Community Table: Real AI Uses For Legal Work, Marketing ROI, and Paid Consultations

Episode Notes

Transcript

Speaker 1:

The Unbillable Hour community table where real lawyers from all around the country with real issues they’re dealing with right now meet together virtually to present their questions to Christopher T. Anderson lawyer and law firm management consultant. New questions every episode and none of it scripted. The real conversations happen here. First up to bat is a group discussion on meaningful ways the participants are using AI in their work.

Robert Leitner:

I would like to talk about, I’d be interested if there are any practical examples of the attorneys on this program using AI in a meaningful way.

Christopher T. Anderson:

I think that’s a great question to go around the table with who’s using AI in a material way.

Speaker 4:

I use it in a meaningful way is probably not the way you’re thinking, but I use it to temper my communications to the staff or to adversaries, especially adversaries to the court, to complaining clients because what I really want to say would not be appropriate. So I’ve been taking some lessons. There’s been other stuff out there about ai, prompt chat prompts, like what to put the prompt in and ask chat GBTI use the four version, the paid version. And so I’ve been working with those prompts that I’ve been learning and then it spits out really cool things and then I get go down a rabbit hole because then I was like, no, let’s try another one. Do it again. And it keeps giving me different versions of the same thing. But so 20 versions later I’m like, and then I start frankensteining them all together.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So has this saves you time?

Speaker 4:

Well, no, it’s just so cool. No, it has not yet because I like to see all the different options of the versions of the AI, of what it’s spinning out, but I’ll tell you it has, okay. You know what, Christopher, I’m going to answer your question. It saved me time in the long run because my email communication is now more efficient and appropriate, which I won’t have to do the back and forth, back and forth later on.

Christopher T. Anderson:

That makes sense. Yeah, you can even deliver it. I find it cathartic to write the angry email and then give it to chat GPT and go make this nice.

Speaker 4:

Yes, I say make it nice, make it professional, but keep it short, succinct, concise or put some levity into it. Depending on the circumstance.

Christopher T. Anderson:

We should try next time. Try to say make this formal in a 19th century way and see what it does.

Speaker 4:

And also for a copy marketing copy, just whatever. I’ve also used it frankly, to spot check my vendors when they send me copy, I was cut and pasting it and to see if they’re using it because then what the hell am I paying for?

Christopher T. Anderson:

How do you compare it? Do you ask chat GPT to tell you whether it was chat GPT?

Speaker 4:

No, I have a different AI platform that I take their topic because take a blog, for example, take a blog and whatever topic that I put that in my other platform and then it spits out the blog for me and I was like, huh, this is verbatim. So I reached out to my vendor and I was like, explain this to me. I showed them like, I can do this. I don’t need to pay you $400 a month to do this. And I had to put ’em on the defensive and I was like, tell me why I should pay you this month for blogs.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Did they have an answer?

Speaker 4:

Not really.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Alright. Anybody else with AI efficient AI experience or use that they found useful?

Speaker 5:

Yeah, I mean I’ve done similar things. So we are tax attorneys. We handle people who have New York state tax warrants and you’re not allowed to solicit anybody, but you can send out a letter. So we wrote this gorgeous letter that was, I don’t know, a few pages long and I said, chat GBT make it one page. And they made it amazingly short and beautiful, succinct. And then we did a mailing and then you have to tell the New York State, I guess the grievance committee, you have to send ’em a copy of the letter and it was approved.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Nice. Good. If we’re not careful with our vendors using chat GPT to write copy for marketing and you put some on your website or your blogs, Google can penalize your website for that. That may change over time, but right now that is a risk. And so yeah, if your vendor’s doing that to you, they might be putting your whole website at risk, not to mention not contributing anything of actual value. So yeah, that’s a really good point.

Speaker 6:

I’ve been using paxton.ai. I can’t remember how I discovered them. It was some article that for some legal tech newsletter I subscribed to. What drew me to them originally was they’ve trained their model and they don’t use open AI’s API because they sell themselves as a legal AI legal assistant. So we don’t train the models on anything you upload. Every single account is separate so you don’t have to worry about your client data and all that. That’s at the forefront of their marketing and all that. But what attracted me to it was they trained their model on all US states and federal laws. And so even though it was originally designed actually for SEC compliance attorneys, it ended up just doing an amazing job at just analyzing any legal document I gave it.

