The Future of Claims — Episode 3: Brian

Host: Andy Anderson | Guest: Brian Kernel

You're listening to "The Future of Claims," a show about the changes happening in the world of insurance claims. I'm your host, Andy Anderson. I've spent over a decade at the intersection of insurance and technology as a founder, a CEO, and a podcast host. We're going to sit down with some of the leading minds in claims to hear how they think technology, people, and organizations will transform claims over the next 10 years. So Brian, thank you so much for coming on "The Future of Claims" podcast.

For those who don't know you, I'd love if you give the one-minute history of you and your firm. Sure. So we run a management consultancy for law firms across the country and a little bit internationally. And we started, I don't know, 25, 28 years ago now. Came out of the management space, running law firms, and decided I wanted to do something more with it, have more and deeper challenges.

So at any moment, we're working with 50 firms, plus or minus, on everything from virtual CFO to law firm to compensation to strategic planning. It really does run the gamut. Yeah. So I remember from our conversation, you were internal doing this function at a couple different law firms that- Yeah ... the pathway.

Yeah. A lot of times people who do what I do came out of that. They start, originally it was the accounting/CPA route and then if you didn't want to do audit or tax, you did management advisory, and when you got into management advisory, it was a natural segue into something like this. Yeah, and so we've worked together a little while on across a couple of different engagements, and so seems like it starts for you often with running the books, but often goes well beyond just running the books and really- Yeah. It usually starts with either someone who's doing well but knows they can do better, someone who's struggling a little bit and needs some help, somebody who just needs direct support in the small mid space that may not have the budget for a full-on CFO at the director level, but they have real good operators inside.

They just need the strategic advice and the more involved stuff as far as the strategic financial stuff. So it evolves into that, but it could be, it's funny, in any one day I might be talking to one of our people about a simple QuickBooks conversion that we're trying to get done so we can get a client profitability system up and running to handling a merger that we do three or four of them a year or so. Yeah. Weirdly, whether by design or by happenstance, you seem to have built a decent presence in the litigation defense, insurance defense ecosystem. Yeah.

You're right, Andy. But that really started, I started here in the New Orleans area, and what we do here, we do litigation really well. We have car wrecks and stuff like that, and torts. We have an oil and gas, but we don't have that classic manufacturing presence or that, so the professions here are really strong, and there is a lot of litigation in the New Orleans area where an insurance company's involved somehow, probably more than three-quarters of it. So you can't help with, it's where I started, and you can't help running into it.

And then like any professional services business, one client introduces you to another who introduces you to another, and a lot of times those clients know one another from professional organizations. So they might be at some claims management seminar or something, and so it just naturally builds. But I'd say probably half of what we do is for a firm that somewhere has got an insurance company involved in it somehow. Yeah. In the client base.

And I think, and we've talked about this a little bit, I think insurance defense tends to be... Well, I'd love for you, you work for both firms that do mostly insurance defense and some that do more stuff. How do those compare? How would you compare what their businesses are like and how both the challenges and the benefits of the litigation defense? Well, it's because if you think about it, there's two ways to look at it, and there's in claims, let's just call them claims, and then there's just other stuff that firms do, whether that be a corporate firm or an employment firm or...

But if you took that entire claims bucket and you will have everything from low-risk policies all the way up to excess insurers that are insuring $50 million. So you might have workers' comp and you might have all measure of different things. And it's almost a little like if you think of retail or something, there are folks that have to operate like Walmart, and on that scale with that because, and they have to be really efficient because the business is there, it's just and the rates are not great generally. And then you have the higher end risks where you can get a pretty good rate, albeit less than maybe somebody working for a company directly with a high retention rate on their policy. So it's really just about what details you pay attention to.

They all want to be efficient, but for some, if they're not as efficient, they don't feel it as much as if your average case is $15,000 or something like that and you start, you're inefficient there and you've got hundreds of them coming in, you're going to hurt yourself pretty quick. So within the claims segment, there's a little bit of divergence on how efficient they are, what their models are. So it's interesting. Sometimes you run into people who should be really efficient who aren't, and you have to remind them that you're getting this, not this. So.

Yeah. Obviously the analogy you're using is Walmart and other retailers. The one that my mind always goes to is running restaurants because that's what it feels like. That's another great one. Some of them, they're running McDonald's franchises, which, oh my God, general franchises, if run well, can be incredibly profitable.

