may not answer the call at all. I write our clients say my calls are down, and you call and they don’t answer. I had a woman networked with, a woman who wanted to catch up with and chat with, who had a firm in Maryland. I called her up and three minutes had rang and nobody ever picked up.

 

Jay Ruane  02:37

Crazy. That’s a real problem. I even post covid. You know, one of the one of the biggest challenges is that the US based call centers are at their breaking point when it comes to getting staff. the overseas ones, there may be delay in the technology, which causing and you know, for clients who are calling in, not having something pick up right away is a problem. So that’s why a lot of people do go to AI because, you know, it answers right away.

 

Speaker 1  03:05

You know, I was talking with McCready or somebody else. I think the limiting factor technology is getting there. It’s getting better and better. That said, it’s still not there. We have companies that are using that start talking in French, randomly, you know, all sorts of random stuff happening. So I think it’s not as much the technology which needs to get there, but what is somebody willing to talk to? Like, meaning, you know, is it overnight people have a higher threshold of speaking to the AI

 

Jay Ruane  03:37

I don’t think so. I mean, here’s the here’s the thing. I mean, from for me and my perspective as a criminal defense lawyer, you know, it’s not just taking the call. There’s a sales component to it that I don’t think AI is necessarily going to be able to do anytime.

 

Seth Price  03:57

Look, it’s so funny, because what my PI partners always talks about, you know, intake is very different for criminal as it is for personal and personal injury. It’s one call close, whether it’s in a perfect world is closing the case so you comply with ethics laws. in criminal, you’re essentially selling a pre consultation, which isn’t all that hard compared to asking for money. Even family law, where there’s an actual many people charge family or immigration charge a consultation fee. And assuming you’re doing that, there is more of a sales component. And so look, go for it, right? I don’t think anything is perfect right now. It is getting better by the month. But what I would say is a lot of this has to do with when are people comfortable with it, and different parts of the country are probably different. You know, Yelp very big on the West Coast Bay Area, Yelp was huge. Connecticut, nobody probably looked at Yelp for a lawyer. So similarly, Connecticut maybe a little bit less, you know, happy with an AI voice, whereas in the Bay Area, people are used to that all the time. You know, they see the self driving cars going up and down the highway testing for months, years. This is not new waymos out there, but way before Waymo, if you’re in the Bay Area, you saw self driving cars. You still do everywhere being tested. So some of it is, where are people as far as that need, and is there a difference between after hours and during the day? I don’t know, but those are the things. So that’s one half of this the equation. The other half is the scoring. And are you able to coach in real time what’s going on? And some of it’s there. All of them seem to have a delay 30 seconds a minute, etc. And the question is, some of this reminds me of the.com era, right? That was my night, the night before I left big law and everybody had a.com There were six pet food, different companies, and they all pretty much disappeared. Maybe the top one worked and sold to Amazon right when the bubble burst in 2000 2001 and so. To me, are the Zooms the Ring Centrals just going to incorporate something and everything else is going to be roadkill. Is that how this stuff ends? You know, there’ll be some winners, but you see all these people with third party pieces. Some are better than others. But is this all going to be centralized? And whether it’s HubSpot, whether it’s Salesforce, you know, is something going to be integrated, that you’re not going to be using a third party? I don’t know. I just it’s there’s a lot of people dancing around it or testing like crazy. I’ve yet to see the killer application, but I am the idea that your your voice over IP, will that eventually have that baked in? And that’s really the question. One of the reasons I think Clio has done so well is they raised enough money that they were able to, for the most part, keep tech, keep up with technology best practices, not on AI, but everything else. Hopefully catch up on AI, use the best of the billion dollars and buy an AI company. So presumably they’re doing that.

 

Jay Ruane  07:11

Yeah, and I mean, and that’s one of the things, I mean, I think you know, part of the issue is that there are third party providers that you can plug into your phone system, and they seem to have promise, and depending on your work area, the niche that you’re in, it may be worthwhile for you to look at it. I think eventually most VoIP phone systems will include some sort of this, because it seems to be becoming ubiquitous. But I think you know what we have to realize is that while we are doing things, everything else is sort of happening around us as well. Like one of the things that happened recently is Google released their workplace workflows, right? And so now when you used to zap something from your email into your drive and that type of thing, well now Google will do that natively, once you get it set up. And so those are, those are the types of things like you may go all in on provide, getting a provider. And three months from now, your phone system might say, Oh, we can just flip a switch and turn it on for you.

