Build or Buy: Choosing the Right AI Tools for Your Law Firm, with Nick Coleman

Episode Notes

Transcript

Zack Glaser [00:00:01]:
Hi, I’m Zack.

Stephanie Everett [00:00:03]:
And I’m Stephanie. Welcome to The Lawyerist Podcast, one of the many ways we help lawyers build healthier law firms, better businesses, and more sustainable lives. Today, Zack’s talking with Nick Coleman about when to build and when to buy in the time of AI.

Zack Glaser [00:00:20]:
It’s an interesting conversation. Nick has some, he, he has built a platform for himself and some other attorneys and Um, you know, in the, in the land of SaaS is dead and we can spin things up pretty quickly. When do you, you know, when do you build your own thing? When do you, when you get in somebody else’s stuff? So.

Stephanie Everett [00:00:36]:
I’ll be curious to hear. I know what I just told my husband recently when he brought his big idea, like, hey, I can code this thing. And I was like, no, you cannot. You do not know how to code. And while you can do it with AI, it doesn’t mean you should. So.

Zack Glaser [00:00:50]:
Mm. Yeah.

Stephanie Everett [00:00:51]:
I think that’s right. Just because he doesn’t understand security and data and like, I mean, come on, guys, there’s some complicated stuff there that I’m, I’m like, let’s not play around.

Zack Glaser [00:01:00]:
You are, you are speaking to what we talk about. That’s, that’s exactly right. Exactly right. So Stephanie, I, this last weekend, I ran a 5K, um, with my cross-country team. Um, one of my, one of my athletes puts on a, um, puts on a charity 5K every year, and she’s been doing it since she was a freshman. She is the one that organized this. She’s a senior now. It’s, it’s Absolutely amazing what she’s able to do.

Zack Glaser [00:01:24]:
So the team does the 5K and I went and ran with them and it made me think, because I’d literally gotten into this situation, it made me think of a rule that I have with these athletes. And I tell them, don’t change speed going uphill. I always tell them, you can change speeds, you can walk, you can run, you can do things how you want to, but don’t change speeds going uphill. And what I mean by that Is at the bottom of the hill is you feel good. You feel good about yourself. You know who you are. You’re, you’re, you’re kind of a better person at the bottom of the hill. In the middle of the hill, when things get difficult, you’re making a decision based on the person who is under stress.

Zack Glaser [00:02:05]:
They, they are, they are having, they’re going through the middle of this difficulty. Why not trust the you that is pre-stress or non-stress you? So go the speed that you decided to go at the bottom of the hill. When you get to the top of the hill, do whatever you want. Change speeds, walk, whatever you want, but don’t change speed in the middle of that hill. And obviously that has normal human implications as well.

Stephanie Everett [00:02:35]:
Yeah, I need to think about that. I’m sitting here thinking, but Zack, I might not make it up the hill. I feel like I’d be the one that’s like, no, I actually need to walk. This isn’t going to work.

Zack Glaser [00:02:45]:
Sometimes I think that is a real critical thing here. Sometimes the person at the beginning of the hill bit off more than they could chew. Sure, sure. If there is a real, real reason to do it, but I mean, at some point it’s like, then fail. Don’t try to change speeds. You might fall, you might, but don’t get in the habit of saying, oh, things got difficult, let me reassess. Don’t reassess just because they got difficult.

Stephanie Everett [00:03:14]:
Yeah,

Zack Glaser [00:03:14]:
you know,

Stephanie Everett [00:03:15]:
that totally resonates. And I do like that. And where it also made me go as leaders, we talk about this in our book, in Next Level Leader, you know, we show up under stress differently for our team and we don’t always realize it, but like, how are we showing up if we’re under, if things are difficult, we’re under a lot of demands and stress, do our good qualities can sometimes get exacerbated into really bad ones. So like, if I’m good under stress and I’m like, I’m decisive, I can make decisions under stress, that could look like being demanding and critical.

Zack Glaser [00:03:48]:
Yeah. Yeah. I, and I think it’s like underlying that whole kind of uphill thing. I think it’s important to understand the different yous that are, that are out there, the different forms that you can take based on what’s going on, you know, external factors, what’s going on around you and learning to cope with those things. Learning to, to, you know, wrangle those different Zacks that show up to the party.

