Jay Ruane  0:07  

Hello, hello, and 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. Seth, looks like you’re in the Blueshark headquarters today. Is that right?

 

Seth Price  0:15  

I am. I am.

 

Jay Ruane  0:17  

It’s cinder block walls, you know. It’s the handcuff to the desk, grinding out world.

 

Seth Price  0:24  

This is the new normal. There’s, there’s almost nobody here. It’s practically a virtual operation. It’s pretty. It’s amazing. And we should talk about that today. You know, we’re now five years in on this virtual experiment, a lot of strengths, lot of weaknesses. Want to, want you know. It’s clear that from a hiring point of view it has opened up the world, literally, as well as the country. But how much is being done in the flex world? Are the days, is it possible that the days off, the days off, the days not in the office are days that are appointment days, doctors, personal, this, that. How much is going on, and how much do we care? Is it you just play your KPIs, and that’s all that matters? Should you care more when you know that stuff is not right at the same time when it’s fully virtual? I don’t think about that as much, meaning there are people that get their jobs done. You’re not. It’s not that, like, oh, I’m all, you know. I’m, you know, scheduling everything for a particular day. I don’t know if that’s.. if that’s been..

 

Jay Ruane  1:38  

I mean, it’s a tough dilemma, because if people are getting their work done, then who cares, right? But, but the reality is not everybody gets their work done at the same pace, and at the same quality, and one of the things that we are going to talk about at our summer meeting is going to this method of anchor days. Where you know everybody is in the office on the, you know, the first and second, first and third Wednesdays of the month, or something like that, where no matter where you are in the world. I mean, obviously, where you are in the state of Connecticut, I guess, for us, but everyone’s got to show up if you’re, if you’re within commuting distance to one of our offices, just so that we have, you know, that proximity. I think there’s something about proximity that does help. Now, you could be in a virtual first operation. I know a lot of successful ones, but you know, in this age of AI and technology replacing a lot of people, or at least replacing tasks, I think the people that are going to win, not only the law firms that are going to win, but the services are going to win, are the people who maintain their personal connections with each other. You know, if you don’t come to the office ever and I can have an AI agent do what you do, I’m more likely to say, all right, bring the agent in. Let’s the agent execute that, that, that role, whereas if you’re here and we have a relationship and I can bounce ideas off you or just talk to you over lunch, and I know you’re a family, you’re less likely to be let go. What are your thoughts on that?

 

Seth Price  2:29  

No, I mean, it’s not the let go piece, it’s the, it’s what the value. Look, the thing that scares me, if I’m thinking about it from like 10,000 feet, is that the training we keep talking about? Right, there are pieces of it that are great virtually, but we’re seeing AI encroaching on junior level work, right. Not long before beyond that, but that you need senior people to do the work at the highest level, you need people that are with experience, but if you’re not going to bring people in because you can do it with AI, is there going to be a talent drain at some point in the not too distant future where you’re thinning out your entry level because you don’t need it, but you know, as a society, as an industry, as a practice area, won’t have those people.

 

Jay Ruane  4:03  

well, that I mean, that I think that happens in law, you know. Think about it, I mean, when you and I started out, there were a lot more trials than there are nowadays. Cases work out, you know. And so, you know, when I was cutting my teeth, and I was doing a dozen trials in a year, you know, that was, that was a lot of reps at bat, right, and, and, and I got the life experience of asking the wrong question and recovering, and that type of thing. But you know, now if you’re, if these young public defenders are getting one or two trials a year rather than a 10, they’re getting fewer chances, and that means the stakes are higher, and they don’t have the experience of dealing with wonky witnesses and things that go left as much, and so they’re not getting the reps at that. I mean, that’s one of the things why I wanted to develop rapport report, I’m going to do a shameless plug, I don’t really do it often here, but. It, if you go to rapport report.ai by

 

Seth Price  5:03  

the way, I think we may, we may need a rebranding exercise.

 

Jay Ruane  5:08  

I love the name,

 

Seth Price  5:08  

i know you love it can the like, it’s just.. I don’t know,

 

Jay Ruane  5:14  

I.. I love the name, so I’m

 

Seth Price  5:16  

one name. give me, give me a name with AI, one name, report, maybe just, you know,

 

Jay Ruane  5:20  

rapport AI,

 

Seth Price  5:22  

yeah,

 

Jay Ruane  5:22  

something like that. I know, I like the double R. My last name starts with an R, so I leaned into the alliteration. But anyway, so you know, my whole thing was

 

Seth Price  5:32  

Ruane AI. I

 

Jay Ruane  5:35  

don’t know about that.

