Life Beyond the Briefs
At Life Beyond the Briefs we help lawyers like you become less busy, make more money, and spend more time doing what they want instead of what they have to. Brian brings you guests from all walks of life are living a life of their own design and are ready to share actionable tips for how you can begin to live your own dream life.
Life Beyond the Briefs
The Future is Now - Conversational AI Intake with Gabbi | Erik Ovesny
Ever feel like your law practice is stuck in a time warp, drowning in paperwork and endless client calls? What if I told you that the key to transforming your client interactions lies in a virtual assistant that can chat like a human and work around the clock? Enter Gabbi AI!
Join me for a mind-blowing conversation with Erik Ovesny, the genius behind this revolutionary conversational agent. We’ll explore how Gabbi AI is not just another tool but your new secret weapon—turning tedious intake processes into engaging conversations that resonate with clients. Imagine boosting lead conversion while you sleep!
Erik spills the secrets on how Gabbi AI personalizes communication, handles after-hours inquiries with empathy, and even tackles complex tasks like conflict checks—without breaking a sweat. Plus, we’ll dive into the ethical considerations of using AI in law and how these agents are evolving so quickly that they might just fool you into thinking they’re human!
Ready to break free from the grind and embrace a future where technology amplifies your practice? Hit play! This episode is packed with actionable insights and fresh perspectives that could redefine how you connect with clients.
Want to connect with Erik and learn more about Gabbi AI? You can find him on LinkedIn or @GabbiAI. For a firsthand experience, visit their website at meetgabbi.com, where you can test out Gabbi’s capabilities and even set up a custom demo tailored to your practice. Don’t miss out—and revolutionize your practice together!
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Brian Glass is a nationally recognized personal injury lawyer in Fairfax, Virginia. He is passionate about living a life of his own design and looking for answers to solutions outside of the legal field. This podcast is his effort to share that passion with others.
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Are we going to get to a point where, if I call a plumber, I can't actually tell if I'm talking to an AI agent or a person?
Speaker 2:I think less than a year, and I can tell you that because there's folks now that have used our system. Then we've gotten calls and they thought they were talking to AI and ended up being a human and vice versa. I think in five years from now it's going to be just, I mean, beyond our imagination.
Speaker 1:Hello, my friends, and welcome to another Tech Forward episode of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live life of their own design, and it does feel like we are doing more and more deep dives into technology, but that's because it is changing all of the time. And today I'm talking with Eric Ovesny, the genius behind Gabby AI, and this one's going to blow your mind because Gabby is a revolutionary conversational AI that transforms how your law firm connects with clients. Think about this Imagine having an assistant that never sleeps, responds instantly and can handle client inquiries like a pro. That's what Eric has built with Gabby. Eric and I dive into how Gabby AI can supercharge lead conversion, elevate your customer service to new heights and make your peanut butter and jelly sandwich Just kidding about that last part. Plus, we're going to explore all of the ethical pitfalls of using AI in the law, because if you're going to do this, you have to do it right. So if you are ready to break free from the trap where you are feeling more and more busy and start living a life of your own design, you will not want to miss this episode. Let's discover how Gabby AI can help you thrive in life beyond the books.
Speaker 1:Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. Today's guest is Eric Ovesny of Gabby AI. Eric has developed an AI intake agent that serves law firms. We're going to be diving into the future of the intake desk at your law firm, eric. Welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. The intake desk at your law firm, eric. Welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. So let's talk about this thing that you've built Meetgabbycom. G-a-b-b-i is the URL if people want to go check it out while they're listening to this episode. But you've developed a conversational AI agent that talks to new callers and new contacts to law firms in a way that's not robotic and all of the things that we are afraid of doing poorly, like the AI done poorly is a bad customer service experience, and you've built a good one. So let's talk about what you've done, differently than all of the other AI chatbots and machines that are out there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you know, when AI really started to become a topic of conversation with the legal industry and even just in everyone's world, everyone was trying to figure out how can we utilize it, what do we need to be afraid of and where is it going? When I first started out, we really created Gabby AI as a even though I hated the word chatbot, but it was basically a chatbot on steroids, and so when we created it, we wanted to make sure we had the proper integrations with case management software, crms and really just help with. The idea was always lead conversion, and I'll talk a little bit about why we focused on lead conversion. But we started off there and then, as AI and tech started to advance, I just really fell in love with this conversational piece, because we all know that a phone call goes a long way.