Stephanie Everett [00:04:14]:
Well, I love it. Let’s just end there. That’s a good nugget of wisdom that you’re dropping on everyone today. So now let’s check out your conversation with Nick.

Nick Coleman [00:04:35]:
My name is Nick Coleman. I am the CEO and founder of LexMed. I’m also a recovering Social Security disability attorney, and what we do is build tools to make Social Security disability attorneys better advocates. And essentially, LexMed’s been a passion project built out of the frustrations of me as a young attorney on the road handling hundreds of cases a year, While making peanuts. And so, yeah.

Zack Glaser [00:05:04]:
So Nick, you and I have talked a couple of times about LexMed and about your journey to building LexMed. But this is, this is a SaaS platform that, you know, you built for yourself initially or to help yourself move forward using artificial intelligence. So you looked around and you said, hey, here are some tools that can make me Not only faster, but more effective. Talk to me about, about the, the impetus of building LexMed.

Nick Coleman [00:05:35]:
Yeah. So I’ve always been a tech nerd. I don’t really technically have like a technical background. I’m not, I’m not going to write code, Python, you know, understand all the syntax, but I’m a systems builder. I have an understanding of leveraging technology the best way I can. And I’d always had built macros and use different plugins with Adobe PDF to help kind of streamline my workflows, right? With, before AI was AI. Before 2022, OpenAI came out and released ChatGPT. The things that I wanted to do, I really couldn’t do other than using the tools that were available to us.

Nick Coleman [00:06:11]:
And with Social Security Disability, a lot of everything we do is really dig into thousands of pages of medical evidence and figure out how those medical conditions link to relevant regulations. And ultimately, how do they explain how this person can no longer work, which is just a very time-consuming tasks. So a lot of what we were doing is just doing, you’d say, Ctrl+F on steroids and matching words, right? And then I would build scripts to find those matching words and flag them, right?

Zack Glaser [00:06:41]:
Yeah. I guess one of the things that we’ve talked about, like in that, we’re talking about a product that is kind of enhancing what somebody does, speeding them up, doing something that they do more quickly. But you and I’ve discussed, and I love this aspect of AI, The ability of this product that you, that you’ve built to do things that you wouldn’t even do if you didn’t have this sort of speed on your side. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about some of the things where you’re not only seeing, oh, we went faster, we went more quickly, it eased things up, but it’s, I did better because I could do something that I wouldn’t do.

Nick Coleman [00:07:22]:
What our systems do is allow you not only to comb through a record, we’re not just this AI, we summarize it for you, right? We’re actually doing detailed analysis while we are breaking out the most important aspects of someone’s longitudinal medical history. Right. And actually grasping and picking up patterns that are very easily missed When you’re running a volume practice on tight margins, right? And so you might have 30 hearings that in the aggregate where you have over 300,000 pages of records and you’re spec— you’re expected to know every needle in the haystack, right? Yeah. With each case. And there’s only so much time in the day, right? And so even the best attorney is going to miss things. because there’s just too much information. What our system does is digest that information, draws the connections into creating patterns of what’s happening over a longitudinal history that might be 15 years of medical treatment, but also looks at how these things connect to the regulatory framework which Social Security uses to evaluate these cases, which is often built on ICD-10 codes. Okay.

Nick Coleman [00:08:43]:
You think of like, when you go to the doctor, how they bill your insurance company. And you’re supposed to have to know, have to be, you have to play kind of junior doctor and an attorney, right? And when you’re evaluating this stuff, and it’s very time-consuming, and it’s very technical. And to be good at it is, it’s difficult. And with the amount of volume that you have to do.

Zack Glaser [00:09:05]:
So talk to me about some of the things, some of the specific things that we’ve discussed on When I look at a lot of AI, it speeds me up. Great. Okay. And then we have a question of, is your practice an hourly billing practice or is your practice a contingency fee practice? And speeding me up in some cases doesn’t help me. And yes, so obviously speeding you up helps you in a contingency practice like Social Security, but you’ve also said that it does, you know, you’ve been able to find things That wouldn’t have even been done, you know, like, and get things done not only faster but better. And yes, more quickly, but like, because we, we almost cut the case’s legs out from under it.

Nick Coleman [00:09:50]:
100%. And, and see, there’s one drastic thing in the way Social Security Disability practitioner runs a practice, a contingency fee to personal injury. The numbers just aren’t there to spend the amount of time that you would

Zack Glaser [00:10:04]:
Right.

