Why Most Law Firm Technology Fails at Scale ft. Kellam Parks | Trial Lawyer View Ep. 86

What actually separates tech chaos from true operational leverage inside a growing law firm?

In this episode of Trial Lawyer View, host Jason Lazarus sits down with Kellam T. Parks, Co-Founder and Managing Member at Parks Zeigler, PLLC, to unpack what it really takes to scale a modern law firm without losing efficiency, profitability, or judgment. From building a paperless cloud-based firm in 2012 to navigating a six figure practice management mistake, Kellam shares hard earned lessons on technology adoption, AI integration, and leadership inside a multi office practice.

If you lead or operate a personal injury firm and are thinking seriously about law firm operations, AI in legal practice, and sustainable scaling, this conversation delivers direct, practical insight.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Why most law firms do not have a technology problem, they have a training and implementation problem
• How “shiny object syndrome” leads to expensive mistakes in practice management systems
• What Kellam learned from a six figure tech rollout failure
• Why cloud based and paperless systems became non negotiable for scaling
• How AI is transforming legal research, medical record review, and document analysis
• A real example of reducing a ten thousand dollar review process to minutes using AI
• The operational advantage smaller firms have when adopting new technology
• Why firms need internal and external AI policies to stay compliant and ethical
• How mindset drives firm growth more than tools or tactics
• The leadership mistakes that quietly slow growth inside otherwise successful firms

Connect with Kellam T. Parks
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kparks1/
The Motivated Lawyer: https://themotivatedlawyer.com
Parks Zeigler, PLLC: https://www.pzlaw.com

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I find a lot of lawyers have the shiny object syndrome. So they see something that interests them and they go, Well, that I'm going to get that. And it turns out they just didn't know how to use it. That is Kelham Park's co-founder and managing member at Parks Ziegler, LLC, who scaled from solo to a multi office firm. He believes most firms do not have a tech problem. They have a training and implementation problem and it quietly kills efficiency. It became a six figure mistake. My people were unhappy. We weren't productive. We were having problems and so we ended up shifting and only two years later went to a new practice manager system. He breaks down why the wrong rollout, turns good software into expensive friction, and how disciplined evaluation and user buy in is what actually protects profitability as you scale as an experiment. Six months ago, I fed that transcript into an AI tool, gave it the order, gave it what I was looking for, and in 5 minutes I got 85% of the same result. 5 minutes. Today, he outlines how to think about technology and AI as a competitive advantage without losing judgment, ethics or quality. By the end of this conversation, you'll learn how to avoid tech chaos, build adoption the right way, and spot the highest leverage workflows worth implementing first. I'm Jason Lazarus and this is trial lawyer view. We know each other from a mastermind that we are part of. And I know a little bit about your firm, but I wanted to start off asking you a little bit about it because I know that you career from solo to a multi office firm with now 14 lawyers and 37 team members across three offices in two states. So you've scaled and I'm wondering what specific technologies became a non-negotiable in your practice management stock because we have personal injury firms that are listeners to this podcast. And I think those things, even though you don't do personal injury, are sort of part of what firms need to understand if they're going to grow and scale in any type of practice. And PR is no different. Sure. No. I mean, I think that's 100% true. So I had worked at a bunch of different firms. And one of the reasons I started my own law firm as a solo in 2012 is I really wanted to use modern technologies more efficiently than you can in a larger firm. So the firm I left had 30 attorneys, about 100 people, and they were fine. They used it. But you can only when you get larger, sort of that middle ground if you're a super big, you might be able to do whatever because you have as much money as you need. But at that size, 100 people, it's really tough. You have the whole change management problem. So one of the main reasons was I really wanted to be sort of ahead of the curve and I was paperless and cloud based back in 2012, which was pretty radical. So that's a non-negotiable. So when I started, there were only three cloud based practice managers systems. There was Clio, which of course is the juggernaut now my case, which is still around and does well. So I used Clio at the time, which was great, but the technology part of it, just in general, but the paperless and cloud based digitizing the practice has been non-negotiable. When we interview people, we say, Look, you need a matter of fact. Our job ads even say, Hey, look, if you're not comfortable with technology, we're not the right fit. You know, I like to say we're not your grandfather's law firm, and that's non-negotiable. For a whole host of reasons clients expected. It builds efficiencies, especially now with AI. The smart utilization of technology is absolutely critical. If you're going to scale at any size, you have to have it that efficiency, profitability as you scale. I think now today is really largely going to be determined by making the right choices in terms of the tech stack. I'm curious, are there things that you did that needed to be abandoned because it just didn't make sense any longer? And I'm curious what those things might have been along the way and whether that educates now kind of your decision making around new tech to bring in to your tech stack for the firm? Yeah. You know, I find a lot of lawyers have the shiny object syndrome, right. So they see something that interests them are probably more often they see they have a successful friend that runs a law firm that says, I use this and they go, well, that I'm going to get that. And then they go sign out for a practice management system because their practice handles the system does do X, Y and Z, and it turns out they just didn't know how to use it. They never trained anybody. It would have been fine. So I'm also a tech head, so that's my thing, right? So I used to build my own computers. I've always been into technology. My daughter actually turned 28 today, and I always like to tell her, I said, You don't have an idea of how uncool I was in the eighties when I was 12 and how cool I would be today at 12 because I was into computers in the eighties, which was not a cool thing to do. But, you know, the missteps were I really had to myself get away from that shiny object syndrome. So I was better at not picking. It didn't work. You know, it's pretty good evaluating things that might work. But I had a habit of