Kevin speaking with Megan Zavieh, Legal Ethics & Defense Attorney at Zevieh Law, at the 2019 Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego. Megan represents others lawyers before the California State Bar who are facing ethic inquiries, and also runs a legal podcast called Lawyers Gone Ethical. 

Transcript

Kevin O’Keefe: Who am I talking with? 

Megan Zavieh: Hi Kevin. I’m Megan Zavieh. 

Kevin: Okay. Well you knew my name. That’s pretty good. 

Megan: I do, I do know your name. 

Kevin: And where are you from? 

Megan: Well live in Atlanta, Georgia. 

Kevin: Okay, well, that’s what I was asking. And what do you do? 

Megan: I represent other lawyers before the California State Bar who are facing ethics inquiries. 

Kevin: Really? So how did we get to talk to you? 

Megan: I mean, did you do something wrong? 

Kevin: No, I mean, it wasn’t even that. Are you speaking here? 

Megan: Um, I was podcasting here. I have a podcast, “Lawyers Gone Ethical” and I’ve been recording with all kinds of very cool Clio people.

Kevin: How long have you been doing a podcast? 

Megan: We’re approaching a hundred episodes, so almost two years. 

Kevin: Good for you. Is that your idea and your brain child?

Megan: Sort of and Nicole Abboud’s. 

Kevin: So when you say, “we”?

Megan: Well, I have some help. So I like to give them credit, especially. I have a wonderful assistant Lee Duckworth who helps make this happen. And Nicole Abboud helped get it off the ground originally.

Kevin:  Okay, but it was your impetus to say, “okay, I’m going to do this”.

Megan: Yeah. It was like, ”Oh, nobody’s doing an ethics podcast. You know, we probably should think about doing one”. 

Kevin: (1:07) And who are the type of people that you bring on?

Megan: A lot of solo lawyers who are just doing cool things with law. Um, like building out new subscription services or like Hello Divorce. You know, things that are just a little different and innovative and we talk about how, “Hey, that’s actually okay, there’s not an ethics problem with this”.

Kevin: Well, what got you interested in doing something like that? Where, I mean, you really, it’s not like you’re saying, “okay, I want to go get ethics layers on that are in other States or different types of issues or whatever. You know, people that sit on, you know, boards for hearings with ethics brought up for hearings or whatever”. You’re not doing that. It’s totally

Megan: Yeah, not much of that. Not so often an ethics colleague.

Kevin: No, but you’re basically saying, “I want to go talk to people that are doing interesting things”. I mean, why? I mean it’s a good idea. I’m not questioning it, but I’m like, why you, who all of a sudden said, “I’d like to do that”.

Megan: (2:03) Well, partly it’s because when I got into ethics defense work, I found that lawyers throw up the ethics rules as a barrier to doing cool new stuff. You know, they’re like, “Oh this, I had this idea, but then I realized of course I can’t do that”. Why not? And they’re like, “well I don’t think the ethics rules is permit it”. I’m like, “which one? Like drill down on this. How in the world are you prevented?”. And like we use them to hold ourselves back a lot and the profession is changing, we’re evolving. The people who are going to really make a killing and help a lot more people, a lot more clients, are the ones that are going to innovate. And I like to kind of open the doors for people and help them see that there’s not actually an ethics reason not to do something new and different. And so when you have an idea, go with it and run with it. Figure out how you can make it happen.

Kevin: So what would you have told some guy in rural Wisconsin that’s trying to figure out whether you can use the internet to connect with people. He knows nothing about the internet, but knows that if you go to Barnes and Noble and you get a floppy disk, you can put it in the side of your machine. Although, that I had to find out. And then I had to find out that you had to take your telephone off the hook in the kitchen of the a hundred year old house, plug it in the side and “I think you dial the phone number?”. I don’t remember what we did.

Megan: You did back then.

Kevin: Maybe the screen came up and you push the button and it clicked. You know that there were thousands and thousands of people asking legal questions on six company sets of message boards. What if somebody came to you and said, and this was me 

Megan: (3:35) I gathered that.

Kevin: and I’d ask, “Can I answer these questions? They’re all over the country, all over different States. Um, there’s gonna be no conflict yet cause we don’t know any of their names. We don’t know whether they’re representative by a lawyer or not, but we’re going to answer. I’m going to answer their questions when I have time, maybe five or seven a day”. What could you imagine if someone in your shoes or the state ethics hotline, if I would’ve called them in 1996 saying.

Megan: Oh they would have actually absolutely lost it. You know that you can’t give advice across state lines. You don’t know who you’re talking to. You haven’t run your conflicts as you mentioned, you know, you can’t give legal advice without diving into a case and knowing all the facts. I mean, there was a time that just would have been so taboo. That’s a little later than when I was in a computer science class before I ever went to law school and it was like computer science 101 and the professor asked me why I was taking the class and I said, “I want to move to Alaska”, where I’ve never been still to this day, because that time I wanted to move there anyways. 

Kevin: Where were you living then?

Megan: California, southern California. And he goes, “okay, what does that have to deal with here?”. And I said, “well, I want to telecommute”. And he said, and this has to be like 1992 and he said, “that’s not a thing that’s never going to be a thing”. And I said, “I think it is”. He like, “it’s not right”. You know, I’m like, “well, I’m going to stay in your class anyway”. And of course I didn’t go into computer science and I became a lawyer, but now look where we are. So similar thing. And I could see it in 1996. Yeah, completely taboo. “This is craziness”.

Kevin: (5:05) You had to just plow ahead, you know, because my thought was “if I get in trouble for this, then I don’t need to be in the law”. Because all of these people are helping each other in many cases better than any lawyer would because they and their family have been through the situation more than any lawyer. They’ve lost a child with medical negligence. They know how to pick the good lawyers. They know what expert witnesses are. I mean, they knew this, many of them, but there weren’t any lawyers helping them, because lawyers don’t go out where people are and try to help them.

Megan: They still don’t always do that.

Kevin: Short disclaimer, just said, “Hey, this is legal information, general information for me to see a lawyer state”. Will Hornsby said, “You know, Kevin”, that years later “ that ain’t going to fly”. And then when he went through our site where the listserv was, he said, “you know, if this is advertising? This could be construed as advertising in your state, then it’s not”. The was the best disclaimer I could come up with at that time. Um, it’s a great idea though, what you’re saying to bring on these people that are doing cool stuff and “it’s okay”. I’m assuming in many cases it benefits lawyers.

Megan: (6:22) Absolutely.

Kevin: So it’s not taking things away from them. It’s enhancing how they serve clients and enhancing their life.

Megan: Yeah. And part of what I like to highlight for people is that when you build a practice that’s doing something, you’re not just passionate, it is an important concept, but I think it is a little overused, but something you’re excited to do and that you want to get up in the morning and be part of and this is something you’re growing, you’re better at it then doing something really boring and you start to design a life that works with your work because it’s not really a work life balance. Like there’s a blend today. There’s no such thing as like leaving work behind. So if you can build a practice you love that fits in your actual life, that’s a really good thing. And that’s very far from the white shoe law firm, put on my suit every morning, you know, punched a clock, missed all the family events. It’s a very different life.

Kevin: So you’re working with Sasha here to get set up? That’s great. So you’ve got this podcast, you invent your own radio station, because you do know.

Megan: That’s what it is.

Kevin: At dinner with Doc Surlies, incredible what he’s done with the blogging and whatnot and the former DJ in California. He lives in Santa Barbara part time and part time in New York. And we were talking about, he goes, “there’s going to be no radio”. I said, “really?”. He said, “There will be no AM or FM radio. It will be just shows on demand”. Your show will just be another show and they’ll probably be algorithms that tell me what I want to see when it’s available. Um, based on what I’ve seen before, what I’ve listened to before or seen before, who the guests are that you have and what I do like to see it. It’s cool what you’re doing from an ethics thing standpoint. Um, what do you most enjoy about it?

Megan: (7:57) It’s really fun just to talk to people who I wouldn’t otherwise probably have like this meaningful of a conversation with. I mean, there’s plenty of people who’ve been gassed that I know from outside. Like, I’ve already had dinner with them or attended a conference with them or whatever. But then it doesn’t mean that we necessarily are going to sit there and like dive into “Let’s talk about the ethics of what you do”, right? I mean that’s not necessarily dinner time conversation. So that’s part of it. And just getting to know people that I wouldn’t have otherwise have the opportunity. And then at conferences like this, I actually like get really excited that people have come up. 

Kevin: They know you.

Megan: And that they’ve listened to an episode. Like I actually had someone come to me and say, you know, and I didn’t know her from before and she said, “I just want to let you know I needed to research an issue and I found your podcast on this topic and it was incredibly helpful”. And I’m like “Yes, I made a difference”. Sometimes some of my episodes are solo. I do guest episodes and also solo episodes where I just talk about a particular issue. I laugh because I’m sitting here like, “I’m sitting here talking to myself, maybe somebody’s out there that they’re going to listen to it”. So like that episode that she came and said was helpful, it was a solo episode. I’m like, “I was just sittin’ there talking to myself and it made a difference to somebody”. So that’s incredibly rewarding and encourages me to keep doing it.

Kevin: Are you in a firm or are you working for a company or insurance company? 

Megan: I’m solo. Totally solo.

Kevin: And all your work is defense ethics? 

Megan: Yes.

Kevin: Your clients are insurance companies and firms or?

Megan: Just California lawyers, mostly solos. 

Kevin: Just California lawyers, interesting.

Megan: Yeah. So I don’t do malpractice defense. I do the ethics side. So these are all state bar inquiries. So every so often insurance kicks in because malpractice insurance does often have a component for ethics coverage, but a lot of lawyers don’t want to access it. Cause sometimes when it comes to the ethics part really does not have a malpractice component. You can have violated the ethics rules without committing malpractice. And so to avoid kicking in their insurance and having insurance problems, they sometimes just bundle it together.

Kevin: (9:56) What do other think about what you’re doing? Do they think it’s wacky or “what are you doing?”?

Megan: I have kind of a split. So more traditional old school lawyers will flat out tell me I’m crazy with some of what I’m doing. Particularly in the ethics defense world, I didn’t really realize when I first got into it that defending the ethics part of the complaints and advising lawyers on how to proceed ethically are two different things. And a lot of my colleagues don’t advise lawyers on how to proceed in their businesses. To me they just go hand in hand. So, some of my colleagues who don’t do the advice, think I’m nuts to do it. Others think I’m insane to think that the profession is evolving and that we don’t need to actually adopt different models. Um, but then I have mostly in the more innovative space, the lawyers love what I’m doing and I appreciate having a sounding board that, you know, I actually like dig into the ethics rules and geek out on them. I’m like, “I’m glad someone does”.

Kevin: Well you must, I assume you must get legal tech companies that talked to you about, you know, “should we do this?” or “how would we set it up?”?

Megan: I have definitely been consulted by tech companies. Um, the individual lawyers are the much more fun ones in my opinion. Um, the tech companies definitely are important players and they will have ethics questions because when they build something, they’re not subject to our regulation. But everybody that’s going to be impacted by what they’re doing will be and they don’t want to build a product that’s going to get their customers in trouble.

Kevin: Interesting, because the lawyers got it all on the line.

Megan: Absolutely. 

Kevin: I mean so it’s a big deal. 

Megan: Cause the companies are not regulated directly. Yeah. I found when you told the ethics people to take a hike, they got upset. I remember that, you know, in law school sitting there thinking scared out of my mind, but realizing, “okay, what you really need to do in, no matter what it is, you just do whatever the ethics body said”. You just respond and do whatever.

Megan: (11:54) And I’ve had clients say to me like, “I will do whatever you tell me”.

Kevin: I mean the plaintiffs stuff was if you didn’t get an adequate board, people would file a grievance and then people started using the political. So, if you got involved in political issues and then the opposing side would have multiple people start filing grievances against you for fraud or something you said in the media and you get these stacks. 

Megan: I’ve seen it happen.

Kevin: I really dislike that portion of the handling of the facts. Where people were using ethics grievances as an arrow. It was being, there was lawyers that were telling them how to do it. They were obviously they weren’t lawyers filing the grievances, but you can see who was coaching this thing behind the scenes to try to show you how getting involved with social issues. I go, “this is really sleazy deal”. How’d you get involved in this? Other than the podcast, how’d you decide to do ethics? Not everybody says, “I want to grow up to go into law school”. “What are you gonna do?”. “I’m going to do ethics work on behalf of lawyers.”

Megan: (12:53) No, that’s probably part of why my defense bar is like me and there’s another guy around my age and then we’re up to another like a 50 year old and everybody else is another couple of decades older. It feels like, um, no, it’s definitely not something you say like, “Hey, when I grow up, I want to be an ethics lawyer”. I actually came out of law school intending on going to medical school and become a psychiatrist, treating lawyers. That was my original goal. And I for went medical school to go to a clerkship and a big law firm, the debt and wanting to start a family and various factors. 

Kevin: So did you go to medical school?

Megan: I did not go to medical school. I had everything ready. I took the MCAT, I did all my premeds during my clerkship and I was ready to go. And then decided, well, I’m going to hold off and hold off and then didn’t. I was instead a big law securities lawyer, securities litigation defense. And I did that for about eight years after my clerkship. And then I moved back to California and I was finally free of the confines of big law. You know where people ask you for help and you’re like, “Oh no, I’m not allowed to help”. 

Kevin: Where were you in big law?

Megan: Um, I was at Schulte Roth & Zabel than what is now K & L Gates and then Deckert in New York and New Jersey. And so you’re on big law, somebody asks you for help, you’re supposed to say, “Oh I’m not allowed to help you because I worked for this big law firm and I can’t, you know, do anything that’s not for a client”.

Kevin: I mean that is a big difference between, “Okay. I’m going to medical school so I can help lawyers, but I decided no, I’m going to do litigation for a huge law firm in Manhattan”.

Megan: (14:21) Can you see that one was in alignment with all my values and the other is really not. 

Kevin: Wasn’t a common thread.

Megan: It was really not, right. And so I ended up, I had been asked to help on a bar defense case when I was in big law. I couldn’t help them out, right. Cause I’m stuck in big law. I’m not allowed to help you. When I got out of big law, I was like, “Oh, I can jump in and help”. So I did. And then I spent some time in this State Bar Court cause California has a separate court just for attorney discipline and I was in the court and seeing the process and seeing some lawyers just lost, absolutely lost representing themselves, not having a clue about this process and the system cause it’s not like every other court and all these things.

Kevin: “I can help them”.

Megan: (14:54) Yeah,  and I was like “I could do this. Like Oh my gosh, I could do this”. 

Kevin: There are so many issues.  I mean like different issues, mental health issues, financial issues, all of these things. Most people don’t go out of their way to say, “I’m going to do something unethical”. It arrives. 

Megan: Right. Yeah, something happens.

Kevin: You get mad. It’s not a good thing to represent yourself. It’s fascinating though to do the podcast all the way to that. What’s been the hardest thing to that podcast? 

Megan: At times, coming up with new things to talk about where I’m like, “haven’t I beaten every dead horse” and I don’t have something new and as soon as that happens that I feel like the well has run dry, something comes into my universe. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, something new or some new topic”. Because it really is constantly changing and evolving and people are constantly coming into the profession with new ideas. And so it doesn’t ever really run dry, but it feels like it does sometimes. And then I find that if I just kind of let go a little bit and relax, I will find something. 

Kevin: What would you tell somebody that’s gonna do a podcast, a lawyer? 

Megan: (15:57) To plan ahead a little bit. Um, that has made it a much less stressful process because I do it weekly and that can get overwhelming cause sometimes a week goes by, I’m like, “What?”. I write monthly for some publications and a month goes by really fast, I imagine a week does. Um, but as long as I’m on top of it and I keep planning, um, that is probably my biggest piece of advice. And then the other being just like, let go a little bit. Like if you miss an episode, it’s okay. You know, there was a time when I was like, “No, no, no, I can’t”. 

Kevin: It’s not like Monday Night Football didn’t play this week. 

Megan: Exactly. And then I have the Heidi debacle, right. No, It’s going to be okay. Yes, people might be expecting it or maybe they’re not, and if it shows up in their feed or not, it’s okay. Um, but have fun with it. You know, podcasting is really fun.

Kevin: Overall, it’s made your life, as a lawyer, more rewarding. 

Megan: Oh, absolutely. I’m, you know, and there have been times where, especially my family will be like, “are you sure you wanna keep doing this?”, when I’m yelling at them all to be quiet. 

Kevin: Mom’s on her podcast.

Megan: You know, yeah, exactly. I tried to put them in when no ones there, but every so often it happens. And like, I remember explaining at one point to my husband and he goes, “so what do you get out of this?”. And I’m like, “honestly, like, it’s incredibly rewarding”. 

Kevin: Megan: “Better than talking to myself”.

Megan: Especially better than talking to myself. 

Kevin: I know some people that actually, I can imagine my wife saying, “and their listening to you?”. 

Megan: Yes. Oh yeah. I get a little bit of blow back for that, but it’s all in good fun. 

Kevin: Thank you very much. I enjoyed it. 

Megan: Thank you for having me.

Kevin: You bet.

Kevin speaking with Richard Marvel, a Solo Attorney and founder of FirmTRAK, at the 2019 Clio Cloud Conference. FirmTRAK was created by Richard to maximize firm efficiency through reporting and analytics. 

Transcript

Kevin O’Keefe: Who am I talking with? 

Rich Marvel: Rich Marvel. 

Kevin: And what does rich model do? 

Rich: I’m a practicing attorney by day and at night I’m the legal tech guy. I’m trying to be, I’m trying to be, anyway.

Kevin: Where are you from? 

Rich: I’m from central Illinois, so I’m from Farmington halfway between Chicago and St. Louis. 

Kevin: I know where it is. 

Rich: The cornfields of McClain County. That’s what I always say. 

Kevin: I’m from Wisconsin from Lacrosse. 

Rich: I saw that. 

Kevin: And so Clio was in Illinois? I think last year, was it Southern Illinois University?

Rich: Southern Illinois is Edwardsville. Further South. Yeah. You made a good idea getting out of Wisconsin and going to Seattle. 

Kevin: Oh, somebody told me it was my first company and they said, “that’s an interesting idea, but the chances of somebody giving you the millions of dollars, you’re gonna need to do that. In Wisconsin, they put a little dot on a piece of paper”. They drew a big circle and he goes, “you know what that is?”. I go, “I’m starting to have the idea”. He goes, “yeah, you go to Austin, Seattle, San Francisco, or Boston. That’s how many people were back that idea”. So I was really became that 

Rich: strategic. 

Kevin: (1:03) Yeah, I had to do that. Um, what do you guys do? I mean, what are you trying to build at night, that’s got you away from practicing law for part of the night? So, we’re building and an analytics platform for attorneys, right. Built by attorneys. And the goal is to provide, you know, better dashboard visualization with respect to what lawyers do on a day to day basis. So really looking for those metrics that will drive their law firm. Not necessarily for top line revenue, but where they can get the most efficiency, the most bang for their buck, the most utility out of the time that they have.