 

Seth Price  08:15

It has taken a hit.

 

Jay Ruane  08:17

Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure, because now the Google Calendar, Google scheduling tool is there. It makes it, makes it very easy.

 

Seth Price  08:26

Craigslist used to do 100 different things, and now there’s, there’s businesses for each I feel like the G Suite has been eating into that.

 

Jay Ruane  08:36

I’m sure. I’m sure. And the question then becomes, how much do you want to go deeper into G Suite? I mean, for you, you’re an Android guy like, that’s great for you, the G Suite keeps opening up. For me, I’m a Mac based person. Me that I use a Google Calendar, but every time I click a link, it tries to drop it into the apple calendar that I don’t use. It’s kind of a pain in the ass that way. But that’s, you know, that’s interesting. But what I wanted to say was, last week I posted a book creation prompt that you can use. And since we were talking about AI and specifically about phone calls, we actually, independent of any outside product, we’re recording our calls using Zapier to get a transcript, then using Google App Scripts to take the transcript, upload it, run it with a prompt and claw. I mean, we’re doing some funky stuff that basically burned a weekend, and now you can go to a third party provider and get that but I’m going to post in the group an AI call analysis prompt so you can take a transcript of one of your calls, upload it with this prompt, and you can actually get an analysis of what your intake people are doing well, how they’re scoring. And what we did when we did this over the over the last six months, is we saw people who were scoring 70 80% of the things they were supposed to hit on the call when we provided the feedback. Went over the calls with them showed them their scores. We got consistently above 90% which is, which is much better than consistently above 70% so what measure matters? 

 

Seth Price  10:11

One of the things that I got is a lot of products out there are pi centric, so the right doing it out of that AI love and B, you know, you got to be careful, because we’re testing a lot of this products. And one of the things we’ll find is it will ding people again. It’ll figure this out. This is but it’ll dig people for a client we don’t want, and then, and then come up with, oh, they weren’t being. They didn’t close the deal. Well, of course, they didn’t close it, you know. So these are the things that are being we got to figure out. So it’s like anything else, it’s cool, and it’s getting better and better, just not quite there yet.

 

Jay Ruane  10:45

Yeah, I can remember back in the early 2000s you know, I had a binder. This is to tell you how long back. I mean, there were no such thing as Google Sheets. I don’t even know if I even knew what Excel was at that time, but I would have HotBot, Lycos, Google, Yahoo, and I would run searches, and I would see where I ranked, and I keep these binders, and I track myself over time. It’s kind of the same thing with the AI products out there. You got Grok, you got Claude, you got ChatGPT, you got Gemini, you got all of these different platforms. You got to see, sort of which one works best for your use case and your use needs. So if you’re running a prompt on one, maybe run it on three or four of them, and see what sort of response you get, because you may find that, hey, Gemini really works well. Gemini can crush PDFs a lot better than ChatGPT. Claude’s can close sort of in the middle. I haven’t really tested Grok for that. So it’s really comes down to what is the best use case and which is the best tool, because they are not all the same, right?

 

Seth Price  11:42

Absolutely great points. You know, something pivot for a second, something you and I talked about offline. We’ve talked about it many times before on the show, but I feel like it’s, it’s almost becoming comical. The business model of many people outside of PI is to get people who have worked for the government, immigration people. People work for that sector, criminal in particular.

 

Jay Ruane  12:05

People are public defenders, easily

 

Seth Price  12:08

and, you know, it’s awesome with, you know, with tuition being through the freaking mood, whole other question for another day. You know, there’s a lot, a lot of schools have these 10 year debt forgiveness programs. You state public interest, and that sounds great, academically, it is making the job of somebody trying to hire in the private sector really difficult. We are now two out of the last three viable candidates that I’ve gotten, and there are few and far between, as we talked about, very hard to find people that get your core values everything else are stuck with a year and a half to go on debt forgiveness.

