Build an Intake Engine That Actually Scales, with Ben Gideon and Jeff Wright

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Hello and welcome to Elawvate, Build

and Grow Your Law Firm. I'm Jeff Wright,

chief operating officer at Gideon

Asen, joined by our host, partner,

attorney, extraordinaire

Ben Gideon. Morning, Ben.

These introductions are getting

more elaborate every time, Jeff.

There's so much I want to say about you

and I don't know what's going to come

out.

I'm glad we're limiting that then.

Yeah, we'll limit it. It's

really good to see you.

We're coming off a very

well received episode.

Our last episode was

attorney compensation,

and we heard from a lot of our listeners

about the episode and how appreciative

they were of your openness, Ben,

and the firm's openness to share our

compensation plan and everything.

So I just wanted to thank our listeners

for reaching out and engaging with us.

Yeah,

it was cool to hear from so many people

and folks took us up on the offer

to share our compensation plan and

spreadsheet documents and everything.

And for everyone who's

asked, we have shared.

If anyone has not asked but

would like that information,

just reach out and we'll send it over.

Let's talk about our

sponsors. I can kick that off.

Our Build and Grow podcast

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1% for the Planet is something our

firm has been involved in for a long

time.

It's an absolutely fantastic

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Firms and businesses simply pledge 1% of

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And it's a fantastic partnership we have.

If anyone does join 1% for the planet,

please reach out to Ben and I and we'll

be sure to give you a shout out on the

show.

Yeah, I've been thinking with the

wildfires burning the world away,

maybe we need to increase it to 2%.

It's crazy out west.

I'm heading to Utah in about a

month and I hope it's still there.

Yeah, it's going on.

There's actually a Google application

you can get on and look at all the world

wildfires going on right now,

but it's crazy how many

different locations are burning.

Canada being the worst for a while.

But my daughter was over in France and

Spain and there are huge wildfires over

there as people probably know. And my

wife and I just came back from Scotland.

There were wildfires there.

We were about 45 minutes from

the location of a major wildfire.

I didn't really understand because it

rained every single day we were there.

So our podcast today is

also sponsored by Supio.

Supio is a AI platform designed

specifically for trial lawyers,

extremely well engineered and designed,

used by a lot of top trial

lawyers all over the country.

Their reaction to the platform

has been wildly positive.

So if anybody needs an AI platform to

help you do things like demand letters

or organize medical records,

request medical records,

create timelines, and there's

a whole series of things,

it can do extremely well.

So check it out at supio.com.

Yeah, we had Jerry,

the CEO and one of the co-founders on

this podcast a number of months ago.

So if you want to go back in the annals,

you can watch that podcast

and learn more about Supio.

And last and certainly not least, this

podcast is brought to you by VisionSpark.

VisionSpark is an executive

key team member search firm,

meaning they'll find chief operating

officers, chief financial officers,

heads of HR, CIOs. If you've

listened to this podcast,

we've talked a lot about culture,

a lot about hiring and how

important it is for us.

And one of our tenants is there's no

better investment than bringing in the

right people and VisionSpark

can certainly help you do that.

So reach out to them, have a

conversation. We think you'll like them.

We use them to this day with the hiring

process, especially for our attorneys,

and it's a fantastic partnership.

All right.

So today we're

transitioning to intakes and

evaluations.

And I think the reason why this

is important when Ben and Taylor

were writing our four-year strategic plan,

our biggest KPI and the

biggest thing that we track is

qualified cases.

So meaning we have pretty stringent

intake criteria for our litigation

team in terms of what we will

take for personal injury,

what we'll take for medical malpractice.

And really the only way to hit that

KPI and get the number of

qualified cases we need to

hit our revenue goals is to scale intakes,

but also free up our litigation

team to handle the influx of new

cases.

And building out an appropriate

intake and evaluation department

was one of the first key tenants

in the strategic plan. So Ben,

I don't know if you want to kind of give

the genesis of your thoughts there when

you were writing the plan.

Yeah, that was well said, Jeff.

I want to be mindful of the idea that

not everybody listening has a plaintiff's

trial firm and does personal

injury, medical malpractice,

the kind of work we do. But

I do think for any law firm,

the idea of the point of contact with new

potential clients and people that are

reaching out with inquiries about possible

cases or business that they

want to bring your way,

that's critical to every firm

because obviously all of us as

attorneys depend on having

enough high quality work,

enough cases or clients to meet our goals.