trying to be bleeding edge, which kind of worked when I was a solo. But it certainly doesn't work when you have 37 people, right? You have to. I need it to be tested. I really can't be beta testing things. So we're much more systematic and deliberate about bringing in tech into our stack. We evaluate it more, we ask our users more. So one misstep that we had in the past is we were shifting from one practice management system. So Clio, which is great, but Clio didn't at the time didn't do what we needed to do in the sense that it didn't have integrated accounting, it didn't have strong reporting, it didn't it didn't have a lot of the things we needed as a multi practice firm. And although we could get other products to bolt on because it's very customizable and it has an open API and it does a good job, you know, you're looking at per seat per license cost and it became cost prohibitive. So I was really looking for more or more all in one solution. So we ended up picking a practice manager system that theoretically could have worked, but the implementation company that we were assigned did a horrible job. We honestly didn't ask our people enough questions, we didn't train them enough and we probably didn't put enough back in support to hire programmers to do what needed to do. And it became a six figure mistake. My people were unhappy, we weren't productive, we were having problems. And so we ended up shifting and only two years later went to new practice manager system. And that process, though I always like to say I learned more from my senior year than my successes a lot of times. And although it was painful and I don't recommend it, it really helped us clarify how we're going to add tech to our stack. And we've been much more deliberate about it. So I don't know if there's a company called Affinity Consulting that I like. It's a national company. They do. They work tech stack for law firms and they have a very nice procedure where they go through very structured and say, hey, we're going to decide. We're going evaluated this and we're going to test it. This is how we're going to implement it and we utilize them. And they really helped us. And matter of fact, Virginia has its own tech show, kind of like the ABA Tech Show, and I'm fortunate to present most years. And last year I co-presented with them on exactly that. How to pick tech, how to pick the practice manager solution or other tech for your law firm. And so the answer is really both questions. One is what not to do and what to do, because it shows now what to do. And we've taken that, for instance, all the way to AI. So that's how our implementing my firm is in that kind of systematic, structured environment and not ad hoc or just whatever it looks like the tech of the day. It's great advice for anyone listening to this in terms of how to go through that systematic process of deploying tech. But, you know, I wanted to ask you about something because you started out as a smaller firm and still not a huge firm, but there's a lot of smaller firms, I think solo practitioners that have this notion that I'm too small for deploying this kind of technology. And I'm curious about your response to that kind of mindset. And if you could give us an example of how a tech forward approach can help a smaller firm perhaps be more competitive punching above its weight class? Sure, there's always a cost. So I understand as a solo, having been there right back in 2012, I was figuring it out. I think I made $32,000 my first year as solo, which was a fraction of obviously what I was making before, but the cost isn't that high. And so I don't think that's much of a barrier that the other barrier I think that Solo's have is the time, right? So that's always the thing is they're doing the law. They don't they barely have time, if any, to actually run the law firm, which I find a lot of sellers just don't they don't have time to pay attention to the business of law. So maybe a little bit money. But I think a lot of times it's this this procedure of I don't have time. And what I try to tell these solos that I talked to and again, I'm in these rooms a lot and people come to me because I'm quote unquote, the tech guy is you can't afford not to and where where they have an advantage even over us. So we're sort of in a sweet spot. We're a little too big to be what I think is the sweet spot, like 8 to 12. I think people total is a nice area. You have enough money and enough time hopefully with that staff to be able to experiment and get in and test some things and use it. But you're not so big that we have that issue, which is the change management issue, is people don't like change and then everybody's got out and you got to train it. You've got people that are holdouts who've been doing it same way. They don't want to do it. And, you know, that's what we struggle with sometimes. But it's it you're you're nimble enough to be able to move. And if it doesn't work, you can just back out. So I think Jeff Bezos has a great analogy. Business decision is a one way door or two a door decision. Most decisions are two way doors. If you make a mistake, you can walk back through the door and do something else. There are a handful that are irreversible and those are the ones you spend all your time working on. Well, these tech decisions are to way door decisions, but the larger you are, the more you have involved, the more it is to change. You know, I was talking about that pain we had about changing practice management systems, the amount of data that we had to move and train. And that was it's a nightmare. So even if I found something that's 50% better than what we have now, I'm not sure that we would change because the amount of pure cost from a time and effort standpoint to change is so big. So my advice to sellers is you have to do it because a great example is when I was paperless and cloud based, so I would get all this discovery from my larger firm, did complicated civil cases and civil litigation was sort of my bread and butter at the time. So getting these seven figure, eight figure cases and I would just get of course, these big firms would just bury me with paper. Well, I would scan in the paper. OCR So it's word searchable. I would beat stamp everything and then I could just word search what I was looking for when I would propound discovery, I would send out tens of thousands of documents, but they would be on a DVD or a CD. I didn't have to print it out and it didn't cost me an arm and a leg to print. I was able to word search documents, organize it, take excerpts, and even back then I did video depositions and I was able to get transcripts, obviously not nearly as effective as today with AI and other tools, but the things you can do with tech makes you more efficient at it, actually, even though it takes time to learn it and it takes money to get it, the amount of time you save in the money, ultimately the efficiencies, you actually gain exponentially more than whatever you put into it as long as you take the time. And that's the key. And again, you know, I know it seems like every other word of mouth is I, but I is that big differentiator