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Testing your ideas against reality can be challenging. Not everything will go as planned. It’s about keeping an open mind, having a clear hypothesis and running multiple tests to see if you have enough directional evidence to keep going.
This is the How I Tested That Podcast, where David J Bland connects with entrepreneurs and innovators who had the courage to test their ideas with real people, in the market, with sometimes surprising results.
Join us as we explore the ups and downs of experimentation… together.
David J Bland (0:1.079)
Welcome to the podcast, Matthew.
Matthew Davis (0:3.158)
Well, hi, it's great to be here and let's talk some shop. How about that?
David J Bland (0:8.162)
That sounds amazing. I'm so excited to talk to you. You have such deep expertise in law and how you structure firms and you have an amazing book that I want to talk about as well. But before we jump into all of that, could you give our listeners just a little bit of background on yourself and how you kind of ended up getting into what you're doing today?
Matthew Davis (0:27.662)
First I'm like, thanks for the compliment, but you know, so some days I feel like I know what I'm doing and some days I feel like the dumbest kid on the block and But you know, I have an 83 year old uncle who's was very successful in Dallas and he's like Matt that's basically what he says and you know if you're doing your business, right you
and you're constantly growing, you're constantly going, I can't believe how dumb I am today. So now I thought I was going to be a Washington lawyer and geared my education towards that. And in 94, I guess I was in DC, maybe 95, and I just had lunch with a cousin and I said, I don't want to do that. And I moved back out to my hometown on the Great Plains, which is
Overgrown Prairie Town, 50,000 people. So it's a small city, regional trade center. And in the meantime, I'd called my girlfriend, who's now my wife and mother of my five kids, and went out to LA and picked her up. And we moved to our hometown. And I built a county seat law practice, spent about 15, 20 years doing that. And then I had a midlife crisis.
and I said, let's go start a law firm. And had no idea what the hell I was doing. I guess I'm exaggerating that. I'd been a partner in a law firm and I'd had a solo practice. But I said, okay, let's go start a law firm. So I went over to the bank and...
found my paralegal that had worked for me previously and said, let's go start a law firm. And here we are. Matter of fact, she was here today. I'm in the Oklahoma City office today and we were interviewing a new paralegal. So that's how we started.
David J Bland (2:30.698)
Amazing. So I guess what are some of the big assumptions you had going into starting a law firm? Because I can't even imagine all the things that go into that. And you did have experience around that industry. But what were some of the big things that you had to work through as far as assumptions that you think it works a certain way, but then you realized, it doesn't quite work the way I thought it might.
Matthew Davis (2:54.836)
Oh, everything just completely everything. So we we bought an old house towards the downtown of my hometown, which is Enid, Oklahoma, and renovated it around ourselves. And then
We started growing the business by working a little bit on marketing and I had more business than I could do myself, but we started hiring attorneys and I thought, okay, well, this will be easy and guess what? It wasn't. And attracting talent to an overgrown prairie town was somewhat difficult and it's not the most appealing place to live if it's not where you're from. There's some things to commend it like my three minute commute is
beautiful. And the other thing I realized is if I was bringing people there to work, the client still wanted me to do all their work. So as we grew the firm to four attorneys there, my life actually got more complicated. And ultimately I said, we got to stop this.
And we set up a branch in Oklahoma City, which is 85 miles down the road. So it's an hour and a half. And when you live on the Great Plains, you're like an hour and a half. You do that every day, and don't worry about it. So we started growing down here. And we had to learn how to market legal services.
down here and we started to pick up clients down here and we start, and it was easier to hire good attorneys here. So I'm in Oklahoma City office today working on a couple things and I hope I'm answering your question, but in a way there was a big thing is like, wow, hiring this talent.
Matthew Davis (5:4.026)
and it's so much easier in a big town. And then we had to figure out who worked with us. Who were the attorneys that we could really make successful with the team? Maybe this is a good spot to dig in because I describe what we do as being the family doctor of business law. So.
You know, you're, you'll have your family doctor and if you have a heart problem, he's going to call the heart specialist. If you've got brain cancer, you're going to go see, you know, the oncologist or, you know, the neurologist or whatever. I've really avoided knowledge of medicine because my mother was an OB-GYN but heavy surgeon and decidedly gross about it. You know, like talking about surgery at dinner. So I don't know much about medicine.
