The Future of Law Firms in the AI Era

[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. All right, what's up, everyone? We're recording, and I got a great friend of mine here, a go getter, a hustler, a great guy. Got to know him through the podcast a few years ago, and also I've gotten to meet him in person at National Trial Lawyers in Miami this past. This year, actually, and just always like, watching him and what he's doing and a lot of other lawyers do as well. Uh, John Barry, welcome to the show today. [00:00:57] Speaker A: Thanks so much for having me again, Kevin. [00:00:59] Speaker B: Yeah, excited to have you here. We think the same. You know, you're. You're applying things to your business, growing your firm. You're thinking about your attorneys, you're thinking about the client. And so I'm excited today to kind of dive into some of the things you're up to and your perspective on those things. We talked a little bit backstage, everyone, so we kind of have a idea of where we're going to go with this conversation. So I'm excited about that. But I always do, like, you know, have my guests kind of give them a little. Give us a little background. If you don't know John and you own a law firm, you're under a rock somewhere maybe, but check his stuff out. You got to check out his podcast as well. But, John, give us a little, little quick, you know, background of who you are and about your firm. [00:01:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm John Barry. Barry Law. We are the American Veterans Injury Law Firm. So we practice primarily in veterans disability appeals and personal injury cases. We've got about 200 employees. We have clients in all 50 states. Under the federal administrative exception, we can represent veterans in all 50 states. Uh, and so it's, it, you know, it's been an honor to represent our nation's heroes. It started off with my father, a Vietnam veteran who came back from Vietnam and started helping a lot of veterans. Pro bono laws changed, allowed us to be compensated for that work, and we have expanded to do that. And I'm very proud of our. Our team. We're about 30% veteran lawyers, leadership team members, and even entry level team members. We are looking for that warrior ethos. So we love to hire veterans. And, you know, it doesn't have to necessarily be a veteran, a veteran, a college athlete, even a farm kid, someone with a great work ethic who done something that's mattered and performed on a team that's who we recruit and we're picky, you know, and we hold people to high standards. And if you want to come here, you're going to get even better or you're not going to stay here for long. [00:02:36] Speaker B: I love it. That's awesome. I love the, just the mentality there and the work ethic and the culture. Super important, you know, culture in your firm. And, you know, nothing really beats that. I mean, they, they protect and people from coming into that. Your company that don't fit, right, they can sniff them out in two seconds. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially at your firm. [00:02:58] Speaker A: Right. And the key is, right, getting rid of them in that amount of time too. Because, you know, if someone's not a good fit, you're usually doing them a disservice, they're not performing. And everybody you hire is either an upgrade or a downgrade. And so when you hire someone who's not at that top standard and then the team has to deal with them. By the time you as the leader find out, you've already inflicted enough pain on your team and you've already, your clients have suffered, your performance has suffered, your bottom line has suffered. And so you need to assess it immediately and do the right thing as a leader. And look, we live by our core values. I think most people, they get all cheery and happy with core values, but that's not the way to lead when you have core values. I love to do this in my quarterly meetings, you know, where we, where we talk to, hey, this is the state of the organization. We take that from eos. I'll get in there and say, here are some really tough decisions and this is how we use the core values to make those decisions. And, you know, we still give awards to employees who go above and beyond. And we'll give a core value award. One employee will get an award for each core value every quarter. But I think by really bringing it home, I've said, look, these are some of the toughest decisions we made this quarter. And look, it takes some vulnerability and some trust, right? Because you want to hear about Barry Law's greatest screw ups of the quarter. Come to our quarterly meeting. Right? But I'm going to tell you how we solve the problem and what core values we use to solve the problem. And some of times, you know, yeah, sometimes people leave and they're like, oh man, you threw me under the bus. I'm like, well, pain is a teaching tool. But, you know, this is a cheat. This may have been an expensive lesson for you. It may have hurt Your pride, it may have hurt your credibility, but everybody else learned from it. And if you know, hey, look, this is what it's all about. We have to be willing to make mistakes, admit our mistakes, and then use our core values to fix those mistakes. [00:04:34] Speaker B: Absolutely. Love it. You know, I've talked about our core values quite a bit in our process here. We live by them daily. We give out points daily across the whole company, you know, 50 some employees. And then we do quarterly awards, monthly bonuses, all tied to core values, and then annual reviews all tied to core values. Higher and fire and everything. So what we don't do, I'm going to go tell my business partner. This is how you've used the core values and led up to them for different situations. I love that. That's awesome. Huge takeaway. [00:05:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Situational leadership, you know, teach them, hey, this was the situation. Because here's the deal, right? Everybody's going to have their narrative of what happened. And everybody knows when things go bad. I mean, you know, 200 people, not everybody's to know, but a lot of people are that are affected are going to know. And then you get to control the narrative. Well, how did we fit what happened and how do we fix the problem? And if we don't, you know, if we're not very open and transparent, people are going to come up with their own stories about why we made the decisions we made. So I, I found it's just better to be open about it and own it. [00:05:28] Speaker B: Yeah. One of our core values here is transparency. So it's. That's a tough one for people to really live up to and to come out with things that they normally don't feel that like they want to talk about. And so we're having our all hands on meeting tomorrow, actually, after this recording with all 53 folks and. Yeah, but I think we most go all the positive spins and cheerful things around the core values and happy go lucky. And we don't really bring in some of the, hey, these are some of the fall downs or the bad things that may happen this year, but here's where our core values came in to save the day. And we stuck to our guns. [00:05:58] Speaker A: Absolutely. [00:05:59] Speaker B: Yeah. Love it. Well, we're not here to talk about core values on the show, but I'm sure we could all day. But I asked John at the beginning, I was like, hey, like, what's, what's something you're really excited about right now? And what's something that's kind of a major change within your business? And so he started Talking about AI, no surprise. But he has a different perspective on it and some of the things he was saying, they make sense a hundred percent and we're doing the same thing here. And so I just want to kind of talk about what John mentioned to me earlier and how he's using AI and rolling into the business and so yeah, let's, if you don't mind, we'll pivot over to what you were talking about and we'll just kind of go down the rabbit hole of that process. So tell me what you're up to. Foreign 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, clarity and