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
Three Takeaways from the Hona Disrupt Conference
Technology should empower—not replace—meaningful client connections in the legal profession. At Hona's Disrupt Conference, the prevailing wisdom wasn't about using AI to minimize client interactions, but rather leveraging automation to create more time for genuine human connection. As Josh Sanford of Lexamica powerfully stated, the goal should be to "waste more time on the phone with clients" so that when critical decisions arise, they trust your guidance.
The most innovative law firms are implementing strategic approaches to enhance client touchpoints. Attorney Ethan Ostroff has introduced a dedicated scheduler position focused solely on client contact and document collection. This overseas virtual role significantly increases client communication, which consistently correlates with better case outcomes and satisfaction. When clients feel connected to their representation, they follow medical recommendations more consistently and ultimately leave more positive reviews—regardless of the case result.
Automation tools are evolving to support deeper client relationships. Hona's platform now offers regular push notifications asking clients about experiences that won't appear in medical records. This accomplishes multiple goals: clients document relevant information in real-time rather than trying to recall details months later; attorneys gather richer case data; and there's a clear record of client engagement. Similarly, implementing early TBI screening helps identify symptoms clients might not initially report to doctors, potentially strengthening case documentation.
A critical insight for any law firm: stay current with your existing technology stack before purchasing new solutions. Products continuously evolve after purchase, and firms often miss valuable new features simply because no one is designated to maintain regular contact with account representatives or attend product updates. The functionality you need may already be available in tools you're paying for.
As the legal landscape evolves with AI and automation handling routine tasks, firms that differentiate themselves through empathy and relationship-building will thrive. The future belongs to lawyers who leverage technology to handle mechanical aspects while dedicating their newly available time to the human elements of legal practice that truly matter to clients.
Looking to grow your practice? Join us at the Great Legal Marketing Summit (October 23-25 in Fairfax, Virginia) where experts like Dan Kennedy, Jay Berkowitz, Jason Hennessey, and more will share cutting-edge strategies for law firm growth. Grab your tickets at glmsummit.com and position your firm for success in this rapidly changing legal landscape.
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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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Hello, my friends, and welcome into a very special Saturday edition of Life Beyond the Briefs, the number one podcast for lawyers choosing to live lives of their own design and build practices that they actually like showing up to on Monday mornings. Okay, so why are you getting a Saturday morning edition of this show? Well, the reality is life has been busy, busy and I hate describing my life as busy because I think that that's a bad goal and I think it's so easy for lawyers and other professionals to default to like that, saying that I'm so busy. But it's better than the alternative and I think busy is a bad thing to chase. But the reality is like we've been busy.
Speaker 1:Wife and I just bought a new house closed on our dream house forever house in late April and we've been doing all of the work that it takes to sell the old one. Old one will go on the market in June. So if you're in the market for a beautiful four bedroom house California contemporary house in Fairfax, virginia, walking distance to an elementary school and probably to a high school, if your kid is willing to trek a little bit, it's a great house, but we have just kind of outgrown it. So we're doing that and in the midst of all of that and the move, I was out in Salt Lake City for Hona's Disrupt Conference for four days. I came back for 36 hours and then moved to a new house. So, yeah, like things have been busy lately. Oh and, by the way, the Monday before that event, we switched over to Filevine in the law firm and so we're solving all the technology problems and issues and opportunities that come with a major migration of all of your law firm data and software and files. So, yeah, we've been busy, but I wanted to record this episode and make sure that I got a solo podcast out to you this week, because I do have some takeaways from this Disrupt Conference that I want to dive into.
Speaker 1:If you missed last week's solo episode, it was the recording that Hona graciously gave me of my talk, and my talk was about how automation and AI should not be overused, because it's easy to substitute those things and speed for empathy, and the big thing that our clients are looking for when they come and hire a lawyer is a result, yes, but it's really a feeling about a result. It's a feeling of being taken care of. I mean, how many times have you gotten a great result for the client and because you hadn't set their expectations properly, like they were upset with the result. And on the other side, how many times have you had a case that you know, for whatever reason usually because of policy limits issues settled or resolved for less money than it should have? But the client because you had done everything in your power to set expectations and hold their hand and make them comfortable with the process along the way, like, was pretty happy with you and still left you a five-star Google review right, it's because the result matters much less than what your client thinks about the result. And that isn't, you know, it's not permission to be a shitty lawyer. Right, the table stakes for doing what we do is being good at what we do, but to get to the next level, you also have to deliver an outstanding client experience, and I thought that that speech was going to be unique at a tech conference, which this was.
