Tech, Automation, and Cybersecurity: A Pioneering Attorney’s Perspective

Episode Notes

Transcript

Adriana Linares:

Welcome to another episode of New Solo on Legal Talk Network. I’m your hostess, Adriana Linares. Very excited to chat with Kellam t Parks today. He’s an attorney based in Virginia Beach or in Virginia. His biggest office is in Virginia Beach. He’s going to tell us about that and I want to make sure and thank our dear friend of the podcast and of course of the entire legal talk network, Ernest Fon for introducing me to Kellam, who is a good friend of his, and they worked together on some projects that I hope we get to hear about. But hi Kellam, thank you for joining us today.

Kellam Parks:

Hey, thank you for the invite. Looking forward to talking to you.

Adriana Linares:

Me too. We’re going to talk hopefully having a law practice and growing it, talking about technology and infrastructure and then you are very much into cybersecurity and security and confidentiality and privacy for your clients, but I want you to talk to us about that for our law firms as well. I know that you launched your solo practice back in 2012, but have since then grown to a three Office 14 attorney firm in Virginia.

Kellam Parks:

Yeah, so I’ve been practicing law this year will make 2025 will be my 25th year. And I’ve worked for a lot of smaller firms, 10 attorney. My last firm that I was at before I started my firm in 2012 as a true solo, we had 30 attorneys, which is pretty big for a local firm. I really wanted to do things, so I really, at the time I thought I wanted to do credit reporting disputes, so I wanted to be a plaintiff lawyer in helping people fix errors on their credit reports. Couldn’t really do that at my other firm because we had so many business clients and we were conflicted out and represent a lot of banks and that kind of stuff. I also wanted to utilize modern technologies, and although my old firm wasn’t bad, it had a hundred people and the larger you are, the harder it is to adopt tech.

Adriana Linares:

I know that one,

Kellam Parks:

Right. I also wanted to use marketing, so I really couldn’t do any kind of individual marketing or even internet marketing because again, they have a lot of corporate clients and a little more traditional. And so sort of all those reasons. And my father, I’m the first one to go to college, but my father has always owned a business and so he had that entrepreneurial nature and I didn’t know I had it, but it turns out I have it. So for all those reasons, I left in 2012 and started my firm as a solo. Quickly found that nobody really cares about credit reporting errors as much as you would hope they would. Even when the big Equifax breach happened, that didn’t lead to the billions of dollars I thought I would make.

Adriana Linares:

I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I don’t think I’ve ever met a credit reporting focused. It’s so interesting. What a weird little nichey area of law.

Kellam Parks:

Yeah, there’s a handful. Usually they couple it with fair debt collection practices Act or consumer fraud, that kind of stuff.

Adriana Linares:

Okay, well maybe that’s more,

Kellam Parks:

But it’s definitely specialized and you have to go to federal court and you got to sue in federal court. You can’t really settle first, so it’s kind of a pain. So I started my firm as a solo. I have an older sister, and I convinced her to move down to be my right hand person. At the time, she wasn’t really happy where she was living at the time, and my goal was to do that and build up a family. I’ve been doing family law for a long time and I was going to build that up, hire some lawyers and go from there. And then about, and again, one of my big emphasis was to integrate technologies and software systems procedures, which is obviously what you do and why we could talk for hours your jam. Totally. And back then I was paperless and cloud-based, which is pretty radical in 2012, and it really set a great foundation for the firm. I grew a little bit, had hired an attorney, hired some staff, and then one of my former partners, Brandon Ziglar, who’s a good friend of mine, he and I have practiced together at two other firms before this one. He came to me in 2015 and said, Hey, look, I’m thinking about starting my own firm. You’ve been doing it. And the end of that conversation was sort of talking about maybe him buying in and now he and I are the two

Adriana Linares:

Oh, very cool

Kellam Parks:

Owners. And then it just sort of organically grew. We do a lot of different practice areas. We have a three legged stool approach of growth, which is we try to find good attorneys, lateral attorneys with a book of business, and if they’re not happy wherever they are for whatever reason, then we look for the second sort of leg is to find a geographic area that we want to expand into and we try to find an established attorney there and then build out around that. And the third leg we haven’t been successful at yet, but the third leg is trying to find older attorneys that are ready to retire or slow down. Because as you know, most of these older attorneys, if these solos, they don’t have anything to sell because it’s them.

Adriana Linares:

They think they don’t.

Kellam Parks:

They think they don’t, but if it’s really them and they’re ready to shut up, shut shop, and they haven’t built systems and procedures and it really is them, which unfortunately all of times it is.

Adriana Linares:

Well, right. They definitely don’t have systems and procedures, but they have a book of clients

Kellam Parks:

Of course, but usually it is tied to them. And so what our pitch is, Hey, if you want to quit, you want to stop practicing law or you just want to slow down instead of just shutting off the faucet, why don’t you join us? We’ll pay you a salary, we’ll pay you benefits. And if you want to practice law, practice law, if you don’t want to practice law, we’ll give you a cut of origination. Your job is to mentor our younger attorneys. Seems like a win-win, but we just haven’t found the right person yet.

Adriana Linares:

Yeah. Another thing I have not really heard about law firms doing, so what a great opportunity for you to reach out right now to anyone who knows attorneys in Virginia. Are you only Virginia?

Kellam Parks:

Yeah, so we’re eastern part of Virginia. Our main office is Virginia Beach, Virginia, and we’ve got another one right down the road in Chesapeake.

Adriana Linares:

Cool.

Kellam Parks:

And then we have an office in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, which is northeast, North Carolina, Eastern Virginia, and North Carolina is where we are right

Adriana Linares:

Now. So good for the attorney to be able to slowly retire. I think it’s hard for a lot of attorneys to just cold Turkey retire. So that’s just a brilliant business model. I love it.