Fortunately, very healthy. But okay, so we're the family doctor of business law. And it took us a while to figure out the attorneys we could be successful with and who we should recruit, who we should make job offers to. My leadership team and I, we'll look at that from time to time. And over the course of the years, we've had about 30 attorneys in the farms, most of them still here and some
leave. And, you know, we did a lot of data analysis on who, you know, who can be successful, you know, from what backgrounds, whether they were just pure desk lawyers, as we call them, or what litigation experience they've had, and understanding their professional background. And
the learning curves that they were bringing to working with us was really an interesting thing to figure out. And that was, we're on the, your podcast is about testing, right? And we had to test a lot of that on the fly.
David J Bland (7:19.234)
Sounds like it. mean, I can't imagine hiring people and then realizing, well, they still want to work with me. So how do you even begin to approach that, you know, to get people to trust in the other people you hired rather than come to you for everything?
Matthew Davis (7:37.498)
Um, we have always had a really collaborative culture and we'll bring the other team members in for interviews that, you know, that makes a difference. So, um, Jamie, our paralegal who's now the firm admin.
She likes to remind me as my adult supervisor. We were down here today interviewing a new paralegal and had two of the attorneys in the office today and they both came in. I just laughed. I'm like, I'm talking too much. You guys just sorted out. They loved her. They were like, good vibes.
Matthew Davis (8:26.980)
It makes a difference just bringing everybody together.
David J Bland (8:32.130)
So collaboration, you said this like a family practice. I know when we were prepping for this, you mentioned something about work-life balance and how that's important to how you structure a firm and how you run your firm. How do you kind of test your way through that? Like, how are you trying to find ways that, especially in your vertical in law where
From the outside looking in, seems like it could be all consuming. Like you can eat into all of your weekends and all your evenings and early mornings. So how do you start looking at what are some things that we can try to do to establish this balance and really kind of keep the culture that's so near and dear to your heart?
Matthew Davis (9:17.556)
That is really part of our secret sauce. And maybe we just stumbled on it. So we're an hourly bill firm, meaning we keep track of our time and that's how we do our billing. That's common in the law business. But...
What we do is we, say to, and I tell people when I'm recruiting them, I said, look, I'm in the attorney lifestyle business. And they usually go, what in the world does that mean? And they're like, what does that mean? I said, look, as you just suggested, the law business can be all consuming. It can just eat up your life, your weekends. So for instance, Dixie, who was one of the...
first attorneys we hired, she's still with us. And she was working at one of the insurance defense firms, billing nine and a half hours a day, which means she was working 12. And I said, Dixie, I can match that salary and put your billing requirement at six a day. And she's like, seriously? And I said, yeah.
And I said, because we run our finances really well and we, you know, we're just, we run a lot tighter. Um, and that's something we got really good at early on. Um, and so.
This idea of putting a bookend on how much to bill a day is really healthy because the other part of it is, know, let's say you're billing six hours a day, you're probably working eight, maybe eight and a half, nine hours a day to do that because you can't bill, you know, unless you're not being honest all of your time. the...
Matthew Davis (11:17.856)
You just hit a point of diminishing returns where your brain isn't working that well, right?
And the thing about that six is do it, move on. And I say, bill your six, go be a mom, go be a dad, go to yoga, go ride your bike, go do whatever. It makes a huge difference in people's satisfaction. And I'm recruiting an attorney right now down in Dallas. We've got an interview week after next. I've got spring break next week. But she's billing 22.
200 hours a year, that's a third more than, know, we want, not third, that's a half again more because, our number is bill 1380 a year. But, you know, the other thing, guess what, is you need to bill, you need to do some work every year. I have friends that run law firms that just pay their attorneys based on,
what they bill, right? So one of my friends has a law firm out on the West Coast. He can't get anybody to bill more than a thousand hours a year. Okay? And they're getting a percentage of that. Well, they're not making what they really should make. Just to support a lifestyle, to have a good retirement, you know, they are cutting themselves short.
of really having the discipline of what they should do to support a good salary and to be able to hit work-life balance, which is also an income balance in their life.
