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The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
I am more convinced than ever that nothing that traditional bar organizations are doing is going to move the needle on the sad stats on lawyer happiness ...
The root cause of all lawyers' problems is financial stress. Financial stress holds you back from getting the right people on the bus, running the right systems, and being able to only do work for clients you want to work with. Financial stress keeps you in the office on nights and weekends, often doing work you hate for people you don't like, and doing that work alone.
(Yes, you have permission to do only work you like doing and doing it with people you like working with.)
The money stress is not because the lawyers are bad lawyers or bad people. In fact, most lawyers are good at the lawyering part and they are good people.
The money stress is caused by the general lack of both business skills and an entrepreneurial mindset.
Thus, good lawyers who are good people get caught up and slowed down in bringing their gifts to the world. Their families, teams, clients, and communities are not well-served because you can't serve others at your top level when you are constantly worrying about money.
We can blame the law schools and the elites of the profession who are running bar organizations, but to blame anyone else for your own woes is a loser's game. It is, in itself, a restrictive, narrow, mindset that will keep you from ever seeing, let alone experiencing, a better future.
Lawyers need to be in rooms with other entrepreneurs. They need to hang with people who won't tell you that your dreams are too big or that "they" or "the system "won't allow you to achieve them. They need to be in rooms where people will be in their ear telling them that their dreams are too small.
Get in better rooms. That would be the first step.
Second step, ignore every piece of advice any general organized bar is giving about how to make your firm or your life better.
The Renegade Lawyer Podcast
Ep. 180 – AI, Access to Justice, and Building Faster Law Firms with Tim Sawyer
What happens when a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple 7-figure exits brings his playbook to the legal world?
In this episode, Ben Glass sits down with Tim Sawyer, Executive VP of Sales at FasterOutcomes.com, to talk about how AI is transforming legal work—and what lawyers need to know right now.
They cover:
- Why so many lawyers haven’t even opened the AI box—and what it’s costing them
- How AI tools are already helping small firms reduce desk time, generate better demands, and serve more clients
- What law firms can learn from elective medicine, insurance, and entrepreneurship
- The rise of AI-powered knowledge bases and playbooks to empower even junior associates
- How Faster Outcomes is partnering with elite lawyers like Rob Levine to systematize excellence in case outcomes
- The “client-first” philosophy driving tech that’s accessible to solos, small firms, and enterprise teams alike
Whether you're curious about legal AI, looking to compete smarter, or just wondering what tools are worth your time, this is a must-listen conversation for forward-thinking lawyers.
👉 Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you tune in.
Ben Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury and long-term disability insurance attorney in Fairfax, VA. Since 2005, Ben Glass and Great Legal Marketing have been helping solo and small firm lawyers make more money, get more clients and still get home in time for dinner. We call this TheGLMTribe.com
What Makes The GLM Tribe Special?
In short, we are the only organization within the "business builder for lawyers" space that is led by two practicing lawyers.
One thing we're sure you've noticed is that despite the variety of options within our space, no one else is mixing
the actual practice of law with business building in the way that we are.
There are no other organizations who understand the highs and lows of running a small law firm and are engaged in talking to real clients. That is what sets GLM apart from every other organization, and it is why we have had loyal members that have been with us for two-decades.
Where we're going now is what's called an agentic demand right, where we're building the prompts into the system that helps them build their own do-it-yourself demand, which they can get back in minutes, right. What you want to do is bring a universal truth that says you know what, in this case, in this jurisdiction, this should be worth this, and this is how you're going to manage the case to get to that outcome this and this is how you're going to manage the case to get to that outcome.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, the show that challenges the way lawyers and professionals think about life, business and success. Hosted by Ben Glass, attorney, entrepreneur, coach and father of nine, this show is about more than just practicing law. For over 40 years, ben has built a law firm that stands for something bigger. He's helped thousands of lawyers create practices that make good money, do meaningful work and still make it home for dinner. Each week, ben brings you real conversations with guests who are challenging the status quo Lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, thinkers and builders. These are people creating bold careers and meaningful lives without burning out or selling out. If you're ready to stop playing small and start thinking like a renegade, you're in the right place. Let's dive in.
Speaker 3:Hey everyone, this is Ben Glass, and welcome back to the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, where most episodes I'm interviewing someone inside or outside of legal who's dinging the world. It's going to be really fun today because we're going to talk about law and AI and, oh my gosh, from my point of view as someone who's into this and trying to stay top of the game every five days everything changes. So today we're going to talk to of the game. Every five days, everything changes. And so today we're going to talk to Tim Sawyer. Tim is the executive vice president of sales for a company called FasterOutcomescom. They're working across a lot of legal verticals and trying to and really helping law firms it looks to be like spend less time on desk, like how can we move the accumulation of information that we're getting, how can we absorb that faster, figure out what to do with it, make the client really happy, and I'm sure Tim will go in deeper.