Speaker 2:You know, as a business owner, I can tell you how many times I've, you know, tried to avoid the text and just hop on the phone with the client and it's just made all the difference. So with the conversational AI piece, the important thing for me was to make it as human-like, as you mentioned. If it sounded robotic or if it just didn't sound as human-like as possible, then it wasn't going to be something that I think was going to be implemented into businesses, so we really took our time in trying to make it the most human-sounding that we possibly could. We worked with other companies that worked with Uber, even ones that worked with with amazon.
Speaker 1:We really focused on that human-like, um voice component of it and we're really happy with uh, the end result and so, you know, I'm looking at your website now and it's you use this term that I just kind of became aware of, um, just a couple of days ago which is the custom agent, and so can you, can you explain different ai agents? And it's not, you know, it's not kind of one character or one avatar, right? What's the use case for? You've given subscription plans, either a five or 10 or unlimited, versus like, hey, I just need the one person or the one machine that answers the question.
Speaker 2:Sure. So you know. What's really cool about Gabby AI is it offers the ability to create teams so your agents can communicate with one another, and what I mean by that it'll know when to transfer. For example, you could have an AI agent that's dedicated to one practice area, but if someone calls and they want to speak to someone, maybe in a different practice area, it knows when to transfer. So these agents they work together as a team on behalf of you, know the firm, and when we say custom agents, I think it's something we get all the time. People think you know Gabby AI is going to be branded in all the knowledge base and everything she talks about is going to be Gabby AI. That is not the case. Every agent is customized for each and every client, customer or practice that we deal with, meaning that you can upload your knowledge base. We upload your website. So what we're essentially doing are these agents become expertly trained employees for your business specifically.
Speaker 1:Interesting, so I upload my website and it talks in my voice, or in the voice of whoever drafted the content for my website.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and even with the actual voice. If you look at our site at MeetGabby, you can actually we have some custom voice examples on there so you can actually upload your own voice if you get a 30 second clip, an MP3 or an audio file, and that agent will sound just like you. It's pretty incredible how far this has come just like you.
Speaker 1:It's pretty incredible how far this has come. So tell me about creating my own custom agent. So what else can I feed this machine for lack of a better word in order to get it to know, talk like and be conversational in the subject matter that we're practicing? Are folks uploading briefs or emails or demand what's? Are they? What's the best practice there?
Speaker 2:All of them. Really, what's? There's really two components. There's the knowledge base and the individual prompt for the agent. The knowledge base can be shared with multiple agents and the teams that we just talked about. So within the knowledge base you can upload your URL, your website, pdfs, documents, emails, really any file, even custom text that you want to manually enter there. That would go in the knowledge base and it's not a set and forget component. All of these areas you can go in and edit at any time. And the same thing for the prompt. The prompt, basically, you can connect it to that knowledge base but then give it more scripting to kind of keep it under the parameters. More scripting to kind of keep it under the parameters.
Speaker 2:But again, because this is artificial intelligence, we have these trains. So if someone goes off topic or if they ask a question that's just completely out of the blue, gabby and the custom agent will answer just like a human would and knows how to pick up on that. So, for a good example what's the weather? Gabby AI can either read it, if we train her to do that, or just say I'm not sure. But if you go to weathercom, you know we got you.
