Ernie The Attorney: A Tech Whisperer Shares His Legal Tech Secrets

Episode Notes

Transcript

Adriana Linares:

Welcome to another episode of New Solo on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Adriana Linares. I’m your host. My guest today is the wonderful and amazing Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson was a practicing attorney for many years in New Orleans. He’s a dear, dear, literally one of my best friends. He and his wife and Ernie is a technology coach for lawyers. He’s got a group called The Inner Circle. I’m going to let him introduce himself in a minute, but I want to tell you what we’re going to talk about today. I asked Ernie to come on and we are challenging ourselves, me and Ernie. Can we actually hold a rapid fire conversation and change topics quickly and easily to jam Pack a podcast with tips and tricks for being more productive and more profitable? I don’t know, but we’re going to talk about automation, outsourcing and marketing, right? Ernie, if we’re going to try.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Yes, we are. Okay, let’s go.

Adriana Linares:

If anybody ever comes to New Orleans where Ernie and I both are, and you want to really nerd out about legal technology and technology and gadgets and ai, come to New Orleans and ask us out to dinner because we will literally blow your brain up with information. Ernie, tell everyone who in this world may have not heard of you, a little bit about you and how you went from being a lawyer to a tech consultant.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Yeah. Well, I’m sure a lot of people have not heard of me. My story basically is I was a philosophy major. I should probably never have been a lawyer, but I became a lawyer. I liked understanding things and I wanted to understand how the legal system worked, and I spent a lot of time doing it. I enjoyed it, but I also thought as I was learning about the legal system, technology and computers, which I was also interested in, would have a big impact. And so I tried to incorporate those things and I kept noticing not a lot of lawyers when I started doing this, which was right out of the gate in 1985 when I graduated from law school, a lot of lawyers were not interested in this, and you and I met at the A tech show, which to me was coming home to a place where everybody got it right, and it just felt like a long slog to get where we are now.

But every lawyer now knows that they need technology. They have smartphones in their pockets. And so the challenge for the so, and small firm lawyers particularly, which is the folks I work with most, is how do you make that technology work for you? So what I did was accidentally back out of practicing law, I didn’t realize that I could make money doing something, not practicing law, but I can, I do. And it’s just helping lawyers who are in so small firm practices figure out what are the best moves to be making. It’s not so much like I’m going to help ’em set up their computer. Other people can do that, but I help them figure out what’s the best moves, what are the best practices, what are the things that look like a good idea but actually really aren’t? Or what are the things that you should be working on first before you go work on this other thing? And it’s basically what you do. We do the same thing for difficult

Adriana Linares:

People, but you have some real specialties and some nuances that I hope we’re going to dive into. I should also mention this is not the first time you’ve been on my podcast. As a matter of fact, I went back and looked at my catalog. Do you know the first time you came on New? Solo was in 2015. Whoa,

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

No. Wow. Okay.

Adriana Linares:

And I regularly invite you back because we always have such great conversations. So thank you. What I did in order to prepare for this is I went to the Inner Circle, which the inner circle is, would you call it like a mastermind group or is it something else?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Mastermind has an association, so I think it could be called a group mastermind, but really it’s more of a community of people who are all trying to accomplish similar or the same things and we just help each other out. None of us knows everything, right? No, I learn as much in there as other people do. So it’s just enjoyable to be on the same journey with people that are thinking along the same lines as you. And that’s what it’s for lawyers mostly, but there are some non-lawyers, tech consultants or consultants like you and other people. But yeah, I’m pretty picky about who gets in there. So it’s a good community.

Adriana Linares:

So I should just explain because I’m a member and you and your wonderful and amazing wife, Donna, my dear friend, run this community. You have regular open office calls. You have a whole slew of courses and posts and chats and information where attorneys can come and pretty much be in a very safe space with a lot of experts. And I do mean just attorneys that have become experts at creating systems or asking questions or figuring out which practice management program to pick. You’ve got Friday Coffee Talks, you bring on experts, a lot of new services and tools, especially in ai. You have them come on, do a demo for your group, and everybody sort of pokes holes in it. So I love the Inner Circle. It’s only a couple hundred dollars a year, literally it’s $200, two 50 a year. You get tons of wonderful help, feedback information, and it is a bit of a curated community. Not anybody can just walk through the door and start poking away in there. Ernie, I know you keep it a little bit. Gate kept. I don’t really like that word that much, but I’m going to call it that because you ask people to go through a somewhat rigorous application process because if you’re not serious about this, you’re just not serious about this. And we like serious members,

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Right? Yeah. I mean, I call it more of an assessment and wasn’t actually, the assessment wasn’t part of the process initially. Initially I was just had this assessment which asked people, what do you use? Do you use this? Do you use that? Do you use a password manager? Do you use systems? Do you document SOPs? Because when people answer all those questions, then you know where they’re weak and where they’re strong

Adriana Linares:

Course you’re doing an audit and

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

They also tell ’em, yeah, it’s an audit. That’s basically what it’s, so I have them do that and I give them the benefit of my observations for free, so they don’t have to join the inner circle. But if you want to join the Inner Circle, you have to go through that assessment because I want to help you in the inner circle, and I need to know where you’re coming from and where you want to go.

