Designing a Bold New Practice with Automation
Trial attorney Erin Gerstenzang argues legal practice needs automation, comparing it to the butterfly stroke in swimming. He maps strategies across the VUCA model: complexity calls for lift-and-shift tools like Orbit Wills, uncertainty demands access-to-justice solutions like Hello Divorce, and volatility requires mastery of platforms like Airtable and Webflow. Eighty percent of Americans have unmet legal needs.
Chapters
Awesome. So hello. I'm excited to be here. As Katherine introduced me, my name is Erin Gerstenzang, and I'm a trial attorney in Atlanta, Georgia. But I also am obsessed with innovation and automation in the legal space. So to kick off today, I want to start off with one of my favorite stories. That is not about legal actually at all. And it's actually about the invention of the butterfly stroke. And it's actually sort of even funny to talk about it as an invention because I don't really think that's how we would normally think about designing a, a way to move through the water. But the butterfly stroke was actually a fairly recent invention in the world of swimming. And it was— there's some debate about who actually gets credited with it, but it was independently simultaneously co-discovered across a couple of continents in the early 1930s. And it showed up on the swimming world similar to the way it showed up in 1933 in Brooklyn, which was at a swim meet with an innovative and sort of forward-thinking coach who had taken the rules of the breaststroke and realized that you could use the same rules around the breaststroke as it had— as you think of what the breaststroke shows up That's how people were swimming. And they realized they could take the rules of the breaststroke and change the movement, change the way the swimmer moved through the water using what we now think of as the butterfly stroke for the arms, right? Bringing the arms out of the water and pulling water through, you could move through the water so much more quickly than the traditional breaststroke arm movement. So as you might imagine, you know, showing up in 1933 at the swim meet swim meet for the breaststroke event with his swimmer, swimmer gets in the water, you know, surely the swimming community, the best breaststroke community would be so excited to see this new innovation, the swimmer enter the water and blow the competition out of the water, I guess metaphorically and literally here. So of course, everybody was really excited to see this new innovation, right? Not true. Human nature being what it was, the breaststroke community was appalled. You know, you bastardized what the breaststroke is supposed to be. You've ruined it. You've, you know, besmirched the good name of the breaststroke. This was really a huge debatable moment in the swimming community because everyone was really upset. We have a traditional way of presenting in the water, and this is not fair. It took about another decade when coaches added the traditional butterfly kick, and it became its own stroke, and then we saw it showing up in the Olympics. But what's really interesting here is that this innovation that really built on something that was good and made it better, and arguably, at least if you're watching Michael Phelps, allows humans to move more beautifully through the water. Should have been received with acclaim and celebration, right? This was obviously an improvement. Um, but that's not what the natural reaction was. So why do we start with this story? I like to start with this story because I think that this innovation that we saw, um, when it came to the butterfly stroke is what we're seeing all over in legal. What we're seeing is lawyers are taking those same rules that we've all adhered to, the traditional way of practicing law, and we've never really questioned if there was a better way to do it. And one of the cool things that's happening, in part because of automation, is lawyers are getting to redefine how they show up at the swim meet, how they show up for clients. And using automation, you can superpower this ability, and it absolutely will become a superpower in your practice. So today on the agenda, you guys have a lot of opportunities to learn about the mechanics of automation, the show me how these applications work. But to start off, we're gonna start at this sort of high-level conversation of the why. I mean, obviously automation is amazing because it's gonna bring efficiency to your office. That's always exciting. That's always a good reason why. But there are bigger questions as to why and bigger things you can do beyond getting a faster process and beyond turning out documents faster. So for the next little while, while we're talking, we want to talk about some bigger, bigger questions about why, and for you to think about as you look at these opportunities in automation, where are they going to fit in your practice and why is it important. Okay. So, let's see. So, what does this type of innovation look like in law? That's where we're going to start. And we're going to look at some examples. But we're going to do it— let's just switch, because we started a little bit late. We're going to just fast-forward my introduction. We're going to do it using a fun model. And this is sort of the why. How do we decide where automation goes? And I think, especially in 2020, the VUCA model for futures is one of the best places to use when deciding where to bring in automation. If you got— I'm a big Clio fan. If you were at the Clio conference, Jack