Rethinking Law Firm Growth in the Age of AI, with Sam Harden

Episode Notes

Transcript

Stephanie Everett:

Hi, I’m Stephanie.

Zack Glaser:

And I’m Zack, and this is episode 5 77 of the Lawyers Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today I talk with Sam Harden about his new role as innovation strategist with us here at Affinity and Lawyerist and how AI tools can help you bridge the gap between, Hey, I’ve got an idea for tool in my office and spending tens of thousands of dollars trying to get some other company to come build it. That moment of is this a decent thing to do?

Stephanie Everett:

So Zack, we always say this is episode whatever part of the Legal Talk network, and I’m not sure if we’ve ever actually told our listeners what is the Legal Talk Network and why should they care?

Zack Glaser:

I guess that’s right. Yeah. Some of them probably know, but for those of you that don’t, the Legal Talk Network is, I guess they produce some shows. They don’t do all of our show, they do some of it, but they also syndicate a lot of podcasts like Above the Law and some other ones that are out there. I think we’ve had Gee and Conrad on from Lunch Hour Legal, we’ve done some stuff with RIS of a New Solo, so they help produce put together and send out a lot of other podcasts as well. So are they like Sister Podcasts with us, Stephanie?

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I like that. Let’s just say that we’re all part of the same big family, so we’re something and people can actually subscribe to all, you can go and subscribe to the Legal Talk Network and then I think you get all of their podcasts or obviously you can go check ’em out and subscribe to individual podcasts.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, well, so one of the nice things about being a part of, kind of a syndication of a team in a sense is that we have other podcasts that are out there that we get to, I got a pre-list to, there’s a series called For the Innocent and they do kind of a thing like Serial did where they take a case from somebody that’s been exonerated and they tell their story, and this season they’re telling the Amanda Knox story. For those of you who don’t know, which quite honestly, I knew the name Amanda Knox, but I didn’t know she’s the American College student that was arrested in Italy and spent four years in jail for allegedly killing her roommate. She’s since been exonerated, so it’s a good use of the word allegedly there.

Stephanie Everett:

Yes, yes. She’s

Zack Glaser:

Since been exonerated and it just got started on September 9th. This episode is coming out on September 11th, so if you’re interested in those types of podcasts, I listened to the first episode and it was compelling. It was pretty cool. If you’re interested in those types of podcasts, I would suggest you dig into Legal Talk Network and go see for the innocent podcast.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, no, that’s exciting. And yeah, sometimes we forget what podcasts people are listening to and for our listeners, I’d love to hear what other shows do you subscribe to and what do you listen to and do you like those kind of shows? I mean, sometimes people want to break from that kind of work or they want more of it. I don’t know. It’s kind of an interesting little thought there. What do you like to listen to?

Zack Glaser:

I remember my dad was a public defender for a while and he was like, I cannot watch procedural crime shows. I’m just doing too much of that. So yeah, what do people do you want to turn off when you’re listening to podcasts? So yeah, we’re going to put a poll in some of these so you can find, or if you can’t find the poll, just comment on the podcast wherever it is, what’s something else that you subscribe to? And then one more step, if you don’t subscribe to the Lawyers podcast, we would love for you to go and like and subscribe and comment on that. We love to hear from our listeners. We have a lot of ’em, so we’d love to hear from you.

Stephanie Everett:

Yeah, I love that. Alright, well now let’s check out your Zack’s conversation with Sam.

Zack Glaser:

Hey y’all, it’s Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist, and today I’ve got Bruce Politsky with me from Tabs3 again and we are talking law practice management software and really your tech stack in general. Bruce, thanks for being with me.

Bruce Politsky:

Great to be with you again, Zack. Really look forward to it. Enjoy these sessions.

Zack Glaser:

So Bruce, I use the term legal tech stack all the time and I probably use it too much or I don’t realize that not everybody necessarily knows exactly what I mean by that, but you certainly do. What do we mean when we’re talking about legal tech stack or your tech stack in your law office,

Bruce Politsky:

Specifically law firms, it’s really the collection of products or software and technology tools that they use to manage their office from client relationships to case management to billing to document management. There’s some staples in everybody’s tech stack of maybe Microsoft Word and Outlook, et cetera, and sometimes people don’t think about that, Adobe, whatever it might be, but all those things combine to the tech stack.