Adriana Linares:

I love it. Well, if you want to learn more about the inner circle, [email protected]. That’s been Ernie’s website for probably 25 years at least. And you can start there, learn about Ernie and learn about the inner Circle, and I hope to see you there. Where I want to start, Ernie, is your overarching principle or rule for the things that you share, learn, and do is the 80 20 rule. So can you explain to us as a lawyer, two other lawyers, what the main concept of the 80 20 rule is? And then we’re going to keep applying it through the rest of this conversation.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

So the 80 20 principle, there’s a guy named Vireo Pareto, who was an Italian economist, and he came up with this first, and he just observed that there was this ratio that existed where 80% of the land was owned by 20% of the people. And he observed these ratios, and then other people started paying attention to it, noticed that it appeared in other places. And it wasn’t always exactly 80 20, but the idea is there’s a disparity between input, let’s say, and output. Another popular example would be people wear 20% of their clothes 80% of the time. So those are all

Adriana Linares:

Preach.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Yeah, they show up. And you can understand that that’s a ratio, but the question is when you apply it to getting a result, is it possible to put in 20% of effort, attention, money, whatever, into getting some kind of result? And you’re not going to get a hundred percent of the result, you’ll get 80%. But that’s really good because that means you freed up 80% of your time to go deploy that in another four areas where you can find this disparity. And conceptually, that’s entirely possible, but figuring out where to make that happen in your own law practice or business is what is the challenge. And so I try to tell people, look, just go do this, and if you just go do this, we don’t even need to bring up the 80 20 principle. It’s just you’re going to have a massive result that you’re not expecting because that’s just how some things work. And automation of course is the prime example. You put a lot of effort in on the front end, set it all up, and then it runs, and that’s one to 97% or something. So you just got to figure out where to do those things and what to do first. And that’s basically the 80 20 principle. And I have a newsletter where I talk about this as well. And again, it’s not all breaking down the 80 20 principle, it’s just that concept.

Adriana Linares:

So your newsletter on Substack is called 80 20 Principle?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Yeah, yeah. It’s 80 20 principle. I mean, every sole and small firm lawyer understands this. If they stop and think about it, it’s like you don’t have a lot of resources. I mean, I worked in a big firm where they wasted time, money, all kinds of things and didn’t think twice about it. They could. But when I went out on my own, it’s like I can’t afford to waste anything. I have to maximize every ounce of my effort, energy, and money. And that’s what I think everybody wants to do. So that’s what we’re trying to accomplish.

Adriana Linares:

That explains the 80 20 rule or principle, and you said the magic word, which is automation. It’s the first thing I want to talk about here. So your first, you are a huge systems guy, and when somebody reaches out to me and says, I need systems, which a lot of lawyers don’t, and they should, I send them straight to you. So

Tell me about, and you have a section in the inner circle called documenting standard operating procedures, which most law firms, unless you’re big enough to have an office manager who’s good enough to have created standard operating procedures, policies, press procedures for opening a matter, closing a matter, you’re just not going to have these things. But solos, especially in small firms, really need this stuff. So can you in just a couple of minutes tell us, I mean I think, I know we know why systems are important, but how do we as a solo start documenting a procedure or a system should our firm grow, which is what happens to almost every solo if they wanted to, they want to bring in an assistant, they want to bring in an associate, but they haven’t bothered to memorialize or document anything. So now we’re stuck and it just never gets done. So how do you start creating standard operating procedures systems and documenting them?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Well, they’re kind like the air you breathe. I mean, they should be. They’re everywhere. I mean, even if you’re not doing something consciously with a system, you probably are operating in a repetitive habitual way, which is effectively a not good system. If it’s not producing good results or optimal results. It’s a not good system. So it takes effort to cognitively think about, okay, what am I going to document? So I understand why, and I understand this a lot because I work with the lawyers and I see it happening, not so much of a resistance. It’s just like it’s a lot of work to think, oh my God, yes, I want to document systems, but I’m just a solo and who’s going to benefit from that besides me? So it’s more of a mindset thing if you’re a true solo. So I would say is this is not controversial.

Why do lawyers love forms? Because it’s a system. Somebody’s already done this, they’ve documented. It’s a template you can work off of it. So we all love forms. The thing is you’re creating your own forms, and so you could transfer them to somebody else. The friction becomes, oh, I don’t want to be doing the thing and then recording it. That takes extra effort. Yes, of course it does. And that’s annoying. So you don’t want to do that. So in the old days, it used to be harder, but now, and I know you know about Loom, there’s this tool Call Loom, and you just record yourself doing whatever you’re doing, and the free version lets you do a lot, but then you’ll get into the paid version, which is not that much considering what it accomplishes. And you can just record yourself doing things and you just let it run and you don’t even have to talk and then just accumulate a lot of these procedures of you doing it.

And the first time you hire somebody new, you can go over there into that repository, watch those videos, which have transcripts by the way, and you can rewind them, look over parts you didn’t understand, ask me questions and you’ll learn everything I’m doing and how I do it. It’s kind of magic. It’s like having a person who shadowed you around. Now here’s the barrier to entry. You have to get Loom pay for it, and then remember to turn it on when you do stuff and then stop recording. It’s actually not that hard, but yeah, so that’s what I would recommend people do. You don’t want to be writing all those procedures out. If you have it in Loom, it’s got to transcript. You can copy and paste that transcript into chat GPT or something and say, Hey, look, take this and turn it into procedures. So we’re in a wonderful place for creating procedures. We don’t have to work that hard and we shouldn’t.

Adriana Linares:

I 100% agree. And I will add a tip to this. If you already pay for Zoom, zoom has added Zoom clips, which I stopped using Loom when Loom was the only answer. And also have Zoom clips now, and I regularly record little snippets of how toss and answer attorney’s questions and send them that snippet that way. I have found that recording a video to answer an attorney’s question, and it doesn’t have to be my face, it could just be, here’s how you do what you’re asking is so much easier, faster, and so much more appreciated. So that’s a great tip. You just record it when you’re doing it. You could add your audio, make sure you always capture this. I always select this if it’s that, and I think a great place to start and tell me, Ernie, if you were going to start with one thing in your law firm, I’ll give you mine. I bet you I know what yours is going to be. Matter opening process, what would you

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Expect? Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, that same thing.

