Eliminate your Law Firm’s Bottleneck: Legal Tech with Jay McAllister

Welcome to Accountants LawPod, where accounting professionals and law firms converge, hosted by Linda Artesani, Sarah Prevost, and Steven Libhart.

Well, welcome everyone. We do have a special guest with us today, and we also are going to miss one of our dear friends on our trio, right, Linda?

Who's—

Yeah.

He's still vacationing, but—

Don't feel bad for him. He's in Hawaii.

He's in Hawaii. Yeah.

I'm so glad it was a vacation. I was like, there's no way you You brought me in for like a death that just happened, and now I'm supposed to try to make this lively. And okay, so—

It's gonna be a memorable podcast that we're gonna have with our—

Very thankful it's just a vacation.

Yeah. Well, I— we had the pleasure of meeting Jay, um, at ClioCon, and it was like a, a moment that I think both Linda and I were like, ooh, this is a good conversation, and This is a well-spoken individual. We're loving this.

It was me who contacted you, remember?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then we had our second conversation and all of that went to the wayside.

Yes, all the fun was had in that second conversation. But we're here today to talk about eliminating your law firm's bottlenecks with our friend Jay, who really has got a deep bench of knowledge and a great story on how he entered this space and And really some phenomenal— I've had some private conversations with you, Jay, and some amazing forethought on how to sort of look at a law firm's way of doing business and how to unlock them, essentially. So go ahead and feel free to introduce yourself. Yeah, definitely.

Like you mentioned, I am Jay McAllister. Recently, I've been told that I should preface by saying I'm not Jake from State Farm. I've been I've been compared to him on many occasions. Funny enough, I did get a meal at Wendy's for free one time as a result of them thinking I was Jake from State Farm. I told them I am literally not Jake from State Farm, and they thought I was being bashful. So they're like, just, you know, give them food, give them free food. They paid for the whole— or they gave me a whole meal for free.

So I love that, that your doppelganger is him, because I can now see that, and that is so— oh man, that's so good. That's so on point too with your mannerisms and everything. That's good.

So I just spoke. So Clio had year-end webinar yesterday. It was all about AI tools. I was the keynote speaker there, and I put out a poll at the very beginning, which is I told people I'm not Jake from State Farm, but I am Jay from Paragon. And I asked them to rank how cool that is in comparison on a scale from 1 to 10. We had some pretty decent results. There were some I wasn't exactly happy with, but I'm going to work on getting that percentage a little higher.

So That's funny.

That's awesome. That's a funny way to do that.

That's great.

Well, so tell us about you. Tell us about your firm and, and just kind of how you came into this space, because it's a good story, to be honest with you.

Well, you know, this space is— so I, I work exclusively with law firms and attorneys, right? Which, which, which for other professions, that may be the part where they, they tune out, right? Because they think it's a snooze fest. But I found the exact opposite. I'm sure that you guys could share some of your experiences as well. You know, it's an industry where typically, you know, the application of technology in a legal space has always been one of the things that's been a scary topic for a lot of firms to contend with. And as a result, they don't do it. Now we're seeing that change, and we can certainly get in a little bit later about, you know, with this age of AI, we're seeing that shift. And there's definitely a higher appetite for technology as firms look to try to compete. But this started all the way back in, I guess, what, 12 years ago when I founded my company. And I, you know, growing up, I had a series of jobs as an IT technician, and I realized that most of the work I was doing was from a residential basis, you know, repairing computers for people who, you know, they can't, they're not able to browse Amazon or watch Netflix, those kind of things, right? Not business-critical tasks. And what I realized is a lot of the work that I was doing then at the moment was actually preparing me to be able to provide technology expertise, advice, guidance to businesses. So I decided to take on my first client. Wasn't a law firm, actually. It was actually my first client, fun fact, was actually an ice cream parlor.

Oh.

It's a place called the Plush Horse, which, as you could imagine, was a phenomenal way to enter into the, into the space of serving organizations and businesses, because who would not like to be paid in money and ice cream?

And ice cream.

That is something that was, uh, I did not, uh, have any issues with at all. So as my first client, you know, I cut my teeth just learning the systems, the processes, the, you know, POS systems, integrating various tools together, and realized that these workflow efficiencies that I could create by just making technology work better in a more cohesive way You know, I always like to compare it to Apple. They have this ecosystem that everyone's aware of, and it just works, right? If you, if you receive a phone call on your iPhone, you can look to your computer and all of a sudden that phone call is also ringing there, right? So it's just this application of technology that it's really complex on the back end, but they implement it in such a way that makes it easy for the user and it unlocks efficiency. So I take that same approach with— You know, the businesses that I support. It's like, how do we create this ecosystem? How do we make it so that way the software tools don't get in the way of you doing what you need to do, but actually enhance that process and make it easy and frictionless to be able to operate?

Yes.

So, yeah, I did that for several years and, uh, winded up picking up my first law firm client back in 2014. And, um, it's a friend of mine, it's a guy by the name of Mike Brady. And it was kind of an interesting thing. He had his entire system meltdown at the time. He was using QuickBooks for all of his billing.

Mm-hmm.

And he had, uh, an issue where— and, and it was just so unfortunate, but now that looking back, it actually is what kind of propelled me on this path. But it was a day that I was visiting him at his office before he was a client, and he knew about the work that I did on the technology front. We had a great conversation, went out to lunch. Well, unfortunately, that night is when his QuickBooks blew up. The entire QuickBooks, all of his billings, all of his invoices, everything was gone. I'm talking 12 years of history, you know, work in progress invoices, everything was gone. So of course he calls me, he's like, Jay, I don't know what happened. It's like, you were at the office. Did you touch anything, by the way? I'm like, Mike, no, no, I didn't. Mike, I didn't touch anything. And what we actually found out was that his, coincidentally the same day, his cleaning crew came by. And he had his QuickBooks file. You guys will get a kick out of this as accountants. He had his QuickBooks file stored on a flash drive, which was inserted into the front of his desk computer, desktop computer, which was sitting on the floor, and someone kicked it and it bent and knocked out the flash drive. Luckily, we were able to kind of finagle it to get it working.

Oh.

Because as we're troubleshooting, I'm like, okay, what have you changed? We're going down the list and we figured out it was the flash drive. So from there, I'm like, Mike, You, you got to realize this, you know, your entire business is sitting on this flash drive. There's a better way to do this. So I started to reach out to friends of mine who were attorneys and like, how are you storing? Do you have a cloud-based system? I'm looking for something that I can implement for Mike. And at the time, I mean, this is back in 2014, the prehistoric ages of legal tech.

Mm-hmm.

And no one had a good answer. Like, there, it was all a combination of, hey, we use spreadsheets to track origination and new cases. And I'm like, there's got to be a better way. So that kind of propelled me on this path of wanting to help law firms implement better technology.

