Agentic Ai for Law Firms Part 4 - Thinking Outside of Constraints

Speaker A: Welcome to the Law Firm Growth Podcast, where we share the latest tips, tactics and strategies for scaling your practice from the top experts in the world of growing law firms. Are you ready to take your practice to the next level? Let's get started.

Speaker B: Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the Law Firm Growth Podcast. I'm your host, Azoze Amarous, and today is part four of our Agentic AI for Law Firm series. And this one is going to be about thinking outside of constraints. So I want to talk about two interconnected things that are related to AI and vibe coding today. One is getting visibility and different things set up within your law firm with a lot of the stuff. And the second one, and arguably the most important one, is the mindset required to do it. So the reason why I think this is important is that we've got the cost of implementation that's going down tremendously. So, you know, these LLMs are going, getting better and better. We're getting new models releasing all the time. To the time I'm recording this, we just had Claude Fable come out. I haven't got, uh, a chance to try it out yet, but it sounds really cool. And the ability to execute on these things is no longer the constraint. That's super cheap, that's super easy. So the new constraint is your mindset. And it kind of reminds me of this old saying that when people say you're only limited by your creativity, but it is more true now than ever because of how easy some of this implementation is. So I want to take you guys through an example, uh, here at Caseo for in the last couple weeks, just to kind of explain what I mean by that. So the background is we've been running mass toward ads for some time now, and we've got a bunch of different campaigns, we have a bunch of different offers, we got a bunch of different creatives that are used to generate these leads. And we've got an internal call team that is working these leads when they come in. And I get the same feedback from them that I'm assuming most of the people listening to their podcast get from their intake staff from time to time. Right. It's not a daily thing. And, you know, everything I ever said about setting expectations in your team, we do internally here, too. But that doesn't stop them from saying stuff like, the leads aren't picking up, it's been a slow week, that sort of thing. Right. So a little while back, and it's funny, I actually mentioned this on a podcast that I was guessing on, um, we had this Massive breakthrough on our ad creative a couple months ago. And it reduced our cost per lead dramatically. Like, I'm talking, like cutting the cost by 2/3. Dramatic. And basically we had this situation where the staff was saying, hey, look, it's weird. We got like a lot of these people that dial. But I'm just. Again, the same thing you're talking about. Slow week, hard to get these people to pick up. People aren't remembering me, yada, yada, yada, yada. So. So this got brought up to me, and to get a definitive answer on whether this was true or not would have been extremely labor intensive. This is a couple months ago. So we've got like hundreds of leads coming in. Like I said, you know, all these different ads, and we need to track every one of those leads through stages, right? So they're getting into the CRM, we're contacting them, we're qualifying them, we're disqualifying them, we're translating the client. That's our, you know, billable event, by the way. So it's all this different stuff that would be so infinitely difficult to have. Like, and again, uh, to be fair, we have set up things like this before for it's a pretty complex operation. We've had. You know, I've got multiple VAs that are doing this kind of work that we've hired over the year to manage stuff like the call center. But the ongoing, you know, work, infrastructure, training, supervision was just like, way too much to bring on. So while I would have liked to get all this stuff up and get a definitive answer, I wasn't able to do that, right? So instead of doing that, I had a gut level conversation with the, uh, people that are leading the team. So it's like, all right, cool, look, are all the leads bad? Answer's no. Are more than 2/3 of them bad? Answer's also no. Well, let's keep it working, right? You know, if. If we have two thirds of the. If we have one third of the lead cost and less than 2/3 of them are bad, back of the napkin. Let's keep it moving. Because in my mind, I was working back towards a number which is ultimately, if it were possible to know definitively what the cost per transfer was, that would net out whether the decreased lead cost merited the potential lower response that those leads happen to be generating, right? So again, and there's more things that get into this, right, because we have the ad spend, but, you know, we have to pay for validating these leads because, you know, there's a lot of stuff that's compliance related. The time that the reps are spending on this stuff, those are salaries you have to pay. And basically, if we have a situation where the aggregate cost per transfer is indeed lower, then it's a good decision. But the road to get there was essentially too complicated. So I had to have a back of a napkin rule of thumb style conversation. I essentially forewent the decision to do it. So a couple months later, a lot of that stuff had changed. Right? So, you know, we had a bunch of different cloud releases. I've got, at this point, way more experience with cloud code under my belt. I've been doing stuff in the business all the time. And then actually, you know, the environment itself had gotten way better. So just for different things that I was setting up elsewhere in the business, we had all these different data sources plug in. We knew what we could get out of Facebook, we knew we could get out of our CRM, we knew we could get out of Google sheets, all that type of stuff. Right? Um, and on top of that, there's data hygiene stuff, which is kind of a different conversation. But so it came up again a few weeks back and then I was like, well, hey, look, I think I could get an answer for this because I know what it's capable of doing. So what I ended up doing was I went into cloud code, I connected ads data that we already had access to, and I cross referenced with CRM data we already had access to. And getting all that stuff together was basically like 45 minutes, right? So I was able to get my answer, which is incredible. And the team ended up being right, which wasn't surprising. I think a lot of the stuff directionally can be, you know, intuitive if it's hard data, but the degree to which they were right was insane. So when it we ended up actually looking at the numbers, the cost per transfer for this particular ad creative that was delivering a ton of leads was over three and a half times more expensive than the older creative, which blew my mind. So we ended up killing that creative the day after. And then, you know, to our surprise, it actually didn't really make the volume down that much. And actually that's a longer conversation about just how Facebook is able to find data. But basically the transfers literally started up the next day. So, you know, at the end of the day, that's more revenue for the company, that's less work for the team, and it's a new direction for us to go to when it comes to creative if we want to Continue launching new ones or refining the existing ones. Right. So a massive win in all counts. And again, but this win was locked behind what I perceive to be an insurmountable amount of work that was made surmountable by the use of alums and these different tools and vibe coding, that kind of thing.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: So that's one example. But I want to go to the pattern of what ends up going here. Right? So when the problem initially came up, identified a constraint, and I changed my expectations around that constraint. So in this case, the time and slash or intelligence that would be required to accomplish a task, and I decided that was too much. So my decision was to not do that task. Now, when we're talking about complex issues, we always have to assume constants, constraints, that kind of thing. You just lose your mind and not be able to move forward with anything if you didn't assume constraints on certain things. And I would definitely classify business as a complex issue. So these things will definitely apply. So what I'm doing and what I encourage everyone to do is to try not to constrain yourself. There's like a lot of these, like, you know, dumb coaching questions that you see in books or people, let's say, on podcasts, will go, what would you do if you had no limits? Blah, blah, blah. But these things are becoming more important as time goes on. It's definitely more important to consider those kind of questions now than in the past, because if you start with the assumption that things can be figured out, you're going to start thinking differently. And the more of the stuff that I do, the more solutions appear. And this is the kind of stuff, you know, it's going to pop in your head while you're taking a shower, that kind of stuff, Right? Because you just know that things are possible and your brain starts connecting the dots. There are literally more possibilities out there than you're aware of until you start thinking like this. And, you know, a lot of the marketing from, you know, Sam Altman and Amaday and all these CEOs of alliances, they're talking about considering intelligence as a utility, which is objectively kind of a weird take, but honestly, it's kind of a useful mental model, right? So what if you had infinite intelligence in terms of brain power, working on a problem or processing data or any of these other things to solve the problem. If you had that, what would change? What would you want to do? And then over the past few weeks, I've been kind of going to do this for a bunch of stuff that seemed like it was kind of in the bucket, like nice to have, but too difficult to implement. And you know, some other projects, I'm not going to go into all these because this will be a really, really long podcast. But, you know, automating, billing, reconciliation, collecting stats for super complex client deployments. Like you're visualizing project management, like you name it, right? And all these dominoes are falling one by one by one. And it's not additional headcount that has to be on, it's not additional workload that has to be audited, it's not additional VAs or who knows it to actually do these things. So I want you guys to think about that for this week. Think about what you've been avoiding that you need to be done in the law firm, in the business, and what would you do if manpower was no object? And, um, you know, I gotta remind you guys, again, I try to do this every single time it says, I'm not selling an AI course, I'm never going to sell an AI course.

