Speakeasy Authority Marketing

I recently did a podcast with a Doctor to find out what Doctors are doing in terms of marketing to get more patients. I learned a unique pricing strategy that this doctor uses successfully to retain more patients.

I've talked about it in detail how Attorneys can use this same technique to land more clients. Listen to the podcast below or download it for later. Make sure to subscribe, share and review the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs from Speakeasy Marketing. Today I did a podcast with a doctor, a plastic surgeon. Not for me, not for a tummy tuck or any other stuff but to find out what doctors are doing in terms of marketing to get more patients. You might think that you would get a reaction but what does it have to do with me as an attorney? Well, actually, quite a bit. So I spoke to a very interesting doctor, Dr. Jonathan Kaplan in California and what he does is he posts a price list on his website. Not just a static price list but a price list that is interactive list. So if you want a breast augmentation or a tummy tuck or those kinds of things, you can go in there and you have to enter your information first. You have to enter your name, email, phone number and that kind of stuff.

He captures his potential patient's info just like you could capture a potential client's info and he puts up pricing so they can choose, okay, I want a tummy tuck or I want a breast augmentation, this that or the other and they can create a wish list of things that they want and they submit it and he gives them the pricing right then and there on the website but what it allows him to do is follow up with these potential patients. He has the staff call them and send them a monthly newsletter and those kinds of things. He said it increased his conversion quite a bit. He gets a lot more patients this way and they don't have sticker shock when they come in to see him. I asked him, "Are your prices more than other people?" He said, "No. They are in line with other people."

I said, "Aren't you worried about driving patients away?" He said "No." Actually it reduces sticker shock and he sees the patients are a lot happier and more willing to come in because of it. There is a much higher booking ratio or what you would call a much lower no show ratio, a much higher appointment booking ratio. So it's a great thing and even though it's not specifically yet for lawyers but he said he will be adapting it. There are definite lessons you can take from this to improve your practice. One thing we talked about which I know many attorneys say as well. Every case is different. It's complicated. I don't want to promise results etc. and in the medical field the same thing happens.

There are doctors that say, well it's really complicated and what I do is different and special and he said that he hasn't found, first of all being a plastic surgeon himself that the pricing is not all complicated. He actually overestimates it a bit. So when a person speaks to the staff, they are pleasantly surprised that it's less. So can you do the same thing as an attorney? Let's say you do DUI. Can you put a price selection widget on your website and you could ask a few questions about it. Was anyone injured? Was your BAC higher than 0.10? Were there drugs in your car? You can ask a series of questions, not too many and you could give an estimate for the case with or without trial. You can certainly do that on your website.

I think it's going to have a similar positive effect just like it's had with Dr. Kaplan's people. So if you want this implemented for your practice, let us know, we can do it. It's not that hard to do at all. Email [email protected] or call (888) 225-8594 but I highly encourage you to take some other industries and learn from them because I do and it really helps tremendously to improve your practice. Hope this helps. Take care. Thank you.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Listen, Subscribe & Review on iTunes

We may not yet be at the point where robots are taking all of our jobs … But why not pass off some of the workload at least to machine learning artificial intelligence software that sets the stage for users to employ its contract analysis and helps attorneys in their due diligence. The Director of Marketing of Kira Systems explains how it works and who it works for. Listen to the podcast below or download it for later. Make sure to subscribe, share and review the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tracy: This is Tracy Merda and today I have a special guest Robin McNamara, Product Coordinator at Kira Systems, a leader in helping enterprises uncover relevant information from unstructured context and related documents. Hello Robin. Thank you so much for joining me.

Robin McNamara: Hi Tracy, Thanks. Thanks very much for having me.

Tracy: As someone who spends a lot of time myself looking over paperwork and contracts and things like that. This topic that came up today with Kira Systems is absolutely fascinating. I'll be honest with you. It sounds too good to be true, to be quite frank. So tell me what is Kira Systems and how does it work?

Robin McNamara: We are a software company that assists law firms with identifying and analyzing important clauses in contracts as well as other important documentation that they might have. In particular we assist or the genesis for our company was assisting law firms with the due diligence process associated with Legal work which is a process in which usually large corporate firms use huge volumes of contracts in order to identify risks or other information that might be relevant to a transaction thereby affecting the purchase price or how the transaction is structured or whether the transaction can really go ahead and happen at all. So this was a process that our founding team, our CEO Noah Waisberg and CTO Alex Hudek identified as an area of legal work that could be sort of improved in the way that it was conducted in the past. They saw an opportunity there and we built a software team to assist with that.

Tracy: So how long have you guys been around?

Robin McNamara: Noah and Alex founded Kira Systems in 2011. Noah's background is as a corporate lawyer at the firm called Weil, Gotshal & Manges in their New York office where he did a lot of this legal work called due diligence which basically involves reviewing usually large numbers of contracts as I said before, in order to identify the risks and also test opportunities and so he did a lot of this work and I think the characteristics of that sort of work really lent itself well to the type of technology that we use which is where Alex comes into this. He has a PhD in Computer Science but specifically has a specialization in machine learning from a school called Waterloo which is sort of Canada's MIT. So the two of them got together and were able to come up with a machine learning based solution to this very common legal problem associated with due diligence. Due diligence being a task that is pretty difficult to do well. So really smart and talented people working at prestigious law firms often struggle to do it well because the information you are trying to find is potentially hidden or nuanced in such a way that it is difficult to recognize. But it's also fairly a repetitive process so oftentimes you are looking for the same sort of things again and again. So in their combined expertise they were able to come up with a software solution that delivers both time saving as well as accuracy benefits and for that reason, our company has been able to attract some very high profile clients including some of the largest and most traditional law firms in the world like DLA Piper, Clifford Chance and Freshfield as well as some of the other large professional service organizations like De Voight. That is a brief history of our company which came to be in the last 5 years or so.

Tracy: You guys came at it with both the technology side of it as well as having someone with firsthand experience and probably a lot of appreciation for anything that can ease the process of going through contract after contract, I imagine.

Robin McNamara: Yes. Exactly. It's our dual expertise that is really important. We seek to provide a good solution in this area. We have a number of computer science PhDs in our staff at the moment as well as a number of really talented developers and designers. We also have quite deep legal expertise particularly in our primary target market. So we have a number of people on our staff who have a lot of experience doing MNA work in a number of different contexts and we think that it really gives us both a solid understanding of what our customer's needs are as well as the cutting edge technical expertise needed to do really exciting and interesting things in this space.

Tracy: Let's talk a little bit more about the technology behind Kira systems. Tell me a little bit about how it works? Obviously I am by no means an expert in this field so if you could dumb it down for me in layman's terms. What is it looking for when it's going through documents and things like that?

Robin McNamara: There are a few different ways that you could approach a problem like this. A problem like this being where you have a lot of unstructured information and you want to find certain phrases or words that are suggestive of broader concepts than you are looking for. Systems in the past used oftentimes rule based approaches to solving these problems. You might come up with a recipe that looks for certain keywords, maybe in a certain order or something like that that you can sort of as a human who is very well experienced in a given area might be able to construct a recipe to find a lot of examples of a certain type of contractual provision. An example of that would be something like an assignment provision usually uses the word assignment and maybe a handful of other words and therefore if you search for those words in close proximity to one another, then maybe you are going to be able to capture a majority of the instances of an assignment provision. The significant difference here between that sort of approach which had been tried a bunch of times in the past and it was moderately successful as a solution to this sort of a problem but had some really significant drawbacks. The difference between that and what Kira Systems does is that we use technology that really determines that recipe for you. So we have technology that will basically break down natural language into it's component parts which we call features and then on it's own will come up with an appropriate recipe to weigh the different features to find the information that you are interested in finding. So for example, an assignment provision, although you as an expert in the field might know that it usually contains the word assignment. There are all sorts of other features that might be relevant to making that determination that you wouldn't be able to maybe pick up on or articulate well. So maybe the assignment provision occurs generally in a certain position within the contract or within only certain types of contracts. Potentially the sequence of words used in assignment provision is atypical. So there are all sorts of things that it would be very difficult for a human to both pick up on and articulate well and oftentimes unpredictable things and for that reason, if you can have a system make those pro se determinations in a mathematical way where you end up having happened is that the system is more accurate and importantly a lot more robust to unforeseen types of phrasing. So if someone uses synonyms or uses a new sort of phrasing, our machine learning system is able to accommodate that and maybe identify that it is an assignment provision even if it is not phrased in exactly the same way as the system has seen before. Does that depiction make sense?

Tracy: Absolutely. This seems like a no-brainer to me. Are a lot of law firms using these systems? What else is out there that they are using instead of this system? It seems crazy to me if someone doesn't jump onboard with this today.

Robin McNamara: As I mentioned, we have a number of very significant law firms and corporations and other professional services firms using our software but this base in general, is fairly new. There aren't too many companies that are approaching contract review using machine learning. There are others but we are all fairly recently established companies. If you look at the way this space is changing there is fairly rapid adoption of Kira Systems technology in law firms as well as corporations and other professional service firms. I think the main reason for that is these organizations are coming to the conclusion which you just mentioned, which is that if you can do this more accurately and in less time then it's a no-brainer that they should use this to enhance the way that you are doing this work.

Tracy: So you mentioned that it's in it's infancy slightly in terms of the companies being around and things like that but you obviously, I'm sure are moving at a fast pace. Where do you expect to see Kira Systems in the next few years as to maybe 10 or 20 years down the line?

Robin McNamara: It's not to say that we've definitely grown quite quickly. We are about 40 employees now which is a good number for a fairly recently established company. We are at the moment drawing a lot of attention for the core use case or the reason for our company being established around due diligence and improving the way that it is done at the moment. I think that there are a number of exciting things that we see on the horizon and there is still around this high level goal of improving the way that contract review is done. But there are a number of different ways that we can assist with that process. An example is that we are excited to assist with more is the sort of knowledge management around best practices for drafting contracts in different sorts of ways. At the moment we focus on primarily with assisting the contract review but we could and have more recently been doing some quite sophisticated studies around deal points and what the trends are in industries with given types of contractual provisions. These are the studies that happened down in the past highly manually but the difference with using technology like Kira for a task like that is that you can do it much more quickly and therefore you can do a much larger volume. In early 2017, for example, we would be able to give legal professionals a fairly comprehensive understanding of the way that certain types of contracts have been drafted in a given industry in 2016 whereas in the past, getting that sort of information would take a long time and be very expensive to have lawyers come in and construct those reports manually. So we see a lot of opportunity to augment the industry knowledge around best practices for contract drafting as well but there are a number of other ways that contract review or creation or a bunch of things around contracts could be improved and our system works either with it to work with. In fact a number of companies that you've also had on this podcast in interesting and exciting ways. So also short of ensuring that our software plays well with the sort of adjacent products in this space is another thing that we are excited about.

Tracy: I love this and I'm so looking forward to seeing what you people do with this especially for a lot of the attorneys that we work with; I already have 5 in my head that I know this would help with. So if someone would like to contact you Robin for more information and see if maybe your services are a fit for their firm, what is the best way to reach out?

Robin McNamara: We have a website as most companies do which is kirasystems.com. There you can read about our company and our product as well as a bunch of literature that we've produced about this sort of industry and our ideas on how and why machine learning is a good way to approach these sorts of problems and you will also find our contact information there. So get in touch with us and schedule a demonstration if you are interested in learning more.

Tracy: Alright. Well, I just want to give a special thanks to Robin McNamara, Product Coordinator at Kira Systems. Robin Thank you so much for this great information and for your time today. I know you will have a lot of interested listeners out there

Robin McNamara: Yes. Thanks very much for your time as well Tracy.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Listen, Subscribe & Review on iTunes

Yellow pages can still be used to get clients in 2017 and it is super cheap to advertise. But to get the most out of yellow pages there are a few tricks that I've shared in my latest podcast. Listen to it below, it will definitely help you. Make sure to subscribe, share and review the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Marketing. Today I've got a strange podcast for you. I'm going to talk about the Yellow pages and how it can still be used effectively right here in 2017 to get clients. It's not what you would expect. It's no longer the main source of clients at all. It doesn't matter what your practice area is for there are still people that read Yellow Pages. One you may not expect is people in jail. So if you do criminal defense, DUI, even divorce, you know family law type stuff, domestic violence, emergency removals, those kinds of things. Sometimes the Yellow pages is the only thing people have in jail to be able to get information about a lawyer. There may be pages torn out of the Yellow Pages that are laminated but depending on the jail, they are definitely there.

So if you have those types of clients, advertising in the Yellow Pages has gotten a lot cheaper because they are desperate. They are dying and you can get a lot of coverage both physical and online. So for those kinds of clients it is good. If you do estate planning or if you deal with high net worth individuals, those people, affluent people tend to eschew older. The older people have the money especially baby boomers and based on traditional media like newspaper, Yellow Pages, things like that. So if you want to apply to an older demographic, do it cheaply and effectively. Yellow Pages is still very viable and you'd be shocked at how much cheaper and easier it is to do so. Yellow Pages is not the juggernaut they once were.

