Speakeasy Authority Marketing

Join us as one of Atlanta's most successful young, female attorneys shares her journey to becoming a leading practitioner in her field, a flourishing small business owner and entrepreneur.

Her energy and passion for law and business are sure to rub off as she explains age and gender can work for or against you – it's up to the individual how that turns out. Listen to the complete interview below and make sure to subscribe, share and review the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tracy: Alright. You are listening to Tracy Merda with Speakeasy Marketing Podcast and today I have a very special guest. The young and beautiful successful attorney Sonia Lakhany of the award winning trademarked law firm Lakhany Law located in Atlanta, Georgia. Wecome Sonia, I appreciate you coming and spending some time with me today.

Sonia Lakhany: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

Tracy: Did I see that you also have an office in Los Angeles?

Sonia Lakhany: Correct. Yes. We actually just opened our 2nd office earlier this year and so I actually manage both vital processes now.

Tracy: Congratulations. That is another huge feather in your hat.

Sonia Lakhany: Thank you. I'm actually originally from Southern California, so when it came time to expand, it was sort of a natural choice to cough up a storefront back home.

Tracy: Absolutely. I just wanted to talk to you. You have blown me away by what I've seen on the web and sort of looking into your career and other set, I hate to keep harping on it but the fact that you are such a young successful female attorney. I wanted to know if you could just tell me a little bit about your upbringing and what were your early career goals when you were a young child, a teenage girl and maybe later on, as you started and went off to college.

Sonia Lakhany: Sure. I kind of always figured I would end up going to law school and it was actually something that my mom pushed me into but what's kind of a running joke now is it looks like it was all planned out but really she just wanted one of her kids to be a lawyer and I got nominated so that is kind of how it happened. I always had an interest in business and I always liked reading about marketing in the news and I always was very intellectual. It's like I kind of knew that I would end up in a career that was very brainy so to speak. I love to read and I love studying. I'm very academic minded but also very business minded and I kind of grew up watching my brother who was a serial entrepreneur starting on his different businesses and had a lot of success with it and really just enjoying the autonomy that he had in his life as well and so even though things started on a bit of formulated track with undergrad and law school and I kind of always knew I would do something a little different and it took me some time to figure out what that would be and it ended up shaping out to be having my own law practice but that was only after working for years at other firms before I decided to make that leap. So it was always just something that I knew I would do and to have my own business. I just never knew it was going to be a law firm.

Tracy: What was that ultimate tipping of the scales for you when it came down to law?

Sonia Lakhany: Sure. I had worked at other law firms like I said and I enjoyed the experience that I had at each position and I felt like that they each sort of created a corner of the learning square for me and taught me the things that I needed to know to move on to the next stage. At a point I reached where I started to think about sort of the other ways I wanted to serve my clients and the relationship I wanted to have that expanded beyond the billable hours and the regimen of a traditional law firm and I realized that I was very good at connecting with my clients and having a relationship with them and going the extra mile and I enjoyed that portion and I started to identify areas where I could add more value and perhaps run a business a little bit more efficiently in terms of how I spent my time and the things or the activities that I did. Most of all it was really that I wanted to focus my entire practice on trademark law. I had positions certainly obviously where I was a trademark lawyer but I was also sort of in charge for full client files where I was maybe reviewing a lease or maybe negotiating another deal and I really wanted to specialize in an area where I feel that entrepreneurs really need a lot of guidance which is naming and brand protection. Now the biggest reason of all is that I wanted to just be able to do trademarks and I realized that sometimes instead of hunting for that perfect job, you just have to create it and that's kind of what I ended up doing, so that's what led me to start my own practice after years of being at other firms.

Tracy: Do you ever question going into a predominantly male field? In history, we know there are these types of changes but did that ever play into a way into this position?

Sonia Lakhany: No. I have to say it didn't because I don't think I realized it was a male dominated field until I was actually in it. Maybe for better or for worse, there is a saying that something about, "She didn't know it couldn't be done, so she did it." If you don't know your limitations, you just kind of blow past them. I didn't realize that was what I was entering. It wasn't until I had graduated and entered the job market where people started talking about you're in a male dominated field. I'm like, "I guess you're right." It wasn't apparent to me, it also wasn't apparent to me in undergrad. I didn't even think about it. I mean everyone was so encouraging about me being a lawyer. I had really started to read up on other female lawyers and the things that they were doing. I wanted to grow up to be Marsha Clark and I always knew that I wouldn't be the courtroom type, that's not my personality but seeing her and she was one of the earliest people I knew that was a strong female lawyer. I don't think that I realized it and now that I am in it, it's certainly something that I do notice but I actually, I've seen it play out as more of a strength where I think the market is turning into a place where business owners and particularly female ones want to work with another female entrepreneur. They want to work with another person who understands what they are going through and the decisions they have to make and their challenges. Actually, I have many male clients as well who have sought me out because I'm a female entrepreneur and a female business owner. They want to support that, they want to encourage that. It's just like with anything else, like with age for example, it can fight for or against you and certainly n the younger end of attorneys that have their own law firms. I'm aware of that but again, I think it's something that's been encouraged by other people and supported and I know that a lot of my business comes from people who do it solely to help my practice and I'm so grateful for that because I really don't know how else I'd have pulled it off if it wasn't for them sort of having that notion to say, okay. Here is someone young, we want to encourage her and we don't want to stifle their growth. Let's send her business or send her a matter here, a case there and help her grow until she can get on her feet and a lot of people did that. Then I think that it can all be interpreted one way or the other but for me they actually represent strength.

Tracy: That's awesome. Do you ever, I mean I have to wonder, any business that someone opens, I mean there is a huge gamble regardless, especially in law firms. It's a difficult field. What gave you the courage and made you decide to venture out on your own where you could probably have joined a number of large firms that are already fully up and running?

Sonia Lakhany: That's a very good question and it is something that I think about a lot actually because at the time, I didn't fully let the fear set in and I think that was probably for the best and I didn't really fully let the fear set in and I think it was probably for the best and then as an afterthought I thought I knew it was risky at the time but I've always been the personality that's relatively fearless when it comes to business. Personally, I'm afraid of dumb things like cooperatives and thunder and clouds and people go like who is afraid of clouds? But from a business standpoint, I've always been that fearless, indispensable, what's the worst that could happen and I've really internalized that mantra because I'm really like how bad can it get? Okay. So I don't have any income for a certain period of time. Well there are all kinds of avenues to make money to keep yourself afloat. It's not like, it's not a zero sum game. Either you make money or not, it's like you don't make a ton of money in the beginning, that's the risk but I knew I was employable as an attorney and even in related skill sets like consulting and other fields where maybe I can lend my skills to those fields if needed and pick up some contract work. So it crossed my mind but I wasn't about to let that be the reason why I didn't do it. I was like, so what? I think part of that is again, where I like to talk about gender and age to an extent but not have it be the theme of what I'm doing but to reference that, there is something a bit freeing about being on the younger side where you don't feel like you have a lot to lose. I was single when I started my law firm, I had no kids, I still don't and so it was just me that I was responsible for. I think that goes a long way into that fearlessness where you can have a psychology f being fearless but also, pragmatically when it comes to an actual practical evaluation, you really have no reason not to be fearless because the expenses are just not that high and I was never really an extravagant person, so I wasn't really worried about up keeping this house or big fancy cars or anything. Even though I was working as a lawyer, I was never really thoughtfully into that lifestyle. Everything I had or was involved in financially was, everything was pretty moderate. I drove a moderate car and lived in a moderate apartment and I was like well I can manage these. I don't know, I think that was a big driving force and I just figured if it was risky, I would find a way out of it. My friends often tell me that entrepreneurs are the type of people that jump off a cliff and then throw the parachute on the way down and they used that to describe me because I'm just like, well it's a calculated risk, you figure it out along the way like you kind of want to have one or two things figured out and then you just fix the rest as you go. I think that's a mentality which has served me really well because it's ensured that I don't get caught up in small details like how's this going to go? What about that? What about this? I'm okay with that. I'm very comfortable with uncertainty.

Tracy: Oh my goodness. I love your energy and enthusiasm. I do because that is exactly what I hope and wish for every young woman. I'm a mom of a young toddler girl and I just want everyone to have that attitude. Tell me if I'm overstepping here but you mentioned that you don't have any kids, if that is something that is in your life plan. Not everybody walks that path but if it is, do you see as a female that it's going to be an extra challenge or do you see it more again as another benefit?

Sonia Lakhany: Oh no. I can't wait to have kids. I've always loved them and I've always wanted to have them. It's obviously been a position to postpone them until the time is right but I really am excited about it and sort of inherently, I believe I've created a lifestyle and a business that lends itself to that. Obviously when you are on your own path, you create your hours, you create your workload and your schedule and it's not a matter of having more or less to do, there are arguments both ways. You are obviously busy working in a law firm for someone else and then you are going to receive a salary versus you don't have to work so much or do you and also you wear many other hats being a business owner and not just a lawyer. There are arguments all the way but the fact remains true that even if the workload doesn't change, you can shift it around so you are not stuck in this typical 8 to 6 model where you are at a desk and regardless of if your child is sick or has a thing at school or PTA. Those things can be moved around. Even in my life now, I'll break to go to lunch with a friend who is visiting or to get my nails done and then come back. You are free to break apart your gig the way you see fit and a lot of entrepreneurs will say that we don't mind that someone is going to sit back down and start at 7:00 or 8:00 but if I have plans that night, on a weeknight, I'll just sit on my couch and do some emailing and work on that stuff but it's because I'd love for 3 hours to go to the mall or to go to see somebody or hang out or something. You're still sort of working the same or more or less but it's just moved around and I think that lends very nicely into being a mom where obviously your schedule is so unpredictable. Most of all, you want to be home for those moments as much as you can be and my work is the type that can be done from anywhere luckily. Trademarks are federal and we are not limited to any one particular state which is why I was able to open up a second office in California. I am in the process of working on getting licensing in California. I'm already licensed in Georgia, in Maryland and in DC but the trademarks can be done electronically. They are filed online through the patents and trademarks office so location is not an issue, being in the office physically is not an issue so a lot of those things are alleviated and I know there are some things that I had in mind when I designed my business because I knew that I wanted to be a mom one day and give full attention to that.

Tracy: I love that because the thing is that with everything you described, when you do become a mom, I'm sure you feel the same. I hate it when people say women can't have it all. You can. In this day and age, you can. Like you said, having the mobile office and I do it every day. As long as you love it, which you do, which is what it sounds like, you are very passionate about anything is possible.

Sonia Lakhany: Absolutely. I think that you just have to decide what are going to be the pieces of ice in the glass and then you pour everything else around that or the rocks in the jar or whatever the saying is but you kind of know what your non-negotiables are so that's flexible hours and deciding your own priorities, then you design things around that. Thinking of being single when I want to go out for a vacation or if I know I'm going to be out of town or if I had a friend in town being in Atlanta and in LA and living with and having friends in so many places that are always coming in and out of town. I can decide that you need this by Monday, I'm not going to be able to do it. I'm not going to make a promise that I can't keep and you have that leeway to say, this is not something that I can be a part of or I know that I want to be in the LA office more in December because it's cold in Atlanta, then I may not be able to take care of certain things but those are the decisions that you make and the thinking when you are a mom I imagine is that you prioritize that and you say, I would love to be there, I would love to take this on and do that but my kid has a play at school or my kid has won an award and I want to go see it. That's the kind of parent I want to be and so I really try to design it around that but I'm not there yet so it may be that my little plan crumbles when the time comes. We'll see.

Tracy: What did you find that, maybe looking back at some of the mistakes you might have made earlier on in your career that you might warn others about now?

Sonia Lakhany: I think one of the things that was a challenge at the beginning of my career was obviously job selection. I graduated in a very bad economy, the legal market changed for good in 2008 and 2009. It's never been the same and I graduated in 2010 so it was right on the heels of that and I had a lot of trouble finding a job period let alone one that paid decently well. I say often that my first job made me $32,000 an year as a Bar attorney. I was licensed from a Top 20 Law school and that's where I was 6 or 7 years ago. I wondered how I could get out of it. I sort of accepted the first job that kind of came along and I don't know if it was a mistake because I don't know what else I should have done at that time but it was in a totally different practice area and so that's something that I hadn't decided at that time. I knew I just wanted employment as an attorney and to try to get some experience in whatever area. But bringing it back to trademarks which is what I've always wanted to do was tough and again I don't know if I would categorize it as a mistake but I was certainly challenged with it was just making the key decisions because your next job is determined by your last job. With the experience and your title and all these things, you know, that was a tough process to know what to do but in hindsight, I can't say I would have done it any differently because there were only so many jobs available and really I was lucky to get the job that I had even at the meagre pay that I got.

Tracy: What do you think are the biggest factors that have made you or your firm successful?

Sonia Lakhany: There are a couple of things. I talk very openly about having passion for what you do and I'm so flattered and I'm so excited that you can hear it because that is something which is either there or it's not. You can't be a little bit passionate. It's a yes or a no and so I think you have to bring that to what you do. The other big thing is that I'm very determined. I mean, to me it's not a matter of if I can pull something off, it's how. So if Plan A doesn't work, then plan B or Plan C. I think that you have to have that no fail, no Plan B mentality of we are going to make this work. I don't know how and if this doesn't work, we'll try something else but I have a relentless work ethic and I think a lot of people say I'm ambitious, a lot of people say I'm driven but you really can't test driven until you are 6 months into your new law practice and the last 3 clients had a signed retainer and you are sitting there trying to figure out what to do. A lot of people would fold under it. This is a slow month but it's going to be difficult and I certainly have never claimed that I have it all figured out. Our two years are coming up and so it's very new compared to a lot of law firms out there but I think that having those two things has gotten me this far and it allowed me to expand and hire staff and grow essentially but hopefully I think people see that. Our clients and our referral partners and our colleagues, people that know me personally trust me to take care of things when they are sent to me because they know how I am. They know it's not a project, it's not an experiment, it's a commitment. For me, when you commit to something, you do it even when you don't feel like it and that's the biggest thing which is having a commitment to pulling something off even when it doesn't quite work out at the time.

Tracy: Are there any final words of wisdom that you can share with other attorneys out there, specifically other young women who are starting out or maybe in other law firms or maybe there is comparing going on?

