Separating The Wheat From The Chaff In Legal Tech (And AI)

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

Managing your law practice can be challenging, marketing, time management, attracting clients, and all the things besides the cases that you need to do that aren’t billable. Welcome to this edition of the Unbillable Hour, the Law Practice Advisory podcast. This is where you’ll get the information you need from expert guests and host Christopher Anderson here on Legal Talk Network.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Welcome to the Unbillable Hour. I’m your host, Christopher Anderson, and today’s episode is about production with a focus we haven’t really discussed in a while, which is legal tech. And I recently went to Clio Cloud conference, say that three times fast, more easily said as Clio Con. And it was as always invigorating and fascinating. And it also kind of reconnected my brain cells that I had forgotten how many solutions there are out there, how many vendors there are out there who have built really cool stuff. And I don’t know if you’re anything like me, it’s tempting to try each and every one of them, which leads not too long thereafter to complete and utter overwhelm making me want to hide from anybody who wants to present me with any solution at all. And of course, neither direction is the right one, not overindulging under indulging, running away not good solutions.

So to help us navigate this sea of information, we’ve invited Jared Correia to speak with us today and help us sort it all out before we get started with Jared, of course, I’ll just remind you that the main triangle of what it is a law firm business must do includes three AEs apac, I think that’s right, acquiring new clients, acquisition two, producing the results that we promised, in other words, delivering, we call that production. And then of course, number three, to me, the most important, achieving the business and professional results for the owner, which is you. And you’re in the center of that whole triangle driving all of it for better or worse. And eliminating some confusion here about technology is going to be for better. So in today’s episode, we’re going to discuss how to choose what technology is right for your law firm business and how to reject the rest without getting overwhelmed.

And for that, my guest is Jared Correia. Now Jared is the CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting and the COO of Giddeon software. And we’re going to call today’s episode Separating the Wheat. Jared, like I said, is the CEO of Red Cave, COO of Giddeon. Red Cave is a subscription based law firm, business management consulting business for law firm and bar associations. And then Giddeon provides end-to-end intake solutions for high volume law firms. And that includes document assembly, e-signature and such. Jared is also an attorney formerly practicing, and TR has found himself cured of that and also internationally recognized legal tech expert. He speaks all over the place anywhere I go. Jared’s there and said he is really, really well respected as he does that, and we’ll get your website information later. So first of all, just Jared, welcome.

Jared Correia:

Thank you. I appreciate it. I had no idea we’d be covering geometry triangles, apexes. I’m already lost.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Don’t worry. Three points is as far as we go, we never talk about squares or Pentagons or Dodecahedrons. Oh good. And certainly never tesser acts like we stay clear of that.

Jared Correia:

Smart. Well, thanks for having me on, man. This is great. I’m excited.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Absolute pleasure. So before we get started, I just said two words about Red Cave and Giddeon. Oh sure. Yeah. So just to kind of round out who you are and how you come to this, can you just talk a little bit more about how you got into legal tech consulting and Red Cave and then what Giddeon’s all about?

Jared Correia:

Yeah, so I went to law school and got a real legal job afterwards, but I was always interested in the consulting piece of it. So when I was in law school, I went to the career development office and I was like, I think I want to do consulting for lawyers. And they were basically get a real job. So I did, it sucked. And then 2008, I want to say Massachusetts where I lived, launched a free consulting platform for all barred attorneys and I was like, great, I can learn how to do consulting. And I worked there for,

Christopher T. Anderson:

That was low mass,

Jared Correia:

Low map in Massachusetts, low map. Yeah, close enough. That was six to eight years I think I was there. And for the last 10 years or so, I broke off of there and found in my own consulting business, there was just too much outreach from other states and other countries and I was leaving money on the table. So basically I do business management consulting for lawyers that’s mostly subscription based. I can work with firms and help ’em to grow. And we talk about a bunch of things like anything related to business management really. But I do a lot of tech consulting in the sense of, okay, what technology’s out there, how do you pick it? You talked about separating the wheat from the chaff, how do you employ it in an effective way? And all the things that are related to technology like reporting and KPIs. So that’s been fun. I’ve got subscription clients, I’ve got bar associations that I partner with about 20 of those. So it’s cool.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Excellent. Yeah. And what about Giddeon? That’s even news to me a little bit. Maybe it shouldn’t be. Maybe I just have amnesia, but No,

Jared Correia:

No, that’s fine.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, tell us about Giddeon.