They are not able to force and then enforce multiyear contracts and you can even advertise out of category. Let's say you are an injury attorney, you don't have to just advertise in the attorney category. You can advertise in the back pain area or the pain doctor area or the charming areas of the Yellow Pages. That gives you some additional coverage. These are my ideas about the Yellow Pages. I do have clients that are using them successfully and getting a good ROI. So you may be surprised. One last thing I'll talk about with the Yellow Pages is even if they break even for you, they can help add to your list of past clients and you can get reviews from these people, that you did a great job for them. They tend to have the ability to pay more because they usually eschew older and you can build your referral list.

If you do a monthly newsletter to past clients, this can help you get more clients and help you build your list faster. So these are all the unorthodox uses of it but definitely it's a great media to look at. It's not cluttered at all anymore. So unorthodox as it is, I suggest you look into it. This is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Marketing. If you need help in getting this going for your firm, if you are still using the Yellow Pages and you want to make your ads better, then we can help you with that. Call (888) 225-8594 or email [email protected].

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Listen, Subscribe & Review on iTunes

Procertas (Professional Certifications and Technology Assessments) offers training on vital, but often dismissed skills such as

Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, Excel, and other common office technologies. In Law Firms, Doctor's offices, and other professional firms, you'd be surprised at how much productivity can be improved when you train your staff on these basic programs.

Procertas' flagship product is the Legal Technology Assessment or LTA. The LTA, is a first of its kind to integrate benchmarking, training platform pairing and competence-based assessments with synchronized, active learning in a live environment. Once a client completes the course, they become COBOT Qualified (Certified Operator of Basic Office Technology).

Casey Flaherty, founder of Procertas, discusses the importance of legal professionals to be fluent in the tools of their trade and how the LTA benchmark assessment and training program can be used for marketing, professional development, team assembly, on-boarding, provider differentiation, rate negotiation, etc. Casey reveals how important it is that legal professionals are getting the training they need in this ever-changing, competitive market.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Hey, this is Richard Jacobs and I'm here today with Casey Flaherty The principal founder and head of Procertas, a company that is dealing in the legal space.

Richard Jacobs: Casey, can you give me a rundown of what Procertas does because it seems like you guys are into several different aspects, consulting, technology provider etc.? Can you let me know what Procertas is and how it works?

Casey Flaherty: I do consulting and I do it under the Procertas name and then we also have our own technology platform. It's a separate platform. It's related to basic technology training. So for desktop software like Word, Excel and PDF in the legal context. Traditionally lawyers do not receive any training whatsoever on those. They don't get it in law school, they don't get it at their law firms and frankly, they are really bad at it. To the extent that we provide training, it's some videos, you should maybe watch them or we might even send you into a classroom where you can sit there and look at your Blackberry while someone stands there and demonstrates something that you are not paying attention to. I'm a big proponent of competence based learning. What I find is important for learning is the core process used for learning. We should be able to measure learning directly and traditionally it's hard to do that because of the logistics but computers have made that much easier. So instead of telling someone here to watch someone lie to them, treat them or watch these videos, here's a specific test. Please do them.

Richard Jacobs: If you are able to demonstrate how much you've learned, then it doesn't matter how long. Okay. It makes sense.

Casey Flaherty: It does actually matter how long because there are a lot of different ways to do these things and some take much longer than others. Just to give you a really simple example, lawyers deal with a lot of contracts, even for litigators, a settlement agreement is a contract. Lawyers love cross references, with the exception of Section 3.2, it has been dated consistent with Section X, Y and Z. You change one little thing in the contract and all those cross references need to be updated. If you know what you are doing, it takes about 5 seconds. If you don't know what you are doing, I can take hours depending on the length of your contract. Only about 5% of associates and staff know how to use automated cross-references in Microsoft Word. I know that because I've accepted thousands of them. So we were tracking accuracy but part of it is that you let people have the training they don't need which is really important because time is valuable. The other thing is that you identify what people know and what they don't and that's one of our biggest problems when it comes to training, these people have no idea how valuable it would be because they don't know what they don't know. They labor under delusions of adequacy. They think they know what they are doing, they are not doing it wrong on purpose. They simply have no conception of how the software works and may think that it demands them to do it the brute force way. They are wrong but they don't know that they are wrong unless you show them they are wrong. So that's where competence based learning comes in and then because it's computer mediated, you can start delivering it in interesting ways where someone does a task, it gets graded, they can be probably given instant feedback on whether or not it was done correctly. If they did it correctly, move on to the next one, if they did it incorrectly, then that's when they get the training video but then they are immediately afforded the opportunity to apply that training in a live environment meaning they try it again. They can go through that sabbatical as many times as they need until they can close the learning loop. Then you can use an assessment on the back end to verify your attention. So again, you are confirming that people actually know how to use things rather than assuming it which is mostly what we do now. People think that simply by sending them to something that we call training, they are going to get trained.

Richard Jacobs: So, how did you get involved with this? Tell me why this is so important to you. What's your background? How did this start?

Casey Flaherty: I went to law school and went to work with a large commercial litigator. I also did quite a bit of E-discovery. I moved in house and when I moved in house there were a lot of things I didn't want to pay for but that had nothing to do with the really valuable lawyering which my law firm provided. It mostly had to do with the labor intensive work that made that lawyering possible. So the low value ad didn't necessarily work. It was my view that law firms and also in house departments were not properly leveraging their expertise through process and technology and so the question becomes how do you talk to your firms about service delivery; about leveraging that expertise through process and technology. The traditional answer tended to be you asked for a discount, we know you are inefficient so we are not going to pay you your full rate. To me discounts are a very silly game. The second most popular answer is you don't talk to them about it at all. You move to flat fees, alternative fees, that's something I'm much more enthusiastic about but I don't think it solves the entire problem. So I came up with an entire methodology for having those kinds of discussions and in fact it's now contained in a guidebook put out by the Association for Corporate Counsel entitled "Unless You Act: How to Get More Fruits from Your Relationships." It outlines how to have these concrete discussions in areas like knowledge management, document automation, expert systems and the use of data in analytics in a bunch of other categories one of which is technology training. For most of those categories I mentioned, you can come up with reasonable proxies that serve as metrics and metrics are not the end of the discussion, they are the beginning of the discussion. They inform the discussion. So, knowledge management, let's say we want our firms to be using some kind of a repository of a case law. You can get statistics. How frequently is it updated? How frequently is it accessed? Does the firm give credit for knowledge management activity? How much credit is it giving to make points for documents that they produce for you that have had their origin or portions of them have originated in their knowledge management or document automation systems. The sequence starts to measure these things to inform your conversation. The place where I had a very hard time finding good proxy was technology training because again, the only proxy there is did you mandate training? From my personal experience, I don't think it has that much informational value. So I need to create my own method and so that's where I came up with this assessment. I had my outside counsel do it and I got their scores. That was it's origin. I am very passionate about it but I see it as one piece in a much larger puzzle or as my friend Mark Cologne would say, it's a legal mosaic. There are lots of little things that go into superior service delivery. Technology training is one of them but it's certainly not the only one. So that's how it originated. I needed a metric and I didn't have one.

Richard Jacobs: So within this training that you created what does the test look for? What are some of the elements?

Casey Flaherty: It gives people pretty basic tasks that you would encounter in a legal environment and just asks them to do it. So here is a document that has been marked up. You need to turn off track changes, accept all changes, delete all comments. Okay someone added a new section and they messed up the numbering. You need to fix the number. Now that you fixed the numbering, the cross references are off, you need to fix the cross references. There is a problem with the footer and just going through the standard document generation procedure. There is also one for PDFs. It's about preparing and E-filing. There is another one for Excel which is analyzing some data that you got from a client. That's always an interesting one because I love it. At in house counsel I spent more time with Excel than I did Word because the business ran on Excel. You go into the database, explore the raw data, put it into a pivot table and start analyzing it. We are absolutely sending that sort of data to our outside counsel and so it matters whether or not they could deal with it but it didn't mean that every one of my outside counsel had to be an expert in Excel rather they needed to have identified Excel experts on their team and a workflow designed to send spreadsheet intensive work their way. So I would ask them the questions who is your Excel expert? How do you know they are an expert? What does your work flow look like? Normally they would just shrug to all of those questions and then it would come out that they defined the Excel expert as the youngest available person which made me laugh. All the time, it's the pernicious myth of the digital native driving you up the wall.

Richard Jacobs: People may say the twentysomethings, they grew up digital, they know about all that "stuff". Right?

Casey Flaherty: Yeah. It's awful.

Richard Jacobs: What have you seen is the effect of proper training? For the people going through your system, what kind of results are they getting? ROI? Better efficiency? What kind of things do they improve?

Casey Flaherty: So there are a few things that occur. First of all, they get measurably better at using Word, Excel and PDF. They also then report that they have translated those skills into day to day use, that they found it worthwhile and then you see their realization lights go on. With the associates and the paralegals, less of their time gets cut. So people are happier, they are getting their work done quicker, they are making more money on the work they are getting done.

Richard Jacobs: Would you say it leads to better retention of paralegals or associates? Any other improvements?

Casey Flaherty: It's way too soon to tell. We've only been at this for a year. Also we don't have access to the firm's data on such things. I suspect that even if we did it would be, that data would be really noisy. So I just don't know. I don't have the data for that.

Richard Jacobs: Is it difficult to sell this training to firms? It doesn't sound very sexy, you know.

Casey Flaherty: I would think, it's extremely difficult.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah, I would think that people would assume probably wrongly that as long as you basically know these programs, you are fine and you don't need to get training in them etc. Is that what you typically run into?

Casey Flaherty: Yes. They assume people are good, they assume their current training is sufficient. They are not willing to test either of those assumptions even when I offered; I offered them, let's do a pilot. Let's see how you people are doing. When they take me up on that their people are horrible and then they say that we don't want to do it because it will shake people's confidence and make them anxious. So they'd rather proceed under the assumptions that were just shattered because it might upset some folks to actually learn that they are not as good as they thought they were. They have false confidence rather than actually go through the training and have real confidence. It's not just about learning specific skills. It's about developing a there is an after that mentality, getting more familiar, more fluent and more fluid with the technology so when you encounter something and maybe you learned it but now you've forgotten it but you have a general sense that it can be done and how it can be done and a general vocabulary of how to look it up. Maybe you didn't learn it at all but now you think, you know what, there has got to be a way to do this that isn't labor intensive. Let me look it up or let me ask somebody. So it changes the way that we relate to our technology the more we invest in it but it is an extremely hard sell. Not impossible. There are absolutely firms that are doing but I've been very not to say disappointed because I didn't think it would be an easy sell to begin with. Where I have been disappointed has been actually with clients because I had so many clients when I was in house say to me what you are doing is great. If we could do it, we would. Then I would just send them a copy of my audit which at the time was manual. You just asked someone to do certain kind of work and you time them. That's really resource intensive. If there was some way that it was automated and we could just get the scores, we'd do that. Okay. So I automated it. You can't ask outside counsel for this they'd be offended. That's been the most disappointing.

Richard Jacobs: Have you thought about certifying paralegals that have gone through your training systems so they can go out and get better work or higher end work?

Casey Flaherty: Yeah. We have many certifications called COBOT, Certified Operator of Basic Office Technology and it gets awarded on a module by module basis where you can do Word without doing Excel and you can do Excel without doing PDF. As we expand content, we are going to have levels.

Richard Jacobs: So people that have gone through COBOT certification, have you had any reports on them being able to get jobs easier or better paying jobs or their experience of it?

Casey Flaherty: Almost all the purchases have been at a firm level or an organization level. So corporate to corporate law department has bought it or a firm has bought it. So we don't have contact with individuals.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Have you approached the Paralegal industry itself?

Casey Flaherty: Yeah. So we've just signed a deal with the Association of Legal Professionals LLP to offer a discount to their members. We also have entered into the oldest Bar associations to create State specific versions that are CLE accredited.

Richard Jacobs: So have you been able to turn your training into CLE credits and time?

Casey Flaherty: Yes.

Richard Jacobs: Do you think that will be kind of an in road that will grease the skids to get a lot more firms to adopt this?

Casey Flaherty: I hope so but who knows. There is always one more excuse, right? So CLE is a current excuse but I have no idea. There is always going to be one more thing. I think with law it always takes a while. It takes years. One of the things I do is I review I run convergence initiatives for law departments where they shrink the numbers of law departments or law firms that they are doing business with in order to ease their administrative burden and create more leverage and create deeper supplier relationships. So I lead a lot of R & P responses and there will be a section of course on technology and there 'll be different questions but one of them will be about merging technologies if you are doing anything with the new stuff. I can't tell you how many times, you're told, Oh Yes and then you'll get a paragraph on their extranets. Extranets have been in legal since 1996 and yet there are firms that genuinely believe that it is an emerging technology. That's how long it takes.

