In this episode of The Law Firm Blueprint, hosts Jay Ruane and Seth Price unpack valuable lessons from the recent Crisp Summit and delve into the transformative power of AI in modern legal practices. Seth shares standout moments from the summit. Jay adds his perspective on how law firms can implement AI to enhance operations, from intake scoring to content creation and team management. The duo discusses practical ways to leverage AI tools for small and mid-sized firms, the importance of adapting to evolving technologies, and how AI can directly impact revenue growth. They also address ethical concerns and data security risks, providing a balanced perspective on using these powerful tools responsibly. Jay encourages listeners to send an email with a voice note to thelawfirmblueprint@gmail.com to aid in brainstorming topics for their upcoming AI series.
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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, just back from the Crisp Summit. Good to see you, Seth, you got to go down there. It looks like it was an amazing time. So why don’t we start the show by you telling me about some of your takeaways from Crisp, it looks like everybody I know was down there. I was home, you know, because I don’t like to travel as much anymore, but tell me about the experience.
Look, Mogill is a genius. I thought that when we did our, in the coaching series where he came on, there was a six minute segment where he has really distilled what was going on. It was like, have you been inside my firm? And so watching his mastery, as far as even just how he puts on a conference, the how purposeful it is, that’s half of what I learned is really just watching the team that he has built and how he has gotten people to do stuff that I can’t figure out how to do. I mean, he has people that go to the mat for them in a way that is really, really awesome to see. Speaker wise, we had Will from Unreasonable Hospitality. My new favorite book, and that was awesome. Sadly, he’s, left the restaurant, and now I have a disputed charge with the new restaurant over a flight that was canceled, and them trying to hold me to a charge. But put that aside. Will was freaking awesome. Morgan made, did, did a great talk. And you know, when I was watching it, his ability to communicate, it’s not a coincidence that he’s created what he’s created what he’s created. Not because he’s a friend, but what I have seen is that had he reached out and said, I want the top of the Democratic ticket, this election would have gone differently. This guy’s ability, you know, when you see the, you know, the hillbilly book written by our VP to be Mr. Vance. That you know, Morgan really speaks to many, many people at once. It is, he has become such an incredible communicator. It’s, it was really awe inspiring just to watch him in action. Um Saban gave, had a nice talk with with Mogill. We had seen him at NTL a number of years ago, when he went, and me, what I want from the coach is the Fire of Brimstone, the thoughtful reflection is interesting, and you can learn a lot. But to me, just like watching Morgan emote, you know, you know, he talked about working hard, and you know all of that, and that’s all true, but it was more of a victory lap on an amazing career to me. So I got, you know, less from that persay.
You want great moments are made from great opportunities, you want, you want that you don’t want the speech in the locker room before they’re sending out to war, right?
Yeah. So it was, it was all great. And look, it’s, it’s been a it’s been a great couple segments. And then I got tons of feedback. Walking around, there are people like, I consume all your content. I love it. People, the coaching series went over huge. And people were talking about the intake series, Falcowitz there. Falcowitz spoke, and I buried the lede, Falcowitz is always awesome. It was good to see him with a smile on the face. Been a long time since I’d seen a real, real smile from him. He seemed like he was in very good shape. But, you know, the things that we’ve learned over the last few quarters from consultants and then intake gurus, great and, you know, sort of pivots to what we want to talk about next, which is okay, great. We have all these things. We’ve seen all these great bells and whistles and advice, particularly in the intake space. How can we leverage technology? AI is everything. How can we, and you’re real excited about this. How can we leverage what is truly, taken from Crisp, or take it from AI? A Game Changer, right? We’re never going back to pre AI, just like we walk around with a phone attached to us. We’re never going back without an internet you know, now that AI is out, how can we leverage that? Thinking the short to medium term, forget about long term. That’s too disturbing to think about, how can we leverage what’s out there to make ourselves better and deliver better services more profitably than we did before?
