EP106: Superior Ai for Law Firms – meet Supio.com’s Edward Kirk, Plus Breaking News about their Series A Funding Round

Yes, there is AI, but there's also an incredible amount of human labor in the process to what we call schematize the records. And that is essentially take these unstructured documents and put structure on them so that the our firms can see a incredibly accurate timeline, but they can also search that information using AI incredibly accurately.

Well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to the 10 golden rules of internet marketing for law firms. Podcast. We have a great guest today. A quick note last week, whatever week it was, go find the episode with Bill Biggs. I was listening to that episode, and I was so fired up, and we played a recording from tgr Live, which was our live conference held in Boca, Raton, Florida, and Bill Biggs absolutely rocked the house. He was the big hit of day two of the conference. We put out the full audio recording and the video recording on YouTube. So if you like watching these podcasts as well, we're putting them on the 10 golden rules YouTube channel. But don't miss Bill Biggs live from tgrs event growth strategies for law firms, and we just booked the dates. So if you're a fan of seeing all these great superstars that you've met on our podcast live and in person. We've started booking some of the talent. We confirmed the dates. It's going to be March 10 and 11th. Monday, Tuesday, March 10 and 11th in beautiful Delray Beach, Florida, which is just adjacent to Boca Raton. We're going to be on the ocean, great location. So definitely save the dates March 10 and 11th, if you're part of the TGR family. Anyways, let's not delay any further. We have an awesome guest today. Edward Kirk was a litigator in London, actually practiced law, and that now is helping run an amazing AI software startup called Supio. Now, the incredible thing about Supio, like, it'll do your depositions, it'll do help you with recruitment in case reviews and medcrons, and, you know, amazing amount of stuff that a lot of the other AIS do, but it this, evidently, this tool is so powerful that the lawyers are bringing it to court with them, and it's like a secret weapon When you're on trial. Anyways, Edward is going to tell us all about it. He's now living in Toronto, which I spent about 15 years from Toronto, My Brides from Toronto, Edward. So with that, welcome to the 10 golden rules podcast.

Thanks for having me, Jay. Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, tell us a little bit about your journey, and you know how you got from practicing law in London to running scaling these startups?

Absolutely so. I started my legal career in 2010 working in litigation teams, starting with prosecuting financial crimes, Ponzi schemes, insider, dealing, working with big teams and working on big data, like sifting through mountains of data, analyzing them. And I remember at the time thinking I am very under qualified to be doing review of this scale. And actually that thought process continued as a bit of did a bit of personal injury in my training, sifting through medical records to find the needles in the haystack, and then laterally I fell into, by happenstance, into being a divorce lawyer and there, analyzing financial records, doing that manually with a highlighter sifting through and and with all of these things, it's prone to human error. And then so in I had sort of two takeaways of seven years in practice. Number one is the data involved is just so huge, so manual, there has to be technology to make to make this so much easier for everybody involved, and also technology that's trained to do the task specifically. And secondly, that if I spend 30 or 40 years in practice, maybe I might help 1000 and maybe 1500 people max. So my impact is, thus, it's it's limited to the time I have in the day. Technology, on the other hand, exponentially impacts practice. And if we think about legal practice as being a little bit of behind the curve, you know, sometimes I say a little bit Jurassic, the impact of technology would have 100x on the on the practice of law. And for me, that excited me. That idea excited me. And so that kind of in 2018 set me on a course, working with a Australian startup, an intake solution that helped family law clients understand the journey they're going on before their initial meeting. And. And and again, gave, gave the lawyer the data they need to also do an effective initial meeting. We scaled that across Australia, the UK, North America. That put me on the radar for my current site, company Supio. They're looking for somebody to be on the front of the house, you know, to front, front stage, to introduce the technology to people, build relationships and and scale it. So it's been a year now. We've just come out of stealth. We've just kind of announced ourselves onto the world and and it's and it's really exciting. We've really got something powerful to show personal injury lawyers, particularly right now in the US, it's exciting place. The

