Jay Ruane 0:07
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, down there in the BluShark headquarters. Is that Avengers gear that you’re wearing?

Seth Price 0:20
It claims Angels is a friend’s company. Wow, I love that they give out such good garbs that I can’t. It’s so comfy.

Jay Ruane 0:31
Well, you know it’s interesting, because we’re just back from spring break. I know you are, too. We’re going to talk a little bit about that today. We actually went to Disney, and then we went on the Warner Bros. lot tour. And it was all about, you know, all these Marvel Avengers. And I think it’s Marvel. I don’t watch comic book movies, and so it means they meant nothing to me. My kids loved it. I tried watching Guardians of the Galaxy because we did that right at Disneyland in California. And I got about 15 minutes into the movie. I was like, Yeah, this ain’t for me. So I saw the logo. I thought that might be it. But how was your spring break, Seth Price? What’d you guys do?

Seth Price 1:07
We had my dad’s 90th. We took the family down to Baha Mar ,and it is, it is a thing. It is like Vegas in the Bahamas.

Jay Ruane 1:15
It really is. Did you get to see the jazz band in the lobby at night?

Seth Price 1:21
You know, there’s the John Baptiste jazz club, and it is the whole, the whole thing. The food is amazing. The dinners are amazing on the property, you know, and obviously, you pay for it. I thought it was very reasonable for what you were getting, right? But, you know, not, not inexpensive. That said, you know, providing service at scale, it’s tough. I personally prefer the smaller properties where you actually get to know people better. It’s, you know, you’re not. It’s not as much of a hustle. Yes, by tipping, you can get a decent seat at the pool or the beach, which I know is what Jay is famous for.

Jay Ruane 1:56
I love being a $20 millionaire. Now, it’s like $50 and $100, but I throw around 50s and $100 bills when I travel. And I know that’s not available to everybody, but I would rather take one fewer trip a year and be able to be very generous with my cash going out there, because I have never gotten a bad deal when I’ve thrown money around to the Bellman, to the doorman, to the checking in. I always, always throw him $100 when I check in and say, You guys work hard. You know, you have to deal with grumpy customers. Here’s 100 bucks. Let me buy you a drink tonight and take out everybody I know. In fact, the first time I did that, I read an article called “The $20 Millionaire: which was in Esquire magazine. And this is God. This was before I met my wife and I tried it out in Atlantis, not far from where you were. I threw $100 to the guy who grabbed my bags, and he marched me to the front of the line, got me, and upgraded me into a suite. I’ve done it when I’ve left on cruises. I’ll throw that money around. You know, like Steve Martin in my Blue Heaven, I don’t believe in tipping. I believe in overtipping. Did you get to try my

Seth Price 3:08
I’m a student of Jay’s, and it worked, you know, it works very, very well. And I would say the thing that struck me and it was necessary. It was so busy, you know, spring break.

Jay Ruane
Yeah spring break

Seth Price,
Spring break, plus a number of the high schools, the private schools, and Scarsdale dumped out seniors into our hotel.

Jay Ruane 3:31
Oh, oh, yeah, not, not. Your sons must have loved it.

Seth Price 3:33
No, I had the middle guy who didn’t want any part of that scene; the other guy would have been at the blackjack tables and lost all their money. But you know, one thing that struck me, though I’m going to take a pivot from this, which is, look, it works. It does work great. But in essence, what we’re what you’re doing, or what we’re doing when we do that, is affecting the behavior of employees at that institution now. In one sense, they want to give great service. They’re supposed to, and they can’t at the volume that they’re dealing with.

So you’re just saying, Hey, if you’re going to give great service to one guy, it’s going to be Jay. Right, absolutely. I get it, but it made me think, because I know inside baseball, and you know, as I’ve grown, I have, I’m less in touch with what’s going on at the surface level. But for its BluShark. We just put in Harvest, which essentially is going back to billing time to know how much time is being spent on each client, right? And we don’t in PI, we don’t bill hours. You don’t do it in criminal. And we all know that the client who’s either really nice or really mean or really grateful very often may get more work done than somebody who’s silent. You know, we don’t intend on that. We want every client to be treated equally, but just like that bellman showed you different service because of how you treated them. And it may not always be money. Sometimes it’s just a connection. It could just be being friendly.