Jared Correia:

So I started a software company with a partner several years back and we’ve been building that up. So we’ve effectively got an intake platform that qualifies clients for law firms and we’ve got some cool stuff built in there. We can do document assembly from intake. We’ve also got a proprietary e-signature tool that we built into that. We work with a lot of high volume PI type of practices, and we actually are building out CRM features, which should launch in the next couple weeks or so. Most. Excellent. Yeah, so

Christopher T. Anderson:

Your sweet spot with that is pi.

Jared Correia:

Yeah, for the most firms that get a lot of leads and need to triage them quickly and the PI people, they just want to get somebody signed up to an engagement agreement and then they’ll figure it out later. So having that qualification mechanism and then an e-signature platform where they can sign documents without channel switching is great for them.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And just for listeners, in case anyone’s interested in getting, when you say high volume, what’s the kind of volume range that you like to deal with?

Jared Correia:

I mean, usually we’re talking hundreds to thousands of monthly intakes at the, not like 20 or 30.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Cool.

Jared Correia:

Alright,

Christopher T. Anderson:

So that’s you. That’s me in a small nutshell,

Jared Correia:

A nutshell.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Let’s get to what we’re here to talk about, which is the technology stuff. So the emotions that I go through, so like I said, I was just a cClio con. This is the same I go to when I go to ABA tech show or legal tech or sometimes the state bar ones or whatever. It always goes the same way. It’s like the first reaction is, holy moly, I didn’t know that existed. That’s amazing. I’ve got to have that. And then after about six of those I’m like, I got to go get a beer. It says I’m done. And so the question is, how should the listeners, the law firm owners and law firm lawyers that are listening and have to deal with technology decisions, how should they approach this? Do they determine their needs first and then go look for it? Do they get really aggressive about buying as much software as possible before they might really need it? How do you advise your clients and how would you advise the listeners to just approach the whole thing?

Jared Correia:

It’s funny, man, I get conversations with people who go to Clio or go to these other events too, and they’re like, I want to buy 17 different softwares. And then they’re like, oh my, that’s a lot of subscriptions that’s going to cost me an additional $900 a month, so maybe I should step back from that. But I guess the thing is it shows that the legal tech environment is pretty healthy. There were a ton of acquisitions recently and there’s still a lot of good software that’s coming out that’s doing things that other software doesn’t do, which I think is awesome. And the way I look at it for law firms is like I have ’em do a baseline review of what they got right now, what software do you have, what does it do? And then I kind of think of it as buying a house.

So I have people develop a wishlist and then things they hate about their existing software. So the wishlist part of it is when you’re buying a house, you’re like, do you need a garage? Do you have to have it? Or are you cool with parking in the driveway? And that may be a different question if you’re living in New England versus living in Southern California. And so I try to get ’em to think of it in that way. And then I’m like, okay, what do you really hate about this software? What really needs to improve? And then we try to select down in any category to no more than three to four softwares. I have ’em do demos, keeping in mind what it is that they want from the software, really focus demos. And then I try to get ’em to pin that down and make choices based on that. That’s usually the process I walk through. But I think the problem is, like you said, everybody’s like, oh, that software is cool. It does this one thing that I really like. Well, does it do the other three or four things I need to do as well? So people, you know how lawyers are, they just want a bill and they’re like, oh, can you just tell me what software to get? But you have to put some effort in here and review the products.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah. Yeah. So you said three to four and I was listening to you say I three or four, that’s like one 10th of what I’ve got. You’d be

Jared Correia:

Like, I want to look at 50.

Christopher T. Anderson:

But seriously, I mean is that the total number of software packages that a firm should be working with? It’s three or four.

Jared Correia:

Well, I guess if you are going to, I think the problem with a lot of law firms is they’ll do a Google search and they’ll be like, oh, there’s 17 cool softwares that I want to look at. So a lot of times when I talk to people and I think lawyers have trouble doing this on their own, which is kind of how I see myself fitting in, I have conversations with ’em and I’m like, okay, you want it to do this. You’re looking at 17 softwares, five of ’em don’t do this. Okay, you want it to do this. You’re looking at 17 softwares, three of ’em don’t do this so effectively, given what their specific requirements are, we can really whittle it down to three to four people, three to four tools pretty easily. So I think it’s always surprising to people where they’re like, oh, I didn’t know it didn’t do that. That’s a deal breaker for me. That’s usually how it works.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Usually after you buy it when you discover that it doesn’t

Jared Correia:

Usually after you buy it, which is why I try to do that upfront.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Because interestingly, the sales folks don’t demo the things it doesn’t do. Now, before we get started, I want to be clear that this does not make toast. Doesn’t do it.