David J Bland (13:1.250)
That resonates with me and I can draw some parallels to kind of coaching and consulting, which is more my world. And I was part of some previous agencies where, you know, if I'm sticking to my principles and my morals, you know, I'm coming into a company and trying to show them, hey, should you invest in this idea that you're about to build this product or service or whatever it is or not? And I show them a process and we go through it. And in good faith, if we don't see evidence for
the thing, then the recommendation is, look, you should not work on this. But from a consulting point of view, what I can see creeping in there is, well, I got to build more hours though. So do I really want to tell them this is a bad idea? Really have any other ideas if I tell them it's a bad idea? Or does that cut the engagement short? And so all these interesting things where you have to have a team around you that sort of aligns in a principal level of, look, we're going to do what's best for our client.
And if they shouldn't work on something, we should give them that recommendation. And if they continue want to work with us and they find it valuable, we will find another idea to work on. so I do see that sometimes, especially not so much in the smaller consulting firms like the boutique ones, but the bigger, if you think like big three out there, you know, that's one of the criticisms you have is that you have to be billing a certain number of hours. You have to fly wherever they're going to tell you to fly. You know, you might not always be doing what's in the best interest of the
client because you're trying to hit your numbers. And I think you setting this threshold or this expectation, I do think changes that dynamic completely because even if we're not trying to be malicious about it, I think it's almost like a, have to always be billing. It's like a mentality on anything like this.
Matthew Davis (14:51.988)
Yeah, it can be a real creep that will not creep like a weirdo, but it creep like it's creeping, that will take over your life. yeah, our job is always to serve the best interest of our clients. the attorneys don't. One thing we do is.
We take care of the marketing for them. Now, as they mature with us, they'll do more and more repeat business. And Lexi's been with us a year and I was talking to her just earlier today, I said, you're starting to get repeat business, aren't you? And she's like, yeah. so, you know, we're very much relationship business like that. But in contrast to a lot of firms,
They'll go try and build their business going to the Chamber of Commerce or Rotary Club or joining industry groups. We don't do that.
And we don't expect our attorneys to go do that because there's plenty of people out there that will hear about us through word of mouth or plenty of people that we're aggressive digital marketers. We pay a lot of attention to that and not only content, but also understanding what people are looking for, which I suppose our content is also crafted towards that. And so...
we generate a lot of opportunities for our attorneys. And we also spend a lot of time helping them understand how to take a lead and convert them to clients. And that's pretty novel in the law business. mean, law firms, they think they're pretty fancy, right? And that, I don't know, I have a
Matthew Davis (16:56.174)
problem with that because at the end of the day, people are looking for solutions to problems and that's our job to deliver them and find out. know, they don't want to hear a bunch of Latin crap. you know, they, you know, they got a business partners that's bad and they need to get rid of them or they need to secure an investment and they need to know their contracts are good. You know, yeah, that takes some professional skills and it takes some intellect, but you know,
At the end of the day, it's just a problem that needs to be solved. And we don't need to get all fancy and prissy and fussy about it. Was that a good sub box or what?
David J Bland (17:39.197)
I like it. like it. It's it sounds as if I don't want you said it's your secret sauce in a way, but I think there's a lot of ingredients to your sauce here. But I think one of it is this this idea of doing digital marketing and trying to find the best fit to bring in and have a good experience. It sounds like you've invested time and money and just learning how to do that well.
And it sounds as if you're kind of testing your way through that and finding sort of the best fit for each attorney. And that's something that would be, I imagine, pretty overwhelming for them to do on their own. And you sort of bring them in and kind of go through that process with them so that they have a, you know, they go home and they value their work every day and their customers do. But you're sort of facilitating that process a bit. And it sounds like you have maybe
a method or something you all use to do that and make sure that everybody's set up for success.
Matthew Davis (18:42.412)
Yeah, our marketing is good and we can go anywhere we want and real quickly, very quickly, is probably better English, start to generate work. another thing we've gotten, and this maybe dovetails into what you're talking about.
We have gotten very tuned in to using Blanchard's situational leadership theory. Are you familiar with that?
David J Bland (19:18.722)
There's so many different leadership models. I think that when, maybe even for our listeners, if you could expand on just a high level of what you take from it.
