Turning Tech Into Profit for Your Small Firm

Episode Notes

Transcript

Adriana Linares:

Hello and welcome to another episode of New Solo on Legal Talk Network. I’m Adriana Linares, and today I have with me John Phoebus, who is a notorious F-bomb dropper and also known as the Crab Lawyer. The conversation we’re going to have, I hate to sound like a YouTube video where they say and watch to the end because that’s where the good stuff is. But I’m telling you in this episode, you’re going to want to listen to the end because John is going to talk to us. The reason I brought him on this podcast about the AI tools that he is actually successfully using and implementing, that’s our third segment. And before that, we’re going to have a really good conversation about some other exciting things that include just having a small practice being efficient using technology. John has some great marketing tips. I know he’s going to give us, he’s a pro at that and like I said at the end is the good stuff. So hello John.

John K. Phoebus:

Hey Adriana. I’m so excited to catch up. It’s been a while since we’ve done this.

Adriana Linares:

It has been a long time and you’ve been a client and a friend of mine for a very long time. I want you to know, I just last week used the gift certificate you sent me to Galatwas for my mom’s birthday.

John K. Phoebus:

That’s great. One of my favorite New Orleans establishments, something we have a lot in common about. I love New Orleans and all the food there. I’m jealous. You get to spend so much time there.

Adriana Linares:

I know. And I can’t wait for you to come back down and see me. So the reason you have a connection to New Orleans is because your law firm partner

John K. Phoebus:

Christy Hickman, my partner is from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but all of her family has now relocated to the Garden District and to Lydell. So now when we all travel out to Louisiana, instead of spending half the time in Baton Rouge and half the time in Nola, we spend all the time in Nola, which Baton Rouge is great too, but it’s why New Orleans is one of my favorite places in the world.

Adriana Linares:

World. It’s true. So tell us a little bit about Anelli, PBIS and Hickman, which is your law firm in Maryland.

John K. Phoebus:

That’s right. So Antonelli, PBIS and Hickman started as an outgrowth of me working for Jim Antonelli, who was my first boss, my mentor, the person who hired me out of law school, worked for him for four years and then I was a true solo for about six months and I stole away my secretary from Antonelli and Otway, my first firm. In about 2001 I became a solo and worked there on my own and then my Jim Antonelli, who was my mentor, he and I, instead of me being his employee, formed a partnership back in 2014 and my prosecutor nemesis Christie Hickman, who was elected state’s attorney for Somerset County, she and I became very close friends having done battles so often on criminal prosecution cases for her and defense cases for me, and I convinced her a couple years after Jim and I formed Anol and Febu to join the firm as our partner Anelli Phoebus and Hickman. Jim Antonelli passed away several years ago. We’ve kept his name on the firm in honor to him and the good reputation he had for excellence in litigation and criminal defense. And so it’s the two of us. Christie does family law and personal entry and I do criminal defense and personal entry.

Adriana Linares:

I think it’s really interesting that you kept the Antonelli name like you said, not just to honor him but because he always had a good name. Can you talk a little bit about deciding to do that? I bet that happens often to other law firms and then some are going to say no, just drop it because of this, but you guys decided to keep it for a lot of good reasons.

John K. Phoebus:

Sure. Well, Jim first of all was had a reputation of being an excellent criminal defense attorney both among the bench among prosecutors, but in the criminal defense world, you get to a level of the practice of law where you’re just known by your last name. No one hired Jim Antonelli to represent him. They just hired Anelle.

Adriana Linares:

Oh, something to strive for young attorneys and new solos and let’s, unless your last name is Smith like.

John K. Phoebus:

And a couple years ago I realized when I would overhear you hear it on jail tapes that your clients will tell their families that you have to get some money because I need to hire Phoebus. And that’s when you knew you had made it as a criminal defense attorney, that you were just a last name, not a first name, just the last name

Adriana Linares:

To the point where somebody goes, is that his first name? That’s all you ever call him by or her. So I like that. That’s something to strive for and hopefully you have an unusual last name, which by the way, there’s nothing wrong with the last name Smith. There just might be another great Smith attorney in the mix. Okay. Tell us a little bit about the makeup of your firm. We’ve got you and Christie as the two partners. We understand your areas of law and then who else supports the practice. How many people do you have working in the firm Altogether

John K. Phoebus:

We have three, three and a half. We have an intake specialist. Peg Peg handles all client intake from text messaging to email to phone calls. That’s obviously a very important part of marketing, having the right person doing that. Peg comes from hospitality, comes from sales. That’s a great background to have. You don’t necessarily need legal to have someone who’s really good at intake. And then both Christie and I have our own fairly dedicated paralegals who support our overlapping but fairly unique practices. Family law and criminal have a lot of intersection unfortunately. That is unfortunate. It is unfortunate. So many times we will be representing the same person in the same case because either divorces can arise out of criminal cases or criminal cases can arise out of divorces.

Adriana Linares:

That could be a whole marketing ad right there. It’s a twofer.