products amazing. I saw the demo at a private conference in Montreal, and, you know, I teased, you know, it's such a great tool that people are bringing it to court with them and winning these incredible cases. So tell us a little bit about your role with the company and and and then tell us about the product first, and then we'll dig into it a little bit. Yeah,

my role is leading partnerships for the company, so I'm there to really present it in the best way possible. So introduce it to firms that we're working with today that it it sort of suits, because right now we're we're focusing on particular types of firms that deal with a heavy amount of volume, because that's the greatest impact right now we can come in and help to streamline processes, shorten the time on desk, which is important thing that you know we hear people talk about, and what you just said there, Jay, strengthen the case. Give them the ability to walk in to to prep for and walk into negotiations, mediation trials, and have the case at their fingertips. They can write in an argument that they just heard, and get the counters. Not only get the counters, but get the source documents right there so they can confidently rebut the arguments that come to them and and you know, if what we hear from our clients is that they might be on the phone to an adjuster, and in normal time without Supio, they'd have to hang up, go to the file and come back, and that's extended the period of the negotiation, a couple of weeks. We can deal with it right then and there. And actually, Jay, you were at a conference that we a couple of weeks back, and one of our firms from Texas mentioned a story that I think helped the firm owner realize the the superpower of Supio, which was he got parachuted in to run a mediation a week ahead of time, and the Director of Legal operations there said, don't worry. The case is here in Supio, here's your chat bot. Any question you need to ask, it will it's contained in the case, and it will give you the insights you need to run an effective mediation. So we did, and that person has since become an investor in the company. So what you just pointed out there, particularly for lawyers, that ability to have essentially a digital colleague there as a sounding board, a collaborator, to point weaknesses in their arguments, in their cases, to highlight any blind spots. It's an incredible, incredibly powerful tool for them, you know, an additional tool in their arsenal and their day to day. Now,

what practice areas Is it best for?

So we focus on personal injury and mass torts. So that includes single event, medical malpractice, complex, other cases like nursing home or birth injury, but also mass talks as well. It's an area that we are building out. We had a really fantastic result last month in Missouri, our client, firm, torman, won a $500 million verdict against Abbott Labs in a neck case you know, related to bowel issues with preterm babies. You know, horrifying, horrifying case. And we were just super proud to be able to assist their trial team in trial, being able to navigate the 40,000 pages of medical records instantly as they needed to. So

that was one of the ones where they had this brilliant, little AI bot in their pocket, right?

Absolutely. Yeah.

Is it a case manager? Or does it work with a case management software

works with complimentary so we have connectors with case management software the major players like litter. File by and smart advocate to streamline the delivery of documents from their case into Supio. We're deepening those integrations so that information feeds back. Because the conversation really now in 2024 is not only about creating these powerful tools, but increasing the efficiencies for law firms, reducing data entry, re keying information so that we have comprehensive records and across the board. And so that's that's a real area that we devote a lot of resource to. All

the case files go into litify, smart advocate file line, and then Supio acts like, like a bot, essentially, or but it's also doing a lot of AI work, right? Like preparing medical chronologies, demand letters. Talk about what, what? Some of the, let's get into the brass tax here.

Absolutely. So as the records are fed in, there's a lot of processes to go through it, and we have humans in the loop as well to ensure the quality of our timelines. Yes, there is AI, but there's also an incredible amount of human labor in the process to what we call schematize the records, and that is essentially take these unstructured documents and put structure on them so that the our firms can see a incredibly accurate timeline, but they can also search that information using AI incredibly accurately. And I'll just kind of frame it in this way, if you were to try and use chat GPT to do this. And first of all, don't do that, because it's not going to enclose your case. It may use that data for its learning agent engine. And if you ask chatgpt as well, it will say that it's not HIPAA compliant. But the other facet there is accuracy these complex records that we're dealing with, police reports, medical charts are not always text based their ticks and crosses and things like that, and these language models just won't know what to do with it. That is why, on our side, we need to, we need to process these documents so that we can teach AI to read them accurately and contain the AI within our firm's case, so that it is just looking to that case for answers, and not connected to the internet looking for answers, and that would increase the chance of hallucination. So