Kevin: What data are you collecting? 

Rich: Well, right now we have the Clio user integration. So coming out of Clio, we use basically all the data coming out of Clio.

Kevin: Fascinating. 

Rich: Time entries, timekeepers, expenses, payments, invoices 

Kevin: All masked, you’re just viewing the data.

Rich: All of it, right? I mean we use all of it. 

Kevin: That’s amazing. So it’s Clio. And how do you draw that? Could they have an API that you’re drawing? 

Rich: (2:01) We have an API. So we’re an integrated partner and we pull their API data and we have some other integrations of course, but like basically the time or the data, the right now that we’re.

Kevin: When did you get that idea? 

Rich: Um, you know, as I was growing my firm, I had some problems with managing what I call the “spinning plates”. So I needed a way to better manage my own internal operations. So I hired a project manager and we started to play around with pivot tables and spreadsheets and CSV downloads. And then I started to think about the types of data that I’ve been collecting for 20 years within law firms and my law firm practices. And I came to the conclusion that most of the data that’s collected is somewhat similar to the 80-20 rule. So if I can take advantage of 80% of the data that’s the same and provide high level metrics based on that data, then I should be able to connect to a variety of different platforms because 80% of the data collections is the same. 

Kevin: (2:52) So when you’re drawing this information off of all of Clio’s data, which has huge amount of data that you have access to, what happens and how does that product ties back out to a firm? How do they use that information?

Rich: Right? So once the integration is made, they get a sign-in for FirmTrak, which is a separate web program, software as a service. So it’s a separate program. They open up the portal, they set up their user defined variables and targets. So at that point we’re putting in, uh, full time equivalencies. So basically we’re trying to get into team management and like what your capacity is as far as how many employees, how many people you have able to work. And then once you identify that, then we can do resource costs from costing. Then we can do billing targets and projections. And then once we get that, those parameters put into the system, there’s some accounts receivable information that we’re playing with and they can set up variables. But once we get the variables set up, then that data is and transformed and lays on top of the Clio data to provide a dashboard that we call “firm track visualize”.

Kevin: So is the Clio data some sort of baseline that they can compare to or what? I’m trying to understand how, what’s the relationship between the Clio data and the data that the firm is sharing as far as their metrics? 

Rich: (4:14) Right. Well, the data that the firm shares is the Clio data. So if you have a user base that has five attorneys and four paralegals, we’re pulling all of the metrics for the five and the four into our system. 

Kevin: Already from Clio?

Rich: Already from Clio. And then we lay our variables on top of it. 

Kevin: These are, these are Clio users that then you’re doing it.

Rich: Yes, exactly.

Kevin: You’re creating something on top of what Clio already has available? 

Rich: Correct. 

Kevin: Okay. Right. I get it. I was just thinking somehow the data.

Rich: Like our goal is to lay on top of the data providers to be the best analytics platform for attorneys, period.

Kevin: (4:51) And how do the potential customers hear of FirmTrak and the opportunity to work with you, based on the fact that they’re a Clio costumer? Do you just go out and contact them? Do you have a list of Clio customers? How does that all work? 

Rich: Well, reaching the customer is the hard part in the legal segment. So right now it’s social, social media is the way, and we’re a direct integration with Clio. So if you search under metrics and like assessment tools within the Clio space, we’re on the dashboard so they can make the direct integration like that. Um, we’re trying to develop, you know, strategic partnerships with. 

Kevin: Okay, so you’re doing it the other way. It’s not like you’ve got this list of Clio customers and you’re out contacting them? 

Rich: No, I wish Clio would give us some customers, but they’re not doing that quite yet. I’ll talk with them about it.

Kevin: I’m sitting here as one of the Clio integration partners. I’m going, “who’s this guy? What does he have that I don’t?”

Rich: “I want to get access?”.No, no, no, no. 

Kevin: You’d be telling me each one of their salespersons mentions me.

Rich: I’m trying to get that done actually. Enough incentives and we’ll see. But no, they’re not sharing their list with us. I wish, you know, but we’re following, you know, there’s user groups, just stack ways.

Kevin: It’s a good, it’s a good idea and a good product, you know what you’re creating? Um, what have been the challenges, you know, maybe it’s, you know, getting a hold of those customers and connect to customers, but what’s been the biggest challenge for you? 

Rich: I think part of the biggest problems that we have with legal tech in general is the momentum of old habits. So finding lawyers that are willing to embrace change in a way that can generate a lot of ROI for them. Without looking at the, you know, the small dollar incremental dollar costs to see what the long term value play is. So, you know, the momentum of habits, old habits. 

Kevin: (6:37) And had you ever been in the time that you’ve been practicing law, have you ever run a company or done a company on the side before this? 

Rich: No. No. I haven’t. I haven’t. 

Kevin: And so why you? I mean really like, it’s like, okay, there’s a lot of other lawyers that practice law like you did across this country and here it is, you goes, “you know, I could take the way that I do things, leverage this data at Clio and create a company”. I mean, why you, what was it in your DNA? 

Rich:  I don’t know if it was just something that I’m always a proponent and highest and best use. So, I want to try to get the most value out of the time that I have available in the day. Considering all the other balances that I had. So, so my goal honestly, was to try to produce a product that provided me less stress, more free time, more revenue. So, when I started to look at it, I had some things align with perspective people and capabilities and capacities. And I knew enough about data and statistics that I was just able to think about how I can apply it. 

Kevin: So it was almost like, “why not?”. 

Rich: It’s was almost by “why not?”. You know, and in my presentation, I indicated that I was doing some, I looked for a solution., right. I’ve tried to find one and I couldn’t. So I went ahead and I took the time and the effort to try and put one together. 

Kevin: (7:53) It’s almost how every entrepreneur I talk to over the years, it’s the same thing. I mean that’s what it look like for me. So when somebody tells me I’m the national leader on blogs for lawyers or some speaking event in San Francisco, and I’m going, “what are they talking about?”. 

Rich: It’s crazy. 

Kevin: I’m baying $495 a month for this thing. And people come up and say, “can you help me do what you’re doing?”. I’m going, “Shit, I’m scared you found my blog. I’ve got to find somebody to help me make it look good and tell me what I’m doing”. 

Rich: I’m trying to find that “maybe I’m not doing this right”.

Kevin: I mean, cause I don’t have a clue. And the best I could find seriously the best I could find. Who was the woman in Florida, and she goes, “I could only help you via email because I got kids that are loud. So we can’t ever talk on the phone”. I’m thinking, “Well, that ain’t gonna work for these large firms that are asking me to help them”.

Rich: I completely understand the fear that you had at that time. Believe me, believe me, I would’ve have never thought that I would be here doing all of this. It’s very exciting, it’s crazy. 

Kevin: You’re speaking. There are people listening to you. Yeah, so how’d that all happen? Yeah. What’s been the real high? What’s been the most rewarding? 

Rich: Um, I guess the rewarding is some, it’s certainly the Clio launch. You know, finalists, you know when, right when you get a call from Clio and they said, you know, out of 80 integrations and you’re one of the top five, you can present. So it was a high, when I found out that I was going to be top five and it was somewhat of than a low and I’m like, wait a minute, I’ve got to get a four minute pitch. So I’ll have to come around with that. But basically the recognition that we have from Clio has been huge and really the positive feedback. I mean we get, I mean we’ve been slammed. 

Kevin: (9:23) That’s great.

Rich: People are clamoring I think for data and data analytics and trying to get deep insights.

Kevin: Here you have Jack and the team constantly talking about it. You know, and be able to use information, so that you can get more value out of your life. 

Rich: Right. Right. 

Kevin: You know, it’s the rare lawyer. I mean, I always was, so let’s find out what we’re the best at and let’s do those things and reduce all the other static from our life. Let’s not have a lawyer do what a lawyer is not required to do. Not to demean anybody, but we could have other people doing things that are more fun that other lawyers were doing. 

Rich: Right. Well, this is totally got me back to enjoying my practice. I mean, outside of what I’ve been doing with FirmTrak, my practice, I’m enjoying my practice more with it, with the balance that I’ve been able to achieve. So it’s been helpful that way. And then just the opportunity to help lawyers. I mean,  I’m a small lawyer, you know. I’m a solo practitioner and, I wanted to create a tool that provided value to other small lawyers to have the ability to use technology in ways that larger law firms are using it. I knew that there was a way that they could do it and I’m kind of passionate about that space. Um, because I never was like large law and had like huge discretionary budgets. 

Kevin: (10:37) Who did the first, you know, coding and technology work for you? Were you were able to do it or do you get you got somebody to help you? 

Rich: I’ve had someone help. So we’ve done some, you know, when you got the pivot tables and excels and then we started to think about how we could use the data in combination. So um, I’ve had certainly, you know, you stand on the shoulders of those that are around you. I’m certainly reaping the benefits of many of the talents that I have on the team. 

Kevin: And like five or 10 years ago you weren’t familiar with API and now it’s you’re calling. 

Rich: It’s funny how many conversations and I start talking about API’s, like I know what I’m talking about and I really don’t. Fake it until you make it, I guess. 

Kevin: Oh, we were just talking about that with somebody else. The nomenclature that, you know, lawyers were sitting in here using these things, which we know some basic things. The things we don’t know, we can’t. I can’t code. 

Rich: I can’t code. I cannot code. 

Kevin: So, I can’t do that thing. But that’s a great thing that you said, I mean you’re, you’re solo lawyer serving small area and now you have a technology company that you’re running while you’re still practicing, which I bet a year from now you’re going to say, “I don’t know if I can keep the practice going hard or it was closed. 

Rich: I hope that maybe it’ll open some opportunities up long term for us. 

Kevin: And you’re reaching people nationally, if not internationally. They’re your customers. 

Rich: We have users all over the country, all over the world, at this point. Hong Kong.

Kevin: Which is great. It’s very cool.

Rich: It’s super exciting. It’s crazy. It’s really crazy. 

Kevin: Thank you very much. 

Rich: Thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity. 

Kevin: It’s a great, it’s a great story. 

Rich: I appreciate that.

Kevin speaking with Nicole Clark, Founder and CEO of Trellis, at the 2019 Clio Cloud Conference in San Diego. Trellis is a legal research and analytics platform designed specifically for California practitioners.

Transcript

Kevin O’Keefe: Who am I talking with? 

Nicole Clark: I am Nicole Clark. I am the founder and CEO of Trellis 

Kevin: That saved me cause I was going to say, “who is Nicole?”

Nicole: Sure.

Kevin: Where are you from?

Nicole: I’m from Los Angeles, California. 

Kevin: Wow. That was easy. 

Nicole: Yes, absolutely. 

Kevin: How did you get here? Drive? Take a train?

Nicole: I drove up and we were actually in San Jose earlier, so came from San Jose to LA and then drove from LA. 

Kevin: What is Trellis?

Nicole: Trellis is a legal data and analytics company. So we mine state trial court data and we make it searchable and we analyze it and we allow attorneys to basically research how their judge actually thinks about specific issues. Um, look at the case law that their judge prefers and really sort of tailor and target most of it. 

Kevin: Did you found the company? 

Nicole: I did. 

Kevin: There’s another company that I remember talking to somebody. It was like “Money Ball” or “Money Ball for Court Analysis and Judge Analysis”. 

Nicole: Interesting. 

Kevin: Also in California, I don’t know if he’s out of LA or Northern California or not. Is the idea that, you know, “I’m a trial lawyer”, and maybe it’s not getting all the way to percentages. Like, yeah, “we can do this and we can do that, we can plead this and we can plead that. This was the lawyer and was the venue and everything. You have 30% chance so we better sell it”. How are people using it? 

Nicole: (1:19) So it’s an interesting thing. I think the analytics are really helpful and in a few times in the case and really helped them, right when you get assigned your judge to make a decision. You know, are you going to ding the judge? Are you going to request assignment to a different judge? That’s great for some hard data in analytics. The way that our clients use our products.

Kevin: I laugh because, I’m thinking like before. When I was practicing, we had email. Somebody would send out a memo asking about sticklers.

Nicole: ”Anyone hear about judge so-and-so?”

Kevin: “Oh they seem okay.”

Nicole: My favorite for the response is like, “Oh, he’s a stickler for the rules”. You don’t say the judge is a stickler for the rules. Well that’s actionable data I can make a decision on. So yup. And I experienced that at every firm that I was at that email going around. I was often the associate that was tasked with sort of collecting the anecdotes and then making a recommendation to the partner. And it just blew my mind that we were relying on antidotes and there’s so much data out there and there’s such great resources and here lawyers are sending out internal emails. You know, God help us.

Kevin: Where were you practicing in LA? 

Nicole: I was I practiced in LA and also in Orange County.

Kevin: (2:26) How is the data mined from the courthouses as far as scraped or gotten so then you can turn around and present this information? 

Nicole: Great question. I have engineers that are far smarter than I am. 

Kevin: Basically one of the most difficult aspects of what we’re doing is at the state court level the data is so fragmented. So every single court is separate. Los Angeles County separate from San Diego County. It’s all, you know, they host their data separately, they maintain it separately. So it requires a ton of work for us to integrate into, to get the data coming in. And then the most difficult work is really structuring the data cause it comes in messy, raw, unstructured, and we have to structure it so that we can actually make meaning out of it. 

Kevin: Oh, same thing man. We’re bringing RSS feeds of content, and you have to make sure that authenticates to be able to pull it through, you got to structure it. You can call metadata. You can call it organizing or whatever. 

Nicole: Yup, yup, absolutely. 

Kevin: How do the judges feel about this whole thing today? 

Nicole: It’s an interesting thing. I’ve had both responses. I’ve had some judges that I think are a little bit concerned about that level of transparency. I’ve had other judges that say we want access because we’re actually reinventing the wheel more than we need to be. We can rely on some of our past decisions, use those, and our opinions and do our job better. And then also maybe it would be helpful for them to actually see areas where they’re an outlier. Um, they basically want to be able to see what the attorneys are seeing, which you can’t blame them. 

Kevin: (3:54) Right, knowing a few judges over the years that can hold grudges, that can be spiteful.

Nicole: Absolutely. 

Kevin: “I’ll show you that’s not what you expected to happen”.

Nicole: It’s true. It’s an interesting question whether the sort of observer bias might change anything. It’s a great philosophical question that we’ll continue to to figure out. 

Kevin: If somebody told me this is what you usually do in that situation. I’d, back in my mind and running around all over. When did you start the company?

Nicole: (4:23) So we started collecting data about four and a half years ago. 

Kevin: Who’s we?

Nicole: A team, so started with co-founder technical. Someone who’s the, you know the engineering brains of the operation. I’m domain expertise. 

Kevin: Why you? I mean you’re practicing law. I mean you didn’t go to law school to say, “I’m going to be running a data analytics company from data from courthouses and present it back to lawyers on a subscription basis”. 

Nicole: That is true. That is definitely not what I went to law school thinking that. You’re absolutely right. The reason that we started Trellis was really, I was complaining to a colleague one night about, I was writing an MSJ. I was just a day. It was a complicated issue. I wasn’t sure how to structure the motion. I was saying I didn’t know anything about the judge and my colleagues said to me that he thought he had appeared before my judge previously and he thought he might have a ruling and we went and we checked and there was a ruling in the file that was on my motion, on my issue by my judge. 

Kevin: In the firm? 

Nicole: (5:20) In the firm, internally with the files. For me it was just this light bulb of, “Oh my God, there is”. 

Kevin: “What’s at the courthouse?”

Nicole: Exactly. There’s this incredible practical data and here we are relying on Lexis. We’re relying on Westlaw appellate data, sort of academic legal research, but what about all the untapped data about how judges are actually ruling? 

Kevin: And you just talking about it. An MFJ, motion for summary judgment, can decide the case. 

Nicole: Absolutely. 

Kevin: Somebody’s saying, “do get the right to have a trial or you don’t”. The judge says, “you don’t. You’re done go home”. You can appeal and you’re sitting trying to read tea leaves as to what the appellate court would say. 

Nicole: Exactly. 

Kevin: This judge who’s never been an appellate lawyer, nor do they even want to be an appellate lawyer. They’re gonna rule on things in front of them based on the briefs and their analysis and we’re going to try to do the right job. 

Nicole: Exactly right.

Kevin: But why you? You have to read and everything, but why was it you you said, “okay I’m going to do this”?

Nicole: The way that it worked was, my first step in was recognizing that this data was out there. Nobody was tapping. And my first step was “let’s start collecting and aggregating it. I’m going to use it in practice and I’m going to see if it’s really valuable”. And for a number of years while we were collecting a super meaningful data set, I just continued practicing. And during that time I had such a successful motion practice, it changed the game for me, because I sort of had the answers to the test. Right? I could see the way the judge thought.

Kevin: Did your clients know they were getting a lawyer that was more? 

Nicole: It was my secret weapon. I didn’t tell the firm it was my secret. They were like, “why do you think the judge is going to deny that?”. “I have a feeling I just have a strong feeling”. Um, but it was such a game changer for me and my practice. 

Kevin: Where were you storing this information?

Nicole: (7:02) Well at that point we had created a separate hosted database, but I was customer number one, so it was really me using it, giving feedback, and the database grew. It definitely got better over time. 

Kevin: Did you contact somebody that you knew that did tech or what? 

Nicole: I went to the smartest engineer that I

Kevin: That you knew

Nicole: Exactly, I said, “can you do this?” And at first he said, “I don’t believe you that every data is utilizing a, I mean every industry is utilizing data, right? What do you mean law is not effectively utilizing data? I don’t believe you”. And then he went and started doing his own market research, saw the opportunity and was like, “Oh my God”. 

Kevin: I love that story about, “I’m using it really well”.

Nicole: And that’s what it was for me. For me, I ended up feeling at that point like I was compelled to start the business. Like I no longer had a choice because the data was so powerful that the opportunity to start a business this big, this scalable that’s helpful to attorneys was something I wasn’t going to in account out in my life.

Kevin: Remind me again, how long ago was that? 

Nicole: About 2 years ago is when I jumped from practice and we probably were a effectively working on it the last three and a half years.

Kevin: So yeah 3 and half, four years. You were going through this process your saying, “Okay”. Did you tell the firm? “I’ve got this now”.

Nicole: They became customer number two. 

Kevin: You had left before you went back to the firm with the information.

Nicole: Well, they actually, when I told them that I was leaving and I told them what I was going to do and they knew that I had been winning for quite a number of years there and so they were able to place it together and say “Oh the product and the legals win. Yes we want the product”. And in fact they actually gave us office space onsite at the firm. 

Kevin: That’s cool. 

Nicole: We had the engineers be able to iterate with the attorneys onsite and so it was our very first sort of launch into and to real customers.

