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Episode 31 – A look inside technology best practices for law firms, with Zack Glaser

In this episode of Legal Marketing Radio, we are joined by Lawyerist Legal Tech Advisor, Zack Glaser.  

In this episode, we discuss current technology trends, obstacles law firms encounter, and some of the top solutions Zack has seen work in the industry.

Transcript

Chip LaFleur: 

So we’re here with Zack Glaser today. He’s the legal tech advisor at Lawyerist with a pretty extensive resume working in in technology. You’re a lawyer. Do you want to kind of bring us up to speed on your background a little bit, Zack?

 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah. So I’m a lawyer licensed out of the state of Tennessee and have been practicing for I guess somewhere around 10 years, 11 years now. When I started practicing, I got very much into automating things and digging into technology. I have a kind of base and history in playing with technology throughout my life. And so after practicing for a while, I started a company called Tech for Lawyers that was assisting attorneys and making their own machines, and I have now moved to working with Lawyerist, helping people figure out what we’re going to do with this legal tech landscape and how to use all the programs that are out there.  

Chip LaFleur: 

Well, I love it. So that is also a one of my favorite topics. I love technology. I just bought a thing called HOOBS for my house which is like a Raspberry Pi automation thing, and I’m trying to make that work. Just it’s like an addiction a little bit.

Working in the legal space it is both exciting and frustrating because we see all this technology. We work with lawyers and we work with some large enterprise organizations as well. And sometimes I get to see this awesome technology on the marketing side, on the automation side, on the project management side. Then I come back to the legal side, and I think, when is it going to catch up? We sit down and talk to clients, and it’s like when are they going to get there? So I mean big picture, what are some of the legal marketing trends that you’re seeing out there? What are you seeing kind of address some of those issues?  

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah. So I think broadly we’re starting to see attorneys maybe not catch up but at least start going down the road, start to look to bring technology into their practices to make it easier on themselves, to make it easier to organize things. We’re seeing many, many, many attorneys go to the cloud now and start relying heavily on the cloud. The attorneys that I see are all going to just digital files, and everything’s paperless. Even when I started at my father’s firm back 10, 11 years ago, we had just paper files. And so we bought a scanner. Which scanner is that? Not the Epson. The Fujitsu Scan Snap IX500. So we bought that, started scanning everything and throwing it into—this was a content management system initially and then we wound up going to a law practice management system. So we’re starting to see more people begin there as opposed to dragging each other in kicking and screaming and writing things on the back of folders and just keeping track of your time on the left hand side of the folder.

I think broadly, I find a lot of attorneys are looking for what’s going to help them because they’re approaching these other pieces of technology and seeing how much they have helped them already.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

That makes a lot of sense. It’s also I think pretty intimidating for an established law practice to kind of start down that road. We have clients that are on, I don’t want to use the name, but I would say kind of antiquated case management systems. But their whole processes are built around those systems. If they have an operations manual, it references on this page within the system. When you flip over to this tab, correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is you’ve helped lawyers kind of get over that hump. 

How do you help a firm that is rooted in either very little technology, or even older technology at this point in time?

How do you get them past that hump of saying, you know what? Here’s this great solution, but in order to implement this great solution, you have to pretty much change the way your practice operates. Like how do you help them with that?  

 

Zack Glaser: 

I think recognizing that these people, these firms many times have been running for 20 years, 30 years, for decades the way they’ve been going. They’ve been doing it with paper and a pen, typewriters, all of that sort of technology that we’re thinking of as being antiquated. The fax machine is still in a lot of people’s offices, but really we shouldn’t be relying on that anymore. But recognizing that they have the processes already, and hopefully, if they’ve got those operations manuals, then this is a really well run firm. They’re just not using the right technology for the time now. And so it’s time for them to change, and that’s okay.