growth strategies. So if you're looking to grow your law firm and not do it alone, please consider joining the group. Bots are limited so I ask for anyone to reach out to me directly through LinkedIn and with the set of a one on one call to make sure it's a fit. Now back to the show. [00:07:15] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. So I should probably give you some background. So I really got interested in using AI to make a better practice and not in the way that you're hearing from a lot of people. I was in a group of veteran CEOs last. Not last. Yeah, in 2024. And there's a guy named France Huang now he owns a law fluid law firm when he's one of the co owners in Washington D.C. it's an intellectual property law firm, about 30 lawyers. France was also, he was a West Point graduate, number two in his class and he was one of George Bush's lawyers. So this guy, I mean he's just a star but he's been, he's had an AI company since 2018. He was the keynote speaker at this amazing event in Dallas and I went up to him afterwards. Like I said, we must be the only two Ranger qualified lawyers in this room. He laughed about that because we were both in the military, we were not lawyers. And so he was a military police officer then had a stint in this special forces. And I wasn't started off as an infantry officer so we never served as lawyers. But when we talked about his company, it just blew me away. And he's, he would give the whiffyo, you know, we're, it's over, you know, but it's only over, you know, it's just the next chapter doesn't have to be the end of the book, but he would go through the failure Stories. And so I had a great conversation with him about that and I was like, wow. And he. And I started asking, well, how are you using AI in your firm? And are you using, you know, Thomson Reuters, Westlaw had a product. And I said, what do you think about this? And. And we started talking and he said, well, I have my company, it's called Boodlebox AI. B O O D L E box AI is like, you should check it out. And so I signed up my marketing team just to start playing with it. And then we realized that the power this thing had. And of course, like I said, I'm talking to him because are you using these products for your law firm? He's like, well, I'm using these bots and these products, but not these, you know, they're not doing any of our work product, their work product yet. But he's like, but you can use them for the support functions. So. And he's like, look, we provide A plus work at my law firm. You know, the bots can do B minus. So, so. And he's like, you know, it's going to improve, but it's not there yet, so we're not going to, you know, so I would. So I really had a lot of conversations with him about that and he was always so generous with his time. And then as I started thinking about our own operations and what we could do, I really started to lean into it because we run into problems. You know, for instance, it's summer. I want our lawyers to take vacations. I want them to come back and be recharged. But when a lawyer is the only person who is really knowledgeable on the case, you know, maybe a lawyer, a paralegal and a legal assistant, or what happens when that lawyer's on vacation and the client calls in and they have an attorney level question? The paralegal might not be qualified to answer that question. Now you could probably send it to another attorney who really doesn't know what's going on, but that's probably going to take some time for that attorney to get up to speed. So we were thinking about that. We were also thinking about accountability, which was one of our core values, and really determining, well, how are we holding people accountable at every positional level. If our clients want something, how can we be hyper responsive to them? And so we are looking now at automated task management where we are dictating that lawyers will do lawyer level work. And you know, paralegals will do paralegal level work, case managers, case manager work, legal assistants will do legal assistant work. And so it's really, instead of attaching, you know, and for the law firm owners are listening to this, I mean, how scary is it when you have that, that rebellion, that coup within your firm where two or three lawyers are going to leave, they're going to try to take all the cases with you, with them, right? If we set up automated, automated task management, the lawyers are getting that, they're getting tasks, but everybody's getting a piece. Now, once again, once something goes to trial, you know, where you're in serious litigation, things are going, right? It's different. But most cases, when they start off, do not start off at that point. So like I said, we're not trying to solve the 100% problem. We're trying to solve the 80% problem, right? Which is that for most cases, like I said, unless you're getting ready to start that trial, you're going to be not only much more effective, but much more efficient. And your client's going to get a lot better service if you can control the task flow. And unfortunately, in firms where I've seen where there's not task flow, there's usually malpractice claims. You know, it's not just having deadline chains and stuff like that. It's really understanding what tasks need to be resolved at what level. And once you figure that out, then you can, you can, you can automate that. And like I said, there's some great AI tools to make that happen. And so we are, we are, we're working through that process. But once again, when you use AI, there must be a human in the loop. I keep seeing all these stories about lawyers submitting, you know, what kind of a crappy lawyer doesn't check the sites? I mean, come on, even in law school, right, we would write, you know, whether you had to go to the blue book, you'd have to check the sites. People in law review would do this thing called spading where they'd go in there and make sure the sites were correct. And it's just like the laziness of it all. And I get it, right? I mean, there's time constraints and clients want value for their money. I totally get that. But one of the reasons why we really, we decided, you know, instead of running away from it, let's lean into it and keep those humans in the loop to make sure that this kind of stuff doesn't happen. Because if you have accountability and you have visibility, that stuff doesn't happen. And when it does happen, you're going to spot it right away and fix it so it doesn't happen. You know, scale. And that's the scary thing. When you start growing your organization, you realize like a mistake that happens once, how often does it happen? No, usually someone screws something up and it keeps getting screwed up until you find it and fix it. So we looked at it from, from that perspective, like how do we provide the best. We want our lawyers to become even better lawyers, as I said in the beginning. So we want them to work on what is the highest and best use of their time, which is doing the high level legal work. And what we learned in law school was that you as the lawyer are responsible to ensure that that work gets done and it gets done properly. That doesn't mean you're responsible for doing the work in all cases. And quite frankly, sometimes it's more cost effective for the client if someone else does it. And not all questions are lawyer questions. Several questions that come in can be answered by legal assistants and paralegals. But when it is a lawyer level question, right, where it's about settling a case, you better make sure that that gets to a lawyer and that lawyer is prompted in the response. And so if you, if you're not managing those tasks, look, we've all had a lawyers that like these people are, raise our practice to the next level. We hire them and life is good. But we've also had some lawyers that turn out to be C lawyers or they were a lawyers and then through personal struggle, whatever it may be, they may not be, you know, performing at that level anymore. And so we want to be able to see that, right? We want to provide a level performance every single