John K. Phoebus:

There you go. Your

Adriana Linares:

Divorce starts to get violent. We’ve got you too.

John K. Phoebus:

We joke about having an annual mixer where the newly single clients can meet their next bad decision for my criminal defense clients, but we haven’t decided to do

Adriana Linares:

That. 100% sounds like something I would do if I owned a law firm.

John K. Phoebus:

We also have two physical locations, which before Zoom based practices, virtual based practices were a thing. We needed to implement technology just so we could communicate with each other from two different physical offices. We have an office in Crisfield, Maryland, the old crab capital of the world, and in Salisbury, Maryland, which is the college town, the largest city on the eastern shore, which is where we do most of our volume in terms of it’s across from the courthouse. Crisfield is not a county seat, so we have two physical locations, two paralegals, intake specialist, and right now we also have Carrie Hickman. Christie’s daughter is helping us out. She’s our special project person. Carrie’s a psychology major recently graduated from William and Mary and she comes in and kind helps us put together cases. She’s great on special projects. So

Adriana Linares:

We’re five

John K. Phoebus:

And a half people.

Adriana Linares:

That sounds very interesting what you’ve got Christie’s daughter or Yeah, Christie’s daughter doing one of the reasons that you and I are good business friends, but I feel also just good friends even though we’ve never met in person. We should really work on that is because you really value what technology can do for your firm. You’re not afraid to try new things, you’re not afraid to dump things, you’re not afraid to learn new things. You’re not afraid to stress your people out with new technology. Can you talk to us about that and why it’s important to you?

John K. Phoebus:

Sure. I’ve always been on the bleeding edge of technology. The person who buys things before, they’re really ready for prime time, but just seeing what technology can do. I’ve been doing this since 1997, so when I went to law school we learned to shepherd eyes with the books and go in the stacks and look things up. So just the game changing that Westlaw and Lexus and online legal research did, you started seeing what other technology could do, having case management, having cloud-based file systems, it just lets us as a small firm be nimble and able to very much go up in personal injury cases to do battle against some of the most well-funded insurance defense firms that exist and technology can turn a two lawyer, five and a half person law firm into the day that can take on Goliath.

Adriana Linares:

I love that. I think it’s very important for everyone to hear, just to hear that and how you have done it successfully, which I know you have. You are definitely one of the hungriest lawyers for efficiency and processes and technology I’ve ever met. Tell us about the processes. You are very process oriented. You like there to be an order of operations and I know you use technology to do that. Can you give us some examples of either technology you’re using or ways that you’re doing to manage a typical from cradle to grave?

John K. Phoebus:

Sure. So we use Clio Grow for CRM for those who don’t know what CRM stands for, may have heard of Salesforce, may have heard of Lawmatics. Clio Grow is a customer relationship managed software or intake platform, which it’s so important to manage. We use Kanban board models, so people who reach out to the office, they go through the life cycle turning from a prospect into a signed client, which helps us manage that process. We use Clio manage for case management. Word is not case management, Acrobat is not case management. Every lawyer needs case management

Adriana Linares:

Software, not case management.

John K. Phoebus:

Yes, and we use the Microsoft platform. So we have Office 365, Microsoft 365, whatever they’re calling it these days. We have Acrobat Pro Maryland is an m Dex State, Maryland Electronic Courts is what MDEC stands for. So Somerset County and Y Kaku County on the little eastern shore in 2016 I think became the first MDEC County. So we’re almost nine years of having electronic filing. We’ve been in hybrid counties where some has been electronic, some has been paper. Baltimore City came on last I think last quarter last year. And so the entire state of Maryland is all electronic following, so we’ve been making our own PDFs. If you’ve listened to Adriana’s other episodes that printing signing your name and scanning is not making a PDF and then we’re using some really exciting AI tech tools. My paralegal, Amanda and I are the most tech savvy at the firm and we’re kind of like Amazon used to have Amazon labs, we’re the AP and H labs of our law firm that we will test drive some things to see if we can make the use case for the Luddites in our law firm who also love technology but don’t want to learn how to use it and they only wanted to learn how to use it if it makes their lives better, which isn’t a bad test for how to decide what technology to employ in a law firm.

Is it going to make the life of your staff better, the life of the case workflow better? Is it going to create those efficiencies? Things that have a huge learning curve are not necessarily going to be those that will make good efficiencies except sometimes you need to learn how to use technology to make things more efficient.

Adriana Linares:

I agree. Can you answer one question for me? Just going back to Clio grow and manage, have you done a lot of customizations to that? So being that the intake part is so important to you, so a product like Grow and we’re going to talk about grow listeners, but know that the question applies to any intake software that you’re using. The key in getting that to start a matter off best foot forward everybody and also getting all that client information right is customizing what you’re asking, how you’re asking it and how that information is being collected. So did you guys do a lot of that with Grow and or manage?