Speaker 3:But as I was doing research for this, I found an interesting story back to 2004, when you left a job and got your family and three kids and traveled 10,000 miles across country in an RV. That's kind of almost maybe on my bucket list. My wife Sandy and I have been binge watching on YouTube, like the RV life. Yeah, I don't know, because some parts of it are really good. And then, tim, every episode, they say and you have to be a really good mechanic too, and I'm not so welcome to the podcast. Let's start there, my friend. Yeah, well, it's so.
Speaker 1:I've had. I tell people I've had one job my whole life, a one W-2 job. I'm an entrepreneur. I worked for a bank for 13 years. Long story short, the bank owner had four sons and the third one was not a Tim Sawyer fan. So he said to his dad, him or me, and I was bummed out. I literally was working, like people say, they work, 60 hours a week. I was legitimately working 60 hours a week for this guy since college and it really it hit me hard.
Speaker 1:And so I said to my wife as soon as I left the job. I said here's what we're going to do. We're going to rent an RV, we're going to go around the country and blow out and it was the greatest experience we ever had and started up in Rhode Island, went all the way down into New Orleans, across the bottom of the country, up through Grand Canyon, yellowstone, and it was really neat because at the end of the day we weren't campers at all. But there's no who owns what and who. It's just, where'd you go yesterday, where are you going tomorrow? And it allowed, allowed my wife and I, who'd been married at that point almost 14 years, to reconnect, allowed me to reconnect with my kids at a very different level and, uh, it was awesome. Man, if anybody that can do it, I get. You need some time, you need unique circumstances when we're working, when I'm in our working years, but if you can do it, I highly recommend it.
Speaker 3:It's the coolest experience in the First time now we've not rented for a month but, like you know, a week, probably 10 days. One time we actually flew out to Grand Canyon and to Lake Powell and rented there. But the very first time we did I thought, man, I'm going to hate this because I told myself I hated camping and I was an addict. I mean, I thought it was the coolest thing to hang out, to sit out at night around campfires, to wake up early in the morning before anyone else is out, and to just visit places and people that I would never have run across before. So have you and your family contemplated any sort of a repeat journey? Or even if it's so many.
Speaker 1:My kids are now 29, 27, and 24. And they've all got significant others. My oldest is married. I have a grandchild. I would do it, but again, it's tricky because once you get into work mode, right, you need time, you need not. A lot of people can get you know to do a meaningful trip. It feels like you know two, three weeks minimum, and companies aren't so gracious these days that they'll give people you know three weeks to go catch up. Well, you know what's so funny? I said that I say that you could do remote. You could. With sophisticated Wi-Fi you could absolutely do remote, and so I should rethink that. They loved it, we had a blast, they all connected and maybe we should.
Speaker 3:My wife and I talk about doing it all the time. Go on YouTube, because the internet technology, of course, has advanced since the time you guys did it and there's all these people that appear to be doing it. And again, I know they only show the good parts, but I'm like and then the renting part, like that makes a lot of sense, because, yeah, that's what we did.
Speaker 1:Now, the one little thing I'll let your viewers know that you don't think about, is so the side of the RV that the awning is on right?
Speaker 3:obviously is the opposite side that your sewage is on. That makes sense, right? You don't eat where you, you know, but what that means is the guy next to you, his sewage is next to your awning yeah, finding the right campsite. So after that journey, you then started your. It looks to me like your tech entrepreneurial journey. So take us through that a little bit, because one of the other things I noted was that you have leadership, sales and marketing strategies to more than 10,000 business owners, so very well rounded and have been involved in some interesting I don't know if they were all startups or probably early, yeah, but let's talk about that a little bit and what this body of experience has been for you.
Speaker 1:So in 2000, my first job, the only job I had, was in the mortgage industry and I had a friend at the time who, young guy, you know, high school graduate he had started an early, early like 1997 digital marketing company for car dealerships.
Speaker 1:So back then some of your viewers may be old enough to remember what's called Flash. Flash was a type of website. It was like a box right, like think of an aquarium real old but at the time very advanced technology. So he would build Flash websites and he invented the virtual test drive. So you put the car on the internet and you spin it around and you could do, and you know they did a nice job. They did email marketing and he was getting ready to sell that. You know they did a nice job. They did email marketing and he was getting ready to sell that. His business partner, by the way, uncle, invented car leasing, hustis Wolfington. What a lot of people don't realize is the first car leasing company was called Half a Car. If you can't afford the whole car, get a half a car Right. So he sold that business at the time. They had a great over $100 million outcome and he and I had become friends.
Speaker 1:I was coming out of mortgage and he said, hey, let's take this idea and morph it for mortgage companies, banks, credit unions We'll build websites, we'll do email marketing, early generation email marketing. And we did that right into the teeth of the 2008 financial crisis. So we had all these big, beautiful contracts that didn't mean anything. Banks, credit unions like I can't pay you, we're not doing that. So it was my first entrepreneurial challenge where we had to retool the entire company and we pivoted to local insurance agents, and that move turned out to be that was the right move, right? So what was happening is the internet at the time. So there was deregulation happening in the insurance industry, which meant, like in Massachusetts I live in Rhode Island, massachusetts it doesn't matter which insurance agent you go to, essentially, they're going to either pull credit and look at your driving record and this is the rate. There's no reason to shop because it's all the same. Well, geico was coming into markets and, as markets were being deregulated, what the agents knew was folks are going to start shopping on the internet, right? And so what we brought to that was hey, listen, if you want to compete, you can draft on the marketing that Geico is going to do driving people to the internet and you just need to get your fair share. So that worked. So we worked with local insurance agents, built our own CRM or client relationship management tool for insurance agents, and then we sold that to Serent Capital private equity exit, I think 2000, 2011.