time. And to do that, we've got, we've got to be able to manage those tasks. We've got to be able to see everything. And by doing that, we're really letting the sunshine in. Now will there be, you know, when that sunshine comes in, we're going to see who's productive, who's performing in ways that we never have before. And is that going to drive some people out? [00:13:37] Speaker B: Probably. [00:13:37] Speaker A: There will probably be some low accountability people that will say, this isn't for me. I want absolute control and this, this and this. But I'm like, look, if I'm doing the right thing, I don't care who's looking over my shoulder. Look, if you're a leader in your organization, people are watching what you do every single day, regardless of what you say. So the point is, I don't mind being watched. You know, hey, because in the end. Like, I want someone to look at everything I submit. I want my briefs to be peer reviewed. I want, you know, my peers and other people in my organization to be involved and to know what's going on because, hey, I may drop the ball. I'm not perfect. I have a life too. And, you know, I appreciate it when I have a team that's one of our core values. Warrior ethos. You know, it's not Russell Crowe in a loincloth, although nobody wants to see that anymore. He's gotten a little bit bigger. But, you know, it's not that, right? It's warrior ethos. Is a, is a, is a four man stack. Kicking in the door, clearing the room together, helping your buddy up. But everybody gets knocked down alone, but we get up as a team. And so reaching out that hand, helping that team member up, right? So for me, it's like, why wouldn't you as a lawyer want complete transparency in all your files and cases? To have peer review, to have help and, and have someone monitoring? I mean, look, we are a meritocracy. Like, you know, we, we use metrics, we're measuring people against other, you know, and look like that's the way the world works, right? The world is not about, you know, it doesn't matter. You've been here for 30 years. If someone's only been here for 10 years and they're better than you, they're better than you, Results matter. Nobody cares that you got result. Nobody cares that you got help from somebody else. They care about the result. Right. Your client doesn't care that two other attorneys helped you. The client only cares that you got them the maximum settlement or you got the huge verdict and collected it. That's all the client cares about. So it doesn't matter if other lawyers are supervising your work product. They're helping you out. Good. Nobody cares who helped you along the way. They only care whether you made it or you didn't. And like, you can look at my journey and I could tell you, here are the top five heroes who helped me. Here's another five people who gave me terrible advice, betrayed me or whatever. And in the end, you don't care. You say, either John Barry has achieved the level of success that he wants, and Barry Law is a great place to work, and we do great things for clients or we don't. We either get results or we don't. And it doesn't matter who supervised you or who helped you. And so with automated task management, you know, we're really saying, hey, Put your ego aside, right? Let's be adults about this and think we are stronger together, we're smarter together, we get better results together. And we all need accountability. We all fall short from time to time. We are human. We all fail. And so to have somebody who's, who's to understand that all your actions are watched, are recorded and you know, are transparent, it works out well. Because then when we grade lawyers at the end, because we force rank our lawyers, you'll know, you come to Barry Law, you will know whether you are lawyer number one or you are lawyer number 53. [00:16:23] Speaker B: Wow, you're going to know. That's so powerful. I mean, we're doing very similar things here. And it's again, it's helping the client, it's getting better results. That's what's matters. And so, and lawyers are, they're not going to be available all the time. Clients are going to have questions, low level questions. They're going to want information and, you know, shouldn't rely on that one lawyer to, like you were telling me earlier, if that lawyer has a whole book of cases, right, by themselves and they're on vacation for a month or they're sick or they're out, where does that responsibility fall, right? And so at the end of the day, a client doesn't care that that lawyer is not there. I got questions, I need answers, right? We record like here for like sales calls. We use an AI software now. It records and say you were doing a sales call, it will say how you did, where you did well, where you sucked, what you forgot, what you need to improve on, you talk too much, whatever. And my whole team looks at that and can see, you know, what was done and what was done wrong. Same with client meetings and things like that. So I absolutely love kind of the, the way you're utilizing it and applying it. I think most of what I hear out there is like, well, we're just using it for a chatbot or we're just using it for this, that. But really taking it to the next level and integrating into your task management, I've not really heard before. So what, what platform are you using? Or is it multiple to make that happen? [00:17:41] Speaker A: We're using multiple platforms. And I don't, I don't want to misspeak. My chief information officer is a, he's also a former Army Ranger. Army Ranger qualified guy. He was a tanker and armor guy, an airborne, great guy. Airborne, okay. Yeah. So there you go. Airborne all the way. Yeah. Beautiful now, great guy. And so we're we're working through the technology, but there are all these pieces that he's putting together. And once again, this is more about the management and the leadership piece of it. And I love, I know the platform that you're talking about for the sales team. We use it with our sales team. And here's the great thing. For those leaders who do not have the intestinal fortitude or just do not like conflict, hey, I'm not telling you you messed up the sales call. Chad GP is telling you you messed or, you know, whatever the. The platform is saying, you mess it up. It's clear as day. [00:18:25] Speaker B: It tells. [00:18:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:18:26] Speaker B: And yeah, I do it with myself and I look at and go, oh, yeah, yeah. And it gives you a suggestion. Hey, next time you could say, hey, like, I have a mastermind. I had a mastermind call and I had some, some members go off on a tangent about hiring VAs or something like that. And so it was like, you should have said, hey, guys, we can take this offline. The conversation right now for this meeting is about this. So just never thought about it until I got prompted to, to do it. And that's all AI telling me that it's helpful. [00:18:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And I think, you know, that's the thing is I think humans have a tendency to take feedback personally. Feedback is a gift and you should never take it personally. But if it's coming from a, like I said, if it's coming from your, your AI, then it's a little bit. Someone can say, well, that's just, you know, it's all algorithmic. It's all based on, you know, it's based on numbers and it's figuring out that this is, it's. It's doing its calculation. It doesn't like me or not like me. It's just doing what it's doing. So even if you disagree with it, you can't take it personal because it, it's all, it's all being done by a machine, not a person. No one is judging you. And you know, you didn't hurt anybody's. It's not here to hurt your feelings. It not judging you. Just, you know, just listen to the feedback. Take it as a gift. Don't take it personally. So that's what I really like about some of that AI feedback is that I think people that are afraid to give. I mean, I love, I love it when our meetings get bloody and people fight for what they believe in and you know, because we're going to walk out as a unified team, but that Being