Join Seth and Jay as Seth helps Jay discard his long-standing scarcity mindset, and a conversation with Ken Hardison and Alex Valencia about the future of AI in Legal Marketing.
Hello and welcome to this edition of the law firm blueprint. We’re back again, and I am one of your hosts, Jay Ruane, CEO of Ruane Attorneys, a criminal defense and civil rights firm in Connecticut as well as the Grand Poohbah myself of the criminal mastermind. Seth, my man over there is all things digital with Price Benowitz, DC, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina and soon to be in Iowa, as well as BluShark Digital SEO and digital marketing for law firms. Seth, it’s been a couple of weeks, I was on break. I got to be a lawyer on the beach in Puerto Rico, which was fabulous. I know you got to take a little bit of a break and head out to Vegas and see your pals at MTMP. So, we haven’t been together, how have you been?
Things are good. I actually got my weekend; we did a virgin cruise with my wife, no kids.
Oh, wow.
Which was…
Really, how are those virgin cruises? Interesting.
It’s the best I can say it’s like the Cosmo hotel in Vegas on the water. You Richard Branson throughout all the rules. He doesn’t have buffets. He doesn’t have big dining rooms. It’s boutique little places. It’s really quite nice. And if you splurge for the sweet class that my wedding planner told me I had to do it makes for a lovely voyage because you have a your own space with champagne at five o’clock that is really decadent and an open and then there’s a party raging a few feet away if that’s your if that’s your jam.
Yeah, you know, it’s funny. Parties raging are no longer my jam.
No, when they rent so there’s a big party on the ships, the red knights Scarlett night, and it’s epic. It’s around the pool. But you know, me and the other middle aged people and my wife are sitting on the upper deck watching down as the gymnasts. The acrobats. The drag queens are putting on a show for the ages. Oh, so cool. Yeah. So you can you could be vicariously looking into the people that are young and hip, while staying out of the fray.
Well, that’s awesome. Yeah, I actually wound up in Puerto Rico with with four other families, 10 adults 25 Kids, we kind of took over the the pool area of our hotel. And it was great, you know, I had a great time, made some money to casino there. And, and really just got to, you know, spend some downtime. I didn’t bring my laptop, which is rare for me. But it was awesome. But there’s one thing that I did bring with me and it’s actually, I don’t know if you can see it, that box over my shoulder here. That’s got the first press, pre pre editing copies of Tiger tactics to the CEO edition. And we’re gonna be talking about that, in the months to come as we get ready to put that out sets one of the co authors with me Ryan McKean. And a whole bunch of other people, Billy Umansky, Billy tercio, are back. But then we have people like Allison Williams, at least Billy Joey vitality, we’ve got some great co authors that are going to be contributing to this edition. And it’s really sort of taking, it’s starting to pick up speed and momentum, which is, which is really awesome. But so I got some that I need to talk to you about. And it was brought up to me yesterday in a meeting with one of my senior lawyers, somebody in my in my management team. And it’s been troubling me, I had a bad night of sleep about it. And I wanted to get your, your feedback on it. And here’s my dilemma. I’ve been growing this firm, essentially, since September 1 2001. So like, which which we started and September 11 happened and nobody started going out and people weren’t gonna get arrested. And so we’ve had we had a rocky start. And then COVID, obviously, you know, bookends that 20 plus years later, so there’s been ups and downs, but when I started my practice, I really kind of just hung a shingle on my own, I didn’t really have much in terms of an inventory of cases, I didn’t have much that I could spend. And so it became a lot of a lot of sweat equity, you know, in me learning digital marketing, and it’s how I’ve gotten to the place that I am today. And, you know, trying to find a cheaper way to get something done to you know, get 90% effective or 70% effective with something that was free or cheap, rather than spending the money on the actual product that was out there in the market, because I just didn’t have that I didn’t have the credit card bandwidth. I didn’t have the money in my pocket. I was literally living hand to mouth I didn’t even make any student loan payments, my first year and a half of practice. And, you know, and my entire being ever since we started this thing has really come from a position of scarcity. And so I find myself now with that lens with that, you know, I’ve built up that, you know, that’s talus, that scab, whatever you want to call it, that anytime something is presented to me, I immediately say, No, we’re not going to spend money on that, we’re not going to spend money on that, you know, somebody comes to me and they want to, they want, you know, a raise, even, you know, and I’m saying, now they can go find another job elsewhere. Now, that certainly has some implications today in the market. But I’m trying to break this scarcity mindset. And it’s not a scarce because I look at my numbers, and I got revenue coming in. I mean, we’re, you know, we’re opening up 3540 files, 50 files, some weeks, I mean, the business is there. And from a, from a perspective of, we’ve got the, we’ve got a lead flow, I should not have this scarcity mindset, but like I am thinking, I, for example, I live my life on my laptop, right? I mean, I am constantly doing stuff with it. I’ve had the same laptop. Now, for a couple of years, I’ve been eyeing a new Apple, it’s gonna cost me like five grand with all the bells and whistles, I can’t pull the trigger on that. Now, that is like, you know, less than 1/10 of 1% of my annual revenue, and I mean, it’s fine. One 100. But I can’t pull the trigger on buying spending five grand on something like that, when I can make it another year, I haven’t bought a new car, you know, in in Dallas separate
the things out, right. They’re different. They’re different pieces, because they’re ones and I look, I struggle with this myself, right? I may, a frugal person by nature, one of the areas I think we’ve broken, which I think is most if you’re gonna line up an order of importance, it salaries to me the idea like that, that is one that cost you more money than anything else is not is not pointing up and making sure you’re at market because markets, whatever people can get somewhere else, not what we have set in our mind, we talked about this on prior episodes, our starting salaries at a college went from 35 to 42, to 50 to 55. Overnight, we’re seeing softening, good news for all the salary talks we’ve had in all the hiring talks. Finally, for anybody out there hiring, I think you got a window. But believe me, in my last week, I asked the office, hey, let’s take it easy on the UberEATS. Let’s find the places that deliver directly. So we’re not paying 35% to the house. Some of this stuff makes sense. Some of it doesn’t. I’m lucky enough to have a law partner, who is does not have that mindset. He’s the guy who who, over tips, picks up tabs, and has shown me not that you don’t and you do that. That’s to be fair, anybody who’s met Jay, he’s the first one to pick up a tab. So that that’s it’s not that. But that. I think that as I’ve seen stuff, particularly a blue shark, where I’m less hands on to day to day, it’s become part of the ethos where it’s out of sight, out of mind. And as long as the numbers at the end of the day are okay, allowing a little bit more to breathe, believe me, you know, the difference between a small team gathering where you where you get like a takeout from a place versus calling the catering department and having something catered it is what I would love to see is people that spend money the way I do, and frankly, the way you do, it’s tough because as you grow, there’s going to be a certain amount of inefficiencies. And I’m trying to get good with that I put old school techniques, old school, new school, please, if you’re taking an Uber check Uber and Lyft. That’s all I say. And then I’m good, whatever it is, it is whereas for me, I’m gaming it from the moment the plane lands to make sure that there’s a spike that I know to wait, nobody else is doing that. Right. I think that if you want to scale, we talked to Andrew Finkelstein, you know, getting comfortable with mediocrity. Or if you’re not comfortable with a certain amount of inefficiency. You can’t scale because nobody’s going to be as frugal as you and nobody’s going to work for the numbers that are in your head.