I found that a lot of attorneys are kind of insulted when you come in and say, you’re not doing this right. Well, they are doing it right. They have been doing it right for years. I found this with my father. Coming in and saying, Dad, you have to put all this on the computer because you’re doing it wrong. Well, he’s not doing it wrong. He’d been practicing for 30 years before I even got there, and he did a great job and is still doing a great job.

So it’s about making these iterative changes and starting from where they will accept. So scanning documents is one of the first places that I would go with somebody that is just very, very old school. Let’s start scanning all of our documents. “Well, Zack, what about this huge file room we have back here?” Don’t worry about those. Scan everything new, everything current. Let’s just start very small, and once we’ve started to get those things scanned, they start to get used to using things on the computer and finding things on the computer.

Well, maybe we start to introduce a practice management system that is a little more advanced than just Excel spreadsheets or project management plus document management. And so we do it iteratively because we’re working on the car while we’re driving down the road. You can’t take all four wheels off at once. You might be able to take one off. I don’t know. You may be that good. But really we’re talking about working on a machine that is already going. And so you have to accept the fact that this is a complex thing that is going to require an intelligent attorney who is very capable. And so approach them that way because again, you come in and say, you’ve been doing this wrong this entire time, now you’re just kind of a jerk.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

That makes a lot of sense. And they wouldn’t be successful if they were doing it wrong this whole time. 

We just had a call literally today and it’s a firm that has just under 30 lawyers and they practice on a variety of primarily business to business, I would say with some big enterprise clients. And as we were going through that, we found out that it is a very successful firm. They’re using Outlook. They’re looking at HubSpot for some automation as a CRM. I don’t recall the name of the platform that they use, but they use basically an on-premises server where they just house all their documents and you just kind of put them in there and they go where they’re supposed to go. And so I’d love to hear your thoughts. 

When we start working with a client, we have a handful of automation platforms that we like to use. But one of the big challenges that I’ve run across is that those automation platforms, especially when they touch on the marketing side, they are not built for lawyers. They’re not built for law firms, and the language is not correct. And even just that obstacle of referring to things as sales or referring to something as a product in that platform is really kind of jarring.

So I would love to hear what you’re seeing out there in terms of trends and then also in terms of platforms. Like who is doing the marketing side? Who’s doing automation well for law firms? What plugs into, like, what’s the current best of class case management plugged into automation plugged into user tracking and analytics? What are some of the things that you’re seeing out there in those areas?  

 

Zack Glaser: 

I think first and foremost is that attorneys are starting to ask for this. That’s kind of amazing to me. Starting Tech for Lawyers years ago, I was just trying to scream into the ether that we had these sorts of tools that were there. But they did say things like sales, which is very icky, which I think is a technical term to attorneys. They want to see potential new clients instead of leads. And I think that’s important. 

Again, it’s meeting the people where they are. And so many attorneys, although HubSpot specifically is very good CRM, many attorneys are going to be turned off from it because a) it’s extremely complicated which means it’s very robust. It’s not unnecessarily complicated. But b) it doesn’t have that kind of touchy-feely PNC and here’s our intake flows and whatnot. So when we see that as attorneys, a lot of times we think, “What am I going to have to change in order to approach this from an appropriate ethical standpoint?” And really, not a lot, but a lot of attorneys don’t want to go through that. They’re practicing law. They don’t want to go through the “what little things am I not thinking about in this?”

And so we’re starting to see a lot more companies, I think, craft their CRMs for lawyers. And I think this is very good because lawyers need to have an intake system. Well, not all of them. But at the end of the day you, got to have clients coming in. You’re going to have a client manager of some sort. So with that, we’re also starting to see the law practice management connect with that client management and see these kind of integrations. 

I think Clio does that with Clio Manage and Clio Grow. Filevine has their own intake systems. That’s actually a pretty good one if you’re willing to kind of put in the work to understand Filevine.  Again, kind of like HubSpot, Filevine is a little more complex than some of the others because it’s very robust because there’s a lot you can do with it.