that it really allows you to do this stuff on a scale that you've never been able to do before. What's good segue into talking about AI, but I think the important point around what you were just talking about is with what's happening with AI and development of new tools. If firms do not adopt some of these tools, I don't think that they're going to survive and be able to compete effectively with firms, particularly smaller ones, that ultimately don't have as much resources. Because if they don't tap into the technology, how are they going to compete with the firms that are embracing it, deploying it, and, you know, probably going to eat their lunch? That's what leads me to ask about the AI revolution, because you have been an early adopter and you know, I have talked a bit about this off line, even giving me some tips and consulting. I'm curious for you what have been the most impactful use cases you've implemented inside of your firm? We started, I think, where most people are going to start, which is legal research. So if you're a Lexus user or a Westlaw user, you know they have an AI, Big Ten. I don't think either one is particularly great. Honestly, we're Lexis firm and I like Lexis, but you know, there isn't the best out there in my opinion, but it works. It's still better than not A.I. And so just as you start there and so the example I like to give is, and again, you and I of a similar generation where we had to go to the library and actually look at the books, and eventually you graduated from that and you could, you know, use online. LEXIS It's great, but even now we have three attorneys in my office that have one year or less experience, right? So we give them a research project. Typically, they would have gone to Lexis, they would have typed in the natural language search, maybe Boolean search, and they would have looked for whatever odds are they would have spent four or 5 hours wandering like the wrong area, not really figuring it out, reading cases, figuring out after they read the whole thing. Oh eight This is not the case I need. This is an area I want. I get a memo that's maybe 10% or I was looking for and that's 6 hours. I can't build my client and that's 6 hours where they're not really learning. You know, maybe they're learning about something that's not useful with their. Now I can give them a hypothetical. I say we tell them, the first thing you do is go to I put in the hypothetical, it's going to at least point you in the right direction. Now there's still going to be a little off and they're still going to have to go read all the cases and the secondary materials where maybe I don't have to because I know what I'm looking for, but they're more efficient, they're learning faster. They're not wasting time. I'm not wasting money. My clients obviously are not charging my clients for somebody going off in the wrong direction, but just everybody wins. And so at a very basic level, legal research is is one of the top ways. And there's other tools out there that I like that we use. But legal research is an easy one and everybody can do it. The next level is and I know, you know, a lot of your listeners and your clients are PR firms. So medical record review, right? It's the bane of P.I. firms. Existence is like, oh, I got to hire. You know, it's big. The big discovery is now we're going to offshore, right? We're going to use well I now has gotten to the even now has gotten to the point where it has these tools. And I think you and I both were at the demo of that one product attorneys, Vinson's group, I think, but VQ is the name of it. They have a specialty, a I product specifically to review medical records. And so they've trained the eye on like every medical record that's ever existed. And it's really good at creating a timeline, a summary it Bates stamps them. And then when you have the timeline of the medical history, you know, you click it and it it shows up. The actual document that goes with the entry so you can verify and double check. But the eye is specifically trained to do that. So it's really good at it and it's really quite amazing. And I think it's like $100 a month for 10,000 pages or something stupid. So it's really not expensive. And then every other, you know, deposition tool, trial prep tools, but at the very basic level, legal research, document review. I had a very complicated custody case about five years ago, and basically two parties didn't get along. I represented Mom, Dad was a real jerk and there was an order in place that basically says, you guys can't be jerks to each other and you can't talk bad of each other and demean people and all the stuff that you would think adults shouldn't have to do. And the dad was doing it. And finally, the mom's like, Look, I can't deal with this anymore. It's affecting my life. I got to stop. So she filed a show cause because he's in violation of the court order. And we had they used a parenting app, so we had three and a half years worth of messaging every day that my paralegals went through. And it cost my client, say, ten grand to go through all these to find examples of how this guy violated it. I didn't need a smoking gun. I needed examples as an experiment. Six months ago, I fed that transcript into an AI tool, gave it the order, gave it what I was looking for, told them what I needed, and in 5 minutes I got 85% of the same result, 5 minutes. And I didn't need the smoking gun, so it was fine. Did I miss a few examples? Yes. Did it matter? It didn't. So I would have been able to tell my client, Hey, I'm only have to charge you 500 bucks for me to look at the results. Then $10,000 and a week's worth of my paralegal time. And that's today. And what I like to say a lot is A.I. as bad as it's ever going to be today, and it's advancing so quickly that next week, you know, it seems like next week there's a new model. So, yeah, I can't say enough about it. And I realize I'm an enthusiast and there's a lot of skepticism. You know, you and I both heard all the time, but it hallucinates. I go, Yeah, but that just means it gets it wrong. And so do your associates. And I don't know anybody that's going to or shouldn't at least submit a brief written by a one year associate that you haven't read and checked. So I don't know why people do that with AI. Right? So it's not perfect, but it's a lot. It's more perfect than you are for that. Like to say from a technical point of view, not from a strategic point of view, but certainly like there are administrative level tasks that, you know, I can automate and easily do. And with the Asiatic revolution and things, it seems to me that there are a myriad of things that today law firms do manually, even things that we do in part of what we do in health killing resolution. We're going through medical billing data for CPT codes. These are things that we're currently training technology to to do all these things, because why wouldn't you? It's faster, it's cheaper, it is way more efficient overall and produces the best result. Obviously, you still need people, as you said, to look at things and check and make sure. But you know that when you look at really