Newton, CEO of Clio, in his keynote talked about how Clio as a company uses VUCA planning to determine how to plan for the future, all the unknowns and unexpected in the future. And it was fun to hear him talk about that because a lot of large businesses use this for their planning, but they've stolen it from the military. It's actually the way the military approaches how do we plan for uncertainty, and they use the VUCA model. And VUCA is actually an acronym that stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. And these are the 4 ways that the future can show up in your business, whether you're running Clio or you're running a small law firm like mine, or the military. So we want to look at this. What's interesting about the year 2020, as we look at this graph, is you're going to see that there's some— you saw all of these kinds of uncertainty and futures arise as we progress through 2020. You know, first of all, there's this sort of less predictable, but we have existing knowledge complexity here, where situations where there are substantial parties, multiple variables, and interconnected relationships. I had a lot of moving parts, a lot of things are happening. You know, we do know we have so much knowledge out there, but we're just not sure where it's going to push us and where it's going to lead. Well, there's some solutions that you're going to look at to deal with complexity. You know, there's also this, you know, volatility, situations where we also have more, we have a lot of knowledge and predictability. So, they're going to whipsaw in different directions, and we're going to look at solutions where you can deal with that. So, as we go through, we're going to use this, and I'll get this slide to you, Katherine, because there's a lot of information on here, but we're going to use this as the framework to look at how we're using automation and innovation to prepare for these moments. In law. Okay, so for that first quadrant that we were talking about, the complexity, I really love this lift and shift approach, which we're stealing from the design world. We're stealing from a lot of different worlds today to look at innovation. The design world is lift and shift. Complexity is, look, there's a lot of things happening, there's a lot of information, where do I start? Well, let's look at, um, let's look at what's been working in the world already. What are attorneys innovating and how are they finding solutions? Because although you may have a specific practice that isn't exactly how these attorneys are showing up, there's a lot of opportunities for us to lift and shift for our practice. It's important history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. So one of my favorite examples here is Orbit Wills. Orbit Wills has been around actually for quite a few years. And this is a law firm out of Tacoma, Washington. And Annie Arbenz is the owner. And she realized a couple of years ago that she could use automation tools like online intake forms to collect a lot of the information she needed to prepare these simple estate documents for clients. And as a working mom with young children, she realized, hey, this is, you know, this is going to be a great place if I could automate this onboarding. The work that I'm doing can be done at any time, day or night. The only really design factor that I have is I'm meeting with clients, and that tends to be during the day, and that can be disruptive if I'm trying to also manage all these other tasks, including childcare. So she designed a tool really just for convenience of her life, to fit her life, which allows all of her clients to come online and fill out the information that they need. They order a simple estate document and they pay for it. And then Annie's like, hey, I get to turn it around for them in the next day or two. She's done very little handholding with the clients, and she gets gets to work on her time. If her great hours of getting work done are between 7:00 PM and 11:00 PM, well, then that's when she gets to knock out those hours. And so she— and then the added bonus is she's like, it's fun. I get to go into my inbox and be like, oh, you have a new order. So she's really sort of designed out of efficiency, used automation to design a practice that was very prophetic. You know, I was looking at these slides last night thinking, gosh, I had prepared the slide. I've been talking about her for 2 or 3 years now. We've seen a lot of lawyers embracing this in the last year. Seems much more commonplace. But these are easy tools to make happen, you know, very quickly. This is not complicated technology she's using. Okay. Now we have the higher end, and this is like an inspirational place of Second Law. And this is just absolutely a law firm that's been ahead of its time for ages. Like they've been around for years. Bahar Ansari is the firm owner, and she has partnered actually with a technologist. So he's not even a lawyer. But her law firm's based in DC. She lives in California, but they have a law firm based in DC because that allows her to partner with a technologist who's a non-lawyer. And they designed a platform where they started looking at all these moments in the law. So whether it was, you know, immigration, they've identified and targeted these places where you can do essentially what Annie Arbenz out of Tacoma, Washington has done for estate planning. They are identifying all the areas of law where you can automate and make these little moments provide these small sort of limited scope