Kellam Parks:

I appreciate that. So I mean, it makes sense. And again, we just haven’t found the right attorney and the right circumstances yet. So the first two models, how we grew, and so we found a lot of lawyers that they’re not making the money or they don’t like the environment or they don’t, we’re all about success means different things for different people. So we’re not all about you have to make us the most money and you have to be the most aggressive or you have to generate the most business. Look, if you want to work a little less than maybe another to my office, well then we can figure that out. I mean, there’s a minimum, but at the end of the day, there’s a path to where you can do good work and advance our firm and advance your own career and make the money you want to make and have that work-life balance, which we think is important. But at the same time, if you’re young and just want to work 80 hours a week and that’s what success looks like, you fine. Great. Eighties a little bit much, but that’s the gist. I was going to say. That’s a lot. I know. I know that’s too much. But that’s worked out pretty well for us. And so we’ve grown and we have, I think currently 14 lawyers, about 38 people.

Adriana Linares:

Wow.

Kellam Parks:

Yeah. So we’re really, really figuring it out day by day

Adriana Linares:

Mean. I hope you figured it out. It sounds like you have, but I’m sure there are all kinds of things you’re constantly having to maneuver. Kum, what is the name of your law firm?

Kellam Parks:

Sure, it’s Parks Ziegler, Z-E-I-G-L-E-R-P-L-L-C.

Adriana Linares:

Is your sister still working with you?

Kellam Parks:

She’s not. So she’s with us for a long time and in general what happened was we outgrew. We took her one position, which was everything, and then, oh, now we have so many people, we need a finance person. Oh, we have so many people now we need a dedicated intake. And so the position outgrew what she should be making and we could support. And so she found she’s now an operations manager for a global rigging company that happens to have a US presence. And so she transitioned to making more money, working less and probably less stress because law is

Adriana Linares:

Stressful. Law is stressful, but also sounds like you recognized the need to find those specialized and hopefully well-trained experts in those small areas that make law firms tick. I think this is something that is hard for lawyers that are building a practice because either one, they think they can do it themselves or kudos to you and your sister. They take that one person and just push them into all these corners where they’re really not comfortable. So congratulations for figuring that out at a time when obviously you needed to. And I’m sure you still follow those same kind of practices like you’re on this bus, I hate to use, but I’m going to, what’s the best seat to put you in? Not the one you fit in or get off the bus. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. Of course. Where do you

Kellam Parks:

Right person to, right seat. Right. So we use, to give you an example, and this goes with the conversation I think is so Brandon and I always like to say we were successful for a long time despite ourselves, meaning we’re not dumb. We treat people, we do a good job, we’re good attorneys, but we were figuring out, we have businesses outside of law, so we did know some business stuff, but we’re so busy practicing law and there’s so many different things to do that even though we had the right path, we couldn’t quite get to it or we didn’t have exactly the right thing and it wasn’t as efficient as it could be. And so about two years ago, we decided to hire a business coach. And so we liked the EOS system, the traction what? That

Adriana Linares:

Gino

Kellam Parks:

Wickman’s. So Gino Wickman’s a business guy that wrote a book called Traction

Adriana Linares:

Gino, not Gina. So Gino,

Kellam Parks:

Sorry, I talked so fast. Yeah, Wickman, W-I-C-K-M-A-N.

Adriana Linares:

Okay. EOS system.

Kellam Parks:

Yeah, the EOS. It’s entrepreneurial operations system and maybe operating, but it’s either operating or operational system. And what he did was he went out and looked at all these different business books and concepts and sort of distilled them down and came up with this is a lean, mean, most efficient way to run your business. Everything from how to run meetings to how do you pick your people to the KPIs and metrics. And both Brandon and I were familiar with that system and I know people and that use it. So we decided, okay, we’re going to do that. And so we looked at different, and EOS is a franchise, the guy’s built it pretty big. And so we looked at franchised coaches and we actually ended up choosing somebody who you may know, Stephanie Everett, who runs the Lawyerist. Oh, of

Adriana Linares:

Course, sure. Isn’t she wonderful?

Kellam Parks:

She’s great. And she as a lawyer and as somebody that ran her own law firm. And the Lawyerist obviously for those that don’t know, they do group coaching and do a fantastic job.

Adriana Linares:

And let me just for listeners, lawyerist.com, which we regularly mention on New Solo, we’re huge fans of the entire organization. They’re now merged with Affinity Consulting their family to us. So it’s a great group to either follow or get involved with. So Lawyerist kind like purist, but lawyerist.com.

Kellam Parks:

Yeah, they’re great. And actually Affinity Consulting is another group we’ve used. And so when Affinity bought Lawyerist to us and they merged, I said, oh, this is fantastic. Now I have both two of my favorite vendors. So Stephanie actually does some one-on-one coaching for firms of a certain size or certain need. And although she’s not EOS modeled, it’s just very similar concepts. And so she uses those and helps us. And it really helped us get more organized, better organized. We hired a chief operating officer the year before, so three years ago we hired a COO, which made a big difference. And we’ve gotten more organized, which has really helped. And so we have a marketing manager, we have an intake director, so we have these management positions because otherwise you can’t scale and grow. You just can’t. And so you’re not going to do that as a solo obviously, which is why my sister was sort of everything. And eventually you grow and have a more specialized need or more and right person, right seat. So I agree.