Sonia Lakhany: I think it's really important to weigh out some different factors and also to kind of set boundaries in whatever stage you are in so certainly, if you are still at a law firm then it's wise and important for you to try and set some boundaries if possible and I know they are tough because you don't want to tell a partner that is doing your review that you can't make it or that you can't do this project or something but I think drawing some boundaries goes a long way even if they are internal, in telling yourself that this life is ours for so many years and so this happens or if you are pulled back in putting limitations because I think that when you don't have boundaries or a plan, that's how you end up 10 or 15 years out and you're like, wait. What happened? I never intended for this to be the outcome but here I am. If going out on your own is something that you are interested in or entertaining, the best way to understand what is involved in that is to ask other women or other people who are doing it. Not just people who are solo but solo in your practice area or in your city to understand what their talents were or how they navigated around certain things. I learned so much from other people and in going to coffees and lunches and dinners and breakfasts and I still do that. I still schedule those and there are still so many people that I meet with regularly and learn from them and I just absorb their information and view them as a mentor. I think you can never have too many of them but there is no substitute for hearing it from somebody's mouth because they all sound great when you look at someone's website or when you see them speak at something but you really won't know the full story until you meet with them and in fact, the biggest advice I can give is to get a realistic understanding of what you are headed for and if you really want to know what it is like to work in a certain field, ask people who do it. You can't rely on what you are learning in school because it's so limited in it's delivery of the practice area and the best information will come from people who do it every day.

Tracy: Wow. This is some awesome information. I just want to give a special thanks to Sonia Lakhany of Lakhany law firm of Atlanta, Georgia and now in Los Angeles. If someone would like to reach out to you and find out more information on what you do, what's the best way to reach you?

Sonia Lakhany: The best way is through our website which is Lakhanylaw.com and that's got information for both of our offices, both of our office phone numbers and you can call, make an appointment to talk by phone or emo me and hopefully we can help out. I'm happy to mentor, I'm happy to provide more information about anything I talked about. I'm happy to do it. So thank you again for having me.

Tracy: Thank you so much. I appreciate all your time and what you do out there for all of us women.

Sonia Lakhany: Thank you again. I appreciate it.

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

Can women have it all? Join us as owner & founder of Markham Law Firm, Jessica Markham tells us the key ingredients to opening her own successful law practice & breaking through the 'good old boy network' to become one of the D.C. areas leading, female attorneys.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tracy: Hello. This is Tracy Merda with Speakeasy Marketing. I have a special guest today joining me. Attorney Jessica Markham of Markham Law group, a leading law firm in Maryland and Washington DC. Welcome Jessica. Thank you for joining me.

Jessica Markham: Thank you Tracy. Thanks for having me.

Tracy: I wanted to get. I'm kind of doing a series, if you will, on female attorneys and what it is like. What challenges you face, so I was just wondering. Tell me a little bit about your upbringing, what your early career goals looked like as a young girl, maybe as a teen and then when you entered college?

Jessica Markham: Okay. I really took kind of a circuitous path to being an attorney and sort of fell into family law. When I was growing up, I was just really a good reader and I didn't think too much about exactly what I wanted to do and then in High School, I was really big into photography and I thought, for a while, I wanted to be a photographer and then I thought that an artist's life was just a little too scary for me. I didn't really want to be a starving artist or be travelling as a photojournalist, so I ended up just being an English major in college and I knew I didn't want to do those, it was just too difficult for me. So, not knowing what I was going to do with my English degree I ended up going to Law school and then from that point on, I was never really sure exactly what I wanted to do with my Law degree but I went to a school that had a really big emphasis on litigation, University of Miami Law School and a lot really depends on good litigation experience so I ended up sort of falling into family law at that point.

Tracy: So that kind of sold you on it, huh?

Jessica Markham: Yeah.

Tracy: Jessica, did you ever have any apprehensions about going into law where primarily, it's been always known as a male dominated field?

Jessica Markham: I think that where I am from which is Montgomery County, Maryland which is right outside Washington, DC, there were always a lot of examples for professional women. My mother wasn't really super career focused but there obviously were lots of powerful women al around me so I never really considered the fact that it wouldn't be completely natural and normal for me to go into law. I'm not sure but I think that Law school enrolment might be close to 50/50. Maybe you know better than I do but I do know that in this area, it seems to be quite a bit of family law attorneys that are women. At least for family law and where I practice, it's not unusual to be a woman. What I will say is that most of the law firms seem to be owned by men or are mostly men as partners so I do things that are somewhat unique to have; a woman owning a law firm is more rare for sure.

Tracy: Tell me a little bit about that because obviously venturing out on your own, opening your own firm. That's risky in any business. What made you decide to go ahead and do that versus maybe just joining a larger law firm?

Jessica Markham: That's a great question. I was with another firm for 10 years and there was one other woman and 4 men. The composition of the team for 10 years but it was mostly men and then I obviously had a lot of meetings and cases and conferences and things of the kind with other law firms in the DC area. I remember one meeting in particular in 2014 where I accidentally showed up half an hour early. I actually got the time wrong. It was a pretty large local firm, one of those really fancy like marble hallways and all glass, very modern kind of layout. I was in the reading room for quite a long time and chatting with the receptionist who I'd been interacting with for like 10 years. She was a woman and you could see in all the conference rooms because they were all glass and I could see in six conference rooms, there were six meetings going on what appeared to be all weird and it was all older men and then in one room, I saw one woman and I actually commented to the receptionist. I said, Wow. A lot of men here and, Oh there's one woman in the corner there. She said she is a big eyed secretary. That was the first time I really started to think about the fact that most of the firms all around me seem to be primarily male dominated in the leadership roles. I started to think about how cool it would be just to start my own firm and I really do think it's important to have women in leadership roles even if you're working privately. That was part of it. Another was that I was at one of the leading firms for 10 years and I was a partner there and so I started practicing when I was 24 and I didn't really feel like there was any other place for me to go. I was there for so long that I just wanted the challenge of having my own law firm with no partners which is definitely less than a safety net but I saw it as a personal challenge. That was interesting to me.

Tracy: I love that. What did you see or notice at the beginning of your career or when you were starting out either with your new firm or is there anything that you found as a challenge as a woman or just in general in starting a new firm?

Jessica Markham: There are obviously a lot of challenges associated with starting your own firm. I would say, specifically as a woman, I'm married and I have a child and many of the people that I interact with, primarily men assumed that I was starting my own firm because I wanted to spend more time with my family and wanted a flexible schedule which is definitely sometimes a benefit and sometimes, it's the opposite because I have left people too. You know, I don't have partners to rely on if needed , but a lot of the men in particular assumed that I wanted to work less and that's why I did it but in reality, it's great that I don't have anybody to report to but the buck stops with me and sometimes I don't have flexibility. I think that it's not true when a man starts their own firm, nobody assumes that they started their own firm because they want to work less. I've actually talked to other men about that as well and I talked to one male attorney in particular that he did step back from his job to take a primary parenting role so that his wife could take a more demanding job but nobody thought that it was why he made his move, so I thought that was interesting. In terms of just starting my own firm in general, what are the challenges? I mean, I think when you have a family and a job, you have to juggle all of these demands and there are several ones where I would be at my other firm and was preparing to start to open the doors of my firm and so I would be doing my date and taking care of all my clients during the day, taking care of my daughter in the evening and then from 9:00 to 4:00 am every night I was doing the work that I needed to do to open the doors of the Markham Law firm. That was definitely a challenge. It took time and I needed the support of my spouse and a supportive family that needed to help me pick up the slack. I think that if I hadn't had those things it would've been more difficult and I have also spoken to other people that are interested in starting their own firm because a lot of people have asked me about my experiences. Basically weekly or every other week. People ask me. How you did it? They are asking for advice and I think it can be more difficult for people in a way that are unmarried because they feel like either everyone is very scared about starting their own business or worried about the income that they are going to have and at least I knew that we had one very stable income in the family even if I brought in nothing which thank goodness was never really the case but it was a comfort to know that we had one steady income in the family no matter what happened to my firm.

Tracy: When it comes to the courtroom and I've talked to other female attorneys who, some say, they feel no challenge or no sexism at all and then others are constantly bombarded by the old boys' club kind of spiel both from judges and other attorneys. Do you ever get that sense when you are practicing in your areas?

Jessica Markham: Again I'm in a very progressive area where there are a lot of female attorneys. I don't have to deal with any of the things that I've heard of in other places like the women have to wear tanks or things like that. I've heard of women kind of getting in trouble and their courtrooms don't have women that wear pantyhose with their skirt suit. I don't want to have to deal with things like that but I primarily do litigation and what goes along with that is a certain toughness in the courtroom and a certain toughness at negotiating and that's what I'm saying. I think we are always looking for women to smile and be nice and if you don't smile and be nice then that gives a really negative impression and it's not always possible in this line of work to always be smiling and be nice. I mean I'm always courteous and professional and civil but I don't always necessarily have a smile on my face. It's not like the client is paying me for it so, I think we always have to, women have to be a little bit more concerned about being judged in that way whereas I don't think men always do. I think a male attorney that is litigating a case, nobody is expecting him to be smiling all day long but somehow women have a double standard. The only other challenge, I think, as a woman litigating a case that I've had is when I was nursing and I had to stop every couple of hours to pump breast milk. That's another thing that men don't have to do, I try to just be totally forthcoming and not ashamed of it. It is what it is and I told many a male judge or male opposing counsel that I have to pump breast milk and it is what it is. Mostly that was just using up my time whereas men were probably going out and getting a bite to eat.

Tracy: Oh my goodness. As a mother, I can relate. What do you think are maybe some of the mistakes you've made early on in your career that you could warn others who are maybe just starting out?

Jessica Markham: That's a great question. I don't know how many times I've looked back with rose colored glasses. I can't really think of any major mistakes per se. Let me put it this way, I would say, in the early years, I stressed quite a bit, more than I do now. When I was practicing as an associate, at least I had somebody else sort of checking my work and helping me along the way so you would think I would be more stressed and worried now but in early years I really lost a lot of sleep worrying about my cases. To some extent I think that's healthy because some attorneys don't understand the gravity of the fact that they have somebody's livelihood and family in their hands and maybe they don't take it seriously or don't stress enough but my mentor told me early on and said it would take at least 5 years of litigating to feel like I knew what I was doing and at least 10 years to feel like I was good at it and that was completely true. So I think that in the first 5 years there were a lot of sleepless nights and worrying about mistakes that I could be making or things that I could do better and I probably spent a little too much energy worrying about that. In terms of career mistakes I think that I'm really fortunate to be in a good firm and I worked as hard as I could and I learned much continuing legal education as I could. I can't really look back and say that there is anything that I would change but I think to some extent, when I saw myself or when I compared myself to my peers, when I first started out, I didn't have children and I didn't really have any obligations to anyone but myself, so I put in a lot of hours of work and I spent a lot of extra time educating myself that I didn't have to do because I wanted to know as much as I could as quickly as I could. I didn't feel like I've only been practicing for one year therefore I'm the dumbest lawyer in the courtroom. I wanted to eat up as much information as I could so I wasn't clueless by comparison. Most of the attorneys that I interact with or interacted with on a daily basis are in their 50s or 60s so I just didn't want to feel like the clueless one. I just went, I think above and beyond to try and educate myself. I took a few courses at the community college. I read every book that I got my hands on. I mean to this day, there is one book that I've read in probably 2007 and I had the time and I still recommend the book to people and people with respect to retirement accounts and things like that have been sort of known to be my specialty. People say, how do you know that? Where did you learn that? I go, I just bought the book and read it. It's like no secret, it's nothing that anybody else couldn't have done. It wasn't any kind of wizard, I can give you the same book and you can learn all of that stuff. I've seen a lot of people that didn't seem bothered at all to get that book or take that extra class and I think that just by doing those easy things that anybody could do, I've really benefitted from those things.

Tracy: What are the biggest factors that have made you a successful attorney, female or not, and that has made your firm successful?

Jessica Markham: It's interesting that when I started out, My husband has this background, he is an MBA and he has actually had some marketing and business background whereas I have no training on that. He asked me how is your firm going to be different from all the other firms? I realized that the Bar association in our local jurisdiction has over 500 attorneys that identify themselves as practicing family law and so I really thought about it a lot, how is my firm going to be different and one day, like I say, I really try to put a lot of emphasis on education. So, anybody that wants to go to any class, I'm more than willing to pay for that. I do trainings, everybody does trainings together. Every month we do webinars and get together in the conference room on the big screen and order pizza. We talk about it and try and make everything, I mean certainly, I don't know everything about family law, so I always want to keep my education going and try and make sure that whenever I have an interesting case or interesting fact pattern or interesting legal issue, we try and talk about it with everybody and everybody kind of shares their issues with each other so we can all continue to learn. I think that we have a lot of experience and a lot of sophisticated family law issues that some other firms don't, so we do get a lot of very tough cases, complex litigation and we get referrals from other attorneys that have very complex cases and they want somebody to aggressively represent them as we've encountered these kinds of legal issues before that isn't going to charge $700 or $800 an hour. I think our prices are, they are not the lowest but they are also not the highest. We try and keep them fairly reasonable as compared to our level of education or experience and what we have to offer. I have some online reviews and I think that the common denominator is that all the clients feel that they are being taken care of and we actually care about their case. So that's extremely important to me that all of us be extremely responsive towards our clients because they are going through unbelievably difficult times. So even if I can't get back to somebody on the same day, I make sure somebody gets back to them or I was out sick yesterday and certainly made sure that my office contacted people that might be expecting to hear from me and let them know that they couldn't hear from me yesterday, they are going to hear from me today. So I think it's really important to give people that level of customer service and be responsive to their needs at what's most likely a very difficult time in their lives.

Tracy: Are there any final words of wisdom that you might share with other attorneys specifically young women who are starting out or maybe already have a firm that they are just maybe not quite where they want to be?

Jessica Markham: I would say, I've read a lot of things that I find extremely interesting about male communication styles and female communication styles. I read this interesting article about and I'm probably going to misquote it in some way but something about men typically overestimate their level of knowledge or competency in an issue and women typically do the opposite. They rate themselves lower and they have sort of lower expectations from themselves. I think that there are a lot of women that might say I can't do that whereas a similarly situated man might say I could do that and may give that a try. So I'm going to say, particularly to the women that if I can do it, you can do it. Anybody that I know that has started their own firm, I don't know anybody that has regretted it. I mean certainly, it takes a level of planning and you have to not be rehearsed or at risk, I would say, but don't doubt your aptitude and be willing to take a risk. There are lots of different tips I would give if you are starting a firm. If you want to work for yourself, obviously do your best in the beginning, keep your expenses low and save money where you can. I think a good website is really important and at the end of the day, you still have to believe in yourself and put yourself out there and be willing to take a risk in all those things but I think that it's worth doing. It's very rewarding.

