BluShark Digital 0:00
Music.

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 Price. But we are joined by not one, but two phenomenal people today. Of course, Mike McCready is with us to talk all things AI, as he has been throughout this entire series. But today we are joined by the one the only, Justin Lovely, who’s going to talk about how AI has impacted his practice Seth, take us away.

Seth Price 0:35
Well, great to have everybody here, and Justin is a longtime friend and admirer of late, of how you’ve leveraged AI into your practice. You’ve, you know, sort of been a inspiration to what is possible. So I’d love, you know, many people on this, listen to us, have seen you speak before, but you know, top level, you can read, you know, you could talk about 100 different things that you’re doing with AI, but given that you’ve been at it for a while, what? What are the top couple things that you’re seeing be impactful? Because so many people out there, including myself, it’s a lot of noise. What we’re we’re, where are you seeing the greatest impact so far?

Justin Lovely 1:12
Well, you know, we were talking before this started going down a rabbit hole, and 100% there’s so many different things that you can do, and you’ll never get anything done because, you know, if you’re like any of us, you know, we’re tech forward lawyers, we’re like, let me do that, let me do this, let me do this, and then you bring it back to your operations team, and they just hate us, right? Because we’re trying to do so many things, but where, and that kind of had to dial back, but where I’m really finding it to have some impact is in the demands. And, you know, there’s a lot of vendors out there. And so we’ve kind of developed our own little AI suite in house, so in the demand phase, and then also in the, the, the firm knowledge, the organizational knowledge, as far as building a, a we call it Lovely Law Firm University. So like an organizational database to where you get everybody up to speed as quick as possible. That way you can leverage the offshore labor, get some savings there, but also the people you hire locally, you know, you can quickly have that one source of truth, you know. And you can use AI to do that, instead of Justin, or my partner, Amy, having to always be, you know, getting videographer time and, you know, going down that route. So, a few big wins I think people can use.

Seth Price 2:21
You’ve talked about this a bunch. I was going to do a follow up on that, because that’s the part that excites me. Is the, we, our university for the firm I know Michael is now multi office in multi, you know, bunch of different states. You know, to me, the piece that everybody talked about were the trainules, that online training. But the moment anything changed, that video was thrown out. It took so much to do it. The idea that scripts can be used with an avatar, to me, seems like one of those, you know, aha, moments where we can really leverage that technology quickly and easily.

Justin Lovely 2:53
Oh, it’s a no brainer. And, you know, I filmed my whole first iteration of Lovely Law Firm University, just the old fashioned way, in front of a camera. We rented a building, had a videographer. I had it perfected, had, I fixed everything in post. We did modules, and it worked. It was great. But I was built on FileVine. And so when I switched from FileVineto Smart Advocate, I was like, oh my god, we gotta do this again. And my staff, too was like, oh no, not again. And so I was looking for a solution, you know, because I was following different AI platforms. And then, you know, we use, we built on originally, we built on Thinkific, you know, but that’s more built for people selling courses. And we changed the whole LMS platform around talent LMS. And then we leverage HeyGen to use me as an avatar. And it really went, when you start doing this. And all firms should do this as they scale. You know, if they’re a solo, even when they’re a solo, if you’d asked me, when should you have start this? Back when it was just me and Amy in one room, that’s when I should have started. So you can always build your best practice and always have something to go back to. But you’re right, if something changes, you would lose the value of that video. But now quickly you can drop a script in there. I don’t even have to be there. My ops can use, HeyGen, knock the video out, send it to me for approval, and then it’s ready to be uploaded to talent LMS as the new, the new way we do things.

Seth Price 4:14
Michael?

Michael McCready 4:15
I love the fact that you’re using AI, you know, within your firm, right? That’s the first place to start. There’s so many crazy things that you can do, you know, externally, but, but it’s a great place to start, especially if you have that data and you have that information already. So, you know, we have, we have SOPs, right? And SOPs change and so forth and so on, you know? But, but when you can, when you can upload, let me backtrack. You know, SOPs are only as good as the ability to find the information, right? So if you’ve got, if you’ve got to rely on an index, you know, people have to understand how to find that information. But when you put all of your. SOPs or your employee handbook or your’re on Smart Advocate. We linked the Smart Advocate users manual, you know, to AI, so no longer do you have to flip through to find the answer. Now you just ask it a question, right? So you type in the question and it searches the data that you give it, whether it’s an SOP or a handbook or an instruction manual, and then the answer is there. So I love the fact that you’re focusing internally first, and I would recommend everybody that’s the place to start.