solutions to people online and build an automation to do it. Second Law is really just sort of just spend some time on their website for inspiration in terms of what can be truly automated. Some of it's hybrid. But a lot of these services are now the way consumers want to do it, which is online on their time at 11:00 PM at night like the rest of us when they're getting their to-do items completed. And they do it at a fraction of the cost of what traditional law firms cost. So for really simple legal solutions, these services are incredibly valuable. Another place for just inspiration— what, where are lawyers using these automations to reduce their— and what you're seeing a theme here is lawyers are using automation to reduce their overhead. They're taking the expensive part of legal services people, right, staff, either your time or your staff's time. They're taking that out and replacing it with technology so they can offer unbelievably competitive fees. So this is— and that you're going to see this theme. And I should take a pause for a moment. I get excited even though it's still not even 9:00 AM on the East Coast. So, you know, I— my background is I have both my parents are criminal defense lawyers. They have a firm in New York. My brother became a criminal defense attorney. My sister's a public defender in San Diego. We were raised in this very old-school approach to the practice of law, which was get as good as you possibly can at your niche. My niche is DUI defense. Get as good as you possibly can so you can charge the most. And that is what a successful law practice is, that you always want to be at the top and you want to be charging the most. And what's interesting is automation and my work in technology has really challenged that assumption. And really, a lot of what's interesting here in this new innovative space is what if we turn that model on its head? What if lawyers are missing a lot of opportunity to help a greater amount of people at a lower price point by doing a lot less work because we're using technology? So when you think about changing this model and just sort of even if you have that sort of what I have now started calling this old school model of Oh, we want to, you know, charge the most for as few cases. You want to think about where are these moments that you can really find these opportunities. So I think Council for Creators has done a really interesting job. And they have a subscription service for creative businesses, which there's a ton of now, especially in 2020 where, you know, we've seen a growth of these sort of home-started businesses, at $95 a month. What's really interesting is not only have they used automation to provide sort of services in this subscription to all of the people who are there. So it's not like they're spending a huge amount of time with each of those individual clients, but it's also this pipeline because as clients, those clients who are paying $95 a month discovered that they need legal solutions that are outside of the subscription. Well, that is the one firm that they obviously already have a relationship with and they're going to turn to for help. So not only have they figured out a new way to offer new and engage with clients in a new way and offer new legal services using automation, but they've also built this magical pipeline for themselves of keeping those clients close to them, reminding them of the other legal solutions that are available. I have a friend who has a subscription law practice, and she says, you know, when my clients call, you know, all of my colleagues are worried when I offer a subscription that clients will be calling all the time. 'll be blowing up my phone if I'm not keeping track of the time.' She's like, 'I see every client call as an opportunity to pitch them new solutions for the problems they're calling me about.' So it's a great way to sort of both be helpful and offer value, and also discover new opportunities for you to be valuable to your clients. Okay, so let's talk about this other con— quadrant. We talked about complexity, sort of when we know that there's a lot of complexity out there, what do people want? We want to look at some of those models that are already working to see if we can riff on them and bring them into our practice. There's this other quadrant, though, uncertainty. And this is where we really struggle because we have— we're not exactly sure what's going to stick. Right? And we think about 2020, we don't know what's going to stick. When we think about changing our market, changing our practice, it's hard to know what the future is going to entail and what people are truly going to need. So, how do we prepare in our businesses for that uncertainty of not even knowing that what we're offering is going to continue to be the same kind of value to clients? And I think one of our real opportunities in this uncertainty is in the access to justice. Gap. There are— the statistics are overwhelming. Staggering numbers of Americans, something like 80% of Americans who would benefit from legal services are not accessing them. And that's not just for the normal reasons that you might think. You might think, well, maybe they're just too poor. A lot of it, and that's, you know, an easy assumption to make in the access to justice space. The data does not support that it's just a financial hurdle. Part of that, a big part of that is an education piece that people don't even know that there's legal services available to them or solutions available to them where they could access law firms. 