Adriana Linares:

Oh, okay.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Of course. Because that’s what you do that most often because you have to do that every time you have a new matter. It’s also super important. It’s super important that it be done exactly the same way and at a high level, putting on your best face at the beginning. Yeah, that’s the one everybody agrees on

Adriana Linares:

That I thought you would say client intake, which everyone knows

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Is well, the client intake is part of that. It’s all part of the same thing. So I’d say that those are a cluster of related procedures. SOP means standard operating procedure, and then this is tool called suite process that I use. And they define a process. They define process as a collection of related procedures, and that is the classic example. Yeah, you got to do the vetting, you got to do the conflict checking. There’s a bunch of things, but they all come together and they should be separate procedures, but they’re related as a process because that’s the onboarding process.

Adriana Linares:

So one of the things you keep mentioning of course, is automation, and that’s our topic at the moment. So you have recently gone through a pretty heavy study on note taking, and I want to talk about the difference. I want to talk about brain dumping note taking. I want to ask you about that, not necessarily summarizing meetings, note taking, which Zoom does for you. Otter, you’re a big fan of Otter and fireflies are two, three ways that you could record a meeting and then get a summary of the meeting. I want you to tell us more about the attorney who needs to do a brain dump on thinking about a case on a list of things he’s going to ask his virtual assistant to do today on topics that she is going to create for her blog. So what have you found are some of the best tools for capturing notes in terms of brain dumping?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

So I started with Otter and fireflies because those were the tools that I already had. And I said, okay, and importantly, Otter had an iPhone or a smartphone app so you could fire it up quickly from your phone. That’s critical. Fireflies added that. So then I was say, all right, well I can use one or the other, lemme try ’em out. And they’re both good for that, but now there’s a swath of new entries into this world and it’s going to become dizzying to try to pick ’em out and get their best one. But there are two that I’ve been using that I can say are really good and worth exploring first. And so one is called Letterly, and I’m going to pop it up on my phone and look at it just to remind myself as I’m talking, but what’s good about this one? And then the next one I’ll mention is that you just fired it up on your phone, you just blabber into it, and they both have a cutoff. So you don’t blabber for an hour, it’s like 15 minutes because you’re not going to talk for more than 15 minutes. Five minutes is usually enough, but you’re going to blabber, incoherently, rambling, talk about whatever, and then it pretty instantly gives you an organized summary by topic with headings and all that

Adriana Linares:

Stuff. Amazing.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Which is, yeah, it’s freaky, right? And it collects ’em all in one place. So it’s kind of like odd or fireflies. That’s for meeting notes. Now I’ve got another place from my brain dumps, and then you can export out the transcript or the audio or do whatever you want. But really it’s more of just about like, okay, I am getting started on what I’m thinking about. Letterly is great, and it’s like I think a one time fee or it was a one time fee. I got it on App Summa, which I’ve discovered as a pretty cool place to find stuff. So Letterly is one, but then the other one, which there’s a guy who’s a newsletter you actually recommended to me, I can’t ever remember his name. It’s

Adriana Linares:

Casey Newton

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Plat. Yeah, I think it’s him, right? So he raved about this thing called Cleft, which is a weird name like Cleft Pal,

Adriana Linares:

Right?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

So this one, which I have to pay for it as a subscription. So I was trying to avoid that. And I liked letterly, I’d paid one fee, but cleft is really good because you can add to the notes. So if you have a note and you go back into it, you can redic dictate more things and it just gets added. That to me was something I felt was missing from these other apps. And so that’s one thing. The other part is when you go into the note that you’ve dictated, it’s got the view section where it shows you the beautifully formatted thing, but then it’s got this right tab that you go over to and it’s got the text that you can see, which is in markdown format, so you can

Tweak it that way. So that’s another thing that they didn’t have. They were kind of either like, oh, we dumped it out, we’re done here. No, I want be able to change it. And so the ability to go in here and edit and that’ll be updated is really good. And then lastly, which this is something I thought I’d like, but it’s not as important as I thought it was, which is Cleft works as Zapier, and so you can automate things off of it, and it’s really fast with Zap, the Zap works really fast. I have my notes dumped into a Slack channel, so they all collect over there in case I want to share ’em out of there or do something with ’em. So cleft is really powerful given what it does. And it’s totally free if you only want the five minutes and not 15 minute limit and some other things. So you can check it out. But I think it’s Mac system only. So that’s the downside

Adriana Linares:

Of cleft. Oh, well if you’ve got an iPhone, then you’ve got a Mac

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

System if you’ve got an iPhone, even if you’re a

Adriana Linares:

PC user.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

And the syncing works really well between the computer and the phone. So it’s very good. Interesting.

Adriana Linares:

And is that, how are you spelling cleft?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

C-L-E-F-T. It’s called Cleft app. Yeah, you have to search for cleft app and maybe type note taking and you’ll find it. But the thing I want to emphasize is that I didn’t realize how useful I knew conceptually, but now I know it viscerally how useful it is to have a tool where you can just blabber out things that are on your mind like Morning to-do list. When Don and I were going to go to Europe, I started blabbering about what was I going to take, what was the travel packing and the fact that I could add to the note later easily

Adriana Linares:

As you thought of something

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Or tweak it. I was like, this is magical. And that’s a pedestrian example for lawyers thinking of what am I going to ask? What am I going to do? I am prepared for a deposition and have it be really frictionless and useful. And on your phone, this is a game changer.

