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- [00:01]
Rise Up Media
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- [01:20]
Tyson Mutrix
This is Maximum Lawyer with your host, Tyson Mutrix. Gary, so you've lived the worst case scenario for lawyers with your firm collapsing twice.
- [01:36]
Gary Allen
Yes.
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Tyson Mutrix
Can you take us back to what happened and how that shaped your view of what was broken in law firm business models?
- [01:44]
Gary Allen
Oh, that's a great question. So coming out of law school, I knew I didn't. I went to Stanford at a time when you could get 50 offers. And I didn't want to work for one of the big firms. So I picked a small firm in San Diego, really great lawyers, really nice people, and I didn't have a clue what the economics of that firm look like. And so I, you know, I was just learning how to practice law and learning what I wanted to do. But after a while, you'd see people going off into the back room and having these sidebar conversations and the partners not necessarily getting along. And before I know it, you know, the firm had broken into several pieces. I was fortunate to land at a good firm after that. But, you know, it's like, I guess what I learned there is that quality lawyering does not necessarily equal quality quality economic performance or business performance. So I practiced in another firm in San Diego, one of the largest ones there. For a while, my wife and I decided we wanted to move somewhere else to raise our Family. So I moved to Boise and I landed in the branch office of a 300 lawyer regional firm. And again, great lawyers, really nice people, but there was some really weird stuff going on there. It was like nobody made any money in this giant prestigious firm. And so after a while, you know, and there are really strange things. Like I had my review from my first year. There was done by somebody from Seattle who I'd never met. And he was kind of making stuff up from notes that people had made that made no sense at all. So it was just, you know, having a bad fit there. And then one day I'm at home on a Saturday afternoon and the managing partner of the local office calls me up and says the office is closing on Monday. And you know, so I'm sitting there, I had a six month old baby at the time and no job. Now, once again, I was fortunate, but you know, let's stop with that firm and talk about what I learned from that. Again, it's prestige. Dr. It doesn't matter. But overhead matters a lot. And this firm, this office was carrying the overhead the same as in Boise, Idaho, the same as the office in Seattle. And so with that kind of overhead load, people couldn't make any money. And so the local partners were happy, the Seattle partners were unhappy. And that broke into Seattle several pieces. And I went with a number of lawyers to my long term firm, called Givens personally. And you know, I had gotten an offer there when I went to Boise and fell for a, and made the wrong decision. But they took me back fortunately and went there and suddenly everything changed. So I think I answered your question about the first two firms.
- [04:57]
Tyson Mutrix
Well, okay, so why do you think that they weren't making money? That is, it's an interesting thing because you probably could see money coming in. But why do you think that they weren't actually making money?
- [05:07]
Gary Allen
You know, there was not a lot of transparency for an associate lawyer at that point. So I don't know exactly. I know that there were a number of lawyers who weren't that busy. And so they were, you know, the revenue, the top line was not very strong for them. I know that was not true of me. I'd always worked hard. I had a, I was an environmental practice at that time that was going well. And you know, I think a lot of it was just overhead plus utilization was a big problem there. Not just because people didn't have enough billable work, but like you had a meeting like every day that was not billable. So a large, you know, time overhead load as well as the money overhead load. And it was just not the culture of that firm somehow. I mean, you know, I think the highest paid partner in the whole firm made about $300,000 in Seattle at that in the early night. So this wasn't nothing. But the young partners were making 80,000, which was barely more than I was making as an associate. So it's like, why go to the trouble to be a partner at this firm and you know, working really hard to make $80,000. So I knew my top line was, you know, 3, 400,000 revenue. I was like, I get 80 out of that and I'm taking risk as a partner. And you know, the culture was strange. Like I said, very top down. I actually had some technology ideas that they squashed. Literally. I got an email by mistake that said they wanted to squash it.
- [06:53]
Tyson Mutrix
That, that's so it's interesting. I worked at a firm early on that was not open to ideas. It was all the ideas at the top were the ideas and no one else's ideas kind of mattered. So what kind of atmosphere do you think that that created for morale for the team? Because that doesn't seem like it's very healthy morale.