Speaker 1:There was a lot of stress on AI and AI voice agents and the ever evolving state of automation and what the bots can do in your law firm, and I really thought that I was bringing a contrarian viewpoint, and there were like four other speakers that said basically the same thing or the same theme that I did, which is amazing, right, like you have all of these thought leaders in the law and, if you know somebody who's been on the speaker circuit, like a good chance they were at this event because there were a lot of big names at this event. But the thing that I wrote down that Josh Sanford of Lexamica said is that actually, the goal of all of these automations is so that we can waste more time his words, not mine on the phone with clients, so that when the time comes to get our clients to make a hard decision, that is the correct decision. They will listen to us and I thought that's so powerful. Lawyers can hear automation and Domino's pizza tracker for your law firm and you know, automated AI messaging and think, shit, that means I can work less. It means I can talk to clients less, and that's absolutely the wrong tack if you want your law firm to succeed into the next decade, because AI is going to do more and more of the legal work and more and more of the back office work, and what is going to distinguish the good law firms from the shitty law firms and the good law firms from the great law firms is that the great ones are going to lean into empathy and lean into actual relationships with their clients and with their referral sources, and do that with all of the free time that they gain from the automation. It's the same way that firms now are taking efficiency gains from AI and automation and plowing that money into marketing. You're going to see the time gain being plowed into relationships with clients, and so I took a couple of ideas that I'll share with you in today's episode about how, if you properly utilize AI and automation, you can have more touch points with your clients, and how that will maximize the value of cases and will get you better Google results and more referrals and all of those things that we are all looking for.
Speaker 1:The next leg up on Okay. So here's idea takeaway number one it comes from my friend, ethan Ostroff, who runs a law firm in Pennsylvania, and I had Ethan on the show about a year ago. I'm talking about his law firm and then also talking about he's got a company called Attorney Assistant. It's a VA staffing company in the Philippines and he's done some cool stuff. Like you're going to have a VA staffing company in the Philippines, you ought to go there every once in a while and meet up with your people. And he's done that and he brought everybody in the company together, which I think is awesome.
Speaker 1:This tip from Ethan, who has grown from a lawyer who was running a pure referral shop right which he was the first lawyer who I ever came across that was not actually operating any cases in-house acquiring these mass tort cases and farming them out, acquiring auto cases across the country, because he had a huge TikTok, has a huge TikTok following and farming them out just through systems and processes. Well, as it turns out, when you farm out all of your cases and I think Ethan would not have a problem with me saying this you don't have any control over the cash flow. And so a couple of months ago, maybe six months ago, started bringing cases in-house. He's got lawyers that are operating the cases now and he started to think about well, how do I control the cash flow and how do I increase the value of the cases? And he was telling me that he's introduced this new scheduler role in his firm. It's a VA who's overseas whose only job is to contact clients and get status updates, schedule client calls and collect documents.
Speaker 1:These are the things that in the US you can't get somebody to do for very long anymore. This absolute entry-level position calling clients it's a lot of emotional work can be a lot of emotional work. It's a lot of frontline work, and it's hard to get somebody in the U? S to do this for very long. And and so for a lot of us it's like this is our paralegal or legal assistant who is doing something else and then also doing this on a batch of cases, and he's created an entire scheduler position where this is all that person does. And the thing is, when you go overseas, into the Philippines and you create a lifestyle job, this is a great job for somebody over there and that person doesn't kind of look up the food chain in your law firm, as I cynically think a lot of the entry-level folks do, and the receptionist wants to be a paralegal, the paralegal wants to be a lawyer, the lawyer wants to be a partner right, you don't have that kind of issue. At least with the lifespan of VAs in the Philippines that we've had, we haven't had that looking at the food chain issue.
Speaker 1:And the scheduler role does a couple of things. Number one it increases touch points with your law firm and everything that we know in every study says that increasing touch points in a law firm, especially in an injury practice, leads to better client outcomes and leads to better client satisfaction. Leads to better client outcomes because they're not missing appointments. They're being reminded to go to doctors Although if you have to remind your clients to go to doctors, that's maybe an issue, and I used to shy away from the term medical management, but these people are doing a little bit of medical management, or at least setting the guardrails. Hey, it's been 12 weeks since your crash and you haven't had an MRI. Like I can't order one for you, but maybe we should talk to the doctor about that, right? Because everybody who does this injury work has had cases where client goes for six months or nine months or 12 months and and with no escalation in care, and then it's a problem at trial. And so I love the idea of this low dollar per hour scheduler role whose only job is to communicate with clients and be your back office. Go get the thing, go get the pictures, go get the police report, and you can do that in an automated fashion and a low dollar fashion, and again, that is what helps increase the value of cases and increase client satisfaction.