Adriana Linares:

I really want to focus on this very important point, which whether you’ve made it or not needs to be super clear. And we need to encourage attorneys to do this. And that is pay for professional help when you need it. And coaching and consulting is something that I think we don’t see enough of in legal, whether it’s an attorney just thinks they can do it all or they think they don’t have the money to pay a professional, which in turn, if you find the money or make the money, which you do have it, attorneys probably comes back to you tenfold. Or a lot of times they can’t find the right professional to help them. It’s amazing how many lawyers don’t realize there are legal technology consultants out there. I mean, there’s not a thousand of us, there’s like a hundred, but we’re out there. And I guess the thought of either posting to a listserv or asking your peers or somehow doing some research just doesn’t come as easy for. So I want to thank you for sharing with us that you recognize that bringing someone in from the outside to help was going to be important no matter what it would’ve cost. And I am sure these people aren’t, well, I know they’re not cheap. I had a Well, they’re

Kellam Parks:

Cheaper than doing it wrong. I mean, the thing is, is that how much money you make? And I tell that all the time. I say, look, whether you’re hourly, flat fee or contingency, figure out what your average case value is and figure out, and this is, look, the bottom line issue is most lawyers are bad business people because they don’t teach you the business of law, law school. They teach you law. Some of the best trial attorneys I know are horrible business people and they work much too hard because they don’t understand how to get business or they don’t understand how to convert the people to clients or they don’t understand how to grow their firm or deal with people or deal with the technologies. But at the end of the day, most likely if you’re a practicing lawyer, your best value is doing that or rainmaking or both. And so don’t set it. I’m a tech guy. I love tech. I’m a tech geek. Me fixing our firm’s printer, which I can do is a very bad use of my time. I’m the most overpaid IT person in the world. So don’t do that. Understanding that it’s money out of your pocket, but your time is the most valuable thing you’ve got and focus it on the highest value things you have.

Adriana Linares:

We should put a presentation together, you and I, Callum that’s just titled, don’t do that.

Kellam Parks:

I love it. I love Don’t do that. Don’t do that. I love it. I love it.

Adriana Linares:

All right, let’s take a quick break. I’m going to come back, ask you some good best practices and suggestions and ideas about security and confidentiality and practicing in the most secure environment that we can because that’s part of our job as a collective. I’m not a lawyer. I need to remind people. So when I say we, I mean the royal we. We’ll be right back and we’re back with Kellum Parks. We’ve had a great conversation so far, but now I want to really dig into your specialty or one of your specialties, kellum, which is cybersecurity. Now you’re normally doing that for clients and practicing as an attorney in cybersecurity among other things. But can you just give us, in this modern world with so much going on and all these programs that we’re subscribing to and integrating and using and old servers being replaced by cloud-based servers, just some tips and suggestions and ideas about the things that you see where law firms could do a better job.

Kellam Parks:

Yeah, of course. It’s funny is how I got into this practice area is that I’ve been involved in this for a long time. I chaired the Virginia State Bar’s special committee. Let’s see, special committee on legal technology and the future practice of law. And so as part of that, we got to talk about these issues and I taught a lot of CLEs on it, and eventually I met a cybersecurity attorney who said, you should really be doing this. And so I started doing it. I actually work, actually, I talked to a lot of lawyers about this stuff, but I also have a lot of law firm clients. I help businesses across all industries, especially in the medical world with HIPAA and that kind of stuff. So the gist is the bottom line is, and what I’ll say, and this goes back to one of the first things we talked about in section one, segment one, which is you need to hire a professional. So you don’t have to be a tech geek like me.

Adriana Linares:

Most lawyers don’t do that.

Kellam Parks:

Aren’t, don’t do that. I’m telling you, that’s the gold right there. So you don’t want your, and I always like to say you don’t want your nephew, Bob or your niece, Jane being your IT person, if that’s not their profession

Seems good.

You don’t want to do it yourself. You don’t want to play around with it because lawyers are big targets with actual, a lot of stuff is automated. So you have just AI bots and stuff looking

Adriana Linares:

On the internet,

Kellam Parks:

Bots, bots and bots. But as these will purposely target law firms, they know lawyers are generally not very technical savvy, especially small firms and solos.

Adriana Linares:

I say this all the time. We are known and again, the collective, we as soft targets,

Kellam Parks:

Yes

Adriana Linares:

We are, we are. We’re soft, easy to penetrate, squishy,

Kellam Parks:

And we have a lot of higher value data, right? Yes. So you have, that’s the issue.

Adriana Linares:

And that is the issue. And I will just say this, I’m just a small town attorney doing small town divorces. Nobody wants my data. They

Kellam Parks:

Of course they do because it doesn’t matter if the person’s got a social and a pulse identity theft, you can steal it. So it’s not

Adriana Linares:

Even if they don’t have a pulse, you can steal

Kellam Parks:

It, right? That’s even better then they wouldn’t notice. So number one thing I tell people all the time is make sure you have good IT assistants.

Adriana Linares:

Excellent.

Kellam Parks:

And then just some things you need to have a baseline education to know what to ask and know what’s what. Because unfortunately, there’s also a lot of small IT providers that aren’t great and a lot of look, even good MSPs, managed service providers, so they’re the people that set up your computer and then the people that maybe fix a problem, but maybe they don’t have cybersecurity savvy. So the baseline stuff you need to know because even if you say, I have my own server, well, you have an internet connection and if you’re using email, then you’re using some cloud service somewhere. Odds are using Dropbox or SharePoint or Box or whatever. If you have a practice management solution, these are all on the cloud and the cloud just means a server somewhere else. So you’ve got to be smart about it. And so base level is you should have a password manager.

Adriana Linares:

Thank you.

Kellam Parks:

That is non-negotiable. In my world. I really think it’s just a no-brainer. I like one password is the one I use. I used to use LastPass, they’ve had some security issues, they’re still fine. And what I also say by the way, is when you’re looking for any kind of solutions, tech solutions, whatever, if you literally Google best blank 2024, you can easily find the top three or four providers of anything.

