Maximum Lawyer

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Are you a firm owner looking for ways to integrate AI into your business? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Richard interviews Hamid Kohan, founder of Law Practice AI, about the rapid impact of AI and technology on law firm operations. Hamid introduces his three-part power model and discusses how these elements are transforming legal staffing, operations, and profitability. 

Hamid shares his three-part power model and how it can change hiring for firms. The model includes ⅓ local staff, ⅓ virtual staff and ⅓ AI. Including some of each can really transform a law firm and allow operations and staffing to benefit from aspects that might seem very different. Virtual staff can cut down your costs and AI can allow you to figure out ways to take some work away from busy local staff and simplify it.

There are areas of a firm that would thrive using AI. AI can supplement what is going on and shift people into more customer facing roles where they are helping clients. Roles like legal assistance, document collections and document summaries can benefit from the use of AI. These do not really require much human interaction, so these areas can be streamlined and made to work in a way to benefit a firm.

Listen to learn more!


  • 2:12 Defining the three part power model 
  • 4:29 The vision for an AI law firm operating system
  • 13:13 Reasons for the law field’s slow tech adoption 
  • 40:12 Advice to start new AI-driven law firms 
  • 46:58 Areas of a firm that would thrive using AI


Tune in to today’s episode and checkout the full show notes here. 


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Creators and Guests

Host
Tyson Mutrux
Tyson is the founder of Mutrux Firm Injury Lawyers and the co-founder of Maximum Lawyer.

What is Maximum Lawyer?

Maximum Lawyer is the podcast for law firm owners who want to scale with intention and build a business that works for their life.

Hosted by Tyson Mutrux, each weekly episode features candid conversations with law firm owners, business experts, and industry leaders sharing real strategies and lessons learned in the trenches.

If you're ready to grow your firm with less stress and more support, this is your next must listen. Subscribe today.

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:00 Hamid, I want to start with the three part power model that you have, which I think is a really cool concept. What was the core problem you were actually trying to solve for law firm owners at the time with that?

Hamid Kohan 00:00:15 Other than we need more business was like, after you get it. The second thing was, no, I need the Army to not to work on these cases and clients and everything. So everything came basically as a challenge being having a affordable, skilled, reliable resources to be able to get the job done. So I ended up when I was doing the consulting part is like, stop everything. Let's go hire some people. So when we get this thing done, we can get it worked out. So and the staffing has been terrible here in Southern California, it's been very hard to find qualified, affordable, reliable, Able legal staff to work in the firms, and then you spread all over the place from New York to LA is the same. It's the same challenge.

Hamid Kohan 00:01:08 So because of that, I started saying, look, what does everybody else does in other industries? And I found out that they're doing global staffing. And I said, why not? Let's try this. But, it wasn't successful because they were doing like salespeople or support people, but not skilled, highly skilled staff. So we started the legal staff by identifying and training global staff to be able to be placed within the law firms in the industry. It was hell because people were just saying, like, I don't even trust the guy sitting in front of me handling my CRM and my client information, the medical record, the HIPAA stuff. Oh no. No way. So some random person in this other country, I don't even know where it is handling it. So it was a it was a big challenge trying to get them to do this.

Tyson Mutrux 00:02:04 Well explain first what the three part power model is. Okay. I think I think it would be helpful for people to understand what it is.

Hamid Kohan 00:02:12 Sure.

Hamid Kohan 00:02:12 So I started with the first part of the pie, which being a local staff. The second part that was added on was a virtual staff to complement the local staff. It didn't mean you get rid of all your local staff and add the second piece of the virtual staff to it. And now, with the evolution of the AI, not the one there needs to be AI one third virtual, one third in house. So God knows this pie from three part II is going to go to four pieces, but for now is like a three piece local virtual AI.

Tyson Mutrux 00:02:46 When you first started, did you ever think that AI would be part of the pie?

Hamid Kohan 00:02:51 Not this fast, I did because I come from 20 plus 25 years of tech I worked in living in Silicon Valley for 20 plus years, so I knew that the data and technology and automation is going to make a huge impact, but I would have never guessed it goes this fast. The last two transitions I was personally involved with was like the.com era, when all the.com came and said, we're all going to shop online.