what that does for you and, you know, for personal injury firms, you know, they're they're not working billable hours. They're trying to figure out how to scrape every penny out of the practice so that they can reinvest to make their firms as profitable as they possibly can be. Utilizing these technologies, to me, is such a no brainer, which seems like why there is such a heavy concentration right now of investment into technology, specifically in PIE. And I don't know if you've looked at it but you know Harvey Eve even up which not all those are strictly but you know targeting pie but even up you know you know they they've all raised so much money on these valuations that seem like they're insane. But I think that the reason for that is how sticky that is going to be because of how how efficient it makes a law for, how much more efficient makes a law firm and allows them to focus on what is revenue generating versus administrative level tasks. Yeah, absolutely. And look, just from a general business sense, I mean, we use it, you know, my tech stack, we use chatbots to do non-legal stuff. So we use chatbots to help with interviewing people, marketing tasks, writing, you name it. We use it for business purposes to automate, look at data, help us, you know, craft right things marketing. So we have three physical offices, we have three actual receptionists in the seats and we're not replacing them. But we said, Hey, look, you don't like answering the phone anyway. You know, you're not always good at it because we're human beings and it's, you know, sometimes you can't get to the phone, sometimes you have an off day, you know, that's life. So we're looking at a solution to replace them, answering the phone. So we will have an AI voice phone system that will be answering her phone 24 seven that will be transferring calls, making calls out. And we're not I'm not quite comfortable enough to use it for intake yet for the actual client acquisition. I don't think it's quite ready for primetime for that level yet. It will be. But for now, just the answering the call. Hey, Park. Ziegler. How can I help you? Anita divorce. Great. Let me get. Let me take some information. Can I text you real quick? Is this. Yes, yes, yes. Let me get you to this person. It can do that all day long. And so we're evaluating we hope to launch that by in the first quarter of next year. And so that's just one use that's going to free up all this time and do a better job that we don't. And it'll be cheaper, actually. We'll see. The cost is cheaper than our call because we have an answering service for when we can't answer the and we're not 24 seven API for most PR firms. All right. So none of our areas or that kind, if we, you know, they need us. It's Saturday at 12 p.m.. They can wait till Monday. It's not a big million dollar case. That's just not how we operate.

So we're not even open after 7: 21:19

00 at night or in the weekends. But we can with this and then we can at least funnel them towards something. And, you know, if they call us, maybe they won't call somebody else. So just another administrative way that you can use it for sure. Yeah, I attended CPO conference and they were showing their new intake engine and how it worked and gave a demo of it with a person talking to the air agent. And it was pretty amazing. I mean, obviously there's risk and like I said, that might be an area where it might make some sense to give a little pause and see how it develops. But I know a lot of firms are really looking at that particular area because of missed calls or bad communication with the person. When they're calling in or about experience. So certainly it seems like there is going to be opportunities for that. It leads me to a question that I'm curious about your take on. You know, what what do you think are maybe the top two tools or workflows that API firm could implement immediately today to reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks like demand drafting or even automating quiet communications? Yeah, I mean, I know there's already, you know, there's certainly already companies out there that do that demand drafting, although I've seen kind of mixed reviews and results from lawyers who have talked about their experiences with some of these platforms in that regard, specifically demand drafting. Yeah, I think, you know, because I don't do API, I don't I'm not sure for internally not asking me particular companies, but for usages. Right. I think medical record review is a big one to be able to put together timelines and summaries and pull out issues and put it together in a very quickly efficient and correct way where you're not outsourcing it, does it cost you $1,000,000 and it doesn't take forever? I think that's a huge one. And again, I've seen some that are good. I've seen some that are bad, but I think that would be a great one for API firms. The demand packages have a lot of friends that do API work. I know some people on the other use even up the NIOs now used to be needles. You know, NIOs is going all in on air use and I think first of all have a good practice management system for your firm and I'm always surprised by law firms that don't. These days I would say find one that is leaning into I. Somebody asked me today they say, you know, Clio was all in on it, right? So they're spending like $1,000,000,000 on air. And somebody asked me on a forum, they said, Hey, do you think Clio is going to be the one that's going to be the I thing I said, look it. If there's an existing one today, they're going to be it because the amount of effort, time and money they put into it. But I really think that in the next year or two, especially once a Gen2 guy comes out, it's going to be some new practice managed, a system that's built from AI where it's going to be really engage in that right there is the game changer. If you have a central hub of your law firm that uses AI instead of piecemeal in it, like even we do, because my practice management system does a fantastic job, but it's open. It doesn't have open API, believe it or not, because we needed we we retreated away from the bleeding line because of the bad experience. And so we have something that does really well that we needed to do, but it's just not on the cutting edge. And so we have these other pieces that require some manual integration and don't do X, Y and Z, and that's fine for now. But obviously with AI and the advancements, you know, that's going to be an issue. So as an overall concept, I would say find a practice managers and that really does a lot of this stuff, do your homework. And then the other is really that the medical review demand package type thing, those two things alone. And then I guess obviously the third is answer the phone if you're not. And again, I'm always surprised, especially with PR firms, that they're not 24 seven, they don't have live human beings answering the phone. They don't have good trained salespeople that are intake people. You know, who answered your phone? Well, I do. My paralegal does. We have a phone tree and I'm like, you can't you can't do that in a consumer driven practice. You just