So in whatever business you're in,

you need to have a system for triaging

and intaking new business,

new clients into the practice.

And that's really what we're

talking about with this department.

It's pretty individualized to the kind

of cases we do and would have to be

tweaked for different types of practices,

but I think a lot of the concepts are

pretty universal and apply to any type of

law practice.

So a couple things you mentioned about it.

One is the critical aspect of having the

functionality of your firm to be able

to accomplish that in terms of allowing

you to scale.

Because if you need a

steady diet of new cases,

new clients, and there's a process

of vetting that, triaging it,

sifting through inquiries to

determine which of those could be

viable clients or cases and which are not,

you have to have a system for that that

can itself be extremely burdensome and

can inhibit your ability to scale because

you get to a point where if you have

enough inquiries, you just can't

handle them or you're missing,

you are not providing good customer

service to people that are contacting your

office. And so people are going elsewhere,

potentially leaving bad reviews

or having bad experiences.

So striking that right balance

where you can accommodate all of the

inquiries and carefully vet them,

give people respectful

communication and interaction,

and then make sure you're not

missing critical assets and key

opportunities for your firm is really

important. And it really maps into the

plan to scale and market

because if you generate too many

inquiries, too many new

potential cases or clients,

but don't have the capability

to handle that on the front end,

then your marketing dollars are being

wasted, you're squandering opportunities,

you're creating bad will.

So those two things have to grow in scale,

in lockstep at the same time.

You can't have more business

than you can handle,

but as you build your business, you need

to have enough business to sustain it.

So it just really needs

to be a balance there.

And that's what we've really attempted

to achieve with this department of the

firm you're discussing now.

Yeah. And I think it's something

the firm has grown into.

And depending on what

stage your firm is at,

whether you're just at the startup

stage going out on your own or you're

looking to scale, when Ben

and Taylor started the firm,

and a lot of this is repetitive

from what we've talked about before,

they brought a small number

of cases over with them.

And then Taylor really

started hitting the phones.

And I don't want to say

the firm was living off of

existing cases and referrals,

but that was your bread and butter.

But because it was you, Taylor,

and a paralegal, you two

were doing all the intakes.

As more business came in and you and

Taylor had to spend more time on the

casework, you brought in an intake

coordinator and additional staff,

additional attorneys, but that intake

coordinator was your frontline.

But if they could not decline the

case or move it to another firm as

a referral, the litigation

team, including you and Taylor,

were still tied up doing inks with these.

So the next

logical migration is what we did where

that was not sustainable to growth

is we developed what we call the

IECU Intake Evaluation and Core

Case Unit. I have no idea how

we came up with that name.

I think Ben came up with it.

I called it ICU I think for my first

three weeks here and it was corrected a

number of times.

And the premise behind

that was we obviously still

have an intake coordinator,

but we brought on a

non-litigation attorney

as well as another paralegal where

they would handle the intakes,

they would do the

preliminary case reviews,

they would do the preliminary

scrub for lack of a better term.

And if they felt that this could

possibly be a qualified case,

at that point, they would bring

in the litigation department.

So did I kind of hit all the

steps on the maturation of that?

Yeah, I think you

described that accurately.

I think it's important to step

back the reference you have to

qualified cases. I'm not sure

we've explained that before,

but every business

should have one or only a

couple,

but ideally one key

performance indicator KPI

that is the most

important indicator of the

health of the business.

And the exercise of trying to

figure out what that is for

your individual business is a really

critical exercise to go through because it

gives you a lot of insight into

what drives the success of your

individual business. And if

you were selling widgets,

it might be sales per month.

Or if you had a

subscription-based business,

it might be numbers of current

subscribers or new subscribers

enlisted in the last 30 days.

But whatever your business is,

if you have an hourly rate firm,

it might be hours billed per month or the

hours per attorney or something

like that or the hourly rate. So you

just really need to drill down on

that. For a plaintiff's trial practice,

it's a challenging thing to come up

with because there are lots of different

candidates for what it could be

such as gross revenue or total

fee receipts or fee generated per lawyer.

But the problem is our type of

business tends to vacillate greatly

between periods of lulls where there

are no case settlements or fees

generated,

and then huge case settlements where

we get a huge influx of fee money and

revenue.

