Spill The Ink Legal tech trends: How technology is transforming the legal industry
The global legal technology market has rapidly grown into a multibillion-dollar industry — and it’s still expanding. Even in its infancy, legal tech is revolutionizing how law firms manage client relationships and internal processes, yielding better overall services for more affordable prices. What trends are shaping the future of the legal industry? What do law firms need to know to keep up with the times?
This episode of Spill the Ink features Jared Correia, the founder and CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting and co-founder of Gideon Software, Inc. Jared and Michelle Calcote King discuss how emerging legal tech is changing the way firms operate and the common barriers to tech adoption in firms.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn- Legal tech trends and how they directly impact law firms
- How may an economic recession impact the legal tech market?
- What market factors drive legal tech development?
- What up-and-coming legal tech companies and events are worth paying attention to?
- How is legal tech changing service delivery and pricing models?
Jared D. Correia, Esq. is the founder and CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting and co-founder and COO of Gideon Software, Inc. Red Cave offers subscription-based business management consulting services for law firms, bar associations and legal organizations. Jared is a regular contributor to legal publications, including his column, “Managing,” for Attorney at Work. Jared is the host of the award-winning Legal Toolkit podcast on Legal Talk Network, and hosts the NonEventcast podcast for Above the Law, which focuses on technology and innovation in the legal field.
Resources mentioned in this episode- Check out Red Cave Law Firm Consulting
- Follow Red Cave Law Firm Consulting on Twitter and LinkedIn
- Check out Gideon Software, Inc.
- Connect with Jared Correia on LinkedIn
- Say hello to Michelle Calcote King on Twitter and LinkedIn
This episode is brought to you by Reputation Ink.
Founded by Michelle Calcote King, Reputation Ink is a public relations and content marketing agency that serves professional services firms of all shapes and sizes across the United States, including corporate law firms and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms.
Reputation Ink understands how sophisticated corporate buyers find and select professional services firms. For more than a decade, they have helped firms grow through thought leadership-fueled strategies, including public relations, content marketing, video marketing, social media, podcasting, marketing strategy services and more.
To learn more visit www.rep-ink.com or email them at info@rep-ink.com today.
Transcript[00:00:00] Jared Correia: I think lawyers have to start being more comfortable with change management. I think lawyers have to start being more comfortable with risk management. That's the biggest barrier to everything. I'm seeing that improve. You see a lot of these attorneys who are 60s, 70s, 80s moving out of the practice. A lot more attorneys who are in 40s and 50s taking over practices, and they have a more open mind. Then the other big issue I see outside of the attorneys is the lack of structured data. If you want to start running analytics, if you want to have machine learning going at a high level, the data needs to be structured. Layperson's term might be “labeled more effectively.”
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[00:00:40]: Welcome to Spill The Ink a podcast by Reputation Ink where we feature experts in growth and brand visibility for law firms and architecture, engineering and construction firms. Now, let's get started with the show.
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[00:00:56] Michelle Calcote King Hey everyone, I'm Michelle Calcote King. I'm your host, and I'm the principal and president of Reputation Ink. We're a public relations and content marketing agency for law firms and legal services companies and other professional services firms. To learn more, go to rep-ink.com.
Today we're going to talk about the legal tech market. It's growing quickly. In 2021, it generated about $27 billion in revenue. In the United States alone, it's expected to exceed $35 billion by 2027. As a side note, my team here has written some great blog posts, especially recently to help legal tech professionals navigate and boost their PR. Go ahead and check out those on our website.
Today we're going to dive into the trends that are impacting the legal tech industry, how emerging technologies are helping law firms and in-house legal departments modernize and improve their operations. Today, I'm speaking to Jared Correia, and in fact, I always ask how to pronounce the name and I forgot to.
[00:01:57] Jared: It's a tough one. There's too many vowels.
[00:02:00] Michelle: Did I butcher it?
[00:02:01] Jared: That was pretty bad. No! But in all seriousness, it's “coh-RI-ah” like the country.
[00:02:06] Michelle: Oh, Correia. There you go. Perfect.
[00:02:08] Jared: It's even simpler than that, though.
[00:02:10] Michelle: I love it. Jared's the founder and CEO of Red Cave Consulting. He's a business management consultant for law firms, and he's a legal tech entrepreneur.
