Consumer-Centric Pricing; Document Assembly for Lawyers; & “Documentary History”

Episode Notes

Transcript

[Music]

Male 2: It’s the Legal Toolkit with Jared Correia, with guests Tony Thai and Ashley Carlisle.  We play documentary history and then Jared shares some of his favorite bargain bin buys.  Well, favorite maybe the wrong word, but certainly most deserving but first your host Jared Correia.

Jared Correia: It’s time for the Legal Toolkit Show, and yes it’s still called the Legal Toolkit Podcast even though I don’t have any stork beak pliers assessable in my home right now, although Christmas is coming.  I’m your host Jared Correia.  You’re stuck with me because Ellen DeGeneres was not available.  She’s yelling at a staff person right now.  But really, how hard is it to get the coffee order, right Tom?  I’m the CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting, a business management consulting service for attorneys and bar associations.  Find us online at redcavelegal.com.  I’m the CEO of Gideon Software.  We build chat bots so law firms can convert more leads and conversational document assembly tools, so law firms can build documents faster and more accurately. You can find out more about Gideon at gideonlegal.com.

Now before we get to our interview today with Tony Thai and Ashley Carlisle of HyperDraft, let’s talk about law firm pricing.  Law firm pricing is not all that transparent honestly.  If I’m a law firm client, a legal consumer, I’m likely greeted by fear and consternation when I walk into a lawyer’s office.  As we’ve gone over ad nauseam on this podcast, hourly billing still rules the day.  So service industry, you work X number of hours, you make X amount of money per hour, you multiply that easy peasy, right?  Everybody goes on their merry way.  Well, not likely, because attorneys, who are not charging for value or likely not going their merry way and also the clients are probably not going their merry way because they have no idea what they’re in for in terms of legal services.  So I’ve said this before, but in terms of legal clients, if you’re telling somebody or charging like $350, $400 an hour until their case is done, legal consumer has no idea when a case is done.  They don’t understand the legal process and they may be on the hook for tens of thousands of dollars and then they have no idea that that’s going to be the case and that may cause them to have an inability to pay down the line because whatever expectations they had, we’re not in the lines with reality or they may go ahead and choose another lawyer that offers an alternative pricing mechanism.  Now, don’t worry, this is not going to be yet another discussion of the death of the billable hour having called for that for too many years now with limited success as have many others, but this is more about a discussion of consumer-centric pricing.

So, if you look across the economy, pretty much everything is consumer centric.  This is the convenience economy.  It’s why corporations like GrubHub and Netflix and Amazon are thriving because they make it very easy for consumers to buy and consume things.  Lawyers do not but in the convenience economy, even as a service industry worker like lawyers, you need to be able to make things easier for your clients, you need to be able to give them what they want and that also relates to pricing, so your pricing as a law firm should be reflected for what your consumers want out of pricing and I’m not talking about giving away free legal services, right?  We are not going down to the level of yeah, be great to get free legal services, but legal services that represent more of a modern option for clients in terms of the value proposition that’s floating their way not just the law firms’ way because as we’ve talked about a million times, the billable hour presents the ability for attorneys to be inefficient and get paid more for it and consumers are not dumb.  They understand that.  I think that as a law firm you should be looking at consumer-centric pricing in a heavy way because it’s going to be one of the most important things differentiating law firms moving forward.  One of the major factors in the economy like ours currently —

(00:05:00)

— especially with the inflation being so high calls for recession that are coming down, its maybe already here, is that law firms to be able to separate themselves need to produce pricing mechanisms that are more in line with what consumers want and need.