Zack Glaser:

What I think of there is how it all works in plays together as well.

Bruce Politsky:

Exactly, and that’s the key is everybody has their tech stack, but how coordinated are they, how much do they integrate, how seamless, I guess is maybe a better way to describe it.

Zack Glaser:

What does a typical tech stack at a office kind of look like? You’ve been doing this for a while and Tabs3 has been around for I think since 10 66, I believe since the Battle of Hastings.

Bruce Politsky:

Yeah, so it’s been a while, but, and one thing that I think gets overlooked, especially when we’re talking about a law firm is their website that should be part of their tech stack as well. It is their online presence, it’s their first impression, it’s what they’re using to drive new business. Sometimes that gets ignored. The second item besides websites I had listed was A-C-R-M-A customer relationship management system potentiallyDepending On your size and the volume that you do, and that is a system that is specifically designed to do that, to capture those leads, to nurture those leads and convert ’em into engaged signed engagements or clients from there. This is where it gets a little blurry case management. They can be one and the same. Sometimes the CRM does the case management, sometimes they’re complimenting the case management and then also blur that a little bit more inside a case management. You have the doc management topic, right? Again, does the case management encompass that?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah.

Bruce Politsky:

Is it a separate tool, but yet it’s again, communicating, integrating, sharing information there tools are starting to expand and what they offer, but bring in other, again, integrations with products. So you want to kind of look at how those things all work together. How easy is it to take one of those documents, send it out to your clients securely for us especially would be billing and finance as part of your tech stack. And then I mentioned case management, but let’s just talk practice management. Maybe that’s more the central, the platform that all these things come together and integrate and work together.

Zack Glaser:

How do all firms know if their tech stack is working for them?

Bruce Politsky:

One thing I think Zack that gets overlooked is taking the opportunity to walk through the customer’s journey from what they see when they first go to your website, how are they brought on as a client? Obviously you’ve got to do what’s right for the firm and get your people’s buy-in of that, but you really have to look at how the technology can streamline both the client’s experience and the firm’s operations.

Zack Glaser:

Perfect, perfect. I do a lot of reviews of legal technology and software and in doing that on our website we have a bunch of different categories and one of those categories is law practice management software, and that is the one where everything blurs because for me, I define law practice management software as something that does five at least of eight very specific tasks that include email management, all these things we were talking about, email management, case management, project management, document management, document creation, things like that. And where I’m going with this is that Tabs3 and the other products in the tab three suite all kind of morph around all of these abilities. Taps three is one of those that can help you with a considerable amount of these or not because you can kind of piece mail things together as well.

Bruce Politsky:

Pick some best in class systems to work with and make sure you do that well. And yeah,

Zack Glaser:

It’s like Captain Planet, their powers combined. You’ve got a really, really robust practice management platform and if people want to learn more about a really, really robust practice management platform, Bruce, where can they go?

Bruce Politsky:

What they need to do is go to our website, which is tab three.com, and then go to tabe.com/c, tab three S-E-E-T-A-B-S. And the number three, if you do go to the main website, there is a link there to get more information and to get a demo, but we’ll walk you through and you’ll get to see how our solution for billing, accounting and manner management all ties together to build up a very strong tech stack.

Zack Glaser:

Sounds great. Sounds great. Well, Bruce, once again, thanks for with me and thanks. Thanks for getting nerdy on Tech Stack with me a little bit here. You bet.

Sam Harden :

Hi, I’m Sam. I am an innovation strategist at Affinity Consulting and this is my first couple of months with Affinity as I’m doing this.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. Yes, Sam, it’s good to have you on the podcast. It’s good to have you with us for Affinity Consulting Group for people. I’m sure a considerable amount of our listeners are familiar with you and your writing online and essentially your voice, but for people that aren’t, what have you been doing prior to coming to us with Affinity?