Hamid Kohan 00:03:15 There's no way in hell we're going to do that. You know? And now we do. So it's the same thing. It's just this implementation of the AI is going like probably 100 eggs faster than anybody expected.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:29 You know, I remember in high school. So like, you know, late 90s, early 2000, I graduated in 2001. I remember a best friend of mine, he was always talking about AI back then. And it was from like the X-Files. I remember him. He loved the X-Files and he loved it. He talked about AI, and to me it was like this urban legend. That was awe. It was like believing in ghosts or believing in aliens or something like that, where I was like, yeah, right. That's that's never going to be a thing. And then I'd say, I don't know, 2020. Kashif Ahmed, he's our CTO. He and I started to talk about AI, and then we started to work with a big four accounting firm to develop because they were already starting to develop AI.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:12 And then 2022 comes along and boom, everyone gets caught up. And it was one of those things for me. It was kind of frustrating because I thought we were so far ahead of the game. But I wonder for you, when did you when did you realize, okay, this is happening faster than what we thought it was going to be?

Hamid Kohan 00:04:29 Exactly. But two and a half years ago, I created a company called Law Practice AI. And so it basically 100% AI for law and development, integration, all that stuff. So when I started explaining it to the people, people said, oh, so you're creating another CRM? I'm like, no, no, no. And I said, no. So you're using ChatGPT? No no no. So even just explaining it was like. Never mind. Just wait until I have it. I'll show you. Because explaining it is going to I'm going to lose you explaining it. So about two and a half years ago, when we opened up that company as part of a legacy of enterprise.

Hamid Kohan 00:05:09 Got a lot of practice data, AI. It is now basically completing that third piece of the pie that I mentioned about not only creating a platform that we can train our staff and virtual and local and everybody to use it so they can optimize their work and reduce any redundancies and things like that. and now we're just this year we launched the first part of it and we continue to launching, but it's basically going to be what we call it. The is a, AI law firm operating system, because it is going to be a system to operate the firm. The biggest AI issue we have Tyson right now is overwhelming with solutions like you go to one of these conferences or you look at some YouTube channels, do you do anything online like like I'm interested to know about, AI intake by end of the day, I'm so overwhelmed and not making no decisions because I got into eight different solutions. They all mean different. They're hard to understand. It's hard to do. So I'm saying, you know what? I'm just going to wait until the dust settles.

Hamid Kohan 00:06:20 So because of that, we I noticed that we want to make it one single platform through this entire law firm AI platform. Everything that they need is in one place or one platform, just like your CRM is. Imagine these guys between Fila and Clio solidify all these other people if they tell you, oh, I only handle your pre litigation cases. But then what? I got to go get another software for litigation. I had a software for elite management. I can't do that. So that's why they become a full CRM is the same exact concept for AI. It can be people like even up saying I have a demand AI and this guy, the intake here says I have an intake AI and then I have a litigation support AI. So how many softwares I need to subscribe to and how many of them do I need to learn? And the toughest thing, how do I get my people to actually use this stuff, you know?

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:14 Yeah.

Hamid Kohan 00:07:15 So that was the solution that we tried to solve by not getting people overwhelmed with the AI impact.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:23 You are so right. So we I've got a Wednesday live show that I do inside the guild, and it's something that for a while, every time I would report on something new when it comes to AI, I would also try to test it out, but it got so overwhelming for me that I just it just couldn't do it. I couldn't test everything. It was. It was so freaking frustrating. And there are so many things. Although I do feel like lately things have slowed down a little bit when it comes to AI. It's not as rapid fire as.

Hamid Kohan 00:07:51 I think you are. Slowed down looking.

Multiple Speakers 00:07:52 For a moment because you're tired so you're not as interested. You're not.

Hamid Kohan 00:07:58 The greatest target.

Multiple Speakers 00:07:59 Audience anymore.

Hamid Kohan 00:08:00 Because you're not hungry. You got enough. So.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:05 Well, we're so engrossed in it. I don't know if it's. I've had enough because we are. We're doing new things with it. We're just not using so many tools. That's the key. But you touched on something that I find pretty interesting because I ever since I became a lawyer.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:19 Right. So 2010 is when I became a lawyer, and I remember being so frustrated with why isn't there a, like a one software that does everything right. And for some reason in the legal space, and I don't know if it's like this in every industry, but you get to have 40 different softwares to do anything, and that just seems insane to me. So I guess for you. Has that always been a frustrating thing for you that there's always different softwares?