Seth Price 5:32
Jay, I know you come from a non PI perspective, and probably have questions along that.

Jay Ruane 5:38
Yeah. Well, so it seems, you know, I love systems. And, you know, I built a wiki years ago, and it’s amazing how, you know, we had the same systems in place for, you know, at least a decade, and now they’ve changed probably 20 times in the last two years, because we’re adopting new technology, and just the speed with which we’re adopting new technology, you have to find solutions. And I love using, HeyGen, we use it in our own office for exactly what you’re doing. You put it out there. Have have me speaking to my, our onboarding. I mean, we’ve taken, you know, there’s a number of things legally in our state. We have to make people watch before they come on board about sexual harassment and that type of thing. It’s always good practice to do it anyway. But my team is able to throw me in there to do an intro. They customize the intro with me to our new people that are onboarding so they’re getting they’re getting me talking to them directly, and it’s really helped us with the interpersonal stuff that I don’t necessarily have to actually go down to our studio, film it, talk about this person, and I think at scale, you’re going to be able to be doing, hey, case updates to your clients using your avatar with just a CSV file uploaded and and created. So I’m really excited about where these things are going.

Michael McCready 7:05
Let me dial it back, just real quickly. We all know what we’re talking about, but for those that don’t, HeyGen is a is a platform. It’s a website. And what you’re able to do is you film yourself for maybe three, four minutes. It tells you what to do, you know, look happy, you know, look mad, you know, look excited, say all these words, and it captures the video. Then you’re able to type anything that you want, and it will use your face and your lips and your mouth to create that video. I know a lot of people are very scared of that, you know, because you can make anybody say anything-

Seth Price 7:46
And rightly so.

Michael McCready 7:47
Yeah, and right, like, but, but when you’re talking about using it internally for your team, you know, I’m able to send a message without me actually even videotape, videoing it by just writing a script. And so what Justin was talking about with training for any of these things, you know, Jay, your own but, but that’s, that’s a program called Hey Gen, which is a pretty neat, pretty neat program.

Seth Price 8:14
I have something for Justin, because look, Justin was fast out of the gate. I was so impressed at how you did this, and I remember seeing some of your early presentations, right? So reflecting back, because you’ve been at this as long as anybody hardcore in the legal space, whether it’s not working or not being able to get buy in, or just the juice not being worth the squeeze. What are examples where you’ve tried to apply AI, not that they might not come back at some point. But you, as an law firm owner with similar type issues that what we’re dealing with and our audience is dealing with, have seen, you know what I wish I could get there, but I wasn’t able to get that across the finish line.