Adriana Linares:

So

Kellam Parks:

I use one password, it doesn’t matter what you use,

Adriana Linares:

Doesn’t matter.

Kellam Parks:

Use

Adriana Linares:

Something that’s not your browser.

Kellam Parks:

Correct. What a password manager will do is it allows you to have one very secure password to manage all your passwords. Your password should be a pass phrase because length beats complexity. And so you want something that’s, I think the recommendation now is 14 to 16 characters long and you’re thinking, oh, I’ll never going to remember that. Sure you will. So the one I use all the time in my example is I love horses the most. And if you put I underscore L zero VE, you’re not going to forget. I love horses the most. No one’s going to ever guess. It won’t be able to be hacked. And then when you access the password manager, every single password you need for every single site, and last time I checked, I think I had 112, but each one has its own unique password that’s just randomly generated.

You don’t never need to remember it. And that way if Citibank is hacked and you have a Citibank account, they can’t get to your other stuff because they’re not the same. I can’t tell you how many businesses, including law firms have had security instances where one of their attorneys got hacked on Citibank, for instance. This is an example that happened. And then they use that same password for their 365. The thieves were saying, oh, I see this person. Oh, I wonder if their email’s this. I wonder if they use the same password. Oh, now I’m in their system.

Adriana Linares:

Super.

Kellam Parks:

And so password manager, strong password. Okay. Second is multifactor authentication needs to be enabled everywhere at all times, no exceptions. And if you’re going to do multifactor, if you have the option, I strongly advise using an app. So I like having the actual pass pass apps. I use Googles, it doesn’t matter. I don’t really like the ones that text you all the time. Because again, you could have, I don’t want to get too technical, but obviously if somebody sim swaps you, then you have an issue that your cell phone could be compromised and therefore the texts go. So that happens a lot of times with crypto. You take your phone to Verizon and then somebody at Verizon steals your sim and clones your sim, and next thing you know you’ve got problems. But the app really works well for that. So multifactor is another big one. And then again, IT professional’s really going to walk you through this, but you need to set up the proper level. You want to make sure for instance, you have the proper level of 365

Adriana Linares:

That

Kellam Parks:

You’re going to be able to have audit trails and you’re going to be able to turn on certain security features.

Adriana Linares:

And I’ll just take a minute to

Kellam Parks:

Please

Adriana Linares:

Mention, if you’ve been a listener of this podcast for a long time, you’re not supposed to be using Microsoft for home or school, you need a Microsoft Business 365 account

Kellam Parks:

For sure. Yes, of course.

Adriana Linares:

For all those reasons that you, just for all those reasons,

Kellam Parks:

Right? And I would say that if you’re, and I say a firm of any size I get, if you’re a small town lawyer doing just traffic tickets in a small town, USA, that’s one thing. But I think any law firm, any law firm that’s a law firm, I think you really do need sort of the extra layer of layer of protection such as we have for instance, used called EDR, so endpoint detection response. So we have SentinelOne set up and we actually have a cybersecurity trained MSP doing our firm, but again, we’re 40 people, three offices across two states. I get it. We’re more complex or robust and larger. But what they’ve set up is, so SentinelOne is basically just a piece of software that sits up on your system that uses machine learning to look at trends. So if gigabytes of data is coming out of your law firm at two in the morning, it’s going to trigger an alert.

If it’s anything weird, it’s got a million different points that looks at real time using all this non-human technology stuff. And then we pair that with a managed sock, so a security operations center. And so what that means is we have a 24 7 manned operation. So there’s humans that if at two in the morning EDR trips, they get alerted, they can then turn off our internet or they can then do something to protect the system until the next morning when our managed service provider is in operations and they can then get on the road and do whatever they need to do. And those aren’t cheap. You got to pay per seat, per person, that kind of thing. And this is my biggest challenge as a cybersecurity attorney is getting lawyers to understand that this is non-negotiable, that you wouldn’t think about not having malpractice insurance or general liability insurance or auto insurance. You’ve got to have cybersecurity insurance, which is another piece. Excellent. And you have to have these tools because the cost of having a data breach is not only crippling as a business, but you have certain legal obligations to notify people. And that’s what I do. So that’s my job.

Adriana Linares:

Can we also just mention, sorry, this is your job, so I just need you to say this. Just say Yes, that’s correct. All 50 states have breached notification laws and triggers, and you are not exempt from them because you’re a law firm.

Kellam Parks:

Oh, no. A hundred percent correct. And the difficult part is until we have a national law, which we don’t, unless you’re a specialty, like medical for instance is hipaa,

But each state has their own data breach law that has to do with where the consumer lives. So if you practice law in two states like we do, we have to comply with North Carolina, Virginia, no problem. But if we have a data breach and one of our clients moved to Colorado, I now have to comply with Colorado’s law, and they’re all different. Now, if you have cyber insurance, guess what? When you have an incident, you call them up, they’re going to give you a lawyer, they’re going to give you the tech people, they’re going to handle it, and it’s all covered. The other thing I’ll say about cybersecurity insurance is unfortunately it’s not a standard policy yet. So the terms and conditions and exclusions are different policy to policy. And there’s a handful of good providers that I recommend, and there’s a whole lot. I don’t. And so sometimes you’re paying a lot of money for a policy that turns out to be garbage. You don’t know.

Adriana Linares:

Yeah, that’s true. I always tell attorneys, make sure you understand what you’re not going to get, What you are going to get makes sense. You’re like, okay, that all sounds good. But then you have to really ask, what am I not getting? And really it’s research and it’s just important due diligence.

Kellam Parks:

And so when I say that I’m a cybersecurity attorney, people say, well, what does that mean? What it means? What I do is, so I actually work with businesses across, and if it’s in Virginia and North Carolina, I have a North Carolina attorneys. I’m providing legal advice, but I actually work with companies all over the United States. Then it’s just consulting.