80% of unmet legal needs, needs in the US. That is huge, especially for small law firms. Everybody, every small law firm owner I know should be obsessed with this market. Between automation and our know-how, there are solutions out there that we could be providing to people for profit, and we haven't tapped into it. So I think it's important, first of all, in understanding this space, you know, who, who are the people? Why are there reasons? What are their reasons for not seeking assistance? You know, only 17% of these people say that it costs too much. So 46% don't even know that there's advice out there or help. OK, so what does this look like? How do we capitalize on this, this knowledge? How do we bring this into the legal space? One brilliant innovator out there, Erin Levine, running Hello Divorce, has also sort of been way ahead of everybody else, way ahead of her time in building a platform which is essentially a do-it-yourself platform for divorce in California. Erin looked at the numbers and she realized that on average, divorces in California were costing about $5,000 to $6,000 on average. That was the cost. And she looked at it and she said, look, well, look, is there a part of this market that we can capture where we can reduce costs for people where they don't need to be spending that much? Obviously, a $5,000 to $6,000 divorce is not a complicated divorce. That's not one where they went to trial. Is there a margin in here where we can provide a cheaper solution? So the divorce navigator is something she ended up designing, which is using a lot of different automation tools, which are not super complicated. I'm very I'm friendly with Erin Levine. She is an innovator. She is amazing. She's brilliant. But it's not like she's this huge tech genius, right? She didn't— she taught herself to use these, these tools to build. And then, and then she also teamed up with teams eventually to build these automations that provide an unbelievably curated handheld experience for people who are curious about divorce, learning about divorce, on the path to divorce, want to get a divorce.. And she's created a lot of different tiers for people to pay on average about $1,500 for their divorce with, with her. She launched this and I got to see her talk about it 8 months later. And so she's providing this service. People love it. It's at this affordable rate. Is she making money? I think she was about 7 or 8 months in and she was at the point she was willing to share the numbers from it. And she had generated something like $50,000 or $60,000 over the course of less than a year from from this automation just running on her website. Since then, it's become much more popular and much more visible, and I'm sure much more profitable. But she's a great example of using this automation. Another good example here, we're going to spin through him. It's great. Check out the Pat Bot. This is a Washington State lawyer. He does employment injury plaintiffs work. And a big part of his problem was determining, you know, which clients to take. When you work on a contingency basis, you have to determine which, which cases are going to be profitable. He's used a lot of data to try to figure out, narrow that down and actually use that data to build a PAT bot, which is sort of this way for people to engage with, you know, a bot and give them good advice about their claim and point them in the right direction, a lot of which is away from his firm. It's sort of screening some of those bad cases. But also building this automation that helps him get visibility and helps make sure he is capturing those leads that are valuable. Megan Xavier out of California is also the playbook. She represents attorneys who are in hot water with the disciplinary committee in California. She realized very early on that lawyers— I mean, I don't envy her. Lawyers must be— I feel like lawyers would be the worst clients. I don't think she's actually said this. I don't want to quote her, but lawyers are tough clients because we tend to think we can do it on our own. We hate to pay legal fees. And unfortunately, you would think that lawyers have a lot of extra money sloshing around to pay for legal fees when they do get in trouble. But as it turns out, they don't. Frequently, a lot of the people who find her and need her help don't have that kind of money. So she designed a digital online solution for lawyers where it gives them a playbook. Playbook. And for $1,500, you can get some assistance from her, but mostly you're going to represent yourself. And here's the playbook and here's the pleadings and here's the process. So she's figured out a really interesting way to deliver her value, her legal service to people in a much more affordable way, as opposed to staying on that model of I need to be the best so I can charge the most. She is truly one of the best, but she figured out a way to distill her expertise and also provide it and make it available at this lower price point. And in a way that as a lawyer, I love the idea of making money while I sleep. I hate the idea of counting how many 6-minute increments I've spent on something and love waking up to emails that people have made these purchases to engage in these services. Okay. So, Volatility. Let's move to the volatility quadrant of VUCA. This is, again, where situations, where things whipsaw in unexpected directions, but forces are understood. So we have a little bit more existing knowledge in these situations for volatility. So we know