Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Most firms survive. The best ones scale.
Welcome to the Managing Partners podcast where law firm leaders learn to think, think bigger.
I'm Kevin. Daisy.
Let's jump in. What's up everyone? We are live recording. Got a good friend of mine here on the show today. He's been on before. We could definitely talk anytime about anything business. But I'm happy to have Darren back on the show. So Darren Finland is back on the show. He's coming live from Michigan, right outside of Detroit. Right, Darren?
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Yep. Suburbs of Detroit. The Motor City.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: The Motor City. He drives a huge muscle car to his office every day.
What do you drive?
[00:01:00] Speaker A: I drive a automated car. I drive a self driving Tesla. Other than not loving Tesla at the moment, I do love driving a self driving car.
[00:01:09] Speaker B: Well, that'll go right with today's topic again. Me and Darren's awesome at business. So if you don't follow Darren or you don't see him at the shows, I mean he's all over the place. I, I've seen him in everything I've ever been to. It's full of energy. But he's also just a great business or a CEO. He's a, he's just great at business and so someone to listen to, to follow. I'm sure he'll drop a lot of great, great information on the show today. But when I reached out to Darren to have him back on the show, you know, AI was something that he is, he's excited about. And obviously we hear AI every second of the day now, but I think there's a lot of noise out there too. But who's actually implementing it? How are they doing it? Um, I talked to a lot of law firm owners that they don't, they don't do it because they're scared of it or they don't understand it or they're just maybe using like a third party product or vendor. But how are you actually leveraging it and using it within your firm and efficiencies and things like that? We are here, my firm for sure. So yeah, decided to hear what Darren's got to share. And I know as much as you do at this point, that's the fun part.
[00:02:07] Speaker A: Terrific. You know, it's, it's fun to talk about AI right now because it's clearly the hot topic and we're exploring just like everyone else is. I'm not going to be on this podcast and present, present all of the answers, but I have a lot of questions about what AI is going to do specifically for my business and specifically for my industry as a whole, AI is both incredibly exciting and also terrifying at the exact same way. And we could talk a little bit about why it's terrifying and also why it's exciting and it also creates tremendous challenges within our own business because this is a significant who moved my cheese Moment where everyone in my office is trying to keep up and understand where we're going as a law firm as well as where our business is going. So a lot to talk about. I'm happy to share. Pardon me, I got a little bit of a allergy itch there. But I'm happy to share where we're going with it. And I love talking to other entrepreneurs and others about AI right now because it is the wild, wild west and, and it's very exciting, a hundred percent.
[00:03:13] Speaker B: And I'm right there with you on, on both sides of that, the excitement side, the unknowns. And I think, you know, as a business owner that's, you know, where you got to live sometimes and have that curiosity and be ahead of it. Don't hide from it. That's for sure.
[00:03:29] Speaker A: I.
Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Oh, sorry. We, I, we just had a. All hands meeting recently and I have over 50 people. All hands video call because my folks are all around the country and we surveyed everyone so it's like a full company meeting. And we did a survey prior to that meeting about AI and it was A, they think it's going to take their job. B was, I forgot what B was. But the. I think C was what was picked. But it was. I'm excited because it's going to improve our product and service and our efficiency and so everyone picked that. We weren't expecting that. I think some picked the B was kind of like in between the two. But my business partner was like thinking everyone's going to. A lot of our younger folks and people that you know are just going to select. I'm concerned that it's going to take my, my job. And so we're just trying to figure out where our people are at in their head. And we were surprised with the response and that's kind of how we want to carry ourselves. It will replace some people and it will change things drastically. But for the ones behind it and leading the charge with it and using it, you know, our folks have a lot more longer chance of staying into what they're doing. So anyways, wanted to see your thoughts on that and then. And yeah, of course, learn what you're doing with it right now.
[00:04:41] Speaker A: Yeah, Kevin, I know that There's a lot of business owners that are talking to their people and trying to get an understanding. As the CEO of the Probate Pro, it is my responsibility to lead the vision and to express the vision and get buy in of the vision and then ultimately execute on the vision. I understand that AI is going to be an essential tool to the future of our business. I asked my director of operations and my integrator COO to schedule an all hands on meeting. About a month ago.
I presented to the entire office an entire primer on AI, as well as things relating to security, ethics, confidentiality, as well as the things that AI is going to do. We made it very clear that you are either going to come with us in this vision or maybe your time is done here at the Probate Pro and you need to start looking elsewhere because we're not going back. We're not going back to the old days of ditto machines and filling in forms. We're moving into the age of AI, so you better run with us or it's time to move on now. Throughout my career, there have been various moments like this. I remember early in my career when word processors were coming into the industry. There were a lot of people that didn't know how to turn on a computer, let alone use word processors. Then when the Internet showed up, same kind of thing was email. The biggest difference now is that the pace of change around AI is not like the changes that we experience with email and Internet as well as word processing. The pace is moving, warp speed. So if you asked me three months ago or six months ago, I'd have a different vision of where we were going to use it. But what I'm seeing, even over the last week or two, continually evolves. My vision of where we're going to use AI within the Probate Pro within our industry. And it also is providing me with a clear understanding of the threats that relate to the business as well as the opportunities that exist. So I told everyone, get on board. And I showed them very concrete examples of how it could be a tool for their operations. Kevin, you also mentioned something that I think is important.