Matthew Davis (19:20.750)
Yeah.
Matthew Davis (19:26.302)
Yeah, it's so powerful because the idea is kind of this.
We can, every job has a set of skills, right? So our attorneys have several skills they have to do. And we've got them broken down. We've got them broken down for our paralegals and we've got them broken down for our intake people and so on. So, you know, every job will have six or eight skills that you need to master to do really well at. And by master, what I mean is that at that skill, you are a self-reliant high achiever.
And so this is from Ken Blanchard's Leadership Meets the One-Minute Manager. The One-Minute Manager is another one of his books that's more famous. But when people start, they start out as enthusiastic beginners. New job, new toy, right? That's what it is. But on some skill sets, not necessarily all of them, they become frustrated learners, right?
That's where you lose them. If on skill set number one and skill set number four, it turns out, oh, this is a lot harder for me than I thought it was gonna be, then wow, they will get frustrated. It defeats their purposes. And at that point,
What we do is we step in, we spend time coaching them, we spend time helping them, we spend time supporting them, providing them what they need to do to be successful. And we've gotten really good.
Matthew Davis (21:16.406)
at when we're interviewing people, just so like if I'm interviewing attorneys, I'll get out a whiteboard and I'll map out the seven skills we have mapped out for attorneys. And I'll say, hey, first one, enthusiastic beginner. You're going to start there. Now, here's the learning curve. Here's frustrated.
You know, here's where you're going to, and frankly, I can predict based on the person's experience where they are most likely, and I'm usually right, about where they're going to hit a learning curve. And I say, we're going to support you there. Okay. And by knowing that that's coming, it has increased our success rate with our attorneys remarkably. And
Because if I bring somebody in that is a little shy on litigation experience, I know we're gonna have to coach them I know we're gonna have to put basically Somebody else with them and pair them up with somebody who can help them So we've gotten really good at getting them over that hurdle. By the way, number three is is kind of fun number three Those people are cautiously competent. Okay? And What that means is
You know, they still want the firm to support them. And you know, there are certain things, you know, some of our attorneys want more paralegal help with litigation or some of them, some of them when we've got a difficult client, guess what? Those exist. You know, they want me to run interference for them and help work with the client. I do that all the time. I'll hop on the phone and talk to somebody.
And so you're providing those people more support. But you get to the self-reliant high achievers, I check in once a month. Hey, what's going on? Leave me alone, Davis. I'm busy. And seriously, that understanding how to use situational leadership theory
Matthew Davis (23:30.162)
in working, developing, growing your people, building your coaching systems. What it does, it gets the elephant that's in the room out in front of everybody. And we can talk about the challenges that our people are having in very mature, very responsible, very respectful, and very encouraging ways.
David J Bland (23:54.317)
love that. I'm familiar with different leadership styles, but I like how you kind of pulled that together in a real actionable way. I feel as if, from my experience, mindset's really important too, right? So I would do this coaching where we would almost have, it looked like a spider or radar diagram or however you want to frame it. We had all these different competencies and then we would help people assess and...
you know, if you want to go from a two to a five, then we would come up with a plan to help you, you know, kind of get there. But where I always got nervous was when people self-assess and they think they're amazing at all of them. And it was always difficult because if you think you're awesome at everything, then how are you going to grow? How are you going to continue to learn, you know, kind of having this growth mindset? And so I didn't really have the challenges with the folks that would self-assess themselves and we would
they get embarrassed that they think they're too low. I always got nervous with the people who thought they were amazing at everything. And then I'm sitting here going, well, how coachable is this person? How am going to help them grow? And I keep coming back to mindset. You they almost had a fixed mindset of, well, I don't need to improve anywhere and you should hire me anyway.
Matthew Davis (25:10.344)
Yeah, those. We've had a few of those. And they yeah, those are. They can be difficult. What's that? There's that ABC.
in a chart of your A, B, and C players, and then you have those people that I've heard it called various different things, but you know, they're the people that just think they're great. And you know, maybe they are, but they're just terrors within your organization. yeah, you know, the other thing we use for that is have you ever read Henry Cloud's necessary endings?
David J Bland (25:43.210)
I agree.