Tracy: We want to give a special thanks to you Jessica. Jessica Markham here of the leading law firm in Maryland and in Washington SDC. Jessica if someone would like to reach out to you for more information or possibly with their legal matters, what is the best way to do so?

Jessica Markham: I would encourage them to check out our website. It's Markhamlegal.com and we have all our information on there. We also have a blog that we update regularly. All our contact information, our twitter and anybody can find me that way.

Tracy: Awesome. I really appreciate your time today. It was some great information and insight for young female attorneys or any attorneys out there who are looking to get out there and start their own firms. Thank you so much Jessica, I appreciate it. Have a good one.

Jessica Markham: My pleasure. Thank you Tracy.

Tracy: Bye

Jessica Markham: Bye

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

Not sure how to get your name out there and compete with big boy law firms? Attorney Gary Port spells out the basics on the most effective ways to market and manage your small law firm.

Listen to the complete interview below and make sure to subscribe to the podcast and post a review.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tracy: Good morning. This is Tracy Merda with Speakeasy Marketing podcast. I want to thank my special guest this morning, Attorney Gary Port Copelander of Port and Sava, Attorneys at law, a leading law firm located in New York City. Good morning Gary. Thank you for joining me.

Gary Port: No problem. Thank you for having me on.

Tracy: Gary, I want to know a little bit about your background and what prompted you to open your own practice?

Gary Port: Well, first of all I'm a 3rd generation lawyer. That's 3 generations ready, if you will. My dad was a solo for many years. I started out in the army and then I went to the DA's office. I started with a mid-sized firm in Manhattan, didn't like that, went to a small firm on the island and I was there for a few years and then my boss did a few things I didn't feel were really appropriate so I literally walked out one day, no plan at all. It was as if I can't stay here. Fine. I'm out. I did that at 40 years old with 3 children and one on the way. It was not exactly a planned exit and I do not recommend that for anybody. Always plan your exit.

Tracy: Well, it seems that all of it turned out well for you. The odds were obviously in your favor What made you feel that starting out your own practice is going to be a success or was it more of a leap of faith? This is an often risky environment in terms of any business.

Gary Port: I think part of the problem with lawyers is we have this myth. The myth of the lawyer practitioner, the lawyer businessman hang out your shingle and the world will be the path to your door. It's a myth which is well engrained in our profession, probably going back to the time before there was this country and we were going back to the English tradition. Go out there and things will happen. That myth can be kind of dangerous. People don't realize that there is a lot more to it than just saying I'm going to set up my own practice. It's something that we as attorneys have never been prepared for. We go to a law school, we work at a firm and we learn to be lawyers but we don't understand a thing about how to run a business. It is not something that you should do without real considerable thought.

Tracy: How did you start out when you had those first few months of starting your business? Was it a fluid ride, was it easy breezy or did you have some struggles in it? How did you survive?

Gary Port: It was terrifying in the beginning. At the beginning I just had a few handful of clients. I was working out of my house. Somehow there was enough money from a few clients, plus I did a side job. I was in the army reserve and I went for one to two weeks a month for about 3 years which supplemented my income. For other attorneys going out, if they are making that leap some of them do things like, they will work for space. In other words, they'll take an office with someone and instead of paying rent, they'll do work for that person or they'll try to buddy up with an elder attorney, an older attorney who will hand them work to try to supplement that first beginning. If you don't go out with clients, you are going to have very lean times unless you have a secondary stream of income from some place.

Tracy: You take a class on Law office management and marketing. Tell me a little bit about what you share with those individuals who end up taking your course?

Gary Port: I've done some CLEs with the Nassau Bar or the Pennsylvania bar on this whole issue of what you need to do and it's what I said before. We are not good businessmen. We don't understand the front office versus the back office. When I set up my office, I was really worried about front office. Front office which is get case in, get them in. Between 2002 to 2008 I was doing quite well at that but by 2008 we had the economic crisis and when the revenues dried up, that's when the mistake in my back office started to show up. The mistakes were, I wasn't keeping track of my accounts receivable, my accounts payable, my return on investment, how much I was paying my employees. When the money was just coming in, I gave no thought to that. So one of the most important things I tell people is when you set up a practice, you have to set up a business. The first thing you want to think of is what kind of entity are you doing? Are you going to be doing a PC or are you going to be doing a sole proprietorship? Are you doing an LLP? What are you doing? You have to talk to your accountant about this because there are tax implications on this. The next thing you need to do is you need to get a bookkeeper. Not a full time one when you start but a part time bookkeeper but also learn yourself what bookkeeping is so you can look over the bookkeeper's shoulder and understand what the bookkeeper is doing otherwise you may end up with a bookkeeper who is either inept or corrupt. If you don't understand basic accounting, you are not going to understand what the bookkeeper is doing. You've got to keep track of your expenses and you've got to keep track of your receivables and you have to look at the return for your investment on advertising. When you spend money on advertising what are you getting back? These are very basic business concepts that attorneys have no idea about. Again, they admit, I'm just going to hang up my shingle and the world will be the path to my door. It doesn't work that way. It's a struggle and if you don't understand it, you can end up going out of business. In 2008, when the crisis hit, I had fortunately just hired a very good bookkeeper and she put us on starvation wages. She shut everything down and was very militant on collecting our receivables. She changed our entire way of how we have to look at stuff. That's very important. If you are not looking at your business as a business, then you are not going to be in business. This is something that I stress at the very beginning when I talk to these attorneys.

Tracy: That's all just incredibly interesting information. I'm just wondering, how much of this knowledge of business management and marketing and creating a whole entity by itself but how would you find attorneys do actually have before you come into contact with them?

Gary Port: Almost none. In fact, in the Nassau Bar, my buddy Tom Foley who is now what they call the associate dean of the Nassau Bar Academy of Law. He and I had been doing a series of programs at the Nassau Bar. We started out when we were running the general solo and small firm committee there where we would just once a month bring in speakers to talk about things that attorneys don't know about but they should like I brought in a real estate agent, renting offices, how do you rent an office? I brought in an accountant, accounting for lawyers. I brought in someone from the Offices of Court Administration to talk about how you can ethically collect your fees because we have some very strict and stringent rules, if you miscollect a fee or collect it wrong, you can get disbarred. I had web designers come in, social media consultants come In. We have had people come in for time management because Tom Foley is big on time management. He runs a PI firm on the island and he is very attuned to the idea of managing my time as an attorney and managing my staff's time so that my time is not wasted and their time is actually leveraging on to my time and that's the kind of stuff that it's all business related that people don't think about. They think that I've got to be a lawyer, I've got to go to court, I've got to answer papers, I've got to do this, I've got to do that. Yes, that's being a lawyer but you have to be a businessman on top of that. The gap between being a lawyer and a businessman, we have found is huge.

Tracy: At Speakeasy Marketing, we work with a lot of small Law offices and it blows my mind that an attorney would have at the time to handle his own marketing, to handle his own business, run payroll. I mean it's just astounding what all can fall on a small firm.

Gary Port: That's quite right. You have to wear so many hats. So the question now is can you do it all? The answer is probably not but at the beginning you have to. At the very beginning when you start out, you don't have the money to hire everyone so what you would rather do is learn everything. Do a little bit of everything and as you start building, then you have to start looking and seeing where you can start putting your additional money. This is your return on investment. The bookkeeper, you go with a part time bookkeeper at first. With marketing, it can be very important based upon which area of law you are in and what type of marketing you use. At the very least every lawyer needs a website. The website can be either a website for straight outright marketing or merely a presence to give substance to your practice. You need to have some basic understanding of it and then later because of the basic understanding, you are better fitted to hire someone and know what they are doing and not just get the fast shuffle. I'll give you a perfect example on attorneys being fast shuffled. More and more attorneys are being pressured to take credit cards because clients want to pay with credit cards but if you don't know anything about credit card processing, you are going to get screwed. I got screwed by my bank, I got screwed by another processor and then I found out from another guy who turned out to be an honest credit card processor. He went through and explained to me all the hidden charges. I now save money when I take a credit card payment so you've got to learn and then find the right person. Ultimately as you are practicing this growth to take care of that lead for you but because you've learned, you are a better consumer when you are purchasing that service. That's part of being a good business person as well.

Tracy: Gary, do you have any sort of requirement when it comes to business management or any sort of marketing courses that are required and if not, do you think that should be part of the program?

Gary Port: First of all I think that the Bar association are getting better at that. I say so because of the Nassau bar but it's very idiosyncratic. It's based upon, are there attorneys in the bar association who are doing this? The law schools are picking up on this and my intern is actually taking a law practice management course but it's being taught by a guy who is the managing partner of one of the largest law firms on Long Island. As I was saying to the kid, it's great. He's teaching you how to manage a large law firm but how much of that is really going to be applicable to the one, two or three man operations. I think they still need to get a little better on that. Again because they still have this myth, the myth of going up and hanging your shingle and the other myth of I'm going to go work for a big law firm and I'm never going to have to worry about this stuff.

Tracy: You've touched on some of them quite a bit but what are some of the other challenges that a small firm is going to face when it comes to marketing themselves and getting themselves out there especially if they are starting out with little to no marketing budget?

Gary Port: The first thing is most people may start out, they need to ask themselves, who am I as an attorney? What is my market? What is my field? A lot of folks will go out there and they will specialize in whatever walks through the door. That makes marketing very difficult because if you are not identifying your market, how do you know how to advertise into that market? So that is really the first thing. Who am I servicing? If I am servicing a, let's say I want to go into bankruptcy. Okay, my market is people who are going bankrupt. How do I get those people in my door? There are going to be 2 ways. One is broadband marketing which is internet or print media but you also have to think about targeting which is a lot of attorneys don't know bankruptcy so maybe your more bang for the buck is to target and market to attorneys. Again, you have to look at who your market is and then how did those people find you? I do a lot of divorce work. Most people looking for divorce lawyers are embarrassed that they are looking for divorce lawyers. I can look on my website and I can tell that most people are on my website at lunch time or late at night. Very rarely do I get people between those times. It's a much smaller number. It's when I am alone and no one is looking at me, I'm going to go on the website and look for a divorce attorney. Again, you need to look at your marketing. Who are you targeting? Then you can sort of figure out how you can adjust your budget. If you are going to be in a field where people are going to be on the internet a lot looking for an attorney, say it's a divorce lawyer, then you are going to want to look at how to market on the internet effectively. If you are in a field where you need to talk to other attorneys, then you need to go to Bar associations, you need to network with attorneys. So that really is the first thing. Who am I? Who am I marketing to? Now you can start to figure out how you get to those people.

Tracy: So it sounds like a lot of effort should be spent on targeting versus just throwing a big wide net out there for marketing.

Gary Port: You have to. I mean if you went to a straight marketing class in college that's what they are going to tell you but we as attorneys don't think about that. Oh I'm a lawyer. What the hell does that mean? What kind of lawyer are you? We are in such an age of specialization. So who are your clients and where are they getting their information from? My partner does a lot of high end commercial litigation. He targets other attorneys because there are a lot of attorneys out there that don't litigate and they have clients who have these issues so they'll go to another attorney. The clients that he has are not looking for him on the internet. The clients that I have are. So again, where are you targeting? How are you targeting? Now, just because his clients are high end doesn't mean he doesn't have a web presence because everyone needs a web presence now and people Google you all the time and in that one of the first things they do is they look at your webpage. If your webpage is terrible, its like walking into a disheveled, dirty and filthy office. If you walked into an attorney's office and there are files all over the place, there is garbage flowing out of the garbage pails, there is a stale smell in the place, the windows are dirty, you are going to turn around and walk out. Same thing with the webpage. You may be getting a direct referral from someone but they are going to go check you out on that website and if your website looks terrible, it looks cheap, it doesn't look like you are a substantial attorney, they are probably not going to call you even though if there was a buddy saying, this attorney is great. Call this gal, she knows what she is doing. So if the website is bad, that could kill the whole deal over there. So that's something which is very important as well.

Tracy: Gary, besides the targeting that was talked about, what are some of the other ways that maybe some of the smaller firms or the guys starting out can get their names out there or compete with those bigger offices with that small or little to no marketing budget? What are some other tools that are out there in the big old world?

Gary Port: Obviously, networking groups. Very important about networking, many people don't understand how to do it properly. Networking is not I got an email to show at a networking event. I show up there and I hand out my cards and no one calls me. That's not the way networking work. Getting into a networking group where you meet these people on a regular basis, you've now formed a relationship with these people. That means that they start to trust you and they know that if they refer something to you, they are going to see you every week or every other week and if you screw up, you know you are going to have to face that person. So there is that level of trust and checking when you are in a networking group where you meet people on a regular basis. It's important in a network to make it clear to the people that you are networking with, I'm not the kind of guy who just shoves a card out and says hire me. What you want to say to people in networking is I need people like you to help my clients so you want to make sure that they get to buy into your practice. So if I meet a realtor, I do divorce work, I sell houses all the time. I need a realtor, you can help me. You do insurance, we have insurance issues in divorce cases, I need your services. That gives a buy in as well. Another thing to do is beyond the traditional networking, you can make use of social media by writing articles, not big articles, 600 words or less on LinkedIn, Facebook, on your website as a blog geared towards clients. Too many attorneys on their websites or on their LinkedIn or on another posts, they write articles like they are written for attorneys. "In the case of Smith Vs. Jones, Judge Pompous opined that…" That's not what they want. They want to know if my spouse committed adultery, can I get the house? No. You can't. Let me explain why. Is a prenup a good idea? Well it depends. So you do conversation and stuff. Keep it short, get the message out there but again, in a way that is easy for people to Obviously, networking groups. Very important about networking, many people don't understand how to do it properly. Networking is not I got an email to show at a networking event. I show up there and I hand out my cards and no one calls me. That's not the way networking work. Getting into a networking group where you meet these people on a regular basis, you've now formed a relationship with these people. That means that they start to trust you and they know that if they refer something to you, they are going to see you every week or every other week and if you screw up, you know you are going to have to face that person. So there is that level of trust and checking when you are in a networking group where you meet people on a regular basis. It's important in a network to make it clear to the people that you are networking with, I'm not the kind of guy who just shoves a card out and says hire me. What you want to say to people in networking is I need people like you to help my clients so you want to make sure that they get to buy into your practice. So if I meet a realtor, I do divorce work, I sell houses all the time. I need a realtor, you can help me. You do insurance, we have insurance issues in divorce cases, I need your services. That gives a buy in as well. Another thing to do is beyond the traditional networking, you can make use of social media by writing articles, not big articles, 600 words or less on LinkedIn, Facebook, on your website as a blog geared towards clients. Too many attorneys on their websites or on their LinkedIn or on another posts, they write articles like they are written for attorneys. "In the case of Smith Vs. Jones, Judge Pompous opined that…" That's not what they want. They want to know if my spouse committed adultery, can I get the house? No. You can't. Let me explain why. Is a prenup a good idea? Well it depends. So you do conversation and stuff. Keep it short, get the message out there but again, in a way that is easy for people to se. put it on Facebook, put it on LinkedIn, write articles for your local paper, things that start to get your name out and keep track every week, Google your name. Go to AVVO, go to some of these other sources where if people start to Google, your name will start to come up. It's a matter of leveraging because again, everyone goes back to the internet even if it's a direct referral. When I first started looking at this about 10 years ago, I Googled my name, there were people with my name but they weren't me and they were showing up in the first 3 pages. Now you Google my name and it's localized. Google is localized in the geographic area. In my geographic area, I generally get the first 3 pages if you just try and Google my name out. The things that you see are things that people will think I'm very substantial. I ran for office, I was appointed a professor at Hofstra Law School, I've written articles, so when you start to read that, you get the impression that Wow. This guy. He is substantial. It's all a matter of getting your name out in as many different venues as possible so that when Google correlates all that together, you have a strong web presence and people say that person is reputable, that person is around, that person is someone people respect.

