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 bigger.
I'm Kevin. Daisy. Let's jump in.
I have Al coming here. He's in Canada, but has an interesting company, a really interesting background, as always. I like to have some unique guests on this show to share some cool insight. Al, before we get into your background, will AI replace lawyers?
[00:00:49] Speaker A: I think AI will definitely replace lawyers. The way that lawyers are today. The nature of lawyers will evolve, and I think you'll see lawyers as kind of like an AI whisperer, where they're trained highly how to use AI. AI is doing most of the work for them, but they're the real experts that are kind of the managers overseeing the file and checking things before it goes out.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Interesting, interesting stuff. So, obviously, AI is a big topic of discussion. I go to conferences and hear lawyers, and there's AI companies popping up all over the place. Of course, you have a lot of experience with that and you're familiar with that, but still a big topic. A lot of the breakouts, a lot of the sessions that you see talking about AI, the use of AI pros and cons and fears and issues with AI. So it's not going to be a topic that goes anywhere anytime soon, probably. But excited to dive in, obviously, to learn more about your business and your background and lots of things we can talk about here today. So, but first, you know, introduce yourself, tell us your, you know, your. Your origin story, if you will, and we'll get into some other cool things as we go through the episode here and chat. So, sure.
[00:01:58] Speaker A: So my name's Al Vijay. I'm the CEO of Caseway. My background is I was in the military for seven years. I went away on operation, and I got shot in the leg. Up until that point, all I wanted to do was go Special Forces, basically the Canadian version of the Navy SEALs, which is called JTF2. That was my only goal in life. And after I got shot, I was given a disability percentage that was above the threshold that allows you to stay in the military, which means you automatically medically release. And I met with someone and they were like, well, we'll pay for your school. You know, what do you want to do with your life? And I was like, well, I have no idea. You know, again, all I wanted to do is, you know, go to war and, you know, get in combat situations. You know, I did a degree in statistics, and then I did what a lot of people end up doing. They go to law school and they don't know what they want to do next. And you know, I did well in law school, but I certainly didn't love it. You know, reading 100 pages a night of case law from the 1800s isn't exactly the most exciting thing. And it didn't feel overly relevant either. And that was in the uk. And when I came back to Canada, I was looking for, you know, internship articling positions and stuff like that. And I actually got a job as a business development manager at a family law firm. And I ended up growing the revenue from 2 to 5 million dollars roughly. And I just fell more and more in love with business and less and less in love with law. And that just kind of continued as I moved forward with my career.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's for one, a very unique background. Thank you for your service there in Canada. And so you had a goal, you know, that your, your mind was on and that was to be in that special forces. Obviously you had a major change that derailed that. But you know, given that background, the military, you know, sounds like you have the discipline and a lot of things you probably learned through that process and applying that to business as well. So, I mean, Al can really bring a lot to the discussion here with raising capital equity splits has experience that I think it just makes him unique and in the space. And so, you know, I want to fast forward so, you know, practicing law to doing digital marketing, to loving the business side. I know a lot of lawyers that love the business side and make that decision and become business owners. And I always talk about that as, do you want to be a lawyer? Do you want to run a business? And some just choose to be in the middle and do both, but the ones that really just outperform the others typically choose to be the business owner. And that's pretty unique. So. But I want to talk more about, you know, Caseway itself too, and what that is and how that helps law firms and kind of what the future looks like there and, you know, pick up some lessons along the way.