can't, in my opinion. At least I wanted to talk, though, about because I think it's important he mentioned hallucinations. There's obviously ethical issues around the use of AI. And in your book, how should a firm design their AI systems or protocols so that they are safely utilizing those technologies and maintaining compliance? Because to me, that's such a a scary thing in terms of just simply cloning technologies. But as a precursor to that, what does a firm need to do to make sure that, you know, someone doesn't do something stupid, like put all the medical records in a jar and ask it to summarize it is a great question. So I recently gave a letter to a group of Virginia family lawyers on air use, and part of it was the ethics, right? So I really went through all this. And because I do cybersecurity data, privacy is a practice area. I create tech policies for companies all over the United States. I've now included an AI policy into that. So we've created for our firm, we have an AI policy internally, and this is what any company should have is this either we're not using AI and you're not allowed to use AI or we are using our AI. But this is the only kind of air you can use and this is how you do it. It's more important than anybody for law firms because we have all the ethical obligations, right? So without full obligation of client confidences, supervision, candor to the tribunal so you can have illuminations, you have all these ethical obligations. So it's even more important. But any business should have it, obviously, because you don't want bad things. And what I will say is, if you don't think that your staff is using AI, you're wrong. They just are their data. If you haven't told them not to, then they're out there using it on their own. And like you exactly said, they don't know. They may not know that chatbot is not confidential and they just use a free account and they're putting in client information or whatever or it is confident they have a paid account. It is confidential, but it's wrong because they don't understand hallucinations and how it works and the limitations of a general limb versus a specifics, you know, more of a bag type environment. So you need to have an internal policy. And then as a lawyer, you need to have an external policy. So we have a policy for our clients. We're like, Hey, we use A.I., here's how we use AI. You shouldn't put your information into general A.I. because it's not confidential. And oh, by the way, it might give you good information. It might not. And you hired us for expertize, and we're always happy to have a conversation with you. But don't put your entire case in a chatbot and then come to us and argue why we're not doing something a certain way right. It's probably not right. And I know your company must get that all the time because it's so technical in what you do. But like what about X, Y and Z? And you're like, All right, well, look at it for 20 years and come back to me. But for ours, it's family law, you know. And it used to be, well, my cousin's case did X, my cousin got X, and my answer was like, Well, you should go hire your cousin's lawyer because either it's not true or they're the best lawyer I've ever seen in my life because I'm not going to be able to get that for you. But we get that for chats now with our clients. And so we have a you need an internal policy as to if you're going to use it or how you're going to use it. You need an external policy on explaining to your client how you're going to use it because you're in an ethical obligation as well. Your bills have to be reasonable. They have to you know, you don't have to get approval for your client to use every piece of tech, but overall they need an informed say in how you're representing them and what's going on. And then also, I think you need to just have a conversation about them using it and coming back to you with weird questions or wrong information. And then as you use it, you just need to check the boxes, right? So you need to make sure that it's confidential. You have to make sure that you're using it responsibly. You have a duty to supervise. Like I said, you got to look over the stuff you're submitting. I am. I was having this conversation the other day with another I forward person and I don't know how these days after all the now several years worth of these hallucination cases, I don't know how judges aren't absolutely throwing the book, not $1,000 fine, but like, hey, we referring to the bar and you may be suspended because you're clearly not checking your work. And at this point, I get it in the beginning, like the guy in New York was the first one, poor guy. And I understood it because it was new and he really didn't know and most people didn't know. And he got, I think, a $5,000 fine and got slapped. But today, I mean, Morgan and Morgan got slapped out in the western district of Wisconsin, or maybe it was Wyoming, I think was Wyoming, where they had their own internal I and they were featured in for a case and they submitted a brief with hallucinations. Now, when it was brought to their attention, they remove their own motion, they pay the other side's attorney's fees. They fell on their sword. And I think the judge fined 1000 bucks, but they also revoked their perjured feature. So, you know, it's really easy not to screw up where they are if you just look at what you're doing, but also know the limitations. So don't expect that deputy general to be able to give you the same kind that you're going to get from something like one of the products I like used to be called cowardice. It's now called Strong Suit. They rebranded, but it's an AI specific tool for lawyers. And so it's built that way and it has redundancies. It's impossible to hallucinate. Cases are holdings the way that they have their things set up. So I know that the cases I'm going to get it right now, whether it's the right case for what I need, is a different story. But that's always the case, right? So have policies, do your due diligence, don't advocate your responsibility to a machine which people somehow think they should. Well, this is a magic box. No, it's not. It's just an algorithm. So just understand how it works, I guess. Ultimately, good advice. Okay. Yeah, right. Right. Well, I wanted to ask you about the utilization of AI in terms of how to make sure that it actually is utilized the right way. I had a guest on recently. He was talking about a very large international law firm that actually created playgrounds and areas for people within the firm to use AI. But these are firms that are massive billable firms where they have the ability to do that. I'm curious in the context of smaller personal injury firms, what do you do to create the habits and processes for law firms and their staff to adopt these technologies and get the full value of it, rather than let it become some other under-utilized or just abandoned piece of technology? We know that that happens. If you haven't followed, there's a fantastic entrepreneurial AI person called Ali K Miller, a Ali'i K Miller. So she came from the air space, but she's now sort of the face of AI for entrepreneurs. And