Yeah, I mean, and that’s part of my challenge is like I was looking last night and I was up in arms, that we’ve been paying $10 a month for software as a service application that we haven’t used it a year, because we transition to something else. Nobody bothered to cancel this thing. And I’m thinking to myself, dude, I just spent $110 on nothing. Now in the grand scheme of my life, that’s nothing
we paid. I just got one of these things. I was paying for retargeting for a site that I didn’t control, you know, at like 150 bucks a month for seven months. A good friend of mine who’s not a lawyer talks of it as the tax of life. There are times when you buy theater tickets and you forget you have shows that night where you know what you got to get a kid to something and your kids are young but you put them in an Uber even though it’s $200 and super surge. There are things that parking tickets those things that as you get to the point where hey, I can’t allow that. Because if you get too much in the weeds in that, but I’ll tell you the flip side, one of the great entrepreneurs who recently died, who created sky vodka and did a bunch of other amazing things. His nephew quoted him in one of the national business magazines and saying, you know, there are days where he thought that he was more concerned with the cost of what the toilet paper was coming into the office than like top line numbers. It’s part of the genius. It’s also a curse.
Yeah, I mean, it really, I, I’m struggling with it. I’m trying to get better at it. Where I can just say to people on my team, look, I trust you to do what’s right, in the best interest of the office. And knowing within parameters,
like anything else, right? I mean, if you see stuff, and it’s crazy, but if you if you want it to be more than the J show, would you may not you struggle with that. And if you do, and you want to be more if you’re trying to expand it as much as the J show could be, but if you really want to be on a beach and you not just lip service, then okay, let’s say hypothetically, there’s going to be $100,000 in bullshit, that gets done because your thumbs not on it. Now I look at it this way, you know, and I will let’s go personal for a second you. You selected a dream, which is getting dream seats for Yankee Stadium. Yep. If you add the seats, one row behind the dream seats, it would save you an order of magnitude of that’s unfathomable. 50%, more much more than 50% meaning from the dream seats to what you would negotiate to a non dream seat might be 75 or 80%. Right? And the fact is, you’re It’s okay. Now there’s benefits to it. There’s a better experience when you take somebody there, but you’re doing a lot of internal meetings, a lot of kids stuff, when you’re taking your kids, does it really matter if you’re the seat behind? No, you’re doing this for you because you want it and there’s nothing wrong with it. But the idea that there is enough fat now. And again, if you can’t I don’t want you to become lazy or complacent. But, you know, if if you had two less games that would take care of you sold two of your games for face value, just putting that $1,000 A ticket. Right? So that’s 8000 bucks or whatever. Yeah, the 8000 bucks TAKE THAT 8000 bucks that solves a lot of micro issues. And the idea is just from a mentality that if you and again, I don’t have the answer. You know, I do I micromanage a lot of the event planning because I know it so well. And I see where they were. There’s their stuff that if you just I’ll leave you with this story, because I think it’s a great story. So when I was graduated college, and I wanted to throw an anniversary party for my parents, it was their 25th anniversary. I had just graduated Penn, I had no money. And I want to take do it. Like I figured brunch more in Manhattan. So it’s not easy to do. So I was like, okay, windows on the world. My dad had a tangential business connection to it. They had a great brunch. That was 20 bucks all you could drink or you know, Mimosa it was it was an awesome deal. So I call up and they’re like, I would like to make a reservation for brunch. And they’re like, Well, how many? Do you want to speak to catering? Or do you want to speak you want to speak to the banquets or you wanna speak to the restaurant? And I’m like, What’s the difference? Well, the banquets are $100 a person plus tip and tax, and the restaurant is 9095. I’m like, I’ll speak to the restaurant. They put me through the restaurant. I’m like, what’s your, you know, largest room? And they’re like, We have a room for 75. Can I make a reservation for 75? Please? They said sure. Again, and we had it the whole thing was 2000 bucks. you’d appreciate this because it’s Jewish event at lunch. The bar Bill was less than 500. Right? Right. This is the difference between our families. And it was an epic it was it was their 25th their their anniversaries. 911 This was their 25th their 35th actual anniversary was 911. So they’re New Yorkers again, it was but the point is, it’s how you think about that. Do it on the big stuff. Try not again, it’s easier advice to give than to take.
Yeah, I mean, it’s just I’m at a point now where I it’s almost every decision I have to make I have to ask him i being you know, has pennywise and pound foolish or pound wise and Penny foolish?