And so basing it on any kind of an

average and when things are dependent on

success of an individual

case makes it very difficult.

So we came up with this concept

of qualified cases for our key

performance indicator,

which when a qualified case is

a case that meets our criteria,

and we have very stringent criteria for

cases we will take into our litigation

teams to litigate and try.

And the idea of our firm health

is that we can measure our firm's health

by the number of qualified cases in our

practice because we know we're

very good at case selection and

we know that over time,

if we have sufficient

quantity of qualified cases,

that's going to generate the revenue

we need for the health of the firm.

And as those qualified case numbers grow,

we know that our future

revenue is going to grow.

And we don't have to drill down into

individual case.This individual case

might not be successful,

this other one might be more

successful than we expected.

But if you look at qualified

cases across the board,

it's a very good metric

for our firm health.

Sorry for that long-winded

explanation of that,

but it's important because when you're

thinking about why are you building

a engine to generate more

business or more of whatever it is

you are looking for,

you need to know what you're looking for

and what is a measure of the health and

success of the firm. So for example, in

our case, it's not the number of cases.

There's a lot of cases we could take

and we don't want. They're cases,

but they're not qualified cases.

And a non-qualified case is not a

measure of the health of our practice.

So once we determined that's what

we needed to build out a system

to generate more qualified cases.

But in order to do that,

a big part of that is the vetting and

filtering process on the front end.

So now we know what the

goal of the process is.

One of the key values in

our firm at really any firm

that wants to be financially successful

is to try to limit the amount of

attorney time necessary

to accomplish goals that

don't require attorney

involvement. And as you alluded to,

there was a time and actually

for years where every new client

basically came into the office and Taylor

or I would just talk to them directly

and have a conversation about their case.

And nine out of 10 of those we would

decline. And that took a lot of time.

And that was a lot of attorney time

devoted to something that didn't have any

economic value at the end of the day.

So one of the insights is

to reduce the amount of

time attorneys have to

spend doing that work.

And we can discuss that from there.

Yeah. For me, it was a pleasant surprise.

Coming from the banking

world for two decades,

every strategic planning

meeting I was part of,

the leading key performance

indicator was always revenue.

Coming here and not seeing that as

the leading key performance indicator

was actually invigorating because I

almost think a revenue number is a cop

out where you need to drill down

to something like we did because

revenue is going to be a product of

our key performance indicator qualified

cases. And just coming up with

an arbitrary number and saying,

"We want to do five million this year,

we want to do 10 million,"

whatever your number happens to be,

give it more thought. Don't

just arbitrarily throw a

random number out there.

Drill down into something like Ben and

Taylor did, put some thought into it,

and I think it's going to be beneficial

for you. So really there were four main

goals of our intake and

evaluation department,

and I'll go through the four goals in my

mind and how we're doing with each one.

So the first was free the litigation team.

We want our litigation attorneys who

I'm sure every firm is like this,

they are arguably your most valuable,

your most highly compensated employees.

You want them working

on your most valuable,

complex cases and important cases.

So number one was free

the litigation team.

Number two was identify

qualified cases quickly,

and we call them diamonds in

the rough or whatever they are,

but train the intake team,

train the attorney and the

paralegal to identify what

has the parameters within it to

possibly be a qualified case and get

them in the hands of

a litigation attorney.

Number three was a lot of cases.

We probably turned down 98%

of the cases for a variety of

reasons,

but there are cases that meet the criteria

of a number of other firms that we

have good relationships with. So we have

the ability to refer those cases out,

which derives a source of revenue for

the firm that wasn't there before.

And the last thing was

certain cases that do not

meet our qualified case standards.

If we feel there is clear

negligence and we feel that case can

ideally settle pre-suit,

we will keep that on the books and

have our IECU attorney and paralegal

work that case without the

involvement of the lit team,

another revenue generator there.

So I'll pause and get Ben's thoughts

on those four goals or four areas.

So one thing we tried to really

keep in mind and remain focused on

was not to mix up goals.

So they're high volume

advertising firms where their goal

is to take in the maximum

number of viable cases and to

move them through the pipeline

and to convert them into cash.

That is not the goal of our IECU.

Our principal goal is to

generate qualified cases for the

practice.That's where we

make our bread and butter.

That's our core business model.

It's the highest value added,

most lucrative work that

we get and that we have,

and that's what we want

to remain focused on.

