Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign most firms survive. The best ones scale.
Welcome to the Managing Partners podcast, where law firm leaders learn to think bigger.
I'm Kevin. Daisy.
Let's jump in.
What's up everyone? We are recording. Hans, welcome to the show.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: Hi, Kevin. Thanks so much. Happy to be here.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm happy to have you on here. You have an interesting background and you do some pretty cool stuff for law firms.
So we'll be digging in some talk about AI today. If you've never heard AI, then please turn off the podcast now.
Hot Topic. Hot topic. But Han's going to share some, some deeper stuff and some cool stuff that he's doing, and we'll get into that in just a second.
I've been liking to ask my, my guest right off the bat what's, what's something, you know, law firm owners that are listening right now, you know, what's some things that they should be thinking about right now with their business and as it relates to AI in general?
[00:01:18] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
AI creates a tremendous opportunity to modernize your practice.
You know, this whole venture that I'm involved in really stems out of my own personal experience. Having gone through a divorce years ago. I couldn't get over the fact that it was a very manual process. And for that reason, it was kind of, it was tough drawn out. I felt a little inefficient, especially with respect to transmitting all the information back and forth. The documents, history of my family and bank accounts, assets, debts, you name it. Just, it was very tedious. And you know, that added on top of the fact that you're going through a divorce, it's just a lot. So I think the opportunity here for law firms is to offer a better experience, a more modern experience that their clients are accustomed to having on their day to day. And that's what we're looking to build.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: That's awesome, man. The show's all about improving, Improving your business, improve your process, improve your marketing, improving your intake, your sales, the lives of your, your team members, employees, the lives of yourself and your family.
So that's what we're all about. So that's a perfect segue. And, and me and Hans, we had, we had. I always meet with my guests prior to recording and, and just talk and, and shoot the shit a little bit. And when he told me the story about his divorce and what he went through and really the, the under, you know, the, and I just thought about it for myself. Cause I'm married and we have lots of things and accounts and he just started telling me all the Things that he had to do manually to upload all this stuff and enter the stuff. And I was like, holy crap. You know, that sounds just terrible. And, you know, he was, you know, he was responsible to do that. And, you know, and so as he talks more about what his system does and what his company does, it really kind of brings everything together. Wow. Okay, that's. That would be super helpful if I was going through that. That kind of experience, so. And we'll dig in that in just a second. So. So tell us maybe a little bit of your background as a professional and kind of like, what other than your experience in divorce, like, how you got to where you're at and where you're located and all that good stuff.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you. I'm. I'm in Menlo Park, California, which is right in the heart of Silicon Valley. Been here now for about 25 years. My entire career has been spent working on technology ventures and startups of every form.
I would say the focus of my career has been on modernizing industries that are sort of historically behind the technology curve. I worked in aerospace, energy, manufacturing, oil and gas, department of defense, finance, healthcare, you name it. It's really. It's been an education in going into these industries and looking at what they do and seeing opportunities to leverage the latest in tech and help them become more efficient, more effective, more profitable, and quite frankly, make their lives easier, too. On top of it all, that's super cool.
[00:04:17] Speaker A: I mean, there's no better place to be than Silicon valley. The last 25 years, I'm sure you've seen a lot of cool stuff and met a lot of interesting people.
[00:04:24] Speaker B: Yeah, it's been a wild ride. You know, the world's changed so much in that time, and it's only accelerating. You know, these days with AI, it's pretty. It's been an amazing experience.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Tell us your company so people can take a look and look you up and tell us what you're about and how it helps firms. At this present, I know you have some future kind of developments as well, but tell us more about your actual company.
[00:05:00] Speaker C: 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 receptionist take the call and take them through a full intake process so we never miss new business again. Now, Answering Legal has been at this for more than a decade, and they specialize in answering phone calls for law Firms like yours, they even have a brand new, easy to use Apple and they integrate with all the top legal softwares and platforms. So from our listeners today, we actually have a special deal of a 400 minute free trial offer of answering legal services that you can try out by going to answeringlegal.com array. You can also call 631-437-4803 and use special code Daisy.
[00:05:55] Speaker A: That's my last name.
[00:05:57] Speaker C: D A I S E Y.
So go check them out and let's get back to the show.
[00:06:03] Speaker B: Yep, yeah, you bet. So about a year ago I started a company called Deliberately AI and we're, we're building a platform for the personal law industry. But we're focused initially on, on family law, mostly stemming out of my own experience in family law years ago with my divorce. And the platform really is, is focused on client intelligence. That's, that's the term that we're, we've coined for this work.