It could be monetary. But when that happens as a business, as a business owner, how is it when people are using their own internal resources differently than what you may have intended when you set the pyramid up to make that business work? Because is that you know, because it clearly you get different reactions, different amounts of time, different resources, credit on your you know, on your account may come which is discretionary, how much of that is not really what you want as a business owner, when you’re the guy at the top of the pyramid.

Jay Ruane 5:50
You know, it’s a really interesting question, because I want my people to take care of everybody to the 10th level. I like that unreasonable hospitality sort of approach. But, you know, I can tell from seeing some of the Slack channels, you know, the clients that are a pain. You know, people roll their eyes or put up, you know, a meme in the slack group that they just spent 25 minutes on the phone with, so and so, you know that now I need to go, you know, take a walk and clear my head. And so, yeah, I mean, that could certainly impact, you know, the quality of your generalization. I mean, I guess in some respects, you have to sit, this is our floor, and you know, we can go up from there. You would hope that they would not need to be incentivized by cash. I mean, it’s, it’s not, you know, it’s funny, it’s interesting, but a gift, right?

Seth Price 6:41
You know, it could be anything. I’ve had insurance.

Jay Ruane 6:46
I’ve had a few criminal clients over the years who’ve come into the office and thrown cash around. Tips. Hey, you always answer my call. Here’s 100 bucks. You know, they’re knocking around, guys. They understand the you know, yeah, but they know that you know, if Jay’s not in the office, Andrea is going to talk to them and not just take a message, you know, because you know they’ll, they’ll drop money, and the phone call goes through when Jay’s like, yeah, I don’t know, take it, you know.

Seth Price 7:13
And so, yes, obviously there’s the floor. The other question is, does it throw off your economics at some level? Let’s assume that each employee has X number of hours to help somebody, and if they are going to spend additional time on one. Now, one is not going to make or break you, but the question is, is it going to force the work behaviors that aren’t necessarily what you wish because of an outside influence, just like you? When you go there, they mean

Jay Ruane 7:53
and you say something frequently that you know you’re going to do what you like to do. So if the support staff doesn’t mind talking to the client, but hates doing something else. They’re going to talk to the client, and, you know, and ignore their other functions. And sometimes you can’t have that happening, because you need the other functions executed as well. That’s even

Seth Price 8:13
a money thing that just may be a, you know, a flirt thing, a friendly thing, whatever it is. And it just struck me. Now, these places are sort of built on. They can’t possibly touch everybody they want. They’re lucky. They can check you in. Like, that’s like the biggest obstacle is just getting somebody in the front door to their room. It was, it was a crazy life moment. I’m on the globalist check-in line. We check in the room isn’t available. I get a text, rooms available. Go there. Turns out there’s a second line to wait on to get once that and I’m like, obviously I’m not playing that game. But I get up and they’re like, Oh yeah, you have to go to that line. Now. I’m like, No, I’ve already waited on one line. We go. Then 20 minutes later, the next room is available, and this is with the J tip, so, like, you know, right? It’s, you know, it is. It shows you that just getting through the day, just like you might have somebody who’s maximum staff, and it’s fascinating, which is why I think the intersection of AI, where hopefully it is good the dream. You know, people talk about getting rid of employees. I just wish, with the same amount of labor, I’m fine with my margins, I could provide better service where, if they have more time, that is the dream for me. I say that now, this is a movie. You fast forward six months. We’re like, man, we could do more with less. But I really, I really hope that it allows us. Because when you read unreasonable hospitality, we talked about a bunch on the show. You the show. You know we are kidding. You’re kidding yourselves. I know we’ll use pi as a benchmark. 80 clients, you’re given some unreasonable hospitality. 100 right? You’re pleasant, and a buck 20, you’re getting through the day. And at a buck 40, you’re kidding yourself, talking about the number of clients per you. Pre-lit or per case manager. And so as you’re looking at those situations, there’s only so much you can do. And I think that when you look at this, what is that? And what I saw was that at the volume that this hotel was at, there was no unreasonable hospitality. At best, it was at the high-end restaurants where you’re protected on a fixed number of reservations, and they can come by and, you know, the general manager saw it was my dad’s 90th and just grabbed an extra glass of champagne and put it in front of him and said, you need an extra drink that, you know, that touch, but you can’t do that in mass. It’s, it’s, you know, just drinks out at the bar and hoping for the best.

