Learning How To Be A Professional

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Hello, welcome to another edition of Thinking Like. A Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice.

Kathryn Rubino:

Hi, Joe Patrice.

Joe Patrice:

And that’s Kathryn Rubino. We are editors at Above the Law, and we are here to talk about the top stories in legal from the week. That was Woo-hoo. We’re normally joined by our editor, Chris Williams, but he’s not here right now. He has some scheduling issues. He may drop in.

Kathryn Rubino:

We’ll keep you apprised. You’ll be the first to know along with us. It’ll be great.

Joe Patrice:

No, that technically means they’re not first, right? If we

Kathryn Rubino:

Simultaneously

Joe Patrice:

Alone, we’ll simultaneously know

Kathryn Rubino:

There’ll be amongst the first to know for

Joe Patrice:

Sure. Sure. All right. But first, I guess let’s have some small talk. Small talk. Yeah. So I came back from a legal tech conference. Obviously those of you who listen to the show every week know that I recorded a show while I was there. But one of the things I learned while I was there that refers to an old show is that apparently the Legal Talk Network has a clip of me that they put on YouTube that is closing in on a million views.

Kathryn Rubino:

Did you know that? I did not.

Joe Patrice:

It’s kind of a frustrating one actually, because it’s from an old episode where we were talking about Kamala Harris as her prosecutorial record, which is fairly, you’ve heard of progressive prosecutors.

Not that.

Her record was fairly regressive as a prosecutor, and it was me making the point several years ago that it is somewhat problematic, the way in which, not just being regressive prosecutor, but the way in which, and the specific prosecutions she chooses to highlight tend to be kind of a toxic aspect of politics. Get to always talk about the harm that you might’ve caused as a prosecutor. And I just said, that’s really not that great. The problem with that clip right now, and by problem, I mean it’s why it’s closing in on almost a million views, but the sad thing about it is it really highlights to me, it highlighted how people can’t walk and chew gum at the same time politically, because there’s conservative people who like it and are trying to claim that it’s a reason not to vote for her, which I mean, it’s not like those people wouldn’t be as or more progressive.

Kathryn Rubino:

The actual prosecutions that you are highlighting are not what they think the problem is,

Joe Patrice:

And the more liberal people who are complaining that we should just pretend that things don’t happen, it leans towards the same sort of cult-like following that I think has poisoned the Republican Party at this juncture. So I certainly don’t think we should do that. I would love to live in a world where you could actually say that a candidate has severe flaws, but they are still the best person to vote for.

Kathryn Rubino:

Here we are.

Joe Patrice:

But instead, this clip is locking down. It was at like 980,000 with a bullet, so,

Kathryn Rubino:

Oh, there you go. Well, yeah, that is interesting. And piggybacking on, right? That’s right. Your event, your legal tech event. We both did an event at the University of Houston Honors College for some pre-law students, and it’s always super fun to talk to people who are thinking about law school. I mean, I jokingly, but also a little bit seriously tend to think that my job here at Above, the Law is trying to convince people not to go to law school.

Joe Patrice:

I mean, it’s certainly part of the job.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. I mean, listen, I think law school gets a really good rep from just kind of the zeitgeist out there. People know what a lawyer is, they see them on tv, but do they actually want to be a lawyer? I’m not sure.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Well, look, and some people do, and some people have really thought through what they want to do, and it was good to talk to those folks. The other brand of folks that I think it’s always good to talk to about law school are folks who are kind of in the position that I was certainly in, which is those who don’t yet know, they have no frame of reference for law. They don’t have family members or whatever. So their approach to law is, I am going to be a litigator. I’ve seen it on tv, which may well work out for them. They may enjoy that, but they’re closing themselves off to practice areas that are less, there’s just not law and order ERISA practice or anything like that.