it's as smart as chat GPT, but it has a specific task. It's trained for a specific thing. That's

it exactly, right? So we

use, so, you know, the data comes in to, let's just call it a big car accident case, someone significantly injured. All the medical information's in there, the police report, and it's going to prepare, like the medical chronologies and get all that information. So basically, it becomes a tool to interact with the case manager as the attorneys are preparing the case now you're going to trial. So, you know, talk about, what role does it play? Like? Where does the lawyer work? The paralegal, the case management software and Supio, who does what?

So, yeah, so I'll start with the beginning of uploading medical records, as you say, we're generating the timeline, but what a paralegal can then do to work up the case in Supio is to spot the issues in that they met, that they're confronted with. So gaps in the records, gaps in treatment, undiagnosed medical issues like concussion, these are the things they can work on to build and strengthen the case, so that when they're ready to draft the demand, they have all of that to hand and they can put that together so and that's something that will then do for the firm, draft that first demand that they can then tailor according to their needs. We'll also analyze the billing records, de duplicate and extract the line items with the dates of service so they have a full ledger. Not only that, we're matching them to the treatments in the records, so that they can see the gaps in the records that they have accurately, and they can use the AI system to do that. So what you're so that's that's in the initial stage, in in the preparation of the case, and that's where we're really. Reducing the time on deaths by speeding up the processing of their cases, reducing backlogs that firms might have to process them quickly and see whether they've got a case and then allocate it correctly to the right lawyer. Once we're moved from the dirt, the demand into negotiation, mediation, you know, perhaps into trial. That is where the lawyers can use it as that collaborator, to ask it, what are the what are the weaknesses in this case? An adjuster might argue, here are my here, you know, I'm about to depose my client or the defense expert. Here are my thoughts. Look for some blind spots in my argument. What am I missing here? Help me to ensure that I'm covering all the bases we heard. The other day, a lawyer suspected the defense expert of repeating or use repeating the same lines in his report, so using a template, what he did was he got the expert reports, the ex, the defense experts, previous reports, and used our deep dive feature in Supio to analyze those repeated references. Took him two hours. He had it all lined up with pages and everything. And then he walked into that deposition to depose the defense expert, and when he told me the story, said, Ed, you know, there are rare days in a lawyer's life that you feel like you knocked it out of the park. That was one of those days. And I give that anecdote just to sort of, I guess, put a little meat on the bone in terms of the ways that the myriad of ways lawyers and their paralegals are finding to add value to their cases, to reduce the time on desk, to strengthen their crate cases, to feel more confident about them as well in the moment,

fantastic. So how do you get started with Supio? Where is it at? How many clients do you have, or can you take on? Yeah,

so at the moment, we got a bit of a waiting list. We've come out of stealth, and we are. We have a bit of a sweet spot for the firms we're focusing, as I mentioned, firms that deal with a heavy amount of volume, that's the kind of firm that we can immediately make significant impact to. But at the same time, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to sort of exclude anyone. Of course, smaller firms are going to get enormous value from supio as well. You know, I just put it like this, it dramatically increases your impact, the impact of your staff, and the their ability to add more time in their day, right? So if you're a smaller shop, that's obviously going to be a great help to you by by reducing the resource gap that you might be coming up against with a big insurance provider. So at the moment, we have a waiting list. But you know, if you reach out to me and give this exclusive to your listeners, if you reach out to me personally and you say, Hey, I found you on the 10 golden rules podcast, let me see what I can do for you.

Good deal. And is it Supio.com or do you have a

yes, Supio.com you can also find me on LinkedIn, or Edward Kirk or ed@supio.com directly, s u, p, o, s u p, i, o, you think about soup and then input output. That's the, that's kind of the, the way that name came about.

It's soup, like super, s u p,

exactly like superior, like superpower, yeah,

and I understand you've got some breaking news that you're going to share with us. It was just released on TechCrunch over the last couple days, it's got a exciting new round of funding. Is that? Is that the news?