I'm sure in the back of everyone's mind they're wondering if that robot is going to replace them. We've seen movies on it. We've been talking about it for years. There was a similar discussion occurring during the Internet and computer boom. And we get it. I understand the fear. I think it's a legitimate fear. Those same existential fears occur to business owners about whether their business will even be needed or relevant in the future. So we're looking at the existential threat to our business as well as to the industry. We're looking at it in totality. I find it intellectually dishonest when business owners tell their people, don't worry, your job is not at risk. This is just a tool to enhance your role. I find it intellectually dishonest because I think most business owners are trying to find more efficient ways to deliver their services. That doesn't mean that the person is going to be replaced and they're going to be having to find a new job. It may just simply mean that their strengths are going to be utilized within the organization in another way. But we're trying to develop ways to be more efficient, to ultimately deliver a higher level of client experience, deliver better services to our client. And if technology is going to help us do it, we're going to do it.
[00:07:58] Speaker B: No, love that 100%. I think it's very interesting that we, we both just had an all hands meeting.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: You can imagine a survey around the country of all the business owners doing all hands on meetings. This must have been happening all over the country over the last few months. Everybody needs to come together and understand where we're going.
[00:08:16] Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's. Well, I'm saying good on you for doing that. And I think, you know, telling them and, and we did the same thing. Like this is happening, this is where we're going. And, and we've done this before too. Kind of like, hey, if you're not a fit here, then almost like, here's your opportunity. We did this recently with a different situation. Like you want to leave, we'll give you a month severance and off the bus. No one took us up on it. And so I think. But drawing that line in the sand versus tiptoeing around it or just not, not coming forward with that vision and saying, hey, this is where we're at, where we're going. Are you on board or not? If you're not, fine. You know, maybe you're not a good fit for probate pro or Ray Digital or whatever.
[00:08:55] Speaker A: I think that's.
[00:08:56] Speaker B: As a leader.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: Yeah. And, and Kevin, the. You know, we believe in radical candor. We want to be always honest and direct in a mindful and polite way. But we're going to be honest and direct and how we lead. Ultimately, it's my responsibility as the visionary, as the leader of this business to make sure that all those fears that exist, and some of them are absolutely legitimate concerns and fears about all sorts of things that can happen. I have to present a vision and then lead my people through that fear. It's that adaptive change mindset that we're going to make changes. I have to recognize their fear, what they're concerned about. I have to be a great grief manager. I have to manage them through the grief, the scare, the fear, the pain that exists that they're experiencing, and then execute and lead through that fear to allow the change to take place. So we, I know some business owners who have shared with me that when they discussed AI, they're. They're second in command or third in command are like, I'm not doing it. That's a problem.
[00:10:00] Speaker B: That's a big problem.
[00:10:01] Speaker A: And then ultimately it's up to the leader to ask, are these people going to lead through this change or not? Are they going to be in alignment with the vision of the organization or are they going to be resistant to that change? So I think that the business leaders are also facing this because they may not be comfortable. Their second, third, fourth in command may not be comfortable. And they recognize that AI is not going away, it's here to stay. And they have to now figure out how are they going to lead their organization from point A to point B with tremendous resistance and fear that exists among the people that they work with.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, that's definitely an issue. If someone has that going on in their business, I think that comes back to responsibility of the leader of that, you know, how you built things when you did. You know, it needs to be. If you want to join our company, this firm, whatever change is constant. It's going to constantly. So if you don't want to be in a place that's changing, moving, shifting the moments of fear and doubt and all these things, then you probably are not a great fit for this company. And I think. And then when we, you know, when you first build your company, you might not know what you don't know, but you have a chance to change those things. Right. And so you need to have a culture that's on board with that and on board with where you're going or you're going to have problems. And those people either a, have to go or you're going to be stagnant and possibly out of business at some point. So I think that's very important to be very direct with them on that. If you have a second in charge, it's like, nope, I don't want to change anything. That could be deep, deep problems within, within the company, for sure.
[00:11:32] Speaker A: Right. And being an entrepreneur, the essence of it is your ability to adapt and change throughout challenging times or stimuli come to your organization, being able to adapt through it. AI is a pretty significant dramatic stimuli that is here and I think a lot about. As AI evolves, the most necessary human behaviors will be needed at even a higher level. The emotional intelligence will be at a premium. Your ability to connect with other human beings, the human dynamic piece of this, providing emotional support, handholding through stressful situations will become even more valuable. The robots and AI can do so much of it. There's so much empathy. But ultimately people are yearning and craving human connection. So as we continue to evolve with AI, those businesses that, that have the human element and have high emotional intelligence and are really good at connecting are going to be those that generally are going to survive. Those that don't are going to miss out. Because ultimately, if AI can solve all the problems, then what is your value proposition anymore? What, what exists?
You know, if AI can do all the work for somebody at home, then why are they going to, why are they going to call the probate? Probably to get them through the challenging piece of time. So I think that there's, there's a. As much as we're focusing on doubling down on investing in AI and investing in automation and efficiencies, just as much or more energy needs to be focused on emotional intelligence, human connection. Because if a business just goes to automation and doesn't focus on the human side, they're going to miss out. They're going to miss out on connecting with their clients and truly providing great value for the client experience.
