TECHSHOW 2024: Podcasting for Lawyers – Mastering the Medium with AI

Episode Notes

Transcript

Laurence Colletti:

Hello, welcome to another edition of On the Road with Legal Talk Networks. Laurence Colletti the host. Today’s show, which being recorded live, live at ABA Tech Show 2024. Here in, I Dunno if it’s cold, it’s beautiful Chicago, Illinois, and that’s middle of winter. It’s about two weeks earlier. We’re here through Valentine’s Day, so that’s been rough. But anyway, I’ve got a tremendous lineup of gentlemen joining us. We’re going to talk about podcasting. So I’m going to look off to my left here. I got Mathew Kerbis used to be one of our hosts for the Young Lawyers Rising podcast with the ABA. We got Patrick Wright joining us and you guys just got done with the presentation. But surprise, surprise, to have a co-host. We have Gyi Tsakalakis, of course, long-term host of the Lunch, Hour,Legal Marketing. We’re going to be talking about podcast. Welcome.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Thanks for having me, gents. Great to see you both. Hope you’re enjoying your tech show experience. And Patrick, you’re a tech show board member, we should say also

Patrick Wright:

That is right Gyi, so

Gyi Tsakalakis:

All of your negative feedback should be directed at Patrick. Do you want to share your email?

Patrick Wright:

Yeah, there will be no negative feedback. Gyi of course. We’ll all be positive, Patrick, at the right lawyers.com, send it away.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I love it and it’s been a great show. You’re doing a great

Patrick Wright:

Job. Thank you, sir. I’m

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Really enjoying myself.

Laurence Colletti:

Well guys, you guys just presented at your session was officially called Podcasting for Lawyers Mastering the Medium with ai. And so let’s start with just the skinny. So just generally speaking, it seemed like some of it was introductory, some of it was a little bit more advanced. You had some workflows in there, but give us kind of the general fly by.

Patrick Wright:

So I got to start out by telling this story because so Gyi had mentioned that I’m on the board and Gyi knows he’s been at large and in charge before of ABA tech show. And so in relation to that, that we get a lot of speeches and we get a lot of topics. And so we had about 167 topics that we were looking at. And so I was looking at working on a project for the state bar of Texas. And so when we were working on the project, one of ’em was creating a podcast for our family law section. And lo and behold, when I’m sorting through the 167 speeches, the AI stack was very large. I might add that there was a paper that was on podcasting and I looked at it and I thought it was an answer to my prayers and it was just fabulous. And so that’s what sort of got the idea germinated that, man, we got to do this this day we have to do a speech on podcasting.

Mathew Kerbis:

But really this is all about the do it yourself approach, as I’m sure Gyi can attest, lawyers want to do everything themselves, even their marketing. And so the reality is they might want to test this out too. And so I definitely let them know that there are other places like the Wonderful Legal Talk Network that could always produce it for you. But if they want to at least try it themselves, think of it as the gateway of podcasting before they either decide they want to outsource it or whatever, but they might really enjoy it and be really good at it. So it’s really just an overview of a do it yourself version. And all the tools these days have AI built into that. We really just wanted to make sure they came to our show. So we made sure to let them know that these tools also have ai.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Very cool. Great way to get those two topics together. I wouldn’t have seen that coming. So surprised me.

Laurence Colletti:

Well, I want to start from the beginning. So I think one of the most important questions we always ask when people come to us, what they knew show idea is the why. So why are you doing the podcast and who is it for? And I was very happy to see that you all spent some time on that. So the why, let’s talk about

Mathew Kerbis:

That and not only did we spend some time on that, but also that was a question at the end where somebody asked, well, can you go over the goals again of having a podcast, which is kind of asking the same question in a different way. And so what are you doing? Well, if you listen to Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing, they often talk about brand affinity. So it could be brand affinity is one of the reasons that you have a podcast. It could be you’re putting out just marketing content. Maybe you’re interviewing clients, potential clients, maybe you’re interviewing a lead partner who their clients or customers are potential clients. So ultimately at the end of the day when you’re focusing on podcasting for lawyers, which is different than just podcasting in general, it’s usually about that marketing, building a brand or getting clients. So that’s what it really comes down to.

