Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We're building the best plaintiff lawyer to ever exist.
[00:00:04] Speaker B: All right, we're rolling a from Eve.
Welcome to the show, man.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me, Kevin. It's good to be on.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Absolutely. Great to connect with your team. Meet in San Diego at Law de Gras and you got a really cool product and wanted to share that today and let our law firm audience lawyers know what you guys have going on and how that can help them. And so we're just going to kind of dive into, you know, a little bit about your background and story and then we'll kind of talk about what Eve is and what it does. Real quick, before we have you kind of introduce yourself, you can go to eve, that's E V E Legal and you can check out EVE for yourself. The website will be pretty self explanatory as well. Go check them out and support them again. Great group of folks and they're doing some good stuff. So excited to learn more about what that is today. Real quick, do you want to give a shout out to our friends Answering Legal? They specialize in answering phones for law firms. That's all they do and they take it all the way from the phone call to intake. Their team is trained and doing that for you. So if you live person on the phone 24 hours need help with that, they help with that. And they've been kind enough to partner us up with us on the show here and things like that. And we're using them for our phones, so. So check them out. They have a free trial deal going right now with US, which is answeringlegal.com array and you can get that free trial to try that out. So Jay, back over to you, man. This is all about you. Tell us about your story and excited to hear that and more about Eve.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: No, it's fantastic. Again, Kevin, thank you so much for giving us the opportunity to share. We've been building for the last four to five years now and it's exciting to see all the traction we've been getting. But I'll start off with a quick background around myself. I think first and foremost, as probably you and number of listeners to this podcast, I am an entrepreneur at heart and I love building and building businesses and going through the struggle probably all of you have been in getting this to be bigger and bigger year over year. And I started my career very early on at Facebook working on their AI algorithms for newsfeed and groups and got that to be about half a billion users. And then I joined Rubrik as a first engineering Hire led product and engineering, about a third of it during my time there. Now it's IPO this year. So pretty exciting to see all the progress we made there. And then was an enterprise AI investor at a firm called Lightspeed, which is now one of the top 10 VC firms investing all the way across the world. And we built to really help plaintiff law firms and lawyers rethink and reimagine their practice all the way from intake to resolution. And that's, we've been fortunate to work with a number of cool, cool law firms building it. And we've seen all the different tactics and strategies law firms are using across the board and we've tailor built our product to be able to fit in with how they do work and accelerate their work. So I focus on the core technology and making it useful for law firms. And you know, I work with people like yourself, Kevin and a number of others to really help figure out like what is the best way to serve your clients and grow your law firm now that software can just do more of the work. So that's, that's the ultimately what we do.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: No, it's, it's a really impressive system and from, you know, not being a law firm, but a marketer, just seeing it in action and you know, have a lot of friends and clients that use your systems.
You know, Jen Gore, good friend and frequent podcast guest over here, they're using Jay's company and their system called eve.
I wanted to kind of, you know, for those that are listening, going, okay, well what does all that mean? How would it help my law firm? And so maybe more of a basic level, what does it do and how someone listening, that's like, okay, I, I have a plaintiff's firm. How would I use EVE to streamline my business?
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Yeah, ultimately, maybe stepping back. What we've always wanted at a software and software like Eve is how do I make it to do the work that I don't really want to do anymore. Right. If I can teach someone to do it once and just have it do it again and again, that's really what you want. And that's what historically we've been using human capital for, like hiring people and training them up and trying to manage them to do these repeated tasks. And the challenges and why we needed people to begin with is they were unique enough that every single task required people to look through it and make minor decisions here and there to basically get it through a workflow. And that's been the largest change. Right. So the goal of software historically and Always have been. How do you get it to be more personalized? More personalized for me, more personalized for my law firm, more personalized for my specific workflow. And that's been ultimately what's changed in the last, really, year and a half, right. So before and again, I've been in the AI space forever. But what used to happen is you needed millions and millions of data points to fine tune a model to make it work for one simple thing. So let's take an example like pulling out, I don't know, client's name from a bunch of documents. Even something as simple as that used to require millions of records and data points that it never ever made economic sense to train a model and put engineering resources in place to be able to make that to be repeated process.