Kathryn Rubino:

Allie McBeal weirdly never handeled

Joe Patrice:

Never was a tax lawyer. And so I always feel like it’s good to have these sorts of conversations to talk about. You can have a legal career that does not look like Matlock, even the old Matlock who was less ethically challenged as we talked about in the past. But

Kathryn Rubino:

You probably should not use a false identity to practice law. Certainly

Joe Patrice:

What’s certainly what we said on last week’s show

Kathryn Rubino:

That is not controversial,

Joe Patrice:

But yeah, so that’s always good to know. I was going to follow up also with, we were just talking about how I recorded a podcast last week by myself speaking of podcasts. I will flag here that James Carville the radio page and has a podcast, and anybody who doesn’t listen to that every week should check out the most recent episode, at least as of this recording around the 47 minute mark or so, he talks about Above the Law and

Kathryn Rubino:

Specifically you and

Joe Patrice:

A story I wrote wrote. Yeah,

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. We were in the office and you started playing it, which seemed a little rude, but I wasn’t shocked by that behavior.

Joe Patrice:

Well, okay.

Kathryn Rubino:

No, but you started playing it, I think, to get my real time kind of reaction.

Joe Patrice:

I mean, it was my real time reaction. Somebody had just written me saying, you should check out this podcast at this time.

Kathryn Rubino:

And sometimes things that we write make waves beyond the insular legal world for sure. But you expect maybe a mention, not necessarily a deep dive. And James Carville had definitely read your piece, thought about your piece, had opinions about your piece, and wanted other people to read your piece and made sure to spell your name, P-A-T-R-I-C-E to make sure that people could find it. Which article was it actually about?

Joe Patrice:

It was an article I recently wrote about Elie Honig, who is a CNN legal analyst who has taken it upon himself. And I’ve talked about this actually when I was on CNN once I talked about this, that he’s taken it upon himself to criticize the prosecutions of Donald Trump in a way that he’s just wrong about. You could have opinions about these prosecutions and why they should or should not have been made. In fact, I was a little skeptical of the New York case when it originally was filed for a variety of reasons. But none of them are the ones that he’s citing. The ones he’s citing don’t even make sense. And so he’s now complaining about the federal prosecution for the January 6th case, saying that it violates the DOJ manual on bringing actions against a political candidate within 90 days of an election, which is putting aside that that’s not actually what that rule says. It’s not as though anything’s been brought here. The case was brought well in advance of this. The Supreme Court tried to slow it down. That doesn’t invoke the DOJs issues here. Just a real kind of botching of this. And I’m not the only one who wrote an article like this. I know PY Wheel wrote some, I think wrote an attack of this claim that the DOJ manual says this. So there are a lot of folks out there making this, but

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure. But I thought what was interesting is your comparison to another frequent topic of this podcast, Jonathan, as James Carville called him Turd Lee.

Joe Patrice:

Yes. Yeah, no, I compared him to Turley and so did, yeah. But it is really a trip.

Kathryn Rubino:

Listen, when people get famous for terrible legal takes, you’re going to see more terrible legal takes that should not be strange to people. It should be concerning

Joe Patrice:

That there is a path to some level of infamy by just being bad at your job. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, no, check out Carville’s podcast. It is really a trip to hear somebody of an age where I remember watching the documentary about that original Clinton election and this larger than life figure who’s from dating back to when I was in junior high high school. And to have him say your name and everything, you’re just kind of like, whoa, guess that’s happening.

Kathryn Rubino:

That is not uncool. I will forgive you. Fair enough.