So let’s talk about what that means.  Five things I think you want to be thinking of when you’re trying to develop consumer-centric pricing in your law firm first is that you need to be clear about what that pricing looks like because I said before, if I relay my hourly rate to a legal consumer, that’s almost meaningless to them because they don’t know how long it’s going to take to work on the case.  That’s like buying into a home renovation and the contractor tells you, “Hey, yeah, it’s going to be like, 400 bucks an hour to do this renovation and it will get done when we finish everything.”  Literally, no one is signing a contract for that because they want to know the total cost.  What’s it going to cost to do the entire renovation, not just what’s it going to cost per hour.  That would be a model that no one would opt for.  So we’ll talk about that in a second.  Hold that thought.  So when I talk about clarity with respect to lawyers, I really mean like two things.  The first is that it’s going to be clear in the sense that there’s a rate that’s outlined in the fee agreement or engagement agreement.  I prefer the term engagement agreement because it should be more engaging, right, and there’s also going to be a scope clause in the engagement agreement which talks about specifically what the attorney is going to be doing.  So, that’s a clear recitation of the price.  That’s also a clear recitation of what the legal work is going to be.  What’s the process?  What is representative of the legal process that is going to get this client from point A to point B in their claim?  And if your fee agreement or your engagement agreement is not clear about that, it’s time to dress that up.  Second thing which is another component of clarity is that you want to be clearly communicating what your fees are.  That means you’re talking about fees as soon as possible.

I know some attorneys that on their intake form will tell the clients like our average engagement is about X.  Are you willing to pay that for legal services, giving them a chance to opt out early because their option is not to take every single client that comes through the door.  They only want to take clients of the bona fide as to pay them.  So communicating this even at the engagement stage or the intake stage even before legal consumers talk to a law firm is a viable way to proceed and if you don’t do that, then I think you probably have the fee conversation during the initial consultation meeting and find out whether or not this person is willing to pay you and if they’re not willing to pay you what you need to get started whether that’s retainer or portion of a flat fee, whatever it is, you have the ability to and you can walk away and you should.  Third thing, I’ve talked about this before, total cost.  As a consumer, I’m very concerned about signing up for an arrangement where I don’t know what the total cost I’m going to pay this because that means it could be possible that I run out of money.  I only get half of what I need and this is how most lawyers bill because that’s how hourly billing works and that’s a dangerous game for lawyers to play as well as consumers because those consumers may walk away for an attorney who’s willing to approximate a total cost.

Now, you notice I use that word approximate because you may not be able to give a guaranteed total cost but if you can give the consumer some idea of what the total cost of the representation is going to be, that’s going to be really helpful.  Two other things in terms of what is reflective of consumer-centric fee, you need to give people options.  So, it doesn’t necessarily have to be that you offer hourly billing and that’s it.  You have flat fees as we’ve talked about before on the show is you can have subscriptions.  You can sell products, not just legal services but the thing that is readily apparent which not a lot of attorneys exercise is that you could mix this up.  You could have hybrid arrangements.  You have a hourly billing tied to a flat fee.  You could have subscriptions tied to products.  So lawyers are very myopic in the way they think of billing their clients.  It has to be one thing and not any other thing but if you start to mix and match, that might provide some viability for your specific client base.  Lastly, in terms of consumer-centric pricing, I think you want to be thinking about risk mitigation.

So, how does a consumer avoid the risk of paying for an open-ended arrangement like legal services?  There are many ways you can do this but a couple options would be a limited scope representation.  So you’re going to do components A, B, C, D and E of the legal service and you only do A, see how that goes.  If that works, we move on to B.  If that works, we move on to C.  That gives the consumer the option to get out at any breakpoint and also the lawyer as well if it’s not going particularly well.  The other thing I’ve seen law firms are success fees.  So I’m going to quote you a number of hours or a price and if I’m below that, I’m going to get a success fee like a bonus of sorts because I’ve completed the work more quickly or alternatively, I’m going to give you discounted rates whatever that rate maybe if I go over my projection.

(00:10:03)

So just to recap, in terms of consumer-centric fees, the things you want to be thinking about in your law practice or whether those rates are clear or they’re clearly communicated, whether or not you were laying the total cost of representation to your clients, whether or not you’re providing them options for services and whether or not your thoughts for risk mitigation for both you and the client.  Now, most attorneys try to aggressively avoid conversations about money but if you meet the moment head on, you’ll probably be able to generate more revenue.  You know, they say money talks but what they don’t tell you is that you also can’t be afraid to talk about money.  You know, it’s always money Joshua Lenon and he’s got this week’s Clio Legal Trends Report minute on tap next.