One of my favorites right now for small to medium-sized law firms is Smokeball, which is an on-prem cloud hybrid solution, and using Lawmatics—which is separate from Smokeball, but Lawmatics as the CRM and Lawmatics is—the reason I like this one more than some is that it has an intake system and you can put your clients into an intake workflow, but it also tracks your marketing efforts. So it helps you track your efforts going out there and saying, okay, well, I have these Facebook ads. How am I going to determine whether or not I got anything back from these Facebook ads? Because with law firm marketing, I always think of the “how do you tell somebody that’s making millions of dollars that they’re doing something wrong?” And there are a lot of people that are making a ton of money that are throwing money at marketing, and it’s working. It’s bringing in more money, but they could probably do it more intelligently using more analytics and figuring out okay, where exactly do I need to put this money in order to get the better return on investment. And I think that Lawmatics and some of the other CRMs are doing a very good job of bringing that into the law firm and saying, here it is in a palatable way.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

That makes a lot of sense. How does that cloud on-prem hybrid work on the on the Smokeball side? That’s kind of an unusual thing for me to hear when we’re referring to a platform that does that specific type of thing.  

 

Zack Glaser: 

So there are a few hybrid solutions out there. Smokeball, LEAP Practice Management System as well. And when I hear on-prem, I think, oh my God, let’s run away. Because you think about PC Law, you think about Needles, all of that. And right now, we like to not like PC Law and Needles and all of that. But I have to remember that the attorneys that are using these platforms were actually the first attorneys or some of the first attorneys to really dive into law practice management systems. So these are people that all you really have to do is convince them to change, not convince them to use a law practice management system. And one of the benefits of that on-prem, which is where people go, “I’m not going to go to the cloud,” is that it’s there when the internet isn’t. And now that most people I think are not having issues with the internet just going out for an entire day every three weeks or something, I don’t think that’s as big of an issue. But at the same time, you could be somewhere, in your vehicle or something like that, and need access to something a little bit more on-prem. And so in comes these hybrid solutions that have the information kind of kept locally partially but then really the bulk of the information is kept in the cloud. And so it’s kept on an AWS, an Amazon Web Server or Microsoft Azure server or something like that. And I’m not going to say it gives you the best of both worlds because it’s not really just the thing where you go, that beats everything. It still has its detriments, and it has its benefits. But that is one of those that I find the hybrid solutions tend to have more robust features a lot of times and mainly in the document automation area. But those tend to be pretty powerful or at least the ones that I just referenced are.  

The other side of that is it requires a little bit more setup, and some people don’t need that power. When I first started practicing, I was in Memphis. I went to University of Memphis. And there’s a thing where, it’s not like a tradition but it’s just a way of practicing law. You literally go to the criminal courthouse and show up and you wear a suit. And you’re going to find clients who showed up to their hearing with no lawyer and money in cash. And so you pick up clients just by showing up to the criminal court in the morning. If you’re practicing like that, you don’t need something massively robust. You’re not going to be creating document automation workflows. But you could make plenty of money doing that. That’s not to say that’s a bad way of practicing law, but it doesn’t require complex law practice management. 

Whereas if you’re doing estate planning and you have a lot of different types of documents that you want to create for your clients after certain inputs, well, then you may need something that tracks more information than others and is able to do more conditional formatting and things like that. So that’s where I like those hybrids. They tend to be a little bit more robust there.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

No, that makes a lot of sense. I mean I could see a great use case for like bankruptcy law, for example, too where there is so much of it that can and should be automated and there are things that should be automated just so that you don’t miss dates or you’re less reliant on a person to do that. And then considering the volume that you have to work through, especially on the personal bankruptcy, specifically on the personal bankruptcy side, how do you do that without some automation and how do you do that if you can’t have both where you’re independent of your connection I guess?  