I love it. We, we, um, our— one of our phrases is modernizing your law firm. It was on our website when we first got together, but it's so true. And we have seen time and time again, which I think you're right to say accountants, you'd get a kick out of this because how many times have we seen, oh, I got it on this backup over here, or it's on So we've got parts of it here and parts of it here. And before you know it, the inefficiency of admin time, right, Linda?

Yeah, it's just a segmented system. And, oh, we use this product over here, desktop. Well, how are you getting the AR over here to the QuickBooks? Oh, we just put it in with the bank feed. And then it's just messy. And hearing your story, it just brings me back to desktop days because first of all, they should have never had their data file in a flash drive. And second of all—

One of the most secure forms of storage, right?

The thought of that. I mean, yeah. That's crazy. And to think that that's all. And I don't know how you got it back in because if it ever broke, he would have been out of luck completely without his data file.

Oh, we've learned too through, through the legacy of desktop users, I guess you could say. And, and obviously moving to a cloud-based system because Intuit had their online system at the time available, but it still—

Back then it wasn't that good either.

It was a work in progress. But, but even then, like, To go back, everyone at some point, unfortunately, Linda and I keep having to pay for the desktop newest versions because we need to go back because everyone at some point has a desktop version that we have to reference a source back to.

Sometimes, yeah.

Yeah. It's crazy. So, and yeah, to share all this data back and forth and how you share it, and it's not—

I think it's the old days of log me in and having to log into a client's file. And if they didn't have— oh, they accidentally shut the computer off so you can't get in and you're trying to work on the weekends and nights because that's when they're not on their computer. And I don't miss any of that. That's for sure.

How did we manage? You know, it just makes you wonder.

Horribly.

We didn't. We didn't.

Yeah.

Ended the week in a corner in the fetal position, and that usually got us through until the next week to experience it all over again.

What a crazy story though. I love the story of like, that's how it got you into this space. It's sort of like very modeled after we've told the story for our listeners is how Lynn and I got together was a data migration. But I love that yours was just almost like a tripping point for you. Like, you kind of fell into this. No pun intended. Yeah.

It could have gone the other way. I mean, he could have fallen into, like, ice cream shops as his, you know, and kind of took off with that because you've got complexity there with it being a shop and, like you said, the POS system and all of that. But to have it come to being with law firms and they are definitely a needy group, I can tell you.

It would have been a much different introduction today if I— he's like the ice cream IT guy. I mean, it does have a ring to it though.

It does.

It does.

We had— we were just talking about this one client and, and before we started to record, and this one client that we were talking about that had the fancy background in Zoom, we not only taught them Zoom, we taught them how to put a camera on their computer. This is going back pre— right before COVID right before COVID because they bought the camera before the prices spiked. After COVID.

Oh, yeah.

Even when they first started working in this particular software, which I think was LeanLaw, they— even though we put them into LeanLaw and QuickBooks Online from— what'd you say it was? Juris? They actually still printed the copy because this firm was an old firm. And the girl, his girl, would run down the hall with the pre-bill to get it approved with a pen instead of using the system inside of the— they didn't have to do any of that. It was all on the computer. It could be done from anywhere. Sometimes you do these migrations and you train people, but they revert back to old habits. And we're like, what are you printing on? This is the reason. Don't print anymore. Like, I don't have a printer. You know, I don't have filing— I have filing cabinets, but they're empty. They don't have files in them. And it's kind of funny how some firms still operate that way. And you don't get that till you start to ask questions of the firm and find out what their processes are. And then when you are doing a migration, Sarah and I have found Don't try to change the world and make them have all these new processes at once because their head will explode. We've even had to resort to dieting.

One of our slogans on the wall at our office says, incremental, not transformational.

I love that.

You try to come in from day one and we're going to make this so— all the marketing buzzwords. We're going to have a transformation. We're going to have ultimate efficiency. It's like, you will probably not fit or you will probably not succeed in that initiative. Like, law firms are slow-moving organizations. Ideas need to be socialized with key stakeholders, with the associates, with the paralegals, with the admins. Because if you get people who, you know, start sort of form a counter movement against your initiative, now you have friction.

Yes.

So I totally agree with you. And, you know, old habits die hard. So look, I mean, law firms, they're no different than any other organization, which is You know, without the proper structure around what are we going to be doing, but also why are we doing it and how is it going to affect my day-to-day, and then making sure they have the right resources as far as support and training to be able to make sure it sticks, then it typically tends to fail, the initiative. So, you know, really our core business model has been created around that issue, the identification of that issue. Like, we didn't decide this is the things that we're going to start to provide for our clients. It was more so, what are the things that are needed in the marketplace? And then we just structured our service to be able to solve for those things.

And in your service offerings, when you're having these conversations with pretty much the stakeholders, the owners of the firms, but you're realizing there's some critical people that need to be in this conversation, how do you, how do you help them identify? Because sometimes people I mean, let's face it, we're, we're dealing with a certain structure of individuals who make decisions like this. They're just used to it.

Yeah.

How do you, how do you help them re-envision this path? Because what you're offering is a lot. You—

I—

the way that I've perceived it is you have this top-level view. We're specialized on the accounting side. We have to dip into these other segments, but you're looking at it from this higher-level view and trying to help them streamline How, how do you help them identify through those conversations? Because law firms really do need to adapt more quickly. I feel like right now that the software is moving way faster than they can accept it.

It is. And there's a lot of software that is aspirational in its goals, but as far as the execution of it doesn't actually solve for the problem. So that's a whole other issue because law firms have been burned by implementing software that doesn't do what it purports it's supposed to do. Or, you know, whether it be, you know, overzealous account executives who are just looking to make a sale and they promise the world, sell a bill of goods, and you find out it was either A, misrepresented, or B, they didn't have a solid understanding of the law firm's true needs to be able to answer questions in a way that will actually move the needle for the firm. So then the firm gets stuck with this thing that no one uses. So we certainly see that, and that only makes it more difficult. And it backs this theme or this belief that I have, which is actually maybe counter slightly to your belief, which is that I think law firms actually, especially key decision makers in law firms, managing partners, associates, or I'm sorry, managing partners and equity partners of firms, they typically make decisions very rapidly in areas of expert— in their areas of expertise, things that they're familiar with and they deal with on a day-to-day basis. They've seen various permutations of how that issue can manifest, and they're usually fairly comfortable moving pretty quickly. But what I find is, as soon as you get into an area where they're unfamiliar with, technology being one of those things, now all of a sudden pump the brakes. And, you know, our average client would typically, when I'm introduced to a firm, it typically takes between 6 months to 12 months before an engagement is inked. And we're actually in the firm working.