Yeah, it’s really amazing what you can do. I mean, we, we’ve started using AI in our firm, and it’s really gone from where we were, you know, a year plus ago when AI dropped, right? Because now we’re two years into AI, because it came out in November of ’22 you know, we first started using it. I think, like most people did with, wow, we can really create a lot of content. And, you know, there’s always a hesitation is, you know, people are like, will Google, like the content, will they not like the content? And I, you know, I steered us away from just, you know, getting generic content, but really using it for the iteration of, what could we write about better? Then we started to take it to the next level of, of, hey, not only can we use Chat GPT, some of the other products that are out there, but we can actually rely on their stuff and then and supplement it. So, you know, it went from being 10% AI, 90% written to more 90% AI, 10% written, at least with our content, and now we’re actually using it in a way. And I’ve seen a couple of posts on this recently. We started about two months ago, where we really, you know, it’s funny, we, we’ve talked for years about listening to intake and you should listen to the intake calls. And, you know, we finally have a system that we can do that. And it was disgusting to hear some of the intake calls, you know, when we first started listening to them over the summer. And I said, there’s got to be a way that AI can help us with this. So, you know, we’re transcribing them, putting them into AI. We’ve give in Chat GPT, a Scoring Matrix, and now we’re seeing our intake people who were scoring 70 for hitting, you know, our 12 points that we want to hit now they’re hitting 85 and guess what? They’re now hitting 85 and our revenue is climbing, so like we’re seeing a direct correlation. But the only reason why we know that is because I couldn’t listen to all the phone calls in a day or in a week or in a month that I would need to. You know, we’ve got five-
And let’s be- let’s be frank. I mean, Falkowitz has been telling us to listen to recorded calls since the beginning of time. It was a game changer for us, but you could only even at best. And the real answer is you had time. You just, either you didn’t or you didn’t delegate to somebody else to do it. This is giving us in a cost effective way. It’s not perfect, but a way to generally push in the right direction, and with time, it will be better and better. We’ve been playing around with the same thing, trying to figure out, how can we create those parameters? Because as we do that, and you don’t need to tie up a manager’s time doing it, and and for let’s, let’s be blunt, for many of our listeners, there isn’t a manager out there. I just, I was, I was on a, on an L10 for BluShark today, and one of the issues that we have is dealing with clients and trying to get conversion data right. PPC is getting more and more expensive. LSAs, they just eliminated challenges for the most part. So if we want to show people what their ROI is, or is isn’t, what is the ROI? Like it or not for a PPC call, to be able to have clean data A), and the idea that most firms like just getting a firm to set up the ability to show what is the call they want, what is the source, is so freaking difficult now that everything we can do to make our lives easier, where you can take the labor and put it towards that and allow something while you sleep to give you a number, it reminds me sort of of the time tracking software, which I know is a controversial subject, but the idea that you can’t police everybody. But wouldn’t it be great just to know hey, is one person way out of the standard deviation. We had that. We had a person or a firm way, way out of the standard deviation. They have one of two reasons. One, they’re using their personal computer, or two, there’s a real problem. You never know, quite know which it is, or there’s something else. But the idea that it alerts you, because we say, set up all these systems. But if it’s a human being, it very often breaks. Hopefully the AI doesn’t break the same way.
Yeah and talking about that. You know, one of the things that my my leadership, brought to me was, you know, we do have a fair number of remote people. You know, we ship them machines and but, you know, maybe what we need to do is go to these, you know, pre installed Amazon desktops where people can log in and we can prevent them from adding programs and stuff to, so that they’re not able to watch Netflix while they’re in front of our machine, because we found that-
We’re going down a different rabbit hole. But there’s stuff where you can control, the router, in theory we’ve talked about for international, things like that. But you know, and then you get to the controversy of, well, there may be one, you know, what? What happens if you need the babysitter, and the kids are on Netflix? How do you, you know, there’s a bunch of stuff going on. Let’s not, that’s not the rabbit hole that to go down to. But bottom line is, you know, I think law firms are sitting here. We see some people like McCready, Justin Lovely, that have been sort of way ahead of the curve on this stuff. Now the question is, you know, how can we bring to our audience, sort of those thought leaders, so that in a concise way, you can start A), to get yourself smart, and B), get some actionable ideas that pick and choose where you want to sort of start to expririment yourself. And third, are there products that are off the shelf that might be right for you?
