Join Seth and Jay as they wrap up the year talking about chatgpt and other important topics
Hello Hello and welcome to this edition of the law firm blueprint. I’m your host Jay Ruane, CEO of the criminal mastermind, managing partner of Ruane attorneys a civil rights and criminal defense firm. And all things social over there. My man Seth price down there in the Delmarva Peninsula. He is the Grand Poobah of blue shark digital, as well as managing partner of price. Benowitz. DC, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, I’m not gonna get you any trouble. Because it’s just gonna be you know, like, No, we’re DC, Maryland, Virginia, South Carolina. That’s all we got right now. You never know you guys are going you want to buy for me, Connecticut? Yeah, you’ve been you’ve been asking me for as long as I know. So, so said, I wanted to chat with you. Because I did something this weekend. And I thought it was kind of cool. I wrote a book. Well, I didn’t write the book. I had chat. GPT write the book, which is all the buzzword right now. And they came up for me with, I think, 10,000 words over of course of me asking them questions and that type of thing. And so and it’s a very generic book. I mean, it’s not it’s, it’s, it’s certainly not personalized to me, although I plan on going in and using it up adding my anecdotes and changing stuff around. But boy as a
as a starter, it seems pretty good. So for those of you who are listening, or watching who don’t know, open AI is a consortium a think tank that has put together basically a number of AI programs. And they released to the wild in the last month, their chat feature where you could ask it to research issues for you or questions. I had it compose a rap song for me that I was thinking about performing on a tick tock all about speeding tickets. And it was actually I mean, it was it was generic, but it rhymed. And it it made sense. But I actually used it to write a book and and also the issue, brainstorm some blog topics, some some video topics. It seems like this is a good solution for some people who need help pushing content. What are your thoughts? Well, it is clearly the the most interesting thing of recent in, in the content space, it’s been out there for a while, Jarvis AI. You know, Google is making these huge proclamations, because they don’t want to see a wilderness of crap content out there. So I think you got to be very careful. You know, as far as this is not like, hey, let’s stop writing content for SEO and put it out there. But you know, we’re playing around with it as a starting point. Is there something there? Absolutely, I think the the issue always is, you know, if you get lazy, it’s sort of like the stuff that I take this the same way I’m doing from the SEO perspective, doing it the right way. Is an will work. Doing it the shortcut way will not the question, I think you hit this is, if you use this to help you with your outline as a first draft to sort of put stuff there. You know, it is really freaking cool. And the piece that is frustrating as somebody who creates content, who deals it pays a lot of freaking money for writers, for editor for all the stuff, typos are still a thing. And the idea that this is type of free, for the most part is just it blows your effing mind. So I think it is not a set it and forget it, but it will definitely be a piece of it. And I think there are people out there saying, is this a threat to Google at some point where you can get answers to stuff without using Google? Well, let me ask you this. Where is chat? Open chat open AI? Where’s where’s it getting its sources from? That’s the thing? I mean, are they is the is the AI going in? And does it have a brain? Is it indexing websites itself to be able to go in and provide these answers, and it’s whatever you give it. That’s what’s crazy. So like whatever we’re seeing today, imagine what it will be in three years as people give it input. Right? Well, here’s the interesting thing. I mean, that’s, you know, so I’m going to put on my criminal defense lawyer had for a moment in having this discussion, because I think it could be illustrated to people. So let’s say that you have somebody who you’re representing like I do who’s been arrested for cocaine. Do you know that when they go to the lab and they test the cocaine, there’s not a computer saying it’s cocaine, it’s a human being that runs it through a machine, they see the GCMS data points, they start clicking around on those points and then match it to a library that they have created or bought, so that it is a created
library that is done by humans. And then it’s also then done by where people click. And what I’m saying about this is, this stuff is only as good as the inputs it originally got. And especially in the legal space, I think you have to be really careful about relying on something like this to create your content. Because who knows where they’re getting their content from. And they can be, you know, I’ve caught, I’ve caught people who are, you know, posting up on, on websites, a year later, after the laws have changed the old law. And you know, we had to catch up, take it down and that type of thing. And so it’s one of these things where you can’t really rush into just using
agree, but how cool would it be, you know, with the set and forget it, because we all have pages that are aged on our site? Imagine you haven’t read through and flagged potential issues? Oh, that would be huge. I’m just saying like, that would be an example. Again, you wouldn’t want to just automatically update it. But the idea that it could tell you, hey, because think about how much stuff that you write 15 years ago, that sitting out there. You know, and I know that when major changes to the law come, we go hit it, but that there are things that this could touch. So to me, I look at it right now as a starting place. Almost like a first draft. But we there are a lot of people watching this. They’re saying, hey, how do I, you know, game the system. But I’ll say the fallout, the following, which is, you know, what happens to the guy who’s trying to this is where it gets crazy. Let’s say there’s a new mass tort, and you you’re like, look, I’m gonna put a burger site out there. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna use spam tactics to get the links in, I’m gonna put this there, you know, is this going to be a way to game the system? Again, will Google catch up to it? Absolutely. There. Every algorithm updated, right is furthering it. But the fact that you could get something up there quickly, when nobody else has anything. That’s pretty freakin cool. Yeah.