That doesn't mean that there can't be

some ancillary benefits of building this

out, which you've just identified.

So the goal is everything is

centered around making sure we don't

miss and that we properly vet the cases,

identify the qualified cases,

and move them into our practice. So if

we were only to accomplish that goal and

nothing else, that would be successful

for what we're trying to do. However,

what we recognized is that in doing that,

we will identify some cases, like you

mentioned, that are not qualified cases,

but that we have the capacity as

long as we build out that capacity,

which we have to monetize those cases,

to provide a service to

those clients because we were

skilled at doing that and that

there's a particular category of case

that doesn't require litigation in

order to move it quickly to resolution,

and that brings value to the

firm and to those clients.

So that's a spillover effect,

but we're capturing that,

the economic value of that.

And then the other economic value we

can capture are those category of cases

that are not qualified cases

that we don't think would be

economical to handle within our own

firm because they might need to be

sued. There might need to be more

elbow grease put into that to

monetize them than what we're

building or have resources to do.

And those can get referred out to

other law firms. And in concept,

our IECU department

should be in some sense

self-funding in that we should

be able to pay for the costs of

that entire unit of our firm and

all of the marketing that we're

doing to attract additional

work and cases through

those kind of ancillary revenue

streams that come out of that IECU.

And our goal is that would be the

case so that it's sort of revenue

neutral in the sense of we're

building a machine to generate

qualified cases and

it's paying for itself.

We would consider that to be a success.

Now the reality is it could become an

additional profit center for the firm that

could go beyond paying for itself and

generate real additional meaningful

revenue.

It hasn't achieved that yet,

but I think there's real

opportunity that it could. Again,

it goes back to just being really clear,

and I think it's been very important

for us to be really clear about what our

purpose in doing it is.

Because if we weren't,

we might continue to hold

on to cases in the IACU that

we shouldn't have because they're too

expensive and time-consuming to litigate.

That would sap additional

resources from that.

That would take away the time that

our lawyer in the ICU has to help us

carefully vet and evaluate cases

to identify more qualified cases.

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Everything comes back to qualified cases.

And that was one thing we did

not. Creating that, number one,

if it became a distraction, was

going to be a problem. Number two,

if it took up too much

litigation team time,

it was going to be a problem because

those were running contrary to

why we were establishing the

unit. But let's talk about it.

Our unit is still in its infancy.

We hired our IECU attorney

last May, so 15 months ago.

A month later, we hired the

paralegal for it. So 14 months ago,

the IECU was created.

We did a very soft rollout

where we provided training,

we came up with our internal

processes and procedures.

So for all intents and purposes,

we've probably been up and

running for roughly one year.

The biggest thing it has

allowed us to do is scale,

and we're very lucky to have an

extraordinary intake coordinator. But when

we started the IECU a year ago,

we were averaging between

25 and 30 intakes a week.

By establishing this unit,

by establishing our processes and

procedures that we've constantly

tweaked along the way,

we're averaging between 50

and 60 intakes now a week.

So we've doubled our

capacity to take the intakes.

And at the end of the day with

our stringent qualified case

criteria, it sounds callous,

but it really is a numbers game.

And you have to sift through a lot

of cases to find those qualified

cases.

And the only way to hit

that KPI was to increase our

numbers. And we've done

that. Just last week,

we had 72 intakes in one

week setting a new record,

and we're still trying to find

a way to continue to scale

without burning out the staff and the

intake team and keeping the service levels

high.

Yeah. And you mentioned

this, but for a long time,

both in my former firm and

then when we started this firm,

the worry about doing more direct

to consumer marketing is that

that's really a different kind

of business than the high-end

trial practice that we have.

And the risk is that you

become distracted from

what you're really good at and

what has been a proven successful

model to do something that you're not

good at competing with people that are

good at doing that other thing,

which is really more of a kind of

business of law than a practice of law.

And so one of our core principles

in building out the marketing and

the IECU was that we wanted to

create an absolute firewall between

that unit and their work

and our litigation practice.

We didn't want any of our trial lawyers

who are working on cases that have

seven and eight figure value and that

we depend upon for our success and our

revenue,

and frankly that the clients are counting

on for those results. We did not want

them distracted even in the slightest

by this other effort that's going

on to generate the

cases. And interestingly,

when we ended up building out this

separate unit and our firm had grown

too large for our current office

suite, which is on top floor,

fourth floor of our building,

there was no more space there.