Richard Jacobs: So yeah, because you have this perspective, what have you seen that is truly an emerging technology for the law space or are you not able to comment on anything like that?

Casey Flaherty: I'm actually on the advisory board of Next Law Labs. I wrote the legal technology column for APC Docket for 2 years. I currently switched to another one on Strategic Sources for legal services. I look at a lot of things and Next Law Labs is an investor in Ross. I'm a big fan of algorithmic invoice review and categorization to get into better mining large existing data. So for companies like Legal Decoder, I'm really excited about getting better stronger qualitative measurements and benchmarks. There absolutely are things out there that are interesting to me and they are not all big and Word rate I think is a fantastic program. It's not world changing next generation AI but it's absolutely valuable at doing something that we are not that good at doing. So there are lots of things that I find interesting. I'm more of a incrementalist, I don't necessarily think that we are in a phase shift from a technological perspective where all of a sudden lawyers disappear to the example of a phase shift which is more business model based that helps departments grow and has mixed feelings about that. I think that from a business model perspective we also look at alternative service providers in the big four so that we have a much different mix of delivery models but on the technology side it tends to be far more incremental. It tends to be, Ross is great but it's a better way to do legal research. That's fantastic. It should actually be explored, purchased etc. but it does not fundamentally change the way we deliver legal services. Legal Decoder running 24 million algorithms against every line item of every invoice helps you categorize things, helps you price things, helps you identify anomalous billing activities. Absolutely fantastic but not that fundamentally different from things that we've been trying to do. It just helps us do them better. Qualmack is essentially a survey with some really interesting statistical stuff on the backend. Great reporting, very slick but someone could have produced a survey 20 years ago about how you feel about your outside counsel and of course large organizations have done it from BCI to Auburn Wilde. This is much more vocal, I would say ultimately it's going to be more useful and I think it could absolutely change the way in house outside counsel talk to each other but it's still not fundamentally changing the relationship in some way that was previously unthinkable. To the extent we are getting anywhere near that, I love the Dan Katts in legal text, can we find new ways to characterize legal risks? Can we securitize it? Can we use an ensemble of probes to rationalize what is a very irrational, informal kind of self-insurance operation that we've got going on? To me, that's fascinating. There are certainly technology components but it's more social than it is technological.

Richard Jacobs: Any new technology coming up that you do think will be more than just incremental changes that will actually be game changers in the legal space?

Casey Flaherty: Game changers? I don't see it. You can see it in particular areas. LegalZoom was a game changer when it came to the production of wills. That had a real impact on a lot of lawyers. Things like Mark Tamminga at Osler did with some automation in particular areas tended to be a game changer. So there are technologies that help drive commoditization or at least mass customization but they tend to be very specific. I can't think of any general purpose technology that is a game changer. I get very excited about all of these things. Virtual reality for accident reconstruction, for example. That's awesome. That's just cool or to the extent that you are doing anything in the patent space or anything where that kind of three dimensional visualization s going to have an enormous impact on the way people understand what is going on. I think that's great. I don't know if that is a game changer. It's just a different way to present information to a jury. It's a better way. It's a way that once it matures, you better be using it or you are going to lose. So, to say it's not a game changer is not to dismiss it in any way, shape or form but at what point do we say the game has changed. So in 96, we had people that were being called dangerous and possibly insane for suggesting that lawyers will start communicating with their clients by email Today, we can't even be called Blackberry addicts anymore because we are all on iPhones but we email with our clients all the time. That has absolutely changed the way that we operate and yet, did it really fundamentally change our relationships with our clients or the kind of work we did? That's where we get into philosophical questions that I can't answer.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah. I'm sure that there are many lawyers that text with their clients too, not just email

Casey Flaherty: Yes. But is that game changing?

Richard Jacobs: No. Not really. You are right.

Casey Flaherty: I'm not saying that I am right. I'm saying I don't know. Do I see something like what Amazon did to bookstores? Or what NetFlix did to Blockbuster? Or what Uber is doing to the Taxi industry? That kind of 3rd party disruption. Completely different way of delivering services. Completely different way of thinking about what it is you are selling, that I don't see but it might also be that I'm not that imaginative. I don't have any problem with the idea that I'm not the smartest, most creative person in legal and maybe I'm absolutely missing it even though I'm a proponent of AI, of VR, of AR, of expert systems of machine learning, natural language processing, I mean go down your buzzword.

Richard Jacobs: Let me ask you a couple of things about that because it's geared towards Future Tech. Especially because of the writing you've done and all the things you've seen in the legal industry, I just wanted to run a couple of ideas by you to see what your thought is. You probably have a more educated stance on it. I've spoken to companies, that, for instance would look at 1000 DUI cases in a given state. Look at the fact patterns, everything about the case, the judge, prosecutor and all that. Use natural language processing to boil it all down and to make a recommendation engine for a drunk driving or a DUI attorney for when they get new clients based on this used corpus of past cases, facts and everything. If you file a motion to do this, it has a high rate of succeeding or not. Do you see a place for those kinds of AI systems or are they more flights of fancy?

Casey Flaherty: Those are fantastic. I love what they are doing at Lex Machina. They are great. In IT matters I would absolutely use them. I think there are ways to organize and analyze the data that will help you make an informed decision. Now still, a person making a decision, I tend to be a follower of Dan Katz in terms of ensembles that you want to use to the extent you can. Experts crowd the algorithm and you are talking about the algorithm piece absolutely make much better decisions. One of the things I do in my consulting is work on decision free analysis. Large companies, large cases trying to find some vigor into how they set reserves, how they decide on settlement authority, how they budget for the case or what the expected value is. The decision tree is just another way to represent an algorithm. If we were doing it right which by the way, we are not, we would have data informing every single one of those inflection points and we'd have a data strategy not only to use in past cases but also to track our forecasting accuracy in past cases and not just how well are the algorithms doing but how well are the individual forecasters who are involved in dealing. I'm a huge proponent that one of these days, I'm going to convince one of these large companies to hire me for an extended period as opposed to one off cases for a large program of developing a data strategy and using predictive analytics to inform the decisions that we make on cases helping us decide whether or not to file a motion, helping us to decide what the outcome of a motion means for the remainder of the case, how we think about settlement etc. Although I will go back to the ensemble part. I consider experts to be part of that process. AI reduces the cost of prediction which thereby increases the value of judgement. The more opportunities that we have to use the machine's predicting, to me the more valuable human judgement becomes because now it's much more informed and now you can actually track the difference between different experts and their judgements. So I think that kind of technology, and by the way it's not just technology, it's a different way of thinking about and delivering legal services which should already be here but absolutely will have a larger and larger role to play in the future.

Richard Jacobs: I spoke to a researcher, Dimitrios Tsanapatsounis. He was one of the people involved in creating what they call the AI judge. So I guess in the European courts they added several hundred cases on human rights. Do you think that in the future, there may be a third party in the courtroom, the judge. Counsel, I'm sorry 4th party. Maybe jury maybe not but an AI system that knows all the case law that can be another voice in the courtroom, that has it all in hand, that can say this is everything on the subject and the case that's going on. It's referenced here, here and here. Do you think there will be an additional voice in the courtroom? Again, that's a computer or AI system that will weigh in and help the judge and the attorneys and everyone making a decision on cases?

Casey Flaherty: I don't think that there will be a neutral AI that is somehow Deus Ex Machina like it's God from the machine and it's coming down and it's speaking to everyone simultaneously but I think you already have some of that. Westlaw in Texas already has AI going into their legal research. They want to make it better, it should be better and they certainly have competition from the likes of that case in law etc. I can absolutely see an expansion of that where people become more and more reliant on the technology to help them through the course of their case. You can have jurors, you can film the entire case as opposed to having to go through a transcript because you have machine learning and you have machine transcription. You can have them go back and watch testimony in a way that they haven't before and rearrange testimony and here I'm getting into a kind of an oblong industry. I don't know if John Undercopler and Ted talk about the way he grabs video from different sources and puts them together. I mean you could have juries with a much different relationship through the evidence than you have right now. An AI would be a huge part of that. You could have judges who are much more reliant on AI when they are making rulings. You can have lawyers that are much more reliant on AI when they are making arguments or facing objections etc. So I see all of that and I also see some cases going the kind of Modria direction where you do have a machine being adjudicated. I don't see the mix where you actually have AI as a voice in the courtroom with the judge. I don't see that anywhere in the near or medium future. In the far future, who knows?

Richard Jacobs: Right. That seems like the shape of your view of all the things going on. It's fascinating. I've contemplated videoing court proceedings and reviewing parts of it later on and having one or both members of counsel bring them up and display them as they are talking and read around them. Those kinds of things.

Casey Flaherty: Yes and then the jury has access to everything like that. In natural language processing, they are able to by voice, bring up such and such testimony and Oh didn't that one person say something about that one thing? They don't need to remember exactly what it was if they know that it is within that general concept of AI to be able to offer them a few different options. Oh this. Oh no. Faulty jury memories is one of the most frustrating things when you sit behind that double pane glass and you are doing jury research. It completely changes the way that juries review evidence. To the extent that you are changing the way that juries review evidence, you are going to change the way that lawyers present it. I'm not Pooh Pooing AI in the courtroom. I see it as a standalone adjudicator in places where we think hat it's going to increase access to justice, we just don't have the bandwidth like Modria and I see it as a tool that is used by everyone that is in our class at courtroom. I don't see it as yet another kind of independent sentient party in a courtroom in the near or medium term.

Richard Jacobs: Right. Got you. Any other technologies that you are aware of that most people wouldn't be aware of?

Casey Flaherty: I never know how to answer that question because I deal with people all the time who think that Extranet is an emerging technology and so I live in this little bubble. I talked to Dan Katz more than I talked to any single practicing attorney. I talk to Bill Henderson, I talk to the people who are at the forefront and so I am always learning things from them but then we have the curse of ignorance. We don't know what we don't know. Then we also have the curse of knowledge. Once you know something, it's hard to imagine not knowing. I have a hard time calibrating this; your audience isn't comprised of just run of the mill lawyers, right? You have people who sell select. So I would think that they read a lot of the same sources that I read.

Richard Jacobs: At the same time they would be hungry to hear any tidbit that they haven't heard before. One more thing I would bring up is have you seen evidence of remote courtrooms where the participants would be in their own locations and the judge would be in their own location so they wouldn't have to physically travel to a courtroom and our proceeding would be held over a secure channel on Skype? Those types of things.

Casey Flaherty: So we've been doing court calls for years. I haven't seen a video conference system for courts but it's not that large a leap from where we are right now with court call. It makes a lot of sense. I don't think there is much in the way of technological barriers to doing it. It's more about social barriers, habit, status quo. I haven't seen any movement afoot but it would seem to be one of those next logical steps.

Richard Jacobs: Now I understand what you mean when you say you are an incrementalist. How you view these things but it makes sense to view them in that way. Law is still law. Things are still are the way that they are. It's just different ways to present, to improve, to make things faster, different, better but still the same thing. That makes sense. Okay.

Casey Flaherty: It could be completely different in 10 years. Again, I'm not that imaginative.

Richard Jacobs: Important question. So for people listening to this podcast whether they be lawyers or people that want to work in the legal sphere. They have a technology idea for instance. Who are the thought leaders who would help someone evaluate whether the legal impact of the new technology, 3D printing, AI, things like that which will interface obviously with the law and how the law may treat them and view them. Do you have any resources? People that can be spoken to or consulted with to give that perspective on how their invention or this new technology will come face to face with the law and how it will be treated?

Casey Flaherty: So I've mentioned Dan Katz. He is a genius. He is amazing. Bill Henderson, I also mentioned. If you have an idea about doing something different in law, there is no better person to run it by than Ken Grady who my friend Jeff Carr lovingly gave the title of dream squasher. He is so smart and so experienced and so genuinely interested in these things that he is phenomenal to talk to about any change you want to make. He can talk to you about the tech side of your work and he is also able to talk to you about the business side, the client's side, the law firm's side. He is amazing and in a similar vein, Ron Freedman, I talked to you about being an incrementalist. There is no one who has written better on incrementalism in law than Ron. Ron is just wonderful. I don't know if he is a person to talk to about Tech but he certainly knows about it but no one understands the economics and the political economy of the legal landscape more than Bruce McKellan. Even if you don't talk to him, you absolutely have to read his books. Mark Cohen is another really good one. There are lots of good people and I feel like I'm going to offend some of my friends by leaving them off this list.