John K. Phoebus:

With Grow, we have manage, we’re still working on taking the, you call it the client journey. It starts with butcher paper, actually painter taped to the biggest empty wall that you have. Everyone has a sharpie and no lawyer knows what the client journey is. Your staff knows what the client journey is and more ideally former clients know what the client journey is, find someone if our friends aren’t hiring us when they need an attorney, what kind of lawyer are we? So find that good friend who knows that you’re passionate about the business process and say, do me a favor, tell me what it was like to make contact with our firm. What did that look like for you? At what points during the process did you need to hear from us? The goal should be for attorneys to be contacting their clients proactively to let ’em know the information, to use things like client portals, automatic updates on when cases get scheduled to take as much to streamline the process as much as possible. If you go stay at a double tree hotel, I think that’s the one that has the chocolate chip cookies. When you walk in the entrance, it’s the same every double tree hotel you go in and that doesn’t mean that every client is being treated just the same way, but it’s a level of excellence in the experience that you should strive for to try to replicate for every person who comes through the process of engaging with your firm and becoming the client. That’s what we’re trying to use growth for.

Adriana Linares:

I want to know how that became important to you. At what point in your lawyer journey where you’re like, oh, this customer experience because really it’s customer service but lawyers don’t like to hear the word customer. They’re clients. Okay, fine, let’s use the words interchangeably, but at what point if you can even pinpoint or sort of tell us, maybe you were just always like this maybe when you were a little kid and doing newspaper delivery, it was important for you to always make sure the newspaper landed exactly in the middle of the porch where the person only had to put one foot out to grab it. I mean maybe you’ve always been like that or was there just part of your journey as an attorney that you thought, okay, well we have got to deliver superlative client service and this is why and this is how we’re going to do it, which I think we’ve sort of covered.

John K. Phoebus:

It was actually meeting a friend, Alison Castellana. She was the events planner of the city of Crisfield. I hired her because I was the president of the Crisfield Chamber of Commerce when we decided we needed to have an events planner and Alison and I stayed friends long after she was events planner and longer after I was president of the Chamber of Commerce, she and I were meeting for I think drinks and dinner at SO’S great restaurant at five o’clock on a Friday, five o’clock on a Friday is a really bad time to meet John Phoebus. I’m still in work mode and I need that shift. Always meet me like an hour away from where I work because I need that long drive in to calm down. And she had somewhere to be. She’s like, we got to meet at five o’clock. I worked right up to five o’clock.

I came in, I was that just the angry still in the office type person. She was asking, why are you so Ed? She said, first of all, I’m never meeting at five o’clock again, you need to take off an hour before you come in. Yeah, I’m yelling at the people because they have the audacity, the seat. Two of us had a table of two and I’m like, I’m mother fing John Phoebus. I eat here all the time. Why am I getting, it’s a Friday. There’s only a table of two. I don’t have reservations. They’re making a table for me. Typical asshole lawyer self coming into social setting. Alison was asking was making me so frustrated and I said, every case I have, I’m trying to write the perfect letter. Here’s what we talked about. Here’s what we’re going to do. And she said, John, you’ve already developed the perfect experience for at that point, the most average case we had was the DUI client, a first defense drunk driving client who’s worried about the process, worried about what’s going to happen, and she said, you don’t go to one of these hotels and expect a different experience every time you choose the hotel because it’s that same good quality experience every time.

Same thing with a restaurant. You don’t go to a restaurant because yeah, they may have great specials every Friday night, they may be locally sourced, but their peace day resistance is always going to be on the menu and you’re going to go there and say, I can always order this and that. Let me kind of stop being stressed out about having to make every case the one off and then to realize what made the experience great for my clients across all the cases and then to replicate that and then technology, it does save time because you come up with the best way of saying things. By the way, take your lawyer’s and feed to ai, get them to rewrite it in a way people can understand it. Don’t write 10 page layers at the beginning of the case. Set up drip campaigns to give them the information that they need across the life of a case. There’s so many tools that we have at our disposal to make the experience better for your clients and also easier and less stressful for you as an attorney. So there’s a date and time that Angry John Phoebus going in for drinks with his friend Allison, changed my outlook on what it meant to be a client of Anthony. No bu segment.

Adriana Linares:

Lot of pearls there. Let’s take a quick break, listen to some messages from some sponsors When we come back I’m going to talk about marketing with John because this is another really important facet of your world as a very successful attorney. We’ll be right back. Okay, we’re back. I’m Adriana Linares, I’m here with John Phoebus. We just finished talking a little broadly about your firm in general and technology, why it’s important to you implementing it, the customer experience, which I love. I do not hear enough attorneys talking about that and now I want to ask you some questions about marketing. So before I forget, one of the things I wanted to go back to was the firm name, which is Antonelli. Pvis and Hickman holds on to a former partner’s name and you kept it. We talked about why you also have an important marketing tool, which is you believe in multiple domain names. Why?