Now what's changed is, and this is what we took a bet on, you know, why did we start the company four or five years ago is, yeah, really, we started seeing that it went from a million records to a couple hundred with the beginning of what eventually gave birth to ChatGPT. It was called transformers. And that is an exponential curve. Right. And for people that are into software and actually compounding interest, as you guys know, as the greatest force in nature, right. We took a bet on that and we've been rewarded for it. And effectively now what happens is you actually can get software to do tasks that otherwise was outside the purview of what computers could do before. And as a result, this is what we really focused our software on. So how do we solve for the problems around you as a lawyer, you as an attorney or a person in a law firm, you don't necessarily have the resources required to like fine tune these models for all these bespoke tasks. Let's say you're evaluating a case to understand whether you need to take it on or not. You might be dealing with a bunch of client files at that point and an intake call. And going through that would actually require, if you're doing it properly, like maybe 10 hours of work. And now it's actually possible to fine tune EVE and a model to do that for you. And 30 seconds, right? In 30 seconds, you kind of know, you know, what is the approximate case value here? What are the salient points I should really focus on? And you know, the more and more data you put into eve, it even gets better at knowing things like these are the potential claims I want to pursue. Right. And you know, what are pieces of information that we would want to go collect and strengthen up our case even more and it just kind of goes from there.
[00:07:30] Speaker B: So it learns more about your specific way of doing business or your firm.
[00:07:35] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:07:36] Speaker B: Yep. That's awesome.
[00:07:37] Speaker A: Exactly. And obviously we're also teaching it to be better and better. Right. So the other really unique thing that's happening now is just like, if you think about all the self driving car stuff that's going on, it's still early ages, but it's come a long way. Why has it come a long way? It's because unlike people, it's possible to put thousands of engineers and data behind making the best driver really, that can operate in every single situation that it just wasn't possible to do with people. Right. Similarly, that's how we're kind of building our software. We're building the best plaintiff lawyer to ever exist. But plaintiff lawyers still need training and specialization in PI bespoke cases when you get into trial prep and litigation, and all of that still requires training. But the best lawyer that is able to be trained on all the cases that exist in the world and all the different workflows you've taken to settle each of those cases, which no one really has apart from us as we were building it.
Now you're able to actually tell them to do anything in your law firm. Like, hey, respond to my client. They're asking, you know, they're not being cooperative and preparing for mediation or whatever it is, and they're even able to put that type of resource to work, even for simple things like that.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty. So imagine if you could hire the best plaintiff lawyer in the world at pennies on the dollar. Right? To be.
[00:09:08] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: Yeah. But. But you can scale that up as well. So. Yeah. Interesting. So, yeah, it's just crazy to see how fast things have moved, you know, with even ChatGPT and the learning and all the things that you can do with it. It's pretty impressive, I think. You know, obviously lawyers and law, you know, tend to lag a little bit on adopting new things. Obviously, if you look at.
Okay, I'll say this, everyone that's listening, if you're listening to this podcast, of course you're probably a little bit more on the cutting edge anyway because you're trying to grow your business. You're listening to me talk, and my guest, you know, talk about building law firms. And so, you know, you're probably adopting this kind of stuff and more open to it. But, you know, what have you seen since like when you, you know, started this journey versus, like now? Because I feel like I went to conferences all year. And it's like, AI, AI, AI, you know, but a lot of lawyers are up there talking about how they're using it versus someone telling them why they should use it. So I feel like it's definitely come a long way and that's good news, hopefully for you all and, and for law firms that are able to leverage the, you know, the software and things that you guys have developed.
[00:10:15] Speaker A: So no ab. Absolutely. And this is exactly the trend that's happening. So, like, I mean, I, like I mentioned I used to be a vc, so getting hype, following the hype train and the trove disillusionment is a very real thing.
I think AI was and probably still is overhyped. Right? That's, that's kind of the, the situation. However, what's happened is the hype cycle is now significantly accelerated, in my opinion. Right. Because what used to happen was we used to hype up things like the cloud, right? And it took 10 years to get to the cloud. Maybe people are still getting to the cloud. It's still not over.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: Some people are still trying to get on the cloud.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. And the same thing happened for all sorts of things, right. Even software and adoption of things like Excel took actually a lot. You know, it was, was kind of like faster, but it was, it was still taking a long time. And now with AI, we're kind of in a similar space. What's unique about AI is it's an evolution of, you know, what people are already used to looking at and buying. Like people have been used to software. It's just that now it's doing useful things.
And to your story, like, you know, when we started initially, and we get a lot of really interesting customers as law firms, and these are people that understand the impact that this type of software can have on their business. And here's what I mean, right? If you really think about growing your business, you have a lot of costs you have to pay to be able to service each case. So let's say you're working on a case that settles for, you know, whatever 30k, you take home a third of that, maybe, maybe half of that, and you have to then start paying out your costs.