 

Zack Glaser: 

Yeah. And it’s not absolutely necessary. You can definitely run bankruptcy practice on something that is completely cloud-based. You can run any practice on something that’s completely cloud-based. But yeah, I can see that use case there because you’re going to wind up or you’re in bankruptcy court a lot if you’re doing specifically personal bankruptcies. You’re showing up to the creditors hearings, you’re showing up to this stuff. And so having some of that information there without having to be tethered to the internet is extremely helpful. But more importantly, having these things connect to, with bankruptcy in particular, having these things connect to a CRM because bankruptcy, you’re going to have to have a constant inflow of potential new clients, and you need to be able to track where you’re getting those potential new clients from. And that jump from information in the CRM to information in your law practice management system needs to be somewhat seamless, or at least it’s a place where you can gain time. You don’t want to double input information. Not only does that create, you’re going to have errors when you double input but you literally have to double input it then. That’s twice the time. So I think bankruptcy specifically is very good to have, even if it’s not high LPMS, having one that’s connected very well with a CRM.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me. We have a handful of clients that are using on-premises Needles only, and they are hesitant to move to the cloud. They’ve had the option to do that. We have a technology partner that we work with that specifically does that, right? They’ll take whatever software you’re using, and they’ll install something on that on-premises server. They’ll move it to the cloud. We haven’t done this yet, but it’s on my list of things that I want to do is I want to work with them, take the Needles instance, either replicate it or move it to a virtual server on the cloud. Because what I’d like to be able to kind of harness the power of either Power BI or Quicksight or Tableau so that we can show business intelligence information and visualizations, right? Because for me personally, I need to see trend lines, I need to see where things are going.

Are you seeing anything out there on the case management side, on the CRM side that’s really doing a great job specifically on the reporting side or on the marketing reporting side? You mentioned Lawmatics. It sounds like they’re doing some of that. For a long time, we’ve used a platform called SharpSpring which again is lacking that language, right? It doesn’t have the language around intake and PNCs and things like that which I think is so important. But it’s a powerful platform, and it gives us a great reporting interface, it gives us life of the lead so that we can see first touch, multi-touch, last touch attribution. What are you seeing out there that has good reporting? And then do you have any thoughts on who’s doing a great job kind of showing and visualizing that in a business intelligence manner on the marketing side?  

 

Zack Glaser: 

Again, I hate to harp on Lawmatics. They’re doing a good job of collecting that information, and they’ve got pretty good reports. I think if you’re really looking for good solid reports like that, then going to a non—I was about to say non-legal—a non-law related. Going to an illegal CRM. Going to a non-law related CRM is where you’re going to find most of that information. And I think a lot of times instead of saying, okay, well, let’s make this palatable, it is also okay to say, listen, get over the ick. Get over it and realize that these platforms, if you have that much marketing, if you’re really doing outreach that is the basis of your firm, then you need to make sure that you’re using a solid marketing platform and I think that you’re not going to get much better than the ones that are already created out there for you. 

But I have started to see some platforms get built on top of. So things that are built on top of Power BI. There’s Marter365 is a law practice management system I think is very interesting because it’s built on top of Microsoft 365. And then there are some that are built directly on top of Salesforce so that they’ll harness the power of Salesforce. And I think, again, you kind of have to say, listen, get over it a little bit on the PNC stuff because that’s going to be using Salesforce. But there’s a reason that Salesforce is huge. It works. It’s very good, and it has those sorts of reports that you can bring back to your firm. I think more importantly, we’re starting to see attorneys look for those reports.