Justin Lovely 8:50
Yeah. So just trying to get buy in of the basic Chat GPT when that first came out. I mean, just trying to say, and because you had to lay some ground rules right? Don’t put any PHI in there, but use this as a tool. And it really frightened them, like they would lose their job if they tried to leverage the AI that way. And so I had a lot of them that would just not use it. And you know, we would have meetings where they’re stuck, and I’m like, well, let’s see what AI says. And they’re like, oh, I didn’t even think about that. And then you would have, I would have, like, my younger attorney, my younger attorney’s pod, just really use it, just really take off with it. And so there was, you’re right. There’s always a disconnect of like me using it for like, operations and marketing, and really replacing, like, I don’t even have a marketing department anymore. It’s all AI and one grassroots girl and my, my director of operations, and then me, that’s it, and we’re running a $15 million law firm, so it’s gone, but then you’ve got, but then we would try things, right? So we would, we were kind of trying too much. So that kind of goes back to what I first started. If you try too much and you’re not managing the change, you really need to have a change management plan. That’s what I was really trying to get across in that Miami speech a couple weeks ago, is if you’re not laying these ground rules down and really letting everybody know that, hey, this is how we’re doing things. We’re going to leverage this new technology. This is the new way we all got to get on board do it this way, you’re going to have these splinters in your office, then you’re really never going to get it done, because you’re going to go back to your quarterly meeting half the team’s using it, half not, that gets you nowhere, right? You’re really starting over. And that has happened. I don’t want to call it any some, some companies, but some have you know, I look at them and I think they’re great. We’ve used some for criminal defense. We still have a criminal defense practice where we thought we could use it for some discovery. We can talk offline about those. And it just didn’t, just didn’t work. It really looked good when you know, when you talk sales or you start using it, and then when you really put it into practice, it just doesn’t, it doesn’t work, and you’re not really saving time. So what you really need to do, and I talked about this in Miami too, is say, where are? Because there’s all these tools. There’s all these tools in whatever practice. There it is, if it’s criminal defense, workers comp, you know, med mal, it’s if it’s personal injury, where is the bottleneck? What’s really what’s going to help you move the needle? And what is it? What really matters to us? We need cash in the bank, right? Our clients want money, and we’re business owners. We got to get paid, grow the business. It’s all cash flow. So what’s going to drive the train, break the break that bottleneck, and get the cash moving. That’s where you need to start putting, putting your AI skills and using AI. One more thing is, you know, we’re all in different stages of our business, right? You might be a solo, right? Well, you’re going to need AI in different ways, and can use AI in different ways than you know, somebody’s doing 3 million, 5 million, 10 million. And that’s where I was thinking, you know, a lot of us have been, I’ve been around, been in the system for a while, and we kind of know each other’s growth, growth plans and growth patterns and how we’ve been growing our businesses. That’s why I was thinking the learning. I mean, because the quicker we can get people up to speed. I mean, that allows you just to keep scaling and scaling and scaling and scaling, because we’re all trying to hire people, and we all gotta be able to to get that perfect hire up to speed with our knowledge and start producing, right, so we can keep this thing going.

Seth Price 8:50
Or, better yet, taking the imperfect tire and trying to make it so that we can live with it.

Justin Lovely 8:57
Absolutely, absolutely, because you’re, you’re 100% right, because we’re all looking for that diamond in the rough, And we definitely are missing people. We’re not giving people-

Seth Price 12:22
Or, like, you can only scale so much with diamonds in the rough. We all have them. When they leave it’s devastating, but that’s not a scalable business model.

Jay Ruane 12:32
You know, I love Justin, I love what you just said about the bottlenecks. Because one of the things that we found is, you know, as a criminal defense firm, we are lawyer heavy, we don’t have a large selection of support staff, because our money goes to putting lawyers in the courtrooms, and so we’re actually trying to develop something now where we can have an AI agent reach out to our clients and get their work history, their educational history, their family history, their psychological, you know, issues that they might have, and we’re finding great success with we had a paralegal who was making these calls, but we think we can have an AI agent make these calls to our clients and serve us up mitigation packets and, you know, all the things that we could need at fractions of what it would cost to actually staff a real, live human making these calls. So I’m really excited about some of the stuff that we can do as these technologies grow. I mean, my intake team is already, you know, my sales lawyer is already sending a avatar. Hey, thank you for talking to me. Video of her talking to the to the people, and they think it’s a custom video that was made just for them, but it was a script that was given in so the, what you can push out is almost what’s coming is better than what you’re able to do now with some of the tools, just creating demands and and doing, you know, text on paper.

Justin Lovely 13:58
The voice agents, I think that is just going to keep getting better and better and better. And it’s we, this is one of our failures. I mean, we used air.ai

Jay Ruane 14:08
Oh and they were terrible.

Justin Lovely 14:09
Well, when they first came out, I had my little Twilio. I’m like, oh my god, I’m gonna be the only guy in town. This is gonna be great, you know. And we first trained it on intake training. So we did ghost calls to ghost call my own intake. So I was kind of scared letting it go. And then, of course, it was, went to, you know where, but there’s probably AIs going out. I don’t know who you’re using now, Jay, but there’s some open source stuff on GitHub too. Now that you can, you can kind of develop your own software.

Seth Price 14:36
Well Mike, just that comes to my question. I want to jump in front of Michael. Let him go next. But the the question is, how do you balance sort of I’d call free or low cost, you know, you know, user wear, versus these very expensive third parties which do amazing things. But how do you recommend balancing it, or is the pay to play people that bring it to you turnkey? That much more advanced than what we can get? How do you how do you balance that?