Speaker 1:What is? What's the quality control mechanism for a law firm? Who's deployed an AI agent? Who's talking to clients? Is it listening to calls? Is it reading transcripts? Is it all of the above? What does that look like?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, as far as you know one of the things I know you mentioned this in the beginning there's different packages. We have some clients that sign up and they're like we just want to do it ourselves. The majority of clients we work with they just say can you set this up for us? And we do offer that, so we actually go through. We have an onboarding system where we ask a number of questions to help set up the agent. The more information we get, the better.
Speaker 2:A good example that will hopefully answer your question is, if you have a good intake system with your human intake team, you can actually take a recording of that call, upload it and say this is a good example. This is what we're looking for and it helps train. You know the AI agent to duplicate that. And you know really one thing and I'm sure we'll get into this too, when we created Gabby AI yes, certainly these AI agents and beyond what we're doing just AI agents in general can replace intake teams, receptionists.
Speaker 2:We built Gabby AI to supplement intake teams and certainly there are firms that costs are smaller that don't have the intake teams, and Gabby AI can handle that. But we also work with medium and larger size firms that may even just use it for website speed delete. So it's yeah and I'm sure we'll get into that. Yeah, there's really the way I look at Gabby AI is we try to look at it like the same way you would a human employee. It's the same training. It's just that because it's AI, it can pick up within seconds and become an expert in the industry and the company.
Speaker 1:So let's talk speed to lead. I know you come from a marketing background and nothing infuriates marketing agencies more than generating all these leads, and then the law firm can't fulfill or can't answer the call or can't get back to the lead form, and so maybe Gabby AI solves that problem. How do you see it as a you mentioned as a supplement to the intake team, if somebody is calling initially, are they, ideally speaking, still to a person in my office, or can I deploy this as a?
Speaker 2:substitute. You can deploy it as a substitute. What's really nice about it is you can use Gabby AI as a gatekeeper, for example. So if someone calls in, hi, I'm Gabby, how can I help you? And based on the response, gabby knows where to do live transfer, so it can work during office hours and transfer to the right person, rather than taking up your intake person's time doing the mundane tasks of doing the live transfers. But also a lot of times after hours and that's another thing with speed to lead, we noticed many firms have great systems in place after hours. A lot of times those can be very costly, but there also are a good number that don't have them, especially the smaller to medium-sized firms. So Gabby AI can help answer all of those calls after hours. There's many things you can do. One of our most popular features Gabby I will send the agent will send an email with all of the notes, the recording of the call and all you know. It's formatted in a way just like a web form would come through.
Speaker 1:How did you come to this idea? What's the background of this company for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, as you mentioned, I've been doing legal marketing for over a decade and the frustrations that came with the lead generation, particularly for law firms, became very evident over the last, I'd say, 18 months year ago and we just went through and I noticed how many leads they were missing out on because they weren't responding to them.
Speaker 2:You know, whether it be social media, after hour calls or even during regular office hours, the phone just going busy and people will hang up.
Speaker 2:And I just really started to dive a little bit deeper into research and reading these studies on how people really react to these. You know, if someone's calling and they need a service, for example, the phone rings more than three times, they're likely hanging up. There's a lot of studies that show if you don't get back to a lead within the first five minutes, it's even less. Now your odds of converting go down more than 80%, and that's where I'm like there's a problem here and although our whole philosophy on marketing was always trying to obtain a 3x ROI and we always tried to measure that, even if we obtain that, we're still leaving potential revenue profit on the table by not getting back to some of these leads and one of the other areas that we help solve is the multilingual capabilities, and we noticed that was a big issue too, is people might reach out Spanish and they didn't have anyone to send it to, and so we, fortunately, were able to help fill that void, too, with some of our multilingual capabilities.
Speaker 1:I've had both of those problems.
Speaker 1:We were running we had a virtual assistant or not a virtual assistant yeah, a virtual assistant in Honduras, and we were running Spanish PPC and we got fired by our Spanish PPC vendor because we weren't answering phones quickly enough.