Just simply say, like you say, I’m not providing you legal advice, but that’s what it is. So I help businesses. I bring in an IT company, I help them figure out what their environment is. I come up with a data breach avoidance plan, an incident response plan, get them insurance, make sure they know what’s going on, do a data map. It’s just planning to protect themselves. And so the other thing I’ll say about law firms, no matter what state you’re in, I guarantee you that you have an ethical obligation to protect client confidences, right? That’s sort of a universal,

You don’t, in most states, and I forgot the number, I haven’t looked it up recently, but most states, their ethical rules say that you have a duty to take reasonable precautions to secure client data. So if you don’t take a reasonable step, which unfortunately a fair number of small solo lawyers, these small town lawyers that we talk about, they haven’t taken reasonable steps. They don’t have a password on their firewall. They’re squishy, soft, squishy targets. And the problem is not only can it affect your business, but you potentially could, you could lose your license. So it’s your livelihood as well as business and your client data and lose confidence of your clients. So at the end of the day, I go back to point number one, which just hire somebody who knows what they’re doing and they will get you. I mean, between that and having good cybersecurity insurance, you should be okay. And then if you want to take the extra step, hire somebody like me or any cybersecurity attorney that knows what they’re doing and could come in and give you the lay of the land and help you plan, but just you have to take reasonable steps. And unfortunately, again, they don’t teach this stuff in law school. Most lawyers are not particularly tech savvy. And it’s interesting because I always found maybe younger lawyers would be, but my,

Adriana Linares:

No, they’re not.

Kellam Parks:

No. They use it more.

Adriana Linares:

That’s it. They’re not afraid of it.

Kellam Parks:

They’re not afraid of it, but they’re also not as cognizant of its risks.

Adriana Linares:

I say this all the time,

Kellam Parks:

It’s true. But yeah. So bottom line, hire an IT person, password protect stuff, have them multifactor authentication, and then cyber returns. And train your people. Yeah, train your people

Adriana Linares:

For sure. Train your, train people on risks. Because the biggest problem, your technology is not your problem. Your people are your problem.

Kellam Parks:

Almost always. Yeah. So we have quarterly mandatory training that we have a third company that sends training in. It’s not that expensive to get, we have phishing tests that come in to test our people.

Adriana Linares:

Oh, good. Penetration tests.

Kellam Parks:

Good. And have, as you can imagine, ours is pretty in depth because it’s what I do. But we have a technology bring our device policy, and we have a technology use policy, and we just train it and train it and train it because your people are your weakest link. And I don’t mean that pejoratively, it’s just that even look, my own attorneys, you just click something. I didn’t think about it. We’re human, we get tired, we skipped something.

Adriana Linares:

Kellum, you might be interested to know that I have my CIPT from the I-A-P-P-I

Kellam Parks:

Interested. I’m actually looking into getting some certification myself because I’m not yet, but that’s

Adriana Linares:

Really awesome. There’s a lot of great lawyers. They don’t do the CIPT as much as they do the CI PP.

Kellam Parks:

That’s what I would be doing. I wouldn’t be doing the pt.

Adriana Linares:

No, that’s cool. I think you’d have no trouble passing and getting

Kellam Parks:

Certified. It’s just time. Yeah, I’m not afraid of it. It’s just, oh, I got to don’t need it for what I do. But it’s one of those things that,

Adriana Linares:

Well, you would like the group, the peer group that you,

Anyway, you gave us a great segue to talk about technology. When we come back from this quick break with some messages from our sponsors. I’ll be right back with Kellam T parks. Alright, we’re back. You had just mentioned that you’re a tech guy and you’ve mentioned several times that technology is an important part to the success of your firm, and that was something that actually catapulted you into a solo practices you couldn’t use and get the technology that you wanted at the firms you were at. So tell us a little bit about your tech journey, what you’re using at your firm, how it’s just, oh God, it’s so important for efficiency and collaboration and client satisfaction. We love hearing from attorneys on this topic.

Kellam Parks:

Sure. So I’ve always been a computer guy, so even, and I tell my daughter who turns, I’m aging myself down, but she turns 20 next month, but I tell her all the time, I said, look, you don’t understand how cool I would be today as a 12-year-old and how uncool I was in the eighties as a 12-year-old because I was so into computers back then and that was not a cool thing to be into. But I’ve always been into it. I’m a computer, computer game. I like computer stuff. I use technology all over the place. And it was frustrating getting into the legal community because as a professional that tries to help lawyers. I’m sure you encounter that A lot of lawyers are Luddites and behind the time and they don’t want to hate.

Adriana Linares:

Very unfortunate. For me,

Kellam Parks:

The industry is slow to adopt even otherwise. Courts are, don’t even get me started on our remote appearances and paperless and stuff. We still have paper. You can’t do paperless in most of the courts in Virginia still, which drives me

Adriana Linares:

Insane. Wow. Yeah.

Kellam Parks:

Drives me nuts. So I’ve always been into that, but my firms have never really focused on it. So when I decided that I wanted to start my own firm, that was one of the reasons, and I said, look, I’m going to be paperless. I’m going to be cloud-based, which was pretty radical in 2012.

Adriana Linares:

Yeah, definitely. You were on another planet.

Kellam Parks:

It was interesting. So one of the primary things that I always tell lawyers is, you need a practice management system.

Adriana Linares:

Duh,

Kellam Parks:

Period. Well, how many don’t? What’s your practice management system? What do you mean use System? I

Use word, I use Word, I use Outlook. I had one law firm that was using their A OL email

Adriana Linares:

To

Kellam Parks:

Run their

Adriana Linares:

Law firm. I use all the time.