I mean, we use that to, you know, to issue to spot out, you know, our next 100 blog topics. Because, you know, when you’ve got the same writers working in your office, and you got the same lawyers, you sort of you sort of spin out, and you know, you’ve used all of your bandwidth up. And so you’re looking for new ideas. And so we we put that in, we got some, we, you know, of the 100, that we asked him to produce 65 of them are our topics that we’ve done, but we phrased them differently. And so I think it’s something that we could, you know, maybe if we change up our you know, our language, and change, what we’re talking about in the videos, we’re gonna get somewhere,
right. So the, I’ll give you the counterpoint, I heard a really cool Conrad gi conversation on this. And the counterpoint would be, is this any different than the old spinning of content? So for those of you that don’t know, there was a point where people basically to create content would write one page of content, and then you couldn’t have duplicate content, or you take a page of content from one site. And you would just rearrange the words almost nonsensically. Right. And that was like early AI, so to speak. I think what we’re seeing is, it is getting closer and closer to an acceptable form that said, you know, well,
let me tell you, I ran some stuff. And I asked some questions, like, you know, and I got the same intro paragraph, the same outro paragraph, and it tended, and when I asked them to write articles, it tended to put them in a bulleted list or a numbered list format, it was very sort of standardized. And so if you’re going to ask, you know, what are, you know, the, what are the speeding ticket laws in Connecticut? And what are the speeding ticket laws in New York, you’re basically gonna get the same article, so you’re gonna have to spend a lot of time using it up or changing it around to make it so that it’s unique, individualized content, if you just start relying on this, I think you’re just gonna wind up with the same thing over and over again. And that, you know, that went out in, you know, 2002, where you could have pages that would rank for the same content, but just changing the place name. So, it’s, it’s certainly interesting to me. I mean, it’s, it’s funny, I went with my trainer, who’s going on a three week vacation to Australia, he’s like, I’m going to write a book. And I Oh, what are you gonna write a book about? He’s like, isometric exercise. I’m going to write a book about that. Between now and when I’m back. And I spent an hour with it on on Saturday, and I wrote his book for him. You know, so he’s just gonna take some pictures, and then his book is done, because he doesn’t need to be very specific. He’s just using it as a calling card to get him and send that out to potential new training clients. And he was blown away by how he’s like, how did you become such a subject matter expert. In a weekend in this stuff? I couldn’t have written this. Well, I said, Well, actually, I didn’t do anything. I did it for us. So it’s certainly it’s certainly something that you can use if you use it correctly.
And I think that’s it. Right. It is an incredible tool. And but you know, with great power comes great responsibility.
Great out there. Okay,
well, I got something I’m pivoting out of content, we can look, we will probably do a more in depth show on justice in the future, and get maybe a panel of people to get their thoughts and perspectives on best practices on how to leverage this because it’s freaking cool. Topic du jour, for me, has been the thought of as lawyers start to be with you for a long time, you want to give them more opportunity, the thought and this is done in the pie space extensively by the criminal space less. And, you know, I think in the family law space, it was right for this is building a pyramid or a pod of people. And allowing the lawyers to sort of start to allow for as they age to have higher level select cases and get a piece of the people beneath them. Maybe I’m watching too much sopranos read just three episodes from rewatching it for the second time. But the idea of allowing a team together, that would maximize because right now, I know there are a lot of times where if I have a high producing lawyer, they take what’s best for them, and spit out the remainder. Now, it can be very profitable that way. But I’ve always wanted to have layers beneath them. Generally I’m pooh poohed because they don’t want to interfere with getting the most possible cases into their personal funnel, they don’t call it that. But that’s, that’s what I’m dealing with. And so I feel that as people are with you 10 years plus, wanting to give them a diversification of income, not just the work they’re doing, but sort of simulate the partnership opportunities, and allow people to sort of have additional bites the app, I want to get your thoughts on that.
