Not All Leads Are Created Equal

Episode Notes

Transcript

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. I am Gyi Tsakalakis of AttorneySync. And I am at the largest legal tech conference in the world.

Conrad Saam:

And I’m Conrad Saam from Mockingbird. And I we’re going to have, say this again. I didn’t have anything come up with You had a terrible good fact. You and I had a terrible good fact.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You are wearing a red hat.

Conrad Saam:

I am pandering to the Boston crowd. I did watch three innings of one of the Mariners games and I still found baseball boring.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, it’s too soon for me because the Mariners took the tigers out of the playoffs in 15 innings in Seattle and I didn’t stay up to watch the whole thing.

Conrad Saam:

I did

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Because did you?

Conrad Saam:

Yeah.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And you weren’t even a baseball fan. I it ferous it put you to put you to bed.

Conrad Saam:

Yes. Sorry.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, we don’t just bash the local sports teams. We also talk about legal marketing here on Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing and we are here in Boston at CLioCon 2025. Conrad, what else are we talking about today?

Conrad Saam:

So as usual, we’re going to cover the news. A lot of that is going to be based on stuff that came out and was announced at ClioCon. And then we’re going to be talking about data, the importance of AI and whether or not small firms, small to medium sized firms can actually play the game.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lawyers data and money.

Announcer:

Hit it. Money makes and welcome to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing, teaching you how to promote market and make fat stacks for your legal practice here on Legal Talk Network.

Conrad Saam:

And we’re back. Alright. And first the news. Ok Gyi, welcome back. There have been a lot of discussions around ai. There are three announcements that are basically the same announcements about an implementation of AI with lead scoring, right? And that came out today or yesterday at the keynote. So Clio doing lead scoring. Can you tell us more about that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yes. And again, I’ll be honest with you, I’ve been to a lot of Clio cons and that was the most information packed keynote that I’ve ever seen. Jack Deliver, did a great job, but at least four or five different Clio products that I could count. And one of them, I’m not even sure which product it must be in Grow, right? Grow will now be doing lead scoring. And for folks that don’t know what lead scoring is, Conrad, can you give us a quick overview because we’re going to dive into lead scoring, right?

Conrad Saam:

We’re going to take a little bit of time to talk about lead scoring, but lead scoring is essentially doing what marketers have been telling you all along that not all leads are created equal. And therefore, and this is where we’re going to come back to this, it’s really important not to treat all leads the same.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right.

Conrad Saam:

So Clio doing lead scoring now in their grow product file Vine announced lead scoring through AI the other day.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yep.

Conrad Saam:

And also our good friends. Your very good friend.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

My very close friend. Very close

Conrad Saam:

Friend. And do you want to disclose?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah. So as we always do disclose that my economic interest in investing in and advising Lawmatics, they are doing lead scoring as well.

Conrad Saam:

So Lawmatics announced their lead scoring product 24 hours before Clay did.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Very strategic,

Conrad Saam:

Well played,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Very

Conrad Saam:

Strategic,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Matt

Conrad Saam:

Spiegel. But seriously guys, if you are running intake and intake management software and you are not doing lead scoring, honestly, you’re really bungling a really key part of marketing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And if you’re really interested in understanding more in depth about what Lawmatics is up to, you should head over to law Next where Bob Ambrogi covered it deeply and is also sitting here to our right. So we are pandering to Bob

Conrad Saam:

Love. We are pandering to Bob and he’s eavesdropping. I told you he’s wife tweeting everything we’re

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Talking about. It’s a great article Bob. Really nice job. And listeners should go and check that out. What other news we got there Conrad?