[00:02:20] Jared: Here I am working from my kitchen!
[00:02:22] Michelle: There you go! He's a seasoned podcaster. I'm really looking forward to this. Welcome to the show. Thanks for joining me.
[00:02:28] Jared: Thank you. Thank you. I brought my best mic just for you. [laughs]
[00:02:32] Michelle: There you go. I like it. Tell me about Red Cave. If you can just give me a background, how you ended up in this area.
[00:02:41] Jared: I don't know if it was necessarily planned. [laughs] I went to law school after college not having any idea what I would do with my life because who knows what they're going to do when they graduate from college with an English degree? What do you do? I don't know. I was like, "Oh, I'll go to law school. That sounds fun." I get to law school and I was like, "Wow, this is horrendously boring." When I was in my second year of law school, I went to the career development office and I'm like, "I think I should do business consulting for lawyers because they don't seem to be great at business consulting."
They were like, "Hey, maybe you should get a real job, like a lawyer job." That's how it went. Then randomly, four or five years later after working in law firms for a little bit Massachusetts launched this free consulting program for attorneys. I started working there, worked there for about eight years, and then started my own company which I've been running for almost 10 years at this point. Then a few years back, I also started a software company with a partner of mine as well. I got a couple irons in the fire.
[00:03:40] Michelle: That's amazing that you thought about consulting back in college. It's one of those things you don't really-- especially business consulting for lawyers, I haven't heard of anyone having that light bulb moment that early on.
[00:03:54] Jared: I was in these law firms on internships and I was like, "My god, this is a dumpster fire. What is going on?" I'm like, "I could do better than this." [laughs] That's how it worked for me.
[00:04:06] Michelle: That's fantastic. Tell me about the software company.
[00:04:09] Jared: About, I want to say four years ago we launched this. It's a chatbot for intake, qualification, scheduling and then document assembly for law firms. The idea is that you can qualify leads and then once those leads become clients, you can produce documents off of a chat-based interface. We've had a lot of success with that. People, clients like building documents via chat through law firms and it takes a lot of the lift off the law firms. We got to a bunch of firms we're working with on that.
[00:04:41] Michelle: What management consulting are you doing? Are you doing it mostly in the tech area or are you advising firms on on other issues?
[00:04:52] Jared: My pitch to law firms is like, "Imagine if you had a partner who actually knew how to run a business. That's me." We engage people usually a couple times a month. We do a biweekly meeting just to keep things moving forward, but it's super broad. I've always been really shallow in terms of the categories. It could be technology, it could be marketing, it could be financial management and then I don't do the implementation stuff and I'm not building websites.
What's really cool, is that I've met a lot of people in the industry who do good work at very specific things. I can say, "Okay, I can help you with this or I can help you construct a plan around this, but you're going to need these three service providers as well who can help you and I've got great recommendations to make for that.” That's being an outside business partner-ish, working as far as this is concerned. Then in addition to working with law firms directly, we also have partnerships with around 20 bar associations. We're the consulting partner for the bar association and that's cheaper for the bars than hiring someone in-house to do that work.
[00:05:55] Michelle: Fantastic. Let's talk about legal tech. You've carved a niche in the legal tech area. I know you do a lot of writing and speaking about legal tech. Tell me your take on what the market's seen this year and where it's going. I'd especially be interested in your thoughts with all this talk around the recession and how that's going to impact legal tech. Sorry to-
[00:06:25] Jared: I know everybody--
[00:06:25] Michelle: -just throw a lot at you there.
[00:06:26] Jared: [laughs] It's so funny.
[00:06:29] Jared: Everybody's like, what about the recession? I'm not an economist. I've no idea.
[00:06:33] Michelle: I feel we've been talking about recessions for three years now.
[00:06:37] Jared: It seems like it's been a long time.
[00:06:38] Michelle: Yes, I know.
[00:06:40] Jared: Inflation's high, obviously. I don't know if we're in a recession or not, but my whole approach to this with law firms is like, you should be using technology to run your practice because it's going to be cheaper than using people in certain spaces. But you always run or run a lean law firm whether there's a recession or not and the leaner you can get, the more profit margin you can make, the more efficient you can be.