And so we were forced to lease another

office suite down on the first floor

of the same building.

And so not only do we have a

conceptual firewall between the

two parts of our business,

there's literally a three-floor

separation between our IEC unit,

which is down on floor one, and

the rest of our litigation teams,

which are up on floor four.

And so we now talk about that case is

going up to litigation or we're going to

send that down or up.

And there'll come a time when our firm

is going to get new space and we'll all

be together in one floor or one area.

But I think that verbiage will

continue because it's become ingrained.

And it's also just the optics of

that or the physical separation

has been useful actually

in reinforcing the concept

that these two parts of our business need

to be firewalled off from one another.

I mean,

I have been involved in

helping to supervise and

build the IACU along with you.

Taylor has now handed that off to

him and he's doing some of that,

but none of our other litigation

attorneys are involved in that at

all other than if there's a qualified

case or a potential qualified

case that they need to weigh in on,

or it goes up to the fourth floor

for their involvement or evaluation.

But the day-to-day handling the

phone calls, doing the intakes,

speaking to new clients,

even doing that initial evaluation of

potential cases before we've determined is

this a qualified case or not,

our trial teams don't have to be

involved in that at all. And we make a

very conscious effort to

avoid any cross-pollination

of that, and we don't want people to be

distracted. And that's really worked.

And not only has it eliminated

the distraction of what could be a

distraction to your core

business, but as you indicated,

it's freed up our trial teams

to have more time to devote to

their cases because in the old days

when there wasn't that separate

department of our firm, they did have

to be involved in those decisions.

They did have to speak

to new potential clients.

They did have to get involved in early

evaluation of cases to determine if this

was a go or not a go. And now all of the

time they would have spent doing that,

they can devote to working on their

important work, their important cases.

So it's been really

beneficial in multiple ways.

I don't want to say it's been hard to

put very definitive KPIs on our IECU

unit, but the biggest challenge for me,

we can't measure freeing

up hundreds of hours,

literally hundreds of hours

of litigation attorney's time.

I don't know how to put

a dollar figure on that.

It's very easy to measure cases

that the IECU has settled.

We have definitive numbers there,

but the qualified cases that this

unit has generated from our direct to

consumer marketing and that we've

identified and we've sent upstairs,

those cases aren't going to

monetize for a number of years.

So it's a little hard to put

very definitive KPIs on the unit,

but we know it's working and

it's working well because

everything we expect this unit

to do, it's doing at this time.

It doesn't mean we haven't

had challenges. We. Have,

and we can talk about some of those.

First of all,

finding an attorney because

an intake attorney is a grind

and their job is we have

a pre-vetting system that

myself, our intake coordinator,

and other people in operations when

we're talking to prospective clients,

we're very conscious of our intake

attorney's schedule and calendar and time,

just like we are a litigation attorney.

So we do everything in our power

to only pass along cases that

we think have some viability.

If we're able to decline the case

or refer them somewhere else or

give them some resources, we do that,

but we want to be very cognizant

of their time. But all day,

their intake attorney is either

on intake calls answering

a plethora of questions from the

intake team on what an SOL or

pre-diagnosed or something that makes it

not a case and they're helping us rule

them out or rule them in,

but then they're also working the cases

they've kept on the books and working

demand letters and speaking

with insurance companies,

so forth and so on.

So finding the right person,

I don't want to say it's been challenging,

but it takes the right

individual for that job.

It's certainly not a job Ben would want.

It's not a job that I would want.

I've done that job in part of

my rest of my work because for

years, like I said,

I talk to every new client or either

Taylor or I talk to everybody and I

actually enjoy talking to people.

And you can learn a lot

about this business by having

those reps of talking to

so many people and seeing

those common fact patterns.

And it helps you get a better sense

for what is and isn't the case.

But you're right,

there comes a point where that's

not economically viable and finding.

So just back up, I mean, why do

you need a lawyer in that role?

I think there's a lot of firms,

volume firms where they

have case manager types,

glorified paralegals or former insurance

adjusters who will do a lot of that

initial screening,

which I do think is a viable way

to structure it. But ultimately in

whatever department

you're going to call that,

there needs to be a lawyer

somewhere because as lawyers,

we cannot make final

decisions that involve legal

decision-making without having

a lawyer somewhere in the chain.

