Clients Care About Legal Tech: Dig Into Legal Tech and Tech Related Careers.

Episode Notes

Transcript

Introduction:

So if I was starting today as a New Solo, I would Entrepreneurial aspect, Change the way they’re practicing, Leader, What it means To be, Make it easy to work with your clients, New approach, new tools, new mindset, New Solo. And it’s making that leap. Making that leap leap.

Adriana Linares:

Hi everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Solo on Legal Talk Network. I’m Adriana Linares, I’m your host. I have a wonderful and informative and experienced guest today, Dan Lear. Dan Lear, you and I have not seen each other in far, far too long, and I am remiss in that. But remind everybody if they have heard your name in the past or tell everyone who doesn’t know about you, your journey through legal technology and what you’re doing today and why you’re qualified to come on today and talk about InfoTrack’s attorney competence and the client experience report, which is what we’re going to talk about.

Dan Lear:

Wow. Okay. That was a multi-pronged question. So I will attempt to hit all of those items, but my background and my journey through legal technology, I often joke about my family that you are not a viable fetus in my family until you get your law degree. So the path for me to becoming a lawyer was set out pretty early. Both my parents are lawyers, they each have one brother. They’re both lawyers. My brother’s a lawyer. So that I would become a lawyer or sort of find my way into the legal sector was probably inevitable. But the interesting thing about both of my parents is that they have kind of both had non-traditional careers. I started my career working in records actually at a large Seattle-based law firm, Perkins Kuey, that I think a lot of people know. I then became a paralegal at Microsoft working both in legal operations as well as more as a straight up legal practitioner, if you will, supporting a business unit, drafting and negotiating contracts, that sort of thing.

So have of really strong respect for, and actually a lot of passion around legal operations. Obviously that was more of an in-house setting, but still thinking about how legal professionals can find ways to scale their operations and do more. So I ended up going to law school, graduated, worked as a technology lawyer for a number of years, but really found myself, again, drawn back to sort of that legal ops. And really I was working with all of these very fascinating technologies, but then when I would go back and actually do my work to support these technologies, I felt like I was sort of going back in time because there were all these powerful technologies. We were building robots in the early stages of ai, and I worked on video games and we had such amazing ways that was changing the landscape and yet the work that I was doing felt like I was working on a glorified typewriter from 150 years ago, and it just wasn’t.

So for me, I got way more excited about how we could use technology to inform and change the practice of law than necessarily staying in that vein. So I’ll fast forward the last 10 years pretty quickly, but managed to find my way to a company that’s still around called avo, talked their CEO EO into basically sort of letting me be the company’s evangelists slash business development reps slash kind of partnerships head of community. And I did that for a number of years. I think that’s where you and I initially met that company was sold in 2018. I started an integrated payments business in the legal sector through the covid years, and six months ago came to InfoTrack to head up partnerships. And my current role here is I manage all of our, so InfoTrack don’t want to make this too pulpit spammy, but we sell integrated litigation support through practice management systems.

What does that mean? We help you electronically file or respond to court cases directly through your practice management system, your clios, your my cases, your smoke balls of the world. We also facilitate service of process in that same fashion. And I manage all of the relationships. I don’t know how competent I am to do something like this, but I happen to know a lot of people, which helps. And so I manage all of their relationships with the clios, the my cases, the smoke balls of the world, both those with whom we have existing relationships as well as building new ones. So that’s me.

Adriana Linares:

Well, what I like about hearing stories like that, and I think listeners appreciate is to always consider an alternative career in legal. So there are a lot of listeners who went through the rigmarole and what it takes to become a lawyer and maybe they don’t like practicing law or they don’t like where or how they’re doing it. And I just want to remind everybody, there are so many things you can do with a law degree and the legal technology sector and field is always growing and always looking for lawyers, not to mention all the other things that you can do with a law degree. So no, you’ve had such an interesting path. You’ve seen so many things. You’ve seen so many changes, and now you’re at InfoTrack, which I think is a great company. And honestly, I don’t know that a lot of lawyers who need process serving realize how technology has advanced that field. So I do want you to take just one more minute and you kind of sped through it, but I want you to tell listeners if this is something you need, where to go look, what to look for, stop doing it the old fashioned way, and just tell us a little bit more about the technology that has enhanced process serving.