[00:04:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, you asked me about equity splits, so something that was really interesting since a lot of your listeners are, you know, business minded lawyers, was that we actually set up a structure to raise capital for a law firm and we were one of the few ones to do that in Canada. And I actually raised one and a half million dollars for this law firm. And we did that through a management structure that owned essentially the law corp. And we set up this, this compliant thing with, you know, the law society's Bar associations. And that was a really, that was again another step towards, you know, raising capital and, and that sort of thing. But the real problem with being a business owner in law is that you always have the regulators over your head. And a lot of the business owners are just so terrified to do anything innovative. You know, they want to take that steps, but they're so afraid of getting their hands slapped. And that was another reason where, you know, I wanted to be in the legal space, but I didn't. I thought the only way to change law was to be outside of law looking in, because otherwise they're always dangling your license over your head and saying like, hey, don't step out of line or I'll smack you, you know, and that's just the worst. So after, after I left the law firm, I actually, I went down to Clio Con in San Diego and I told a bunch of the, the Clio people, I want to get out of the legal space or, you know, practicing law and I want to do something illegal tech. Because I just noticed that so many of the legal tech people were so happy and so many people at the family law firm that I worked out were so depressed and I was like, well, how do I be more like you guys? And I started learning about tech. I started learning, I mean, this is before AI. This is like three years before, you know, AI became popular at least. And my first answer was to build the avo, which is obviously very popular in the States, but to build it in the UK and Canada. And we grew it to 200,000 monthly uniques. We grew it to I think over 20,000 lawyer reviews. But the problem there was that it's hard to sell to lawyers when they have a negative review on your website because they always try and barter with you or they get angry with you and they see you as kind of like an adversarial, you know, party or something like that. And it sucks, right, because it's like, well, you also have five positive reviews and you have one negative review. So overall that's pretty good. They're like, no, no, like all my negative reviews are false. They're all from fake people. You know, it's like, oh, you know, it's really hard.
So we left that up that, that that entity is called Clearway. And that's kind of like my give back to the community sort of thing. But you know, it's hard to raise capital for a two sided marketplace as well because you have to raise 10 to 20 million dollars. And I looked at a Y Combinator chart. And it was like the number of unicorns that exist. And almost all of them were SaaS companies. And I was like, well, that's, you know, that's unfortunate for us because we're a marketplace so we might have to go in that direction. And then ChatGPT came out, you know, popular in January 2023, and then all the investor interest went towards SaaS B2B AI. You know, you had to do these things. And I was like, okay, you know, it's time for, you know, another pivot. And that was what ultimately became Caseway in the future.
[00:07:48] 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. 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 app 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. That's my last name. D A I S E Y. So go check them out and let's get back to the show. And so Caseway, I want to dive into, you know, again, how, what the program is and how it helps lawyers. And also you, you had a lawsuit in the first month, I think when.
[00:09:04] Speaker A: You started starting it off right.
[00:09:06] Speaker B: So that's fun. You always got the lawsuits behind you, so that means you're doing something right.
[00:09:10] Speaker A: Yeah, gotta piss someone off, I guess. If you're innovating, you can't innovate in a box, they say.
Yeah, so I mean, that's the nature of the AI space. I think OpenAI has like 300 lawsuits against them or something right now. And the real issue is that no one knows what the laws are because the courts haven't caught up. And that's common. I mean, if we go back to 1995, the Internet just came out and Google and Bing were being sued all the time because people didn't want to be on their platform. That's hilarious now because people spend so much money on SEO and pay Per click ads, you know, trying to get those spots. But everyone was like, you're taking my images, you're taking my website and you're making money off it. This is terrible. Stop it. Google Bing won those lawsuits. Yahoo moved forward a little bit. Avvo got sued a lot as well when they started using images. I think they got sued three times in their first few months and you know, they won all those lawsuits too. And so the nature of the AI space, when we started we were already thinking about it and we were like, well, what would a judge decide five years from now? And my answer when I did the research was that, you know, copyright is going to be protected. So if you create, you know, an article, if you create blogs, if you create, you know, these videos, that's your work product. And no one else should, you know, be able to use it without, you know, compensation. But things like court decisions are paid for by the taxpayers and it's created by a judge. And even though that goes down the line and there's different entities that benefit from it, Thompson, Reuters, LexisNexis, Hanley, whatever, they don't own that data and they'll never own that data. Now. They can build work products on top of that, practice guides, all that kind of thing. But that is absolutely what I believe the courts would say. And I think we just got the first decision back and it was the Ross AI Thomson Reuters case. And essentially the judge was saying, you can't use the practice notes, you can't use any of the work product. But the underlying court decisions are safe and we've only always used the court decisions, the raw data. And that's what the AI likes as well. You know, it just likes raw data. It's not like a human, where it wants to read through some beautifully constructed headlines and all that stuff, a machine. So we, our answer to the lawsuit is that, you know, if you're, if you're not liable or if you're, you know, an innocent party, whatever you want to say, we just opened our database to them, to the plaintiff and we're like, you can hire a third party. You know, it's a hundred million court decisions, so you're not going to be able to go through it with your own eyes. But hire a third party, you know, forensic team and see if you find any of your work product in there. And they went through it and they didn't find anything. So I was pretty proud with how we dealt with the lawsuit and I also blew it up in the media. So I think we got 30 media articles when it came out. I send it to every journalist and I put out a bunch of controversial quotes, just basically talking about the plaintiff. And you know, that goes against the traditional legal advice you get where it's like, don't say anything, say this is before the courts, you know, we're not making a comment. But I was like, screw that, you know, like, we didn't do anything wrong. I'm not going to say no comment. I'm going to say, these guys are idiots. You know, like, that's how I feel. That's my position. People don't have to agree with it, but that's what I'm saying.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: Being different, I like it. So. So if I'm a lawyer right now, listening, I own a law firm. How's K Sway help me. What does the actual product do for you?