Jay Ruane 10:42
And that also begs the question, you know, in a PI case, or in a criminal case, if you’re you know, net fee at the end of the case after everything is going to be three or $5,000 versus another one that’s $50,000 fee. Are you giving the same type of hospitality to those two people?

Seth Price 11:00
When they’re reasonable, the hospital has talked about the number one restaurant in the world where the average, you know, per what are the per check or not per head fee, right? With a prefix menu and wine, it was probably around seven or $800 right? Right? Because you know where you have one waiter on X number of tables, you know you it gives you that fat or that margin to do work with and that to pretend that if you’re in a fast food joint, fast casual, maybe friendly, you could be positive, but you certainly don’t have that extra piece. There are lessons to be learned for sure, but I feel like making sure that you are aware of what you have and that you’re not pretending to be something that you’re not, because otherwise, the flip side is, if you spend too much, you’d be out of business, right,

Jay Ruane 11:53
right? You know, I had an interesting thing happen when I was on my break and my executive assistant resigned. And, you know, I took some time to take a step back and sort of determine what the next role is. And I have freed myself up from a lot of the work that I was doing when I hired her five years ago now. I mean, she was my first hire during COVID, and she came in as my review Wrangler, and then we added somebody to her team, and she moved up to be my executive assistant. All remote. She found a great job at the end of last year in her desired field overseas, but it was only available part-time. So she was like, I’m going to do both jobs, and I can do your job part-time in that one. That one is part-time. And then, of course, she got into it, and she’s exceptional. So they found a way to give her a full-time job so she’ll be gone by the end of this month from me. And I sat down and I was like, Okay, what is she doing for me now that she shouldn’t have been doing if she doesn’t have to do anymore? You know, one of the things was

Seth Price 13:04
doing my email for me,

Jay Ruane 13:05
because I’ve really been able to get out of a lot of emails because I’m not actively hearing a caseload and that type of thing. But I’ve been able to find, like, five things that if I were to hire somebody new, I could put five people into five different roles in my office. And so what I think I’m going to do is I’m not going to replace her as my executive assistant, and we’re going to look for five part-timers to start out these different roles and then see which ones work and which ones don’t. Yeah, I don’t like that.

Seth Price 13:36
idea at all. That is terrible. Why? Look, we got to get back to the days where, you know, the good old days where we, you know, went back and forth on these things. I have a personal issue with the part-time concept at that level five part-time, it’s five people. You’re like juggling. You got to find five people, screen them, bring them in, you know, train them to me. I want a guy. I want a person. You know, it’s funny, you know, to talk about the favor economy where, like, you know, I want a guy not to yell at. I know that that’s going to come off negatively, but I want one person that I can go to to get stuff done. I want to think about where I’m going. And I think the idea that, you know, with part-time, it is less stable than full-time. That’s my own personal philosophy. And again, when you’re starting out, if you’re hustling, God bless you.

Jay Ruane 14:29
Okay, so maybe it’s not part-time, maybe they’re 30 hours a week, and

Seth Price 14:33
you replaced your 40 hour person with 330

Jay Ruane 14:37
hour week 530 hours one person’s going to be focusing on. She’s been doing some of my AI stuff, where we’re grading our calls, we’re doing the AI interviews. I’m going to bring somebody whose job solely is to work with our AI tools. That’s not

Seth Price 14:52
your executive assistant. You want an AI person as you should. But what

Jay Ruane 14:57
I’m saying she had been filling a little bit of these roles. Goals, because when I came up with an idea, she helped me get there. Okay, now I think I’m at a point where I can say this should be a role, Okay, Let’s

Seth Price 15:08
rephrase. You’re not bringing part-time people, right? So we’re not disagreeing. But look, it was, it was my Rebecca Berkowitz. Rebecca Berkowitz was the woman when we first started the firm. She came on as an admin with a bunch of guys that just nobody could do it. They were, you know, the people, one guy couldn’t type. One woman was just, you know, behaving inappropriately in the office. Got a woman, Vassar grad Rockstar, who did every job in the office, right from accounting to reception to paralegals to taking the trash out, you name it. She did everything but intake, marketing, and lawyering, and what eventually happened when she left was we tried replacing her, and it fell apart. And the truth is we needed three, or four people to replace her. She was a rock star. We’d also grown. She reminds me of that.