- [07:12]
Gary Allen
Well, I don't know that much about Seattle. Well, and it was a firm that recently were two larger firms had recently merged, one in Portland, one in Seattle. So you know, that culture was just emerging. I think the Portland culture was probably better. I mean in Seattle, the Seattle part of the firm was just very old school and they worked for, for one of the largest banks in the country was their major client. And so they had kind of a comfortable client relationship that I think stopped very much of any entrepreneurial feeling about it. And they, they managed like it was a bank. So it was just very staid. You know, it was very traditional. And yeah, entrepreneurship just had no place there at all. And they could survive that because of who their clients were and the reputation of some of the lawyers.
- [08:19]
Tyson Mutrix
Well, after all that, luckily you didn't just survive, you were able to survive, but you also, you helped build a multi million dollar practice. And so what changed for you when you finally landed at a place that understood the business side of the.
- [08:35]
Gary Allen
Yeah, that was remarkable. That's one of the most remarkable moments of my career. And all of us, there were four or five of us who went to that firm at the time. We all noticed it the minute we walked in the door. And it was, the first thing was you didn't have a non billable meeting every day. It was just gone right so it's like all of that and none of the sort of top down requirements and all of that because you were treated as an entrepreneur in that firm. And that was true of us coming in as lateral partners and associates, but also true of every first year associate coming into the firm. You come into the firm, it's like, you know, you're responsible to feed yourself and you know, make your practice work. If you're brand new, your clients are all of the lawyers and other lawyers in the firm. Go get to know them and see what they need and see how you can help them. And you know, you get some mentorship on the way. Not like, you know, massive training programs like you get in a big firm, but you know, like you're going to be in court your first month on the job, so you get real experience, which I thought was, you know, very good. So you know, there was that. The compensation system was very refreshing having come from, you know, you get a salary. There wasn't even a bonus component in the firm I was with before, but two, you have a compensation formula and it was slightly different between associates and partners because associates didn't take risk. You were paid based on billings and partners were based on paid based on collections. But you had a formula with several components. Origination, of course, and work. The amount you worked, which was the prime, you were primarily paid for doing work for clients. You had some compensation. For origination, you had some compensation. There was an equity component for partners that you would buy into points in an equity pool. But it was predictable how that pool was created. And you know, had a very good track record of producing profit for the partners. And you know, so what I noticed about that was as a partner you would get a spreadsheet every month that had your origination, your working attorney collections. And then you had an overhead which was right there. And then you saw everybody's what they had, their income and what they had available for draw. And you know, you think, oh, now I get to go see what so and so is making. I spend a lot of time doing that. It had exactly the opposite effect. It's like, okay, now I'm comfortable that you know, this senior partner is paid on the same basis that I am. So now I can just pay attention to me, I don't have to worry about what everybody else is doing in the firm because that's self regulating. And you know, people get paid more or less and it never comes out of my pocket. If somebody is a poor performer and they get more a formula we've all agreed to if they work harder. So it was. Seemed very fair and again, just took that load off my shoulders. The other thing that I loved about that was that the overhead was right there in front of your nose every month.
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Tyson Mutrix
Interesting.
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Gary Allen
So it made everybody into an overhead poc. So, you know, you couldn't. There's. There's a tendency in law firms to kind of sneak in, oh, well, I need a half another assistant, because, you know, my practice is so amazing, or, you know, I need somebody who can take care of my dry cleaning. And this just made that go away because it's like, wait a minute, we just had a bump in the overhead. How did that happen? I mean, mostly that went away. There might have been a little bit of that, but mostly people were going, how do we produce more for less? Because that shows up very directly in my bottom line.
- [12:56]
Tyson Mutrix
I love that. That's really interesting. Okay, we're going to transition now because I want to make sure we talk about Lean Law. Sure. So you went from law practice to then legal tech founder, which to me seems like a pretty big change. Although it does sound like you had. You had interest in tech, which is. Makes complete sense, but it's still a massive transition. So what was the moment or the realization that sparked the idea for LeanLaw?