[00:12:23] Speaker A: So we started with the low hanging fruit. The idea in tech is the minimum viable product, which means you aren't trying to build the most exciting thing in the world, just something that works. And basically what we did was we got, I think 3 million court decisions, we put it into our database and we started building search algorithms on top of that. And I gave it to about a hundred lawyers I know. And I was like, is this useful? And basically it could go through court decisions and within seconds it could find answers. Now, a way that it was different at that time, this is eight months ago, was that LexisNexis and Thomson Reuters did a really good job with research and practice guides and all that kind of thing, but it wasn't conversational the way that ours was. And then on the flip side, ChatGPT is conversational, but it's not credible because it pulls in information from the entire Internet. Reddit, blogs, all that sort of thing. And that's where the hallucinations come in, is that it just has way too much data, has trillions of data points and it will confuse things. The other thing is that it's trained to appease you. So you'll notice that ChatGPT doesn't normally tell you, I'm sorry, I don't know, it just gives us its, you know, its best go. That's okay if you're doing a recipe or you want a travel plan. Maybe it wasn't a hundred percent, maybe it wasn't perfect, but it was pretty good. If you're doing that with court decisions and you come up with something that's pretty realistic, that doesn't work because the judge is like, well, this decision doesn't exist. This isn't what the judge actually said, you're screwed.
So one thing that we did was we trained our AI to say, I don't know which was very valuable to only consider court decisions, nothing outside of that. So if a judge didn't write it, our AI didn't say it. And then to put all the sources next to it, our AI responds. And then it says, this is where I found the. I found it in the court decision. And then if that's the same thing, then you're good to go. And that was our first version of Casework.
[00:14:09] Speaker B: What's the future 4K sway? And what's that look like? What's the next step for you guys?
[00:14:14] Speaker A: So we're approaching 3,000 users for our first act, which is that legal research.
And so that's gone very well. We started on the contract AI space, but we just saw it was too competitive. It seems like every AI company is going into reviewing contracts with AI. So we're like, I don't know that we want to jump in that space, but we found a hole that no one is doing. We call it the bespoke agent. And that's where a law firm can populate our database with their own documents. So they can either choose to use the 100 million court decisions or their own documents. And to provide an example, an immigration law firm could upload thousands of immigration applications that they've done successfully in the past into our database. And then every time they ask a question, it will create that document in the exact wording, format, structure, legal basis, whatever, that they've done it in the past. And that takes you away from generic AIs like ChatGPT to something that's super specific. We are going to go live with that very soon. We're just working on some privacy stuff because it's the first time that we're actually hosting data that isn't public. So we're making sure that we're doing, you know, cybersecurity pen tests, we're getting checks, we're working with like, all the compliance providers, and we're also working with SharePoint and Google Drive to just see if they'll host it for us. And then we can add the AI on top of that and run inference on those documents. So we're playing around with that.
[00:15:36] Speaker B: And so within that. So, yeah, it's like you're. You're. Yeah, you can go pull from court decisions or you can basically have your own. Your own database, if you will, of how you've done things and the way you've Done it and it can build from that as well. Can it kind of do both as.
[00:15:54] Speaker A: Well or you could do both for sure. But, you know, if you're confident that you, you have done it right in the past, you know, like you've done the separation agreement thousands of times, you want it just like this. Don't consider the court decisions because it's going to alter it. If you're doing something that you've never done before, only use the court decisions because you don't have any templates. And yeah, you can, you can use both too, if you want. Whatever you want to do.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: That's pretty cool stuff. What is, you know, as far as marketing and coming out, you know, some of these folks, like, what has been, you know, what's been your plan there and what's been working well for you as far as getting your name out there?