Well, do you have a deputy that you can help mentor in training that?
Well, that the deputy is who brought this to me saying, hey, I really don’t understand your logic. Sometimes you’re like, hey, just spend the money. And other times you’re like, why are we spending 1499 to overnight something first delivery when they don’t need it until the afternoon and we could have saved $5 And he’s like, I don’t get your logic on.
With a lot of that. Then it’s then that now we’re down to real brass tacks, which is it’s sitting down with somebody and doing that we did something our iOS coach, talk to us about doing taking the 20% of your expenses. And I gotta tell you, it took me two months to extract that. It was it was a circus. I couldn’t even get it. And then when you get the top 20% It’s less exciting. You think some of that stuff’s like rent, right? And like contracts that are in place that are going where you can guess you could change it when they come up for renewal. But you know, like LinkedIn, I’m locked into a contract, you know, things like that. So, I would say, and again, it is advice that I, as I say it, I know, but it’s the relationship with the person who is minding it. Because otherwise, if you’re doing it, it’s bad on a bunch of levels.
Oh, yeah, I can’t be the one doing and I need to sit down and have a team that, you know, my people put this stuff to me, I will tell you this. You know, we started three weeks ago, finally, with somebody handling HR, somebody who we, you know, we didn’t hire an HR person, we promoted somebody who had been with us for a while in a paralegal position, who seems suited to the role. And I’ll say, 90 days, and she is blossoming. I mean, it’s been so much as off my plate. It’s amazing just to have somebody who everyone you can turn to, and she can if she has to come to me for questions. It’s I get a Slack answer these five questions, and I’ll take care of it. I gotta tell you, I wish I wish I had done this 10 years ago.
Well, I’ll tell you, we I sort of we talked a little bit about this, but I’ll tell you is I we talked, I’ve conversed with Bill Biggs, friend of the show, I have eliminated the position of HR within Price Benowitz. It is now there’s a firm ops person, there’s somebody doing benefits, there’s somebody doing who part of the portfolio, we have three or four administrative people, I’ve never had this robust of a team. But there’s a, you know, a benefits, there’s an onboarding, there are different tasks. And each of those go out. And yes, there needs to be a place where somebody is being sexually harassed, they could go right God willing, that’s not a major factor. But the idea that there’s a person designated and I saw this, because when I interviewed pure HR, it’s ripe with peril. And we went back in the history of the firm firm has been around for almost 20 years, 17 real, let’s say, well, while being scaled, and I had never met a quote unquote, HR person that wasn’t filled with drama and mediocre. And the only person that wasn’t who sort of fit the bill and did that ended up sexually harassing two of his direct reports. And a college intern who’s a dear friend’s daughter, like the idea that like, is that something that at our level, when you meet the people at like Hilton and Fannie Mae, they’re making a quarter million dollars, those people are rockstars, but the people that raise their hand to be a small to medium sized firm, quote, unquote, HR, I go ops all day long and get stuff done, then somebody who thinks that they want that power for usually less money than they would get if that same person was the administrator, you know, operations track, they would make significantly choose this, I think, because they liked that ethos. And it’s something I I’m hoping, hoping, hoping that, you know, that we’re able to peel off and get what we want done without the drama element.
Yeah, you know, it’s really, it’s really interesting to me, you know, as I look back the things that I could have the things that I stressed over that I could have easily solved, but I wasn’t ready to make that decision. And it goes back to that scarcity mindset. I was like, Can I afford to have somebody who’s just in this role? You know, and
am I and I’m not saying to do that. I’m saying, Get, make a list of what you want done, but don’t like, again, you’re home growing somebody. So I’m hoping that you pick the right person, but the lateral when that person quits, moves on transitions, when you put out an ad for HR, and I look at what we saw, these were people 25 years, 30 years in the business making 75 to 80, who I’m just sitting there, and I like you look at the personality tests that come back, and you’re just like, this is like, when it breaks or when the disaster and some of these people were at jobs for years and years and years, they found a place they could hide, but it’s just anyway,
when you’re when you’re posting that job, what you need to do is identify these are the skill sets that I need this person to accomplish. And that’s what you hire for.
But when you put the title, right tracks this versus again, we went with and it was a bit of some internal strife. One of the stakeholders didn’t love the idea to me, quote unquote, didn’t have HR experience. And I said just the opposite. I want somebody who knows how to deal with people and can accomplish what we want to accomplish. I don’t want that. Anyway, I digress. Let’s talk AI.
Yeah, well, I want to talk about it, you know, because, you know, in my mastermind, we’re talking about it, I actually have been communicating with somebody on LinkedIn, who’s going to come in and give a little presentation about how we, as criminal defense lawyers can use AI. But you know, there are a ton of things going on with new tools coming out and that type of thing. And what I am seeing is that if you are not trying these things out, if you’re not testing out to see what’s out there and you’re burying your head in the sand, you’re talking you know, you’re gonna be two, three years behind everybody else. And these aren’t necessarily tools that are Um, that like, for example, I got knowledgeable in AdWords long before any other attorney was knowledgeable in AdWords, because I knew there was a way for me to to make money doing that, you’re not necessarily going to make money directly correlated to your use of chat GBT. But you’ll save money and that in turn will make you money. But your competitors are going to be using it. To be able to scale faster, iterate faster, your opponents in courtrooms and on the other sides of your cases are going to be using it. I just got a you know, it’s interesting, I uploaded Tiger tactics, right. Whereas in here to a AI program, and I said, you know, here’s 175 pages, give me give me a two page summary of this document. And I didn’t use changing it, I use another an AI program. The summary was awesome. I mean, it was literally like it was all the best bullet points of all the different authors. And I was I was blown away with how good it was with hyperlinks to the sections of the of the manuscript where I can find that exact thing. And it found some some parallels between some of the author’s that I didn’t see on the first time I read it through. And I’m just thinking, you know, for these voluminous discovery cases, on the PII side are a game changer. But what about if you’re a lawyer who, whose job it is, is to read line contracts? Like if you’re if you read line contracts at a big firm, not not, that’s not our audience, right? But some of our audience had been that person at a big fry. I’ve been that person. You know, you redline those things. You stack them up, now you got AI taking care of it. Oh, my God, you’re in real trouble. If you’re a paralegal who’d Sue’s whose job it is to support the litigation team and do deposition digests on major litigation, you got some problems. And I’m just wondering, how many other things if we’re not using this to our advantage. And really, there’s a lack of training out there for lawyers, how to give the right prompts to these things. And I think that’s the thing.