Wow.

Not alone. Right. So we can—

How many times do you think you have conversations with them? Do they do like an initial consult and then they think about it and then maybe something doesn't go well in their current software or something, and then they come back to you like, we're still thinking about this. Is that typical what you see?

It is. Yeah. Usually what I find is, you know, the folks who want to, you know, hey, we'd love to pick your brain. Normally, that's a—

that's my favorite line.

That's a red flag usually of like, I'm not going to retain you, but I'd like your knowledge. Which, look, if my schedule is open enough at that time, I'm happy to take a conversation. Most of the time it's not. So, you know, I really have to focus and guard my time because I got to make sure I take care of my clients. They're paying for services. So I don't want to not deliver to them because I'm allowing someone to pick my brain.

Yeah.

So that is the case. I think most Recognize there's some catalyst event, right? Like, uh, there's a firm that I just onboarded, and she called me. I was actually introduced to her. Um, I don't want to say— I'm not going to say how I was introduced to her.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You could deduce how— who she is. But, uh, she was introduced to me in some fashion by some person. And when she called, our very first call, uh, I answered the phone. Before I could even get Out the words hello, she proceeds to tell me how the firm is on fire and how processes are broken, how she's had— she's gone through so many staff members and she's experienced so much churn because she was throwing people at the problem, realizing now that we actually have an issue with our technology and our systems and our processes of how we're operating. She's like, the documents are being filed. There's incorrect information there. I'm catching it currently. I can't continue to catch it. Like, this is just something that is— she's like, I got stuck. She's like, um, I got stuck in my car the other day for 30 minutes on the phone with the client because we're so unstructured. And I just had to be— I was the only one who could take the call, and I didn't want the client to feel the interruption of, you know, me moving around and, you know, things like that. So I got stuck in the car for 30 minutes in a warm climate. So like things like this.

Mm-hmm.

So it's like she always knew in the back of her head that there was going to be the need to bring someone in who specialized in making sure their software, they were maximizing the functionality there.

Mm-hmm.

But the catalyst event was, hey, we just had our paralegal who's been working here for many years, she quit because the chaos is too much for her and the demands are too high. So, you know, rather than just slot a new paralegal in and experience the same cycle over again, let's take initiative and solve the problem. So that's usually what it is. There's usually something that it's like, We can't go on any longer unless we solve for this. And then that's where the conversations typically begin.

I feel like it's that intentional catalyst moment where the light bulb comes back on to the firm owner and is like, all right, I can't keep doing what I'm doing because I'm just spinning my wheels. And employees are assets. Some people don't have that perspective.

Oh, definitely assets. And, you know, it's so funny. We've got people we've met that actually change their software every year. Looking for the latest, the greatest, the best, the better. This one doesn't do this, and I want something that—

and it's like, I know, Chase.

I think I wrote a blog post on a couple of years ago. It starts out, dear Mr. and Ms. Attorney, and it's just all about constantly looking for that greatest, best software, which there's no such thing unless you build it yourself. You're not going to have that.

So if you build it yourself, you have to pay to maintain it.

It's gonna be expensive and this is not a cheap thing to do, right? And it's just to me that we've had that happen. Then you have to factor in like a lot of the firms that we get that come to us, they usually come off of a spreadsheet. They've got some kind of spreadsheet thing happening or they're using some inefficient system that may be desktop from a long time ago and we get them out of that into something more modern. And then we're like, you know, hey, now that you're in QuickBooks Online, what about You know, you have a lot of AP. Why don't we introduce Dext? Or, you know, you're gonna be paying your bills. Let's eliminate the check process. We had a firm not too long ago that it was completely a very manual work process, I think, because the bookkeeper had been with them for 20-something years or 30 years, and they were so used to— they threw everything in an envelope. Think of this, mailed it off. And this is the old way of doing it, mailed it in a FedEx envelope. So they had a tracking. person would open it up, pay all the bills, enter them with the checks that they had in their office, and then mail it back to be signed. And I mean, can you think of a more inefficient process? And they were very excited. And we have that happen a lot of times. We get these firms that are excited to move forward. But like you said, you don't want to throw a lot, slap a lot of different software on them. But if they're open to listening to what's out there to be able to move the systems quicker and you get way more efficient and, and you're also going to get cleaner data and you're going to get— The fact that a lot of people don't understand that you can actually put the bill in electronically into a system and then it attaches to the transaction where now if you want to know where that client cost is, you can click into the image and see it. And there's still people out there that don't know even that software. And it's been around for how long? I mean, how long has Hubdoc been around? Xero or Dex? It's been around a long time. There's Receipt Bank.

They've been around a long time and they're specialized. And that's the thing too, is when I'm previously, when I've talked to Jay, it's like the specialization. So maybe some transformation comes in like us. But then I feel like a firm owner realizes I have a deficit of knowledge in how do I acquire clients? How does this whole thing work? Where is the time being spent effectively? The sales cycle, it exposes the other fractured areas that have just been sort of band-aided over through the years. And then kind of to probably our own private conversations we've all had with each other, which is You know, the modern-day firm looks like X now, and what it is, the driving force behind it, is, is the asset of the employee. Getting employees in that want to work in— to your point, Jay, they want to work in less of a chaos. They want to— some people just purely appreciate a well-run system and answers in a more efficient manner. But, you know, I think the way that I see it is When they are coming to people like us, especially you, Jay, you're— you've got this— you're looking through this technology lens in addition to your— you actually have specialized spaces that you're looking at of like, you kind of similar to us, but more specialized in the sense of like we're looking through the accounting lens and the work efficiency lens. You have work efficiency. How do you acquire your clients? What's the longevity?

Our clients.

You've got this whole arc. In addition to technology needs, right? Like, like you said, there's these, there's software out there that's not even well-serving and it's just being sold.

Right.

I don't know how you navigate it.

I mean, I think the, the, the critical part is just level setting early on with the firm. Like, we're not selling transformations, we're selling iterations. And exactly, I mean, you can look at it as a transformation, but you just have to expand your time horizon. So we're not gonna, we certainly won't be transforming your operations in 1 month or 3 months or 6 months. But when you look over a 1-year period of time, a 2-year period of time, a 3-year period of time, that's where the transformation becomes visible. But you don't, you, you don't want to feel like you're in a transition, like you're in a transformation while you're in it, because that typically means you're experiencing the pain of a transition, which we all know, switching accounting platforms or whatever it might be. There's pain associated. So that's a unique challenge for the legal space, is that because you have individuals who— the law is special in, in the sense that you have individuals who come from various firms and they have various ways of operating, and they tend to remain fairly siloed when they enter a new firm. So now you have all of these attorneys who technically are part of the same brand, but they all have their own quirks and nuances for how they work, how they draft documents, how they retrieve documents, how they take notes, how they create narratives for their time entries. You have all of these ways, you know, like you mentioned, how do you, how do you generate your draft bills and approve those running down the hallway versus— I mean, there's so many ways to do it, sticky notes. So you have all of this, you know, cacophony of operating styles in one, under one roof. So of course, in order to make progress, you have to be able to understand the way that the firm operates, the way that the individual attorneys operate. And the why, because then only then does it unveil that second layer, which is, okay, now we can make effective recommendations that are going to fit the goals of the firm. Unless you know those things, you're, you're just shooting in the dark. So I think it's just all about identifying those items, making sure to set expectations, reasonable expectations around how long this is going to take, right? Oftentimes we have attorneys and firms who say, yep, let's, let's get started. I want to have this thing done in 2 months, you know, whether it be, let's take a case management, a case management system migration, for example.