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Gary Allen
Oh, that's really interesting. I listened to one of your podcasts, Gary getting ready for this, and you're going, why is it that we just can't have a all in one software that does everything?
- [13:38]
Tyson Mutrix
You heard that episode? I'm so frustrated by it. It frustrates the hell out of me.
- [13:43]
Gary Allen
Yeah. So that's kind of where I started. And even in the early 90s, you probably don't even know what this is, but there's a tool called Lotus Agenda, which was sort of an early practice management type of thing thing that allowed you to do various things. I mean, I used it for. Made a macro to calendar court deadlines with it, and it started back in those days. I mean, I'd taken a computer programming class or two in college, but was pretty bad at it.
- [14:13]
Tyson Mutrix
Real quick, though. So will you explain to people what macros mean? Because I don't. I. I don't think a lot of people know what a macro is.
- [14:22]
Gary Allen
That is a good point. It's a good point. A macro is kind of a mini computer program within another program. So you write a little bit of specialized instruction, so it will do something that it wouldn't otherwise do. Like Excel has lots of macros in it. If you know how to Use them. So this was, this was just a version of that. So, you know, I could explain.
- [14:46]
Tyson Mutrix
That's a really. That's one of the, maybe the best explanations I've ever heard of a macro. So a lot of people, my first firm, they use some macros in some Word documents. And if it was kind of interesting because if the macros didn't work right, your documents were all jacked up. So it's. But anyways, continue on. I, I did, but I do think it's one of those things where I think it's important. You, you definitely had some technical expertise. I don't know where you picked that up.
- [15:12]
Gary Allen
Yeah, a bit. I mean, I, Yeah, you know, it's like I understand this stuff conceptually, but I am not quite detail oriented enough to, to build something that works very well. I mean, AI would be a great help to me if as a coder. But fortunately I have other people to do that now. So all along I can see this potential for software to make law firms more efficient. And all along I was struck by how crazy inefficient these law firms were. Even the good one I was at in San Diego, they were kind of transparent. And they showed me my top line and my overhead. And I looked at the overhead number and I went, what? It was like 250 grand in 1990. And so I, you know, I went to my partner and said, you know, hey, we could reduce that overhead a whole lot. And he goes, it's too much trouble, too much, too hard to save costs. Just focus on the top line. So. So I'm kind of struggling with all of this. And then you start to see practice management software come out. It's like, finally this one thing that will do everything. And we used various versions of it in the firms I worked in. None of them ever worked the way you wanted it to. There is a certain software that will remain nameless. That is still a dirty word in, in my firm. So, you know, so I just kept waiting and going, this is not that hard. In early 2000s, I kind of made up like a whole requirements list for what I needed an all in one software to do every function, you know, And I had this vision in my mind which is actually getting more realistic. The code name was Gladys because it was the. That perfect assistant who would do everything for you. So you talk about, I heard you talk in your other webinar about the. Or your guests talked about the degradation of the interface layer. And it's like, okay, well, let's just have an assistant that you talk to and say, gladys, draft me a pleading. And, you know, it would have been pretty hinky in those days, but, you know, I went along that for a long time and the tech wasn't ready. You didn't really have cloud yet. And I couldn't find the people I needed in Boise, Idaho at that time. And so I abandoned this idea of creating a good all in one Software in like 2008, 2009. And then a few years later, stuff just started to happen. I had a friend who ran the executive MBA program at Boise State, and he started introducing me to people and doors started opening. And by about 2014, 2015, we were ready to start a software company. You know, that's where Leanlaw started again. We probably started with the idea we would build a better clio, but as we got into it, it. It was like, well, that's too complicated. And so you needed to focus. And the logical place to focus was on the financial side of the firm. And particularly because you have a good SMB foundational program like QuickBooks Online that we could build on top of, because we weren't going to build a better accounting software than QuickBooks. And so we created what we think is the best QuickBooks integration and sort of made it work for law firms.