Speaker 1:He's like you're wasting your money here. So he did the right thing by telling us you're not good at this, like you should stop burning money over here. But the other thing that I've noticed, because I dove into our data recently, is that if somebody calls and they hit a live person in our office, taking all callers like do we want the case, do we not want the case? We're signing up 16% of those cases. If they, instead of hitting a live person in our office, hit our after hours answering service, it plummets to 10%. Right, yeah, so you do 60% Delta, um or 60% more more cases if we can just have it answered live in the office and move them on to the next step, and our after-hour service is doing things like setting appointments and taking all the data. I think they're the best of a tough industry to be in. Yeah, but it sounds like you've solved the problem of capture the lead information. Take the next step, and there may also be some additional follow-up things that you have going on in the background that my answering service doesn't.
Speaker 1:And the other problem with the answering service is right. That person is answering the phone for a hundred different law firms during the course of their evening, right? They're not trained on me in the way that your agents are. Exactly.
Speaker 2:I mean that's kind of the big selling point is Gabby AI is trained again as an expert employee of your business. Versus some of these other vendors that do a great job I've worked with some of them but at the end of the day they're human agents and they don't know the business is a very unique selling point with Gabby AI is her ability. When someone calls it's after hours, there's a couple things that can be done. She can send a link and help schedule because she integrates with calendars. So if it's a free consultation she will set that up. An attorney will walk in and just see that free consultation after she vets them and verifies this is a quality case, seemingly, based on the data that they provided.
Speaker 2:We've actually used it and had contracts signed. We've used it and Gabby will actually collect down payments for certain areas. So Gabby isn't just sitting there talking to them about what happened. She's doing that and showing empathy because in our industry we know that's very important and we wanted to make sure you know that empathy was a part of the conversation to make it more human like, but more so you know Gabby AI is doing taking action, scheduling them. You know if they're a quality case, getting them on the calendar and just making them feel like the job is done. They don't have to call any other firm reminding them about the contingency fee where applicable. So those have been. I think, some of our better success stories with Gabby AI so far are those actions that come with the call.
Speaker 1:How have you navigated the sometimes complex legal ethics guardrails around? Well, I don't want to wind up representing two people that have been in the same crash, or I don't want to have somebody pay me a deposit when I might have another client who they're now in conflict with. How does a law firm or a motor robot thinking about that on the front end with an AI agent like yours?
Speaker 2:Well, I think at the very top point it varies because, you know, we primarily work with impersonal injury, but we've also started working within criminal defense just because they have the same, if not more, you know of these issues with the speed to lead. So we see a lot more of like the down payments and whatnot in the criminal defense versus on the actual consultations. We see that very often with the PI. The nice thing as far as registering data behind the collar is we not only can we feed information into case management softwares or CRMs, we have the ability to also read it so we can actually pick up if this isn't existing by a unique identifier, whether it be their name, the phone number usually it's the phone number, email address but with that unique code that we set as an identifier, it can actually pick up and register that this is an existing client. Or at the very beginning of the call, we ask are you a new or existing client? To help filter that conversation.
Speaker 1:Very interesting. I'm curious just from a software perspective and I don't know a whole lot about software whether this AI build is it like a from scratch build for you, or are there components that are open source, somewhere that you've drawn from where you don't have to recreate a language model Like how does that part work?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So when I first started, I really just started looking what was out there and there were a few big players, but each one of them offered something great and but was missing one piece. What I basically try to do was take all the best parts of each one, of maybe three or four bring them together and create what I think sounds the most human like, doesn't have pauses We've now have it so it can have background noise, so it's like a little bit of an office, just to give it more realism. So the build. Fortunately, you know, I've had a good development team. We were able to take some pieces out there and stitch them together to work with others to create our own perfect system. As far as how easy it is when someone signs up to use it, it just really depends on how comfortable you are setting up agents. For me, I mean, I can set things up in just a couple minutes. For others, it's going to take them a little bit to navigate and that's why we offer the done-for-you as an offering.
