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
What If Your Law Firm Ran Like a Startup? | Manny Griffiths
What can a law firm learn from a tech startup?
In this episode, I sit down with Manny Griffiths, CEO and co-founder of Hona, to talk about how his journey, from selling pest control door to door to building a 67-person legal tech company, is full of lessons for law firm owners looking to grow without burning out.
We talk about:
- The real-world use cases for AI in law firms (including after-hours lead capture)
- Why “automate the redundant to empower the personal” is more than a catchy phrase
- How to hire and fire with clarity, and why doing both faster might save your culture
- What pain journaling is, and how it’s boosting settlement values for personal injury firms
Manny also opens up about Hona’s early days: working out of his basement, building a sales team through a window, and how venture capital changed their growth trajectory.
Learn more about Hona’s VoiceAI and connect with Manny here:
🔗 Hona on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/honasoftware
👋 Manny Griffiths: linkedin.com/in/manny-griffiths/
🎧 Tap play to learn how startup thinking can unlock your firm’s next chapter.
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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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We released a tool that is like an AI receptionist that mostly works for after hours and overflow calls. So the reason we did this is because we have a client, just a small personal injury firm here on Salt Lake City, and he was telling us a story about him going home from work having dinner with his family and he got this call at 6, 635 pm. He rejects the call. 535 pm. He rejects the call. Six minutes later, after his dinner, he calls him back and they had already agreed to sign up with another personal injury firm. I don't believe they'd signed the engagement yet, but they're like oh, I'm going to go with this firm and we realized how great, like how time sensitive leads are and how expensive they are and really how bad call centers are.
Speaker 2:All right, folks, this one's going to be fun. Today I've got my buddy, manny Griffiths, ceo and co-founder of Hona, joining me on the mic. If you've seen any of my social media lately, you already know I'm a full-blown Hona fanboy. Manny's journey is wild from selling pest control door-to-door to building a 67-person legal tech rocket ship that's changing how law firms handle client comms, ai and growth. We're talking startup hustle, firing without fear, measuring what matters and why your next best hire probably needs to come through a window. Yes, really. If you've ever wondered what it would look like to run your firm like a tech startup, this is your blueprint. Let's get into it.
Speaker 3:What's up everybody, welcome back to the show. Today's guest is Manny Griffiths, the CEO and co-founder of Hona, and if you have been following me on any kind of social media channel in the month of May, you know that I'm a complete and total Hona fanboy. I'm happy to have you guys on the show Again. I had your co-founder, matt, on the show, probably when the show had a different name, like two years ago, and a smaller audience, so you can tell him that your episode got more downloads for sure. Manny Griffiths, welcome to the show.
Speaker 1:Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're a fanboy up to the point of jumping into our ball pit at the Disrupt Conference. I think you were one of three people to do that, so we appreciated that.
Speaker 3:How boring are lawyers that you had 100 people there and only three of them jumped into the ball pit that was right outside the door.
Speaker 1:There was risk there. They were all injury lawyers. They thought what's under the balls? What's am I going to get injured?
Speaker 3:So it doesn't maybe a good place to start. So you guys, we just had your first ever user conference and I thought it was a great event and you had, like everybody who's famous or even semi-famous, like me, in the legal influencer space, like Mike, mike Morris, jen Gore, rob Levine, brian McKean, Tyson Mutrix, flew out for like less than 12 hours. I think how did you go about thinking about who should we get into this room and onto the stage?
Speaker 1:Yeah, have you ever heard of I don't know if this is a thing but blue bubble conversations, like, are you on a on blue bubble basis with this person? That's my? It just means I message on an iPhone. Like when we wanted to do this conference, we were worried that it would be small and so initially I was like who is every big name I'm on blue bubble basis with? And I texted and I texted them all. So like I had Tyson's cell phone number, Ryan McKean's cell phone, your cell phone, Rob Levine's cell phone, and I was like, hey, doing this conference, can you please make it? And like that. And I actually think, like, looking back, we probably went a little bit overboard and like we, but I don't know, maybe not. So that was kind of our whole thing early on with the conferences. Anyone I'm on Blue Bubble basis with, it's a big name, I'm getting them to our conference.