Depending on what your cost profile looks like, if you're able to save even 10% of that year over year through work you're doing, you're now looking at a drastically different business even at two or three years out. And the people that were adopting our software early on, I think deeply understood this fact. Right. And why they went through the pain of adopting early technology. I mean, I'll be honest, our software, probably like everyone else's, was rough around the edges early on, but they understood where to put effort into to get that payback on their costs immediately. And then they start are able to use it to take that time they save to then take on and qualify new cases and actually increase their top of line. And this ultimately is actually what software companies benefited from. So companies like what I'm building and what I used to invest in at, the only reason why it worked is the cost of delivering additional goods and services over time can amortize itself to low costs, right? Something like 10 to 20% of gross margins. And because that existed, you are now able to reinvest majority of your money and resources into top of marketing sales spend like Kevin, you could give more money to Kevin and Ray Digital to help with that.
And that ultimately is what allows you to step away from competition, right? Because you're able to take additional capital, use that to acquire new customers and new revenue stream and then also very importantly, use that to make your own goods and services better. And the only real way which I've seen law firms improve their goods and services, to be completely frank, is like the person that's running the firm typically still tends to be the largest expert and they have to rely on retaining talent. But it's very, very difficult to pass that on. Even if you have, even if you are doing an amazing job of keeping track of all your data, buying a dms, you've done all the right things. It's still so hard to train a new resource to be just as good as you. And that is what's changing now, right? So it's not a silver bull bullet. It's still nowhere near as good as humans, but it can start mimicking things humans can do on a case by case basis. Which that's where we are at today. But eventually, yeah, it really can do quite a bit.
[00:14:21] Speaker B: Yeah, it's, I mean there's a lot of things to unpack there I think one, you know, owning businesses and being a partner and quite a few people are your business like that's the, you know, that's what makes your business special and unique and culture and all those things. But it's also one of the hardest parts of your business to maintain and to be on track with. And then someone leaves, you got to replace them, you got to train them. So it's really taxing on a business, the people part of it, it's the hardest part to figure out.
So if you could take a lot of the things that you need a person to do and have software assist you with that and let this, let your people do what they're best at, what's their strengths, like what are they there for versus the mindless stuff that can be repetitive. So to me it's, you're not taken away, you're just letting your people do the best work that they are passionate about doing and that's going to create a stronger culture, stronger company versus, you know, just replacing all your people with software. Right. The other thing too is cash flow and profit. Like you don't stay in business if you can't maintain those things. And so yeah, even like you're saying a few percentages or 10% is massive when you look at three or four or five years down the line. So you mentioned like compounding. Right. So if you can make some of those efficiencies and increase, you know, your margins, yeah, you can reinvest it back into your business. I've always made the most investing in my companies versus something else like stocks or real estate, whatever. So, and we track that, to be honest with you. So, so yeah, there's, there's just a lot of good things right there. And so you know, any lawyers that are kind of like, yeah, I'm not going to do, I'm not going to use AI or I'm not going to replace anybody. I just want people, they're going to, you're going to be left behind, you know, so you got to adopt some of this stuff and get more efficient.
And again, your best people can be doing what they really love and what their strengths are. So I doubt it's sending a message or removing someone's name from 100 documents.
[00:16:35] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:16:41] Speaker B: Today's episode is brought to you by Answering Legal. Now, I just switched my company Array Digital over to Answering Legal and it's made my life a whole lot easier. If I can't get to the phone, their 247 virtual receptionists take the call and take them through a full intake process so we never miss new business again.
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[00:17:59] Speaker A: Right. I mean, why would you not rather have your best people that you hire working on strategic things that'll move the needle for you and your firm and for your clients. Right. So you want them really to not worry about very simple things like, you know, what's the language I need to write in a demand letter, or how do I put together these calculations together and add it up and verify it. These are relatively low value work compared to, you know, what actually goes into the demand, like what are the things I should really hone in on and how do I handle the rest of litigation process to optimize for the best possible outcome for my client. And that work is a lot harder and a lot more meaningful. Right. And it's also from a lot of lawyers I talk to, more fun to work on.
[00:18:48] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. You know, the other thing too, I think, you know, with people and I do this all the time, I get in trouble all the time. Hey, Kevin, you didn't follow that new process we have for this? Like.