said, most people in our organization are not on the leadership team and there are people who have not, you know, yet had we developed leaders. But you know, in their, in their journey, some of these leaders are relatively green and they haven't had the experience, so they don't know what it's like to give that feedback. And it's, I think it's a good, I think it's a good tool because you can, you can have that tool adjust itself to be kinder in giving the feedback. That's what I like too, you know. Now some people, because nobody look, everybody's different for me. Give me a hard punch in the face. I love that. I mean, but for some people, it's like, you know, give me a gentle, you know, a gentle nudge and be nice to me about, you know, that, hey, I made, I can do better. Whereas me like, hey, John, you fucked up. You know what? You failed. You're a no go at this station. Here's what you need to do to, to be a go. And I, I am good with that. I love that. I love direct feedback. Pain, like I said, pain is a teaching tool. If it's a painful feedback, man, I always ask, why does it hurt me? Because it's true and I need to work on it and I need to deal with it. [00:20:41] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, it's toxic if you have a whole organization of people that walk on eggshells, don't say what they think, and just try to save themselves. Like, that's a terrible culture to have, right? And it's going to blow up at some point and everybody's gonna walk out. So definitely no way to be. Again, one of ours is transparency. So it's living. I think that's the hardest one for most people to, to live up to, but it's something we, we hit on a lot. And so, and then here's another thing, like, so ChatGPT tells me, like, I sucked at something. And I'm like, I just kind of go, yeah, it's right, you know, I believe it. It'd be just like if like one of your best mentors, somebody you really look up to gave you feedback. You're more likely to not feel offended by it just because you respect them, you look up to them, versus a maybe a colleague or someone lateral to you comes and says, hey, you kind of fucked up that. So I think people are more, you know, more offended by those types of feedback situations versus, like, if it was their absolute mentor idol, they probably would take it a little bit More seriously. [00:21:39] Speaker A: Well, and that's the other problem too is the authority piece. And this, this is something that's going to be a little bit scary for lawyers to hear. So get ready to hear this. I've been a mastermind and there's a lawyer, large personal injury firm and they had a huge case and the case had gone on for years and the client decided to ask ChatGPT to evaluate the lawyer's performance in the case. And of course chatgpt tore him apart. And so that was kind of. So we heard about that. And it was, you know, I was like, wow. Like the client obviously was not happy with that and then started second guessing things. It's just like what the Google lawyer, right? That's all coming back. So everybody's now is looking for CHAT GPT answers, um, trying to use chat GPT to grade their lawyers performance. But here's so this. So we saw that and so we have a look. We don't do business law, so we have business law attorneys for every, you know, we have different lawyers for different things. I'll just, in one specific business law, some concern about the performance of the attorney. I mean, once again, I know the partner is phenomenal, but the associate attorney was working on this thing and it was delayed, there was issues and you know, my, my CMO put it through one of our tools and it said they did this, this, this, this wrong. They should have done A, B, C and D. And here's our suggestion is, you know, basically I suggested we fire him. It was crazy. So yeah, so you know, you got to be where. I mean, look, at the end of the day, I'm not an expert in that area of law. So I am not going to rely on ChatGPT. But it did raise some questions that we should be asking that lawyer, you know, about this, these, you know, if they're advising us on certain aspects of the business and things don't seem right, it's really good. It may not give you the answer you want, but it could give you the questions. Right. If you understand, you know. And look, people get all intimidated about prompt engineering. Let me tell you something from my over 20 years in the military. Prompt engineering is the same thing as good delegation. You know, give the who, what, when, where, why be specific. And then if there's, you know, and then a good, right, A good human will ask questions. And so when I, or that's my chief of staff, my executive assistant, I'll say hey, what did I just tell you? So I'm trying to get the back brief from them. Right. And so with AI it's the same thing where if you don't give a good concise direction, well, it's your fault. Like you need to, and then, and you need to clarify. But that's what I love about AI is it's making people better at delegation because you're going to have to be specific. And so I'm really, I'm really excited about where it's going to take our capabilities because we have a lot of military leaders who are phenomenal delegators and have, you know, can, can delegate with specificity. And you know, in the military, in any mission statement, we always say the mission statement twice. But we always give the who, what, when, where, why. We never give the how because the leader should always figure out how they are going to do it. And we don't want to micromanage that. But I would say yes, you know, the line for me, the line between delegation and abdication is the result. You're a great, you're a great delegator. You got the result and I don't care how you did it as long as you did it legally and ethically, great. But if you, once you start abdicating responsibility and you say, well, I told Susie to do it, okay, Susie's been here for two weeks. Did she have enough training? Did you, did you have her give you a back brief to have her explain exactly what did you give her step by step or did you just give her general guidance? Did you tell her this is the task condition and standard or did you just tell her, I want you to do X by X date, Good luck by you know. And look, I want people to get follow up questions. But I think that's the great thing about AI is you're, you're starting to learn to anticipate what those follow up questions will be. As you start, you know, as you start trying to give those commands, as you start to prompt it, you can see where maybe you are deficient in your own delegation to your team. So I think it's a wonderful tool. Once again, there always has to be a human in the loop. And you know, it's not, it's not going to replace lawyers, but it's going to replace mediocre lawyers. If a great lawyer can 10x his output. Because I have the John Barry bot that talks like John Barry, thinks like John Barry, writes like John Barry and analyzes problems like John Barry, I might to use that bot as opposed to trying to train every new associate that comes in My door. That has to learn. And I've talked to some lawyers at firms much larger than mine, more like AmLaw 50 firms. And you know, they're like, yeah, I mean, that we. There's a case here for creating the bots that replicate you, that can do your level of work, you know, instead. And then if you have to review the associates work anyway, why wouldn't you review the bots? You know, why not just have your own bot do it? It'll do things in your voice that every time you train it, it gets better. And it's not gonna, it's not gonna leave and go to a competitor. It's not gonna call in sick. It's not gonna have a breakdown, you know. No, it's. It's, you know, the more you train that bot, the better it's gonna get. And. But once again, a human in the loop. You are responsible. But that's what I'm saying. These senior lawyers are like, well, gee, you know, I'm training all these associates. I still have to review all their work anyway. So they're like, of course it makes sense to use, use AI because I still have to