Speaker 1:As you project yourself, maybe five years into the future, and as these AI agents become more ubiquitous, not only for your company but for other companies? Are we going to get to a point where, if I call a plumber, I can't actually tell if I'm talking to an ai agent or a person, because what you've described is like you have a receptionist that answers the phone. She tells you I'm going to transfer you to the finance team, who's also ai. Finance team goes oh no, this isn't actually the right place. I got to transfer you out to our service agent, who's also ai, all with like background noise, as though we're in an actual office. So how far are we from not being able to tell?
Speaker 2:I think less than a year, and I can tell you that because there's folks now that have used our system. Then we've gotten calls and they thought they were talking to AI and ended up being a human and vice versa, and it's hard to. I think, with some of the tools and I know with they're going to be coming out with a new the like the, the chat, gpt, they're going to be coming out with gpt5 and I think that's going to be a game changer. I think they're saying that's going to be hitting this summer, um, or, I'm sorry, next summer, but that is going to be, I think, an absolute game changer. I think in five years from now, it's, it's going to be just, I mean, beyond our imagination. So for this, I think, less than a year.
Speaker 1:This is so. You know. I've been saying for a couple of years now that it is a bad time to be a low or no skill American, because I'm finding your back of office work far cheaper overseas and in the Philippines. But it may also be, you know, no, far from being a bad time, to be a thousand dollar a month employee anywhere.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah yeah, no, I think you know my biggest thing is, you know, I admit I tend to get shiny objects syndrome when I see the latest and greatest thing. It just so happened with AI. You know something about it just stuck with me, and I think it was a mixture of. I've always been very creative and creativity was something I was stuck with, and a good example is and I know I've talked about this before on other podcasts, but you know AI, like I, was able to develop a whole YouTube channel with cinematic trailers that ended up growing and amassed over. I think we're at a hundred thousand views somewhere around there, just by putting up using artificial intelligence, like a software, like runway, and creating trailers that people thought were actual, like hollywood studio trailers. So it's I, I think you know, the biggest thing.
Speaker 2:When ai first started circulating, a lot of people were worried, how, you know a I just I don't want to run to this. Um, this is the latest greatest thing. We're just going to sit back and see what happens. I think in the legal industry, you know, we don't always to be pioneers, to say the least. It's definitely an industry where, especially marketing and advertising, we deal with a lot of laggards. But I really felt like AI could solve some big issues in the legal industry, and you've got to be careful with how you use it. I fortunately created it to solve an issue that I was dealing with, so I was living and breathing in it, and I think that it's something that's going to continue to become more popular.
Speaker 1:Well, certainly within the personal injury space. I mean, you go to any of these conferences now and there's AI everything Demands. Fileline just launched an AI depositions tool intake. I don't get the sense that this exists in like family law or estate planning, at least not to the extent that it's beginning to saturate personal injury. But I think you know it has an incredible use case in big law firms and in corporate law firms where you can synthesize. You know rooms full of paper like that. So, yes, the legal industry as a whole tends to be a laggard, but I think within that industry, like the personal injury space, is moving faster and faster and faster towards AI, everything. It's a little bit scary.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a great point. You know, obviously different industries with even different types of law are migrating towards AI in different ways, but I can attest to that, just working heavily within the personal injury realm, it definitely seems like they're adapting it a lot quicker, and more so than they have other mediums or tech in the past. You know, I know like when social media first came out and became an advertising platform, people were kind of slow, didn't really believe in it. Then now look at it today, everyone's on it, everyone's using it. Same thing with things like AdWords, pay-per-click. I mean, that's just a no-brainer for everyone anymore. So, yeah, I think with Gabby AI, what we're trying to do is constantly try to stay ahead of the curve and add components to keep us separated from others out there, because conversational AI is still a newer component. I think technology is going to allow more and more of these types of industries to come about. But again, gabby AI has a lot of different components built within it that make it unique and specific to the legal industry.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about. You said that you're focused on lead conversion, so walk me through, like with all of the bells and whistles. What Gabby is capable of doing from you know either from initial phone call or from form fill.