Adriana Linares:

Frictionless is a term you use a lot. And we should just say everything Ernie talks about is reducing friction, basically making, I hate friction, making things

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Easy. I hate friction

Adriana Linares:

Much like I hate small talk. Okay, next one I’m going to ask you about is back to just automating and being efficient and all these tools that we have at our fingertips these days. And I don’t think enough attorneys are using this, and it’s a great segue from note taking is just general voice dictation. So can you tell us the difference between blabbering into a note-taking tool and efficiently using voice dictation and how, when and where? We will do that,

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

And this is one of the questions I ask people on the assessment. I’ll say, how much voice to text are you using? Because that to me is a gauge of how efficient and frictionless they are. Because we all know we’ve all, or you and I have watched the Dragon Naturally speaking era, we had to train it and we’ve been through this whole rigmarole where it was really hard getting a specialty microphone. Every phone now is a dictation device and everywhere you can type text now there’s a little thing that has a microphone icon and if you click on it and blabber into your phone, it’s astonishingly accurate. It’s weird to me it is almost, it’s like that thing that people say, oh, I think my phone’s listening because I was talking to somebody about some product and the next thing you know, I’m seeing all these ads. I think our phones, I mean, I don’t dunno if that’s true or not, but it feels like it. But I think our phones are also learning the names of people that we talk to and it spells weird names and gets them right in a way that just blows my mind. So I think if lawyers are not using that, they’re not aware of how good it’s gotten and how easy it is to just tap that little microphone button and blabber into it.

Adriana Linares:

And I’m going to give one quick example of where I often recommend doing that, and that is if you have a case management system that has an app or you’re just doing your timekeeping and just dictating a narrative for what’s going to go on the bill, click the button and just say it out loud. It’ll capture it for you. Stop typing so much, you’re making it harder on yourself. I also want to say an ad. Yes, every mobile device has dictation, as does every computer on the planet at this point because we’re either Max or PCs, sorry for those Linux users out there. I am sure Linux still also has dictation, but Windows has Windows dictation built into it that’s also gotten very, very good and that you activate any place anytime, anywhere by simply clicking or tapping Ctrl NH on your keyboard. The first time you do that, windows is going to prompt you to set up a microphone and dictation. And then on the Mac, who’s had it actually a lot, lot longer than PCs have, Ernie, what’s the keyboard shortcut to activate voice dictation on the Mac?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

You can set it up to be whatever you want, but if you double press the function key in the bottom left,

Adriana Linares:

Just turns on and you can start talking wherever your is blinking, you can start talking and these magical robots will do all the work for you. Well, let’s take a quick break, listen to some messages from some sponsors and we’ll be right back. I’m here with Ernest Fon from Ernie the attorney.net, who runs his inner circle group that I’m a member of and really enjoy being a part of. Okay, we’re back. I’ve got Ernie, the attorney here. We’ve talked about voice and saying things to be quick and efficient. And now you can also, when you do have to type and you don’t feel like dictating or maybe you’re in a place where you can’t because you’re waiting in line for something and you just got a new inquiry from a potential new client on your website and you want to send them a reply via email and you have this standard language that you use all the time. Thanks so much for reaching out. Here’s how we work. Please fill out this form, here’s a link, and then this is what’s going to happen after I receive that form. So let’s say you keep going back to send items to find the last time you sent a similar email. How can text automation help us with this instead?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Yeah, I mean, well first off, I think every lawyer should be training their brain to understand automation. And it’s not hard to train your brain. It’s basically if this happens hard

Adriana Linares:

To train the lawyer,

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

If this happens, then I want this to happen. So you just have to say, okay, well this thing is happening a lot. I’m getting a new client, I’m going to have to send them this email. I’m always sending the same email, so if the new client comes in, I’m going to need to send email. Alright, well what is that email going to say? Well, you set it up into some place, which could be,

Adriana Linares:

There’s only one place.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

I mean, text Expander for me is useful, but I would say that the most important thing to understand about a tool like Text Expander, it’s not the only one because there’s a couple of different ones that they’re universal. The main thing that’s beneficial is they’re universal. So once you learn how to trigger it, you don’t have to go, wait a second, what do I do over here? Because in this program it’s different. It’s the same. You type the same command, you do the same trigger, it spits out the same thing and it’s sophisticated. It even ask you questions, what’s the first name? And so it’s this little Swiss army knife tool that’s like how I like to think about it. That has amazing power across everything you do on your computer. There’s a version for the phone, but don’t use that. It’s hard. But on your computer it works really well.

PC Mac doesn’t matter. It works great. Syncs across all your devices if you have multiple computers. And so it’s giving you a chance to take advantage of automation in a bunch of different little places that are cool, but it’s also training your brain to be thinking, oh, this is a repetitive thing. How can I automate it? Can I use text expander? And at some point, text expander is not going to be the tool you use, but it’s like training wheels. You will have learned to think about automation. And so when you go use Zapier or something else, you understand a lot of what you need to be thinking about, oh, that didn’t work the first time, why didn’t it work? Oh, I didn’t take this into consideration. Alright, I need to tweak that. Let’s fix it. So yeah, it’s a training tool. It’s a Swiss Army knife and it works across all platforms. So it’s one of those tools I can safely recommend and do as one of my top 10 tech tool recommendations. Everyone should use it.

Adriana Linares:

Same here. I can’t. If you’ve listened to this podcast long enough, I cannot talk enough about how efficient and amazing a tool like text expander.com is. Ernie and I do not get paid or get anything from Text Expander by telling you to use this tool. But I have something just as small as my first name and last name to an entire email. So one thing I thought to say real quick is a lot of you listening are going to say, well, I use a CRM that helps me initiate that first email to a potential new contact. Yes, but how many times do you have to add a phrase, add something because there’s a specific thing you want to mention, they’re calling you about a will for their pet, and you have this one thing you always say. And don’t forget, one of the things about pet Wills or wills that include pets is this. That’s where then a text expansion would come in where you’d be able to pop that right into the middle of an already created form. And I do like to remind people that it works across all platforms and all devices because they’re synced to the cloud. And Ernie, are there any other tools that you recommend aside from Text Expander that do this?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Oh yeah. Oh, that do this? No, in the Inner Circle, this is a topic that’s come up and this is why I like the Inner Circle. There’s a couple of people like, oh, I prefer this one. I forget the name of the other one because it does some sophisticated thing. And I’m like, that’s great, whatever, whatever. It’s the same as Text Expander for you. I’m not telling people they have to use a specific tool, but a specific type of tool. And I think there’s another thing that deserves to be mentioned, which I’m sure you’ve said many times, but when you’re having Text expander type, your email address, your home address, but let’s just stick to the email address, you’re never going to misspell it, which is a problem for a lot of things. So it gives you so many benefits that are hard to summarize so many of them.