Nick Coleman [00:10:04]:
On a case that’s a trucking case that’s worth $3 million. You spend hundreds of hours on that because at the end of the day, if you win, it’s big. Social Security, there’s some nuance to the fees, but really, for the most part, people are getting capped at $9,200 a case. Right. And so you just, you have the economics of it don’t make sense for you to spend hundreds of hours on a case. So, I’ll give you the prime example, and what happens is, is when these cases, after they go before an ALJ and you lose, there’s a tribunal that goes, that is above them.

Zack Glaser [00:10:38]:
I’m sorry, I’m going to interrupt you. I love, I love that concept because this is like attorneys get this of like you’re going to go in front of the ALJ, you’re going to lose, fine, like that’s just the step we have to go through. So, yeah, sorry to interrupt.

Nick Coleman [00:10:49]:
Yeah, yeah, so you’re gonna lose and then you’re, you’re in this what I call the administrative universe before you can get out and sue the administration. You’ve got these 4 stages. You go before the judge. That’s the 3rd stage. You lose. And then there’s this tribunal that, you know, nobody sees that you appeal to in Virginia, the Appeals Council.

Zack Glaser [00:11:10]:
Mm-hmm.

Nick Coleman [00:11:11]:
They release their numbers every year. And on average, in the last 10 years, there is a 15% remand rate, which is— it’s dismal. You have no chance. You go to federal court, it goes up. So, here’s the scenario. Jane’s case has just been denied by an ALJ. It’s hit your, it’s hit your desk. You’re on day 65.

Nick Coleman [00:11:31]:
That’s the deadline that you’ve got to get this in. You also have 5 cases that are gimmes on Friday, but you still need to prepare for them, right?

Zack Glaser [00:11:41]:
Mm-hmm.

Nick Coleman [00:11:42]:
Well, Jane’s case is a difficult, uh, what they think is fibromyalgia, but it’s also really possibly a more complicated degenerative muscles condition. And you’ve got some evidence, and it’s probably going to take some research and really to draft a well-drafted brief, it’s going to take you 8 hours. Well, are you going to spend 8 hours on Jane’s case? Are you going to dedicate that time to those 4 cases on Friday where you’re— if you just put a little bit of time, you’ll win all of them? That’s the economics of it. And so Jane’s case doesn’t get— doesn’t get taken care of. They call it in. And right, it’s a garbage brief that’s submitted.

Zack Glaser [00:12:18]:
To be clear, Jane doesn’t lose. We just extend the time considerably that we’re going to be doing Jane’s case.

Nick Coleman [00:12:27]:
Yeah. Yes.

Zack Glaser [00:12:28]:
Considerably. But if you had that moment, if you had that capability, then you can wrap that one up too. I think that’s the thing that’s interesting to me is the economics of that, almost the hours economics of that, of like, okay, well, if I can write a really sharp brief on this, which would take me so much time. I can get this thing done right now and Jane can get, get this, you know, handled more quickly. But like, we, we, we have to, we have to do the other ones too. We’re, you know, we’re doing the right thing, we’re making the right choices, but now with, with some technology, I mean, we can adjust our choices, you know?

Nick Coleman [00:13:07]:
And what it does is it honestly levels, uh, it’s kind of, kind of become cliché and cheesy, like democratizing justice. And what we’re really trying to do is make you, the attorneys, be able to effectively advocate equally amongst all of their clients. Right. And that’s not, that’s not what’s happening.

Zack Glaser [00:13:29]:
Yeah.

Nick Coleman [00:13:30]:
Because Jane’s case, yeah, you know, she’s got some serious conditions, but there’s, it’s, there’s a lot of nuance to it. It’s going to be difficult, but the economics of it don’t work for you to spend as much time on her case when you’ve got 4 winners that are going to produce maybe over $30,000 in fees. In a month, right? You’re gonna give some time to Jenny, but not the amount of time that it deserves.

Zack Glaser [00:13:52]:
That’s a fascinating concept when you’re, when you’re talking about democratizing. It’s not democratizing between, you know, one side and the other side. It’s democratizing it across your clients.

Nick Coleman [00:14:04]:
Yes.