Christopher T. Anderson:

That’s awesome.

Speaker 6:

And so I just use it as I would use an associate or a Paralegal saying, here’s this document, here’s a 600 plus page franchise disclosure document. Give me all the franchisee responsibilities, that type of thing. And so it’s just been a massive time saver for me. I’m also using all the other free tools out there too, but Paxton has been a superpower for me.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Excellent, thank you. Yeah, interesting. On the legal front, we had, I don’t remember if it was six months ago or so, we had the one lawyer who got sanctioned for the document that had cases that didn’t exist. It happened again this time. Cohen, Michael Cohen and his lawyer, I’m going to presume unbeknownst to Cohen included non-existent cases. Now it hasn’t been mentioned yet, whether those were AI generated or just complete bs, but yeah, got called out for that. So that’s the danger, right? So analysis good, but I don’t even know if Paxton has anti hallucination safeguards, but we always have to be careful about AI hallucinating

Speaker 6:

In the six months or so that I’ve been using it zero hallucinations from the start used retrieval augmented generation. It’s like you have to select your state law that’s relevant to the query and or then the documents that you want it to draw from

Christopher T. Anderson:

Most. Excellent. That’s cool.

Speaker 4:

I’d like to figure out how to use it for billing review, auditing, billing, review of

Christopher T. Anderson:

Billing. I would imagine that would be very, very useful for that and relatively easy

Speaker 4:

Question of whether confidentiality and all that stuff, security, but you can upload the bills and say, find me discrepancies maybe because now with my chat GBT four, I can upload documents. So I’m wondering if

Christopher T. Anderson:

That, but chat GPT-4 doesn’t give you the safeguard saying that they’re not using what you upload as in their training.

Speaker 4:

Say that again.

Christopher T. Anderson:

So chat GT four or OpenAI does not give you the safeguard that they will not train the model on your documents,

Speaker 4:

Which means I would have to redact them or at least the names

Speaker 7:

On the AI piece, Excel formulas. It will write them for you.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah,

Speaker 7:

Just very helpful. Sometimes

Christopher T. Anderson:

It’s good with that. I’ve noticed to be familiar with the Excel formulas because it won’t always write the one you think, but you might think you got the one you want. So you just want to make sure that you either know about the formulas or you gut check the results to make sure what you’re expecting.

Speaker 7:

Yes. Not sophisticated math

Speaker 1:

On deck is a question from an attorney on how to better convey the value of the paid consultation.

Speaker 8:

I’m having a similar issue conveying the value of meeting with an attorney I need in immigration. That’s what I do. I need to convey to them that yes, they do have options. It is going to cost them more. If they don’t hire an attorney, the only option that they are thinking about is what their cousin had or didn’t have or their cousin’s girlfriend. They just come with preconceived notions and then they don’t want to pay for the consultation fee until somebody tells them they do have options and we can help them, which is not exactly the case. So I want to be able to give them some sort of handout or brochure or something customized based on what I’m discussing with them on the consultation so they feel like there is value that they received on that consultation. I just don’t know, like a checklist perhaps, or this is what you should be doing or shouldn’t you be doing whether you hire me or not this way, at least on the consultation, they feel like they want to pay it. So that’s where I am. I just don’t know what the content of that should be.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay. So I’m a big fan of giving away content in the lead up to them talking with you. I think the best content and you can’t customize it. You could have two or three general because you have two or three, maybe four general paths. Do you do mostly for business visas or you doing mostly individuals that just want a green card? What’s your practice?

Speaker 8:

Family, employment and investment. I don’t do removal defense.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Okay, there you just named the three. So you should have some content for those three. And the best content from my perspective is content that is value is overwhelming and makes it clear that they’re going to be at a world of hurt if they try to do this themselves. It’s kind of like baguettes. I want to make baguettes, I really do. My son and I, we bake together. However, when I pick up a good baguette recipe and read through it, I realize that I’ve got no business making baguettes. I don’t have the equipment, I don’t have the knowledge, I don’t have the skills. And the recipe you want to be providing is the one that makes it clear. So first of all, turn your steam oven up to 400 degrees. Oh shit, I don’t have a steam oven. Accurate, valuable, little bit overwhelming. Making it clear that you’ve got specialized tools and skills that they don’t.