Adriana Linares:

And the last thing we’ll say on this topic is there is Text Expander for business, which allows you to create a set of boilerplate text templates, a case caption, your signature blocks, something that you want to be consistent throughout your firm. This is where a tool like this comes in handy and

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Text. Well, this will set up perhaps another topic that we’re going to come to because I have used the business version because when I have a VA working for me in the Philippines, wherever I want them to send the same messages I do and I can because synced,

Adriana Linares:

We are going to talk about VAs in just a moment. The last topic, oh, I wanted to say I pay $40 a year for text expander and it is worth every single penny tenfold. These tools are so far we’ve talked about tools that are either free or very little. So there’s no reason that any listener going through this shouldn’t be quickly adopting all of these tips and suggestions that we’re making. We forgot to say, Ernie, in that last segment, everything we talked about was applying the 80 20 principle.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Oh, totally.

Adriana Linares:

Right?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Yeah. I mean that’s the thing is you want to get a lot of benefit without having to put in a lot of effort. And that’s what these tools, and that’s what these ways of operating do.

Adriana Linares:

I think that’s a perfect segue into our second topic, which is what I refer to as Helping Hands, getting help from outsourced services, parties, companies. And you’re a huge advocate of this, especially for solos who think they can do it alone, but yet they can’t. So let’s start just with virtual assistants and you call them VAs. So when Ernie says VA or I say va, we’re talking about virtual assistants. I don’t like the word virtual that much for virtual meetings, virtual receptionist or virtual assistant, they’re actually just remote. The virtual assistants to me are the robots when I ask Siri a question or Google. But anyway, so VAs virtual assistants or remote assistants tell me what you suggest and recommend. And a common question I’m sure you get is, how can I do this in an ethical manner where I’m hiring someone that lives in the Philippines or works in a different state and just make sure that my client’s information is being kept confidential?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

So first of all, there’s a spectrum. Just like with Tax Expander, there’s a starting point and then you get more sophisticated. As you get more sophisticated, they’re more considerations. So when I give my lawyers my top 10 tech tool recommendations, even though outsourcing in its full-blown capacity is the most amazing thing, and you want to get there, I know that’s a long journey for people. And so I say, look, go use Fancy Hands.

And Fancy Hands is a tool or is a service where you pay a subscription and because you’re paying a subscription, it’s kind of like a nudging like, oh, I should be getting them to do stuff for Me’s. True. So you start learning that There’s a whole bunch of things that a remote assistant can do for you that you shouldn’t be doing. And with Fancy Hands, one of the most useful ones that are this common is like, Hey, contact this company and cancel my thing or get a refund or book a flight or gather information for me. And you could use AI to go gather information to do it yourself, but let them do it and they will follow up. They can make purchases for you. So when you start to experience the breath of fresh air that it is to offload something really quickly to somebody else and have them just take it and run with it, you start thinking again, where else can I make this happen in my life?

Adriana Linares:

Training the

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Brain. And eventually you get to the point where you’re like, well, could I have somebody do this for me kind of on a full-time basis? Or if I can’t afford, or I don’t need somebody for 40 hours a week, I have somebody in the Philippines, it is 20 hours a week. I don’t need 40 hours, I only need 20. So I’ve got 20 and she’s my go-to, and I can just give stuff to her. And importantly, over time, just like everybody else you work with, they start to learn your preferences, how you think about things, and they start taking on things. And so that’s where it’s magical when Chay, my assistant says, look, I’ll just, I saw this, you were trying to do this, but I just did this because I figured that’s what you want to do. Is that what you want to do?

Yeah, I just want the result. Thank you. If you see a better way to do it faster, just do it right. I’ll say going back to Loom when Chay came on, because there was somebody else that I was working with, I had all these Loom videos and I hadn’t organized ’em because I don’t care. I just record new ones. And I had her go through and organize them, and in doing so, she was watching and she learned a whole bunch about how I operated. So she was onboarded. Now, she doesn’t spend any time organizing the Loom videos anymore because neither one of us care. But when you have somebody that can do that, it’s complete game changer and solo lawyers, again, you can’t be wasting your valuable time doing things that don’t require a law license to do,

And you can only automate so much. And automation takes sophistication and then things change and you got to adjust them. You want to, human will do these things for you. That’s what you want. And they’re out there and let’s just take the country or the Philippines to focus on one, not the only one, but there’s one. The people there have a strong work ethic. They speak English to them. The job of working for an attorney in the US is a highly prestigious thing. They’re not looking to quit that job as long as you’re treating them well and they have enough work to do and they can make money, they love this job as opposed to people in the United States who are becoming more disillusioned, skipping work. So it’s just way easier to get somebody once you’ve set it all up to work with you on an ongoing basis. And it’s critical. You need somebody to help you. You can’t do all this stuff on your own.

Adriana Linares:

I use Fancy Hands too, and I think I pay them minimal, I don’t know, $20 a month for three or four tasks, but they accumulate. They roll over, they roll over.