Well, I’d like this this conversation, we’re going to toss in a minute to a great conversation I had with Ken Hardison, and Alex Valencia, Kent artisan from filma outfit lens here from we do web content, talking about some of the stuff they’re going to be having up at tilma. I hope we get your LinkedIn AI talk, we could maybe splice that into a future episode. highlights from that. But the the I feel angst, you talked about angst on the money piece, I’m less concerned with that I see money coming in. I you know, we in both blue shark and it priced better once we broke out departments to do it, we just set quarterly rocks at blue shark. And I pushed hard that we wanted to have two items in beta for every department above and beyond stuff along the lines of like, I use for tire tactics to record a book technique I recorded it went back and then edited from there. And one of the things that makes that methodology expensive is that historically, it needs to be transcribed by a human, even if it’s overseas to then bring back and the editing time and cost is extraordinary. If we can get for web to the point where because you know, as you know, one of the techniques that I love is people being interviewed, it’s very expensive. And it actually started becoming more expensive to get web quality content with somebody speaking and writing it directly. Which is crazy. If AI allows for the genius of Jay, on Connecticut DUI to go straight to a web page with limited costs, or reduce reduce costs where that intersection where it becomes clear. That’s a huge deal. And so Tiger tactic, if the idea that you could get a round of editing or suggested edits, where you’re looking for grammatical issues where you’re looking for, like you have how many different authors each using different tenses. You say, hey, we want everything in present tense. Let’s get rid of all those numbnuts who put this in passive, all that stuff. If you could start using it for those pieces. It is it is a game changer and I definitely feel angst about am I doing it fast enough. But you know what I remember when the something we’ve discussed on this, this roundtable conversation is the adaptation. How long does it take to get people online? Versus how fast has it gotten people to be using chat GPT as as sort of a flagship of this. It hasn’t taken long to get crazy numbers of people, you know, playing around with it.
You know, it’s interesting. If you if you look, I’m a student of history, right? So if you look back, you have the Stone Age, you had the Bronze Age, then you had the Industrial Revolution. I think the last 20 years has really been the silicon revolution where the computers are really taking off up. And now we are about to end the silicon revolution. And we’re going into the AI revolution. And these time periods are condensing dramatically as as things progress. And I think we need to be aware of that. And not say, I’m going to pick this up in six months. Because
No, no, no, yes. I’d also say that we never know exactly where it’s going. This seems bigger. It seems like it has legs. But look, you just saw Facebook do a huge rate write off on meta. It’s still like, where’s it going to be in the plate somewhere. But it’s not like we know that there’s a particular universe we’re going to be in or anything like that.
This is really interesting to me, because I remember something years ago, and it was, I forget which Olympics, it was a Winter Olympics, my famous or big skiers. And we were watching freestyle ski, right. And I can remember them, you know, the guys they hit the moguls and women, they hit the moguls and they go over the jump, they do a flip, and they do some more moguls than they do another flip. That’s and so for people who aren’t aware of it, that that’s what it is. And we’re watching it. And one of the commentator gets up there and says, Okay, next up is American, Jonny Moseley. And he is not going to score well on this. But watch what he is doing. Now, everyone will be doing in four years at the next Olympics, but they don’t know how to score him yet. And so he’s not going to medal. But his run now will be the gold medal run in four years, but four years from now, he’ll be doing something else more progressive. And I think that’s kind of where we’re at, sort of right now, with this stuff in that, you know, there’s a lot of people trying to, you know, jam into this space and say, I’ve got the solution for you, as lawyers. And I mean, if you go into my LinkedIn feed, I’m sharing yours, every other post is how to use chat GPT to scale your marketing to do this to do that. But I really think what’s gonna happen is, if you’re not paying attention to this stuff, now, you’re, you’re gonna, you’re gonna be promised. So what I would say is,
and I’ll just put the positive on it, if you’re actually figuring out how to do it, not just playing with like, as you get those different pieces, they will they that will dramatically change the economics of your firm, you talked about margin before, right? So for blue shark, we’re always looking at what is the cost of a piece of of finite content being posted. I’m not looking at writing content that way. But if this could be one of the sets of eyes where there’s an extra SIFT, and there’s less likely to see a gaffe, which costs, reputation, everything else. To me, that’s where this stuff like, as that stuff gets integrated in what’s really fascinating, I’ll leave you this because we do have to flip out of this is to watch millennials that used to be, you know, ahead of the curve. It’s now the Gen, it’s now the Gen Zers. That are the ones manipulating it faster, because they’re first generation with this, rather than people that are sort of like, you know, I’m still the guy that calls when you text me, you know, they’re they’re making fun of that now, you know, the younger generations making fun of them for not being chat, you know, not being AI first.
Yeah, it’s funny, I still go to Edit, Copy, Edit, Paste, rather than Ctrl V, control C. That’s how old school I am. You know, but it’s just, you know, it’s what you’re comfortable with. So this is interesting. So tell us a little bit more about this. And then we’ll wrap up and we’ll shoot
Yeah, so no, so this is an awesome conversation. So Ken, who’s a friend of the show, he’s doing his summit next month in New Orleans, it’s a great thing, what I love about pi focused, but it’s business of law, there won’t be any deposition tutorials or anything like that. So I’ve totally found a home with my people. They’re great, great talks, with some some emphasis on on AI. And, you know, basically, Ken is looking at this as, hey, if I want to make sure that the people in my herd aren’t falling behind, I need to make bring them more and more information. So that you know, and Valencia who focuses on content has sort of been a voice of reason that like, Hey, we’re not we’re not really we’re not using this for writing of content. But let’s find all the different applications. Just because you can’t just completely cut out writers doesn’t mean that you can’t use this amazing technology in great way. So a fascinating conversation that I hope our group loves.