Speaker 1:At the time we thought we were geniuses. We sold 48%, we had 52. We got the front of that deal. We didn't get the back of that deal. It was great.
Speaker 1:And then from there, we went into elective medicine, took the same business philosophy three words find, sell, keep Every for-profit business, whether you're an insurance agency or you're Nike or whatever, you have to do three things you have to find, increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website, phone store, whatever you want. You have to sell, increase the conversion rate of that traffic and then keep you have to retain them. So we took that same mentality and went into elective medicine. So our customers were plastic surgeons, cosmetic dermatologists, med, spas and built a platform for them. What's interesting, ben, is, each one of those companies took seven and a half years from inception, the concept to sale. And then we sold Crystal Clear Digital Marketing to two private equity groups in 2020, blue Star Innovation Partners, which is Jerry Jones's private equity group the guy who owns the Cowboys and Providence Equity Group so great transaction.
Speaker 1:And then I thought I was done.
Speaker 1:Thought I was done and taught financial literacy to high school kids for a couple of years, did some volunteer work. After that I own an elected medical clinic myself. And then my old friend, rishi Bhatia, the CEO of Faster Outcomes, came a call and said hey, man, you know AI in legal that's where it's at. He was very passionate about the project based on a personal story that he has with the legal system in the United States. It was a family issue. He's like we got to change the way this works. This is so.
Speaker 1:His idea around faster outcomes was AI and legal is going to lead him to keeping the client at the center of everything that we do. The client right, not the lawyer, not the investor. The client at the center of everything we do. And Rishi's plan is to provide access, more access to the justice system. There are a lot of marginalized folks in the communities that don't get equal access to the justice system. There are a lot of marginalized folks in the communities that don't get equal access to the justice system One percent of everything that we do every employee's time, equity, talent and money goes back to creating money for a legal fund that we want to provide more access to the justice system, and so that's the noble concept, but the war is there's a lot of people that are providing legal AI, and we got to be the best that we could possibly be, yeah, so we've got more coming up, but first a quick break.
Speaker 2:Here's something we think you'll want to hear.
Speaker 4:Okay, real talk. If the phrase legal futurist makes you raise an eyebrow, you're going to want to hear this. Dr Cain Elliott is the chief legal futurist at Filebean and he's not your average tech guy. At the GLM Summit this October, cain's diving deep into what AI, automation and the next era of law really mean for your firm. Not theory, not hype, just sharp insight on where it's all heading and how smart law firm owners can actually use it. If you're building a future, ready practice, go to GLMSummitcom and get your seat. Cain's bringing the future. You just need to show up.
Speaker 2:All right, let's get back to the conversation.
Speaker 3:So there's a lot there to unpack. It's interesting. I just sent a letter to the Virginia State Bar. It'll be published in the next issue of their journal and one of the problems the bar is trying to solve for and the bar is slow and clunky and not innovative, but they're trying to solve for what they call legal deserts here in Virginia not innovative, but they're trying to solve for what they call legal deserts here in Virginia, which are areas of the state where you know, per 1000 people, there's no lawyers.
Speaker 3:And you know, my solution is some version of hey, three of us in non-competing practice areas go and rent a building. You know a nice building or an office in wherever Southwest Virginia where there are no lawyers. You employ two people, nice people, but their only job is to hook up the technology. So when Tim comes in and he's got his will or you know where he's finding this landlord, whatever now that person in Southwest Virginia can get connected with some of the best legal minds in the state and somebody like me who's 42 years or so in with a whole lot of knowledge in the personal injury and disability space, but some generalized knowledge right To be good enough, a hundred percent, yeah, yeah, and so we'll see. But that's interesting that you guys have that on your plate as well, because I think that that's a big space.
Speaker 3:So legal will now be able to do things that were just economically unaffordable for legal to do. Like Ben is not going to go set up a shop in Southwest Virginia, just not right. So that's cool. Cool now, at the end of the day, for faster outcomes. One of the things that is concerning to my market, the solo and small firm market, is yes, is it ai companies? A lot of. So I get a lot of emails like the email that introduced you to me, and we're wondering like, how soon is it before it's ai to consumer? Well, yeah, and maybe it exists now already, and if it happens and it's done really well, will that actually make a difference? I don't know, but that's one of the things we think about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, as you think about that, ben, the early application of that is already happening, right? So in the personal injury space, there are chatbots, avatars. They're not humans, they look like humans, they behave like humans and they're live, right. There are many law firms that use AI for intake. So the person calls up and says, hey, I was in a car crash and an AI bot that looks like me. And you goes oh my gosh, are you okay? And they I can't believe that happened. Can I get your name, in case we get disconnected? And they go through the hole and you can try to trick them and say, oh, is Rob Levine in today? No, actually, he's traveling to like. And where are you located? Oh, it's beautiful out. Today I'm here in Massachusetts, so it's not a big leap of faith to think you can go from that to using AI, right. So I think we'll.