We’re starting to see your general practice or the PI attorneys have been out there doing this for a long time. And we’re starting to see that kind of come into the other practice areas that are out there. I like to tell people, if something in marketing works for PI attorneys, it’s kind of like marketing to the heavy cleaners, the people that clean, clean, clean, clean, clean. You want your product to be marketed to that person because everybody else goes, ah, that’ll work for me. And so if it works for marketing for PI, then it’s probably going to be complex enough or robust enough for it to work for your own marketing.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I mean there is this delay of time where something is implemented, and I feel like even in PI, it’s not at the front end of that, right? Like you have B2B organizations that are very progressive, very eager to jump on the next thing, they jump in the wrong spot a couple of times. But you’re really pushing the envelope. They jump on the bleeding edge. Then that filters over to other industries like specifically personal injury and legal vertical and then it gets over to where it’s going. But I think there’s value in being that early adopter, and I agree with what you’re saying. Sometimes you just have to get over it. 

The thing that I feel like nobody wants to get over is that duplicate data entry, and that speaks to what you’re talking about where you’re taking an on-prem, moving that to a hybrid where you have on-prem cloud mix because that seems to open up a lot of those doors like I was talking about a minute ago. If we could take Needles, move it into cloud, we can access that database using Power BI, we can get some of that great reporting out. And so I always try to think of like, “What are ways to kind of bridge the gap or blend the gap so that you can still get some of the power out there from an existing platform?” Do you have any thoughts on what’s out there that’s doing a good job with their API, that’s doing a good job making their data accessible?  

 

Zack Glaser: 

That’s a really good question. No. Short answer, not necessarily. A lot of times the APIs that are there, we’re looking at just getting client information from point A to point B, which is wonderful. That’s step one, and it’s huge. So that gets rid of most of the duplicative double entry. But if we’re talking about running kind of independent reports or making sure that I’m able to get more data from these files into QuickBooks or something like that, I haven’t run across anything that has impressed me in that sense of saying like, you can really get your information out of here. Because I think most places think you want to get your information into here, and that’s a natural thing from a software creation standpoint. You wouldn’t be creating that software if you didn’t think people were going to be using it mainly for the most part. But I have run into scenarios where all I want to do is get this information into Google Sheets and then manipulate it and then put it somewhere else or use that Google Sheet to get it to somewhere else. And a lot of times I find myself looking at Zapier to say, okay, can Zapier get that information out of there and put it into Google Sheets? And a lot of times the answer is no, because you’ve got eight actions in the Zap and three search functions in the Zap and it’s just not doing very well.

When I first started doing Tech for Lawyers, though, I had a thing called KYP which is know your programmer. Everybody knows now hopefully that you should know some sort of either IT company or IT person or somebody that can set up your information technology, somebody that can set up your system. That is separate in a tech world from somebody that can write your code. I think that’s something we skip over as attorneys is recognizing that we need to have somebody that can write some of these automations for us because none of these systems are going to be the silver bullet. They just aren’t. I mean they either have to be so specific that they work extremely well for one very specific subset of attorneys or they have to be so broad that they kind of work for everybody and then you’ve got to kind of write your own code around it. So I think we tend to lean on Zapier and, I think that’s good. But knowing a programmer, going out and finding somebody. And this could be somebody you find on Fiverr. This could be somebody that you—this doesn’t have to be a law firm specific coder. It’s just somebody that knows how to write PHP or Python or something like that.

I think that’s more important than really even finding the right product because really we’re finding the right six products or eight products or whatever.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

Yeah. No, I agree with that 100%. I mean you have the question of, do you want everything lumped into one, which sounds great except that one thing is never best of class across all of the features that you want and then you have find best of class and make it work together. We have a technology partner. The name of the company is Verdant TCS. And we’ve been leaning on them pretty heavily to do that for us because for the services that we provide, and we do content marketing, media, we help with intake, we’re very focused on not lead volume generated but cases signed. And so we’re sitting there and we’re going through with intake teams to make sure that the leads that we’re getting are getting treated the right way so that they turn into clients. And if there’s a breakdown at any point in there, that’s where we lean on a lot of that business intelligence, especially through Power BI to pull that data. And so we’ve had the most experience doing that in Needles. We pull the data out of Needles. 