Awesome. So what we’re gonna do now is we’re gonna sign off, I want to thank you for being with us. Of course, you can always catch us live most Thursdays 3pm. Eastern 12pm Pacific here in the law firm Facebook group, or you can take us on the go wherever you get podcast by checking out the law firm blueprint podcast. Of course, if you do that, be sure to give us five stars. And make sure that you subscribe so that you can catch up with us whenever we post new episodes. Of course right now, I want to thank Seth for being with me and we are going to shoot it over two sets interview so stay tuned for that, and we will see you next week. You’re here on the law firm blueprint. Bye for now.
Welcome everybody. I am very excited. We have never done this before. We have a three way podcast here with two of my favorites. Ken Hardison with a law firm grow podcast, we have Alex Valencia from the we do marketing. Our, it is it is great to have you both here. And, you know, traveling the country to all these great thought leadership forums. And all we hear about is Ay ay ay ay ay ay. And it is clearly here. I think it’s one of those moments that you know, what the cab industry thought when when, when Uber came vertical, it’s going to be different. We don’t know how, but I think the landscape in a couple of years will be significantly different. Ken, I know you’ve been giving a lot of thought to this, you know, and you speak to lawyers from around the country? How are you seeing AI impacting short term? And where do you think we’re going? That’s what we’re talking about here for our time together?
Yeah, the short term, you’re gonna see lawyers trying to figure out how to use it for marketing. But I think long term, it’s going to be used in every aspect of the business in the management of the files, in contacting clients, doing demands, and then litigation, have on Discovery depo prep. I mean, it’s got to be there’s so many ways it’s going to use and my my fear is, is that a lot of lawyers are going to stick their head in the sand like they did when the website stuff came out. And the ones that took advantage of the cube with it for years, and then took the other ones years to catch up. But, you know, we’ll see. We’ll see where it goes on the you know, but I think it’s the biggest thing. Since the printing press, I mean, I mean, it’s
It’s huge. It’s definitely huge and stuff.
We’ve heard this before, right? We saw this on the metaverse, we all going to be having law firms there. And I kind of took a little bit of a warning. I didn’t see people going there. I was gonna wait to that. Peter Shankman, who will be speaking at the Super Summit. You know, he had places there for the last 10 years bought all of Time Square and one of these places, you know, to me, the question is, we are already using AI, right? It’s already auto filling our suggestions on Google, it’s already being used by Google to figure out what you want. You know, Alex, I mean, content, sort of the epicenter of the AI explosion given Chechi beauty and you and I have talked about this before, but talk to me about like at your an innovative company, we’ve talked to already about the fact that this is not stop writing content use use chat, GBT. But how are you guys leveraging AI within a content first environment.
Um, so we’re still looking at it from the perspective of HCI as opposed to AI like human intelligence as a performance to fully artificial intelligence. But we are using an embracing it right, like, just like you said, we don’t want to be the taxi cabs to Uber. We don’t want to be the blockbuster to Netflix. And I don’t feel like that. That’s the situation. I think there’s still a lot of work there. We’re experimenting, we put a whole team aside associated editors and senior editors just to work on the AI. So we’re really trying to figure out the prompts on how it really understands, I think the goal here is for anyone and future employees, for people in any industry is how do you learn to manipulate this and learn how to speak to it as a prop. So when we started back in the internet, back in 99, remember when you had to do a search, it was hashtag something or quotes something right to prompt Google to give you the exact information you have and eventually became smarter and smarter and smarter. And you didn’t have to use those prompts. We just went directly into keywords. So I think we’re going in the same way is how do I talk to this robot to give me the information I want, it’s still too early to have all of the information that’s out in the internet, like one of the biggest databases that it pulls from is Reddit, right? How much BS information is on Reddit and how much good is on there. Right. And that’s the issue is to
lose that. But if that’s, you know, that’s a friend, look, we saw stuff. That was great, even though it you know, there are points where, depending on its its inventory of information, he didn’t know what COVID was, because if it didn’t, if it wasn’t 22, it was 19 2019. And before it wouldn’t even have it. Obviously that will catch up over time. One of the things I find fascinating, you know, having spoken to some of the inner people at Google, right, because Google’s not first mover on this. It’s an unusual place for us in the last 20 years, where Google is not first and foremost. In fact, that kind of laid an egg I have no doubt it’ll catch up. But being with their investment has sort of jumped everybody else. So what are your thoughts given that we have been in Google first environment? I mean, Ken’s entire ecosystem of law firms and marketers has been Google first, all of a sudden, you know, Microsoft comes in with a differentiator. Is that something that will hold? Or is this something that is, hey, they got their first but everybody else will catch up soon?