Kellam Parks:

And as a cybersecurity attorney, that frightens the gart as

Adriana Linares:

It should.

Kellam Parks:

But when I did in 2012, there was really only three practice management solutions back then, which is just crazy for me to think about. So I did that, which was paperless, which one of the examples I give all the time is I have a standard quick part of my emails that when I get into a case with any attorney, it’s a standard thing that says, Hey, we’re paperless. You have permission to serve me electronically. I’d like to communicate email and serve you electronically.

Adriana Linares:

Oh, very good’s a great tip.

Kellam Parks:

Yeah, because all we do with paper, all we do with paper, scan it and trash it. And if you fax it to me, it just looks worse. So let’s actually be paperless. And in 2012, almost universally, every attorney would say no.

Adriana Linares:

Right?

Kellam Parks:

And I’m happy to report that in coming up on 2025, most attorneys stay. Yes, not all of them

Adriana Linares:

Strides, small strides, but here we go. But here we go. Moving into modern

Kellam Parks:

Times.

Adriana Linares:

I know today we’re much better and I’m very

Kellam Parks:

Happy. No, we’re so much better. Which is nice. So we’ve been cloud-based practice for a while. Our first practice management solution was Clio. We outgrew Clio because we have so many different practice areas. We needed more robust reporting. We wanted integrated accounting, some things that Clio didn’t have at the time. And so we switched over to fy, which is a Salesforce based product that ended up not working out well for us. It was, I

Adriana Linares:

Can tell you why.

Kellam Parks:

Yeah, look, if you’re large and I mean the whole thing is you really need to be even larger than we are. I would say don’t do it. Don’t even look at it unless you have a hundred people. And then even then, if you don’t have a Salesforce admin tech person, but look, if you have the resources to modify a Salesforce product, then it’ll do anything you want it to do. But forget it out. And as a lawyer, it’s hard. It’s just hard. So we moved away from that. We’re now with Carrot Legal, which used to be called Zola Suites, which we really like. So we went live in September of last year in 23. It’s great. It has integrated accounting, it’s got its own document management system, it’s got integrated emails, it’s got the guts of what we need. It also is the same company that own Hot Docs. So foreign generation is great. They just added the feature of having automation and workflows, which is great. So we’ve been really happy with them. I’m happy to say.

Adriana Linares:

Love to hear that.

Kellam Parks:

So we are integrating, so the baseline is that we’re paperless and cloud-based. We’re on the cloud. So it’s a Microsoft 365 environment. All of our attorneys and staff have laptops which are synced up with a docking station so that they can be portable if they need to be. We use, again, the hot docs form generation. So we’re very big on trying to systematize and proceduralize as much as possible because although lawyers seem to think that every case is different, in reality, 90 to 95% of every case is the same. So a divorce is a divorce is a divorce. You may have a million different issues in the divorce, but they’re all, you can tweak those still divorce. It’s still a divorce. And so we do a lot of those. So we have workflows set up, we have automations, we have tasks, we have, the gist is we just try to automate. So we use Lawmatics for both our intake and our background CRM and we use Carrot for our practice management and we use Outlook for our email.

Adriana Linares:

And

Kellam Parks:

Those are really three biggest tools. 365 environment for all that

Adriana Linares:

Stuff. Great. What do you use for PDF manipulation?

Kellam Parks:

Right now we’re using Adobe. We were looking into some other options. I don’t know if we’re going to switch, but

Adriana Linares:

It’s a Cadillac I’d stated.

Kellam Parks:

It is. It is. It’s expensive Cadillac, but that’s where we’re

Adriana Linares:

For now. It’s funny, I just did a New Solo launch consult this morning and I said, okay, here’s what a domain name is going to cost you. Here’s what Microsoft 365 is going to cost you. Here’s what a case management program is going to cost you, and here’s what Adobe Acrobat Pro is going to cost you. It seems like the most expensive, but if you really use it to the hilt, it’s worth every penny. So yeah, it it’s lopsided, right? You pay $20 a month for that and it does a certain set of useful things, and then you pay 13 to $25 a month through Microsoft 365, which does a thousand things. Okay. Could you explain to us the importance of, but begin with what is a workflow? And especially when you’re working with other people? Workflows and task lists have come up a lot over the past couple years because today’s modern practice management programs are really pushing on them for very good reason. But I think a lot of attorneys still don’t grasp what we mean by a workflow.

Kellam Parks:

Sure, absolutely. And that’s one thing that Lit Fify did very well, and we spent a lot of time building that. We’re duplicating now into Carrot because Carrot just launched that ability in last three, four or five months. So what a workflow is basically it’s a way for you to look at what the path of a case is going to be. So sort of the way LiFi did it, which I liked was each type of case, you could set up stages of the case. So pre-litigation, first stage of litigation through discovery, second stage of litigation, appeals, whatever. And under each stage you could identify what’s going to happen. And under each, you can have automated actions, you can have reminders, you can set up tasks that once the tasks are finished, it will trigger the next step. And that’s the workflow. So a good example that I like to give is discovery. So in every civil litigation case in Virginia, you have the standard discovery rules. And so if you’re going to issue discovery, you’re going to issue interrogatories, request production documents, whatever. Once they’re issued, the other side has a certain amount of time to respond depending on how you transmit them. So it’s 21, 24, 28 days depending on what’s going on. So let’s say 21 days.

So once somebody issues the discovery, they would check a box to say discovery issue. And then the system automatically on the 22nd day says, Hey, did they answer discovery? And if the answer is no, you can actually check a box and then at the very base level it can say, oh, you need to send a deficiency letter.