Dan Lear:

Sure. And the tip of the spear for us, Adriana is E-filing as well. So I want to hit both of those. Both have very clear and obvious once you sort of get it, but it does take a minute. So let’s start with the E-filing. I think today between 80 and 90%, it might be in the low nineties of courts in the United States have some form of electronic filing, right?

Adriana Linares:

Thank the Lord, baby Jesus. Yeah.

Dan Lear:

Well, and we’ve still got a long way to go. Let’s be clear. So long most courts have it. So if you’re a litigator, you know that you instead of walking down to the courthouse and plunking down your lawsuit on the clerk’s desk, you can file it electronically and get a certification of filing back. What you may not know, or what you may not be aware of is that there’s an ability to facilitate all of that through your practice management system. So if you use, again, Clio, my case, spoke ball, a handful of others, you can actually have all of that, that you can run that workflow directly through your practice management system. And that means you never have to leave your practice management system when you’re doing this. And again, I don’t want to sell, I just want people to understand.

Adriana Linares:

No, let me do it for you. Hold on. Let me just take this as an opportunity to remind listeners, those of you who are out there who are still not using a proper case management system. Well, and that’s a whole, this is yet another, that’s

Dan Lear:

A whole nother conversation.

Adriana Linares:

So I know I do have maybe five listeners left that haven’t bothered to get a case management system because they think they’re efficient or they don’t want to pay that whole $70 a month that a system like this might cost. But this is another really good reason to think about why you should have a good modern case management system. Dan, I’m going to guess that services like InfoTrack and others of the world don’t integrate with what I refer to as traditional practice management systems, the ones that are still server-based or desktop-based. So talking now to the second type of listeners that I still might have, which is those of you that are holding on to traditional, I won’t name names, but if you can’t get tech support and updates anymore for your case management system, if you can’t text message your clients through your case management system, if you can’t integrate with Microsoft 365 through your case management system, it’s time to upgrade and update. So go ahead back to just we get it right. No preach, e-filing doesn’t have to be done the way Fred Flintstone did it anymore. You can do it more efficiently in more modern ways, but really you’ve got to have a modern platform on the backend to be able to use some of these services like InfoTrack.

Dan Lear:

And that’s a perfect lead in. And I will just very quickly hit why you would want to do it through us and the value that we bring, you can pull the document straight out of your case management system and file it. B, all of the file documents get automatically returned to your case management system. And C, and this is the part I think is most relevant, all of the fees associated with the filing get automatically attributed to the client matter. And that’s the piece I think that legal professionals leave on the table so often is they’re like, okay, I’m in my whatever. Hopefully I’m in a case management system, then I come over here and I file the document and then I come back over here and I get back in my case management system and I just spent like $500. And especially for a solo like you file five, 10 cases a month, that’s real money and you forget to attribute it back to the client matter and that’s just lost revenue.

So that’s the key piece. And then on the service process side, my analogy here is this is so nerdy, it’s such a throwback, but you can through our UI and again through your case management system, press a button. Then basically the beacon goes out to Dick Tracy on his watch that’s like, Hey, so-and-so needs their document served. And you’ll obviously get a copy of the documents, the process server goes and serves them. We can actually have them also file the affidavit of service with the court and then return all of that to you in your case management system. So that’s what we do. I think honestly, if I can just even step back, that’s what got me so excited about this opportunity and you’ve kind of already been preaching it, and we don’t have to stay on this soapbox if we don’t want, but this is a huge efficiency gain for lawyers and it makes it so that legal professionals, law firms, solos, whomever can serve more people, can handle more work, can grow their businesses. Like when Gretzky said, this is where the puck is going, this is what you should expect for how your case management system should work and what you should expect, what clients should expect for how legal professionals should run their practices. So I think there’s just so much opportunity. It’s exciting. I’m really pleased that we’re at a place where we can start to see all of these things come together and converge in a way that I think makes the ecosystem better across the board.