Tracy: Just touching on some of the things that you said, I find that as myself, a layperson, getting that information from an attorney in layman's terms is so much less intimidating and so much more helpful in terms of actually being able to process it as a consumer.

Gary Port: Absolutely. Lawyers have a tendency as in every profession, we get so tied into our own lingo whether you are talking about law, medicine, law enforcement, military, we all have our own secret handshake and we sometimes forget that when the person comes in, they have no idea of what we are talking about and if we don't bring it into their vernacular we are sort of locking them out. We need to make ourselves look smart but accessible. One of the other things I did is I hate these videos on the lawyer websites where the video shows up and the lawyer looks so serious. You know, do we do it? How we care for our clients and we take; It just annoys the hell out of me. What I did was set it deliberately the other way. I had my associate and I sit down in front of some law books in a slightly amateurish thing. She and I spent about 5 minutes talking about various legal issues but the key in those discussions was that one wasn't a talking head and two, it was two people talking together, who seemed like nice people. That was the goal. I wanted people to look at this video and say I like those two. They seem like they are very good people. I've gotten good feedback from people who have gone to my website seen the video and said, "Hey you guys really seemed like nice folks." That was my point. I didn't want to look like I was some ponderous self-important pretentious guy because I'm not and that's not what people want from an attorney. They want someone who is accessible. They want someone who knows what they are doing but as a human being is going to care about me. That's what we try to portray in these videos. These are the type of people that we really are.

Tracy: Just one more thing about the social media, you kind of touched on. I've heard conflicting reports from some attorneys on what works and what doesn't. What do you find are your thoughts on social media and what do you find is irresponsible ways? Just one more thing about the social media, you kind of touched on. I've heard conflicting reports from some attorneys on what works and what doesn't. What do you find are your thoughts on social media and what do you find is irresponsible ways?

Gary Port: Social media is constantly evolving because the audience is constantly changing. What was a really great website 10 years ago is a really ugly website now. In fact what was a great website an year ago maybe an ugly website now. People are constantly changing. Google is constantly changing their algorithms and you've got to figure out what that is. You can't be promiscuous because that's a problem because Google will hammer you on being promiscuous as well. You've got to really look at again, what is my target audience? What is my plan? What am I trying to achieve? The other thing which is very important with the social media is that Google searches social media just like Google searches everything else. You've got to figure out what are the words that people are looking at when they do searching. This is where a good SEO person can help you out and a bad one can mess you up. When a person is searching for an attorney, they may just write in Divorce attorney. The word Divorce attorney has a very high value on Google searches, so a lot of people are spending a lot of money on that. So if you used divorce attorney and you are not sending a lot of money, you are going to get crushed by the big guys. What you have to do is think what are people actually looking at? Are they writing divorce attorney or are they writing things like if my wife cheats, can I get the house? That's a real search and it shows up quite a bit on my pages. You have to then start to think about getting your search engine optimization on your social media, on your blog posts. What are the words that real people are going to be looking at? A good SEO person can take a look at the Google analytics and start warning some of those numbers. Maybe a million people look for divorce lawyers and a thousand people look for if my wife cheats, can I get the house? But for a small guy, the thousand people looking for that. I'm going to do my SEO on that term because a lot fewer people are, as you say, bidding against that term so I can get more people on to my website in looking at that as opposed to trying to compete against divorce lawyer. That's part of the things that these guys don't understand. You have to look at how people are searching, how many people are searching with those terms and then the value of those terms as part of the open market competition trying to get Google's attention.

Tracy: This has been some great information Gary and I'm sure it will be helpful to a lot of our listeners out there. Are there any final words of wisdom that you can share with other attorneys out there who are struggling to make a name for themselves or who might be finding it difficult to market their firm?

Gary Port: I think that the best thing is

1. Be a careful consumer when you are doing the marketing.
2. You have to be patient. Some of the marketing schemes are not going to turn over anything overnight. They may take 2 or 3 or 4 months and then you have to check the cost that you are paying for it against your return on investment and that's really why it's impacting on the return on investment. Most places, you want to give at least 3 months to, because it takes at least 3 months to really get that campaign going.

If you don't have the money and you don't have the time, then you are wasting your time because I spend money for a couple of weeks and nothing happened. Of course, nothing can happen. Marketing takes time to build roots. It isn't something that happens overnight. It takes months to get the campaign going and it takes years to get the name really out there. If you think that people are going to be at the path to your door immediately, you are probably delusional.

Tracy: I just want to really thank you for your time Gary. It has been a true pleasure. A special thanks to my guest Attorney Gary Port of Port And Sava, Attorneys at Law. Gary if someone would like more information on perhaps the courses that you teach or just to get in contact with you in general, what's the best way to reach you?

Gary Port: My office number is (516) 352-2999 and my email is [email protected] and if anyone is a member of the National Bar Association, you can get some of these courses at we teach on DVD and I believe that the Pennsylvania Bar also recorded my presentation there so if you are a member of the Pennsylvania bar, you can contact them and get the copy for those presentations as well.

Tracy: That's fine Gary. Thank you so much. Alright and I appreciate your time. This is Tracy Merda with Speakeasy Marketing Podcast signing off. Thank You so much Gary. Have a good one.

Gary Port: Okay. Thank you so much. Alright, bye.

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

Marketing your law firm in 2017 is expected to become even harder and you should prepare yourself for the tough competition ahead. There are so many marketing techniques out there, some of them work and some don't.

My strong recommendation is to author a book on your practice area or any legal matter that relates to your practice area.

It will crush your competition, elevate your perceived status and will help you attract better, high paying and quality clients.

We've helped nearly 200 attorneys author their own book on almost every practice area like DUI, Criminal Defense, Domestic Violence, Personal Injury, Auto Accidents, Family Law etc. We call this 'Speak a Book' process.

I've talked about this in detail in this episode, listen to it or download it below to learn more about speak a book process. Make sure to subscribe and review the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Hello, this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Marketing. We are approaching the end of 2016. We are in December now, 2017 is coming and on the side, I'm working on my second edition of the Secrets of Attorney Marketing Law Schools Dare Not Teach book. Just about done with the editing. Finishing up now. I can tell you that probably the number one thing that's helped us become successful in helping the lawyers has been the authorship of this book. I haven't sold any copies. I've sold maybe $1000 worth of copies but by giving them away to potential clients of which you may be on, we made quite a bit of money and got new clients and had a lot of success. Again, out of all the marketing we do, this is the number one thing that has gotten us business times a hundred. It's really fantastic. Guess what?

You can do the same thing for your law practice. Everyone's got competitors, everyone has price shoppers, everyone is using the internet and Google and it's a fiercely competitive space with many people shouting from the rooftops. People have reviews, they have websites, they have live chat, they have direct mail, Facebook. I mean all these different ways of marketing. So it's not easy out there and you want to just be an attorney and worry about that but unfortunately marketing is critical in order to get clients. So what I want to recommend to you is you take a look at the Speak-a-book process, that's what we call it. Before I explain to you how it works, let me tell you why or what the effect is or what effect will it have on your practice. We've done this for well over 170 attorneys and approaching 200.

Done it in all practice areas, Estate planning, family law, intellectual property, Medical Marijuana, DUI, criminal defense, workers comp, any practice area, you name it, immigration, anything. What happens is we help you create a book. The book is 50, 60 pages in length typically, sometimes they are longer. What you can do with this book is that when clients call, potential clients call you, your admins or you can say, "Just to let you know, as we talk about your case, attorney so and so has just written a book recently on that, on auto accidents. It's on Amazon, usually runs for about $15 but he's instructed me to let you know that since you are a serious potential client, to give you a complimentary copy. What's your best email address? What's your best physical address? We'll get a copy out to you in the mail right away."

The typical response of a potential client will be, "Oh thanks! That's great." The response in their mind will now be this guy or this woman has written a book. That's pretty impressive. In the average person's mind, people that write books are experts and it takes many years to write a book which normally is true. So it makes a serious impression in the mind of a prospect. They see you as more professional, they see you as more pre-eminent and it really puts you in a different playing field than your competitors because very few of your competitors have written books. They may have done them for other lawyers. If you change publishing or places like that but very few attorneys have done one for their potential client in any space.

If you do one, it's going to help you with your image, it's going to help attract better clients, more clients and they really elevate your practice. That's what this whole book process is about. Now let's talk about how to get it done. Normally what we hear is I wanted to write a book for years but I just don't have the time so we've come up with what we call the Speak –a-book process where we get on the phone with you and we do a 90 minute Q& A interview that gets recorded. We have question banks, so we know typically for almost any practice area, what to ask you. We send you the questions. Do these look good? Anything you want to add or remove or change? Okay, great.

Then we do the phone interview, 90 minutes, get recorded. Then we take that and we edit it, we transcribe it, we put it in book format and we get it finalized with pictures, cover art, all that good stuff and then get it sent back to you. This takes about 3 weeks in total to get it back to you. Then if there is any minor or final edits you want to do, great, you do those. Then we get the book published. We get it on Amazon and Kindle, you get 100 physical copies of the book delivered to you including shipping. You get an image of it to put on the site and a download widget so people that come to your website can download it. You get an emailable version of the book so you can send it out to potential clients through email and physically mail it to them.

You get all of this for an excellent price. Typically, the price it would be to get one client. So the pricing varies a little bit but it's priced so that you get one client ever in your entire career until you retire, this speak a book process pays for itself. That's pretty great. That's a pretty low threshold to make money on this and we've got plenty of clients and plenty of people that've got the book done. When they use it in their marketing, they are getting within the first five or six months, they are getting 4, 5 or 6 times return on their money. Some people have gotten higher than that. The ones that actually use it to promote themselves. So it's a great investment. It's a great thing that you should look into and talk to us about.

To do so, call (888) 225-8594 or email [email protected] and mention in the subject line, Speak-a-book. That's what we call it. I will be glad to answer all of your questions and get this implemented for you but it's a big deal and it'll take you to the next level and it'll get you quite a few clients in 2017. Thank you.

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

The worst thing that you might do to a potential client is redirecting them to this or that part of your site so they get an answer they're looking for. That's the death of your business and there is no joke in it.

Internet is one place you can get lost in even at the expense of your own money and time. So when your potentials get on a call with you (and believe me, that's one big effort on their part), telling them to visit your site is like slapping your door shut right in their faces and bam…they're gone forever!

What you should do instead is what I've shared in this podcast. Listen, subscribe, share and review the podcast.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Today I'm going to give you a real simple concept. There are few words that you can say, that a lot of businesses say, that will absolutely kill your business and I'm not exaggerating here. Very simple stuff and the reason why, I'll go into when I tell you what it is. The simple words are , without further ado, go check out our website or it's on the website or go to the website. Why are these words such killers? Isn't everything on the web these days? Don't people use the web for everything? Yes, they do but the real magic in getting new clients that will pay you good money is to take them off the internet and on to the phone.

If someone is asking you or your staff a legal question or that kind of thing, the worst thing that you can do is turn them back into the busy bazaar of the internet where competition is a click or a touch away. Competition is often on the same screen they are looking at. So just Google search results, 4, 5, 6 or 8 competitors. Why would you ever send them back to that environment where they can be lured away at a moment's notice? Or they get horribly distracted by Facebook, email, phone calls, tweets, texts and all kinds of stuff. So you never ever, if possible once you get someone on the phone or in a quiet medium or in person send them back to the internet. It is death and you will lose that potential client.

If you look at a lot of the businesses, you'll call them up and again, you are a live person on the phone. They will say, Oh that information is on our website. Go to our website. Why can't you answer it over the phone? Yes, it will take a few more seconds or it will take your staff members maybe 2 more minutes to answer those questions. Well now you have a chance to make a bond with a person whose voice at least in person is better. You always want people to come into your office to do an in office consult because then you know that you've got them but phone is a pretty good proxy for it. Far better than text, far better than WhatsApp or looking at a website or all of those things.

These people have to make an effort to go and do that even though a small effort, believe me, the effort between one click and two clicks versus three is a huge difference. The effort between just getting a question answered on the phone and speaking to a live person versus them having to go to the internet and look stuff up, again huge difference. So you want to avoid this at all costs. This is an absolute deal and client killer. Don't do it. Train your staff to answer stuff on your phone and not to push away customers. I promise you this will help your business big time.

This is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Marketing. If you need help implementing this in your law practice, SEO, newsletters to past clients, anything to help grow it, make it better and bigger, more clients, better clients, better quality of clients, call (888) 225-8594 and guess what? We'll talk to you and send you back to the internet or email [email protected]. Thank you.

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

I was in a car accident a few weeks back and now have first hand experience of how it feels to be in a collision, suffer injury (soft tissue damage at least), have to look for an attorney, talk to insurance companies, etc.

Although I know a lot about the legal process, I still had specific questions as a potential client. I went to different attorney's web sites but I didn't find the answers I was looking for.

Even though I know many attorneys, imagine the frustration level of a layman who gets into an accident and knows nothing about the legal process.