Kevin: You had a firm with a little bit of foresight. As opposed to “Get out of here” if you don’t like our model. 

Nicole: That’s totally what I was expecting. I tell you when I went in there, I was fully expecting them to say, “you know, addios, good luck with that”. But they were really receptive. 

Kevin: How’d you figure out, okay, how much am I gonna charge? Is it a subscription? Do we charge by the firm? Do we charge by the user? Do we charge, you know, whatever? How’d you figure that all out? 

Nicole: (9:19) So I think, and for particularly for startups, it’s an iterative process. I think it’s a journey to figure out exactly what revenue model is gonna work best with the customers. And you basically watch it and then tweak and then watch and then tweak. Um, my original plan was “I’m going to be like Lexis and Westlaw. I’m going to sell to the entire firm enterprise. If one person wants it, the whole firm has to it”. Right? Then I got into the sales cycle at large law firms. 

Kevin: Yeah, that’s tough.

Nicole: And so that sort of hit me pretty hard and I recognize that what we really need are internal champions. When we get people using the product, they’re super excited about it, right? 

Kevin: Champions is the right word.

Nicole: And so we need those folks saying, “yes, I use it. Yes, it’s helpful.

Kevin: One at a time.

Nicole: Exactly, and we’ll take them one at a time to take over there. 

Kevin: We used to get the checks in the beginning, I’d go, “wow. A check, from a lawyer at Wilson & Sonsini, but it’s from her and her husband’s checking account”. They were coming like that and so you realize this person really likes what we’re doing. They’re not even bothering their firm about it. They’re willing to pay the $2,500 a year or whatever they’re going to be. They’re going to be champions. It’s going to do good stuff for them, and they’re going to share the word to other people over time. What’s amazing, now we’re sitting here talking about being a lawyer and you’re being a lawyer, and to think that three and a half years ago or four years ago, you’d be winging things off revenue model, iterative changes, the sale process, champions, insights, how you sell, how you do tech. How you do all this.

Nicole: Become an expert in marketing an expert in sales an expert in managing people. Right? And it’s mind blowing. 

Kevin: But it just happens.

Nicole: It just happens. When you get really excited about something, you figure out how to make it happen. 

Kevin: All of a sudden you’re listening to other people and go, “yeah, that’s what”, I mean. I remember what scaling is. Okay, that’s right. That scaling. Or people say “we want to do this or that”, and I go, “if you think we’re going to start putting people to that problem, that is really unlikely”. When we see the opportunity, we’ll change the product and and add some features.

Nicole: (11:19) Exactly. 

Kevin: Cause we’re not going to go broke. 

Nicole: We can’t, we don’t have the resources. Right. It really is a study in prioritization, right. 

Kevin: How do we maintain it? We got engineers that are going to work on one platform. They’re not going to work on two or three. I learned all of those problems over the years. Obviously you’re having fun. 

Nicole: Yeah, absolutely. 

Kevin: Um, what was the biggest thing you learned? That you said, “wow, didn’t know that. Didn’t know that was gonna happen”. 

Nicole: In terms of the business itself, I honestly, I feel like I get one of those every day. It’s just, and it’s a regularly feel like, “wow, how did this happen on a regular basis?”. 

Kevin: When was the biggest moment where you go, “Oh my God, it shouldn’t be this hard. I don’t know. I don’t even know if we’re gonna make it after. I thought it was perfect”? 

Nicole: I though the down moments are this or this, the slowness of attorneys to adopt. So you get people and they’ll be super excited about the product and they’ll be an internal champion, but then they’ll say, “help sell it into the firm? Oh, we don’t know how to do that, but I’d love to invest in your company”. And you’re like, where’s the disconnect?  You’re willing to invest, but you can’t help us become a customer. So it’s very confusing sometimes with attorneys. 

Kevin: Do they paid per seat? Did they pay for a period of time? Do they buy us a subscription? 

Nicole: It’s a subscription. 

Kevin: That’s what it is. 

Nicole: Exactly. 

Kevin: What do people pay per a monthly subscription? 

Nicole: (12:50) $100 a month. 

Kevin: That’s really really reasonable. It really is. And we’re right now, we’re not trying to nickel and dime people. We’re trying to give them serious values. And they can go and tell their friends we were making a great product and we want them to be champions. 

Kevin: It’s totally, I mean you know already, but it’s totally the way to go. You want them as raving fans, not moderately satisfied, but somebody that brags about it to their friends. 

Nicole: Exactly. They, each one of them become a little marketers for you. 

Kevin: You can never let go of the fact that we’re customer centered like we’re 15 year in. Sometimes, it’s hard. Then everybody realizes that you came to work for the company in the company or even existed and they, and they came. Some people came for the job through the passion and the experience of everything.

Nicole: It’s an interesting thing to recognize, right that your employees don’t, you know, they share, they’re there cause they share in the vision. They don’t have the same level of buy in as you do. They don’t have the same amount on the line. 

Kevin: I’ll be telling people, “well why not? We all don’t get this excited?”. 

Nicole: I hear you. You are preaching to the choir. 

Kevin: With somebody that was in my company for seven or eight years with me and he goes, “Kevin. Just so you know. Not everybody here is going to be as excited as you are” and I’m like, “Well, why not?”. 

Nicole: Totally agree. Totally agree. 

Kevin: What’s been the most rewarding for you? I mean to look back and say, “I was went to law school as your lawyers doing a good job. I enjoyed it”. What’s most rewarding about this? 

Nicole: (14:19) I think it’s having actually built something that people love, right? So we were, we were at a conference recently and someone came up to me and I said, “I heard about this. My friend was raving about it”. It’s a recognition that, you know, we started from nothing and we put the pieces together to really build something that people love and use. That’s huge. 

Kevin: To have them come up and thank you.

Nicole: Come up and thanking me, right? I never in my life as an attorney did I expect that and it’s incredibly rewarding. 

Kevin: It’s totally rewarding, because the people that are out there and get seen and come up and say they’re a customer, “great to meet you”, may have talked with you sometime but never met you face to face and how much you did to help them. I mean, you know, you will occasionally, I used to tell the lawyer, so you get a letter from a client, you keep it in the drawer. On a bad day you open it up and read it, but you don’t have a lot. 

Nicole: But it’s a little bit of a thankless job there because you’re just pushing forward on deadlines and when you win they expect it and when you lose, they’re not happy.

Kevin: So if you’re out there talking to law students today, or maybe you already do. 

Nicole: We do.

Kevin: To you that the sky is the limit for opportunities for a lawyer?

Nicole: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think that we need to get out of the mindset that you’re stuck in, you know, the way that the profession has sort of, um, generally been established and “I have to work at a private practice firm” and “I have this number of years before I can jump to my next job”. And you know, there’s all of these things that we expect when we go in. And I think I was under that mindset for a long time. 

Kevin: Or we were educated that way. 

Nicole: Absolutely. 

Kevin: You go into law school and tell them that they gotta change what they’re doing and they’re thinking, “we’re going to screw that up. That’ll screw up our ratings” and “we’ve got to get these kids out of here. I’m not going to go to major firms and make them”. 

Nicole: That’s funny, that’s interesting.

Kevin: They do. They actually say that. “That’s okay, but we can’t do that because we got to get the kids in the major firms in the major cities and I’m going to get them clerking in the right spots because if they don’t clerk our ratings will all go down”.

Nicole: Or there may be only one way to go forward, cause that’s what we’re told. And then it turns out that’s not the case at all. 

Kevin: There’s always opportunities. Look at you. Look, you’re here today. 

Nicole: Exactly, it’s a wide open universe out there. 

Kevin: It was great talking with you. This was great. 

Nicole: Absolutely, you too Kevin.

Kevin: Thank you very much.

Kevin speaking with Erin Levine, CEO and Founder of Hello Divorce, on making the divorce process both easier and more affordable through her company’s web-based application. Erine was also a guest presenter at this year’s Clio Cloud Conference, speaking on “The Win-Win Legal Services Model”.

Transcript:

Kevin: Who am I talking with?

Erin Levine: Erin Levine

Kevin: Who is Erin Levine?

Erin: I’m the managing attorney of Levine family law group and the CEO and founder of hello divorce.

Kevin: Where are you from? Where’s Levine Family Law Group)?

Erin Levine: It’s in Oakland, California.

Kevin: Question: So you didn’t have so far to go.

Erin: No, in fact, I was in San Diego just a few weeks ago with my family and to take the kids to Legoland. I love being here. I was so excited when I heard that it would be here.

Kevin: How many kids do you have?

Erin: Two

Kevin: Oh that’s not so bad.

Erin: Well, they’re little. They’re wonderful. But this is kind of a nice break.

Kevin: I have five total (laughs). That’s the reason I ask. They’re older though. I

Erin: Five kids!?

Kevin: They’re older though. It goes by fast.

Erin:I can’t even imagine. I mean two (kids) feels like ten (kids) so…

Kevin: Like Guy Kawasaki always said when you go from two to three then you start playing a zone. And that’s when it all changes. It’s a whole new game.

Erin: Wow, that’s impressive (laughs).

Kevin: So in addition to, you know, practicing family law, you have Hello Divorce, what is it?

Erin: Hello Divorce is a web platform that offers legal, health and wellness supports people who are going through divorce. So it’s a web app. Well, let me back up a minute. It’s kind of in between legal zoom or rocket lawyer and a full fledged law firm. So I had done a survey of hundreds of people who were either just starting the divorce or had just finished their divorce and asked them what they needed or what they wanted or what could have been better. And as it turns out, most of them really wanted technology. They wanted the opportunity to do things on their own, but they also wanted a helping hand if they needed it.So our app not only takes people through the divorce process, but if at any time they need some extra help, they can click and access on demand lawyers.

Kevin: So, and (does) the “on-demand lawyer” mean different lawyers around the country or in California? Where’s it being used?

Erin: Yea, we’re partnering with different firms, because hello divorce itself can’t offer the legal advice right now. We tested it in California with my firm, and some contract attorneys that work with my firm. We wanted to make sure that it was a sustainable option for lawyers, we wanted to prove that lawyers would actually make money even though they’re charging less because their overhead is like none. And it’s worked. And so next, we’re going to Texas.

Kevin: Good for you, I mean stay with the large states with where you’re going. But I think that’s right. It’s a hard mindset. I used to practice law (but) I didn’t bill by the hour, it was contingency fees so I didn’t worry about that stuff. But it’s a hard mindset to get lawyers to realize that being more efficient can actually be better, and for the clients, that’s what they want anyway. They’re not looking to be spending the most time with you, they necessarily don’t like you, they don’t love you like their families to spend more time to make it more efficient. How’d you go about the process of saying, okay, we’re going to build this thing or have this app. What’d you do? Where’d you go? Where’d you go get the developer? Where do I start?

Erin: Oh my goodness. Um, well I, I had really burnt out on practicing law all the time. Like I was doing a lot of litigation. I had little kids at home. I just kind of needed a break and I had always loved tech and I’d always loved access to justice. And we have millennials coming into our office on a regular basis saying that they had the information, they had Googled it, they knew it, but they were having trouble like processing it or problem solving. And so they were asking for like fixed fee services or just unbundled services. And we weren’t set up to do that in a way where we could make money because our overhead was so high. So I went to a tech firm in San Francisco, um, called Yeti. And with them we did a design sprint and we really mapped out what we wanted or felt the user journey should be. We asked people in surveys, we, um, looked at colors, we looked at how we could integrate wellness support. We put everything in plain English, which is hard for us lawyers. Um, and then we had this amazing plan, but not enough money. So I, I did a minimal viable product on WordPress. I actually took like every plugin you can possibly imagine to try to rig together what is now our divorce navigator. And there was interest.

Kevin So it’s a web based site it’s not an application per se

Erin: Right it’s a web application now, but it’s not, um, you know, available for download in the Apple store. Um, but it is an application built in Python. It integrates with some of our sponsors here. So that’s nice too.

Kevin: How long ago was that? That you were in the office in San Francisco, the tech firm mapping out the journey.

Erin: Two years. Yeah.

Kevin: Yeah. What did you learn throughout that process that you didn’t know and there might be 80 things cause I don’t know. What did you get into that? They go quite, I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that.

Erin: Yeah. Um, just for me it was like just how much the consumer has changed in the past 15 years. Even. So I’ve been practicing law for 15 years and you know, it used to be that we were like barricaded by this fortress of information and no one had access to it. And we told clients, you’ve got to trust us, like we’re going to give you the answer. You gotta trust us. And they really had no other choice. And now people expect more. They, they have the information or they want it and they’re willing to pay for a lawyer and they’re willing to pay for legal services, but they want to ensure that we know our stuff and that the user experience, um, is comparable to all the other apps that they use.

Kevin: That’s right. They have a relative or a family member that’s got a serious disease. What are they doing? They’re turning to the internet. And they’re getting great information and they may even be able to talk with somebody in that field via the internet, maybe on their iPhone and here it is and divorce that, Hey, it’s not fun, but it isn’t as serious as some life threatening diseases, but we’re going to live with a mystery cause Now I get it because I got all this information, but how do I go through it? They don’t want to do surgery, but it’s the same.

Erin: That that was a big piece of it. Like we made tons of worksheets and checklists so people could digest little pieces of the divorce process without trying to take it in all at once. So our most popular worksheet is the parenting plan when to help you figure that out. And the other most popular one actually is our self care worksheet, which surprised us, but we love it. We’ve got great consumers.

Kevin: The customers for you per se, are they the law firm, then that deploys it into their customer base or the consumers directly. Then that can go to the lawyer who is, who is the party that’s taking money out of their pocket and putting it into your pocket.

Erin 7:28: So right now we’re B to C (business-to-consumer sales), we are up until this point and October 1st we started, we launched our first ad campaign. But up until this point, we did no, like very little paid marketing and advertising. It’s all been word of mouth, social media, um, mediators, uh, just me getting out there and meeting people and whatnot. So consumers, but ultimately the goal is that lawyers will pay to use our platform, right? So that it makes divorce like that much easier for them. And we’ve had new lawyers tell us that they’ve paid for a membership, like a subscription to our app to learn how to do this stuff.

Kevin: I remember when I visited Nolo press, the was just coming about at 96 or 97 I had the idea of a virtual law community. I wanted to pull different pieces together. So, you know, I went out to Berkeley from Wisconsin and visited Nolo. Awesome. You guys got awesome stuff, you know, and they’re saying, Hey, do you understand what, this isn’t like a freebie. This is very capitalistic in what we’re trying to make as far as money from this book. And I’m realizing that those books ought to be in my library or my reception area and I should be buying them for the clients, you know? So if we want to know what’s going to go in on a trial, you one, what’s going on at deposition their A hell of a lot better than any books that the bar association.

Erin: So true. I don’t know why lawyers think that. If it gets the information, they’re not going to need us.

Kevin: And then when I told Nolo, why aren’t you selling this to lawyers, they go lawyers aren’t going to buy us. They hate us. I said, well, maybe they hate you because of the way you’re approaching it, but they don’t know. But if they had these books, it would make their lives easier. Um, think about it there was landlord tenant real estate there was divorce.

Erin: They had all these consumer facing areas of law. It was written for consumers.

Kevin: I mean, it was written for consumers so they could wade through it. See it in an entertaining way, like a dummy’s book it’s great.
Erin: It’s going to be decades before the legal system is efficient and streamlined. And until that happens, we’ve got counties with different rules. We’ve got States with different rules. People need help navigating that, but they don’t necessarily need a lawyer doing it.

Kevin: Not always no or they, or they could use a lawyer that has technology so the lawyer can access if they need to. I mean, if they paying the lawyer, they get a response back in about maybe an hour, but if the most oftentimes 10 minutes.

Erin: Yeah. I mean that’s definitely our advantage because people can click and they’re immediately, um, they can pay this all takes like two minutes. They get their, um, welcome email.

Kevin: What does it cost for someone to use this service?

Um, so the basic service, um, just to get access to the information in exchange for their email address is free. Yeah. It’s $99 a month to use the divorce navigator. And people are averaging five, six months. Divorce is a process

Kevin: And they can buy it by the month they don’t have to buy it by the year?

Erin: Exactly. They could easily, um, I hope people aren’t subscribing on a yearly basis. That would be terrible, just one divorce.

Kevin: Hopefully no one needs a lifetime subscription

Erin: Oh my gosh. Yeah. No, we need to give a discount for repeat customers or something. But what we’re finding is most people using the divorce navigator are upgrading to one time fee of $395, which allows us to do all the filing and processing and serving.

Kevin: How are you enjoying it? Are you having fun?

Erin: I love it. This is the best. It’s like, it’s so close to my heart because I always knew there was a way to lower the cost, um, and really target that 77% of people who aren’t getting their legal needs met. But I also wanted to find a way that I could earn a living because I wanted to show this to the lawyers. I wanted to introduce it to them here and say, look guys, like there’s a different way we can do this. And like, I got to do that today. So it’s like a dream come true.I’m such a nerd.

Kevin: So you spoke here today?

Erin: I spoke yesterday. Yeah.

Kevin: What were you talking on?

Erin 11:43: The win-win legal services model. So talking about passive income and how we can leverage the technology we already have to really like meet the consumer where they’re at and I’m just trying to convince people like Jack, you know the legal market is changing and if you’re not feeling it like we are, we’re in the Bay area, we’re surrounded by tech you will feel it, I mean I have had lawyer after lawyer come up to me and say I haven’t had a new case in awhile. And if you talk to the consumer, if you’re authentic, if you connect with them like a real human being, that’s what they want now look to make sure you have the credentials, but they don’t need that in their face. It’s not about you.

Kevin: No, my doctor, he said if we don’t get back to, you know, within an hour we might be tied up in something. I’m thinking hey that’s ok. I emailed an email to the office and it goes through, I think it goes through a vetting system where they can queue it as to where it goes. Because it’s only him and four or five staff and I got a personal email back know from the doctor about it. And I don’t have to go in. I pay a flat monthly fee, but so what.

Erin: Exactly, we have Kaiser out here in California. Do you?

Kevin: It’s up in Seattle, yes.

Erin: but you know, you have like a skin rash or something. You could take a picture and upload it to the app and then they’ll, you’ll talk right to the doctor or the nurse practitioner it’s extraordinary.

Kevin: Then you talk to somebody that’s this younger. They couldn’t imagine not having that. When you tell them the story of like, you know when I started to practice law, yeah, no, you make an appointment you come in you go in with a legal pad and pen, you make all types of notes and then, then you forget about half of stuff because you can’t read it. Then you dictate a summary or dictate a letter back to the client and they’re paying for the time.

Erin: The dictation. My dad was always dictating.

Kevin: I should just bring in like exactly what went on. At night I came in and 7 to 11 every night I was dictating stuff and then it was just stacks and it had numbers one, two and rubber bands around the tapes to go in the files and you copied the books and you cut them and put them in there and you had notes for the dictation. I think about how inefficient that was.