David J Bland (25:52.266)
I have not.
Matthew Davis (25:53.838)
know, Henry Cloud is the guy that popularized the concept of boundaries. I mean, he owns that word. And I can't remember if he's a psychologist or psych, you know, he's one of those psych guys. And, but he talks about coaching people based on this trichotomy, if that's the right word. It says,
there's a few evil people in the world, just a few, okay? Most everybody's trying to do the best they can do, okay? But every, and then most people are wise, and what he means by that, and this is just distinction for purposes here, is if you try and correct them, if you try and give them some suggestions about how to do their work, how to reach the common goal, they're gonna listen to you, they're gonna adjust, right?
Now, the category you're talking about is what he would call fools. They won't take responsibility. They just try and pass it off on you. They're great at everything. And you can't reason with them. And so you know what you do? You quit talking. And when I get somebody like that, here's what I do.
I say, fine, if you're so great, here's what we're expecting you to do. Here's your KPIs and you're going to meet them and we're going to have a meeting at X day at X time. I'm putting it on your calendar.
And you know, great. If they've gone out and shined, met all their KPIs, not disturbed everybody else.
Matthew Davis (27:46.796)
That meeting's going to be great job. I'm going to leave you alone. If not, that meeting is going to be, here's, me your keys, give me your credit card. We're done.
David J Bland (28:1.186)
I like that approach, setting expectations and giving it space to play out that way. And I imagine it plays out both ways. Sometimes it goes well, sometimes it does not.
Matthew Davis (28:6.351)
the
Matthew Davis (28:12.082)
Usually, it plays out with the, me your keys and give me your credit card if you want to know the truth. If I'm setting a meeting with somebody in the future about performance, I'm just probably giving them enough rope to hang themselves.
David J Bland (28:20.768)
Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.
David J Bland (28:31.308)
Yeah, fit is really important and really important for the culture you're trying to create. It doesn't take much for that culture to start to... It's almost like weeding a garden, right? And the weeds take over, right? If you're not careful. So we were talking about all these things you do to make yourselves different and unique and...
I remember we were talking about you joining the podcast and you were saying it doesn't have to be this way and this way being how traditional firms sort of organize themselves and how people are treated and how they bill. You also have this amazing book called The Art of Preventing Stupid, which is one of my favorite titles, I have to say, of everybody I've had on here so far. So could you give our listeners who aren't familiar with your book just a little background on what it does and who it's for and
We'll go from there.
Matthew Davis (29:27.808)
Well, the thing that really pisses me off is watching people get into trouble that they could have avoided, right? Which probably means I'm pissed off a lot when I'm practicing law, to the extent I still do. so, I, know, entrepreneurs, you know, they're...
They've got a lot of bravado and they think they're 13 feet tall and bulletproof. That's almost part of the definition. And the thing we see and the thing I'm constantly preaching or harping, depending on how you look at it, about is, look, let's play a little defense.
let's not just stay on offense. One of the lines I like to use because it's memorable is if you will deal with your vulnerabilities, you get to capitalize on your opportunities. Because, you know, if you can hit them up front, get them out of the way, get them under control, get the manageable. And by the way, the reason I talk about that being stupid not to do that is because
you can usually figure out where you're vulnerable if you'll spend a little time. And there's a tool in that book called the Business Immune System Report that will help you do that. And the basic principle is learning how to brainstorm with good questions. And the thing I point out in that book is your vulnerabilities are going to come from one of three sources.
And one would be catastrophes. That's where the universe is just going to whack you upside the head. And some of them, most of them, you can either prepare for or prevent. I was thinking about the California wildfires because it's really windy outside today. You can't prevent that, but you could have had good insurance.
Matthew Davis (31:30.700)
Okay, now some things you can prevent, right? Next thing that can happen to you is you can be vulnerable because of lack of knowledge. I call that ignorance because that's a synonym for that. And the way you fix that is you go learn. And there's this saying, you don't know what you don't know. Well, you know.
Yeah, maybe that's true, but what's really important is when you're getting frustrated about something, somebody has usually created a solution for that because there's nothing new under the sun. So.