Jared Correia:

Yeah, I’ve never heard that said before,

Christopher T. Anderson:

But it’s true, right? No, all, okay, so you said make a list a wishlist of the things you want. This particular thing to be able to do that to me was fit. So you might not be sure it fits and probably good idea to talk to somebody because I’ve seen some people buy both ways. I’ve seen people buy stuff that kind of does what they want it to do, but it’s for a much smaller firm and they’re out going to outgrow it. It’s not really for ’em. They’re buying one of these off the shelf CRMs that is very, very good when you’re getting started, but not very good. Or to the contrary, some smaller firms buying enterprise level stuff that requires immense amounts of configuration. What did it keep used to be called? Infusionsoft, stuff like that. I see small firms buy Infusionsoft and be like, oh my god, you can’t do that. So that’s fit. But you also, when we were talking and preparing, you also talked about usability. How is that an important part of the inquiry?

Jared Correia:

I mean, just quickly, I think you make a great point about the fit part of it, part of the conversation I have with firms as well, what is your growth plan? And then let’s figure out are you going to buy software for a later point in time or are you buying software right now that you’ll need to upgrade? There’s not necessarily a bad answer for that, but again, it’s something you should be thoughtful about and planning for. And then the other thing related to that is what version of the software do you want? Every software has got three or four different versions up to the enterprise version. And you know how it is from a psychology standpoint, everybody’s going to pick the middle, but it’s not really right for your law firm. That’s something you should dive into. But the usability thing is interesting. I can have really robust conversations with firms, we’re on the phone for three hours talking about technology, and then they’re like, you know what? I like the way this one looks. And then often

Christopher T. Anderson:

I like green.

Jared Correia:

This has a cool color. So I think the UI stuff, user interface stuff, usability stuff, super important for attorneys because they don’t want, I mean, I get it to some extent. It’s like if you’re an unsophisticated tech buyer, which a lot of attorneys are, frankly that’s going to be the thing that catches your eye like, oh, this software looks cool. I think it’ll do cool things. But then the other piece of it is also logistical because the people in your firm actually have to use it. It can’t be like this mystery box where it’s like, how do I do this function? I need to take three steps to get there, or is it really obvious that I click this button and it does this thing? There’s some viability to that as well. So I think UI is highly important to law firms when they’re talking about choosing software, but they often don’t go beyond that.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And the problem with that too is that the buyer’s not the user a lot of times. And you got that problem where you buy this thing that is a little bit complicated, but you’re like, I can figure it out. Then you bring it to your team, they’re like, I can’t figure it out. You’ve got training and all that other stuff.

Jared Correia:

If you’ve got law firms that have tech managers, it’s a whole different thing too, who are not an attorney. There’s a lot of stuff going on with that.

Christopher T. Anderson:

We’re going to take a break here and let our sponsors have a word. They pay the bills and stuff. So we’re going to let them do their thing and we’re going to come back and we’re going to turn our attention to a little bit of data security because to me that sort of ebbs and flows over the years. People get more interested in it and less interested in it, but lately, if people aren’t getting interested in it, they need to be. So let’s talk about that when we come back and a whole bunch of other stuff. But first we’ll hear from them. Alright, we are back with Jared Crea. He’s the CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting and also CEO of Giddeon software, which is an intake software solution. And really system, it sounds like from what we learned, but we’ve been talking about law firms and vetting software and how to make decisions. And the third piece of that that I wanted to talk to when we went to break was security. I think it was Jack Newton at Clio was talking about how law firms have really become, as other businesses, banks and brokers and doctors and medicine and all these other places have gotten really good at security, law firms have kind of become the soft underbelly and we hold a treasure trove of information that’s valuable. And so what should people be thinking about when they’re acquiring software? How should they be considering security?