Erin: Oh my gosh. I remember my dad had, he was a trial attorney with the firm in LA. He had, we used to take the file carts and like run around the hallways and he had this huge room for a library, a huge room for the files and a huge cold room for the server. It was like a whole room. It was amazing. I mean now we’re seeing like these lawyers come out of law school and like set up shop on their computers in 2 minutes

Kevin: and never had a buy library subscription. Could you imagine every month the pocket parks come and have somebody has to pull them out of the books, put them back in and then they would sit on the library table and you’re wondering whether we should have them in the books or not. It’s insane. And amount of money we spent on, it was just, obscene so now whatever people are complaining about today is a fraction of what it was and so what you’re bringing into the environment is saying, Hey, you not only can serve people better, you might make money when you’re asleep now and that’s okay. It’s not to try to steal from people. You’re just having, you could develop subscription base businesses over time working with customers that have a better experience about the whole thing so that they’re raving about us. It’s really interesting what you’re saying about somebody who hasn’t had a call for a client for a period of time and it might be the way they’re presenting themselves and they’re inaccessible. You know, you’re right. You’re living in the middle of the Bay area and I’m living in tech, pretty tech savvy area as well

Erin: Yeah It’s, you know, I think that, you know, us gen excers, we really have this unique perspective because we saw our parents, um, and like really working in like non-tech. We didn’t grow up with iPhones like we were still on beepers and then all of a sudden we were expected to like know all this and know it quickly. I think you could probably relate to that as well.

Kevin: There were no word processors when we started and it was an amazing thing when two word processors arrived at the office with green font.

Erin: Did you love it? Did you embrace it right away or were you like, this is never going to work.

Kevin: Those I saw could work because it went I mean it sounds goofy but they went from IBM selectrix to an IBM with a mag card writer if you had a mag card writer it basically could kick things out, stop. And then whoever was keying in or typing in would stop and put in the name or whatever the information. There were only so many variables and documents should cause lawyers that were doing business and estate work and whatnot. They were making money in their sleep because they weren’t doing anything except finding five or six variables and their secretary was preparing the documents on the machines. I didn’t embrace the legal research and technology I thought it was the craziest thing in the world that we were gonna use computers to find.

Erin: I have people on my team that still won’t do it with the computer they want the book.

Kevin: Well it was delightful to talk with you. It’s great to hear that you’re having fun and you’re onto the next state Texas and then you’ll be on Florida and probably New York after that.

Erin: Yeah, you got it.

Kevin: You take care. Thank you very much.

Amir Reshef talks with Kevin O’ Keefe on how he started dealcloser, where the company is today, and what he’s learned along the way.

Kevin O’Keefe: Who am I talking with?

Amir Reshef: Amir Reshef.

Kevin O’Keefe: And what do you do?

Amir Reshef: I’m the CEO and cofounder of the legal tech company called dealcloser.

Kevin O’Keefe: And where are you from?

Amir Reshef: Alberta, Edmonton.

Kevin O’Keefe: The same place as Jack Newton that co-founded Clio. And what does dealcloser do?

Amir Reshef: Dealcloser is a transaction management platform.

Kevin O’Keefe: What does that mean?

Amir Reshef: It’s for corporate lawyers to run their deals through. The M&A process is typically very paper heavy, very manual. A lot of those tasks can be automated with our software. So, we make the transaction process better for lawyers and their clients.

Kevin O’Keefe: And how did you get involved in that?

Amir Reshef: I used to be a lawyer at a big international firm and I just lived that process and I hated it and I couldn’t understand why we were doing it. And, couldn’t understand why we were doing the things we were doing. And not just us–all corporate law does it that way. And so we–my cofounder and I–thought ‘wouldn’t it be great if there was something that did these things and just made the process less manual, less frustrating, less annoying?’ And decided to go for it two years ago.

Kevin O’Keefe: So you went out and started it. With what? Did you have savings, did you have anything?

Amir Reshef: Not a whole lot.

Kevin O’Keefe: Is your co-founder a woman or man?

Amir Reshef: He’s a guy.

Kevin O’Keefe: Lawyer or not a lawyer?

Amir Reshef:  No, he’s technical. He’s a technical guy.

Kevin O’Keefe: How did you guys know each other?

Amir Reshef: Mutual friends. He started off as a contractor, him and another guy. And then he became the CTO and the other guy is an employee of ours too. I call him a cofounder because he was there from day one, but he started as a contractor.

Kevin O’Keefe: So you had this idea in your head, ‘Hey, better way to do this. This is way too painful.’.

Amir Reshef: Yeah. 5 am, night after night, I didn’t want it anymore.

Kevin O’Keefe: Yeah and obviously if you’ve talked to other entrepreneurs, you are exactly from the road that people come from. They’re working in some type of issue, and they’re past it–there’s too much pain. So when you hired him as a contractor, how’d you pay him? Where’d you get the money to do this thing?

Amir Reshef: We made a terrible PowerPoint to explain what it’ll do. And I showed it to some lawyers at my firm and one was like, ‘oh I’ll invest in this.’ Wasn’t even expecting that, but he gave us our first investment. It was now what seems to me like a small amount, but back then was a lot of money and that’s how we started. That was what we started to pay contractors with.

Kevin O’Keefe: How’d you go get the customers?

Amir Reshef: We built out an alpha, basically. Completely nonfunctional, but it looked way better than our terrible PowerPoint. And we went to firms in Edmonton and I said, ‘when this exists, would you be willing to use it?’ And we even asked for a small fee just to show people are willing to put money into this. And that’s how it started. It started with local firms in Edmonton and then as we started to grow, we expanded our reach and now we’re all throughout North America.

Kevin O’Keefe: How many firms are using dealcloser now?

Amir Reshef: We’re at over 25.

Kevin O’Keefe: They’re of all sizes? Or tend to be a little bit larger because of the nature of the deals that you’re doing?

Amir Reshef: Actually, even small firms. Simple sales–like the sale at a gas station–it’s not a big transaction, but it’s still happening all the time. Our smallest firm is one lawyer and our biggest firm is 400 lawyers.

Kevin O’Keefe: So somebody can go in this interface–it’s reduced to an interface as opposed to document by document by document. I assume you see where they are on the stage of getting everything done. And by putting information in, it’s then producing the documents based on the input of information as opposed to filling in blanks in a word processor. I’m just guessing. I don’t know.

Amir Reshef: Yeah. It’s not quite that. Document automation–we are actually going to build that. But typically lawyers are using their own documents. We are really a process tool. They upload their documents, they can invite–most deals are two sided–the other law firm. They invite their clients of course. They can invite the accountants. Everyone involved on a deal comes together in one true digital version of the deal instead of having separate closing rooms and emailing documents, then the clients have their own portal where they can securely review and then sign their documents and as they’re signing documents, that’s all tracked back so the lawyer can see exactly who signed what and who hasn’t. It’s funny because most people think of signing a document: It’s very quick, it’s one contract or whatever and maybe two people signing.

Kevin O’Keefe: Oh no–you could have page after page

Amir Reshef: Yeah, so when you have a thousand documents, the problem gets huge when it’s on a deal.

Kevin O’Keefe: Did you go directly from college, law, to: you’re in the large firm, and now you’re an entrepreneur? 

Amir Reshef: Yeah, exactly.

Kevin O’Keefe: What’s been the biggest surprise? Or let me ask, before even that–why you? When you’re sitting there working at large firm, you’re not working with a lot of people that are ready to quit and start their own companies. What made you as somebody that was willing to do that?

Amir Reshef: It’s funny, I never had heard of entrepreneurship until I did a joint JD MBA. And so in my MBA I had always just assumed every company has always existed. I don’t know how I never thought of it. Facebook was always Facebook. I’d never thought about the people behind the company who started it. Somehow I missed the boat on it completely, but then I started learning about it more during my MBA and I was like, ‘this seems amazing.’ And I decided–I gave myself a maximum of five years.

Kevin O’Keefe: So you had a plan?

Amir Reshef: Yeah. After five years, I was afraid the golden handcuffs would kick in too strongly. So I said ‘five years at most,’ but then after practicing–and I always thought I’d join a startup and be employee number 30 or whatever. I got–what I see it as fortunate enough–to live this problem and actually quit long before five years. I practiced almost three and then decided to take the plunge and co-found a company.

Kevin O’Keefe: Who were the mentors that allowed you to do that, that you were talking to ‘I’m going to do this thing and different things’ because obviously you’ve got an MBA–you’re learning something, but it’s nothing like learning it on the ground.

Amir Reshef: No, it’s nothing at all. I’m really lucky. Edmonton has a really great tech community and startup community. I have a lot of friends in that community. So when I was thinking about it, I was able to talk to other co-founders and founders and ask questions like, ‘When should I quit? Am I crazy? What’s it going to be like?’ And you can’t actually prepare for what it’s going to be like. I’m lucky that I have a lot of mentors in my community that I bet are always willing to give me some time of day, even from some of the really big companies. Edmonton’s a very supportive and collaborative community. So that’s how.

Kevin O’Keefe: What’s been your biggest surprise?

Amir Reshef: Honestly, this is going to make me sound very naive, but I thought it would be like a red carpet unrolled for us. Like it’d be so easy. Customers would be flocking to sign up. And I just didn’t expect how hard it was going to be. Also it’s been super rewarding. But I was completely naive–thought it’d be like, ‘here’s some money.’ It’s obviously not that easy or else everyone would be doing. It’s been extremely rewarding. But that was the big surprise–just learning the reality of what I decided to undertake. Maybe I should have done better research.

Kevin O’Keefe: Were your parents or relatives, asking ‘what are you doing?’

Amir Reshef:  They’ve been extremely supportive. I’m lucky. I don’t have a lot of risks. I rent. No kids. Not married. So this is the time to try this kind of thing. My parents are happy that I did and I would not have been able to do it without them and the level of support they’ve given me.

Kevin O’Keefe: I started my first law firm and I haven’t practiced in 20 some years and I traveled 200 some miles to see my mentor in Milwaukee and I’m telling him I’m thinking about starting my own firm and he goes ‘you don’t have any risk.’ I go, ‘I have five kids and we just bought an old Victorian house. We’re going to restore it.’ He goes, ‘if it doesn’t work out. You just fall down and get back up and do it again and it will probably work out anyway.’ and I’m like ‘are you nuts?’ But I think there’s a lot of truth to that for people to really step back and say, what do I really have at risk? And if I’m really confident in an idea that I believe in, if I don’t do it, that might be the greater risk.

Amir Reshef: That’s the risk, yeah.

Kevin O’Keefe: It’s your first company and your vision of how it’s going to be so easy and so obvious–it’s going to work. But there have to have been moments where you go, ‘this is going to fly. We’re going to do this. I know it. Now.’ Are there occasions where that’s happened or do you remember particular events or you got this client?

Amir Reshef: Yeah, exactly. I still get that feeling when something good happens, but I guess what’s interesting is, and what’s changed is it used to be at the early days, there wasn’t a lot of good news and there wasn’t a lot of bad news. So good news really stood out and bad news was crushing and now there’s more of both kinds. It just averages out to be ‘a day’ now. But yeah, there’s lots of moments where I’m just like, ‘this is awesome.’ Even at our booth, someone just signed up just earlier, like an hour ago so I was, I was happy about that. That was cool. I was like, ‘this is working, this is validation.’.

Kevin O’Keefe: Do they pay a subscription over a period of time or they pay per use?

Amir Reshef: It’s a per person per month cost. $79 month to month.

Kevin O’Keefe: Pretty good.

Amir Reshef: Yeah, we’re pretty competitive for pricing. They can pay for the year and then it’s cheaper. It ends up being 69 a month.

Kevin O’Keefe: How did you figure out your pricing?

Amir Reshef: We looked at a lot of other companies, including Clio and we saw the range in legal tech and in SaaS. But pricing is something we have to continually revisit. I read an article that said most startups, they basically set their price in their first days of existence and then never go back to it. And it’s one of your most important things so we don’t talk about it often. Maybe not as often as we should, but we do talk about it and we’re ready to try different prices out. Startups are like tons of experiments that you’re running.

Kevin O’Keefe: Yeah you’re trying to figure out: can we add greater value to validate this price or increase the price? Do we need to go down in price as we’re becoming more efficient?

Amir Reshef: Or do we have a new feature that is going to be a different tier. There’s lots of things you can do.

Kevin O’Keefe: How many people are working?

Amir Reshef: Eight. Five of them are here today.

Kevin O’Keefe: That’s impressive. How’s everybody feeling like coming here?

Amir Reshef: I went last year as an attendee and loved it and I like talked it up on how much fun they’re going to have and it’s been awesome.

Kevin O’Keefe: Do you find that having your people at Clio and you being at Clio, in addition to meeting lawyers and you can sign up customers, just the inspiration–the client centric, ‘we can do this stuff,’ just rubs off?

Amir Reshef: It does, it’s very inspiring.

Kevin O’Keefe: You go home and you’re ready to do more and conquer the world.

Amir Reshef: I mean Jack’s keynote yesterday was super interesting from all those stats. They’ve led us to think about what directions we can take on our next features. That was super valuable for us to hear those thoughts. He did all the research for us.

Kevin O’Keefe: I’m going on Twitter and I’m giving messages to my team. ‘Why can’t Lexblog do this?’

Amir Reshef: Yeah, my developers too when I started making feature requests, they tried to like calm me down.

Kevin O’Keefe: Yeah. Because sometimes you know, Hey, you haven’t thought about what we might be able to do with this if we work on this to do that. And that will be a real art on your part to be able to step back and power these people to do great things and they’ll come back and do better things that you couldn’t have envisioned.

Amir Reshef: That also has evolved. It used to be everything I said got built because I was a subject matter expert. Right. And now I asked for something sometimes that my developers will be like, well did a customer tell you that? They question me now about it. Like ‘why should we do it? What’s the priority?’

Kevin O’Keefe: But sometimes you know, I tell our team, man, customers don’t know what they want.

Amir Reshef: That’s true too.

Kevin O’Keefe: Nobody was waiting on this thing when we just introduced it to the marketplace. But yet they’re buying.

Amir Reshef: That’s why we also track how they use the app cause tells a different thing.

Kevin O’Keefe: What do you tell somebody that’s sitting at a firm whose maybe thinking like you thinking, I only want to be on it for a period of time. What do you tell them?

Amir Reshef: Go for it. That it’s not easy.

Kevin O’Keefe: What’s the most important thing they need to have when they leave [a firm]?

Amir Reshef: In what sense?

Kevin O’Keefe: Not talking about money, but what did they need to have? What has got to be in your DNA?

Amir Reshef: Risk tolerance. Enjoying situations where there’s no instructions. When you’re an associate at a firm you do what you’re told. You don’t have to think too hard about what you do next or how you do it, but there’s no manual for what we’re doing. They have to be prepared for the unknown really and be comfortable with that.

Kevin O’Keefe: It’s great what you’re doing, it’s a cool idea. And what i’m amazed is I go to different conferences, just set up shop or go on Twitter and say, ‘I would like to talk to legal tech entrepreneurs,’ and meet people like you and they just keep coming. It’s going to be the lifeblood of the law because as things from large law begin to change in the way they deliver legal services, it’s going to take that tech and that automation for people to look at things differently.

Amir Reshef: It’s coming whether they like it or not.

Kevin O’Keefe: That’s right. But actually you can help individual lawyers maybe make more money, they might be able to do more sales.

Amir Reshef: We we have stats on that in fact so that we’re starting to collect it with some of our customers. So we are trying to build an ROI calculator cause nothing is more compelling than just the numbers. We’re working on that now.

Kevin O’Keefe: And you can be empowering individual lawyers are a couple lawyers to go out and be their own law firm.

Amir Reshef: Yeah and they can punch above their weight. We like to tell them that.

Kevin O’Keefe: I told Jack [Newton] that. I said ‘you’re punching above your weight, way above your weight’ at Clio. It just continues to get higher and higher. You’re doing it, and you’re helping those lawyers do it. It’s pretty cool.

Amir Reshef: Thank you. It’s fun to do this. It’s stressful, but I find the stress better than the stress I had at a law firm. It’s like a less toxic stress.

Kevin O’Keefe: That’s a really good way to put it because people are stressed by it. ‘Is this what I want to do. this isn’t rewarding. I’m getting paid a bunch of money. It this all that’s going to happen to me in my entire life? You wake up in the night, probably more with that than you do with things that people would think you should be scared about in a Startup. Congratulations. Great to chat with you.

Amir Reshef: Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Kevin speaking with Clio CEO Jack Newton on his vision for the company, the industry’s direction, and ClioCloud9. Jack reflects on the early days of Clio and how much he’s learned a long the way, saying “For me it’s almost a time of reflection, where I realize we’re now the grandfather of this new wave of technology as one of the first cloud based applications and first cloud based practice management product when we launched back in 2008.”

Transcript

Kevin O’Keefe: I won’t even ask you who I’m talking with. Talking with Jack Newton from the Clio. How many years for Clio Con?

Jack Newton: This is our seventh Clio Con, if you can believe it. So, we started back in 2013 at the Hotel Sachs, with just over 200 attendees at that very first Clio Con. And six short years later, we’re celebrating our seventh Clio Con and it’s grown to about 2000 attendees. We’ve got over 90, exhibitors and sponsors of the conference here. We’ve got keynote speakers like Daniel Pink and Glenn Greenwald presented yesterday. So yeah, it’s unbelievable how far this conference has come, a relatively short amount of time. 

Kevin: I was walking, taking the escalator up, you know, to get to talk to some of the keynote speakers in the back room. Not that long ago, there was like this impression of, “okay, this is kind of cool. You go, people go to Chicago and you’ve got this quaint user conference, you know, will it ever grow?”. Now you have some vision of what you thought it could be. I guess I wouldn’t have underestimated you, but I’ve never really thought it would’ve been like this. 

Jack:Yeah. Well, truth be told, you know, I had a vision for what I hoped it would eventually become. And this is, this is really, I think in a lot of ways become even grander and bigger than what that initial vision was. You know, I think, and maybe it’s in step a little bit with I think our growing ambitions for Clio as well. Um, where, you know, six years ago we had a different series of goals in mind for where we wanted to take with Clio.And I think especially when we celebrated our 10th anniversary and thought about the kind of opportunity that lies ahead for Clio and the way we want to transform the legal industry, we started doing this conference as a really essential tool for us catalyzing that change. I think there was a real moment for me probably three or four years ago, that I realized Clio has gotta be way more than just a software product to really have the kind of impact from a mission perspective as you know, but maybe not all of your viewers do. Our mission is to transform the practice of law for good. And we realized, you know, like I said, four or five years ago that things like Clio Con need to be about obviously evangelizing the product and hopefully getting people more successful with Clio. But it’s also about how do we need to innovate in the way that we’re delivering legal services. How can Clio be part of helping the legal industry as a whole thrive? And that’s really what the conference has become is a really important both communication platform for us to talk to the industry outward, but also to bring together, you know, the thought leaders in the legal industry and you look around and it’s really a who’s who of everyone who’s doing anything interesting in legal. 

