00:00 Will Petersen: Welcome to the evolution of legal technology. My name is Will Petersen, I am the attorney experience manager here at ARAG. In a moment, we're going to have a conversation regarding legal technology in the world today, where it's going, and how it can help you in your daily practice. Before that, I wanted to take an opportunity to share with you how we here at ARAG and in the attorney relations department are changing the experience between you and our attorney portal and hopefully our entire team utilizing technology that's also in practice currently in the legal industry. And that's by using chatbots. We wanted to explore how we can use a chatbot for our network attorneys to help service them 24/7 365, and utilize that powerful AI to reduce human interactions. Not because we don't wanna talk to you, of course, but because we wanna give you a more thorough and quick answer when you need it.
00:57 WP: So in exploring that opportunity, we decided that maybe there's a partner out there we could work with. And thankfully, one of our own network attorneys, Tom Martin, the CEO of LawDroid, who works with the same plan members you work with, but also works with attorneys to help them utilize chatbots to intake their own clients, seemed to be the perfect partner for us to build what we built for you, and that's Alibot.
01:22 WP: So right now, when you access the attorney portal, you can see Alibot in action. Alibot is there to answer any other questions you may have. Now, bear in mind, we're using a technology that grows with you, so we're also understanding what our attorneys are asking us, that's powerful, that's gonna help us create new innovations, new technologies for you. You'll be able to interact with her at any time and she can guide you to portions of the site that you may not know existed, portions of the site you may not be able to find, but also give you answers to questions that normally could be answered by our team of attorney advocates. Thus, Alibot, the virtual attorney advocate was created with the help of LawDroid.
02:05 WP: We also hope that in working with this technology you see how it could be something that could help you in your practice. We wanna try to be someone who's out there showing that legal technology can help and that it doesn't have to be daunting. So if you have a chance, I would encourage you to interact with Alibot next time you log into the attorney portal. Not because you have a question, but maybe because you just like to see how that technology works. We're very excited about it, we're very excited as Alibot grows and we continue to encourage you to continue using her whenever you have that question.
02:42 WP: And now to our discussion on the evolution of legal technology. Very excited today to be joined by Tom Martin, a proud network attorney as well as I would say legal tech entrepreneur extraordinaire, and that's what we're excited to talk about today, is overcoming those fears of incorporating legal technology into your practice. Tom, tell me a little bit about when I met you, gosh, about 10 years ago, you were utilizing already then a virtual office. I know that's something that you were kind of an early pioneer in. What made you interested in that and what made you turn that into an additional side career? As we talked a little about LawDroid in our partnership that we've mentioned just prior to this.
03:29 Tom Martin: Well, first off, Will, thank you so much for hosting me at the ARAG headquarters. It's really cool to visit here for the first time and get to know everyone in person. But kind of my motivation at the time was wanting to not necessarily be tied to the office, tied to a physical location. I was going through with my firm, restructuring of it to one practice area to a different practice area, and I wanted to decentralize it so the people that worked with me can work from home. It also had the happy benefit of lowering costs because the thousands and thousands of dollars per month that went out were paying for the space could then be used on marketing, which was much more useful in getting new clients.
04:23 WP: And I know, staffing is always a problem with firms. We hear it quite often. Has that helped you have stability with staffing for your firm, the ability to have office staff wherever they wanna be?
04:40 TM: Yeah, definitely. I think one good example of that are the attorneys that work with me in providing telephone advice for ARAG members. And initially, we were all based out of Long Beach, California. And it stayed that way for a while, but then I moved to Vancouver, Canada. My paralegal who's been working with me for almost 10 years, moved to Idaho and is still working for me. And the attorneys, one of them moved to Florida, one moved to Texas, one stayed in California, but moved into the mountain area of California, near Big Bear. And the other is still working in Glendale, California. And what it's provided all of us is the ability to honestly find a place that is affordable, you can have a good life for your family, and not have to be dependent on where the company is located. And they're all happy, they're all staying... It's led to them, I guess some kind of stickiness in staying with the company, because they don't have to be in Long Beach. So the attorney, for example, that moved to Florida to retire is doing this as a part-time business, but she didn't have to quit because she moved to Florida.
06:13 WP: But clearly, without technology, none of this would be possible.
06:16 TM: Yeah, not at all.
06:17 WP: Yeah, I remember distinctly having a conversation with you, assuming you were just sitting in California and you just happened to throw as an aside that you were hanging out in Rome. It is a seamless experience. So you've seen legal technology change, and now you're involved with chatbots in particular. Where do you think we're going with legal technology and how it can help attorneys better practice in law?
06:49 TM: Well, I think from the consumer side, where we're going is, I think, where they've always wanted to go. And that's for it to be an easy and seamless experience. It's up until now been the exact opposite of that. It's always been very traditional on the attorneys' time during their work, work day. It's been inconvenient. It's been expensive. There's been a lot of roadblocks to getting solutions to your legal problems. And I think what's gonna happen over the next 10 years, especially in light of there's all these different jurisdictional changes, to allow for more access to justice, that it's gonna be as easy as everything else. Like you can go on to an app and... For example, Uber Eats. You're hungry. You don't wanna walk down to McDonald's. You just tell them, you make your order on your phone, and in 10-15 minutes, somebody drives up with your bag of McDonald's and you go on your way, you're happy.