We had one scenario where we were able to identify one intake person on a team that was just a rock star, and the question that was brought to us was, “Why has our case volume decreased?” And so we took a few years of data out of Needles, we put it in Power BI, we started to present it and show it. And come to find out they had just one absolute rock star on the intake side and then she left and their intake just dove down. And one of the crazy things to me about that was that nobody knew that. Nobody on the team knew that in the moment. And so we’re in there, we figured that out, it worked out very well because the firm actually went back to that person and said, hey, why did you quit? And it turns out she hated doing medical records retrieval, and they were having her do that and intake. And they said, hey, can we bring you back? We’re going to pay you X, and you’re not going to have to do that. And she came back and then the next year was just incredible. But the power of that information is just undeniable, right? And you need to have someone who’s going to help you implement that. 

But I think as you raise that point, which makes complete sense to me because we do that sometimes. We lean on partners to do that sometimes. You do that. But the firm kind of needs a you or a me to be able to speak the language of saying, “Hey, we need someone who knows PHP or someone who knows how to tie these two systems together, what an API is, what JSON is.” And so you know that, I know that, most of the attorneys I’ve worked with don’t. And so I think that what you’re doing on Lawyerist is great, because you’re helping lawyers understand how to run their practice better using technology. But you as a resource to be able to almost do a translation to say, “Okay, I understand what your needs are. I also understand how to get there using skills that I don’t necessarily need to have,” but you can communicate that across that barrier. And so I think finding someone or working with someone who can do that … and I think a good starting place is probably your MSP, your IT company. Talk to them. See if you can get someone there who is interested in the firm, interested in what you’re doing, that can then help you get plugged into that person. Because without someone like you, that’s a lot of Latin.  

 

Zack Glaser: 

That’s true. I a lot of times consider myself just a liaison between the legal world and the information technology and programming world. And I find it doesn’t seem like there should be quite as much of a butting of heads there. But both of these areas of the world are magic. Lawyers perform magic by writing things on paper. Programmers perform magic by coding things behind the scenes. And if you ask them how they did it, it’s not worth explaining to you. And so they’re both used to somebody saying, well, how did you do that? And they go, I don’t know, magic. And so both of these magicians are trying to talk to each other and don’t have a common language. And so it can be kind of grating to both of them. So it’s not required that I have a law degree to be able to do this, but it is kind of required that I’m able to talk to lawyers, that I have a familiarity with the area at the very least. But I think this position is starting to show itself in some of the larger firms. 

We’re starting to see the people that are that are dealing with the legal tech, the advisors, somebody that is saying, all right, I’m going to set up our platforms. I’m going to make sure that our technology buying, our purchasing is appropriate and somebody that is internal. And I think that we’re starting to see some outside vendors trying to position themselves. And to be fair, some have already. But trying to position themselves more as a kind of liaison or just an advisor in that capacity.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

Yeah, I agree with that. I think that—obviously I run a marketing company. So I am biased towards this. But I think that that’s also a good provider who should be pretty adept in the technology side. That’s something we try to do. I mean the whole reason I got into this particular vertical working with lawyers was a lawyer who became a very good friend of mine down in Texas and I got to hear about the cases that he was working on. I also got to meet his clients and hear the stories. And I also happen to love technology. And the thing that I’ve noticed in working with him is that we’ve been able to do that, where we’ve been able to bridge those gaps, which is fun and exciting. Also, you’re dealing with two of the—not to stereotype too much—but two of the more skeptical, evidence-based groups in existence when you’re dealing with developers who want to look at something and understand the logic and why it works and lawyers who say, look, if we follow these processes, we should end up here. Writing those two to match is a trick.  

 

Zack Glaser: 

But they should match.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

They should.  

 

Zack Glaser: 

The idea that it’s all for both practices let’s say. It’s all logic gates. It’s a lot of if this, then this. And although you get into legal writing, you get into persuasion and things like that, and it starts to get a little bit more gray and fuzzy. But at the end of the day, there’s literally code in both practices, and those codes do the same thing. They reference other places and they have definitions and tell you what to do specifically. Just one’s interpreted by a computer, and the other is interpreted by humans and judges. Someday it’ll be interpreted by a computer though hopefully.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

Oh, I believe it. I believe it. 