 

Seth Price  5:36  

Why he could probably buy it cheap, nobody else wants.

 

Jay Ruane  5:38  

I could buy it for $1.99 wants to buy Ruane? They can barely pronounce it as it is, but the whole thing, the whole concept behind it was I needed to get my intake people, my like, okay, here’s a perfect example, starting june 1, I have six new people in intake,

 

Seth Price  5:54  

Oh my god.

 

Jay Ruane  5:56  

six, we put,. We wanted four. We hired six, thinking two are going to flame out, right, and four of them are American. Five of them are American, one of them is remote, and you know, and we’re excited about this, you know. We went to Washington State, we went to Florida, we’re in a really, really good spot with the people that we hired, we think they have excellent potential, but I needed, you know, we set up a Google Classroom, because we’re on the Google atmosphere ecosphere in Google Workspace, and so we set up a classroom. It’s got, you know, 40 hours of lectures and all that stuff, but you’ve trained intake. A lot of it is sitting, sitting next to a person and listening to them on the phone, but if you’re remote, how do you do that? Right, it’s nearly impossible to.. I mean, you can do it with, with having them listen, but you don’t get the ability to pass notes, you don’t get the ability to cover the handset and say, see what I did there, that type of thing. So, what I did is, I actually built it myself first, I vibe coded it using, using Claude, I said this is what I want to do. How is this possible? And so we built it using Airtable and Make and Retail AI, and it’s duct taped together, and we found a way to make it even better. So that’s the product that’s going to come out in the next month, but it allows my people in intake to do reps, starting to talk to people with speeding tickets, then it goes to first offense DUI. The more complicated ones, the more complicated criminal cases, that type of thing, and they will run through 100 avatars of people in their first week of training, and so they do lecture reps, and then you know, we see people that are hitting the ground after having done this, and they’re excelling. And so I think you can utilize AI to make your people better, not necessarily replace your people, because I know I don’t want to talk to AI if I’m calling a physician. I’m calling somebody I’m paying big money to, I don’t want to talk to AI. I hate that.

 

Seth Price  8:04  

you know, and it works when it works. It’s effing awesome. There are times when it’s better than anything else. The problem is it’s the questions on the fringe, so you know there could be, you know, if somebody has a real, you know, a DUI case with all the bells and whistles that you’re going to want, AI could do a pretty decent job, but what happens when it’s like, oh yeah, I’m calling for my cousin, and but it’s a real case, but it’s not clean direct line.

 

Jay Ruane  8:29  

Yeah, I mean all of those things matter, and so I think I think the firms that are going to win, in my opinion, are the firms that utilize AI to make their human connections better.

 

Seth Price  8:40  

Well, in reverse order to my to my Monday night, so we normally start the show with personal stuff, and it’ll land with went to Knicks game four, got to see the sweep, it was freaking awesome.

 

Jay Ruane  8:56  

nice,

 

Seth Price  8:57  

but pregame we blew off dinner, we go down, we’re standing courtside, and the usher comes to sort of push us out of our front row seats. For

 

Jay Ruane  9:05  

you didn’t have front row seats.

 

Seth Price  9:08  

Well, I mean, it was much more reasonable than New York, mind you. And Knick fans were not allowed to buy the front front row, so we were in the.. I was standing in the first row of the non-pullout seat, right behind the bench, behind the next bench, and I look at the guy who’s been pushed, who I’ve now moved over two seats, so he can have his actual seats, and it’s an old friend of mine, Jason Calacanis. Jason Calacanis, many in the audience will know him from the All In podcast. according to him the other day, heading towards the seventh most popular podcast in the world. I mean, it is four very brilliant guys who are now intersecting with the White House and startups, and you know, the unicorn company. It’s crazy what this podcast has become. So, a few things. Just backstory was, I, I spent time with Jason, when I had my first startup, a music startup. He was doing the Silicon Alley Reporter, a color glossy magazine. Threw these amazing parties and conferences back in the day, rising tide conferences, sort of what we’re seeing now with AI. When that blew up, he reinvented himself in the blogger space, and then eventually as a startup investor, and hit big with a number of things, I believe Uber and others, very public, and he’s done this, you know, had this incredible ride. So I had about 30 minutes of small talk with this guy that I knew from the late 90s, who’s hit it as bit, about as big as anybody,

 

Jay Ruane  10:39  

and you asked him to be a guest on our show,

 

Seth Price  10:41  

exactly. You know what, a couple things he said. One, his podcast was wildly successful. 15 years of doing it. Only took off in the last five, so we may still have another eight years to go. You know, he was always ahead of the curve. He was doing podcasts before they were cool. We were sort of.. it was cool-ish now on fire, but you know, as talking to him, you know, Hulu winners, like, you know. In one sense, he hangs out with the guys, you know, the anthropic guys, and Musk, and all these, you know, people at the top of the pyramids, and clearly that stuff is there, and valuations right, not right. But what I was asking about was the stuff that we hit, which is the AI that’s hitting legal, that’s doing PI or non-PI. How is that going to assess out? Because as Claude gets more developed, is a, you know, $300 a case fee per case going to fly if you could just build this yourself with Claude?