And finally, when I called an attorney to get my questions answered, I didn't feel I was listened to, not much information was provided, the attorney didn't make me feel empowered and in control of the situation, but instead pushed for an in-office consultation.

Don't make the same mistakes I experienced that push your potentials away. Listen to this podcast where I've shared my first hand experience on the exact mistakes attorneys make and how you can avoid them to convert more. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast and post a review.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Well, guess what? I got into a car accident. So now I become a client of one of you guys out there. I'm in Texas, so I won't say who but anyways an accident attorney. So I got some feedback on it, the process itself and no it wasn't my fault. I was rear ended actually at high speed, at night, on a highway and pushed off the road; I'm okay. I'm not saying this for sympathy. I'm saying this to give you a client's perspective on the auto accident and the legal industry in general. So, what did I do? I went to Google and I searched different attorneys and I did have questions about what may happen.

Even though I may know a lot about personal injury or auto accidents, I don't know nearly as much as attorneys do, especially in my state and then I have all the urban myths floating in my head regardless, so I knew not to talk to the other insurance company, actually I had become suspicious of my own insurance company because of all the attorneys that I have talked to. They called me and they wanted a statement and this that or the other. I've started to get the bills in from the accident. I've had to get a new car and all the other stuff because my car was totaled. The great thing is that because I've talked to a whole bunch of attorneys, I knew certain things. I knew not to talk to the other insurance company, I knew to be careful in that.

Probably nobody is on my side except the attorney and my insurance company and all that. Most customers don't know that and what takes place in your head regardless of what you know is the urban myths and doubts and things like that. I'm not mad at the guy that hit me but then again, I'm not crippled. Luckily enough, I came out of it with soft tissue damage and I'm okay. I don't know how I'd feel if he had really messed me up or chopped my arm off or disabled me for life and I'm not sure how that would have changed my thoughts on getting a lawyer but I guess I'm like a lot of people. I just want the money back for my medical bills. I don't want any medical bills to come out of it.

My car wasn't worth a lot, it was worth maybe $10,000 but I'd like to have enough money at least to get a new car and not have to deal with that stuff. There is some pain and suffering, etc. So here is my experience. I'm searching for lawyers and I'm questions about the case and I went to different several attorney websites which is kind of funny to look at from a customer's perspective but very few of them answered my questions. There's tons of calls to action to call me for a consultation, no fee no recovery, all that stuff. I know all that stuff. That's great.

I know about contingency and everything but I had some specific questions about my car, about what to say to my insurance company, about how to gracefully not say anything to the other party's insurance company that have started calling me, all those types of things. Then again, I was very disappointed. There were very few attorneys that had much of that stuff on their site. There was plenty of legalese but not much real information. If I had gotten that information, if I had become comfortable and my questions answered, it wouldn't have pushed me off from calling that attorney. It would have actually enticed me to call them more.

So I had to call them pretty much blind and I am seeing that a lot of clients have to do the same. There's basic platitudes on a lot of attorneys' sites and probably on yours as well but the detailed information is missing and I'm not saying to give legal advice or any of that stuff on your site. I don't want that but I want answers first; before I Google Dallas Injury Lawyer, that kind of thing. When you do that, you see all the same stuff, free consultation, no fee no recovery, that kind of thing. Then I called and I got the office person and not the attorney out of bat and she didn't say Oh my God. I'm so sorry to hear about that.

She just started asking me questions and I'm patient with that and I'm answering the questions and everything and I said, alright, can you put me on with the attorney now? I want to see if I have a case or if there's nothing here. Okay, hold on a second. So I get on with the attorney and the attorney is like How are you doing sir? I heard you had an accident and I said, you might want to take a minute because your secretary I hope made a bunch of notes, so before you ask me questions, go over the notes she made and he says No I can handle it. That's okay. That was mistake number one. I didn't feel like I was listened to immediately because I had to go through this secretary and then rehash the whole story which I don't like to do..

It's embarrassing. You feel bad, you feel stupid for being in an accident. You don't want someone to feel sorry for you and all that stuff. So I had to rehash that whole thing. Then when I'm talking to the attorney, he's saying we really take care of our clients, we take care of people, we'll make sure of this, that or the other. I was asking him questions and he was like come on in for a consultation. I said, I'll probably do that but I've got some questions first. He said, really the best way is to come in for a consultation and I said I understand that, I totally understand that but for me to get in the car and do this that or the other, I would really rather have some questions answered first. Can you do that?

He was like Okay. Sure. But I kind of had to fight to get him to do that. I shouldn't have to do that. You should get all your questions answered before you even get in your car and decide to go see somebody. Why? Because the customer's time is valuable, your time is valuable. Why even have someone in that does not have any strong intention of hiring you? That's another piece of advice. Then I get to the office and then minor things happen after so much paperwork. It's literally paper. Why can't I type stuff in? Then I wasn't told what documents to bring but then I realized that I better bring the whole bunch of documents. The police report, this, that and the other.

So I brought all that myself and the attorney is like Oh Good. I'm glad you brought all that stuff. Most people don't. Well, doesn't that tell you that you should be instructing people on what to bring and what to expect and all the other stuff. I ended up hiring the guy because it's contingency and there's not much going on. It looks good, track record and all that but I really wanted more of the personal interaction. I wanted to know, do I like this guy? Is he a jerk? Does he really seem to care or is he like whatever? That kind of thing. I explained to him what I'm hoping to get out of the case. I'm not looking for a windfall.

I'm looking to not to come out of pocket for it. I'm looking to move on and all the other stuff. So the guy did a pretty decent job but again, I definitely saw some ways for him to improve and I want this to be a lesson to everyone listening regardless of your practice area. The lesson here is the more you prepare your prospect, The more likely it is they will come into first place because their questions have been answered, because they've been told as much as possible what's likely to happen. You want to do that and the people that answer your phone are your first line of defense there.

If they are not good, if they mumble, if they stumble, if you can't hear them, if they are not prepared to empathize with the client right off the bat, whether it's estate planning or divorce or auto accidents, remember people call your office almost always because they have a big problem that requires a lawyer. They are not calling for the fun of it, they are not calling because you are cool and they just want to talk to someone that is fun to talk to. Unfortunately, your business is problems. That's what you do. You've got to realize that when they are calling, you have to show empathy right off the bat.

No matter who answers has got to show that empathy right off the bat because if you don't, there is no bond established and you want your office staff, if they answer the phone before you to start establishing that bond so you have an easier time of converting that client. Why not have them smooth the path to getting the client to like you and trust you and want to retain you? Why not do that? That's what they are there for. They are not just there to do their paper work and to process claims and to file stuff for you and to type stuff up. They are there to help you get more business so have them help you. Really prepare them.

If you want to boil all this down, I would boil it down to empathy and information and empowerment. Those things are what I would boil it down to. So I hope this helps. Again, this is not for sympathy, this is just so you can get a first person perspective on what a client thinks and feels. It's always good to know. So this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Marketing. By the way if you need help with your marketing. If you need help to train your staff, to lay down the groundwork, so you can get more clients and you have an easier time getting them to retain you, I definitely have got a lot of insights for you. I have many ways of helping.

If you want that help, call (888) 225-8594 or email [email protected]. Thank you.

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

Legal Robot's Artificial Intelligence engine can scan a long form contract, and provide you with a 1 page summary of all the important issues contained in the contract, as well as red flags that may be present.

Legal Robot substitutes traditional contract review (and drafting as well) with an automated, intelligent natural language processing AI system. Using their legal language model, the intelligent assistant flags issues & proposes enhancements by considering best practices, risk factors, and jurisdictional differences.

Legal Robot gives you an immediate error check for your contracts helping you produce better legal documents, but more importantly, avoiding contracts that would be detrimental to your wishes, unfair agreements, and agreements with hidden clauses that can hurt you.

Listen to the complete interview below. Make sure to subscribe and post a review.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Richard Jacobs: Okay. This is Richard Jacobs. Today I'm talking with Dan Reubens, co-founder of Legal Robot. Dan How are you doing?

Dan Reubens: Good. Thanks.

Richard Jacobs: Thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate it. It would be interesting. We are talking about Artificial Intelligence and how your firm is using it in the legal field. So can you give a quick background on what it is that Legal Robot does and what areas of the legal industry you work in?

Dan Reubens: Sure. We at Legal Robot analyze contracts with machine learning. We try to make it more understandable and help to free companies from some of the friction that contracts cause in their legal processes.

Richard Jacobs: Are you using natural language processing to interpret what's in a contract? Is that how it works?

Dan Reubens: Yes, we use natural language processing and some other forms of machine learning. There is one specific field of machine learning called deep learning. We use that to understand how people use legal language in practice and then use that to understand how it's being used in a particular target document.

Richard Jacobs: Can you give me an example of a couple of legal terms that are pretty common and that your AI system can understand them?

Dan Reubens: We don't think of them as individual legal terms. We really look at the entire sentence or the entire paragraph in context to the whole document. So we can throw out a word like indemnification and we see a lot of that in contracts naturally but the meaning of that really changes based on the words around it. So we really like to look at the entire context that the word is used in. That might be a trigger word for a lawyer that is reading contracts, they want to look at that section in particular and look for something but we really try to look at the entire sentence in a way that it's being used.

Richard Jacobs: Okay, so a document will be analyzed and then what's next? An attorney will be given the analysis of the document along with the original? What's the process?

Dan Reubens: Sometimes we work with attorneys but we've actually found that usually we are working directly with people in the business. We are working with a head of sales or a sales person himself or we are working with someone in HR. These are all sort of the end users of law and I think what's funny is that lawyers and by the way, I'm not a lawyer. I'm a machine learning guy myself, that I think lawyers sometimes tend to forget that the end users of law actually aren't lawyers. Lawyers are sort of the mechanics of law. They fix problems and that's great. They are very necessary in that but they are not really the end users of the law. The people that are actually operating businesses. There are individuals that are actually trying to resolve legal issues. So we really are making more products for the end users of law in trying to make the law more friendly for them.

Richard Jacobs: Makes sense. So as an end user, let's say I'm going to rent a commercial building and I get an agreement from the landlord's attorney and it's like a 30 page nightmare and my eyes are crossing. What will Legal Robot do for me in that example? What will I get from it as an output? Will it translate the gobbledygook into English? What will it do?

Dan Reubens: You get a few different things. For one thing, you will get a certain one page summary for the document. Some things that help you understand the key terms in the document and understand the point of the document. It's basically like an automatically generating term sheet. We also pair that with some deeper level analysis. If you are trying to proof read the document, it hasn't been executed yet and there is still some time for changes, we'll help you spot legal issues in there and maybe used the definition wrong or maybe there is some other sort of problem in there. Maybe you really probably should put something like a reasonable effort instead of best effort. Maybe that's sort of the standard for that type of agreement. We'll look for those sorts of errors and we'll provide some statistics on how often certain terms are used in that sort of agreement and then you can make your own decision if you want to go ahead and negotiate on that point. We won't necessarily tell you the way but we'll give you some more data to serve and inform that decision.

Richard Jacobs: So, it sounds like, for a particular agreement, you've had to have trained your system on similar agreements in the same niche or genre of the agreement, right?

Dan Reubens: Right. Yes, we've trained very generally on legal language and how people use legal language. That was a very large data set that we trained on. We've also trained on specific legal agreements that you might have more targeted questions about. So if you have for example like a stock purchase agreement or a commercial lease or something like that. Those are some things that are very well represented in private data sources. That's something that we have trained on. Other data sets, if we don't have a particular type of contract that we've seen a lot on maybe your own niche or industry, you can actually go and train your own algorithms on that through our web interface.

Richard Jacobs: Are you saying that you have an API where you can take your AI system and train it on my data, for instance?

Dan Reubens: Yes. You can actually do that yourself without any coding. Let's say, you work in oil and gas and you have some really specific type of patented agreement that you are looking for and we haven't trained on it yet. Right out of the box, you will get some use out of our product. We understand how people generally use legal language but for something really specific, you can train your own classifiers, your own algorithms and you can run your own checks on documents that come through the door.

Richard Jacobs: So the results; let's say it's a commercial lease. So I'll get a one page summary on what the lease is about in plain English. Will the system also point out, hey this provision right here is not customary. In only 3% of leases reviewed have we seen this term or what else do you gather that's useful in how I want to use it?

Dan Reubens: We do a number of things. We'll acquire things like Can Adams manual self-contract drafting plotters. But yeah we also do the kind of statistical analysis that says, in this type of document which we've reviewed, a statistically significant number of these documents, we don't really see this clause a lot. Let's say you are looking at an NDA and for some reason, someone copied and pasted something and they got a royalty clause in there. As a lawyer, you can review that and just be like, what's this doing in here? Get this out of here. This is clearly an error but a nonprofessional who is reading that might not spot that. So it will help you spot that and then we'll also go a little deeper. We'll actually help you to identify areas of ambiguity. Sometimes that's strategic ambiguity, sometimes it's not intentional and it's sort of the way the document is structured that can result in significant changes in meaning.

Richard Jacobs: So if I use Legal Robot on a contract, do you still recommend that I get an attorney to review it and your analysis? Will you be able to make a recommendation like that?

Dan Reubens: We definitely think that people still need them. Attorneys aren't going anywhere. This is definitely not going to put any attorneys out of business. This is still a parlance of proper legal analysis. We just think that for certain individuals, this is something that can help them have more meaningful and productive consultation with their attorney and when we are thinking about using a more appropriate environment, this is something that allows the lines of business or the people that are actually operating and working with these contracts. It lets them sort of have a pre-check before a legal department review. They sort of know that this is going to get through legal and that none of the stupid errors that I usually send to legal, they are not going to get flagged in here or I just need to go in and fix this one thing that is not compliant with my in house legal guidelines or something like that. That is sort of one of the cases that we work with but on the consumer side where it's sort of a pre-check or prima facie review for some of those lawyers out there and then on the corporate side, it's again something to make sure that you are compliant with in house standards.

Richard Jacobs: Are any of your client's attorneys or the firms themselves? What about a firm that has to review thousands of contracts or high volume stuff? Do you have a use for law firms themselves?

Dan Reubens: We definitely do have law firms that are interested. Quite a few law firms have signed up for our early data. We've actually got 8 of the Top 10 global law firms signed up for our early data. I think a lot of them are interested in it for some due diligence and Boyer scale document review cases. How that ends up playing out in the market, we'll see. Honestly, they are not our primary clients. We'd really rather sell to the in house legal department in a business. Selling to law firms is notoriously difficult and we find that a lot of them are already adopting technology that is quite helpful, so they may not have a need for it. If you're in a large law firm and you are using associate time to do large scale document review, you are not really using your associates well. So a lot of them in recent years, have made certain advances and invested in their own technology for this.