I'm always telling law firms whether it's a recession or not, whether it's high times, you want to be as efficient as possible and running your law firm as effectively as possible because you're making the most money you can in that construct whatever's happening at that time. Maybe it's less than you would've made two years ago, but it's still pretty good probably. I found that most law firms are not really innovative at all. Not a lot of law firms are trying new things, not a lot of law firms are being aggressive about marketing, for example.
The ability to be an outlier and legal it's a little bit easier to do that than in other industries where the business owners absolutely are more savvy. That's the way I look at it with folks. As far as legal tech trends are concerned, I guess there's two big ones I'm looking at right now. One is all the consolidation that's happening. As you know, all these larger companies, oftentimes like the case management software companies like the Clio or a Filevine or MyCase, they're either snapping up these smaller companies, or in the case of MyCase, they're being snapped up by larger companies like a LawPay.
I think everybody's got this notion in their head that there's going to be this operating system for legal and there's this big battle between these huge companies about who's going to be the operating system for legal. I think that's a flawed premise, honestly. I don't buy that as being a thing. I think lawyers are too independent and I think most lawyers want to choose the best in class solution rather than--
[00:08:35] Michelle: And law firms are different. I know there's a lot of similarities. A small firm versus a large firm, a business firm versus a plaintiff firm. There's quite a variety.
[00:08:46] Jared: I'm not seeing a world in which there's the Lexis and Westlaw of legal technology. I'm just not seeing that. The other thing I'm seeing is I kind of feel we're in the second wave of legal technology, as I would call it. The first wave is '08, '09, everybody started using the Cloud, all these case management software products came out, Rocket Matter came out, Clio came out, everybody's like, "That's awesome. Back office software. That seems to be selling. Let's build a ton of that." Then nobody built anything else. Pandemic hits and all of a sudden, all of these law firms are doing analog intake. You got to do digital intake and they have no way to do it. There's no software for lawyers built for that. Now you're starting to see more investments made in front office technology. You're starting to see more companies come out in front office technology, you're starting to see these back office tools, either acquiring systems that can do front office technology or building those features into their own products. I think that's going to continue, and I think it's long overdue. And that's one of the reasons we started a company that was a front office software because there's not enough of that in the space.
[00:09:49] Michelle: Absolutely. I was shocked. I remember during the pandemic learning that one of my clients, no one had laptops. The entire firm.
[00:10:00] Jared: What were they using instead? Stone tablets?
[00:10:02] Michelle: Desktops, yes. You had to be in the office to work and I thought, "Are you kidding me?" It was quite a wake up call.
[00:10:11] Jared: It's so wild. Lawyers cling to those desktops, it's crazy.
[00:10:14] Michelle: Yes, it really is. I know we all have stories like this, but I still have a client — I don't do a lot of the day-to-day work anymore — but he will print out an email, write his response on the piece of paper, hand it to his assistant who will scan it and send it back to us.
[laughter]
[00:10:37] Jared: I was talking to a lawyer last week who was like all out of breath and I was like, "What are you doing?" She's like, "Oh, I'm taking my desktop out of my trunk and bringing it to my office." I'm like, "Are you for real right now?" [laughs]
[00:10:47] Michelle: Wow, that's wild.
[00:10:48] Jared: It's crazy. It happens all the time.
[00:10:52] Michelle: What do you see are the areas that you think are going to really continue to grow? We had the pandemic that really put a turbocharge on — and you mentioned the front office stuff. Are there certain areas where you think are going to grow moving forward more than others?
[00:11:10] Jared: I think the front office tech is going to explode a little bit here, which I've already mentioned. The other thing probably obviously maybe not, is automation: triggered automation, behavior automation, which leads to the machine learning and the AI. I get law firms, for example, who ask me all the time can you automate conflict checks?
I don't think you can because I don't think the technology's sensitive enough right now. But at some point if you run a viable AI on that, you could be in a position where you could do something like that where a machine could tell you whether there's a conflict and do it in a similar way to how a human would do it. I think that technology is in its nascent stages.
If you look at all that back office, front office software I'm talking about, none of it uses really any high level machine learning or artificial intelligence. You're seeing some of this stuff happening in legal research software. They're actually starting to use data effectively.