Richard Jacobs: One thing that would be helpful is some of these guys have common names. I don't know if you've provided the end or another segment or to text but do you have any other identifiers on how people interested in contacting these people or reading their works could find them?

Casey Flaherty: Dan Katz is @computational on Twitter but if you just look up Dan Katz, you will be able to find a bunch of his talks and presentations. Ken Grady is I believe @legallane, I have to look that up but Ken writes sidelines for Psyfar. Ron Freedmann runs Prism Legal and so Ken Grady is @leanlawstrategy, Ron Freedman is @ronfreedmann. He also writes Prism Legal. Mark Cohen is @legalmosaic. He writes the legal mosaic blog. I think I also mentioned Bill Henderson. He's at @wihender on Twitter. He blogs or writes at different places, so it's just better to look up Professor William Henderson or Professor Bill Henderson in Indiana. Who else did I mention. All those people are and then there is Bruce McKellan. He writes Adam Smith.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Got you. That would include yourself. You definitely seem to be a source of a lot of information.

Casey Flaherty: If you go to procertas.com, there is an in the news section and it links to all of my writing because I write all over the place.

Richard Jacobs: That's great. Okay. That's great research. That was the last question I was going to ask you. For people listening whether they be law firms, individuals, lawyers, etc. what's the best way for them to get in contact with you and find out about your COBOT certification and your consulting and learn from you or implement what you have.

Casey Flaherty: Through procertas.com. My email is just [email protected].

Richard Jacobs: Okay, Casey, like I said. I count you among these possible people to speak to, as being a great source of info and I appreciate you taking the time today to do this interview.

Casey Flaherty: Great. Thank you so much.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Listen, Subscribe & Review on iTunes

Not so sure about adding live chat to your website? Join us as the VP/Co-Founder and the Director of Marketing of ApexChat share how their service can result in a 40% increase in leads for your law firm. Stay tuned to the end. ApexChat offers listeners an exclusive value offer. Listen to the interview below and make sure to subscribe, share and review the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tracy: This is Tracy Merda with Secrets of Attorney Marketing and today I have two very special guests with me. I have the co-founder of Apex Chat Jim Bert and Kenneth Lee. Apex chat is an industry leader in Live Chat services providing live chat services and software that helps online businesses turn valuable advertising into customers. Thank you so much for joining me today gentlemen.

Jim Bert: Thank You. Thank you for having us.

Kenneth Lee: Not a problem. We are excited to get this interview underway.

Tracy: Let's just jump right in. Why don't you tell me a little bit about Apex Chat? Just tell me a little bit about the history. What kind of brought the company about and how you guys work?

Jim Bert: Yeah. So Apex Chat was founded back in April 2008 and our business is to create more reach for our clients. In other words, convert more people that come to the website into leads for business. In doing that we provide a live chat service, we have 150 people who all they do is take chats on behalf of our clients. As I mentioned, our role is to convert more visitors to websites into prospects for the business. Today, we have about 6000 clients or over 6000 clients, most of which are law firms. We have well over 2000 law firms that we do business with and those law firms all have the same goal. That is they want to capture more information on the people that come to their website and convert them into leads for the business. As you probably know, today a lot of people will go to a website and they won't do anything at all. They'll just leave and they don't necessarily want to make a phone call to the business. They don't want to fill out a form, so we found that on the other hand they will chat with someone. In fact, we see a 40% increase in the leads that we can supply for business when they had our live chat services in their website.

Tracy: Wow. Okay. That's huge. Who are your clients typically besides the legal firms and things like that?

Jim Bert: If you can turn on your radio in the morning or you watch TV and you see people advertising, here in the San Francisco Bay Area which is where we are headquartered, we have a lot of law firms that we see advertising for Mesothelioma and around this time of the year a lot of tax attorneys will advertise and then there's always the solar firms, the electrical firms, the heating and air conditioning companies, the carpet companies. So lots of companies that want to come to your home and give you a quote on their services. Every one of those people are very good prospects for us because they are very obviously just spending money advertising. So what they want to do is to convert more of those people that come to their website into prospects for their businesses. In addition to in-home services businesses and attorneys, we have automobile dealerships, we have plastic surgeons, we have some real estate agents, we have a lot of educational businesses. We have pest control businesses and many more. In other words, anybody you hear advertising on the radio or television is probably a great prospect for chat.

Tracy: You talked a little bit about why people prefer live chat. Do you think it's just the world that we live in today. I'm totally guilty myself. I hate picking up the phone unless I have to. I want to get as much information as possible before I have to dial a phone. Do you think it works in all industries or is it more specific to things like legal firms and other companies that you work with?

Jim Bert: In our business you know, obviously we are not experts in every single business that we talk to. So if you are asking a few simple questions and getting the answers to those questions and then getting the contact information for the visitor back to the firm in a couple of minutes that the chat is over in. We can do that very nicely in the industries that I mentioned. However, I mean chat isn't a good application for a restaurant or a bar or a retail store or even many E-commerce sites where the kinds of questions that people are going to ask from the chat representative are things like I'm trying to check out and my Visa card doesn't work. Obviously we can't help with things like that. So those businesses that I mentioned to you are, for the most part really good prospects for us and the more traffic they have on their site, the better the prospect because the more they are interested in converting higher numbers of those people that are coming to their website.

Kenneth Lee: I'd also like to add that one of the core reasons why Live chat works on a website is that for attorneys, specifically of course the goal is to get your website visited, to pick up a phone and set up a consultation with the firm but that in reality isn't always an easy decision for a person to do right away. What live chat does is give them another opportunity, another communication channel if you will, to warm up to contact with the firm, to kind of engage the dialogue and extract the customer's contact information and pass it along to the firm.

Tracy: Walk me through the process. I am a prospective client, I'm looking for an attorney. I go to their website, does the screen pop up? What am I asked? What am I looking for? How do you disarm those that maybe aren't attracted to that initial popup screen if that's what it looks like?

Jim Bert: We call that pop up screen a proactive invitation. A proactive invitation depending on the business, they might want it to be intrusive. By intrusive, I mean there are some sites that have a pop up that comes up in the middle of the window and darkens the screen and you can't do anything until you click Yes or No. Most of our clients prefer not to have that style of invitation. They prefer something else that's more subtle but no matter what it is it should be animated in some way. Something that grabs the attention of someone coming to the website. When you put a proactive invitation on the website, it is much more effective than a button that just sits there and says Click Here For Help because you want to grab the attention of that person visiting the website. If you think about us, your listeners, yourself and me, I don't know necessarily why I do a search when I'm presented with a lot of different options. What makes us choose to start a conversation with website A versus website B? We know that if you introduce a proactive invitation 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I was just going on in the middle of the night on weekends, that visitor to the website is much more likely to communicate with your business first over another business that doesn't offer that. I mean they are going to think, well, this is, especially in the middle of the night, this must be a large firm. Obviously they are very customer service oriented, here is a nice friendly person that said how can I help you? So , for all those reasons, when chat gets put on a website, a law firm and really any business should expect about a 40% increase, it's a very large number, a 40% increase in the number of leads they are getting from the internet but remember this, a chat not only occurs on a desktop but over 40% now of chats that are started come in from a mobile device. Whatever you do, you've got to have that chat available on mobile device as well, on desktops, mobile devices and tablets all of which of course, we do.

Tracy: Once the information gets to the attorneys, what are you finding are the follow up rates or if you are able to track the information of the attorneys already going through following up and the clients materializing?

Jim Bert: It's interesting you asked that question because you can take Law firm A and Law Firm B. Law firm A does things a certain way and law firm B does things a different way. Law firm A gets 20 leads from us and law firm B gets 20 leads from us. Law Firm A converts a high number of those leads, Law Firm B converts a low number of those leads. So it's very important that the firm has a system in place to deal with not only leads that come from chat but phone calls, emails, any other forms, any other method and a lot of firms don't do really well with that and that's why there are companies in the marketplace that have various systems to help attorneys manage that. We integrate with an awful lot of them. common firms like Salesforce.com, Infusionsoft, Hubspot are some of the CRM systems and then there are systems like Needles and Captora which are specific to the legal industry. So we integrate with all of them and so it's very important that we are able to do that.

Kenneth Lee: I'll also add to what Jim just said. It really comes down to speed. If an attorney has a system where they are able to get a lead from live chat or even a phone call, any lead as you mentioned, and they will be the first attorney. You know if a prospective client contacted 3 different firms, they will be the first one to set up a consultation without our clients that have that system in place tend to convert a higher percentage of the live chat leads we send them.

Tracy: Who is on the other end of this chat? I'm looking at the information, I'm looking at the website, it pops up. What am I looking at? Who am I going to talk to?

Jim Bert: We have people dedicated to taking chats 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. So the people that are answering those chats are our people. A common question we get is how do your people know what to say? Are they experts in the legal field? The answer to that question is no. They aren't necessarily experts in the legal industry although we have people that take chats that specialize in personal injury and criminal and bankruptcy. They are still not legal people. They are not lawyers and they don't answer legal questions. Let me give you an example of a typical chat for a personal injury attorney. Hi my name is Jim. How may I help you? We get something back. Can you tell me a little bit about what happened? We get something back. When and where did it happen? We get something back. Have you seen a doctor? We get something back. May I have your name and your phone number and your email address? I'm going to send your information over to the firm and someone will get back to you to set up a free consultation. Typical conversation that takes place with a visitor to a personal injury site. We have similar what we call scripts that our agents use to communicate for bankruptcy or criminal or immigration and in other industries as well, we have these scripts which we alter to fit the specifics of the firm.

Tracy: So you mentioned the timeframes that these chats are answered in. Right there I see that as a huge benefit to our attorney clients and listeners who don't have that staff on hand to be answering calls after business hours let alone 24/7 so what have you heard in success stories in clients being able to capture that market that sometimes gets away from them?

Jim Bert: Let me try to answer that in a couple of ways. We talked a little bit about who answers the chats. So there are really 3 ways to approach that. If a firm decides that they want to have live chat and can see that and talk to other people. They are going to learn that if they have live chat on their website, then they are going to get more leads, period. 40% is the number we use because that's typically what happens. Some firms prefer to take their own chats. They have legal specialists available. They can obviously answer legal questions. It's their business. So they would prefer to take their own chats. So one way of doing it is to have your own software or whatever product is available and take your own chats. The question then becomes what do you do off hours for taking chats with your own people. So option one for a firm is to take my own chats and not do anything off hours. Option 2 is to use a service like Apex Chat a 100% of the time so that the firm doesn't have to worry about whether they have operators available or people available to answer chats, Apex Chat takes care of that and we are better at it typically than the firm even though we can't answer specific legal questions, we know how to deal with them in getting the information and getting it back to the firm. But we don't forget a thing, we don't forget the phone number, we don't forget the chat where it took place. We get a lot of business from firms that have tried to take their own chats and they end up missing the chats altogether or they find out afterwards that they didn't get the name of the person. So that's our job, that's what we do. Then we have some clients that use our product to take their own chats during the day and then use us off hours with the added benefit that if they are logged into the system and they miss a chat. This also happens to a lot of people who don't do this full time, they walk away from the computer. So perhaps, you've seen this. I've seen it. You go in, you start a chat and no one responds. A wheel starts turning and nothing happens. So, with our product, if someone wants to take their own chats, use us off hours, we have a little thing we call a rollover feature or if the client doesn't pick up that chat in a certain number of seconds and together, we all determine that number, then it rolls over to us. So in effect, they know they'll never miss a chat.

Tracy: I love that.

Jim Bert: We have mostly large firms that do that.

Kenneth Lee: Now, I'll add to what Jim just said in terms of taking chats during office hours and then having some kind of service after the office closes. The reason why that's so critical is that we found after all the clients we serviced, we generate leads after office hours. That's where 42% of the leads happen after the office closed. So if a firm isn't thinking about what is happening after office doors close, they are actually missing out on a sizeable amount of leads that have to be generated via live chat.

Tracy: Absolutely. So where do you see Apex Chat and Live Chat in general to be in the future 5, 10 or 15 years from now?