Speaker 3:I thought you guys you did a great job and I thought you know, one of the things that your conference and the team that put it together did really well was making it valuable for everybody who took the time to fly out there and go on the stage, right. So you had somebody doing headshots, your team collected a whole bunch of video and photo and they've given us all that collateral. And then you know it's this conference thing is is interesting because your first time going to a conference you don't know anybody, but your third or fourth time on the conference law firm conference scene like you have so many friends and so going to a smaller event like yours only had maybe 100 150 people at it. It's like you you have really quality face time, like I had. I had dinner with ray from even up. I had to sit next to and talk to a unicorn founder about what kind of problems are you solving on a day-to-day basis, like I don't know. I don't get a lot of opportunities like that, so thank you for having me out.
Speaker 1:Uh, to salt lake city and a beautiful venue we loved having you and your talk was particularly interesting to me because a lot of it was technology focused and like how AI is changing the game. And then you kind of came this other way and, like to me, your talk reminded me of what Jeff Bezos says. He's like what's not going to change in 10 years. Like most of the conference was what's going to change, and you were like what's not going to change, and I think that's what firms should really focus on. So we loved having you. It was a good time.
Speaker 3:It's interesting because I thought it was totally unique, but then, like you, had so many speakers that said really the exact same thing. No, it's all about human relationships, like, the more time that we can spend on the phone with clients, learning their story and building relationships with them, the better off we are. And again, the temptation of all the AI and automation is to spend less and less and less time on client files and try to run the widget through the factory faster, and I think that's a recipe for one-star reviews.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, I think the successful ones figure that out. So it was fun to see that theme kind of come across.
Speaker 3:So one of the things that I love talking with tech guys about is their career and entrepreneurial journey. Right, and at some point everybody's story and your story touches Filevine. Give me your. I mean I'm looking at your LinkedIn page. You got a job as a sales representative for Filevine back in 2017. Was that first job out of college or first job back from mission? How did that work for you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it was my first job. I was actually still in college, I was studying for-. Wait a minute.
Speaker 3:Wait a minute. You have a better story and I'd forgotten until just now. Tell the lawn mowing or the pest control story that you told at your conference.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, when I was in college. So I was poor like a lot of college students and at BYU it's in Provo, utah, which I call door-to-door sales capital of the world, which is such an obscure thing. But the reason it is is because you got all these kids that have come from LDS missions where they serve two years abroad and, you know, teach the gospel, you know teach about the LDS church, and they baptize people and bring them into the church. So it's like selling religion essentially. And so you get all these kids that are used to rejection selling the hardest thing there is to sell. And then all these companies say these are perfect people to go knock on doors and sell door to door.
Speaker 1:So I was in college. I was like, not a ton in debt, I think, I was like 12 grand in debt but needed to pay for the next four years. So got recruited to sell pest control door to door and it's crazy, like these kids are in school and they'll recruit you because they have they're driving a Mercedes or a BMW and they're like they paid for it themselves and they're like hey, do you want to come make 50, 60, 100 grand this summer? You're like in a summer and they're like yeah, I made 110 grand in four months selling pest control. And you're like so you go out and you hustle, you work every day, and but there's huge commissions on these things, and so that's what I did in college to pay for school, which is how I got into sales. Like that's why I started working at Filevine as a sales rep was because I had done door to door in college to pay for school.
Speaker 3:And then you and I've forgotten what the technology was, but you told some story about how that company had used an app or some technology and had grown from like a low seven figure company to like nine figures.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was crazy. So, like when I first started doing door to door sales, the like the absolute best pest control reps would sell like four or five hundred accounts in a summer. So you know they're selling three, four or five a day, every day in the summer and like if you did four or 500 counts, you're making like $150,000 in the summer. But, like, the technology you use when I first went out was a notebook. You had paper contracts and you just would take notes on the houses you knocked. So you'd write down the address and you'd say this these people have problems with ants, but the husband's not there, so I got to come back at 8 pm when he's home. And that's like what you do. You'd sell them, they'd sign the contract and you'd go. You take it home at the end of the day. You'd like go in for a morning meeting and you'd whiteboard what's your statistics.
Speaker 1:But then, like my third year selling, they got this app called Sales Rabbit and it had the map of like Google Maps and you could see all the houses you were knocking. You could do pins, you had e-signature contracts. It would give you updates on the other sales reps and how many deals they would sell. So like you'd see your buddies and like if they sold one at 2 pm, you'd get like this competitive thing where I got to go sell a deal and it completely changed the industry.