Speaker 2:Sure, we. You know Gabby AI offers both outbound and inbound. So on the outbound side, what's really cool, we actually can create a web form that looks exactly like the form on your site. You take the code, you embed it on your site. If someone fills out a form and we qualify them, if it's a good case or a want, within 10 seconds Gabby AI gets them on the phone. We'll call them Gabby AI, which I know we didn't talk a lot about this.
Speaker 2:We focused on the phone conversation, but can have full on text conversations too. And what's nice about that? You know they're opting into the form, so they have a consent that they they agree to these text messages. But we've also recently added on emails. So if you have like, our system has the ability to have email marketing very similar to that like constant contact, MailChimp. But what's nice, we have built-in automation. So if an email isn't opened or a campaign after certain days, if you're running a drip campaign, Gabby can call that person after you know, let's say, between day three and five. And again, our big thing is within the first 10 seconds, Like, that's our like we want, when you fill out a web form and it's a one, Gabby gets on the phone, people are like wow, like wow, that was fast. But you can also set those parameters. It can be 30 seconds, it can be a minute, but again, the quicker the better and what about?
Speaker 1:so you have a little reactivation campaign. If they haven't opened three emails in three to five days, what does the follow-up look like? Uh, after that they used it, and maybe this is set by the individual offer, but when does the campaign stop? So I'll tell you why I'm asking that question. Sure, I'm shopping for homeowners insurance quotes, and lawyers can learn a lot about follow-up done by homeowners insurance guys, because my phone hasn't stopped ringing from phone numbers that I don't recognize, and so. But at a certain point I imagine there's a built-in like all right, I've called this guy five times, like whatever, what is the kind of the best case reactivation campaign look like?
Speaker 2:Sure, two things. You can set it, you know, to go on really as long as you want. I mean, typically what we do is we set it to have five touch points that spread across, you know, maybe 10 days. But you can also have it set to stop on response, so they communicate on the phone, you know if they respond to the text, if they respond to the email, we know and we can opt them out of the rest of the automations.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, this is all the stuff that, like you, you wish you could train your team to do. But then, of course, when you bring in the second team member, if the first team member hasn't put all the notes into the system and if the second person didn't actually check the notes in the system before they picked up the phone and made the follow-up call. Yeah, this is an amazing product that it sounds like you built. So you're coming out to talk about it at the Great Legal Marketing Summit. I think this episode probably will be out after that. Have you been to many other legal conferences to show this thing off?
Speaker 2:been to many other legal conferences to show this thing off. This will be the first conference that we are going to where we're going to show off the conversational, the phone conversation piece. We were at a legal conference who this was about, I think a year ago now, and we were really focused more so on the chat piece, which we still have, but it's you know, everyone, I think, has a has figured out the AI chat functionality, so that isn't like a key feature. So this will be the first one where we're showing out the new Gabby 2.0, if you will Scroll on your website.
Speaker 1:You have Gabby doing legal intake, you have Darth Gabber Darth Vader play, and then you have Gabriella, the Spanish intake. I think this is a really cool, really cool product and I'm excited to see the live demo out at the summit. Eric, where can people find more about your company?
Speaker 2:Sure. So LinkedIn we have a LinkedIn Gabby AI. We also have a Facebook page, meet Gabby. Those are our two big channels, and then again, our website is meetgabbycom. What's really cool. If you go there, you fill out our form, you could actually test out the speed to lead and converse with our version of Gabby, and then on there, you can actually set up a custom demo where we'll actually go through and we'll set up a demo that's catered towards your business.
Speaker 1:The future is coming and if you are not on board with AI and technology, you're going to get run over. So, eric, thank you for coming on today. I enjoyed this conversation Awesome.
Speaker 2:Brian.