John K. Phoebus:

Well first of all, antonelli, PBIS are very hard to spell. Hickman is the common spelling and it’s what everyone struggles with. In the old days when it was a billboard and a 800 number, you had to get a memorable 800 number. You had to get a memorable thing. No one is going to remember how to spell both Anelli and Febu. It’s virtually

Speaker 1:

Impossible. Yes.

John K. Phoebus:

So early on in days of this was probably MySpace. This was probably some handle, maybe it was my a OL instant messenger handle or something that I came up with a name crab lawyer. So crystal me, if no one who listens to this podcast outside the state of Maryland and maybe the eastern shore of Virginia will know where Crisfield Maryland is. But if you’ve been here, you’ll remember Crisfield Maryland at the turn of the century, 1900 Crisfield was known as the crab capital of the world. It’s a seafood town, it’s the town of Waterman. First was the town of Oystermen, then the town of Crabbers and the seafood industry is what has kind of made Crisfield. One of my niche parts of criminal defense as a practice is waterman will occasionally get charged with preser poaching violations. So I’m somewhat of an expert on oyster sanctuaries and crabbing regulations and I know crab

Adriana Linares:

Who knew this was a thing.

John K. Phoebus:

It’s a huge thing and crabbing cases can turn to federal Laci Act cases. Something that gets you a $25 fine in state court, which is an undersized crab. All crab meat goes into interstate commerce. That can be a $50,000 five year felony in federal court for a LAC Act violations. So there are not many attorneys who do natural resources criminal defense and being the only lawyer in the crab capital of the world, I came upon the name Crab lawyer

Speaker 1:

Love it.

John K. Phoebus:

So I registered as a domain name. If you tell people how to find your website, it’s way easier to remember crab lawyer.com. That is how to spell pbis.

Adriana Linares:

Don’t you also have pbis law.com?

John K. Phoebus:

Yes. Pbis law.com. Crab lawyer.com. We have a legacy j antonelli law.com websites. Domains are cheap. Everyone should own their own correct. Go to GoDaddy, check and see who owns your website. If it’s your web marketing company that’s a mistake. Try to get out of that when you renew your next contract. Owning your domain is very important for you and set it up so it auto, the renews have multiple ways of getting back in contact. Everyone’s heard the horror story of how some the team move of China of the day steals your website because you didn’t reregister it and then you have to wait to try and get back

Adriana Linares:

And do all those domain names. Point to the same website

John K. Phoebus:

They do. Right now we’re in Talk Suite, we use Scorpion and we’re pretty happy with Scorpion. I think I’ve been a customer of Scorpion. One of the founders was on a sales call with me the other day because we’re thinking about changing what we’re doing in terms of local service ads, some Google ad words and building out more. Our practice over the years has focused more and more toward personal injury. We had $2 million plus verdicts last year. Congrat jury verdicts in personal injury cases, which was kind of awesome. So we would love to shift the practice from family law, which Christie has just churning by the hour doing to more contingency fee stuff. Last year more than 60% of her income came from personal injury, contingency based work. So contingency based flat fee. You listen to Adriana’s podcast, that’s where to go. It’s where efficiencies can make you more profitable and more money. So anyway, scorpion has been working with us on possibly separating out the practice areas to have a different domain. Personal injury and criminal defense. They’re common that lawyers will do the same thing, but the clientele who are looking for the lawyers may be looking for different things and focusing practice areas is so important. What’s the saying? If you’re a jack of Val trades, you’re a master of none.

No one is looking for that lawyer that does a little bit of everything because the lawyer who does a little bit of everything probably isn’t who you would choose to do the most important case to you, which for everyone, that’s what their case is.

Adriana Linares:

I just want to reiterate this. One of my thoughts I was having, which is you can own multiple domains, but that doesn’t mean you have to build multiple websites. They can all point to the same one if you’re just starting or thinking about what we’re saying. So an example is my little company is called law tech partners.com, but of course back in the MySpace days when you could buy a domain name, I bought Adriana ris.com. I don’t want someone else to have it. So of course I have it and it points right back to law tech partners.com. So just a note for everyone out there, you should own your own name again, unless your name is John Smith. That might be kind of hard, but you should own your own domain name. You don’t want someone else to have it and you don’t need multiple websites, but you should at some point recognize when it might be a good idea like John you just described, and I love the way you have such good information about the law firm. Did you say 60% or 80% of your cases? Personal injury. Personal injury. Okay. So I guess the point I’m trying to make here is the financial health of your firm is not just important to be successful, but how do you know that most of your cases are personal injury?

John K. Phoebus:

There’s a saying if you can’t measure it, you can’t have goals. So everyone should be thinking about what the practice areas are. Hire an accountant to set up your books. We use QuickBooks online. Find an accountant that’s okay with QuickBooks online. That’s a warning sign that you’re not using the right CPA firm if they try to keep you in an on-prem setting. Everyone in the world is using QuickBooks online. Listen to any of Adriana’s other podcasts about the importance of being in the cloud off on-prem, outsourcing your IT to people who know what they’re doing. You can’t do it yourself. You don’t want to do it yourself, even if you can do it yourself. Anyway, set your QuickBooks up.