I'm sorry. Yeah. If you put two more pickles on that burger, and you went from a great business to not a great business. Right. Or you're running the high-end, higher margin, lower volume.

Quality matters for both, but yeah, you're just watching different stuff. Well, yeah. And the risks are different. If you've got something with a policy limit of $50,000 outside of bad faith, if you blow the whole case, it's $50,000. So you tend to look at that differently than if you've got a policy limit of $2 million, and you can outkick your malpractice coverage.

They have professional ethics, and they're never careless. It's just that when you're operating at scale, maybe 100, 200 claims over a team or something, versus somebody who's got 10 or 15 cases, it's just a different approach. But they all want to be more efficient. There's a frustrating part of litigation, if you want to think of it like that, that can be inherently inefficient, and it seems like case will come in, they'll accept the initial assignment. There's a little dopamine hit, new case, it's great.

Then it sits on the shelf, and then they're just triaging all day long. And one of the things that is hoped, was really hoped with some of these AIs, what everybody's talking about these days, but there's a tremendous amount of turnover in the legal space. And I've looked at some data on that. It's not as much as you think it is as far as, I don't know, maybe it's 20 or 30% when it might've been before COVID maybe 15, 20%. So it's only about 10% more.

It's just that if you're a 30-lawyer law firm and you turn over three lawyers a year, it's a million dollars worth of business with loose change. But it creates this, because you have three going out and three coming in, and so it creates this constant staffing shortage, and the claims keep piling up. And so the clients are just parking this business wherever they can find capacity. And so I think the hope is that technology in some way will allow, especially small-mids, but even larger firms, it's all relative to operate at a pace where they can improve service and get the claims in, get them out. Get the case in, get them out.

Or at least you got the courts in there, and it's not as easy as just, you can be way ahead of it, and then that just means it's going to sit on somebody else's desk, whether it's an adjuster at the client or whatever. So there's a balance that you have to have with that. But that's what's hoped. That's what people hope. Yeah.

At two different, both in college and in business school, I took operations research, which I think for anybody who runs a business, knowing enough operations research, even if you don't- They called it- ... deeply- They called it ops management when I was in school, but that's all. Yeah. Well, a little- More gray hairs than me. But the other thing that we used to call it was the study of lines.

Yeah. Because it's line science. It's like queuing and how, and if you've ever messed around with any of those problems, very quickly you change one little thing. You have four checkers instead of five, suddenly your line goes from three deep to 30 deep. There's little changes, or just how you structure the line.

It's so funny because classic production management, it's funny you're reminding me. The example was a breakfast shop where you didn't put the toast down until you had the eggs started and the coffee, and there was this order of things. And if you got any one of those things out of order, so the 30 deep line. Yeah. People got cold eggs, no toast, and cold coffee or something.

It was a disaster. Yeah, and I don't think we're going to be offending any of your clients or too many of the lawyers that we talk to is, I think the lawyers that I talk to all day, they're incredibly good lawyers, but I think most of them, unfortunately, are lacking in at least formal business education. Yeah. Very few of them have done a lot of those classes that I'm sure you did. I did it in business school- Yeah ...

a little bit in undergrad as well. Yeah. And so I'm sure that's what makes it fun, but also these ways to, some of these management pieces, and it goes beyond just managing people or accounting. It's these other pieces that how you truly run a business- Yeah ... that I think.

Well, when you really think about what a lawyer does all day long, and I thought about it in these terms when I first started. I was fresh out of school, or actually I was probably in school, and I always thought, I said to one of the partners one time, I said, "Man, you guys got a job where you have a final exam or a term paper due every day." And that's the problem. One of the things is they have these overarching requirements by the court or some judge or somebody else who's, and it can be daunting and very few of, most of the traditional law firms, especially in small mid space, you have owner, I call them owner-operators. These are not executives sitting back saying, "Yeah, I used to take depositions." These are people engaged in the fight all day long, and so they have this much time at the end of the day to be thinking like this. And then if they don't really have the training, it's hard to pick it up on the fly.

And I think a lot of them just are like, they look at people like us, frankly, and sometimes you have to set expectations. It's funny. It's like when I first started using just ChatGPT, when it first came out, I was like everybody else, asking it really stupid questions, very ambiguous. Because I'm like, "Well, I'll just put in this thoughtful prompt, and it'll somehow figure me out and give me a great answer." And I quickly learned that isn't how it works. And I think sometimes with them, they look at people like us and they go, "Just fix it, man." And it's like And that's the extent of the instruction.