[Music]

Joshua Lenon: Here’s a fact about lawyers, who switched jobs in the last 12 months, 37% of them moved firms in pursuit of better work life balance.  I’m Joshua Lenon, Lawyer in Resident to Clio and this is just one finding from our recent Legal Trends Report.  Given the irregular schedules and long hours that lawyers often dedicate to their client, it’s no surprise that many are willing to leave in pursuit of a more manageable work life.  The unfortunate result is that staff turnover can be incredibly disruptive for both your firm and your clients.  For more information on what law firms can do to keep good people, download Clio’s Legal Trends report for free at clio.com/trends.  That’s Clio spelled C-L-I-O.com/trends.

[Music]

Jared Correia: Okay. Let’s ride the wave of another unscripted interview and see how this goes.  I’m cautiously optimistic.  It’s time to interview our guests.  Guests, plural, I said.  My guests today are Tony Thai and Ashley Carlisle.  Tony is the CEO and chief engineer HyperDraft and Ashley is head of marketing.  So, I never do this.  It’s like a promotional thing for people who come on the show because I think your services can probably sell themselves, but like I got to tell you I’m intrigued.  I went on the HyperDraft website today and what it says is HyperDraft 2.0 and it’s like put your email address in and I’m like I don’t know.  Should I?  Can you reveal anything about HyperDraft 2.0 or we still in like you can’t reveal nothing about HyperDraft 2.0.

Tony Thai: You know it’s funny every time we talk to you, there’s something else that’s like highly confidential secret that we’re going to tell about to push out.

Jared Correia: Why are you always accusing me?

Tony Thai: I’m always teasing — you know what’s funny?  I’ll share this with you and your listeners.  Since we took down the main website, you had more email signups than ever before which is hilarious because you’re like I just — now I need to know like before there was something here, but now there’s nothing and I need to know what’s happening next.  It’s just like —

Jared Correia: Yeah.  I’m intrigued 

Tony Thai: I think that’s the part of the strategy.  I mean you can thank Ashley for all of that.

Jared Correia: All right.  So, now that we’ve gone down this road, I want you guys talk a little about document management, document assembly.  So, can you give me like the rundown on HyperDraft 1.0?  Can we talk about that?

Tony Thai: HyderDraft 1.0 was solving for DocGen and DocGen kind of runs the gamut in terms of like self-serve, just basic mail merge-like features.  The second step is kind of like the visual builders in that, you know, will help you craft these things yourselves with some basic logic and then a third one is like fully serviced, you know, you think your contract express or hot docs where they have a pretty robust platform and then the way that they think about hyper draft is we’re all three buckets all in one.  So we provide any sort of level functionality that people want either self-serve to self manage to fully managed by us and so that was V1 of our solution in that.

Jared Correia: Got you.

Ashley Carlisle: You also build draft — he is too humble which is a marketing personnel.  I want to shake him sometimes to be like explain what you’re doing.

Jared Correia: Alright Ashley, tell me the real deal.

Ashley Carlisle: The real deal is Tony is very humble because he is the chief engineer of this and he created this for himself years ago.  Tony, are we at five year ago now?

Tony Thai: Five years, yeah.  Five or six years.

Ashley Carlisle: Yeah, so HyperDraft has been operating for five or six years now and Tony originally built it to run the gamut like he said, of all of kind of the different tiers of document automation that are out there to make sure all the functionality is there but also he added actual drafting features that lawyers would use.  So, redlining, precedent carousels, you name it, it’s actually in there.  So it’s not just a quick questionnaire and you get a document out.  You can still have the experience of kind of, you know, a lot of drafting and a lot of what lawyers pride and drafting is kind of like their expertise of crafting certain provisions and saving language they like over time.  You still get that experience in HyperDraft which I think is why people love it because you’re not just having a sterile questionnaire that you’re answering.  It is more interactive and you’re doing a lot of the stuff that you actually like about drafting.