Jim Bert: So, before I answer that, let me tell you a couple of other things that we've done fairly recently to enhance our current service. One of them is we have the ability to connect a visitor by phone to the business while we are chatting with them. Obviously that's better than telling your visitor that someone will get back to them because then you are in email tag and phone tag and that is fine but we have this capability where we can say to this visitor, would you like to speak to somebody right now? If they say yes, we ask for their phone number and the system automatically connects them to the business. So we do that for almost 100% of our legal clients. All we need is the phone numbers and the hours of the office and we set that up. The other thing that we've noticed is that there is a large population that prefers to text rather than chat with somebody even on a mobile device. So we just added the capability for a visitor who is coming to the site on their mobile device to actually text us. So, on their mobile phone it goes into text mode versus a chat mode if you will. So we've just added that. The 3rd thing that we've just added or are about to add just next week is, let's say someone is on a website and they don't start a chat and they are about to leave. We can now detect where their mouse is, if they are on a desktop, near the X in the browser or near the toolbar in the browser, we can introduce what we call an exit popup. It says, Hey we see that you are about to leave our site. Are you sure that there isn't anything that we can help you with? So that's about to come out. So where we are is we as a company are expanding in a couple of different ways. We are expanding by adding sales people but we also sell our products through digital marketing companies whose business it is to create websites, push traffic to a website through SEO campaigns, PPC campaigns etc. So it's a natural partnership for us because we have nothing to do with that. We can only come into play once they get to the website and we can convert more traffic. So that digital web marketing company looks better to their client. So we have a lot of partnerships. We have over 150 partners that we sell our products and many of them in the legal industry. So we are expanding in that area. In the next 5 years chat is really in it's infancy. If you go do a search somewhere, not in just the legal industry but anywhere, what percentage of websites are going to have chat? Very small because it's just now starting to take hold. So we expect that growth to come from adding more products and adding more digital marketing companies to our portfolio and continuing to grow and also to add more integration with 3rd party systems. So I think I mentioned earlier, we integrate with a lot of these CRM systems. I had a conversation recently with a company that offers platforms that do all kinds of analyses in the marketplace. So integrating our chat function into all of those is going to continue to be something that we do on a regular basis.

Kenneth Lee: I also want to add to what Jim said in terms of where we fit and how the landscape is changing. I think Live Chat is being adopted on a mass scale and certainly in 5 years, I see consumers almost expecting websites to offer Live Chat and because they expect that to be available and we are trying to take advantage of that offering for many small businesses and many law firms that are unable to handle their own chats. I also think that in terms of our direction as a company. I'm the Director of Marketing and I see really what our proposition is and that is Live Chat. What we are really doing is helping our clients increase leads and conversion on our websites and so some of the things that Jim had mentioned like the exit popup and SMS texting abilities that we handle are all pointing at one major goal, to help our end clients get more leads whether that's with Live Chat or not. In 10 or 15 years it may morph into something else that helps our clients get more leads.

Tracy: That's just some fascinating information today guys. We here at Speakeasy are a big fan of what you all do. If someone would like more information or if someone would maybe like to look into the services of Apex Chat, what is the best way to reach out to you guys?

Jim Bert: So what we are going to do is we are going to give an offer for your listeners only. We are going to create a special URL which is try.apexchat.com/speakeasy and what they'll see there is an exclusive offer for your listeners, a waived set of fee which typically is $300 to start our service. We are going to waive that to make it extremely easy for your listeners to give us a try.

Tracy: That is awesome. That is an incredible offer. I want to give a special thanks to my guests today, both Kenneth Lee of Apex Chat as well as Jim. Thank you for joining us. Jim is the co-founder of Apex Chat and an industry leader in Live Chat services. Thank you gentlemen and please continue to keep us posted on all that is Live Chat and what we can expect in the future here.

Jim Bert: Thank You. Thanks for having us.

Kenneth Lee: Thanks for having us.

Tracy: Alright. Have a good one.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Listen, Subscribe & Review on iTunes

If you're doing heavy contract drafting, review, editing, and/or e-discovery, then Legal Sifter can help you understand lengthy and complex contracts within minutes using their artificial intelligence and machine learning technology.

Legal Sifter uses natural language processing (NPL) & machine learning, to process unstructured raw terms, conditions & words into well-structured data & insights ready to be used to make quick & well informed decisions, saving both time as well as money for both attorneys and anyone facing the reading and interpretation of one or more legal agreements.

Kevin Miller, Chief Executive Officer of Legal Sifter explain how their contract interpretation artificial intelligence software helps the lay person and experienced attorney both read and understand contracts faster. The software gives you a second set of eyes to find the hidden terms & conditions that may be overlooked in a contract.

The legal industry is being transformed by artificial intelligence, and democratizing tools like Legal Sifter are allowing people who may find it difficult or too time consuming to hire an attorney to interpret contracts and make education decisions.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Hey, this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Marketing's attorney marketing podcast and I'm speaking to Kevin Miller, CEO of Legal Sifter. It's an application used to help people understand contracts which can be quite complex at times.

Richard Jacobs: So welcome Kevin, how are you doing?

Kevin Miller: I'm doing great Richard. Thank you so much.

Richard Jacobs: Thanks for being on the podcast. Really appreciate it. I gave a 2 second description. Can you give a better description of what Legal Sifter does and how it works?

Kevin Miller: We are an artificial intelligence company. We are based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and born originally in Carnegie Mellon University and we are using a form of artificial intelligence specifically machine learning and natural language processing to help people digest contracts. The way it works is customers upload contracts that have been executed or are in draft form. We have built models that we call sifters that when clicked and selected, the customer can navigate around the contract faster, they can zip around the contract faster. They uncover hidden terms and conditions that they may otherwise miss when they are reading through a 20, 30, 40 page single space document. It helps to ensure that they don't miss those things by highlighting the clauses that might relate to indemnification and finally the sifters help the customers to organize all of their data to structured fields that can then be exported to Excel and other databases for analysis and reporting.

Richard Jacobs: So, for the average person that doesn't know much about artificial intelligence. There are all kinds of crazy things that people think. Can you break down what are the elements that make your system intelligent? Maybe start with the natural language processing. How does it work and how does it understand the document?

Kevin Miller: I think there are a couple of major concepts to understand when we talk about this technology. The first concept is that it's math. It's really fancy math. It's machine learning algorithms and natural language processing. That's the jargon and in the middle of that is the word algorithm. So think about, I always talk about it as extremely fancy regressions for those of you who took statistics but math problems that are predicting outcomes based on input data. So the first concept is that it's math and it's using forecasting to represent results to the user. The second concept is natural language processing. So it's applying that math to language. In this case, text in a document. What it's doing is it's looking for sequences of letters and numbers and their relationship to other letters and numbers to say that that sequence of letters and numbers is probably governing law. The reason we think that it's governing law or the reason we think it's indemnification or the reason we think it's a start date in a contract is because we've trained on and built mathematical models to see unique sequences of letters and numbers and interpret those as a concept. So we are applying math to letters and numbers and language. That's the second concept. The last concept is learning, the machine learning. The great thing about this technology or the thing that makes it different from the software that you and I have been staring at for the last couple of decades is it learns, meaning if we feed it more information and more examples, say of governing law or start date in unique sequences of letters or numbers, it can then improve the mathematical model such that it sees the other unique sets of letters and numbers that perhaps it has never seen before, we can infer that it is part of a set called governing law and that's what's cool because if you think about how people navigate through contracts today, they have to generally scroll through the pages or flip through them to find the concepts they are looking for. Now, sometimes in the document, you can apply keyword searches and search for certain keywords but if you don't know the right keywords to search for or people use different words, you can easily miss those concepts. With this type of technology, math on top of text that gets smarter over time and recognizes unique series of letters and numbers, it can see unique phrases and infer that it's a part of a certain concept and highlight that to the user. That's important when you are reading a contract and one of the things we all read a contract for are things that can get us in trouble. We want to make sure you don't miss anything. So these sifters are like someone looking over your shoulder on top of your document to help you navigate these complex things and make sure you don't miss anything.

Richard Jacobs: So the natural language processing, does it essentially build up a library of mathematical concepts that apply to legal concepts and then when you present it in a new document, does it compare that against the library of concepts and also going a step further and being able to infer that okay, this looks similar to that mathematically so it's probably included in that. Does that make sense? Is that how it works?

Kevin Miller: Yes. That is a pretty good description of how it works. Yes.

Richard Jacobs: I understand. Very strange. I don't know if you can do this but is there a way to show how it would understand one concept in a document. Let's say that something.. Is there a really simple element in a contract that the machine can understand and can use. How would it understand that? How would it mess up and how would it correct itself?

Kevin Miller: Today we don't ask the machine to do anything with what it finds other than to highlight it for the user. So it's not trying to replace a person. We are trying to supplement the person with the technology today so we have these major problems. I was just at a conference, The International Association of Commercial and Contract managers which was out in San Diego which is an organization of contract management professionals consisting of lawyers and non-lawyers, 40,000 people strong. They presented the results of their annual benchmarking survey and they said that only 12% of their population agreed or strongly agreed with the statement that contracts were understandable or easy to read or something to that effect which said differently means 88% of the world find contracts difficult to get through and I think it's probably higher than that. I think that our first goal with our first set of products that we've commercialized has been to use this technology just to help the people navigate through the contracts and just to help them organize the data inside the contracts. So often times people want to know things like when is my contract up for renewal? The way it happens today is people have to read through those contracts and write that information down or maybe they want to understand which of my contracts are assignable if there is a change of control or if we get bought. Somebody has to read that document and write that stuff down. We provide a tool that helps those sort of processes go faster. So that's how we are using it today for navigation and helping to ensure that people don't miss anything in organizing their data. However 2 years ago, we built a product that did something more than that. We built something called the Freelancer Scorecard and we are sitting on this technology right now and you will see us come out with something like this in the coming quarters. We use this technology not just to recognize the concepts inside of a contract but also to give the user feedback on what is found inside the contract in context of the contract itself. We targeted freelance software developers. These are folks who do 10-99 or contract work for software development or web development work and they oftentimes sign contracts with customers that they never show to a lawyer because they can't afford the average cost of an attorney. So they sign a contract, they do their work but they don't get paid because they signed a bad contract. Our team built a solution called the Freelancer Scorecard, you uploaded your contract if you were a freelance software developer, you upload a contract you were negotiating and our software used machine learning and natural language processing to "read it" and then to provide after a few seconds or a second or two, a bunch of in context feedback next to the clauses and offered help and support and suggestions on how to protect themselves, themselves being the Freelancer Scorecard or freelance software developer. So we told them, hey look. You need to look out for this, you need to look out for this and you should consider adding this or subtracting this from the contract. It was launched to the web in August of 14 and it got 4000 customers within a couple of weeks. We are sitting on this technology right now. We are the first people in the world to try to use NLP, Natural Language Processing and machine learning to give that kind of in context feedback within a contract. So you are going to see us go back to that in 2017. So when you talk about how would this tool or how would these algorithms recognize "a concept" and do something with it. That's what we expect to do. We expect to partner with the legal community and launch a series of tools that allow the users to upload these complex documents that they are negotiating or have negotiated and get an automatic in context read on what's inside of it which is so much of a battle with contracts given their complexity.

Richard Jacobs: I would think that when you look at a particular niche, employment contracts. Now the thing is you've looked at thousands of them, 90% of the clauses would be boiler plate and the same and then there would be a few outliners. So I would guess that your software would know the library and what's common after having been trained on X number of contracts and that's how it could, not advise you but point out, hey you have this clause that occurs very rarely or never seen this before or you are missing this other one that occurs in 90% of contracts. You should have it. Is that how it works?

Kevin Miller: That's right. The spirit of what you are talking about is correct. This math, the artificial intelligence in today's world. It's not generally intelligent. It's actually quite dumb but it can be trained for a very specific purpose and then it can be quite efficient, quite intelligent and quite helpful and most importantly quite fast. I like to liken today's technology to a 4 or 5 year old child. I have children, I have teenagers so I've seen this progression and you can teach a 4 or 5 year old child to put his or her dishes away after they eat dinner or you can teach a 4 or 5 year old child to clean up their room. You could teach them to do a specific thing but they are unlikely to teach themselves and they are unlikely to do it on their own and not without a lot of instruction. But then in a few years they are 8 or 9 years old and then a few years after that, they are 15 or 16 year old and they can do other things, teach themselves and start to advance quite quickly. That's how this technology is going to progress. What it means is if we trained these models to look for cob salad or the recipe for cob salad and the recipe happened to be in a contract, it would find it. The flipside is if we train it to look for governing law and find it in a restaurant menu, it would find it but until we tell it what to do with it, it's very dumb. The nice thing about many contracts is that they do follow certain patterns and so it's somewhat easier although this is really some hard stuff, somewhat easier, this is a good place to begin to apply the technology to text because you are seeing a series of terms and conditions that you are seeing over and over again. So you can actually train that 4 or 5 year old to grow up and help you out.

Richard Jacobs: What kinds of contracts has the system been trained on? Is it good enough where if you showed a genre of contract that it hasn't seen before, will it still be able to interpret it or it has to be pretty narrow based on what it's been trained on?