Adriana Linares:

I feel so validated having you on as a guest. You should come on on a regular basis when I’m feeling blue.

John K. Phoebus:

There you go. You have great information, not just for new solos but for anyone who wants to use technology in their practice. I listened to you. I have a car ride from Chris Field to Salisbury of about 45 minutes every day, 45 minutes there, 45 minutes on the way back and at least one day a week. I look for one of your podcast episodes to come back to the well to hear new ideas that other attorneys have. I recently listened to one of your guests from Virginia Beach, which is just two hours away. I’m going to call him up because I get calls for Virginia Beach attorneys all the time. You’ve connected me to other attorneys. In fact, there’s someone from out in the Midwest, Nebraska, Nebraska that we are going to do a screen share for me to show her some of these cool AI things that you and I are about to talk about.

But the answer on measuring is your chart of accounts should be based upon what the business is that you want to have. And for us, that is family law, personal injury, criminal defense and D-U-I-D-U-I feels like it’s criminal defense. It is criminal defense, but it’s marketed much, much differently than criminal defense. And so you should segment that out. So also your marketing people should be able to tell you how something came to you. We use CallRail. CallRail lets you get 10 different numbers. If you’re a criminal defense attorney, you’re still in the Yellow Pages. If you sponsor local little league teams, that’s a marketing source for you. We have a different phone number for not for every little league team, but for local business support. Marketing gets one CallRail. Number one yellow page gets another CallRail number so when those calls come in, you’re able to see what the ROI of your marketing spend is and then you should be able to connect that ultimately to who calls you up. And what is that criminal defense is that personal injury is that family law? We’re working with Scorpion right now to fine tune more toward personal injury and less toward family law because on flat fee and contingency based, that’s where the efficiencies and the automations and law firms can really make you much, much more profitable.

Adriana Linares:

I want to add a point here. It’s kind of a trick question. How do you know you actually know? Because in your office every day and you’re working on these cases and you’re a small firm, but there are a couple ways that technology can help and this comes down to customizing your case management systems. So we’re going to use Clio as an example because they sponsor this podcast and you and I are very familiar with it. When you open up a new matter in Clio, you can tell it what practice area it’s for, whether it’s family law, personal injury or criminal. It’s important to do that and I think a lot of you launch these case management systems without thinking about customizing it and getting very helpful reports at the end of the year letting you validate what you think, which is, well, I think I’m making our most profitable types of cases are contingent, but oh, I’m not really sure.

You know what, you don’t have to think that hard about these things because that’s where the robots can help. And by the robots I just mean the technology and simple things like case management, which I am still terrified at how many lawyers do not use case management. So if you’re using any of these tools that you hear me talk about on the podcast all the time or guests are talking about, it’s really important that you dive in and customize it and make sure you’re using it to the hilt. John, any other quick pearls you want to drop on marketing? I mean it just sounds like you’ve spent so much time and obviously so much money. Actually, let me ask you the question. Sounds like you spend money on advertising, marketing the right channels. Is it worth it?

John K. Phoebus:

It is. I’m a big believer in long form and content-based marketing. If you invest in Google AdWords, it’s a spigot that when you’re spending money on AdWords, the cases come in and then the moment the spend stops, the cases go off.

Content-based marketing, we’re providing useful information, repurposing things. Find that letter it that you’ve written to a client. It can probably turn into a blog post, it can turn into a Facebook reel, it can turn into video. We’re not doing a lot with video now. We’re thinking about doing stuff with video to provide that knowledge, information what’s like no trust. That’s the important thing. Locally, we are active in our community not because we’re trying to get cases from it, but because we care about our community. Our local humane society is a passion of ours. My law partner and I love dogs we sponsor. We’re also the people that join the field day to raise money for the Humane Society and then decide we’re going to win field day against all the 10-year-old little league teams. And we’re like, yeah, how much did that really help? When you’re smacking down the beanbags across from a 10-year-old, we’re going to come in first place, but we beat sharp water.

I mean great match sharp water, they’re coming back next year with a vengeance to take us it. So we are competitively being passionate about local organizations that we love. I don’t know if I get cases from Humane Society. I love dogs. I do criminal defense. I won’t do an animal abuse case. I love dogs. People come into my office and if you go on my Facebook page, you’ll see pictures of Coleman at my golden doodle at the beach yesterday at the dog company. He’s awesome. He’s the coolest dog ever. He’s home today so it’s not bothering the podcast. Be a real person. No one wants the lawyer who has 35 years of doing lawyer things or X number of years of combined experience standing in front of law books, doing lawyer things, find people who love Louisiana cooking and love to travel and love their dog. And that’s how we connect to people because we’re real people.