Michael McCready 15:04
Well, you certainly need to have somebody on your team, or hire somebody that can do this. You know, Justin and myself, I mean, our firms are really leveraging this technology, but I realize that most firms aren’t there and and you’re lucky if you have somebody on your staff that can do a CRM. So these, these turnkey, these, these big programs that are expensive, they’re all backed by, you know, private equity. They’re there to make money, you know, definitely serve a purpose. And and you know, whether, experiment with which one you might like its like Westlaw and Lexis?

Seth Price 15:44
Of course, but what I’m saying is like, so that’s a great example. Like, there are people out there that don’t pay for Lexus and Westlaw and use the different free services that are out there and adjust accordingly. Is it one of those things where what is being done at a paid number? Is it liability that you’re saving because they’re segmenting data, whereas your staff doesn’t really know where the hell your stuff is going when you put it into some of these programs, you know, what are we getting with the very expensive third party groups versus, you know, having an IT person in house that’s leveraging the different AI programs that are cheaper or free.

Michael McCready 16:23
I think the biggest problem is just people are scared to try it right, start with Chat GPT. I mean, you can, you can look and find out how you do it and fool around. And-

Seth Price 16:34
I get it, but let me throw it to Justin. Because you play, you do a lot of stuff yourself. Don’t hear a lot of these very expensive third party groups being done here is this because you’re so entrenched, you’re doing what Michael just said, which is you play with it enough, you know? Or is there like when you evaluate, you’ve seen all these different tools, how do you determine whether or not it’s better just to keep doing it very inexpensive, versus allowing these other people with private equity backed groups to be part of the solution.

Justin Lovely 17:06
Well, the first thing I’ll say is, at least in the injury world, they know that we’re lazy and we like to throw money at it and solve problems. Okay, I mean, let’s be honest. That’s, that’s, I mean, that’s how these companies become multi million dollar companies. At every one of these seminars we go to. When I look at it now, you know, Michael and I have a base level of knowledge, right? So I think we can look at it and say, I think I can build that, you know, or you can say, this guy, I can’t figure this out, and it’s a fair price, and it solves my problem with my bottleneck, right? Because I’m starting back here, this is something that can make me money, and then it’s a cost benefit analysis. Should I implement this? Okay, that’s when you should spend some money. Now, if it’s something where it’s just a Chat GPT wrapper, they jack the price up and they got a fancy sales page, which a lot of these are. This is just like web pages were, you know, Pay Per Click was, you know, years ago. I mean, all this stuff initially comes out. Everybody’s oohing and awhing. They just don’t understand the base level of knowledge to protect themselves and not waste money.

Seth Price 18:06
But I’m gonna look, I’ll throw Jay. Jay thought, you know people, Michael actually brought this to me. There are people who like to build their own software. Jay actually did it. Michael discussed doing it, and I’m always like, we’re not in the software bus- but if you want to be, you want to be in the FileVine or the next Smart Advocate, God bless and go all in and figure it out. But otherwise, you know, pay the money and get it done by somebody else. The question here is, is that, like, if you have interest, can you build the stuff you all yourself? Is is it really just lazy, or is there something like, what are the advantages, as you see it, from your perspective, Michael, from your perspective of, because you pay for some of these third parties, you know what? What are the advantages? When do you sort of say, hey, it’s worth it’s worth paying for, versus, you know what? It really is, a Chat GPT wrapped up better.

Michael McCready 18:54
Yes, listen, a lot, a lot of these platforms right now are just an idea, right? And if you if you look at it and dissect it, you really can do a lot of this stuff in house. These companies, in my opinion, aren’t going to be around, because the technology is going to make it to everybody’s offices. Now, the difference is, with some of the bigger platforms, what you’re talking about is an LLM, a large language model, right? And the more data that you feed it, more information that you give it, it learns, and it gets better. So you know, you can create your own GPT to create demand letters, and you can customize it, and you can teach it the way that you want it. But it’s not going to catch up with these companies that have done 10s of 1000s of demand letters. So I think that’s the difference, is that is the data set and how much, how much programming has gone into some of these. But the simple chat bots, you know, whether it’s, you know, live chat, or any of those that that’s pretty simple to be done in house.