Speaker 1:Because what is the number one complaint about lawyers from the consumer section? I can't ever talk to the person who's working on my case and of course, it's not a lawyer that you're talking to when the scheduler role is calling you, but it is somebody from the law firm. So that's number one. There's all of these ways to increase touch points and we should be utilizing them in the case. Number two is an automated way to do that, and I heard this from two different people and Hona. If you don't know what Hona is, it's the.
Speaker 1:These guys describe their app as a Domino's pizza tracker for your case, and I said in my talk, like I was doing this manually. When I met them back in 2021 or 2022, we'd shot all these videos about what's going on at certain statuses and milestones in the case and we sent it out to the client manually. And then they have their app integrates with your case management system. So every time a client moves from treating to demand to litigation to settled, the client gets a push notification with videos and with frequently asked questions at those intervals. And so here's a little meta takeaway, right, and I'll give you first the tactical thing.
Speaker 1:Tactical thing is they've now developed a way to push a notification to your clients every whatever interval you set and I'm thinking two weeks is a good interval. They just ask them a really simple question and you can come up with your own questions and your practice area and mileage may vary, but I'm thinking every two weeks we ought to be pushing a notification to our clients saying is there anything that's not going to show up in your medical records, that was difficult for you in the last week or two weeks? Because what happens in these cases is our clients treat for 12 weeks or they treat for nine months or whatever it is, and we get to the end and we create their demand package and we say here's the demand package. What I need from you is a little bit of color. I need you to give me either a journal or running Word document or you know all of the things that are not in your medical records that reflect the impact that this had on your life. And most of our clients will have kept that thing for a couple of days, if they kept it at all. And then life gets in the way and then they don't keep it and then they're going back into their memory and they're trying to recreate it, right, and we lose all of the simple little things.
Speaker 1:Well, hona has solved that, because now I can push a notification every two weeks. It says tell me what happened in the last two weeks, right? And this does two things. Number one it creates a large set of data that's coming back into my case management system, because it integrates with my case management system case management system so that when I draft the demand or, better yet, when I use AI to draft the demand and that's coming also I have all of those facts from the client that I can use in the demand package. The second thing that it does is it reminds your client that you're looking for this information. They start to think about the information and then it gives them like, we all have these problem clients that don't fill anything out and then expect a great result. And you can go back and say, listen, dude, I'd love to get you a great result, but you're not giving me any ammunition. Like, I sent you 17 of these push notifications during the life of your case. You didn't respond to one of them. Like, help me, help you, right? And so that can go out at a periodic interval to the clients.
Speaker 1:And then I heard Rob Levine, who operates a practice up in Boston, talk about sending this Philadelphia test for TBIs out to his new car crash clients early in the case, which I think is just brilliant. How many times have you had a case where your client had low-level symptoms, maybe didn't report them to a doctor because they felt they would go away, and then they didn't go away and two weeks later they're finally reporting something to a doctor and the insurance company goes well, it wasn't there for the first two weeks. How do we know it's related to the crash. And so sending this screen to your clients triggers to you who knows something about brain injuries, that your client has symptoms that they haven't reported to a doctor yet. And so we can say now hey, like that, that sleep trouble that you've been having for the last three days I don't know if it's concussion related, but it might be. You ought to talk to your doctor about that and it's a way to find brain injury cases in your cases where your clients aren't reporting brain injury cases.
Speaker 1:All right, and I also told you I would tell you about the meta part of this. The meta part of this is that every app, every add-on client case management thing that you sign up for continues to develop after you sign up for it, and it is very hard as the law firm owner to keep up with all of these developments. You have to have somebody in your office who's paying attention, who's going to webinars, who's attending the product updates for your intakers, your HONAs, your file vines, your case peers, whatever technology you use, because so many of us will go out and buy the next new thing that we see at a conference without recognizing that the things that we already have in-house and that we're already paying subscriptions for in-house will do this. And so it is like, if you don't have somebody who's looked at your tech stack every once in a while and gotten on a call with an account representative for the companies you're already paying subscriptions to, you should find out what new stuff they're doing, because you will find gold in those new product updates. Okay, third thing I'm going to tell you is God you got to get out to these in-person events. You know, especially as a young lawyer and if you're a young lawyer listening to this, thank you for listening the temptation is to sit behind your desk and to cram your CLE hours and your business development hours into Zoom. And God, it is such a mistake, especially when you're raising young kids and you have a family Like it's hard to travel out of town and it's hard to take a couple of days and go wherever the thing is. But all of the value in these events or not all, I won't say all, hona, not all, at least half of the value in these events comes from the people that you talk to in the hallways and at dinner. And I'm so thankful and so lucky to have had some of the conversations with some of the people that I have. And so if you get a chance to go to events and you have your choice of, like, big ass events or small user conference, you should go to both. But every once in a while you got to go to the small user conference. I had a chance at this event to hang out with, like everybody whose name you've heard in these circles Jen Gore, ryan McKean, ethan Ostroff, tyson Mutrix, ray whose name I can't pronounce from Even Up, my dude and you get really good one-on-one time with vendors and they're typically not like the 25-year-old brand executive at who gets sent to the large shows.