Conrad Saam:

Okay. Clio has also released their legal trends report.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We’re

Conrad Saam:

Going to have a full episode on the CLIA legal trends report. And Gyi, I’ll note that CLIA is no longer a sponsor of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. We’re not doing this just to pander to an advertiser. It’s because we think you guys really need to hear some of this conversation. But what’s the big point that came out of the CLIA legal trends report?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I think there’s a lot of big points, but the thing that’s most interesting to me, and this has been a theme here and I think it’s been a theme at many conferences where the topic has been ai, the pitch here for AI is that hours and days of legal work is now reduced to minutes and seconds. And so it begs the question for a lawyer that’s sitting there listening that bills by the hour in particular all of this time that I used to bill doing this stuff is now taking minutes and not hours. And how is that going to affect my business model and my utilization? Look, the optimistic camp, the Luddite fallacy camp is that there’s going to be all this new work that’s going to be opening up. I just interviewed the brilliant Ed Walters and one of the godfathers of

Conrad Saam:

Speaking of pandering, well done legal ai, good job that is kissing up at lunch or legal marketing at an unbelievable unprecedented rate.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well done. Well, I’m feeling very inspired because I just interviewed him. And not to put words in Ed’s mouth, you can go look at what Ed’s written and spoken about on this topic. I think he would say that, look, the AI is going to replace the crap work that lawyers do that lawyers don’t want to do anyway. And that frees them up to do the important work of legal. And so the abundance mindset would be that there’s plenty of unserved legal needs out there that lawyers will be able to now serve because they’ve got all this time. Now, the other side of that coin might be if you’re sitting there listening and you’re like, I’m a family lawyer in my local community, there’s only so many people getting divorced in my local community and now and I, I’m The Un-Billable time lawyer and now all this stuff that I used to bill for now is I can do in minutes and I can’t bill for it. And so it starts begging the question of what’s the business model? Is it project based? Is it value-based pricing? Is it some kind of new business model? And I think that to me is the thing that lawyers are going to have to address. And I think a lot of lawyers maybe are optimistic that maybe this is the death of the billable hour finally. But it’s something that a lot of lawyers are going to have to navigate that is going to be very uncomfortable for many in my opinion.

Conrad Saam:

So I know this is a new segment and we’re going way down

Gyi Tsakalakis:

A rabbit hole, but we’re here all day.

Conrad Saam:

We’re here all day. So strap in as we continue down the rabbit hole. I ran into Mark Britt yesterday. We had a quick conversation. I remember

Gyi Tsakalakis:

When tell the kids who Mark Britt is, tell

Conrad Saam:

The kids who, and for those of you who have not been in law for more than 10 years, Mark Britt was the founder of avo. He’s the person who dragged me into this industry. And I remember when I first met Mark, we did an interview, I can still remember where we were sitting and he was explaining to me how technology was going to close the justice gap. And you mentioned divorce, there are only so many people getting divorced, but you and I know as marketers, one of the most common questions we get from family lawyers is I need to find people who can afford me. And the promises, and this has been unfulfilled, really unfulfilled, is that there’s an opportunity to move down market and close the justice gap. AI is going to have some impact on that. How big that impact is, I don’t know. But coming back to the overall thesis of the Clio legal trends report, which is why we started down this rabbit hole, their big perspective is that growth is happening in law firms by making lawyers more productive. And law firms are not necessarily growing by headcount, but they’re more growing by efficiency, which means their revenue is growing, their revenue per lawyer has gone up dramatically. And that is a systemic change that they’re seeing across law firms.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And just to take that one step further, if your people cost is fixed because you’re not hiring more lawyers and your revenue’s going up, guess where that falls down onto the bottom line of profitability? And so increased opportunity and profitability for law firms. That’s the pitch.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, back to the news. The purpose of this segment was to talk about the news. A lot of acquisition talk from Clio, a lot of acquisition announcements. We have talked a lot about the consolidation that’s going on, the impact of private equity, et cetera. Then there was one very big announcement from Clio. What were the big announcements from an acquisition perspective?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, again, the recent one, and you sound like we’re pandering here at ClioCon, but think about this, the VX acquisition, which at the time, I don’t know when this is going to go live, but they’re still pending some regulatory, but they’ve been assured it’ll be done by the end of this month. So it’s clean close to the end. But you think VLX just happened months ago that this acquisition went down. They already have a product announcement with Clio Library. It’s mind bending to think the work that’s been going in to make that happen. But I think to me that’s the big game changer that, and Jack talked about this in the keynote, is this merger of the business of law context engineering with the practice of law. And so doing reliable legal research right inside a single platform. To me that acquisition of vle is a game changer. The data inside of that product is gold for them. There’s very few sources of reliable legal data the way that they have at Clio now. And so to me that’s the biggest acquisition. But there are some others share DO was acquired. I don’t know what the timing is on that one. And to the point though is that that’s enterprise, right? That’s upmarket. As Jack mentioned, they’re being pulled upmarket because

Conrad Saam:

That was great phraseology

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Really, really smooth that these big law firms have saw what these small law firms were benefiting from and they were demanding that Clio go up market.