Joe Patrice:

Thanks for that. Okay. Alright, let’s talk. Speaking of talk TikTok, you have a story,

Kathryn Rubino:

So I don’t know if your TikTok feed is anything like mine, but for the last few weeks I’ve gotten a ton of content about Gen Z and the workplace. Apparently Gen Z is just awful at working. And there was a recent study that said 60% of employers had fired a Gen Z employee within months of hiring them. They did some, I think 90% of respondents said that Gen Z needed work etiquette lessons because they don’t know how to speak to people in the workplace. They don’t know how to respond in a professional manner. Just lots of sort of dogging on Gen Z that they treat it like it’s school and that’s a real problem. And I think part of the issue is that school has changed to a consumer based model. That’s true of both undergraduate and even high schools where it’s the students and the parents are the consumers and try and the consumers never really wrong. And so they have a very different attitude towards teachers. And so that translates when they’re in the workplace and they think that sort of the organization should be serving them, and that is really not how capitalism works. So it’s been a kind of rough transition for Gen Z, but the oldest of Gen Z, those who may have gone straight through from undergrad to law school are now lawyers.

And there was a TikTok of an experienced Florida attorney who had to deal with a very new attorney, and it was just some of the more egregiously rude behavior you’ve heard about in the legal space. It was a criminal defense attorney speaking to somebody, a prosecutor, about a very standard kind of continuance. There had been no discovery in the case, whatever emailed. Apparently the deadline for the judge was there was a deadline coming up on Thursday email. It’s Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, tracked them down to their office. They very rudely sort of held up a finger and was like, I am busy. Email me. And the woman was like, I have for several days now. Eventually wound up putting all of the correspond, got ahold of the assistant. You could hear in the background the attorney yelling at the assistant, how dare you interrupt me? This is a breach of my boundaries. And the experienced attorney’s like, no, it’s not. I promise you this is just very, very, very standard motion practice wound up putting all of these sort of interactions into their motion. They usually get prosecutor’s approval before they submit them. But the judge quickly read it all was like, oh yeah, you get this continuance. So kind of had a happy ending for the attorney, but I don’t think this is going to end well if that’s your attitude in the legal profession, not just because you are not making friends and listen, networking is a tremendously large part of the job.

When you treat someone like that, you’re going to need a defense attorney’s approval in the future. You’re going to have to work together. Yes, it’s adversarial, but there’s still supposed to be some professional respect amongst you and the opponent, and you’re not going to get it if you start treating people like this. And I think that the content creator was very gracious and said, I remember the beginning of my career. You get overwhelmed, especially in the criminal space. You often get overwhelmed with clients and deadlines and there’s so much going on. But I think that how one reacts to that pressure and how one reacts to that feeling of overwhelmedness really matters. I think that’s something that schools are not teaching kids

Joe Patrice:

It is interesting you make that point about schools. Every generation goes through this where the old people pretend that this new generation is uniquely broken in a way that they aren’t. They’re just like everybody else historically. But you do make the point that schools have become a little more lenient towards the customer being right in ways that are a little messed up. I hear from people I know in collegiate education that say parents will CallRail up administrators and be like, my kid needs this, my kid needs that. And I’m like, I can’t even, that would horrify anybody in college when I was there.

Kathryn Rubino:

And I think there’s definitely that, and there’s also sort of more leniency about rule violations at a lot of schools. This is obviously not universal, but there’s a lot more plagiarism and sort of breaking of other sort of rules because of the internet and things are so widely available and some schools have ai, generative AI policies and others do not, et cetera, et cetera,

Joe Patrice:

Which means that’s going to become more of an issue.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. It’s only going to get worse. And there was definitely a world where if you were credibly accused and the school found that you had plagiarized, you were out.

Joe Patrice:

But right now we are dealing, and we see this, there’s some legal aspect to this. It’s become more of a political thing, but we’ve definitely had legal instances of this. We’re also dealing with a world where nobody understands what plagiarism even means because we’ve got the Washington free Beacon and out here blaming everybody, every liberal person of all time. A plagiarizing

Kathryn Rubino:

For quoting. Yeah,

Joe Patrice:

Because they’re quoting. I mean, the one that was the most egregious was the Harvard president that they managed to get fired. Well force out of the job by claiming, look at all these times that there’s plagiarism and some of it is quoting the text of a statute she’s writing about,

Kathryn Rubino:

Which that is not plagiarism, not what I was talking about.