Just fix it. We need to make more. So they tend to think of it in terms of the final outcome. Forget about the KPIs, forget about the milestones, and all the things that people who organize progress like to think about. They just go, "I don't make enough money.

I don't have enough people. We're taking too long." And it's just like boom, boom, and you're just like... And that's the instructions you get. That's the extent of the instruction. Yeah, go down and see that person.

Yeah. It's too slow. You're just like- Yeah ... what attitude do I have? And yeah, and I think it is, if we stay in the world of operations management, research, line science, you can move the bottleneck, you can move the constraint, but you cannot eliminate it.

There are trade-offs everywhere, and so you can- Yeah ... and I think you can make better trade-offs, but- I think you can. Yeah. But what you can do, though, if you stay in this line of sight, because in the end, we're not a lot different. We focus on different aspects of it.

You're more involved in the actual battle itself, if you want to think of it like that. I'm more back in logistics and just making sure the ecosystem of the business is healthy, whatever you're doing. So we don't get too involved in the actual production of the product. There are lots of people who do focus on that side of it. So those are different relationships, but it all is important, and it all needs to get done, and so it's really challenging for them because, again, they've got a full-time job.

And so I get it. Now, we're just talking about the law firms in general. Let's define who they are. If you think about law firm partners in general, first of all, they're trained to manage risk. Okay?

So everything can sometimes be looked at as, is it good or a bad, or is there a risk in it? Is there not risk in it? Because that's what makes them really great at what they do. They can spot a situation and figure out real quickly if there's risk there or not. And people like us, we tend to just say, "There might be some risk there, but that's acceptable." Because it's business risk to us, but to them, it's more than that.

Yeah. They're professional at looking at how could this go wrong, basically. But almost everything can go wrong somehow, but you can get yourself to analysis paralysis then. Yeah. You're like, well, okay, if you don't want to change anything, you're not going to grow.

You're not going to even be able to operate. So you've got to choose which risks you're going to accept and which you're going to try to avoid. I'm sure you've run into this, being I know what you do, and I know how long it takes. We're working together on some things. It seems like change takes a really long time.

Yeah. But you've got to remember, there's no corporate office that calls up and says, "Hey, we're rolling you out next week." And you're like, "No, we don't want to roll out." "No, you're rolling out next week." If you've ever worked, like I did a stint for about three years at a Fortune 500, and first of all, I was glad I was only auditing the class. I owned a company, and I sold it, and I was like, wow. It's funny when you're looking at it going, this isn't going to be my life. But then you start to look at it as a student of it, and when those guys want to roll something out, when they wanted to roll something out, there wasn't any debate about it.

We were changing, I don't know, from Lotus Notes to GroupWise. There wasn't any debate. It was, we're doing it. Doesn't work that way in law firms. Is the partners opt in and opt out, if they just, sometimes the changes are there, and they're like, "We're not using it." Brodie would tell you this, our mutual friend, how many case management systems.

We went and did a study in our law firms, just an informal study, and we called them up and we said, "Okay. You have case management system. You have CRM. You have this, you have that." And it came back that they were using maybe 20% of the feature sets. Literally.

I had a big old heavy case manager that was basically a souped-up version of Outlook. And you would say, like, "Yeah, that stuff would be great, but we just can't get it set up." And because it couldn't claw the data. It's just too hard to go through- Yeah ... all the files. And so I do think we're headed for a better world- Yeah ...

just in terms of that. Yeah, and I was at DRI a couple of weeks ago and was talking about this, and I literally spoke for an hour. I was on stage for an hour and 45 minutes over three days. It was crazy. Yeah.

That's longer than a children's feature-length movie. And one of them was really on change management, and I boned up a little bit on the literature out there and- Yeah ... found a great book, "Switch," that I thought gave a nice framework, and it really talked about the classic three, which are people, tools, and process. Yeah. Like McKinsey's classic triad.

People, processes, and tools. Yeah. Everybody's been- But then it dug deeper because underneath each of those is the human elements of it, and in some ways, the people are the hardest part to change. And you have to understand them at an emotional level, you have to appeal to them at an intellectual level, and then you have to almost appeal to them at the habitual level, like the habits that they have every day. And you got to overcome all three of those, and that's a lot to do.

And I think one of the things that I think, at least having been in as many industries as I have, was the juice really worth the squeeze for a lot of these attorneys previous to this generation of technology? A lot of those case management platforms, they're amazing, but fundamentally, they weren't going to do the work for you. They would just, in a lot of cases, they just ended up being more work. Yeah. For no ROI that they could point to.