Speaker 1:It went from like where four, four and 500 accounts in a summer was the best summer to like 1,000, 1,200 accounts, people literally like two and a half X production, and like the contract values went way up because you'd see, you'd see, oh, this person got a $500 a year contract, I'm going to go get six. And so it was crazy to see the company that I worked for they went. I know they were 1.7 million in annual revenue when I was there. It was like two offices. To now they're like 170 million in revenue, like crazy scale. And now they have, you know, 40 offices and like a completely different operation. And not all of that was attributed to this technology that came out, but a huge chunk of it was. It really like changed the industry. So that's kind of a cool experience.
Speaker 3:You know that competition theme comes up in a number of different places. So Mike Morris talks often about the big scorecard that's hanging in his office, and Craig Golden Farm has his team's metrics displayed on a TV screen throughout the day. Have you implemented anything like that in Hona, where the sales reps are competing against each other, knowing how the other guys and girls in the company are doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we do. We have, like our CRM does a really good job with this natively. So we use HubSpot and it's kind of it's cool because it has like how you're doing on the month, how many calls, how many deals you've won, the contract value et cetera. So like it naturally has that. But another thing we do is in our Slack, every time someone wins a deal it pops up and the whole company sees what the deal is. So it's like you sold X law firm and maybe I shouldn't say this, but like it'll tell you how much money they're paying. Like so the sales reps are like John just got a deal, he closed that firm. That's such a big name and so like that increases the competition and it's a good thing.
Speaker 3:So yeah, Competition is good for everybody and the people who it isn't. No, that's a good point. Everybody's billables on the wall and show them, show, show the guys in the bottom what's possible Number one. Show the guys at the top like there's some dead weight pulling the rest of the company around and just see what happens. Right and people quit. But then they replace them with people that were willing to work harder and build more. It's like you know, we have so much, so much pain internally when our people aren't living up to the standard. We won't go and talk to them and won't say, you know, like, hey, I only need you to build 1200, 1400. And you're like eight, like let's you're, you're at half, let's figure this out. And we won't publicly do that because we're afraid of what it'll do to the culture. But in fact, like the culture is all pissed off at the guy who everybody knows is not working. It's just not shared public knowledge.
Speaker 1:Totally. It's funny you were talking about us. I actually there was a quote that I talked about at Great Legal Marketing Conference a few years ago. It's this when performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates. So there's something about that scorecard and having everyone know that like just increases. Another thing I've learned, just as a business owner is and this probably applies to personal injury firms is to never always hire in pairs, and it's because of this competitive aspect. So when we hire a salesperson, we never hire one. You need someone to judge your performance against. So we have seen dramatic success with this. Because you need someone to judge your performance against. So we have seen dramatic success with this. Because they have someone to benchmark they're doing better, and then they push each other and they go back and forth, because you can't look at someone that's been there for two years. You're always going to say they're more experienced, but you can look at the better leads.
Speaker 3:Yeah exactly you got the fresh leads. They were fresh when you got them two years ago.
Speaker 1:Exactly. Have you ever heard of?
Speaker 3:Price's Law, uh-uh. So I'm going to read it so that I get it right. But I heard this at a Funnel Hacking Live last October. So Price's Law is the principle that 50% of the output of any field is produced by the square root of the total number of contributors to the field, right? So if you have four people, then two of them are going to produce half the outcome, like duh, right. But if you have a hundred people, 10 of them are going to produce half the outcome, right? This is kind of like Pareto principle, although exponential, right? The larger your team, the smaller the number of people who are doing or producing half of the work.
Speaker 1:Yes, I have heard of something similar.
Speaker 3:They called the 80, 20, 80, 20 those two yeah, 80, 20 is pareto okay, similar principle this this is um, um, yeah, price is law, it's I don't know. You know you, we always wonder, like I gotta hire more people now. You just maybe top grade your people a little bit. That's such an important thing. All right, I took a left turn there, so you went from selling pest control door-to-door to Filevine in like the early, like 2017, that's early Filevine at least seems like it from the outside. And then, after several years there, you and Matt had this idea hey, we're going to go and start the Domino's Pizza Tracker for your law firm, and you've told me the story. Firm, and you've told me the story, and so, and matt's told me the story. But you know, for a while you guys were working out of air mattresses in somebody's basement yeah, yeah, we worked in my basement for like six or eight months, something like that.