Adriana Linares:

Look, I agree, I’m always preaching efficiency, making that workflow easier. And I’m going to add one more point to considering modernizing your practice, not just through modern case management system, but making sure you using the right integrations, which when somebody calls me for a consultation on what tech should I get? My answer always starts with whatever you’re thinking about and considering, make sure it talks to other things. Integration is key to this efficiency. But I’m going to add one more thing, which is for those of you who are struggling with an amount of work that might be over your head and you’re considering hiring a paralegal or an assistant to help you, if you’re using technology that’s available in the right ways, you can stretch the time out to where you need that type of assistance from not being administrative but being more substantive. So if you’re going to hire a paralegal, why are you hiring them just to do filing or just to draft documents?

Get to the point where you can use a paralegal for their paralegal skills versus just that administrative work. So I love reminding people that you can do more when you have the right technology in the right places doing the right things. So to move on to our next segment, which we’re going to take a break in just a second, I want to talk about what we’re going to talk about, which is the attorney competence report that InfoTrack published, which is why you’re here. I saw the report, I said, oh, I should have Dan come on and talk about this report because I think it’s really, these reports are really interesting and I know lawyers like hearing about these statistics and this information that they’re not necessarily going to either know or talk about at the next Bar Association meeting. But when we come back, everyone we’re going to talk about what the InfoTrack attorney competence report covered, what they asked clients about, what the results look like.

We’ll be right back. Okay, we’re back. I’m here with Dan Lear, who’s VP of integrations with InfoTrack, and we spent the first segment of the show reminding you why you want to have a modern case management system talking about integrations and specifically about process serving. So Dan, as we sort of segue into talking about the attorney competence report that InfoTrack published, my first question to you is why did InfoTrack feel like they needed to do? You needed to do another one of these reports. Seems like all the big practice management and legal technology companies are doing them. And by the way, that’s not a complaint because I feel every company that does it brings a different angle and information to these reports. So give me a little info background on info track report and where can we get it? Oh yeah, tell us too where we can get it.

Dan Lear:

Oh yeah, well, we’ll put a link to the show notes. Perfect. We’ll put a link to the report in the show notes. I think that’s the easiest way to do it so I don’t have to talk out some random URL that the listeners will then be listening to trying to type in. So why I think there’s two pieces. I think the first is lawyers love themselves, a list of rankings and something to compare themselves to.

Adriana Linares:

Honestly, I thought you were going to say lawyers love themselves, stop.

Dan Lear:

Oh, that’s probably true too. But I mean the number of conversations I had when I worked at AVO about the 10th of a point that certain people got off their ratings or the competitiveness that they had around answering questions on our q and a, we do this stuff because legal professionals respond to it and they care about it, which a lot of people do too, right? You’re like, Hey, what are the 10 best restaurants in my city? You’re like, if you care at all about food, you want to go see whether I’ve been to them and whether I agree. So one reason is we know that people will pay attention to this. I think second Adriana, I’m actually going to give four things now I think about it aligned with the conversation that you and I just had. Smart solos and legal professionals are increasingly adopting case management system.

Like you said, there’s five of your listeners out there who aren’t and maybe another five who are still on a non-cloud based system. But most of the rest have to your point, found religion and entered the 21st century, which is fantastic. But for us, the way we think about this is I want to pat those people on the back who have adopted those systems and say, good on you. You’re moving in the right direction. We want to encourage lawyers to take that next step. We want them to raise their eyes a little bit and think, well, what more can I do? Yeah, I might not have thought of myself as, or my practice as technologically savvy to begin with, but hey, I’ve adopted this cloud-based practice manager system. I’m trying to get hip, what else can I do? And so this kind of encourages them to say, Hey, now that I may be thinking of myself as more of a technologically forward legal professional, what else is out there?