 

Jay Ruane  12:48

I mean, you can’t take them away from that you’re not a good partner in their career.

 

Seth Price  12:56

And I’ve always said philosophically when I talk to people during interview, I have to make you better off with me than without you. Without me, I say, you know, economically and otherwise and it is the struggle is real. I mean, I don’t know what to do about it, but you know, I don’t know whether you know. We’re now, for the first time, talking full circle. We are now looking at going back to summer programs and or, you know, at very least, you know, third, third year law school, second semester clerkships, and actually going to have to put together training programs. So the good deal, deal is, we’re much more sophisticated on training, but I’m now going back Jay Ruane style to hiring people out of school and hoping. And then the question is, how many people do you take it to get one there?

 

Jay Ruane  13:45

Well, that’s the thing. You hire one. They may flame out and decide, oh, I don’t like doing this type of law. And then they go someplace else within three months. You

 

Seth Price  13:54

the idea of doing the clerkship is different, right? In theory, they know what they’re getting.In theory, right? You’re not, 

 

Jay Ruane  14:01

yeah, but here’s, here’s my problem with people right out of, right out of law school. You know, for many people, they did four years in high school, then changed and went four years in college, then changed and went three years in law school. And the problem is, is that after two and a half three years, their body’s been programmed that it’s time for a change, no matter what

 

Seth Price  14:21

So I’ll take two and a half years. That’s the issue I’m having. You ask me that two and a half years, I may not be as excited, but we are. It is a risk factor for our business. For the first time ever, right there, with 50 lawyers, it’s like there’s nobody, but for the first time ever, I have open seats, not where I want growth, but where I’ve actually not been able to fill something, and I’m at negative revenue, where the marketing is producing people, and I don’t have a lawyer to do it. And look, if you take the real estate idiot, that means they’re just not paying enough, right? You pay enough, you get somebody, in theory, but I’m not even seeing that. Like, yes. If you pay, you pay big firm money. I’m sure somebody would come over. But we’re doing everything, you know, for years, we could hire and get people that could both perform and sell. And now we’re saying, okay, take the selling off the table. We’ll use the Jay Ruane, you know, I, either I we use the attorney salesperson. Use the non attorney salesperson. You know, whatever it is we’re going to like handicaps. You know that the sell anymore, it is real. The struggle is real. 

 

Jay Ruane  15:07

Let me ask you a question about that. You have lawyers who who sell themselves, and you deliver them leads. You also now have a non attorney sale. You have an attorney sales person, and you’re eating the cost of that attorney, salesperson, right? Like that. 

 

Seth Price  15:45

I think I’ve changed the deal for my people. 

 

Jay Ruane  15:48

Okay, that was my next question. That was my next question because

 

Seth Price  15:51

my logic was that I could sell more with that person, that that covers their cost and makes it cost effective,

 

Jay Ruane  15:59

sure, sure, sure. But are the people who have to sell for themselves saying, Hey, man, I could recapture some time and Bill on that time.

 

Seth Price  16:09

The people that want to sell for themselves be the attorney, salesperson, right? Those are the those are the rock stars. I wish, if somebody wanted me to do more, I’m there for me. The struggle is pulling those people, getting people to agree because they’re so incentivized. But we just had two people leave the firm, and in each case, this was part of of the rub was, you know, in one case, somebody wasn’t returning phone calls that they were bigger issue, probably, but you know, we were like, wire tripping calls. And she said, Well, I’m driving all the time. I’m like, isn’t that what the drive time is for?

 

Jay Ruane  16:46

 Like, I’ve made more phone calls driving my car than I have outside.

 

Seth Price  16:49

I just came back from Israel with one of my partners who, you know, he’s a mad man. He drives all over the place. Made a whole career with car time that it pays him a very nice, you know, very, very nice living by by doing it that way. So, you know, part of it is she a perfect to be fair, she’s a very good practitioner, but she was not into the hustle. And if I can somehow keep that person by handing them cases, they go to court. Now, there are other issues if somebody’s that dysfunctional, and I say that our world is that there are other issues. They’ve got dark to our staff, stuff like that. You know, it is, it is a real thing. And so…

 

Jay Ruane  17:33

Now that you’ve taken, and this is a question for you, now that you’ve taken the selling off the plate

 

Seth Price  17:39

of some attorneys 

 

Jay Ruane  17:40

Of some attornsy in some practice areas, and you have an alternative for selling. Has that opened up the doors to more candidates who are like, Hey, I’d love to come work with you, but I don’t sell. I just grind work.