[00:13:27] Speaker B: 100% agree. I literally just spoke about this not too long. Well, this is probably over a year ago, but then again, recently is like, who's employable? Like, let's just think, you know, if you're young, going through school and your basic degree, trying to get, you know, a basic job, who stands out? And I was talking to some young people not too long ago. I've speak to a few high schools and entrepreneurship programs and stuff like that. And like, if you can't connect with people, you're not able to have that emotional intelligence. You're not outgoing, you're not, you know, presenting yourself, you're not connecting with people. Those are the ones that are gonna win for sure because we, we hire people to work with people. We hire companies we work with to work with people. It's that connection point. Right? So we follow people on social media, we don't follow companies. Right.
So it's regardless of skill. Those are the ones that will survive. I want Darren here in the office. I love working with him. Everyone else, just as a wrench turner. They're replaced. They don't. They don't stand out. There's no connection. I can replace them very easily.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: So absolutely.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: You know, maybe let me just share a few things that we're toying with and playing around with.
[00:14:36] Speaker B: Sure, please.
[00:14:37] Speaker A: And some of these are really exciting and at the moment, maybe cutting edge. At least I think they're cutting edge, but not so sure others will. But we are. We have been fortunate to be integrated by Gino Wickman, who wrote, of course Traction and is the the founder of the eos, the entrepreneurial operating system.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: Awesome.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: And as part of that model, we have quarterly meetings and then we have a two day yearly meeting in which we're setting the course of the direction of the probate pro. Well, about a week ago we had our quarterly meeting and I talked to my COO about bringing AI into the meeting. And what I meant by that is I put on a tripod ChatGPT in live video form and asked ChatGPT to participate during an eight hour meeting. As a member of my leadership team, my executive leadership team, I asked ChatGPT to have an owner's mentality. I asked ChatGPT to provide insight into the issues that we're discussing and to only provide insight and opinion if it was unique, novel, and could advance the organization's mission. I also provided ChatGPT with a lot of data and ChatGPT listened in during an entire meeting. Pading participated during the IDS session which is issued discussion solved, where we're addressing the most important and urgent issues facing the probate pro and and asked ChatGPT to participate live in those discussions. It was wild. It was truly a wild experience. And to give the end of the story, ChatGPT did a great job. Perfect, no, Did a great job. Though there were times that ChatGPT was too much of a generalist. This is before 5o was released, but still a little bit general. But most of the time chatgpt. And I'm calling her a she because mine happens to use those pronouns. ChatGPT was incredibly insightful and helped speed up and solve many of our issues. So it gave us a great idea. What about ChatGPT participating not just in that meeting, but all of our meetings, our weekly level 10 meetings, all of our organization meetings. Let ChatGPT summarize the meetings, create the to DOS, hold people accountable, participate in discussion. So pretty interesting experiment I thought it had a low risk in terms of failure. The worst thing that we do is turn it off if she, if she was annoying. And it was incredible. Truly an incredible experience. And I would encourage others to give it a whirl. And if people are interested to know how we pulled it off, reach out to me. I'm happy to share.
[00:17:20] Speaker B: That is awesome. I love that. I'm taking that to my business partner right after we get done recording this.
[00:17:26] Speaker A: I got another weird one like that we toyed around with and this, this didn't come from me, but this is.
I saw a TikTok video and a prompt that I'm happy to share the link to. But it was a very interesting prompt and the prompt was to pose to your advisory board.
And your advisory board is going to answer the questions in the voice and with the knowledge of those experts. And the advisory board was going to be Steve Jobs, Director of Innovation. Simon Sin Nick Director of Purpose and why Brene Brown, Director of Culture. Then I think it's Seth Godin, the marketing head of marketing. So these C level employees are making up your board of advisors. Some are not alive and some are alive but there's lots of data that has been that's available for the AI to draw from and then pose really important questions to this board of directors. You could add Elon Musk. There's lots of people you could add. You could mix and match depending on what your organization needs or the people you want in the room.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: That's amazing.
[00:18:35] Speaker A: And ask really important questions about your organization, about its future. The risks, do they see the business moving in the direction that you see it? Are there blind spots that you have because you've fallen in love with your business? So we've played around with this and again this is like spine tingling kind of experience around AI wild results.
I encourage people to give it a whirl and see what see you experience from it. But it was pretty remarkable when we played around.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: Thank you for tuning into the show today.
I have taken things to the next level and I've started the managing Partners Mastermind. We're a peer group of owners looking for connection, cloud clarity and growth strategies. So if you're looking to grow your law firm and not do it alone, please consider joining the group. Spots are limited so I ask for anyone to reach out to me directly through LinkedIn and with the setup of a one on one call to make sure it's a fit.
Now back to the show. That is awesome right there. I think I've heard something Similar uses of it. Not exactly the way you're, you're talking about, but that's something. Imagine you know, Darren, you're started your business and it's just you and you're, you're, you haven't built out a team and you're just, you're trying to do your thing. You literally could have another C level person or in this case a whole team of C level folks in the meetings with you, helping you, right? As a person of one.
[00:20:06] Speaker A: Think about how alone we all felt when we started our businesses. We were, you know, you're, you're flying off by the seat of your pants. You don't know, you don't have a C level CMO or a C level CTO or a C level, you know, finance person. But all of a sudden you have available to you these C level people available for free.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: Highest level.