Sam Harden :

So I’ve done a lot, and that probably means I’m older than I think I am. I graduated law school back at 2009, so the financial crash was when I got out of law school. Oh

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. That was a good time to get out of law school. That was

Sam Harden :

A great time to get out of grad school. And when I was in law school, my goal was to be a trial lawyer. I really liked doing mock trial on the mock trial team. I was passionate about zealously representing people to try and get compensation for their injuries or help them in the Courtroom. I’m an extrovert by nature. I love being in front of people. Public speaking for some reason doesn’t phase me. I don’t know why that is, but it’s something I enjoyed doing. And so that was what I thought I really wanted to do. And so I checked all the boxes that I thought you should check. I did mock trial, as I said, I interned at a group that worked with plaintiff’s lawyers. I did the externship at the state attorney’s office in law school, did some DUI trials as second chair in the limits of what they let you do. I tried to do the law school things that would get me on that path. And then after law school, when I was looking for work in the middle of the financial recession, I was fortunate enough to go to a large civil defense firm in Florida that was statewide, worked there for a number of years and then went into plaintiff’s practice. But I really found I was not well equipped to handle just the stress of practicing law either on the defense or the plaintiff’s side. It was very, very acrimonious with other lawyers.

It was not something that suited me personally, even though I felt like I had developed a skillset practically to try andDo it, It was emotionally draining to me.

Zack Glaser:

I feel that. I Completely feel That,

Sam Harden :

Yeah, it’s a hard business and I really respect the people that are able to do it for the long-term. And please don’t read. What I’m saying is wow, you shouldn’t be doing, I think it’s a very necessary area of law on both sides, but it’s just not something I was equipped to handle really. And I didn’t realize that. So after that, I started a small firm with someone I knew from law school who was still running his own firm and we did a mix of criminal defense and some light pi, some just helping people with legal problems, a lot of answering the phone. We were a two man firm. We answered our own phones for the most part, and that’s when I was working there. I got really interested in how technology could start helping lawyers practice law and help people find lawyers, help them understand what was going on with their cases and things like that. So he and I kind of split the firm. He kept the firm, I went off on my own to do what I thought I could do with technology and ended up trying a number of different things and getting scooped up by a nonprofit in Florida that did civil justice technology for the Florida Bar Foundation

And worked with them for a while on statewide projects, online forms, tools, things like that. And unfortunately, they had to wind down. It was the Florida Justice Technology Center and then was out on my own as a consultant. I did some stuff with small firms, some stuff with legal aid organizations, some generic stuff in legal technology

And

Then worked for pro bono net, which I was there for five years and that’s where I was until I got hired by Affinity.

Zack Glaser:

Okay, cool. Yeah, you’ve done a little bit of, you’ve been around, seen a lot of different types of law, seen a lot of different types of ways that we’re, I think more specifically obviously for this podcast is a lot of different ways that we as lawyers are interacting with technology and how it’s helping people increase what they can do. And actually that’s what I want to talk to you about today is this idea of using technology to increase capacity of let’s say one human being. If you increase the capacity of a person or a law firm or something like that, we might be able to do more work with less people.

And so I get into this because we have a teams message board internally that’s an AI task force message board, and you commented something actually today that was we’re talking about people implementing artificial intelligence into their office and this idea that AI can make us be able to do more work with less people. And you commented on that there’s going to be a lot of people that try to do, there are a lot of firms that try to do the same work with less people using that. And you’re saying that may not be the right path to take of like, okay, I am a two person firm. I’m implementing ai now I can actually do it one person and I’m doing the same stuff.

Sam Harden :

So I really do think that a lot of the conversations I see about AI in law practice focuses right now on how can we gain efficiency and how can we gain efficiency to do the same work with fewer people? Because people in any organization are expensive. You have to pay the people, you have to figure out equipment for the people to use. You have to have office space for the people or have them have a home office be available. There’s a lot of ranging, and AI is very good at just doing whatever it is it thinks you want it to do by typing the words into the magic box.

And I think there’s a perception that when we see a new AI tool, lawyers think, well, wait, I could ask this thing to do this task for me that I have this person do. And I think that’s the wrong way to think about it honestly, because do you really want to narrow down what it is your firm and you are capable of with this technology, which is what I think it’s doing in that mindset, or do you want to think a little bit bigger? Do you want to think, how could I use this to expand what I do? How could I use it to take what I do and multiply it or do it in new ways or serve a new group of clients that I’m not already serving or help me expand into a new practice area or grow my business? I think in business you see a lot of growth and you see a lot of stagnation and, and frankly things kind of falling down and failing. And I worry that the mindset of we’re going to use AI and we’re going to get rid of our support staff and do it all with AI is the wrong way to think about it because I think that puts you on the path to eventually folding up your business potentially because you’re no longer growing, you’re no longer looking for new opportunities, you’re choosing a path that leads to stagnation

With an interesting technology, but it’s still this mindset of we’re going to do the same thing and maybe less of it, but we’re going to do it cheaper.