Yeah, I mean, I think the reality is, is that you can apply AI to your management. You can apply it to pleading drafting and brief drafting. You can apply it towards managing your calendar. You can certainly apply it towards your intake and judging your intake. The problem we have is that a lot of people in our audience, it’s one or two lawyers, a couple of paralegals, if that, and they don’t have the bandwidth to just say, oh, I’m going to knock around for this week and just try to figure out all the different permutations of products that are out there. So I’m hoping that we can bring them some of the stuff that’s out there, and start to say, hey, look, this is what it’s good for. This is what people are using it for. This is something else that you can use with it. So, you know, I think, you know, I think, and quite frankly, our audience is savvy enough, and I think they’re also willing to take chances that I bet you some members of our audience have created some use cases for different AIs, whether it’s Chat GPT or other other products, where they’re getting good stuff out of it. And I’d love to hear from them too. So I’m actually going to tell you something. I set up an email address, so if you are using AI in your firm now and you think it’s a creative way of using AI, we’d like to feature you on the program, so I’d like you to actually make a voice note, tell me about how you’re using it and send it to thelawfirmblueprint@gmail.com. Seth, and I will be able to listen to your voice note. And we’ll either use your voice note on a show, or we’ll invite you on the show to talk about how you’re using AI in your practice in coming episodes, because I think that’s a great way for people to either give us feedback on the shows that we’re doing, if there’s something that you want to comment about, or if you want to share some stuff that you think that you’re doing is somewhat unique. We’d love to hear from you
Look and I gotta say that there’s some scary stuff, you know, AI.We saw the early one, right? There was the guy turned the thing into court, nonsense, right? You got to read when you’re going to court. Put that aside. But there’s questions, right? You’re dumping all your intakes of the Chat GPT, it’s fun, but what the hell is going? Is there privilege stuff going out there? Right? There’s, there’s one rule of thumb, which is, don’t go with just, you know, free or Chat GPT, go with a closed loop. That’s why I think some of our guests are gonna be interesting, because, in theory, they’re creating, you know, those, those, those sort of private worlds where the data being used is not the rest of the world, right? So that’s one thing, but I’ll just tell you a scary story, just from a minute ago, literally, you know, I’ve been having that AI note taker follow me around. It’s cool. Gives me summaries. One of my people, one of my top executives, had, oh, I don’t like that brand. I have a different brand. And we were on a call, and, you know, she’s we were going to talk about, or try to put together an incentive package for somebody who’s on the call. So that person stepped off and we, she called me back to start our conversation, right? Audio call, at the end of the call, and I said, [inaudible] I want to get off. She’s like, Oh, the AI note taker is on. I’m like, it’s not going to go to the other person on the call. She’s like, well, you have to be careful about the settings. She’s like, are your settings, right? Shit, yes. At the end of the call, I got the notes from that meeting that I was not the originator on. That’s scary shit. So that you know, AI, great. But imagine you’re having a call, and all of a sudden, you know, you’re having an off the record call with somebody, and all of a sudden you just sent them the AI notes.
Well I mean think about it in the context of, you know, you’re having a leadership meeting with your team or your HR person, and you’re talking about something. Next thing you know, one of your employees gets, you know information about their job and their performance problems without, you know, coming in the right context.
McCready talks about this a lot, which is, you know, do you really want to dump all of your stuff into a wiki or a chat? Because you know what, you know you don’t really, I mean, look, there’s a lot of stuff you want to be open about, but if you want to have a personal, not a personal conversation, but a conversation about, how do you manage somebody, the sausage making isn’t really what you want that person to see. You want to see whatever you distill as the message you want to send.
Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s one of the things that you know. People aren’t necessarily thinking down the line with what is out there and what you’re you’re feeding into the AI products. And, I mean, there’s things like notebook, LM, the Google product, where they’re like, you upload all your stuff, and we’ll create something just from that stuff, and then we’ll destroy that stuff.
In theory, like-
[Inaudible] destroying it? I’ll tell you right now, we’ve got, I’ve got a great there’s a, if anybody’s interested in geopolitical stuff, there’s a great podcast out there called geopolitics unplugged, that is made with Google LM, I mean, with Notebook LM, it’s, you know, a, like 40 sources. Up, they create a 10 minute conversation about different topics. It’s really fascinating. I love the podcast. I would, I, you know, highly recommend it. And it’s all AI driven.
So can we just put our stuff in one of these private groups, and then just we can take, we don’t have to record all this?
Yeah, we’ll take December off, right? We’ll take December off. We’ll just put up a bunch of things, and we’ll create a, you know, a Seth avatar and a Jay avatar, and it’ll just do the stuff for us-
[inaudible].
You could, well, I can get you speaking Spanish with-
I am. Didn’t you hear the story? We did an ad for Univision and record, we recorded it, and they used AI. I actually, I’ll get it. I’ll make sure as part of the series, people see it. They did a commercial where I am perfectly accent, lips are moving. It was so good we couldn’t use it because it was disingenuous. We didn’t want somebody to be coming in and saying, oh, you don’t really- it was that good. It was crazy.
Yeah, we, you can do that. I know we’re doing stuff with with that, converting a whole bunch of my videos using Hey Gen, which is an AI product. But maybe that’s the thing, you know, maybe if people can, can send in the AI products that they’re using to thlawfirmblueprint@gmail.com we can create a list and post it in the Facebook group of all the different ones that not necessarily have been vetted, but people are finding success with. And I would love to see that, because I’m always on the lookout for a new tool.