[00:20:30] Speaker A: At the highest level. You know, I did something on a flight, I was flying out to AJ a few weeks ago and I started pouring lots of data, lots of salesforce data into my AI and just asking it to be, you know, the highest McKinsey consultant to deeply analyze my data, provide insights and my multi hour flight San Francisco, I was getting levels of information that I would have paid my CFO for many, many hours to do analysis or I would have paid a consulting firm that would have taken them months to deliver and I was getting it in a snap. Now was it as good? Sometimes. Not always though. Sometimes you have to ask the next question. And one of the beauties of working with AI is that unlike your Google searches where you're asking a question and getting a response that's ad generated, with AI, you can iterate, you can have conversations, you can speak to AI as if you're speaking to your consultant. Ask, I don't understand.
What about this? Why not that? And you can keep iterating and it's generative in terms of its product. It's, it's truly extraordinary. So you know, the first time you ever played around using some of these AI bots, at first you, you think you're talking as if it's Google and then you realize no, this is, this is not Google. This is something far, far more remarkable and valuable than anything you could get in the past. So is it perfect? No, I use the metaphor that in my self driving car I still keep my hands close to the wheel because once in a while it'll do something weird. But most of the time at some point and I know because I had a self driving car when I first got it, I had to hold the wheel and every hour was as if I was going to potentially crash. And now I'm holding my hands near the wheel or touching the wheel. But I'm not constantly having to self correct. It's almost always right. Once in a while I'll be there to correct it. And I think the same is with AI. You still have to use your, your intelligence and your wisdom and your, you know, to understand contextually whether that is valuable data or not. But as a tool, whether it's marketing idea generation and marketing, whether it's analysis through for financials, whether it's strategy, whether it's hr, you're getting instantaneous help. And to your point, if you are a solo person, all of a sudden you got a team.
[00:23:04] Speaker B: You got a team.
[00:23:05] Speaker A: So people better lean into this because otherwise you're going to be very quickly falling behind.
[00:23:10] Speaker B: I mean, yeah, no, no better opportunity than now to start something and be successful with it. And just look masterminds out there, the least groups that are out there that are available to everybody, like there's and YouTube and AI like there's just no question, there's all the information is out there.
[00:23:25] Speaker A: Right. And you know that mastermind piece is interesting also. Right. We people pay lots of money to be among these great brilliant thinkers in their space. They meet and they have these meetings. You could essentially do that mastermind with AI. So I could replicate a group of incredibly talented people and just simply ask AI to be my, in my mastermind. Now I don't have to listen to the other people go on and on and on. I could just focus wholly on myself.
[00:23:50] Speaker B: Yeah. So here's all my challenges. And have your AI board of or members contribute to your challenges only.
[00:23:59] Speaker A: Right.
[00:24:00] Speaker B: And again, a little sliver of the time in the room.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: Right. And we know that we learn from other people, Right. We get it. But imagine what is available. Yeah, I always think of this. I was at my doctor a day ago doing an annual physical and I'm thinking to myself, I'm going to this doctor. He's been a doctor, let's say for 30 years. He's read lots of books, he went to med school, he's seen thousands of patients over these years. He's brilliant. And I'm asking him about my health based on the data that he has. Compare that to what we're going to see in the very near future.
Am I going to ask that one doctor to analyze my objective data from the testing that just occurred or am I going to have the availability of every journal that has ever been published compared to everybody's data based on my genetics. And have AI have the wisdom of every single doctor. Now we know the answer. You're not going to go to the one doctor and say, well I trust that one doctor. No, that one doctor has learned from information that has been available to them. Now with AI you have, it's everywhere. You have all of the available information, all of the wisdom of every doctor and every publication. Now there's going to be biases and there's going to be incorrect information.
So there's still hands near the wheel that need to occur to make sure you grab onto the wheel and steer correctly. You still have to use your, your mind. Yet the possibilities are pretty extraordinary in terms of every industry and I'm not just talking about medicine, it occurs in law, it occurs in marketing. Every industry is at risk in some way existentially. With AI in my mind, I've been worried about the existential piece of this because this is what business leaders do. They, they worry about the future and where the industry is taking them. I had a really interesting conversation with a lawyer a week ago who has a massive, huge law firm out of Texas and he said, Darren, I just want to remind you, Elon Musk said that the self driving car was going to take over the roads within a few years. That all the cars were going to be there. He said, as much as this technology is racing forward and advancing, it won't occur as fast as you as a visionary think as you as somebody that is an early adopter, is a futurist. As much as you understand where the world can go, people's adoption are still going to be a lot slower than you envision. So in my mind I'm like, well okay, you know, everything's going to happen in a few months. The whole world's going to get overrun by robots. He said, remember that there's still gasoline cars and people still go to the gas pumps and there's still a million people who die in auto accidents a year because they haven't adopted self driving cars that can make sure that accidents are reduced and are more negligible. There's a million worldwide deaths a year in auto accidents that could problem could be solved pretty quickly if people adopted and we advance the technology. But it still hasn't happened. Even with that very important compelling thing, it still hasn't occurred as fast as the great visionaries think it should. So I still don't know the answer of how long or we're overrun by robots.
[00:27:11] Speaker B: But you know, I had, you know, similar thoughts, you know, so we're in marketing, right. So we're wildly at risk and we're leaning into, to all the positives and leveraging it of course being the future, being on the front end, you're like, oh yeah, all this is going to happen, it's going to happen fast. And we're, I've been we messing with AI since it came out so we've been early adopters if you will. But at the same time I interact with people, law firm owners specifically, that are still so far behind what I would think was five or 10 years ago, you know, with their web presence or their marketing or social media. And it's just a lot of folks are way, way, way behind and I think it's to your point, it's going to take a lot longer for people to adopt these things. Even though we're talking about it, we're at conferences, we're talking to smart people. It seems like it's going to be much faster.