 

Zack Glaser: 

But I think you hit on something very good there that I just kind of want to make sure to say. It is very difficult to separate marketing from technology in this field. One of the places that I would say to look for a programmer or somebody to ask about a programmer would be whoever is doing your marketing, provided you’re happy with your marketing because they a lot of times are going to advise you on what CRMs to use, what automations to use. 

I mean you cannot separate legal marketing from legal technology.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

Yeah, yeah. I would add that so long as your marketing company is focused on actual intake, right? Because one of the things we see all the time is look at your stats. Hey, your bounce rate has gone way down. And we think, well, that’s meaningless. I mean it’s not meaningless, but like if that’s the thing that’s being shown as the metric for success. Whereas the one undeniable thing is what does your intake look like, how many new cases are you signing. I feel like the way to get there is by good use of technology and by a good understanding of what’s working and what’s not working which, of course, we try to do.

There’s a lot of other companies that try to do it too and I think do a great job. But that makes a lot of sense. So one last question just to throw at you. So if you were the CTO or the CIO at either a case management or an intake technology company, what is the area that you would want to invest in at this point in time where you’d really love to see like the solution come out on top?  

 

Zack Glaser: 

I’ve got two that are extremely interesting to me, and I hear about them a lot from lawyers that I talk to. One is project management. One aspect of your practice that at least a law practice management system should take care of, but a lot of times your CRM will as well, is literally your project management, whether it’s Agile, whether it’s a Kanban board, or if it’s just tasks. A lot of people like writing tasks down and having templated task lists. But having solid project management that is comfortable for the users. And then two, just because it’s my favorite thing, is the document automation. And not even so much the automation as the assembly. I think starting to dig into and really get into connecting the document assembly with the intake even. Because you get into forms, conditional forms that you’re putting out there, and that is gathering information. But then as that information is gathered, it matriculates through the system, and it starts to create documents out the back end. And I think recognizing that those two things are married and that they are extremely powerful for an attorney to start to automate large processes. I’d like to see more people, and I think a lot of them are. But I really enjoy it. Let’s say it that way. I really enjoy it when law practice management systems push into document assembly as opposed to just document automation.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

I love that. That makes sense. I’d love to see more of the visualization reporting. I think Filevine is utilizing Domo now to do some of that, and I think Domo is a good product. I just went through a Domo through part of Filevine. I have a follow-up to check out what we can get in Domo. But I think that’s a big opportunity. I love that. I use that to run my own business. Again, for me, I need to see it, I need to see the trend lines. If I see a number and I see a number every week, I don’t know, I don’t recall what that was three weeks ago. So I would love to see that. So anything else you want to add?  

 

Zack Glaser: 

No, I’ve really enjoyed the conversation. This has been very interesting. I always like talking about what I call the legal tech stack, all the stuff that you that you combine together to run your practice. So I appreciate you having me here.  

 

Chip LaFleur: 

I appreciate you coming on. So again, Zack Glaser, check out the podcast on Lawyerist. I think it’s worth listening to. I appreciate you taking the time to come and join us here. We’ll send this out, we’ll push this out to our audience. Then we’ll put a link back to your podcast too so that people can check that out. I think there’s a lot of incredibly valuable information there.  

 

Zack Glaser: 

Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Chip. I enjoyed it.  

 

Conclusion: 

That’s it for this episode of Legal Marketing Radio. As always, if you have a suggestion or question for the podcast, just send an email to [email protected]. I’ll read what you send and either address your question on a podcast or possibly do an entire episode about the topic you suggest. That’s it for this time. Thank you for tuning in. We’ll see you next time on Legal Marketing Radio from LaFleur.