So that’s step two is like I’ve adopted, what does competence look like? It’s also important for us to sort of push the narrative to consumers about how and why lawyers are thinking about technology adoption. Then my fourth one, which is my favorite, or at least I always love me, a good analogy, and I actually think about this a lot, and this is one of the things I really started thinking about back when I started at AVO was I think that there’s a lot of BS honestly, that gets sold to lawyers and legal professionals about what technology can do and how it can help you in your practice and that sort of thing. But I also think it’s really important to not undersell the fundamental ways that technology is transforming what we do and how we work. And this is a very roundabout way of getting there, but hear me out.

So as I mentioned earlier, I’m a lawyer and so I have to do my CLE credits. So I was listening to A CLE actually just yesterday about, it was like updates in food law. It was actually really great. I’m fascinated by this stuff. So this is all of the litigation around whether certain contaminants get into food and the class actions that are broad and the things that people argue about. But one of the things they said is the internet has enabled consumers to be more sophisticated about knowing what goes into their food. And it has enabled us to be more sophisticated, honestly about how we consume pretty much everything, right?

Adriana Linares:

Anything from makeup, I think about it all the time. Yeah.

Dan Lear:

Yep. And that was actually one of the things I said at the end as a side note was a lot of this same type of idea, we’re seeing these types of litigations pop up to your point in makeup, in consumer goods, in clothing even. And when we think about this, this makes a ton of sense. You want to know, well, a lot of consumers want to know whether the thing that they tell you is organic, is actually organic. And I’m always looking for ways that the economy is running, the consumer economy is running because legal is understandably, and this is, I don’t want to make this a bashing session, but we tend to be five to 10 years behind the broader sort of wave in a lot of things, which is fine, lots of good reasons for that. But anyway, I think it is very reasonable to believe that as consumers become increasingly better educated by the internet and by the abundance of information that it can provide, that they’re going to want to have more insight into how lawyers and law firms get their work done. And so communicating to them about that information, I think that’s going to be something that’s going to be increasingly common. And so encouraging legal professionals to think again, not only to push that boundary for their own benefit, but also because ultimately we believe that consumers are going to want to know and are going to care is the other reason we sort of did this.

Adriana Linares:

Well, I agree with you, and sometimes when I get frustrated with consulting and my world of thinking, I’ve been saying the same thing for 25 years. I’ve been trained the same. Sometimes I think I’m going to flip my consultancy to the other side and help clients find truly tech savvy attorneys because the amount of time and money that gets wasted by not being it makes me angry for the client. Alright, back to the report, which we’re going to link to in the show notes, and it’s called the 2024 report of the by InfoTrack. InfoTrack is one word with the CK on the end attorney competence and the client experience. In the report you covered technological competence, legal competence, and also communication. So these are three incredibly important things. Tell me the overall takeaway from technology, competence and expertise.

Dan Lear:

Just a quick background. So we surveyed more than a thousand people who have hired an attorney or a legal aid group in the last year, and we asked them about their experiences specifically as it relates to how the attorney or law firm or legal aid group use technology. So there’s the context, the headline is Consumers care more about this than attorneys might think, and you’ve hired lawyers and I’ve hired lawyers. And just to talk common sense for a minute, we know this is true. I mentioned in my intro that I helped to start an integrated payments business in legal, the number of attorneys and law firms, legal professionals, not just attorneys that I had to talk out of, Hey, we just accept checks, we’re fine, is crazy because I’ve had to try to pay a law firm through a check or a wire.

I just don’t understand why as a business, as someone who ostensibly holds themselves out as an individual who would like money for their work and services makes it hard for someone to give them said money. It’s just crazy. And that’s just example one. So clients care about this for very obvious reasons, making it easier to pay you, making it easier to understand the status of your matter, making it easier to understand answer questions or share documents or the conclusion of your matter. All of these things, it’s not just because they are against the notion of a stodgy law firm that writes with a quill and ink. It’s because it actually impacts the way that you interact with your law firm when you’re in sometimes the heat of a very challenging and complex legal problem. So that’s the headline.