 

Jay Ruane  11:43  

right,

 

Seth Price  11:44  

and his take was because we were sort of reminiscing of the.com bubble, and you know the six pet food online companies, etc. is generally those, you know, these companies will, you know, you know. the investment concept behind them, which is what he sort of focuses on, was you’ll get your money back, but likely these things are going to roll into something bigger, and that you’re not, you’re that, that was he was, you know, for the early stage guy, you know, he was optimistic for, you know, a lot of these cool startups, maybe somebody doing intake, but that it was, it was just fascinating discussion. You know, because he’s playing at this, you know, in addition to investing in these small startups, he plays with the CEOs of these massive companies, and it was just fascinating to get this perspective. You know, we’re stuck in the middle with all of this technology that’s trying to make it, and the question is, you know, McCready always talks about leasing versus buying, and the question is will the mother ship companies be able to provide what we need accessible enough? you know, do you have to be Jay Ruane, who sits up all night, you know, building agents, or will other people be able to, will the average law firm be able to get what they need from it?

 

Jay Ruane  13:06  

Well, I mean, I, I like building the agents, I’d love to be able to have an off the rack thing that I could buy and plug in. I just don’t know,

 

Seth Price  13:18  

would you pay for it is the question>

 

Jay Ruane  13:21  

if it’s not the right thing, I mean,

 

Seth Price  13:25  

you never, you didn’t go the case management route, you know, you’ve done

 

Jay Ruane  13:30  

half a million dollars on my own,

 

Seth Price  13:32  

you take it with yourself, meaning you’re going to be people,

 

Jay Ruane  13:35  

because I started building mine before any of these ones existed,

 

Seth Price  13:38  

understood, but at some point they were there and robust, and

 

Jay Ruane  13:41  

right,

 

Seth Price  13:42  

could help out, and so you know, it was an interesting life moment. A, I’ll write more about on LinkedIn, but it was fascinating, you know, to watch a guy who has talked about pivoting major pivots in life to end up where he is.

 

Jay Ruane  13:58  

Well, I think if you, if you’re constantly moving, a pivot becomes a lot much easier, you know that, and that’s something that we have to think about. So, that leads me to my big question for today, and I’ve been thinking about this because this is something that I like to think about every year. But let’s say you are a young lawyer in the greater DC area, and you see this Godzilla called Price Benowitz. Now, Seth, I want you to take off – not literally, you can still wear it – but take off that Price Benowitz hat that you’re wearing, and figuratively tell me how you would advise this young lawyer on how to beat Price Benowitz. Now, I know you’re not going to beat him in six months because you’ve got 20 years of, you know, institutional inertia, you know, that’s rolling along, but how would you beat your firm? Because I like to ask myself this every time.

 

Seth Price  14:55  

so I’d say on the on the criminal side, for example, I don’t think I would advise somebody to go all in to beat us. Meaning I don’t, meaning I’m not, I’m not bullish on some, on some of this stuff, you know. So there, there are areas where, like, oh my god, there’s a massive opportunity, versus others where be careful what you ask for. I’m watching, interestingly enough, on the PI side, and I think that what I’ve noticed, that we are, you know, we are a substantial player in this space, but there are lots of awesome players that what I’m watching people do is everybody’s doing something different. One guy does bus shelters, another guy’s doing busses, you know, another guy is doing billboards in Baltimore, and everybody’s digital at some level, but that you know, I think what they’re doing is what can I do that differentiates me to get market share, and I think to

 

Jay Ruane  15:48  

be honest with you, bus shelters and busses are not different, they’re they’re one in the same thing. I mean, yes, at a micro level, yes, but you know, at a macro level, it’s brand in a large market, using, you know. it’s the same thing as putting up signs in a bodega for Newport cigarettes and paying for it, getting paid $4 a month for the.