Speaker 1:It was pretty funny. We had a, so we broke off to go start this thing. It was the three co-founders me, matt and josh. We worked in my basement and I've told this to you, but before, but I don't know if the everyone else knows so in my basement I have like a window. Well, and matt, my co-founder, he was like kind of like he hated knocking on the door in the morning and like potentially having my wife in a robe with our daughter coming to answer the door. So we put a ladder in the stairwell, removed the screen from the window and he would come down the stairwell and he'd knock on the window and I'd open the window and then we had a step ladder that he could come down in and he had his little desk there.
Speaker 1:We worked that way for like six or eight months. Our first employee was some like 21. Well, our first salesperson, some like 21 year old kid in college that had done pest control sales and he would do the same thing. He'd come down the window and he was like so excited because you know it was a startup he was like you don't even have to pay me and we're like, no, we'll pay you. He thought it was the coolest thing to work there. It was crazy times, but yeah, it was started in that basement. Now we're like it's been three and a half years since then and we have 67 people, so we've grown really fast.
Speaker 3:It's like seven and a half years You've got the 67 people and you took some VC money, maybe a year, 18 months ago. Yeah, how has that allowed you? Either you know either access to like smarter business people in C-suite, or is it more marketing, or is it more money to throw at people. What, what would you say, is a primary couple of benefits that taking on the venture capital funding provided your company?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you you nailed it. Actually we you know venture backed businesses. You get this investment like our last last round was like $10 million. You're burning money every month which is so foreign for a law firm to hear. Like you're burning X amount of money per month. That's crazy. But the big thing is people Like our business requires so much R&D upfront to build the product, so you're paying for these really expensive engineers and you're paying them a lot of money and so you go hire five engineers that make, call it, 200 grand a year. That's really an expensive burden on the business. But if you look at the long-term of the business like once the product is really built out, you can kind of you don't have to have as many engineers and so that's what you'll start making money on the tail end. But we like that's where the big thing is is like we got to get engineers in the door.
Speaker 3:And did. Did you get a crash course in what to do with the money through Y Combinator or through the connections that you made there?
Speaker 1:You know, what's funny is like with Y Combinator. They gave us so we raised. So I'll tell you kind of the history of our fundraising. We did like a friends and family round when we started the business back in the basement days and it was like really small amount of money, like $100,000. And then we did Y Combinator and that was like probably 10 months later.
Speaker 1:And Y Combinator, when you get in, they give you half a million bucks like that, and like when you get in, they wire it to you like within a few weeks. They don't tell you anything about where you should, what you should, do with the money, which was kind of crazy. They're not like they don't, they're just like make it happen. It's crazy. And they they don't even like we never had an audit, they never ask. It's like they trust you to just go make it work.
Speaker 1:That being said, we like we're in such a cool day and age where we listened to a ton of podcasts on, like what you should do with the money. So there's one in particular called Saster and it's like all about building SaaS businesses and we listened to it religiously. We would come into work the three founders and would be like what'd you catch on that episode. What'd you learn? And it's like that was like how we formed this business, because we didn't know what we were doing. We talked to other founders, sure, and we were pretty close with the Utah founder community, but a lot of what we learned can be attributed to podcasts.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I mean you're describing the journey of many law firms also, Like, yeah, okay, graduated law school didn't know how to run a business. Graduated law school didn't know how to run a business, talked to some other lawyers who also didn't know how to run a business, and then found some podcasts somewhere, right, and then just made a mistake and learned something. And made another mistake and learned something. But you've come from three guys in a basement, four guys in a basement, to 67 in a very nice open office that I see behind you. Now, what are the couple of things that you've personally had to learn and improve from a management perspective to have 67? How long do we have? How long do you got?
Speaker 1:there's so much. I think people have been the biggest learning in getting the right people. We kind of talked about this later, but I think early on you kind of just take whoever's willing to come to your business and then later on you figure out how to find A players. But, like one of the things like people management, like learning how to fire people, has been massive for me. I think I'm like an empathetic person. I like people but I've learned how, like if someone person, I like people. But I've learned how, like if someone's not a good fit to cut them, to cut them quickly and to do that and the way I do it. I'll tell a funny story. Maybe I shouldn't tell this, but funny firing story.