(00:15:04)

Did I actually like drafting when I was practicing, it depends on the day, but Tony made it better, but he’s very harmful which as the marketing person, literally, I yell at him every day.

Jared Correia: Well, played.  I was promised a discussion on the history of document assembly.  I’m a big history person.  So —

Tony Thai: All right.

Jared Correia: So, talk to me about like where it was, where it is now, how do we get to this point and why do solutions like this need to exist?

Tony Thai: Where it was?  It started — I mean you can trace it back to people’s need to make money, right?  Like any solution, you got to think back and look back at people’s desire to make money and so it started with, yeah, invoicing.  So I worked for a telecom company.  You know, we negotiated this deal a few years ago with an IT company that were building technology — sorry, servicing technology that was built like 30, 40 years ago written on something called Cobalt, but it started with trying to generate invoices, right, billing and invoicing.  And so it started with the simple concept of mail merge, right?  Here are fields that you need to plug information into, let’s start there and lawyers really haven’t caught on to that for like decades, right?  We’ve never made use of it.  We had what we called the secretaries.

Jared Correia: We’re making this right now, mail merge.

Tony Thai: Yeah, mail merge.  You know what’s surprising to me, there’s still attorneys that don’t know mail merge is.

Jared Correia: Oh, there are, yeah absolutely.

Tony Thai: It blows my mind, but I would say origin stories starts with mail merge and then slowly people got to the scripting of like, what if I could do like simple event which by the way, you could still handle mail merge but I don’t need to get into that.  So, you know, people started writing very simple scripting and then it got to okay, let me script inside of Word documents, right?  Let me write like these complicated scripts on like, “Oh if this then throw this huge chunk of text in there” and more recently, it has gotten to the WYSIWYG, you know, self-serve visual builders.

Jared Correia: People might not know what WYSIWYG is.

Ashley Carlisle: Yeah, please define that Tony.

Tony Thai: What you see is what you get.  I forgot how old I am now.

Jared Correia: Yeah.

Tony Thai: Yeah.  You’re not that old.  Well, yeah, I mean more recently, I’d say the past 5, 10 years have been the kind of the visual coding, you know, WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get type of build or innovation and I think we’re right now on the time that we’re trying to pioneer which is the all-in-one automated solution where you feed it information and it figures out the forms for you. So, that’s I think the next stage is where, you know, what we’re trying to build out is the ability to talk to a system, interface with a system in a more natural way without having to deal with the complexities around learning how to CodeLogic because lawyers are not just very good at that.

Jared Correia: Yeah, absolutely.  All right, so like document assembly, document generation, whatever you want to call it, for my money the math seems pretty easy, right?  Like, if you can’t get through more work more quickly, you make more money and lawyers hate math, but that’s easy math.  Why don’t more law firms adopt document assembly software, like what’s going on?

Tony Thai: I think it’s snake oil man.  Like I think people are kind of burned by being snake — 

Jared Correia: Sassy take, yes.  Hit me.

Tony Thai: I mean I was taken by it, right?  Like I tried go down that rabbit hole to and then you realize, “Oh, I tried to save 20 hours.”  The expected time investment upfront for me is 55 hours in order to get this damn system up in place and even then it’s not perfect in order to save my 15 to 20 hours a month.

Jared Correia: Yeah.

Tony Thai: So lawyers do that math and they’re just like I’m not billing and it’s by the way risky, right, risky in a sense that you might not get an ROI on that.  You might abandon solution altogether which is what we usually see with our clients.  We’re coming in where, you know, people have been through some stuff, right, and they’re there gone through this relationship, Tony, it’s not worked out well.  I’m like but I’m different, you know, right?  I’m a different man.  So, well, you know, you’re coming in it.  It is usually an uphill battle for us because we usually go in and we’re like we know you’ve been through this whole gamut before, so how about we do it a little bit better and kind of save you some time in the sense that like you don’t have to put any time investment.  Just send us your forms and we’ll do it for you and so that’s the Delta, but to answer your —

Jared Correia: So, you’re the rebound software?