- [18:59]
Tyson Mutrix
So I'm gonna. I wanna pull up my phone because you, you mentioned Gladys, and I'm a little. I gotta say, I'm a little mad that you did not build that all in one system. I'm a little mad, but I'm gonna let that go for now. But you mentioned Gladys. Right. And the reason why I wanted to pull up my phone is because I. I want to just play around with Chad GPT. Where we've gone from 2022 to 2025 is amazing. Okay. I don't know if you played around with Chad GPT when it comes to their voice assistant at the beginning versus now, for those of you that have not heard it lately. And we're going to use your scenario where you mentioned creating a. Drafting a pleading. Okay. So just bear with me for a second. Okay. All right, so I'm. I need some help drafting an entry of appearance for a case in St. Louis County. Can. Can you help me out with this?
- [19:50]
AI Assistant
Of course. An entry of appearance is pretty straightforward. Usually you'll just need to include the name of the attorney entering their appearance, the party they're representing, the case caption, and the case number. If you want, you can let me know any specific details and I can help you draft it up.
- [20:06]
Tyson Mutrix
Yeah. So you already have my information because you have, you know a lot about me. So you go, you can go ahead and include my information in the, in the signature line. The case number is 1-238-ABC.
- [20:18]
AI Assistant
Got it. I'll put something together for you. It'll look something like this. In the Circuit Court of St. Louis County, Missouri. Case number 123abc. Plaintiff, defendant, entry of appearance comes now. Tyson Mutrix of Mutrix Firm Injury Lawyers and hereby enters his appearance as counsel for the plaintiff or defendant in the above captioned matter. Respectfully submitted, Tyson Mutrix Mutrix Firm Lawyers, 222 Central Ave. Steep. 550 Clayton, Mo. 63105 Bone 314-20273. You can fill in the plaintiff and defendant names and let me know if you need any changes.
- [20:55]
Tyson Mutrix
Thanks. Appreciate it. So Gladys has gotten pretty darn good over the last few years.
- [21:01]
Gary Allen
I love that there was an in there.
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Tyson Mutrix
So that's the part that I wanted to bring in. Right. Because it is, it is mind boggling. I showed it to my kids or let my kids listen to it and they're like, they thought I was talking to a real person because it was so good. Now it was a different voice. The voice we just listened to, to me seems more like an AI. The male voice that I had on it before, we just changed because we were playing around the car over the weekend with it. But the, the male voice that we had on there, I can't remember the names. They have really interesting names. But he, his voice sounds way more natural. It is a, it's real and it's getting kind of creepy. But you mentioned that and I wanted to kind of. I thought that would be kind of fun. But. So I want to get back to LeanLaw though, because you all. It's interesting that at this point you've already helped firms process over a billion dollars in legal fees every year.
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Gary Allen
Yeah. In the last 12 months. Yeah.
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Tyson Mutrix
That's what I saw. That's what I saw in the tw. In the last 12. The last 12 months. A billion dollars. So what is it you'd say that is like it's the core operational problem that you're helping small or mid sized firms solve?
- [22:18]
Gary Allen
Well, it's. We're the financial operating system for the law firm. So you know, with, with QuickBooks in the background. We integrate with QuickBooks so you can do your timekeeping, invoicing, collections, trust accounting and reporting all in a very automated way. And we are, we play well with others that's part of our best in class philosophy is, you know, we, we take advantage of the best that other programs do. So we have a few really great integrations like our QuickBooks integration that allow you to put together a best in class technology stack that, you know, we hope one day functions like that all in one that you're talking about, but it just happens to be made by. The pieces are made by different companies.
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Tyson Mutrix
Got you. So you on the horizon, you've got, you've got a bigger, grander plan. Is that, is that fair to say?