Mm-hmm.

So firm's going from, I don't know, they're an old PC Law client and they're going into Clio or they're going into Centerbase, right? And they say, okay, you know, it's, and this will happen, it's December 13th today, right? So let's say I onboarded a client today and they'll say, okay, it's December 13th, I've paid you. Now, I'd like this software to be in place by February, mid-February. Is that good? It's like, well, one, we have the holidays here, so you have to take that into account.

No.

We have to train you. We have to first understand how you operate. We have to look at your data that exists now. We have a personal injury client who, when we initially proposed to them about moving them into— they were actually, it was going to be a Clio migration. They decided, we think we're going to handle this one ourselves, which, okay, I'm a low-pressure kind of guy. So I said, let me know if you need any help. So they went, they migrated to Clio. Well, what they found is that they didn't have the ability to bring from, I think they came from MyCase into Clio. They didn't have the ability to bring the case statuses into Clio the way they performed it. So now they had hundreds of cases, if not thousands of cases, that all were in open phase.

Yeah.

Everything.

Yeah.

So they had no idea what actually was open and what was not. So of course this generated a tremendous amount of friction within the firm. The managing partners of the firm are now looking at this equity partner going, okay, you said this was going to be seamless. And now we don't even know what cases are open in our system. So he had to spend a couple weekends just going through manually and selecting which cases are open and closed, right? Prioritizing the ones from that he thought were most recent and working his way back. But it's like, those are the kind of unforeseen challenges that exist. I'm sure you all see that as well on the accounting side.

Yeah.

There's just so many variables. So, yeah, my, my biggest thing for those firms, for any law firm who's looking to operate more strategically using technology, is you got to set the expectations and you have to say, this is a long process. It's going to take some work on your end. I do need you to provide us your availability to be available to us for training and your staff as well. Like, this is a commitment, and if they're not ready for that commitment, that's okay. It's just this would not be an appropriate time to implement something new for your firm if the firm is not ready to commit.

That's so true. Oh, I was gonna say, not to mention the value of your time. Let's be honest, are you a partner in a firm or an owner in a firm and that's your best suited position? I mean, the power of delegation alone on that, like, pay for it to get the quality out of it. It'll be someone like our problems, right? Like, we'd have to support that. Why is it that you're running a great firm? Why do you need to be handcuffed to this decision process?

Sometimes too, I mean, they want it done before the next billing. I mean, they're like, oh, I want— like, they're coming to you today saying, I bill on January 10th, can you have this up and running?

For that, right? Yeah.

Oh my God. And then when that date— and you have to set those expectations, but also set them up with the staff, because like you just said, You have to take this staff and they have to help you. This is not— I think they think they pay you and it's all done and it's just going to magically appear on the day it's supposed to start. It doesn't work that way.

Or I'm going to DIY it and then I'm going to pay you for the other side. Well, I cannot guarantee the product that came in. Yeah, I know the pitfalls, but that wasn't your decision. I'm the person that should know that. But you chose to do it.

You know, my— so my dad is moving. He just sold his home. It's under contract. Right. And so we're looking at movers, right?

Yeah.

And we want to reduce the workload. We've moved a ton of times, you know, as kids growing up. And so we've all kind of resigned. We're not doing any more moves. We won't pick up any more boxes. I know it sounds very— No, it doesn't. You know, first world issue of me. But, but that's what we've decided. But, you know, it would be like thinking that my dad could just pay the movers and all of a sudden everything would appear at the new house. he still has to unlock the door. He still has to show them. He still has to direct them where he wants things. Like, he still has some level of involvement. Of course, they're still going to do the heavy lifting, pun intended, but there's still some level of involvement. And I think, but, but that's on us also as, as, as proficient consultants to be able to level set early on. Here's the level invol— of involvement I need from you.

Mm-hmm.

To make sure that they achieve that, right? I, I had a client that It's primarily a family law firm. And, you know, in one of our first conversations, we had, you know, we talked about this, this process of onboarding them, and we're going to help them with their creating better processes for their intake. And then we're going to move down the line and start, you know, looking at other, other procedures as well. Well, it wound up actually not working out. There was a breakdown in communication. And on our exit interview, I like to always find out, okay, what went wrong? And I want to, I want to learn from this in the future. So, you know, and one of the things that he said struck me and it sticks with me today. He's like, well, I thought when I was hiring you, it was going to be like Amazon where I click a button and then I get the output, right? And it was on— I realized it was on me for not properly explaining the expectations initially because unfortunately, in a lot of scenarios, it's not like Amazon. I do need a little bit of context. I do need to be able to sit with your staff. I need to be able to understand how they work. How do you bill? You know, how do you just— how do you, uh, you know, this particular firm, they had 7 different compensation types for their attorneys, right? Supervision fees and origination, all these types of fees. Like, I can't just magically understand that without getting into the weeds. So, yeah, bad. You know, that one was on me. But it's like, I take all of these scenarios and I use them at— you know, it's, it's a waste if I don't use that as a way to grow and learn in the future.

Yeah.

And now I'm just— I'm very aware of the fact that You know, the expectation around what might happen with some sort of technology initiative could be vastly different depending on who you talk to. So rather than assuming that there's some level of, you know, ubiquitous process that happens, I just break it down and explain and really clearly set the expectations because then you can't— and then write them down also. Make sure that's, hey, here's what I need from you.

Absolutely.

And when we get to week number 3, I'm going to need about 1 to 2 hours a week from you for training. Can you commit to that? Can you make yourself available? Because then you have a fallback and you can say, hey, look, we agreed, you know, we're in week 3, I do need you to be available, I'm not getting the availability from you that I need, and we can kind of problem solve from there. But at least we have a, we have a fighting chance when we approach it that way versus the previous.