Adriana Linares:

This was promising. What we see in the report here, which is long story short, I’m going to read you just the one line that I think really matters based on the results we can surmise that 3.1% of law firms made a terrible technological impression. That’s pretty damn low if you ask me 7.6 were on the side of, okay, okay, but then 23.5% of your surveyed legal hiring entities we’re on the higher side of, okay, and this is the number that I actually really like. 65.8% ranked their technology competence as great. Now that’s relative because what are they actually measuring? They might not be very tech savvy themselves, but their lawyers might shine compared to what they’re able to do, but that’s still really impressive and congratulations pool of legal professionals who are in that 68 or 65.8%. That’s a really great impression and important to your clients.

Dan Lear:

Yeah, totally. Not to be too Debbie downer compared to what would be my question. And if you are the law firm that can really knock it out of the park, I’d love to see firms double down on this and kind of improve it even more. But absolutely like it’s great that we don’t make our clients return to the 18 hundreds or feel like they have to return to the 18 hundreds in order to work with us. That’s fantastic.

Adriana Linares:

I want to just real quick, we don’t need to spend too much time on this one, but I do want to talk about this other question, which was it’s question number five in the report. Based on your recent experience, how would you rate your legal representatives understanding of your legal issue? So now we’ve flipped it from how are they using technology to how well do they understand your legal issue and how did they do? And I would like to say, and let all your lawyers know that you’re doing pretty good in this department too, where in general, people rated their law firm’s legal skills actually higher than their tech skills, which that’s what I would hope for. I wouldn’t want an incredibly tech savvy lawyer who doesn’t understand how to use that technology in order to better apply the law and solve my legal problem. So this I thought was also a pretty positive study, at least the question was

Dan Lear:

That’s a super interesting data point Adriana and I would love for us honestly to dig in, well, not me, and although that would be fun too, but for InfoTrack to dig in more deeply on that intersection of technological competence and legal competence. Because one of the things that I think is true, well, and this is why they come to us, why clients come to legal professionals is they’re not the experts and they need our help. And so one data point was that came out of this was the complexity of the legal issue and the client’s opinion had very little impact on their overall satisfaction and their opinions about the attorney. So people with highly complex issues are not significantly harder to please, but in some ways I’m kind of like, duh, because they don’t know how complex their legal issue is. And I don’t want, of course, I never want to encourage legal professionals to not focus on competence

Adriana Linares:

Of course.

Dan Lear:

However, and I think we could probably do a much better job communicating to clients without boring them the level of complexity of the matters we deal with. Because that’s part of the sales process is helping people understand all of the value that they’re getting. But to answer your question, a customer’s or a client’s sense of the value of the let’s of the actual quality of the thing delivered is correlated to the experience of how that thing was delivered. I would say in the majority of situations, the easier it is for us to have that experience, the easier that business makes it for us to transact with them. Even if we don’t have a really great gauge of the quality of the actual service or product delivered, we’re more likely to think more highly of that service provider. Competence of course, is important and it must be central, and it’s important to figure out how to communicate that competence. And the way that you communicate your substantive legal competence more effectively is by ensuring that your clients have a good experience in general and technology is the way you facilitate that.

Adriana Linares:

Totally agree. Listen, let’s take a quick break, listen to some messages from some sponsors and when we come back, we’re going to talk about one of my favorite things that came out of this report and then give our listeners some tips on how they can try to do better based on some of these suggestions. We’ll be right back. All right, we’re back. I’m here with Dan Lear from InfoTrack, and I was holding off one of my favorite parts of the InfoTrack attorney competence report for the last segment of the show, which comes down to communication. If you’ve been listening to me for any period of time, you have probably heard me talk about myself as a portal pusher. So I love portals and I don’t feel enough attorneys are using them, and I’m very disappointed in this survey where the used and preferred methods of communication are telephone, email, text message, in person or online portal.

There’s other which is so low, I’m not even going to talk about it. I need to see this ranking for communication methods go up in the next InfoTrack report. Let me tell you why. When I say to a client of mine, which is the lawyer, what are the three most common ways that you communicate with a client? The answers are always telephone, email, and text message, which are an in person, but I’m always thinking about remote communications, so I’m going to leave off the in-person, but when I ask attorneys what are the three ways that you communicate with their clients, they always say telephone, email, and usually begrudgingly text messaging. And my follow-up response is, what are the three least secure ways that you can communicate with

Dan Lear:

Your clients? Telephone, email, and text message.