And it is focused on collecting, consuming, aggregating, organizing all of the facts and information related to a particular client's legal matter. In the case of family law, typically a divorce. And as we were talking about a moment ago, in today's world, most of that information gets sent back and forth via email, maybe Dropbox if you have that. But there's not typically a centralized system that's collecting all that information for you and organizing it and making it available to you in real time. You know, one of the things we do right out of the box is we start providing real time case summaries for attorneys. So when we talk to our attorneys, they tell us, hey, we've got so many cases going on, it's hard for us to even remember the details of a particular case. And when we go to meet a client, often it takes 15 or 20 minutes to dig into our inbox, pull up documents, try to remember where the case is at, maybe whether the client even has children or not or what their names are. We can, we can feel and feel like we're current and, and give the, the customer sense that we're, that we're engaged and actively following the case. Even though it's awfully hard, you know, for attorneys to do that across so many cases.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: I said yeah, for sure. I mean to remember all those clients, if you have like 200 cases, that they have kids or what the kids names are and, and where are the status, I mean that's, that's a lot of information to, to hold in your head.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: It is crazy, right? And any one of those cases could have many dozens to hundreds of documents worth of information. Trying to keep track of all that in your inbox, it's nearly impossible. It's, it's really a, it's really a heavy load for attorneys. And for that reason there's a lot of burnout and also some client dissatisfaction, a lot of churn and things that make attorney lives even more difficult.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: Yeah. So in a new experience yourself, obviously your, you're able to go back through that experience and say, okay, what were the frustrations you had and what were the pain points on your side and how would you wanted to see it go?
You know, best case scenario. Right. And I was sure you've been just working that into this whole process. So you are, you know, I don't know the process really, but as going through a divorce having access to this information or even having a file to upload or somewhere to enter it in, like how many different ways are these, these attorneys trying to collect it? But I assume that they're putting it on you as like hey, I need all this stuff.
And the attorney probably just has to wait and sit back and say well let me go on to my next case because they have their third to do list, if you will.
[00:09:07] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, just about no matter what they're doing today, it's a manual process. You know, it's typically some early intake meetings where attorney is getting a sense of lay of the land for a particular case and then some intake forms that are list questions and asking for high level documents and then, and then many, many emails back and forth asking for additional information, additional documents. And one of the things that's especially challenging about this is that the documents have, you know, a lifespan. So for example, your bank statements that are, that are shared this month might be out of date in a month from now or two months from now and you got to do it again. So it's just over the course of, of the divorce, it's just a continuous back and forth. It's like ping pong between attorney and client trying to get all that information as it's needed.
So one of the things we did right right away as you mentioned, is this is based on my own experience as a client. But we went out and, and enlisted the help of a bunch of law firms as design partners and they were great in giving us their perspective and telling us how it's difficult for them. And with all of that in mind, we started laying out the, the roadmap for a, for a platform that solves both problems for client and Also for attorney makes life better for all.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: That's excellent. So in that you, you know, you didn't just try to do this based on your experience, but you actually brought in attorneys and you got their perspective and they, they've kind of had some part in developing this. So that's awesome.
As far as the system is, I think this is when we talked last time.
Is it kind of like a question based kind of system where it's running you through and then you're able to answer a question then okay, you're going to need to provide this and then is it that kind of system where it walks the client through that?
[00:11:00] Speaker B: That's right, yeah.
So we built the platform for law professionals, we sell it into law firms and then law firms extend the platform to their clients and the clients have an experience and the attorneys have an experience on the, on the client side. It's, it's a chat based experience that's, it's a bit like any of the AI chat agents that you, that you're familiar with, like ChatGPT, but it's, it's turned on its head. So it's, it's almost the reverse of that. Rather than the client asking questions of the AI, the AI has awareness of the case and the kinds of things that the attorney looks for and it facilitates a conversation with the client and asks a bunch of questions. It unfolds as a, as an organic thing. That's, that's what's special about AI. It would have been impossible to do this really well three or four years ago because family law cases are unstructured. Every family is unique, every family is different. And the, it can, they, it can, it can roll with it right? As it learns, as it's asking these questions and the client is answering questions, it can ask more directed questions and it can ask for the right kinds of supporting information and documents and allows the client to just drag those documents in and, and they all go into a repository behind the scenes that's then available for the attorney.