Kevin Miller: We've trained our sifters on terms and conditions and so think of a contract not as one thing but as a stack of terms and conditions even that if a term or a condition appears in a contract, it doesn't matter what the format of a contract is, it will find it. For example, start date or termination date or renewal clause or governing law or jurisdiction or assignment, these are clauses and terms that appear in many different types of contracts. Therefore the technology can be applied to those contracts to the extent that you care about those terms and conditions. We have seen everything from employment contracts to procurement. We got it from the seller's side and from the buyer's side, general commercial contracts, we've seen financing documents, insurance documents, non-disclosure agreements, it's a fairly long list of agreements that we've seen because our customers have run the gamut. We've sold this to general counsels, to procurement, to sales, to operations, to law firms and the reason for that is all of those people have different viewpoints of looking at contracts. Because we are solving the problem at the clause level and not necessarily the contract level, we've been able to apply our math in many different contexts.

Richard Jacobs: That's great. Okay. Any types of statements or agreements that the computer is having a hard time figuring out or you are having a hard time mathematically modelling? Where does it get murky?

Kevin Miller: I think when you start to get more precise. So right now, we are using the technology to recall concepts, so find stuff that's probably in the realm of indemnification or assignment to the extent that you want us to go inside the assignment clause and tell you what type of assignment clause it is. Assignment clauses usually fall into a couple of buckets, I can freely assign this without your permission, I have to assign it with notice, I have to assign it with your consent, I can't consign it or it's one sided, one party can assign but another can't and this is in the event, say it gets bought by a company and then there are all kinds of exceptions. You can model all the different assignment types but to actually have the algorithms then recognize that this is Type B of the 15 different types of assignment clauses and then do something with that, that requires another level of sophistication because you have to recognize that it is in a set of assignments and this is how I think about it or math guys may explain it. You have to recognize that this is in the genre of assignment and you have to recognize that this is an assignment clause that's saying a specific thing. So what that means is we are able to recall what this clause is in assignment. We are not yet able to say in a precise way, this is always something in this type of assignment clause, therefore we should do this. We can't be as precise with our read on that yet. That will come in time, we just need more time, more investment, RND etc. That's for the level of precision, the more precise you want to be the more effort we have to get to. So it's like a lot of things, you can get to 95% or 98% but getting that last 2 or 5 percent often times makes the difference on another concept or another offering or another value proposition and there is a lot of effort that goes into getting that 2 or 5 percent. That's how I would explain it, I don't know if I did a good job but that's kind of where we are struggling.

Richard Jacobs: It made sense. It makes me think of the question, if your system is trained on 3 different types of contracts, does it hurt the system or dilute it? It keeps learning more and more things or is it each training data set discrete and kept on its own or does the system help itself get better in interpreting language?

Kevin Miller: On a broad level, as we improve a model, as we get more experience, we are re-training our models and then redeploying those models across all our customers where that's appropriate. So, to the extent that our models are performing at a certain level today, we just did this last week. Last week we realized a bunch of improvements to a handful of models and a bunch of improvements to a handful of sifters and then we released the new sifters. All of that was a function of new training data, in many cases, new focus and we refined the input to improve the math and then we redeployed that on our customer site. We are doing that on an ongoing basis but in an ad-hoc manual way, so we ask our customers that they give us access to the contracts for sifting purposes. We ask them for permission to use their contracts for research and development purposes. To date, all of our customers have said yes because they'd like our models to get better and better. Eventually what will happen and eventually could mean inside of 12 months, not quite sure, we will set up the system so that the feedback mechanism will be more real time such that our users give feedback on the quality on the lack of quality of a particular, from their perspective position. We get that feedback from the user communities and we improve the models that much faster so there will be more of a real feedback mechanism that will be built into our tools over time that will improve the intelligence. Finally, we will also do this in parallel, we will also teach the software at some level to go out and train itself. That's where a lot of the magic happens. That's a much more complex thought, there is a lot of trickiness to that, it's not in any way, shape or form easy but it's the path that we are on.

Richard Jacobs: What do you think is realistic and what do you think is fantasy over the next two years? What is possible and what's say really way out there kind of science fiction and not likely to happen for quite a long time?

Kevin Miller: That's a really good question. Here is what I think, here is what is really possible. Really possible and only because we've done it before. We did it in 14, it was really a beta format with the Freelancer's Scorecard and what we are going to launch next year. What is really possible is for these algorithms to present the best practice point of view of a company internal to itself in the context of the contract. So what does all that jargon mean? A lot of times when you deal with an organization and let's take a data person contract and you've got a bunch of buyers all over the world that are buying stuff and they are not lawyers. Before they can sign off on something that they are buying but they've got the customer's paper or the supplier's paper or theirs, the person with the contract has to get to an attorney. Typically, like a lot of personal contracts, a lot of this stuff looks the same and if the buyer were better trained, he or she and you typically see this, I did 6 years in supply chain, so I know that the more experienced buyers can take on more and more responsibility for the negotiation. They'll know what to do with so many indemnification clauses and the governing law clause and the payment term clause and they won't have to go to legal but when you have a new buyer, you have a buyer that doesn't understand that stuff, you always have to run the contract back and forth to legal and it delays everything. Wouldn't it be great to put the general counsel's mind, put her mind in the context of the document that the buyer is working with in real time? That's possible. The idea that the buyer could upload a draft of that supply contract whether it's the customer's or the supplier's paper or theirs and the give it to read to the tool and put down the 25 things in context that the buyer needs to think about such that the buyer can make his or her red lines in real time. Hopefully they will not have to go to legal to get the deal done and look out for the gauchos to make sure that they don't sign anything they shouldn't. That's the first step, that's going to happen, that's within reach. I'm telling you that's within 6 months' reach, not within 6 years' reach. What's not going to happen in two years, so I think that's what's going to happen. You are going to see these playbooks played out. It's almost like your grammar check and your spell check in Word except that the check that you are going to get is your general counsel's brain expressed through these algorithms and expressed through our technology and others. What's not going to happen and what is still years away and I don't really know what the timeframe is, 4, 5, 6 years. You upload a contract and the tool "reads" it all and gives you a summary feedback that says, Hey look Richard, you don't have to worry about this non-disclosure agreement. You can just sign it or Hey Richard, I've read this whole thing and I know how you think about things and you can probably let these 5 clauses go and just kind of go ahead because we know that we don't care too much about this and we only care about this one clause. You need to go and get this residuals clause out of this non-disclosure agreement. That's a wiser way. That's a level of complexity and a level of conclusions on top of conclusions that are hard to model today but will be within reach in years. It's a real dream in the short term and maybe it's five years out or maybe it's 7 years out, I don't know but it's a ways away for us to be able to do that and provide that kind of, people want to see this on contracts that actually work. You are going to see us get there incrementally.

Richard Jacobs: Outside of contracts, I don't know if you are in contact with any other AI involved applications, that article in the Guardian, I think, about a month ago where this team fed a machine learning system human rights cases in the EU and then asked it to make determinations on what the outcome would be on more cases and they said that they got like a 79% correct ruling rate. They call it like an AI judge. Anything else out there that you've seen from other companies or other people that is going to be interesting in the AI space of law?

Kevin Miller: Well, I think what this Ross company is doing with legal research is interesting on top of IBM's Watson platform, I think. I don't know if you know this, Ross company, rossintelligence.com. I think you guys may have done an interview with them.

Richard Jacobs: Yes we just recently talked to them.

Kevin Miller: I think what they are doing on top of legal research, I think Watson is well suited for that type of work and I don't know the folks but it sounds like they can really harness that and are putting it to good use and I think they are going to get a lot of looks and a lot of interest. So I think that's one area where you are going to see this stuff. I think another area where you are going to see these applications of machine learning is the general challenge of reviewing emails or lots and lots of documents for pertinent information from a risk perspective or even an e-discovery perspective. E-discovery, those firms have been using some machine learning for a while in the form of predictive coding. They are using it at a high level saying hey is this document relevant or not. Yes, no. I think we'll see quite a bit of advancement in that approach in the coming years from those companies and from companies that might be better than those companies that are doing that type of stuff because when you talk to lawyers about predictive coding, they'll tell you that it still has a long way to go but it's promising in the E-discovery space but I think you'll see more and more of a focus on Hey can you go into all of my emails and tell me if I've got some sort of a hidden liability there based on some promise that somebody made over the course of last year? It's kind of a Hillary Clinton story, you know, Hillary Clinton had all those emails and the FBI comes out and says we have to get through all these emails and in the legal system, we thought gosh, we are not too far away in able to being help out with a problem like that. I'm not sure how they got through all those emails but I'm sure they used some technology that's not too far afield from what we are working on because the ability to process the text and identify risks quickly, that's extremely valuable in a world where the compounding creation of information is just overwhelming, I suppose. So I think those are some areas where I think you'll see this legal research space with folks like Ross. I think you'll see further advancements in predictive coding and E–discovery, specifically litigation and then I think you'll see some early Tsunami warning systems on things like email inside of people's companies as general counsels try to get a handle on the exposure that companies have. Those are some of the things. Otherwise I think you will see us and maybe a couple of others try to do what we are trying to do which is we want to bring affordable legal services to the world by empowering people with artificial intelligence. Lawyers, in general have not been able to scale themselves and it is one of the primary reasons why they are so expensive and that's because they have not had technology that gets at the heart of what they do every day. It's not the lawyer's fault. This technology helps them read things, helps them analyze things, helps them make decisions and recommendations which is what lawyers do. I heard that from Thompson –Reuters, I heard that lawyers read things, they analyze things so I thought that it's a very good model. They haven't had anything to lessen scale and I think what we are doing is going to help them scale and that will eventually bring down the cost of legal services and hopefully help close a lot of the justice captives out there and actually double the market. You know that legal services is a $750 billion, $850 billion market by some estimates and it should be twice that because the unmet demand is just enormous and the only reason that the demand goes unmet is that the lawyers can't work fast enough and at a low enough cost to serve that customer base and as a result, a lot of businesses and people can't get to where they need to get to.

Richard Jacobs: One thing that came to mind is nowadays if regular people were confronted with terms and conditions constantly, when you try to launch an app, when you use a website, there are privacy policies and all kinds of things. Have you thought about an incarnation of your system that helps people when they are confronted and they have to make a decision in 30 seconds whether to use an app or not or some other service, GPS and they have this 30 page terms and conditions type of document. Do you have your system distill that right away maybe live as they are looking at it and tell them of any warnings if they are opting into something? I'm going to give you a quick example. Google Drive, I don't know if you know this but part of their terms and conditions is that they are allowed to make derivative copies of anything you put on Google Drive. I don't know if you knew that. It's just pretty extensive rights that you are giving away when you opt in to something as simple as that or let's say when I use Google Navigation on my phone, I mean their terms and conditions for use are pretty extensive and it could cause you liability and people might want to be aware of that. So I don't know if you've thought about an incarnation like this to help people because when you are in a time crunch and you want to use something you are not going to just sit there for 20 minutes and read it especially if it gets updated every few months.

Kevin Miller: Yeah, so I think what you are talking about is a natural extension of what this company built with the Freelancer Scorecard in 2014 and we absolutely intend to go in that direction. When the vast majority of the world is tied together. Arguably the most important document in Global commerce is the contract and it is the least understood of all the documents. It's so painful and as I stated before, 88% of the profession dedicated to looking at contracts all day find them difficult to read or work with. So the average layperson doesn't have a chance. A template is not going to help you with that and a lawyer can't help you with that on his or her own because they are so expensive the way they are doing business today but we perceive a world where what you just said happens in seconds supported by the legal community, enabled by this type of technology and it's a natural extension of what we built 2 years ago. As the math gets more precise, as the processing speeds improve, as deep learning becomes more pervasive, you will see us and others aggressively pursue that type of consumer and business applications because it's on our mind.

Richard Jacobs: Okay, very good. One last question and I've been asking several AI companies on this. What's your thoughts on this? Is it possible that a system which would review a thousand divorce cases in the state of Minnesota and then a family law attorney would use it. They get a new divorce case, they feed in the facts of the case to the machine learning program and the machine learning program acts like a recommendation engine and tells them to go this way in a case, there is a high likelihood of this happening, if you go this way, no. Is it viable or is it fantasy? What do you think?

Kevin Miller: I think it's completely viable. Machine learning and I think Watson is a good example of this, is well suited to digest a whole bunch of information and make predictions based on the past. What you are talking about fits into that simple statement and simple hypothesis. So, to the extent that someone is able to collect the information and find the talent. You don't want to underestimate this, you can't go and just hire a developer to do this, you have to go to school for this stuff. It's math and computer sciences. This stuff is really hard. I was told recently that some of the stuff that we are doing and I was in Pittsburgh, it's the land of driverless cars. So we've got Uber driverless cars all over the place in our city and the heart of robotics and the heart of machine learning, currently known as the number one machine learning school in the world with Stanford and so we are at the heart of this revolution that's happening and I was told recently that what we are trying to do in natural language processing is in some ways harder that what they are trying to do in making a driverless car. So you don't want to underestimate the difficulty of what our guys and other companies like us are trying to do. That being said, to the extent that somebody can get the information to a person who can do the math is possible.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Very Good. Last question or two. Who do you want to appeal to on this podcast and give your contact information to for them to possibly become a customer for your company? Is it attorneys? Is it individuals? What service can you provide to them now or in the near future that they may be interested in?