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Gary Allen
Oh my gosh. I mean our. I just looked at our AI plan the other day and it's like you can't just be scattershot with AI, but if you pick the right types of things to work on, it's amazing what we're going to be able to do. So we think we can create a very seamless experience for the user which will have its Gladys like elements talking to the agents like you did. And it will also help the software talk to the software better and you know, pull more things out than you can now. You don't have to write macros for everything. The AI can pull those reports together. I mean like reporting is one of the big frustrations a lot of law firms have because never quite right. And for 11 law firms, there are 12 ways that they want to do everything. So you can't really hardwire that into the code. You have to have something like an AI to say I want a report that's going to do this, this, this and this. And it will be able to connect the dots among all the data. If you have a great data set, as your guest the other day pointed out, I mean it's like it changes the focus of your company to, you know, you must have great integrations and APIs and great data. And if you've got those, you can put together something that's really powerful from the user standpoint.
- [24:47]
Tyson Mutrix
I wonder if from that conversation if there's anything that you disagreed with what we talked about because I like to hear where I'm wrong sometimes. So do you think with any of the lot of the stuff we were talking about was theoretical, but I will dance Nerbush, he and I, I think that's the one you're talking about, the episode. But he and I, we kind of got, got deep on some things. We're kind of getting there and I just like those kind of kind of conversations. I like to talk about sort of where I think the law is headed in the next few years. And all that. But I, I do wonder if there's anything from that conversation. We're like, these guys got this wrong. That's just not right. That's, they're just off base.
- [25:28]
Gary Allen
I'm just curious, you know, it's, I'm approaching these next few years with a lot of humility because we're going to get a lot of surprises. Some will be good and some will not. Probably not. So, no, I think it's all a healthy conversation at this point. And I like it. I felt like it was a fairly realistic conversation, which is you're not hearing a lot in the legal world. You're hearing it's the end of the world. You know, it's a panacea, but trying to really get into it and, you know, help law firms figure out how do we keep up with this thing without doing stupid and expensive things and appearing in court as a cat lawyer and, you know, sending in falsified pleadings and, you know, do something productive with it.
- [26:26]
Tyson Mutrix
So, so I saw last week, just last week, a circuit court judge had actually ruled on a case with fake cases. And I think we all knew it was going to happen at some point. But the thing that I thought is kind of interesting is that it makes me wonder if you go back to like the 70s and 80s, how many cases were fake cases back then? Because there was, it was very hard think about what it took to verify whether or not a case was actually a real case. Back then. You had to go to a library, grab a book and actually find it in a book. So to me, it's far easy, it was far easier back then to make up a case than it is these days. You can, you can know in a minute whether or not it's probably less than that. You can copy and paste it into. You could. We, we got to the point where every single pleading, we are going through and double checking every single freaking case as I, I, I guess as, as you should. But after it's a final document we're going through again and saying, because that terror, I'm terrified of it. I am absolutely terrified of us actually using a case because I, I don't, new news flash, I don't draft the majority of our pleadings. They're drafted by someone else. I then go through and review it, make my edits to it. And so I want to make sure that something has not been put in there that shouldn't be. So with that, I'm going to transition, do a rough transition with this, with where is there anything like that when, when it comes to building out the tech that you have to keep an eye, like we have to keep an eye on the, the, the case law to make sure that we're not getting fabricated cases in our pleadings. Is there anything like that when it comes to the tech world that you're working on, that you, that concerns you to the point where you are, you all have like checklist items to make sure that, that you're, you're safe?
- [28:13]
Gary Allen
Oh, I think we need every aspect of the company needs processes related to that. I mean, there is no place where AI is the end all and be all. I mean, particularly it is helping us to write code. It has doubled our productivity writing code in the last three months. I mean, that's crazy. But it writes bad code. So the job switches for the people who are reviewing the code to make sure that it is properly done. You become an editor more than a drafter, and you also have to be an architect because it's not necessarily good at the architecture of the code and how that works. So there's clearly. In that part of the world, one of the things I really worry about with AI question I ask myself a lot is, is it making me smarter or dumber? And that's particularly true in my part of, you know, I do content and, you know, marketing, where you have to be just so tuned in to your customer and it's really easy to churn out garbage in AI and stuff that's not very creative. So it puts a lot of pressure on you and in that part of the world to say, you know, because it's like, okay, you have one good idea. Now AI can help you put that idea, you know, to make that idea into something real. Like, now this is going to sound silly, but I made some cartoons about legal administrators and managing partners. And it's like, you know, am I capable of drawing those myself? Probably not, but I had AI draw some and it's like, they weren't bad, but, you know, I now have to take that and go, because nobody's gonna, you know, just have to have that framed by their desk. It's like, but if we, you know, if we can get it to a little higher level, then it's valuable. And how do you take that content and not just go, oh, that's good enough. You know, how do you take it and help it to elevate yourself in a way?