The other thing I would want to do in the glide slope is tell some stories, make it clear, I’m going to make this up. I don’t do immigration law, I don’t know much about it, but I think compelling copy might be something like this. You know that some people sail through the immigration process and some people get really bogged down and sometimes don’t make it. And you know that the difference between those two people is very often a skilled lawyer. We pride ourselves on getting our clients through the process as quickly and easily as possible. We can’t take all the pain out of it, but we can help to make it work for you. Just you have to set up that dichotomy with a lawyer without a lawyer. So that’s my initial take. I’m going to shut up for a moment because I think Rob is really good at this stuff and I’d love for him to pipe in and see where else he can assist you with this

Robert Leitner:

Very similar thoughts. So they don’t want to pay the consultation fee. So what do we do here to convey value? I would proactively handle their objections, you know what their objections are to not paying a consultation fee. How do we overcome them? And I would precondition probably a little bit more than you are what to expect. They should know before what’s going to happen during that consultation and how it’s going to help solve their problem or get ’em started on the right track, whatever it may be.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Without being an expert in immigration law, just what would you want? What would you give an example of what that would look like from Connie? What would you tell the client about what’s going to happen?

Robert Leitner:

Good question. I would let them know they’re going to meet with an attorney. We’re going to talk about your problem. We’re going to define your problem, obviously you want to repeat what their issue is. We want to talk about how we’re going to solve it, what’s going to happen. This is going to happen. In other words, the attitude, it should be you’re already doing business with them. Why the hell wouldn’t they sign up for it? Why the hell wouldn’t they? You’re already doing business with them, they have a problem, you’re going to solve it. And you lay that out for them. You tell them exactly what’s going to happen and when, because they may not understand the process. All they know is there’s a consultation fee. You flip the script, we’re not talking about the fee, we’re talking about your life. What are the consequences?

What else would you spend money on? What’s more important in your life that you’re spending money on right now? So flip the script a little bit. It’s not about money, it’s about outcomes in their life and the really serious nature of what’s going on and they need a fricking attorney and don’t be afraid to discuss consequences and this is what Christopher was speaking about. You could tell them consequences and you can be pretty damn blunt about it. And I would take all of that and that’s how I would create the content. And again, no bullshit. It’s not about you connect to the PNC

Speaker 1:

Up next in the hole is an attorney who seeks guidance on how to market more efficiently.

Speaker 9:

We are trying to determine which vendors we want to keep for the following year. We’re working on the marketing plan. A lot of people say PPC works. A lot of people say local ads work, all of this stuff. And we can obviously look at the numbers and figure out if these really worked for us this year, I’ve been told that they need to produce at least eight times ROI. So that would be my first question. Is that the truth? How long should it take? Some people say PPC should hit immediately. I don’t think that that’s true with family and probate law, which is what we practice. So that’s number one. And then number two is when do we switch over? At what point do we continue throwing money into different marketing vendors and start looking at acquisitions of other family and probate law firms?

Christopher T. Anderson:

Got it. I’m going to answer the second one, Rob. I would love for you to answer her question regarding ROI.

Robert Leitner:

Okay, so let’s define when you say eight XROI am assuming that you mean for every dollar you spend on marketing, the firm receives $8 in revenue. Is that correct?

Speaker 9:

I believe so. So is that the same thing as saying if I spend a thousand dollars or a hundred dollars a month on PPC, it should be providing $800 or Yeah, $800 of closed business.