Adriana Linares:

I love that you are real people and I think it’s important to get involved in your community, not just to make sure your name is out there because you care about your community. We’ll be right back. We’re going to take a quick break and the whole reason John is here is because he’s actively using ai. He has been infected by the bug. He is going to tell us how it has truly helped his practice. We’ll be right back. Okay, we’re back. I’m Adriana Linares and with me is attorney John Phoebus who’s given us so much good information. You have gotten bitten by the AI bug and I want you to get other attorneys excited about how you’re using. I think there’s still too much talk about AI and you could do this and you could do that and there’s not a lot of real examples and I still don’t have enough attorneys calling me up to talk about it. Go tell us and we want to hear everything. We’re dying. We’re on the edge of our seats.

John K. Phoebus:

Co-counsel is our first step into a legal based AI and everyone needs to at least pay for the AI that you’re using. And by the way, your firm’s using ai, whether you realize they’re using AI or not because your staff are using it and encourage it, but then make sure you know what they’re using and that you’re paying for them to use it and just turn on the privacy features. It’s not hard to do. You don’t want to be sharing stuff back. You don’t want to put client data in there in things that you’re not paying for. What’s great about co-counsel is it has all those guardrails in place. It’s encrypting things end to end. You can put it’s HIPAA compliant. You could if you wanted to, you shouldn’t even into co-counsel put your client social security number in there. But you can upload documents that contain medical information, contain tax information that put that in co-counsel because it’s going to be encrypted.

It’s going to be studied by co-counsel. They’re going to use a chat GPT based large language model that draws upon the Westlaw database, draws upon trusted sources and then applies it to what you’ve fed. It spits out answers much like chat GPT and then once you close it out, forgets about it. It doesn’t report the stuff. Back to the large language model, the horror stories people hear about are people who are laying ai, right, their briefs, those attorneys should be disbarred. I agree. They’re the same attorneys that were buying briefs from brief banks. The National Legal Research Bureau used to write briefs for people and you get what you pay for it and a $500 brief that you don’t proofread can make you like a fool. The attorneys who used to cite the annotations without reading the case, don’t be that lawyer. Don’t be the lawyer that doesn’t read what your associate does.

Treat AI like you would treat a wet behind the ears, eager to please hardworking, fresh out law school associate who sometimes gets things wrong but a lot of times can really be that base that you build value on. Co-counsel was so amazing. My sales rep gave me a seven day trial of the thing seven days and scheduled the sales call for day eight, which meant that I came into work one Thursday morning and co-counsel didn’t work. I had to paywall. It’s like contact your sales rep. I said to Amanda, what time is my meeting with Mark? Get him on the phone. 10 30 he could have charged me. And I mean if the west sales reps are listening to this call DM me, I’ll tell you I’m actually paying because I think this speech made them realize they could charge even more for it than we’re paying for it. I would’ve bought at any price for seven days of using the thing. I could not imagine practicing law without it. Let me tell you some things that can do timelines, personal injury cases, we will get sometimes three years worth of medical records, sometimes 20 years worth of medical records.

Adriana Linares:

In what formats?

John K. Phoebus:

In PDF formats scans like the dirty

Adriana Linares:

Scans

John K. Phoebus:

From OX that have scanned it five times to make it not readable and they give it back to you. You dump all that into co-counsel. You can upload I think 10 gigabytes at a time, two gigabytes at a time. You just keep giving them files, put all the files up there. Say we represent a nice person named, we’ll say Jane Smith. Jane Smith got hurt in a car accident on such and such of a date. Create a timeline of her medical history and all the treatments she received from the day of the car accident to present and what used to take attorneys or paralegals or staff days to do you get back in 10 minutes, five minutes. It’s amazing. You give them 20 years worth of medical records, you’ve had a deposition, you’ve got off the phone with the adjuster and they say, well, your client was always complaining about that.

They’d always said, oh my back hurt me. Hey co-counsel, find every reference in the client’s medical records from before the accident going back all we have where they’ve said I’ve had back pain. And what co-counsel does is it gives you hyper click footnotes to the image of the document, the PDF that you just uploaded so you can see where it came from. So it’s like instant source check. You get to hover and click and it pulls up a screen beside it and you can see where it came from. So you don’t have that wonder is it getting it wrong? Is it getting it right? Everything that chat GPT does, co-counsel also does. So you can assign it roles. You can say take on the role of a judge who’s about to hear an argument. Take on the role of opposing counsel. Read my brief and tell me the arguments that you’re going to make in response to it.

You’re about to take the testimony of a police officer who stopped your client for A DUI. You can upload the police report. You can upload a transcript to the body-worn camera, say co-counsel thinks everything’s a deposition. So you have to say, I’m taking the deposition of the police officer. Suggest the questions to ask for trial. You’re about to prepare your client for a deposition. You can give all the answers to interrogatories and the complaint in the case and say I’m about to take the deposition of my own client. What questions would I ask? Spits out five pages of deposition questions. You wouldn’t use all of them, but there’s going to be gems in there that you wouldn’t have thought of and you don’t delegate to co-counsel. You just use it as a brainstorming partner to make yourself a better lawyer.