things are going to be changing in 2020. We know the world is crazy. We know that, you know, 20 years ago, you could rely that things that worked yesterday are going to work tomorrow. We know in this world that that's no longer true. And I think that this is really— I think that this is really— when I came across this quote, I think it's important for lawyers to think about not just in marketing, but in technology skills. Lawyers trying to compete for commodity work in the future will need superior marketing tactics. They won't learn to master online marketing skills in law school, but it's probably the single most valuable capability that many of them will need to be successful. You know, I think the new world of marketing also, as you're seeing some of these examples, is really about a lot of automation and comfort with technology and figuring out ways to be helpful online. That is a lot of what the new age of marketing is. And also, when you're figuring out how to be helpful online, that's also how we're designing for the future. So one of my favorite examples, and like, I don't know if we're going to get you all these, write down TateEsquire.com. His— he is a great example. His website is fantastic. So he's done a couple of these things that I say every lawyer should be doing. So, first of all, he sort of found himself his own little niche area. He realized he was clerking for bankruptcy and bankruptcy. And he realized, you know, there's not a lot of lawyers out there who are sort of helping students navigate these student loan issues. And if you've been paying attention to the news in the last 5 to 10 years, the student loan crisis is huge and looming. A huge pain point that people have that lawyers really weren't speaking to or providing legal solutions for. Again, he falls in that quadrant of this access to justice. 46% didn't even really know that if they're having trouble paying their student loans, they could go to a lawyer and afford a lawyer and get help there. That's a totally new kind of area. So Stanley, who also goes by Tate, he sort of leaned into his just like willingness to learn new school skills and tools. So, he talks about designing his practice. One of my favorite things that I want to highlight here is learning new tools is when you go to his website, not only does he have this awesome niche practice, but he's figured out a way, because one of the problems he talks about his practice is he started blogging and because there was nobody doing this in the space, his website went to the top of Google and then he's getting like 30,000 inbounds and he's like, I'm a solo, you know, I don't, I can't even vet these.. So one of the tools he learned to use was VideoAsk. And so this is actually something I'm working on, on my law firm, is it's a great way to interact with your audience and automate you. Like, he's actually automated himself in those onboarding screen screening calls that most clients would have to talk to him to have. He set up this experience. So as he describes it, clients feel like they've spoken to him. They feel like they know by the time they get to him and by the time they're scheduling a call, he's weeded out the people who he can't might be helpful, too. And he's also weeded out the people who, as he says, he's like, I've weeded out the people who don't want to work with me. If you don't like the way that I talk or the way that I show up, like this is— I show up authentically on my site. And so the people he ends up talking to are the people who convert. He also has used Airtable. He's done a lot of really cool things to automate that service. But he's told us in venues, you know, he's making a ton of money from his house, not working. He's working, you know, I think 20 to 30 hours a week. He takes a week off every 6 weeks. And he's, he has almost no overhead. And he's built this practice in the last, I want to say, 5 years, where there was just like all this open, wide open space, so much low-hanging fruit that just a little bit of automation and know-how, he built something that I'm frankly, obviously very envious of. So anyway, spend some time at his website. But I think new tools and a turn— and when it comes to managing this volatility, when we think about being flexible and agile, our skill that as lawyers we haven't focused on but we desperately need to— this is the new most important skill you could have going into 2021— is the ability to learn how to use new tools, right? The tool that Stanley's using is VideoAsk. I love this tool. It's amazing. It's very easy to use. This, this tool that I'm referencing is Webflow. Building a website has never been easier. One of the best things about 2020 is like, even if you're scared at the idea of having to use new tools, tools have never been easier to learn or use. There's whole teams devoted to making these things easy to use, to making it only a 10-minute video on YouTube at most for you to learn how to be an expert in using these tools. So we have the information. We really just have to spend a small amount of time playing with them. And that is the most important skill that you can develop for 2021, is being flexible and getting to be that kind of person who says, yeah, I can learn that, as opposed to the person who says, I don't like technology. It doesn't work for me. It's too frustrating. I give up. And that is going to be the difference between feeling really successful and prepared for the future, I think, in a lot of spaces and not. Another new tool is Kajabi. Kajabi is