The three big things I see, one is the AI piece that's coming, the use of data analytics by law firms and software. You've seen that happen in sports, you've seen that happen in finance, you've seen that happen in a bunch of other industries where there's more reliance on data so people can make better decisions. No law firm are really doing that right now. I think the software is going to start to be developed to do that.
Then the other stuff I think is interesting is all these web-based communities. People look at— Facebook changes name to Meta and everybody thinks Facebook is the Metaverse. There's a bunch of these different segregated online communities, which are various Metaverses and you're starting to see law firms do things like set up virtual office spaces in there. I think that's going to start to become more and more utilized by firms. Those are three things that I think are trending right now that you're going to see developed over the course of like probably in terms of AI over the next 15, 20 years, maybe more.
[00:13:10] Michelle: Are there any major barriers that this industry is going to face that might slow down the growth?
[00:13:21] Jared: The biggest barrier are the attorneys, because they hate change. When I talk to people about lawyers, people are like, “Lawyers are risk averse. They're so risk averse. I don't understand why.” It's obvious because their job is to spot every possible risk and so when they look at a new venture, they're like, "Oh, my god, look at all the things that could go wrong here. Why would I do that?" If they were advising a client, they would never do that.
I think lawyers have to start being more comfortable with change management. I think lawyers have to start being more comfortable with risk management. That's the biggest barrier to everything. I'm seeing that improve. You see a lot of these attorneys who are 60s, 70s, 80s moving out of the practice. A lot more attorneys who are 40s and 50s taking over practices, and they have a more open mind. Then the other big issue I see outside of the attorneys is the lack of structured data. If you want to start running analytics, if you want to have machine learning going at a high level, the data needs to be structured. Layperson's term might be “labeled more effectively.”
If there are five different software you're using and they each label a settlement with a different field, it's going to be very hard to extract meaningful information from that data. That's one of the things that's going to have to happen and both the technology companies and the attorneys are going to have to put a premium on that. That's just hard work that no one wants to do. Those are two big issues that I see.
[00:14:53] Michelle: Do you think the trends that I've seen in the legal industry are often driven by client demand, things like diversity… Diversity is the best example I can think of.
[00:15:07] Jared: That's a great example.
[00:15:09] Michelle: This isn't altruistic firms, this is client saying, "Do it." Do you think clients will have any impact on the growth of this market?
[00:15:21] Jared: Yes and I think they already are. I think the two big things that are being driven by law firm clients — and it's more of a push the bigger they get. The bigger companies are going to demand more of this. Law firms that are operating as outside council are starting to see this already in waves. The first is efficiency.
A few years back, like Casey Flaherty who was a Chief Legal Counselor at Kia, the car company. He was starting to give efficiency tests to law firms. Like, can you actually convert a PDF from a Word document? A lot of them couldn't do it, because all these companies are upset because a lot of these firms are operating on the billable hour that incentivizes inefficiency. Why would you learn to do anything more efficiently? You wouldn't.
You're seeing a lot of pressure from companies now about law firm efficiency, more challenging of billing, more requests for alternative pricing models as well that don't value efficiency as highly. Then I think in addition to that, the other big thing is data security. You see a lot of these larger companies say, "Okay we've got sensitive legal files on our side, but you as a law firm are also maintaining sensitive legal files. We see new stories about law firms being breached all the time. What are you doing to secure your data effectively?"
That's not just any longer about having a written information security program or a data security document that's two pages long. That's also about filling out the forms that these companies want you to fill out. I have a friend of mine who runs IT for several large law firms and they're asking these firms to fill out 100 page, 200 page queries about how they manage their data security. They have no clue how to do it. Those questions are only going to get harder. And this is in the US, we're not even talking about Europe with GDPR.
[00:17:15] Michelle: I attended a managing partners forum, maybe it was last year. The very beginning of it, they went around and talked about-- The question was, what's keeping you up at night? These are managing partners of mostly smaller defense firms. The amount of people that said cybersecurity was outstanding to me. I mean it was by far the number one topic. That doesn’t surprise me at all.
[00:17:45] Jared: It's a huge deal. Lawyers are risk averse because they understand the law very well. They don't understand the data security space very well and it's really dangerous. It's not enough just to get a cybersecurity malpractice insurance policy. You need to actually implement the tools in your office.