 

Seth Price  17:57

I wish it was perfect, and I can tell you, hallelujah, what I can tell you is, it saved current attorneys who, okay, good, and the seller doubled their revenue

 

Jay Ruane  18:11

Oh, wow. That’s huge.

 

Seth Price  18:12

That’s huge, right? Perfectly, fine. Lawyer like, great. You know, very good Court program. So I wish I could tell you I’ve had a flood of people where but it’s what I’m seeing I started this was. I have a very wide net right now, and we aren’t hitting it out of the park. I’m taking the step to do exactly what you’re saying which I should be able to hire more people. It’s what’s the delta between people, you know, generally, the people with our core values, with what we want, can do both. It’s, I’m hoping that, as you just said, that there are people that are really good but aren’t great at the sale component. And I’m sure there will be, but it has not been the panacea that I hoped it would, but it’s certainly not going to hurt.

 

Jay Ruane  19:04

Yeah, I’m just, I’m wondering, do you actually list that in the in the job listings that are out there, like you won’t have to do any sales, right? 

 

Seth Price  19:13

We are adding that to it. 

 

Jay Ruane  19:15

 I just thought about that as I’m sitting here, I realized that that’s not part of any of my job descriptions.

 

Seth Price  19:21

I’m not sure that ours have it in there to begin with. You

 

Jay Ruane  19:25

know, because I have gotten attorneys in the past applying for, like, lateral positions, and in the interviews, one of the things that have come up has been the, oh, I have to do these intake consults. And, you know, I really have no interest in doing that, and we can’t, we are able to respond saying, hey, you’ll never talk to somebody until they paid for us to be their lawyer. And that sort of lights eyes up, right? Because, wait, I don’t have to do any of these hour long meetings, because I get a lot of young lawyers who are like. Hey, you know, the associate, the senior comes in and says, Hey, associate, go sit with this client and and quote them the fee of x, because they know it’s not a high value case.

 

Seth Price  20:10

We are doing this partially to retain and I God willing, the Jay Ruane theory is right, and we are going to be able to, you know, hire, because right now we are not in great shape on hiring. It is tough.

 

Jay Ruane  20:24

Yeah, it’s tough. Listen, I mean, my summer, I told you my saga of I had a law student who was with us and failed the bar twice, then we hired another lawyer.

 

Seth Price  20:34

Let me cut you off there. What is your theory? We have a very, very bad record, and I don’t want to a lot of people don’t pass the bar the first time, but we have a very poor record on people that have failed the bar. Now I’m not saying we’ve done it, obviously, with poor records, we don’t kick people out that moment, but if I’m asking you to go back and reflect, let our listeners reflect. When somebody fails the bar, how often does it turn out? They stay with you, they pass it on the next time, not beyond that, and turn out to be a stellar member of the firm that is profitable for any length of time.

 

Jay Ruane  21:13

So I’ve had that happen three times in the last decade, where we have had clerks that were with us and then failed the bar. Both of them failed twice, and then the other one failed once, and none of them made it more than two years with as an attorney with our firm,

 

Seth Price  21:33

but they made but they passed it and stayed some length of time there.

 

Jay Ruane  21:38

One of them passed it on their second go round, stayed with us for a year, took a job with the government to be able to get loan forgiveness. Another one failed it twice, passed it on the third time, took a job at 18 months as a DA to get loan forgiveness. Third one failed it twice. Then told us, I’m not taking it again. And we said, well, then we’re going to cut ties. And so that’s the way it was. And guess what the bar was. The bar results came out two weeks ago. Actually took it still hasn’t passed. So we’re talking four times now. They would have been able

 

Seth Price  22:19

First by passage rates. We just had some historically. And look, I know people have been very, very successful in life. Have Failed bar a bar exam. You know, first time. That’s not, it’s not. I don’t want to put it that way, but as a business owner, statistically, we’ve had a lot of really bad issues. If I look at the number, probably 80% have had some form of drama. And part of it, what you’re saying, if somebody fails it twice, that means they’ve been with you for at least a year or more, if they were clerked before. So they don’t think they’ve been with you for a year. They think they’ve been with you for two and a half years.