So like you said,

there could be questions of a statute

of limitations or whether there's a

viable legal claim or even just

in a med mal case doing the

analysis of the medicine for standard

of care and causation issues.

At some point in the chain,

especially if you're going to do more

complex stuff like medical malpractice,

you need to have a lawyer's involvement.

And so that can only come from two places.

It can come from taking the time of

the lawyers that are skilled at those

cases and litigating them actively,

or you can have a different lawyer

who's not also doing that job.

And the skillset required for the lawyer

who's doing the intake and evaluation

role is pretty broad. There's a lot of

things you need to be able to be good at.

I mean, for one,

you have to be able to talk to people

on the phone and instill confidence

because when someone's calling and they're

looking for a lawyer and they don't

feel confident in the person they're

talking to on the other end of the phone

and it's a significant case,

there's a chance you're going to

lose the case if they don't make that

connection and make it quickly and

make it in a way that gives the client

confidence that you can help them

with whatever their issue is.

And so there are a lot of people

that just don't have the skillset to

communicate that sort of

level of confidence when

they're talking to somebody,

number one. Number two,

you have to be able to quickly

process information so that you can

segregate what is a case from what

isn't a case quickly. And in most

instances,

make that decision during that one initial

phone call because you don't really

have time given the volume of

those cases to spend extra time,

do research, go back and talk

to somebody a second time.

If you don't make the

decision in phone call one,

you've just doubled the time that it

requires to deal with this individual

person. And if it's not a case,

that's not a good use of time.

So there's that skillset. You

need to have the ability then to,

in the cases that you are

taking in to evaluate,

to do evaluation of what could be a

fairly complex set of facts in medical

cases, complex medicine,

and to at least come to a fairly

well-informed conclusion about whether

this is a viable case or it's not a

viable case.

And that requires a fair amount of

intellectual processing power. Some of our

core values, curiosity about the

work, somebody who's willing to

not follow conventional

wisdom, but search for answers.

And then that same lawyer's also

in our model charged with working

up and settling those category of

cases that we keep in our IECU for

processing through to conclusion.

And that's yet a different skillset.

You have to have the ability to get

on the phone with insurance adjusters,

to talk to clients, to negotiate

settlements, to work out liens.

So there's a whole series of

things. And maybe most important,

you have to have someone who has all

of those skills and is capable of doing

that wide variety of things,

but also is willing not to be

suing cases who doesn't want to go

to court, who's not likely to be

taking your defending depositions.

And so getting somebody who has a

certain amount of interpersonal skills,

relational skills, communication skills,

but also doesn't have potentially

the ambition to be a trial lawyer,

to be in court or trying cases,

it's challenging to find somebody

who checks all those boxes. I mean,

step one is knowing exactly

what you're looking for.

And we have a sense for

what we're looking for,

what the skillset is that would

be required to do that job well.

I feel like right now that the person

we have in that role does check all of

those boxes, but finding

somebody. And frankly,

the vital thing is somebody who's

willing to do that day in and day out,

despite the tediousness and the

challenging nature of that work.

Because talking to people regularly,

having to decline their case,

that's not always pleasant.

You're listening to a lot

of very difficult stories

from people who've all been

through a lot and that can

take a toll on you over time.

Doing all that without having the glory

of the big win in the courtroom or the

big settlement in the high value case.

It can be a lot to ask of any individuals.

Yeah, I think another thing,

and this is probably an entire

show at some point in the future,

one other thing that has allowed

us to scale and I think has allowed

our attorney and our intakes team's

learning curve to be shortened is

our adoption of technology

and AI in certain areas.

When we talk about case workup,

it takes med mal attorneys years

and years to become proficient in

their craft.

Most of the attorneys you're going to

find to be an intake type attorney,

a pre-litigation attorney is most likely

not going to have a substantial med mal

background. It's just they're more

litigators than anything else.

And the adoption of AI beyond

chat and claude and everything,

finding a good third party system

that can do the med mal review,

organize, give you chronologies, you

can have a good back and forth with it,

has really shortened that learning curve.

The other thing from a technology

standpoint is during this

building out of the IECU,

we realized our current phone

system was not cutting it.

So we did a phone system integration

with a new company that is AI

focused, gives us AI transcripts.