[00:27:59] Speaker A: But you look around and Kevin, echo chamber, right? Entrepreneurial, forward thinking people like to spend time with entrepreneurial, forward thinking people. We, we end up having a big echo chamber and we fail to recognize that there are people that still don't have computers, that still don't have email addresses, that still don't understand technology.
And we forget that sometimes that there's a massive amount of people that aren't anywhere close. We're on the cutting edge and there are people that are years and years and years behind.
So I think that this is, you know, an interesting point, but I think for the businesses that are unwilling to adapt and I mean start adapting very quickly, I think they're going to be left behind very, very quickly because you're not going to be able to do your role nearly as efficiently or as effectively as those that are adapting AI at a breakneck speed. You're simply going to be less efficient. It's going to cost you more to.
[00:28:55] Speaker B: Do it and you'll lose clients because your price is that much more. So I think, yeah, I think the immediate effect is the ones that aren't using it at all, that just aren't efficient. So their, their competition just comes in with, with better prices and a faster delivery of service. So it's not necessarily that you can't do your job or the work. You're just going to be left behind because of the inefficiencies and costs that you bring with it without adapting. So you, yeah, 100% like again, we do marketing, we do social media, we do SEO and content and all these things. There's so much there that can be automated or leverage AI and we have to do it. And at the same time we do content for law firms. So aba, ABA Compliance and or ada, ABA Guidelines, the law per state. There's still a lot of things that have to be considered, but you can build a lot of that in. And we still have smart human people, human beings that are the hands by the wheel part of this. Right?
[00:29:45] Speaker A: So yeah, no question. Yeah, I saw something interesting today. I got a communication from an in pro per person who sent a very, very lengthy letter to me and there was zero doubt that the entire thing was AI written, the entire demand. So one of the other interesting things about access to justice, access to legal AI is going to democratize a lot of this. I've spoken about this quite a bit. I went to law school and I have a scarcity of knowledge that I learned because I went to law school, you know, one of the number of lawyers around the country that have this scarcity of knowledge. And I've been able through my business to sell that scarcity of knowledge for 30 years. I've been doing this for 30 years. I have a scarcity of knowledge and I create a great value proposition because people want access to my knowledge. Well, when that knowledge becomes democratized and available to everyone, the value of my scarcity of knowledge is not nearly as valuable. So one of the big questions ultimately is then what? So we're starting to see clients and non clients and laypeople utilizing AI rather than hiring a lawyer. And if you don't think this is happening, I promise you you're wrong. Think of how Many people use LegalZoom and other services without a lawyer because it's less expensive and they can fill out a wizard. Well, what happens if you don't need LegalZoo or any of these wizard based programs to provide some legal services? What happens if you just go to your free version of AI and ask it to do it, have a conversation with it just like you were having a conversation with your lawyer and the documents and the information is provided to you as good as the wizard would provide you or the software would provide you? So this is a reality that this information is going to be widely used. We talk about, we talk about Google doctor or Google Lawyer. I Googled to try. I have a symptom. So I'm going to Google it and get the answer. You're going to see the same thing with AI. We're going to see a lot of AI based document generation legal research are done by lay people. Forget about the lawyers, you're gonna see lay people doing it.
And I got one today and it was clear as day that it was AI drafted and created.
[00:32:10] Speaker B: That's crazy. I mean, yeah. So just for the marketing side, the SEO side, you know, we're, we're big SEO people here. AI search is something that we're leaning heavy into and we're tracking and positioning our clients to come up in AI versus Google because people are asking, hey, who's the best law firm in Michigan for xyz? It's going to tell you and it's going to pull from sources and then back up why it did that. And you, or you could say, why did you suggest probate pro. Well, let's go deeper. Here's why we suggested it. Oh, okay. So you can continue that versus on Google. Paid spots here, local reviews here. Make my own decision based on that data, maybe go to the website, whatever. And most of SEO for like years has been, well, let's answer questions, let's write blogs on what's the statute of limitations in Michigan, what's seatbelt laws, blah, blah, blah, whatever. That's all answered by AI overnight, that's now gone. So all the questions you wanted to ask a lawyer at a low level, hot top funnel, gone. Like you're not even needed anymore. It's already been answered. So that's taken off the table. And so all the traffic for these law firms websites, all that stuff has to. Only now you're fighting for a high intent, which is direct.
I need a lawyer in this area.
But when you ask AI, you get a totally different result. It's pulling from other sources.
Again, you can go deeper. Well, why did you suggest Darren and his firm? You can't do that on Google. Right?
It's pretty, it's getting really interesting real quick.
[00:33:37] Speaker A: Right. So for all these years, you know, these SEO companies understood Google and Bing's algorithms. They tried to understand them and then they directed the strategy to maximize the opportunity for them to be higher in the ranking, whether it be through SEO, search engine optimization or paying words to get on top of Google's advertising model. It's changing, changed and it's changing rapidly. So all of a sudden the strategy is, okay, are you worrying about Google ranking high or are you worried about how do you make sure that AI recognizes that you're the best? So when somebody plugs into ChatGPT best, you know, probate lawyer, why is it going to say the probate pro in ChatGPT.