Jared Correia:

lawyers are not great at this, and I will tell you, I probably get, I talk with a lot of law firms, I will get no less than 10 emails every week from a law firm that’s had a data breach. And they’re like, please don’t open our emails. And I’m like, I hope that’s not the only thing you’re doing. So the data stuff is not necessarily overly complex, but the problem is lawyers take the first steps to figure it out. So there’s two components here. The first is that when you’re vetting software, you want to have an understanding of what security features exist in that software. So you can look at the service level agreement to figure some of that stuff out. Some of these companies have security audits that they publish on their website. Some of these companies are certified in a specific way and really based on the changes to the ethics rules in almost every state where lawyers need to have a reasonable competency in terms of using technology that extends to vetting software for security.

So you want to ask the right questions, you want to record your research just in case something happens because likely that a firm would get breached at some point to some extent. But the rule is not that you have to guarantee that you’re avoiding breach, you have to take reasonable steps to avoid it. So you want to do that research. There’s good ethics opinions in almost every state that talk about the questions you should ask. But then the other part of it is once you get into the software, what can you turn on that’s not turned on automatically? It’s still crazy to me how many law firms aren’t even aware of secondary factors of authentication. And that’s the easiest way to avoid a breach because what happens a lot of time is somebody accesses your password and that’s a problem, especially

Christopher T. Anderson:

If your password is password,

Jared Correia:

Which most of them are. But the second stage is, okay, do they have your phone so they can access the authentication code? Unlikely. So just setting up that step protects you so much, but software doesn’t come out of the box with that. You have to set it up. You also have to understand the sharing capabilities of any software you’re using when data’s encrypted, when it’s not, when data’s in transit, when it’s moving, what effect that has at a very baseline level. If you have strong passwords, secondary factors, authentication, and you encrypt data when you should and don’t send it Vieth email, that’s 95% of the battle when it comes to data security and lawyers, a lot of law firms don’t even know that that’s a thing that they can do.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So I’d like you to repeat one thing because I think that’d be the cool thing for them to look at. You said we were talking about the in case people didn’t know what we meant. I think it’s model rule 1.1 has comment, it’s not in the rule,

Jared Correia:

It’s not. It’s in the

Christopher T. Anderson:

Comments that 1.1 is just about competence, but in the comments, almost every state has now adopted the model comment from the ABA, which is that you, in addition to competence as a lawyer, you’ve got to actually have a competence as to the technology that you use. And here’s the new one, don’t use. So failure to use,

Jared Correia:

Are we talking about ai? No, go ahead.

Christopher T. Anderson:

But no failure to use a relevant technology can also be a breach of 1.1.

Jared Correia:

Yes, absolutely. And there’ve been cases about that for sure. So in your state, it’s either going to usually be comment six or comment eight to rule 1.1. And you could make the argument that beyond that comment, it makes sense from a logistics perspective that you do this as a lawyer, why wouldn’t you?

Christopher T. Anderson:

Right, exactly. But what I wanted you to comment and repeat though was in relation to that, you said that most bars have a list of questions to ask. Where would people access that? I think that’d be a really great resource for people.

Jared Correia:

So most bars have an ethics opinion related to professional competency in technology, and a lot of them have a list of questions that you want to ask of vendors. It’s usually 10 to 25 questions, which I think is really helpful if you’ve never asked those questions before. The other thing I should mention quickly is that there’s some decent alignment between the ethics opinions that have been produced and also the state laws on data security. At this point, almost every state, I think every state does have a law on data security of some kind. Some are more stringent than others like Massachusetts and California. But if you look at the language, it kind of tracks back to the requirements and the ethics rules. So largely speaking, if you follow the state requirements, that’s enough to configure yourself correctly for the ethics. That’s a great point.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Requirements sort of related to security. I don’t want to age you, so I’m just going to age myself.

Jared Correia:

You can age me.

Christopher T. Anderson:

I’ve been around long enough that at the beginning of my career, law firms were just setting up networks. They had individual computers, they were setting up networks, and then they bought servers. And now for the most part, servers, a lot of law firms still have ’em.

Jared Correia:

They do.

Christopher T. Anderson:

But a lot of law firms have moved to mostly cloud-based solutions. What’s your take? Do law firms really need hardware anymore or how should they be thinking about that? Because a security bit about that too.

Jared Correia:

Yeah, I think a lot of lawyers think the hardware is more secure, and so that’s why they want to have the physical servers. But it’s largely about how you set it up. We just talked about four or five different things you could do to secure cloud-based technology, which in a lot of cases is going to be more secure than physical hardware to stop somebody from breaking into your office and stealing your server. I feel like the cloud is much more secure in a lot of ways. So the only hardware I would have if I was running a law firm is probably a laptop, a tablet and a smartphone. And it, I’d be accessing everything else on the cloud. That’s even true if I have desktop software that I’m using, because I’m probably setting that desktop software up on a terminal server so that I can access it Vieth the cloud.