So I use them all the time for clerical things, for doing some research. Just a real simple example was I wanted a spreadsheet of every podcast I’ve ever done for New Solo. Do you think I was going to sit there and go through the archive of New Solo podcast and find the date, find the topic, the guest, and then a link for it? No, I gave that to Fancy Hands. So I think your idea of starting with something simple and clerical and a service like Fancy Hands is a great gateway drug to figuring out how then you could use virtual assistant paralegals or freelance lawyers, which we won’t spend too much time on because I’ve had a whole podcast about LawClerk and you can go back and find it, but there are a lot of companies that in the us, and it’s specifically for a state that if you are looking for a paralegal or a legal assistant who’s practiced, and by practiced I mean has experience with the first place for you to start is at your state Bar association’s member benefit programs. See if your state bar has a partnership. I know Florida does, I know Nebraska does, I know California does, and I’m sure many others do. So that’s a good place to start.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Yeah, and LawClerk Legal is the one that I recommend people check out first if they’re in the us. You can’t do it if you’re in Canada because as you and I know Kristen, Tyler and the folks who worked there, it’s a great company. They built it for themselves. It’s taken off and it doesn’t cost anything to register. And I tell lawyers, just go sign up. So it’s there in case you need overflow work, and it works like everything else. There’s people vetted, they got ratings. You put the work out, see who’s available. Everyone should sign up and just have it in the back pocket in case they need it

Adriana Linares:

Ready to go. No brainer. It’s just a no-brainer everybody. You cannot do it alone and you will lose your mind trying to. The last one I’ll mention, and I’ll just say the same thing, ask your peers, put it on a listserv, ask another group of attorneys is you’ve got to have a bookkeeper. You will not do your own bookkeeping in a timely manner. You just will not have the time, even if you’re just launching and you’re like, I’m going to be slow at first. You know where you need to be spending your time when you’re launching and you’re slow documenting systems, getting ready to grow your firm, bookkeeping

Attorneys don’t really need to be doing their bookkeeping. Please find a bookkeeper. It’s cheap. I’m telling you, it’s not more than a hundred, couple hundred bucks a month to have someone who reconciles your books asks you the right questions about where to file things. Start with your peers, ask them who they might be using, and certainly you have a CPA. Your CPA either has a bookkeeping function within their office or they will recommend someone to you that they trust. Okay? Get yourself a virtual assistant, freelance, legal assistants, paralegals or attorneys, and anyone else that can help you apply that 80 20 rule. You don’t need to be working so hard. Okay, I think we knocked that one out really quickly. I’m going to take a quick break, listen to this last set of messages from some sponsors, and we’ll be right back. We’re going to talk about marketing when we come back. One of Ernie’s favorite topics. Okay, everyone, we’re back. I’m Adriana Linares in case you’re new here. And I’m here with my dear friend Ernie, the attorney, Ernest Vincent, one of the things that I think you obsess over, which there are a lot of things you obsess over much like me, is marketing.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Yes,

Adriana Linares:

I don know. Do you love marketing or do you hate marketing?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Well, okay, I like it a lot because when I discovered what really makes it tick, because I hated networking, okay, let’s just clear up. When I was in the big firm, they were like, oh, you have to go to these events and network and network and network and meet a bunch of people. I’m like, I don’t like a lot of people, or I’m picky about certain people and I don’t want to meet ’em all at once. I want to have deep conversations one at a time. So I thought, well, I’m not good at marketing. I’m just going to be one of those guys who works and doesn’t have clients. But then when I started the blog in 2002 and then people started finding me and they’re like, oh man, we really like you don’t seem like another lawyer. We trust you. What a cool name, or the attorney.

And I was like, oh, wait. So I can find people that me understand what I’m trying to do, and I’m not doing a lot of effort. I don’t have to go meet people. I just say, great, yes, we can work together and no, we can’t. That appeals to me, that is marketing. And it worked great when there weren’t a lot of lawyers with blogs. And then when I pivoted away from being a lawyer, practicing to helping lawyers, I thought, well, it’d be real easy here too. I’ll just do it. But by then, the internet had become clogged, and it’s just not enough to just, the internet had become clogged.

Adriana Linares:

It

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Did was

Adriana Linares:

Friction. Can somebody get out there and UNC the internet, there’s too much garbage clogging up

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

The internet. It is. Come on, people look around. You don’t think that’s a clogged internet? But so then I was like, well, what is going on? What did I not get? And then I realized, oh, I don’t actually even know how marketing works. I just accidentally was the beneficiary of a certain place in time. And so I started studying marketing. And what I like about marketing is it’s really just human nature

And the story. My dad was a shrink, and I understanding why people act the way they do. I’ve spent my whole life trying to figure out what his job was initially. And then it was like, oh, figuring out how people think. All right, well, that’s useful. And so if that’s all marketing is figuring out what people want, what they need to understand first, what they’re afraid of, what they resist, and then communicating. That’s another thing. I like writing and communicating well. So those two things make it, and plus it has a benefit. It produces a practical benefit. So yeah, I love marketing. And then I realized solo and small firm lawyers need good clients coming in on a regular basis. And if they get bad clients coming in on a regular basis, that’s good for money, but it’s bad for your mental health because they’re bad clients.

So you need good clients regular basis. And if that’s happening, magic land. And then here’s the best part, given that the internet, even though it’s clogged now, is at your disposal, it’s free. And if you automate a lot of the onboarding and messaging and things, and now with Gen ai, you can write things easily. If you get all of that going really quickly and easily, you won’t have to spend a lot of time. You can do what you need to do, which is practice law and help your clients, but not get bogged down with trying to track new ones.

Adriana Linares:

I think what the best way to describe you and your relationship with marketing is you hate bad marketing.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Oh, I do. Well, everyone, I mean, well, not everyone s

Adriana Linares:

No, everyone does, but they just don’t know it. They just think We hate all marketing. I definitely, but you hate bad

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Marketing. Yeah, I hate bad

Adriana Linares:

Market. Oh my God. You love good marketing.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Yes.