[00:18:06] Michelle: Yes, absolutely, because it's such a reputation risk as well.
[00:18:12] Jared: That's the biggest thing. As you would know, running a PR firm. That's a PR nightmare. A data breach.
[00:18:17] Michelle: PR nightmare, absolutely. The risk aversion is something that as marketing and PR people, it's sort of the opposite approach. I see marketing and PR people…by nature, you have to push the envelope, you have to take risks. Marketing is not a risk averse discipline. We have to avoid shiny object syndrome. There has to be strategy, but in general you have to be willing to try some new things.
[00:18:49] Jared: For sure.
[00:18:50] Michelle: It's certainly a challenge working with lawyers who will point out anything and everything that could go wrong. If you spend too much time, why would you put anything out there? After a while, pretty much anything could go wrong and the more risk you take out of it, the blander and less effective it gets.
[00:19:10] Jared: Yes, absolutely. Take a chance. Come on, lawyers.
[laughter]
[00:19:15] Michelle: Are there any companies in the legal tech space that you think are going to be the ones that are really disrupting the space that are important to watch?
[00:19:26] Jared: Yes. I think some of the bigger companies that have been around for a while are still being pretty disruptive. Like Filevine for example. I interviewed your CEO on a podcast the other day. They've been really doing a good job building out case management features in their systems. They've actually started to cross over the larger law firms, which is something that hasn't really been done before. I think that's a pretty big bellwether for where this is going because a lot of those bigger firms prefer document management systems, they’ve never use case management systems. That's a big deal.
NetDocuments is a document management and automation platform. They've been taking up a ton of market share in the large legal space. Then there's some smaller companies which are doing interesting things as well.
This company called Milestones, I talked to their CEO the other day. They're doing law firm notifications to clients based on workflows. Essentially no touch notifications, which I think is a really interesting thing to do because most law firms are going to forget to do that, or they're going to try to do that in a manual way. That's a really hard thing to do.
[00:20:33] Michelle: What notifications? Explain that to me a little bit more.
[00:20:36] Jared: Emails, text, any notification you could send. Potentially with integrations as well. If you're using WhatsApp or whatever for texting, you might be able to send a notification that way too. I think that's something that some of these companies lack, these larger case management software companies.
Then what I'm waiting to see actually is a really hardcore legal project management or task management tools. You see a lot of uptick on like Asana, Trello, Notion. There's no Notion for legal. I think something like that, I'm sure somebody may be developing that right now. Maybe I will.
[00:21:14] Michelle: That's a really great point.
[00:21:16] Jared: That, I don't see anything.
[00:21:17] Michelle: I haven't seen that either. That's fascinating. Who are the people that are who are leading these companies? Do you see any trend in terms of are they all former attorneys? Do you see anything where they were smaller firms, bigger firms? What are you seeing?
[00:21:39] Jared: Most of them, to my knowledge, are not lawyers. You see a few people who are attorneys who started companies. I talked about Filevine, Ryan Anderson, the CEO, he's an attorney. You look at a Clio, Jack Newton, the CEO over there, not an attorney. If I had to guess, I would say that probably like 75% of the founders and are not lawyers. They're people who are looking to disrupt the legal industry.
[00:22:04] Michelle: Disrupt an industry.
[00:22:05] Jared: I think the part of that is obviously because they're less risk averse. They look at this and they say, "Oh, there's so many solutions we can provide that lawyers just don't have the opportunity to even access."
The other thing I will say that, it's encouraging that the legal investment has been going up significantly year over year until this year because people worried about recession as we talked about, but nobody wanted to invest in legal technology for a long time. Lawyers are intelligent, which means they're hard to sell to. The sales cycle is long. There's a lot of entrenched tools, they're skeptical. All bad things, right? [laughs] I think it's encouraging that the investment has been coming in and I think that's probably part of the reason that more lawyers, non-lawyers I should say, have been attracted to this.
The other thing I find honestly is that you see a lot of lawyers who launch tech companies, but they can't get out of their own practice because they haven't figured out a way to manage that effectively or hand off the reigns. It's really tough to do two things like that at once: managing a large law firm and also trying to create a tech venture because that's a very competitive space.