Conrad Saam:

Whether that poll was genuine or whether it’s something that is being proactively done. I think that is one of my takeaways from this conference. Clio is really, and they were very clear, they are not abandoning the solo solo and small. They were very clear about that, but they are very deliberately being either pulled up market or targeting up

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Market. No, that’s right. And look, and Jack broke down some of the numbers. There’s a huge market of SMBs, their DNA is to serve those clients, but they’re going to be then in addition expanding to serve enterprise. And so the acquisition of Share do was a part of that. And I’ll be interesting to see how that is received. Because again, as we know, a lot of these larger enterprise firms, they either roll their own, they have their own technology infrastructure and teams. And so it’ll be interesting to see how they do that foray into enterprise.

Conrad Saam:

And all of you listening at home, you’ll note that we have wandered on about the news because Adam is not here telling us to wrap it up

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right

Conrad Saam:

When we come back, we are going to either talk about the plight of small firms in an era of AI and or lead scoring. And we’re back and we’re back, but we didn’t discuss what we were going to talk about.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I think let’s just talk about it. Let’s just talk about it. Let’s just go about it. So again, for me, I keep coming back to this. Look, it’s Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. Our world is a lot of direct to consumer. I think a lot of people would say smaller. In fact, in Clio they defined for, let’s use Cleo’s definitions. So Clio had, I think it is solo and Smalls is like one to 10 or 20 then which is 20 to a thousand. It was 20 to 220, 200 and then 200 to a thousand plus.

And our clients, some of them are in the solo small, some of ’em in the mid-size bandwidth, but primarily direct to consumer, not enterprise. You should come to these conferences, you should come to Cliocon because again, even if you’re not a Clio user, being around these people that are shaping the future and it’s going to have an impact on the entire market space, in my opinion, you start to think about, okay, I’m thinking about growing my firm and I’m like, this technology seems like it could be really helpful. We’ll start with lead scoring, right? You’re like, oh wow. Now the technology can tell me something like this is a lead that I want to get in front of right now. And Chase, and this is something I talked with Matt about a lot over lunch as well, is that Lawmatics, you can be like the technology’s identified that this is a good fit lead that I want to chase, prioritize it, and then build a workflow to not just collect more information from that lead, but maybe it even impacts how you follow up with the lead.

Conrad Saam:

And I’ll say this, this is a massive miss among law firms. We’ve talked about this from a philosophical point of you tend to think that if we just had more leads, we would be doing better. Well, you bungle how you follow up with your leads, but you also don’t recognize that a phone call lead is going to convert at a higher rate than a form fill lead. And all of those types of things, all leads are not created equal. So why on earth are you guys still following up with all leads in the same manner? And this is just taking that further extension, the notion that we have a single workflow, if you can identify that some leads are more important than others is just insane. And so I think for your firm, whether you’re using AI lead scoring, whether it’s Lawmatics or even if it’s Bill, the guy who answers the phone who can recognize that this is a much more important hot lead that we can then change the way we are following up amazingly important. And just think about the value of converting the higher value leads at a higher rate or the leads that you want to work with at a higher rate. You guys know this intellectually, but many people are not doing it. So being able to systematize this and follow up Lawmatics is an example of that. File Vine Clio, Clio grow. Changing the way you are following up at a systemic level with high value leads can be a game changer for your business.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And here’s the other part, and this is the part that’s unclear, and this is going to take us into a conversation about APIs and walled gardens and platform choices and all this stuff. The other thing that scoring leads provides you is to inform your marketing deployment. You and I have been talking about this forever is to say, Hey, look, when you have data on a lead record that you can use to make decisions about your media that you’re buying, that’s very powerful. I mean to me it’s table stakes. How can you spend media dollars without knowing if the leads that you’re generating are qualified? And even now, I think with the ai, you’re going to be able to even make more nuanced segmentation of the quality of the lead. Like hey, a