Justin Lovely 20:01
I would, I would add, does it add, at least for my- so we built that AI suite everycase.ai, and it started off just for T Lovely Law Firm doing demands. Because I was like, I can do this right? And nobody could ever tell you where your data was. And so that was important for me. I want to, I want to know exactly where my data is, because I don’t want to be the guy who gets busted by the bar. There was something today about Morgan, and Morgan got busted in Wyoming, about, about letting a hallucinations site get into a pleading again. I mean, come on, right?

Seth Price 20:29
Not just a site, most of them.

Justin Lovely 20:31
Yeah, it was like the whole, the whole motion, right? So, I mean, that’s just, I’m not going to risk my bar license. So for us, or at least for me, I want to own it. And also thinking, you know, when I sell the firm, is, is this piece of AI, like a, like, a gimmick, like, you know, you know, copy my voice for an outbound phone call? Okay, maybe that’s going to be everywhere. Or is it something’s going to be a core function of a personal injury law firm, such as the analytic, the base analytics, the the demands, you’re always, we’re always going to be sending demands, hopefully with, who knows, with these AI algorithms, maybe we’ll just hook into the insurance companies and settle the case, but that’s the way I look at it. And then you look at it, can I build it, and over time, am I going to come out on it, you know? And that’s kind of how we’ve looked at software.

Seth Price 21:17
But question, look, we have now two smart, three, smart advocate people here. There’s, you know, FileVine, there’s Litify, there’s all these different groups, you know, these third 30 party tools are great, and they’re doing stuff faster than many of us can do it ourselves. But my question is, if we blink, six months to a year, will these case management systems essentially have it integrated directly in making it that much more user friendly for the, for staff to be able to execute on this, rather than having to, like, go to multiple places.

Michael McCready 21:52
You know, that’s a really interesting question, because the what AI is now capable of may make a lot of case management systems, I won’t say obsolete, but you’re going to be going to AI on a lot of things rather than go to your case management system. So for example, you can go to the case management system and say, pull me up the interrogatories that the defendant sent me, and they’ll pull them up. But you know, AI you’re going to say, please answer these interrogatories and pull from all the data in the case. And there’s, there’s your, there’s your answer, its outside of the case management system.

Seth Price 22:32
Do you guys perceive that, I mean what I’ve heard, rumblings with all the money that’s being raised by these AI companies that they’re going to, they, you know, we wonder what’s next? Will the next generation of case management be on one of these AI platforms, where it’s AI first, given that that’s where you’re going to get your efficiencies?

Justin Lovely 22:53
Probably not going to have a choice.

Jay Ruane 22:54
I’ll tell you, for somebody who built their own CRM. I mean, I, and I don’t, I don’t encourage anybody to do it. I mean, I built mine because it didn’t exist. And when, when I started my practice, 26 years ago, I said, I need to keep track of these people, and I want to send out automated letters and the like. And so we found a database engineer to help us create something. There was no cloud. We had it running locally on the server. I would never, ever start today and decide to build my own software, but I’m 25 years into it, and now it’s just a couple tweaks, and I’ve got a team of developers that can make me make quick changes, and we can things, but I mean, every day, I am running searches to find out, how can I get an AI plug in into my database so that we can leverage that sort of knowledge gathering and interpretation, and I’d love to see, you know, I mean, it’s probably the one thing that would make me leave my custom made system, is if I could get into another one that had AI baked already into it. You know, I’m hoping to implement AI into my file maker system by the end of the year, but I know other places, other companies, already have it, and that would get me to switch. If I can’t do it.

Justin Lovely 24:14
I can tell you one thing about smart advocate. You mentioned them. They have been awesome with opening the API for me to do whatever kind of automation I want if I want to build something, if I want to tweak something. And I told Sean up front, hey, man, I want to build some AI tools, you know. And, you know, Igor and Sean are just like, Okay, what are you doing? So we kind of know what’s going on. And I don’t know if they’re keeping an eye on it, because maybe they want to absorb somebody, or they want to just they do want to build their own, but they’ve been, they’ve been great, and that’s that’s made the process for The Lovely Law Firm at least a lot smoother, because we’re not having to wait for FileVine to, you know, two weeks later to approve one little change, and then two more weeks later is, that, when I was in that database, it was just, it was a nightmare, and it was not as fun. Okay? It was not as fun. Jay, talking about building your own software, there’s all these AI tools that will help you build micro SaaS or little tools and little things that you can use in your firm. You got bolt, you’ve got cursor, you got lovable which is my favorite for like marketing landing pages and kind of using all that stuff, you still need a development team, right? But that can kind of give you base that, the base code base that you need to kind of say, hey, this could be real. And then take that, give it to a development team, and then speed it up. Speed up the process.