Speaker 1:It won't be long and many would argue with me before you could use AI in adjudication, right? So if it's a simple legal matter, you've got two people in front of an AI judge and the AI judge takes in the information, internalizes it, scans through his database or her database and goes hey, you owe him 80 bucks, you know and we are definitely going to get to a place. We're not. The thing with AI right now is there's so many great applications, but we still have to be mindful it's not perfect, it's not right. So anybody that comes to call in and says, ben, trust me, this is 100% accurate. We're not at that place, right, we're a smidge away. That said, if you could get it to do 90% of something, we are highly accurate.
Speaker 3:Yeah, one degree of separation to perfect, but pretty damn close. I'll tell you some of the things that we're doing here. So I practice you know Brian has his automobile practice in Virginia and I practice in the space of ERISA long-term disability insurance claims. You know, mainly in the mid-Atlantic. We have cases all over the country. We have developed a GPT that has our complete knowledge base in it, has all the federal regulations pertaining to the subject matter in it, has our sample briefs and pleadings, has the pertinent First Circuit law in it. It's still so and it's reducing by 90 our time on desk for a particular stage of these cases, and that's a that's a huge movement, both for the client and for us, but it still requires the human being right. It still requires my team, who understand this area of the law, to be able to ask great questions and query the data you're getting back. Yeah, but it's amazing.
Speaker 3:And again, all with, as you say, with the client in mind, let me ask you, before we talk about faster outcomes, I am curious about a guy who's been involved in several very successful startups and had endings and exits. Know, endings and exits, yeah, exits like what? So what drives you like when you're when your buddy called you and said hey, I know you're teaching literacy to high schoolers and that sounds really cool, but I'm working on this cool shit over here yeah and, of course, you probably like, I don't really need to do that, but sounds interesting.
Speaker 3:So yeah, tell me a little bit about. Is this in your background? Were your parents entrepreneurial? Was this in your blood?
Speaker 1:No, they weren't. You know it's going to sound strange or maybe not, so my motivation is. So. Rishi's motivation is client in the middle. Right, he's passionate about that, and not that I'm not passionate about that, but I'm equally passionate about when you start a business and you can think about what you can do for others, right. So the jobs that you create, right. So I'm super passionate about my son-in-law soon to be son-in-law is getting married in October. Works for me 28 years started when he was 28 years old.
Speaker 1:We've been in the space Ben, think about this for a little over a year in market nine months and Andrew is his name knew nothing about legal. None of us knew anything about the law, right, he's actually in Missouri today at a family law conference with another colleague of ours. But Andrew last week gave a CLE talk to 175 lawyers who blew up the executive director's phone. This kid is amazing. Wow, I can't. How long has he been in the legal space and so become a gifted public speaker? He understands the law.
Speaker 1:So think about the trajectory of his career, right, and how his earning potential has skyrocketed, right, and if you can take a group of people and my goal is always I say I just want to leave them in a better position than I found them and if I can do that, level up skill sets, level up 401k, level up their healthcare benefits you make a difference. Right, like that's my juice is to see someone who is making $80,000 a year. Now they're making $200,000 a year and you know, everybody wants to hire them and that's my oxygen and I really do feel like so. It could be selling microphones, it could be selling art, it doesn't matter, right, it's the mission and the mission. So, once you get behind the mission, so when Rishi says, okay, tim, this is the mission, right, that's the mission. Now, ultimately, it's you got to get value for shareholders. I get that. That's the ultimate mission. Right, you got to make the world a better place for the customer. But it's the people that get involved in the mission.
Speaker 3:They become your family and that drives me you out and it gives your team a reason to come to work on Monday and be excited about the work that they're doing. And then it doesn't matter what business you're in, what industry, and you become unstoppable. I think that's one of the things Brian and I have tried to build at Ben Glass Law. It's like, why are we even doing this? Well, most PI lawyers it's like well, to get all the money from the insurance company and seek justice, and we're like, okay, but that's what everybody says. How about if we just build a place where everybody will thrive, the owners thrive, the team thrives? If the owners and the team are thriving, then the clients will be well, well served, and so I love that.
Speaker 3:So, and great to hear you say son-in-law or future son-in-law, g in law or a future son-in-law, gets married in October. Okay, so that's awesome too. Like to to take what I would call you can call a young'un too right who probably went to college, who probably studied, you know, kind of regular whatever college curriculum, but learns more from working around you for six months than he does in four years or whatever it took, and he has and he is an absolute beast, and so I love that and, to the extent that I can make the world, like I said, just make the world a better place for some people.