Adriana Linares:

Your enthusiasm for this is amazing. I love it so much and thank you for giving us real life examples of ways that you can use this tool. I want to remind everybody what co-counsel is in case they’re not familiar. So co-counsel was a tool developed by, at the time a legal research company called Casetext. Casetext was born out of the Silicon Valley. I think that two guys in their garage kind of built, not really, I mean it’s more than that, but Jay Keller is, I’ve known Jake for a million years. He had started this alternative crowdsourcing based legal research tool called casetext, and then they developed co-counsel and it’s their AI tool that would help you even more. I mean they’ve built case text on AI from the beginning of time for them. And in 2023, Thomson Reuters paid. Listen to this everybody, this is crazy.

This has never happened before in legal 650 million in cash to acquire co-counsel and case text because it was amazing and you are now proving and telling us how amazing it it’s. So if you’re not a Westlaw user, I mean Lexus might have a tool like this, and if somebody out there is listening to this and you’re using their tool, send me a message, we’ll talk about it, but I’m sure there are other competitors. I think the point here is you’re using a tool built for lawyers that has the guardrails in place. It’s able to point back to where it’s getting its information from. And you said a couple of really important things. You don’t delegate to it. You use it like an assistant. You treat it like an assistant. You don’t trust everything it wrote. You have to double check all the things. We don’t have to go all over all that because it’s been said enough times. I want you to tell us more about some of the other tools you might be using. I think you mentioned something called Justice Text.

John K. Phoebus:

Yes. So as a criminal defense attorney, I get an incredible amount of digital evidence that’s not in word form. So ever since Ferguson happened, police departments across the nation have all implemented body-worn cameras. Before there were body-worn cameras, there were dash cameras, your typical DUI case, this is how Axon evidence has deployed this and they give it away. It’s like the printer model. They give you the printers and sell you the ink. Axon gives police departments the cameras and sells them the storage. In Ocean City, Maryland in the summer, the police officer to tourist ratio is very, very high and their cameras are set up so that when one police officer deploys his camera, the cameras of every police officer within an eighth of a mile of that police officer, their cameras also deploy. So it’s like a Quentin Tarantino movie. You have the officer who’s talking to the suspect and then you have the guy who’s running up to see if he needs assistance.

You have the guy who’s over talking to the person at Thrasher french fries who looks over his shoulder, oh, I better go help them. And you have the same thing being filmed from eight different angles and you as an attorney have to figure out which one of these do I watch. So enter justice text. And so the police and law enforcement have a version through Axon that Axon really only gives to prosecutors law enforcement that’s doing AI from the law enforcement side, which lets you stitch together eight different views and watch ’em all at the same time. And then you can just pick which camera angle you want to see. It transcribes. You can choose, I think I’m paying a hundred hours a month for 20 hours of transcripts a month. I’m about to upgrade to the next level, which I think gets me a hundred

Adriana Linares:

Hours. No, they’re going to give it to you for free for talking about them on this podcast. Go on

John K. Phoebus:

Justice Text is amazing. So Justice Text is smart enough to know when there’s an arrest, when the person’s been ordered out of the car, when Miranda has been read to someone in A DUI case they know when the Horizontal gaze nystagmus eye test is being administered when the walk and turn test is being administered when a breath test has been offered. So it lets you from a video perspective dial into the highlight reel. Now you still have to watch the whole video, but you know which video to watch first. You get a transcript, the transcript may have things that aren’t quite right, it’s AI based transcripts, but close enough. Here’s the pro move. You take the written police report, you upload it to co-counsel. You say, Hey co-counsel, I’m about to get the body-worn camera video transcribed. Find all the proper nouns in the police report that the transcriptionist would need to know how to spell.

Then you can upload to justice text. Here’s the name of the street it was on. Here’s the last name of the police officer pulled him over and Justice text reads that and says, oh, that’s what that word is. So they make it correct. When you’re watching the video, you can identify who the speaker is and it recognizes the voice and then labels the speaker and the transcript for everything. Then you can take that transcript, you can put back in co-counsel and say to co-counsel compare whether the police officer’s written police report of his interaction is consistent with the actual transcript of the interaction with

Adriana Linares:

Get out of here.

John K. Phoebus:

Boom. It’s the flywheel. I mean I used to think Jack Newton came up with the flywheel example, but then I learned that he stole it from Jeff Bezos. But if you’re going to steal ideas, there’s no better person to steal ideas from. And I don’t think Jack Newton will get offended if I compare him to the Jeff Bezos of Legal Tech Flywheel. The incremental improvements that just make your day in day out practice better. I used to dread getting 10 hours of body-worn camera video in. Now I can’t wait to upload it to Justice Text. I can’t wait to my staff. They’re like, I want to do it this time. Can I do it this time? I mean, we’re excited about getting this stuff in and then my clients watch it. They get the highlight reel. I can share the link with the client. Again, all encrypted, all secure. I called the founders of Justice Text to make sure that they’re not making it part of some bigger thing. They’re like, no, we’re just make sure you’re not training it. This is why legal specific AI is generally good, but there’s room for chant GPT and Google Notebook as well. There’s some great things you can use those for. But these two legal tech products in AI have just really changed the whole AI practice law.