I attended a two day workshop that she put together called AI First Workshop, and it was fantastic. She had guests like somebody from Cloud and some other places where they were talking about their tech. But a lot of the seminar was about how to think about in how to implement into your companies. And it was companies, you know, all companies, right. Obviously not just law firms, but one of the big takeaways, I mean, I got a lot of great things from it. It was well worth my time and money, but it was the how to think about it. I said, don't think about AI is just another tech tool. Think about it as a fundamental shift in the way that you're operating. So how can I plan and implement this into the very fiber of my business? And if you start there and you spend the time thinking out loud and so I do some law firm coaching. And so I was talking to one of my law firm owner clients the other day, and we were talking about there there are smaller firms and one of their challenges is getting the work done and getting the things done. And so we're talking about staffing. So in the old days it was you hire somebody locally, then it was like, Oh, maybe I'm going to outsource, maybe I'll offshore. And what I was sharing with this person is, look, when I have when we're at our firm, we have a gap to fill or we need to do better. Somewhere I start with can automate it. If I can't automate it, can I do it? And then I'm like, well, if I can't do it, can we outsource it or offshore it? And if not, can somebody else in my office do it? And then, if not, am I the one that has to do it? And that's how I operate. Every decision in my life is I only try to do the tasks that only I can do or that I really want to do. Obviously you have to have a life, right? So I do some stuff that I don't have to do, but I want to do. But for instance, I really like computer stuff, right? Obviously I'm the computer guy, but I don't build my own computers anymore and I don't. If the printer breaks here, I'm not the guy that's fixing it even though I could. So from a legal standpoint, it's when you think about I is can I solve this fundamental system, not Can I do legal research? It's how can I build efficiencies across my entire firm to better serve my clients, help my other lawyers learn and everybody win. So the one example of that is that we do a lot of family law, which is traditionally hourly. Well, the more I use I, the less money I make. And I don't like the hourly model I never have, but it's just sort of is. And a couple of times in my career we have in the last 14 years we've looked at fixed fee sliding stage work for family law because other firms that I know have done that. But the hard part was figuring out the data. How much do we charge for this particular stage? And that's it was hard. And what I like to say, you know, that the juice wasn't worth the squeeze. We made plenty money hourly. It's just too hard. We're not going to do it. Well, now we have to do it for a high. So the idea is if normally for an hourly work, if this if this process of getting through this part of the thing would cost $20,000 with a I can charge my client ten and maybe it only takes me five if you look at an hourly. So I'm doubling my profit from an hourly point of view. My clients pay in half what they would have paid if I were billing by the hour. And so everybody wins. And thank God Virginia came out with the law in Leo literally two weeks ago. Where where we have said you can bill for efficiencies. The ABA actually says we're not so sure you can. And Virginia which I love Virginia goes they're wrong like literally in the opinion says I think ABA has got it wrong, which I agree with. I think that if you're taking the time to learn the now caveat, your billing always has to be reasonable. And that example I gave earlier, I can't charge my client $8,000 for 5 minutes worth of work because they would have charged ten. I think that's unreasonable. But if I would have charged 20 and I'm charging you ten and it really only takes me five if we just gamed out the hours, I think that's reasonable. So look at it systematically. Don't try to add hockey, start add hockey. And that's the other thing is what one of the things Ali said is, look, you're going to start with a particular problem to solve or use. That's fine, but don't get stuck in that. Look at it as a absolute across the board. How can I use AI to transform my business and integrate it into all laterals in all verticals? You mentioned coaching and it's a good segway into a couple more questions before we wrap up the episode. And I've gotten some of the newsletters from the motivated lawyer, your lawyer coaching program. What led you to to want to start out? Yeah, you know, when I started my firm in 20, so I come from a line of entrepreneurs. My dad owned several businesses, a used car, lots. He owned an automotive repair shop before he retired. My mom owned a craft business making teacher gifts and some other cool stuff. I never knew I was an entrepreneur until I started my own law firm. And then I was like, Wow, I really like the business of law and I like to I still practice law, but I found that I don't enjoy litigation as much as I used to. And even when I'm doing cybersecurity work, which is mainly transactional, I like the business of law. I've paid for coaching since day one, so for 14 years I've been part of different coaching groups and I've paid for singular coaching and coaching programs and materials and books and whatever. I find that the more I learned and the more that I experienced, the more I gave back. But what I really found that I enjoyed is helping other lawyers figure it out and not so much. Here's the answer, because I know everything, but hey, I've done it now 14 years. I've grown from a solo. You know, sometimes I have people go, Oh, you know, I want a firm like yours and Magneto. We do 14 practice or 13 practice areas or 14 lawyers. I love my firm or a successful firm, but if I had to start over tomorrow, I would probably be much more focused on an area or two because trying to market 13 practice areas and learning what I learned and experiencing what I experienced, I really enjoy helping others figure out what the perfect firm for them is because ours is growth. Maybe yours isn't. Maybe yours is a lifestyle firm. Maybe you just want to be the best environmental lawyer on the planet. Maybe your social justice person. Maybe that's your goal. Maybe you're about gardening work for children. Whatever your goal is, I want to try to help them from a business perspective because they don't teach how to run a law firm in law school much at all. They never did at Art when we went to school. They barely do it now. And so I really like sharing that because a win win litigations win lose and coaching is a win win. You know, I'm winning because I'm sharing information. I'm obviously getting paid to do it, which is nice. It's not my main gig though. I'm really doing it more for that. I love doing it than the money. And there obviously, hopefully if I'm doing my job right, they're winning because they're able to advance their goals better. So