- [30:35]
Tyson Mutrix
You know, Becca sent me something last night, and I find it very interesting when it comes to content and content creation, because there is, I Spoke at Disrupt a month or a half ago or maybe two months ago, and I talked about, you could create like a mediocre law firm right now with just AI. You could, you could do that, a fully AI run law firm. But it's going to be mediocre, really. At best. It's going to be. But with. Same thing with content. You can create content right now. Poor content that is all AI. But YouTube, just recently they said that starting July 15, they're only monetizing content with real human voices. Which I thought was, I was like, that's an interesting move because you had all of these faceless Facebook channels popping up, making lots of money off of YouTube and they're shifting that. And I found that to be really, really interesting.
- [31:28]
Gary Allen
Yeah, I think that, yeah, there's a lot to be decided on. Sort of how does the market respond to this absolute deluge of content? Right. So, I mean, I'm struggling with it as a human being, is just like, okay, how do I pick the pieces out of this that actually, you know, give me some value? So. And then you've got, of course, all the copyright issues that have to be sorted out and you know, sort of the legal aspects of it of what are we going to be able to use? And then how did you know, like, yeah, YouTube is going, hey, I can't pay you X dollars per click for this crap.
- [32:13]
Tyson Mutrix
Well, it's what. It's watering down their brand is what it's doing. I mean. Yeah, it.
- [32:17]
Gary Allen
Exactly. Yeah. You know, I don't know if we'll get into marketing at all. But you know, like, that's being totally disrupted. The, the search, search and paid digital advertising is being totally disrupted by AI. So, you know, any firms out there depending on pay per click, if you can make it pencil at all, are going to have to totally change how they approach that.
- [32:45]
Tyson Mutrix
Yeah, well, I mean, we can get into that because I, it's one of those things where the thing I like about our format is I can go into whatever I want to go into and we can talk about whatever is interesting. So talk, talk more about that. Why is that?
- [32:58]
Gary Allen
Why is what exactly?
- [33:01]
Tyson Mutrix
When it comes to the paper, the pay per click, why is it that people are going to adapt what they're doing currently? And I guess, how is AI affecting pay per click specifically? Because I know a lot of people rely on pay per click to get a lot of their leads.
- [33:12]
Gary Allen
Yeah, no, exactly. Right. I mean, if you're in a PI firm, you know, one or any kind of B2C type of firm that's, you know, that's how you, how you find people these days. Well, I mean what we see on our side, I mean we're not experts in marketing for PI firms but we really think hard about digital channels is that all the keywords that we care about are completely unaffordable. You know, so there are, we've got all kinds of venture funded competitors who you know, throw money at that sort of thing and drive those customers costs up so that it's like, you know, just an ordinary pay per click campaign is absolutely, does not pay off for us. So we have to, you know, we have to go into content and other more clever strategies or you know, we, it's just too expensive to acquire a customer. So I see that affecting law firms competing the same way is you know, it's just more and more competing for, for less and less real estate there. Plus if you've looked at the Google search page, it's like totally crammed with AI and advertisements now. So I mean SEO doesn't help you a whole lot in that world. And you know, is the, the person, your, your potential customer going to sort, continue to sort through all of that stuff to, to click and find their law firm or they get, you know, are they going to go oh, what's the AI going to tell me here? Which is not telling, giving them the same sort of clear answer they used to have on Google. So I, I think that's going to be, I think that's going to change a lot. I don't know how but I don't, I don't think we'll have Google the way we have Google today, five years from now, maybe not three years from now.