And recently our overflow or

our third party after hours

coverage again was not cutting

it and we've migrated to an

AI-generated system that we

actually launched two days ago

to better streamline that process. So Ben,

you can obviously speak more

about how AI and doing a good

case review before we send

something up to the litigation team,

again, to be conscious of their time,

how important that is

and how it's working.

Yeah, you're right.

It's probably a whole show on some

of the AI applications that we use.

But just to emphasize what you just said,

it really has accelerated the

learning curve so that somebody who

would've had an extremely difficult time

getting up to speed on med mal cases,

just identifying what the

key issues in the case are,

the decision points for accepting

a case or rejecting the case.

AI helps you do that much

more quickly because it can

take a complex set of facts and

distill it down to some of the

core ideas or questions that are

going to be definitive for the case.

I think for our intake attorney,

if before a phone call there's a

description of the case and she's able

to plug that in,

she can get a good sense for what

some of the issues may be and what

some of the key questions are that she

needs to ask the client about that can

help make the decision about whether

it's a case we take or we don't take. I

should say we don't use AI to evaluate

cases or just for the human judgment of

it.

It's much easier to identify rule

out criteria than a 100% rule

in criteria.

But a lot of the job of the

IACU attorney is rule out

because if it's a clear rule

out, that's easy. That case,

we don't have to do any more work.

It doesn't generate any more attorney

time or involvement for the firm.

It's just a polite rejection.

And AI can help with that.

Once you get to the part of, okay,

this seems like a viable case,

the AI can help do an initial

sort of high level overview and

analysis,

and then that's when the attorney needs

to get in and start to go down each of

the specific strands

of the case in detail.

And that can be done to some

extent with AI assisting,

but it's also a cross-referencing

specific records,

particular information,

articles, literature,

whatever the case may be

for the particular case.

But the bottom line is it's

extremely valuable and it can take

what would've been years to get to up

to speed to ask the right questions

to identify the key issues.

It can change that from years to

months in terms of the learning curve.

It can assist in developing

rule out criteria very well

and expedite the process of

filtering out cases we don't want

and can assist in the more substantive

evaluation of the cases as well.

So there's just many ways that in some

sense allows this model to work because

probably there was a day recently where

you couldn't bring in somebody who

wasn't the skilled and experienced

medical malpractice lawyer and have them

involved in vetting and triaging

med mal cases on the front end.

I do think with the supplement of

AI and supervision from lawyers,

more senior lawyers, which

we do in our practice,

that's completely viable today.

I wanted to comment on one other thing you

mentioned,

which is I think it's important for our

listeners to understand that the way our

IACU works is really a full team approach.

We mentioned the intake coordinator.

We have the IACU attorney,

we have an IACU paralegal,

but we also have Jeff,

our chief operating officer,

who you are regularly involved

in the intake side of the

business. People regularly

come to you with questions.

You will actually take client

calls. If they're difficult clients,

you will sometimes offer to

take that off somebody's hands.

You're picking up overflow calls.

Our finance director, Christine,

at one point was our intake coordinator.

She knows all of these issues intimately.

She's always willing and available and

often does participate or assist in

overflow if somebody's not in the office

or if there's questions when she's

around that she can address.

So she's involved in it. Our business

administrative assistant who also

works on the first floor

will take overflow calls.

She's trained on how to handle

this. So it's really a team effort.

And one of the things that I've been so

impressed at in your management of this

is just how you have built out

the entire team in a way that they

all see themselves as part of it and are

always willing to step in and support

each other so that even if we're

getting 72 new case inquiries a week,

which we did last week, we

have capacity to handle it all.

One other thing I would want to say about

that is that you guys have also done

an amazing job at continually

refining the process.

And Christine is heavily

involved in that as well.

But because what you realize as you

start to get up into the volume and the

scaling is that little things add

up to big things. And if you can

take what's a standard intake call

that used to take 30 minutes with a

new client and reduce that down to

10 minutes or even five minutes,

that's like hiring two or three new

intake coordinators because you're so much

more efficient.

And we have done that by

not only creating other ways

that clients contact us and can get

us critical information without human

involvement,

but also streamlining the way in which

we interface with our digital systems

so that things are

automatically imported in.

Or even if people have to

type things into the system,

it's all expedited and streamlined

to shortcut and shorten that

process.

And you guys have really just to a very

fine degree engineered all of that and

continue to refine and engineer it.