Zack Glaser:

One of the things that really fascinated me about that comment and what you’re saying here, and first I want to kind of make sure that the listeners know that we can expand this whole idea to technology in general. It’s not just ai. We have this issue with just any sort of automation. And I think when a lot of lawyers extrapolate out, what can I use this automation for? What can I use this technology to speed me up for? We start to get into, okay, well we’re going to have to reduce because we’re actually going to reduce our billable hours as well. So this kind of couples into that into, well, if you’re reducing the amount of people you have, if you’re reducing the amount of time it takes, I think that starts to scare the crap out of people. If I can do things faster and cheaper, now I’ve got to go get more clients and how do I do that?

Sam Harden :

Yeah, and I think that is a great question. How do I go and get more clients? How do I bring people into the system that I’ve built? And if I’m gaining all of this efficiency right, then that means all of a sudden I’m either doing way more work for the same clients who may or may not want it. They may have hired me to do specific things, but if I say, here’s all the things I did and it would’ve taken me this much time, but because I had time left over, I also bill you for all these other things that I did with ai. I don’t think a lot of clients are going to be super happy with that. And so that’s like you said, where do I find inputs for my system? Where do I bring in customers? And law is a weird business, at least to me because if you went to a bakery or any other business or a bike shop and you said, here’s the problem that you’re going to face over the next six months is too many customers, they would be thrilled. You’re going to have to figure out what to do with all this time you’ve saved and you can go get more customers. They would be thrilled. But

Lawyers have this mentality of it’s a zero sum game, only have so much time, only have so much that I can do, but AI sort of upends that.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. And so you have to start thinking, I mean, I guess ultimately what you’re saying is you have to start thinking about how are we practicing? What’s our business model? And I bring in all technology into this because I think this is something that has been an issue hiding not so hidden underneath the surface for years of, okay, if I become too efficient, then I can’t bill for that. And now AI is just exacerbating that and bringing it to light. So I guess, and more than that, it’s kind of brought us to a tipping point. We can’t just say, I’ll just put my head in the sand. We either, like you’re saying, reduce the amount of people that we have, the amount of stuff that we’re doing. And I think that’s fascinating because we either do that or we go out and we increase and some people are going to turn towards the reduction. The knee-jerk reaction I think is to say, okay, well, I just won’t have to hire as many people, but you’re right, that’s not growth. That which is not growing is dying, right?

Sam Harden :

Yeah. And I think about too, so say you are a law firm and you see technology, not just ai, but automated forms is okay, it’s this great time saving thing and I could spend some amount of money on this new technology, be it ai, be it automation, be it whatever, and it’s going to save me all this time, so I’m going to let go of people at some point, if you pick up more clients, if you pick up more business to fill that gap, you’re going to have to rehire people probably. And rehiring and hiring new people is expensive. It’s time consuming, it’s hard. Why would you let the people that you have go now for a temporary efficiency gain that you’re not sure how is going to work out in the future?

No one can really predict the future other than it’s going to be different and maybe somewhat similar than what we have now. So why would you do that when you think maybe I’ll have to hire more people in the future? Why not take the people that you have now? Let them operate at a higher level. Give them the tools that they can use to do better stuff for you. Because people want to improve as well. People working in a law firm who don’t own the firm also want to improve. They want to see growth, they want to see a plan. They want to see some sort of future that they can look out to and say, this is where we’re going and where we’d want to be. Right?

Zack Glaser:

Yeah. I guess the natural kind of next step is, and I think this goes to some of the things you’ve written in your substack, for the listeners out there, if you don’t follow Sam’s Substack, go find him. We’ll have a link in the show notes that way we don’t have to say it here. I don’t know exactly where it’s on. But I guess then the question is how do I as regular attorney, Zack Glazer, just I’m an attorney. I’m not super privy to how AI works. I know that it’s math that thinks, but how do I then exploit that? How do I even know where to start in adjusting the way that I’m delivering these systems?