[00:23:08] Michelle: Well, and that made me think too, the big challenge that I see a lot of law firms talking about is handing it over to that next generation. I would imagine that tech plays a big role there. You've got to-- Law firms are that quintessential, you don't own a company, you own a job almost, until you've built processes and systems.
[00:23:34] Jared: Oh, man, you're so spot on. After the pandemic, and during, most of the law firms I was talking to prior to that, they were like, "I'm really inefficient. I don't know why." Then law firms started reaching out to me and they're like, "Hey, we need to start building processes and workflows." I'm like, "Okay. We're getting somewhere now." You're totally right in that lawyers don't build businesses like that. We haven't talked about this, but some states are now authorizing alternative business structures where non-attorneys, non-law firms can be involved in law firms.
To be able to compete with organizations like that, you have to take chances in marketing, you have to build processes, and there's a chance that maybe you get acquired by some of those companies down the road. I think lawyers are going to be forced to do this eventually, but honestly it's about time because it only benefits them frankly.
[00:24:30] Michelle: Absolutely. A few of our clients are ALSPs. Law firms often were founded based on geography, and their business was built around a particular geographic market. You're seeing that rise of the niche, and obviously you're still regulated by where you can practice in court, but I'm seeing more and more attorneys build brands that are national and international. ALSPs are good at that, too. They have a niche focus that can really deliver a niche optimized service. That's going to be something that the law firms have to compete with.
[00:25:19] Jared: I mean, it's crazy. If you look at, even the ethics rules, before the pandemic, in half the states, you couldn't even have a brand name for your law firm. All those rules came off the book almost simultaneously. The bonafide office stuff. Everybody knew that was BS, but took like a global pandemic to change that. They're still behind the eight ball. It's wild.
[00:25:40] Michelle: It's wild. It really is. This has been fascinating. Tell me, are there any trends that we haven't touched on? I want to make sure, and then the other question I have is just since we're doing a broad overview of legal tech, what are some of the associations, conferences? If you're dipping your toe into legal tech, let's say you're a managing partner, you want to start following the industry, getting information, what are the some of those that you recommend that they pay attention to?
[00:26:13] Jared: I can do a couple more trends first if you want.
[00:26:15] Michelle: Oh yes, let's do trends.
[00:26:17] Jared: I like how your cat popped into the screen here, mirroring my daughter who's come back and forth for snacks. Well, two of the trends I haven't mentioned yet that I've been seeing is like a change in pricing models. I talk about firms moving away from the billable hour potentially. What do you move to? I see a lot more firms that adopting evergreen retainers. I see more firms doing subscriptions and products. What's interesting about that is that in terms of service delivery, which is a second big trend, and that's changing as well. The law firms only deliver services in one way, like painstaking. Cottage industry.
Now, if you've got a law firm products, you can deliver documents. What I never understood was you got companies like LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer out there, and law firms are like, "Oh, they suck. I don't like them." But law firms could offer the same services, capture those DIY clients as well. They just never did. There was no reason for it.
I've seen a lot more law firms looking at new pricing structures, which is going to communicate more value to the client, which is going to potentially be more valuable to the law firm as well, which gets closer to like that total cost of representation, which is really what legal consumers want. Then I think that's going to change the service delivery significantly as well. The law firms of the future are probably going to have-- or the law firm conglomerations with other businesses, whatever they are, pricing model's going to be different, service delivery's going to be different.
[00:27:42] Michelle: How will it change the service delivery?
[00:27:45] Jared: I think it's just a totally different model for a law firm. If you built out-- The way I look at this is like every law firm process is analog, now it's becoming digital. My software company will help a lot of law firms, like, offer estate plans, right? Instead of doing the traditional thing where you meet with somebody, we have law firms that are like faxing documents back and forth. Meet with somebody, you write stuff out, you painstaking do mail merge on the well and stuff like that.
You can make that an entirely consumer facing product where instead of having to have a staff, you can just say, "Hey, complete this chat conversation" and guess what? A document pops out on the other end and you're done. You don't want to talk to a lawyer, great. It's cheaper to do it this way, but if you do want to talk to a lawyer, we have options to do that.” That's just a seat change from most law firms.
[00:28:34] Michelle: It really is. It's being driven by… I notice I have very little patience. I have some consultants that I deal with for my own business. I have one in particular who loves to call me.