I'm kind of irritated right now because the electricians came in and dropped conduit pipe right down the wall of our conference room when I told them to put it in the wall, right? Okay, what's done is done. And I'm irritated about it, okay? But I don't know how to fix it because, so okay, you I'm on Amazon. I'm getting educated about how to fix this. And of course, there's a product out there that is specifically designed to cover that, okay? So, you know, I was ignorant about this. I said, okay, I'm frustrated.
here's my ignorance, let's go learn it. Now the third thing, your third source of vulnerability is really lack of discipline.
Okay, I called it ineptitude in the book, but it's like, you're not doing what you know what you're supposed to be doing. Right? And we all do that on occasion right now. Okay. You know, I got bad again last year because I wasn't doing what I know I supposed to be doing. And also because I had a very hectic year, my COO died and that's not good for business. you know, once you get those categories, you start to think
Matthew Davis (33:19.664)
about your vulnerabilities differently. The art of preventing stupid maps out, how to then ask smart questions about...
various systems in your business. I learned years ago, I wish I knew who talked about the systems of a business being circular and who developed the concept. I don't know and I'm embarrassed that I can't give them credit. But you have your people, they do the production in your plant or your facilities, and then you have to measure it, and then you have to market to get more business, and then you have to close the business with sales. That all operates.
around your management and you know when you start out the management and the people are you right and but you know think about this if you go well what could go wrong with my business that's not a very good question that's not very incisive but you know you go okay what sort of catastrophes could hit my facilities okay
David J Bland (34:8.300)
Yeah.
Matthew Davis (34:29.642)
Or you go, you know, where am I ignorant about sales?
And you start to get a comprehensive list of questions about where you're vulnerable. And this is not just me talking to the universe, some dumb okey wandering around asking these stupid questions. Andy Grove helped build a little company, right, didn't he? You remember the name of that?
David J Bland (34:57.258)
Yeah, he did. Intel, I believe.
Matthew Davis (35:0.222)
Intel, exactly. You know, he wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive. And so what I'm teaching with the art of preventing stupid is how to be productively paranoid. How to ask the smart questions that gets your list of what you need to deal with.
so you can go capitalize on your opportunities. And frankly, it's one of the main reasons we move as quickly and as successful as we do, because we don't make a lot of unforced errors.
David J Bland (35:32.589)
Yeah, I like how you framed it in that book. I have, I use not exactly the same kind of work, but in my coaching consulting, we do a lot of business design, business testing, and I'm often trying like, are the big assumptions you're making in your business? And then coming back to discipline.
Matthew Davis (35:46.904)
Mm-hmm.
David J Bland (35:50.147)
One of the things that are most important where you have the least amount of evidence, because you just want to ignore that stuff and hope it goes away and then play in the realms you're comfortable playing in, you have to do the hard work. And quite often, I see teams, it's almost like they snowplow risk, you know, it's, I don't want to deal with the stuff that's really important where I don't have evidence, I just want to pretend that doesn't exist and play in things I'm comfortable in. And so much of being an entrepreneur and being a business leader is being uncomfortable.
Matthew Davis (35:59.395)
Mm-hmm.
Matthew Davis (36:15.874)
Yeah.
David J Bland (36:15.906)
And so I do think having a little process or something or even some principles you can stick to makes it little bit more manageable because even the best of us, like you said, mean, it's hard to be disciplined all the time. So it's good to have some guides or have a little process that helps you along the way.
Matthew Davis (36:33.354)
It's great to just ask yourself, where are we becoming slackers? Where are we messing up? Where are we not doing? Where are we not following our own processes? It's really powerful.
David J Bland (36:47.458)
Yeah, I agree. Thank you so much for just giving a little bit insight into your book. we're also going to include that book on our detail page as well. I kind of want to wrap up with something of every episode seems to be talking about, which is, know, AI and
and how it impacts legal. We had David Snerman, who I believe you also know, on a previous podcast, and he was talking about how he prices things and everything from legal packages. And we talked a little bit about AI. I just see things, and I don't even really follow your realm as much, and I still see things pop across my feed as if I created a custom bot to...
do interrogation and I'm going to do cross-examination with using a GPT or something. Is this impacting you at all or have you been mostly insulated from this crazy wave that we're seeing right now?