Zack Glaser [00:14:05]:
That’s interesting. Okay. So the, I definitely wanted to talk to you about the building of this, the reason you build it, you know, And there is the aspect of we want to go faster, we want to do things better, but you built this yourself for you. And when you looked at this and you said, hey, I’ve got this great product, you also said, well, I want to turn this outward towards other people, sell it, let other people use it. And I think that’s a reasonably familiar idea for attorneys. I get honestly, I get people calling me all the time saying, hey, this is a, this is an interesting use case. I’m, I’m an attorney who’s done blank. And so talk to me about, about making that switch and turning the, the, uh, the product from internal to external.

Nick Coleman [00:14:54]:
I always, I’ve kind of had a knack for this in this practice area. I started out in this volume and doing administrative work, and then I migrated to doing the appellate work, which is more technical. So, actually doing litigations in the courts. So, I ended up becoming the go-to guy in Arkansas to send referrals for the appellate work because a lot of people were intimidated by going to actually doing— you go from administrative work to actually getting federal courts. A lot of people are intimidated by federal court level. I mean, it’s not just Social Security, it’s any, it’s any, yeah, any field.

Zack Glaser [00:15:24]:
It’s not where they’re comfortable. It’s not where they’ve been. It’s not where their wheelhouse necessarily, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just not their wheelhouse. Yeah.

Nick Coleman [00:15:30]:
So I kind of became a name myself just because of— I was younger. And then I was, I was handling one of the few just solely appellate practices in Arkansas. And I would just have so many different conversations with attorneys like, this is— I would love if I had this, I’d love to have that. And there were things that I was even doing, like I said before, OpenAI came out. And there were things that I was actually working out where we were on the cusp of OpenAI, where we’re using AWS Medical Comprehend, some of their natural language processing stuff before. And I was just hearing all this feedback from like people of what they wanted. And then when OpenAI came out, it made things that I was trying to do using regular expressions and natural language processing and things like that.

Zack Glaser [00:16:13]:
My God, Rick.

Nick Coleman [00:16:14]:
It just blew the doors off of it, right? Because what we’re trying to do is connect the dots between very technical medical data and overcomplex regulatory requirements, archaic things. Right. And so the big thing was like, I’ll give a short example and not get too technical, but like what you’re trying to find is one regulation to establish disability requires them to meet a musculoskeletal listing for the back. But the word is limited range of motion. With regular express disat, or, you know, NLP, it really had to be a one for one. To match that from the medical record. AI changed that because it can distinguish between, you know, like words between the same thing and still get you a conclusion on whether these particular conditions meet these requirements. And so that’s—

Zack Glaser [00:17:03]:
So for example, we’re saying instead of it just looking for literally the word limited, it’s maybe reduced.

Nick Coleman [00:17:10]:
Yes.

Zack Glaser [00:17:11]:
You know, it puts that into the bucket of like, we’re gonna flag every

Nick Coleman [00:17:14]:
synonym. They could think that would allow because And every electronic medical record has a template of how they use particular language to describe symptoms or objective findings within a record. Yeah. And with the way it was very difficult to do it beforehand. Now with AI, it knows it can distinguish between different words to make that match. And so that’s what— when I was like, oh, this is big. And then so I started building just when it was like 3. Was it ChatGPT 3.5, right?

Zack Glaser [00:17:46]:
Oh, man. Okay. Yeah.

Nick Coleman [00:17:48]:
Yeah, it was like, I guess that was like 5 years ago. So I was like, I started creating this prompt engineering, all this stuff, right? Like at the time, and I was like, this is amazing. And then I started doing some like thought leadership talking in this space. And then people were like, man, this is really— and I had kind of had the idea that I wanted to do this. But people were like, I want this, Nick, will you build this? And then I started kind of tinkering around some more. And then I just started building tools across the whole lifecycle of Social Security. And then I started having products and, and then, and then it became, and then I was trying to get a company off the ground, but I was actually running a practice and moonlighting as a tech founder at night. And it didn’t work because, and this is where it comes to like, dude, why don’t I just vibe code this stuff myself?