Richard Jacobs: Technology that uses AI or technology that just uses character recognition like mass scanning into a database?

Dan Reubens: Sort of the basic level of the document understanding and the natural language processing. There are a lot of good e-discovery tools that can be adapted to this purpose, so we don't really see a huge market there, honestly.

Richard Jacobs: You see a big market in the end user. The person that wants to rent a commercial property or is negotiating a NDA or other agreement with the company, that kind of thing?

Dan Reubens: Actually yes. Going back to the sort of car example. If the end user of the car is the driver. We all need to drive a car to get to work that's really our end user and not the mechanics. We'd really much prefer to service all of the end users in the world rather than just the mechanics.

Richard Jacobs: It seems like a big imbalance of power especially with the terms of use or somebody saying, this is web related. Could this be used as a tool for people to apply when faced suddenly with a 30 page terms of use document? Are there any landmines if I agree to this?

Dan Reubens: Well, actually, recently I just got an email from Uber and they just updated their terms of service and I was like, I would like to know the summary of what they've changed but I'm kind of curious. What did they really change? What are they trying to slip in there that's needed to try and fly under the radar. So I mentioned some changes to the arbitration procedures. Turns out those changes might not be totally in the consumer's favor as you would expect. It's kind of interesting. We do see some things like that and we can pretty quickly analyze those major changes to those major terms and privacy policies. We are actually going to make a lot of those public. Changes to major services like Apple and Google and Uber and sort of the big companies that tend to make a lot of news, we are actually going to make those changes public.

Richard Jacobs: Oh really? So you are going to analyze them yourself and you are going to make them public?

Dan Reubens: Yes.

Richard Jacobs: Okay, very interesting. Can you talk about some of the mechanics that you deal with? Do you use programming languages? If so, what do you use? How does a piece of code do what your program does? How does it analyze a document or multiple documents and find concepts or understand them?

Dan Reubens: If you think of sort of the traditional programming of a computer, you are writing out rules and you are writing out the logic of particular rules and you compose them into functions and higher level objects. That's certainly one way to write a program. But I think what has changed in the computer science world in the last few years and what made this possible is we are now evaluating the source document rather than passing it out through a big set of handwritten rules. What we are doing is we are looking at the internal relationships in that document. The way we start is we actually build what's called a code trans matrix or we count how many times a word shows up alongside every other word. That's a lot of computational work to do that which is why we've only been able to do it recently. So we start out and we build that code trans matrix. That basically gets changed into a long set of numbers that represent a single word or a single sense. We now have basically a set of numbers that represent an indemnification clause. We can test that long string of numbers and pass that through a bunch of old style statistic algorithms and we can analyze the relationship between that set of numbers and other sets of numbers, so we can see how close that indemnification clause is as represented by those numbers. We can see how close that is to other indemnification clauses. Then we can say, Okay, it's this far apart and we can measure that distance. That's something which is really interesting that's become possible in the last 5 years that has enabled our technology.

Richard Jacobs: Alright. So you are looking for occurrence of certain words in the same sentence or not. Obviously, you've disclosed as much as you can but what else goes into making your program work besides the frequency of certain words appearing together? How does it even understand a concept? How does it work?

Dan Reubens: What we do is we take the tested long strings of numbers and we build what's called a classifier on top of it and when we build enough classifiers, we get to the point where we can understand what legal concepts are being used in a particular sentence or a particular paragraph. We actually send that to phonontology. So if you remember back to legal theory and in drawing out the different sort of exchanges in the contract, you can actually draw those out in between two parties if you have a circle on one side as Party A and a circle on the other side which is Party B. You draw a line between them. That's an exchange. So we'll actually build out each of those components using a classifier. We build a whole lot of those, so we are actually able to model a contract in that way. We are able to draw all the different lines and concepts of that contract. We call it the conceptual draft of the contract and then we prepare that conceptual draft to other contracts.

Richard Jacobs: How do you define the universe of all the contractual exchanges and elements that are possible and then your system is looking for when any one of those elements occurs in an agreement that it's reviewing?

Dan Reubens: Right. We can look at an agreement and say that it's got a 100 different exchanges in the agreement or 12 different changes in the agreement. We can look at the nature of those exchanges and how they transfer between different parties and different characteristics than they have. That provides us with really rich information that we can then display to the user of the software. Suffice to say, how the complicated stuff behind the scenes is made but on the surface what happens is you upload a document and within a few seconds, you get very rich summary of the legal language inside and what's really happening in the legal language behind of it. It's a much more visual way to work with a legal language than most people are used to. I mean, you could flip through all 60 pages of the contract but if you can also look in there and on one screen, find the one particular instruction error that you care about. That's a much more efficient way to review a contract.

Richard Jacobs: Makes sense. I've seen out there on the web, Google has a natural language processing API, Watson, IBM also has one. Did you guys have to build your own from scratch or did you piggyback off those? How good is your versus theirs?

Dan Reubens: We actually started out with what suits you best thinking. We can get this into the market real quick if we just used some off the shelf tools. There are some really great natural language tools out there. The field has just been taking leaps and bounds in recent years. What we found out very quickly is that a lot of them are trained on sort of traditional prose, so they are trained on normal sentences and there is really nothing natural about legal language. We really couldn't use those off the shelf tools. We had to build our own. We started off trying to use those and we tried Watson and we tried the Stanford Pore and LT Toolkit and we tried some other tools that are relatively well known and they provided some insight to be sure but they really didn't give us the kind of level of accuracy that we were looking for on legal sentences. The reason is that legal sentences are so much longer, they have what's called the long range dependency problem where you have a sentence that might be 15 words in normal text and in legal text, it ends up being something that is 40 or 50 words long in a single sentence. So it's a really different kind of problem. The nice thing is, we get a lot more hierarchy in legal language, so we can actually explore that hierarchy in unique ways, so we ended up doing our own algorithms but it ended up being something really good for us as far as accuracy.

Richard Jacobs: Where are you at with your product? Is it available to the public and for what types of agreements or is it still in data? Where are you at in the process?

Dan Reubens: So it's not available to the public yet. We are working with 6 companies that are in the hyper data stage right now. We are really trying to get a sense of how they use it day to day in their business before we actually launch it publicly. This is something where people are going to be depending on this for understanding legal language. They could be making business decisions based off this. So we want to make sure that this is something really solid and we also need to make sure that it's incredibly secure. So we are only working with a small set of customers at this point just to make sure that we get everything right early on. We haven't launched it publicly yet but in just a couple of weeks, we are actually going to be launching just a small product that is just a part of it to do some legal automation work.

Richard Jacobs: What's that going to be?

Dan Reubens: Just recently, the US Copyright office kind of screwed up the entire digital millennium copyright act, Safe Harbor for everyone. So they decided to wipe out everyone's Safe Harbor rights and sort of replace them with a new online registry which is good in a way but there is going to be a scramble over the next year to re-register for Safe Harbor for any website based in the US that hosts user created content. We are actually providing a product that launches in a couple of weeks that automates that process for website owners. So they may not be legal professionals, they may not be people that are super-technical and familiar with this but we will give them this really important legal protection with a minimum amount of effort. We've provided essentially a DMCA Safe Harbor bot that will go ahead and do the registrations for them and keep them up to date.

Richard Jacobs: It sounds like your tool could actually help with compliance. Let's say, crafting a compliant terms of service policy, privacy policy, those kinds of things. I would guess multiple uses of legislation need to be addressed in one of those. Do you see a use case for a product like that?

Dan Reubens: Yes, we do. There is actually some other folks out there in the legal tech industry doing some interesting things with that. Naturally, on a large scale there are products like Contract Express that are quite useful. There are also tools like iubenda. So those things are interesting and certainly useful but we were trying to stay away from automatically generating legal language because that gets much more into the realm of actual legal practice. When you are generating a particular document for someone, it might straddle the line between sort of providing them something that they are going to use and actually I guess, it really depends upon as a legal document.

Richard Jacobs: Where do you see your biggest opportunity in the upcoming years?

Dan Reubens: I think you nailed it with the compliance and the automation there. Really, the way that we think of our product right now was contracting and letters. This is our sort of product. We are eventually moving more into the compliance space as we develop this product more. It's really compliance with contracts and the automation of that compliance. I think that's where we are headed as a company. As far as the overall industry, I think there is going to be more of a push towards smaller units of work. When we hire a lawyer, we typically go through a service called out counsel that when you think of it as the word for legal services. So we go to them and we hire a partner level attorney for a fraction of the cost and we get a fixed fee. So I think you are going to have a lot of small businesses going toward that kind of model because it fits with their consumption model.

Richard Jacobs: The nature of AI and machine learning seems to be harmless improvement on a pretty expansive and vast scale. Do you see that happening with your products? How "good" will they get and what will it mean when they become better than humans or exceptional. What do you see as happening with your products?

Dan Reubens: There is always this question that at what point will we reach human level intelligence with a particular product. I think that's really sort of asking the wrong question and sort of looking at that in the wrong way. Computers are already much better than humans in a lot of ways. They are certainly much faster and so if you are trying to review 10,000 documents, you can do that in a few minutes with a computer or with some AI. I really think that kind of question is interesting but I'd really think of it more in what sort of things do humans do today which will no longer need to be done. If we think of filing a brief or something, the human is probably going to come up with legal concepts on that and whether they actually write the whole document or not, I think that will change. I think enforcing compliance will change but as far as the creative aspects, I think we're a ways away from computers managing the creative aspects of certain intelligence for quite a while.

Richard Jacobs: Okay and the last question. To get some use out of this interview or this podcast, who would make a good client for you at this stage? Is it an individual or a company or a law firm? How can they get in contact with you?

Dan Reubens: The bulk of our interest right now is acquiring customers and large companies. These are typically heads of sales or heads of HR or heads of procurement that are having problems with their in house legal team. Or if the in house legal team is really feeling the pain of deficiency in their own department. Those are our ideal customers right now. They can get in touch with us through our website legalrobot.com or just drop us a line at [email protected].

Richard Jacobs: Okay. It's been really great and informative and very interesting. I think the work that you are doing is really fascinating. It has a lot of applications and I'm glad it's more of a contract side and seemingly at the consumer side as well. So thanks for taking the time for this interview. I really appreciate it.

Dan Reubens: Sure. Thanks for having me.

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

You may have heard about the Artificially Intelligence Judge (we covered in a previous podcasts, you can listen to it HERE), and you'll discover more about how AI and the law are coming together in this interview with Jimoh Ovbiagele, Cofounder/CTO at ROSS Intelligence.

ROSS helps human lawyers perform faster, more accurate legal research, especially in the area of Bankruptcy and contract law and saves law firm's countless hours of research time.

ROSS is intuitive and simple to understand and can be mastered in minutes. Listen to the podcast below for detailed interview and make sure to subscribe and post a review.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Richard Jacobs: Okay. This is Richard Jacobs. I'm here with Jimoh Ovbiagele. He is the co-founder and CTO of Ross Intelligence. A company that is working in the legal field using artificial intelligence to make the legal field evolve into the next generation. Whatever that is. Welcome Jimoh. How are you doing?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm doing great.

Richard Jacobs: Good. Yeah. It's a really good opportunity to get to speak to you. What is Ross Intelligence doing in the legal field? What is the latest project that's going to be?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Ross Intelligence develops and sells Ross, an artificially intelligent lawyer that can answer complex legal questions. We have some of the top law firms in the world as our customers like Dentons, the world's largest law firm by head count and Latham & Watkins which is the world's largest firm by revenue. So we help them work more efficiently and effectively.

Richard Jacobs: What's an example of a recent project? Are you looking to replace attorneys on their team or advise them? How does that work?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Typically an associate spends about 30% of their time researching and this is not the best use of their talent. The way a research typically goes, a client comes to a lawyer and has a legal issue, the lawyer has to research what the courts have said about that legal issue, so they open up a keyword database to find potentially relevant legal cases. Then they spend hours reading through hundreds of pages of cases just to find the passages that answer the legal questions. Ross does that for them so they can focus on more value added activity. So Ross isn't a replacement for associates, it's really an augmentation or a power up for human lawyers that already exist.

Richard Jacobs: So you know, if it's so intelligent, what will it do? Will it be instructed by the attorney to read through a whole corpus of cases that are related and look for keywords or how does it work?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Lawyers ask Ross their question in natural language as they would ask a colleague who has experience on that matter and Ross will read through and find precise answers through that corpus of case law. In order to do this we developed our own legal AI framework called Legal Cognition. The way Legal Cognition works is it analyzes the relationships between and in the meaning of words in order to read through and understand millions of laws. That's the high level of the magic behind Ross.

Richard Jacobs: Wow! What areas of law is the Ross AI tuned to work on? Anything? or only certain kinds?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: We started off with Bankruptcy, the reason being that in a Bankruptcy, there are many cost and time constraints as would make sense because a company is going bankrupt and people are trying to get as much money as they can back, so the way that we thought about it was that if we could help bankruptcy lawyers, we could help any lawyer. So we started at about a year ago on that project and it was successful, now we are moving into other areas of the law like Intellectual property, employment and labor, in short because our technology, we didn't teach it what the laws were, we just taught it how to read the law, so it can be scaled to other domains.

Richard Jacobs: When you say it works in Bankruptcy and it was successful, what does that mean? Does it actually suggest motions to bring in a case? What does it suggest? Does it simply point out anything dealing with this type of asset or bankruptcy?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: When our customers or users work with Ross on their Bankruptcy cases and they have a research question. For example, like can a student loan debt be discharged in the event of a bankruptcy in New York city. Ross will bring back the exact passages where a judge or a lawyer in that case specifically addresses that question, so this is fundamentally different from what they'll have to do where traditional legal research tools just bring back cases that contain the keywords and then you have to read through them in order to find those passages but oftentimes, most of the cases that you read through are completely irrelevant to you and you have to dispose of them.

Richard Jacobs: So when Ross brings back search results, are there other times when it's bringing back way too many results or are you able to tune it that it's bringing back enough results that are useful. What are some examples of what it's brought back. Have you been able to tweak it?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: I don't remember any search results off the top of my head but in a matter of minutes, Ross is able to place lawyers dead center on the issue. The way Ross works now is that it brings back the 10 most relevant passages from the law. Most of the time, in those 10 passages, you are going to have what you need to place you dead center on the issues. It serves as a basis for exploration in your research.