a really fun tool for building online courses. One of the things that I've done in COVID and I've made a considerable amount of money and marketing is going, you know, the courts got closed. So I'm a criminal defense attorney, ended up doing a lot of online instruction for other attorneys. I leveraged my expertise and turned it into courses that attorneys could purchase, which ended up turning into— I was very worried that numbers would slow.. But that also ended up being marketing. That was just a skill because I knew I could come to a tool like Kajabi and start, you know, spend, spend some time on YouTube learning it, figuring it out and get better. Gumroad is also another great just like hub to go to. This is what Erin Levine, who built Hello Divorce, she always credits. That's a big part of her platform that she used to build her Hello Divorce series. And again, there's a bunch of cute little videos that explain exactly what they do and how they show you to do it. This information is very accessible when we get curious. Community Lawyer is another great place to spend. This is a free tool. It can be free or you can pay for it. If you do it for free, you have to have your, whatever you build is free to the public. So you get to see what other lawyers are building. But they've built essentially, you know, we talked about Second Law. It had the picture of the shark where I said Bahar Ansari has been like, 8 years ahead of other attorneys, and she's built this platform and she partnered with a technologist. You know, when she was building it, she needed to partner with a technologist because the technology didn't exist to be able to build this tool that would allow for automated legal services. Well, now in 2020, we have Community Lawyer. Every single person on this call has exactly what Bahar has— had in a partner who was a technologist in DC. Community Lawyer is a really amazing platform that helps you, and they give you examples. Here are some examples of the things that lawyers have been using to build legal solutions and use these tools. COVID-19 Rent Relief Letter. Renters can use this app to generate a letter requesting an extension on their rent payment. Injustice Square Park Claim. File a claim to get compensated for the loss of property in Injustice Square Park. Kentucky Expungement of Eligibility App determines whether a particular conviction or charge can be expunged in Kentucky. Public Charge Advisor helps lawyers determine if immigration clients are subject to the new public charge rule. Debt Collection Lawsuit Answer Tool responds to a debt collection lawsuit in California and protects your rights. Mortgage Help, a guide to communicating with your mortgage servicer. So you can see there's a theme here, right? This isn't huge legal solutions. That we're talking about. We're talking about sort of discrete, but painful and really problematic legal problems that people have that lawyers, as lawyers, we are in this great position to know the answers. And when we couple that wisdom and knowledge with technology, we can do it at scale. And we can make money doing it. And also, you know, do good. All right. So the final quadrant, ambiguity. Explore and experiment. So, this ambiguity is sort of the, you know, it's the less predictable and we have the least amount of knowledge to deal with. So, this is just like wide open canvas. And 2020 has definitely presented us with some of that as well. So, what do we do when we literally don't know what we don't know and we just have to brace for what's coming? How can we put ourselves in the best position to survive that? So my favorite place, and you'll sort of pick up that I've been hinting about this, is to be better at looking for new solutions. You know, I was raised by lawyers. You know, there were, when I, when I was even in law school, what kind of lawyer are you going to be? Is it going to be a criminal defense lawyer? Is it going to be a civil lawyer? You know, we have these very strict definitions of what kind of law there is to practice and what kind of people we can help solve problems. But as lawyers, we're literally professional problem solvers. And 2020, you know, just the 2000s, but like even in the last decade has brought on so many new problems that people have that we have not also kept up with developing readily recognized practice areas. So new solutions like Stanley Tate is finding for people who have pain points and don't have anywhere to turn. So one of the things, one of the trends that we're seeing in this space is also, you know, in this new solution, people are trying to solve these problems for themselves because there's not— lawyers aren't out there. And we also have a culture and a community of, you know, I think even as lawyers, we suffer from this the most, where we think, well, I can probably figure it out. I can probably figure out a solution. A lot of the public is doing that as well. In fact, 1 in 5 legal consumers believe that with enough time and research, they can harness the knowledge and expertise of a trained lawyer, which is, you know, interesting. Depending on your practice area, that may be, that may be more correct than others. It's certainly not necessarily true in the criminal world. But knowing this is something we want to keep in mind as we design for solutions. Because I think that there's something here when you look at how lawyers are leaning into some do-it-yourself solutions that they're offering people, sometimes as a pipeline, sometimes as a, as a marketing