Yeah, we just completed series, a funding round with an outfit called sapphire ventures. Sapphire usually a venture capital company that much later in rounds, sort of C and D rounds, but they came down to to lead this round of funding with us, and but, but from what I've been told, it's the biggest round of funding for a company like ours In in the Seattle area in this this industry so super exciting, and gives us the, you know, the the resource to double down on, on this value that firms are already getting from Super today, great.

So you'll be able to get out of, out of the waiting list, maybe, and get some more folks on the. Program. Well,

that, you know that's adding more engineers, adding more developers, absolutely, increasing our support system. In particular, this is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about and talking about internally, the education piece of this technology. I don't I think most people I talk to today recognize the significance of the this latest wave of AI technology, to the industry, to legal practice. But people, people need to feel comfortable with this technology, and that is, that's where we're here to guide these firms, to educate them, to get comfortable with it, because right now, this is an opportunity, and in the not too distant future, it will be the norm. And getting comfortable with technology now will enable firms to think about how their practice is run. Think about how they hire people. Do we want to hire more empathetic people that can spend time with our clients, getting back to them, thinking about it that way, and also thinking about how this technology will increase the capacity of the firm to help them go out and get more business. It seems

to me like it's like you added a really smart paralegal and a really smart attorney to your team, and it's almost like you had two more people working up the case, you know, cleaning up all the documents, and then it's like you had a really, really smart attorney sitting with you in court, And it's all accessible by asking it questions, or does it proactively make suggestions like, one thing you mentioned, like, is there a gap in treatment? Is there, you know, should, should they be looking into concussion issues? Given, you know, does it just read all these, you know, all the medical reports and and then say, hey, you know, did you consider sending this person to a brain trauma specialist? Like, does it proactively tell you these things, or do you have to ask a questions?

That's a great question in our next version of Supio that we'll release in a couple of months time, what it will have is a tab talking about insights, and it will have pre created commands for the AI that specifically handle regular issues that you come across in each case that could be gaps in treatment, undiagnosed injuries, causation, liability topics like that that the user can click on, and it will, it will immediately start answering that question in relevance to the case. They can read that, see what those issues have been highlighted in this specific case, and then continue the conversation. And then for the team at the firm, perhaps the supervising attorney, the managing attorney, they can go in and immediately see those important conversations that have been happening and see where that paralegal, where that lawyer has taken the conversation, maybe they haven't yet, so that's something that they need to push for and ensure that they're asking the right questions. And what we're getting to is a level of standardization in the care that we give to our clients. And if we're thinking about a firm that handles a significant volume of cases. Maybe they have case managers that handle 100 or 200 cases. This is where we're really adding, you know, this is another area of significant value to those teams, to even out, perhaps the quality of those staff members, because we're giving that guidance, we're giving that coaching to enable them to look at their cases in the right way, ask the right questions.

So if you're it seems like, if you're a big firm, high volume, got a couple 100 cases in your files, this is a great fit. Get on the Get on the short list, and it'll give you an advantage, and he'll get you up the trial list. But let's say you're a smaller attorney. You know, two, three attorneys and 4050, cases that you're working up. What tips would you have for getting started with AI if you're not ready for this level of sophistication?