Speaker 1:Now, to your point, it's a war, right, and you have to put on your guns. It's so funny. I don't know if you ever saw the movie the Patriot with Mel Gibson Probably yeah, so he guns and it's so funny. I don't know if you ever saw the movie the patriot with mel gibson probably yeah, yeah. But uh, so he he finished, he goes through this war against the french, you know, and he ceremoniously puts his axe that was his weapon of choice, the axe and his guns into this trunk and he closes it right, he put his guns down.
Speaker 1:I thought I had done that, I thought I had put my guns down. I'm like I'm not, you know, I was like I kind of felt like, maybe because, crystal clear, I was traveling 42 weekends a year, right, four days a week, so you're talking basically half a year on the road and it takes, you know, you lose body parts. That's a lot, it's a lot. And I was like, do I want to really? But once you accept, you know, once you take the keys and you go okay, I'm in charge of revenue. There's a switch that goes off the mission becomes the game.
Speaker 3:The game is on. It's kind of like the when are you going to retire question. I'm like, well, I don't know. I kind of like what I do and if you follow me around for a week you wouldn't be able to tell what's fun and what's work or what's play and what's work. A good framework Like what questions should people like me and those running solo and small firms and you're in the PI and the healthcare and the family law, corporate law and employment law space? Like how should we be thinking about companies, vendors, that we might want to team up with, invest in in terms of you know buying their services or their product? How should, like you know buying their services or their product? How should, like you know, besides just trying and failing, trying and failing, trying and failing?
Speaker 3:which may be the answer.
Speaker 1:I think it's. It starts with what you know. I would say, ultimately, what are you trying to accomplish, right? I'll say, when people say, well, what does Faster Outcomes do? I said you know what Faster Outcomes does.
Speaker 1:Our goal is to provide lawyers with more time to do the things they love. If that's smash their competition and make as much money as they can, good for you. If that's get home a little early and help put the kids to bed, very noble too. So it's understanding ultimately what. So okay, tim, I want to have more time. And then what can we do to give you back more time? Right? And then helping them understand how much time they spend at the desk working on things that are repetitive, redundant, that they don't need to do that, right? That's not the highest and best use of their time and talent. So first is helping them understand. You know, first of all, you can't use open source AI, as many lawyers do with personal health information. You can't do that. It's not okay, right? So the first thing you need to be working in is an encrypted environment that's protected, and understanding that there's things that you're spending so much time on, particularly in personal injury, where there's no billable hour, right, because it's all contingency-based, so every hour you get back is an hour that you now have a choice to decide what you want to do with it. You can either go get more high-value customers, clients, or you can just go on TikTok On an RV tour, so it's helping them connect the dots of. Hey, what are you trying to accomplish in life? If you want to go faster, right, so well, tim, I want to get more cases, perfect. The first thing we need to do is reduce the time that you're spending on things that don't matter and then maybe partner them with a marketing company that will help them increase the you know quantity and quality of traffic to their website and phone, and even use AI in different marketing formats. Right, the other one, if they go. I just want to work less. Perfect. Let's do that.
Speaker 1:And to your point, most AI companies are at a place now where you can create a demand letter. You Companies are at a place now where you can create a demand letter. You can create a medical chronology pretty easy, but it's also looking at what a billing model that makes sense for you and I'm not saying faster outcomes is the perfect billing model. I think it is. But understanding, what are you going to get charged for? Right? So is a model that every time you open a matter, they've got your credit card and you're going to get charged $300. And what percentage of those matters go to a demand? Because if you're paying for every matter and you open 10 matters and you pay 3000 bucks and only two go to demand, you didn't really gain anything, right. And then understanding where the marketplace is in terms of what you're going to pay for a demand right, so there's great companies that charge $600 for a demand. There's great companies that charge 300 for a demand. So it's understanding the billing model, understanding your volume and what you're trying to accomplish.
Speaker 1:And then it's looking at now more sophisticated, not the single sole practitioner. More sophisticated, it's interesting that you mentioned you've created a product that we have called Knowledge. Right, and Knowledge is exactly what you described. Right, we take all the law firm's IP aggregate. It put it into a protected environment right, and they have the ability to every form template, document, outcome, podcast, everything they've ever done. Right. They now have access to that and that is a commitment that, as you know, doesn't just take dollars. It takes some time and you've got to find a company that will help you think through that and ultimately, what are you trying to get to? And then work your way backwards. So there are a lot of great companies out there.
Speaker 1:And then the last piece I'll mention, and this is, generically speaking, where we're trying to get to, particularly in demands for personal injury, is human in the middle is really important, still, right, meaning the machine can do 80%, but you still want to have some eyes on that. Right where we're at with ai, but what we're seeing now more and more is personal injury lawyers saying I don't, I don't think I need you to review this, because they obviously want to get the cost down, but they also want to get the time down right. So where we're going now is what's called an agentic demand right, where we're building the prompts into the system that helps them build their own do-it-yourself demand which they can get back in minutes. Right, and that's the playbooks, right. And so, again, think about client in the middle is, if you look at settlement data, right, the limited data that there is, but there's some lawyers get widely different results on the same case types. That drives me freaking crazy, right. Why is that? So?