And they're all busy. These law firms are so busy. And Sarah and I, we've adapted along the way as well. We've learned from each project and we'll tell them there's the line in the sand and there's going to be overlaps. You're going to be still working in this one, we're going to validate the data as it comes over, and then we're make sure that we, you know, obviously we had to do— we may draw the line in the sand, but the light switch being flipped is still going to require us to rebuild some back data in the interim. And just letting them know that. But a lot of times our projects stall out because we don't get the information from the client. And we've had to put that in the agreement. If we're promising you a date and then we're not getting the data we need, that's going to stall the project, you know. And we just let them know, like, there'll be an additional retainer as this job drags out. And we've had that happen. Where they've actually paid it. They've had the job drag out for whatever reason on their side. I mean, they're always busy. I don't think I've ever worked with a law firm that had nothing to do. They're always super busy. And that's what makes this such a painful process between the cost of migrating and then also the cost of training and getting the staff and doing the double work. I mean, there is definitely a cost in it. It's probably made up on the efficiencies on the other end of it if they kind of do a cost comparison. But a lot of times we're in that painful part. The timing of it. And what do we tell them, Sarah? We tell them that's the first billing, we're there, I'm going to hold your hand through it, and then we're not taking off on you. We'll be there for the second billing. We're going to let you handle the second billing alone.

And there's got to be some support.

So they know that we're not just, okay, we're all done, see you later, we're going on to the next client and we don't care about you anymore. And that relief that you can see on the person's face that's actually reached out to you and is doing the work is like, oh, thank God. I was so afraid you're going to leave because A lot of times the transactions that come up are like, how do you do a refund in Clio? How do you do, you know, those little weird things that happen, right?

Oh yeah, we're used to just writing checks. So now you have an entry for a check and you didn't realize the refund actually does that automatically. So now you've got duplicate. We've seen that as well.

Oh yeah.

But I think you bring up a great point because, you know, when you're thinking about this whole process and Being able to operate intelligently and being able to implement, whether it be an account, a new accounting package or a new CRM or whatever it is, it's so critical for the client to be on board and for them to know and for you to be vocal about like, here's where we draw the line in the sand. I remember having a conversation with Sarah where, and I love what you said because you said, uh, you were talking about how you love to have a relationship with your client. It's critical.

Oh yeah.

It's like, it's a necessity. You want to have that dialogue, you want to have a relationship. And, and I remember you said, like, and it's as if you tell the client, like, hey, if it gets transactional and it's just—

Yeah.

Then it's not a good fit anymore, right? And you, and you stick by that. I think just, it's just, it's, it's good to know what your own culture is and your own values and the things that, you know, are leading indicators of a productive relationship, right? Because even if the client may not know, You know that, hey, on the back end, if we have the ability to communicate, we're going to be able to solve issues before they actually happen because we're going to have this open line of dialogue. And if you're just trying to make it client and vendor, it's going to break down how our service ultimately works and how valuable it is for you.

You're saying something that keeps going in my head is we look at it, we're such a, in a positive position to be able to have this viewpoint from how everybody works, right? Like you've got this breadth of knowledge, Jay, like Lynn and I do of like these these are how other firms work. What could fine-tune over here to help you, right? So we have this kind of this overview overarching thing, but we also— and I— you've said this earlier too— is that not every software is your, is your bill. Like, just because I have a tech stack in my brain that works for me and my people can adjust and adapt to it and knows how it works, it doesn't mean we're not adaptable to another thing. It's just what is the value of that software? Because if that software is being recommended to you, as we always see down the street, your friend, or in court—

Courtroom.

You know, you're having this recommendation, but our services are tailored to you as a firm, which makes me feel more of like what I hint at is it becomes a relationship. It's a customized approach. Yes, it does have a price tag to it, but I'm not going to sit there and Linda and I've seen this before. We've done— we've fixed things that have been done 4 times, 5 times over, same software, just done poorly. And we come in and it's like, where have you guys been? Well, you know what, it's the relationship. But also, I'm not paying the price for your bad experiences before either. Let's, let's level set it there. But it's hard because it's a trust-building moment. And I, I know this From talking to you, Jay, but I know this about Linda and I. To us, we're going to invest our time as a company to work with the firm as, as a financial team, just like we're working— like, if Jay's on the scene with us, then we're that team with him.

Yeah.

We're going to support vendor-vendor relationship because ultimately the client wins out. When it becomes on the back end transactional in that way, that becomes even harder. That's another pull. behind the scenes because we're not flowing together. We've been in these large dataset conversations, and I'm like, what's the goal? Is the goal because the owner just needs validation and you're not getting out of the software? Is this even the right path, or is this just entertaining someone's price tag? Because some people just want to pay to play. They just want, oh, I tried this, I made this, I did that. I'm like, okay, I want action. I want to move forward.

On the flip side of that, though, Sarah and Jay, you probably experienced this too. Nothing makes you happier than you've done the migration, you've got them the training, everything you check in, everything's working really well. And you start to produce these reports to show the owners of the firm, here's where you're at. These are the metrics we see. Here's some benchmarks so you can see how you're doing. And they're like, this exists? They had no clue that they could get this, extrapolate this data out.

Yeah.

And we do, when we do a lot of the data migrations, we actually clean up the data. In most cases, it's the trust isn't balanced. They think it's balanced. It's not balanced. And we, we do a lot of cleaning up. So when they get the new records on the other side of it, not only is it migrated, but it's also cleaned up. And then they're like, well, how would it— and a lot of times we will stay on maybe in a capacity of just reviewing the work that the team is— their bookkeeping team is doing. Or sometimes we end up getting the job altogether and we end up doing their accounting for them because they're getting something that they never had before. And that is— it's just, it's really— we're never in there to take anybody's job away, but when we show them—

No. Yeah.

We never are. We, we're always like very clear about that. But when we show them what they can see that they never had before, and that helps them figure out where they're gonna go with their firm and the firm's trajectory, and to know that that's available to them, because sometimes they're in like a PC law or something like that. They didn't have a lot of that data. I mean, just look at the balance sheet when you pull it out on a PDF on a PC law, what that looks like. That is the ugliest report you've ever seen with overlapping weirdo numbers and stuff. And you're going to get more out of it. Or some of these other systems that we've taken people off of that they didn't have the reports because they were paid. You had to pay for each one and they didn't pay for those modules. It's like, wow, you don't even have this at all. Or they've never had a 3-way bank reconciliation. That one always blows my mind that you never had a 3-way. And we've actually figured out a way to do it where we have a system that we've partnered with LifeFlow that we've got this system in play that it's on there. They have a template of it and you pull the data out of the 2 systems and you make the 3-way and it's Saves time and it's a beautiful system and we use it.

It's beautiful.