Richard Jacobs: How do you get all of the law into Ross to process? I mean there are so many states. Even within one area of the law, laws are often different by state and the case law around there, you know recent decisions. How do you gather all of this data to train it?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: That is a great question. We formed a partnership with a legal publisher that we'll be announcing shortly that provides us to a pipeline of that data. That way, we can focus on artificial intelligence rather than data collection. Data collection is just very hard and it's essential but we are focused on artificial intelligence. Kind of how we like to think about it is it's like the petroleum industry. There are companies that focus on the exploration and mining for oil, then there are companies that refine petroleum and turn it into products like rubber and fuel and other petroleum based products.

Richard Jacobs: Are you able to give any estimation on the amount of data that is needed for your system to work properly?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: It could work on a corpus of any size but what I really think you are getting at is the machine learning fee because Ross learns how to answer questions by looking at a training data set of questions and answers which it tries to find patterns in and applies to new questions that come in. So Ross has been trained on tens of thousands of questions. So it has a lot of experience unto itself.

Richard Jacobs: What do you think about moving on to other areas of the law? Let's say criminal defense and beyond just research, do you think that an AI may turn into an attorney itself or litigation support. Let me give you an example. Let's say in a criminal case, using Ross at some point, we'll be able to look at the fact pattern of the case and all the law before it and make recommendations like file a motion to do this and you'll have a high likelihood of success or don't do that or you should plead in this case because it's a 90% likelihood that it'll go best for you that way?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Absolutely. That is our vision and that's what we are working towards. We don't ever see Ross interacting or working without a human with clients. Humans will always be at the center of our system and will also always be that support team for that lawyer. We think that's really important because if you look at the legal industry right now, 80% of people in the United States that need legal help can't afford it and this is an unacceptable number and we are going to bring this number down. The constitution says liberty and justice for all, not liberty and justice for some. This is what drives us at Ross. We want to help the lawyers that we have now help more people.

Richard Jacobs: Makes sense. What's your background? How did Ross come to be and how did you get into this?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: I've been interested in AI for a while. I was 18 when Watson beat the world champions at Jeopardy and for my generation, I think it was like watching NASA send a man to space, watching Neil Armstrong land on the moon. So that really inspired me. After that I read every single research paper that came out of that project and I continued to study artificial intelligence in University. When I was there I started to think more about how AI was going to change the world and then I remembered back to the struggle that my single mother endured under crippling legal bills when she and my father split up. I wanted to bring the power of AI to the legal industry. So that's how the idea for Ross came about. I joined up with a fellow computer science classmate while studying at the University of Toronto called Parves Daouliou and a rising lawyer in Toronto called Andrew Rudolf of Canada who brought the intelligence to bring Ross to life.

Richard Jacobs: Back to how Ross works. Is it using natural language processing to understand the law itself?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Yes. Natural language processing techniques is a field in computer sciences where we try to understand and break down language.

Richard Jacobs: Were there any hiccups along the way in the development of it? Things that stuck out to you as curiosities or surprises as you've been grading the software?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Yeah. Language is an incredibly hard thing. I think what I've realized over the course of developing Ross is how absolutely amazing the human mind is, while trying to recreate it in a way. We do things without even thinking about it, we take them for granted. Simple things like, in a conversation to annul based on the context, who someone is talking about when they say they or him or who. Those are hard things that it comes so easy to us which is pretty incredible.

Richard Jacobs: What do you see in the next year or so that Ross will work on? What sort of cases or what areas of law? What's the expansion plan?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Now that we have our foundation down, we are going to be marching steadily forward, expanding to other areas of the law, broadening Ross' scope. We are going to be deepening Ross' intelligence, the AI space is developing very quickly, a lot of great research is coming out of universities and we are going to apply that to what makes Ross smarter but also legal research is just the beginning for Ross. our legal cognition framework is something that we'll be applying to other activities in a law firm like knowledge management, like helping law firms leverage the work that they've already done and stored inside their firm helping with due diligence, contract review and other things. So that is the direction that we are going in and we are really excited about it here.

Richard Jacobs: What do you think will be the toughest hurdles going forward? Are there any areas of the law, the things that an attorney does that you just don't think Ross is going to be able to help with or to emulate or take over for?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Right off the bat, the things that comes to my mind is, right now, we are teaching Ross how to write memos or legal briefs but the one thing that it's hard to teach a machine is writing persuasively because that takes a lot of context and understanding to your audience and understanding humans. So I think that even though Ross is helping with research and will help more and more with research. In fact, I think lawyers will always be ahead of AI in that aspect and so that's one of many things but that's the first thing that comes to my mind because it's something that I was working on here with the team most recently.

Richard Jacobs: Do you think eventually, in courtrooms, an AI can be a third party. Let's say, you have the judge, you have counsel, the attorneys on both sides. what if you had a 3rd entity or a 4th one, AI that anytime an issue came up in the courtroom, it could immediately quote all the applicable law based on what's being said, this is actually what's out there. So people wouldn't need to leave and do research and come back. It would actually be in the courtroom. Do you ever see that happening?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Absolutely and I think it's going to be coming real soon. I wouldn't put it as it will be a 3rd party . AI would be something that would be for every party. The judge will be equipped with AI and then all the lawyers would be equipped with AI so we could get that real time information in the courtroom and we already know that courts are overloaded, so we could make our court systems more efficient that way and also fair. Yeah, so I think once that happens, that is going to become the standard. There is going to be no going back from that.

Richard Jacobs: Have you spoken with many lawyers about this? Is there resistance or fear of what your system can do or is it being welcomed so far?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: It is being welcomed but we have met people who are afraid of it but I think that just comes from a misunderstanding. I think it's kind of like when there is a new guy on your team and you are trying to figure out where that person is going to fit on your team. You are trying to figure out whether that person is going to compete with you because you don't really know your strengths or weaknesses relative to them. What we try to educate lawyers about is the strength of AI and also the strengths of humans and when they see that, their fears disappear and then what we say, on a macro level is that back to what I said, 80% of Americans cannot afford access to legal services meanwhile demand for legal services in the existing market is going down. So, law firms are looking for new markets to expand their business in. So having the support of AI will help law firms expand into this massive untapped market which is worth billions of dollars. Not only is it the economical thing to do, it's the right thing to do. So what we like to say often is that AI isn't the end of the law like people are saying, it's the beginning of it.

Richard Jacobs: You said you think the need for attorneys is going down. What do you think is happening that is causing the need for attorneys to go down meanwhile there are just too many people unrepresented?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: There are a lot of different forces in the legal market today. There are more competitors out there, there are more law firms, there are non law firms like consulting firms who provide some form of legal services. Companies are building legal teams in house. Generally clients are smarter and they are more cost sensitive. One thing which is interesting is that clients increasingly refuse to pay for the time of an associate especially time that's spent on research. so whereas doing research was once a source of revenue for a law firm, now it's an operational cost. There are a lot of different pressures going on in the legal industry that's causing them to rethink how they do business.

Richard Jacobs: Historically, in the legal profession, all the legal work itself obviously was handled or is handled by an attorney and there are licensing requirements for someone that is not an attorney can't "practice" law but I guess your intelligent system would be okay. It wouldn't be practicing, it would be providing research and the attorney is supposed to do the work or the legal representation itself.

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Exactly. Yeah.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah. Very Good. Last question. what do you see as happening, I know you are partially incident but in the next 2 or 3 years because things move so fast. Where do you see Ross going?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Like I said that I think that although our system is very capable today and other AI systems that we are seeing right now. We are still in the very nascent stages but there is so much potential ahead of us. So I see Ross becoming more capable, being more able to help lawyers more. I see that partnership and that trust between machines and lawyers growing where it becomes commonplace where now we have a great group of earlier doctors who are innovators in this space but I think that in the next 2 years, AI in the legal industry will be mainstream.

Richard Jacobs: Wow. That's a big change. Okay. So for attorneys that want to get in touch with Ross and maybe try out their system, use it for legal research, what are some ways to get in touch with your firm or you?

Jimoh Ovbiagele: You could visit our website at www.rossintelligence.com and if you'd like to speak to me, my email is [email protected] and you could also follow us on Twitter, our handle is @rossintel and my personal Twitter is @findingjimoh. It's a play off Finding Nemo.

Richard Jacobs: Yeah. Very Good. I appreciate your time and I'd say it's very fascinating, very unusual. It's going to be interesting what's going to happen in the next few years so thanks for your time.

Jimoh Ovbiagele: Thank you, Richard.

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

Election Day is around the corner folks – but before you take that selfie and paste, post, tweet, snap or whatever the kids are doing nowadays … beware … you could land yourself with a misdemeanor and a fine!

Jaclyn Belczyk, Research Director for JURIST, the award winning web-based legal news and real-time legal research service housed at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, tells us why this "ballot selfie" craze is all a buzz this election season and which states are just saying "no", to sharing your vote.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tracy: Hi, this is Tracy Merda with Speakeasy Marketing and today, we have a very exciting guest, Jaclyn Belczyk of JURIST. Jaclyn joins us as the research director of JURIST which is of course an award winning web based legal news and online research. Jaclyn, thanks for joining me today.

Jaclyn: Sure, happy to do that.

Tracy: Well, Jaclyn, you just recently wrote a really interesting article on the selfie ballot which seems to be the craze this election season. Tell me a little bit about that.

Jaclyn: Yes. We've actually written quite a number of articles on this topic. Just over the past couple of weeks seems to be an issue that's popping up in a lot of different states. Basically there are laws on the books in many different states that prohibit the taking of so-called ballot selfies, people snapping photographs at the polling place of their ballots and sharing those or posting those to social media, so these have been challenged in a number of states, there have been various lawsuits and court rulings and basically it's kind of resulted in the state of confusion where depending on where you are, this is something that might or might not be allowed.

Tracy: Well, I mean cameras and cell phone use is then banned from polling places for — as long as I can remember, so why do you think there is so much hype and attention this year.

Jaclyn: Yes. So, I think that's probably a combination of things. In most cases, these aren't brand new laws. There have been laws like you said banning cameras from polling areas in many different states or laws preventing people from sharing their ballots, so these aren't new laws but I think their application in this context to the Smartphone, social media and everything is still fairly new. It seems like we all have been carrying our Smartphones around forever but it's still a pretty recent phenomenon that everybody has a Smartphone and everybody is posting things that they do to social media, so fairly new for this election in particular. And I also feel like the tone of this election is a little bit different than what we have seen before. It seems like here on JURIST, we have seen a lot more litigation over all kinds of voting right issues in the months and weeks leading up to the election more than I can recall certainly in 2012 or 2008. So this is just one of many different voting type of issues that I have seen court rulings on in recent weeks.

Tracy: And why do you think the ballot selfie voters are so eager to get out there and share who they are voting for? I mean if anything, I guess my age was more so like I voted sticker, that's how we kind of announced it.

Jaclyn: Yes. Again, I think it's something about this election, this particular election, these candidates have really touched the nerve with a lot of people. People have really strong opinions about which candidates they are supporting, they have really strong reasons for their support and they have been sharing that on social media for months now. So it seems I think maybe a natural extension for a lot of people to want to post the combination of that on their social media profiles, it's just one more way for them to show their friends, their relatives who they are supporting and where they stand. And I am sure they are also hoping that sharing a ballot selfie is going to encourage other members of their social network to get out and vote hopefully for their candidate and maybe even share their support on their social media networks.

Tracy: So the main theories of the ballot selfie are really saying things like the laws are there to protect voter rights and privacy. What is the ECLU of Northern California and other proponents of the ballot selfie saying?

Jaclyn: Well, basically they are making first amendments pre-speech argument. So they are arguing that any kind of laws that restrict people from sharing images of their ballots, sharing on information, posting it to social media, taking pictures that those types of laws are an infringement on their right to free speech, freedom of expression. And I think that's a fairly strong argument actually. Nevertheless, courts have been going in different directions on that. So some courts, like the Northern District of California, Southern District of New York that we saw recently have rejected these challenges basically on the premise that making a change at this stage in the election cycle is just going to cause a lot of confusion. As a judge in New York wrote just recently "The public's interest in orderly elections outweighs the plaintiff's interest in taking and posting ballot selfies". So the courts haven't necessarily come down ruling on the merits saying, "There isn't a first amendment violation but courts have been a little bit hesitant to enjoying the laws at this point for fear of creating a lot of confusion about what is or isn't allowed". And then there are other courts that have gone the other way and upheld the challenges and said, "The ballot selfies are fine". So it will be interesting to see where that goes from here because I do think that first amendment argument is a pretty strong argument.

Tracy: It is. And certainly in the states that it is illegal, do you really think that it's realistic that police are going to go on and prosecute people for taking pictures with their ballots?

Jaclyn: Well, that's hard to say. I have a hard time personally imagining that this is going to be a top priority for prosecutors. That being said, I think it will be a pretty easy case for them to make. Their evidence is going to be right there on your social media account. And then accusations of voter fraud have been flying around recently and I am sure this is going to be a contentious election, so who knows what types of claims might get made in the days and weeks following the election. My best guess is that you'd be unlikely to be prosecuted if you are posting a ballot selfie in the state where that's prohibited but I would account on that. So I think you'd have a pretty strong first amendment argument to make in your defense if they did come after you though, so I bet you'd be able to find some lawyers to take on your case.

Tracy: Who knows for this year, right. Anything is possible.

Jaclyn: Right. And that's what I am saying, I am like anything could come up.

Tracy: So Jaclyn, what do you think to come the next big election? How do you perceive ballot selfies, social media or other technology with this, the youngest generation, if you will or maybe even our generation, how do you see those trends coming into play and maybe kind of being brought even further to the light?

Jaclyn: Yes. I mean I don't think that this is something that's going to just go away. I think we'll see a trend of states moving to make changes to their laws. For example, California, not going to be allowing ballot selfies for Tuesday's election but there's already a law that's set to take affect on January 1st that's going to allow them in upcoming elections. So I think we are going to start to see more of that. Social Medias have such a big role to play and how people are talking about the election, how people are talking about the issues that are important to them and I don't see that as something that's going to change. Courts, lawmakers are always a few beats behind on new technology though, so once the laws catch up on ballot selfies, who knows what the next technology is going to be that the courts or lawmakers haven't necessarily anticipated.

Tracy: Well, it will be interesting day regardless of what happens with the selfie ballots or our lovely candidates.

Jaclyn: Definitely.