Speaker 1:When I'm on a, when I'm on a podcast, I become an open book. So we had a higher I won't say the position or anything, but we had this hire. We learned within like three months that he was not the right hire. It was the first time I had to fire someone one-on-one, so take him into the room. And I was like, hey, you know, here's all the reasons. And I was like really nervous and I was like and we have to, you know, let you go. And he was like okay, like kind of. You know, when someone gets fired, they're in shock. So we part ways.
Speaker 1:And he calls me two days later and was like can I get some more clarity? And so I was like yeah, we're making these cuts. And he's like cuts, so is this more like you're doing layoffs? And I was like, honestly, if you wanted to tell the story like that to help you get a job, I would be fine with it. Well, the next week on LinkedIn, he starts talking about how he was laid off from his company. And then I start getting all these Slack messages from employees saying are we doing layoffs? Why was there like do we not have enough money? And so I get like bombarded. Then people from the LinkedIn community start reaching out to me.
Speaker 2:So it wasn't just Vultures are circling.
Speaker 1:Yes, it wasn't employees. And then it was all of a sudden it was like Hona's not doing well and we were doing great. But I didn't do it in a If I would have gone and said, hey, we have to fire you, it's not working out, and walked out of the room. I don't have this problem, but it's. But then, like all these problems, because I was trying to soften the blow, we got blowback. Employees were scared, the community looked at us Investment community probably looked at us and said, oh, they're doing layoffs, things aren't going well, so that's like a huge thing. I've learned Now, when I do it, it's just hey, we're firing you, thank you for all your work, and I walk out of the room like it's just a different thing thing and you have, you must have.
Speaker 3:Well, I don't know what your HR look like. Do you have somebody who's managing you have you must have reviews and things like that. I think it should never, should never be a surprise for the employee, but oftentimes in smaller companies it is right, because we bottle it up and then you get frustrated and then you go fuck, you're fired. You know, but what is your? What is? What is the lead up to getting fired from? You? Guys look like you have like a 30, 60, 90. What does that look like?
Speaker 1:well, that's it, that's it, that's it. Yeah, this is something that we've learned too. It's like setting really clear expectations. We used to like we would do like at least one conversation. Like hey, things aren't going well, if they don't improve, you get fired. And we try to do that with some roles. It's really easy, like if sales like a salesperson, if they're not hitting, you get fired. And we try to do that With some roles. It's really easy, like if sales like a salesperson, if they're not hitting quota, you put them on a PIP, a performance improvement plan. If they don't hit that, they're fired. Like it's really straightforward.
Speaker 1:But now we implemented like a one, two, three, like one-on-one performance review thing. So it's super simple three levels One, not meeting expectations. Two, you're meeting expectations. Three, you're exceeding expectations. So like monthly, we have to have, we have to give a number to all of our direct reports on if they're meeting expectations or not. If you're a one, then you should be expecting that, you know. If you have multiple ones, you should be expecting that you're going to get fired.
Speaker 1:And so we, you know, and everything is documented in a Google Doc. So like that's how we do it and we, you know, we didn't really have HR early on. We didn't have processes for these things. Now we have a PEO and we have an HR department and someone that runs it internally. But, like early on, I think the hard thing about this is they say that if you know someone's not the right person, it's two weeks too late. Like you have to hire the next person and train them, so you're three months behind. You lose so much time where you're trying to work really fast. So I think early on you kind of have to fire people quick and you get some blowback because you're behind if you picked the wrong person.
Speaker 3:The challenge with a lot of those one-on-one things where you've got a direct supervisor who's reviewing the person, is they'll give them all threes. I forget if threes were good or bad, but they'll give them all the good thing, right. And then three months later they're like this guy kind of sucks. Well, you gave him all threes in the last review while I was kind of just trying to be nice. It's getting people to be actually honest with the employee is better for both the employee and the company in the long term. Right, I mean, we are bad at this. We're better now that my wife is running our HR, but we are bad at letting people who we know are not good fits stick around for too long because we think and because sometimes it is like really hard to go and find that person's replacement, but almost uniformly the people that we've let go or the people who have quit because it's become awkward, like the staff is relieved immediately afterwards, even if they in the short term they have to do more work.