So this is interesting, this is actually something that we are planning on talking about in the criminal mastermind in February, it’s on our calendar, and one of the people that we’re bringing in to talk about it is Michael Smith, who, you know, who’s been at some of the Fisher masterminds, and he’s given me some great ideas about compensations and, and what you could do in that situation with a pod is actually give some sort of profit of the pod percentage to the leader of the pack, I guess, the leader of the pod, and actually encourage them to become a more profitable organization rather than one person taking the majority of the of the highly profitable cases. You know, it’s difficult in the in the criminal context, because, you know, people stick with one lawyer throughout the whole thing. But I definitely think that there’s, there’s potential here to create pods. I mean, in the context of family law, I think it could be huge.
I think that there are firms that essentially do that, right, they hire a rock star as a managing attorney. And then they pyramid down, I see this in the how to manage model where there’s an owner off somewhere else, senior lawyer, and then people under them. It’s not always stable, because a lot of a lot of weight on that person, that person leaves that poll, you know, you’re pulling out an essential building block to your to your world. That said, and I’m also concerned because is it something that people want? And will they pivot into it? Meaning I had a bad experience early in my career, where we had a junior partner who was responsible for supervising, you could call it as a pod, he is responsible for supervising a junior lawyer. And, you know, shockingly, he wanted the renumeration from that, but they weren’t really going over the cases well enough to discover that this lawyer who is doing expungements really had his eye off the ball and being kind, there was somebody who was not doing their work for a period of time. So it’s one of those things you don’t want to just compensate somebody blindly. But you want to make sure that it’s a you know, with a KPI with a quid pro quo, that they will make sure that that those people are there, because I don’t know over the history of our firm. I’ve had four people across four different jurisdictions, each completely shit, the bed was a shit, the bed didn’t do work, were completely off the rails. And you know, you’re responsible from an ethics point of view to make sure that you have that checks and balance, but it’s statistically significant, the number of junior people that have had major issues, and that if you don’t have some sort of checks and balance, and you go it goes back to the age old debate, you and I have had between third through eighth year versus first through third year that bring those first 2/3 years in has a risk hasn’t liability risk unless they’re properly managed.
Yeah, I mean, without a doubt, and one of the things that we built our systems around John was was having the management and the checks and balances for those first or third year people. So and we, you know, we, we were cautious about what we gave them until they were properly trained. But one of the problems is that you have when you’re building these pods is that, you know, sometimes these lawyers that are good lawyers, you know, experienced trial lawyers are terrible managers. Terrible.
No, no, I already know where that’s going to be because of the guys who are amazing at teaching. I’m not worried about those. But there are those that are, like, you know, want the insatiable like, you know, drug addicts, they just want more and more, are they going to take that time? And is important? Or is there a point in life where they do when they like, they’re like, Okay, you know, where they do want to take it, I look, I look at my partner, Dave, right? The amazing guy, he says he wants to slow down, he just came out a six week trial, like, he can’t turn it off. I can’t even say, Can you do it for 80% intensity, and take that 20% help manage. And he may say it, but now he’s in trial. He’s all in.
Right. And that’s part of the thing. And we have a tendency to promote people to positions because of time with you. And not necessarily because of their skill in actually managing and that’s that is, that’s huge.
I see that, like, I’ve made that mistake, countless times i intake team, I promoted somebody because they were the senior person. And or, you know, and that we had a real before the woman we have to have this amazing, we had a real mistake made where somebody came in who had great guy could be a senior lead, but couldn’t manage people.
Yeah, I mean, that’s a problem. I mean, we have a problem right now going on with one of our overseas people, where they are just disappearing. And I mean, this was this was a this was a talent, who, who came in was one of our first people, and has been a rockstar in the last six months has just essentially disappeared. And we’re, you know, they’re on a performance improvement plan. It’s not taking. And, you know, that’s a challenge, because we’ve had them have, you know, go back to their supervisor. And one of the one of the responses was, how are you, my supervisor, I’ve been here a year longer than you. And well, because this person has management experience and is attentive to the job, you’re, you’re not answering phones, when people buzz you so that, you know, and I think they just I think it’s gonna play now,
something just I had a life moment, I’ll throw that out there to try to help, you know, to try to help with, you know, anybody else, I did a test call, which I used to do a lot more of on the weekend actually needed some information from somebody. And I was basically, I saw like a voice over IP quality issue that I did not like. And I just want everybody to know, like, you know, in the world, everything can go wrong. You know, I talked prior shows about, you know, wanting to upsell our very highly trained people with us cultural sports location issues. I think that if we’re going to be in an international world, checking the connectivity issues on a regular basis and having a system to do so. Just like you Secret Shop calls, I think the quality a the the transmission quality is something that needs to be graded and make sure that it’s in good shape.