Well, I think your most I think, be curious. Ask internally, what, what are the things that we do manually, that are that we hate, that are prone to human error and and that technology is there to help with, and there are. Many examples out there in the market today, we've actually created a document that we've called How to Choose the Right AI solution for your firm, and we've got a list of, like, a checklist of 10 points that I can share with you, Jay, and you could put into the clip notes, or if anybody reaches out to me. I'm happy to share it, but that's where I start. Like looking internally about how you run your practice, and where are the areas that we can improve, that technology can help us and and what we're talking about today is really in the processing and understanding, the comprehension of these complex documents. Most companies these days will give you a free trial at least one. So ask about that. Even if you have to pay for it, it's a small price to pay when, you know, when we're talking about a potentially expensive tool that you might have to pay for for 12 months. So ensuring that it sits well, that your team are going to use it, are comfortable with it, you know, how many clicks does it take to do that? How many clicks does it take to do this? These are the things you're going to want to you want to double check, and then, you know, test out a case that you know well, so that you can compare the accuracy. And then think about how much time did it take my team to do that? Because you're probably here, that it took them two weeks or maybe even a month to do that one timeline, and then extrapolate that and think about, you know, how that can change your business by, by implementing technology that frees, that releases your team from doing a task like that. So those are the things that I tell people to think about when they're considering technology, because it may be that maybe they think of themselves as small. But then when they start to consider these technologies, they start to think about how it's going to release people, it's going to release their A players to do more and add more value, reduce the time on desk and also increase the value of their cases as well.

So that's great. Check the show notes. We'll make sure we get the link to that AI guide. And this is like a Back to the Future moment, because I think next week we have a podcast coming out, which will be last week or something when you're listening, but I believe it's episode 105, and again, content from our live event growth strategies for law firms. 10 golden rules event. Justin, lovelies, absolutely awesome. Have you guys met Justin? I haven't

met Justin, but I have heard a lot about Bill Biggs, who you mentioned at the top of the show.

I'll connect you with Justin, because this guy is, like, the AI lawyer, and he's spoken at a number of the conferences, and he and he was absolutely so Bill Biggs was the star of day two of our event, Justin was the star of day day one of our event. As a matter of fact, I, you know, as I was a little bit embarrassed, a few people were coming up to me. He's like, that speaker the first morning of day one was great. I'm like, Oh, you mean me, I was the opening speaker. No, no, no, the AI guy, but you get so Anyways, long story short, episode 105, Justin lovely. If you want to want the good basic stuff for AI, if you're not ready for Supio, you're not you're not big enough, you wait on the on the waiting list. Justin uses about 14 different AI tools in his practice, including using chat GPT, just for simple things like, you know, write 10 blog topics on how to select a motorcycle accident lawyer after motorcycle accident, and then he'll record those 10 blog topics using another AI called Hey Jeb, where he doesn't even have, you know, the chat. GPT writes the script, and then he checks the script, and then Hey, Jen does a version of him in English and Spanish. He doesn't even have to record those videos. So if you want the AI, quick start for the small firm, listen to Justin lovely. If you're big enough, get in touch with Edward. So next, I want to talk a little bit about the startup, because you've been had this successful run now with a couple startups. Talk to me a little bit about, you know, you guys creating the company, and how you get it to market, and how you develop the product and and get it in the hands of people. And, you know, go from alpha beta to now live in the market? Yeah, it

really starts with finding a group of lawyers that where we talk about the problem, and they get excited about going on that risk, reward journey of being your early adopters and giving feedback to improve the product along the way, and we've had some incredible early adopter firms that have that were excited about the problem we were solving, and have been there along the way to give that feedback work. Work with us to improve the products that we offer to our firms. And continue to do that, we have a super advisory board that we, that we, that we bounce ideas off of and show the next sort of features that are coming along, and these firms are the first ones on the tools to try it out. So getting that raving group of fans at the beginning, that's really what set us on our way, and adding to that group, and we've added substantially to that group. Today, we're at about 3030, 3540 firms I sort of lose track. Now, kind

of build the base product, yeah, get some people in, you know, to play with it a little bit, then really get their teams using it, and get it really live in the market, and then continue with an advisory board,

exactly so, so you know what? What is what we think about a lot, and I should say, you know, we're at that sort of 3040, number, and this is sort of August 2024, what we talk about a lot is ensuring that these people that have invested time and energy into evolving supo remain an important part of our journey. So having something like a super advisory board ensures that we stay as close as possible to those firms, you know, without becoming a pest or something like that, but be but being there to ensure that we stay as close as possible to what really matters to these firms, and we don't get overexcited about technologies that are just not going to add value. You know, you can go away into the lab and create things that you think might work, and maybe, maybe two people have said, Oh, it'd be great to do that, but you need to continuously listen to the group to to ensure that what you're creating for these guys is, is going to work for the for the crowd, and not just the minority. So where we're at today is is taking taking that group to the next level, building out our processes internally, adding bodies to engineering, to development, to customer support, to front of house as well in terms of sales and marketing and and going to market. This is where we are today. This is the exciting stage of sort of turning on all of the all of the marketing switches and introducing Supio to the world, and putting our best foot forward in terms of how we can communicate the value of Supio, how people understand what we can add to their business. Great. So