Conrad Saam:

Hundred percent.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And then to take that. And so that takes us to our step two, which is, okay, how are we going to take this data that’s been generated inside of our platform and get it out of platform to be able to inform the media platform that we’re buying from and to work with If you’ve got an agency partner or if you’ve got an in-house marketing team, you want to make that frictionless. So that, I mean, it has to be happening almost in real time. And then it brings us to this conversation, which Jack in his press conference, which was really awesome, I thought addressed this, that they’re still committed to open API for being able to get data out of Clio to inform other integration partners and platforms to be able to do stuff like this. And in fact, he said himself, I think he had said, how cool would it be to be able to say, Hey, Clio grow, I’ve got $10,000 to go spend, go identify where I should be deploying those resources and then actually take that money and go and spend it on different platforms.

Conrad Saam:

So we’re going to get back to that because I think that was the part, and I did not ask him a follow up question and I regret not asking that. I want to get to the plight of the $10,000 advertiser and whether or not that can work. But before we do that, I want to really, I want to give an example because I had to live this for a long time. We’re talking very kind of theoretically about different lead channels, different marketing channels, having different values, values, blah, blah, blah. It sounds like a great NBA kind of philosophical

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Exercise,

Conrad Saam:

But I live this, I mean Mark Bri was here. You guys know that people who come into you through directories have a propensity to be people who have been already rejected by law firms. They’re going to a directory and they’re contacting seven lawyers because they want someone to take their case. That is a pattern. I lived it when we were working in Ava. All of your leads are just crappy leads, blah, blah, blah. I don’t know that that applies to all the other directories, but I can’t imagine that it doesn’t. So it is very real. We also know that pay-per-click leads tend to do really, really well. Pay-per-click leads are when someone is in the buying mind frame. We also know that Google business profile leads tend to actually not be from Google business profile. They tend to be referrals. And so these leads are actually fundamentally very, very different. We’re not talking about small percentage points. There’s a very, very wide disparity among your marketing channels of the value of your leads based on the marketing channel and based on frankly how they contact you. And these are things that we don’t think about because law firms are just stuck in this. I just need more leads and we would be just fine. And it’s not, you just need more leads. You actually need more consultations

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And you need to be deploying your marketing resources and your budgets against those patterns of channels that are most effective. And so even though this is another example is you might find that this client persona, even though there’s lower volume, they’re actually more profitable. And so now you’re like, that’s a totally different way of looking at your business because as to your point, not all leads and not all clients are created equally, especially when you view that from a profitability standpoint.

Conrad Saam:

I’m going to go down one more rabbit hole working on what you just talked about. You mentioned some clients are more profitable. And this has come up recently and it’s why I wanted to highlight this. Your marketing in a perfect world should not be enough to get enough clients to meet your growth goals. It should be able to pick those clients, choose, be selective, be choosy about the clients that you have, which means your marketing budget is actually more than you need. But when you can be selective about your clients, whether it’s higher value matters or people that you like to work with or matters that you want to work on, that changes the dynamic of the firm instead of just having just enough marketing to reach our growth goals, which means we’re going to take anyone who’s qualified, right? There’s spectrum of qualified leads and I love to talk to those firms where they have too much marketing and they can be selective. And that is a beautiful position to be in. Okay, Gabe, coming back to what we promised to talk about, we asked Jack that question about the small law firm and data scarcity

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That why don’t you frame that for us? So tell us about, so let me set it up a little bit and then you can go a little deeper. So there’s this promise of this data that you’ve got is going to be able to help inform, we just set it ourselves. So you’ve got, you’re going to have lead data and client data that’s going to be able to help inform your marketing. To your point that you brought up, I’m a small firm. I’m doing, I don’t know, 10 new clients a month. I’m just going to make up numbers here. Sure. A hundred leads. That’s turning into 10 clients. Is that enough data for the machine to actually learn to be able to make an informed decision about where to spend your media dollars?