That reasoning is quite different than the reasoning it would pull up in Google a hundred percent. And we know that you could be not a good lawyer and show up high in Google searches. You could be not a good lawyer and gain the SEO system or you could be a small player in AI. It's quite different. It's looking at this much more holistically. I did an AI search of my business yesterday and my videos. I do a video a day. My videos are coming up, the content of my video. Reddit is coming up. It's not a web crawl anymore. This is a much deeper analysis of information that isn't even close to what you were doing with SEO and Google. How do you, how do you win that war? How do you ensure that you're at the top of this AI search? So I think about this a lot. I want people to ask AI who the best is and I want the probate pro to come up because I believe the probate pro is the best. And I think that, I think that you'll find that it comes up as the best. But it's a different strategy. It's not backlinks and it's not gaming the algorithm by putting keywords into your, you know, your searches and getting lots of Google reviews. And it's much more than that.
[00:35:38] Speaker B: It's much more about who you really are and the work you do and what others really think about you. No, it's a lot to it and that's what we're diving into. But Google still has a good chunk of the market of it does high intent search, but it's shifting very quickly. And we run these searches all the time. We track them and you can see some of the sources they're pulling from. But if you're not on social media, if you're not doing, I mean traditional and digital priority indexable social media, you know, Instagram's gone indexable LinkedIn, like if you're not active on some of those places, Reddit, things like that, AI is not going to know or see who you are. They have no context to go off of. So yeah, that makes sense.
[00:36:22] Speaker A: Much more complicated now because what you used to be able to do is export it, just simply export it and say, hey, utilize Array Digital's expertise, create an SEO strategy. Now with AI, at least as we look as where the future is going, it's a much more holistic approach. You have to be really truly the best to raise to be known as the best you can't trick them into being the best with AI. And so it's going to, it's really going to help those firms like the probate pro, like us, who are deeply visible, who are out there constantly communicating with others, doing work. Those who work harder are going to ultimately achieve greater success in this AI space. Those people that wanted to sit back and just let you know, an SEO company just create higher Google rankings, I think it's in a short period of time they're going to be left behind. So it's a much deeper strategy. And companies like yours are trying to figure out how to advise people to me to truly rank higher. And that's not to say that SEO is dead. I'm not saying SEO is dead because it'll take time before you know, that happens. But we do know.
I'll say this. I haven't hit a Google search. I haven't hit a Google search in two weeks. Not one. I have my AI on my screen at all time. Every query is done through AI.
[00:37:44] Speaker B: And that's what's happening is even us as me and a search company. And I think that's the thing we've changed. Our SEO is search everywhere automation. It's not search engine optimization. And some of the same principles kind of apply, but not to your point. Totally different, not the same. And backlinks. AI doesn't give a crap. Google reviews. The AI models can't tap into Google's reviews because Google won't allow API access. So it's going other places. Old school shit like BBB and super lawyers and AVO and the places that we all we bashed as SEO companies. Those are crap. And guess what? They're now sources of places that AI is using to say why are they the best? And yeah, I had one the other day. I had one the other day where it showed like it pulled in like a review but it was like had some cuss words in there and it was like this is why this law firm is a badass or whatever. It was literally pulling contextual things like this is what Bob had to say about this firm and his experience there. It's amazing you don't get that from Google.
[00:38:43] Speaker A: Right? It's very interesting where, where this is going. And again I started this podcast by saying I've got a lot of many, many, many more questions than I have answers. But we do know it's changing and changing quickly. And exposed to this new technology the moment you use it, once you immediately recognize that this can have great value. You generally aren't Going to say, you know what, that's interesting. I don't want to do it. Unless you're scared of privacy, which is a legitimate concern. You don't want to, you know, you're a Luddite or you don't want to be involved in technology, but once you use it, once you're generally hooked because it's incredibly powerful. And you know, just as an example, we talked about the lonely entrepreneur. What about the lonely person sitting at home who AI becomes their therapist, their girlfriend, boyfriend, their partner, their person to talk to, you know, guru, you know, their psychic. We just go down the list. Yeah, it's available. So once you start talking to it and you know, one of the things that, again, I don't know, the people that are watching this, if they've gone deep into, for example, ChatGPT, just as an example, ChatGPT allows you to walk around with your camera on and talk to people, live and participate and do things that you. It recognizes the world upon which you're walking through and it's participating in that world with deep reasoning and deep logic. So I was using it as an example. I was talking to a friend and asking it to live translate my conversation in from English into Mandarin Chinese. Now, I had a great grandparent when I was a child who spoke Spanish. I did not. I didn't have to speak Spanish. I never was able to communicate other than hugging them because I didn't speak the same language this way to solve that problem. Now when you go travel, language is much less of a problem, but the ability for it to view the world upon which you're walking around in and adding information along the way live. I mean, doing it live. I mean, walk to the grocery store, walk around the streets, talk to it and ask questions along the way. This is extraordinary. This is science fiction. Hard to imagine. Incredibly powerful, also incredibly dangerous. But the opportunity for its use are really endless.
[00:41:04] Speaker B: I've never used it like that. So I'll sum it up too.
[00:41:07] Speaker A: I'll show you, Kevin, your, your mind will be blown because it is. It's eerie and creepy. It's watching the world as you're observing it, and it's seeing things that you may not be seeing. So as I, you know, we used to talk about the glasses that Google was going to come out with, and this is available right now. You walk around with your phone on in that live mode and it will tell you the plant you just walked by, the genus and species and how to water it. It will tell you how to do this or that it will explain, it will translate, it will, will comfort you. You can ask it to be more empathetic, less empathetic. You can ask it to be, hold you accountable, be a friend, be a foe. I mean it can, it can do it all and it acts in a live capacity. It's pretty eerie and pretty wild.