let's change course a little bit and get some tips from an expert here. I'm a member of a group called the strategic forum, and our meetings are audited by a group of MBAs who sit in because we're based a university here in South Florida, and one of the things we always ask our guests is, you know, talk to me about any pivots or choices you made in your career, that you could share a lesson with the students in the room. So, you know, for the young, young lawyers, or if we have any MBAs or young attorneys listening today, you know, you made a pretty significant pivot from attorney to working with these startups. You know, how did you make that choice? And and talk about making, you know, taking the lead for a young attorney or a young person.

It's a great, great question. So two books that I would recommend sort of in my Well, the ones that made the greatest impact on me when I was practicing. One was by Richard Siskind about the future of law. Is sort of a British legal technologist, and he's kind of really predicted the way that legal practice would change over the last sort of 30 years. So reading that really helped frame technology in the place of legal practice, and also think about my place within it. And and that sort of leads to the second book, which is outliers by Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, I read that point. I read that book at a really timely moment in my career. If you haven't read it, Jay or any of the audience, Malcolm explores the significance of where we are born, the geography of where we're born the time, and he talks about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, you know, certainly smart people, but they're also born in California at the time that they could exploit the personal computer boom. Also talks about hockey players and how,

of course, I know it well. It started in a hockey rink, and you. In Canada, which is where I started. And then the story is, he was, he was sitting there, I think he's a Jamaican, and he married a Canadian, so he's completely out of place sitting in a hockey rink. And he was sitting there, and he's reading, I believe his wife was reading the roster, and she said, you know, Malcolm, why do you think that every player on these all star teams was born in January and February, with like, one March and one November. And then he looked into it, and he found out that the kids, you know, when they were five or six, and they went skating for the first time. You know, the kids who were born in January, February, were like a year older than the kids born in, you know, August, September, October. And so they were like six inches taller, just by the nature of their birth date. And so, you know, the coaches would say, Yeah, you know, I like this kid, this kid, this kid. And then they'd go to Johnny's parents and say, you know, hopefully little Johnny's good in school, because he's not going to be a hockey player. And then he looked, you know, hockey players and basketball players and football players. And there was a similar circumstance, but sometimes it was like the kids born in September, October, November, because that's when the football season started, and the year change over whatever so and then the same thing with the computer guys, you know, Bill Gates had access to a computer, and he would actually sneak out of his house and ride to school, and he had the keys, and we go into The computer lab and code all night. And the guys at some microsystems were at University of Michigan, and they got one of the first computers, and they similarly figured a way to hack the system so they could get they could code all night, and they didn't count against their limited hours that everyone was supposed to share on this first supercomputer. And so the early some of the early computer multimillionaires or billionaires, these these guys had computer access, and they could code 20 hours a day when nobody else in the world had access to computers. And so they were, like, three or four years ahead of most of the rest of the

world. That's exactly right. And

that like, how did you make the choice to jump into tech?