Yeah, sorry, I thought it was this way. Well, we tweaked it. And so just imagine that's for all this. Most of the stuff that's up, it's going to be followed to a T. Right. So consistent process following. Right. Versus human error and training and all that stuff that's required. I just think you have more consistent and again, focus on the things that strategic planning or future growth or whatever. Right. So I just, to me, it makes a ton of sense and we, we leverage software and AI as much as we possibly can in our businesses. Again, it lets you work on the stuff that you're passionate about. Your team can't be excited about doing some of this, this stuff that they just have to do. It's crushing.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: No, absolutely. And I think philosophically that is the change we're going to go through. A society, I think as AI and software gets more adoption is doing any single task, the moment you define it, software will get good at it. Right. So if you go and play that out, really the change we need to make mentally to take the best advantage of the future that's coming up is how do we start becoming the art directors? How do we start laying out processes that actually matter? And eventually you have to assume what you'll go head to head against and compete with others on is your process versus their process. And the more and more you can train yourself and the rest of your staff to start operating around that set of principles, you're just going to do so much better, right? And anyway, that's how we think about it and we operate internally and it's helping us out a lot. Right? So like, our sales team is very AI first in how they operate. You'll probably see very structured summary meetings and things like that right after you meet with us. And certainly, you know, we're doing it, but it's heavily AI influenced and, and similarly for yourself, you should be considering doing all of those things and set, set a different bar for your clients. You know, once they interact with you, why would they go to anyone else?
[00:21:02] Speaker B: 100%. I mean, you know, that's, that's interesting because all the best business books that you can read, like how to start a business, how to run a business process, write that crap down so that someone else can do it. Like, the majority of books are like process, process, process, so that you can get efficient, so that you can walk away, so you can sell it, so you can go on vacation, right? And so interestingly enough, now it's like, you know, we're gonna, now it's like, who's better at putting together process, like who that's gonna win, right? And that's always kind of been the case, but now it's, you know, you can just take it to a whole different level. I've mentioned this a lot lately. It's like, you know, someone like myself, I've never been in a car accident, never been injured enough to have a personal injury attorney to hire. I've never hired a lawyer outside of business attorneys. And so I'm not comparing this PI firm to that PI firm. I'm comparing you to Uber Domino's instantaneous result and feedback and information. How fast are they going to go? Do I know what's going on? Do I have everything I need on my, on the client side? Like, and to your point, your sales team or me, if you sign up this podcast, you know, let you know what's going on, messages, emails, this is what the process like, here's what to expect. People are expecting that now versus an old way of doing business as a law firm where it's, you can't talk to the attorney, you know, well, we'll get back to you whenever we have an update. Like, it's just, you're not going to survive that way anymore.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: So it's a really good point and one I've seen a Lot of our own customers try to use our software to help them do some of these things you're mentioning. But I think at the core of it, you're absolutely right, is clients are not no longer comparing you to just other law firms. Right. And what their interactions are like, especially if this is your first time getting through, you know, being injured, etc. They're comparing you to other pieces of software that they use that have put immense amount of trouble and effort into making it understandable, easy to use, three clicks to get to what they want. And if, you know, if you meet that bar, you're going to set yourself up so far ahead of any other law firm out there. And what's cool is you can actually, there's really no excuse to not be able to do that today anymore. It's just a matter of investing time, which is not even that much to be able to set all these processes up to where you can start looking like, you know, have the same level of love that people have towards these massive companies that they use every single day that they have towards you.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, people are love their brands, right? They'll go, you know, chick fil A, you know, is the processes they have and the things that they've done that have built a file in. Right. You know, so this is kind of taking that same thing and applying it to your, your, your law firm or service business. It's just like me, I go look at a website for a law firm, it's like no photos, no team, no video, walls of text. Like people interacting with this like that. You need video, audio, like make, you know, the. What's the experience when they find you and then when they hire you, what's that experience? Right. And so all these things that have been recommended for a long time, why aren't you doing them? Right? Why don't you have video on your website? Why aren't you talking to the person that's found you through search or ads that you paid a bunch of money for, yet you don't care if they build a connection with you once they land there and then once they sign up, what's.
How did they become a referral? You should be like, guaranteeing that they're a referral source from before they find you. Just think about it like that, like this is gonna be so awesome for them that they're gonna give us referrals, guaranteed, and then just work it backwards. Yeah, I love it. It's cool to see all the things that are coming out and eve and seeing you Guys at the shows. And again, I know people that use your all stuff. So what's, you know, what's the best way for someone to listen? That's like, I want to go check this out. Do you guys have a demo? Should they reach out to.
Is it Ryan over there? Like, what's the best way?