[00:12:22] Speaker A: Super cool right there. So say like, you know, it sounds like I could be like engaging with the, with the AI and then go off and I got something else to do. I got meetings to come back.
Like it knows where you were in the process, it knows what you still need to, what it needs to collect. But it'd be like having unlimited time with your attorney to keep talking in with them and keep going and finding stuff. And I assume it's quite a process to find a lot of this documentation, access, you know, passwords and whatever things you need to do.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah, that's right. You know, in my own experience it was often a bit like hurry up and wait. You know, the next, the next meeting with attorney might be two, three weeks out and if I have some blocking questions on my side, I'd just be kind of waiting around. And this allows the attorney to extend the platform to me. The attorney can go off and do their work and I can just work on my, on my case. You know, in my nights and evenings when the attorney might not be available, I can be answering questions, uploading documents. And when the attorney comes back the next day, they see a real time update of everything that's been provided. They see progress in the case and show what's missing. Things like that.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: That's awesome. I mean, so I just think from like a peace of mind piece to like, of this too, like you're in a bad situation.
It's, it's scary. You don't know what's going to happen. You're, you're trying to navigate this, this, this situation anyway and to sit on things for three weeks at a time or have questions and you can't ask, get answers to them. You just become frustrated for one, as a client to the law firm, then. Yeah, it's just, it's, you're, you're distressed versus like I get to work on my case as much as I want to. If it's a Sunday or a weekend or whatever. If that's on your mind, you want to work on it and get stuff together for it, then you can, you can do that and offload a little bit. Meanwhile you're pushing things forward and the attorney can focus on strategy or the problem areas or things that you need to work on.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: Yeah, that's exactly right. That's really the bottom line. We think a lot of these things can be automated for the attorney. Right. Not the legal work, but the administrative logistical work. Those are the kinds of things that attorneys say we don't want to do that and we're buried in that stuff, emailing back and forth, trying to get this information or that information. It doesn't leave a lot of time in the day to actually focus on strategy.
[00:14:49] Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I would do, do the real good work that they want to do and what they went to school for. And you know, what's the important parts that helps people focus on that? Just kind of like with what we do here is marketing. We're interested in the strategy then than, you know, collecting Logins and doing all the admin work and setting things up. But the strategy is what you want to be paid for and what you want to focus on. But usually a lot of other stuff that you got to do before that.
[00:15:23] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right.
[00:15:25] Speaker A: That's really awesome. So right now you're mainly focused on the family space. You're a year in, roughly, it sounds like what's kind of the roadmap. And what do you kind of see as you guys go forward in this, this venture? I guess.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we are about a year in. It takes, it takes time to build a great product. One of the things I think that's sort of unique about us is I would say we're the, we're the first enterprise grade software company for family law ever, as far as I can tell. You know, the tools and software that are available for this industry, they're, they're pretty terrible. I mean, I'm hearing about them every day as I talk to attorneys and I see them and I understand why people are frustrated. You know, my background here in Silicon Valley is, is building really world class software. Right. The kinds of things that get built for major Fortune 500 companies around the world. And that's the same approach that we're taking with this platform.
So we've been highly focused over this year on building a really robust, scalable, secure system. And we're now approaching the point where we're ready to start turning it on for our design partners who have become pilot customers and a small set of customers that we're calling our charter customers.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: Charter customers. Cool.
[00:16:41] Speaker B: They'll be giving us feedback, letting us know what to add next and we'll go from there. So we'll be doing that in the next couple of weeks and then over the course of this year, we'll be opening up the platform to wider and wider swaths of law firms.
[00:16:56] Speaker A: Excellent. Well, if you're listening to the podcast, you know, could be one of the first to know about his product and, and that'll be available soon. So that's some, you know, happy to have you on the podcast to, to talk about this and to get this in front of folks that are listening. What's coming, what's available, what's possible. Sounds like, you know, you guys are put together an amazing product and yeah, I, I, I know a lot of AI companies and a lot of them reach out to come on the show or I meet them at conferences and you know, it's, there's a lot of things out there, a lot of Noise. You know, a lot of small solutions, you know, for little things here and there, which I think, you know, a lot of them have some utility and some, some purpose for sure.
But most people stay around from, like, they stay away from, like, the bigger, more robust platforms or things that, that should be out there being developed, like what you guys are doing, so. But you got the background for it, so. Pretty cool stuff.
[00:17:47] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, as you mentioned, we, we'd love to, you know, if you have interests, we'd love to talk to you. The more input we have, the better product we can make. And we love, we love hearing about the challenges that, that small firms face.