Hamid Kohan 00:08:46 Yeah, in all industries it is. That's why people, by the way, like, Salesforce or HubSpot are successful and they grow crazy is because they eliminate one of the first things that they do. They eliminate 100 different Google Sheets and Excel sheets and tracking sheets and 18 software on the side of it. So when you're buying one of these software and the solution you, you end up replacing a bunch of other things that you shouldn't have to use paper. And they're not connected either. So I cannot do part of my business work in this here and then over here, and then they're not connected.

Hamid Kohan 00:09:27 And how am I going to move? The data is just and how am I ever going to do any analytics if I don't have all the data connected into a relational system?

Tyson Mutrux 00:09:37 I'm very curious if you have, I kind of want to get into your brain a little bit because I wonder when you are you're designing these new platforms because, I mean, you've done a lot in the tech industry, but in the legal tech especially, so when you're developing a new product, like what is your process for making sure that you're creating something that is all encompassing? I guess, for what that attacks, the problem that you're trying to attack.

Hamid Kohan 00:10:07 Is one of the first things we learn in the tech industry. I was there when they invented the laptop, but seriously, I worked at a company who had a patent on the flip top of the. And nobody could ever get away with not paying loyalty to flip the laptop. It's called grid system. It's in San Francisco Museum of Tech art. the thing is that what you learn in the in that in the Silicon Valley makes it very unique place, is that everything starts with a problem statement.

Hamid Kohan 00:10:41 What's the problem? So you go around, for example, just thinking, what are the problems for businesses? For organizations, for communities. You start with a problem statement. Then you identify a solution to that problem that is doable, not imaginary. And then you're sizing out the market and adaptability of that solution into the market. You know, there's no point of, you know, finding a solution to little tiny market that it takes ten years to implement. It's like, I'm not interested. So market sizing, market implementation, adaptability to the solution that you identify to the problem that you picked. You pick a problem. You find a solution.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:28 Interesting. Have you ever actually tell me I know this had to has had to have happened before. Where you come up, there's an issue that you keep seeing in, you know, maybe the legal industry, maybe it's another industry and you think, oh, I know, I know that tech can solve this problem. Is there been a time where you've encountered a problem that you thought tech could solve it, and actually tech made it more complicated or made it worse?

Hamid Kohan 00:11:56 Sometimes it feels like you made it complicated and worse, but it really isn't because one either didn't get implemented properly, it's not being used properly, or you had the wrong expectation from it.

Hamid Kohan 00:12:10 Those are the three causes that create the disappointment that didn't solve the problem.

Tyson Mutrux 00:12:16 Okay, tell me more about that, because I think that that's that's an important lesson for people.

Hamid Kohan 00:12:22 It's, you know, like all this, all this gadget, software or hardware that comes out to the market and they never make it. True. A is a good example. Every one of us have bought a service or a product or a device that we thought is going to fix the problem. Either didn't fix the problem, or the problem wasn't really a problem. It was an imaginary problem. You know, it's like, it's like when somebody naturally lazy I can't fix it. Doesn't matter what kind of a thing I do is naturally that way. So. So you have to you have to really justify the problem that you have encountered, and then putting yourself in the position of the actual people who having the problem not from sitting from the outside and says, oh, they're very unorganized and they need a piece of software.

Hamid Kohan 00:13:13 No, go in there and see how does the work goes. What? Face the challenges yourself and find the solution that solve your own problem being yourself in that organization. So when I went to law, the first thing that I noticed is that like 7 or 8 years ago, it was like, if you I always made this statement, even in my book, I said it. I said, if you leave them alone, they'll be still wearing their pagers, waiting at the fax machine for the next fax. Stop. Leave him alone. See what happened? That's exactly what it's going to happen. So that basically means adaptability for this crowd is difficult because you guys go to law school. You get taught from constitutional law to everything else. It's just like books, laws, case studies, case law and all of that. They don't teach lawyers anything. in a way. I have one lawyer in my house, my son, my daughter. One is getting lawyer next year, so I grew up in house.