that's it's it's more of a filming thing for me. The framework that can help motivate students for Mindset Organization, Team Information, visibility, action, technology I education that essentially lays out a blueprint for building a law firm like a building block. Which one of those do you feel like is most neglected by lawyers when they're starting practices or even into their practices and why the cost of ignoring the. Yeah, you know, it's funny, I was asked the other day by somebody, you know, why didn't you just start a technology consulting company like that's what you do right? And I say because it's only one part and although it's an important part, it's a tool. It's not the foundation. The foundation is mindset. And this isn't woo woo mindset like positivity, which is important. By the way, I'm a positive guy and I believe in all of that, but it's when I talk about mindset, it's having goals. So most lawyers, I was like this when I went out on my own. I wanted to do good law work. I wanted to make a good living and I wanted to be a lawyer. Right. Awesome. Isn't that every lawyer? Right. But I didn't have a goal. I mean, we were rudderless for many years until we got our own business coach and they were like, What are you doing? We had an embarrassment of riches. We had all these opportunities and we would take every one of them. And so mindset is figuring out, what do you want? Like, why are you practicing law? What kind of firm like sitting here today, what kind of firm do you want? You want to be the only lawyer. You want to be the only owner. Do you want to grow an empire? Like what? What do you what's your current goal? And then the big one that I like to ask my clients is, Do you like the practice of law? Do you like the business, the law, or do you like both because you can have a successful firm in any of those three, but if you want to just practice law, you want to be the best trial lawyer. There, then you have to hire people to run it. If you just want to run it, obviously you have to hire people to do the law work and if you want to do both, that's the hardest because then you have to balance practicing the law and then running the firm. That's your struggle. Because I know you have a law firm, you practice law. That's my struggle. I try to practice less and less, but I still do it. So that mindset piece, I find that very few lawyers either thinking about start a law firm or practice 20 years. They don't have a real plan. And so I like to sit down with them, figure that out, and then the organization, all the other stuff is let's actually make the plan, let's implement the plan, let's do the tech, let's get educated and let's have the right people. Let's do marketing, let's do it, you know, all that stuff. But mindset is what I find that most lawyers neglect because we're just grinders. We were workers great. But you can't, you know, if you don't have a plan, how do you get there? So that's a great point, though, too, about knowing yourself if you're the one starting this business and looking at what you want the end result to be because like you said, you want to be the best litigator in the country. Great. But you know, if your law firm's going to grow in scale, you're going to need people around you to do that while you go and litigate and vice versa. I mean, it's so often overload, particularly, it seems like in personal injury, it seems like it's slowly changing and evolving. Now, where more firms have leadership teams because that and, you know, just wasn't the case for a very long time. And even, you know, lawyers thinking about the practice of law as something different from a business, which it's just not. It is a business. Sure. There's a lot of other things that are a little bit different, but at its core, if you don't run a law firm like a business, then either it's going to be lifestyle just for you, or it may not even be successful because you don't have enough insights into what's going on financially, even with the firm. If you don't have infrastructure around it to make sure you don't wind up in a place that's, you know, really a bad place which actually great segway into the last question I was gonna ask you which are, you know, what are one or two painful mistakes you made running your own firm that you now try to keep others from repeating with the motivated lawyer coaching platform? Sure. You know, it it's honestly the first one is that mindset part, right. So it's I alluded to it when I said we had my partner and I, Brendan Ziegler and I, we're fortunate. We both have practiced a long time. You know, we have good reputations. We've we've know a lot of people. We got a lot of business. Great. And so we had really so many opportunities. People would come to us and go, Hey, I want to work for you. Hey, I'd like to open an office over here. Hey, what about adding this practice area? Hey, what about this opportunity? And, you know, we're not idiots, so we evaluated them what we thought was best at the time. And what that did was it took us off our what little planning we had. If we opened a new office somewhere else. We have to spend time and to money at that office. Maybe it's successful, maybe it's not. But if our main goal is do X and we've now gone way over here, it is by definition it taken us off our goal. And so we we got a personal one on one business coach about three years ago and she came in and said, okay, guys, you're going to vote like, let's up with a plan. You have a five year plan, a three year plan, a one year plan. We implement this, right? And unless that opportunity is 100 x Barro, I leave it alone. If it's not in your plan. And we've done that to not always because we're human and we still suffer from we sometimes we're like, oh, that's why we didn't do that. But that has enabled us to grow so much faster, better, less stress, because, again, we're focused, right? And then we can if that opportunity goes away, fine, there'll be another. So that's sort of one of the biggest mistakes that we've made in the past is and it seems weird. It's almost like, what's your biggest weakness? I care too much. Right? What? What's your biggest failure? Well, I just had too many opportunities, but it is. And it's look, it's a good problem to have. It's better than to have an opportunity to not have opportunity. I would say another big mistake that we made before is we would do all the due diligence that the leadership level, and then we would implement changes without communicating consistently or properly and or getting enough feedback. So even if the decision was the right one, which we tried to do obviously all the time and sometimes we don't, but even if the decision was the right one, there is that thing called change management, which is people don't like change. And when they're not part of the decision making process, they feel like, well, wait a minute, I don't know if I want to do this. And, you know, it takes a lot more energy to show somebody you're really going to like this better after you've already made the decision for them. And again, my partner and I are the only two owners, so we get to make all the