review the work, but I don't lose the training if I lose the human. The bot keeps learning and learning. [00:26:32] Speaker B: That's pretty crazy, you know. Back to the delegation too. Yes. I'm thinking just situations in my head, like, it's easy to be like, hey, John, go do this and just get it done. Figure it out. And then if you go to AI right now, ChatGPT, and you just put in some basic prompts, like, you're not mad at ChatGPT because it came out with the wrong answer or the wrong thing you wanted. And so, no, you're like, well, my dumb ass didn't give it enough information. So I love that point because how many times anyone listening have we done that to our. Our team or someone we just hired or whatever, and they just, they have no information to go on, and they're like, I gotta go figure this crap out. And you expect them to come back with the right answer and the right information. So. [00:27:14] Speaker A: Yeah, good point. Yeah. And here's the deal. I mean, here's the problem. The problem is we get spoiled, right? You have, like, in this always, you. [00:27:19] Speaker B: Know, like every time I player that just does it for you, and you. [00:27:22] Speaker A: Just figure it out. And then. So I usually, the EAs that I hire, I want to keep them for maybe a year or two, and then I want them to move on to a bigger better, but I'm looking for, like, stars that want more. And so now, you know, maybe that's not the right answer, but it's like I'm, I'm recruiting a star who wants to be a star in the organization. And so my investment is in that person's development. Right. And I look, it could be easier for me if I just hired an experienced EA and taught whatever. But if I can develop someone and they can learn stuff, this person is going to be a future leader on my team. And so I'm going to invest everything I have. But then the problem is I've got them for a year or two and it's like, intuitive. I say, hey, I need. And they're already finishing my sentences. Yeah, I know you need this, this and this. Okay, whatever. They're the ones that are calling me, telling me, hey, John, where are you? This, you know, or they're coming to pick me up to take me, you know, and they're just. But then you get the new EA and they come in, it's day one, and they, yeah, you've given them a whole binder, you know, of stuff, which is now electronic files. But you give them all that and they can't absorb it. You know, they can't. They just can't absorb it quickly enough. And then you're, you know, you're used to that person coming in the door every day telling you what you're going to do for the day. And now you've got somebody who's green who doesn't know anything about the organization. It's like, it becomes so infuriating. The word that comes to mind, the right word should be frustrating. I should just be frustrated. But sometimes I get so. I'm like, you know, how do you not know how to do the last person you know? But it's like, no, like that person, it took them months to figure this out, and they had different skill sets. And, you know, and it's, you know, it's, it's, it's tough. So even with your EA tasks, you know, hey, develop an EA bot and let that bot do some of it. [00:28:50] Speaker B: So well, they can ask the, the future EA could ask the bot, hey, what would John want in this case? Or what would John ask for here? And like, they don't have to come to you with all that dumbass question. So just, they can, they can ask them right there. Come to you with probably what you actually want. Exactly. And then carry on and learn on time. Over time. [00:29:09] Speaker A: Yeah. So here's, here's the, here's the bigger this is. This is very interesting to me. So I had a friend, he's a West Pointer Special Forces officer, went to Kellogg School of Business, runs a, a talent agency now headhunter. And he, he, he called me and said, john, I want to come to Berkshire Hathaway. Now, I own stock, but I have, I haven't been to a Berkshire Hathaway meeting in probably 30 years. So he wants to come this time. And I just bought a house. I'm like, look, man, come to my house, stay at my house. I'd love to have you. He's like, great. So he flies in and we're there and he, you know, we get up like at six in the morning, you know, to go stand in line to get in, you know, make sure we get a good seat to watch Warren Buffett, which was good because it was probably, you know, this is the last year he's going to be the CEO giving the presentation. So it was good. But, but, you know, at the end of it, there, there are some AI questions. And my friend, his name is Freddie Kim. Freddie's like, you know, I wonder by now, with all their investments in AI, have they already created the AI Warren Buffett? You know, have they studied him and all of his decisions and all that data over all these decades, and are they going to try to use that for Berkshire Hathaway to continue to make the. I thought that was a great, great question and a great insight, but also, you know, a thought in what is possible. The greatest people, the greatest performers, the greatest minds, you know, can we AI replicate them? And then, you know, and so you could have that, that bot that's out there and make those decisions. [00:30:27] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's like the, you know, old sci fi movies were like, you know, you got like the, the brain and the jar. It's still, still that person or whatever. So it's. Or again, some sci fi films. I can't think of what they are. But where? [00:30:38] Speaker A: Westworld. Remember HBO did a remake of that 1970s movie Westworld? And there was the guy who's in. I can't think of his name, but he played in succession. He was. And he was the old guy. And he wanted to, he wanted to become a character in Westworld so that he could. His AI, the AI version of him would live on forever and so that he. Yeah, so that, yeah, you could literally. [00:30:59] Speaker B: Do that now and talk to Warren Buffett and ask him questions and, and you can make it look like him, sound like him, everything at this point. So that's that's kind of interesting. There could be a John Barry that I could go talk with. And this might not even be John on the show right now. [00:31:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And actually, I will bring up one other scary thing. So I have a friend, Marley. Yeah, no, yeah, her name is Marley Anderson. She runs a company, it's called Rocket Data. And she was telling me that she had a. An interview and she'll say, hey, give me five on the high five on the screen. And. Because there was actually an AI bot that got to the second round of interviews. What? And think about it. If you created a bunch of AI bots that could do your job, then you could get a paycheck and not even work. So the scary thing was, though, that this, you know, she was like, there was something wrong. There was a delay in the way the questions were answered. And it was very. It was just. There's something weird about the person's facial expressions. But yeah, it was an AI bot that had gotten to the second round of interviews. So. So some of these are really good. It's just something to think about that that's out there. This is. [00:32:00] Speaker B: I'll piggyback on that. So my wife is a recruiter, headhunter. So she's been in the recruiting space for, you know, 20 some years, does very well at Top Performer and her billion dollar company. She's like, number five. She's been doing it for a long time. So some of her team had some pushback and some big clients, like, big clients, like big national brands. And so they came to them really upset and complaining about their, again, national account they have with them because there was multiple, many fake people doing interviews that weren't them. And they're all AI and this is happened across this whole account. And so they had literally hired multiple people that were not even showing up for the interviews. All AI phone calls, everything like that, with fake resumes. And so someone's getting a paycheck for doing something, but all completely fake. And so they're now