Are you guys going to be at conferences? Like, what's, what's the plan and what's that look like for you guys?
[00:16:34] Speaker A: I hate conferences. I just, I don't enjoy them personally. I believe in the Internet. I, you know, things like SEO. I believe in pay per click. I believe in podcasts. Of course, anytime there's anything that I can jump into the media and say something truthful and controversial about, I'll do it. Like, when we got sued, I sent it to 30 journalists. Most people wouldn't do that, but they appreciated it because I got two of my quotes in there because they were like, you came to us instead of hiding under a rock and hoping that no one would find this lawsuit. So people appreciate that sort of thing. We also have a very unique plan for the states. So we realized that there's not one public website that you can go to pull every court decision in the states. We have it in Canada, not in the states. I've asked over 50 lawyers and it doesn't exist.
LexisNexis and Thompson. Reuters has it behind a paywall, essentially. But there should be a free version of this. So what we're going to do is we're going to add a whole all 100 million court decisions to a public website that's for free in the States. And then we're going to make it indexable as well by search engines, which is going to be a bit of a shitstorm. But we're also going to allow people to request that we initialize or redact certain information so that if it is a family matter and suddenly, you know, someone looks up your name or something and something from the past comes up you know, we'll be fair about that. We don't want to, you know, we'll ruffle some feathers, but we're not trying to be unjust. And we have run the numbers and we believe that's going to bring 20 million people to the free version of our website every single month. And basically from there we'll have banners and pop ups that are like, hey, are you enjoying our free service? If you're tired of manually reading through, you know, 100 pages of court decisions, why don't you try Caseway seven day free trial, no credit card, just try it. And if any percentage of that converts to a paid user will break out, you know, 1 million annual income very soon.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: That's right. That's really cool right there. So, so basically, you know, these courses are public information already, but they're just not accessible in one source. One, one area.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Interesting.
[00:18:32] Speaker A: And they're not indexable by search engines either.
[00:18:34] Speaker B: Interesting. So yeah, by, by providing that, putting that together, you're, that's your, that's your ticket to all the traffic, to all the eyeballs people searching for it. Interesting. Yeah, I mean I'm all about digital, you know, because what we do so. And a lot of law firms, old school tactics like law firms will do is they'll make like a glossary of legal, like a legal index or glossary on their website to try to get search traffic, which is an old way to do things. But that's their, their effort of providing a resource of legal information and then gaining traffic for it. In their case, it doesn't work as well because they're a law firm that needs clientele in that certain geographic area and it's usually not the traffic they're getting.
[00:19:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, you can't do big scale things like this again because like we're looking for customers across the state. So I don't care if you're in Alaska, I don't care if you're in California, I don't care if it's a family law matter, immigration, you know, if there's a court decision about it, which there will be, you know, Case way is the place to end up. So I'm really looking forward to that. I'm sure there's probably going to be some lawsuits from some companies I've never heard of before or entities or like, I don't know, I just, I can guarantee you it's going to happen. But you know, embrace the chaos. You know, this is what I live for.
[00:19:46] Speaker B: I love it. I think it's it's kind of playing into your hand, right? It's like part of your marketing plan is to get exposure and get sued.
[00:19:55] Speaker A: Blow it up, sued a couple times.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: So that's the marketing message here. If you want to really market, you know, get yourself sued. Pissing people off. I was just on with. I was just recording a podcast a second before this with a PI guy out of Louisiana, and like, I guess there's like some kind of lawsuits going on right now down there with. There's basically. There's so many billboards for these PI firms in a certain condensed area that they're. They're basically trying to cut.
Cut them back to be like, you know, you can't advertise this much in this amount of space.
So you got the billboard companies that are like, let's go. But then I think it's big insurance companies that are fighting to be like, hey, this is, you know, not appropriate to be advertising this much in this one space. So I don't know how that's going to go down, but it's got attention.
[00:20:45] Speaker A: So that's an interesting case. Especially if the insurance are, you know, the ones that are pushing for less exposure for PI attorneys. That's kind of hypocritical, I think.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: I totally agree. Yeah. So that's very. I didn't know much about it, and I still don't, but I just heard it a minute ago. And in some of these areas, like South Florida or Louisiana or Michigan, I mean, it's like, Bill, you know, that's a personal education. Every billboard, you know, so I can see, like a city or town being like, hey, we need to have, like, billboards for local attractions and other things, not just personal entry.