Or feel, really, right? Yeah, really feel it. Yeah. Like, I got a task from this system. Right.

Great. How's that different than I got an email about this matter? Yeah. Yeah. It's funny.

A couple of years back, I was talking to somebody who was putting in a system, and he was saying it's kind of like a project management thing, and he's like, "Yeah. And this thing will just remind the associates, you got this task, you got this task, you got this task. And we'll probably get more out of them that way." And I thought about that, and I said, so my thought was, how many of them are behind on what they do? How many of them are behind on the tasks they already know about? Okay.

Because just loading them up with a longer list is just going to mean they've got more opportunity to pick and choose all the easy ones, just to say, "Hey, I got all the easy ones done. I got 50 of them done today." So we've used them all, too, and we've organized the chaos. And if you don't really get at fundamentally what's causing the tasks to start with, assuming some of them are-- Look, business causes tasks. Okay, I get it. But there are those stress points, especially in law firms, where they have all these calendaring systems.

Redundant. Hell, some of them still keep a manual calendar because they just need it. And it's just like organizing and organizing and organizing and organizing, and it gets sufferable at some point because the list never-- They never gain on the list. And some of them like that. Some of them feel like, well, that's my job security, but it's very stressful for a lot of others to-- So I think those case management systems came with the promise that that would be easier and that you wouldn't feel that anxiety, and all it did was give you a whole bunch more anxiety.

So I don't know. But again, the adoption rates, I actually think the AI stuff, everybody thinks what they're going through is different. You have the dot com thing and then just everything. But I can tell you, this one just feels a lot different in terms of its ability to eliminate some of the low-level, just right out of the gate. I'm sure it's going to be doing higher-level stuff soon, too, but it can, right out of the gate, just annihilate some low-level tasks that people mistake for valuable work.

And I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. It's just in the end game, yeah, it's got to get done. It's got to get done, but it's not what the client really appreciates. The client appreciates an outcome, and it's hard to tie that lower-level stuff to the out-- It's like the relief pitcher in baseball comes in and gets the final three outs. He gets the dog pile.

The starter who went eight innings and pitched a great game gets a good game, but the closer, he gets the dog pile, and the partners, a lot of times, are the closers. Defense teams are drowning. Tighter deadlines, thinner margins, and the plaintiff firms armed with AI and litigation defense. That's why we built Oraclaim. I'm a former insurance executive.

My co-founder is a former litigation defense partner. We built Oraclaim specifically for the work defense teams actually do inside a fully closed, secure system. The result? Faster, more comprehensive work, better outcomes for carriers, increased profitability for firms. Today, Oraclaim is being used by top national insurance defense firms and regional boutique specialists handling workers' comp, trucking, construction defect, med mal, toxic torts, and everything in between.

Oraclaim, AI for the defense. Learn more at oraclaim.com. That's O-R-A-C-L-A-I-M.com. The number of times I've had the conversation around, oh my God, AI's going to replace me, and what's going to happen to my job, and blah, blah, blah. And I think, I don't know, certainly even over the last 12 months, it seems to have flipped.

Now people are getting it. It's getting a little less scary for them. And there's just so much. And again, we've looked together at some of the numbers, and the things that AI will impact, it's a significant percentage, but it's not- Well, I try to keep my mind open as far as trying not to-- First of all, I never feel like that I'd figure it out. None of us really have it figured out.

And I saw something the other day, and it was really interesting to me. It was like all the people talking about AI, they're great. They're everybody's talking about it, and they're going to talk, but they're living anything at all. If you work in the trenches, you work in the firm, and it's really... And I'm just speaking about law firms now, and you understand what's going on every day in law firms.

We see it. We're like, "Yeah, you're talking about a theoretical world that doesn't exist." In the trenches, the adoption rates are still just tiny. When you really think of, and I know you're trying to change that, but the actual adoption rates are just really, "Hey, I use ChatGPT" and or whatever one you're using, "and it read this contract for me, and it gave me a list of things." And it does that really well. If you're trying to get ready for a meeting and you drop a contract in the NotebookLM and say, "What are the provisions on cancellation?" Because your client wants to talk to you about that, as opposed to trying to read it on the way to the call or something. It's great for that.