And I mean, it’s not only a security thing, it’s also a logistics thing, an efficiency thing. And this was a pandemic thing that happened with a lot of law firms. When the pandemic hit, I had all these law firms call me and they were like, I can’t get to my server, can’t get to my phones. And I’m like, Hey, I got good news for you. There’s an easy solution for that. So when I talk to law firms, I am like, I’m biased about it. I want them off of hardware. It’s costly, it’s hard to maintain, and the cloud stuff is just so much easier. And at this point, I had a law firm that I was talking to the other day and they were like, well, is Microsoft safe? I’m like, I hope so because every law firm in the world uses it.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And I was like, I like to turn that question around and go, who do you think is spending more money on being safe? You or Microsoft? When people want to resist the cloud, they come up with these James Bond scenarios and it’s just like, is it safer than you? Is it safer than Peggy down the hall who pays her password on her screen?

Jared Correia:

Well, it’s interesting because the state laws I was referencing, a lot of those have different requirements for the different size of business and the different resources that business has. So actually by law, Microsoft, Amazon companies like that are required to have far superior security than the small law firm would. That’s codified.

Christopher T. Anderson:

And so why not ride on that, right? Why not take advantage? I’ll tell you a little anecdote, then we’re going to go to another break. But I was working with a law firm who was giving me this hardware argument like, no, our hardware’s more secure. And so I was like, listen, tell you what, I want to review your situation. So we’re going to meet next Tuesday at your office and we’re going to talk about it. And so we’re going to meet at eight o’clock. And so I go in at eight o’clock on Tuesday and the place is on fire. Not literally people running around like crazy, we can’t access any of our hardware, our software, we can’t access the whole network’s down. We don’t know what’s going on. And I’m like, yeah, is that really true? Yeah. Huh, that’s really awful. Tell you, why don’t we go in this conference room? Lemme tell you something. And we went into the conference room, I said, the reason you can’t access your software is I bribed your cleaning crew last night and came in here and I pulled out one ethernet cable from your server and I plugged it into my device that I’ve got sitting in that room right now copying everything.

Jared Correia:

It’s amazing.

Christopher T. Anderson:

50 bucks, 50 bucks. Now you want to talk to me about Microsoft and if they’re safe. And that was it. That’s great. That’s great. That’s my anecdote and for I love that. I’ll never out the firm, but they went to the cloud that year and what they did, and we do need to go to break, but I think you kind of alluded to it, but for those who are a little bit nervous about switching to cloud-based software, there is an interim or an intermediate solution where you can actually just have your server environment put in a safe place.

Jared Correia:

Yes. That would be a terminal server option that we talked about. Yeah, you can have your own cloud server, like a private cloud.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, exactly. Okay, we are going to take a break here. When we come back, we’re going to just talk about what are the big four. If you’re thinking about what do I need, if you haven’t really bought much, if you’re thinking about starting your law firm, we’re going to talk about the big four, what four major pieces of software should every law firm have, and then we’ll see if we’ve got time for anything else. But first we’ll hear one more word from our sponsors and we are back with Jared crea. What I wanted to do is if folks are just getting started, or even if they aren’t because maybe one of these four is not one of the ones they’ve got, what would you say is the core four? That’s what we’re going to call it. The core four software that every law firm really should have.

Jared Correia:

I think probably two of ’em are obvious, right? You need productivity software. And when I say productivity software, I know a lot of people may not know what that means. That’s like email calendar, document storage, that type of thing, and a whole bunch of other stuff like Google

Christopher T. Anderson:

Workspace, Microsoft these days, basically Microsoft Outlook and online or the Google suite of services.

Jared Correia:

And for most law firms, it’s Microsoft, honestly. And then you need an accounting software, which is mostly QuickBooks, and then a smattering of other players including Xero. And then the other two, I think a lot of law firms at this point have case management software or law management software, which I really like because it’s a relational database for law firms. So honestly, I stopped pricing law really because we had these interminable case meetings all the time. I remember the first law firm I was at, all these old partners would bring me in on a Saturday and we’d do a case review of every single case we had every week. And I was like, this is stupid. I should be at the beach. Isn’t there a better way to organize this data? And lo and behold, there was, they just weren’t using it. So if you get a case management software, especially a cloud-based one, it can suck in all this information, attach it to a case.