they're like auditing everything. And then my wife was like, crap, I hope none of these people are my people. Luckily they weren't. But it's like the recruiter does a job of interviewing and vetting them and submitting them and saying, okay, I have John Barry here. He was a amazing lawyer. He'd be perfect for your team. He fits your culture, your, you know, all this stuff. And so they're getting past some of these kind of lower level, you know, recruiters that kind of maybe just came into the Field. But yeah, they're, they're getting positions at some of these national brands to do like IT work and software development. And they're not real people doing, I mean, they're probably having AI do the work for them, which is ongoing so far, but. [00:33:25] Speaker A: And that's, that's best case scenario, right? Best case scenario is it's just, it's just someone who's trying to get a free paycheck. It could be someone who's much more nefarious, trying to get into your systems, hijack your company, steal your trade secrets, whatever. [00:33:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you're talking. These are like software developer, engineer jobs. [00:33:41] Speaker A: Yep. [00:33:41] Speaker B: So like, you mean, hey, you got the job. Sweet. Now you're in our system. Great. Now you're, you're plugged into everything. And again, these are national brands that you would, that everyone on the show would know that you see in every neighborhood. Pretty much, yeah. Pretty crazy stuff. So that's, that's happening right now. So, yeah, lawyers be, beware. I mean, you're lean into AI, leverage it to better your service and your product for your clients and your results. You're definitely going to be left behind. [00:34:06] Speaker A: Yeah. But keep a human in the loop. Let the human make the decision, hold the human accountable for the decision. Because once you know, it's a great tool, but it is not the end all, be all. And for people that are lazy, they're going to get caught and they're going to hurt their clients, they're going to hurt the profession. [00:34:21] Speaker B: I totally agree with you. I called a firm earlier today, this a firm that's been talking to us. And I called them and I called them last week and I had, I got a person on the phone, called them this week and I got a total AI person or an AI and it was a personal injury firm. And so I had this come up the other day and someone, I just wanted your thoughts on it, but someone's like, hey, we're using all AI for like our phone intake for personal injury cases. And someone was like, okay, I draw the line there. Like, someone needs to be a human on the end of the phone and being able to be empathetic and all that stuff. And so, but AI can do that and it can do it consistently versus someone having a shitty day and is shitty on the phone. So what are your thoughts on eventually going off to like AI, answering the phones, feeling the questions and doing intake? [00:35:06] Speaker A: Yeah, this is, you know, this is something that we're currently struggling with and we're working our way through it. On one hand, I hate having an IVR where someone calls in and says, thanks for calling. You know, it's an automated message. Thanks for calling. Barry Law. If you would like to be a client, press 1. If you're a current client, press 2. Now what we do is we have a data dip that goes into filevine. If it is, if it's a current client client, it'll, it'll route them a different place than, than, than someone and a number that's not identified. But it's not perfect. And we still are, you know, a lot of our intake. And I call it sales. Like, I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna be dishonest about it, right? It is, it is sales. It is not intake, it is sales. And so, and that's every law firm, it's a sale. Every business is a sales function. You can call it intake, you can call it whatever you want. But in the end, you know, if we're gonna talk business owner to business owner, it's, it's a sales function. And that sales function has to deal with the leads, the cold calls, the calls that are coming in. The issue becomes how much human time are you going to spend on unqualified leads? And so in my mind, I think there, you can pay a human and some people pay humans, you know, that are near shored or wherever, and they, and they, they may have an accent, but there's an AI device that actually makes them sound more American, right, that gives it the, what they call it the Mid Atlantic accent, which is my accent. I don't sound like a southerner, I don't sound like a northerner. I am Mid Atlantic, I am news, prime news right here. This is what you hear. None of these, no twang and no stuffiness, right? Just plain English. So what they found is to get that Mid Atlantic accent, there's their software that you can have someone in South America who doesn't have a, who has an accent, they can actually fix it in real time with the AI, which I think is interesting. So that's one option. The other option is you pay a human in the United States, you know, a lot of money to qualify or not qualify those leads. Or the third option is maybe for the first few questions that qualify the leads, it goes through AI, so the first person that picks up the phone, so, you know, whatever your first question is, is okay, were you injured? When were you injured? What state? And then boom. And then boom, it goes to a live operator. But there are, I think there may be an opportunity for, I think AI in those initial questions before to qualify them. Once again, I'm not saying like 10, I'm saying like maybe just two or three questions that's going to qualify them. So then it can get to a human who can answer the question. Like I said, whether that's a near shore human or a human here in the United States. Those are all questions. And all businesses are trying to figure that out right now. And for me, I don't know the answer yet, but I've seen companies do all three methods, right? And I've seen some companies that, that do all their, their intake is near shored and they, and they do a phenomenal job. I've seen some, that every employee is here in the United States. They are going to call and they're going to answer the questions. And I've seen some use AI for almost the entire process and then others who are saying we're going to use AI just to qualify the prospect and then if they're qualified, then we'll push it off. There's pros and cons either way. And I've seen people be successful away. And I think the answer is this. It doesn't matter which road you choose. It's about execution, right? Your strategy, it doesn't matter if it doesn't work. It was a fantasy. The strategy requires executions. If your strategy is, you know, whatever it's going to be, it doesn't matter. But whatever it is, you have to be able to actually do it and not just talk about it, measure it. [00:38:30] Speaker B: You know, and adjust if it's not working. Right? So yeah, I think that's a good perspective on it. And I think, you know, we, right people, consumers, we're getting a lot more used to interacting with AI and chatbots and AI and do we really care as long as we're getting the help and we get put in the right direction and then we're connected to the right person. At the end of the day, I think most people may prefer it or think it's more helpful versus getting Sally on the phone that's having a shit day and you know, is rude. And maybe that's something that happens within your firm that you may find out, but the damage that could be done or the cases that may be lost because of it, where AI is consistent. [00:39:07] Speaker A: Every time and, and that, and that's fair too. And you know, once again, I'm not here to critique anybody else's business decisions. You know, I, I'm not here to grade somebody's Paper based on one thing. Hey, if they're beating me, they're better than me. You know, I'm not, I'm not here to say there's a right way, but I will say this. Me personally, right, having called and I don't like to. This is why I have an ea. I don't like to call places and be put on hold