[00:41:55] Speaker B: That's a cool stuff. And here's the thing, you know, it's still new now. Fast is changing. So I think the moral of this is obviously Darren is leaned into it, heavy early adopter, I believe that we are as well. But it's moving fast and there's so many applications for it that are good. If your business isn't getting behind, you know, using it, leveraging it, you're going to have negative effects if you, if you don't go out of business completely.
[00:42:18] Speaker A: I think people just need to, people who are afraid because there's a lot of people I talk to that are just afraid now. First of all, you're using AI already. When you take a photo with your camera, it is using AI to enhance the photo, to alter it, to make it look prettier. You're using AI when you're doing searches, you're already doing it. But what I'm talking about is these, these new chats like ChatGPT or Cloud or Perplexity or Gemini or Copilot. Start using it, just try it, see what happens, get comfortable. No different than the first time you did a Google search. Play around with it, see if it's for you and see how it can work with your business. And if people have questions about the way we're using it, I'm always happy to chat about, I love talking about this stuff. It's exciting, really exciting to talk to other people about how they're using it.
[00:43:06] Speaker B: Yeah, better talking about it than avoiding it, that's for sure. So I learned something every time I talk to anyone about it, just like some stuff you just. Whenever it's today that I've never heard done before. I love the idea of the C Suite or even just a single C suite member being part of your meetings. We have leadership meetings all the time. So I'm going to throw out that idea to my partner right now. He's, he loves AI as well. Like we're, we're, we actually on our all hands brought an AI, like consultant, if you will, to talk to the whole team for like two, three hours and gave us tons of like prompts and templates and specifically for our kind of company and prepared. And it was we had everyone involved to kind of, how can we use this? And we want everyone to use this. Everyone in my company has a chat team license, Paid license.
[00:43:52] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:43:53] Speaker B: Because we want them to use it.
[00:43:54] Speaker A: Yeah. And Kevin, one of the things that we, we. We did because as a visionary, I wanted everyone to just use it. Like, jump in the pool. Everyone. All people in my organization just go. My COO correctly said, darren, slow down. For this to be effective, you, some people are going to need to be slowly moving through this. So we did a pilot program where we took some people that are tech forward and some people that are scared of technology. We told them they had to participate. It was not an option. And we, we explained, here are the uses. We want you to only use these four uses that we believed were really relevant. For example, doc generation, content creation, like email editing and responding to motions, things like that. And we wanted them to use it specifically for mock hearings. So, for example, if there's a contested motion, we want the motion dropped in the response. The reply, maybe the judge's transcript. And we want them to do mock hearings with the judge, learn the strengths and weaknesses of their case, deal with voir dire, deal with questioning. How is the other side going to ask questions? What's the judge going to say? How do you overcome that? Do it live as if it's a mock trial. Imagine you used to spend lots and lots of money on mock juries and you know people to do this. You can do this live. It's instantaneous. We did it in front of our office live, and we played around with it, and it works beautifully. Ask it to be in the voice of the judge. Ask to be a very difficult judge. Ask to be a jerky opponent. Ask it to get to evaluate your performance. Did you do a good job arguing that motion or poor? Where. Where were the Mrs. Yeah, where did you improve?
[00:45:37] Speaker B: We do that for sales. We record sales calls. And it tells you, hey, here's things you did well at. Here's the areas that you could have improved. Here's how long he talks. Here's everything.
[00:45:47] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it'd be fun. What we should have done, Kevin, is we should have had AI sitting in this meeting and suggested the questions you should have asked that would have been better or how good or bad my responses were. We could have gotten some live feedback. I mean, how far away are we, Kevin, from a lawyer standing in court with an earbud in their ear. And as the judge asks a question, they're being fed a response, the case law. The response, well, first of all, the technology is here right now. This isn't new technology. It's available. I don't know if the judges will get mad or will allow it, but a layperson could do it right now in depositions. As the depositions going on, you're getting a live transcript, you're getting a summary. We're getting it on our phone calls and you're getting prompts. When you're talking to people at these large companies right now and you're asking questions, they're getting AI based suggested responses that are provided to them. Yeah, they're not just, you know, brilliant intake people. So how far away are we from this happening in court in front of a jury? How about this? How far away are we from there no longer being a jury, but it's a crowd jury of AI bots that are determining the fate? I don't know. I mean, that's science fiction, but could it happen?
[00:47:03] Speaker B: Judge, what was that movie?
[00:47:05] Speaker A: How about this idea? Like Judge Judy. But how about this idea instead of a facilitator or a mediator, the facilitator or mediator is an AI bot. Or how about you want to arbitrate, but you don't want to spend the money. You're fighting over $820.
You agree to an AI arbitration and the arbitration's binding and the bot decides. So these are things that could happen. I know that, you know, as a visionary, I come up with a lot of wild ideas. Some of them are okay, but most of them are terrible. But I mean, I don't know where this is going to go.