Kevin Miller: I think if you are a general counsel of a small, medium or large enterprise. We've had Global 100 companies all the way down to 14, 15 people, person organizations work with us to date. You are a general counsel to start with if you are operations, or sales or a law firm, with our current suite of products, you are in the second tier of customers. Here is what we can help you with. First, if you have a stack of contracts and you need to know somethings or many things about what is in that stack of contracts, we can do that for you. We have something called the Contract Sifter Service where we use our AI in conjunction with service providers on multiple levels including on onshore attorneys to sift out the terms and conditions and the data that you want in a structured format. We could do that for you or we could provide you with the tool, contract sifter and you could do it yourself faster, cheaper and better than you could do it on your own with higher quality because a person plus an algorithm is stronger than either by itself. So if you are a general counsel or you are a procurement person and you are concerned about the assignability of a bunch of contracts because you just got bought or you just bought somebody and you want to re-assign all those contracts to your company, someone needs to read all those contracts and understand what is going to happen. Do we need to notify people or can we do it with consent or can we not assign these contracts in order to move forward? If you want to know things like when are all of the end dates in my contract so I can manage my renewals, somebody has to read through those contracts. We can help you do that faster, cheaper and better. We had a project for a large multinational bank, one that you would know, one of the largest ones. They had 31000 procurement contracts that they wanted to go through to understand whether or not they were impacted by the EU safe harbor ruling that happened last year where the EU safe harbor policy has governed how we handle data across the ocean between Europe and United States and other countries for years. It was invalidated in 2-4 of last year. So this large bank needed to know which of these 31000 contracts were impacted by the safe harbor ruling. We did that in a weekend. There is no way that a human could have read 31,000 contracts and figured that out without our technology. So, a lot of times general counsels are presented with this challenge. Hey, we just bought this bank and they use off-shore suppliers. I know we have customers that don't allow us to use off-shore suppliers. Which customers are those? Nobody can tell you those things without reading the contract. So those are examples, procurement has these cases, general counsels typically in due diligence situations, they have to read and digest contracts quickly in a short period of time. We have tools in our service that can help them do that. On the sales and operations side, it's similar but it's different. Operationally, if you have a company where you are driven by contracts, where commercial business doesn't start until you have a signed contract with a customer. Typically what happens is when that contract gets signed, it gets read multiple times throughout the organization. It's an extraction process. So it sits right there in order management and it gets passed around to marketing because they care about publicity and then it goes to finance for payment terms and then it goes to service and manufacturing or executive leadership or sales compensation and people read these contracts 4 or 5 times. Wouldn't it be great if it got read once because it got read for the same things every time, the same data was extracted every time and then that data was elegantly pushed out to everyone quickly throughout the organization. Costs would go down, quality problems would lower. The cycle times to celebration would go down. We think there is a nice use case there at the point of order management. Then on the sales side, there are some businesses who are outsourcing procurement for a company and in their sales cycle, they need to review contracts just to put together a proposal. We have a use case right now for one of our customers with that. Or if I'm a sales person, I want to know what have I sold to these customers? Are there any triggers like some sort of payment accelerator if I hit a threshold? What are my renewal clauses looking like? How do I manage my renewals? I need to get a bunch of information out to manage my sales operations. If you are doing that by hand or if you are doing that manually, leasing companies or real estate companies are like this. They are managing lots and lots of commercial leases and they have armies of people that are reading these documents. Those people would be faster, cheaper and have higher quality results if they were using contract sifter. These are the types of customers that we are trying to target with Contract Sifter. Last point, law firms who are interested in becoming able with artificial intelligence and turning their service only offerings into AI enabled service offerings, they need to come talk to us because we are going to come out with a series of solutions that we hope to partner with the legal community, that will enable them to once and for all scale. Lawyers generally can't make money while they are asleep because they don't have anything generally that allows customers to interact with them or interact with their brains unless they are awake and they are billing and they are doing business. That's not the way it is. So many other businesses. We can for the first time in history provide them with a suite of tools that are coming out that will allow them to scale and we want to do that with them. So if there is a law firm out there that is interested in getting on an AI journey because this is going to be bigger than the internet and computers and mobile and cloud and it's going to change everything. If they are interested in getting on that journey, we want them to call Legal Sifter.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Very good. Literally, what's your contact information? Website, phone number etc. email?

Kevin Miller: My name is Kevin Miller. I serve as the CEO of Legal Sifter and we are www. Legalsifter.com and you can contact me at [email protected] or my phone (412) 370-1356. You can also contact Legal Sifter at our main number and talk to any number of our people at (724) 224-7348 which is (721) 224 –SIFT and we'd like to hear from you.

Richard Jacobs: Well, very good. It's been a great conversation, a lot of useful info and I think attorneys listening, people interested in AI and it's applications will all get the benefit from understanding it. You boiled it down really well. So thanks again for your time. I really appreciate it.

Kevin Miller: Thank you, Richard. We look forward to the podcast and thank you so much for your interest in Legal Sifter.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Listen, Subscribe & Review on iTunes

Google AdWords or Pay Per Click is super expensive and the reason behind this is the fierece competition in the legal industry. But there's a way how you can make pay per click advertising profitable for your firm and get more clients in an unexpected way.

Remember, PPC doesn't work if you don't know exactly what you are doing & you don't have a lot of expertise in running PPC campaigns.

I've shared the insights in this podcast, listen to it or download it below and make sure to subscribe, share and review the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Marketing. Today, I want to talk to you about Google AdWords also called Google Pay Per Click and how it can help you in your practice. Unfortunately Google Pay Per Click is known for being notoriously expensive and difficult to get results but besides the normal things they can do which is to get you to the top of Google for any given keyword because you are paying to be there and you are paying for people to click on your listing. It has a secondary effect and that effect is that you appear for a given search word potentially on 2 places on the page.

If you look at mobile search results, Google Pay Per Click Is pretty much the only thing that shows up on your screen until you scroll down, maybe a match listing. But if you look at your practice and people searching for the kind of law that you do, let's say family law, Los Angeles Family Attorney, if you appear in Google maps and you appear in organic search and you appear in Google Pay Per Click, now you are there 3 times on the page. So the impression that people will get whether you are on their page or not, they may click on your SEOO listing, they may click on your maps listing but you are there 3 times on that page, so you look like you are everywhere, you look like you are a big firm that spends a lot of money and it gives a better impression to callers.

It gets you more calls, it gets you better customers and it will increase profits in your law firm. So that's why I recommend even a small budget to do a Pay Per Click will help you because there may be keywords that you can't get out of the first page of Google or you are struggling, you can't optimize for everything. One thing that you are missing out on, that you want to get more cases in, it's to be a great thing to help you. One thing that you are going to be ready on first page for that are very competitive and you want to push out some of the other annoying competitors and appear in 2 or 3 spots that will help you. So it's a rising tide that lifts all boats. So that's our recommendation. If you need help in getting Google AdWords or Pay Per Click set up for your firm, we do have quite a bit of experience with that.

It takes work, you can't just throw an ad up there and that's it. You can target by keywords, you can target by time of day, by city, by location and then the ads themselves can change. You shouldn't just throw up one ad, you want to put up multiple ads and test the different language in each ad. You can add a location listing that can shows your address on your listing. You can fatten it up and put a lot of extra things, reviews, other links on your listing so it looks fatter and takes up more real estate on the page. There are a lot of things you can do and a lot of nuances associated with Pay Per Click or Google AdWords, so it does take expertise to do it.

We can do that for you if you are interested. Number is (888) 225-8594 or email [email protected]. Thank you.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Listen, Subscribe & Review on iTunes

Leading Los Angeles attorney, Robbin L. Itkin, shares invaluable insight on the challenges businesses faced in the past few years and a few thoughts on what may be in store under Trump in 2017.

Listen to the complete interview below and make sure to subscribe, share and review the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tracy: Good morning. This is Tracy Merda with Speakeasy Marketing podcast and this morning, I have a very special guest I want to welcome. Attorney Robbin Itkin, a real professional in her practice area. She is leading the business solutions and financial restructuring group at Liner LLP, a business focused entrepreneurial law firm based in Los Angeles. Good morning Robbin. Thank you for joining me.

Robbin L. Itkin: Good morning Tracy. Thank you for having me.

Tracy: Tell me a little bit about the areas of law that you work in at Liner LLP. I know it's a lot of different areas, if you could just break off a piece of each and just sort of tell me a little bit about what you do.

Robbin L. Itkin: Sure. I think maybe it could be burrowed down to the I am a preventer and a fixer of financial problems. I advise businesses through their entire life cycle at first for startups on how to plan for and vent financial issues that may arise and how to best deal with them. I help prevent those from occurring like financial problems and then when businesses which happens with everyone at some point deals with financial issues. I help them resolve those problems and I also deal with individuals in doing the same thing from someone who has a 40 hour week job to high profile individuals to talented sports figures and my goal is to keep people out of bankruptcy when bankruptcy is the right tool. We've also filed bankruptcy for parties but my primary goal is to try to work these things out of court in the best interests of the client.

Tracy: You obviously work with a variety of different types of clients including startup companies, debtors, creditors, corporate restructurings and also bankruptcies when and where appropriate. What have you seen over the past several years as some of the biggest challenges that your clients have faced?

Robbin L. Itkin: Sure. I really do represent people from all angles, from the debtor who has the debt and owes it to other parties to the creditors in different cases to whom the debt is owed, to purchasers out of bankruptcies, to buy assets where you can get them free and clear of all the junk that why people file to get around that and I think that there are a few things that have occurred over the last year. One is that bankruptcies have just gotten so huge and expensive that a lot of banks and lenders are really trying to avoid bankruptcies because they are very expensive. People think it's ironic that you need money to file a bankruptcy but you do especially when you are dealing with a business, these cases can get very expensive. So one of the things that has happened is the attempt to have more out of court workouts which is a good thing because that's less expensive and less stressful for everybody involved. The goal is to try to work things out without the need to go to court, without the expense of having to file motions and go to hearings and have all those parties involved. Also to try to resolve things outside the public eye when you are dealing with high profile people and businesses who are concerned about being affected by the public knowing they have financial issues. One of the things that I kind of call a 2 sided monster is you have a couple of things. You have the company that is dealing with the financial issues and you have their creditors. The company obviously is having a difficult time and is trying to do what it can to pay creditors and get out of its financial problems. A lot of times for these companies to become debtors to the other companies having financial issues. We've seen that a lot especially starting with 2008 with the subprime mortgage issues and the too big to fail bankruptcies that occur with the Lehmann's and the Chryslers, then you have a lot of people who are affected by those companies who have their own financial issues but then when they became a creditor for the other company that was having a bankruptcy issues, they then had to file or had deep financial problems, so it becomes like a domino effect and that's a big challenge to deal with. Two other things that really have occurred is because of the expense of going through financial restructuring, we no longer have the common restructuring, the reorganization we had in which bankruptcy, we were seeking a fresh start and restructure a company and move forward. But what has happened in a lot of instances now is that it goes really straight to a liquidation in a bankruptcy case. It will be a controlled liquidation of assets so that the company does not stay around. We see that for instance now in American Apparel who filed a year ago. They did what was called a restructure to stay in business and now has filed again and it looks like they are going to be picked apart by buyers and there won't be one big company staying in business. It's a real risk of loss of jobs to many people which then starts the cycle and domino effect of them having financial problems. One other thing that I've seen in the last few years is because of these bankruptcies, usually there is a secured creditor and in the bankruptcy, they get paid first before any other unsecured or trade get paid. You find that there's not really much to give to the creditors, the mom or pop, the trade, the vendors. There is usually very little by the time you pay off your debt to secured creditors that come first, to taxes that have priority and so what's happening now is creditors are looking to other sources of recovery for what they are owed. So DNO policies and DNO litigation directors and officers, liability and litigation has become a part of the norm as to what to go after the directors and officers for because of these filings and the inability to pay people, so it's created more of an issue in terms of individual liability for directors and officers which can obviously be a problem as well. Those are the things that I've seen happen in the last few years.

Tracy: Obviously, with the huge election that just happened, of course, a lot is up in the air and we don't know fully what to expect but there are a lot of rumors out there. What changes do you see forthcoming under the new administration that could potentially affect the number of your clients and those in your business as well?