Speaker C: Right.

Speaker B: The ability to implement this stuff is super, super available for free online. If this is something that you've started to do, keep doing that. If you haven't. I think every day you wait is potentially a day that other people are getting ahead and it eventually is going to become a more specialized skill set. But for the time being, to get to the frontier of this extremely valuable skill set might be 2, 3 months of serious work. So just, you know, download cloud code, get on YouTube, start looking some stuff up. It's, it's super easy. And also just, you, uh, know, as a quick aside, it is partially because I'm more focused on delivering results for my clients that I'm not going to become a coaching this. But I would go so far as to say there's probably less utility to getting people for cogenesis, because when you start getting into this, you get to see that it's so customized. So the value of having a step 1, 2, 3 process to do this stuff is contextualized to someone's business. And before long you're going to realize it's easier to come up with your own 1, 2, 3. If you're operating from first principles. Again, one of the other things I love to talk about in this podcast, but if you've got some directions and strategy and a little bit elbow grease to get this stuff out, you would be shocked at what you're able to accomplish. So that's it for now, guys. I hope this was enlightening. Consider the constraints that you might be building into how you think about things. And I hope that everyone listening to this episode that wants to can get a project off the ground that will increase the options that you can have for getting things done. That's it for now. I'll see you guys next Tuesday at 8am Eastern on Law Firm Growth Podcast.

Speaker A: Thank you for listening to the Law Firm Growth Podcast. For show notes, free resources and ah, more, head on over to casefuel.com podcast. Looking forward to catching up on the next episode.

Speaker C: Sam.