[00:47:40] Speaker B: Well, I mean, just think about, just think about even outside the law, I have salespeople that work for me. Like salespeople on a call with you trying to sell the probate pro on marketing, SEO or AI search. They can get live responses back to your, you know, to your objections to whatever. Like things where you wouldn't even know maybe, or care. So it's not even getting into like the courtroom kind of situations. But how can you apply it in your business, throughout the whole business where it will. It's helping the situation, it's helping the customer. It's something you serves them, whether it's intake or whatever.
We could be using this right now.
[00:48:15] Speaker A: Are you using. I don't know if you've been receiving spam calls. Right now I'm getting spam calls from AI bots. They're completely AI generated, no human being, just AI. They sound pretty good. They're not perfect. They're pretty good. And they can fool a lot of people.
[00:48:31] Speaker B: Yeah, that's.
[00:48:32] Speaker A: You're really discerning. But they're getting, you know, this is no different than holding the hands near the steering wheel. They're getting pretty good. And they're going to get so good that you won't be able to discern the difference who you're talking to. So I'm getting AI telephone calls. Well, how far away are we from changing our intake system to AI we're not. We're already interviewing companies to see who can handle phone calls and intake, especially after hours. Press 1 for the probate department, press 2 if you're a client, press 3 if you're the court. Well, that's a static voicemail. What about a dynamic conversation where people can run out of a difficult client, can run on for a half an hour and tell their entire life story at 3 in the morning?
[00:49:14] Speaker B: Yep, yep, all there.
[00:49:17] Speaker A: We're getting there.
[00:49:18] Speaker B: We have a law firm. I have a law firm client. I called the other day for something. Someone answered the phone. I called a few days later for something else. AI answered the phone. It was clearly AI but it was still. I wasn't upset with the experience because it got me where I needed to go. So you're gonna definitely see that we're.
[00:49:35] Speaker A: Pretty close to that.
[00:49:36] Speaker B: And for intake, say for like car accidents or any kind of law firm, like, you know, your people always have to be on their game. They always have to be working on their delivery, their empathy, all that stuff. Well, AI consistent every time, right?
[00:49:48] Speaker A: AI never gets angry. AI never takes a cigarette break. AI never offends or shouldn't offend anyone.
AI doesn't slam the phone down angry when a client's abusive. It doesn't happen. There are other problems with AI there's that concept of, what do they call it, uncanny valley with the idea that you can kind of tell you're talking to AI it's not, not quite perfect. And, you know, we're getting closer to that realism. And at some point you won't be able to discern the difference. Now, I do know that you could take an AI deep fake of me, and I could be talking to every client in, you know, a month. You could essentially have my voice talking to everybody all the time. Is that good? Is it bad? You can make an argument both ways. So the, the prospects are really interesting. And, and one of the things, you know, Kevin, when we talked about doing a thing on AI what's amazing about this, we could talk about this forever. I mean, we could just Riff on this.
[00:50:46] Speaker B: We might be AI talking about this right now.
[00:50:49] Speaker A: Right. And we can do this again next month. And the topics would be completely different.
[00:50:53] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's why we have an hour long episode. Sometimes I only do 30 minute episodes. So we could, we could definitely just keep going.
[00:51:00] Speaker A: It's great. It's fun to talk to you about this stuff.
[00:51:02] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, it's just interesting stuff. But I guess, you know, the big thing is all my law firm owners listening. Other business owners listen to this as well. Across the board entrepreneurs for the most part lean into this stuff. Get to know it, get to use, start using it and if not. Yeah, reach out to me, connect with Darren. He's obviously doing some interesting stuff with it and I'm sure he's happy to, to share. But to his point, even by the time this releases, you know, there's other things that we will probably be doing with it, things we didn't think about. So it's, there's a lot of opportunity right now, honestly. So you're going to get left behind or you can jump on the. Jump on the train.
[00:51:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Dip your toe in the water. At least right now. I know it's scary and I would suggest that you work with maybe someone young who's really comfortable using it. Just to get it on your phone, get it on your computer, start playing around with it and get a feel that its use is pretty easy to use. Very intuitive, highly intuitive. And it will be scary because some of the implication or applications in its use can be really dangerous and concerning about the threats to your own business. But I don't suggest anyone hide from it. I think you need to understand it so you can make decisions on how best to lead your organization forward.
[00:52:13] Speaker B: I love it. Amen to that. So well, Darren, I appreciate you sharing as always. We could talk anytime and you're doing some really awesome stuff over there. And like I said in the beginning of the episode, Darren's always on the cutting edge. He's always pushing things forward. He's, he's growing, he's scaling and always open to share a lot of that as well. So appreciate you having on the show. Hopefully you found this very informative and hopefully most of you are using AI and not hiding from it so well.
[00:52:37] Speaker A: The key here is use AI, use the probate pro and definitely use array Digital.
[00:52:42] Speaker B: I like it. I just said AI. Have him say that. That's good. It's not even really Darren. It's actually my deep fake version of him. Great, Darren, thank you so much, obviously. Everyone, check out the probate pro. Connect with Darren. He's all over social media. He's at all the conferences. You can't miss him. He's usually got a red shirt on. Today he's got a blue shirt on.
[00:53:01] Speaker A: Very intuitive.
[00:53:02] Speaker B: You never know what to expect.
[00:53:03] Speaker A: I think I just got a little tired of the red, so I threw on a blue one today.
[00:53:08] Speaker B: Well, you never know what to expect from Darren. So everyone, thank you so much for tuning in for this awesome episode and we'll see you on the next one.
[00:53:23] Speaker A: Sam.