Awesome. Let’s see. So look, it’s, you know, next chapter we will move. We will move towards the AI world. It is, it is changing fast. And like the piece, the advice that I wish I took more and more is, frankly, what Nike says, which is, just do it. You know what you just did there. And I go back to the early days of the internet. I was at bar meetings where the Avvo guy showed up, and I remember him being yelled at by people about what he was doing online and like, is it gonna be perfect? Is there gonna be some mistakes along the way? I’m sure. But like everybody who’s just it’s, can you make it part of your vernacular? Is it something that you’re using day to day? That’s going to be the difference. It’s not going to be you know, if you wait for perfection, it’s not there. And there’s something to be said, like, wait for it to play out, and then you’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t. But I see that the people that make it part of what they do day in and day out, you know, versus the guys who are waiting for a workout routine versus guys who just run every day, you know?
You know, it’s interesting because, and I don’t know who said it, I’m sure somebody can, can remind me who actually said it, but they said the riskiest thing is doing nothing, right. Like, just, okay, I’m going to wait to see how this shakes out. Like, look, I was one of the first people in my state to have a website, right? It’s done me pretty well over the years, you know, and we constantly tweak it and change it and but, you know, I still run into lawyers who, you know, they had, they I see some of their websites and I want to vomit, and I’m just like, and they’re like, well, I don’t really need one, you know, I get all my business through referrals. I’m like, right? But those referrals are 20 years older than you, and now they’re dead, and you’re wondering why you’re getting no business. Because you haven’t put any money into a website, and other than a, you know, a three page brochure that you’re paying thousands of dollars a month to FindLaw for, you know. So you know, the hardest thing you can do, the worst thing you can do is stay still. I mean, even if you just become knowledgeable-
You’re essentially summarizing the John Morgan words at the conference, which, you know, basically, you know, you know, imperfect plan. You know, doesn’t matter. You know, move forward.
Well. And, I mean, think about it. You know, we talked a lot about this stuff during COVID, you know. And if you want to go back and listen to all of our old shows we were talking about how we were in a position to pivot, to move, to do something new, to try something because we didn’t have to worry about, hey, I gotta call around and try to find a VoIP phone system now, because all my people are, I was like, all of our people have phones and and laptops, so I shut the office down, and the next day, everybody was fine. We were able to get our jobs done. Yeah, did we need, you know, better chairs at home and some cameras? Sure.
It was a lot more than that, but, but the point was, you were fine, and you find out where the breakage was and you moved on. It wasn’t like you were sitting there with hardwired computers and you hadn’t, you know, I mean-
Yeah, all those, think about all those people who had, you know, legacy servers sitting in their office with no way to VPN into them. You know, that was a problem for a lot of people in those first couple of weeks and months of COVID.
And that was always my but, you know, look, for many years we had an IT guy that was just so awful. It hurt. He showed up. That was like a contract. At least he showed up. And the reason that I originally, I remember my imputus of going to the cloud was that if I ever got sued for something, Pentagon Papers type situation, and put this guy on the stand, people like, oh, of course, this guy screwed- Like it was like, I know that we’re not smart enough. If Amazon gets hacked Bezos, like, I, you know, it’s like nobody gets fired for hiring, you know, for hiring Cravath or Skadden on the corporate side, it’s nobody gets fired for, like, getting on Amazon or Google, you know, put it, put it with somebody who’s thought about security 17 more ways than you.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
Awesome. This is great. I can’t wait for this next series. And really enjoyed the intake piece. I thought they were all great, and Falcowitz may have been the MVP, but learned so much from all of them.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Alright, folks, that’s going to do it for us on this edition of The Law Firm Blueprint. Of course, if you want to follow us along, you can do so wherever you get your podcasts, just search up The Law Firm Blueprint podcast. Be sure to subscribe. Give us five stars, and we are looking for your feedback. So be sure to, you know, record a voice note on your phone and send an email to the lawfirmblueprint@gmail.com let us know what AI tools you’re using. If you have any questions for Seth and I please give us some feedback so that we could be sure that we cover the stuff that you, our listeners want. And of course, you can always catch us live every week, 3pm, 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific, in the Facebook group as well as live on LinkedIn. Thank you so much for being with us. Anything else Seth?
No I was gonna say, let’s make sure we start that thread in the Facebook group to get to get people engaged on this.
Yeah, I’ll put something up. I’ll put something up right away, so that, you know, people are pinging us with their tools.
You’re, you’re asking for an email. And people like, our more junior compatriots. Like, what’s this email thing you talk about? If it’s not in Slack or it’s not on social, you know?
Well, you know, I’m still old school, and there’s enough of us out there who, you know, I just didn’t want it flooding my email box, so I figured I’d make a Law Firm Blueprint at Gmail, email address so that we can get, both of us get to it. But folks, that’s gonna do it for us. Thank you so much for being with us. I appreciate it more than you will ever know. Bye for now.
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