Jay Ruane 25:28
Yeah, I’m using [inaudible] right now to integrate with Twilio and Calendly so that I can push out this, this product that I want to create just for our own use, to to get a better level of service to our clients. I’m not gonna, you know, it’s giving us the opportunity to do something that we don’t otherwise have the ability to afford to do, and but using stacking AI tools and making it happen, we’re able to give a level of service that nobody can compete with in my state.

Michael McCready 25:56
So it’s interesting. I mean, Jay, with you being a criminal attorney and us doing PI, you know, we really are. We’re not selling our time, right? We’re not billing by the hour. So anything that we can do to make ourselves more efficient and still deliver the same, if not better, customer and client care, you have to look into, you know, we don’t keep track of our time, but if it takes, if it takes 20 hours to to handle a case, and we can save even one hour, and AI is saving more than one hour, you know, that increases the efficiency of what everybody can do now. It doesn’t replace people. Okay? You know, you still need human oversight. You still need lawyer oversight. No one in the AI field is saying that AI is perfect, but when you can get 75%, 90% of the way there, it’s nothing but a time saver. So I’m not sure how it relates to hourly. But even still, lawyers are charged by the hour, you’re going to be able to do more work. So Justin, you know, tell me about the efficiencies that you’ve brought into your firm at different levels, you know, whether it’s intake or case management or medical records, and the time savings that that you’ve seen from that.

Justin Lovely 27:18
Well, the biggest thing that we weren’t prepared for is the, is the bottleneck shift, okay, so, and what I mean by that is we really, I really wanted to attack demands, and so we really, we set KPIs, we set goals, and we met our goals, and we and we’re getting all this money in, but we’re getting it all, all these cases settled, and everything at once. What we didn’t think about was now I’ve moved from that demand phase, or moving all those, all those files on top of what was already there, as far as settlements. And so when you’re packing on minor settlements, wrongful death settlements, just regular settlements, waiting on liens and because you sped that up and didn’t really think it through, now we’ve been working through having to hire settlement paralegals and having to have somebody who really their only job is pull that money to the finish line, because it means nothing in my trust account, I got a bank it from trust to operating right. And if you want to lose sleep at night, some people, some of my people, tell me, my friends say me, this is a great problem to have. I think it’s terrible, because I’m worried. You know, clients get crazy when they know that settlements hit. They don’t understand that Medicare has to wait 65 days, you know, and we’re waiting on a lein to get resolved and but, you know, we’re working through it, which is great. So now we’re able to manage by report, at least in so far as when they’re done treating, manage by report. As far as getting demands out the door, AI can produce it. My paralegals can now become those who are drafting demands are now editors, so they don’t have to really sit there and really start from scratch. They’re now editing. It’s 99% done, and they pass off to an attorney for their final look. And then we can speed that, get that demand out the door. And that’s kind of where you can really pick it up, as far as onboarding, when you have a full talent, talent LMS, Lovely Law Firm, University, when that’s fully built, and whatever your law firm is, whatever you want to name it, when that system is done, it is a thing of beauty, right? Because you don’t have to worry about what they’re learning week one, what they’re learning week two, it’s a full curriculum, right? Based off, are they an intake specialist? Here’s curriculum. Are they a case manager for- case manager for car wrecks? You know? Boom, here’s your curriculum? Are you a criminal defense paralegal? Boom, it’s here. And then, of course, there’s things we all have to learn. And it’s really sped that up. So getting up to speed with with the again, the organizational knowledge. And then we just got to find more people, right? So instead of my ops people spending time getting these new employees up to speed, they’re able to interview more. Keep going back and trying to, trying to, you know, get more people on the team. Those are the two big, huge wins, and I’ve seen as far as efficiency gains.