decisions. But that's not how we want to run the firm. We want to get input. We want to make sure everybody is on board. There are going to be times when maybe we have to make the decision because it's a business decision and maybe you're not going to love it. But boy, I really wish sooner than we had. We brought in more people to the table like that practice management shift. When we moved from the bad product to what we have now, we lengthened the testing process. We brought in more of our paralegals, we let them test it out, we got their feedback, we listened to them. And then when we implemented Boy, they were a lot happier because they were familiar with it. They felt like they were part of the process. And so those are sort of two biggest missteps I've had is not being focused enough and then making changes without getting enough input in or if nothing else, communication ahead of time. Hey, this is what we're thinking about. Here's why we're doing it. We want to explain it to you. So now we do lunch and learn. So we just I just did a lunch and learn with my marketing manager today on marketing, we said, Hey, this is why we're doing all this stuff. I know you're grumbling about having to write this blog article or do this thing or shoot this video, but here's why we're doing it. Here's why it's important, and here's here are the metrics and I've already heard from here will be able to go, Oh, thank you so much. I didn't really understand. Do what I say, don't do what I do. So learn it faster than I do. That's a great point because we've struggled with that over the years and have brought in change management advisors and to help with all of those things. And it's always a really difficult thing to navigate. But your point, the more you can be transparent and give people insight into the why, it makes it much easier, even though some people are still, you know, they're just hard to get to change just because of their profiles. It's just part of their mindset. And that's one thing that you can't control is how people show up ultimately. But you can do your part and be transparent with the way to make it easier for adoption. Ultimately, what so I wanted to ask you your final question is when I ask all four deaths since the trial or review and it's very open ended, so you can answer however you want. So as an experienced lawyer, as a law firm coach, as a legal technologist, what's your view? My view is, and not surprisingly, it's going to be about I. Right. So my my main view is this is that air is here. It's not something you could ignore. You shouldn't be afraid of it. But you have to understand it and you have to be able to implement it. Because exactly like you said, if you're not, you're going to be left behind. And there are some transactional lawyers, for instance, that absolutely. You just won't have a job if they don't implement it. But you don't need to be afraid of it because something that I can't do, at least for the foreseeable future, is the personal connection. Customer service part, which fortunately the bar for a lawyer is so low because most of us do such a bad job that you can really stand out. And then the other strategic thinking right? So for our trust in a state's lawyers, for instance, we're like, look, anybody can now write a trust in a will and probably do a really good job because I the right I but what you can do is you can the empathy, the strategic planning, understanding their goals more. And it's not just answering this one question, it's what did you think about the tax implications and all this other stuff. So I would say that's my view is don't be afraid of it. You have to learn about it, you have to implement it. You just can't ignore it. Great way to end it. And too, it ties back into something that you offered around the policies for use in a law firm. So if anyone listening is interested in that or interested in the motivated lawyer, what's the best way to get in touch with you and learn more about those things? Feel free to talk a little bit about each so that our listeners know what you can add to their to their practices. Sure, absolutely. So if you go to the motivated lawyer, Dotcom, the motivated lawyer becomes a website. Right now it's a newsletter. Sign up. I send out a newsletter every Tuesday morning. I talk about one of the motivate principles. I talk about ideas of the last week or so, and then I give a practical tip. So it's something that you can quickly read and hopefully it'll give you at least one or two pieces of good information. I've been doing some one on one coaching. I have a 12 week program that I work with law firm owners. The big launch of the company is at the end of the month. So by the end of the year, I'm going to be doing a monthly coaching program where I wanted to do Zoom's a month. One Zoom is me talking for an hour about one of these principles. The other is I'm going to have guests who are experts, law firm owners or vendors, you know, giving value to my people. And then I'm going to have a community, we're going to use a circle night associate. So it's a community that you can come and message each other and talk and I can share information. And that's just a month to month thing that that I'm going to offer people to hopefully create a community for other people to help each other and may be able to give some advice. But yeah, so if you just go to the menu retailer dot com sign up for the newsletter you can email me at that. It's K parks at the motivated lawyer dot com if want the information I'm happy to share that policy with you. Give that to you. The other place that people can find me is my law firm. So it's Park Ziegler and the websites PC law dot com. If you're in Virginia North Carolina we do all sorts of law. Most useful for your people is the cybersecurity data privacy work that I do. So I'm always happy to talk to law firm owners about make sure they have the right insurance, make sure they have the policies, which includes that. I again, I'm happy to give that away. So either way, just get a hold of me. If you can't remember any of that, just Google my name. I have a weird first name so I pop up pretty quickly. I'm always happy to talk to law firm owners and lawyers across the nation on all the stuff I love. It will include all the contact information in the show notes today so nobody will have to go and Google, but they won't be able to find it right there. Well, Kellen, thanks for joining me and appreciate your time. And we'll see everybody on the next episode of Trial of You. If today's episode gave you a new perspective on how your firm operates or sparked a useful idea, consider sharing it with a colleague and be sure to follow the show so you don't miss future conversations with leaders across the personal injury space. Trial Lawyer Review is brought to you by Synergy, a strategic operations partner helping personal injury firms resolve health care leans more efficiently. If you're looking to accelerate case flow and allow your team to focus on high level legal work that moves cases faster, consider partnering with Synergy. I'm Jason Lazarus and I'll see you in the next episode.