Adriana Linares:

If not, then this

Kellam Parks:

Exactly. But

Adriana Linares:

Then what’s if yes, then this,

Kellam Parks:

Right? And then with hot docs, which is why we like Carrot. One of the reasons we like Carrot is that we have the workflows, but we can also marry it with hot docs. And so we’ve

Adriana Linares:

Created

Kellam Parks:

A form that’s our standard deficiency letter.

Adriana Linares:

We

Kellam Parks:

Check the box and then it gives us the form that you can then fill in. And because its carrot is by the same company, it actually pulls and fills the information

Adriana Linares:

Data from

Kellam Parks:

Carrot, from the matter into hot docs. And you don’t even have to do that. And then it can be okay, and then you send a deficient letter and let’s say that your standard practice is to give them seven days, and then on the eighth day it says, did they respond to the letter? And if the answer is no, it’s like, oh, now I need to do a motion to compel. Well, those are standard fill in the blank for the form, but it’s the same thing. And so you can even do standard set of discovery, Hey, time to issue discovery. What kind of case is it? Oh, it’s a child custody case. It’ll give you the standard set of discovery and then it’ll even again pull in the information. And so that marries the workflow with form generation,

Adriana Linares:

With the automation

Kellam Parks:

And that amount of time, especially now, I also think hourly work is bad. I think it’s a bad business model. And we’re moving,

Adriana Linares:

It’s funny how we all say it. We think it’s

Kellam Parks:

Bad. Well, we do a lot of it, so I feel bad, but it breeds inefficiencies. But especially if from an economical point of view, if you’re flat fee or contingency efficiency is how you make money. Now you should be as efficient anyway, but from your own selfish point of view, that’s the way to do it. And so the more efficient you can be, the more streamlined you could be, the better off you’re going to be.

Adriana Linares:

I will say in defensive attorneys, one of the former presidents of the Florida bar, John Stewart used to say, we’d have this conversation all the time. He was very tech forward and always pushing best technology practice for attorneys. He would just constantly say, my clients don’t want a flat rate. They want billed by the hour so they can see what we’re doing. And they can, so in defensive attorneys who have those clients, okay, we’re going to give you a buy. But on the other side of the coin, really the amount of time, I mean just hearing you walk through that process in an automated step-by-step way must be making attorneys go, oh yeah, oh yeah. Oh yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Now, I guess what I really just want to push is these are dreams that attorneys have about how to run their practices.

What if I could, and these technologies have been around for a really long time, but I think today more than ever, they are so well integrated into affordable, modern case management systems that if you have a modern case management system, it has these abilities in it and you need to make sure you’re using it. That’s kind of everything I wanted to say is here’s an attorney who’s done it, and it does take time to set that up. I think it’s important that you just mentioned that for a second. You have nine areas of practice, which means you had to map out nine if not more. When you get into the sub areas of practice task and lists and workflows in order to put that in there, but look at how it’s paid off in the end.

Kellam Parks:

I’m

Adriana Linares:

Sure you’re constantly tweaking,

Kellam Parks:

But you’ve got to do the setup work. But once you do the setup work, it pays in spades and it makes you a better lawyer because then you actually have documented, you have the procedures, and so your new lawyers then can go be, it makes it easier to train them. It makes it easier to train staff. There’s a reason pilots have checklists, and so the plane doesn’t crash. And people don’t think of law firms like that a lot of times, but it’s the same thing is you don’t want to miss a date. You don’t want to miss a step. And we had that recently, we had an issue where we had an attorney who was out of pocket, she was on vacation and was somewhere where there wasn’t cell service. And her paralegal who’s handling everything, got a sudden illness and was in the hospital. And we found out that certain things weren’t being done a certain way and things weren’t on the server, like the cloud, not server, but cloud, the practice management. So we had to go get that paralegal’s laptop and

Adriana Linares:

Oh my

Kellam Parks:

Goodness, it pointed out, if you don’t follow our procedures, this is why we have them. Which was good to find the hole. Right. Nothing’s perfect. The other thing you asked me about is our VoIP system. We used to sort of a regional, but we recently switched to Dialpad.

Adriana Linares:

Oh, good. I hear a lot about Dialpad and does it integrate with Carrot? Is that one of the reasons you picked it?

Kellam Parks:

It doesn’t. It doesn’t. The one thing that I would say, and then I learned the hard way in as much of a technique as I am, there is no unicorn, right? So there’s no perfect practice management system

Adriana Linares:

Make this clear.

Kellam Parks:

And carrot’s great for a lot of reasons. One of my wishlists of Carrot is they don’t have an open API, They don’t play well with other systems yet. And so if they don’t have it, it’s not as easy. Like Clio is all open API. And one of the downsides of Clio is they have a lot of stuff they don’t do, but oh, by the way, you could buy something that does, but then this

Adriana Linares:

Guy

Kellam Parks:

Doesn’t paying 50 licenses. So it’s one of the reasons we went away from Clio is the larger we got, the more expensive it was because now I need six different services. That

Adriana Linares:

Makes a lot of sense.

Kellam Parks:

So they don’t integrate. So we don’t use it to integration, but it does integrate with everything else we need it to integrate with. And we found that it’s reliable, that the tech works well. Yes, that’s what we use for

Adriana Linares:

VoIP. Excellent. I only ask because that’s a question I get all the time, is what are attorneys using? And Dialpad is very popular from the lawyer on the beach group and Facebook, which I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this group on the podcast, but I’m going to you guys, if you’re on Facebook, go join this group. If you’re a lawyer called Lawyer on the Beach, it is probably the most supportive and helpful. Also a place to rant if you need to and get some support for attorneys. I am on there and I really just use it for informational purposes to talk about things like, well, I see that a lot of lawyers are using Dialpad. Let’s talk real quick and put a pitch in for another one of our favorite groups, which is Ernie’s Inner Circle Group, which is how you and I met, you and Ernie have been working together for a long time. So can you tell us a little bit about that peer network peer group that you’re with? It’s Ernie, the attorney’s inner circle.