She didn’t take full credit. I think she should, but I think what you’re saying, Jay, is that you have evolved. She showed you what’s possible, and rather than just an executive assistant, you actually want somebody doing AI full time, because that person, and you know what you may need, an overseas person, you said no, but let’s say you could use somebody in your email full time hypothetically, because that’s actually one of my rocks for this quarter, is I spend too much time in my email. You know, I got a travel guy that changed my world, and he took some time off last week, and it was scary. Not that people can’t take time off, that’s of course, but when it was when you sort of, like, earn an unstable work situation that can be problematic. And so I, you know, when you have somebody who’s there, reliable and dependable, they’re going to be a bunch of those moments when we lost our integrator a few months back. You know, there have been a few of those moments. We have a new person in place.

He’s very competent, very good. But you have a few of those life moments where, what I’m hoping you’re saying is you’ve now evolved, where you don’t want the side hustle. You don’t want somebody just doing your way on the side, you want an AI person, which is freaking.

Jay Ruane 17:06
I think I need to have an AI assistant who can, you know, run, you know, and then there are some things that we can do through automation, but I want somebody being able to show up at the pod meetings and give reports, and that’ll be part of that job. So I’m really trying to, you know, be able to say to the pod leader, okay, we graded your nine different intake people for us, it’s six now, and here’s the scores that they got. Here’s where the best ones are. Here was their worst. You said

Seth Price 17:33
something that I thought was really fascinating. So we went back and forth in one of the Facebook groups where I was asking about, you know, intrigued on different AI, intaking, intake, grading, pretty sophisticated program at this point. Listen to recorded calls. There’s coaching. And you were like, Hey, why do you spend money? Use a GBT prompt. And here’s what I’m doing. And I loved it. I thought it was one of those eye-opening things. And I think that one of the things I hope you talk about, and I don’t think the podcast is the right place, is to talk to McCready today about this. We need to figure out what is the right platform to share and encourage each other on AI, because I find the podcast interesting, but interesting doesn’t make money. Where is the place where we can dump what happened in this thread where people like, what about this? What about that? How is, you know, automated? Asking these questions sort of pushes us to a better place. But you made a point, which I thought was fascinating, which is, that all the stuff that we do on coaching is in arrears.

How much of this is like, when you have somebody who’s there, dedicated out of probation, they know what they’re doing, how cool would be if they could self, get the feedback and gamify it for themselves, for ourselves. If we could get it after an episode, how good an episode was, we get it. All we get is some people that tell us, me in the parking lot, in a conference, but if we could get some sort of scoring that gave us immediate feedback, it would allow us to be better and better, and I feel that like that’s one of the things I’m most excited about, is not the reporting to the manager, but giving people the tools to themselves do things with the one caveat, which I think the GBT example that you gave in that chat room about how to build out grading for causes. It’s like salespeople, whatever you incentivize is going to happen, and if you put a heavy lever.

I saw somebody talking to somebody who put this huge lever on empathy. Well, that’s great, but it’s not at the expense of closing the case. So right? Somebody was giving somebody a hard time on their call scoring when they signed the freaking case. You know what? If the case signs, all bets are off. I mean, of course, right? You say that, but you get so caught up in that, that we literally had a life moment where that was an issue for a minute, where we’ve gotten so in the weeds, you forget it’s not for our health, it’s to sign the case, right?