 

Seth Price  16:14  

for the things, but in order, but right, so the question is, How are people getting eyeballs, and how are they competing against Morgan? Others, you know, the struggle is real. It’s not nothing. And so, what I’m, what I’m seeing is people are getting creative and pushing to areas that were sort of, you know, not as focused on, you know, places where eyeballs were, I mean, you’ve seen, you know, Shanara sort of wake everybody up on billboards, saying, “Wow, this is what some guy went all in on billboards. You know, Gary Starters did a nice job sort of evangelizing radio as an option. They’re all these different ways to gain.. there’s only, you know, at the end of the day, you know, there’s digital, that you know. So there’s a guy, there’s a long time BluShark client who’s always pissy about something, and you know they’re like, oh well, the few, you know, we’re gonna go for earned media. We are gonna, we don’t care about SEO anymore, and I’m like, okay, like, you know. Goo God bless. And so, and history is written by the victor. If it turns out that earned media surpasses the ability to get cases from digital, and I think what, what people are frustrated by is that with some of the changes Google has made, you have not, you, you know, we always want to grow, and we see these, you know, these great curves that there is a tightening as things have gotten more competitive. It’s only gonna get more so with private equity coming in, and that it’s not that digital isn’t working, but that it’s, it may, you know, it’s not like you’re God’s gift to the world, where you know you’re going to do, you know, 25% growth a year. Right now, you’re trying to figure out, how do I maintain what I have, and then find other channels to make sure that they continue to grow. There are areas where it grows, it depends where you are in the curve, your competition, et cetera. But we are seeing all of these things infiltrate, but I think taking your, your eye off the thing that’s giving you that base of cases would be pretty dangerous.

 

Jay Ruane  18:30  

Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree with that. I mean, I’m just, I’m trying to figure out what would I do if I were a young lawyer and I wanted to compete with my firm.

 

Seth Price  18:40  

Would you go into this?

 

Jay Ruane  18:43  

That’s a good question. I mean, look, I stay in the criminal space because I’m passionate about it. I think if I were to leave the criminal space or start over, and I were not in criminal, I probably wouldn’t even be a lawyers.

 

Seth Price  18:57  

You get your law degree and pivot to something else, right? 

 

Jay Ruane  19:00  

Exactly, like I, you know, but if I had a passion for criminal law, and I was 2829 years old, looking to hang a shingle and compete with Jay Ruane, right, what would I do? I would, obviously, I would hustle to try to get as many trials as possible, because not a lot of people can compete with me in my home state on that stuff. But I think with DUI, I was known as the DUI guy for years. I think there are some niches you can get into in DUI that are growing, you know, like the drug-related ones and the science-backed stuff that I think you can set yourself apart. 

 

Seth Price  19:32  

I’m going to push back. Where do you.. is that, you know, as a solo? Yeah, you can have that nice niche, but to scale that part of its time, you know, you’re a 25 year over success.

 

Jay Ruane  19:45  

I mean, think about it, you could, you could, I, if I wanted to scale in criminal right now, I would get into computer forensics, because I think that is a growing area of criminal law, so knowing how to deal with cell phone. Phones and cell phone searches and laptop searches, you know, the CSAM stuff is very..

 

Seth Price  20:05  

That almost goes back to being an associated bigger firm, you know, like, is.. and frankly, right now, you know, anybody doing federal criminal is sucking wind. You know, they.. when you don’t charge people and you gut the Department of Justice. There just aren’t that many cases.

 

Jay Ruane  20:20  

Yeah, I mean, you know, it’s interesting. There are.. it’s that’s something I know a lot of guys and women who have survived for 15-20 years off their CJA appointments, and then picking up, you know, a half a dozen private pay cases over the course of the year. But they always have.. always have one or two cases that’s pending at a time, and they’re able to bill the government, you know, they’re they’re $135 or whatever, for days when they don’t have anything else going on, they go visit their client in jail, and they make, you know, they make 1000 bucks, and you know, they’re solos. Right, but boy, you know, I’m seeing those lawyers really hurting in that, you know, one of them I talked to recently, he’s like, there’s just no work. He’s like, you know, I

 

Seth Price  21:03  

on the federal side

 

Jay Ruane  21:04  

on the federal side, right.

 

Seth Price  21:05  

Right. So, the federal side is like, all in DC, which is, you know, more federal white-collar people. Every single guy has bailed for civil, like that, just that’s a thing. And on the criminal side, look, we talked about the loan forgiveness being a real issue for hiring, right. So, when you look at the risk factors that, and we’ve seen in DC. It’s not, it’s not universal, because, like, a lot of most jurisdictions are not as rich as DC. But in DC, for criminal, this is a market that used to have four Price Benowitz attorneys down to one in criminal court, right? That’s, you know, and it’s not, and I can’t even tell you that they’re at 100% capacity. It’s that as a strong, if not dominoes

 

Jay Ruane  21:51  

Is that a change of your brand? And I mean, if you

 

Seth Price  21:55  

No, this is because we market very well for that. It’s a charge, it’s a change in how things are charged, like Philadelphia. We didn’t, you know, we bailed out of that. I mean, if you don’t charge people, criminal defense lawyers, and have any business, that’s not the federal issue. It was, you know, the local policing, and it has been really, you know, there have been periods during Covid where DC did no income verification or check for court-appointed lawyers, that’s bad for business.