Conrad Saam:

And the answer to that is no. And that is the problem. This is the thing. So there is a promise of AI that presupposes,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I mean we had, hold on. We had this problem before ai, right? That’s true. Data scarcity is that’s an issue for even if a human being’s doing the analysis, statistically significant insights from marketing data is a problem. If you don’t have enough data. I mean, this is the pitch that agency, I mean we make that pitch. Scorpion makes that pitch. We’ve got all this

Conrad Saam:

Data

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That we can use to inform your marketing, but if you don’t have the data, there’s nothing to use to inform it.

Conrad Saam:

So this becomes a really interesting policy problem.

And it’s going to be very fascinating to see how this bubbles out over time. The policy, and you guys are rightly very protective of your own data and you are scared about sharing that data with the firm across the street. And rightly so. It’s why, Gyi, you and I believe in market exclusivity because otherwise I’m going to take the data from Fred and sell it to Mary and we’re going to do a better job for Mary than we are for Fred, even though they’re both my clients. And you guys are rightly terrified and protective of that. But the problem when you have this protection of your data is that if you don’t have a lot of data, you have nothing from which to make any learnings, whether it’s your pay-per-click strategies or what you can feed back into ai. And so the follow-up question yesterday to Jack during the press conference was around the sharing of the data and they were very clear that they do not share data.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And in fact, as listeners can, we’ll put a link,

Conrad Saam:

Oh boy, I know where you’re going with this.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And when we interviewed our friends previously from Clio and Scorpion, that same message was communicated by Scorpion. We do not use account data to train other firm’s accounts.

Conrad Saam:

And I believe I said bullshit,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You were thinking it at least

Conrad Saam:

Well, but see, this is why I’m thinking bullshit and I’m happy to say it now because that takes all of the value of Scorpion away. It does not make sense to me. And by the way, they used to say, we can’t give you access to your data because then we would be sharing all of your data with everyone else. So they were clearly putting it in the same place. The value, and I’m not a fan, but we did say this previously, and I’ll say it again. The value of Scorpion is that they have the biggest legal

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Marketing data maybe

Conrad Saam:

From pay-per-click. They do. They do. There’s huge value on that. The notion that they wouldn’t help their clients by sharing that data across accounts does not make any sense to me, nor from historically do I believe that’s how they have operated.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So let’s clarify this because I think this is important and maybe this nuance is getting lost. You and I are of the, well, I don’t want to speak for you, but I’m of the mindset,

Conrad Saam:

Go ahead.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That I’m like, yeah. One of the benefits of our agency is that we have data from multiple law firms. We are careful about who we’re working with and how we’re using that data and yada, yada, yada. And we’re very transparent about that. But I believe that it is an advantage of working with an agency that they have data across these accounts. So you’re not saying that they shouldn’t be using the data. Your issue is is that it’s like, well, they’re using the data to help both law firm A in the community in the same practice area, law firm B, law firm C, law firm D and 30 other law

Conrad Saam:

Firms. That’s my problem. And you and I, our pitch has always been that we’ll take the data from Chattanooga and we’ll apply it to Poughkeepsie and you’ll do better because we’ve got Chattanooga and 20 other markets and we know what works and we can apply it to Poughkeepsie. We’re just not going to take that second firm in Chattanooga, and that’s my beef with Scorpion. But they were very clear that they do not share data. We’ll see, the same thing came from Clio yesterday.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right.

Conrad Saam:

They do not share data.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

That’s right.

Conrad Saam:

And so the asset that you have then is prompts. It’s the ai, it’s what they have trained, But It’s taking a very, what can be a very small data set and putting it into a very well done, scalable prompt. I think you don’t have enough data for the small firm to really start optimizing at that point in time. And my concern is for that small and medium sized firm, not being able to win there. Interestingly, we talked about AVO earlier. We haven’t mentioned internet brands. Internet brands runs a bunch of legal brands.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

They get a lot of data too.