So I click a button on a matter and I see everything that’s happening in that case in chronological order historically, it’s beautiful. So you got to have that, I think because email doesn’t do that. It’s not a relational database, it just tracks emails. You can organize in sub-folders, but that’s not the same thing. And then the fourth, which is more of a pandemic thing than anything else, because lawyers started calling me on this where they were like, okay, we don’t know what to do. We’ve got leads, but they can’t come to our office and sign a piece of paper because no one wants to touch our pen and they can’t pay us a check. They can’t come into the office. Law firms had all analog intake processes up through 2020, and then they were like, oh my God, we have to bill something from scratch now.

So the fourth one would be CRM, customer relationship management software or lead management software. So how do you get a lead to convert to a client in the firm? There’s a whole pipeline for that. You can track your advertising, get reporting done through that. You can do marketing automation through that tool. I think every law firm should have a CRM, even the small ones. And it depends on what one you buy. You were talking about if you’re Solo lawyer, you don’t need to get Infusionsoft, but you could get a smaller product. Shouldn’t be, yeah, there’s so many options out there now to look at, but you want to have something. So those are a big four as far as I’m concerned. CRM, law, practice management, productivity software and accounting software. And you unify all those because they’re cloud-based and you swap data back and forth. It’s a good deal,

Christopher T. Anderson:

Which gives us a great segue. You unify all of those. Some of them actually have built-in integrations, one to the other,

Jared Correia:

Right? Some don’t

Christopher T. Anderson:

And some don’t. Is that a must? Do you need to have the built-in integration, or how should law firms think about that?

Jared Correia:

I mean, ideally you want have what I would call a direct integration or built-in integration, which is that two companies work together and they’re like, Hey, we’re going to move data back and forth between our products. I’m writing to your API, you’re writing to my API, which is just a fancy way of saying these softwares can share data with each other. So you can drop your time and billing information into Xero or QuickBooks pretty easily. You can archive emails or your case management software, that kind of thing. The good thing about direct integrations is that they usually have more features and they don’t cost anything. If you don’t have a direct integration, you got two options. One is you could create an indirect integration using a third party software. Like Zapier is probably the most popular tool that does this. But you could have two companies that don’t have a direct integration, but they’ve both written for Zapier’s API, so I could connect Google Forms to my case management software, for example. Now, the problem with that is because there’s a third party that needs to get paid, depending on how many of these things you set up, depending on how many triggers you build, your cost starts to ramp up a little bit. So it’s not ideal. I would

Christopher T. Anderson:

Never have believed that third party integration software like Zapier. For me, Zapier, I would be paying them more than I pay selling my software.

Jared Correia:

I know, it’s wild, isn’t it? It’s

Christopher T. Anderson:

Like what does it do? It’s pipes.

Jared Correia:

Exactly.

Christopher T. Anderson:

It’s just

Jared Correia:

Pipes. Exactly. It’s funny, it’s, I remember when people started ditching cable and it was like, oh, great, I’m going to have a streaming services I can buy and it’s going to cost me 30 bucks a month. Now I got a million streaming services. It’s the same type of thing. But the alternative is getting the API access yourself. And some companies won’t give up that information to individuals or individual businesses, and that’s costly. And you got to maintain it because these APIs break all the time because Oh yeah,

Christopher T. Anderson:

Or they just change.

Jared Correia:

Well, yeah, they change ’em. One company changes the name of a field and the whole thing’s busted. So I tell, don’t build your own. If you can’t find a direct integration, find an indirect integration. There’s a whole bunch of ’em available.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Alright, so I want to wrap this with the hot topic.