Jay Ruane 19:59
Yeah, right. I mean, one of the things that has really worked for me is, you know, I know there are other open phones, there’s some other products that are out there, but you know, I’ve got a great relationship with my phone people. And so the minute I said, Hey, look, this is what I want to do, they’re saying to me, yes, we’ve got the transcripts, we’ve got the email destination. We can do it by extension, and we can push it into an AI product. We can have them run your prompt, and you can get the score, and the individuals can get their own scores. It’s coming. We’re going to get there. We’ll figure out how to do it, probably using Make for Zapier. You know, on my end in

Seth Price 20:37
this position, I am scared. Were you? I don’t know if we’re still using the same one or not. I think maybe maybe, but I don’t want to be the guinea pig. I want somebody where this is, this is in place. I Zapier is great Zapier, but, you know, I am,

Jay Ruane 20:51
I am pushing. I wonder if it’s Zapier because it’s a French company. So maybe it’s, maybe we’re all saying it wrong. I’m sure we, but I, but I agree with you. I want it baked in. Here’s the problem. I wanted an online database 25 years ago when I started and this just didn’t exist. The only thing that you can do is go out and create it yourself now, but

Seth Price 21:15
Zoom is sort of doing it.

Jay Ruane 21:18
Yeah. But then do I really want to change everything over to a Zoom phone?

Seth Price 21:21
It’s how many of your people are now on voice-over IP that don’t even have a hand 100% what the hell’s

Jay Ruane 21:27
the difference? Well, but the thing is, I have a relationship with people that, you know, my costs are not as much as they would be on Zoom phone, 100% No, no. And they get the job done, and they’re available. When I text a question on Friday night, I’m saying, hey, I want to, I want to try this. And they’re saying, Well, yeah, this is how we can make

Seth Price 21:52
it happens, right? But you’re through a third party, so yeah.

Jay Ruane 21:55
you know, it’s, it’s difficult, but this is, this is trying to do things differently. There are, there’s always going to be a provider, I’m sure, next year at the ABA tech show. So we’re, we’re 11 months away, I guarantee you there’s going to be a software, phone system that grades. You’re going to take calls. It’s

Seth Price 22:13
funny, because they were still, they were still phone systems at ABA tech, and I was walking around because I was in the market. I want to have something today that does it, and the ones that were presented were all the old-school guys, right?

Jay Ruane 22:25
But see, the thing is, because they’re not seeing the future, they’re seeing the past, you know, and they’re trying, and also, we’re nerds. I mean, let’s face it, we want to try to push the envelope on things. I mean, you know, I don’t know a lot of law firms that, seven years ago, found an API for a note card writing service so that we could schedule it. But I’ve been sending automated note cards in, you know, handwritten note cards out for seven years. I’ve sent, you know, hundreds of 1000s of them at this point, you know. And that’s just, you know, I said I want to do it, and I figured out how to make it happen. Not everybody is playing, and I’m not trying to demean people, but there’s not everybody playing at this level that we are. I mean, with, you know, 1000s of clients a year, versus, you know, 100 and so that, you know, there has to be enough people asking for this product to make those people go out and get it. And in the meantime, I’m going to figure it out, because I don’t want to wait. That’s just my philosophy. Awesome. I’d rather, I’d rather take, you know, my $150,000 research and development budget that I set aside every year and take shocks and some things absolutely fail. I spent 10 grand putting a connection to a paper mail platform so I could send out letters by paper mail to clients, and all I got from that was the clients didn’t even read the emails. Why am I mailing them letters, let you know, let’s, let’s, let’s. Why? Why spend the money on paper letters when we can get them the stuff by email and then send them a text message to remind them to check their email? I don’t know. I just sometimes want to grab things and run with it.

Seth Price 24:15
just great to bless the curse,

Jay Ruane 24:19
right? But see, that’s kind of what I’m filling my days with right now chasing dragons, right? That

Seth Price 24:24
then have some staff around you, right? And that’s why

Jay Ruane 24:27
I want to bring in an AI person. And your job is AI right,

Seth Price 24:31
but your executive assistant shouldn’t be the AI person, right? But

Jay Ruane 24:34
Do I even need an executive assistant? That’s the question. And

Seth Price 24:38
I think, look, I think that I am moving more and more towards an apartment. Yes, it forces you to behave differently and creates more discipline with what you’re doing, especially when they are, you know, International Executive Assistant, which is not the right thing. No,

Jay Ruane 24:57
They’re definitely not. Now, here’s the question I have. Well, I wonder if I should investigate a time-shifted person who is in the Philippines. Can I leave them a list of things to do overnight, or do I want them available to me while I’m working?