Robbin L. Itkin: Sure. This is real and like you said, we don't know. The rumors and we've already seen that there have been changes in platform and what's been said during the nomination process and then the election process but one thing is if interest rates don't rise, which is the typical thing more for a republican administration than a democratic administration. If interest rates stay low, that will help spur more buying and more capital infusion into companies and more growth. That is one thing that has helped. In the last few years interest rates have been low and so everyone is waiting for this burst to occur when interest rates are finally going to rise but it hasn't happened yet and if they stay low, that will certainly help people to deal with their financial issues that are more loans, more ability to pay loans off and the ability to grow or extend your businesses. It depends on what happens with trade deals obviously. If we are going to have foreign trade that is going to be impacted and we have this threat now from China that's come out during the last few days. If these things happen and trade is reduced, that is clearly going to affect the businesses that rely on incoming and outgoing for their business. That could cause another rippling effect of a whole another slew of bankruptcies with retail and other businesses that just can't afford to continue to do business if they can't trade and sell what they have or deal with workers abroad, that is going to be a big issue. So that's really important. So I think it just depends on what happens. Also there are a lot of different programs that have been taking place to help businesses with tax benefits, to help businesses and people avoid bankruptcy and if those somehow are affected and there is no way of knowing whether they will be or not at this pointy, that will be a problem. Also, at school, we've heard some things of people being looked at for the executive cabinet that believe in more private schools and not public schools. People can't all afford private schools and people need scholarships and loans to go to school and so depending on what happens with student loans and with the cost of going to school and colleges and vocational schools, that could be a huge effect because we know there has been a big issue in this economy over many years for student loans and how those get paid off and they are very expensive and when people graduate and can't get the jobs that they need to pay off those loans, that creates a huge problem and you have people in their sixties still trying to pay off loans and having that burden. Also, with Medicare and health, if we are not going to give people the benefits to help them with their health problems, it's going to be a huge issue that is going to affect people. When it affects people it affects businesses and we have a lot of the older generation now still dealing with the inability to pay for their needs or their health and a lot of people have filed bankruptcy because of their medical bills. These are all things that are issues that exist now and could either be more hindered or become a bigger problem in the next administration or it could be helped. It just depends on what happens.

Tracy: You are so right. I mean there is so much unknown

Robbin L. Itkin: That's the problem. We just really don't know. The market reacts because it thinks it's going a certain way but you just don't know and we won't know for a while.

Tracy: This is probably the broadest question I've ever asked anyone. Do you foresee things getting better for businesses or possibly even new issues arising that we maybe haven't dealt with yet?

Robbin L. Itkin: I think it's both. I really do. I wish I had a crystal ball because I could get help probably doing what I do but I think it's going to be both. I think in some areas, we are going to see things better and they are going to help and help maybe spur some spending but I think in other areas, the ones that I just spoke about perhaps, in helping people with medical bills and what's going to happen with Obamacare, we just don't know. I don't know how that's going to be affected. On one hand, we are told that if there is a change, it's still not going to affect pre-conditions but then I don't know how you do that and how you pay for that. If you don't so some of these other programs, so it's all so interrelated in terms of how one thing affects another. If you cut one thing, then how do you afford something else? So we know how it all plays out, it's really just a guess on anyone's part and all I can do is cross my fingers and my toes and hope that all these things are being considered because it doesn't take a lot for a business to be affected and the thing which we see and this is what I deal with the most and I can get the most challenging or emotional when you are dealing with people that have financial issues whether it's a business or a person, it always affects them personally and physically. So a lot of issues and emotional problems, breakups, divorces, suicides, unfortunately are effects of having stress and financial issues that people need to understand that can be resolved. No matter how this looks like it's going to be in the next administration and how things play out, people need to understand that there are people to talk to and work things out because they can get out of control and you need to understand that they don't have to. There are people there, financial experts, consultants, lawyers, people like myself and Liner, you know, we help everybody with different aspects of their problems but wherever you go, there are people that can help you and that's a really important thing to think about because in this economy and in this world now, we've had the too big to sell and companies going bust, people still, they have nobody to trust and that's for a good reason. We've seen these companies that are so greedy in what they do. People need to just remember. There are good people, there are ways to deal with these problems and they need to get help both financially and personally with their emotions and physical ailments to address these things.

Tracy: I really want to thank you so much for your time and insight. This is really a fascinating waiting game. A special thanks to my guest attorney Robbin with the business solutions and financial restructuring group at Liner LLP. Robbin, thank you so much for your time and we will wait and see what happens.

Robbin L. Itkin: Right. That's all we can do. We can hopefully deal with it

Tracy: Crossing fingers and toes, right?

Robbin L. Itkin: Right. Exactly and thank you so much

Tracy: If someone would like to maybe pick your brain or get some legal advice, what is the best way to reach out to you?

Robbin L. Itkin: Probably, emailing me is really good. I'm on my emails all the time and it's [email protected] and I'm happy to address questions and see if I can help people. That's something I'm really happy to do.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Listen, Subscribe & Review on iTunes

The best way to get most out of your marketing, become the most successful attorney and to get the most number of clients is to get involved in your marketing.

I know you want to be an attorney and devote your full time to practice law and not marketing. But the most successful attorney clients I have are the ones who participate in their marketing, who get involved in the process.

Now, I am not asking you to put your 50% of the time into your marketing but at least, you should know what's going on with it, how's your marketing company handling your online presence, what are their plans to get your more clients etc.

I've talked about the importance of being involved in your marketing in this episode, it's the number 1 predictor of a law firm's ability to grow. Listen to it or download it and make sure to subscribe, share and review the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Marketing. Today, I want to talk to you about the best way to get the most out of our marketing to make you the most successful and get you the most clients and to give you the practice, you've always wanted to have. There is a very simple way to do this and unfortunately, it requires you being involved. Good marketing and successful law practice owners do not treat their marketing like cable TV where it's either working or it's not working. If the cable is not working, you kick the TV or call your cable company and say, Hey, what's going on with the cable? They restore it or not. It's not like that.

It's not like the house cleaner or the laundromat that you have them come to clean the house or you take your clothes to the laundromat, they clean them and you get them back. It's not like that. You've got to be involved. I know that you want to be an attorney and you want to go to court and you want to do your case work. I know that. That's your number 1 thing, the whole reason you are in business. Yeah, it's perfectly valid. I'm not saying you have to spend a whole bunch of time on your marketing but the best clients I have and the most successful attorneys do spend 10% of their time on marketing and being involved and getting a little bit more knowledge about it. So it's definitely worth it for you to do.

You take, say a lease, every couple of years, you have to do it. You have to keep honing your craft, you have to keep learning about the latest developments in it but you also have to pay attention to your marketing. So when you work with a company or you work with a vendor, one good hallmark of a good vendor is that they want to engage with you. They are calling you. They are sending you reports. They are suggesting changes to you. If you are smart and you are involved in your marketing, you're emailing them, you're calling them. You are saying hey, I saw this month's numbers. What else can we be doing? Or I noticed this. What else can we be doing? Or how is my Twitter marketing going? How is my Google AdWords? How is SEO? I noticed, in my practice, I'm getting these kinds of cases but I really want to get those kinds of cases. How can you help me do that?

If you interact with your marketing company once a month, even, it's great. Even that, you'll get far better results than just tuning on the juice and letting it run and cook on a stove and eventually burn. That's when you get into trouble. That's when you wake up. Six months down the line and you realize you haven't got the results that you wanted. Unfortunately, part of the blame is with you and to truly take responsibility with it. I'm not saying, don't see any other company. Good or bad, any of that stuff but you've got to take some responsibility for it because by doing so, you gain power. By saying that's not my area, I'm not supposed to handle that, you are supposed to that for me and just absconding all responsibility, you're only hurting yourself. It may feel good because you are not taking the blame but you are only hurting yourself because you would get far better results if you engaged.

Whoever you are with, whatever marketing company, engage with them more. If they won't engage with you, fine that's a bad sign but do your part. Once a month, talk to them, see what's going on, give them feedback on what you're experiencing and see if they'll tailor your results because I guarantee you if you do this just once a month for a whole year. That means 11 or 12 times in a year, you've done a course correction. Guess what? If you do that, by the end of an year, you're going to be in a far better place than you otherwise would have been, just closing your eyes and going to work every day and work on cases. It's not possible to be far better off. So be involved in your marketing, just a little bit and things will work far better for you.

If you want help with this, if you would like to work with us or talk to us about working with us, to evaluate your marketing and to give you this customer centric approach where we do want to talk to you each month, where we do want your feedback and we want to help you grow, call (888) 225-8594 or email [email protected]. Thank you.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Listen, Subscribe & Review on iTunes

2017 is around the corner and getting more clients is going to get even tougher. And to find the higher quality clients that actually pay your fees, you must have a plan.

You need look at the marketing you're doing, how you're targeting your audience and who you're targeting. I've talked about how you can target these high-end clients specifically in this podcast. Listen to it or download it to learn more. Make sure to subscribe, share and review the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Marketing. Today, I want to talk to you about getting the kind of clients that you want and ask you the sort of questions that you may not have thought of or just thought of in passing. Whatever your practice area or areas there are going to be certain clients that are bringing in more money, that are less hassle, that may require fewer trips to the courthouse, that you like to get. Maybe they are in town A vs. town B and town A is near your home and you don't have to travel so far, not against traffic. Maybe the kind of clients you get or you want to get are more referrals or bigger value cases or smaller value cases where not much is at stake.

Have you ever thought what kind of clients am I getting right now? Let me look at the past year and categorize them. What kind of clients do I want more of and what kind of clients do I want less of? The reason that this thinking is valuable is now that you've thought about this or if you've thought about this. Now you can say how can I do that? How can I engineer my practice to do that? Yes there are ways. Let's say you want to get more referrals because you find that they are the least price resistant, they make the best clients, and you enjoy helping referrals of people that you've helped before. So how do you get more of them? One way, for instance is to start sending a monthly newsletter to past clients to keep you in their mind 12 times a year.

Then they are much more likely when a friend or a co-worker or a spouse or associate or someone they meet that they know about really well has a legal issue whether it's estate planning or car accident, divorce, that kind of thing. They are much more likely to refer and increase your referral rate, so that's an example of thinking, strategizing and making a plan of action. What's another way? Let's say that you really don't like the people who have no money and who have to offer payment plans to you. Are you advertising or you seem to get people from poorer parts of town? Maybe that's not good for you if you are a DUI lawyer or a divorce lawyer. How do you get people with more money or people that are less likely to complain about price? Can you focus your marketing on a wealthier part of town?

Is there a certain demographic or ethnicity that you can focus on more, maybe for some reason Asian in your neighborhood or this other neighborhood tend to have cases that you like to take? Maybe Indian people, maybe women or men or older people or wealthier people. How can you reconfigure things in your practice to attract those kinds of people and to repel the tire kickers, the ones that have no money, that price shop you that only care about the minimum amount of work you can do for the lowest price. You don't want those people, for instance. So how do you find them? What types of marketing do you do? I'll give you a couple of examples here. What does your website say? Does it talk about things that appeal to the lowest common denominator or does it appeal to let's say wealthier people or people with more severe problems that will pay more? What do the articles on your website say?

What do the images show? Do they show you as a high end attorney or you have just kind of a pixelated okay image that doesn't really show you as a true professional or a high powered person? How is the color scheme? How is the look and feel of your website? Does it feel upscale or does it feel more at home and approachable and that kind of thing? Is that the kind of client that you want? That is another place to look. Look at your reviews. What kind of cases do you have positive reviews or testimonials for? Let's say, you do criminal defense and you've got a lot of traffic ticket ones, you've got a couple DUI ones but you want to focus on White Collar crime, if you don't have any reviews specific to that part of your practice area, you are much less likely to get those kind of clients because They don't see that.

Yes, you are criminal defense lawyer, wonderful but have you handled embezzlements or fraud cases or securities cases, those kinds of things. Let's say, if it's a drug offense, do you have specific drug offense testimonials? If not, again, you won't have that much of a pull on customers. What I'm trying to say is, once you start this thought process, it's a very valuable thing to do. It's a very valuable thing to go through your files and to think about this past year now that the year is coming to a close of what kinds of clients did you get? How many? What did you like about who you got? What did you not like about who you got? How can you change things up in your practice to get more of the best ones because that means 2017 is going to be a much better year for you if you do it.

It may take half way through the year to do it but with a good strategy and a good plan you are much more likely to get what you want versus random chance in the universe or a change in law or something some external force magically either bringing it or not bringing it to you and no one wants that. Everyone wants to be in control of their own destiny. I certainly do and I'm sure you do. That's why you spend so much time in law school and so much time in practicing and doing all the things that you do. Hope this helps. If you need strategy and you don't understand how you can attract the kind of clients you want, give us a call (888) 225-8594. We can help you do that. It doesn't matter, your practice area whether it's for corporations or individual people or people that take a long time to decide or people that have immediate needs.

All these people have needs and you can speak to all these flavors and types of people. So besides calling us at (888) 225-8594 you can email me at [email protected]. Thank you.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Listen, Subscribe & Review on iTunes