Speaker 1:If I get hit by a bus and my wife has a friend who does part-time personal injury, part-time family law, whatever. That's fine, but she's not an expert, right, and maybe she needs to pay some bills. She's got a tuition payment coming up for a kid or something and she's going to settle fast to get customer their money, client their money and get her money. That drives me nuts and I'm not don't say that in a disrespectful way. I love every lawyer that's out there, but what we want to do is bring a universal truth that says you know what, in this case, in this jurisdiction, this should be worth this and this is how you're going to manage the case to get to that outcome, to create a universal truth, right.
Speaker 1:Like I told you last time we spoke, I don't understand how you show someone a demand letter on this side of the street. They go. That's amazing. I love that. Same lawyer across you know similar across the street to go. I would never use that. That's crappy. How are we at a place in 2025 where there's not a freaking universal demand letter that the insurance companies go that makes sense, the lawyer goes, that makes sense and we freaking do that.
Speaker 3:Well, I keep asking how can we be in a place where most firms don't have any form of a knowledge base, except for oh, I remember that case I think we did a while ago. Let me go see if I can find that pleading. I mean, I'm shocked at good, not tiny, not new good plaintiffs, personal injury firms, guys and gals I hang out with who basically seem to be restarting research in almost every case, and they are good, and so their work product over the years is excellent, and they have no way A to access it easily but B to bring it to access it to the next generation of travelers. It's shocking, and so I think that's a big use case for AI.
Speaker 3:You know Tego Forte's second brain, right, like we build this thing over here so that and you're right, I mean it gets smarter, it asks the right question, it reminds you of things that you didn't think about in this case. It reminds you of what you did in the last case with a similar factual situation. So it is fascinating, I think, from where you sit, it's got to be very competitive because, like you said, everybody is not everybody, but there are many firms that are out there working on this, trying to solve this problem for lawyers every week. I know I'm one of the one percent that the weirdos that listen to the ai podcasts and read the ai literature and literally, as you know, you know, even as we talk, like last week, right, yeah, new versions of gpt and what it does and what it doesn't do.
Speaker 1:It's funny you could, you gotta, you gotta not. You drown that out, right? And so I tell my team all the time, when we were doing digital marketing at Crystal Clear with CRM technology, you know we'd go to a big show in Vegas and you'd walk the floor and there'd be 42 digital marketing companies in the convention soliciting the same doctors. Right, you got to. Just, they'll do what they do, we do what we do. The good news is, most recent study, I just interviewed a gal from Affinipay. Affinipay is a great company. I've got brands on LinkedIn. Well, their legal tech expert just did a survey and it was in the high twenties. About 27% 28% of legal professionals have adopted some type of systematic AI. Well, that means 72% of millions of legal professionals have not. So if there's a thousand AI companies which there isn't there's plenty of folks that need help. Right, and if we focus on what we do, we love and serve our team. We love and serve our customers. We provide a world-class experience. We're going to be more than sure.
Speaker 3:I phrase that as so many lawyers have not yet even opened the box to see what's inside. Look, I'm real familiar in the PI space, but I don't know the family law and the corporate law and employment law space so much. Can you give us some examples of how your product is being used across some of these other verticals that me and many of my listeners might not be totally familiar with?
Speaker 1:Yes, family law is labor intensive. Right, it's pouring over tons and tons and tons and tons of information. But if you think about it, the way that I like to explain it is and it really doesn't matter if you're a mortgage broker, you're a accountant, you're a doctor, whatever it is, or if you're a family lawyer we all have to do when we're confronted with a matter, in this case, a legal matter. We all have to do three things. First thing we have to do is aggregate information. Right, we got to figure out financial. So in a family law case, there's five years of financials. We have to start there. We have to get all the financial records. We have to get credit card statements. We have to get, you know, the bank statements and all that, because we're going to go. Now there's a forensic component to it, right, who stole from who and all that? Or maybe they did or didn't. So they have to aggregate that information. Second thing they need to do is analyze that information. Now, I've got all my information. Now I've got to go through it. And then the third thing I need to do is act. I have to plot a course of action. So, ai, what's better than AI at analyzing, at aggregating, analyzing and plotting a course of action. So when you, again, through creative prompting, they start uploading the financials and now they can chat with the financials, is there any evidence of suspect? Have I in this case? What is the projected child support? What is? And then the AI is actually managing the case for them, right, so that they can get from A to Z a lot faster. Right, and when there's because there's an external research component, they can look for precedents, other cases, to your point, right, where has this happened before? How can I compare and contrast that? So, a family law.
Speaker 1:Now, the trick in family law is figuring out how is this going to affect billable hours? Right, because in family law, in most cases it's not. It's good that it takes 10 hours, 10 times 750. And so what I think is going to happen not today, but we talk a lot about this and many legal tech experts do the idea of a straight, you know, traditional billable hour model. I think that's going to come under pressure. Yes, it doesn't mean that margins will get compressed and they won't be able to get paid. It just means the way we disclose to the consumer how we got to this output is going to be. Yes, by the way, there's a consent form. We use AI. This is how we get here. It used to cost you $2,200. I'm only going to charge you $1,500 for the output. We good, right. And then it's kind of like we don't need to tell you how long it took because it's a fixed base pricing or some blend or hybrid of that. I think you'll see that in family law.