And we're working on now, we're working on like template KPI stuff with them. So it's if you have the right— because sometimes these forms, these certain reports don't come out of QuickBooks. We also see sometimes with law firms, what do I need that extra software for? What do I need it for? And it's like, oh, do you have a trust account? Where are you storing your documents of your clients?

We had a client who They were on a platform called About Time. I don't know if you guys have dealt with that one. It's really old, antiquated. I think they only have 3 or 4 clients in the US still on.

Well, it's about time.

It's about time.

That was— yeah, we thought we were unique with that joke. It turns out we're not. It turns out that's the first joke that everyone comes up with. So I remember with this particular firm, I mean, there was no reporting. And the reports that they did, that they were able to produce, they would have to actually go to About Time and they would have to have them generate, like, create bespoke reports, right? And they're charging them, you know, thousands of dollars each request they have to generate these, to create these reports. So when we moved this firm, we moved them to Carrot. Yep. Back when it was Zola Suite. And we were able to show them, right? Because it's like, okay, we didn't have reports before. We were just fine. We were able to show them a derivative of, you know, it's an efficiency metric that we call profit factor. Maybe you guys as accountants will— maybe, maybe there's a technical name for it. We call it profit factor, basically defined as the total employee spend versus the firm revenue.

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, this particular firm, they were at a 1.5x multiple of employee spend and revenue. Right. When the average is like around 3-ish, right? Somewhere in 3. Uh, if you're doing 4, you're doing phenomenal. 5, like you're crushing it. Right. And they were at a 1.5x. So they were grossly overspending on employee salaries and they weren't bringing in enough work really to justify it.

Right.

So, you know, the, you know, a 1.5x, that means for every dollar you spend, you're only getting $1.50 back. From your employees, right? That's, that's, that's not a profitable, that's not a sustainable business model.

No.

So, but, you know, they were paying the bills, you know, and, uh, and that was basically the way that they would gauge whether they were operating properly. So once we did that, they were able to see, okay, we've got this major inefficiency here. We're, we're, we're, we can close the gap, but you can only close the gap when you have visibility on those metrics. So I think it's just You know, from the reporting standpoint, having data is something that's new to a lot of these firms. But let's face it, at the end of the day, like, for example, in this particular firm, it's an insurance defense firm. They have, uh, the carrier— the insurance carriers have tremendous amounts of data. They get data from all of the, you know, the firms who are submitting, uh, work.

Mm-hmm.

They can see time entries. They can see all of this granular information around how long these cases are actually taking. And you better bet they are using it in order to justify why they're, why they're going to cut down your bill, right? And that's why they're driving the market. So, and it's interesting too, because from the perspective of, you know, we're in this age of AI, there's where I'm already seeing this with my clients where insurance carriers is starting with them. They're actually pushing back and saying these tasks could have been done by AI.

Oh.

So therefore we're going to cut down the time that you spent. So the firm has to either adjust and Start using more efficient methods like AI or continue with the previous methods, but know that their profitability is going to take a hit.

To your point, they dictate a junior associate, a paralegal work to a senior.

That's a tough business to be in. It really is.

It is.

It could be very profitable, very lucrative. But yeah, that's a tough one.

It's all negotiated rates.

If you take that on as a client, that type of law firm, know that you are going to be having a lot of Interesting billing issues and things like that, because that is— yeah, that's a tough industry for sure.

But, but, but also it's kind of like Jevons paradox where, like, what we found is like, if they can find the efficiencies and they can bill lower amounts, they're actually able to take on a higher volume of work because they're more attractive to those carriers. And then they actually wind up making more money on the back end. And, and the thing no one talks about, but they should, especially in the legal profession, They're actually enjoying their jobs because let's face it, most of those tasks that are automatable right now with AI are the stuff that attorneys don't want to do anyway.

Yeah.

They don't want to spend 3 hours analyzing a contract when they could use AI to query it and say, you know, what are the, what are the clauses that are missing in this contract? Or, you know, is this contract too, you know, overly aggressive, you know, towards my client or towards the counterparty, whatever it might be. The analysis and the strategy is what the lawyer wants to do. They don't want to do the, the rote, you know, reading and intake of information.

Yeah.

You're seeing now, since you opened up Pandora's box of mentioning AI, and you're kind of known in our industry as that expert, what you're seeing with AI, because I think what we're seeing is being— is very legal industry is one of the industries that it seems to be pretty effective with. Um, do you think, do you think there's a lot of firms actually using the tools that have AI, or you think they're afraid to use the tools? This—

yeah, there's a lot of firms using it improperly, I'll say, right? That's the stage we're in now. A lot of firms are starting to use it. Um, you know, like I had a firm who they were using— so I gave this talk, it was a webinar that I, that I did back in, I think it was August or Maybe it was May. I think it was May. I guess webinar about creating custom GPTs. Didn't I have probably not, not a crazy, crazy high attended webinar. Maybe I had 20 to 30 people in that, in that webinar. One of the people who attended this webinar, they got the idea from, and just custom GPT, what a custom GPT is. Everybody knows what ChatGPT is. Custom GPT is like taking ChatGPT and putting it in its own little container. and training it to perform one type of task. So it actually gives it more context. You can create a knowledge base, you can give it instructions, and then you can have it set up so that other people can use that GPT to perform that task. So this particular firm, even though I gave them a framework, I call it Leverage AI, I gave them a framework to decide what activities would be suitable for a custom GPT. But they abandoned that and they decided in this particular firm that they were going to use custom GPTs to actually draft contracts. They were going to draft bespoke contracts for their clients using custom GPTs. Oh, which is not a good idea because, because these, these GPTs are stochastic, meaning the output is not deterministic. It won't be the same every time. I can run the exact same prompt twice and get 2 totally different answers. So what they were finding is that the attorneys were spending more time reviewing and modifying it than it— than it— than when it took them more time. Using templates that they had already. So that's what I mean. A lot of attorneys are using it, which is a good thing. This is like, yeah, talk about transformations. This is transformational in the legal industry because lawyers have always been the laggards, especially when it comes to technology.

Oh yeah.

One of the first ones there. They have an appetite for new technology in there and they're on the forefront.

Yeah.

And they also have to write to it, the legal parameters to it in the sense of like, How, how other professionals utilize this in their own firm. There's, there's laws being currently written on how to, like, how is it utilized? How is it safely utilized? It's, it's the Wild West at the internet stage in a whole different level.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's definitely with chat. I think chat is so verbal, right? It's, that's where it does a really great job. Throw your email in and say, look, I was really pissed off when I wrote this. Can you make this nicer? And it spits out a better version all the time. Like, if you do anything that you're writing, throw it in and tell it, give it the right prompt. going to come back with a much better, like, why didn't I write it like that? But yeah, you got to be so careful, right? What was that case? The Smith versus Jones case or whatever it was with that attorney in New York that used it for just through— yeah, remember that one?