 

Jay Ruane  22:57

Right, And I mean, part of the problem is, is that, you know, I think if they do pass and start practicing, they’re anxious to start anew at a new place that doesn’t know them, having failed the bar. I think there’s a little bit of that as well. Like, they want to go in clean and, like you’ve told me, they also come out of my firm with, you know, now they have more value on the street.

 

Seth Price  23:21

That’s always the case. Let me land the play with this, which, you know, Jay with his systems and AI, I would something that I struggle with, right? We’ve made a lot of great hires. We have people with us, multiple people with us, 12,15, 17 years at this point. That’s awesome, but we’ve made a lot of bad hires over the years. Have we ever have taken the time to put our bad hires into some sort of a formula with AI is going to be possible to find out one of those commonalities 

 

Jay Ruane  23:54

that would be awesome

 

Seth Price  23:56

going in and said, Oh yeah, I’m good with that, whether it be bar failure, whether it be because I’m saying the bar failure, if not for length of time, I’ll discount that was, “Are these people that left with bad reviews at the end? Are these people you know, that did a bad Glassdoor on the way out the door?” Like, how much if you could have avoided drama over the years? What would you know? What are those red flags? Now, it has all this stuff, but I would love to be able to figure out, you know, you ever just exit interviews if you put the refactors in and then amalgamate so that you could get back out there? Or were there times you’re like, Hey, I know I’m walking to massive risk, but I don’t have anybody else, and I might as well take a shot, because there’s a 40% chance this person works out and they got nobody else.

 

Jay Ruane  24:47

Yeah. I mean, not having anybody else really put you in a bind. I think, you know, part of the problem I’ve always found, traditionally with exit interviews is that people tell you what they think you want to hear,

 

Seth Price  24:57

Im not saying just that. I’m saying it’s. What they’re saying that you make a decision to Okay, person belts down. When I look back, it’s like a post war FAA. Well, the FAA looks at the crash, right? It’s like what led up to this. And you’re saying, was there something that happened on the assembly line way back? Is it a maintenance issue, you know, maybe a little bit of everyone. But what is it that’s causing, you know, is there something that we could learn statistically, that the, you know, I hate to Yeah,

 

Jay Ruane  25:33

It makes a lot of sense. I think you’d have, I mean, you know, the prompt for that would be very long. I think one of the challenges is that you know you need critical mass of people to be able to get to those decisions. And I don’t know the most firms in our listening audience will have critical mass of that many people leaving that’s going to be.

 

Seth Price  25:55

We could share it with others. If we could have okay, if everybody gave us their worst three meltdowns. And I’ll take it a different way, which I’ve always thought. A study I’ve always wanted to see. if they put 100,000 marriages, and looked at what were the ones that worked, and what were the ones that didn’t, and you put factors like same religion, age you got married, income, all those things. Are there any things that could tell you that you look if 50% of marriages end in divorce, what are the factors that make it 80% and what are the factors that make it 20% right? If you know if you dated for for two years before you got married, is that going to give you a better shot of knowing what’s going on if you get married after 25 before by the before 25. Are there any benchmarks? And then, coming back here, what are the factors that were staring us in the face. They’re sitting there, you know, talking using the marriage analogy. Somebody had a great I was in Israel, somebody used the, you know, somebody was later in life dating, and they’re like, I know everybody has baggage. I just want baggage that fits in the overhead. And I thought that was brilliant, was pretty

 

Jay Ruane  27:21

Mine, was I want baggage. I want a matching set, like I want to know what I can handle. This type of baggage.

 

Seth Price  27:26

I can deal with it. I just don’t want the stuff that needs to be checked and you pay the the overage because it’s too heavy for the regular ticket, or that’s going to be oversized place where the skis come out.