Kellam Parks:

Yeah, so Ernie, as you know, Ernie was a big firm lawyer for a little while. Then smartly got out of it and been doing coaching and tech stuff for a long time, really the tech end of things. And so he created a group, he’s got the inner circle, and then he is got co-pilot, sort of the higher level group. And it’s interesting. So I’ve been following Ernie forever. He had an end of year deal where he says, oh, you can get half off for a year. And I joined. And what’s so amazing is it’s an environment where he basically, it’s all about efficiencies. So when I say coach, he doesn’t really individually coach, but what he does is he’s really trying to help lawyers figure out a way to be most efficient and smartly implement technology. It’s been great. And so he’s got the group where he has an open call every Friday that I’m on, and then he’s got one or two Thursdays where he sort of have a set topic

Adriana Linares:

And

Kellam Parks:

Then he’s got a circle.io site, which is

Adriana Linares:

Slack.

Kellam Parks:

It’s like Slack. So it’s just an online platform where you can have forums and discussions. And so I’ve just got a lot. So what I was saying serendipitously, which is really interesting, is that I had, and you and I talked before we started recording that I found early on after I started my law firm that I really enjoy the business of law more than the practice of law, Though I Still litigate and I still do some law, mainly try to do cybersecurity these days. But what I enjoy even more than the business of law is helping other lawyers figure out how to run a law firm and treat law as a business because they don’t teach that in law school. And it’s something that I really just love.

Adriana Linares:

You should do some coaching, Kelly,

Kellam Parks:

Hey, look at that. So that’s what I’m going to do. So I’m launching a coaching group by first quarter of next year, but that’s where Ernie came in is because one of Ernie’s focuses is how to create a law product and how to, and I was like, Hey, wait a minute, I’m doing this thing. And he said, look, he’s so generous. And he’s like, look, I’d love to help to a false yes. And so love Ernie and his group is really not expensive. I think it’s 150 bucks a month or something. It’s nothing. It’s

Adriana Linares:

Nothing.

Kellam Parks:

The amount of stuff you’ll get out of it is just tremendous. But I can’t say enough good things about Ernie.

Adriana Linares:

He says that you are very active in the group. And so if you are interested in just getting to interact with Kellum on a one-on-one basis in these groups and just hearing how you’re running your practice, that’s a great place to do it. And I always have Ernie’s Thursday call on my calendar. I’m just never available and Friday’s even worse. So I miss a lot, but I wish I could be on there more often. If you’re interested in learning more about Ernie, you can of course Google, Ernie, the attorney, and then Kellum. How do we keep an eye on this coaching practice that you’re going to launch next year? Where do we hear once it’s launched?

Kellam Parks:

Yes. Well, what I would love to do is I’d love to invite myself back to talk to you again and we can dive in because we’ll talk about all the specific things that we’re touching a little bit on now.

Adriana Linares:

Do you think we could find ourselves a Guinea pig attorney and actually have you do some coaching?

Kellam Parks:

Yeah, absolutely.

Adriana Linares:

I think that would be a great idea.

Kellam Parks:

No, I would love to do it. Yeah, because basically I’m coming up with a system. So the gist is I’m going to start with individualized coaching with an emphasis of technology and even more of an emphasis on ai, use artificial intelligence.

Adriana Linares:

Excellent.

Kellam Parks:

It’s not all tech stuff. So that’s something I want to make clear because I don’t want to turn off people that are afraid of tech or not into tech, but it’s about efficiencies and systems and procedures. And it turns out that tech and AI as sort of the easiest way to do that. But at the core, it’s all about figuring out mindset, figuring out what you want to do, how to set things up, and then all the different areas you need to do to run a business, which again, lawyers are bad at.

Adriana Linares:

So aside from getting any new leads for you to grow your law practice with attorneys in the Virginia area that are looking to retire or pull back, we can also say out loud, if you are an attorney thinking about starting your practice, launching your practice, or figuring out how to better run your existing practice, contact Kellam. But then make sure you say, and I want to be the subject of your podcasts in 2025 with Adriana about how this has all worked. I want to play it out live. So if you are attorney i’d, yeah, wouldn’t it be fun? So if you’re an attorney who isn’t afraid to put yourself out there and help us help each other, let us know. Callum, I have taken up so much of your morning and you have given us so much information. You’ve been very generous with your time and I can’t thank you enough before I let you go, just remind everyone where they can find friend, follow you, and we will for sure see you on New Solo next year.

Kellam Parks:

Yeah, absolutely. Look, if you have any questions about anything that I’ve talked about, whether it’s my potential coaching, the future technology, cybersecurity, how to run a law firm, whatever, you can just email me at [email protected]. You can find [email protected], my law firm. I’m on LinkedIn, I’m on Facebook, you guys can find me.

Adriana Linares:

And thank you for having an easy to remember domain name.

Kellam Parks:

That was a conscious choice. We thought about that. I was like, all right, how law. I know

Adriana Linares:

I just did a consult this morning with again, a new attorney, and I said, first thing you’re going to do is pick your domain name. Please make it easy to spell and easy to remember. It doesn’t have to be the name of your law firm, but your domain name. Easy to remember, easy to spell. So thank you. Love that. Thanks everyone for joining us for another episode of New Solo. This is really great, a wonderful conversation. This is the second to last episode of 2024, so we’ll see you one more time before the end of the year. Thanks again, Kellam, and of course another special thanks to Ernie for introducing us and for everyone else, thanks for listening to another episode of New Solo and we’ll see you next

Continue Reading