Hamid Kohan 00:14:08 Till now, it's like they don't show me anything about technology, business, finance, marketing, innovations, acquisitions, nothing. So is the problem statement itself.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:23 You're so. You're so right. I had this conversation today. Actually, I was having this exact same conversation where I feel like inside the maximum lawyer community, it's very common for people to know what AI is and how they're implementing it. But you step outside of our little atmosphere. And you've got you've got lawyers that are practicing and they have. They have very little idea what. AI what you can do with AI. It is quite mind boggling how many people are just letting. AI is going to bulldoze them because they don't know what's going on. It's such a fascinating thing to me.

Hamid Kohan 00:14:56 65% of all transactional law firms are going to go away.

Tyson Mutrux 00:15:01 Wow. So you think it's that? You think it's that high?

Hamid Kohan 00:15:04 I guarantee it is going to go down. Let me tell you. Let me tell you what happens here. And the transactional law to me is estate planning, bankruptcy of family law with no contested divorces.

Hamid Kohan 00:15:17 corporate formations, essentially everything transactional. Immigration for sure. because there is no lawyering being done. Is that creating a process, creating an application, filling out a bunch of forms, providing a whole bunch of documents, summarizing the documents, analyzing it and predicting what's going to happen next, and submitting it somewhere to court, to IRS, to whatever. For family law is all going to be done with AI. So, I mean, what does it do? What does the immigration firm today? In fact, were we developed the immigration thing, they called us immigration AI that wipes out the entire staffing requirement of the immigration law for 18 different visa types. No receptionist, no intake, no case manager, no paralegal at all. All done within the AI. And it's getting released like in 30 days. So that's one element. The second element is all the big boys intake, the Amazons and the Googles and so forth. They're all getting into law right now via the ABS program. I don't know if you know about that.

Tyson Mutrux 00:16:31 Oh yeah, it's.

Hamid Kohan 00:16:32 I have.

Tyson Mutrux 00:16:32 I've been a radar for a while.

Hamid Kohan 00:16:34 Yeah, I've been the owner of a law firm since four years ago. I was the first one in California who got licensed in Arizona to have a law firm as a non attorney. Just for the heck of it, I wasn't doing it. I wasn't practicing anything. But I just got tired of people telling me, well, you're not even a lawyer or you never owned a law firm, whatever that was, just to prove a point.

Tyson Mutrux 00:16:56 But okay, so I really want to stay on the subject because I think you you probably have caught the attention of several attorneys right now listening to this. The immigration types, the I think that the immigration attorneys might give you a little bit of pushback, that there's more lawyer law lawyering whenever it comes to interviews and things like that.

Hamid Kohan 00:17:14 No. 3%.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:15 Yeah.

Hamid Kohan 00:17:15 3% of the cases is lawyering. 97% is not lawyering.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:19 And then the transactional lawyers I have I have been asking them casually because I what I don't want to do, I don't want to be sound alarmist, but what I do, I've said that there's going to be a shrinking.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:31 That would be my prediction. There's definitely going to be a shrinking over the next ten years, and it's going to be bigger than what people think. 65% is huge. But the transactional lawyers I've been asking them, I've just kind of casually, you know. Are you worried at all? And no one's told me. Yes, I'm worried. And I'm kind of surprised by that, because to me, those are the firms that are ripe for AI to just demolish.

Hamid Kohan 00:17:53 It takes it over. I give you a perfect example. Last year I was a speaker on the bankruptcy conference. There was a 360 bankruptcy attorneys present, and I was there speaker. And I said this, and it shook up the room to the point where they said, what? No. I said, okay, give me an example of the case, like chapter seven 1113, whatever. Give me an example right now that AI cannot go through the entire process better than you do, faster than you do. We did like 6 or 7 examples and all lost because everything they did in the course of doing the bankruptcy.

Hamid Kohan 00:18:31 AI did it better, faster or smarter?

Tyson Mutrux 00:18:36 Yeah. Bankruptcy is another one. I think if it's if you're talking about just I mean if you're talking about just breaking it down like ones and zeros, it's a lot of it is just data. Right. It's data. Yeah. And where I think there is a there's a little bit of a buffer in like practice areas like mine where there's personal injury and we have litigation. There are there are going to be fences being placed around things like courthouses where there is there's going to be arguing.

Hamid Kohan 00:19:03 I'm talking about like in the PR is all the prelude which is intake. Okay. My intake here right now AI will do. I have within the legal staff, we have about 1800 visual intake placed into 600 law firms. And my intake AI next year will do better than they do. So I'm basically replacing my own people. Right. Because it does it better. So on the pi intake, dot document collection, dot case analysis, dot AI, setting up appointments with the medical providers and following up and make sure the treatment happened and the medical records are provided.