Adriana Linares:

And do you think, I think I know the answer this, so it might be rhetorical. Do you think your enthusiasm for practicing law and coming to work every day has changed because of that? I mean, you sound so excited.

John K. Phoebus:

There was a tediousness that the digital dumps had created and we all got together fellow DUI attorneys like, oh my God, 10 hours of video on every DUI case. How are we going to be able to turn through it in family law? The same thing, text messages. I mean, Christie will get the day before a divorce hearing 1800 pages of print out text messages.

Adriana Linares:

Perfect love when clients do that.

John K. Phoebus:

Look how much an asshole my husband was. Well, it’s like, well, look what you said to him here, and you have to try to digest it. AI is a great thing to digest. You don’t have the hours in the 10 hours before the hearing that your client dumps it on you. But AI can help you get to the good parts, cut through the chaff. Again, you still have to do your work, but it can make otherwise Climbable Mountains stuff that you can digest and use and everyone’s worried Is AI going to replace lawyers? And I wish I knew who this came from, but the saying is, AI is not going to replace lawyers, but lawyers who use AI are going to replace lawyers who don’t use

Adriana Linares:

That. Yes, that’s a great way to put it. I think we’ve all heard that, but we might not think that’s real until talking to someone like you. You also mentioned you were using a new notebook tool. You just mentioned it from Google. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

John K. Phoebus:

Yes. I just two days ago started using this. Google has a feature and almost everyone has a Google account. I’m in the Microsoft platform, not the Google workspace, but everyone has Gmail, everyone has the Google thing. Part of that, they have something called Google Notebook lm, which is a study and note-taking tool. But here’s the amazing thing it does. You can upload really complicated, dull, boring things to read, like expert opinions on weird forms of psychology and five different reported court cases and law review articles. You’re falling asleep even hearing about those things and you know, need to read it just to get a high level sense of what it is. Google Notebook, LM will turn it into a chatty, humorous 20 minute podcast. Wow. For stuff that you need to get a sense of, is this something I need to dive into? And to get that high level view of it who hasn’t read 10 reported cases?

And you have to read 10 of ’em before you even understand the area of the law. And the judges talking about science and the scientists disagree with each other and they’re using all kinds of fancy terms. It’s like having two educated, humorous people. It’s not as good of a podcast as yours, Adriana, but it makes it entertaining to listen to. And if you like podcasts already, Google Notebook, lm, you upload PDFs to it. The free version I think gives you five podcasts per whatever. I mean the day I used it, again, don’t test drive stuff that you’re not paying for once you pay for

Adriana Linares:

It or put your client information in there. Obviously you’re talking about published public documents, research journals, opinions.

John K. Phoebus:

Absolutely. That’s a great thing to use the free tools for. No one’s going to get disbarred because you put a law review article in Chat GPT and asked chat GP to summarize it for you. No one’s going to get disbarred because you took a published opinion, an expert scientific journal article that you just found on the internet.

Speaker 1:

Yes,

John K. Phoebus:

I used to print all this stuff out and I have a red folder that goes in my briefcase to court. I think it’s labeled Chat to read in court, which is stuff that I want to casually read, but it’s not that important. I sit there while all the other cases are being called and I thumb through it, and that works for that setting. I can’t put AirPods and listen to a podcast, but I can also make a podcast. I can then play on my ride home from work that turns something that was dull and boring into something that’s chatty. It gives me a 50,000 foot view of the thing, saves me some time. And for that sort of reading, it’s just turned into a fun way of getting stuff that makes me, in that case, a better lawyer.

Adriana Linares:

That’s amazing. Well, we could go on, but we won’t because we’re going to leave a little more so that you can come back on in a few months and tell us what other amazing tools you’ve discovered and how you’re using all these things. John, I can’t thank you enough. It’s always so fun chatting with you even by text. Tell everyone how they can find friend or follow you. Learn more about the way you’re using these things.

John K. Phoebus:

Sure. I’m on Twitter, crab Lawyer on Twitter. That’s a great way to DM me. I don’t post much on Twitter, but I,

Adriana Linares:

You’re there.

John K. Phoebus:

Follow a lot of the people that are having these conversations. I’m on Facebook, John Phoebus on Facebook, www.crablawyer.com. We’ll guest to our website. So any of those are great ways to get in contact with me.

Adriana Linares:

I love it. Thank you so much, John. I can’t wait to catch up again. And for listeners out there, if you enjoyed this podcast, please pass it on to your friends, give us a five star review. I haven’t asked for that in a long time. That would be great on Apple Podcasts. And we’ll see you next time on New Solo.

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