 

Jay Ruane  22:27  

And then in our state, yeah,

 

Seth Price  22:29  

Right, meaning, but you know, somebody’s making a buck 50 and they get a free lawyer, that’s that’s your, that, that would be your client. And then finally, is as CGA rates have risen again. Virginia’s still pretty low, but, like DC, you know, when you get yourself to 90 an hour for state court, and some guy can make a buck 80 billing his hours, that makes, you know, that with, with no office, no overhead, to speak of, you know, that is pressure on the local business, and so all of those things. That’s why I’ll go full circle to the beginning, which is why I don’t think criminal would be the place I would advise somebody to go right now, but I’m seeing, you know, areas that you know that social media can market to things that are national SSDI immigration things like that, where you can speak to the world or country or whatever you want to do at a very cost-effective rate. Those to me are the areas where that, so I think that’s what I would advise somebody. Took me a while to get to the answer, but I think that social and tapping into what’s there, people that get social that know how to create content, that content creators can do things, particularly in national practice areas. That’s why we’ve seen some of the PI aggregators do amazing, you know, not always my style, but engaging content that brings in cases, and I think that those are – it’s a heavy lift for a local player, but if you can take a case from anywhere, that changes the value of it.

 

Jay Ruane  24:13  

Oh, absolutely, absolutely, and that’s one of the things that we’re considering here on our office, is trying to figure out sort of where’s our next growth? Is have we maxed out what we can get from the local market? Should we, you know, open up a new state, you know, track, go up into Western Massachusetts, which is there and close to us and a possibility, or have we not squeezed all the juice out of out of the state of Connecticut? Should I open up another regional office, and at what point you look at the expansions of things like the Goddard School, right there. That preschool type thing. They are in all the big markets already, and so now they’re opening up in smaller markets, and they still seem to find people to fill, even though the millennials are having fewer kids, and that type of thing. So, the question is, you know, how do you identify the areas that you’re going to open your next office? Do I go up to Springfield, Mass, which is a big city, and try to compete up there, or do I find a smaller city in Connecticut that’s really ripe for taking over and not have to create new systems, et cetera? And that’s a question that we have to discuss here at our firm to decide where we go, or?

 

Seth Price  24:13  

are there courthouses objectively that you are not getting the cases, particularly online from?

 

Jay Ruane  24:13  

the only courthouse that we really don’t target is down in the southwestern part of the state, Stanford, and we have a mutual friend who really has cornered that market, and I said I’m not going to bother to drive up both of our advertising costs and market heavy in that space?

 

Seth Price  24:13  

I know you market everywhere, but are there courthouses you, you know, number of private

 

Jay Ruane  24:13  

I think there’s a couple of courthouses where I think we’re light and we can get more. The question is, how do I get into that, because those are old boy networks. I mean, literally old boy networks. The average age of those lawyers is like 80 plus.

 

Seth Price  24:13  

but Jay goes back to digital, and that, though they’re not getting their cases from digital for the most part.

 

Jay Ruane  24:59  

Right, which is why we’re, you know, you’re getting out in front of little league teams like we were this spring, and in sponsoring things and getting haircuts, getting haircuts. I should probably find some people up the state. I’m actually due. I’m going to go tomorrow for my Friday touch-up, and we’ll see how it goes.

 

Seth Price  25:14  

Love it.

 

Jay Ruane  25:15  

So, I think that’s good. We had a good conversation today. This was illustrative of what we try to do here. Of course, I’m interested to know if you have been listening, please, in the comments, let me know how you would be your firm, because I think that’s a conversation that that everybody should be thinking about at some point over the course of the year, and at the end of May, as the summer begins, maybe it’s something that you want to think about, so you can put yourself in place to do that, but that’s gonna do it for us this week here on the Law Firm Blueprint. I am Jay Ruane, and he is Seth Price. We are the Law Firm Blueprint. Be sure to take us anywhere you need to go by subscribing to The Law Firm Blueprint podcast, and you can catch us live every Thursday, 3 pm Eastern, 12 pm Pacific, live on LinkedIn, and live in our Facebook group, of which you should be a member. The Law Firm Blueprint. So that’s it for me, Seth. Any final words? Nope. Have a, have a great week. Have a great week, folks. Bye for now.