Speaker 3:Oh, I think. So you probably see it. Across the billable hour spectrum. The Virginia State Bar, as conservative as it is, just came out with a legal ethics opinion recently that addressed this point in a way that was very favorable to the lawyer saying yeah, I mean, as long as you're disclosing and you're making a fair deal, right, hey, tim, I'm going to do your case up to this part and it's going to cost X, right, and that's the deal we don't even use. We don't even think in terms of billable hours anymore. As long as that's disclosed and the client goes, yeah, that sounds good and it's kind of clear what done looks like for the fee they're being paid, that's going to be fine.
Speaker 3:I think that what will be really interesting is the sort of the corporate defense side of this whole equation, because there's, you know my friends that are in that space. I'm not kidding. They've not opened the box. They are waiting for the rules to come down from on high about how our firm is going to do this, and they are still. You know what this reminds me of.
Speaker 3:So I've been 42 years in and you know there was a time when the advent of electronic legal research, like we had that in law school but it was very slow and clunky in the 80s, the early 80s, but then it became widely available as you had access to the internet, right, and I can remember some of my insurance defense friends saying we don't want it because right now I'm billing to get in my car and drive to the local law library and do research and drive back and I don't know what I'll do if I can just type in a query and get answers. So I think that'll be an interesting space. You all are probably Faster. Outcomes is probably playing in the entrepreneurial lawyer space, I imagine. I don't know, are you also going after that? The market of the more corporate-type firms?
Speaker 1:We're getting there. So what's happening? So what's going to drive that shift? When you think about in-house counsel, right, in-house counsel a lot of times in large corporate settings, they're legal consumers, right. So they're going out to other law firms and they're consuming their legal services. These people aren't stupid, right? There's going to be a conversation that says, like three years ago it was like you're not using AI right. Now it's you're using AI, right. And I think they're going to demand hey, you should be, you know, utilizing the most advanced technology you can on behalf of your customers. So there'll be pressure, corporate pressure, from that. There's a lot of law firms, too, one of our largest customers, interestingly enough.
Speaker 1:In business healthcare they use a subscription model. So they you pay instead of these big retainers and then you work them off. You pay monthly, right? You pay 5, of these big retainers and then you work them off. You pay monthly, right. You pay $5,000, $10,000 up front and then you pay your $2,500 a month and that gives you X number of matters, x number of time and so for them, we just built this knowledge instance.
Speaker 1:You know they need a ton of in addition to all their own information they work with. They're in elective health healthcare, so meds, but same people med spas, you know plastic surgeons, so they have to do a ton of external research because it's you know who can fire a laser, who can inject both changes county by county in some states like California. So in addition to having they need a huge research base right. So they're very entrepreneurial in that they're not functioning on a billable hour model, so every hour they save is the ability to get another med spa right. And that is entrepreneurial thinking and I think you'll see more of that as time goes on and you know who knows what's going to happen based like if you look at Arizona where things are changing and you have the ability of someone who's not a lawyer to own a law firm when they open that box and private equity firms can own law firms.
Speaker 3:Yeah, widespread adoption. National trial lawyers, at their November event out in Scottsdale, will be doing a whole day on alternative business solutions. And even though I'm in Virginia which is probably the last state ever I'll be there because I think even just the idea you just gave with the med spas like that's transferable to entrepreneurial lawyers. It goes back to what I said about now. We could, in effect, open an office in an underserved part of the state if we were smart about it, and the people you could get involved would make law more accessible to folks who probably can't afford it right now. Let me ask you you all have a partnership with Rob Levine Legal Solutions what is if you tell us a little bit about what that is and what you're learning from that?
Speaker 1:Everything. So Rob Levine is the 1% of 1%ers in terms of lawyers, is the 1% of 1%ers in terms of lawyers, absolute brilliant businessman and one of the most disciplined, process-driven humans I've ever met in my entire life Totally the opposite of me, and one of each. And it goes back to what I said. So what we're learning from Rob is there is a universal truth in how to manage every type of case. It's a process and you have to stick to the process, right? So we're building out playbooks. Most are done Say okay, how do I handle a DU? How do I handle a construction site case? How do I handle a slip and fall? How do I handle? How do I handle and you know he's processing thousands of matters a month and he's been doing it for 25 years, right? And the other thing I'm realizing is that you are who you hang out with. So if you look at his mastermind groups that he's part of and the people who are involved in those, they're also 1% of 1%ers, right? So they actually this group of five in his mastermind group all agreed on this is the way to create a demand letter, a universal truth, not Rob's way, tim's way, ben's way. This is how we're going to do it right and you get points for certain aspects of the demand that lead to the highest outcome for the consumer and for yourself. And so what we've learned from him is that not all lawyers approach a case the same way, and what he gave me this little test Ben, you'll love this.