Tracy: Well, I want to thank you, Jaclyn, really for joining us today. This is a great quick interview. I just was eager to get your insight into the process and we just look forward to see what the outcome brings tomorrow.

Jaclyn: Okay, well thanks so much for having me.

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

Lecturer in Law at University of Sheffield and Associate at Panayotis Yatagantzidis Law Offices, Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis shares his research about judicial decision-making using artificial intelligence.

Artificially intelligent judge has been developed and it can predict the court verdicts with an amazing 79% accuracy. Listen to the podcast for more detailed take on this. Make sure to subscribe to the podcast and post a review.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Hey, this is Richard Jacobs with Speakeasy Marketing and I have today Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis. He is an attorney based out of Greece that has worked in the realm of artificial intelligence and the law. He has got quite a bit of experience, various experiences so I'm going to let him describe who he is because he can do a better job of it.

Richard Jacobs: Welcome Dimitrios. How are you doing?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: I'm good. Thank you very much. It's great to be with you. Just a little bit of background as you said. I have worked as an attorney back in Athens, Greece where with my first law degree I went to Athens and then I pursued 2 post graduate degrees, one in Athens and one in Paris, France where I also got my PhD. So currently I'm working as a lecturer in New York, the University of Sheffield and that is where my research with artificial intelligence and computer sciences began. There is one in the UK and one in the US actually. I'm still handling some cases in Europe. Some of them to do with European Law and the European Court of Human Rights which would of course mean that those cases which we would contest without adequate members maybe. So thank you again very much.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Tell me a little bit about. So you work with computer people that used an artificial intelligence machine learning algorithm to evaluate cases in a certain area of law. So go ahead, tell us about the background on the experiment and what happened, what the result was.

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: Okay. So the idea was this. I teamed up with Sam Bostocks in Computer Science. Two of them were based in UCL, University College of London and one in the University of Pennsylvania but actually I knew all of them because they did their BSc when I was teaching. All I did was to use a typical natural language processing model which is just one way than an algorithm breaks down text and tries to solve it's patterns between textual features which is for easiness, words and we used judgements of the European Court of Human Rights which is an international and not a regional court in Europe which tries cases where individuals mostly make applications against their own states on the grounds that some violation of human rights contained within the convention has kind of happened. Then our idea was because those judgements are very well practiced so they are not like common law jurisdiction judgements. We have very specific factors so we begin with the facts of the case. The circumstances of course cause it but you know it's more or less operated by facts. Then they go on with the legal arguments we practice and then we have the reasons provided by the court to hear and justify the argument and at the end the judgement will have the option. So we began by trying to focus on 3 articles of the convention which corresponded to human rights and cut down those judgements into pieces, chunks of text. Then the algorithm with about 250 cases, we used in total about 584 cases and then for the rest of the cases, we tried to use the textual features to make the algorithm depict what the outcome was just on the basis of text. What was surprising about this; the idea was that we could use this as a proxy for the data within an algorithm. To give you an idea, we didn't have access either to the applications of the individuals to the courts because generally no one with such data is allowed without having specific permission by the court nor to the briefs by the parties but we had access to the judgements because there is a huge online database which contains all those judgements we used for textual patterns and then we tried to see which of those chunks can help predict the outcome. The surprising part was the algorithm after being trained had an average accuracy of 79% in predicting the outcome. So in a nutshell,

Richard Jacobs: Dimitrios. So you showed it the facts of the case without showing it the final judgement. The briefs, the motions etc. and you are saying the computer would figure out and it would produce a judgement that was 79% similar to what the judge actually said in the case.

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: Exactly. That's what I'm saying

Richard Jacobs: That's amazing.

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: Well, it's less amazing if you think that one of the reasons that we also chose that; and I have to mention this, one of the reasons that we chose the European Court of Human Rights is that the outcome is finite. So the courts either say that if you enter such a violation, such rights have been replaced or not. So there is no possibility for example of predicting or within using it to predict whether a guy is going to get damages or whenever the court has the possibility to choose between more than 2 calamities or damages. In a nutshell, in fact, it's an algorithm.

Richard Jacobs: So, it's a start. It's definitely a very auspicious start. So out of 580 some odd cases you fed the computer half the cases. How did you instruct the algorithm to understand what was going on in the text? Did you give it rules or how did it figure it out?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: That's the idea. I would never figure out what the text is. I'm not a computer scientist. I'm going to make it simpler. I'm a lawyer and I wrote the qualitative analysis part of the algorithm and the legal analysis. So the algorithm definitely does understand the words. The algorithm has a fixed dictionary and what it does is work with patterns between words, so it breaks down the text into patterns and by identifying the physical patterns between the legal words, it could relate those with outcomes. So that's how it learns. It doesn't really understand what the words mean and that's the interesting part about it because it can spot patterns. For example, you know sometimes judges use without explicitly saying so or even without them thinking so.

Richard Jacobs: I know, for instance, everyone has a verbal tick or a way of speaking that repeats itself in conversation and I've also read and seen in relationships where people know each other, the conversational patterns tend to repeat quite often. So I could see how this could come about in court cases.

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: Exactly. That's the idea. The idea was to try to spot patterns in the natural language because the technical details are most complicated but to spot patterns between words and outcomes which this kind of software does pretty well. After having fed the algorithm or after having trained, I should say, the algorithm, then to extract the outcome, then to provide different judgements and to make it predict what the outcome was. So that's where the accuracy count came in which was 79%.

Richard Jacobs: Do you think the accuracy can go higher with more cases analyzed? Where would you go from here?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: I really don't know. Our next step and that's what we want to do. In academia, we are very cautious. Actually we published this paper in a journal called the Big Journal of Computer Science which is available online and is open source to everyone on visit. Our ambition was only to do what some people call the "Proof of Causes", to really show that this type of analogy was possible. The next step would be to actually try to generalize with many more; with much bigger data. So I was glad really to first come into contact after the publication of this paper with judges and other people of the European Court of Human Rights and try to fit it with real applications and briefs and motions so that we can try to test. A second thing which would be easier would be to try to work with many more cases so that's what we will try to do.

Richard Jacobs: What are the computer guys saying? What do they believe may happen if you have a thousand cases? At what level do they think that the accuracy will go way up may be even 100%?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: I really don't have an answer to that. What I really know is that these algorithms are really good at being trained and the more cases you feed them the more they can actually spot these patterns and try to predict what the outcome was. What was interesting from a legal analysis point of view was that different chunks of text have different scores in terms of accuracy. So generally speaking and that's interesting for people like me because I'm doing a bit of legal theory. Generally speaking, the chunks that only correspond to the facts of the case were a bit more accurate than the chunks corresponding to the legal arguments of the parties and that actually corroborates many empirical works on how judges decide cases but actually the next step would be to try to enlarge the data input and see where we are after that.

Richard Jacobs: What do you think is going to be the implication if this works? Are you going to next try to apply it to cases where it's not just binary, where there are damages, where there are shades of right and wrong?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: I'm not sure about that right now because I'm working. Actually my academic division works with the European Court of Human Rights so I'm very keen on enlarging the data and that point on but our algorithm and the article are openly accessible to everyone and we trust the people to try and position over that. So actually it was the idea more or less that was original than the techniques, the specific techniques used if I may put it this way. So people can try to use it in any possible way.

Richard Jacobs: I thought about this. For instance, in the United States, let's say, Drunk Driving. What if you had an algorithm and you fed it 1000 drunk driving cases in one particular state and all the rulings on them, the police reports, the facts of the case and everything, I wonder if an algorithm can become a recommendation engine where it wouldn't replace the lawyer but it would be a little advisement of if you file this motion, if you take the case down this path, you have a much higher likelihood of succeeding than if you do that, it would be an adjunct. Do you see that this possibly could become something like that in the future?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: Richard what you said was spot on, I think. I really believe that this is what the future is going to look like. I really believe that. So what these things can do, I mean what these algorithms could do is actually spot patterns very easily and the big difference right now is that we had access to the enormous amounts of data between them. So yes, I'm actually seeing things like that evolving in the future and lawyers using specific passwords, lawyers correlating outcomes with specific judges, clients correlating outcome with specific lawyers and so on and so forth. Yes, I think that in about 10 to 20 years' time, law firms will be using that sort of thing.

Richard Jacobs: I know good attorneys and good lawyers do this already. They know, Okay, judge so and so tends to do this, so I'll do that, but this is a computer assisted way of doing it.

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: Exactly and it's much more accurate and it can spot things which for various reasons, we humans cannot spot. So that's one more thing to it. One thing we have highlighted in our analysis was that the Older Increasing Doctrinal, let's call them that have grains and patterns in the European Court of Human Rights were more or less identified correctly by the algorithm but the algorithm also identified various other patterns that lawyers can use to do exactly that kind of work. So actually it helps them systemize the kind of knowledge we already have.

Richard Jacobs: Do you think if algorithms, if they become more widespread will actually change interpretation of the law, make it more rigid or change how the law is interpreted and unearth the need for changes to exist in the law?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: I really don't have a view on that right now. I would like to do a lot more research. I'm trying to understand how this works a lot better before answering your question. What I can tell you though is that the preliminary results from the kind of research we have done seems to suggest that at least the kind of cases that we are talking about is parts of facts that are more important than legal argument results which would be let's say the interpretive part of this. Actually that corroborates one of the major movements in legal house in the US. The so called legal reality because you have all these great lawyers and things. At the beginning of the century, the US, saying that appellate courts, especially appellate courts decide cases on the basis of the facts of the case not on the basis of legal arguments. So yes, our algorithm corroborated that and it can spot those patterns very easily.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Very Interesting. Before we leave this subject, any other thing that you think will come out of this? You know, intentional or unintentional, anything that it's made you aware of or shocked you or put a new thought in your head as to what may happen in the future because of this.

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: Yeah. The first thing that shocked me really was the accuracy rate. I was expecting it to be much lower than that. What I believe is that this kind of analogies will surely change how. It's already changing many other domains. The software has been used for various other kinds of projects. I'll give you an example. The researchers I have collaborated with have actually tried to use it to independently predict people's incomes from the kind of content that we have. They have actually done that pretty accurately. Or for example, we have tried to predict flu outbreaks from the content available. So applying it to the law is just one idea among many others. I really believe that things are evolving and changing in a way that we cannot really even imagine right now.

Richard Jacobs: That is really fascinating. Anything else in the unique nature of your work and what you do that you think will be of interest to my audience.

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: I have said more or less what this goal was about and how it could be used to support some kind of position in the ever going debate between the so called legal realities and legal formalities. The results seem to corroborate what legal reality among other things says. The thing to think about is that this kind of algorithm can be used to identify topics. So if you read the paper you will see that the algorithm provides scores for words and it ranks words depending on how it believes that they correlate with outcomes. So it could be at the very least an assisting tool for lawyers to try to have spots. Which words will win the day against the kind of words that will eventually lose it even though it's pretty crude for the time being but it is evolving.

Richard Jacobs: It actually seems like it could be a 3rd or 4th party in the courtroom. You have the lawyers, you have the judge, sometimes you have the jury but what if you had in the future, a computer that gives you it's version of what it thinks the outcomes should be based on the facts and the pattern matches. What if it became a 3rd voice in the courtroom besides the judge or an addition that was relied upon in the determination of the case. Do you see that happening?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: As things stand right now, I don't see that happening. It could be used behind the scenes by various people prior to exclusively saying that they like it. I'm saying this because our idea of what a courtroom should be is a process which is reasoned, where there are various ideas that are justified, where the outcome is justified and judges give reasons for the way they decided the case and so on and so forth. So this kind of algorithm cannot work like that. It actually is completely incapable of providing reasons for the kinds of outcomes it predicts. The second thing is that the algorithm is in a sense conservative. In which sense? In the sense that it can only extrapolate from patterns that have already been spotted. So it doesn't have, let's call it for lack of a better word, the imagination to invent new doctrine so as to provide a new solution. It extrapolates from past patterns. So I wouldn't say it for the time being. No one knows what the future will look like. I wouldn't see it being the 4th party in a courtroom but I would see it being used by both clerks of judges and lawyers just to see what's going on.

Richard Jacobs: What about if it was the ultimate in legal research? Lawyers who offer to reference other cases, other case law to make a point. If you had a computer that had all the case law in it, tens of thousands of cases, it could be a tremendous resource for both sides to draw on in a case.

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: Exactly. Yeah it could be. It seems to me that this is also one way in which this algorithm could be used. It seems to me that there are some people working to get that extra knowledge already. So yes, I definitely see that happening too.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Any other questions on the subject that I should have asked you but that I left out?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: It seems to me that we can work all that which was gathered for intelligent and ambitious lawyers.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Yeah. I really appreciate your feedback. For people to access this paper, do you have a URL? Or do you just Google something that we will find it?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: Either they can Google my name, or they can Google the name of the paper which is entitled "Predicting Judicial Decisions Of The European Court of Human Rights." I'm not sure on language processing perspective, it's open access. They can alternatively go on pwrj.com so that would be P W R J dot com on the computer science journal because there is also, it seems to me a live biology and health sciences as well and they can easily find it. They can also find the algorithm plus the whole research history. So as our computer sciences say, it's up to them really to develop the model further.

Richard Jacobs: For someone reading this paper, do they have to be a computer scientist to understand it or if they are an attorney, do you believe they can understand it?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: The good thing about me being a lawyer and a big part of the team of researchers is that there are a lot of things that a lawyer can understand just by reading it. There is a technical section of the paper which describes the methodology and that section is a bit more demanding for computer scientists but more or less I think it's a bit accessible to lawyers as it is.

Richard Jacobs: Okay. Alright. Very Good. I appreciate your time doing this call. It was very informative.

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: I have to say that you have given me the time, Richard. Thanks a lot.

Richard Jacobs: Are you open to anyone contacting you for your thoughts on this or would you rather they go to the paper?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: Sure. I'm open to that. I have to discuss this especially with people growing more skeptical about the idea because many people were skeptical of me. Back in my room, people said especially lawyers that we are not going to let machines dominate us in this way.

Richard Jacobs: How would people get in contact with you if they wanted to have a conversation? What is the best way?

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: The easiest way is to email me my email address is [email protected]

Richard Jacobs: Okay thanks a lot for coming. I really appreciate it.

Dimitrios Tsarapatsanis: A big thanks to you for inviting me.

You've been listening to the Secrets of Attorney Marketing Podcast from Speakeasy Marketing. Call (888) 225-8594 or email [email protected] to enhance your reputation and out-market your competitors. Make sure you subscribe to the podcast and post a review.

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