Adriana Linares:

Exactly. So how do you simplify communication but still make it effective and at the same time a secure method of communication? It’s going to be an online portal. So I’m a little bummed that portals were ranked pretty low and I want to encourage everyone to use them more. And I only think they’re ranked low because attorneys are afraid of them and they don’t know how easy they actually are to use. I always get the complaint, well, they’re going to have to log in. And what I say every time is how do you think your clients communicate with their doctors, their bankers, their real estate professionals? Nobody is sending medical results. Your blood panel results over email, you’re logging into a portal to get them. So I think attorneys are the problem in creating this suffrage for the poor online portals because they’re not taking advantage of what they can provide. You could make that in-person conversation much more succinct and easier if you were using an online portal to give all the background information. But anyway, talk to me about communications. So listeners, just so you know, Dan Lear is a portal contrarian, and we had this little side conversation in the green room, which is where this is coming from.

Dan Lear:

But I got to say, I think you might’ve won me over, I think you might’ve won me over here is my relatively weak portal contrarian take. But I really think you’re right. I really think you’re right. I sometimes equate sometimes working with your lawyer, even the best lawyers who are the most competent and the most technologically savvy with going to the dentist, no one really gets excited about it. And that’s not always true. Some lawyers make working with them really easy and a lot of times, not a lot of times, but there are times where working with a lawyer as a, you’re trying to achieve something that’s really great for your life or for your family. So I don’t want to be totally the downer on that front, but I sort of thought kind of creating a portal to communicate with your law firm I think is just making that filling even worse, right?

You’re just like continuing to drill. But again, I have to agree with you, and I will give my slight caveat here at the end, but let me fall in line. I think you’re right. I appreciate, and banks have gotten better at it across the board, banks have gotten better at it, doctors have gotten better at it, real estate folks have gotten better at it. To the point that getting into those portals, paying on them, getting the information that you need, the quality varies. But by and large, I find myself using those portals with some frequency and I find myself trusting the information in there. I find myself even in some cases with my bank being like, and this is something I never would’ve thought I would’ve said about my bank, truly walking away from one of those experiences saying, wow, that was actually kind of quick and painless.

Which again, I would’ve said banks in some ways are even behind legal professionals in some of those ways. I was only going to additionally opine that I was pleased to hear text on that list and I agree with you about the security piece, but that is how a lot of people communicate today and I’m pleased to hear that lawyers are adopting it because I do think it’s you need to meet your in the right way. You need to meet your clients and your prospects where they are, and it’s okay to your point, to push them to a portal for privileged communication or sharing documents. Exactly. Yeah. I mean

Adriana Linares:

You’re obviously still going to want to have that in person consultation even if it is by phone. But why are you wasting your time answering questions, reminding them that there’s an appointment, that there’s a hearing when you can’t just often automate that through these case management systems

Dan Lear:

And you can run it all. And to your point, the portal becomes the central, which again, I completely agree with you. The portal becomes the central repository of information. You have an appointment, you have a due date, here’s a new document, all of that. So you’re not pay your bill as a client. You’re not looking three or four different places to try to track that information down.

Adriana Linares:

So I think much of our key takeaways from looking at this report and just our conversation is general, is that to the degree that it’s relative for each individual attorney, you really need to keep pushing technology and its use within your firm to make your job more efficient to make communicating and working with your clients easier. So Dan, in your experience, I know you talked to a lot of attorneys the way I do, what are some ways to do this other than having what you just said about the portal is actually what I consider a modern case management system, which is in legal tech, we’ve used a term for 25 years called matter centric practice, meaning everything you do related to a matter, phone calls, documents, appointments, process, service should be in one central location, a matter centric environment so that you only go to one place to find all that information.