Speaker 1:So we were talking about one of the most important things in a personal injury is to determine is there any type of traumatic brain injury? Traumatic brain injury is bad for the consumer and obviously has a high impact on the outcome. We were talking and he said you know, tim, you might be surprised how many lawyers wouldn't really understand even how to determine if there's evidence of traumatic brain injury, right? So one of the things we write a prompt built into the solution is is there any evidence of traumatic brain injury? And he's like it's called the Philadelphia test, right, and you administer the Philadelphia test and that he said I challenge you. I won't mention the conference I was at. He said walk up to 10 personal injury lawyers, talk to them about traumatic brain injury and ask them what tests they use to determine that. And he said I would be surprised if one of them says the Philadelphia questionnaire.
Speaker 3:They're all going to say if the doctor's report says it right, so 0 for 10.
Speaker 1:Yeah0 for 10. And I was like I get it. And so what, he's helping us understand and this is good for the writ large, the industry, right Is okay. I've got a lawyer who's two years out of law school. Three years out of law school. There's no way, there's no way that they're going to have the knowledge base that someone like you or your son or Rob has, and we're going to empower them with those tools. So when they log in their toolkit, the tool belt goes on and they have the most advanced weaponry to to, to go in the fight, right and. And so that's what AI does. It makes everybody Rob Levine. That's the key, you know. So he spends a lot of, he's an investor, he's a partner, he's a customer and he's I've been friends with Rob for 25 years, so do I think that he gives us a distinct competitive advantage in personal injury with our AI? I 100% do.
Speaker 3:He's got the most at-bats right and the more reps, the most reps and he goes by the heavy hitter. So, tim, look, this has been great. Who is your avatar? I mean, could you mention like lawyers that are maybe running three or four different practice areas? Obviously, there's an investment if you're going to get involved in any of these AI platforms. Who is something like Faster Outcomes best for, like I should be calling Tim. Talk to him or your team about the product.
Speaker 1:So the largest percentage of customers. We have tend to be small firms one and two lawyers, a couple of paralegals and we have tend to be small firms one and two lawyers, couple paralegals and we have a super affordable platform that they can get onboarded with in five minutes, right, and then we can spend an hour training them how to do it. And we've got great support. And that you know, probably because that's the highest percentage of personal injury lawyers tend to be one and two lawyers with a couple of paralegals. So there's that. We do have the Rob Levines of the world. We have more sophisticated solutions for them, more time investment, more dollars invested for sure Family law. We have everything from one family law practitioner to we just onboarded somebody we call them licenses with 30 licenses.
Speaker 1:So it's a combination of lawyers and paralegals. We're going to put the knowledge base into that law firm. So, and then on the business healthcare side, knowledge would apply. So single practitioners are going to use our pro and discover platform. They're going to open a matter. They're going to work that matter. They're going to use our playbooks. They're going to get to an outcome quickly. They can pay for a demand, no-transcript, his understanding and then getting great developers, and so if you do that, that's my avatar having the smartest CTO in the world, and then most firms will come to us with a problem we can solve it and then protecting that CTO from the metas of the world who want to buy that person from you.
Speaker 4:It's called options. Yeah, it's called lots of options.
Speaker 3:There you go. You and I could have a whole other discussion really, about the whole. Options upon options, yeah, the world of private equity and venture capital and growing businesses. It's been awesome. As usual, folks want to take another. The next step, have a chat with you, your team, get a demonstration. What should they?
Speaker 1:do Fasteroutcomescom F-A-S-T-E-R outcomescom Shoot me an email if you have a question about anything we talked about today. Tim at fasteroutcomescom, I'll answer your email and you know the good thing about reaching out whether you decide to do something with faster outcomes or, first of all, you should be using AI Hard stop. Whether it's us or somebody like us, you got to use AI guys, you got to do it. Here's a couple of things that I know. One, if you do a demo with us, you're going to know more about AI than when you started, whether you pull the trigger or not. So that's a positive.
Speaker 1:The second is we've never onboarded a customer who, after two months, says you know I was using it a lot, now I use it less. That freaking never happens. You know, be mindful of what you're trying to accomplish. And, and you know, the last thing that I know we're trying to wind down is, if you're not fully versed with AI, go on chat, gpt, open source, free and write a poem or a bedtime story or something. You know where you want to go fishing. Just get comfortable using the technology in general. And as we become more comfortable here, like I said, what I know is we use it more and more and more, and then we get to a place where we go. I should use this in my business. That's the progression.
Speaker 3:I will be out at a number of conferences.
Speaker 1:we have around One of us, or both of us, will probably run into you at some point, and I look forward to it. Yeah, thanks for spending time with us today, tim. I had a really good time. Thanks, ben.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it. Awesome day, thanks. That's it for today's episode of the Renegade Lawyer Podcast, where we're rewriting the rules of what it means to build a great law practice and a great life. If something sparked a new idea or gave you clarity, pass it on, subscribe, leave a review and share this with someone who's ready to think bigger, want more tools, strategies and stories from the trenches? Visit greatlegalmarketingcom or connect with Ben Glass and the team on LinkedIn. Keep building boldly. We'll see you next time.