Well, that Yeah. So I'm not comparing myself to Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. I just want to make that clear. But what it did for me was think about the opportunity that was most relevant to my career and legal technology. Seemed like it seemed to me in 2017 2018 in this sort of burgeoning moment where it would exponentially, uh, increase its impact in a profession that you hadn't really seen a significant update since email and personal computers and and word right that so 35 years lawyers hadn't really changed the way that they do the job or paralegals reviewing documents in that period. And so my bet, and most people in my personal life told me I was an idiot for leaving practice when I was sort of earning well and and I gone through all the pain and suffering through law school and at all of that to get to where I was, just to, in their view, toss it away. But from my, you know, and I mentioned this early on about impact and technology, be able to 100x the impact on practice that I could have individually. That's, that's what set me on the course, that gave me the inspiration to think, this is, this is the opportunity of my skill set, of my time, that I could go out and exploit and and along the way, you know, it wasn't like, you know, I just got into legal technology, and it all sort of worked out. But having the legal education, knowing lawyers as well, and also using the tools that lawyers were used to, you know, practice management systems, things like that, having that knowledge gave me an advantage when speaking to other lawyers about technology and and I, and I see myself more as an evangelist. I'm here to spread the word, to educate about these tools and how you can do things differently. For the you know you mentioned, sort of the other the other people in the room, the MBAs, the students, perhaps the people getting into startups and things like that. I think the key things for me that we talk about our company are zero to one, by Peter Thiel and also Crossing the Chasm, by Jeffrey Moore. Those are two excellent books for think, first, you know, as you sort of embark on a a lean startup and creating a product, which you know, in Crossing the Chasm, moves from those early adopters to the long tail of the market, and just finally, yeah, in the context of where I am now, because I kind of pivoted to learning more about personal injury and things like that. I'm currently reading King. Of tort. This is sort of the math tort world by Alan Lang and Tom Davis. Tom Dawson, excuse me about Dicky scrubs, the guy who took on asbestos in the 80s and then big tobacco in the 90s, but then had a big fall. And there's also another one called running with the bulls that constantly gets recommended to us about how to write great demand letters. So a little selection for you that have helped me on my journey to my education.

You wouldn't even realize one of my upcoming questions is, can you recommend some great business books? But I'm going to skip that one today.

Well, I do have one business model,

like, you know, four of the five books you've recommended I haven't read. So next question, you're in a unique position, like we are, where we look at firms from the outside in Yep. Now I wonder what you'd think about, you know, a lot of times I can see very clearly, like this firm basically has their act together. You know, they properly, maybe they're running on Eos, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, which we've talked a lot about on this podcast. But you know, some firms just get it and they run the firm like a business. And some firms, you know, are always in a scramble mode. What do you see from the outside in? Like, what are some tips for law firms on how to how to run, run your business like a business?

That's a great question. And I, when I think about the firms that are clients of ours, and I really respect their operation, I think it starts with having individuals in positions that can just focus on the operation. Law firms generally are run by the people that founded them, and a lot of lawyers themselves. Rarely have they been trained on how to run a good business. I think personal injury is fascinating for many reasons, but one of the key differentiators is that law firms want run on contingency, so they only make money if they win the case, and then they get a percentage, whereas most law firms run on the billable hour, which, as a result, makes them less efficient, because they don't think about how to be more efficient personal injury firms do. They think about how they can speed up that time on desk of cases, they think about how they can give a great client service and, and that's, and that's where you start. You know, that's where an operator would start to look at how, how many times are we getting back to clients? What are the, what are the calls that we get from clients most often, that we could help them, help themselves, like how the other ways that we can give them updates or educate them on the journey they're going through in the litigation that mean they don't have to call us to so that we can just just remove that call so we can focus on their cases? Yeah, just thinking of those steps. And as I said earlier, you know, when you're considering about AI solutions, ask your team, like, what are the manual things that they could just get rid of? And then, and then, you know, and not, you know, finding that solution is one thing, but then also thinking about its implementation. A lot of firms will just say, that's great. You know, the visionary the firm will go, I totally see the reason for that. And then they'll just dump it on the staff and walk away. And then the staff, you know, they may have done something for 30 years the same way and getting them to move change that process. That's, that's, you have to guide them. You have to really be hand hold them sometimes through that process. And I always say to firms when we're when we're doing a trial, give me your most tech board person, and also give you a naysayer. Because more times that, yeah, most times out of 10, I'll turn that naysayer into the cheerleader. They'll be the evangelist in the firm. They'll become the person, my my person, my go to person to the firm, ensure that it's running well. So those are, those are things that you know. Don't forget about the implementation. Think about how we're going to make sure that we get success, so that the thing that you spend a lot of money on does add the value that you see it well.