08:03 TM: It should be that easy. I mean, not necessarily like ordering McDonald's, but it should be as easy as you get on your app, you get on your computer, you have the same kind of fulfilling consumer experience that you do with all other services. And I don't think that's a downside for lawyers. I think it's actually makes our lives richer too because the things that we don't wanna be wasting time on, we don't have to. And it also, as I've done with my practice, provides this decentralized approach where you can live... I mean, one of the advantages to being a lawyer in this age is that because we deal in information, we don't have to be tied down to a specific place. So why not be in Rome or Barcelona or wherever you wanna be and providing value to people in a seamless way that they experience, and everybody wins?
09:01 WP: And it's a competitive differentiator, I would assume, with today's consumer. They're looking for an attorney that's upwardly mobile on his way. That's actually something they wanna have, is they wanna have that electronic connectivity.
09:17 TM: I think they do. Especially... Everybody talks about the millennial generation, but I think it's really everyone.
09:27 WP: Yeah.
09:28 TM: You have grandmas and grandpas that are online.
09:31 WP: Absolutely.
09:32 TM: It's just... It's become the everyday common sense of how you communicate. And so it's only gonna become more and more like that for everyone. And I think the vast majority of people, that's how they communicate, and just making it easier is gonna make it a differentiator. To think that finally now making things easy for consumers is gonna be the differentiator when it should always be... If it had been that way.
10:01 WP: So you and I have talked on regular occasions about this very subject, integrating technology into your legal practice. I, as a outside observer, going to conferences, talking to attorneys, see very often that there is fear, there's trepidation. But I think so often, I think that comes from a place where an attorney is looking at the whole enchilada, for lack of a better term. They think that if I'm gonna dive into legal technology, I have to get a all encompassing legal solution versus solution spotting for very specific areas. And I think that's a philosophy you've always had. You find the right solution for the right problem, I think, would probably be the way that I've always interpreted your working.
10:54 TM: Yeah. In fact, literally that way early on. Early on... I've been a lawyer for over 20 years now. All along the way, I've been dabbling in technology and creating solutions, initially for my own firm, that were based on very concrete problems we were having, and how to solve them. And so I think the number one problem that lawyers create for themselves in dealing with legal tech is that they just go... They go into the marketplace, they see these thousands of apps and they're overwhelmed, and naturally so. It is overwhelming, especially now that there are so many options available. But I think if their first step is defining the problem, if they give their law firm a very careful and methodical audit of like, okay, talking to their associates, talking to partners, what are the pain points that we have? What are the things that are recurring every single day that are wasting too much time that we could better spend elsewhere?
12:00 TM: And then once they've defined those problems, then go into the marketplace and find out, "Okay, what are the solutions that are the best approximation of what I need solved?" Because nothing is gonna be perfect. And that's the other thing I bring up sometimes is that you have to be satisfied with probably the thing that solves 80% of your problems. It's never gonna be a perfect solution. Although if you're willing, you can hire a software developer to create that 100%. Custom solution will be much more expensive. But yeah, it does appear overwhelming at first, but I think if lawyers do some homework to define the problem, they'll be able to find the solution that can really help them with the things they need.
12:46 WP: So I wanna talk to you about LawDroid. How did you as a lawyer, get involved in coding, developing? And why chatbots? What about that technology intrigued you?
12:46 TM: So I give a lot of credit to Joshua Browder, who if you all listening are not familiar with Joshua Browder, he is a young man from London, England. And he created a chatbot about four, four and a half years ago now. What it did is, if somebody got a parking ticket in London, which lots of parking tickets there, like any major metropolitan area, if you wanted to contest the ticket, you had a chatbot where you would type in the essentials about your ticket, and then it would auto-create an appeal so you could appeal the ticket. And by the way, his site is called DoNotPay, because...
[chuckle]
13:50 TM: Originally, DoNotPay the ticket uses bot. And so I forget exactly what the figures are, but it was... He had literally saved people hundreds of thousands of dollars in terms of parking tickets that they didn't have to pay. And gotten, yeah, a lot of people out of their parking tickets. And that was like the genesis of his use of that technology. And reading a news article about that about four years ago is what inspired me. So I've told this before and it sounds corny, but it's true. When I read that news article about this chatbot getting people out of parking tickets, especially back then, I remember, there weren't any chatbots that...
14:37 WP: Feels like 40 years ago. [chuckle] I feel that was just 40 years ago.
14:40 TM: Yeah, it's like a RCA Victor... Thing. [chuckle] But when I first read that article, literally the hairs on my arm and back of my neck stood up. It felt eerie, like an eerie opportunity that it just... I was sensing, there are so many possibilities and opportunity with this technology, because... And I'll try not to make it too long, but there's three ways I define what legal services, what attorneys provide. There's three pillars. There's legal documents, legal advice and court advocacy. Those to me are the three defining things about what attorneys do.