Kevin: And leave them inspired. Making them inspired to go do great things on their own. 

Jack: Right and create a space for them to collaborate and get together. 

Kevin: (3:15) I mean, you’ve grown into this role, I’m talking Clio and you personally. You guys would become very worthy of the role you’re now playing in the industry. And so you, I mean, things are dramatically changed. I mean, you’re off sitting on other boards right now. How do you view your role in that regard? You have positions at other companies and boards and whatnot based on your stature in legal. 

Jack: I mean, it’s humbling for me on one end where I’m, you know, sought after as this seasoned professional in legal technology. And I look back and there’s a little bit of a disconnect almost where I still think about Clio and myself as the upstart. Um, and the startup that is still trying to disrupt incumbents and disrupt an industry with established on premise players. So for me it’s almost a moment of reflection where I realize, wow, “we’re actually the grandfather of this new wave of technology as one of the first cloud based applications and the first cloud based practice management product when we launched back in 2008”. I realized they with the benefit of hindsight like, “wow, I have learned a lot”. I’ve got a lot of knowledge and experience and hard learned lessons. I always talk about, you know, I view part of my role is I was really just trying to pay it forward. I want the next generation of founders to be successful. I think there is a lot of what I describe as, “avoidable scar tissue” that, you know, if I can pass on a lesson that, you know, it was maybe a hard learned lesson for me to a younger founder or to an up and coming founder, that’s massively valuable and something I want to, you know, really evolve into is somebody who is helping create large scale impact in the legal industry and in a way that is bigger than just Clio. Clio is obviously the primary platform for that, but I want to be strategically helping out, you know, a lot of different companies who are kind of locking arms with us and trying to transform this industry. 

Kevin: (5:14) Maybe you can’t do it all. 

Jack: That’s right. 

Kevin: You did a wonderful job in taking that brand from the cloud-based and what it could do there for people to transforming the business in the practice of law. And you know, in addition to how that’s perceived in the outside world, probably 80 times more important is the belief that your team has and how it inspires them to do great things that you’re not doing, that they could do better than you’ve ever wanted. You guys continue to bout above your weight. We’re learning things as we go. We try new things and we’re not afraid to try things. And all of a sudden you’re up here and you’re up here. You’re up here. Cause I mean, recently you just raised a huge sum of money, you know, it’s staggering when you think about it. I mean, I tried to imagine if I would have told you and Rian, you know at your stand at the ABA Tech Show 10 or 11 years ago, “do you know what, you guys are going to raise a quarter of $1 billion in about 10 years?”.

Jack: (6:17) Yeah. We would’ve laughed you out of our booth. 

Kevin: “Do you realize we gotta return this back to the Apple store to get our money back?”

Unidentified Person:  So sorry to bug you Jack, can I steal a selfie with you man?

Kevin: Can you wait a minute?

Jack: I’m just, Uh, sure, sure.

Unidentified Person: I’m so sorry.

Jack: No problem, okay.

Unidentified Person: That’s all I need man.

Jack: Great to meet you.

Kevin: See who you are.

Jack: There we go. There we go.

Kevin: He didn’t ask you to sit on his board.

Jack: Not yet, we’ll wait for that.

Kevin: If I would have told you “there’s things you just do with that. Well, I might go to the moon in a rocket”. And there might be better chance maybe. 

Jack: (6:55) It’s truly astonishing. And I think, you know, huge validation of what the mission has grown into. You know, that we’ve got some of the most sophisticated and smartest investors on the planet. Um, underwriting. 

Kevin: Tell me about them. And you know, how you came together with them and how they grew with Clio for some of time. And now there’s new investors and new people, you know, what you think they see in you and your team.

Jack: So, yeah, I think that what they, you know, what they saw. So, so number one, you know, Clio was in the very fortunate position of a seeing enormous growth over the last decade. We’ve been growing, you know, dramatically year over year. And we’ve been in the very fortunate position of actually not needing to raise capital. Which only makes investors only want to invest in you more, is if you say, don’t worry, I don’t need your money. Um, but we were at an inflection point, you know, as a company where we saw an opportunity to really double down and accelerate in our vision. And we had, we had dozens of venture capital firms and growth equity firms pursuing us, you know, trying to convince us to take their money. And I’ve got to say TCD and JMI who are the two firms we ended up partnering with were two of the most persistent firms that, you know, spent literally four years building relationships with me and the management team and even our existing investors. Um, you know, TCV, you know, leveraged Mark for example, saying “we really want to get in on this Clio deal. Do you know, Jack, can you make an intro? Can you help, you know, get us to the table if they ended up doing a deal?” which is, exactly what Mark did. And it all came together in a way that I’m super happy with where, you know, I shared with them the vision they’re buying into is a, well a few of the facts in a few of the aspects of the vision they’re buying into is, number one, they want to invest it in and back a clear industry leaders, they want to back the number one company in a space that has the opportunity to become the overall winner and dominant player in that space, the long-term enduring winners. So, you know, I think with Clio, they saw the opportunity to say, “look, this is the Salesforce for legal”. And in the same way that salesforce.com utterly dominates the sales automation industry, they saw the opportunity for Clio to really do that in legal. They saw an industry that has still really, like, even with all the success Clio has seen, they see us as not even being in the early innings, but just walking out onto the field when it comes to technology adoption in legal. And you know, even with the success we’ve had to this point, we still see a vast amount of under penetration of technology in the legal industry. As I mentioned in my opening keynote, I truly believe it legal is the last major industry to be fundamentally transformed by technology. 

Kevin: (9:58) What do you guys see is the size of the market?

Jack: The size of the market I would say is, you know, number one, we’ve got a million attorneys in the U.S. I think we have two to three times that in terms of staff surrounding those attorneys and the worldwide market is two or three times bigger than that. So I think there’s an opportunity and the vision for Clio, the longer term vision is not only to transform the practice of law for good, but we think we have a really solid shot at becoming an IPO scale company from a revenue and growth perspective and that’s always been mine ann the team’s dream is “can we build and show that a legal tech company can not only drive a lot of positive change for the industry and create more opportunity for lawyers, but also in the process of doing that become an enormous and successful company where, you know, myself and the management team are able to, you know, number one, foster the amazing culture that’s helped get us, get us to this point, catalyze this industry change, make our customers more successful and happier, make their clients happier and more satisfied with the interactions they’re having with their lawyer. And as a side effect of doing all of this, I think we’re also really increasing access to justice by allowing lawyers to operate more efficiently and deliver client experiences that match their client expectations”. 

Kevin: You have all that leading to demand.  Access to legal service that people thought of using a lawyer because not sure they knew of one or not sure they they don’t interact in that world. So when I go out and you probably run into the same crew that I run a lot. So, I’m talking about Clio, the culture, what you guys are building, you know, being a platform that people can integrate onto it and he’s going to continue to grow and grow and people haven’t seen probably anything there in large. So they’re looking at, well, “Clio is doing this thing and they’re doing really good and they’re doing mom and pop shops and solo lawyers or whatever, but it’s obviously nothing we’ll ever be involved in”. You know, I’d never looked at it that way. Now when you realize the opportunity in the foundation in this platform that you built, now to grown from, you guys see the opportunity for, like you just described, “it’s a million lawyers in the States”. It’s doesn’t matter what size of organization you’re in. They could be using things on our platform. 

Jack: (12:25) Yeah, yeah. I view every lawyer in the U S as a potential customer. I see that there’s going to be, you know, I believe a longterm advantages to solos and smaller firms and boutique firms over the very large firms. I think that, you know, there’s been plenty published about this, but there’s diseconomies of scale as you grow. And I think technology is actually interestingly enough, rapidly creating this asymmetry where solos and small firms and mid size firms have better tools at their disposal with tools like Clio then there their large firm counterparts do. I had a small firm mentioned me recently that they were using Clio connect to interact with a client and give them a secure portal for logging in at his client had previously been working with, you know, an AmLaw 10 firm and with their, you know, literally millions of dollars of on-prem systems they were still not able to deliver this kind of a client of experience. And this client preferred using the smaller firms using these cloud tools that deliver a better client experience. You know, as Clio does over working with a big firm that doesn’t have these tools. So I think what’s really interesting is, all of a sudden, and it’s just happened over the course of a decade, but the scales have really tipped in favor of nimble firms that can adopt new technology rapidly and use that to become more efficient and to deliver better client experiences.

Kevin: (14:00) Yeah. I mean like when we introduced blogs, all of a sudden lawyers are going, “this is amazing”. I’m sitting there next to skin because I’m publishing in environments that they could only have access to before and they’re not even using it as well to reach to reach people. You know, it’s phenomenal when you think about it, you know, in that fashion. I mean, the other thing that has to be going on too, is you have greater and greater efficiencies of technology, which is disrupting the large firm model of, “well, I’ve got 500 associate lawyers and junior partners below me that are billing it $4-$500 an hour and it’s going out to the corporation. And so I’ll sit at the end and I get my $800,000 salary, but I get my one and a half or $2 million profits, them compensate them”. You’re going to be gone because who’s going to pay four or $500 an hour because It can be somewhat automated and it requires less people

Jack: (14:48) A bunch of things, right? I mean, there’s things that can be automated. There’s the structural cost of having that AAA office space in downtown, wherever. You know, a good friend of mine works at a very large law firm in Canada. He was sharing with me the other day that his overhead is $20,000 a month. So he needs to do $20,000 of billings before he even breaks even for the firm, because of the administrative overhead, the technology overhead, the AAA office space he has in downtown Vancouver, all of that stuff. And that’s what creates the structural access to justice problem. 

Kevin: Mine was $30,000 in Lacrosse, Wisconsin in 1996. 

Jack: I’m sure $20,000 is actually not bad compared. So you just think about that and you think about like and about all that we do. 

Kevin: Why don’t we start to strip that all away?

Jack: We’re just on the cusp and this is the division for Clio and where I think things are happening very rapidly heading is the need for bricks and mortar law offices are going to go away. The need to impress your client by inviting them into your, you know, marble lined lobby and expensive walnut burled office environment is going to be in the rear view mirror. And we’re going to have nimble lawyers delivering legal solutions to their clients. Working out of a WeWork working out about some other co-working space. 

Kevin: (16:02) And I remember a lawyer telling me this morning that’s she’s working out of a trailer. 

Jack: In an RV. I spoke to the same lady. 

Kevin: She was speaking today. 

Jack: It was like a roving law office. 

Kevin: With three kids. 

Jack: With three kids. Amazing. So I think that’s it. You’ll see people working out of their home office, but they’ll be able to deliver better legal experiences using technology at like, not just a slightly more efficient cost basis, but you know, an order of magnitude better cost basis than what their traditional bricks and mortar, large law firm competitors, are doing.

Kevin: That woman that we both talked with, she’s doing sophisticated energy work. 

Jack: Oh yeah. 

Kevin: I mean, well somebody will say, “well, our firm does all this stuff”. She has some really sophisticated clients. 

Jack: Oh yeah. And I meet those lawyers all the time. They’ve left very large firms, they’ve moved into a boutique practice or a small practice. The phrase I keep hearing is, “I work half as much as I make twice as much”. You know, I’ve talked to several customers that have been able to make that transition. They’re able to keep all of the revenue they’re generating, their overhead costs are minimal. You know they’re able to essentially pay for a few software as a service subscriptions and other minor, maybe a. I love the legal research tool and they’ve got a fully, they’ve got everything they need to run an efficient law practice.

Kevin: (17:27) You need to keep the drive and the energy going for that with your team and with all these people that are becoming advanced. Even me, because at times I get cynical as to whether I can push this rock over the hill. I come here and I go, “I can do that”. You know, based on you and Clio, but even some of the speakers you have in here. 

Jack: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 

Kevin: I’m not afraid to say what I think. Which you guys have a heck of a swagger right now and saying, “this is the way it’s going to be. Look what we just found in our report. Lawyers are woefully inefficient. Lawyers are pathetic in the way they’re responding to customer service issues”. Um, it’s really inspiring to hear that from you. 

Jack: Well, thank you. I’m glad to hear that. And that’s, you know, that’s exactly what we’re trying to do. We think there’s, you know, there’s so much gnashing of teeth around what the future of the legal profession looks like. And, um, you know, I talk a lot about a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. And I think the legal industry, if they take a growth mindset approach to things, if they look at something that outlined in the opening keynote, which is this product market fit opportunity, if they look at it not as, you know, this “$437 billion industry is highly competitive and getting commodified”. How about the fact that there’s 77% of this market that is completely untapped. 

Kevin: It’s all about these niches. 

Jack: (18:51) If you innovate, even in the most minimal of ways. 

Kevin: Yeah, you showed that.

Jack: If you innovate in a way that lets you be more responsive to inbound leads, if you find a way to pick up the phone, you know, and maybe that’s hiring one of the three call answering services that are here and directly integrated with Clio so that you make sure you’re picking up every single inbound lead. You’re using a proper lead tracking system to make sure you’re nurturing those leads and moving them through a pipeline. You look at your law firm as a business. And that’s something that Mark Britton talked about yesterday to, you know, great reviews is the fact that, you know, lawyers need to look at themselves as business people. They need to look at lead generation and they need to look at their prospective clients really as leads that they need to be responsive to.

Kevin: And here’s this guy and how Jack Newton was, with what, three kids? 

Jack: Three kids on yeah. 

Kevin: You’re not on lawyer. 

Jack: Nope. Not a lawyer. 

Kevin: Your technology guy. You’re building the following. How’d that happen? Just very quickly. How did Jack Newton get here to lead all these lawyers to somewhat the promised land? How you can use technology to have a better life?

Jack: (20:03) I think number one there’s, as non obvious as it might be, there’s so many parallels between how I’ve built Clio and the lessons I’ve applied and the way I’ve built Clio and the way that I think lawyers need to be looking at developing their clients and developing their opportunity. And you know, when even the book I just published “The Clientcentric Law Firm” and I know you’ve got a preview copy, it’s really an adaptation of the lessons I’ve learned in building Clio and being clientcentric and how we’ve built Clio. Um, and I think what happened, you know, I think, to your question more completely, I think one of the really important things that happened is, I realized at some point along our journey, you know, we started off kind of building a product and then throwing it across the fence and just asking the lawyers “is this useful?”. And again, we were building that product market fit over time and initially there was, okay product market fit and it just kept getting better and better and better. Um, and then, you know, cut to maybe five years ago, I realize we’re working with thousands of the best and smartest law firms in the country. We’re at the forefront of innovation and we’re co-creators with these firms around what the future of the practice of law looks like. And furthermore, we’ve got this, I’ve got, and we’ve got this unique vantage point where we’re almost like a, I’m a Kinsey or Boston consulting group where we get this, this kind of lateral view of all the great works that that’s happening across all these different firms. Um, and that just makes me, puts me in a really great place to observe, “what are the important trends, what are the leaders in this space doing? How are we helping catalyze change with technology and co-creating with them?”. And then, “How can I gather all of those learnings up?”. Also, you know, I’m a technology guy, I see what’s happening in other consumer spaces. I see what Amazon’s doing. Right? I see what, um, you know, I talked about Zoom and Slack and all these other. 

Kevin: (22:15) The way you’ve done it. To say “I had all this. Now, I’m co-creating with the lawyers”. It’s a great model. 

Jack: It’s an amazing place to be in. And then at an event like this, we’re able to, to turn around and say, “look, here’s everything we learned”. To answer your question, you know, as, “how do we draw this crowd and audience to hear that message?”, you know, my only hope is we’re saying something that’s worth hearing and that we’re inspiring people. 

Kevin: We go home and you tell them what to come back to, then we gotta be here next year and year after year and continuing to grow, and I expect we’ll be 2,500 people here, if not 3000.

Jack: Yeah. And I have every expectation that this’ll keep growing. 

Kevin: Thank you for doing it. I really appreciate it personally.

Jack: Well, thanks. Thanks for supporting it. 

Kevin: Thank you.

Crystal McDonough, Founder of McDonough Law LLC, speaks with Kevin at the seventh annual ClioCloud9 conference in San Diego about her experiences as an attorney while traveling the country in a “condo on wheels.”

Transcript

Kevin O’Keefe: Whom I talking with? 

Crystal McDonough: I’m Crystal McDonough. 

Kevin: And what does Crystal McDonough do?

Crystal: I am an attorney and I own McDonough Law LLC.

Kevin: Nice last name. Did you you have that before you got married or did you pick that up?

Crystal: That’s my married name.

Kevin: Good for you. Being Irish, I’m empathetic towards the Irish name. Where are you? I’ve met you the other night and I think I may have said, you know, like “where do you live?”. And so where do you live? Where, where’s your law office?

Crystal: Alright, so we have four offices, three of them in Colorado, one in Wyoming. Um, home is Colorado.

Kevin: The thing that piqued my interest was what, all of a sudden it was like, “Wow, how can that be where you guys are living?”. What’s the story about this?

Crystal: So I grew up in Grand Lake tiny, tiny little mountain town, ramping right next to Rocky Mountain National Park, way up in the mountains. And so, my heart’s always been in Colorado, but I love to travel. So about 2013, I convinced my husband to buy an RV and pack up the kids, the dogs, and head out on an adventure. 

Kevin: (1:23) As a lawyer too.

Crystal: As a lawyer, yeah. So we headed out for our first two week adventure, went up to Yellowstone and loved it. So I was hooked. 

Kevin: What was the WiFi like up in Yellowstone?

Crystal: Honestly I don’t even remember that, but, since then we’ve gotten a lot more sophisticated with our travel and a hotspots and things like that.

Kevin: But as I understand it, I mean your entire family of three children, you have three children?

Crystal: I have three kids, three teenagers. 

Kevin: You and your husband travel at the same time that you’re practicing law.

Crystal: Yes, yes.

Kevin: And you’re doing this out of a motor home or a very large sized trailer that’s being pulled by a truck.

Crystal: (2:04) Yup. We have a giant 40 foot fifth wheel, four slides, and a fireplace, and a kitchen island. So I call it my condo on wheels.

Kevin: So imagine somebody like me, who started practicing and graduated from law school in 1982. You know, you basically got to find, we’ll first it was in Ireland, we still had offices, but then, you know, we have an office, we have a firm, we’d come in in the morning, we hang our coat on the back of the hook. Um, you know, we have the hard line telephone. You know, the clients come in and meet us. Uh, we meet the clients at the office, we walked in the courthouse, you know, and here you are off in this traveling thing with the entire family. It’s so far fetched for what I could even imagine. What type of work do you do that allows you to do that type of work? And then how do you interface with clients today?