Zack Glaser [00:18:36]:
I, I think that’s, I think that’s the next question is, you know, you, you’ve, I, I don’t, I, I do want to call this vibe coding, but I also don’t want to call it vibe coding because You know, there’s a big spectrum of what I consider vibe coding. You know, some of it is like, oh, I just threw up an HTML visualization over here and we call it vibe coding. And then some of it is, you know, people designing something, vibe coding it, and then sending it off to engineers to like really, really sharpen it up. So, this really let you design all of this stuff and like test it. and kick it around and all that. And I think the question then is, yes, why would somebody— and you have to know, you have to think about this as a founder— why would somebody come to your product instead of just building it themselves? Like, for me, what, what, when do I decide to buy versus build?

Nick Coleman [00:19:31]:
I think there’s several applications of using AI where you don’t need to have the whole SaaS platform, and it’s small one-off cases, but With what we’re providing.

Zack Glaser [00:19:41]:
Mm-hmm.

Nick Coleman [00:19:42]:
There’s so many layers to it, whether it’s security to regulatory maintenance to something we’ll talk about later, as far as like getting feedback and getting community into, into making these products progressively better. It is just so difficult to build out a product like we have in our platform because Murphy’s Law is alive and well. Things go wrong every day. Every day they go wrong. Things that we don’t know until they go wrong, until customer tells us that they go wrong. Yeah.

Zack Glaser [00:20:18]:
And if you’re in court when a customer tells you that something went wrong and they need it, you know, recoded, what, what are you gonna do? Is just Zack Glazer sitting there in court vibe coding up a, a SaaS platform. And maybe it’s not a customer, maybe it’s your assistant.

Nick Coleman [00:20:33]:
All of it seems— because these, the, those front-end models have become so good at coding and, and prototyping, essentially, it seems like you can just run with these things and do everything. The thing is, is like, yes, it might create a good prototype, but are you going to have the time in the day to keep up with the maintenance of Keeping all the libraries up to date on that program? Are you going to be able to keep up with the regulatory updates? Well, security updates their programs all the time. We have a system where we have 2 SMEs right now, including myself. We stay on top of this to make sure that all of our regulatory requirements are aligned with what’s present. Right. And I just don’t— I’ve tried to do this, build this company as a solo practitioner. and tried to moonlight it and just did not work. And I just can’t imagine another busy practitioner being able to do, build software that they can rely upon and trust, uh, for, you know what I mean? It’s, yeah, it seems I do.

Zack Glaser [00:21:44]:
So I used to tell people when, when, you know, when I would meet with attorneys and they’d be like, I am, you know, building this, uh, Internal product and it’s an automation, or I’m the one that sets up my computers. I was the guy that set up my computers and the infrastructure in my office. Great. And I used to tell people, you can change your own oil in your car. I’ve got a big 250. I can change the oil in my truck in a heartbeat. I don’t have to lift it up. I just slide right under there, but I don’t do it because why? Somebody else can do it cheaper.

Zack Glaser [00:22:19]:
And better. The only reason to change your oil in your car is if you like doing it, and then it becomes— then it’s a hobby. Then it’s not, I’m actually working on my business. So if you’re setting up the computers and the infrastructure in your office, great, do it. But that’s a hobby. That’s not— that’s not you, you know, running your business. And I, I think now we’re talking about That’s a full functioning business, separate business. This is what you came across.

Zack Glaser [00:22:50]:
It’s like now you’re not just changing the oil in your car, you’re setting up a quick lube in your garage and you’re trying to change other people’s oil. And I— at that point, it is, it is a fully functioning business. So how do you do that? Like, and you found, I can’t run this business and practice. Well, conversely, how do you practice and run that business? And I think, I think that’s difficult. But what I liked about what you started with was, if you’re just creating tools, small one-off tools in your office, fantastic. Build that. Great. You know, like, like ease into that infrastructure.

Zack Glaser [00:23:26]:
But if you, if you need it to be a big functioning machine, I mean, design it, but maybe ship that out or buy it, you know?

Nick Coleman [00:23:34]:
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s probably more opportunities for solos and things to to like do that. But if you’re wanting to put this to where you need to have a program that needs to follow internal governance with AI, have other employees use it, I think that you’re gonna have a lot of headaches unless— Yeah. Unless you can hire an on-staff, like internal developers, which gets very expensive, can handle the cloud expenses involved with it and all of that. Mm-hmm. Then I think you’re gonna, I think you’re gonna run into A lot of headaches and you’re gonna end up spending a lot of money trying to build something where you thought it might be $50,000 and it turns into a million-dollar project and it never goes anywhere. And it happens.