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Absolutely, absolutely. If you go to Eve Legal and hit the book a demo button, it'll route to an expert on our team and we'll show you a demo and kind of walk you through. I think the really cool part is, as I mentioned to you before, it's not just the product we've gotten good at, but also what other law firms are doing and how to best implement AI in your law firm. And that actually can make or break a good purchase. Right? Like, at the end of the day, software is what software does, but how you use it actually makes a pretty big difference. And we are actually build processes around how we help our customers, whether they buy us or not, take better advantage of AI in general. So even if it's to learn that I, you know, 100% recommend just booking a demo, learning more. Mention Kevin and Array and we'll see. We'll see what we can do for you.
[00:26:06] Speaker B: I appreciate that. Yeah, I think, you know, that's a good point. That's a really good point. Like, you're not just like, oh, hey, yeah, we have this thing. Plug into it and start using it. Maybe like buying HubSpot, right? Hey, here's our Salesforce. Here's Salesforce.
Good luck. You need to build out how you're going to use it, and then you're stuck going, well, how should I use it?
And then, well, we can build it to however you like. And it's, it's a undertaking.
And so like a CRM, you have to. How are you going to use it? What is. You know, so it's. So I think it's important. Like you're saying it's just like someone wants to do marketing or SEO for us. Like, we have hundreds of clients that we're doing it for in different markets in the same practice area so we can learn across those clients. Say, hey, well, here's what we know is working and here's a strategy that we know is going to be the best for what you're trying to accomplish. We're not exactly. There's no guesswork involved. It's. It's like, hey, here's what we see and we can implement that for you. So.
Good point.
[00:27:05] Speaker A: That's exactly right.
[00:27:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think that might stop some people from doing some stuff like software. We got to sign up for a Software that means Q1 screwed. We're going to be trying to learn this thing. And I think that's kind of a lot of people's reaction to, to changing on anything. Right? So. But it sounds like that's not the case with you guys.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: No, I mean, it's, it's frankly something we've heard a lot because that's the reaction people get after, I don't know, like, you know, the older generation of software had a lot of that. Right. Where it required a lot of setup and before you see any value at all. And that's something we've thought through. Right. The nice part is there are some very well known things that you're doing most often that we can just hit the ground running with and show you value right off the bat. If you're writing a demand, a medical review, etc. It's saving you 40, 50 hours of work right away.
And that gives us and you enough confidence to know like where you would use it. And then, and then that's the starting point. That's kind of the cool part is, as we mentioned, you can actually just set up EVE thoughtfully to do exactly how you like to operate and help you alongside the whole litigation process. And once you do that on the platform, you can then use EVE to generate complaints or respond to discovery and profound discovery, all of that, it just happens seamlessly the more you interact with EVE within a case.
So that's the part we've been very fortunate about. We have hundreds upon hundreds of hours of conversations around like, what are the components we make super easy to use. So they don't need. Law firms don't need training and their attorneys don't need training to get value immediately. And how do we structure the parts that does need set up thoughtfully, such that we're able to do it at the right time and make it so that new people coming in don't have to go through all that work required. And we've hired a number of talented individuals that built the best software from Google, Facebook, et cetera, to think through this on behalf of our customers and showcase that.
[00:29:05] Speaker B: That's awesome. Yes, that's good.
But yeah, you know, that's what I, you know, when we used to sell earlier on like marketing, SEO, it's like always go for like everything we want the world and redo everything. And it's like, how do we get quick wins? Like we need to get wins and then we can always build more. We can always do more. And so, you know, my mindset's changed a lot over the years. It's like, how do we get a win for this person, this client, and then we can always do more. Don't overdo it. Don't over sign. And that's a lot of marketing agencies have just, you know, screwed people a lot, and they've sent a lot of money, and then they're going, this didn't work. So. So you gotta get those wins, get some progress along the way, and then, you know, ease into it. So I think that works well. So, Jay, I appreciate you sharing more about Eve. I'm excited to see you guys at, you know, more shows this year coming up in 2025, and. And just excited to see you guys grow. So thank you so much, Kevin, today.
[00:30:03] Speaker A: Thank you for having me on.
[00:30:05] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, everyone, go check out Jay's company, Eve. That's Eve legal, and sign up for a free demo. Check it out. Shoot me a comment. Let me know what you think. And if you want a connection to him or someone on the scene, let me know, and we'll do that as well. So thanks for tuning in, Jay. Thank you so much, and I'll be seeing you soon.
[00:30:27] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:30:28] Speaker B: All right, everyone, have a great day.