Joe Patrice:

Get real. Yeah, no, it’s

Kathryn Rubino:

A separate.

Joe Patrice:

Well, and I guess now they’re trying to claim that Harris plagiarized something because there’s vague quotes of other statutes and stuff in her book. We don’t have a sense of what plagiarism means, and I mean query whether or not plagiarism’s even something we should be mad about. That’s a shout out to law professor Brian Fry who argues that maybe we should be more lenient about plagiarizing generally.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, okay, but not really the point here. The point is just that all sorts of problems, academic problems are being treated a lot more leniently than I think historically. The curves are getting more generous, et cetera, and not sort of being forced to have consequences dire sometimes consequences. I mean within the context, it’s not life and death necessarily, but I think has really had an impact on an entire generation of students.

Joe Patrice:

All right. Well, from there, let’s go to the chief justice. The chief justice, not unlike one of those students, has had his feelings hurt as we’ve learned from a CNN piece covering this. The chief justice is sad.

Yeah. Apparently he felt that everyone was going to love his Trump opinion in which he determined that Trump not only is immune from official acts in office, which isn’t particularly earth shattering, but that this definition of official acts is sufficiently expansive. That even if he were to commit personal nonofficial acts, you couldn’t use anything from his time doing his time in office where he’s doing also official stuff to prove that he did something unofficial. Essentially, the practical aspect of this is that for instance, his paying a private lawyer to pay hush money to a porn star and then create false business records to record that. Obviously not an official act of a president, but since this happened while he was in office, and therefore the testimony of some of his aids was important in proving that it had happened according to Robert’s opinion, that would potentially mean that that verdict is suspect because you can’t use the fact that he used official people or official documents or official testimony to prove even unofficial acts.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, I mean, I think what this piece really shows just how out of sync the Supreme Court is, and I mean, I think that’s inevitable in any role where you have a lifetime appointment and no practical recourse to a lot of misbehavior as we have seen on the court currently. But I don’t imagine John Roberts knows what most people think.

Joe Patrice:

It is an interesting take for him to apparently have these feelings, especially because it’s not like he didn’t live through the Gerald Ford situation. And that was an instance where Gerald Ford thought he was healing the country by pardoning Nixon, and more or less all he did was seal his fate as the Gyi who was going to lose the next election. Because as it turns out, people don’t generally love when you bend over backwards for partisan reasons to shut off the criminal justice

Kathryn Rubino:

Process. I mean, I think that he’s probably right in the sense that the political temperature is very different in 2024, but it is not improved that for his position. And I mean, listen, there was a Fox News poll that we wrote about just kind of across the board, Democrats, republicans, independents, widely disapprove of this Supreme Court decision. And that was a real shock for a man who doesn’t talk to the average American probably ever.

Joe Patrice:

I mean, a point that we’ve made in our coverage of it is it’s often talked about as being a six three opinion with all the conservatives on one side and the liberals on the other. And while it is true that part of the decision is six three, it is only that official act part that is six three for full credit, Amy Coney Barrett did not join the part that said You can’t use Hope Hick’s testimony to prove a crime that is non-official. And that’s really a weird part. It

Kathryn Rubino:

Seemed quite upset or at least annoyed by the majority on that.

Joe Patrice:

And there’s a non-zero argument. There is a decent colorable argument that the six justice part of that majority is probably more right than wrong. We do have reasons why if you are a president and you do something as part of your official office, you are immune from prosecution over it. But yeah, she definitely correctly, I think

Kathryn Rubino:

Noticed, listen, if that part was the only part of the decision and it had been more judiciously worded is possible was a nine. Oh, right. Because if you read those dissents, the dissents really are talking about the sort of second half the part that’s five four. That’s the stuff that’s when Sodo Moor’s descent really goes off on. So I mean, I think that there was certainly a world where a much more measured, narrowly constructed decision gets written that is much more unifying in a way that he maybe hoped.