Yeah, that’s something that we ran into a problem with in the summer. And we actually got rid of a bunch of people in Honduras, because they did not have sufficient bandwidth to be able to handle the calls and calls were getting answered. They were like, well, I’m waiting for it to show up on park because they would put it on Park. And it would the delay of having somebody else would, you can keep somebody holding for over a minute before the light started as before another person and another desk could pick up the call. And we just couldn’t we couldn’t stay. And
sadly, we saw that in Venezuela, we had the best talent for reasonable that were unbelievable. But if you don’t have a stable connection, it’s just so let me
ask you this is it worth trying to find space and getting you know the best and bringing people around and like basically having a remote office? And so look, let’s work from home.
As you know, I Proform a black market as a concept, because I wanted to train people I still I know what I want to do whether I can do it cost effectively, or just do it for myself. But the idea that that is the great back and forth, right? So they’re the what they call BPOS the people that are like legitimate employees versus the contractors sitting in their own homes and regret. You could take the contracts in their home, put them through a BPO but you know, there are guys in Nicaragua and other places that have built those places. You know, I like it. They’re cost effective. The downside is you get whoever can commute to that office. So what I love about what we have right now is, I feel our heart quality is so incredibly high because we have the entire world to choose from, and not that little community that said, you know, two steps forward one step back, I may at some point, you know, there may be a point where you can’t do that, in theory, we are testing and making sure that the connectivity for everybody we hire is there, but stuff comes in and out, you know, right service areas, you know, there’s a flood stuff gets knocked out. Part of the reasons I don’t love the Philippines was that was that whole deal, you know, was the fact that you’d lose people for hours or days at a time,
I’m wondering if like, maybe you need to look at like Mexico City and find, you know, like a place that’s a major, you know, and say, Okay, we’re opening an office in Mexico City, that’s going to be our call center,
there are people who’ve done it. I mean, when I look at a lot of the international players, you know, it’s Philippines, Mexico City, and then like, A, Nicaragua, they there is a demand for that, and that what I’ve seen for some groups, is for higher skilled labor in particular, that you’re willing to put that, you know, but that comes with issues too. Right? Yeah, absolutely. Graph the the crime, all that stuff.
Yeah. I mean, it’s, you know, at the end of the day, it’s, it’s nothing is easy. If it was easy, everybody would be doing
it my partner ever saying everyday, Nothing’s easy, like not easy. And it’s easy. You know, as we speaking of that, I’ll pivot to our last topic, you brought up Wikipedia this week, I’m going to tell my trials and tribulations of Wikipedia now that you’re an author and podcaster and mastermind leader. I have a Wikipedia page. Exactly. And it is a crazy, crazy culture. I learned my lesson a long time ago, probably when I first met you. I went and found the guy online. Who for I forget what it was for 500 hours would get me on Wikipedia. So like Soul, and I found Wikipedia posting service, I put it on, they affect us, Dave, I was pushing Dave Beto, it’s who’s legit. He’s in the papers in the post. He’s doing national stories. And we got flagged, and like what the fuck. And it turns out, I assume it’s still the rule. I’ve not looked at it recently. But we do we do a lot with Wikipedia. But you are not allowed to pay a consultant to put you on Wikipedia that is against their rules. And Wikipedia as you start peeling the onion is a bizarre thing. They asked for money, but they have a ton of money. It’s a bunch of people, it’s almost like the people running this or the Instagram comment section. You know, it’s like they would it would eat their own young. I had a guy for a while that acted as an advisor who helped me navigate. And I had a stub that I didn’t ever stop it is. And this is the worst part, you could be an Australian fourth league, you know, part time rugby player. And that qualifies, right. But a business owner that employs 100, several 100 People who’s published places and does all sorts of stuff. Unless you check the box of articles written about you. There’s a there’s a disdain for business owners. And so it is it is political, it is non, it’s counterintuitive. Be careful about taking somebody publicly who says they do it because they know who those people are the whole gotcha mentality. So what we’ve tried to do is leverage people that are already legitimately in that ecosystem, and then find tie ins to it, but it is not for the faint of heart. We have you know, found certain paths to success from an SEO point of view, but man did get the J RW Wayne article where legitimately you’ve touched many, many people’s lives. It is it is a real to do and something that is is is not is counterintuitive, and not easy and extremely frustrating.