Crystal: (3:00) So this is by design. I knew this as second career for me. I went to law school with three little kids. My youngest was three years old when I went to law school. And I knew when I went to law school that I wanted to start a law firm. The goal was to be independent and to have freedom and flexibility to work and live around my family rather than being married to my job all day. So this was an intentional plan. I designed my practice so that we could be completely mobile and not tied to any one location. While we have physical offices, we rarely use them and, instead, I’ve designed our practice so that every single person in the firm can work remotely.

Kevin: And who’s we? When you say “we at the firm”, who are all these people? Are they lawyers? Are there other paralegals, assistants? What, who are they all?

Crystal: So started off solo and grew from there. I had a partner at one point and then, um, you know, as life goes, I found myself solo again and then decided to rebrand and started hiring attorneys and support staff, and paralegals. So I’ve got about 10 folks working for me now and I love it. And every single one of them gets to work remotely. I do have one paralegal that comes into the office because occasionally we have mail, but I’ve set us up completely paperless. So when I’m working with clients, we work remotely anyway. Most of my clients are very busy and don’t have the time to come into the office or they don’t live anywhere near one of our offices. I’ve got clients all over the country. 

Kevin: What type of work? 

Crystal: (4:41) So we practice natural resources, energy, business, and trust in the States.

Kevin: You know, I think when people first hear this they’re thinking, well you know, “what type of sophisticated client would even consider, you know, this type of thing?”. So it doesn’t bother those clients where you’re working or where your team is or anything about it. So long as they’re getting good quality representation.

Crystal: Exactly. And we’re always available. I always have my phone and my clients have my cell phone number. 

Kevin: So 24/7/365. 

Crystal: So, yes. They can reach me at always email, phone calls, zoom calls, you know, whatever works, whatever they need, we get the job done. 

Kevin: Where’s your husband? Is your husband working? 

Crystal: He is now a stay at home dad.

Kevin: Yeah. I would guess. You’re able to build this thing at the same time, you gotta go out to law school where your youngest is three years old. You know, I can only imagine. What’s it like for the kids? You know, mom is around or in the trailer, travelling all over. What do they think?

Crystal: They love it. So, in order to make the traveling work and started, we home-schooled our kids. It’s been just a wonderful experience for all of us. We’ll get to sit down at the kitchen table. I’ll be working on client work. They can be working on school and or I’m in my home office and if they’ve got questions they can come in and talk to me. My littlest, she used to have a little desk set up in my office and that was her desk and she would do her school in my office while mommy was working. And it was wonderful. When I took a break I could have lunch with them or snacks or cuddle with them. It’s been great.

Kevin: (6:16) As far as the area of the law that you’re doing, did that dovetail off of Wyoming as far as the energy area? 

Crystal: Yeah. I went to the University of Wyoming and I received my JD and my master’s. So my master’s is in natural resources and energy. And then I also worked for the school of energy resources as a graduate assistant. I got to work on amazing energy projects while I was a student. And in fact I actually worked for the state legislature. I was assigned by the school of energy resources to the wind energy task force in the state legislature. So I did all the research and assisted in drafting a lot of the wind energy policy, which was fascinating as a law student and in great opportunity it helped to jumpstart my career. So when I went out on my own and started my firm, I had clients in hand.

Kevin: Alrighty. And you were already on your way to knowing what you’re doing too, as opposed to trying to figure out what you’re doing. You know the idea of a distributed workforce today is a term that’s becoming involved. We use as our core software is WordPress. So I’ve gotten to know Matt Mullenweg who’s the co founder of WordPress, but he’s the principal on our, you know, WordPress.com a largest install of it, which is a multi-billion dollar company. They have no officers and Matt has people around the world. Last year I think he traveled 200,000 miles to make sure he got to spend time with them. And the only time their team comes together is if they want to do meetups, but they can say “okay we’re located in Canada, the States, located wherever. Let’s have a meeting in Athens”. And they do that. In our company, we moved out of regular offices, but we moved into offices at WeWork where we all are. But now we are going to distributed cause why would we call somebody “remote” like it’s a lesser thing. I got a new newish team member that will be running products I haven’t met. I’ll meet on Thursday. Lives in Austin that joined us about 10 days to two weeks ago. It’s an eye opening thing. What do you see as someone your age that where you practiced law, the internet existed and these new means of communication like you said, “I’ve got this in my pocket”? It’s totally different than someone my age that hasn’t seen it. It’s almost like I feel that we’re a little bit handicapped because we can’t see what you see. We haven’t communicated like you’ve communicated in this new world. I mean, I’m sure you’ve been asked the question by people that are saying, well, “how’s that possible? Could I really do this? That’s impossible for me to do that”? How do you look at it? Why do you look at it differently? What caused you to look at this differently?

Crystal: (9:12) Well, I looked at it, I think because I came to law firm from a different background. You know, I had three kids. We had already owned and operated several small businesses by the time I started law school. I was in my thirties when I started law school, so I’m now in my forties. And I think that having those backgrounds and experiences before law completely changed the way 

Kevin: It’s a paradigm. 

Crystal: It is. It is. I think differently. I look at things different. I see the possibilities differently. I really think that’s why I do still need help on the technology side. Sometimes my kids have to help me with my phone. Um, but you know, it’s been great. I hired one of my attorneys while I was on the road in Florida.

Kevin: (10:03) I asked my COO? I said, “Garry, come on, I mean, seriously? This person is going to lead our products? You know, we’ve never met him”. He goes, “I’ll tell you if it doesn’t work out, you know, we may never meet him. He’ll part ways or we’ll part ways with him”. Why’d you become a lawyer?

Crystal: So my path is a little bit different. I never set out to be a lawyer.

Kevin: But somehow you ended up in law school?

Crystal: I did, I love learning and I just continued to go to school. Um, while my kids were babies, I just kept taking classes and taking more classes and I ended up with multiple degrees and my husband looked at me one day and he said, is there an end to all of this? Are you just going to keep going to school? I mean, there should be a purpose. We’re spending a lot of money on this. So I started trying to think, okay, what do I really want to do? I started in program at the University of Denver, a masters program in environmental policy. And my first class was taught by a law professor that Ved Nanda from the DU law school. It was “global energy law” and everything he said that night just clicked with me. I grew up around natural resources. My dad worked for a water company that managed hydro and the Colorado river and my grandfather was a farmer and a rancher and managed his natural resources and, you know, took care of the land. He had oil and gas and it just kind of clicked for me. I came home that night and I said, “I gotta go to law school”. My husband said, “I don’t even have any idea how to do that, but we’ll figure it out”.

Kevin: (11:50) It’s different in the West because I was in the Midwest, then I came out to law school in California, in Northern California. Nobody’s concerned about, you know, water. Whether it was rights or water to the farmers. Ag stuff was so big and then classes on water law and I thinking “I never thought about this stuff”. Yeah. Uh, yeah, the West is much different. Um, what would you tell people, I mean, you were in a different business before, you just told the story about how you stumbled into law school. What do you tell young people about the, the opportunities that might await them as they see the law in law school? 

Crystal: There is so much work out there. People need and are looking for attorneys who can be counselors and can guide them through situations that they need help. And those can range from anything from business to various things. 

Kevin: This idea that there’s no more jobs left and there’s no opportunity. I mean, you probably have taught at law school and then some are like, “well, maybe there’s opportunities for you, but there’s none for us today”. “You know, we’re going to law school and paying all this money. We have all these student loans. We’re not gonna have any opportunities” and they’re saying, “woe is us”. You’re saying, “Hey, wait a second. There are plenty of opportunities”. 

Crystal: (13:06) There’s so much opportunity for people who are willing to look at law differently. What I think is the old traditional model of law, for me, it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work for me. Maybe it still works for, I know it works for many people. They’re still doing it, but that’s not what consumers want. Consumers want their attorneys to be accessible. The consumers want their attorneys to be responsible. They want to be paperless. They want to see commitment to the community and the environment. Consumers want to be able to use their smartphone to pay their bill. I have a client down in Texas. We manage his ranch in Colorado for him and we did some work for him. I sent him his invoice and popped up on his phone and he paid with his credit card and it was done. He called me and he said, “Crystal, will you please talk to my Texas attorney? I can’t convince him to send bills through email or text”. 

Kevin: It’s all over though. I mean, it’s the medical care. My doctor, I can email their team and they’ll spit it out and within an hour I’ll have a response. And I think it’s the greatest thing in the world. I’m showing it to people and I’m saying, “You see this? My doctor is responding in an email telling me exactly the situation”. That I probably don’t need to come in and here’s what’s going on. I love it. And I’m telling people about it. “Hey you gotta go to him”. You have those stats that Clio put, that Jack put up yesterday, and it’s shocking as far as the lawyers not getting back to people at all and all of that. You have a picture of the, cause I almost felt like calling out on, okay, “show me this thing that you can actually hold a family around and do legal work on them with the fireplace”. 

Crystal: (14:50) Yeah, I call it my condo on wheels because it’s so nice and comfortable. 

Kevin: That’s not all bad. How many square feet is it or do you know? 

Crystal: I don’t know. It’s 40 foot long and it has four slide-outs so I don’t know. I’m sure my husband can tell you exactly how many square feet it is. 

Kevin: You know that’s a good size. It’s the size of a good condominium. 

Crystal: Right, but you know if you’re going to live in for a month or two at a time or three months, you want to, you want to be comfortable. So this is it. 

Kevin: Can you see that? Thanks Melissa. What did you call it, the something on wheels? 

Crystal: The condo on wheels. 

Kevin: Yes, the condo on wheels. 

Crystal: We hauled the mountain bikes, we haul kayaks and paddle boards.

Kevin: How many days, or months, or weeks a year you’ll live in there at home?

Crystal: (15:37) So we tend to be on the road anywhere from four to six months and it kind of depends on what activities we have planned for the year. I typically like to go to Florida for the winter. I don’t like being cold any longer. 

Kevin: So will you guys head to Florida this winter?

Crystal: Not this year, not this year. We have a new adventure plan this winter. We’re buying horse property and we just bought our, our youngest daughter a horse. She’s been borrowing a horse for two years for Gymkhana and Four-H. So we decided it’s time to bite the bullet. She’s 13 she’s our youngest. So we’re all in.

Kevin: Pretty cool. And so when your kids go off to college or law school and they say, “Oh, you know, where are you from?”. “The condo on wheels” in addition to all their things. It’s a great inspiration for your kids. Great role model for your kids. You can do what you want. You can enjoy what you want. You can interact with the type of people that you want to and that the world is changing radically. Whether they’re professional like you, whether the business owners work in distributed workforce it’s very, very cool.

Crystal: Yeah, it’s exciting. It’s an exciting time to be in law and in business.

Kevin: Did you get to speak here and share your story or are you going to today?

Crystal: I am going to today at 3:15 and there’s a big slideshow of all of our favorite pictures. Our whole family sat down and picked out pictures to share with everybody here at the conference.

Kevin: So you tell your kids, “Hey, I’m going to this conference. This is what’s going on. Can you help me pick up pictures? I want to show up. I want to show a thousand people this, a thousand people what we do”.

Crystal: Yeah, so we’ve got a 30 minutes slide show loop. 

Kevin: That’s really cool. Thank you very much. 

Crystal: Thank you.

Kevin speaking with Manav Monga, co-founder of Heymarket, a Launch // Code finalist for the $100,000 grand prize awarded by Clio. Manav previously co-founded Manymoon, a social productivity app acquired by SalesForce.com in 2011. 

Transcript

Kevin O’Keefe: Who am I talking to? 

Manav Monga: I’m Manav Monga from Hey Market. 

Kevin: Okay. And what does Hey Market do? 

Manav: Hey Market is a business texting solution. Um, so most law firms today have a phone system that they use to communicate with the customers on, but there are a lot of issues with phone calls. Uh, Jack Newton was saying this morning, “60% of those calls go unanswered”. So what we do, we replaced that communication with texting. Where your clients or the attorney’s clients today would prefer to message the business, the law firm, and the entire team at the law firm could respond to that text. So there’s not just one person that text gets sent to. 

Kevin: How’s does that integrate with the conflict system at the firm? Um, does it integrate, is there some fashion that integrates on the conflict? So it comes in on a text, is their identification as to who the person is, what their company is an all that?

Manav: (1:01) Absolutely. So, we integrate with Clio, which is the source of truth in the contact record itself. So as soon as the message comes in, we go back into the clear record and see which, um, customer or contact the client or matter code matches that phone number. And then we marry those two up and then show you. 

Kevin: So it’s for existing customers, it’s not new customers coming in?

Manav: So the new customer comes in, you can immediately create a contact for that customer and it gets fed into Clio. So that way there’s a full record of the entire history of the conversation in a clear record, in a clear contact. 

Kevin: What were you doing before? Are you the founder of a company or one of the founders of the company or co-founder? 

Manav: Yeah, I’m one of the founders of the company yeah.

Kevin: What were you doing before?

Manav: So we were building, we’ve been building, uh, enterprise apps with now for the past 10 years. We had an app before this, um, called MiniMoon.com that was acquired by Salesforce. So we were at Salesforce for awhile. That app was pretty much taking a form of communication that was being used in consumer, which was feeds, and we took that and we pretty much made that so that it was enterprise grade. So instead of sharing your party photos and you know, throwing sheep at your friends, you were actually sharing documents and images and links and meetings and having discussions over them in a feed where the entire organization could be part of it. And there was total transparency around that. So that companies served over a 100,000 businesses. And then we joined Salesforce. We’re there for about, um, a few years, learned a lot from the big company, a lot of marketing, a lot of security and then we took some time off and started to travel as a team and we saw that outside of the United States, people just had left the desktop generation and had gone straight to mobile where they were communicating with businesses and their friends over messaging. So if you go to Spain, they’re ordering taxis over messenger. If you go to India, you can order drugs over messenger. So you do the entire transaction over messaging. But when we came back to the U S we saw that there was evidence of that happening in a lot of industries, but there were individuals that were bringing in their own cell phones and we’re doing the communication over their own personal device, which poses a lot of issues for the enterprise itself.

Kevin: (3:34) So does your product focus just on the law? Is it focused on other verticals?

Manav: So our product is the horizontal solution. We work through a lot of different verticals. Legal is a huge vertical for us.

Kevin: How did you identify legal as something you wanted to be in?

Manav: We initially started to get a few law firms and it started to grow by word of mouth. Um, and it really got viral with law firms. And what we heard from a lot of attorneys were that “our clients are not responding to us. And we send them emails or we do phone calls. But we send them a text message”. A text message has a 90% read rate on a 70% reply rate. So they were saying they could get payment reminders done. They could get people to attend court dates, they could get information off of them if they sent them a text message and vice versa. These clients have been messaging their attorneys and their attorneys have been doing this all on their personal devices and they have no record of that. So they can’t do any billing off of it. They can’t tie it back to their case. They have no one that can assist if they go on a holiday. 

Kevin: (4:50) So, the ability then when you integrate with Clio and you’re saying, “okay, we’re going to send out the message that we need to get this back to the client signed or whatever”, could come directly through a, you know, a Clio organized interface, but basically saying, “okay, did it go out by email? Did it go out by text?” You’re integrating in along those lines?

Manav: Absolutely. So we’re the communication channel for messaging. We have an interface in Clio that allows you to do all the texting right from there. We also have a mobile app, a very powerful mobile app, that allows you to be on the road and just communicate as if you were communicating on an app that you’re very familiar with. The great thing is your entire team is on that app.

Kevin: Could it be used by any business but you’re not going out. I mean like my business.

Manav: Yeah. So we have thousands of businesses that use us today. You know it’s businesses, it’s teams of different sizes. It could be you and your assistant that is dealing with potential bloggers or potential companies that you want to bring onto your platform that you could simply just have that entire communication over text.

Kevin: Yeah, cause I don’t use a machine. I’m all iOS. So the only thing I’m using is probably 40% my phone and 60% my iPad. And and all communications with my family and close customers and business partners are all text. So if I’m communicating with Ed Walters, if it’s late at night on the East coast, I don’t want to bug him in a text past midnight, but any other time it’s a text.

Manav: (6:22) And even you and Walter can be on the same phone number and you both can look at the same communication that you’re having and you can even private mention him in the app saying, “Hey Walter, can you help me out with this?” And he can then go and jump into that conversation and continue that conversation. It ties all back into a CRM.

Kevin: So, me personally, it allows me to jump service and impress my clients and I’m trying to be more consumer-centric for them personally.

Manav: Yup, yeah.

Kevin: Well that’s cool.

Manav: Yeah. Your clients are looking for companies like you to be on the channels that they’re on.

Kevin: That’s right. Everybody’s got to be thinking that way. We can’t. And sometimes you know, you can say like, we’ll say in the company sometimes, “You know I think we need this”. “Oh we haven’t had the customers demanding that”. The customers don’t know what they want. I said “if we wait for those requests. We never would have started blogs”.

Manav: (7:12) Totally, I mean, think about it today. If you could text versus call, what would you do? 

Kevin: Who wouldn’t text? 

Manav: Exactly. And so you would say the clients are doing the same thing and they expect the business to be compliant with that.

Kevin: I mean I’ve had my new iPhone for I think, I don’t know, however long they’ve been out, but it wasn’t until today when I realized, “Oh shit, it was requiring me to go in and put a new password in for the voicemail. I wonder what’s in there for voicemail?”. And at first I was starting to get paranoid and I’m thinking, “there aint anything in there that’s important”. There may be, but you know, maybe it was a medical issue or something. But short of that, you know, I’d rather get a text. Emails are good too. So how long did you do in the company that got acquired by Salesforce? How long have you been running that? 

Manav: (7:58) So that company went then for about two and a half years. 

Kevin: What were you doing before that? 

Manav: Before that I was working at another software company that I was one of the early engineers for. Um, and that was doing apps for old voice over IP phones. So, um, I’ve been in the telecom space for, uh, over 15 years. 

Kevin: What do you like most about, you know, starting things that didn’t exist before? 

Manav: Yeah, I think one, um, it has to be a problem that resonates with me. I have to think of users first. I need to understand the pains that it takes to actually use the application and find joy and delight with it. If I don’t find that, I don’t expect anyone else to. Um, so we use our own application to communicate with our customers. Um, and that’s really important for us. And the other thing is we want to solve, we think the business are just like consumers. They should not get tools that are that are a secondary thought or an afterthought. And you’ve got 15 things you’ve got to configure before you can actually start to use it. Um, companies like Dropbox, Apple, have made everyone equal in terms of how they consume technology. And I think business applications need to be the same thing. They’ve got to think about the user first, how they will interact with it, and then make every other thing invisible that matter to the business itself. 

Kevin: How big is your team? 

Manav: Um, we’re seven people and we’re growing. 

Kevin: When you said that you guys “went and you traveled”? Was it all seven? 

Manav: (9:36) No, that was the old team. Most of it we traveled as a team. 

Kevin: Were you’re working on stuff or just enjoying life. 