Conrad Saam:

There’s a lot of data. And if you go back and look at Indeed, they do hire data scientists, and you bet they won hundred percent share data across all of those platforms. And there is huge value in that for all of those end customers. The flip is most of you don’t realize that your data is being shared across all of those different brands of internet brands and that I take umbridge with.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Yeah, and look, I’m empathetic because it’s like you’re a solo small, mid-size law firm. You’re trying to focus on practicing law. You’ve got all this technology stuff’s hitting you and are you reading the fine print on every single end user agreement for all these different platforms that

Conrad Saam:

You’re not even reading the contract? Come on. We know this.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And so I think it matters. And so I’m trying to put my Kirby Oscar hat on here and say, look, Gyi, Conrad, some firms, you want to be the, I think they said the mad scientist. You want the mad scientist data informed decision making. You want to be deep in that this platform’s not for you, but for many law firms, they’re like, look, they’re like, it’s working for me. I get it. They’re working with my competition, but I’m hitting my, but there’s value. There’s value. I’m hitting my target cost per client. I’m hitting

Conrad Saam:

My no, no, no, because they don’t know that. This is where I get annoyed.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, you have full access to all of your data.

Conrad Saam:

They don’t know that they’re not doing that analysis. That’s what irks the crap out of me is that they literally said, we like clients who don’t want to be curious about their data. And that is problematic when you have a self-interested third party running your stuff. That’s my line that I draw.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, and I come back a big picture. My curiosity is really around this idea of these legal tech wars are heating up, right? Ranks seem to be closing. There’s consolidation, there’s acquisitions, especially across the big players. And this historic idea, and again, Jack expressed his commitment to it. Historically, we’ve had this open ecosystem of integration partners, and Jack said this too, which I think is an important to ask. Clio is very committed to the firms own their data. He said that very specific, we believe the data is the firms. It’s not Cleo’s

Conrad Saam:

And he’s right. We agree. We agree with that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Right?

Conrad Saam:

And there’s a limitation to that, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, I wonder if there’s an inconsistency, there’s a developing, maybe call it a vibe. There’s a developing vibe out there.

Conrad Saam:

Wow, that is very teenage vernacular

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You got going on. Yeah. To yeah, I’m trying to be hip. There’s this developing vibe out there that one, I’m going to just use a buzz phrase, one platform to rule them. All right? So the tech people will say, there’s an advantage of having all of your data in one platform and we can do the better features, better value drivers if all of your data is in a single platform. And frankly, I think there probably some truth to that.

Conrad Saam:

There’s a lot of truth to that because you know this because you’ve spent a ton of your client’s money putting their systems together spec by spec. How does this integrate with that? How do we move data from CallRail into this? You live that?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I do, but I’m like there is advantages to having it all in one spot. I don’t know if that one spot should be the, I think of BigQuery. BigQuery, it’s about as independent from all of this as you possibly can be. It’s not a practice management tool. It’s not a CRM tool. It’s not a legal research tool. And so it’s a database that you’re paying for, call it. It’s the digital dirt. And so I want my data out of these platforms so that I can marry it with this data from across all these other platforms versus everything. It just feels, it’s starting to feel like this one platform to rule ’em all. It’s very proprietary.

Conrad Saam:

It feels very Apple.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Exactly.

Conrad Saam:

It feels very Apple. I mean interestingly, and I will, and

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You look, Apple’s

Conrad Saam:

A very valuable company. So Apple is a very valuable, and I have this nice phone here and it’s great. I love it. And then we’ve got one filming us right now, but I’ll nail the quote because you didn’t, Jack did say Lea was arguably the world’s largest law firm.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, now you’re going to take us in a new direction, which I think is worth talking about.

Conrad Saam:

No, but it’s really talking about having all this in one ecosystem that works really seamlessly together. Being able to set up, doing all the setup that you and I have spent hundreds of thousands of our clients dollars on at a bespoke piecemeal level and making that a seamless, easy experience. There’s huge value in that. Totally. My wish for the small medium sized firm and medium here. I mean we’re sitting at Clio, medium to them is 200

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Lawyers. Yeah, 20 to 200.