Ashley Carlisle: Yeah Tony, you’re the ultimate — we’re ultimate rebound.  Is that what you’re saying?  Is that our new tagline?  We’re the ultimate rebound.

Jared Correia: As you lawyer legal software, that’s working out.  I’ll help you guys with marketing.  You just say the word.

Tony Thai: I could image so many memes based on this figure.

Jared Correia: Let’s help.

Ashley Carlisle: Oh my goodness.

Jared Correia: So people have had a bad experience, they come into you, you’ll like, “Hey, we’ll take care it for you.”

(00:20:00)

Tony Thai: Yeah.

Ashley Carlisle: Yeah, they’ve been burned before by other providers.  Another thing which, Jared I’m sure you’ve heard those before, I think some lawyers especially older lawyers, like I don’t know if it’s a pride or ego thing, but they just can’t imagine that their work can be replicated.  They’re like what I do is so complicated, there’s no way you can do it.

Tony Thai: Oh, yeah.

Ashley Carlisle: And Tony and I always look at them, were like how do we kindly tell them like, “I’m sorry, you are smart.  You are special but we can replicate this.”  It’s a weird situation.

Jared Correia: All right.  So like one of the things you mentioned I wanted to tease out a little bit which is kind of like the setup for document simplicity.  Let’s say you had a firm who has never done this before and they’ve got like this set of documents, you know like help me, like what do I do.  They’re like I know you take it off their hands, but like do they have to have these documents finalized, how to get to that point like how do they tease out clauses they may not know even exist in these documents anymore like that’s going to be a challenge for law firms to do, right?

Tony Thai: It’s a challenge for us, but we ship all that work in-house to us or they outsource it to us basically.  So, give us two sets of that.  Basically, I have them do a little of the work and their homework is find 5 to 10 forms that you like, right?  Let’s say we’re doing an MSA, right, master services agreement, and they don’t have a form set up yet but they’re like, “But I know generally what I like, so start here, here’s nine other forms” and then you know, there’s no secret to it.  We run red lines.  We figure out how that works and you know which provisions they prefer with some optionality there.  And then the second phase is once we get that template down in that document questionnaire down, we have them show the entire database.  So whatever document database they’ve got and then perform our analysis on that to help provide additional optionality for them and say, “Hey you know what, you actually agree to this limitation of liability carved out a lot.  Do you want us to add that in?”  So that’s kind of that two-step phase onboarding strategy for their clients.

Jared Correia: That sounds like magic to a lot of attorneys, right, especially people who are like doing find and replace.

Tony Thai: It is and the reality of is like it’s just a lot of hard work on our end.  We’re just willing to do it and I think that that’s the major problem with legal tech these days is you’re still getting a lot of engineers dictating what lawyers do and it’s largely why we started this company because I was tired of engineers telling me that I should do it X or Y way, like there’s a more efficient way Tony.  Why don’t you write this in a JSON Object and then generate the documents this way every single time like that’s stupid, fuck it, no.  I’m not doing that.

Ashley Carlisle: It’s not what lawyers do.  You can’t change workflows like they’re so stubborn and everyone is different.  It has to go to them which is what I love because I’m bad at technology as we found in soundtrack here even and I can use HyperDraft because it just — it knows what I’m going to do.  It’s great because if it was hard, like if I would be not a great user, some of these other legal tech things I try to use like wholeheartedly I’m like so confused.  Within like two seconds, I’m like wait, what, what’s happening?

Jared Correia: This is a fun — you guys want to hang around for the next segment.  We’re going to do another segment after this.

Tony Thai: Yes.  Let’s do it.

Ashley Carlisle: Yeah.

Jared Correia: All right, it’s coming back.  Okay, so we’ll take one final sponsor break, so you can hear more about our sponsors and what they could do for your law practice.  Then stay tuned for the Rump Roast.  It’s even more supple than the roast beast.