Hamid Kohan 00:19:43 AI summarizing the medical record. Creating chronology, creating a demand. AI you know, creating a demand, sending it out, confirming it and taking the offer in AI. So I would say 65% of the prelude on Pi is going to be AI.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:01 I don't disagree at all. Actually, I agree with you heavily. That's why I've been working on something on my own. It's a little project I've been documenting and I maybe.

Multiple Speakers 00:20:10 That's the scary part in everybody is everybody. They take legal medical. Everybody's working.

Hamid Kohan 00:20:15 On some AI.

Multiple Speakers 00:20:16 Thing.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:17 Well, no it's not. Well, to me it's I mean, it's it's we're all working. I think I'm not building my own AI, that's for sure, but I what I'm what I'm doing is I've created my own little playground where I'm developing an AI only firm where it's just be right. I'm the only human. And I wonder if if you were to start from scratch, like, let's say you and I were going to build this thing out, I do wonder what what sort of framework you would build it on.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:41 And what I mean by that is if I were just going to kind of pencil this out, like what I guess, how would you attack it? Where would you start first? What elements would you include in it? I'm very curious as to how you would approach it.

Hamid Kohan 00:20:53 I will start with every position that I'm describing from my practice that I'm starting tomorrow. like I need a receptionist. I need an intake here. I need a legal assistant. I write down what they're supposed to be doing. What is their job description? What is the KPIs? Whatever. I write them all up because I want to go higher. Ten people to open up a law firm. And then I start mapping each one of those positions to the AI solution that is already exists. So receptionist tons of AI. Receptionist I don't need the receptionist receptionists in their care. Be able to speak 100 plus languages and works 24 over seven. I got that. I don't need the intake case manager to collect the documents, set up appointments, follow up with the client, give them a status.

Hamid Kohan 00:21:40 I got one of those A's, so I don't need that. I go all the way up to like, I need a senior paralegal for that big litigation case, and I need an attorney to run it. So I basically do an elimination of all of those positions systematically, position by position.

Tyson Mutrux 00:21:58 Yeah. Where do those jobs go? Do you think if there's going to be a 65% reduction in transactional firms?

Hamid Kohan 00:22:04 I'm moving to the move because it's going.

Multiple Speakers 00:22:07 To be dangerous. Yeah.

Hamid Kohan 00:22:09 I yeah, there's going to be such a I mean, you're seeing it right now even though nothing has happened really. You see all these huge layoffs from big companies like the IBM's and, even tech companies like Oracle and so forth. For? they're not in hundreds anymore. They're in thousands and and nothing. The AI has hit that way. But now they're doing three, five, 10,000 layoffs at a time. Just imagine when the AI actually hits.

Tyson Mutrux 00:22:41 Truly. I mean it really.

Multiple Speakers 00:22:43 I give you I give you another example.

Hamid Kohan 00:22:46 My son works for a major software company, and he only does enterprise sales, which means $8 million and above clients. Right. And he's been doing it for like ten plus years. and he just came back and said, hey, dad, I think our jobs are eliminated because there were 17 of us handling 8 million plus clients, $8 million annual revenue per client, and all of them got laid off except me. I'm like, how does that happen? He goes, they automate the heck out of our jobs. I'm the only one left and the AI is going to take over. Setting up the appointment during the demonstration. Sending the contract. Getting the contract back. I mean, the whole thing.

Tyson Mutrux 00:23:30 I am curious with your with your viewpoint on this. Have you advised your kids not to go to law school or just to put the brakes on law school?

Hamid Kohan 00:23:40 No, I basically said I have a sort of a patent on the thing called AI, a school of law that when you finish law school, you go to the AI School of Law.

Hamid Kohan 00:23:51 You need to finish that one, too, before you go back in the field, because, having a law degree is not good enough anymore. It's basically giving you license to be in law, first of all. And then I give you a license to cherry pick those high value cases, litigations that you want to do, but they're running the business and running a pre litigation group or whatever is all gone.

Tyson Mutrux 00:24:14 Why do you think that so much money is flooding into legal tech right now?