Conrad Saam:

That’s a lot of lawyers. That is. So my wish for that very large segment of medium is to have an ability to have shared data that’s not related to your competitors. That’s the kind of holy, it’s the caution cautionary tale. That’s what I would like to

Gyi Tsakalakis:

See. Well, and I don’t even know where we are on time because who knows, but who cares

Conrad Saam:

Who? Adam typing, wrap.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Wrap it ups, who cares? You mentioned this. Clio is the largest law firm in the world. And when I was watching the keynote, I got that sense too, and I brought it up with Ed Walters who very artfully distinguish that his vision is not to empower legal services consumers necessarily, but to empower lawyers. He does believe that the lawyer expertise is essential to legal services clients having a good legal outcome. And I agree, but it does seem to feel like gosh, is part of the solution to this access to justice gap that keeps coming up a direct to consumer legal AI mind.

Conrad Saam:

Adam just told us to wrap it up and now we have to have a

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Longer set. You brought Adam. I know. Well, maybe we can make a second episode about this.

Conrad Saam:

Well, we can keep going and Adam can

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Kill us, right? Well, he’s not here in post fix Start Fix it in post. Come to the show, Adam.

Conrad Saam:

Okay, so why don’t you go a little bit further.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

So an idea that’s been out there is that the technology can actually provide the legal answer for some legal context. And look, we already know this. Consumers are going to chat GPT to ask their legal questions. And unfortunately because a combination of chat GPT isn’t there yet and hallucinations and yada yada yada, there’s a lot of bad information coming out of that. But the promise of a well-grounded, especially grounded in Clio Library, a grounded AI experience, GPT experience where a consumer could ask Clio the largest law firm in the world, an answer to a question and draft a document. Like imagine that seems to me that that is a part of the potential future for the access to justice issue. Because again, let’s face the facts here. Part of the access to justice issue is that people don’t have money to pay for the lawyer to do the

Conrad Saam:

Thing. This is justice gap question. And I mean this is what we’re delightfully tying this back to my Mark Brit quote from the very beginning of the show, how does this change the way lawyers work? And who’s already doing this? It’s hella divorce. And so it would be fascinating. And we haven’t done a dive into hella divorce. We haven’t talked to Aaron for a while.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, we invited Erin to lunch, Charlie Legal Marketing, and she ghosted us.

Conrad Saam:

She said, no,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

We love you, Erin.

Conrad Saam:

We will send, we’re huge

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Fans.

Conrad Saam:

Aaron, don’t misunderstand us. If you would like Erin Levine to please show up to the next Lunch Hour, Legal Marketing, her cell phone number, no. It’ll be interesting to see how she’s using AI to kind of bridge that gap. I mean, that is the most classic example. Family law. They always want to find people who can afford them. That’s their marketing key. Well, what does that look like when you can use AI to move down market? And how do lawyers play in that game? That is a story that has yet to be written.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And again, I think the abundance mindset is that there are going to be contexts. Technology can be a direct to consumer solver for, and there are going to be contexts, they’re going to require lawyers. But what is the overall impact on that? On the quote, pie of legal, and again, abundance mindset. People would be like, it’s just a bigger pie. There’s more new legal work to do. Lawyers can stop spending their time focusing on the crap part of legal work and deliver on the services that require legal expertise, require human involvement, require empathy, client service, the unreasonable hospitality. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I still, it’s kind of hazy in my mind and I know history is replete with examples. The speed with which this is happening I just think is unique and that a lot of lawyers aren’t able to move at that pace. And so there’s a question mark of what does the overall lawyer demand the expertise need look like in a largely tech enabled future?

Conrad Saam:

Alright, well we are here at Clio. The cheeseburgers are coming out right over here. Gyi and I are going to have to sign off. Thank God the listeners are saying it’s about time we’re going to have to sign off. This room is going to get very loud and very lunchy in about two minutes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

And if someone sent you this episode because they’re like, who the heck are these guys? Please do subscribe to Lunch Hour Legal Marketing podcast on your favorite podcast, widge Ma bobb wi Bobb, or check us out on YouTube if you want to see Conrad’s beautiful face staring at you. And those blue eyes and his red hat. Wow.

Conrad Saam:

Alright. Pandering, you can’t believe like a true marketer.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Until next time, Gyi and Conrad for Lunch Hour Legal marketing.

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