Sam Harden :

Yeah, I think we’re at an interesting place right now because we’re kind of at the place where AI has been around, or generative AI, I should say, has been around for a couple of years, right? Chat, GPT was, and I’m going to get the year wrong, it was 2022 or 2023. I’d have to ask chat, GPT, when did chat g PT comes

Zack Glaser:

Out? We’ll use AI to put the right date in there in the podcast.

Sam Harden :

Yeah, it’s been out for a couple of years. Enough people have used it. It’s like the fifth most visited website in the world is chat GPT. I mean, that’s kind of mind blowing

Zack Glaser:

To me in the world.

Sam Harden :

In the world. If I read Google correctly, and this was Google’s AI summary, so who knows people are out in the world using it. And if you go on anywhere like LinkedIn, like Twitter, any social media account, there are a lot of opinions about ai.

There’s a lot of people saying a lot of things both good and bad about ai. And I think there are good things and bad things. And I think all that to say, I think in law we’re in kind of a unique place where this technology is still new, but there’s a lot of people saying a lot of things about it and saying that they have expertise in it. But I think a lot of people, most people, me included, are I am continuously astonished at how good it is at things. There are products out there that will create a podcast out of a set of documents that you give it, and then you can ask the podcast questions live, I mean live. But you can do things like that. You can have ai, you could have it create a crazy recipe in a pirate voice for you, or you could say, role play this with me. Play the part of this person, and I’m going to ask you questions. There are people using it to help them game out scenarios with it’s a life coach or it’s a nutritionist, things like that. And I give the disclaimer, AI is seco fan. It still hallucinates a bit. Don’t take everything at face value. Don’t do that. I’m not saying that, but it is incredibly powerful at what it can do. And I think for lawyers, that means you’re going to have to try it to see what it can do for you.

Every lawyer practices slightly differently, even though law is very similar, like law firm to law firm to law firm. There are a lot of similarities, but lawyers have their own unique way of doing things. Law is a profession, it’s not an assembly line, it’s not a car factory. It’s a profession and it’s a profession of the mind. And I think that’s where AI gets really interesting is it can do a lot of those or assist with a lot of those mental tasks like going through a hearing transcript or going through a deposition and having it, feeding it a deposition transcript securely do that, but have it say, okay, game out. What I missed here, what tips would you give me for next time? It’s really, really interesting where we are right now.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, so let’s go a little bit, if you don’t mind, a little level deeper for our listeners here, because let’s assume right now that our listeners have played with artificial intelligence, have messed with generative ai, have started to say, okay, well I can probably do a few things here. And they’ve done that kind of, alright, I’m using the large language model to help me suss out things. In one of your articles on Substack, you’re talking about this kind of middle land between, and I’m going to have to get you to define vibe coding for everybody, but between vibe coding and bespoke custom software that’s out there. And so we can assume, well, I mean we can see that there are legal software companies, software companies for the legal field. I guess that’s probably a way of saying it, that are creating really, really bespoke stuff to do things in like PI or find medical documents or file things and stuff. And then we can also see where attorneys are just spinning up their own stuff as quickly as they can to play with it in a sense. And you argue that the real innovation is going to be kind of in the middle between those two things. So before we get to that though, if you don’t mind giving everybody kind of an idea of what do we mean by vibe coding on that one side of spinning up and playing with ai.

Sam Harden :

Basically Vibe coding is getting AI to build an application for you by just asking it to do it by giving it vibes is the idea.

Zack Glaser:

Okay.

Sam Harden :

So yeah, it’s fascinating that it can do this. And honestly, it’s one of the more mind blowing things that I’ve seen, at least to me because historically, if 10 years ago if I went to a computer development shop and said, I want a web application that has this data in it and it displays it in these ways and it’s accessible from the internet and the front end is sortable by these things and it looks really nice, it performs well, things like that. It would be multiple thousands of dollars in development time for a development firm to stand that up. Maybe over $10,000.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, that’s

Sam Harden :

The mvp, right? And I could go on Jim and I or chat GPT right now and say, here’s what I want you to build for me as a single page web app. I want it to, one recent example is my kids are in scouts, one is in Cub Scouts, one is in the troop, the big scouts, and I am in charge of planning camp outs. So I asked Jim and I do a deep research report, find all the campsites that meet these criteria within an hour and a half drive from where I live, organize it this way, here’s what I want to see. And then I took that deep research report and I said, okay, now create a web application single page that uses that as the data and let me be able to search and sort it by all these criteria. And it did it in less than the deep research took longer than the actual vibe coating for it. Just astonishing stuff. So that’s vibe coating when I talk about it.