And do you want to talk a

little bit about that, Jeff?

Yeah, no, I think you hit it on the head.

And kind of what I'd said before

that just setting a revenue goal or a

revenue KPI is a cop out.

The cop out for scaling is

all just hire two more people.

I don't want to say it's very

easy to hire a couple more people,

but to find another intake person that's

going to do it correctly and pay them

and train them and give them benefits,

and then you scale a little more and you

have to do and bring in a third intake

person.

There's ways to create efficiencies

without having to increase your FTEs

and increasing your

expenses. And to Ben's point,

it's an entire team effort.

It's a small group of us,

but we work on everything together

and we test everything together.

And automation is key.

We have web forms and we have chat

inquiries and web forms that come in.

And now we have the after hours

AI summaries that come in.

And we've worked with all the third

parties to create APIs so they're

automatically going into our CRM

system that really cuts down on the

manual data entry.

Christine then created an AI

rewrite within our CRM system that

organizes it in a way where it filters

and everything pops into the correct

boxes. So what we were

manually boarding a year ago,

someone would call in, we would

get an email with the information.

We were then manually typing that

into our case management system.

And then at times we weren't

getting good information.

We had to physically go listen to the

phone call, log into a third party system.

You got the MP3 of the phone call,

sit and listen to a 19-minute phone

call and fill in all the blanks.

So you've worked on that intake for 30

minutes and you haven't even reached out

to the PC yet.

We've gotten rid of all of that.

So it is much more refined and

really one of your biggest assets,

your biggest commodities is your time.

We talk about freeing the

litigation team's time up.

We also need to free up our intake

court team's time up so that we can have

good conversations with potentially

qualified candidates and expedite

all the ones that we do

not feel are qualified.

It doesn't mean we're blowing them off.

We are giving them the same amount of

attention that the other ones are getting.

Everyone either gets a call back or if

they've applied electronically or say

they want a text, they're getting

a text, they're getting an email,

they're getting a phone call all within

a certain timeframe as quickly as we

can turn it around.

So we're not losing the humor

interaction by automating these things,

but we're conscious of the intakes team

time. The entire intake team time is

very conscious of our attorney's

time and we're only giving

them. If we can't rule it out and we

think there's some viability there,

that's all our attorney is seeing,

something that we cannot rule out.

If they cannot rule it out,

that is the only time the

litigation team is getting involved.

And we stick to that criteria pretty

well and it's allowed us to scale to this

point.

And I'm glad Ben mentioned that because

none of this would be possible without

it being an entire team effort.

Yeah, that's probably

a great spot to end on.

I think one of the hanging loose

ends is our new AI after hours

call service,

which I know you spent a lot of time

developing the algorithm, refining,

improving numerous test

calls and continuing

to refine it to a point where

we're comfortable rolling it out,

but it's still new.

So maybe that's something we can report

back on in a few months and see how

that's going. The reality is this is

almost certainly where we will be heading.

The timeframe where you're going to have

live humans answering the majority of

phone calls is probably behind us.

There'll come a point where the AI can

do that as well or better than the live

human,

or at least be screening mechanism

to identify people that need to

speak to a human versus those that

your business doesn't gain any

value in having that done. But all of

that's still in flux and remains to be

seen how it works. We'll.

Certainly report back. Like I said

earlier, it's been live for two days.

I know Ben tried it out yesterday with

a phone call that gave us some good

laughs. So that was very helpful.

That's one of the best parts of the AI

is you can mess with it and see what it

does. Yeah.

But we took about eight weeks creating

the logic with the third party and doing

test calls and changing things

around. And to what Ben said,

we got it to a point where we

think it's ready to roll out.

We're monitoring it virtually every

call that it takes with overflow,

and I'm sure we'll make tweaks. But yeah,

we'll report back on how it's working.

And then assuming it's working well,

we'll probably shout out

that company as well.

And the point of comparison

is not the perfect,

it's the human after hours call

service that we had used before,

which was simply horrendous. Yeah.

This is already a hundred times

better than the human after hours,

but we want to get it to a point where

it's working as well as possible and

we're not missing any qualified cases.

All comes back to qualified cases.

All right. I appreciate it, Ben.

Thanks for your time. Thanks.

Jeff. See you next time. Yeah.

Everyone have a great day.

Thanks for listening to Elevate.

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