Speaker 1:Like you get good one-on-one time with the founders and if you're growing anything of substance, you need to be hanging out with people who have done bigger and better things than you have. Like I had a chance to. I had dinner with with Ray, from even up. Ray is the only unicorn founder that I've ever talked to, probably, and he's talking about you know I I start my day and I have three things on my list and then problems pop up and I don't get to any of my three things. I'm like dude, you should get an ea and you should get a c-suite team. He's like duh, I have both of those and I still have this problem, oh shit. So like you get bigger and it doesn't get any easier. And it's just good to have that one-on-one time in those realizations, because it is so easy to sit from your office and look at everybody who you think is successful and think that their lives must be so easy and their lives must be so easy and their lives must, you know, be simpler and they must have people who solve all these problems for you. And it's just not the case.
Speaker 1:I also had a I had a really interesting conversation about like would you do it again with Tyson Mutrix and with Ryan McKean about knowing everything that you know now, would you go to law school again in 2025? And all three of us said no. There's a lot of being a lawyer. It's a great way to make money. I think that we have a significant early mover advantage over people that are going to law school in 2025. I think that what you're going to see in the coming years is that it is very hard to be a young lawyer, because you're going to see this compression in the job market where companies aren't going to be a young lawyer, because you're going to see this compression in the job market where companies aren't going to be willing to pay big law for associate work that can be done by AI or by automation. Right Can aggregate all this data. It's going to force a lot of really smart people who I did not have to compete with in the small firm space down into the small firm space and into the trial lawyer space, and it's going to make what we do a whole lot harder. And so would I go to law school again in 2025, knowing everything that I know now, if I were 22? I don't think so. I think that there are other higher leverage, lower barrier to entry, jobs and verticals that you could go into without taking on the debt, without having to spend three years not working, three additional years not working. I think that's a really challenging spot to be in. However, if you ask any owner of a solo or a small law firm what the number one challenge in 2025 is, it's finding good young lawyers. So I don't know, maybe I'm totally wrong about that. Maybe the market is wide open for people that want to work hard and be good at what we do. But from three pretty successful guys who were coaching other lawyers on how to run law firms, it's just interesting that none of us would choose to go back and do it all over again. All right, so that's it. That's your Saturday morning. Very special episode of Life Beyond the Briefs.
Speaker 1:If you're looking for a small-ish conference to go to, you got to check out the Great Legal Marketing Summit. It's going to be October 23rd through the 25th in Fairfax, virginia, out by Dulles Airport, and boy. I don't think that we've announced the slate of speakers, but it's going to be awesome. I'll give you a little taste. If you've heard of them in digital marketing, they're going to be there. So Jay Berkowitz, jason Hennessey, conrad Somm, guy Sakalakis we're trying to talk those guys into doing a live show of Lunch Hour Legal Marketing. That's going to be amazing. We have the godfather of direct marketing, dan Kennedy, coming. We have Kia Arian talking on brand. We have my good friend and favorite GLM ex-employee, tiffany Swidensky, who's going to be talking about how to manage all of the players in your marketing space. And then, of course, as valuable as the stuff from the stage is going to be, the really invaluable stuff is going to happen over lunches and dinners and breakfasts and happy hours.
Speaker 1:This year we are bringing for the first time ever into the legal space this concept of expert roundtables. We're going to have two hours of roundtable events where you can get up, move around the event and sit down with anybody who's the leading expert about whatever it is that that person is going to be talking about. Any question that you have about digital marketing, referral marketing, hr taxes even we have a couple CPAs and fractional CFOs coming you're going to get answered here. So if you are a solo or a small law firm owner and you are trying to grow your business, either you're trying to get over that $1 million mark or you're trying to get over that $5 million mark, and both of those are important thresholds in your business. This is a place to do it. You can get your tickets at glmsummitcom and, until next time, have a great week.