Robert Leitner:

That is, and that’s an important element. So we define that. There are a lot of different variables here. So if you’re getting good reporting from your marketing vendors, how much you spend per channel, whatever the management fees are, and you should know your cost of acquisition. So at the end of the day you’re spending a certain amount of money per month, how many leads did you get and how many clients did you get? So I’m less interested in the one to eight or the one to 10 or the one to 15 ratio. I’m more interested in how much is it costing per channel for you to get leads and clients. Once you can compare those, then you can choose marketing vendors and you can also make a decision within marketing vendors, what channels are not profitable. Maybe pay per-click isn’t really working out for you. Same thing with local service ads. How much are we paying? How many clients are we getting, et cetera. That’s where I would start.

Speaker 9:

So going back to what you just said, do you also consider the value of coming up at the top of PPC and local service ads as an ROI? Because if we’re coming up at the top on the Google page, we’re more likely to be called even if they’re not calling the number associated with it. So there’s some sort of value that we cannot calculate in that. Does that make sense?

Christopher T. Anderson:

No.

Robert Leitner:

Well it does in terms of SEO. If you want to look at the results for SEO, that would be the situation you just described. Are you coming up on the third page results or the first page of results? But getting to Christopher’s point, the general answer is no, we need results and it has to be data-driven and who gives a shit if you’re coming up second, third, fifth, if you’re getting the good leads and you can convert and turn them into clients, that’s what you’re interested in, right? At the end of the day, you’re paying a marketing company, how much business are you getting from it?

Christopher T. Anderson:

Right? So the reason I said no is exactly what Rob said. We were talking about PPC now for SEO, whole other conversation. But at the end of the day, it is about getting that return, which means what is it costing on the leads? And as long as you get that lead cost where you need it to be, I don’t care what page you’re on, it doesn’t matter. That’s vanity. You try going into a bank and go, Hey, please give me an operating loan because I’m in the first place on Google and see what happens. It is just about getting the clients in the door, whatever it takes. And let’s also face it, at the end of the day, digital ain’t the end all be all. Once you’ve got that dialed in, we’ve got other stuff to do. And so that leads us to the conversation about when to shift over to acquisition.

There is no such thing as shifting over. If you don’t have a steady marketing machine that is dialed in and delivering results, you’ve got no business acquiring anything except if there is an acquisition target that has a marketing machine that is steadily producing leads at a good cost. If there’s someone out there that you could acquire that’s already got that dialed in, that is worthy of acquisition, everything else, remember what you’re doing with acquisition. If you’re being a smart acquirer of other businesses, you are taking talent and the ability to produce work and plugging it into your marketing machine that works and therefore you are delivering higher profit than the current owner thinks they’ve got, right? Because that’s how you get leverage. So if they’re turning profitability at 9%, 10%, 15% per year on gross revenue and you’ve got a marketing machine that can do that at a low enough cost and you’ve got a well-oiled production machine and you know can take those, that same amount of work and deliver at 20 and 25% profit, you will pay multiple of their profitability and get multiple of your profitability, which is instant accretive value. So once you’ve got to get your own marketing shit and your own production shit dialed in tight before you got any business acquiring anything, again, unless you acquire a tight marketing or a tight production machine. Does that make sense?

Speaker 9:

Yep. I’ve already acquired a firm very early on, just have it done it again. So that’s why I’ve, but yes, it does make sense.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Yeah, get this stuff dialed in really well and then again, not a pitch fest, but when it comes time to acquire, come talk to us. We’re happy to help anytime, but seriously get this stuff dialed in on the ROI numbers. Part of the problem with your question was your question because you didn’t even say eight times what that your ROI should be eight times or actually what the denominator was. So if you put in this many dollars of marketing, you get a return of eight. What’s eight revenues or eight profits? It’s very different numbers and then the answer to that goes into what your profitability is. So if you’re running at 25% profitability, then every marketing dollar’s got to produce at least $4 of profit, which might mean a lot more revenue. But the real problem I think when people ask that question is they’ve heard other people say some numbers and then they think they should adopt those numbers. You’ve got to do your own and the best way is what Rob said, which is find out what your channels are doing now. Pick the best ones, find your way, feel your way to the best results. All right, thank you.

Speaker 1:

Bating cleanup today is an attorney who is considering making his phone number more visible to increase sales.