Jared Correia:

Oh yeah.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Again, Clio Con was all about it, but I mean if you haven’t noticed it this year, you ain’t paying attention. And that’s ai, artificial intelligence, it’s all the buzz. Everybody’s talking about how law firms are really, really ripe for disruption. Of course, again, aren’t always spent three decades being told how law firms are really right for disruption by X, Y, and Z, but I kind of think it’s true. So how does AI fit into what we’ve been talking about? How lawyers, what should lawyers be thinking about and choosing to get some of that ai? How do they wrap their minds around this? What should they be thinking about over the next

Jared Correia:

Year? That’s going to be somebody’s slogan, now get some of that ai. I guess I’m thinking of three things. One is if you haven’t tried it yet, just check it out. Do something stupid on chat, GPT or Google Bard or whatever. My son likes these sports drinks called Prime, which are crazy popular now. And so I’m like, let’s make our own. Let’s build a recipe on chat, GPT, we can do that for you. I’m like, okay, give me this recipe. Remove the caffeine, make it a flavor, like that kind of thing. So just get used to it. The other thing is that there’s AI happening being utilized in products you’re already using. So we talked about Microsoft. It’s funny when you’re drafting an email in Microsoft or a Word document, they’ve got these phrase completions now. And I talk to people and they’re like, oh my God, I would’ve said that.

Of course, because they’re monitoring what you’re doing. They’re implementing ai. That’s like an AI tool that you’re using every day without even realizing it. They know. They know Google search has an AI component, now it’s coming everywhere. So get used to that stuff and understand how it works. And then what you’re starting to see now, which I think is probably eventually going to be the fullest flowering of this, is that you’ve got legal technology companies using AI and releasing AI features at a pretty rapid rate. Some companies have been doing this for a long time, like eDiscovery has been using AI forever. Legal research companies have been using AI forever. But now you’re seeing a push in case management software companies like you went to Clio Con, they released a bunch of AI related features. File Vine just launched a bunch of AI released related features.

Right now, they’re fairly simple in the sense that they’re relying a lot on generative ai, which is you ask a question or create a prompt and the AI spits out the answer. So you’re seeing things like medical record summaries, that kind of thing, but it’s going to get more sophisticated over the course of time. Data’s going to become more involved. And what I like about those is that’s a closed environment. So one of the problems with AI is that it hallucinates. It makes things up if it thinks you can give you an answer. But if you’re researching in Thomson Reuters, Westlaw, which just acquired Case Text, which had a feature called co-counsel, which is AI assisted legal research, the sites are going to be good because they’re drawing from the sites that Westlaw has. So it’s a little bit safer for attorneys to utilize AI and the software they’re already utilizing. And I think that’s going to be what they start to do as

Christopher T. Anderson:

Opposed to going to chat GPT and writing a brief that you actually submit where it hallucinated entire cases.

Jared Correia:

And then people are like, Hey, are these cases correct and chat GP T’s like, sure, bill. These cases are correct.

Christopher T. Anderson:

It’s wild.

Jared Correia:

And people rely on that, like intelligent people, attorneys. It’s crazy to me. So yeah, use the AI tools that are embedded into the software you’re using.

Christopher T. Anderson:

That makes a lot

Jared Correia:

Of sense because they’re already there or they’re coming and

Christopher T. Anderson:

They’re vetted and they’re tuned. And to avoid problems like that. Listen, Jared, we are out of time, and so we’re going to have to wrap this up. What I’d love to be able to do though, so first of all, that does wrap up this edition of The Un-Billable Hour. So thank you all our listeners for hanging in here with us. My guest today has been Jared Correia, Esquire, CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting, and COO of Giddeon Software. Jared. We talked about a lot of stuff. Some folks might want to follow up with you on some of it. How can they get in touch with you?

Jared Correia:

Oh yeah, A couple websites, Red Cave legal.com for consulting, Giddeon legal.com for the software. And then if you type my name into Google, if you can spell it C-O-R-R-E-I-A, you’ll find a bunch of stuff.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Fantastic. Thank you so much for being on the show. Jared.

Jared Correia:

Thank you. This was a lot of fun.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, it was. All right. And of course, I am Christopher T Anderson, and I look forward to seeing, listening, being with all of you again next month with another great guest as we learn more about topics that help us build the law firm business that works for you. And just a quick reminder that in addition to this interview podcast on the Unbillable Hour also has the Community Table, which we release every month, but you can participate in the Community Table live each and every one of you by coming on through the Legal Talk Network. And we are on the third Thursday at 3:00 PM Eastern Time every month. Third Thursday is at three o’clock Eastern on the community table. And look for that podcast as well. People ask great questions and get good advice from me and others as far as this show. You can subscribe to all the additions of this podcast at legaltalknetwork.com or on iTunes. Thanks for joining us. We’ll speak again soon.

Speaker 1:

The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders, and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer. Thanks for listening to the Unbillable Hour, the Law Practice Advisory Podcast. Join us again for the next edition right here with Legal Talk Network.

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