Hamid Kohan 00:24:19 Because it is most outdated industry on the planet. I mean, it was. I told you, it goes back to the comment that said, leave the lawyer alone. They're still wearing pagers and waiting at the fax machine because they don't adopt anything new. They go to law school learning not to change or adopt anything. Follow the law. Right. So it puts your mind into I'm just going to follow, not lead, not change anything. Then they don't teach them to change or modify or upgrade the law.

Hamid Kohan 00:24:50 They just say get it, interpret it, follow it, make sure everybody else does. Right. So innovation is other law. The thing that makes sure you don't do is innovate because you lose your license if you innovate.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:06 That's very that's that's very true.

Multiple Speakers 00:25:09 Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:10 I've kind of had this thought and I've mentioned it to my firm a couple times where I said, you know, if we were to just all take off for a month, everyone in the firm and we just start building, right? We build the AI firm out, right? I think we could do it in about a month. Like a viable product. Like something we could use internally. Not not something we scale. Not something we use for, you know, sell to other people. But I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

Hamid Kohan 00:25:39 Everybody thinks like you do right now. And that's why we're having a big problem. Because this is what you're getting. I mean, it's like, you know, I said, everybody can build the Excel sheet, but can anybody build a pivot oriented, multi-dimensional Excel sheet that updates dynamically? That's what people need.

Hamid Kohan 00:26:01 But they say, no, I can make you Excel sheet. AI is like, yeah, anybody sits on a computer for you can even use the AI to build your AI solution.

Multiple Speakers 00:26:12 You know, you don't.

Hamid Kohan 00:26:13 Even need to do anything. You just tell them, build me one.

Tyson Mutrux 00:26:17 Like like for example. like you like bolt or there's a few other ones, like where like you can vibe coat it. I, I do want to know your, your view on vibe coding where you can use AI to build, you know, other softwares.

Hamid Kohan 00:26:29 I am not a skill on that, because when you go into the launching into the market and you get user experience, user retention, all the elements that make things, you know, there is a reason why Apple is Apple is they made it simple from day one. They make it something intelligent. But gadget looking, gadget acting and there are hundreds of others cell phone creators or laptop creators, whatever is like. Yeah, putting one AI solution out there is fast and easy, making it work for a large number of people without glitches, without, you know, basically being stuck with the bugs and upgrades and so forth.

Hamid Kohan 00:27:18 That's a whole different game.

Tyson Mutrux 00:27:20 Yeah. I mean, I can tell you from personal experience that's that's something we've experienced where we we would build we've built out things that on the, on the end of it. So we got it about 90% of the way there. And then the last 10% had to be done by humans because of all the glitches. And there were certain things we just couldn't. I mean, I'm not a coder, so I don't know. I don't know these things, but using the humans for the last 10%, it did a really. I mean, they did they did a really great job for us.

Hamid Kohan 00:27:47 But did you make it for yourself or Pierce?

Tyson Mutrux 00:27:51 No, we made it for Pierce. This is something we built. We we built out Becca's list, which is a it's a vendor ratings website. Where? Yeah. So people can go in and they they can rate, you know, legal, soft or any, you know, a bunch of other softwares. And that was something we started with vibe coding and then so it's got everyone's got a log in, they've got a you log in with LinkedIn And then we.

Tyson Mutrux 00:28:15 Then vendors can then sign up to get additional features and all that. So it's it's it's not a super simple. The what made it complicated was actually the vendors. If it was.

Hamid Kohan 00:28:25 Done.

Tyson Mutrux 00:28:26 Yeah. If it was just the users, that was easy. It was easier. But then once you added in the additional type of login for a vendor, that was it made it way more complicated then the the vibe code. So we use it. We did it on bolt and that actually it was really it really struggled with that. But that's where the humans had to come in and fix it. And it took them quite a while to actually fix or not fix, but actually build up what we needed. but I would say it probably saved us tens of thousands of dollars, if not more, getting it up to that point.

Hamid Kohan 00:28:57 Of course, is is about the scaling. when you build something that is is targeted for the 100 people or 1000 people or tens of thousands of people, the requirements changes and the, you know, the Past or no past becomes a lot more critical that I get a pass on this or I don't get a pass on this because it's a lot more complicated now, and there's a lot more mission critical when you're building tools that is mission critical, like demand writing for P.I. firm, or try to do demand writing for employment firm.