I think it’s a catch up game. I think Google, I mean, I think Microsoft Bing is still one of those where you look at it, and you’re like, is that really going to be my first search spot? I think what I’ve seen already, even at our latest conference, or any conversation with lawyers that are using it, right, because that’s the world we’re in, we’re in the legal world, whether it’s us marketers, or lawyers within that whole space, is just using the app for fun. So right now, people are like, Hey, how can I send an amazing text message, create a stupid song, or at some of the really smart attorneys are like, how can I get this to create a demand letter? Right? How can I use it for that? And you and like Ken touched on is I think a lot of them are looking at it, how can I use for marketing, amazing for emails? You know, why spend time trying to generate an intelligent email, right? Even from a marketer standpoint, like what do I want to say to this guy, this is who I’m speaking to, this is what I want to say, do it. So I wrote my own and then and put the information prompts from chat, GBT, it wasn’t exactly how to set it, but and then I told it, combined mine, and this one, and it was fucking amazing. Like it was
and that’s, that’s what I’m Chet, you can that’s what I’m chomping at the bit for, you know, one of the things that the blue shark did in price, Benjamin said early on was trying to get verbiage directly from lawyers as a process, right, you get it, you got to transcribe it. We didn’t at the time, find a transcription service, that was good enough, AI is getting better and better. And then the idea is, if you can take rougher contents, as opposed, you know, and get help cleaning it up to the point where the underlying bones are the intelligence of the lawyers, and that you then could produce their words. Because if you just took their words without cleaning it up, and the cleanup costs could X, you know, exceed the cost of producing content through an Alex or others, then you’re at a point where, okay, I can start getting the words of a Ken Hardison, out of him and onto the web page in a crawlable format. To me, that’s a short term game changer that we’re working on. I can’t tell you it’s fully there. But it’s out there whether or not we harness it writes the next question. You know, Ken, what are you thinking?
Now? Yeah, I agree. I mean, listen, everybody talks about chat, GPT, four, and all that, but there’s so many other apps out there, lavender helps you with emails, then you got, you know, the Dalai, which is still in its embassy, and still got some bugs in it. But like, here’s something I’m doing right now. I mean, we’ve gone out and we’re finding a company. And I’m gonna get in front of a camera for about 1520 minutes and read a bunch of scripts and do the sort mannerisms, the creating an avatar for me. So you will be it’ll be me, but it’s not me. Okay. It’ll be I’m gonna like really walk to explore and play with it and test it on like, even social media. Would it be nice if I could just do a bunch of social media that looks like me, but it’s not me. And
Well, that’s your dream. I mean, can you if you could just be sitting in Key West? Yes.
That’s, that’s, that’s my lifestyle. I told him. I said, I gotta have it before Summit. Because I’m gonna I’m gonna shut everybody down. And this is what you can do. And if it’s good, and it’s good, if it’s not good, then they can see but, but I really and for $2,000 a year and get 40 minutes of video a month. I mean, we went out searched, my people went out and searched everywhere. Now. I think it’s a game changer. I mean, under but I think that I feel like we’re just in like, what Alex was saying. We’re just in the infancy of it, where it’s gonna just get you know. And then you and I think there’s ways we’re gonna use it that nobody’s even thought about. I mean, I really do. I think I think it’s, it’s gonna go faster. I mean, you look at it, over 100 million users in less than three months. That’s the difference between that and metaverse. And nobody’s put Microsoft $10 billion in the metaverse, I can tell you that. That’s why
it’d be fair Facebook, you know, Facebook did, people people did put money there. But as you’re saying, there weren’t 100 million people playing it.
Yeah, and that fan It’s just so it’s growing so fast.
Well, let me ask you, we got to film the Super Summit coming up very excited back in New Orleans, beautiful venue. It sounds like you have this. You’re gonna have a fair amount with talking about AI chat GBT, etc. Tell us a little bit about what’s going on there.
Yeah, so Well, first of all, we got the 60s with eight tanks down in the Ritz Carlton. We got room bought really reasonable rooms. I think they’re less than we know what they are. But I need a luxury right half price of what you usually get them for. And we got the whole hotel. Oh, wow. Yeah, we booked the whole hotel. Nobody else is gonna be there. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. Well, and we expect to sell out we got about 50 vendors there. We limited to 50. But yeah, we got we got all your good friend set. Peter Shankman, who is a futurist, who is a guy that sees things before they happen. Great marketer. We’ve got Cameron, What’s his last name? You know,
I’m terrible. Camera terrible. Oh, yeah.
I didn’t know he was coming.
Yeah, he’s gonna be speaking. And
you know what he does? In addition, I hate to take it away from the AI theme. But what I think he’s genius, obviously, the COO 100 got junk. And not only a great coach, but he has a thing. That’s not law firm specific at all. But I think everybody law firms faces dancing around this space. And a lot of people are trying to crack the code of how do you get not just the leader of the law firm, but the guy behind the scenes or the girl behind the scenes, the CEO, and he has a mastermind of CEOs that I think
is just genius. Second, he’s got a problem called second in command. Exactly. So
it’s the blue shark second in command. Is that that, you know,
my CEOs is doing it. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course, you can teach them more than I can for sure. But
frankly, they teach each other as well. Pretty big grain trust. And, again, I’m digressing. But since we have time, and we’re amongst friends, one of the things that I have seen is I’ve done some higher level coaching. I got one on one program as CEO Coaching International, which is like, Guys are make make everybody in the Pillman world looked like tiny players. These are guys like eight, nine figure businesses selling left and right, like it’s a different animal. But whenever they give vendor recommendations, I find them generally I would say office too strong a term but not appropriate for what we’re doing in life. And that I’m sure they help some people, but they’re either very expensive or very niche. And that what I really liked about the CEO alliances, it was bringing people like minded people together, like who solved your problems on payroll, and benefits and things that are fundamental to getting through the day that aren’t for the hoity toity, but like actually have proven results to existing firms. And that that’s been a, I think the greatest benefit is that we’re getting partners in the space both for blue shark and for price veterans that normally I just can’t get to, you know, you see the mansion at Tony Robbins and you think about the kickbacks that are going through these big organizations. And instead so I digress. But I think that’s one of the huge benefits of Canada’s organization.
Yeah, they like doors, they got to Turner Jones will be talking about jet GPT and how it can be used in marketing. I also have Justin Levy, who’s in one of my masterminds, he was just a brilliant lawyer, but I think even more brilliant marketer, and he’s
gonna make sure it’s a husband and wife presentation. We’re gonna get to hear from her as well.
I don’t, I don’t know.
my secret sauce back there.