Michael McCready 29:54
I mean, with with a firm as big as yours and as many clients, but it doesn’t matter if you’re a solo. When you just have a handful of clients, you gotta manage the flow and, and when you, when you adjust one, one segment of the case, it can affect everything else. You know, let’s say, all of a sudden you put some money into marketing and your phone’s ringing off the hook, and all of a sudden you’ve got, you know, 20, 30% more clients than you have had in the past. You know, that creates an obstacle. But guess what? That glut is going to follow its way through the firm. It means the next step is the case managers are going to be overwhelmed, and then after they’re all done treating it means the medical records are going to be overwhelmed, and then the lawyers are, the demands are going to be so, you know, really managing the flow is important.

Jay Ruane 30:41
You know, you bring this up, and I want to ask you in the PI context, because it really didn’t impact me, but I think I remember during COVID, there was a, you know, a massive rush to try to settle cases so that you had cash flow to get you through. But there was also a dramatic drop in the number of, you know, single motor vehicle, single car motor vehicle accident injuries, that type of thing. So you were looking at like an 18 month period where all of a sudden, cash flow was going to really drop because people weren’t driving. Did that help you guys be able to iterate in a rapidly changing firm so like, did you pull the skills that you learned five years ago and now you’re able to apply it to AI? Because I think that’s something that you guys would have, you know, because you were moving, it helped you stay moving and do these things.

Michael McCready 31:33
You know, it’s interesting, because during COVID, we didn’t let anybody go, okay, didn’t let anybody we didn’t lay anybody off. But you know what its, because I still had money coming in from cases that were 12 months and 18 months, you know, that were that were settling, what my team didn’t realize is that the real jeopardy of their job was going to be 18 months after COVID started, right? Because our intakes went down dramatically. You know, I was aware of that. But once again, that’s just keeping an eye on the pulse of your firm and, and, and the flow, and making sure that everything, everything is going through your systems, and you’re keeping track of that. What was your experience Justin?

Justin Lovely 32:17
Yeah, I mean, we had the same, you know, the dip once they kind of worked themselves through. I mean, luckily, we do have that criminal defense practice that had cash up front. And actually that kind of went up because people were out, you know, breaking the law. So, and then when, you know, when we opened back up in South Carolina, we had a lot of DUI, so a lot of we had a lot of DUI work, so that that really helped kind of smooth it, you know, as far as cash flow. But, you know, going back to what Michael said about manage the flow of the case, you’re, you’re 100% right, and really sitting down and you’rethinking through your best and worst case scenario of any technology or any AI, and just realize, just like, kind of like I mentioned, if I clear this bottleneck, what’s going to happen If I spend 100,000 and sign all these cases, do I have the infrastructure to move these things, or am I going to pile it all on my case manager? They’re going to hate me, right? Really, having that change management plan will will go go a long, long way before you decide what AI you want to implement?

Michael McCready 33:17
Yeah, so here’s, here’s a perfect example that ties in with this discussion. So I’ve always kind of intuitively known, you know, how many cases a case manager can handle effectively, how many cases a lawyer can handle effectively, you know, pre lit litigation. You know, I have all that. I have a lot of the data, but, but I was able to put all my historical data into AI and come up with a, you know, a solid number. And now I know if we bring in 100 new leads, we’re going to sign up 30 of them, we’re going to withdraw from 20% so that means, if I bring in 100 new leads, I’m going to have 24 more cases. And now I know how many case managers I need, and I can project what my needs are in the future. And like I said, I kind of knew that intuitively. But now that I’ve grown my team’s over 100 you know, having that, having that data, and putting it into AI and and asking the right queries. Hey, you know, please look at these. This, these numbers. This is the case manager responsibility. This is, give me a give me an optimal number of cases that a case manager should be handling at any one time.

Justin Lovely 34:29
So you’re able to be proactive instead of reactive, which is awesome.

Seth Price 34:32
Justin, you said something, hey, we’re not eliminating jobs. But the question is, as this stuff gets better, it’s not like you’re kicking somebody out the door, but is the definition of how the work’s being done. So Michael, you’re saying in one hand, hey, I know what the, this is. But if, if what everything we’re talking about here works, should each person be able to handle a greater caseload? And where you know, are you seeing so far, Justin the ability to either handle more with the same amount or. Are there areas that you think are short term not going to be or, reduced and or, not in law firms?