Matthew Davis (37:42.254)
you
Matthew Davis (37:45.786)
I don't know if you know the horror stories about AI and the legal business, but the famous one is there was a law firm back, I think it was New York, it could have been Jersey, maybe it was, anyway, Northeast. And they let AI write their briefs and whichever platform, I don't know, just made up cases.
literally made up cases. Citations didn't exist, this, that, and the other thing. And the judge roasted them, as he should have. I mean, they didn't check. They, oh well, we'll trust this, you know, the robot, as I call it. And we have a...
very strict AI policy with our firm. I'm a member of lot of several law firm owners groups and a lot of them are really freaking out about AI. I think that's a chicken little way of looking at things. It's gonna change the law business some. I have a friend, we were in a...
virtual meeting and he's using it very effectively to sort of set his outlines in some mergers and acquisitions that he does. And I was pretty impressed with how it was helping him build the checklists for stuff. We use AI a little bit for content. What it does is takes our writing time of a blog for maybe four hours to two hours.
So we use it, but you can't rely on it. You have to still put some expertise in it. I think it's going to make some changes in the law business. But I guess I...
Matthew Davis (39:48.682)
A lot of people are really worried about it impacting our business. I think it's going to help with some efficiency. I think it's going to make some people's jobs easier. It's going to make a few jobs go away. But there are some people that are just worried to high end, no end about it. But I'm like, look, we're still cleverer and more ingenious than the AI is, the AI, the robot.
So I'm keeping a watch on it. We're using it judiciously and we're not freaking out.
David J Bland (40:30.522)
I like that. I like the, I read recently it's called human in the loop. So you keep a human in the loop of this process and you're not necessarily pressing a button, have it create everything for you, which is sounds like the firm did. But you're reviewing things and trying to make things more efficient with it. I would say until I see leaps and bounds of progress, I feel much more comfortable with a human in the loop model with leveraging it. So it sounds like.
You're not necessarily terrified of it, but at the same time, you're not ignoring it either.
Matthew Davis (41:2.420)
It's a tool. mean, it's a tool like the internet was a tool. And the changes I've seen in the law over, I started practicing mid 90s, so here we are 30 years in. I knew guys that, I actually talked to somebody the other day and they were like, we're still dictating our pleadings. And I'm like, which freaking planet are you on? What is wrong with you?
Right? Little micro tapes. I'm like, what are you doing? And yeah, it's a tool and it's going to change things. it can be, I we had a client, this was kind of funny, had a client from up in Canada and they pulled me in on the case because it was a pretty complicated case down in Austin. he kept sending us all these outlines and we were like,
he's playing lawyer. And then finally, I go, he's not playing lawyer, he's using chat GPT to write us, you know, questions, just to make sure we know what we're doing, so to speak. And I'm like, yeah, that's what he's doing, you know, I was like, so we deal with that with clients, you know, so there's this element that we're getting armchair quarterback by chat GPT, right? Okay, I can deal with that.
David J Bland (42:22.100)
Interesting. Well, I do think it will improve, but I like your method. I think the way that you're including it, it sounds very aligned to the culture you're trying to build and everything. And you're not trying to necessarily just have it replace people and have it generate stuff, especially if it's not high quality. So I couldn't let you go without asking you about it. sort of the topic of everything at the moment. So I appreciate your honest answer. You know, we've talked about a lot of different things today from how you
structure law firms to how you manage and create this culture, how using digital marketing, which I find fascinating in your industry to really dial into things. And we talked a little bit about your book and wrapped up about AI. If folks have listened to this and they want to reach out to you or they want to reach out and contact you about questions about they had of anything we talked about, what's the best way for them to find you?
Matthew Davis (43:16.716)
best way just drop me an email Matt or M Davis. So just my first initial Davis at Davis business law.com. And I'm, one of those dorks that has maybe 10 emails in my email box at any given time. So if it gets through to me, I'll answer you.
David J Bland (43:34.882)
That's awesome. We'll also make sure that we have that link. I just want to thank you so much for hanging out with me from your busy schedule and sharing some insights into an industry that we haven't had a lot of topics on yet. And I really appreciate you being open and honest and willing to discuss stuff with us today.
Matthew Davis (43:54.658)
My pleasure and thank you.