Yeah, that was bad. I forget the attorney's— yeah, actually, just—

Only reference, I think.

What's that?

It's often kindly referenced once in a while in a sad way, but in a way that's like a learning moment.

You know, and I've started to not reference those particularly because I'm talking about AI in some pretty decently sized audiences. I'm like, you know, what if they happen to be in the audience? Like, they're not gonna be feeling good. They're not gonna feel good about being the fodder of my presentation and showing what not to do. So I just, you know, so maybe it's good that I don't remember the name, right?

I'm so glad I don't.

One of our best presentations they had on AI, and this is going back a couple, maybe last summer or maybe 2 summers ago, and it was at a conference, and they actually put some data up and asked ChatGPT to do the calculations, and the math was wrong. And it was just a highlight to the audience that it, it doesn't do math very well back then, and that don't rely on Don't rely on it, right? I mean, if you ever look at the pictures, I just saw it the other day. Somebody posted a picture on Facebook and they used that. I can tell an AI picture from a mile away, and there's a lot of people using it, but the hands look like hoofs. Like, did you not look at your hands in this picture? They took their image and made an AI, and it— I'm just like, oh, don't do that.

I actually have, like, a— wait, can we do something brand new? I don't know if this will work live, but let's see. Can I share screen? Is that— Yes, of course.

Yes, let's do it.

Hurry up, everybody, switch over to YouTube.

Watch YouTube and watch this, listeners.

Oh, right, right. That's right. Because—

no, it's all good.

We'll explain it in great detail as well. Okay, so I actually— I just spoke about this, uh, recently in a presentation I gave. I'm gonna give you a cheat code because, Linda, you start— you touched on how you can identify.

Oh, I can look at it totally. And it Every time I see them, I kind of cringe, you know, that it's like, oh my goodness.

So there's actually a formulaic way that you can identify if an image has been created by AI.

Oh, hands.

Yeah.

So I'm going to show you.

God.

So AI image generators tend— they have always been particularly bad at generating hands. Why? It's because they know what a hand looks like, but they don't know how a hand functions in action. So typically you will get these grossly misrepresented images of hands. What you— if you could see the screen, you'd be seeing hands with, you know, too many fingers or the bottom left. It's the fingers are actually made out of spaghetti. I think that is.

Yeah.

It's just AI trying to do its best at creating hands.

Yeah.

Okay. It also struggles with text, although it is getting better with generating text. But as you can see in that bottom right-hand image, the text is that there are letters that are missing. You know, there's an extra T in there.

Yeah.

There's one similarity with all of these images, which have all been generated by AI, and this is how you detect whether an image has been generated by AI or not. They all use what's called a noise pattern to be generated. The AI platform basically takes a random assortment of ones and zeros, and it has to all average out to being a gray image. So what I mean by that is, if you look at all these images, they're all extremely high contrast. So you'll see Bright areas and dark areas. There's actually, if you were to just take this into a math, a mathematics program, mathematically, they have equal light and dark portions in these images, in all of these images, because that's how the AI image generators work. They have to balance that image. So if you see an image that you— so let me put it this way. You will never see an AI image generate an image that is all bright or all dark. You will always see like really dark areas and really bright areas. So that's a dead giveaway. If you see something that's high contrast, you can probably guess that it is AI generated in equal proportions.

In equal proportions. Yeah, I was gonna say it has to be equal. And I see it now when you, when you say that, I'm looking at every little shot here in the 4 squares and there is some proportion of brightness to darkness and a fade even. In some—

yeah, I never realized that, but I knew by looking at it. Like, I can tell by looking at it that it's an AI picture, but that's fascinating.

It's fascinating.

I love that.

So, so also, since we're— so right now we are also in what OpenAI is calling 12 Days of OpenAI. So essentially this program that they are putting on right now is what they're gonna be doing is releasing a new piece of AI functionality every single day. So I think we're on day 6 now, the 13th.

Okay.

On day 3, they released Sora 2, which is their video generator. So you take a text prompt like ChatGPT, but it actually outputs a video, a photorealistic video. This is like a brand new frontier.

That's got to do with Apple, right? Is that the Apple integration stuff?

That was day 4.

Okay, that's when it crashed, right? Yeah.

Yes, that was when it crashed. So basically what this all means is now that OpenAI has released Sora into the, into the wild, which you can't get in because there was so high demand for it that they actually shut down. You can't sign up yet. But now that it's in the public, they realize people have the option and the ability to generate photorealistic text with ChatGPT.

Hmm.

I should say not photorealistic, convincing human-like text with ChatGPT, photorealistic images with DALL-E. That's their image generator that these images were all generated with. And now photorealistic video with Sora. That's a potentially catastrophic combination.

Scary.

Actually, what they've implemented is this thing called C2PA, and it is a provenance authenticator, meaning it allows you to— and the platforms that people post videos and pictures on, it allows that platform to understand whether that is a true source photograph or video or whether it's been AI generated. It's just baked into the metadata of the file. So they are thinking about ways to verify the provenance of, of these things. And it's already part of these platforms as of now. So you'll see if you look at the bottom right-hand corner of any Sora-generated video, you'll see that white— there's going to be a white icon. It's a watermark, which is the OpenAI logo. That's all relating to that verification and provenance process.

I wonder— that's so fascinating because I do wonder if the verification of a business like a photographer, videographer, and the reason why I bring this up is my, my spouse, he signed up and then went to do a business profile and there was a ton of like questions that I was like, I've never heard of that before. And he has to submit a video of what it is that he does. Like he has like a whole bunch of stuff that he needs to do in order to be on this social media platform. And I was like, I've never heard of that. But I'm wondering, because how do you, how do you make sure that who's on there is on there as the person that they are, the business that they're selling, the product that they're selling, and the authentication of it? Because it's the fear of some of these creators.

And if somebody copies it, sorry, you're taking their property. Like, your husband's an artist in my eyes. He's an artist. He's been an artistic guy.

Yeah.

So anybody could take that image once it's uploaded somewhere, right? And make it into— that's the thing that they gotta protect is the rights of that person who created it and had that eye or that look of, you know, he'll be riding, he'll drive by a bridge and stop and pull over and see something that I would drive by, or even if I had the camera, I wouldn't take that picture because he has that ability to do that. And that's the stuff they really— I think that's part of the wild, wild west of AI is how they're gonna be able to protect this artistic quality. And as the AI gets better, I mean, hey, it does great at poetry. So, I mean, there's some things it does a really great job with. And I— the more I hear about it and the more that— and sometimes they'd make all these improvements and you see, I mean, the fact that Apple's kind of jumped in here now with their own thing and everybody's making their own now.