 

Jay Ruane  27:38

I get you. I get you. I mean, look, the reality is, is that there are so many moving parts when it comes to running a firm that it really, you really have to be make conscious decisions along the way. You know what circumstance?

 

Seth Price  27:51

I think there’s something here that if we could the marriage world, we’ll leave that somebody else. But if we took our greatest meltdowns and looked at it. Are there any things that we could say no, preventative for ourselves, or, frankly, any of our listeners who are sort of making those earlier hires?

 

Jay Ruane  28:12

Well, I can tell you what I think. Right off the top. It’s, it’s your your active need for because a lot of times, everybody who’s listening to this is hiring because I need a body now somebody just left. And I think, honestly, as I have learned and matured in my role here, we are starting a process now that we are not we are going to, we’re going to limp through until we get the right person, and we’re going to continue hiring. And then, as you find gold, I will find them work. I will up budgets. I’ll do whatever is necessary. We’ll break things down. But every time I have hired somebody, because somebody left and I hired the first warm body, thinking I’ll get through with them, even if it’s for, you know, three months, six months, nine months, at some point, lot sooner than I would like, there’s a flame out, and that’s, that’s really the thing you almost, you know, you can’t hire from need. You got to hire from desire.

 

Seth Price  29:15

All right, so that’s clear on the draft board. Got it essentially saying, and look, easier said than done. But as I mentioned, I have a couple slots open. The younger me would have just found people and right

 

Jay Ruane  29:26

I’m the exact same way. I have this. I think I was telling you before we came online. I have this. I have this low floater lawyer position that I want to fill. I’ve been trying to fill it for 18 months. Once I fill it, we’re going to be in great shape, but I’m not just going to fill the next with the next warm body. I’ve got a couple of applicants who won’t let me alone, but I know they’re not the right person because of their baggage, because of their prior work experiences, their prior locations, who they’ve been with. They’re not the right person, and despite me posting the job, I’m not going to bring them in and watch them flame out in six months.

 

Seth Price  30:06

No, look, I know we got to lay on the plane here, but I’ll give it two thoughts. One that’s helped us is focusing on core values of hiring, like moving away from just a plaque on the wall, but if you buy into your core values and using that, I think that’s helped a lot. A and B, it’s again, this is, is they say, hire, slow, fire, fast, and it’s a lot easier said than done. Oh, yeah, but we both know that we’ve kept people because we’re like, I will hold on till we get out. Because

 

Jay Ruane  30:36

we’re nice people. We don’t want to my last person I could have fired after she failed the bar once.

 

Seth Price  30:42

It’s that you’re limping along, and if that person’s gone, you’re like, you think it’s going to have issues with the people there. They’ll get overworked, and you’re trying to just get through the day again. It’s easier to talk about in hindsight, when you’re sitting there at the time playing chess, you’re like, I’ll get an extra month out of this person, even though I know they’re working 50 cents on the dollar, and it turns out they’re working negative 20. 

 

Jay Ruane  30:58

Yeah, you’re right. So folks, that’s going to do it this week here on the law firm blueprint. Thank you for being with us. Of course, you can take us anywhere you want to go by subscribing to the law firm blueprint podcast, wherever you get your podcast, be sure to check out this week in the law firm blueprint Facebook group. I’m going to be posting my AI call prompt that you can use if you get a transcript of your calls. You can run them through this prompt and score your intake people. You may even want to score yourself to see how you do in that context, but that’s going to do it for us this week. Next week, I’m actually traveling. I’m heading off to Charleston for the AI Era conference, gonna meet up with about 100 and something people so learn all about AI. I’ll be speaking about Master prompting. So it’ll be some good stuff. If I get a copy of it, I’ll be sure to put it up in the Facebook group. 

 

Seth Price  31:52

Which day is it

 

Jay Ruane  31:53

 that is Thursday? I am speaking Thursday the 13th, down in Charleston. It’s good. I’m the first speaker. I’m kicking off the show according to the agenda. So it’ll it’ll be great. And I’m gonna get myself some Rodney Scott barbecue, if you know, you know. that is well worth the trip to Charleston, just for that. So thank you all for being with us. I’m Jay Ruane. He is Seth Price bye for now.

 

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