Zack Glaser:

And that in and of itself I think is something to say, Hey, lawyers, you can go do this type of thing so you can start to spin up these, because I think there are a lot of attorneys out there, one of the reasons that I was drawn to legal technology is that I think a lot of lawyers, or at least lawyers, that there’s a certain sector of lawyers that do it because it’s logical and technology and coding and things like that makes sense to them. And it’s like, I like to do a lot of if this, then this and things like that. And so I think there are a lot of people out there that in their mind can design what they want something to do. They don’t have the time to go learn Python or even HTML or whatever new super fancy ice cream flavor of code there is now.

But if you’re doing that, I could spin something up and then play with it a little bit. Because I think one of the problems that we have as lawyers in developing technology is that we can kind of say what we want. We can kind of tell you what we want. So there’s this middle ground then between me being able to spin up something, vibe coating, and between me going and becoming a software developer, creating a company and then building this massive thing in this middle area, how do you see people being able to use and innovate in that giant, giant middle space?

Sam Harden :

So I think it’s worth defining the area to the other side of the middle too, which I think of as Thomson Reuters, VL Lexus the big, when I think of the extreme, I don’t know right hand side is kind of how I think of it.

Zack Glaser:

Sure, yeah.

Sam Harden :

These established technology companies that have buildings full of people in big cities that are tasked with how do we build this product? How do we improve this product? How do we code this thing? How do we do all these intricate technical things and how we sell it to lawyers, how do we get lawyers to use it? Stuff like that. I think that’s kind of to the side. And when I think about what is in the middle, like you said, it’s very wide. And I think it depends a lot on the individual lawyer. I think it depends on the practice, and I think it’s something that we have yet to explore. The big companies like Lexus, like VAX, the big practice management people, they’re going to build something that is like world-class software. That’s what they do. But maybe a lawyer wants something to help explain to clients, here’s how a will travels through probate in the state that you’re in. And instead of creating a PDF that has bullet points, what if the lawyer could turn that into a clickable narrative almost game?

Maybe the lawyer could experiment with that. Maybe the lawyer could experiment with something that helps a client understand the discovery process that they’re going through. Maybe they could use vibe coding to teach a client, here’s the pitfalls of doing business formation on your own. Here’s where lawyers come in and help you in the process. Here’s the documents that you need to gather in order to help me serve you better and do it more efficiently. I think there’s so much room for experimentation that I wouldn’t be able to say, here is what I think of when I think of the middle. I think of it as this big gray area that we’re going to have to explore together. And one of the things that excites me about the ability to vibe, code and put things in that middle space is the speed at which you can test things out and test out theories and software. It’s really expensive to develop and it’s really expensive to test. And I’ve seen a lot of things come along that were not well tested and not well proven out, but people feel committed to them because they spent so much time on them. It’s my thing, it’s my child,

Zack Glaser:

But it’s built in c plus plus. But with, yeah,

Sam Harden :

If you have an idea and you have some concept in your mind that you can put the right words in the box and have it come out sort of what you want, then even if it’s not exactly what you wanted, you could test out your ideas really cheaply really quickly and you can see, wow, that was terrible. Or, wow, that was actually kind of good.

Zack Glaser:

How

Sam Harden :

Can I improve it?

Zack Glaser:

And I think that idea is fascinating to me of having this, I see this vibe coating as being a way, and it seems to be how you’re talking about it as kind of an entry point to that middle area, that area where we can experiment where because and such, the problem with having a large company that is developing these things is that they have to have a large customer base. And so you wind up having to create things that serve the largest customer base. Okay, well, we already said that lawyers run their practices in a very different way. We’re all doing kind of the same thing, extremely differently.