Zack Glaser [00:24:18]:
Yeah, yeah, I absolutely. And I think it’s happened like that happens even prior to AI. I just think that 100% this question is really here. It’s been souped up because of the ability to spin things up so quickly. Like we can— I was talking to some people at a conference last night, some CEOs of some of these legal tech companies. And it’s, if you can build at the speed of thought, you know, like we can build at the speed of thought now. Like, how do we maintain this stuff? How do we, like, we’re going to get behind the 8-ball if you just don’t have experience with it and don’t have the ability to kind of focus, you know?

Nick Coleman [00:24:58]:
Yeah. And there’s just so many nuanced things that I didn’t even appreciate with product development that like, that I do appreciate now because I’m in the mix of it. Right. It’s like, you don’t know what you don’t know.

Zack Glaser [00:25:09]:
Yeah.

Nick Coleman [00:25:09]:
Right. It’s like you don’t with all these security measures, like it just, just privacy, like AI has been great because it, like we’ve said, like it makes things so easy, but it’s an illusion. It’s a, it’s illusion when you actually start trying to implement this in something that you’re going to use day to day. Right. Yeah.

Zack Glaser [00:25:30]:
Well, so one thing I kind of wanted to get to as well is the, when you can spin up a SaaS product, like if, let’s say I don’t want to sell it to other people and I do want to spin it up internally and I’m not super concerned, you know, I’m able to deal with the security and I hired somebody in-house. I’ve been thinking about the idea of like, what does a SaaS product bring to the table A collective SaaS product, a public SaaS product. What does that bring to the table that a local product that I built myself doesn’t? And it’s community. 100%. It’s, you know, it’s you and your other SMEs in the background, you know, making, keeping things up to date. But even more than that, it’s the, the user feedback loop that you can create in that scenario. Talk to me about that. I know you’ve had experience with the feedback loop.

Nick Coleman [00:26:23]:
Yeah, it’s vital for us. You know, a big thing with us, you know, right out of the gate is obviously it’s, it’s, it’s privacy and security with all attorneys, but we’re dealing with so much such sensitive medical data all the time. It’s always at the top of mind, right, on, on how we are using claimant information. The big thing right out of the gate is obviously like ZDR policies and, and ensuring that we’re following best practices so you can be in compliance with Model Rules of Professional Conduct 1.6, all that stuff, right? And so, right, we— and, and on training data and training using, using claimants’ data to train. And that’s like one of the first questions. We are not training our models like in a traditional sense. We’re using customer feedback to make our systems better, right? And so as we’ve explained that to our customers, they understand that It’s not just— their feedback is more critical than maybe what they’ve provided feedback to their case management software program. Yeah.

Nick Coleman [00:27:27]:
It’s like MyCase or Smokeball or whatever, you know what I mean? Like, I’ve used it. You give feedback, it is more critical because although I like to think I know everything about Social Security disability, I don’t. And there are going to be edge cases. There’s a million edge cases with the law, right? And it’s things that AI cannot That’s one thing where AI is not going to be able to know everything. It can suck up the whole internet, but it’s not going to know every edge case, whether it’s Social Security disability, you’re dealing with personal injury or mergers and acquisitions, whatever. There’s too many edge cases because it’s, it’s human interaction. Humans are unpredictable.

Zack Glaser [00:28:08]:
Right. And AI is not creative. You know, it may seem, it may feign creativity, but it’s not creative. So it’s not going to come up with a novel solution to the problem like a human will.

Nick Coleman [00:28:20]:
So, so a big thing that we try to establish early on when we onboard with our customers, and I think it helps that I’m an actual practitioner too when I’m telling these people, because I tell them, you know, I hate all the downfalls of these SaaS companies I’ve dealt with in the past. And so you really try to build the connections like, we’re not going to do that to When we ask for feedback, we mean it, because what you give us is going to fundamentally change how we build this product. And the things that you see, we’re going to fix that week. If there’s a problem with it not detecting this issue that is critical for your case, we’re going to fix it right then. Yeah. And so we have this feedback loop with all of our customers where they, they feel heard. I won’t name the companies, but I would tell these companies things for myself and it would just go into a void. Great.