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[Music]

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Jared Correia: Welcome everyone.  Here we are back again at the rear end of the Legal Toolkit.  It’s the Rump Roast.  That’s right.  It’s a grab bag of short-form topics all of my choosing.  Why do I get to pick, because I’m the host.  Today, you guys fucking love documents.  So I got a new trivia game for you all about documents.  We’re going to do something I’m going to call documentary history.  I also love documentaries.  I told you I loved history.  So we’re going to do a five-part quiz.

(00:25:00)

I’m going to name or I’m going to described a document, and it’s your job to pick out what it is and we got two people here.  So I have high expectations, and let me just say documents I’m defining those very broadly.  It doesn’t necessarily need to be a paper document.  So we may be talking about like, really old school documents which will get the lawyers and Cobalt coders in the audience really excited.  All right, here we go.  I’m going to describe something, you can tell me what it is if you know it.  If not, I’ll give you multiple choice.  First, this is a steel composed of granodiorite which I don’t even know what that is but that’s apparently some kind of stone, taking this from Wikipedia, inscribed with three versions of a decree issued in Memphis, Egypt, not Memphis, Tennessee in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic Dynasty on behalf of King Ptolemy the fifth.  The top and middle texts are an ancient Egyptian using hieroglyphics and what are called demotic scripts while the bottom is in ancient Greek.  The decree has only minor differences between the three versions making this the key, the key, the key to deciphering Egyptian scripts.  Is it the tabula rasa, is it the Rosetta Stone or is it the Ptolemaic decree?

Tony Thai: It’s not the Rosetta Stones, so it’s got to be C.

Ashley Carlisle: C.

Jared Correia: it is the Rosetta Stone.

Tony Thai: What?

Jared Correia: Yes.

Ashley Carlisle: Tony, you led us stray.

Tony Thai: Oh no.  How do I mess that up?  I didn’t think it was —

Jared Correia: Too much coding.

Tony Thai: It wasn’t blank slate.  What was — which what the word was?

Jared Correia: It was the third one.  The origin, it is from the Ptolemaic Dynasty in 196 BC.

Tony Thai: Well, (00:26:45) day.  I didn’t know that.

Jared Correia: Well, you know, we try to teach our audience as well on the Legal Toolkit Podcast.

Ashley Carlisle: Wow, I’m so behind on my history channel.

Jared Correia: Oh, there’s more.  Here we go.

Ashley Carlisle: Oh my goodness.  Okay.  Let’s gear it up.

Jared Correia: I really enjoy history.  I’m like really enjoying this.

Ashley Carlisle: So, would you have known the answer to this?

Jared Correia: Oh, absolutely.  All right, if you guys liked that one, here’s an even better one.

Tony Thai: All right, let’s go.  Let’s go.

Jared Correia: This is an ancient clay cylinder, now broken into several pieces on which is written a declaration in Akkadian cuneiform script in the name of (00:27:18) Achaemenid king Cyrus the Great, Cyrus the Great, that maybe the important part here. It dates from the 6th Century BC and was discovered in the ruins of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon in 1879.  It is currently in the British museum.  Is this document called the Persian platform, the akkadian absentia or the Cyrus Cylinder.  You can go visit this in the British Museum.

Tony Thai: Oh, I feel we should get like just some —

Jared Correia: I’m giving you some points just for listening to me because if I had this conversation, definitely they would just walk out of the room.  They’re like you’re an idiot and annoying.

Ashley Carlisle: I feel like my gut reaction is not going to be right.

Tony Thai: It’s your gut.

Ashley Carlisle: Then it’s B.

Jared Correia: The Akkadian absentia, I that you answer?  Is that your final answer?

Ashley Carlisle: Unfortunately yes.

Jared Correia: This sound totally made up, but this thing is actually called the Cyrus Cylinder.

Ashley Carlisle: How creative.