Speaker 3:Yeah that's enough in the hiring corner.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'll say one last comment on what you just said. It really is people. It's not fair to employees to keep someone. That's not good.
Speaker 3:So you're right, yeah, yeah, it's not fair to employees to keep someone. That's not good. So you're right on that. Yeah, I mean, your A players want to work with A players and your B players want to work with Cs. That's interesting, yeah, that's interesting. And then you know you're surrounded by a bunch of C players. How? So you guys are doing some incredible things with AI. How is? How are you utilizing AI internal to your company?
Speaker 1:Yeah, the biggest use cases for our developers. I'm sure you've seen there's been massive layoffs from large tech companies because they're able to do. You know, one developer can do the work of three with the use of AI. So our developers use a tool called Cursor that helps them code and it's crazy, it actually will write most of the code for them. So they'll say like, hey, I need to build a button that does this function and here's the parameters enter. It writes most the code. The developer will go in and pick and choose and maybe take out some lines, but like, they're literally doing two or three times the work that they could have two years ago, and so that is the biggest use for AI. Internally. We do a lot of stuff with marketing too, where you know, we use like CapCut that helps us edit videos and do stuff with our imagery for social media posts. Like, yeah, by and large, the biggest use case internally for us is coding. Yeah, anyway.
Speaker 3:Well, I mean, and the coding thing is amazing because it helps you run faster, until you realize that it's also helping all of your competitors run faster as well. Right, and so it's not good enough to be speeding up at the rate of change. You have to be ahead of where your competitors are changing. And again, the same is same is true in law firms, and your technology enables law firms to stay ahead of their competitors in terms of customer service and in terms of connection, connectivity with your clients and getting information back from them.
Speaker 3:I picked up really two things from your conference that we are immediately putting into place at our law firm.
Speaker 3:Number one and I think this came from Rob Levine is the ability to push out through HONA, the Philadelphia brain injury test, to clients who maybe have not reported to their doctors that they have a brain injury.
Speaker 3:You push out the symptoms and make sure that they ask all that. You were asking them all the questions and then, when you get those responses back, you go hey, maybe you should see a neurologist or maybe you should see a concussion doctor. And the other one is the ability to push out that periodic request for information of all the things that don't show up in the medical records about, like, what were the things you couldn't do in the last two weeks because of the injury right, pushes it back and it can tie into our file line, which then has an AI demand function and it could build that demand over the things that haven't shown up in the medical record. So those are just two of the things that I came back with, that again helping us run a little bit faster and stay ahead of the competition. But what is exciting, that you're producing or working on, or the next cool thing to roll out from Hona?
Speaker 1:Yeah well, I want to touch on the. We call it pain journaling. But that's been so big for a lot of our firms lately and I'm glad you're going to implement it because I think it's huge and the integration with Filevine is crazy. But we've learned so much about this. One of our firms will send them out. So they do everyone that's in treatment phase. They send out a questionnaire and it's two or three questions. They do it on a Sunday night because people are usually at home sitting on a couch relaxing and it's really easy to fill out three questions and essentially those questions are all the non-economic damages. I think the old school version of this is like personal injury firms would give people a little notebook and a pen and they would write down hey, I wasn't able to play piano because my wrist hurts this week and things like that. But you know, imagine if there are 16 weeks of treatment and you have data every week of the emotional pain and suffering that they go through. That is like we have some really cool use cases of people increasing their settlement value just because of that non-economic damage. So I think I'm glad you're doing that and that's been, you know, a really big big thing internally here, I think. I mean, I'm excited about our voice AI tool. I think it's just working. It's crazy. Some people aren't on it yet but it's like one of our.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, for the audience, we released a tool that is like an AI receptionist that mostly works for after hours and overflow calls. So the reason we did this is because we have a client, just a small personal injury firm here on Salt Lake City, and he was telling us a story about him going home from work, having dinner with his family and he got this call at 6, 6.35pm. He rejects the call. Six minutes later, after his dinner, he calls him back and they had already agreed to sign up with another personal injury firm. I don't believe they'd signed the engagement yet, but they're like oh, I'm going to go with this firm. And we realized how great, like howsensitive leads are and how expensive they are and really how bad call centers are. Like call centers. A lot of times you're paying for this call center and it still goes to voicemail or they don't get the name right, and people are so frustrated. And so we released an AI receptionist that's better than most call centers and can intake this information and schedule an appointment on your calendar. So we're releasing a lot of functionality around this.