So your assistant is going to that same place to find that information. And your clients are also going to the same place where the access for all these individuals, you, your assistant and your client is based on their role, right? So your client doesn’t see your work in progress, they don’t see your research, they don’t see the text communication. And by text I mean the online communication like in a teams exchange within your office or if you’re using messaging within your case management system, your client can’t see all that stuff. They only see what you have given them access to based on their role, which is they’re the client. Your assistant should only see things that allow them to do their job based on their role. And those are permissions that can be set inside of your case management system. So this matter centric philosophy I think needs to be pushed more and needs to be adopted more. And when I do a consult for an attorney, it’s what I tell them all the time. Pick services and products that integrate and talk to your case management system, which should be the center of your universe. What are things can you think of that are important to sort of moving toward this tech savvy yet secure, efficient, non-painful way of running a law practice?

Dan Lear:

I guarantee you that if you look, there are things that you’re doing to today that can better be done probably by technology, whether it’s insisting on only accepting checks, whether it’s not having e-filing or service process integrated through your practice management system, document drafting, updating clients or communicating with them about what’s going on. There is a ton. And if you think you’ve checked all those boxes, I guarantee you there’s something else. And so that’s my first thing. My second thing, this is more about mindset and less about technology, but it’s really great and I’m a big fan, so I want to push it really fast. So there’s this kind of business guru, this guy by the name of Dan Martel, but he wrote a really great book called Buy Back Your Time. And it’s not aimed at lawyers, it’s just aimed at professionals. And the book is fantastic. Again, I’m a big fan, but one of the things he talks about pretty early on in the book is calculating and then leveraging what he calls your buyback rate. And what he effectively does is figures out how much you as a professional, again, it’s not legal, although it maps on really nicely to legal professionals who bill by the hour or don’t. He calculates what he calls your buyback rate, which is how much it costs you an hour to have you do anything.

Adriana Linares:

I’d hate to do that calculation with my own time.

Dan Lear:

Yeah, no, it’s actually really eyeopening. And then what he says is, anything that is less expensive for you to buy back than to do yourself, you should outsource. If you start to look for all of these little things that you’re doing in your life that are not efficient for you to do vis-a-vis your payback rate, your buyback rate, you begin to understand that you could be using that time to generate revenue instead of being someone who a $250 an hour data entry person. So that’s my other piece is just think about what it costs you to do all of these other things that either like me and taxes for stubbornness or control reasons you didn’t want to let go, and then look for ways, whether it’s technology or outsource resources, look for ways to get that stuff off of your plate because that’s the way, especially as a solo, you scale yourself.

Adriana Linares:

That’s right. Well, Dan, this is awesome. Thank you so much. We’ve had such a fun conversation and hopefully inspired everyone to not just look at ways to use technology better and smarter. But like you said, it’s not always about technology. To me, it is listeners and you all know that. But out of respect for Dan and his view, let me just say I agree.

Dan Lear:

Well, and it’s just about getting that mind. The question is not whether or not the question is how do you identify those things that you shouldn’t be doing? And then you can look for way and often technology can be the answer to that question, but to start at the high level of what is it that I shouldn’t be doing? And then you look at the plethora of tools in front of you to solve that problem.

Adriana Linares:

That’s true. Just open your eyes and look around Dan, tell everyone how they can find friend or follow you. You did offer your time. If anyone wanted to talk more about buying back their time,

Dan Lear:

I love talking to folks. I’m on LinkedIn, Dan Lear, pretty easy to find. Again, I’m the VP of partnerships at InfoTrack. If you want to email me, dan dot [email protected] and then I used to spend a lot of time on, it’ll always be Twitter to me. I spend less time there than I used to, but you can still track me down there. I’m at right brain law.

Adriana Linares:

Well thanks, totally appreciate this. And listeners, don’t forget, we’re going to put a link to the attorney competence report in the show notes, but I’m pretty sure you can Google the words InfoTrack attorney competence report, download it, and have a look and maybe spark some new ideas from it on how you can improve your practice. Thanks everyone for listening to another episode of New Solo. We will see you next month. Until then, have a great rest of your month

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