Patrick Wright:

And one of the things that we hit on when we were talking about the speech was sort of this tribe curation, public versus private podcast and then being able to outreach to your audience in sort of more of a structured way where you could maintain base with them. And I think that it is kind of interesting because we always think that the podcast is going to be this public facing podcast when you can also just use it to keep up with your tribe,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Love those ideas. And another thing that I always think about is if you’re not quite ready to go feet first in your own podcast, go on somebody else’s. Right? And then back to your point about cross pollinating audiences and stuff like that, I think it’s really, really effective way to get in front of other folks. I want

Laurence Colletti:

To take some time and map out just the software aspects of it and the equipment aspects of it. And I think you all have different setups on that, but why don’t we start with the gear. This always blows people away, how affordable it’s really become to do a podcast these days with absolutely tremendous equipment.

Patrick Wright:

So it’s just a great comment and it’s what we are also just talking about was sort of how much money do you’ll have to dump into this to get started. When I was working on the project for the state bar with Mathew’s assistance, we sort of went through and did a budget for what it costs to actually get in. I mean the cost is so low. I mean you could probably do it for under 500 bucks and maybe even free from some of the products that are out there. But I’ll let Mathew talk about some of the costs on ’em.

Mathew Kerbis:

Yeah, so most of us have a really expensive device in our pocket that especially these days, has a really incredible camera. I’ve completely pivoted to just using continuity camera when I’m doing video podcasting and a really great microphone. I mean it’s not going to be the best thing you could use, but in terms of getting started, which a lot of the attendees were just assuming don’t actually have a podcast yet or they’ve tried and failed, when you maximize the usage of the devices that you have available to you and also tune the right settings like Lossless mode and voice for an iPhone, then you could still capture really good audio. And one of the things that we focused on is you don’t necessarily want to spend a bunch of money on equipment and on software. Your recording space matters the absolute most. And so first identifying that recording space, which you could spend a little bit of money on soundproofing blankets or other sorts of panels, but you don’t even have to do that if you just have a walk-in closet. And so that’s really what we talked about that it doesn’t need to cost you anything. Let’s look at what you already have and then here’s ways that you could layer on. And even the software descrip, I use that tool for a lot more than just the podcast. I use it for marketing, I use it for a lot of things. They have a freemium version, so you could just test it out and give it a spin.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Love the script.

Patrick Wright:

And we are also talking about just using Zoom. Most of us have Zoom, we use it in our practices, the practitioners, people going to court, we have to have it. I mean it’s already there. We could just use that.

Mathew Kerbis:

And there’s squad Cast and there’s Riverside and there’s all these other platforms that you could use too. But again, like Patrick said, you probably already are paying for Zoom. If you go into your settings, you got to go into your settings and customize it. So it’s optimized for podcast recording. It says the best thing out there. No, but if your audio sounds good enough that they’re not distracted with bad audio, that’s what matters in the beginning. And

Laurence Colletti:

I like what you said about the recording environment, and I’ll tell you this, I mean I’ve recorded some unusual spaces during the course of my career

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Here. Crawl space,

Mathew Kerbis:

Like here,

Laurence Colletti:

Here. Well, I mean the equipment here helps. We use, this is just an example, a little behind the scenes baseball, these SM 50 eights that we’re using. Sure. Incredibly inexpensive microphone for what you get. And it really drowns out the background noise and they’re about bulletproof. I’ve never broken one in all these years that we travel. But

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Great quality. I mean you can’t go around with this. I’m a sure MV seven just we’re going around keeping story.

Laurence Colletti:

Oh, those are wonderful too. They’re wonderful.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well for USB, because I got tired of carrying around the

Mathew Kerbis:

Mixer, the mixer,

Laurence Colletti:

But I wanted to just, that’s a fun question to ask you. The most unusual that you’ve used to record anything. So mine was hotel curtains. I had to do a quick voiceover in Washington DC and did not have a recording space and I think I had towers get it done. And so I was looking around the room and everything was really echoy. So what I did is I contained myself within the curtains of my hotel room and it worked

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Very creative. Were they like the fireproof ones that are heavier or were they

Laurence Colletti:

Smelled if you spark something that you were going to die in a fire.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Okay, good. A nice added feature.