and wait for things. I mean, I've had some, you know, overseas calls overseas, like for tech issues or whatever. And I'm waiting for this person to give a response, get a supervisor, figure the problem out. At that point, I would rather talk to an AI bot who is an expert, right? An AI bot who knows just as much as Kevin does. So that I don't have to call Kevin. I'd rather talk to Kevin's bot and just ask the question rather than talk to Kevin's, you know, brand new assistant or associate or brand new SEO manager, you know, who, who really doesn't know everything yet. I'd rather get on the phone and I have a problem and I want that problem solved now. I would rather talk to the bot who has hundreds, probably millions of times the knowledge that a human is able to carry in their head. Right? I mean, talk to my team instead. [00:40:10] Speaker B: Of me, by the way. [00:40:11] Speaker A: Yeah, no, no, yeah. I'm just, I'm. But, but that's, you know, that, that's my point. My point is that, you know, I would rather talk to a bot who can, who can quickly solve my problem than talk to a human for 30 minutes who can't solve it. I would rather, you know, who could speak to it. And look, I think it's brilliant because the bots can speak in language. So let's think about scaling your business. You know, maybe you want people to call in and the bots talk to them because they can talk to them in their language and they're going to have more information than any of your employees ever will. Right? Because they have the vastness of what is, you know, the, the Internet. And so now are they going to come to the right answer? You know, I don't know. But if I just need my, you know, my wireless router to work, I really don't. It's, you know, I don't need to talk to a lawyer. I don't need to talk to, I don't need to talk to an engineer, I don't need to talk to a scientist. I just need to talk to somebody who knows how to solve the problem, how to troubleshoot it, and chances are a Bot is going to do that just as well, if not better than a human in the future. Maybe not now, but in the future. [00:41:09] Speaker B: No, I think it makes a ton of sense. And you know, I was, I had a guy on recently that, it's a tech guy, he's a engineer kind of problem solver kind of guy. He's been in Silicon Valley helping firms, you know, re revolutionize and innovate. And so he had a divorce, a personal, you know, divorce. And first time he never ever interacted with a lawyer and just said the whole divorce experience was just terrible. You know, it took a year and a half and never knew what was going on and had set times with the lawyer every few, you know, once a month or less. And so his case just was slow because every time he'd show up to the lawyer to meet, hey, did you give us this, this, this, this and this? No, I didn't know I need to give you that. Well, yeah, when we meet next time, make sure you have all that stuff. So he built an AI that ask you questions as you're going through a divorce and then as you answer it says, oh well we're going to need this. Well, we're going to need access to this account and you, you can talk to that bot all day, any day and work on your own case. And then when you meet with a lawyer, they have all the details, summary your kids names so they can be like, hey John, you know, how's your son Tommy? And blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Here's everything we figured out and your case is moving along down the roads obviously. That's, that's pretty awesome. That helps that lawyer scale and it helps the client work on the case and feel more comfortable about what's going on instead of getting frustrated and can file on a complaint. Right. That their lawyer's not responsive to them. [00:42:34] Speaker A: So yeah, especially when they're billing hourly. Right. It's like, well, wait a minute, I just had to have an hour long meeting with you to get documents that you should have asked for in the first meeting. Now I have seen even low tech divorce lawyers though, they have forms. Right. And, but that is frustrating. They send me, you know, 10 page, a 10 page form to, to disclose all my assets and everything that's going on in my life and my kids and where they go to school and everybody's dates of birth and Social Security number. You know, it's like, man, like, you know, it would be nice. Yeah. If I didn't have to get on, you know, do this paperwork if something I could just be on the phone while I'm driving to Lincoln or Omaha and knock out an hour's worth of questions that I'm answering and then, you know, for it to be able to then generate, auto, generate an email to me saying hey, great conversation today. Pursuant to our conversation, you need to provide me all these documents, right? And that way I have a list of documents. But, but yeah, I mean I've seen like, I've seen, I've seen some pretty low tech family law operations where they will, you know, they do a good job of asking all the questions, but it's still just such a pain to go through and fill it out, fill out all the forms and it's just like, you know, like if I could just talk to somebody on the phone or cut and paste for my computer and add, you know, it's just, I, I, because some of these forms like hand or you know, they're like, you know, give me something with a link, a Dropbox, something. But I don't need to, don't give me something I'm supposed to hand jam, you know, don't give me something, I'm supposed to, that somehow, you know, I gotta convert the PDF and no, just like, let's just, boom, save me the time. I mean, I think about athletes all the time and like, you know, shaving off a tenth of a second, like your day, right? If you could shave off an hour of your day from, from doing mundane tasks, right, where you could refocus that energy or conserve that energy for the greater things that are actually going to move the, you know, the needle in your organization or in your life, you know, that's, that's what's key. I mean it's kind of like, you know, I have a home gym, I had to put a long story but you know, I, I, I, I still like going to the gym sometimes. But you know, I, the days that I work out at the home gym, I save 20 minutes, 10 minutes driving there, 10 minutes driving back and I can, you know, I can just go in my home gym in my underwear if I want work out, I forget my water bottle or whatever, it's no big deal, I just run in and get, you know, so I'm just telling you like, if you can shave off that time and AI can do that, I think it's really important and think what it does for your employees and think about 200 employees. If you could save everybody an hour a week, a billable hour a week, you know, you start looking about that over the year and you're like, wow, like this. There's a lot of money at stake here in just being efficient and using some of these AI tools now. There's always pain on the front end and there's always got to be a human in the loop, but it's worth it. [00:44:57] Speaker B: 100%. 