And the other thing that I think is really interesting, what we learn from behind the scenes because of this CNN reporting is that he didn’t even, John did not seem to even try to reach out to the liberals on the court to kind of get them in on a bunch of these sort of very political decisions this term or this past term, not this current term. And I think that that lack is a real problem. How do you not see what’s going on in the country right now and not understand that trying to create a nine oh on any of these political issues would’ve had tremendous power and impact? There’s a reason why Brown V Board was nine, and it took two years to come to, and that kind of foresight and historical perspective is simply something that is missing in the chief justice.

Joe Patrice:

Well, and it’s weird because the narrative that he’s in no small part helped cultivate is that he cares about the legitimacy of the institution, and this is becoming a real problem for the institution. This is, as you said, this is a situation where you could have probably gotten a nine Oh on official acts? No, on official acts

Kathryn Rubino:

Yes. A better chief could have found a nine. Oh, in that case.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. I think if you assigned this to Barrett, you probably would’ve gotten nine. Oh, on that part. You might’ve gotten some

Kathryn Rubino:

Defense on both sides.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Some mean concurrences saying, Hey, we should go further. But you would’ve done that. The problem is if you’d done that, you would’ve meant that several of the prosecutions against Trump unequivocally have to go forward. And ultimately that was what this court was trying to do was stop these prosecutions because at the end of the day, there was no principle to any of

Kathryn Rubino:

This. Right? Yes. And that naked fact has been laid bare by the chief justice’s actions as well as other members of the court. But I think that the past couple of years, Mac it very, very clear what John Roberts actually values. And it’s gaslighting to say that it’s the credibility of the court.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. It’s time to stop indulging that narrative.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. I mean, listen, the institution’s credibility is at an all time low, and it doesn’t appear to be any way for it to recover unless we have massive reform of the institution, which seems like a political long shot.

Joe Patrice:

And I’m going to write a piece on this in the near future. I haven’t gotten around to it, but there’s a disturbing, you use the word gaslighting. There’s a disturbing form of gaslighting that’s now starting to kick up, which is as the court’s credibility continues to decline and people CallRail for reform, the response is to say, you people are calling the court illegitimate, and that’s bad, which no one’s necessarily using, or if they’re using that term, they’re using it in a very different way, but they’re trying to shield the credibility loss from reform by claiming that not believing the court has credibility means that you are declaring the government illegitimate, which is, it’s a gaslighting effort that has been on the uptick. And there’ve been several articles that have tried to use this idea that if you in any way question how many free vacations a justice gets that you have crossed from saying, we need reform into Andrew Jackson territory. Alright, we’re back. Chris has finally made it in.

Kathryn Rubino:

Hey, Chris.

Chris Williams:

Yeah. I took a wrong turn at the platform. Nine and three quarters.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Oh, nice. Nice, nice. Well, yeah, no, we had mentioned that there was a chance we were going to be able to get you in before the end of the show, so you made it welcome. And

Kathryn Rubino:

You get to be here for, I would argue our story about spooky season. It’s about ghosting.

Chris Williams:

Oh. Oh, that was bad. Yeah. Let me leave right now. Come, I think my train’s outside,

Kathryn Rubino:

But it is actually your story. It is actually about ghosting. Yeah, it is actually about ghosting. It is actually Joe’s story, one of the numerous legal tech conferences that he’s been popping off to had some Really, you suck.

Joe Patrice:

Sorry, I had to try and find the sound effect. It’s not one that we bring up often.

Kathryn Rubino:

It does. Where it actually falls in the show makes me think that it’s saying that you suck since I was talking about your reporting in this instance, my

Joe Patrice:

Reporting is excellent. Your joke though, that’s where we’re going to,

Kathryn Rubino:

It was real good.