[00:28:49] Jared: Feel like this could have been a text. [laughs]
[00:28:51] Michelle: I'm to the point where I just-- you start thinking about whether or not I need to switch providers because my patience has left the building for phone calls. It's because, honestly, in our personal lives, things like Amazon and UberEats… I can have dinner delivered to my door and not speak to anybody. It changes your behavior in your work life.
[00:29:22] Jared: Oh, lord.
[00:29:23] Michelle: You lose that patience of things that could be digitized and automated and that aren't.
[00:29:30] Jared: Can we not talk about how much I spend on Grubhub every month? Could we leave that out?
[laughter]
[00:29:38] Michelle: Same actually, and Amazon.
[00:29:41] Jared: Yes. It's funny you mentioned that because that's totally true. I used to practice law, I don't anymore. Now, as somebody who hires lawyers from time to time, I don't want to drive to your office. I don't want to touch your pen, I just want to schedule something online, have a quick meeting via Zoom and be done. I need to get onto the other stuff. Lawyers have never operated that way. They sit at the desk and they're like, "How does this statute from 1843 apply to this document I'm drafting?" I'm not interested in that. Lawyers love that though. They love being inefficient.
[00:30:16] Michelle: I think it's almost taught to them. It will change as-
[00:30:21] Jared: It has to.
[00:30:22] Michelle: -the generational shift. Absolutely.
[00:30:26] Jared: You asked about conferences too, events and stuff like that. Obviously, a weird time for that. I don't get out to as many events as I used to. It's starting to come back. I'll tell you the places I go to usually, where I pick up some useful stuff is some of the user conferences for the tech companies. I just went to Clio's cloud conference in Nashville a couple months ago. They had about 2,000 people in-person, a 1,000 people online.
[00:30:53] Michelle: Wow.
[00:30:53] Jared: That was a really good conference. Lots of vendors there. Talked to a lot of people about what features they're adopting. Filevine’s got a conference. I think MyCase is maybe doing some conferences across the country at some point. Then I also go to the Bar Association Conferences. You've got small firm conferences are pretty good. You've also got bench bar conferences, which draw a lot of lawyers because the judges go to those.
Some of those bar associations have tech conferences, and then I use the term bar associations broadly. I'm not talking just about state bar associations, but also county, city specialty bar associations. Those are generally good. Then some marketing companies throw really good conferences like Crisp Video down in Atlanta, they do great conference. They give away Lamborghinis…
[00:31:39] Michelle: Oh, do they really?
[00:31:40] Jared: Yes. There's a lot of different places you can go if you're looking for legal information and want to meet lawyers. ABA Tech Show has been around forever. That's another big one that a lot of people go to.
If you want to find legal tech conferences or legal conferences in general to go to, there's no shortage of places to go for sure. I’d start with the vendors and the bar associations.
[00:32:04] Michelle: That's great information. This has been a great conversation. I really appreciate you joining me.
[00:32:12] Jared: I've enjoyed myself. I finished my iced tea.
[00:32:15] Michelle: I love it. I want to point people, if they want to learn more about you and your consulting, where should they go?
[00:32:23] Jared: Oh, sure. You can just go to the website. It's redcavelegal.com
[00:32:27] Michelle: Where'd you get that name? What's the Red Cave? If you wouldn't mind.
[00:32:32] Jared: All right. Remember when I said I was an English major?
[00:32:34] Michelle: Yes.
[00:32:34] Jared: I went to a small liberal arts scholar, it was a humanities program. It's based on Plato's Allegory of the Cave. The idea is like you're in the cave, you're not seeing real things, you're not seeing the forms, you're just seeing shadows and then you come out of the cave and everything opens up to you and then you understand the world. I thought to myself, "What would it look like to be out of the cave and looking back on it?” And it's probably very bright flames coming out because they're projecting shadows on the wall." That was the vision I had for it. Then I designed a logo off of that.
[00:33:09] Michelle: That's very deep.
[00:33:11] Jared: Very deep.
[00:33:13] Michelle: Very deep. I love it. Great to talk to you. Thanks for joining me.
[00:33:18] Jared: Same. Thank you. This is awesome. Take care.
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[00:33:22] Thanks for listening to Spill the Ink, a podcast by Reputation Ink. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.