It's as prepared as you're going to be. So there are really helpful, handy gadgets. Now, do I think that you add enough of the gadgets together and you have a system? Yeah, I think sometimes you add 10 or 12 gadgets together and you actually have the system. But do I see a lot of advanced organized workflows around AI right now that are making a meaningful difference?

Not yet. Yeah. Not yet. I think some good things are happening. I think some of the bar associations are getting it together, and they're giving the firms some guidance on how you have to use it.

The courts have certainly gotten more active, and that's what it's going to take. But I think it's going to be one of these things, Andy, where it was like you're too young to remember it, but I'm not. But it was when we first were rolling out email, you had these senior partners typically, because they had the power to do this, like, "Yeah, I don't do email." Okay? And I literally would ... in my career, have participated in discussions about whether a firm was going to put an email system in or not.

And back then, I think it was GroupWise or something, or one of these private ones. And it was this big thing, and it was this big discussion, and it would go on for months. And then all of a sudden, it just was there. It was ubiquitous. Everybody had it.

And I think AI's gone along. It's not that people were going there faster, because people generally, since the iPhone, honestly, are way more technologically open. You were still at a point where these people weren't necessarily open to technology, but now everybody's pretty open to it. I think it's getting to that place where it's just going to be ubiquitous, and it's just going to be everywhere, and it's going to take you like a tsunami, and you're not even going to realize it. You're just going to use it.

So I think that, so what's a law firm supposed to do right now? That's a really good question, especially circling back to claims, because you've got to look at this from two ways, and this is something that I've had more than a lot of conversations on this. You got the clients and what they'd like to see happen when it comes to AI, for example. And you have the law firms who agree that like, "Yeah, we'd love to get rid of some of this redundant, rudimentary bill review, things like that, get the reporting automated and faster," and all the stuff that's just overhead to the relationship, doesn't really advance the outcome of the case. It's just part of the case.

But there's like, okay, we've got our infrastructure and we've got our ways of doing things, and it's the clients now, and we're all comfortable, honestly, at the line level, managing these claims and all the rest. And if we eliminate a lot of that, then, hey, what's going to happen to me? So you have that going on here. Like, yeah, I love the idea of it, but at the same time, I feel some pressure from it. And then the law firms have this existential threat in their mind about, hey, we better figure out how to bill this stuff, because I can't survive on an hourly rate if all of a sudden there are no hours.

There'll be hours for some things, but I'll have to charge $5,000 an hour or something just to keep a law firm. So that part of it on both sides is a little like, how do we- Yeah. And I think what I'm seeing and where I think, I don't think we're going to go, and again, I've been doing some digging on one of our mutual clients in terms of what their hours look like and what these matters actually entail, and what has actually surprised me is that just how much, it's almost 50/50 what I think what AI will touch in terms of the legal work and what AI won't touch. Good. So already, I think you're like, let's be honest, AI is not going to take a deposition without you being there.

Right. It's not going to roll into court without you being there. So there's a lot of stuff that's going to have to have, regardless of what people want, a human will be present for that and running that. And also, the very fact that it's high risk, do you really want to trust? Maybe it's your $50,000 claim, but a lot of them, most of the time, litigation is getting involved with a lot of things that are much, much bigger than that.

Yeah. Usually for the price. A zero. Yeah. So I think there's an element of that human touch piece anytime you've got big stuff.

But I also think just that little, to go back to our line science stuff, even just a little bit of technology, like a little bit of excess capacity around the edges. If you've studied traffic jams or watched lines, you add one more checker and suddenly- Yeah ... things flow a lot easier. So, I don't know. And obviously I'm an optimist and I live in the heart of Silicon Valley, so I believe in the power of technology.

But also I've seen it in other places. Same concerns with accountants. Do you worry that you're going to get replaced because you use QuickBooks? Yeah. No, look, there's example after example, and I personally don't live in that world, but I do understand.

I spend a great deal of time talking to our people. We're rolling out some things here, and explaining to them, look, you won't be doing this, but you'll be doing this, and you'll be doing a lot more of this, and you'll enjoy this a lot more than this. You won't be transposing numbers from a PDF that won't convert into a spreadsheet. That's going to go away. And for anybody who has ever had to do it, that's like saying, hey, you cut the grass today, doesn't that, you've got to push that thing and the grass is wet.