Yeah, I can only imagine I can only imagine but I was I was just thinking about this week. But you know, we’re heading into the last 10 days of the year like eight days left now before New Year’s Do you have any new year’s resolutions? Seth Well,
I am excited I am off to the Holy Land i say next year in Jerusalem it will be in Jerusalem. So excited and I think it’s to continue to work on the work life balance you know, enjoy enjoy the stuff and the last couple days I was able to hit a hockey game to watch the the OVI run and big giants commanders game so I feel like you know, friends sports you know work family like try to try to make sure that you check all the boxes.
Yeah, I mean that’s that’s really what it all comes down my I’m still gonna focus on my health next year. You know, I want to I want to keep dropping the weight that I’ve been able to do start working out I got to do more cardio. I love lifting three, four days a week. I got to do more walking. That’s really at the end of the day. I gotta
I gotta question your systems. Why is there not a system for that for you?
There? Well, I do have a system Am I just ignore it? You know what I have found that works. It’s a pure system, I got to just get out of bed and do it first thing in the morning because once I, that my day starts, I get away from it. But I wanted to tell people, if you are out on a walk, you can take us on our podcast replay of all of our shows. It’s available, wherever podcasts are available on Google on Apple, and Spotify on Amazon, on Anchor, you can check out the law firm blueprint wherever you go, please take us on your trips when you have some downtime. Over the next couple of weeks. Be sure to fill up yourself with all of our back catalogue of episodes, there’s some good stuff that you know, I was just listening to one of our old shows where we did a bunch of hacks, and some of them are still via valid. So go back in our history and find some of the marketing hacks that we put out there. There’s some really good shows where we were gonna
do that, like we did prior years when you do a holiday run of shows.
We’re going to do some runs this shows next week. I did do I got a lot of good feedback in the group from my review of Clockwork by Michael McCalla wits. So I reread Purple Cow by Seth Godin, I did a video about that. And I’m going to be working on a whole bunch of stuff I’m going to do, I’m going to do a book a week. That’s one of my resolutions for this question. We talked, we talked about AI, if I want to record stuff, like you always talk about like, I want to, you know, dict talk a book and we’re, you know, got one project going, what app or what do you think is the best way to record it to sort of make it as easy upload and get it edited and transcribed?
So I’m a big fan. I’ve been using speech pad for years, and they have dialogue Hall. So you just dial in and you dictate it to them. And then they they push you
what if you want stuff where you don’t have connectivity?
Well, what the easiest thing to do in that is would be make a voice voice note on your phone, and then upload the voice note to something like otter and have it transcribed. That’s that’s how I would do it. And that that I mean, it’s it’s I use a lot of Otter, I’d do it on the cheap. So it would just be Voice Note to as soon mp3 or WAV file and then upload that wav file to otter for transcription. Are you going to work on Tiger tactics to win? So there you go. I can’t imagine seeing you hunched over a keyboard. I don’t think that’s your style.
No, it’s not. But I’m not sure what the over the Atlantic what the connectivity will be?
Oh, I’m sure it’ll be fine. I’m sure it’ll be fine. You know, we’re talking from from from DC to Israel. I got
no no, no. But Vinnie, you can’t dial into a phone number there.
Oh, well, you wouldn’t be able to do that. You can’t dial any of those services. No, no, no. That’s why you want the voice note or something’s on your phone. Yeah. So I would just I would just leave a voice note on your phone and upload that. And folks, if you want to suggest a book for me to read, I’ve got to do one book a week in a law firm blueprint group. Let me know down in the comments or send me a DM, you can catch either Seth or myself anytime, through any of our social channels, or you can email us. And I think that is it. Of course. We’re going to take the next week off. So that’s going to be abroad. We’ll be back in January for season five of the law firm blueprint, which is astounding me that we’re going into season five, and we’ve created some good stuff over the years. So thank you all for being with us. Every year and if you have any suggestions something you want to hear about something you want to talk about, please drop us a line. But for that Seth Emil final words for
excited for a great holiday and we’ll see everybody in January. Awesome, folks.
So Happy New Year from Seth and for me, and we’re gonna say bye for now. Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Subcribe to our newletter to receive news on update