That's a great point, because customers are great, great, phenomenal. Customer service is no longer optional. You know, the hear it over and over, the number one bar complaint is my lawyer doesn't get back to me and update me on my case. And, you know, I think, you know, look, you can't mess with Mother Nature. And in my business, you know who Mother Nature is, right? Uh, Google, okay. What I mean by that is, if, like, if you're not getting one or two five star reviews every week, you're not ranking in Google Maps and the local service ads, and frankly, it's built into the overall SEO algorithm. So three of Google's four products, and probably even pay per click, are ranking your firm every week on your consistent cadence of getting good reviews. So if your firm, you know, is basically like a we had a client who was like 3.7 stars, then they got their act together, and now they're like 4.8 stars in their five, five Google stars, right? So it's a massive difference, because if people won't give you the reviews, or if they're giving you bad reviews, it's hurting your marketing very, very significantly. And even if someone refers someone to the firm and they go and look and you've got 3.7 stars, forget it. So great. Customer service is mission critical for marketing, and mission critical for not for actually losing cases. So let's do this quick. We're at time coming up, but any apps or techniques you use for personal productivity?

Well, there are, there are various things that my old company used to use, a service called minuteme to record internal meetings and keep us focused in those meetings. I think that was really useful because we had that record. I mean, these days at our company, we use something like fireflies that connects to all of our meetings, internal and external. So we have a bank of recordings that help with training, but also help because it's connected to our HubSpot. And so it all automated in that sense, so that anybody coming into the deal knows any into you know if they're prospecting or their customer support, they know what, what's going on in the case that finalize for me, has been a game changer, I would say, in many, in many ways, but at the same time, it's always important to keep notes. Sorry, Jake,

using fathom.ai, and it's taking notes at this meeting, and it'll give a series of notes to the folks who are going to prepare the meeting notes. And I use it for my networking and my sales meetings, and then I can search it. It's an incredible database. What blogs, podcasts and YouTubes Do you subscribe to? And when they come in your feed, those are the A listers you got to listen to that every week. Well,

I'm obviously subscribed to your YouTube. Jay, so I think there's a lot of great content there in terms of legal technology. Bob Ambrogi has a great blog podcast that I listen to regularly, just to keep me on top of what's going on in the industry, I would say he's, he's my kind of go to on

that side of things, legal tech, or just technology, legal

tech. Legal tech. Yeah, so he's been doing it for like, 20 or 30 years, and he's kind of, he, he's, he's the main guy, I would say, in industry, by

the way, Parker saying hi, for those of you who know, hey Parker, and who's your NFL or football team,

great question. Arsenal in the UK, obviously, I'm a soccer football fan, if I want to say it properly, I do in all the American sports, NFL is the one I can I do enjoy, and I'll tell you why. It's because there's 17 or whatever games in the season before the playoffs, so much more digestible. And unlike game one, it gets serious. Whereas baseball, NBA, hockey, I understand, I can enjoy the playoffs. That's just so much. So many games

you have an NFL team there.

I did enjoy when Brady went to the bucks. I did enjoy that probably sound like a glory Hunter, which is the worst thing you can possibly be, but I just, I'm up here in Toronto, so probably the builds, you know, they're our local team.

I think the bills are on the way down. I'm based in South so it's to a time, baby. You gotta jump on Miami Dolphins. Last question, where, where can people get in touch with you? We covered it earlier, but if you, if you didn't make a decision yet, Edward Kirk on on LinkedIn or Supio, s u p, i, o.com,

exactly, right? Yeah, yeah. And if you you can email me. It's quite straightforward. Ed@supio.com

Oh. Ed at s u p, I o.com, thank you so much. This was enlightening, interesting, awesome, great to have you, and we'll see you soon. I guess we got a couple conferences over the next few months.

That's right. Thanks so much for having me. Jay. Cheers, bye.