Manav: Enjoying. We actually, when we left Salesforce, we thought we were going to take three months off and that ended up being 14 months. A very good 14 months for us, we’d been working very hard and it was a good way to reset, to really look at everything from a different lens, to come back and see how things are being done in different countries. 

Kevin: Where did you do learn to do that? I mean like who had the idea, where did you learn to say “we need to reset. We should go travel as a team. We can take at least three months”. And as three months went on said, “we should take more”. It’s not your average people that do that.

Manav: Yeah totally. I think we were having fun exploring and discovering new things. We’d all worked as a team very hard before that. So it was actually great to start to acknowledge other things like meeting friends and family or you know, looking at how things are done in Burma for instance, or in a remote part in Japan where still everyone is very technology focused. But the culturally, it’s a very different take on it. 

Kevin: (10:50) It’s fascinating to hear that you did that. I mean, and then to come back and take a fresh look at things based on what you learned and being refreshed enough that you can look at things differently. Rather than the minute you’ve come out of that company.

Manav: Absolutely. Sometimes you’re very much entrenched into things that you forget to look at the bigger picture. 

Kevin: So what’s your feeling as to the law vertical and what do you see?

Manav: I think there’s a transformation that’s happening. Legal always has been, you know, slower to move. But I think as a new generation of clients come in, as a new generation of attorneys come in, and they are recognizing the need of taking all of this data that they’re collecting from different sources and really using that to their advantage. 

Kevin: And legal was always, you know, slow to move faster to close. So it goes to word processing. Very slow to adapt emails especially. “We’re not going to use email. It’s never going to happen. Nobody would ever communicate like that”. Boom. It’s closed. Fax machine. How could anybody send half financial communications across cell phone line so we couldn’t even see what was out there and they could get intercepted. Boom. You know, law closes fast once they see that thing. Size of law firms, I assume you can do, you’re doing the whole gamut? 

Manav: (12:15) We’re doing the whole gamut. We start with teams. So we really start with people that have a need for outbound communication or inbound communication. So they’re coming in and saying, “we need the paralegal, we need the office assistant and we need the attorney on the same thread. They’re doing this today on their own cell phones and doing it through a Google voice number”. There’s just no integrations with other things and it’s just, that’s where we go in and we first streamline that process and then it grows within the organization where they can start to get another numbers with us and then it pretty much mushrooms from there. What we do have, we have seen, which is a great thing that we do, is we try and not disrupt your current workflow. If you have a number published out there, we’ll take that number and text enable it. Um, if you have all of that data in Clio, we’re gonna make sure that data stays in Clio.

Kevin: It’s very cool. I mean, you’ve been involved now two, three or more technology startups. What do you tell people out there that think about doing it? 

Manav: Um, they should do it. I think we, you know, it’s daunting at first. There’s a lot of things that, a lot of uncertainties when you start to disrupt a market. Um, but, we need disruptors. We need people to go out and take that risk. Because it’s only those people that can actually cause a change, and that shift is really, really important. Otherwise, we’ll still be doing things in an archaic manner, or no one’s going to be satisfied.

Kevin: That’s pretty cool. Thanks much. 

Manav: Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate it. 

Kevin: This was good.

Mark Britton, founder of Avvo and member of Clio’s board talks with Kevin about working with legal tech startups, and what life has been life since selling Avvo. 

Transcript

Kevin O’Keefe: Who am I speaking with? 

Mark Britton:  I’m Mark Britton, 

Kevin: That took a second.

Mark: Who am I speaking with? Wait a minute, how did I get here?

Kevin: So you’re on the board now at Clio, right? 

Mark: I am. 

Kevin: How long have you known Jack? 

Mark: You know we’ve talked about that. I mean from the very beginning of Clio. I can’t tell you exactly where and when it was, but, you know, Jack started coming to our AVVO conference early on. We had him speaking at our AVVO Conference. And what I loved about Jack from the beginning is that he just, um, pushing the cloud, although in retrospect it seems like such a simple concept in the same way rating attorneys or having a marketplace in tech is such a simple concept. But we connected very early and very strongly because I just thought he had such a great sense for where lawyers needed to go with technology. And, uh, so we met somewhere early on, probably in the conference, maybe the AVVO conference. We connected and we’ve always been close since. I just love the guy. Everybody does for the industry. 

Kevin: (1:01) Yeah, and it’s a great culture. I find it inspiring. And I met Jack before they launched the company. 

Mark: You met him before we launched our company.

Kevin: Yeah. I guess in both cases you guys sought me out. I have no idea why. 

Mark: Because you’re a pain in the…

Kevin: Yeah, try to neutralize the guy. 

Mark: Exactly.

Kevin: I do remember that. Met in a Starbucks.

Mark: Starbucks in Pioneer Square.

Kevin: These guys were quizzing me for about two to three hours. Basically, I’m hearing, you know, a plan for “how do we take out Martindale?”. 

Mark: And it worked.

Kevin: You’re the guy that’s been there. Your company got bought by them? 

Mark: Yeah, I know. 

Kevin: Now your name is on their side 

Mark: Martindale AVVO, it’s wild to see. But the legacy of AVVO will continue. 

Kevin: Yeah. So now you’re on the board at Clio, you know, AVVO sold and it’s been sold for how long now? 

Mark: A year, year and a half. 

Kevin: Yeah. And then you’ve been out doing different things, like making investments. You’re sitting at, you know, you’re sitting in a venture capital enterprise right now. 

Mark: I work formally, with Madrone Ventures, which is really the premier northwest, west coast venture capital groups as far as early venture. And then I also do quite a bit of work on a one off basis, not in a formal role with quite a bit of growth equity and one of them resulted in the Clio deal. And also um, private equity. 

Kevin: (2:25) Good for you. Are all of those along the West coast? Where are they at?

Mark: No there, I mean a lot of private equity, private equity is everywhere quite honestly. Even though lots of New York, um, yeah, it tends to be tech-oriented and it tends to revolve around uh, kind of white collar, like legal tech, FinTech type stuff. 

Kevin: I mean you have have lawyers here or you have entrepreneurs here. Now your work, like you’re working at Madrona and it is a highly respected company. I found myself in there just asking questions of people at times, like “Am I doing the right stuff? Doing the wrong?”

Mark: Really smart people there.

Kevin:  Really smart, really smart. I think when I arrived in Seattle, one of the lead partners had run I don’t remember Delta or maybe Burlington Northern Railroad. I’m trying to remember. 

Mark: I think it was Jerry Greenstone who was actually also on the Expedia board when I was general council at Expedia. It’s, that’s Jerry Greenstone. Yeah, he is. He’s fantastic. 

Kevin: (3:14) You’re sitting there in the reception area are going, “Those guys are behind the wall. How the hell did I get in this place? Yeah, but what’s Mark Britton’s role at these various places at Madrona, you know, on private equity, you know?

Mark: It’s all different. 

Kevin: What can it be? Like at Madrona, when you’re involved there what are you doing? 

Mark: Well, it’s interesting because I actually have the same title as Jerry Greenstone has. One of the things that Madrone has done very smartly as they take in a number of successful ex-CEOs. So Sutro Patel who founded Isilon, uh, Steve Singh who founded Concur, there’s me, there’s some others. Then two of their founders they have in this “strategic director” role. And um, I mean to be totally fair, I think it’s for those that aren’t necessarily looking to become venture capitalists. I don’t want to be a VC, but I do want to invest and I want to work with interesting companies. So there’s a, there’s a symbiotic relationship there. Where I can help bring them companies, I can help them vet companies. And it for me, selfishly, helps me, you know, stay plugged into the Seattle business community, help entrepreneurs in the way that a lot of people help me be successful at AVVO. And then also I can figure out, I mean, I’ve got a whole team helping me think through or maybe they’re thinking through it and I’m drafting behind, what would be great investments. 

Kevin: (4:39) When you think about investments what goes through Mark Britton’s head? And there’s a whole myriad of things, but what are the things that seem to attract you? 

Mark: The team. I mean, I really, it’s something that I don’t think is a unique or you know, uh, a revelation for anybody that spends a lot of time investing. But you break it down as there is, I think it starts with the CEO and the people that the CEO has put around him or her. And then um, the size of the market is the next most important thing. And then the idea that they have for that market, I would argue, is the third most important thing because most likely that the idea that they have the inefficiency they found. Like how they’re attacking it will change. Yeah. You need a team that’s big enough to make some mistakes, but you need a team that whatever mistake they make, like whatever wall they hit, they’re going to climb over. And so that’s what just so many great companies have pivoted into being great companies. And so maybe is almost like an insurance policy. You want to focus on the entrepreneur rather than the idea. But if you can hit all three, then that’s where you drive valuation. 

Kevin: (5:54) So you’re on the, maybe you’re on the board at AVVO, which is obviously in the legal space, the legal tech space, but the type of opportunities and the type of things that interest you would go beyond legal tech obviously? 

Mark: Yeah, I do a lot in travel, not surprisingly. Again, FinTech is something that, you know, you’re looking for those adjacencies and, really I think what I’m best known for is “marketplace”. So AVVO was such a successful marketplace in a, and so just for anybody who is watching this, a marketplace in the most simple sense is where you have two sets of people that are trying to find each other and you act as a facilitator in between. And, so, there are all sorts of interesting marketplaces, but you think of Zillow or AVVO or Yelp. 

Kevin: And you went back to the travel. I mean, you go back. 

Mark: Well, like TripAdvisor would be an informational marketplace. But, um, so now I’ve got a little off track and explaining marketplaces. Oh. So I’m, you know, I think what I’m most known is for somebody in a really hard industry and actually two, because you remember we did doctors too and sold out to HealthTown. So there is at least the perception whether it’s founded or not, that “Hey, getting something started that in an industry, in a vertical that is that difficult, can we talk to you about our marketplace idea and sell them as that in legal?”

Kevin: (7:32) If you had a, you know, small legal tech company here and there’s a lot of them here, some are exhibiting, some are just walking around and trying to absorb the space and they’d come up and said, “Mark, what should I be thinking about? What should I be doing”

Mark: There have been no less than 10 of them that hit me already.

Kevin: Really? 

Mark: Oh yeah. People that are either quite developed and presenting or there are a number of people who are just in the process of getting businesses off the ground. 

Kevin: You’re not a bad person to talk to for them. 

Mark: Yeah. It’s, it is hard though in this environment to get the whole download to give them the full feedback. But I appreciate it. Like there was a gentleman that came and sat with me. Um, I was kind of running in between a media stuff including this. I was trying to grab a bite to eat and he stopped and said, “Hey, let me tell you about this, content marketplace that I’m trying to build”. And it was a super interesting discussion. Um, but mostly I just appreciate it. And anybody that’s trying to do something different, I want to give them some of my time. Uh, because like it’s hard getting these businesses off the ground is incredibly hard.

Kevin: That’s why I talk to the entrepreneurs a lot. “Why did you do it? What was the hardest moment?”. What was the hardest moment at AVVO? Maybe it was deciding that you were going to sell? 

Mark: I think there were a lot. Getting sued nine days after we launched, that was hard. 

Kevin: What’s that lawyers name? 

Mark: Which one? John Henry? 

Kevin: You had a good lawyer defining you. 

Mark: There’s an implication you made to that.

Kevin: (9:03) No, Bruce, wasn’t Bruce Johnson defending you?

Mark: He was defending us. 

Kevin: That’s what I mean. Bruce Johnson was defending you. You had a great lawyer.

Mark: Bruce’s, I’ll tell you on that. Being a lawyer, I was always told that you never guarantee anything for the client. I was, we were. You’ve got to understand that I both from a product standpoint and from a media standpoint, I mean I had been working day and night for months and I was at the end of my rope like you launch a big consumer product like that that’s in the spotlight. It just almost killed me and then we get sued nine days later. I remember going into their office, so spent, I mean, I was a mess. I was just crumpled in the seat. Bruce and his partner said, “okay, walk us through the whole thing”. We walked through it and Bruce said, “you realize you’re going to win this case”. 

Kevin: I could see him saying that. 

Mark: And it was like a huge cloud being lifted to have that type of first Amendment, one of the best known first amendment lawyers in the United States. 

Kevin: He could look and compartmentalized things so fast. He’ll get very clear on the message, he’d say, “this is what’s likely to happen”. 

Mark: No, and we used Bruce for all sorts of stuff after that. I mean Davis Wright is a phenomenal firm and he is just an exceptional lawyer. 

Kevin: Yeah. And to me it was, it was cool to watch it play out on first amendment grounds like, “we have the right to do this”. Oh, there were people that are called me or I called them and I’d say, “what do you think?”.  They’d go “I think they’re going to go out of business in 60 days”.

Mark: Yeah, well, they were wrong.

Kevin: And then there were some major players in there and they were wrong. And it wasn’t LexisNexis. 

Mark: (10:50) Yeah, it was scary. It was hard. Um, I just, what was really hard about it is they were fairly media savvy. They knew their way around media. And so, for example, they called down anyone who had done an article on us that was favorable or unfavorable and called them and told them a story. What a lot of people don’t understand and even reporters don’t understand, is that just because it’s in a complaint doesn’t make it true. 

Kevin: That’s right. 

Mark: And so, you know, they would mail that complaint and tell the story. And it was really, I spent, so I talked about the two weeks, two months that were, um, I mean it was really acute on the media front that two weeks going into launch and then I had another, at least two weeks, where I would literally sit in a conference room with the head of PR and all day long do media interviews trying to tell the story.

Kevin: Persuade, yeah.

Mark: And because everybody was convinced that we were up to no good. Okay.

Unidentified Person: Oh, sorry are you in an interview?

Mark: Good to see you

Kevin: We’re gonna talk, we’ll be just about done. 

Kevin: It’s not funny to you, but I mean, you guys went so far beyond that, that I don’t even remember that anymore. You, have it delled in your skull. 

Mark: (11:52) It was so impacting at the time. But yeah, I mean there were, I just don’t think you can run a business without a series of highs and lows. Anyone thinks that they’re going to get away with the lows need to go do something else. 

Kevin: I remember when our platform went down, it was first 15 hours, you know, I’m putting my head over the top of the urinal going, “it’s not supposed to be this hard. Somehow we’re going to recover from this”. 

Mark: I’ll tell you one of the things around selling AVVO that really drove it home for me, is I remember my wife, who is a lawyer and used to be a big firm lawyer, and she gets it. She gets the stress that goes in kind of big corporate life. She was kind of bulletproof and that it was never an issue that my wife raised about whether me being on the road or me not calling or working late or whatever it was. And when we were talking about whether we should sell the company, she turned around and said, “quite honestly, I’d just like to have my husband back”. And that was like, it was, I don’t think I knew. So you talk about “standing at the urinal”. I would come home for dinner so many times and my wife would be like “Talk. You need to keep your mouth moving”. 

Kevin: (13:10) Yeah. It doesn’t happen. You’re just, you’re thinking about something else. 

Mark: I’m still at the office and the kids are there and they don’t totally see it. So anyway, uh, having her so forcefully say “it’s time”. 

Kevin: How old are your kids now?

Mark: I just sent one off to college, which is fascinating for me. 

Kevin: But you have plenty of time. A great time to sell your company.

Mark: It’s perfect.

Kevin: For you to spend time with the kids, to get this time in life, to step back. 

Mark: And my son’s going to school up in Boston and I was able to go back and forth with him multiple times. No, I would’ve never been able to do that. No, it’s the greatest gift. It really is. And so I have two still at home. They’re just awesome, wonderful, fun kids. And my wife as well. It just, that is where I’m, if there’s anything, I mean I’m still finding my feet a little bit, but if there’s anything that really feels stable, it’s that time that I can spend with my family.

Kevin: Some night when you guys are out to eat and you’ll be talking about some deal more often than other one than me. It’s like, wow, are you going to get involved in this thing again or do that? 

Mark: Yeah. That’s a tough one. 

Kevin: You’re young, you’re young guy. I mean it could happen again. You don’t know. 

Mark: Yeah, I think I would, I don’t know exactly what that looks like. I’m open to anything. If it moves the world forward in some way. Like I have an idea, like I actually focused on an idea for about three months that I know would make money, but then I stopped myself and I was like, “really the only thing this does is makes me money”. And it was more around the advertising space and I was like, “is that, that’s not”. I was having a tough time. I was spending a lot of time with a really smart guy that’s a younger developer engineer type and I just was having a tough time getting back to him. And what had dawned on me is “this is just about money” and that’s not what I want to go do next. 

Kevin: (15:05) When you spoke at the last, you know, conference after announced AVVO was sold and you had a picture of the highway or going up the mountains and you know, “where does the road take you?”. And you could kind of sense, “I’m a little bit hollow, and I’m going to need to find something that was meaningful. I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what that is yet. And I’ll find it at some point in time”. Um, but there’s a lot of truth to that. If you get as old as I am, then it becomes all that much more important. You know, I have to tell my team “we have to do something meaningful”. We have to focus on like the most meaningful thing is even if it’s not the money thing.

Mark: Yeah. And it’s the speech that I just gave. You know, the Clio folks asked me to give this speech and I was like, “yeah, happy to do it”. But one of the things I talk about is the core purpose and a lot of organizations and especially a lot of law firms really struggle getting to the “why?” and you know, “why do they exist? Why do their customers choose them over anybody else?”. They don’t ask those questions. 

Kevin: (16:05) And in a company, you’re all always asking me, 

Mark: Always. You Know, all the best leaders are, they’re constantly peeling back the onion to say, “Why?”. You know, once you distill it down, “the why” of that core purpose, mission, whatever you want to call it, everything kind of rolls out pretty easily behind it. Especially, you know “the how”, and “the what”. 

Kevin: I mean, I don’t know what, you’re a better CEO than I ever was.

Mark: I don’t know we’ve never worked together. You might be amazing.

Kevin: The way you grew that team and the way then they took their place and they took on greater responsibility and you added even more talented people, but I struggle with at times, remember that it’s “the why” we do things. And “why do people select us” as opposed to somebody else? Because that’s the thing we have to think about. And then you guys will figure out how we’re going to deliver that cause you guys, cause you’re smarter than me and in the functions you’re in. 

Mark: And a lot of CEO’s, a lot of leaders in general, really have a tough time letting go like that. 

Kevin: Very hard, very hard for me all the time. I’m up to so much. I’m much less “let go, let go”.

Mark: I’m so much lazier than you. I don’t know. Maybe people that worked with me would disagree. But no, I, you know, Rich Barton, who was very involved with AVVO was one of the greatest leaders of all time, really.

Kevin: (17:18) Great guy.