15:23 TM: Now, legal documents, LegalZoom over the past, I think 17-18 years now, they really had a handle on that in terms of automating documents. The advice part hadn't really been automated yet. And so the genius I saw in what Joshua Browder did is he combined two out of the three. He had this legal information, legal advice, automation on top of the document generation of the appeals. And taking that concept and then looking at all of legal, you could automate a lot and make things a lot easier for a lot of people who can't afford lawyers. And then for lawyers, make it much easier that they don't have to spend the time on very rudimentary tasks.
16:17 WP: Yeah. I mean a lot of... I know what the bots you develop can do, are helping, who's a majority of our 14,000 network attorneys, which are small and solo practicing firms who are overwhelmed and who struggle with that intake, with locating clients, getting them in. So you did what we were talking about, you focused on a solution and how bots could help and enhance attorneys' lives. 'Cause often we hear that artificial intelligence is going to take away the attorneys' most prized possession, which is their knowledge. That's not the case.
17:00 TM: Not at all. When you focus on the issues that can be automated, that are wasting time, or making it inconvenient for clients, bots can be very helpful there. One way... Just to mention one product LawDroid has, we have the marketing automation bot, that basically is installed on... And sits in the lower right hand corner. And it could provide a lot of information to somebody who's visiting a lawyer's website, about their services, about their pricing, about its attorneys, both as people and as lawyers. And really give them that tour of who are these lawyers and how can they help you? And that's a conversation that could be served up to potentially new clients, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And the lawyers don't have to be physically there to have that conversation. And so it helps lawyers in a very practical way to have that sales conversation when they're on vacation...
18:06 WP: Absolutely.
18:07 TM: Or they're sleeping. And so somebody could be there at Sunday at 2:00 AM, who's just gotten arrested or just had a car accident, and they could have that conversation. And there are benefits to it vis-a-vis having somebody... Some staff member stuck in the Live Chat because that person may be out sick, they might not be available. And then you wanna make sure that everyone is on the same page in terms of what they should be communicating to a client. And when you have it automated, you're gonna be 100% sure that it's gonna be best practices, what you want communicated.
18:45 WP: And that's what our statistics show at ARAG constantly, when it comes to our member feedback is, there's always a high level of confidence in the actual practice of law. That's not where things fall down. It's in that point of entry that you're talking about. It's in that capturing the client upfront, instilling just that customer service confidence. So utilizing automation for things that may not be specialties of lawyers is really, I think, important and powerful way to use that.
19:17 TM: Yeah, I think... So this is legal trends report that comes out every year that has a lot of good statistics in it, and I might be getting this statistic wrong but I think it's like 53% of lawyers don't even answer calls that they get from potential new clients, because there's something not available. Now anecdotally, we know that that's true, but this legal trends report has those stats in it, and it's a big problem, and the reason why they're not answering is because they're probably in court or maybe they're on vacation, or all these things which you can solve through this type of automation. So simply making yourself more available, I've talked about it before, is cloning yourself, is not undercutting you, it's actually making you more available.
20:09 WP: It's enhancing your life, I think that's great. So any other really kind of cool and innovative in summary things that are coming around then that you're excited about in legal technology?
20:30 TM: I definitely think there's a lot more to be done, but I think that lawyers right now, I think them just focusing on what's available and digesting that is probably the number one thing. And for them to really get a handle on what their needs are, it's probably more important than the bleeding edge.
20:53 WP: I was gonna say, have you seen this trend I feel like when I go to conferences now and I look at the products that are coming out, the innovation is almost in its simplicity, people are trying to make it more digestible for attorneys. Using Word... Leveraging Word documents and turning them to automated documents, versus having some super complex automated document system. Kind of de stigmatizing some of this legal technology so attorneys wanna use it.
21:23 TM: Yeah, and one example of simplification which I totally agree with you that's the trend, it's just to make things easier, is another product that we have called Money Moji. Now the legal trends report and data analytics... Analytics dashboards and all of these numbers that are available for us as lawyers to know if we're succeeding or not. All of that's great, but sometimes you could look at these dashboards and it looks like the dashboard of the 747. [chuckle] It's confusing, like, what does it mean? Are we gonna crash, or are we gonna take off, what's going on? And so with Money Moji, one thing we hopefully have accomplished is to synthesize that information into something really easy to understand, which is an emoji. The Emoji, it's either like if you're totally excellent, a Money emoji with the little dollar signs on it, or if you're doing poorly, then you have a little sad face and everything in between.
22:22 TM: And the idea there is that for a lawyer, and a lot of lawyers that don't like dealing with numbers, instead of having to dig into everything, you can get an overall instant picture of how you're doing. And then if you wanna drill down into the numbers, you can. But I think that represents a shift towards this synthesis, the simplification of tech, so that it actually works for you in a way that's easy to understand.
22:53 WP: So the way you start is just solving one problem at a time and keep working your way through the list, right?
22:57 TM: You really do.
23:00 WP: Yeah, I think it's great. Hey Tom, I appreciate you being here, I appreciate all you do to evangelize legal technology, and thanks for your time.
23:08 TM: Thanks, Will.