Speaker 1:The ability to do outbound calls is what's next. So, like, if you need to collect more information and you can't get a hold of the client, the AI can actually say hey, I'm calling from the firm to collect these pieces of information, can you give these to me? And then boom, it's going to put it in your case management software for you. So, like, our whole mission oh no, and we talked about this at Disrupt is automate the redundant to empower the personal. You don't want to do these redundant calls to like call and ask for information. So our AI is going to get that for you, so that you can have more one-on-one personal touch with your clients. So that's what I'm excited about. It's like all the future of voice AI and what's going to come from that. I think it's going to be huge.
Speaker 3:Well, and your AI can call seven times during a day, right, yeah, without having to be the human dialing seven times during the day. And I think the mistake that most lawyers make when they listen to a voice AI tool and they go, no, it's not quite ready is is misunderstanding the role and the place of the voice AI tool. Because it's not going to replace your receptionist, right, but it is going to help you harness those cases that come in at 630 when you're sitting down to dinner with your family, because the goal of that is really not to sell that person, it's to get them to stop shopping for anybody else, right. And so if you have a decent to a good voice AI tool that can, all it does is it captures the people who were calling for Brian, right? Who don't then get frustrated seven minutes later that Brian didn't answer and they call somebody else, right? So all that thing has to do is capture name, phone number, email maybe you know sync with Calendly and schedule a time on somebody's calendar on Monday and then push a notification to that person.
Speaker 3:Okay, hey, we've got you set up for the next step. It's Monday at nine 30 in the morning, great. What happens now? You go back to Netflix, you stop calling other law firms, right, and so many people will listen to a voice AI demo and go it's not, as it's not a good customer service experience. Well, it's better than hitting your voicemail.
Speaker 1:Yes, totally.
Speaker 3:Then you have no shot In three years.
Speaker 1:It's going to be amazing, yes, and you just spent $1,000 for that phone call and it hits your voicemail. And I think it's all about setting expectations. One thing that's really interesting that we let our firms set up the call flow however they want, but we have a really strong opinion that you should call it out that this is a voice AI that's only meant to schedule an appointment. And a lot of firms will ask us hey, can we not do that? Can we like see, like, try to trick them? I'm like, no, don't trick them. Set the expectation. I'm only here because I'm at dinner.
Speaker 1:Like, set it up to say that I can't take your call right now, but I have access to the calendar. I'll schedule with you or, if it's really urgent, I can live transfer. So, like I think and it's the same thing with using Hona, Brian, like you I'm sure you tell your clients, hey, we use an application that will give you updates. It's not so that we don't talk to you, it's so that you can learn and we're still available. Like, you just have to set expectations correctly.
Speaker 3:Yeah Right, I mean it's, it's all of these things. All that's true. It's not a substitute, it's an augmentation to what you're already doing and you have to understand the role of these things within your business. And you know, buy one and stack on, stack, stack, stack, stack. Right, you're not going to go from a solo lawyer to you know, full sales team overnight, but there are pieces that'll help you get there. And that ai voice thing that'll pick up the phone when you're at dinner with your family is good for you, it's good for the clients, it's good for your family totally.
Speaker 1:Yep, yeah, that's what I'm all right man.
Speaker 3:Well, I think this is as good a place as any to try to land the plane. You are coming, coming. I hope you are coming out to Great Legal Marketing Summit October 23rd to the 25th. One of the things that I'm beginning to miss when I go to conferences now is all of my buddies who graduated out of these SDR roles like you did. I don't see as many of my friends at other people's conferences anymore, so I hope to see you there. I know Ona is going to be there. I'll be there. Where else can people find you? What do you want them to connect?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, if you're looking, if you're interested in Hona our website's H-O-N-A. Honacom. I love to connect with people on LinkedIn. I love that there's a growing LinkedIn presence for attorneys and you're helping that, brian. Thank you for doing that. So I love to connect on.