Seth Price 25:15
Absolutely, that’s why I don’t love the Philippines. I know that I don’t besmirch an entire country, that the costs are less, and they’re very friendly and amenable, but I don’t love the idea of people working through the night, and I think it leads to problems with sustainability. But

Jay Ruane 25:33
I’ve never had anybody over there, so I actually have somebody in Spain who’s a Jersey boy.

Seth Price 25:41
Then they had built out a whole modest team there. But look, it works for some people, right? But, oh, before we wrap up, May 30, last Friday in May, Fisher mastermind experienced New York City. Yes,

Jay Ruane 25:59
I told my team I was going to be out that day. I’m definitely coming. So

Seth Price 26:03
A, it’s going to be great, and I’m excited. It’s going to be at a friend of mine’s restaurant. You know, I’m getting a, you know, everything in New York needs an angle, right? If you go to a hotel, it’s 10s of 1000s of dollars, sure, right? So my friend’s restaurants are only open for dinner. Well, there you go. We got it for lunch. We’re buying lunch. They would be closed otherwise. We have the entire space, medium rare, 33rd, and third.

Jay Ruane 26:32
It’s brilliant, oh, isn’t that like a state freak place, exactly?

Seth Price 26:35
Yeah, I’ve heard of it, yes. Well, you’ll be having state freaks. There’s one secret off the menu, vegetarian dishes. But the guy’s a genius. He had a and I’ll tell the story there, but he basically had some success with a burger joint. Tried something that did everything, didn’t work, and he is now taking this concept. We have three in DC, but there, he’s very involved with the NFL Players Association and did a lot with the NFL retired players. They are taking this restaurant to every NFL City Smart so DC, well.

Jay Ruane 27:08
There is one similar to that, the encontro del Venice, or whatever like that that closed and reopened recently, and I think he opened it in the interim.

Seth Price 27:20
Well, so basically, he was in Paris with his daughter, saw this line of people, and said, We got to do this and brought it back here.

Jay Ruane 27:27
I’ve eaten at the original one, not the original one, but the model that they had in Paris. They had one in the city. I ate there and had a great time. And when I heard they closed, I was disappointed. But then I heard medium rare open. And I’m actually going into a second circuit argument on Friday on a civil rights case that we’re connected to. And that’s one of the things that we were talking about after the argument. Hitting medium rare for dinner. It opens at five. Yeah, hitting that five. I was gonna go, then fit in some shirts, then hit it, and then, and then they train. Oh, awesome. So that could work out. Awesome. I’m sorry, that’s gonna be great. Well, wait, so are we doing that for dinner too?

Seth Price 28:04
I’m not sure where dinner is. I said I got, I got the daytime, but we’re gonna buy a special treat if we’re getting medium rare for lunch, which doesn’t exist, right? That’s awesome. I’m psyched. Yes, well,

Jay Ruane 28:19
I’m definitely signing up. I need to do that. I’ll do that as soon as we get off this to lock in my seat. Because if you haven’t been to a John Fisher mastermind, you’re definitely missing out. It’s a good reason to come to the city, if you’re anywhere on the East Coast, or if you’re flying in, absolutely. Alright, folks, that’s gonna do for us. Little talk today, a lot about vacations and dining, but that’s what we’re all about here in the law firm blueprint. We want to have you wherever you go. You can take us with you on the Law Firm A Blueprint podcast. Get that wherever you get your podcast. Of course, if you want to join us in our Facebook group, it’s called the Law Firm Blueprint, and you can catch this show live every Thursday, 3 pm Pacific, 3 pm Eastern, and 12 pm Pacific, and you’ll be able to comment on us as well as on LinkedIn, live on LinkedIn. Seth always has this show running simultaneously, so thank you for being with us. That’s it for me. Seth, yeah,

Seth Price 29:12
Next week, let’s talk about LinkedIn a little bit.

Jay Ruane 29:15
Okay, that sounds like a plan. Alright, folks, that’s gonna do it for now. Bye for now.