move, sometimes just to be helpful. It's interesting to see how they do succeed, in part because people do believe that they can represent themselves just as well as an attorney. So we want to lean into that and we want to look at the world of legal services, because in some places we recognize that statement of being able to represent yourself as ridiculous. But if you're honest with yourself, there's also places in the law where people don't necessarily always need a lawyer. So you want to think about the world of law in this reference point of areas that are well lawyered versus areas where there's very limited access. And there's also simple and complex kinds of legal problems. When we start looking for these do-it-yourself, these like hybrid or limited scope solutions, this is the play that— this is the place that we want to play when we're thinking about bringing automation to solving some of these problems. Things that are simple and limited access. I think Stanley Tate's example is really a good example of the student loan, helping people navigate student loans. He's picked something that's not super complicated. It's not complicated. The solutions he's offering, they're easily automated. He has a huge high-volume practice. And but he's figured out a way to stay out of that practice by using automation, by offering simple, solutions in a place where there's limited access. I think, so another great example is Takora Davis. She has the Creators Law Lab and she's got a huge following. So she's like a little bit of a, you know, in this space, a celebrity. But she's also got the Creators Law Lab where you can sign up for $2,000 and she sort of coaches you through protecting your brand. And so she's automated a lot of this stuff that she was probably giving to her actual picks clients. And she realized, hey, there's this limited scope, you know, a lot of my clients only need this process. What if I could automate this part of it, this small chunk, and just offer it for a flat fee and then sort of get out of the instruction part of it, get out of the hand-holding part of it? And now she gets to do that and help people and make that money while she sleeps. This is another example of what she offers people in her service. All right. Lester Law. Again, I said Erin Levine, who did Hello Divorce, she was way ahead. But we're starting to see in the area of family law, a lot of lawyers are riffing on this and they're figuring out ways to offer these limited scope services. What if instead of solving the whole global problem for my family law clients, which is the divorce, what if I just help them figure out a way to give them a bite-sized solution to some of these other problems I know they're having. So she's offered these other kinds of services under her law practice, a lot of which are automated. Chat Legal, again, is another example. This is actually out of Australia, which is a good place to spend time and look and see how they are focusing— what are the issues that they're focusing on. You know, Australia is a little bit different, so I like to just hang out on their site just to see their take on it. It's not exactly a roadmap for the US, but you can see that they've, they've separated their packages in limited scope and they've divided it from like the bronze package, which is you attend an online meeting, maximum 2.5 hours, and then you receive documents. And they lay this out for people very clearly. What I love about this example is they've really gone through the kinds of solutions that they've offered to their clients really deeply, spent time trying to understand each of those sets. And divide it out and apportion a value to it. And it makes it really clear for the person who's purchasing this service what they're getting and what they're not getting. When you think about it, this is how we're purchasing a lot of important services as consumers on a daily basis. So while it may feel weird to apply in the law context, it's far more common and is received by the consumer so much more readily than you might expect. Okay, sliding in just under the wire. Hopefully today has been— hopefully these examples have provided you with some inspiration and optimism about what the future can hold. You know, a little bit, you came today wanting to learn about automation. So if your goal here is to just find efficiency solutions, Efficiency solutions will change your world. If you're not using any automation or you're using a little automation and you find one automation solution to what you're doing, that's, that's a huge win. What you will discover if you're at the early stages of this path is that the more solutions you start finding, even in the efficiency space, will become addictive. It will drive your desire to find new ways to implement. Brilliant. So I definitely encourage you to look at these tools, examine them, think about how other lawyers are using them to redesign the practice of law, because that's really, more so than ever, that's what's on the table here, is these lawyers are going out and rethinking and redesigning how we deliver legal solutions to people and how we solve problems. And they're building careers and firms that they love, that fit their lifestyles, and really help a good portion of the community who prior to this don't always have access and know that those legal solutions are available. So use these tools that you're going to learn today and go find your butterfly stroke. And let me know about it. I would love to hear. So with that, thank you.