Jared Correia: All right, I got a more modern one for you.  I’m going to give you guys a break.  This document was a secret diplomatic communication issued from the German foreign office in January 1917 to propose a military alliance between Germany and Mexico if the United States entered World War I against Germany.  Mexico would recover Texas, Arizona and New Mexico.  This was intercepted and decoded by British intelligence.  Is this the Zimmerman Note, the Potsdam Post It or the Munich Memo.

Ashley Carlisle: I have a gut reaction but I was rolling the last one, so Tony if you want to —

Tony Thai: Use your gut.  I don’t think it’s —

Ashley Carlisle: I’m pretty sure because, you know, I’m from — I’m that Texan in this moment.  I’m from the great State of Texas.  I had 13 years of text and history and for some reason I know what the first one is.  I don’t know if it’s related to that, but I know what the first one is.  But I did just completely fail at the last question, so I’m very little confidence in my abilities on this question.

Jared Correia: I agree with your answer.  There’s no judgment here.

Tony Thai: Well, what’s answer?  Do you think it’s A?

Ashley Carlisle: Uh-huh and Jared it took everything not to like somehow secretly Google because I don’t like losing.

Jared Correia: You guys are being good.  A lot of people —

Ashley Carlisle: We’re trying.  We are trying.

Jared Correia: You are correct.  You are correct.

Ashley Carlisle: Yes!  See Texas history.

Jared Correia: This is Zimmerman —

Ashley Carlisle: Let’s go.

Jared Correia: No, and that would have sucked because like imagine if like Germany and Mexico are in alliance, maybe there’s no taco Tuesdays, maybe –

Tony Thai: What was C?

Jared Correia: Oh, the Munich Memo.  I totally made that up.

Ashley Carlisle: Yeah, I was like that’s not it.

Tony Thai: I’ve never heard of that before.

Ashley Carlisle: Because I’ve heard of Potsdam Post It, so what is that?  I’ve heard of that before, but I didn’t think –

(00:30:00)

Jared Correia: All right, I just made that up too.  That’s totally made up.

Ashley Carlisle: I know there’s the Potsdam Reporter or something might happened.

Jared Correia: Yes.

Ashley Carlisle: Yeah.  Okay.

Jared Correia: That’s correct.  I was trying to throw you up.  I didn’t succeed though because you got it right.

Ashley Carlisle: You don’t mean we’re still failing.

Tony Thai: We got to do trivia night at HyperDraft apparently.

Jared Correia: Oh, hell yeah.

Ashley Carlisle: Definitely.

Jared Correia: Just let me help out with that. Okay.  We got two more for you.  You’re still be over 500 here.  This is a tough one.  So, this is a slab of gray wax stone covered in runes that was allegedly discovered in Central Minnesota in 1898.  Olaf Oman who is a real person, a Swedish immigrant, reported that he unearthed from a field the largely rural Township of solemn in Douglas County.  It was later named after the nearest settlement.  The inscription purports to be a record left behind by Scandinavian explorers in the 14th century.  There has been drawn out debate regarding the stones authenticity.  This is the first scientific examination in 1910.  The scholarly consensus has classified it as a 19th century hoax.  Is this the Kensington Runestone, the Purple Rune or the Solem Hoax?  Kensington Runestone, Purple Rune or the Solem Hoax?

Tony Thai: I thought you were going to go down the history of Mormonism, but I —

Ashley Carlisle: You’re not on the right geographic area.

Tony Thai: Yeah.

Jared Correia: We need that faith.

Ashley Carlisle: Fun fact.  Document automation, legal document automation was technically started 1970s by BYU professors.

Jared Correia: Oh, perfect.  I thought that segue.

Tony Thai: Good that’s more (00:31:42) practice that one Jared.

Jared Correia: Nice drop.  Now, we could get to the —

Ashley Carlisle: Can I get some like pizzazz points?

Tony Thai: I had no idea what the answer is.  A or C?  Actually your call.

Ashley Carlisle: I think it’s C.

Tony Thai: All right, go for it.

Jared Correia: Good guess.  That’s actually it.  The Kensington Runestone.