Speaker 6:

This one may only be applicable to newer attorneys or attorneys thinking about going Solo or newer law firm owners I should say. So when I went Solo about two years ago, I decided to not prominently display my phone number and email, but I make it really easy to schedule a call with me using Calendly via embed codes and such on my website. Super, super easy, and I did this to filter the right type of client for me that needs to be tech savvy. I don’t charge a lot and I need a tech savvy client so I can be efficient.

However, after much debate with some mentors, I’m apparently leaving a lot of money on the table, which I know I am, but I also am trying to weigh that against a lot of spam because I’m already getting spam from people are finding my, if you Google me and you Google my law firms through Google my business or whatever they call it these days, my phone number is there, but it’s not prominently displayed on my website, right? I’m just worried the administrative burden of posting that number prominently will be far outweighed by the potential increase in business that I’ll finally have to hire somebody just to manage the phones, which I don’t have to do and I am profit, I’m profitable, but I’m just trying to figure out is the potential to just having a phone number out there so great that it’s worth the administrative burden and potentially hiring a VA or someone to handle the phones?

Christopher T. Anderson:

No, you decided your avatar and you went with it. I applaud you for that and you need to jettison the mentors that suggested otherwise. I mean, I’m sorry, was that not equivocal enough? No, you made a rational decision. Listen, as you scale your business at some point, are you going to want to start drawing in more? Maybe. But you’ve decided what your avatar is and your avatar is me in a sense, right? I don’t ever want to call you. I don’t like talking to people on the phone and so you’re speaking my language. Oh, I can schedule with you without ever talking to a human being. Maybe I can even engage you without talking to a human being. That would be awesome. It drives me absolutely nuts when I use my phone to call an Uber and the Uber drives up to the airport and fucking calls me.

What are you doing? We’re on this wonderful technology platform, and so my advice is you stick with Avatar and you stick with your guns. I think you’re doing the right thing for the clients that you want to get and no. Yeah, I think if you add your phone number, you’re just adding a screening expense to your business. And that’s not forever advice. I just want to be clear. There will become a time when you want to scale, scale and or add a product or something else and then that advice will change. Rob, do you disagree with me?

Robert Leitner:

I don’t disagree. I would just want more data concerning perhaps you are losing customers and this is how you want to operate. I would just want to make sure that you’re meeting your potential clients where they are, that they’re technically astute and that they will create a Calendly event and that they don’t really care if they speak to you and they don’t really care if they text the office and they don’t really want email. So I would just make sure that that is the case. I’ll give you an example. There’s an immigration firm that I used to work with on the border in Texas and Mexico and 95% of their communications are text their PNCs, their clients. They all live life on their phones. If they didn’t meet them where they are, that would be a problem. So I don’t disagree at all. I would just want more information confirming that you’re not leaving anything on the table by not throwing out the widest net.

Speaker 6:

Yeah, it’s definitely something I’ve considered and I’ve considered getting an additional phone number to try it out so that I could ditch it if I just get a

Robert Leitner:

Bunch of spa. Yeah, you can absolutely test it. You can automate systems. There’s all sorts of things you can do, but maybe it’s worth the test, maybe not. If you know your avatar and you’re confident about your avatar and you have data to back that up, then you probably don’t have to do anything different.

Speaker 6:

Yeah, I mean a little bit of data, like clients who had my phone number before I went, Solo, definitely don’t schedule calls with me on my calendar. And clients who, when they sign up with me from the get-go, that’s how they know that that’s the way to get ahold of me. Even if they inevitably get my number, they still schedule calls because they know from the start that they’re guaranteed to get me if they book a call with me as opposed to just try to call me. So it’s complicated. I have been thinking about these call answering services for lawyers where I don’t even need to use the four lawyers. One, I just need somebody picks up the phone and then opens the Calendly link and schedules it with them on the phone, but then the client isn’t learning that that’s the way to do it. So I’m still figuring out is that worth testing out for a few months or something.

Christopher T. Anderson:

Rob and I will both always tell you that anything question like that is worth testing. Everything in business is an experiment until you have the data and most of them will fail and that’s okay.

Speaker 1:

Thank you for listening. This has been the Unbillable Hour community table on the Legal Talk Network.

Continue Reading