- [35:18]
Tyson Mutrix
No, the, the, the search has, has already plummeted. Search, the volume of search has already started to plummet. What was interesting is, is that if you go back to the origin, origin of search engines and the big debate was at the time, and this isn't for me in my experience I was pretty young at the time. I was in high school but in high school, middle school age but from reading multiple books about this topic was really interesting is that the debate was about whether or not to go to start with a paid model or an advertising model. And the debate was what okay, if it's, if it's an advertising model we're going to get a lot of garbage and, but if we go with the paid model the adoption is going to be slower basically. And there's more to it obviously. I do think it's interesting how the LLMs have gone more to the paid model. There's a free option, but if you want the more advanced features, you're going to have to pay for it. So I do think it's interesting and it makes me wonder if they're going to go more to the advertising model at some point or if they're going to stick with that paid model. Because if there's no advertising, it really does go back to making sure that you're optimizing your content so it's no longer SEO. I don't know what the new term is going to be for optimizing your websites for LLMs, but it is interesting how the true focus is going to have to be on making sure that the content is right in. Almost like the original origin of what Google wanted it to be, where they want people producing good content. And it seems like the LLMs are going to force that to happen because you can't just keyword stuff. You just can't put personal injury alert, Personal injury alert, Personal injury alert over and over and over again on your site. It's. You have to provide actual value on your sites. And I think that that does dynamic that, that shift in. That is really, really interesting.
- [37:05]
Gary Allen
It. I think that is super interesting. And, you know, how do you create a. A place where people can go to find that good content that isn't just buried in AI garbage? Because that, you know, I find that exhausting. You know, so it's like, okay, maybe, you know, real estate on the Internet shouldn't be free if you have to pay for it. It's going to be better by.
- [37:34]
Tyson Mutrix
Yeah, by necessity. It'll have to be better.
- [37:36]
Gary Allen
Yeah. But I don't know. I don't love that answer because I don't want to make this. It shouldn't be about who's got the money, but something's got to. Got to move on all of that because it's. Whatever we're doing now is definitely not working. And I think if my son has, who is a software developer, has already turned off his Internet. He just, he just completely checked out.
- [38:01]
Tyson Mutrix
Wow.
- [38:02]
Gary Allen
Yeah. And it actually is. It has positive implications for happiness. So there is that part.
- [38:11]
Tyson Mutrix
Yeah, I. So I do want to kind of get back. I didn't. I've enjoyed this conversation thoroughly. Trust me. I do want to get back to Lean Lux. I want to, I want to ask a little bit more about that because I want to understand kind of how the mechanics work and how you help solve problems because you've got firm firms, they're going like they're billing hours, they got to collect the fees, a lot of them, they're scrambling with cash flow issues. Maybe they've got, you know, collections problems. And I wonder, what is it that LeanLaw, how does LeanLaw help that, that picture for the law firm owner where like it streamlines things because we've been talking about like content and other things where like AI helps, the helps can help you create content pretty quickly. Right. It helps you streamline a lot of things. So how does, how is it that LeanLaw helps with that, with streamlining things when it comes to the finances?
- [38:56]
Gary Allen
Right, right. Well, I mean, kind of the initial pain point that we fixed for people was connecting QuickBooks to their billing. Right. I mean you can use QuickBooks as a legal billing tool, but, but it's quite painful and particularly if you have like a trust account. You know, it's like a 12 step process to do a trust accounting entry in QuickBooks by itself. And so we automated a lot of that and we decided, you know, rather than do 200 integrations with everything, we said, let's do one really good one with QuickBooks. And when we started they were just having the two way sync. So, you know, basically we can keep QuickBooks accurate in real time and in sync with your billing software. So, you know, and that allows us to completely automate a trust transaction. So I can send you your retainer request you fill that out with your credit card information, information that comes back and the money's deposited in the bank. The trend, the transaction is recorded in both in your trust ledger and in your, in the individual client ledger. You know, it's all set for your three way reconciliation. So that, that's, that's kind of number.