Ashley Carlisle: Darn it.

Jared Correia: Super inetesting.

Ashley Carlisle: Tony no longer listens to me.

Tony Thai: By the way, what did the inscription say, like why was it a hoax.  Is it just like the guy that said like —

Jared Correia: No.

Tony Thai: — I found–

Jared Correia: Yeah, this guy just made it up.  It was supposed to be the fact that like people from like Scandinavia were in America, in Minnesota in like the 14th century but it’s still BS.  The guy just carved it.

Tony Thai: That’s a really lame hoax to do, like what clout does that give you.  At leats, some of these are religion around theirs, right?  Like lesser if that’s true.

Jared Correia: I think the answer is just as pretty smartphones so people have to get creative I guess.

Tony Thai: Got you.  Got you.

Jared Correia: I have one more for you.  I got one more for you.

Tony Thai: Let’s do it.

Ashley Carlisle: Let’s get this one.

Jared Correia: 40% is solid plus with Ashley’s pizzazz points, I think this gets you there, 50% if we get this one.  So, this document named after its creator is the first complete book printed from movable type.  This document has set the stage for print production moving forward.  Is it the Maltese McGuffin, the Gutenberg Bible or the Lutheran Hymnal?  Maltese McGuffin —

Tony Thai: B.

Jared Correia: Gutenberg Bible.

Tony Thai: Gutenberg.

Jared Correia: Yes. Tony, well done. Pulling it from the fire.

Tony Thai: Only because one of the best friends (00:33:12) is the Gutenberg and so he’s researching fun facts about his family.

Ashley Carlisle: As one does.  Just research fun facts about four family.

Tony Thai: No, no, wanted to figure out like what dark — we’re doing — well, I don’t want to get into this.

Jared Correia: Tony is like I like to deeply research my friends without them knowing about it.

Ashley Carlisle: Was this from the D&D preparation or something.

Tony Thai: Wow, you just (00:33:33).  I don’t even play D&D.  I feel insulted.

Jared Correia: Wow, that savage.  I’m insulted.  Let’s get it on here.

Ashley Carlisle: I apologize to everyone who is an active D&D player.  My husband does play.  It was a good joke.

Jared Correia: Thanks for apologizing to those losers to actually – thanks for coming on everybody.  This was fun.  You guys are pretty well.  That’s was a hard place.

Ashley Carlisle: That was mainly hard.

Tony Thai: Listen man, like you can’t just do it like that.  Now, we’re going to go around (00:34:00) trivia.  Way to go.  Team versus team.  I’m proposing it right now.

Jared Correia: Well, let’s do it.  We’ll come back and we’ll do more trivia.  Absolutely.  Evan is going to wrap up.  So, I’m going to say.  Thanks everybody for listening.  Tony, Ashley, thanks for coming on.  You guys were a lot of fun.

Ashley Carlisle: Thanks for having us.

Tony Thai: Thanks for having us on Jared.

Jared Correia: If you want to find outmore about Tony Thai, Ashley Carlisle and HyperDraft visit hyperdraftai.com.  That’s hyperdraftai.com.  Now for those of you sitting in your living room in Skiddo, California, I’ve got an amazing Spotify playlist for you which has been aggregated by our guests today, Tony and Ashley.  I’ve nothing to do with this.  That’s because it’s an L.A.-centered playlist and I hate L.A. as you know.  So this should be a real treat for everyone listening because I’m probably never going to play this playlist on my own and I’ve never would have created a playlist like this, but kudos to Tony and Ashley for both generating a playlist for me so I didn’t have to and then also getting at me with it.

(00:35:04)

Now, I don’t want to have the time to tell about how I once discovered a human liver on a shelf at Ocean State Job Lot.  So, I guess we’ll have to save that discussion for another day because we’re out of time on this particular episode of the Legal Toolkit Podcast.  This is Jared Correia reminding you that not everything tastes like chicken, like apricots for instance.  Apricots tastes like shit.

[Music]

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