Nick Coleman [00:29:09]:
Attorneys complaining again about our product. I don’t see it as complaints. I see it as that you are fundamentally making our product better for us, and then for you’re not just making the product better for you; you’re making that product better for twenty other attorneys across the country. And when you make the product better for them, it doesn’t just have the impact on the attorneys as a downstream effect because everything we’re building impacts. a claimant that is applying for Social Security disability benefits or has been denied benefits, and, and our team buys into that too.

Zack Glaser [00:29:44]:
Yeah.

Nick Coleman [00:29:44]:
And so, um, that’s the community we, we make with our, uh, attorney customers. And I say this, I was like, we don’t— this, some of these things I say seem kind of cheesy. Look, we’re not— that we do not look at this as a customer-vendor relationship. We really look at this as a partnership because we want to make these products work for you. We want these products to work for your clients. And so, you know, it’s vital for us.

Zack Glaser [00:30:17]:
I think you’ve hit on something there as a founder that the SaaS products writ large are going to have to make sure that they address. from my perspective is that if I can build something, if I can build a product that doesn’t listen to me, you know, I can build a product that doesn’t listen to me all day. I can build a product that doesn’t update and make my life better all day. But I think there’s a heightened importance on that user-facing, user feedback, that loop that we have to be building this to meet the user where they are, but also meet the user not where we want them to go, but where they want to go.

Nick Coleman [00:30:59]:
Yeah. And then I was about to touch on this. There’s a little bit of like having some humility too about building these tools, right? Because you want— like, I was kind of joking, I think I know everything. I don’t know anything. Like, I know I’m— I did really very, very well for myself in the Social Security disability practice, and I’m pretty tech savvy for attorneys. So you do kind of have an ego about yourself, right? And so What I’ve— the biggest thing for me was learning to listen. You don’t like— and, and once I’ve really kind of honed in on this and like listen to these customers and let, let them kind of guide the product, it’s really been beneficial for us. And not get too, you know, get your feelings hurt because they didn’t like it this way or whatever.

Nick Coleman [00:31:42]:
Like, that’s easy to do, right? Because this is my baby. It’s just like, just like with anybody who’s building a product. Right? They don’t know what they’re talking about.

Zack Glaser [00:31:50]:
But no, you should read my YouTube comments.

Nick Coleman [00:31:53]:
Yeah. But when you get to— and I think that’s with any founder who’s, who’s, who’s— this is their, you know, passion project. Like, there’s a lot of emotions tied with it. But once you can kind of— there’s— it’s good to be proud, have a lot of pride about your products. But

Zack Glaser [00:32:09]:
of course,

Nick Coleman [00:32:09]:
also,

Zack Glaser [00:32:10]:
you want to—

Nick Coleman [00:32:10]:
Also, it’s also good to be able to look at this new, like, From a neutral perspective and say, these, this feedback is crucial. You need to take this and accept it because ultimately it’s because we’ve done that and we’ve made ourselves have products that are really kicking butt in this particular market.

Zack Glaser [00:32:29]:
Love it. Well, Nick, I appreciate you, uh, uh, sharing your experience with, with me and, and I mean, like sharing your, your concept of, of this build versus buy with SaaS products and like what the, what the, um, the benefit is, because I think a lot of attorneys, a lot of people are looking at this and, you know, I, I met with Matt Spiegel the other day from Lawmatics and, and he was like, SaaS is dead, you know, because everybody can build so much. And, you know, whether or not that’s true, I think there’s a, there’s an argument that the community aspect of, of this and, and the maintenance aspect of this, like it’s, it’s not dead. But it’s a different animal now.

Nick Coleman [00:33:07]:
It definitely is. Um, but I still think there’s value in some platforms where, where, where you, where the human element, like the way we are using it in our product development, is still vital. Um, yeah.

Zack Glaser [00:33:20]:
Yeah.

Nick Coleman [00:33:20]:
So no, thank you very much for having me on the show. I’ve really enjoyed it.

Zack Glaser [00:33:24]:
Yeah, I appreciate it. And, and, uh, where can people find you? I imagine they can find you on LinkedIn and they can obviously go to lexmed.ai to, to check out you know, the product. But they can find you on LinkedIn. And

Nick Coleman [00:33:35]:
yeah, I’m very active on LinkedIn. And then you can go to our website, www.lexmed.ai.

Zack Glaser [00:33:41]:
Sounds good. Once again, Nick, thank you very much for being with me. I appreciate

Nick Coleman [00:33:44]:
it. Thank you.

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