Yeah. Miss Lawrence. I know. It’s, yeah, it’s, uh, so he’s using it a lot already. And so he’s gonna bring practical stuff that he’s doing with jet GBT as a mother as apps that he’s trying to really, you know, we go back, and I didn’t want to say this. What Alex will say I’ll just say is not replace people, but here’s what it’s gonna do. It’s gonna make it where you can get as much work with 10 people would one person is 10 times more work maybe in five years, 100 times more productivity than out of one person than you did before. Obviously, it is a game changer and with PR overheads going up and you know, I’m saying and everybody’s staying at a 30 or 40%. You’ve got to figure out some way or don’t your margins are going down. And I think this is that so I mean, what is being outsourced overseas, but I really think it will have somebody talking about that too, at the deal. Who’s speaking on that at the summit? A guy legal soft solutions, I can’t remember his name out there one of our sponsors, and
I got to think it’s gonna be a combination of all right, so we see domestic costs and you know Alex, myself on each independently on podcast talked about the cost of labor. And it’s not what we’re getting rid of domestic labor, right. But anything we can do that allows us to keep the precious people we have, whether it be leveraging International and or AI or eating together, then all of a sudden, we are in a position. You know, Alex, you know, you, I don’t know how much you guys have used International, but just wanted to get your thoughts on the intersection of layering, you know, domestic labor, international labor and AI, in order to try to sort of make sure that you’re getting stuff done at the most competitive price point, because I know your world and your world is about, you know, getting people value to feed the Google beast at a cost effective rate. How have you done that.
So I’ve got a partnership with actually, we’re probably going to launch and this is between friends, but it’s, it’s eventually going to be live to starting a whole Spanish side marketing. So I have a whole company and a gentleman that I’ve been working with for five years now, that produces all of my SEO Spanish content. Together, he and I, you know, it’s going to actually reduce my costs significantly by partnering with him, and marketing that side of it, but he also does radio, TV, SEO, but I’ve been purchasing my Spanish content. And working directly with him and my editors in my team. So we built our own internal team, I think we’re gonna go live with it, where we go full Spanish soon. But that was a great way for us to leverage costs, you know, using that outsource from Colombia and Mexico, mostly Mexico, where it was using those international that international labor for that, so that I think that was a great opportunity for us, you know, the English. I mean, you remember when we started this, Ken, I’ve known you since probably 2010. And Seth, early on, I remember I was able to get content, like a 500 word page for $19. Right? And then it would come inside and house and then we’d spend like 50 bucks on it. Right. So then we would be spending, you know, selling it for a certain amount now, because the content skyrocketing, which is why the AI comes in I mean, I think the human intelligence is still important. But if there’s a way to incorporate the AI, eventually to where gets it to the right place. And you nailed it, Seth, when you said, can we get the language of the attorney which, which is what we’ve been doing with our software and creating our own internal client profiles, for every client that we manage, is we have their database, their client profile, the words, they want to use the words that they don’t want to use, all in our own internal AI before AI came out, for us to create content for them. I think it’s just going to enhance it. All right. Hopefully, you know, I don’t think it’ll reduce costs significantly because of the AI. I think it’s just
not so sure. I think once we figure it out, not that like, it’s just going to be like, who knows what it will reduce for everybody eventually. But I’ll give you an example. I’m curious because I can one of the reasons I went first overseas during the pandemic, where I went, and now have like, you know, 3540 people, employees for both price benefits and blue shark in Latin America on top of full domestic team was that I was paying this huge premium for bilingual labor in the DMV, right? And the question whether your Spanish English or English, Spanish shouldn’t matter. But this has been something that Alex and I can’t I’m sure your clients or, you know, partner law firms that they’re a part of Hilma have struggled with is, I can’t tell you over the years, when I hired somebody to write this even before blue shark hired somebody to write a page in Spanish. And they were all excited. And I had it edited. And it was great to people like oh, yeah, yeah, that’s good if you live in Colombia, but it’s no good for Mexico. And these are the things where theoretically, I would hope that AI is going to take us where a page of content could be individualized, where you’re now could speak directly to a particular population without having to write a brand new piece of content for each one. That’s sort of the types of thing where you could get it to give you nuance that you’re not like I don’t speak Spanish I couldn’t do this myself. But if nothing else, be a a checks and balances to know the different you know, nuances between the different forms of Spanish that are out there. What are yours that’s
a brilliant because Colombia alone has like seven dialects within the whole country, right, like right so even that so it’s like you you prompt that and say turn this into how someone for many II would speak. If it could do that
or better yet you get somebody From wherever, next whenever, can you turn this in cow? Can you sanitize it? To get rid of those local nuances so that you could have what? Which is what’s what’s considered universal? Like Barcelona, Spanish?
No. So that would be to go.
So what’s like, you know, can you strip it of everything? I mean, can you seen people that a lot of people come to filma pitching Spanish specific marketing, for example. We want to get your thoughts because as excited as we are, we’ve also seen a lot of people come with not ready for primetime products that sold them, and crashed and burned. How many if we had invested in every single person doing geofencing from the beginning of time, we would have wasted a lot of money. Right? So how do you how do you advise a law firm that wants to get and leverage this new technology without getting burnt that they’re getting something? Because it sounds like the shiny object?
Yeah. And that’s what you got to work out. There’s gonna be a lot of people out there hucksters? Yeah, what I would do, this is what I think. And I’m looking into I think every law firm should invest in a product engineer for a while you use that word a lot. That is the key to AI is knowing how to ask the questions. It’s the if you know how to ask the question, and that’s prompts, you know how to write the prompts. And you know, your field and you know how to write the prompts, then you are a goldmine. I mean, listen, you can name your price, I really believe that historically. If you’re good, they’ll be upset and they said profit engineers. 160 180,000 a year.
Already I’ll there’s someone who already marketing themselves.
But to be fair, I have someone who nobody else is raising their hand on that.
Right? Nobody’s raising, but it’s very brand new, like you didn’t just become a prop engineer in the last two months, right. Since this.
I think Shadley, I’ll just I’ll play the other side of that out. I think a lot of people did just become a prop.