Yeah, it's interesting. Well, what's interesting too is the What I think is, is the, the long, kind of the long game of this. What are the stamps? Or what are the authentications that we're going to be utilizing to reference? It's like, it's like we had Cliff Notes for reference. So are we going to have like Cliff Notes, like notes that indicate how this came about? Or what are reference points? Or it'll be interesting how this— I find this whole thing fascinating. You've like opened my mind to a whole bunch of interesting thought processes now, Jay, but you always Do this to me.

I love you. That's what the C2PA promises to do is, you know, its goal is so that way there's always metadata that you cannot easily strip away from the file. So that way, social and social media platforms can implement it in whatever way they like because the metadata exists in the file. So the social— let's say you post a photo that's AI-generated to Facebook. Well, that metadata is baked in the file that it's an AI-generated image. So what Facebook can do is say, for any file that has this metadata baked in, display this icon or put a little disclaimer underneath that says this image has been AI generated. So that's the part that we still needs to be built. But that's the easy part. The hard part is this, you know, the protocol for how they're going to all universally decide that, you know, this, this is AI generated. So that's already built and it's already in a part of all of these files. So it'll be interesting. I mean, I think about this often. You know, not only in the context of legal, but just in the context of, you know, we talked about poetry. Linda, you brought up poetry. You know, is, is my poetry any more or less valuable if I were to, you know, Valentine's Day is coming up in a couple months. If I were to write a poem for my wife assisted by an AI language model, does it make it any more or less romantic or valuable that I wrote the poetry? Like, yeah, let's talk about that. Is that like, you know, where, where does that fall on the spectrum of, you know, I still put the effort in, I prompted, I made changes, I modified. Is that inherently less valuable than if I were to sit down, block myself in a room with a pen and paper and get to work that way?

And do it for hours, right? Or—

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, but the thing is too, if you're the— my fear is, okay, so we stop using parts of our brain like we did when we had maps, right? We used to have a map. I was terrible at it.

Yeah.

We had an app, and we had to figure out where we were going. And now we get in the car and say, hey, take me there, and it takes us there. Now we're not using that part of the map brain that we used to use, which apparently is a really important part of our brain that now we really don't use anymore. So we start to see this stuff become efficient. And things like you just said, writing the poetry, is it the same as somebody going and locking themselves in the room and writing from their heart? You're still writing from your heart, but you're getting an assistant that kind of falls into that gray area that we're all going to have to figure out with AI, I think, is just part of figuring it out.

Yeah.

Look at what happened to a client of ours. I mean, we've seen this before. It's a longstanding scam. You scam somebody by using their website or using their photo on social media and then putting a different phone number, and it's not authenticated. There's more and more of this, and people spamming people and saying, hey, I'm so-and-so. That person's not going to write you. I'll just use Mel Robbins. Mel Robbins is not personally writing you, my friends, on Facebook, right? Things like that are happening. And so the concern is, is how, as we move through this, how do we make sure to protect ourselves? Or how do we, like you said, how do we make sure that it's authentic, or it's, it's validated? But yeah, this is, this is crazy.

The point you bring up, because, you know, the whole point of authenticity, and, you know, we're all, I think all of our desire at the end of the day is to provide as much value to the world as possible and do it in an efficient way as possible, because we have a finite amount of resources, time and energy, money, right? So, I mean, to, you know, you talk about the map thing and not being like, we've turned off a part of our brain, our, you know, geolocation services that run within our own brain, we've turned that off. I can definitely attest to that. I mean, you know, we, we moved into a new house almost 2 years ago. And my wife still doesn't know how to get here from our old house.

Because she might have a brain like mine. We never had that piece. I'm really terrible with that.

Fair point. Fair point. Yeah. But like, she'll use the GPS every time. So she just turns left when it tells her to turn left. She's not, you know, when I say, oh, babe, you got to go to the new place they just opened. It's just 2 blocks east. And it's like, east? What do you mean? And I'm like, well, like the direction the sun's not in. When you wake up, right? Like that. So she's like, okay, that I guess. So she tries. But, you know, I wonder, you know, for some of these things that are— that we're outsourcing to technology, are they really valuable for us to be doing?

Exactly.

I could make an argument that maybe when it comes to location, it might be valuable to know how to navigate. What if your phone dies? You know, her argument will be, well, I have my iPad. You know, what if the iPad dies? Well, we have the Tesla. And they— so there's like, oh, redundancy's built in.

Yeah.

Our society the way it's built. But I think the whole argument with this skill atrophy conversation when it comes to AI is, are these particular things valuable enough for us to continue doing? Like, do we need to all be crack mathematicians where we can, you know, perform mental math at a blistering pace, or do we just use calculators? for, you know, equations and solving, solving math and, and leave that to the technology so that we can focus on bigger problems that we're solving when the math has now just become a subset of these larger issues that we're now armed with tools to— that we can actually solve these now.

Yeah, that probably was a question in our head when we were writing on grid paper and a pencil way back in my day. And then the calculator came out and I can remember a teacher saying, you're not using the calculator, you're going to know how to do it. And do— I mean, yes, I think it's great that we know how to do it, but that probably was a question that they had then. And it's just like everything else, right? We're— as we start to build technology, we, we think of these things. But I guess if you ask anybody that really was relying on ChatGPT when it went down the other day, what happened to them?

Right?

It's just like when the internet goes off, go for a walk. But, you know, it's the same thing, right? Yeah. It's like— If you're relying on it for your job.

You know, I bet back in the Neolithic days, you know, firemaking 101 was a very important skill, and you probably spent years of your life focused on learning the skill of fire because it was so critical to society at that time. So maybe my proposition is maybe we're moving into a new phase of society where these skills which used to be important now have diminished importance because there's other things that we can now spend our time learning which actually advance society forward.

Give us time to do something else, right? Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's the Wild West. This was a great—

We have you back for AI conversation again.

Yeah, I think a separate one for that. But I feel like what we did is really recap, like, in kind of in summary of what we talked about is mostly about just the process of how to unlock ourselves in our firms and do a better job of supporting a firm moving into a more modern future. And there's a lot of obviously bumpers and guidelines and processes that you need to consider. And it's more than just one person. Sometimes it's a team to make that happen. Hire a pro.

Save yourself a lot of heartache.

So true. And, Jay, it's always— to me, it's always such an enjoyable time to spend with you, just kind of learning from you and talking to you and just conversation. It just flows so natural. So thank you for joining us today.

Thank you.

Likewise on my end. I had such a good time. I didn't even use any of my props.

Oh, look at that.

You know, I, I just totally forgot because I was so enthralled in the conversation. So I will definitely come back if you'll have me, and there will be some props.

Awesome, awesome. Well, thank you.

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Thank you.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye, everybody.

Take it easy.