Patrick Wright:

So I have to ask this, Mathew, this question since we just talked about this, which is you were saying that you used a green screen like blanket,

Mathew Kerbis:

Right. So I do have one of those el gato green screens that you could just pull up and put down and put under a couch or behind a couch or something. But when I moved into my home from the city out into the suburbs, I had this little tiny closet that I could fit a little desk in. And so I have these auto mute I think is the brand blankets, and I think they only sell black versions front and back now. So sorry, this isn’t available to you unless you buy secondhand, but you could buy colors. So I bought two white ones that wrap around the front and a green one that wraps around the back. And so I’ve got a green screen behind me, but it’s actually an audio proofing blanket and then the white reflects the light. So I’m getting good lighting. So that’s my current sound setup.

And since I’m a virtual attorney and I’m almost always recording at home, that’s where I’m recording. But here at Tech Show what I do is I have lavalier microphones and so I just plug ’em into either my phone or my surface and either write into descrip or in my voice memos if I’m recording on location. I find that the lavalier makes, they can pick up a lot of room noise unfortunately, but in descrip they have studio sound feature, which is never going to be as good as what an actual audio engineer can do. But when you’re doing it yourself, it really helps with that background

Patrick Wright:

Noise. So I’ll say this too, if you’re just in the room with us, you would’ve seen Mathew miking up the mics. So when you’re putting those mics on the microphones, was that the lavalier mics?

Mathew Kerbis:

Yeah, yeah. Just in case we moved around. I wanted to make sure that we were always capturing the audio. I was

Patrick Wright:

Like, why is he miking the mics

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Very clever. Do you want to give a plug to lavalier mic of Preference?

Mathew Kerbis:

I mean, so thank you for this. So go to the tech show app and you could download the materials or you could email me. I mean I’ll give you an easy one to spell. kbi, K-E-R-B-I [email protected]. And I’m happy to share, I have the whole list of my whole tech stack equipment and software with the presentation materials

Gyi Tsakalakis:

You just made this episode worth people listening to. Nice job. Very

Laurence Colletti:

Cool. Good job. Before we leave, there’s just the audio quality aspect. One thing I do want to say is that regardless of the microphone that you pick, and I like what you said about the background taking care of that to make sure the idea you want to do is make sure that your voice is recognizable, that it is separated from those background noises if you’re recording at a live event. And that’s the idea so that the listener can ultimately hear, and that’s how I define good audio quality. Even if it’s not on the most ideal microphone, can you understand the person? So we wanted to leave with that tidbit before we moved on.

Patrick Wright:

Yeah, that’s a good tidbit. The other thing that we were talking about was because we hit on this script, which was even though that your quality might not be just amazing through the AI features right now, there’s a lot of good stuff that you can use to clear up distortions and spaces and those type things, which is pretty amazing.

Laurence Colletti:

I want to transition into production. And so you all have been podcasting for a long time. We’ve all been podcasting for a long time and I think one of the most challenging issues that new podcasters come up with is content and content schedule. Meaning how often are we going to publish, what are we going to talk about? And they get started and they got a lot of wonderful ideas and then they realize that it’s going to take a lot longer than they ever plan and they kind of run out of ideas. And so I guess Mathew, you’ve got some great workflows out there that you shared. And so with your own podcast, what are the procedures that you use to make sure that you stay on time, that you’ve got content coming, that it remains interesting and fresh

Mathew Kerbis:

Just like practicing law, finding a niche is going to help you come up with more ideas for podcast episodes and more guests because it’s so narrow and you’re constrained and you could work within that. So my podcast Lost Subscribed, we just talk about subscription legal services. So if you DM me on LinkedIn that you could get me millions of subscribers, I don’t that large of an audience. So it helps to have that niche. And then when you do interview somebody, what I always ask them is, do you have any other, now that you’ve been on the show, anyone you could recommend who’d make a good guest? And so my topics are more around the specialty of the guest as it relates to ditching the billable hour, and that’s because I have that niche. If you don’t, what you could do is, and we talked about this in the presentation, leverage generative AI and come up with a boatload of topics.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, that’s a great point. I’ll give you some of our process. Lockwood really keeps us organized. We have a rundown sheet that we drop ideas in there as we’re just doing work, right? Like something comes to you and you’re like, you see something, it’s like, oh, that’d be a great topic for a podcast. I’d back up the idea of going on the niche, and I’ll even say this, some lawyers I think would benefit, especially if you’re like a lawyer serving a local community for a specific practice area. Forget about the law altogether to cover your local sports teams. Restaurants do small business Saturday type of stuff. But I think that you can always work your expertise in as a lawyer, but if you really want this areas, you’re not going to get a regular weekly subscriber to certain legal stuff. And so keeping it fresh and interesting, I think that to me that’s the biggest challenge.