- [40:24]
Tyson Mutrix
One by the way. That, that just, that by itself is pretty incredible. Just that one.
- [40:31]
Gary Allen
Yeah. And it's pretty complicated. It was not easy to write that especially, you know, doing that so that it's a real time sync. That's a trick. So we've got all of that automation. We similarly automate the invoicing process all the way down to, you know, the collection of the payment and the accounting associated with that. So we have a partner called Confido Leasing, which is our payments partner. And we like them because they're legal, specific and flexible about how they do things. So we can create that tight integration. So, you know, everything from the time entry to the invoice to the sending the invoice to the client with a nice email and a summary of the account, collecting that payment, doing the accounting, all of that can be automated. Then the, another big pain point that we fix is we have, you know, real time reporting because we have, we're connected with QuickBooks the way we are. Your books are always in sync. You can always look up your reports and get the data that you need in, in real time. And you know, so that's a good sample of the types of things that we do.
- [41:50]
Tyson Mutrix
That's pretty incredible. With the limited time, I want to make sure people know how to reach out to you. So where can people reach out to you for more information about LeanLaw or connecting with you or to see. Maybe they, maybe they just have questions for you about tech or if they want to reach out to you about working with their firm. How do people get in touch with you?
- [42:09]
Gary Allen
Yeah, I think my email is probably the best. So gary allen@mylenelaw.com G-A-R-Y.a l l e n at my l e a n l a w dot com.
- [42:24]
Tyson Mutrix
Thanks, Tyson, but so I'm going to leave you with a doozy question. So we'll see and hopefully we're gonna, we're gonna play this back in a few years to see where you, whether you got it right. But where do you see the future of law firm operations heading and how are you building Lean Law? And it sounds like all your other things that you had going on, but how are you building those to meet that future?
- [42:48]
Gary Allen
That's really interesting. I mean, how long have we been saying that law is going to be disrupted the way manufacturing and tech and other things have been decades? I think I'm finally getting convinced that's about to, that's happening and it's going to take five to 10 years. But you know, the AI is the thing that is going to force that to happen. Now there's a lot of other things that need to happen. I mean, we still do trials like we did in the 18th century. You know, you can't have a judicial system that is 200 years behind and, and have a modern legal, modern law firm operating within it efficiently. So, you know, there's a whole systemic change that I hope we can accomplish here. I mean, it's when we have a system where 80% of people can't afford a lawyer, something's basically wrong and that pillar of a free society is wobbling. And so we've got to figure that out. I think AI gives us the opportunity to do a lot in that respect. So you know what exactly what that system looks like. I don't know But I think you could see a very different legal system 10 years from now because of that. LeanLaw wants to be the financial operating system of the law firm. Within that, we want to integrate with best in class technology, Microsoft, QuickBooks, net documents, other top of the line tools so that the law firm can operate, you know, in a smooth and automated manner. Within that. That's going to require being very nimble in the coming days. I mean, and some of the legacy tech companies, well, maybe all of the legacy tech companies are going to have a hard, hard time doing that. The innovators dilemma applies to law just like it applies to everything else. So I'm excited for the next 10 years. I'm hoping to be sitting on the beach for part of it at least. But I think that we finally got to the point where we can make law firms more efficient, we can make the system more efficient and we can make it work, work better for everybody.
- [45:15]
Tyson Mutrix
Amen. I think that's a great way of ending it. Thank you, Gary, for your time. Really appreciate this. Like I said, I've really thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Anytime I can talk tech with somebody, it's I, I like it. So really, really appreciate your time.
- [45:27]
Gary Allen
It's awesome. Thank you, Tyson. I really appreciate the opportunity and I enjoyed the conversation as well. So let's do it again sometime. You can come on my webinar series.
- [45:37]
Tyson Mutrix
Deal. Let's do it anytime. Anytime you want.
- [45:40]
Gary Allen
Awesome.
- [45:41]
Tyson Mutrix
Foreign.
- [45:54]
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