Joe Patrice:

So we will jump from there. So yes, I was at the Clio Cloud conference. Among the things that happened there, obviously they talk about the technology that they are working on. They also talk about their broader philosophy for building out small and solo law firms. But one of the key aspects of that show every year is the release of their legal trends report, which now they’ve done for nine years. Maybe what the legal trends report takes some data that they gather through Survey also takes anonymized data from the use of their platform to figure out things about just the general practice of law. A lot of interesting insights we’ve talked in the past about insights about where billing rates should be relative to the market and stuff. Anyway, the big one here is they did another iteration of something they did several years ago, which was a secret shopper effort where basically

Kathryn Rubino:

I just watched the secret shopper episode of Superstore. So I’m very interested, which is from years ago at this point, but my nieces were very interested in it. So how do you secret shop a law firm?

Joe Patrice:

So in conjunction with some consultants, they were calling around, they had a specific request of a hypothetical client and they were reaching out to law firms to find out what’s going on. They like specific answers to some key legal questions, some conversations about representation. They reached out through multiple formats. They reached out to a thousand law firms via email and 500 over the phone. The last time they did this in 2019, the numbers were pretty grim. A lot of people didn’t really respond to them, which hence your ghosting joke, which is not great since the fundamental thing you need as a lawyer,

Kathryn Rubino:

Clients, they’re the ones who pay. That’s your business,

Joe Patrice:

Overinflated sense of self-worth and clients. Those are the things that you need.

Kathryn Rubino:

And yet that self-worth is yet to pay. The bill does not keep the lights on.

Joe Patrice:

Back in 2019, only 60% of law firms responded to those emails. That’s thankfully with the benefit of five years

Kathryn Rubino:

And the perspective based on this information,

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, five years, it is now 67%. So it has gotten worse. That’s over two thirds around if not over two thirds of law firms did not respond to email requests for what’s going on. Now, on the one hand, there is something to be said for the rise of spam and phishing. There are more people who reach out with, as I put in the piece, hello friend, I am Nigerian Prince and I need legal advice to collect a million dollars. If that’s the request,

Chris Williams:

Wait, he emailed you too.

Joe Patrice:

Right? If that’s a request, I understand why you might not read it. That said, these were crafted requests that were designed to seem very, very legitimate. So maybe that’s a reason people aren’t responding over email, but it’s not a very,

Kathryn Rubino:

That old fashioned phone,

Joe Patrice:

CallRail phone calls become a lot harder to justify back in 2019. Now, my one quibble with the report is that they do the numbers backwards here as opposed to who didn’t respond. This is now who did back in 20 19, 70 3% did CallRail back.

Kathryn Rubino:

Okay, so that seems correct.

Joe Patrice:

Now, 52% called back. So roughly half of you have roughly a little off of 50 50 shot of somebody answering you if you CallRail a law firm.

Chris Williams:

Is this about big law firms proper or just like law firms generally? Middle size, small size.

Joe Patrice:

Largely they’re calling small firms, but they’re small and mid,

Kathryn Rubino:

Which is the kind of the Clio specialty there,

Joe Patrice:

Which is kind of the Clio specialty. It’s also true that there’s just a lot more of them. And so when you’re getting into the numbers like 1500 law firms, you’ve moved well beyond the MLA 200. There’s also, there was a little bit more depth to it, which is that the consultants had worked out as part of crafting their requests. They had certain benchmarks for what the answer from the firm they expected to hear would be saying, oh, you do have a case because of this or that, whatever. Just some substantive responses that they expected to have. They only got about 2% of law firms who were hitting all the marks that they expected to hear.

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s not great.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, it was 27% in 2019. So it’s a major decline. And this is obviously a problem because people don’t necessarily run to write reviews for lawyers, but they tend to, when they get completely ignored and more to the point, even if they aren’t writing a ton of reviews and squeaky wheels at all, it does turn out that when you get a response over the phone, to the extent they do, they did some surveying and found that around 39% of customers become active promoters of you after that. It’s

Kathryn Rubino:

Really in your benefit to answer the damn phone and email.

