Jay Ruane  0:00  

Hello and welcome to this edition of the law firm blueprint. I’m doing shoot away, today. Seth, how you doing? Seth, how’s everybody over there?

 

Seth Price  0:17  

Great. Doozy for you. Jay, you know, running a business. We all know that, you know, so we have somebody remote worker, because maybe four or five months who had been out for a little bit, there had been something medical, and then they’re supposed to back on, let’s say, a Monday, and they didn’t come back. No phone call, no email, no nothing. We little concerned because there had been a medical issue in the past, hopefully not violating anything here. But I’m not saying who this is, and we call emergency contact, no answer, no reply, text, call everything. Person doesn’t hit us back, and we’re sitting there with, like, what the heck I go check out LinkedIn. Person has never updated their LinkedIn to include our firm. And I’m like, oh, so brings up a lot of stuff. As a firm owner, you know, is this person in a coma and they just can’t physically get back to us in any way, shape or form? Are they somebody who’s ghosting us like you might have been in the dating scenario? Is, you know, you know what?

 

Jay Ruane  1:28  

Maybe you did that when you’re dating. I would never do something like that.

 

Seth Price  1:31  

IT was done to me. I was never the person. So my question, Mr. Jay, is, what do you do is you just assume like 99% this person is got is decided they are not working for us, but have not informed us of such, but there’s a percentage chance that this person is not

 

Jay Ruane  1:56  

are they US based remote or overseas?

 

Seth Price  1:59  

US based

 

Jay Ruane  2:00  

Okay, obviously, we don’t want to get into too many details, but is it such that you can do a wellness check?

 

Seth Price  2:08  

We that’s on the checklist.

 

Jay Ruane  2:10  

Like, do we send law enforcement out for a wellness check?

 

Seth Price  2:13  

That’s, that’s where we’re at. You know, we

 

Jay Ruane  2:15  

You have somebody else close enough, you know, that could get there, probably, maybe, maybe not. Like, I mean, if you have somebody that lives two hours away that works, there

 

Seth Price  2:24  

is, where do you as an employer? Where does this fit in? You know,

 

Jay Ruane  2:28  

that’s a really,

 

Seth Price  2:29  

in your office, you feel like it’s a different form of relationship. It’s a person, they’re a w2 employee, they’re not a contractor, presumably. And there they are, it’s an employee, and it’s like, what do you do at what point is, you know, where does your responsibility go? What to do next?

 

Jay Ruane  2:51  

Yeah, that’s really tough, because obviously, you know, you care about your people, especially, I mean, this isn’t somebody who came in for, you know, the first week and on Thursday, left and never came back like they’ve been with you for, what, four or five months.

 

Seth Price  3:04  

Yeah, for but, and, you know, for the can’t say again crowdsourcing. I can’t say a rockstar, although we did have a recent, pretty significant blunder the person made before this went down. But, you know, look, we all we’ve talked about on prior shows with people having multiple jobs, about multiple this, we can try to get to what I don’t think it’s a magic answer. all the stuff you’ve talked about, wellness check, emergency contact, all those things are being hit. But you know, is the fact that they never updated their LinkedIn in the first place, a piece of the puzzle.

 

Jay Ruane  3:41  

Well, I mean, I guess it’s a piece of the puzzle. I mean, you know, depending on what the role is, they may not be active on LinkedIn to begin with. I mean, you know, professionals, lawyers, paralegals, they may do it, but, you know.

 

Seth Price  3:55  

It doesn’t have their last place of employment sometime before ours. And I’ve seen, look, I’ve seen this a lot, when there are people that one of the red flags in hiring this is not talking about this person whatsoever. But, you know, I we have been burnt where people come in who are contractors doing stuff, so in the marketing space a lot, and they’re with you for X amount of time. They leave unceremoniously, with or without notice, but you realize you never make the LinkedIn, or if you did, it’s removed and is no longer there to never show this so that.

 

Jay Ruane  4:31  

So let me ask you. Let me ask you, do you want that link from LinkedIn as a social signal, as a link like 

 

Seth Price  4:38  

no no 

 

Jay Ruane  4:39  

care if your people, because, quite frankly, I don’t want my people on LinkedIn because I don’t want them getting poached,

 

Seth Price  4:44  

fair enough, which is another issue, but let’s balance it with we don’t really want our people being poached, but at the same time, if somebody is actively not putting you on LinkedIn when it’s something they’ve done in the past. Yes, they’re just not doing it for you. Is this the equivalent of somebody who is still on a dating app when

 

Jay Ruane  5:08  

no but, but.

 

Seth Price  5:10  

the opposite meaning, has the person not made the commitment that they are with you?

 

Jay Ruane  5:15  

Yeah, but Seth, I still have a MySpace account. If you logged into MySpace right now, you would see that I’m there.

 

Seth Price  5:22  

active on it so but if you were, if you were, if you have somebody who’s shown all their prior employment on LinkedIn, but not you, does that mean something?

 

Jay Ruane  5:33  

I don’t know. I don’t know if I could read into it that way, because ostensibly, they would have found a home and not have no plan or desire to leave. So yeah, they haven’t updated it, because it’s not something that’s a priority to them.

 

Seth Price  5:48  

All the things that we see now with it, you know, if it’s not updated, are they doing? Is there a multi hustle going on, multiple jobs?

 

Jay Ruane  5:54  

One of the things that we do in my firm on day one is as part of our onboarding practice, we encourage everyone to make an announcement on their socials. Hey, I’ve started a new job. So Facebook, Instagram, they’ll get a picture of their desk, and, you know, they’ll do all those things. And obviously LinkedIn could be, or should be part of that, as part of your, you know, day one onboarding, because, you know, there’s a lot of things that have to get done, paperwork wise and familiarity wise, but this is something that you know. Let them know. Let them let their friends know that they’re working at a law firm.

 

Seth Price  6:21  

But let’s say they do something that’s, that’s outward facing at some point in their employment, and somebody checks out, who are they talking to, and they’re not listed as working for you on LinkedIn that to me. I mean, that’s not nothing. Look I..

 

Jay Ruane  6:46  

Coming from a Price Benowitz email address. I mean, I don’t

 

Seth Price  6:49  

The whole side of the story of LinkedIn where there’s a negative we talk about as an employer. It’s a place that recruiters go to find people. I get that, but I am now crowdsourcing over the last decade, two decades, that what I am seeing is that not placing it understood that they may not be as poachable. But at the same time, whenever something goes wonky, not right, and I go back and I look the LinkedIn wasn’t updated. Meaning the rational players at some level of professionalism are going to go and update a LinkedIn, and that when somebody doesn’t, is it part of a hedge to see for several reasons. One, I’m not fully in, I haven’t fully committed to the place. And secondly, if it doesn’t work out, I was never there, and that’s what I see. again, the red flag, which I’m very adamant about, is that if somebody has not had employment in 4, 6, 10, years, and they’ve been a contractor, and they say, Jay, I think you’re so fantastic that I want to be a w2 employee with you. I’m coming in. I’m off the market, and you don’t see LinkedIn updated to me, they haven’t really fully in that. They’re, you’re just another client of theirs, and they’re going to determine in X period of time whether or not they feel like being there.

 

Jay Ruane  7:35  

Well, and that’s and that’s, and that’s one of the things that I mean, let’s talk about it. Because, you know, I’m, I now have we, right? I told you before we came on the air, we just posted a new job. Because we need to hire, we want to hire four new people in intake by Labor Day. That’s, it’s our summer mission, right? We’re losing one to maternity leave, and she is a single mom in Honduras who’s a kick ass intake person. She’s pregnant with twins. Her child’s father lives in Spain. I don’t think she’s coming back.

 

Seth Price  7:58  

no time soon.

 

Jay Ruane  7:58  

No, we actually, we actually crafted a role, because we love her. We crafted a role for her that is that doesn’t have any time restrictions to it, like she doesn’t have to be a desk nine to five she’s going to be able to do a job.

 

Seth Price  7:58  

Lost your intake person.

 

Jay Ruane  6:49  

I’ve lost I’ve lost one of the intake people. And you know, our leads are going up enough that we think, hey, let’s just hire four, figuring maybe three of them make it through training and can do the job. So my firm today, the assistant who’s helping us, reactivated indeed, because we’ve been using wise hire and LinkedIn. But they went on Indeed, just because they said, Let’s try something new. Well, the last time we ran an indeed ad, I clearly was the was the only person in charge of them, because my email was the account, and my email has now gotten in the last hour, now 771 applicants for this intake specialist job. I mean, literally within an hour. So now I’ve got a filter. These things and ship them out to the people who are going to be doing

 

Seth Price  7:41  

Turn it off and use the, use the indeed platform so,

 

Jay Ruane  7:45  

well, that’s, I mean, that’s what we’re gonna that’s what we’re gonna do. But just going through this many applicants is going to take, you know, eight hours for for somebody to do. 

 

Seth Price  10:13  

Well look, that’s one of those ones where you almost, you somebody did not place the ad well.

 

Jay Ruane  10:18  

Right exactly. And I’m not, you know, I’m Mr. Systems, right? You know, we had a system for a lot of things, but we didn’t have a system to make sure that I wasn’t getting the emails. But look, hey, hopefully we’ll find somebody we’re looking to recruit in other parts of the country, and because one of the reasons why we want to recruit out west is the time shift, right?

 

Seth Price  10:38  

it gives you more time.

 

Jay Ruane  10:42  

Exactly. So, you know, we’re fumbling through it, but we’re going to get it done, and I think it’s going to work out. But one of the great things that we’ve been able to do is actually utilize AI. And my firm administrator and I were able to work on using AI to go through our existing job postings, reword them in a way that’s more compelling. You know, change things up because our firm has changed since the last time we went through. that’s another thing I want to mention. Like, you need to be looking at this stuff regularly. You know, the job posting I had for intake that I posted eight years ago is not who we need in intake now. No, it’s definitely different. And what we have, I mean, we have a whole Google Classroom. I mean, we have, you know, we have 40 hours of lecture. I had that intake training tool that I developed that we’re using, where they do 100 AI avatar calls.

 

Seth Price  11:37  

how much the world has changed when, you know, pre covid. We had recent college grads in the basement. You know, it’s just that the world, we now have 30 people around the planet doing their part. And, you know,

 

Jay Ruane  11:51  

I guess you know, you can have all the systems in the world. Number one, you need to use them. And number two, you need to constantly keep eyes on them and update them.

 

Seth Price  12:02  

Look, I think that’s that is probably the biggest piece we certainly on this. You see this at all different levels. Every once in a while you have that like moment as a business owner where, God forbid, somebody is following the system. It’s just not what you want them to do. And that’s, you know, they it’s a system problem, more often than not, it’s the missing piece of it, but it’s making sure that, do you use anything where we’re on confluence of late to you know, our wiki of sorts. Are you still Jay does most things himself, but have you used any third party for that?

 

Jay Ruane  12:37  

Well, my brother built me a WordPress website that lives on a sub domain of our website, and that’s what we use. It integrates with Slack. It’s got integrations with AI. I mean, he, you know, he loves it, like I do when it comes to the systems. So he built it, and we get all the bells and whistles as he continues to develop the product. So it’s been great because, you know, as we add systems, there’s an alert within slack. You can do a search within slack to find the system that you need, so you’re not really leaving the platform. And we audit it as regularly as possible. But now I’m thinking, shit, nobody had looked at the employment one, and it’s time that we have to go back through that. You know, we look at the operational stuff more regularly because we’re interacting with courthouses, and things change when a new judge comes in and has new standing orders. So we update those, but nobody updated, you know, change it from Jay Ruane attorneys to hiring manager at Ruane attorneys for the email address, and so that we got it fixed, and we’ll fumble through again. I mean, look, the fact is, you know, I may look like I have it all together, but we’re still stumbling every now and then, probably more times than not. And you know, the operation that we have today is using systems for a $1 million a year law firm, and that’s not us anymore.

 

Seth Price  13:54  

So let me got a new one today, you know, so a number of years ago. So anyway, listen to this. One of the best things I ever did was firm wide emails have to be approved. So it used to be, anybody could just put, you know, whatever the original one firm@pricebenowitz said, we go to the whole firm. We, after somebody sort of abused, that we eventually, you know, went back to the drawing board and put whatever, whatever our firm wide distribution is, but it can’t go to the firm, and it has to be approved by the by some, by an administrator first, before it goes out.

 

Jay Ruane  14:30  

That’s a lot of sense

 

Seth Price  14:31  

right? And if you haven’t done that as you’re growing, you either do it or you’ll ping me afterwards and say, Oh yeah, that’s why you do this, because somebody will send something absurd out, and you know, you don’t want it.

 

Jay Ruane  14:42  

we do something similar, like we can’t authorize a refund until somebody has a second set of eyes on it.

 

Seth Price  14:49  

Given this, this is one step further, which is just what’s going to your entire team. Can random attorney put a political rant out that goes to the full team? Right? I think this is just, you know, nothing goes out to the firm wide email unless somebody hits set. You know, they can’t just do it. But what is the firm policy if somebody has a fundraising initiative that’s near and dear to their heart, you know, as again, when we’re small, who care? Just ask everybody. But now that we’re bigger and there are people in different offices around the world, what should the policy? Should there be a policy for this? Or just, you know, somebody wants to send something out, you approve it, and it goes out. What do you think should is it, you know, don’t worry about it until there’s a problem. The number one thing is not to be we don’t want to treat anybody different than anybody else. You also want to spam the firm with nonsense. So what do you what say you Jay as far as employee wishes to share a passion project that they are very passionate about?

 

Jay Ruane  15:59  

I think what you just say is that has to get approved by an owner and HR for anything. So you know, you want to say, Hey, I’m walking in this walk a THON. I’d love for you to sponsor me. I mean, approval is not going to be withheld unreasonably. But, I mean, with the subjects of politics and religion, obviously you never talk about this. And one of the other things that we do annually as a law firm is we identify two or three charities that we’re going to, you know, spend money on as a charity every year, and we include our people in the conversation and ask them to pitch us the organizations.I think everything needs to be approved.

 

Seth Price  16:45  

Absolutely. You just want to look. It was one of those life moments. My first reaction, yeah, do whatever, you know, send it out like they’re asking for money. People want to give money. Let them give money. But you realize that over time, there are sort of like using firm platform. Do you care? And somebody else going to feel pressure that they have to do it? What if everybody wants to do it? You know, it’s those types of things. My attitude was, approve it, move on. If it becomes something that becomes a regular deal, we can deal with it. But at, you know, there are times when process and, you know these there’s a reason that HR is in place as you get larger, right? Because why we can’t have nice things is somebody will be upset on the other side. you’re trying to anticipate what is unfair, what is not right, what is you know, how you’re not treating people equally. But you know, it’s fascinating. I started the firm and really wanted to do everything differently than the firm that I started at. I saw it grow from about 75 lawyers when I got there to 250 when I left. lots of procedures, lots of stuff that wasn’t kind lots of stuff that, by today’s standards, would be beyond cringe worthy. sexual harassment at legendary levels. The guy in charge of the work room, requiring women to come to his house for their annual reviews. Yeah, over a bottle of wine. Yeah, so, this is not that long ago. This is 90s, you know, you know stuff. It was a different, different world. There was, you know, people were slowly coming out of the closet. In those days that was a big deal. Some people didn’t quite know what to do with that new found freedom, all sorts of stuff. I digress, but I really didn’t, if you know, like in general, you know me well enough to know if I didn’t have to have a contract for anything, was a handshake, send me the stuff. Stops working. We stopped doing business. It hurt me in certain areas. You know, there were people I had referral relations with. That just complete. But my attitude generally is, you paper everything, you never get anything done. You know, on the HR side. I wish I could just be like, Yeah, sure. Of course, do anything. What’s the negative repercussion from not thinking beyond just, you know, want to keep this person happy with the cause they’re near and dear to their heart. Of course, they should do it, versus should you give any further thought or regulation to it?

 

Jay Ruane  19:05  

Yeah, well, I mean, think about it in this context. You know, we are a firm, you know, with young a lot of young families, and I think I told people, we’ve got about 30 kids under 15 among all of my employees, including me. And you know, the soccer team is doing a fundraiser. They’re selling popcorn. The Girl Scouts are selling cookies. The Boy Scouts are selling holiday cards, and that type of thing. You know, if everybody puts something up there, and I’ve been very, very, you know, cognizant of not putting the stuff that my kids are involved in on there, because I don’t want people to feel obligated that, oh, Jay’s the boss and his kids, you know, looking for a fundraiser. So I gotta buy..

 

Seth Price  19:29  

I go the other way. Any girl style cookies, 50 or $100 just sign me up. Like, put them, you know, put them in the break room, you know, immediately, like, I try to go the other way. Obviously, you know, funny moment when I had to explain to the kids why they didn’t get lottery tickets. We do a big, huge, very popular raffle at our annual party with big and small prizes. And I still remember, like, why can’t we win? Dad? Like, because that’s just not good luck.

 

Jay Ruane  20:12  

You’ve already won in life, kids, that’s what I tell my kids, trust me, you’ve already won. And you know, but the thing is, is that, you know, people feel obligated if their co worker puts it out, you don’t want and you don’t know the financial pressures that, I mean, we pay well, but you know, there’s other people who are supporting extended family members, and you know you just, you don’t want people to feel bad or put out. So maybe the best policy is to say, hey, we’re not doing this here.

 

Seth Price  20:42  

I don’t want to be that guy. If it’s like, it’s sometimes it has to do with the kid thing and this or that, like you, and that’s what I’m saying it come the first reaction was that, do whatever you want. But as Jay thinks about it, he’s like, at one end, do nothing. You know, could it be a Slack channel where you put the stuff? That’s one answer. But I’d like to, like, part of me feels like, you allow whatever it is to go on until it’s a problem, maybe sometimes too late. My HR, my lawyer wouldn’t tell me that, right?

 

Jay Ruane  21:10  

Well, that’s exactly the thing. Like, at what point does it become a problem? Because it may not be a problem for Seth, but it could be a problem for 17 people. I mean, one of the things that we make a hard rule on in onboarding is we don’t discuss politics. through the whole through the whole thing like it’s, look, everyone’s entitled to their own political opinions. We have people who, I think really, in my firm, really run the spectrum. I mean shit, my wife, you can’t get more liberal than her. I mean, you, I don’t think you could. And then we have some, you know, paralegals and some attorneys who are very conservative. And so it’s just better to not talk about politics at all.

 

Seth Price  21:54  

I’ll throw it out. This was a, I believe, a former issue where, what do you do when an employee is putting extreme views out on socials where it’s clear who they you know, they’re not hiding. It’s who they are. It’s public, so it’s not it’s not to their friends, and it’s extreme, one way or the other. Let’s say outside of the current standard deviation.

 

Jay Ruane  22:20  

Maybe that’s why you don’t want them on LinkedIn. You

 

Seth Price  22:24  

You don’t

 

Jay Ruane  22:24  

Well I’m just saying generally, you know, call back to the beginning.

 

Seth Price  22:29  

 I wish you would like, like, if it was a LinkedIn, it would be what it was, extreme enough stuff that generally, like in LinkedIn is a great example. Most people are not doing political rants on there that, you know, there are plenty of other platforms for the political rants. But what you know is that something where, how do you deal with stuff, which is not during the not in the four corners of the office, but four corners the office doesn’t really exist anymore in a lot of worlds, right? You know. And so, you know, is anything said on public facing social This isn’t like somebody’s hitting the cap, somebody’s, you know, getting a screenshot. This is publicly available stuff. Do you care what somebody’s putting out there?

 

Jay Ruane  22:30  

Well, I think that’s part of your onboarding. And this is the kind of stuff that you only deal with after you’ve run into this problem. But I think in part of your onboarding, you say, Now, let’s talk about the First Amendment, right? We are not a government, and things that you say can impact your job standing here at the office. And so you should know that if you post publicly, that’s something that could impact your ability to stay with us, to advance with this, because you’re a public facing member of our organization, and obviously coming into a law firm. How many people have you met in your life who are like, Well, I have a First Amendment right to speak. You absolutely do, but I’m not the government, so I can

 

Seth Price  24:03  

understood piece, which is

 

Jay Ruane  24:05  

absolutely but I think it’s incumbent upon us as owners, especially as lawyer owners, to have that conversation on day one, because as part of the onboarding saying, hey, look

 

Seth Price  24:17  

and the world changes. I remember early, early law firm, some paralegal had all sorts of scantily clad photos on her socials. It seemed crazy. Today, friends daughters have stuff significantly worse than we thought was, and they’re not in the minority anymore. What’s on social like how people dress has, even in the social context, has changed dramatically. So it’s, you know, you never want to be cutting edge and stuff like that in general, talking about, you know, it is the whole number one goal for us is to do no. Harm, whether as a business, right we talk about, you know, we want to be edgy at the same time, the edge, hopefully look. And there are times when you do stuff intentionally. Many plaintiffs firms are very left leaning. They’re like, You know what we’re going to if you’re right leaning, that’s great. But the whole reason we can, we can advocate for you, is because of laws that are there that are protected by this set of politicians, okay, that that, you know, you stood in, sort of. There are, I know, people out there that sort of just don’t give an F, and they that becomes their mantra. I’m sure at some level, it could be client development in certain niches. But you want personality at the same time. What do you do to make sure you’re not turning people off before they even get to know who you are as a firm.

 

Jay Ruane  25:52  

yeah, and that’s, I don’t know. I mean, it’s. I mean, I know people who want to know what side you’re on, because they’ll only do business with people whose values or perspectives align with theirs. I know people who say, I don’t want to know. I am hiring you to a job. You know, I don’t want to know any of that stuff. I mean, we here’s an interesting here’s interesting. You know, I own guns. I keep them at my office in a safe.

 

Seth Price  26:26  

I did not know that.

 

Jay Ruane  26:27  

Okay. I I am. I support the Second Amendment. I also support, you know, good controls on them. You know, I don’t think everybody should have access to firearms. Personally, I think you should, if you have firearms, you should have to get insurance, just like if ou have a car, you should have to get insurance,

 

Seth Price  26:48  

maybe even a license, just like you would for a car.

 

Jay Ruane  26:51  

In my state, I had to get a license qualified.

 

Seth Price  26:54  

That’s the piece I don’t get. Like, why? Why? Like again, I think I like many things in life. Over the last few years, my whole political spectrum has changed, and left feels right and right feels left on a lot of

 

Jay Ruane  27:07  

stuff. Okay, so we hired a contractor to come in and redo our kitchen a couple of years ago, and my wife is very anti gun. She doesn’t like them. And when the contractor came in to talk to her, she happened to notice that he was carrying and she said, Look, I’ll hire you. You come very well recommended. I don’t want that firearm in my house. And he said, Well, I don’t go anywhere without carrying it. And she goes, lock it in your truck in the driveway, you’ll be fine. And that became a decision point in who we hired to handle our kitchen renovation, you know, and she that’s just who she is, and I respect that.

 

Seth Price  27:55  

again, again. I grew up in New York City, where you can see guns on the street, because it was just you because

 

Jay Ruane  28:01  

it was just, you know, with guns on the street,

 

Seth Price  28:05  

right, right, right, there are more issues when you see that. But like so, but that

 

Jay Ruane  28:10  

I got, I got a great story about that. So speaking, speaking of which, I can remember being probably like 22-23 I was in the city. Was out drinking. We were on the Lower East Side, and I’m heading back uptown, you know, because a lot of my friends lived on the Upper East Side, and I am stopped at a traffic light, and out of nowhere, a fight just sort of like, like tumbleweeds in the old west, a fight of like, 1415, people. It just slowly passes in front of my car, slowly passes. And I’m talking, I’m like, you know, you nowadays, you don’t really see fights like this anymore. And the response was, Well, that’s because there aren’t, there aren’t as many guns in New York City, because back where I grew up, you know, the fight like that breaks out and someone whips out a gun, and everybody disperses. Well, sure as shit as the thing is going all of a sudden, you hear Gun, gun, gun, and one person there had a gun, and everybody dispersed, and I, of course, floored it. I took off. I looked saw and I took off through the light. But that, you know, that’s the type of thing that that happened. So yeah, guns were I was a lot. I felt a lot safer in the clubs in my in my teens and 20s, hanging out in clubs in New York City, because there are fewer guns there than there were at home in Bridgeport. That’s just

 

Seth Price  29:25  

on that, on that note, let’s,

 

Jay Ruane  29:27  

let’s land the plane. So, so okay, it is the middle of May. Schools are getting out. People are planning their summer breaks and all that thing. Do you have a plan? I mean, I announced mine at beginning. We’re going to hire four intake by September 1. What’s the what’s the price? Benowitz goal for I know it’s not it’s an it’s there something that you wish you can accomplish.

 

Seth Price  29:51  

We’re building up our family law practice, which is awesome. We are tightening the i. Expenses across the firm, but particularly in the personal injury side. We, you know, are continuing to integrate AI into as much as we can with you. We added zoom phones in this year, and so figuring out how much should be done natively, just you playing with Claude, and how much is are going to be built in tools like the Lexus Nexus, you know, zoom that have, that have these pieces. I think the this is not the rock, but will be interesting is as AI and what we’ll call the traditional case management systems start to collide. Right now the AI is integrating into the case management systems. The question is, at some point soon, will we be playing on platforms that are AI first that will organize your information and will just like right now we are, you know, you’re seeing Salesforce go through this whole you know, how much is going to be integrated into existing platforms, and how much is the platform of the future going to be something we haven’t even seen yet.

 

Jay Ruane  31:12  

I think it’s more of the second than the first. I think it’s, I think, you know, it’s, what’s interesting to me is with the development that Google has put into Gemini and their desire to be around work integration with the Google workspace and sheets and email and phone and all these other things, it’s amazing to me that Google hasn’t integrated into their workspace a basic functioning CRM, because there’s so many out there that are weak, and it could be something that could be a difference maker in Google, especially if it’s tied to Gemini. And you can go across all of your drive and everything that you have, and you can pull stuff out, and you could literally have, like, you know, a user profile, basic contact information, and then just a serve a question bar to, you know, when was the last time a motion was filed in this case, that type of thing. And I think that could be a killer for a lot of things that are out there. I wonder if it’s possible to even build that and now with API access, actually, that’s probably what we I should be looking into see if I can create that and and do that internally, because I’m cheap, and so I’ll spend half,

 

Seth Price  32:26  

you know what I’m going with, not cheap, because you’re not cheap. I know you very well. What you are is you want control of your own stuff,

 

Jay Ruane  32:34  

right?

 

Seth Price  32:35  

And

 

Jay Ruane  32:35  

that’s the end of the day. And it’s worked for me for years. You know, having control.

 

Seth Price  32:41  

Look, I think it hasn’t, hasn’t you know, knowing you well enough, would you

 

Jay Ruane  32:45  

left money on the table?

 

Seth Price  32:47  

Well, right? And that there’s advantages to it, the way it goes, and there are disadvantages.

 

Jay Ruane  32:52  

Meaning one of the advantages are, I own, my own everything. And, you know, it’s now the end of our show, and it’s not the end of the work day, but it is for me, I’m going to shut down here and go off and do do my afternoon meditation and and go get an ice cream cone and then head home and have a very nice life. Just don’t tell my wife that. You know, every Thursday I pop in and I’ll get just a single scoop, but it’s my way to treat Jay. I’m gonna treat myself

 

Seth Price  33:20  

in between haircuts.

 

Jay Ruane  33:22  

You know what? It’s the it’s it is in between. In fact, I’m over you because I was traveling, so I got to get in and get and get tightened up. But I’ll do that tomorrow, on my Friday. I mean, I think tomorrow morning I’m going to go to the to the reflexologist, get a nice little foot rub and get a haircut. You know, I’m trying to and trying to enjoy this life that we have.

 

Seth Price  33:42  

I’m working. I’m with you. I played a tennis game in the middle of the day for the first time that I, I think ever so, you know, I that’s

 

Jay Ruane  33:53  

That’s what it’s all about you. I mean, we, you know, we work all the time, so you got to take the time when you can find it and actually treat yourself, because otherwise, what’s the point of being self employed if you never get a break from the drudgery that, folks, we’re going to leave it. Thank you for being with us. This is not where I thought it would go today. Seth, but it was a good conversation. So folks, that’s going to do it for us today here on the law firm blueprint. Of course, you can take this on the go by following the law firm blueprint podcast, wherever you get your podcast, and of course, catch us live 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific, live on LinkedIn and live in our Facebook group, the law firm blueprint. Please join if you’re not a member, and we will see you next time here. Bye for now.