Because you have a person who’s doing that, exactly. And he’s doing it for us. So you know, we didn’t hire him full time. But he’s doing like, he’ll be doing a whole prop training for us. But he still hasn’t got it. Like my guy, my internal content guy is not allowing any of that content to come through no matter how much he keeps manipulating it, and putting in the prompts. Because it’s still not good enough for legal. It’s not, he did it for mortgages. He did it for like landscaping and did it for my brother’s business. But it’s it’s not there for legal. We know our clients. I know my lawyers. And I think eventually, once we crack the code on it, I’m going to sell a tier, an AI tier, but my premium tier is still going to be human intelligence, because you got to know the lawyer, you got to know how pissy he’s going to get when something’s incorrect. You know, this set? You know how many people? How many lawyers have been pissed off by one piece of content? So
that’s right. And that’s the question, right? Because we could all we could, I could sit with Alex on the couch right now, right? Any content, my law partner literally could rewrite his own briefs from a year ago, if I put it in front of him, he wouldn’t even notice it. Right. And then people don’t look at anything. Right. So they’re, I guess they wouldn’t care as much. But we care about Ken making sure that Google loves it. Because as long as Google is still king, we need to make sure and look, this is the part I thought and I think I’m wrong on it. But the idea that Google is going to actually have a checker to see what’s AI versus not, but
that’s right. And that’s the question, right? Because we could all we could, I could sit with Alex on the couch right now, right? Any content, my law partner literally could rewrite his own briefs from a year ago, if I put it in front of him, he wouldn’t even notice it. Right. And then people don’t look at anything. Right. So they’re, I guess they wouldn’t care as much. But we care about Ken making sure that Google loves it. Because as long as Google is still king, we need to make sure and look, this is the part I thought and I think I’m wrong on it. But the idea that Google is going to actually have a checker to see what’s AI versus not, but
what they don’t care anymore.
Will they care that the last week? Content?
Quality,
right? Is it high quality and but the problem is, like one of the fiction’s we deal with. And you’ve asked me this a number of times, I said, Why should Google care if you have the same content for 20 different counties in a state and state laws the same? We’ve had this conversation, so AI would be the best thing ever to replicate it for all these different locations. The problem is they’re pulling out of a finite universe, whether it be you know, whatever it is, so at some point, it will be repetitive, we don’t feel because we’re like, wow, this is brilliant. But we would feel that if you if I went to one of Alex’s clients, and read their webpage on like, this is brilliant. You still can’t copy it onto your site. So it’s first getting it good enough and then second, having the assumption that the university so pictures, right, everyone’s all excited. We can make Ken beautiful. Can could be a Kindle, but if they’re pulling the graphic images, too, to make the new kid off of trademarked or copyrighted material, that’s a whole nother world that we have to do. We’re about to step into. Yeah.
No, I agree with Dude, man, great. We could talk about this all day long. Well, I’m super stoked for me. I forgot it was like right around the corner for us to be in New Orleans together, we were just together at mass torts made perfect last week, had a great lunch, great conversation, which is what pivoted us to this call, which is great. I think we should do more of these. I think that combination of three different perspectives is absolutely intelligent for all the lawyers for any other marketers that are out there. We’d love to have more conversations, but I’m stoked man, New Orleans, and I gotta give it to you, Ken. Since 2010, you’ve been an integral part of the relationship with our company and us gaining clients. vendors out there, if you have not signed up for Panama. This is a conference that you even if you’re not a vendor, if you go and pay the price as a lawyer, one of the mastermind, whatever angle you take to attend tilma it is going to be your stepping stone to the next one. And I’m going to I’m going to call, call out all the masterminds are out there. My first mastermind was Ben Glass shortly after Ben Glass. My boy Ken Hardison, Ken Hardison launched all these different masterminds and now one lawyer has another lawyer has another lawyer has over here, all of them started from this dude, he was the root, they all created branches from it. If you want to learn and get into a group of people and start launching yourself, call my boy.
And I’m gonna be much more superficial because I’ve been to the a bit of Pillman Groupby since since Atlanta, but which is goes back to right around 2010 I think the second second ish, but you know, to be able to get with this many smart people and you walk around the room, and you’ll see guys that are like, you know, 100 million dollar firms multi 100 million dollar firms walking with guys who just started the sharing in there and the openness Great. Ritz Carlton in New Orleans for a couple $100 A night you still have rooms left? Yeah, yeah. It to me if you know nothing. You got the whole hotel?
Yeah, first time we ever did it. That was dope for
me to be in New Orleans with the hotel itself is this just gorgeous place with amazing gumbo, great learning and sharing
a waste dress got to have the oysters.
And to me, like the coma as a home as a home base for people, you know, for the people like myself, who don’t want to be in court, and who want to build our business. Most places you go and it’s like a track or a class. But the idea that you get nothing but the best and brightest thinking and working on how to build your firm up to me. It’s always been a gift.
Like you guys are waiting to cry, but I appreciate it. We try to give value and you know, I will I will brag about one thing. We’ve had a money back guarantee since 2009. Anybody goes to the service after the first day, I’ll give them their money back. Plus, it used to be 5000 documented travel costs. And I’ve never had anybody asked for the money back in 14 years. Well, 1314 years, it’s been a fair thing to you. What’s the Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, we can’t wait to be there a lot a lot. It’s like, it’d be all the fundamentals that are there. But what I love about this year is it’s going to be forward facing and thinking about what’s next. Because every law firm needs to be there. And again, it’s not like, it is not like if you’re not there right now. It’s too late. It’s we’re just at the infancy. You know, I remember being part of the early.com bubble, and just think about what was going on in the mid to late 90s compared to now. It’s just remarkable. So let’s let’s make sure we strike while the iron is hot. Well, thank you very much, Ken and Alex. I hope is the first of many, but it’s a lot of fun having all this brainpower on one podcast and syndicating it out through all these amazing channels.
All right, my friends. Have a good day.
See you at the summit.
Alright, see you there.
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