Adriana Linares:

So then the next thing is a story that I thought of. You probably won’t even remember this, but this is so important for attorneys to hear. You can fire clients because you want, and you did want to work with clients that you liked. And I remember we were walking through the French Quarter once, we were on a double date with our partners. This was a long time ago. You probably won’t even remember this.

And this guy came walking by and he had a jester hat on. It was probably during Mardi Gras or Carnival. And you said, oh, I fired that guy once. And I said, you fired that guy. It’s weird. People don’t think about attorneys firing people, but clients, but you can and you should when they’re creating stress and strain on your brain and your life. And this guy obviously did. And I said, why’d you fire him? And you very simply said he wouldn’t listen to me. That was it. End of story. Was it? He wouldn’t listen to me.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Oh, yeah. So when I went out on my own, I was frustrated because in the big firm, I couldn’t fire clients unless they were mine. And even if they were mine,

People would visit me and go, what the hell did you just do? You fired a client. I mean, the firm did have some standards. But anyway, there was some clients I really hated. So when I went out on my own, I was like, I’m not going to work with those kind of clients. But then some sneak in the door and then I first, it wasn’t that I hated clients. I could keep out the ones I hated. I could figure out quickly the ones that weren’t going to work well with me and refer them out to do whatever. But then invariably, there’d come a time where they weren’t listening to things I was telling them to do, and the bad thing that I told them that was going to happen if they didn’t listen would happen. And they get all upset. And I’m like, let’s revisit this.

I told you not to do this. You did it, and this is exactly what is happening. So I talk about systems. I went back to my engagement letter and I said, here’s a thing. If you don’t listen to me, you don’t follow my advice. Yes, exactly. That is grounds for me to terminate the relationship. And I will tell you, and you can go on your way, and then there’s whatever. If I don’t do it, but I had it in there, and when people would come on, I wouldn’t point everything out, but I’d go, this part here, this is really important. And I’d say, look, the reason for this is if you are paying me to give you advice and you’re not following it, you’re wasting your money. So you’re wasting your money. I’m getting frustrated watching you do the thing that I told you not to do.

And so it’s not a good fit. Okay, relat a toxic relationship. You want to go relationship? Yeah, go pay somebody else less money or just do whatever you want on your own for free because I’m not doing you any good. So then they’d always nod their head like, oh, yeah, yeah, okay, got it. And then later on, if that situation came up, I’d say, you remember when we talked about that? That’s what’s happening here. And nine times out of 10, I’d have to let ’em go. But that one time Dave would go, oh, you know what? You’re right. And then they would adjust, but they wouldn’t have adjusted their behavior if I hadn’t done all that work beforehand. So that’s communicated how a system evolves. You look at things that are going on and you think, I need to make this better,

Adriana Linares:

And you document it and you make it clear to the client, you communicate to them. Let’s get back to our topic, which is our last one, and I’m excited about because it’s a term, most attorneys either haven’t heard or they’ve heard it and they don’t think it applies to them, but to you and your world of training attorneys, this is a critical term process, practice thing to do, and that is referral marketing. What does that mean?

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Yes, it’s relationship marketing. It’s another way to call it relationship marketing, because in a professional services business, most of your work, your good work is going to come from some kind of referral. Now, when you start out, maybe not because you’re starting out, but after a while you have a track record and people know you, and then they say, Hey, oh yeah, you’ve got that problem. Well, you can do that work, Ernie. Go see Ernie. Right? That’s how it works at underlying all marketing for professional services is some strong component of that. So then the question 80 20 principle is how can we amplify this? How can we take what’s going on naturally or what could be going on naturally if we tweaked it a little and make it produce greater benefits? So the greater benefits come when I call it the three Rs of referral marketing. You got to remind people regularly in a reasonable way that you exist, what you do, things like that. So reminding them could be once a month you send out an email newsletter, which I think is the best way to do it. And

So that’s regular because doing it regularly and you set it up to where they expect that newsletter to come, and you make it reasonable so you don’t lar it up with a bunch of stupid information and make it look like a law review article. In fact, plug it up where most lawyers screw this up, if they can get to the point where they’re doing it regularly and they don’t do it regularly, it becomes intimidating. I have to write a long thing. No, you don’t. No, no, no, no. Do not write a long thing. Write nothing more. You could say, Hey, just thinking of you, is anything going on? If so, give me a call. Let’s chat. The more the email comes into their inbox and looks like an email, it’s from you personally to them personally, because this is another thing that people think, oh, but it’s not.

I’m sending to a lot of people at once. They don’t know that and they don’t care. I get emails from people that use that tactic, and I very go, oh my God, they’re reaching out to me. I need to write back to Mike Kim. And then I look at the bottom and I see the unsubscribe and I’m like, oh, yeah, okay. He did that thing. It doesn’t offend me. I go like, yeah, I should probably get in touch with Mike Kim, so I get in touch with him, right? It’s just nudging people to get in touch with you when they’re ready, if they’re ready and reminding them what you do. An email is close to free to send out. It doesn’t cost much. It takes a little time, but not much. And if you just do it regularly and you don’t do something stupid and offend them or come across as too salesy or pushy, and most lawyers I deal with are not like that afraid that they’re supposed to do more than they need to do. And so email marketing is it because if you don’t have a website, you need to email market. If you have a website, you need to connect the email marketing to the website and offer something on the website so people give you their email address and start the process because it’s referral marketing. There are people out there that know you like you and trust you, who are going to refer business to you,

And you need to remind those people that know you like you and trust you regularly, that you’re out there, you exist and you appreciate the referrals. That’s all it is. Super simple.