Mark: And I remember him saying to me when we were, uh, so I was off teaching in Italy, kind of got the whole spark for this thing. And rich actually came out. We went on a bike trip together with our families in Southern Italy. Kind of pitched him on this essentially, Zillow for lawyers. And he was like, “I love it. It’s so simple, but I love it”. And so then he came back and I’ll keep this story a much shorter. Oh, I came back from Italy and, um, we were sitting down having, I mean, he was just instrumental in helping connect me early on with some people like Bill Gurley at Benchmark, et cetera. To help us, kind of get up onto the next phase of fundraising or what have you. But I remember him saying, actually I’ll give you two things he told me. On the lawsuit that we talked about, I remember him telling me in a board meeting, “if it’s not scary, it’s not important”. 

Kevin: That’s right. 

Mark: I was like, “that made me feel so much better”. Then the other was, he said, “you will only succeed if you surround yourself with a bunch of smart people and let them run the company”. I so followed that in really the investment that I made. I just went out and found like the smartest people, especially from Expedia early on that I could. 

Kevin: (18:50) Yeah. I mean there’s a lot of truth to that because the more they grow and the more exciting there is for them to be around and you watch them. I tell the team, the most rewarding thing for me is to watch you guys grow. And I said, “if you do decide to leave at some point in time because of what you came here and what you learned”, I said, “that’s incredibly great”. Now the other employees that watch those people leave they get very, like “that was mean of them to do that”. I said, “I don’t know”. 

Mark: I read something really pithy that says it so much better than I can say it. Maybe it’ll come to me. Even in speeches to groups of lawyers, I’ve often said, “train people to leave you”. Yeah. And I tell the story of a Miami lawyer that said to me, “I can’t train people to do what I do and when I do, they leave”. And I just so wanted to say to her that, “what you do is you train them to leave, but then you give them reasons to stay”.

Kevin: Yes, exactly. When I started my first law firm, best associate came and he said, you know, I could go to any firm in town, I said, “I hope so”. I said, “I’m working really hard to help you be really great. You are already good”. I said, “hopefully I can retain you”. 

Mark: I mean do you really want to keep your people untrained so that you’d have a bunch of dummies that’s surround you. It just doesn’t work. You see that kind of philosophy rear its head over and over and so, yeah, I think leaders, you know, 

Kevin: That’s like your talk. I mean this is how law firms are thinking versus you who is the CEO of a good company you’re thinking that way, “How do I hire great people and help them better at what they do so they could go anywhere they want in their life?”.

Mark: And then give them a reason to stay. And usually you know that person that’s thinking about leaving or you feel that they might be thinking about leaving, then give them another chunk of the business. Then they’ll go  build their own

Kevin: “You want a chunk of the action?”. 

Mark: “Take it, take a third, take whatever it is”, but whatever the percentage is, that’s called leverage. It is so antithetical to so many lawyer managers. 

Kevin: It was fun to talk with you. Maybe do it sometime over a coffee in Seattle.

Mark: It was great seeing you. Yeah, sure seeing as we’re more than just down the street. It’s always good to see you. I love what you guys do. 

Kevin: We’re trying. We’re trying to do different stuff now.

Kevin speaks John Gilmartin, CEO of Klyant, on the growth of their legal accounting software, and what it’s like being an entrepreneur in Ireland. 

Transcription

Kevin O’Keefe: We’re going again. Who am I talking with?

John Gilmartin: I’m John Gilmartin. I’m the CEO at a company called Klyant and we do legal accounting software

Kevin: And from where? Dublin? 

John: Dublin, Ireland. We’re out of Dublin, Ireland. 

Kevin: Not all bad. I feel some affinity based on the name, but my first law job was in County Clare in Ennis. Um, and I understand you think that Ignatius, Hoollihan, & Sons. Michael Hoolihan or Hoolihan & Sons might still be a customer. 

John: I might need to go and double check, but I think in terms of Ennis, it’s always been good to us. So we do quite a few firms down in Ennis yeah. 

Kevin: I can guarantee you when I was there, we didn’t have any computers. In fact, behind the receptionist desk was this big machine and it had like butcher paper on it and I’m going, “okay, what’s that for?” or “because when the telephone company goes on strike and we don’t have any telephones, then we do all the communications based on this teletype machine”. It’s just that hard. That was the cutting edge of technology. There’s probably things like that that maybe you want to invest in Ennis. You know as a tech guy. So what do you guys do? 

John: (1:17) So, we’re a complete web-based stat legal accounting application designed specifically for law firms. So, and that’s going to the end to make it, to explain it, we remove the need to manipulate general accounting systems and in order to cater properly for the management of trust money as well as the operating money. So we do all of that in one system.

Kevin: So competitor is the guy that has a business out in North Carolina. I can’t even think of the name of it, trust something or whatever. I met him last year or something.

John: Yeah, so those guys over at TrustPlex. So, those guys concentrate specifically on the reconciliation of trust funds accounts. I guess were different, insofar as, more in terms of kind of our direct competitors or, as an alternative, would be QuickBooks. So it’s we’re like a replacement to a QuickBooks. So our USB would be that will do everything like your QuickBooks but we’ll properly manage your trust account. 

Kevin: (2:07) So you told me already you’re a lawyer.

John: Yeah, former lawyer, but yes. You’re never not a lawyer if you qualify it. 

Kevin: That’s what I tell people. I said, “I’m a lawyer”. I don’t have to do the same things that other lawyers do and they don’t have to do things that I do. I mean, hell if you think most 

John: The training is still there. 

Kevin: Most of the lawyers, that you work with, do you think they would want to do what you’re doing? 

John: No, absolutely not, no. That’s cause they’re sensible. 

Kevin: Come to the United States and meet a whole bunch of people you’d never met before and kind of make up things as you go to some extent, and how you’re dealing with people and how you service them. I mean, so when you went to law school, what did you want to do?

John: Genuinely, I wanted to practice law and that was, yeah, I had a real genuine passion for it. But I think, I was always going to build a business. And so, what my kind of thinking was very early on and to even pre qualification and I knew I’d be setting up my own firm at some point. That was my thinking at that stage. So, in many ways, that was my hammer, you know, looking for that nail in terms of business. 

Kevin: (3:03) My dad used to tell me all the time over dinner, he’d be telling us, you know, nothing like on your own show or you’ve got to own your own show, go run our business. And I kept thinking, “what does he mean?”. I mean, I need to get a job. What did your dad do? 

John: Well, my dad was also an entrepreneur and actually funny enough, in terms of advice, it’s funny you should say that in terms of what dads say, actually it’s really rung true. Kind of made that point is that once you do build your own business, it’s always going to be hard to go back or certainly, where you go back to work, you can’t influence decision when you’re not kind of sitting there in terms of it and I certainly do have that feeling. I do love that feeling of being able to grow something and work with kind of great team to kind of build something kind of special and kind of be constantly, hopefully heading in the right direction. 

Kevin: Yeah, I mean you can’t. I mean, my previous company was acquired by LexisNexis. Now all of a sudden I’m inside this thing and it was great that the person told me, “Hey, don’t move your whole family from Seattle back to New Jersey until you find out what corporate America is like. And I’m thinking, “Oh, it’s going to be great. You guys got budgets, we’ll be able to get stuff done overnight”. Boy, was that an eye opening experience and I could not go back again. I had to go back to the garage.

John: Pretty much knowing that you can make a call and then see it happen. 

Kevin: Yeah, and to do it very quickly. Um, when did you get involved with this company? How’d that all come about? 

John: (4:19) So I was practicing over in Bristol. My dad had a company. 

Kevin: Bristol is in the UK?

John: Yeah this was in the UK. United Kingdom. Yeah. That’s where I qualified. And so I did my primary degree in Dublin, Ireland and then, and then went over to. 

Kevin: Where’s Bristol for people that are. 

John: It’s south, southwest. So if people know where Wales is on the map, it’s down from England just before you go over to Cardiff. So Southwest of the UK. Cider country we call it over there. A great time. Yeah, absolutely. Worth going, but, remind me your question?

Kevin: So, how did you get started in this? You’re in Bristol practicing law? 

John: I always had a  long lasting goal. I grew up around and an entrepreneurial founding. My dad had always been in business. He was always involved in actually supplying everything from kind of your office supplies to uh, to stationary to printing services to ultimately computers and tech and then software. Then selling into the entire legal industry. And they’d had a very successful business doing that in Dublin. And so that was there and he had taken on another partner and they made some various different decisions. But anyway, a partner come all in on the tech side and they thought they’d build some software. There was an opportunity to buyout another company coming up, very small software company that had a hundred firms out of Ireland. It was all happening around that time. And there was also an opportunity essentially for Dad’’s partner at the time that someone’s going to buy them out and was a developer, wants to move on to something else and enter me. And so, yeah, a very short conversation one day just talking as dads and sons do about what he was thinking and saying, “well look, I, you know, really kind of keen to kind of think about setting up this firm or doing it as quickly as possible and we’re adding the numbers”. Saying, “look, why don’t you think about that doing this, you know?” and then I did. So yeah. So I got involved, bought him out, and the first thing we did was buyout that company. Which sounds bigger than it was. Very small business, only about a hundred firms, but very low kind of license fees. And we did that.

Kevin: (6:09) How long ago was that?

John: That’s now just over nine years ago. Yeah. So when, so we did that. Built up that up new, kind of went through the whole recession and all that did a great job in terms of maintaining stability and growth. And during that period and all building up to division, that kind of developed, of course over time. But we stopped building clients in late 2015, mid 2015. And in building that to the two or three years, kind of prior to that, it was all building up and trying to work out and, you know, validate. We saw this huge gap globally really that, um, in terms of kind of accounts technology and uh, solving that property using next generation technology. So then we set out in that journey and mission on then having a good chat with you today.

Kevin: You have a family? 

John: I do indeed. Yeah. Wife, two kids. 

Kevin: So, she think your nuts?

John: She thinks I’m absolutely insane, but she knew that the day I met her though, so, so that’s okay. No, she’s been very good and supportive, but you have to say that, especially when I’m on camera. But, yeah, she’s been brilliant, and if you don’t have that it would be more scary.

Kevin: (7:10) Certainly you’re an entrepreneur in the middle of a company. The whole family’s in it. Cause you’re feeling it all the time. Even if you’re out coaching the kids or something in the back of your mind, you’re thinking about the something. 

John: I’m Irish, I’m always talking about it as well. There’s a lot of that.

Kevin: The rest of the parents maybe having a beer, talking about nothing cause they’re working for the state. You’re thinking about, “I’m working for me”. 

John: Yeah, yeah, you gotta meet payroll. No, that’s it. That’s the reality of building a business that you want to become a fast growth business. 

Kevin: What’s your thinking going on as far as, “okay, we’re in Ireland, we’ve made good penetration there. We got a good customer base. We’re doing some work in the UK now. Now you’re in the states. Um, what’s your thinking as far as the states? 

John: I think it’s a huge opportunity and we’ve known it for a long time. And if anything, we’re just frustrated in the pace. The pace it’s taking us, to kind of, go after in a avail of that opportunity. And that’s the challenge. But there’s a lot of, back to your point, there’s a lot of thinking and talking about it. 

Kevin: (8:11) Well, you’re Irish, you’re going to feel guilty anyway. 

John: Yeah, yeah we do definitely. Got the Catholic guilt going on in lots of ways. But yeah, that’s probably just some of the pressure that we put on ourselves in business. We’re very ambitious. I’m lucky, I think we’ve built a really great team around us. We know we can do it now. We spent this year doing a lot of validation. We’re at ABA tech show later on this year. Attend a lot of conferences over here as attendees and you’re exhibited with ABA tech show and obviously we’re at ClioCon today. And so what we’ve been doing is we’ve built a great relationship with Clio guys in Dublin there EMEA offices are in Dublin. So they’ve been very good to us. Clio throughout the journey of the last year,  year and a half. They’ve been really good in terms of talking and getting lots of information and insights and based in North American market. And so including Canada in that. So we’ve now over, I guess that last year, year and a half, we’ve been planning in parallel to continue our growth in the UK and Irish market. We’re about one in four firms now have in Ireland. And so growing quite quickly on that side of things. And we enter the UK market a year and a half and that’s going very well for us. So we trying to run that in parallel while planning for the U S and I think that’s the key. I think if I was advising anyone, I think when you’re coming and looking at the U.S. market and it’s so big and it could be overwhelming. So I think you’ve got to take that time rather than rushing in headstrong. And I’ve seen people do that and that hasn’t worked out so well.

Kevin: (9:18) And I’m sitting here with the U.S. market realizing, you know, with large law, you know, how much more can we push? You know, you’re not going to get 100%. I went over and hung out at LegalGeek, you know, last year. I wish I was there again this year. You’re sitting there and you’re going and then another conference in Amsterdam and you’re going, “wow,  United States is really small legal market compared to the world. 

John: When you compare it to the globe, yes. And it’s still a huge market, if you compare it to, you know, the UK. You know, specific countries within EMEA. 

Kevin: The thing that’s different about the UK is as soon as you’re in the UK, everybody looks at the market as the world and it was like a mindset that they’ve been in since they were putting ships in the water and going around and conquering the world. Because of this Island, “there’s not in a business here we got to be worldwide commerce”. With the United States, people here look at it and say, “well, if we have the West or the East or even the United States, we’re doing really good”.

John: (10:15) Well I think that’s right. And I that learning and that kind of mindset is what I think you get from coming to the bench like this and understanding and learning those things before you rush into it. And that’s, that’s very much where our kind of mindset is. We’re coming, we’re looking now in January, we’re launching for the U.S. market and we’re looking at basing ourselves most likely that in New York in terms of our kind of base. Has to do a flight time and all of that kind of side of things and, and really building partnerships and looking at efficient ways of getting that market, early market penetration without trying to, when it all wants to do, we just wouldn’t have the funding to do that.

Kevin: I was just gonna ask you about the partnership thing, because the partnership is so key you don’t know the nuances of different markets. I mean, you know the UK and Ireland like the back of your hand. All of a sudden something strange is going to come up here or there and you’re gonna go, “I didn’t know that this goes on, or this goes on”, but those partners can help you with that. I mean, Starbucks had their greatest challenge in Germany because it was the one place they decided to go without a partner. Turned out to be a mess.

John: (11:08) It’s kind of the theme of this conversation, right? It’s also being able to put yourself out there and say, “look, this is what we do know, this is what we don’t know. Can you help us what we don’t know? And when I think if you do a lot of that, you do that preparation and hopefully that will hold us in good stead. Yeah, no, we’re really excited about the opportunity in terms of, as I said, it’s such a big market. And what I also think, um, yeah, what we’ve done and what we’ve been very focused on is being very product centric over the last couple years. Maybe what you’re hearing for the most days, “we know we have the product, we know it’s there. We know it’s scalable. We think it’s great”, but all guys in my position think that. But yeah, it’s a good strong product. We’ve got good customer count, great feedback, great customers, and I think we’re ready for now, like anything else not moving too fast. 

Kevin: What’d you tell a lawyer? You know, like you, they’re practicing in a firm and they’ve got an itch to do something else, you know, what do you tell them? What do they have to think about, you know, somebody you were having a pint with somebody and they’re saying, “I’ve been at this firm for a few years, I’ve got a niche for my dad was an entrepreneur, my mom was an entrepreneur, I want to do something else”. What would you tell them? 

John: (12:12) Well I think, I would start out with, “I think go for it”. I think you should always follow your passion. I think that’s key. You’re going to keep hearing it repeated every day. And I think you’ve got to know it’s going to be hard too. And I think you can’t just know it. You’ve got to go and make sure you understand it and whatever you need to do that. So I think, you know, there’s a lot to be said and people will often advise going to go, just take the punch. So I think it’s okay to dip your toe in the water too and really try to understand it? And I think, look, I’m an accounts guy and I’m deep in it, but I think very quickly get into the numbers early and we’ll make sure that the numbers going to guide everything that you do. They’re the type of things I’d say to be, but I think ultimately I wouldn’t be saying “go for it”. I think it’s exciting. It’s brilliant. And I think if you’re in a firm, I think perhaps the law is brilliant. I think you need to, there’s nothing wrong with putting your head above the desk and going, “you know, is this the area I want to be?”. Maybe it isn’t that they’re going off to be an entrepreneur. Maybe, they want to move into a different department or try something different to put themselves out there. But if they’re looking at going with becoming an entrepreneur and setting up something, there’s so many opportunities out there.

Kevin: (13:05) Don’t you think the opportunities are getting bigger because the manner in which legal services are delivered and managed, the way they’re being run, is all changing? 

John: It’s just scratching the surface. 

Kevin: So, the doors are open to us to invent things that we just see opportunities to do. Never been as big as this. I don’t think.

John: I think that’s exactly it. I think the thing is that you can’t have that kind of mindset of “it’s all going to end” or “all the great ideas have been taken up”. I think a lot of lawyers, those huddled risk averse lawyers that may be sitting there, I mean if you are that person, you’re looking that way, probably isn’t gonna be for you. What I think if you are ever looking in you only see opportunity I think you’re probably right from the gate. I would give it a go. Yeah, I think so. You’re right. Like look, literally it’s only been scratched. I mean, look at Clio. 10 years ago and you know, and now they’re talking about being the operating system for legal. And I think they’ll do it. And I think it’s just mind blowing to think of all this.

Kevin: (13:58) I met Jack in a Starbucks. I’m not sure if it was in the hotel or up the street from where legal tech was. He hadn’t started, he hadn’t launched the company yet. He’s just was out. He was out meeting people. He met people that people said were influential or good people to meet. Seriously. And I arrived in Chicago a few months later at ABA Tech Show and I brought two of my team and I, you know, at a large video camera on a mono-pod and I said, “let’s find some cool people to go interview”, you know. And I pointed out different people. Then I run into this Jack Newton guy. I go, “I know that guy. I met him”, well he’s got a company now. He’s launched a company. It was just the two of them, Rian and Jack standing there and uh, white shirts and black ties, but their passion was there and their heart was there for the opportunities there. I, you know, I do really think Clio’s a good place if you have an idea, even if you’re still practicing. Just come, come to this conference and talk to people like yourself or myself and just hang out. 

John: That’s exactly it. There’s a room full of people that are just trying to work it out. You know some are at different levels on the journey, but as you say, “there’s so many good people to have conversations”. Just about talking, learning, and taking on board the lessons really.  Watching the people who are doing it better than you and trying to learn from them.

Kevin:: Ask them to say, “who should I talk to?”. Go up to Jack and say, “who do you think is doing some really cool stuff that I should talk to? 

John: 100% 

Kevin: Talk to Andrew Gay. He’s doing all the integrations. Lots of cool stuff. 

John: No, I think that’s exactly it on these guys. That’s the thing. And you’ll spot the entrepreneur because they’ll want to talk to you, because they’re passionate and they’re excited about it and they’ll want a see people kind of kick it off. 

Kevin: Now somebody comes over to you to say, “I heard you’re doing great stuff. Could you tell me about it?”.

John: “How did you do that?”, “Had some guys”, but no that’s good.

Kevin: It’s been great to talk with you. 

John: I enjoy it. 

Kevin: Thank you very much. 

John: Nice to meet you. Thanks.