Well, you're going to get this new thing, and you're going to pull it back, and it's going to go all by itself, and you're going to go, "Man, sign me up." Go, "No, I'd rather cut it with scissors." So I do think, though, I do think a narrative needs to be from leadership in these law firms. We're going to do all these things, and you should be glad that you're in a firm that's going to embrace these changes, and there's a place for you, and here's what that place is. Because I do think that the media around this, and I don't necessarily mean like national media, I just mean even in the podcasting space, for every optimist, there are three doomers. And so where people are getting this mindset, they're getting way more doomers than they are getting optimists. And so I do think it's a leadership challenge in law firms to make people understand the object of the game is to make us all do better work so that we do get better results for our clients, and we'll do just fine that way.

And you will be fine in that. The object of this game is to not say, "Gee, if I get this, I can get rid of 10 of you." The object of the game is to say, "If we do this, we can handle three times what we're handling now." ... four times, whatever it is. So I'm part of the optimists. I'm on the optimist train, not blindly, but I'm on the optimist train because I can see sort of the waste of just having really smart, educated people doing very redundant manual things and billing by the hour for it, and then calling that like, you went to seven years of school.

Obviously, you're smart. Yeah. Where I'm having a lot of these conversations is I think that, and per where we started this conversation is to expect just the way the law firm shouldn't expect that they're going to bring in technology and suddenly it's going to solve all their problems. They shouldn't expect to bring you in and suddenly you're going to be like, "Fix it." Yeah. You have to bring process, you have to bring structure, you have to build, bring analysis to it, and then technology as it fits into a more overall change management.

Like what are we going to change? How is that going to look more holistically? Look at how it's going to change the bottom line. How does it change the people, the process, the technology, all three of them playing together. Then that's when if you truly get them all, and again, each one of them individually will have decent amount of change, but when all three are put together, that's when things will really start.

You'll start running the proverbial McDonald's and not your corner hamburger stand. Yeah. And again, what you're doing is primarily right now, could expand what you're doing really is this highly technical but easy-to-use approach to automating parts of a case, if you want to think- Yeah ... of it just like that. I don't know that you're going to be able to stand up in front of a judge and argue a claim right out of, or a claim, but at the same time, going to make getting there a hell of a lot easier and a hell of a lot faster and a hell of a lot more prepared.

Yeah. And I think that's what, when people get it, they appreciate that we're not going to replace them, but it lets them do all the things that they really wish they could do on every case. Yeah. And most of the time, if the lawyer closed the door and they said, "Did you work every file the way you would love to if time was no issue and money was no issue?" They're like, "Of course not. I made all kinds of compromises." And some of those don't matter, and it's partly you're paying for the expertise.

But a lot of times like, gosh, could you have taken this? And quite honestly, that's some of the stuff that we're studying because we're studying the tool side and we build the tools, but it's really the data that really gets at least me particularly excited. Well, that's an interesting pivot if you want to take it, because it's like the original thought or idea was when you're in AI, it's like everybody's going to know everything and it's great. And so you're going to know everything I know, I'm going to know everything. And all of a sudden, it's evolved.

I literally, I saw somebody talking about this. It was the CEO of Microsoft, Satya, and I was thinking to myself, I've had that thought too, that, for example, your superpower is your data, okay? And maybe, I'm not saying everybody's going to get a bunch of Mac Minis, but Microsoft's also talking about putting enough chip into a workstation that you'll run on-prem again, because you'll process there, because we all going to have to worry about the cost of tokens if they ever do decide to start charging us what they cost. And so there's all kinds of different approaches, quite honestly, to this. But I do think, be careful about just throwing your data out into the-- Obviously, you got to be careful with that, but the idea is not to like...

The idea is to take your data and this whole collective and get at it in ways, in other words, discover what you already know but have forgotten. Okay? Think about that. Yeah. And that's what we're trying to do.

We appreciate that the firms that we work with, we want to make them the powerhouse in whatever niche they choose to be- Right ... a powerhouse. Likely where they are already. Now, they may expand that niche, but if they are the best auto defense attorneys in Southern Louisiana, we want to supercharge them to do that. Yeah.

And give them... Yeah. You give them the keys to unlock, again, a thing they already know. They just have forgotten they know it or they can't assimilate it all. Nobody can keep up with that many things.