Justin Lovely 35:07
Well, in our office, 100% we’re doing more with less, but I’m also scaling. And some of that is because of AI, and some of it is because I’m signing a lot more cases. I definitely think as this stuff keeps getting better and better. I mean, now you’ve got with Open AI, you’ve got the agents and the operators, right? So, I mean, that’s going to replace legal assistance for anything that, you know, normally you could, you could build something and maybe do a make or a Zapier web hook and get some, something automated. But now, I mean, literally, you’re going to have agents going and getting stuff done for you, if anything, it’s on the internet. So in the criminal defense side, maybe it’s scraping the public database to figure out what a court date is, or whatever that legal assistant kind of work is. That’s 100%, that those jobs are going to be gone.

Michael McCready 35:53
Listen, there was an article that said the top 10 positions that are going to be eliminated, and I couldn’t tell you what nine of them were. One of them was paralegal.

Jay Ruane 36:01
Yeah, which is crazy, because 15 years ago, everyone said the number one growing position isn’t lawyer, it’s paralegal.

Justin Lovely 36:09
Yeah, I think the role will change, I think you’ll still need a para- the way we think of paralegals Now, as far as maybe pushing paper and that kind of stuff, I think you’ll, you’ll, you’ll have better medical managers, hopefully that can manage the medicals. Hopefully that raises all our case values, because they’re able to talk to the clients more. But who knows, maybe that’s even automated with our voice, AI, but I think at the end of the day, I mean, and maybe I’m wrong, a year from now, you need somebody who’s empathetic, who can manage the case load, who can make sure they’re going to the doctor, who can ask the right questions so they can report back to the lawyer. Can spot TBIs. I mean, that’s, that’s how you really pop these cases. And really, you know, add value, at least in the personal injury field. But if anything, that’s like pushing paper, you know, clicking here, clicking there, doing web searches, the research, all that kind of stuff. I think it’s gone.

Michael McCready 37:01
And, you know, this is not AI, but for years, you know, I’ve pushed automation in my law firm and and primarily through smart advocates. So there’s so many automated processes that we have built into our case management system. So what does that do? It frees up the time for my attorneys and my case managers and paralegals to have those discussions that need to be had, right? I don’t need my paralegal saying, if you’re on Medicare, please send me your Medicare card. Oh, of course, that goes out automated, you know, I, but if somebody misses an appointment, I want my case manager on the phone and saying, hey, you missed your appointment for Dr. so and so, and that’s going to affect your case, or I want my lawyers talking about, I mean, we can, we can send automated things about what a deposition is, but you’re, but a lawyer will always, well, I shouldn’t say that, a lawyer should always prep a client for a deposition.

Seth Price 37:59
But just like, you know, just, I’ll take it back, just like the training. Know, Jay, we’re gonna wrap up in a second. But just like the training, you know, I remember old school showing up at a big law and they’d hand you a binder and said, reader for the day. Now there’s going to be an avatar of Justin reading that same information in a more engaging way. The question is, if you’re going to prep somebody, how cool would it be for them to go through some sort of virtual prep before they get the Michael ,Justin or Jay time? So,

Michael McCready 38:31
Well, I mean, listen, we’re already doing that with training our younger attorneys. So we will, we will upload a, you know, a transcript of a deposition of a doctor, and with the voice activated GPT, we will have the lawyers practice cross examination. So we will upload the transcripts and say you are Dr. so and so, a world renowned orthopedic surgeon. You know, here’s your testimony, and here, you know, here’s your report. The lawyer is going to ask you some questions. I want you to be abrasive, and I want your answers to be elusive. And and our lawyers, our young lawyers, are practicing on this now, right?

Justin Lovely 39:14
Very cool.

Seth Price 39:15
Justin, thank you so much for making the time, and Michael for this awesome series on AI, Jay bring us home.

Jay Ruane 39:21
Alright, folks. So that’s going to do it for this edition of The Law Firm Blueprint. Want to thank our special guest, Justin Lovely, as well as Mike McCready. My name is Jay Ruane, and he is Seth Price. You can catch us every week, live 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific. Live in our Facebook group, The Law Firm Blueprint, also live on LinkedIn. Just check out Seth and his profile, you’ll be able to find our show. Of course, if you want to take us on the go, you can always take us wherever you get your podcast by searching up The Law Firm Blueprint podcast, be sure to give us a five star review. And of course, if you want to ask us a question or get in touch, send us an email to thelawfirm blueprint@gmail.com. That’s going to do it for us today. Thank you so much to our guests. Thanks to everybody, and bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai