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William McCreight  0:00  

All right. Andy, I appreciate you jumping on with me, excited to have you on the podcast as our first partner. Spotlight. The podcast is really geared towards helping young lawyers and firm owners take advantage of trends in technology as well as utilize their time as effectively as possible in order to help scale their practice and stay up to date with trends in the space. Really, just want to kick things off here, you know, tell me a little bit about who you are and what your Case Status is, sure.

 

Andy Seavers  0:32  

Well, yeah, thanks for having me, and it’s good too good to be on. So a little bit about my background. I was actually a pre-law major in college, so I had a strong desire to law school, but ended up in software and entrepreneurship, had a number of failed startups, and ultimately met a plaintiff attorney who who struggling with lots of inbound phone calls, clients being frustrated because they didn’t know what’s going on with their case. And so seven years ago, we sought to solve that problem. 

 

What started as the Domino’s Pizza tracker of your legal case now is a true client engagement platform designed really to engage clients more effectively so that they trust their law firm. We always say that you don’t trust your bank because you call and email them all the time and they demonstrate to you that they can handle your money. Well, we help law firms demonstrate to their clients that they can handle their cases and ultimately, the relationship is a lot different. 

 

William McCreight  1:36  

Yeah, and it’s been really enjoyable to watch the growth of Case Status over the past couple of years, I really consider you guys kind of a powerhouse in the space, and really best off when it comes to what you guys offer in that legal space, tell me a little bit more about what sort of firms might be a good fit for Case Status, and really a little bit more specifically about what you all offer In order to help the firms that you work with.

 

Andy Seavers  2:01  

Yeah, yeah. So we really do focus on the Consumer Law space. You know, if you think about an individual on the other end of a case, this is probably not a normal occurrence for them. This is likely the most difficult time in their life. And so they really do desire to trust that their law firm has their best interest at heart, that they’re equipped to ultimately handle their case. And so we, especially early in our journey, focused heavily on the personal injury space, kind of secondarily Social Security, disability, workers comp, and mass tort, and then really started to expand immigration, family, estate, criminal bankruptcy, but you can hear the trend. 

 

It’s all very consumer-driven and, I mean, we know that in flat fee and contingency-based law, when you don’t Bill hourly, there’s no incentive to talk to clients, and so the experience ends up really, really poor. You know, the legal industry, I think one of Cleo legal Trends reports said that the net promoter score for the legal industry is a 37 but if you really look at consumer-based law, it’s closer to Comcast, which is like a negative 30. I mean, it’s, it’s probably somewhere in the middle there, like a zero, and that’s, you know, what a sad thing. I mean, you have to hire a lawyer in some, some circumstances, and you’re put in a position where you are just going to expect a terrible experience. 

 

We’re helping really change that view in the industry. And, and I appreciate you viewing us as the powerhouse. I mean, we’ve worked really hard to establish this, this client service solution, vertical in the space. And, and we, I think, take some pretty innovative approaches in the way that we do that. And so you had asked a little bit more about what we do. I mean, we talked a lot about, like, Zendesk is known as a ticketing tool, and B to B support, or a lot of different organizations use kind of the ticket as a way to provide client service. Well, we know that that doesn’t work within legal law; the type of engagement is much different, more relationship-driven. It’s longer. 

 

There are more interactions and then more lull periods. It’s this different type of relationship. And so we have the Case Status mobile app. We also have web and text to first engage the client. But we say, just like Zendesk, the ticket is just the conduit for clients or customer support. The mobile app is just the conduit for true client support within legal and when the client is engaged, you’re able to really understand what they care about, who they are, and what they are trying to uncover. So like, for example, when they say, what’s the status of my case? What they really might be asking is, is, hey, I’m feeling really stressed, and I’m looking for some assurance. 

 

Can you give that to me? And at the deepest level, we are starting to uncover sentiment. We’re starting to predict sentiment, to really uncover our clients truly satisfied. And. Then quantifiably measure that within the Case Status platform, clients have a 70 net promoter score, and so it is a quantifiably better experience because of the tools that we give the law firm to better proactively engage. But it starts with the client being able to self-service when they can’t sleep at midnight, they can open up the app and they can see what’s going on with their case, and what’s blocking the case. The timeline, frequently asked questions, videos, and things that they care about, where 93% of the time they open the app and find what they need, and then for the other 7% who didn’t find what they need, we help the law firm proactively engage. 

 

We help them move cases faster. We just had a law firm say that they’re moving their injury cases over 95 days faster on the Case Status platform versus the segment of clients that weren’t on it before the use Case Status. And so that’s a super exciting use case to be able to say, not only are you quantifiably providing a better experience, you’re helping conclude that case faster, we’re also starting to work on pulling in really understanding the financial outcome for these clients because we have had customers say we close cases for a higher dollar amount when using Case Status, because we have the time to better care for clients, better uncover the challenges they’re dealing with, and ultimately draft better demands, and ultimately have more to go to bat with against the insurance company. And so we get really excited about all that and the way that we integrate with the different solutions they already use just makes it pretty easy to build into their process.

 

William McCreight  6:34  

Yeah, and I want to circle back and talk some more about the importance of that execution when it comes to your time. But before we jump there, I know we’ve talked about Net Promoter Score and NPS a couple of times, for anybody who might be unfamiliar with what that is and what it means, can you share a little bit of context about that net promoter score, what it is and really why it’s important?

 

Andy Seavers  6:55  

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So Google and a number of other new organizations have set net promoter scores, really the standard in understanding how to measure client service. It starts with the questions zero to 10, how likely are you to refer us to a friend or colleague? And so that question of, will you refer us is a very interesting question, right? Because when you ask it, if I say yes, well, then the next question may be, well, then will you refer us, or will you write us a review, or will you do something? And so it causes this level of honesty where you might not get that in a hey, one to five. How are we doing? I mean, we’re in a world where if we’re on Google or Yelp, it’s five stars, unless it’s one, and that’s not the reality. I mean, most experiences we have are three stars, but we wouldn’t go to Google and give them a three star because it was a good experience, because we know that would actually hurt their reputation. And so by asking a different question, zero to 10, we’re able to identify that nines and 10s are net promoters. 

 

You have the sevens and eights who are passive, and you have the six and below who are actually detractors, the people who have had such a bad experience, they’re going to say, will you not use this law firm. It was a terrible experience. And so it’s the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors, and it creates a score. And I know that sounds complicated, but what it really does is it helps you uncover the people who are going to help you grow, people who you haven’t earned that trust with, and the people you’ve lost. And our opportunity is, how do we move people to an experience that they actually deserve, the one that you’re actually putting on your billboards when you’re saying, “hey, we’re gonna get back to you within 24 hours”, but then law firms don’t have any measurement to actually know if they’re gonna be able to do that or not. We help unlock response time, we help lock just the visibility to know if they’ve gotten back to clients. It’s amazing how many partners believe they get back to every client. And then when we help peel back the layers, they’re not getting back to more than 50% of the clients that reach out. And so we really believe that net promoter, that net the Net Promoter Score, NPS is the kind of the foundational driver of a true client experience.

 

William McCreight  9:06  

Yeah, and I would argue that that knowledge is crucial, especially at the early stages of a firm, not just understanding, you know, who is unhappy specifically, and how do we make sure that they are receiving the quality that they’re looking for, but also we need to know who those net promoters are because we need to take advantage of those positive experiences and help translate to things like reviews on your Google business profile as an example, and really make sure that we’re taking advantage of those assets in the first step to being able to identify how we’re going to be able to help improve that experience or capitalize on that experience, is that knowledge that you all provide, and I think it’s extremely important. 

You talked a little bit about the importance of that time execution, and I was doing some research I saw back in 2015 you actually talked quite a bit about this, in the importance of being intentional. With your time before Case Status even came to be. And that really stood out to me, because obviously, this is something that has been very important to you, like I said, before Case Status even came to be. So you know, talk a little bit more about the importance of that, especially when it’s looking towards, you know, younger attorneys or people who are early on in the growth of their firm, and how Case Status allows you that freedom to be intentional with your time.

 

Andy Seavers  10:27  

Yeah, yeah. Well, if you go back in time to 10 years actually, I just put a LinkedIn post up about this where 10 years ago, like this week, I quit my job. I said I’m going to be an entrepreneur full-time. I felt like I wasn’t being true to who I’m supposed to be if I’m not building and when you first branch into entrepreneurship, just like many lawyers who are probably listening to starting their law firm and kind of like, what do I do next? I mean being intentional with your time. That’s all that you have, especially at the beginning. And so many people really aren’t cut out for running businesses, because they’re not willing to look themselves in the face and say, I’m not good at managing my time. 

 

I need to find ways to really structure this and really take advantage of how to utilize my time the best. And you know, kind of fast-forward three years when we started Case Status at the core level. We believe that so many lawyers lose time just because they are spending time doing low-value tasks for their staff, especially as they scale. You know, we kind of have two business segments, the true small, solo, small firm segment, and then we have the mid to large segment, but it’s, it’s consistent across the board, which is, they’re spending so much time doing low-value tasks that their opportunity cost is just way off. 

 

They could be doing tasks that are going to move cases faster, doing tasks that are going to ultimately drive more value for the client, but they just spend these this time, even with just updates and phone calls and the response to the email and the same question again and so when you really start to look at your time as the most important currency, and you start to, you know, put $1 amount to it. I mean, I know in a lot of like in flat fee consumer base, they don’t Bill hourly, but a lot of lawyers still think of their time in terms of hours, when you can really start to say is my 10 minutes to respond to that email, which is really 20 because I’m having to it’s the cost of switching and the 45 minute phone call. Are those the best and highest use of my time? Sometimes the answer is yes, but most of the time, there is a better way to build processes, train people, and ultimately use solutions like Case Status or whatever else, to better utilize your time to be more effective. And so I just think that’s such an important piece. And I mean, these days, everybody’s like, Oh, all I care about is revenue and growth for the firm. And look when you when clients are happier. And this is a reputation business. Your clients are growing. You grow your business through your law firm, through reviews and referrals. More than law firms even know it is such a revenue drive. But let’s also understand, I mean, if I the number of lawyers who don’t know what gross margin is, you know, truly understand what is your profit per case before all your other expenses, they’ll be like, Oh, maybe it’s 15% well, is 5% of that an unnecessary margin? It’s like, you could unlock another 5% just by doing higher-value tasks and removing the tasks that are low-value. But what we’ll get there is that the market is maturing a lot, and it’s exciting to see more and more law firms starting to think quantitatively and using data and metrics to really drive their business.

 

William McCreight  13:50  

Yeah, and this is really going to be a recurring point of conversation throughout this series, is that the first step is having the right knowledge in place, and everything that you’re saying translates very similarly to, you know, the advertising in the visibility world, where it’s, you know, we may be doing X and it’s giving us a two times return on our investment, but that does not mean that we should not be using that same level of resources and potentially getting a four times return on that investment. And it really starts by having the right data in place and understanding exactly what we’re dealing with, because that’s the only way that we can really make these decisions. 

 

And I really appreciate your point about the changing mindset within the space. And one thing that I think I’ve seen very frequently over the past couple of years in particular is that a lot of these firm owners are really starting to shift their mindset away from, hey, I own a law firm to hey, I’m an entrepreneur, right? I own a business. Talk to me about, you know, what you’ve seen in that sense, and you know how, in addition to what you just mentioned, Case Status, is really able to play a role in that mindset shift away from just. A, I own a firm too, you know, I own and scale a business.

 

Andy Seavers  15:03  

Yeah, yeah. It’s, I mean, it’s, it’s so funny how I probably don’t even realize all the different ways that it’s changed. But, I mean, seven years ago, we were talking to law firms who were like, I don’t like my clients. I don’t want to talk to them and they don’t deserve to know what’s going on, or I don’t want them to know what’s going on because I’m not doing the right things. I mean, this, this language that indicates the client didn’t matter. I mean, you think about the most successful businesses today. I mean, Southwest was, like, the kind of prime example for so many years, because they were successful, because it was all about their clients, all about their customers. 

 

And I mean, if we had that approach, we’d be like, we hate law firms, like they’re the worst, like they’re the ones that pay the bills for us. That’s what this is, ultimately what this is about. Now, we first focus on their clients to then ultimately impact the law firms. But focusing on your customer, on your client, is such a core tenant of building an effective business and I mean, so many lawyers were trained to just be a practitioner, where it was all about the legal work itself. But the reality is, this is a people business, and it’s a customer business and we may call them clients, but ultimately they are hiring you for a service. And yeah, they might be paying you upfront, or they might be paying you a third of the settlement, but they do deserve a level of service that is equal or close to what they’re spending, which, which is today or historically, has been way off. It’s starting to move more effectively in that direction. I’m also seeing firms, you know, outside of the just, just this kind of qualitative focusing on clients, just a more metrics-driven approach. There was a time where, you know, you really couldn’t dive into any data about the firm, because they didn’t know. I mean, we still deal with it, we almost don’t ask the question, how many inbound phone calls are you getting? Because most of the time they go, I have no idea yet. 

 

They came to us because they said they were getting too many inbound client phone calls. It’s like, well, you know, it’s too many, because of your gut, but you don’t know exactly how many are actually getting and what is the right number? Right? Exactly, right? And so when they start to really think about the data and how it unlocks real insight into their organization, it’s I’ve heard dozens of lawyers say this when you start getting into the data, it’s actually way worse than you think in these law firms and and they start to uncover things that they, you know, they almost wish they hadn’t. But just like, what is it? Ignorance of the laws? No defense. You know, it’s like, for some reason, like ignorance to your clients, or ignorance to the effectiveness of your firm, that’s, that’s, you know, you can, you can be ignorant to that. That’s fine. 

 

But it’s starting to change in a lot of ways where, where firms are starting to say now I I know it’s broken, and I’m happy to see that there are enough, there are enough resources out there to help me, me fix the problem, not just throwing bodies at the problem, but now I’m able to hire experience, I’m able to build process, I’m able to buy software, I’m able to utilize different things to ultimately make their firm more effective. And we’re just seeing that at a faster scale than we ever have. I mean, you see all the AI stuff is just, is really making legal super exciting? Seven years ago, no one was excited about law. Everyone was like, do lawyers buy software? Do they want to change? I don’t think so. Now everyone’s saying, Oh, this is the prime market to see super growth.

 

William McCreight 18:23  

Yeah, and it’s really because the value of doing these small things correctly is crucial. And when we look at the landscape of the competition in the legal space, we’re seeing more and more of these large players, right thinking Morgan and Morgan continue to grow and build and expand. And for me, the best way to protect yourself from these larger players stepping into your market is to differentiate yourself. And, you know, I think that Case Status does a phenomenal job about, not just, you know, allowing people to utilize, right, that hands-on approach that a larger firm isn’t always going to be able to offer. So talk to me about, you know, what you’ve seen in that sense, and how you know, firms might be able to utilize a Case Status to differentiate themselves from these larger players. You know, I like to think of McDonald’s coming in next door to the mom-and-pop burger shop, right? And how you can use Case Status to really drive that experience and protect yourself from these big players.

 

Andy Seavers  19:23  

Yeah, yeah. I mean, in a lot of ways, we do see that the future of Case Status is not as a differentiator, but the minimum. I mean, it’s the same way if a bank called you today and said, Hey, we’re not going to do online banking anymore, you can come back into the branch. It’s like, that’s not even something that’s the minimum that we expect when we go and work with the bank. But you are right that today, it really is a differentiator still for law firms and so for the smaller firms. I mean, yes, you might not be as busy, and you may have the resources to be able to communicate with clients, but it’s not either or the reality. If a client that’s up at midnight, that can’t sleep, doesn’t want to reach out, and you’re asleep, they’re not going to be able to reach out. So they do deserve to be able to find peace of mind wherever they’re at. There are a lot of different personas of clients within a law firm, we do some work to start to uncover what are the different personas of clients you work with. And there’s the persona that’s never going to reach out because they know you’re busy, but they really are scared. They’re really going through a hard time. And if you just proactively gave them an update, you proactively gave them visibility into what’s going on in their case, the trust that they would have for you would be so much different, and they would become such a different type of advocate for your firm than ones like, yeah, they just really never talked to me, and I, you know, I didn’t want to bother them, but, but I don’t even know if they’re working on my case. Like, what a terrible relationship ultimately has with your law firm. Yeah.

 

William McCreight 20:52  

And look at your time as a resource, just like the dollars that you’re spending or resources. And when you look at these larger firms, something I hear very frequently is, hey, I don’t have the you know, level of resources to compete on an advertising standpoint, like some of these larger firms, and they talk about the element of having these recurring, you know, clients from a lead standpoint and right, these returning cases coming through from people that they’ve worked with in The past. And you know, if we don’t have a spend to compete digitally with some of these larger players, we need to make sure that we’re doing everything that we can to make sure that when somebody comes back and they need a firm to work with that you’ve worked with in the past, that you’re capitalizing on, that you’re making sure that you’re getting these people to call you first when something happens is that something that you’ve seen from the firms that you work with?

 

Andy Seavers  21:44  

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the bar is pretty low right now to be able to start to get to head, get ahead on those things. I mean, we talk a lot about one of our customers that we’ve had for the last few years upon the hockey up in Pennsylvania, they had 400 Google reviews and a 4.4 when we started, and now they have over 3000 and they have a 4.8 and that’s not rocket science. They just, we just help them track client satisfaction throughout the case. They know when clients are having a great experience. They ask for a review, and we can help them know when to ask, and it drives impact for them. 

 

But 400 reviews, it’s not a tiny amount, but firms right now who are small have an opportunity to get well above 400 without that many clients, especially over a couple of years. And so for many law firms that we seek to work with or that we work with, we say, this is the time to really set the standard in your market. And then the reality is, it’s really nice to have a lot of Google reviews, but it’s more symptomatic of your average is more symptomatic of your ability to deliver service. And so I tell the firms out there that have the 4.3 Hey, that’s the thing that you actually should be concerned about. Because if you think about it, we all started a five, and that means, over time, you’re going down, gone down, more likely to go up or to go down without directly investing in caring about the client. And so from our standpoint, we’re saying, hey, let’s let’s turn the curve. 

Let’s start to raise that average backup. And yes, it’ll benefit you from a growth standpoint, but what it’s really benefiting is your reputation in that market. And what we’ve seen from all these firms popping up in Arizona, doing marketing all over the country, is without a local reputation. Your dollar doesn’t go very far. And so many firms lose the engine of growth because they have so many clients in a local market that aren’t happy. And I’ve talked to the old managing partner who’s genuinely like, I just hope I get to retire before the bar complaints become too loud. And it’s like, What a sad thing. It’s like, what we should be thinking about our lawyers in the same way that we think about doctors. They’re here to help, they care for you. I mean, they’re literally ethically bound, just like a doctor’s ethically bound. Yet if you think about the most ethical people in your life, a lot of times lawyers are on that list, and what a sad thing. So we really do see, although, you know, we help the law firm in so many different ways, we do really believe when you start to reshape the client experience, it redefines how you operate.

 

William McCreight  24:14  

Yeah, and something that I hear, you know, ask very frequently when I’m speaking with firms, especially these smaller firms, it’s whether they’re working with us and they’re trying to figure out what they can do on their end to help what we’re doing from a digital standpoint, or maybe they’re not at the point where they’re able to start putting resources into their digital presence. What can I do to show Digital Gain? And my answer is, the best use of your time is going to be to get as many Google reviews as you possibly can that are five stars, right? And we look at the threshold that we need from a success standpoint, which is really a 4.7 or 4.8 and above. And while intuitively, a 4.3 you know, it’s above four, it’s closer to five than it is to one, right? That is a low number. And so firms may not always realize. That, if you have a 4.3 right, that is not where we need to be, and that is the best use of your time. Whether you’re, you know, not at a stage where it makes sense to invest yet in digital, or you’re, you are working with a digital provider, and it’s how can I make sure that I’m doing everything I can on my end to support that work that’s going in from the agency standpoint. 

 

Now, we talked a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey early on, and I know that you have worked through a bunch of different startups up to this point. You’ve done stuff ranging from college student storage over the summers to kind of parking technology, and I know that you even had a startup focused on recommendations for local food and beverage places, which is similar in a lot of senses to what we’re talking about here. What are some of those overlapping challenges that you faced in startups that really cover a variety of different topics, but I’m sure have similar challenges shared amongst them? 

 

Andy Seavers  26:03  

Oh yeah, man, such a big question. There are so many things that I’ve learned over the years about how to run a business, but even at our scale, which those other startups never got even close to the scale we’re at with Case Status, it’s consistent that you know when you think about, well, what is truly the problem we’re solving? Is it a real problem? And you know, people take that for granted with it with taste, the the the the app for finding local favorites, it was all about locals and their one favorite so, so if you’re in Charleston, which is where I live, you get one favorite burger place, one favorite dessert place, one favorite coffee shop. And so you go to the city where there’s a bunch of five-star rains, and you’re like, okay, they could have just had one bad day. That calls for a bunch of negative reviews. 

 

I want to know where the locals go and say that this is truly the best solution, what I’m describing to you, very, very strong. But when you really get into the core problem, you know, people are typically looking for confirmation bias. They’re looking for that review, that written review, to tell them they’re going to have the experience they want to have. Tell me the patio is nice, it’s not too hot, the food’s really good. And when I find that review, even if it’s fake, which unfortunately fake reviews, is becoming such a problem. In fact, I’m seeing it even in the last six months in law firms, more than I ever have. And we have a contact at Google that’s going to start to really crack down on fake reviews in a way that they haven’t done before. Because of the AI analysis they can do on those reviews, we just started to discover that the pain we were trying to solve with taste, it wasn’t really a pain that they were trying to solve honestly, and it was really too hard to explain the solution. 

 

And so when we, when I think about Case Status, the core pain that we uncovered so many, you know, client portals is kind of a piece of what we do. So many client portals have come and gone over the years because, to them, they’re just focused on the pain of the lawyer. Like, yeah, the lawyer wants cases to move faster, and they want to get documents better, and they want to create a better client experience. 

 

Awesome. So we’re just going to only focus on the law firm. But the reality is if you don’t solve the client’s pain first, then this doesn’t work. Most of these client portals are all about chat, but the client doesn’t want better communication. That’s what they say that they want. But what they truly want is to trust that you are the best equipped to handle this case, and they want to feel good about it. That is, it’s a slightly different problem, but it’s a very interesting one. And so for us, our core kind of baseline metric is our clients feeling that trust when they go into the Case Status platform. Not like, nor are they, you know, they getting like? It’s important to get responses quickly, and it’s because that feeds into it’s important to know that their experience is good, but at the core level, do they trust their law firm? And if we can really, you know, can prove that, if we can really demonstrate that do the Net Promoter Score and the other ways we do it, then we, over, over the last seven years, have very much proven that, that this is a real pain and that the solution when focused on trust, that is what unlocks everything else, and that’s where we still today have seen no one else in The Space who’s competing with us, understand the pain of the client so intimately and try and build a solution in that way, pretty much everybody’s focused on, you know, they’re focused on just the lawyer and not the client. And then when that starts to fail, and they start to expand into, okay, well, maybe I’ll try and do some more, some more marketing features. I’ll try and do some more chat features, and look, those things are great, but only after you’ve established trust.

 

William McCreight  29:45  

Yeah, yeah. And that’s actually a great segue towards something I saw you writing about. I thought it was very interesting, the idea of not just removing friction, but creating that satisfaction as well. And I think that what you just described is great. Example of, you know, there’s ways to remove friction, but we need to make sure that we’re also creating that satisfaction that makes that experience enjoyable. And I think you gave some analogies to the way that notifications are set up in social media and things of that nature. And you know, how has that idea shaped what you all have put out there at Case Status that differentiates yourself versus others, as you mentioned, you know, things that have come, come and gone in the past, yeah.

 

Andy Seavers  30:27  

I mean, our theme last year was friction. It was removing bad and leading to good. I think it’s a, it’s a core tenant of, there are times where you need to remove friction, but there are also times you need to create friction to really, you know, get to the core value that you’re trying to uncover and, and that was just, it’s a really good theme for us to focus on because we saw a lot of growth in the company in that way today. I mean, we try and help the law firm really uncover what friction exists in the process, and how we can make, for the staff members who maybe are, if Case Status does the job well, they can actually do their job effectively. 

 

Now, they’re still going to be fully utilized. Their time is going to still be maximized. But how can they actually feel good about that experience? I think one of the posts I wrote about, I talked about software, is a lot about game theory. It’s all about popping the notification bubbles. It’s all about getting through, you know, complete my, you know, my quests, or complete my items. I’m kind of nerding out here a little bit, but it’s, you know when I’m utilizing software, I want to actually create an experience for the staff member that feels like they are completing their job, that they’re doing a good job, that they’re getting highlighted for it, that they’re not getting replaced, but they’re being, you know, unlocked to be faster, and all of those things create, you know, an unblocking of friction that I think is just so important and but for some, you know, we the friction of like our what our platform really does is it standardizes the way that you manage clients. So the standard process unlocks a new data set, and then we give you metrics to scale. 

 

That’s like, truly what we are doing for the law firm. And so the friction of a new process is friction that is worthwhile because the new process is a better process, and it’s the process that unlocks what law firms really haven’t been able to do for the last 30 years, and that’s what we get really, really excited about.

 

William McCreight  32:26  

All right, yeah, I really appreciate you sharing that. I couldn’t agree more, and it’s not just making it seamless, right? And seamless can be intuitive, but it’s making sure that people enjoy that interaction as well, and that it allows them to really take advantage of what you guys are offering, which is also why I really appreciate the app-based solution versus just some sort of Portal on the back end of a website.

 

Andy Seavers  32:49  

Yeah, we realized that for the client, you know, that’s when we understand the client very, very deeply. We have a customer whose customer base is all homeless, but they all have a smartphone. That’s where their entire life is. And you know, seven years ago, we used to get things like, well, what if my client doesn’t have a smartphone? We have a solution for that. But today, everybody, just, you know, understands the smartphone is the way that most consumers engage with their life on a day-to-day basis. And if we think about the things that we engage with Amazon, our bank, maybe medical portals, social media, it’s all through mobile apps. 

 

It’s all on our phone. If somebody’s in a legal case, this is very, very important to them, and believe me, they want to have access to it in real-time. They don’t have to go find a link in some text thread. They don’t want to have to log into your website. THEY DON’T WANT TO have to, you know, take multiple steps to get that, you know, that essentially feel that trust that they’re looking to feel.

 

William McCreight  33:46  

Yeah, final question for you, as we wrap up here, you know, you guys have worked with tons of firms, especially over the past couple of years, and you’ve seen plenty of them grow and continue to scale and utilize what you all put out there. What are some of those characteristics that you see across the board with firms that have seen that growth and that scale scalability over the past couple of years, and as you’ve grown with them,

 

Andy Seavers 34:08  

yeah, yeah, that’s a man there. There are so many different things that we look for, I mean, firms who are willing to acknowledge that there’s brokenness, that there’s there, there’s an opportunity to change and to get better. That’s such a starting point. It’s such a good starting point because there are so many you know, it’s like, never admit fault. Well, lawyers have taken that to mean, never admit there’s a problem ever and, and that’s, you know, like, that’s not the reality. It’s like, we all have challenges in our business that we’re looking to overcome. Just acknowledge what the pain is, and that there might be a solution that you haven’t tried or that you didn’t come up with, that can work. 

 

And so when we see this level of humility as a starting point, it’s a really good step for William McCreight’s step. We also see firms that hire really good people. That helps. I mean, our platform is designed so you don’t. Really have to have really good people to be successful in Case Status. But when we see a CEO or a COO that’s not a lawyer that was trained in business, those firms close faster than any other firm, because they do the math and they’re like, this is such a day one impact for our bottom line, for our growth and for our margin. Why did we find you five years ago? And we go, Well, I don’t know. We’re trying to spend as much on marketing as we can. And so that’s really the second thing. And then the third thing is really utilizing the data that we unlock. And so for us, we look at what value realization really means for a law firm. And my favorite thing, and this is back to when I was implementing customers myself. 

 

I was the salesperson. I was writing code, I was doing every part of the Case Status process seven years ago. And it was when I would come to a managing partner and say, hey, great news. Your first 10 net promoter scores have come in. Here are the seven good but hey, here are the three, the three unhappy clients. And without fail, they would say, Who are those people? And that’s value realization because they start to realize, I’ve never had that level of access to understand if my clients are satisfied. I’ve never had the data to quantify if they’re happy across the board. And so that’s really what we get excited about. Law firms are getting excited about a lot of things today, I guess. But, is understanding that data really does drive the business and that Case Status can unlock new data sets for them? Yeah, I love it. 

 

William McCreight  36:31  

Where can people go to learn more about Case Status, connect with somebody on your team, and where can people hear some of your thoughts?

 

Andy Seavers  36:37  

Yeah, casetatus.com, is an easy first step. We’re about to do a webinar with a number of our operational leaders at a number of our big law firms. I think that’ll be a really effective webinar to join. You can also see a demo on the website, and we will do over 100 conferences this year. We’ve got a pretty big team that spreads out so they can always come find us at a booth, or maybe I’ll be speaking about something, come over and say, Hi.

 

William McCreight 37:07  

Yeah, I love it. I appreciate you. You know, taking some time to share a little bit more about what you’ve seen. And I tell everybody, you know, I think that what you all do is crucial, and I think it’s one of the most important steps that firms can take to really utilize their time and grow as effectively as they’re capable of. So appreciate you sharing these thoughts, and hopefully, people who are listening were able to find some value. And I definitely encourage everybody to reach out to learn if Case Status might be a good fit for your firm, and consider taking those next steps.

 

Andy Seavers  37:38  

Awesome. Thanks. Will Cool. Thanks.