So I'm always just floored sometimes, and we do it here, like we're a Google shop, and Gemini is rolling out its version, I think of, they don't call it this, but it's going to open claw internal loads. It's just cross-platform, Gemini being cross-platform. And I'll literally get on a thing and I'll, whether I'm in Notebook or wherever I'm doing it, and I'll say, "Look, I've got this problem," and I'll, "How have we solved this problem in the past?" And inevitably it'll go out to the G Drive, it'll go to my emails, it'll go here, it'll go there, and go, well, it'll give me something and I'll go, "S**t, I totally forgot about that." That's exactly right. And then you start... So my point is, it's going to give you this incredible ability, think of it this way, without having to go down to the file room and go, so to speak, or search, less modern, search your G Drive with just a simple explorer saying, "Where the hell is that?

I know I put that thing in there somewhere. I'm pretty sure. I can't find it, though. Where'd you save it? It might be in my inbox.

I don't remember if I saved it or where." It does a lot of really important things for you. And once you have them If you're doing it right and you're creating a knowledge base, it's remembering that you lost this thing last time, and it's going to remember where you put it this time. Okay? So really practical things that anybody would really appreciate. What's it add up to?

It adds up to being able to give your clients, at least us, more in-context answers much quicker when they actually have the problem. And this is true in the legal business, that the typical problem happens now. The solution is better the closer it is to the event. If it takes, "Well, you tell me what your issue is, and then I have to go away and I got to, because I have these older processes, and it takes me three weeks to get back to you." A lot of times you're like, "What was that? Oh, I don't remember.

Okay, yeah, that." And then so it has a half-life, and a lot of this stuff is degrades. So all of this is going to be really good for people, and I just don't think just yet it's organized. It's not systematized. It's random. Yeah.

That's- Yeah. And that's what I think has been fun for us, partly because we're so focused. We don't sell to every type of lawyer. We don't work across practice groups. We really only do litigation defense, and so with so many of these platforms, you have to basically set it up correctly, and then feed and water it, and then give it access, and oh, and maybe they have someone who's thinking about workflows and what that looks like.

We do that all day, every day, and firm to firm to firm, we're bringing those learnings. From a data perspective, we don't bring any of the data. The structure, and the process, and how to do it, that's what's really fun, and yeah, I love what you said, that the superpower of so many of these attorneys, and most of them have one. Yeah, were they incredible trial attorneys? Are they amazing at depositions?

Are they great at investigations? Are they great at negotiation? And you see that at firms, obviously, you may have teams that work, and you sort of pass the file among the teams, but now suddenly you can do the thing that really makes you really, really amazing, and maybe some of the other parts of the flow on that case get handled with help from technology. Well, Brian, I know this has been really fun. As always, I really enjoy chatting with you, and you give a perspective from somebody who's been doing it for a while and maybe not quite as optimistic as me, which I appreciate.

A little more, maybe I won't call it jaded, but- One hopes you're optimistic. Actually, yeah. It is what it is. It comes across the way it comes across. When I think about it, what you're looking at is someone like you is coming in, you have a new idea, you can help somebody, and you come in with a lot of energy, and then talking to the operators, and we're really operators.

The whole thing that's going through an operator's mind really is, okay, first of all, can we use this? Second of all, how are we going to use this, and what's going to be the ROI on something like this? And will we adopt it? And so you're going through all these, if you think of it like if-then statements, and you're just trying to... The other thing, Andy, I'd close with this, is that it is really, and this isn't just in the legal space, this is just in general.

There's so much utter malarkey. There's just so much utter h*******t out there that people are claiming that they're doing, or they're talking about, or they're just taking an idea and extending it out of its reality, and there's a little bit of a gold rush mentality, and this is all normal, I guess, for this thing, this any change. But we're not doing a great job, I think, as a holistically, and I don't know exactly, necessarily mean you and me, I'm just saying holistically, of setting expectations properly. Because I think people go into these things, and they just have these really high expectations, and they get into it and they're using it and go, "Well, I've still got to work at this. This doesn't just do it for me.

I still have to prompt it. I have to deal with the limitations of it forgetting context. I have to deal with not having a token budget that's unlimited. I have to deal with all these practical things that you don't know about until you get into it and you start using it." And then you're like, "Wow." Yeah. "It is easier, but man, I thought it was going to be real easy." And it's like, no, you still got to work.

Yeah. I've worked at a number of startups, and one of them, we used to do a lot of stuff with Gartner and- Yeah, Gartner ... and Gartner has some great things that they built a franchise on. Yeah, absolutely. One is the Magic Quadrant, but- Yeah ...

I love the Hype Cycle, which if anyone's never- Is that where we're at, a hype cycle? Yeah. Good way to put it. If you've never seen it, it's innovations on one axis and time on the other, and something new comes out, and then it's the peak of inflated expectations. I don't know.

For some, I think they're still climbing, but then it's the trough of disillusionment is next. Right. I think some have slid back to the trough, and then the last is the slope of enlightenment, eventually to that plateau of productivity. You've got to go through all of it. You've got to go through them all, and I think we're riding that rollercoaster, and if you look at that, I'll put it in the show notes so people could see it.

It does look like a rollercoaster. It is really a great-- I'd forgotten about that, the hype cycle. Yeah. But what's interesting to me is, and I try to just be practical about this, but sometimes you'll come across a client who's discovered it for the first time. They'll just have sat it out up and until now, and then somebody says they discover it somehow, whether their kid does it or a friend of them, and all of a sudden they come like, "Do you know about this?

Do you know this?" And they're so excited, and you don't want to kill their energy. "And we got to..." And I'm like, and so you're sitting there, and you can't big league them or anything. You just got to go with it, since it's a discovery for the first time, and you feel the dreams. When did these guys show up? But then you say, and this is absolutely true, "Hey, you didn't really miss anything, man.

You can get caught up in a day." Okay. Yeah. You know what I mean? When you really stop and think about it, if you were an early adopter in, let's just say in the beginning when ChatGPT came out, you might have a little bit of an advantage, but the truth of the matter is these models are all lapping each other all day long, and it's not- Yeah ... about the models anyway.

It's really more about the stuff like you do, the apps. And so it's- Yeah, although I think I would say that's true on the technology side, because I actually think that although the technology is advancing, what I think where we're seeing is that, again, it's not the technology that's the biggest challenge, it's the people. And so if you... I know, and we've talked about this, some of the firms are out there trying new stuff, and some are way back in C. And I really worry about the ones that are way back in C, because the technology may not, they can get their credit card out and buy the new technology anytime they want, but the institutional knowledge, the change that the people have to make, that's going to be, you can't do that overnight.

And if they are, I think we're in this, and again, I've watched several different platform switches, which is what we're in the midst of. A platform switch, we went from desktop to cloud, to mobile. Each of these, you have this opportunity where fortunes are made, and I think that's what's going to happen for some of these law firms. And we're already seeing it, because my perspective is from the carriers. The carriers are getting it, and they're starting to move.

They're starting to point the fire hose towards those firms that they think are going to have figured it out. Yeah. That's something we didn't spend a lot of time on. But the carriers have so much to contribute here and so much. And I think some of them are, and I think some of them...

Look, it's the other thing, too, is all of this stuff costs money, and it costs money, and it's capital and everything else. And most law firms are not handled, can't handle massive capital investments, and so they just aren't capitalized that way. The tax code doesn't gear them that way. They're pass-through entities, so they don't generally build capital. They use debt sometimes.

Most of them are debt adverse, but so they try to do everything out of cash flow. And that's fine for 20 laptops a year or something, but once you start getting into massive technology investments and trying to do it as an OPEX, I think that the, and the carriers are looking at them going, "Yeah, you should do all that." And it's like, "No, you guys are the ones with the capital. You guys can raise capital. You guys need to be doing it." So there's going to be a little standoff there, but we'll see. But I think the carriers eventually are going to start dictating, to your point, I think, are going to start dictating, "If you want to do business with us, this is how it's going to work." And they do that now, but there's a lot of flexibility in the way your work gets done.

They don't say, "You have to have this system or that system or this system." You know what? Lexis or you can't have West or whatever it was, even just then. But maybe now they start dictating how work gets done, what tool you use, for example. So we'll see. But listen, man, I could go on for days.

We both could, and probably enjoy it, but- This was great, Brian. So much fun, and I'll do a little infomercial for some of the stuff we were talking about before this, which is, I know we're going to be putting together some of this, some more formalized training to help some of these law firm leaders as well as some of these practitioners. So are you training, and what's the scope of the training? Are you going to do it? Yeah, we're going to do some online stuff.

We're going to do it with some of the associations that we're involved with and- That's a good idea ... I'm going to hold you to it. I'm going to bring you on as a guest lecturer, Brian- Yeah ... and help me. Because I do think not all will make the transition, but I at least want to give a bunch of these law firm leaders the clear pathway that they could take to say- Oh, yeah ...

"Okay, here's how you could do it." Because again, you only have this much time in the day to think about it. Yeah. The folks like us who have, think about this all day every day. You get to do it all day every day. So very fun, Brian.

Good stuff. You take care. See you, Andy. You too.