But I guess, you know, it's a, you know, capitalism. So, you know, come to our city.
[00:21:26] Speaker A: It's the best for lawsuits. Get. Get hit by a car here.
[00:21:29] Speaker B: You get hit by a car anywhere, we're going to help you out.
[00:21:32] Speaker A: Yeah, this is the place to do it.
[00:21:35] Speaker B: It's just that it's interesting, though. I mean, I would see it more being like a, you know, like a city ordinance or like a. You know, just like, if you. If you were to build a building, it has a look a certain way in certain areas of its city. They control that.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:21:50] Speaker B: I don't know. Be interesting to see what happens with some of this stuff. But I think it's an awesome plan you have. I'm interested to see where it goes.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm sure you'll read about it in the news and we'll stay in contact and all that. You know, just, just, just stay up to date with the lawsuits and you'll stay up to date with me.
[00:22:07] Speaker B: I'll be like that guy getting handcuffed there. I knew that guy. That's good.
[00:22:11] Speaker A: Hopefully not that I don't cross the criminal line. So I met him. We're right up to that line, but not, not across it.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: Well, Al. Wanna call him? Call him Al. I asked him Alistair, but he goes by Alice. Well, been an interesting conversation. You've done a lot of things. Your, your journey has been interesting so far and obviously within the business realm, some of the things that you've already done, raised money, capital, marketing. All these things make you pretty unique. So folks, reach out, connect with them, follow him. Check out Caseway. What's the best way for folks to stay in contact with you or, or connect with you?
[00:22:42] Speaker A: LinkedIn's good. You can also follow Attorney Proms. It's a meme account for lawyers and it has almost 300,000 followers. So if you, if you'd rather look at funny memes than my face, then that's a good way to do it, which is totally understandable.
[00:22:55] Speaker B: Awesome. What is, what's the account? Is that on Instagram?
[00:22:58] Speaker A: Yeah, attorney problems.
[00:22:59] Speaker B: Attorney problems. Nice. I'm going to do it right now while we're, while we're recording people.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: You're that excited?
[00:23:06] Speaker B: That's hilarious. Yeah. And you guys, you got a huge following. That's awesome.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: Yeah, we're moving to the, to the video memes soon because that's, that's where a lot of it's going now, so away from the pictures and the video memes. I just have to figure out how to do that. But it's so much better.
[00:23:19] Speaker B: And so just a sidebar, like, so you start an Instagram account.
You got almost 300,000 followers on there. I just looked at it, how long you've had that account and, and what was how, how were you successful at getting that many followers? Obviously it's a meme account, but yeah.
[00:23:36] Speaker A: I have a partner in that. I'll mention that first. He's been a big part of it. He's a PI lawyer in, in Los Angeles. But basically the strategy was that I did the morning, or, sorry, he did the morning. I do the night post. So you try and post twice a day, try and make the memes funny. I mean, it's. Make it so that people share them, people engage with it. It's definitely not rocket science, but, you know, just being consistent, funny and Putting out stuff that people want to follow. I mean, that's really.
There's no deep answer. Quality content.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: That's cool though. I'm going to just ask because, you know, so many people are trying to be Instagram famous and have an account and a following, and I think it's hard for a lawyer to just do that as a lawyer and be, you know, just talking about the law. But some have done it, some have been very successful at it. And that's cool to see. So, yeah, you're just successful in a lot of areas. So pretty cool stuff.
And yeah, interesting to see how it goes for you. I'll be tracking you. Won't see you at conferences, although I like going to conferences. I don't get a booth. I don't do signs and all that. I just go have walk around, meet people.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: And that's the best way and.
[00:24:41] Speaker B: And that's the best way to do it for me. So maybe in the future, but for the most part, you'll see me at conferences hanging out with people, most of my guests on this show.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: So yeah, I'll look forward to it.
[00:24:52] Speaker B: Cool, dude. Hey, Al, thanks so much. Stay on with me while this uploads for everyone else listening. Thanks for tuning in. Check Al out. Go follow him. Check out Caseway and follow his story and hopefully he'll have a nice free resource for you to use here soon. So I'll be interested to see how that goes.
[00:25:10] Speaker A: Thanks for having me on.
[00:25:11] Speaker B: Yes, sir. All right, everyone, thank you for tuning in. Get out there, grow your law firms, be different and stand out. We'll see you soon.