Adriana Linares:

And I’m just going to restate and add the obvious, which is with an occasional touchpoint, whether it’s email, which you strongly recommend, and I agree with you, or you’re just really good at social media and you’ve got a lot of good followers and you’re regularly posting, you’re staying top of mind. And that’s the key, is you are the person you’re directly contacting through that email newsletter. Might not need a lawyer right now, but their neighbor, their brother or their cousin might. And especially solos and small firms in more rural areas, you are the key. You have what a lot of people need. They don’t realize they need you. They forget they need you. They think they can’t afford you. But if you make it clear that you’re out there, even just to do a free consult for a neighbor whose dog just bit the mailman, then you just want to stay top of mind.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Yeah, top of mind is the key. And I should have used that phrase, that’s what the reminder is. It’s actuating the top of mind. And I’ll say, when I first started doing email marketing, I had the same, this seems like extra work. Why don’t I just have my blog posts forwarded automatically? I didn’t understand it. Then when I started doing it, I was like, oh my God, this is amazing. And my friend Dane, who I started this whole journey with, who we started doing our own conferences and things, we get together from lunch periodically and talk about things we’ve learned. I’m like, Dane, you should start doing email marketing. He goes, yeah, I’m getting your emails. What’s up with that? Why would I want to do that? And he goes, I write my blog post and that’s enough, right? And I’m like, no, man, I’m telling you it’s really good.

And he was very resistant, which he normally isn’t, but I said, so do this. Just trust me. Send it. He goes, okay. So he sends it out. Next time we get together for lunch three or four months later, I’m like, so how’s it going? He goes, man, it works so great. It’s amazing. I send out the email and he goes, and then over the next couple of days, I get a couple of calls and he goes, and every once in a while I skip a month. And when I skip, I don’t get the calls. I’m like, right, is there a correlation there? Top of mind, top of mind. That’s what top of mind looks like.

Adriana Linares:

And I think everything we’ve talked about previously, email marketing or blog post writing seems so daunting to a of attorneys. But today, you can use a lot of tools that are available. We’re not going to spend a lot of time on ai, actually, we’re not going to spend any. But Ernie and I, just so you know, everyone knows we are both completely obsessed with ai and we both use it all day every day to do all sorts of things. I mean, really, and I hope more and more lawyers are really taking advantage of it. So Ernie, you’ve spent a lot of time with me and I appreciate it, and I love everything we’ve covered, which was a lot. The last thing I’ll ask you to mention, because it’s not a topic where we’re going to make it a real quick topic, is your favorite AI tool right now, because you and I actually talked about it for a long time, so just throw out a little bit.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Complexity. Complexity,

Adriana Linares:

Yeah. Perplexity.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Perplexity. I love perplexity. So perplexity is, and if you haven’t tried it, you must try it immediately because chat, GBT, Gemini, Claude, all those are of one type of thing. But perplexity is what’s, what is replacing Google. In fact, Seth Godin said he doesn’t use Google anymore. He just uses perplexity. He also said, and this is kind of correlated, he said that he’s lost 80% of his blog traffic over the past couple of months, and he’s fine with that. But the reason why he’s losing that is because people are not going to be using Google anymore to search for information that they can get frictionlessly without the internet being all clogged up and just get the answer that they want. And so Perplexity is just an astonishingly useful tool for getting answers to questions. And one of them, I’ll just give you a quick example, and it’s topical because I got a new iPhone. You and I were talking about this. I told you that the process of setting it up was frictionless word.

Adriana Linares:

I did it

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Last night. And so I was thinking I should figure out why it’s frictionless. And I was going to invite my friend, a friend of mine onto the podcast explained to me, and I thought, why would I take up his time before I first do the legwork? Let me go to my favorite new tool, perplexity and ask it. And so I’ve gotten to the point where I just, instead of typing in a search, why is it new? I said, Hey, I went and got a new iPhone. It was frictionless, and I just described a narrative way. So your voice, and then you can see it thinking and saying, okay, first, check this. First. You kind of get a sense quickly of what it’s doing, and then it constructs its search and goes, okay. And then it starts and it starts spitting it all out. And then I look at this and I’m like, oh my God, I had no idea that all these new things were happening with Apple. Here it is. Here’s my explanation. But most importantly, especially for lawyers, it’s not just telling me the answer. It’s got citations where I can go check to see where it got that information that it delivered and verify. Yes, that in fact is true. So perplexity for lawyers, I just think that we should all be using it.

Adriana Linares:

I love it. Well, Ernest Fon, as usual, another conversation where we ran out of time. Hope to see you at dinner soon. We can continue and very much appreciate it. Tell everyone where they can find friend follow you.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

If you just Google Ernie, the attorney, you’ll find my website and all the resources are listed there. And if you want to be part of the Inner Circle, I think it’s a great community. It’s how you can learn a lot of this stuff. Because learning how to prompt is more about learning how to think about it. And also sometimes somebody just says to you, Hey, you know what I did? One of the people in there the other day said, I asked it to do something and it didn’t give me the calculation for some California thing properly. And she said, I just told it. Show me your work. And then all of a sudden, it recomm babul and gave the correct answer with its explanation of how it reached it. So a lot of the prompting, you have to just learn to think differently. And the best way to do that is to talk to other people who are using it, telling you, do you know how easy it is? Just tell it to show it’s work, for example. Oh, cool. I didn’t know that that

Adriana Linares:

Was, yeah, hadn’t thought of that.

Ernie “The Attorney” Svenson:

Yeah.

Adriana Linares:

That’s awesome. Well, Ernie, my dear friend, thank you again and I hope everyone has been jotting down all of the tools, services, and products we mentioned. If not, remember, you can look in the show notes. The Legal Talk Network does a good job of linking out to things and services and products that we’ve mentioned. And with that, I will conclude yet another wonderful episode of New Solo. Thank you Ernest Benson for coming on today, and I hope to hear from listeners of new ideas topics you’d like to see. You can always reach out to me at New Solo at legal talk network.com. Have a wonderful rest of your day, everyone

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