[00:18:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So are you looking for more charter clients, if you will, or folks that are interested in, to check it out or sign up?
[00:18:08] Speaker B: Absolutely, absolutely. You know, we're especially focused on, you know, attorneys who tend to be younger in age and they're, they're accustomed to working in technology and using AI. And those, those, those are the folks who tend to be most excited about what we're doing, and they'd be excellent. Our customers for us.
[00:18:27] Speaker A: Excellent. All right, we heard that here first. Yeah. Reach out. And, and Hans, what's the, you know, first off, best way to connect with you? Obviously, go to the website. Is there any preferred way to connect directly with you?
You know, social media that, that you use direct contact or email? What's, what's the best way to, to tell people to connect with you?
[00:18:48] Speaker B: I'd love to hear from you. You can contact me directly. My email is Hans, at deliberately cool.
[00:18:54] Speaker A: And then, of course, you can go to the website and take a look at what they have going on there. And I always say, you know, if you, if you didn't get that email or want a direct connection, just ask me, like, hey, he was that guy that, you know, was on the AI for family firms.
I got you. We'll. We'll make the connection. So. Well, Hans, leave with a tip.
What's, what's something that maybe we haven't covered?
Something that you feel. Be nice to share in regards to, you know, what you're doing and how you're helping firms. But what's, what's a good thing that you'd like to leave us with?
[00:19:23] Speaker B: Well, I'd just say don't get left behind. You know, I think we're in the period of transformation right now where firms that adopt these technologies are going to become more efficient, more effective, better at what they do, probably have better client satisfaction. And those that don't, you know, Honestly, their lives will remain hard and they'll struggle. And so we'd love to help you. We'd love to help you modernize your practice.
Yeah.
[00:19:49] Speaker A: I think a good way you put it in the beginning was you modernize, but it's the client experience. Right. And then I. I think when what you're doing, too, is not just the experience the clients have, which is super important. Lot of complaints, local bars and stuff like that, state bars on communication, response time and availability, it's rampant. So I. I think just improving that client experience is really important.
And today, people, they're used to Uber and dominoes and instant, you know, gratification and always having a pulse on what's happening with their order or with their Uber.
And so we just. You gotta. You gotta get on board with this stuff. Maybe you have some Runway to continue with the clients you have, but at some point, you have to be on board with this stuff. But just think about the client and the experience and the frustration that they're. They're gonna be experiencing. Pods experienced firsthand. So put yourself in that. Those shoes. I think this becomes a little more easier to say, you know what? This is time I start adopting these things and getting intelligent about AI.
[00:20:50] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. And honestly, we've made it very easy. We've automated the setup. We've made it such that you just turn this on and it starts working, which I think has been historically a big hurdle for law firms. It's a big rollout of a technology platform and integrations. We've done away with all of that.
[00:21:08] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, that I could see that being a concern. Maybe that's a good question for people to. To understand is when you're looking at anything, like, right now, I'm switching. We're switching to new payroll and healthcare and benefits provider.
Massive undertaking. Every single employee I have, you know, 50 people plus.
Hey, we're switching. Hey. You know, meetings and benefits and it's just, you know, rolling over 401k, all this, it's insane.
Not something you want to do. Or if you switch to QuickBooks or some other system platform, I think business owners in general are like, the switching cost is not worth it.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:21:44] Speaker A: So that's. I'm glad you threw that out there. That it's easy. You turn it on, boom, you're up and running. I think we'll help. People say, okay, well, maybe it's something I should look into.
[00:21:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's been a. That's been a core value since day one. Because, you know, the industry's been slow to adopt technology for that reason. It's because technology has not been easy to adopt. AI we, we can make it fairly easy.
[00:22:07] Speaker A: Excellent. Well, it's good to hear. Well, it sounds like you guys are doing a good job developing a great product. Hopefully we'll see you out there and about. You know, I'm always, I always go to shows and conferences and, and and see lawyers all over the country. So I hope to see you guys once you're up and running out and about, excited to see where you guys go.
[00:22:23] Speaker B: We'd love that. Thanks so much. Kevin.
[00:22:25] Speaker A: Yes, Hans, thank you so much for joining me on the show.
Please take a look at what they have his product and again, if you want any connection, let me know, please. And y' all have a great day. Thanks for tuning into the show as always and get out there, improve your law firm and we'll see you on the next episode. See you. Thanks again.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Bye Bye.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: Sam.