And so I think it’s fascinating to think about spinning these things up very quickly, but I could talk to you about this for a few more days, I’m sure. But my producers tell me that I have to wrap this up at some point. So I really want to ask, as people are getting into building these sorts of things for their offices, and I want to get past the idea of well use AI for marketing, use AI to write your client letters or things like that, kind of that surface level, entry level sort of thing. How would you tell somebody, well, let me rephrase this. How would you tell somebody to go about starting to do this vibe coating sort of stuff? How would you tell them to get started? What’s the rubber meets the road?

Sam Harden :

I would say just try it out on something dumb first. Honestly, really and truly, and that sounds kind of flippant, but I think about my little example with the Cub Scouts

Troop campgrounds. The way I managed that before was I had a spreadsheet in Google Sheets that I would use, and I had to add the links manually and things like that. And now I have this little website that I can go to and just search and sort, and it’s really handy. It’s a proof of concept. It’s not a professional grade web application that a database on the backend, and it has middleware that runs crud. If you know what that means, you know what it means. It’s not that. But I didn’t want that, right? I wanted something that I could look at and just say, okay, and if I need to update it, I can ask Gemini to update it. It doesn’t have to be professional grade. Maybe at some point I’ll get inspired by a surplus of caffeine and go and use the code and modify it myself and do something more with it, but probably not. So start with something dumb. Start with something that kind of shows you the potential. Create a game is what I like to do. I Created these little educational games for my kids, how to do multiplication, how to identify the parts of the sentence. And Gemini is really, really fantastically good at these little web app games. So do something like that, get started with it and then try it. That will start the creative juices flowing, I think for vibe coating. And that’s the point, right? Yeah, that’s the point. Get familiar with it, see what it can do. Understand that it’s not professional grade. Understand that you should not put client information and vibe, code it into something. Just don’t And don’t say hard told you to. I did not.

Zack Glaser:

Yeah, do not, do not do that. Do not. Yeah. And that’s the thing. But we start to get past that Ninos paradox thing of like, I don’t know what, I don’t know When you do that, when you go in and you’re just like, I’m going to create a rideshare app for my cross country athletes or something like that. Yeah, you can do a lot of different things, but I love the idea of being able to experiment with these sorts of things and do that and then go, okay, now I can see where I could bring that into my practice. And now I have a thing. Because I think a lot of times, and this gets back to the beginning of where I was going with all this, now I have a thing to show a developer for what I want the damn thing to look like.

Because a lot of times people, attorneys know what they think they want in their head and then they go to a developer, and it’s that whole thing of trying to describe how to make a peanut butter sandwich to a computer. We don’t go through all the right things. If you look up trying to describe how to make a peanut butter sandwich to a computer on YouTube or whatever, there’s a lot of good videos on that, but it gets past that. It gets us to where we can show this is the type of thing that I want. And to me that’s helping to put these very logical trained brains of attorneys into designer as opposed to just into client of these computer engineers. That’s my rant. That’s my rant for this. But before you, thanks for letting me rant, Sam. What I’d like to know though, after all of this, after I just asked you all these other questions, is you’re coming into Affinity Consulting, you’re an innovation strategist, is that what,

Sam Harden :

Yes. Innovation strategists.

Zack Glaser:

What are you most excited about or most looking forward to in that new role?

Sam Harden :

I’m looking forward to a couple of things. I think the biggest thing is being able to work with lawyers and law firms that want to innovate and that have a desire for growth. Like I was talking about earlier,

People that really want to improve the way they do things and do things in new ways to either go into new markets, serve new clients, new practice areas, and rethink the traditional ways that lawyers have done things in the past. I did, as I’d mentioned before, I did insurance defense in a large firm, and we have a set list of things we did for each case and it followed a routine, which was great. But I think we have the opportunity now as lawyers with technology and with AI to think what is valuable and what’s expensive, what’s valuable to our clients, what do our clients see as expensive? And I’m really looking forward to working in that space with lawyers that want to grow.

Zack Glaser:

I like it. Well, and I think I know you’re well suited for that, so I’m excited to have you here. And I know that we at Affinity are Affinity and Lawyerist and all of that, are very excited to have you here. More importantly though, Sam, thank you for being with me on the podcast. I really appreciate it.

Sam Harden :

Thank you for having me. This was great.

Zack Glaser:

Absolutely. We’ll have to have you again.

Sam Harden :

Alright.

Zack Glaser:

Right.

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