Joe Patrice:

It’s a striking amount of people who respond with email. It’s less, it’s around 19%, but it is really striking how much a client can become loyal and an evangelist for you if they feel like you’ve taken

Kathryn Rubino:

Care of that. People want to be listened to. I mean, fundamentally, the law is a client service industry. You have to cultivate that by just paying attention. That’s like the bare minimum.

Chris Williams:

Hotels don’t leave chocolates on the pillows. They like you. They know the importance of having a good reputation in your mind. And as easy as it is to think about, oh, what I’m doing is this heady service, you got to also cover just the basic good bedside manner parts of being a firm.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. One of the interesting findings of the study was if a lawyer says, we’re overwhelmed, we can’t handle this. To what extent do AI chatbots have a role in helping out here? And I think a lot of lawyers would say, well, it’s better not even a CallRail back than to have AI there. But as it turns out, clients aren’t actually all that offended by it. The numbers were that clients were pretty cool dealing with a chat bot for an initial contact, assuming it was made clear that a human was going to be there eventually. And that can be a way to really automate a lot of this. And even if you don’t want the chat bot because you think that doesn’t for your clientele, you think that might be a problem. There are other automated ways to fill out this form with everything and we’ll get back to you. That can really streamline the process. The clients don’t find off-putting, they find it normal to do that. And if that’s what you need to do in order to not seem like you’ve dropped a touch, then that’s probably what you should invest

Chris Williams:

In. Yeah. An important thing to remember about delegation is you don’t have to delegate to a person that will do the job as good as you. If they can do it 70% as well, then it’s worth delegating. So it’s

Joe Patrice:

Better than zero.

Chris Williams:

It’s better than zero. So it’s better to have something there that’ll do it, especially if, like you said, eventually you’ll get to it than have nothing.

Joe Patrice:

And Joshua Lyon, who’s their lawyer in residence, who always at Clio gives the presentation on this particular report, he also raised virtual receptionist services. Those do exist. There are reasons

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s a ton of technology out there that really can help with this.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Well, and Cleo’s product can help with the automated intake. These virtual receptionist services exist where you can just hire somebody who answers your phone for you. And because in a central banking situation with specific scripts that respond to what you want, just so that the intake happens before you then can do your job, you can make sure that that’s happening. And yeah, if you’re a solo, sometimes you can’t answer the phone. You’re in court and they’ve locked it up somewhere, that’s fine. But somebody has to still be there to take the CallRail and you can get it back later. But

Kathryn Rubino:

Anyway, and it will help you in the longterm.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. So that story was a big one last week, which I thought was great. It’s always heartening when these tech stories strike a nerve with our audience because not everybody in our audience loves tech as much as I do. So it was good when that happens. All right. Well, I think that’s it. Thanks everybody for joining us. You should subscribe to the show so you get new episodes every time they drop. You should leave reviews, write something stars. All of that helps. You should be reading Above the Law because that way you read these and other stories before they come out. You can follow us on social media. It’s at ATL blog at Joseph Patrice at Kathryn one at writes for rent. You can hit me on, you have sums on Blue Sky too. I’m just Joe Patrice over there. I shortened it. You should be listening to the Jabot Catherine’s other podcast. I’m also a guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Roundtable, which we did live at CLE Con

Kathryn Rubino:

This year. Fancy.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

How was it?

Joe Patrice:

It was great. Really well done show. It’s not up yet, I don’t think, because they edit the video and everything there, but that it’ll be up soon. So that was exciting. We’re going to do it again at a tech show, it sounds like. So we’re going to make this a whole thing. And you should also check out the other shows on the Legal Talk Network. And with all of that said, we’re done.

Kathryn Rubino:

Peace.

Joe Patrice:

Bye.

Chris Williams:

Peace.

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