100% agree with you. I have a EA that's been me for about a year. Amazing. Done awesome work. She's in Columbia and we have I don't know how many now. Probably six, seven, eight, I don't know. Now she's moved into a role kind of like you're saying now she's AI implementation. And so she going, she's going to each department and looking at all their processes and going, okay, I'm implementing AI to streamline those processes. And she's going department to department and we created a new position. She's getting paid a bunch more and that's not her job. And so we're bringing another AEN to replace what she was doing. So, yeah, this is, it's big stuff. I mean, everyone, if you're listening, you gotta get on the board, on the ball. I like making it simple. If you can save an hour per person, I got 53 people. Like that's, that's insane, right? [00:45:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean that's two full time employees a week. You're probably saving. You know, when you look at actual work that people are doing, right, 53 hours. You know, some people, don't get me wrong, you get some people that can grind, but most people, they have four or five good hours in a day. Me, I have like two good hours a day where I am on and then the rest of it, like I gotta do a podcast or something, right? Cause I, I just, I can't keep that focus and that energy and that intensity. [00:46:08] Speaker B: Well, I stole an hour from you right today. So yeah, I'm saying way, you know, you got that there's, there's times where you're just in it and then sometimes you're just like, okay, I need, I need to focus time. I need to just find time to think. If your day is just filled up, you know, you're not getting that time, then you're not, you're not able to focus on your business. Well, John, I appreciate you coming on to share passionately about this stuff today. Love what you're doing, congrats on your success and love your perspective on it. Everyone, if you're listening, if you don't know John, please check him out. Please follow him check out his veteran led podcast. Check out. I think it's Barry Law. [00:46:42] Speaker A: Yep. Barrylaw.com and you know what? This is great talking to SEO guy. But we are, we had two sites, one for our veterans and then one for our personal injury veterans. Is national personal injuries been Nebraska and Iowa and Kansas. And now we're looking at bring it all into one site. And so this is what was interesting. I'll just tell you. So this is great. Everybody says no, but think about the brand. And maybe I'm wrong, but it's been interesting. So I went to our SEO company and I called, you know, and I said, no, no, no, I don't want to talk to my case. This is an, this is a CEO to CEO call because this is a huge strategic decision. [00:47:15] Speaker B: Yeah, it is. [00:47:16] Speaker A: SEO is one, one piece of it. And I said, okay, I talked to him. Then I, I called France, my guy, boodle box because he's not a marketer, he's a law firm owner. Oh, but he's an AI expert. So I said, tell me about AI search in the future. What do you think? You know, what's your, what's your position on it? And then, and then after I talked to him, talked to the SEO expert, then we asked chat, GPT, Grok. Then we went through all, I'd asked all the AI models what they thought about it and what we should do and AI, all the AI models, all the people are hesitant and say, yeah, I don't know, there's some pros, some cons. Yeah, long term, I agree. Three years from now, it's a good decision. But you, it's going to hurt your SEO in the short term. But you know, it's all emotion. Whereas all of the, all the, all the, here's all the reasons to do it, here's where it may hurt you. That is short term pain, you know, suck it up like. [00:48:08] Speaker B: So AI gets like, where do you want to be? Right. [00:48:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:48:11] Speaker B: So you're not thinking about right now. You're looking at where you're going. And if you want to get there, you have to make the decision and do it. Yeah, we got three or four clients right now that are about to do that very similar thing. They're maybe not in the, the, the place that you are, but they're not small firms either. And that's the conversation that comes up to us a lot. And I tell this very same thing. Listen, this is the business decision. You know, here's what could happen, here's the downfall. It could happen. But if you're trying to get up to here, then now's the time to do it. [00:48:42] Speaker A: The longer you wait, we may lose, we may lose 20% of our leads from SEO if it goes, you know, completely. You know that. But hey, that's why we do traditional. That's why we do LSA ppc. That's why we do display ads, that's why we do community activities. That's why, that's why we have multiple marketing channels. So that if something happens with. We love great SEO. That's where like, you know, I mean, we wouldn't be here if we didn't have great SEO. And I'm sure your clients will all say the same thing or if they won't, you can tell from the numbers that your clients wouldn't be there without great SEO. Sometimes it's the things that you're doing that is giving you the most successful, that is going to prevent you from achieving your vision. And so yeah, we have ptsd, lawyers dot com. We've had it for a long time. It does extremely well. Great domain rating. Same for jsburylaw.com, but we own barrylaw.com and barrylawfirm.com and we are going to, you know, the thought is we're going to transfer everything to barrylaw.com and we're squirreling away a ton of money because we know it's going to hurt our SEO, but we're going to keep paying, you know, we'll do whatever it takes to get the leads. It's a business decision, but I think most people like, you know, and especially if I have an SEO company, I'm like, hey, look, it's a great long term decision. Just understand we will do everything we can to help you. Kevin. I'm sure you tell these guys this, Kevin, but it's like you're going to hurt yourself short term. So is the short term pain worth the long term gain? Do you have the financial resources to weather the storm that you are about to create? But God, I love it when I create the storm right? Every day you're either going into a storm, the storm is ending, you know, or you're right in the middle of the storm. But when you get to control the tempo and the pace, when the shit is going to hit the fan, that is the, that is, that is what control is all about. When you control when you, you're gonna bring the pain on yourself to get the future you want and you're ready for it and you have the resources and you have the patience by God. You know, you have just taken control of your life and you're gonna be successful. Even if you do lose everything, you'll have learned the lesson and it'll be a good lesson. [00:50:33] Speaker B: Well, I'm more than sure that you'll be just fine. And trust me, we flipped sites like this before, got all the value back, plus more. And it's all about brand. Right? So SEO this, SEO that, whatever that's we. It's. If you don't have a brand, it's all about the brand. AI search is gonna heavy on brand. It doesn't care that you switch domains, it doesn't care about backlinks. So we're doing a lot with AI search because that's where shit's going. And so if you have a strong brand and you can make that consistent, like what you're going to be doing and bringing that together, that'll be stronger than all these sites that are split up apart. So I would say a hundred percent do it. And that makes a lot of sense to me. So. [00:51:09] Speaker A: Awesome. I just got some free advice, so thank you. [00:51:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Everything's been about brands, brand mentions. Social is going to play a huge part in the AI search. Indexable things. Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram's now going indexable. So. And like Google reviews, AI can't even get them. Like AI is. Google has those locked down to ChatGPT. So then they're, they're still looking at things like AVO and super lawyers and fine law and all that crap. So it's. I would say now's the time to do it. And that makes the right sense, you know, makes sense to me. I wouldn't be worried about the, the traffic drop. You should be able, your SEO team should be able to retain as much of that as possible. [00:51:44] Speaker A: Yep. Atmosphere. [00:51:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:51:45] Speaker A: Well, that's, that's great advice. Thank you. [00:51:46] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:51:47] Speaker A: So your listeners. Wow. I mean, yeah, that's just. Yeah. Whoever who is listening to this. Yeah. Great. Well, thank you so much, Kevin. [00:51:52] Speaker B: Dude. Yeah. Thank you for coming on the show, everyone. We appreciate you tuning in as always and just love been on this journey almost 400 episodes John's been on. This is the second time. Welcome anytime, of course. And so please reach out, connect with John. You can learn so much from him and look forward to seeing you again in person here at some conferences coming up. Everyone have a great day. We'll see you soon.