Patrick Wright:

And I’ll say this, and it’s not on the specific podcasting topic, but I was looking at a local lawyer’s Facebook page the other day and I was going through the content. It was like what you were saying, Gyi, there was a lot of local content, but it was a PI lawyer and he also gave away a television like a 40 inch. I was shocked at the amount of exchange between people on there and the numbers that he was pulling off of Facebook. And this was someone that was in a small town in east Texas. And so think about if we’re having a giveaway today on our podcast that we should do that here.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Patrick’s putting up a 70 inch TV today. Very generous, Patrick. He already gave out his email.

Patrick Wright:

Yes. Not a promissory guarantee being a lawyer. Yes, yes.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

No, but that’s a good point too, is that I think there’s a lot of crossover between mediums. Another thing that we do is we’ll take Eclipse from the show and put ’em on social media and that helps attract the audience. You guys cross-pollinate across platforms, that kind of thing.

Mathew Kerbis:

I have over 80 hours worth of content that I have not done that with. But a new feature in D script, because they integrate with GPT-4, they’re backed by OpenAI, is you could use the AI actions and say, get me four clips like this for TikTok or get me four clips that show the guest’s expertise. And it will not only get those four clips, but it will resize it for you for TikTok. Wow. So I have it on my to-do list to time block some time to do that.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Well, we look forward to seeing that content come out. So I love this conversation about how we use the script and I’ve only really just scratched the surface of what description do. One of the things I know that it at least markets is that it can take a transcript and do a completely AI voiceover of the transcript. So the lawyers listening to this, they’re like, can you type up a transcript and actually have the script, do the episode for it? Have it played around with that at all?

Mathew Kerbis:

This is one of those things where less is more, so the longer it’s going for, the more it’s going to sound robotic because it’s only going to do an okay job at the intonations and the speech patterns. But for short things, fan freaking fantastic, I pay the highest individual subscriber level because of all the extra AI features that you get for cloning a voice, dubbing a voice, all of those things. I’ve definitely tried just doing a straight up AI for two or three minutes and it’s okay. And you know what? It’s the worst it’s ever going to be, right?

Gyi Tsakalakis:

Amazing. That’s awesome. I haven’t really played around with that. The ones I’ve done it, it didn’t work as well as I thought, but I think it is getting a lot better fast.

Patrick Wright:

So one of the things that we were talking about on that, I was going to ask Mathew if he’s done this, but I saw a demo where they had recorded and they were doing post-production and they dropped in four minutes because they didn’t like it in the first part of it in his video, and then they dropped it into the back quarter of the, and it just was seamless. You couldn’t even tell. It was just amazing.

Gyi Tsakalakis:

The other thing that I like, and this is more for video than podcasting, but you can fix your eyes. So if you’re reading off a transcript, Mathew’s shaking his head, he is not buying it.

Mathew Kerbis:

So I’ve definitely played around with this tool before. It is totally uncanny valley, but again, it’s the worst it’s ever going to be. It’s only going to get better from here. I definitely don’t recommend using that version because here’s the thing you could buy, I mean it’s going to cost you, but El Gado has a teleprompter and so if you really want to make it like you’re looking at the camera, the tools are already available to make it so you’re actually looking at the camera and reading your script. I think it’s more relatable if you’re not, but don’t rely too much on prewritten stuff anyway, just have notes that you could skim.

Laurence Colletti:

Alright, well gentlemen, we are out time, but thank you so much. This was an incredible conversation. And so before we sign off though, I do want to leave with the listeners some contact information that they want to reach out, follow up some questions about some of the things we talked about. How can they find you? Let’s start with, Gyi,

Gyi Tsakalakis:

I’d be super grateful if you give us feedback and listen to Lunch, Hour, Legal Marketing and hashtag lm. We want to hear from you.

Laurence Colletti:

Alright

Mathew Kerbis:

Mathew, so you can subscribe for free to my podcast, www to law subscribed.com. Reach out on Substack or shoot me an email through there

Patrick Wright:

And I mind, the best way is just email, so it’s [email protected]. It’s W-R-I-G-H-T lawyers.com and I’ll be happy to answer any questions.

Laurence Colletti:

And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. And listeners, if you like to please rate and review us in your favorite podcasting app. Until next time, I’m Laurence Colletti and you’ve been listening on the Road Legal Talk Network.

Speaker 5:

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