Hamid Kohan 00:29:33 That's why, even if nobody else has done it, because it's like, are you crazy? How do I even I have experienced employment attorneys with seven years experience. They still can't write the right demand for an employment case, right? Pi is easy. You hit me. Add injuries. This is pain and suffering. Pay me. Employment is not like that. So when you're making it for those kind of environments, the target audience determines the complexity and the time and the cost of doing a solution. The more complex the longer it takes, the more expensive it is.

Tyson Mutrux 00:30:07 Very true. So something that's been a cool little thing for us is so we used to use Infusionsoft, which is now keep, you know, years ago and well, the, the thing we like to do now, it's kind of a concept that they had, they had like a sandbox where you could play around with and you, you didn't deploy it or once you deployed it, it would go into your account, but you could kind of create the sandbox and play around with.

Tyson Mutrux 00:30:32 And one of the things I did is I built out in bolts, I built out a case management system with no intention of actually deploying it. But what we're able to do with it is, is that we have our own case management system, and we will we we play around, we use that. The one that I built out to play around in as kind of like our sandbox, and then we use it to test out different features. If we like those features, we then will deploy them into our environment, which I think is it's a fun way of using it without actually trying to fully deploy it inside a board.

Hamid Kohan 00:31:01 Right? But imagine even yourself and your firm, the way things are going in, the way you're developing some stuff, using some stuff, customizing some of this stuff a year down the road. When you have a sand bag of all of the stuff in it, and then now you're trying to get five of your employees to use them properly.

Tyson Mutrux 00:31:22 Well, and that's where we are.

Tyson Mutrux 00:31:24 That's why that's why we have our sandboxes separate. We deploy it. Here's the here's how we do it. And this is, I think, why it works. We take the things the features that we that we like. And then we will deploy those to the entire firm one at a time where they test those things out. So by the time that it gets to them, we've already tested it out on on the in the sandbox, then they can that that's why it works is because it's not it's not like we're we're like deploying all these different little bells and whistles all at one time.

Hamid Kohan 00:31:52 Yeah. In the tech industry we call it alpha testing. So you're doing alpha testing after you release it, and then you do beta testing, which you're giving it to other bunch of other selected group of people to, to test it before you do production release. But getting back on this AI initiatives with illegal is going to be practice type by practice type implementation. Always Pi is the double number because it has the highest number of, you know, cases money, investments, open mind about growth and business.

Hamid Kohan 00:32:24 And then basically the next contingency practice is like employment. And then maybe workers comp, there may be a little bit of a mass tort. It'd be a bit before it gets into, I have a friend who works for a big, big law employment defense, and they have some major, major clients, and they just got notification from clients that if you're using AI for any of these segments, like creating a demand motion, you know, the discovery summary and so forth, we're not paying your hourly bills.

Tyson Mutrux 00:33:00 Yep.

Multiple Speakers 00:33:02 That's that's yes. So that was like a 30% cut.

Hamid Kohan 00:33:06 On the revenue immediately because you know this fortune 500 company with my client who says, look, if you're using AI, I'm not going to pay you, whatever, $1,200 an hour fee because you just use AI for it. And I know.

Tyson Mutrux 00:33:22 There there are courts creating there actually court rules that have been released already across the country where if you use AI to create even part of your pleading, you have to disclose the fact that you used AI to create all or part of your pleading, which is really interesting.

Tyson Mutrux 00:33:41 What are your thoughts on that?

Hamid Kohan 00:33:43 Look, they're trying to to protect a few different things. One is like I talked about is this billable hour thing. If you build me for ten hours or $2,000 an hour rate, and you use 15 minutes of the AI to generate everything, somebody should protect me as a client of the firm. The second is that the protecting the client from the fully AI generated outcomes that is not audited. Read no regulation, no auditing, no nothing. And I just submit it to the court, whatever. And it blows up and you're like, oops. I mean, so there needs to be regulation and protections and stuff around the AI. And I think we haven't seen much at all. Just like ChatGPT changing that. They cannot do medical advice, legal advice, financial advice. There's going to be a lot more of that to come that is going to limit their advisement.

Tyson Mutrux 00:34:41 Yeah, I do agree with that. I think it's it's an interesting thing that's happening and no one really knows what's what's going to happen.

Tyson Mutrux 00:34:49 But I've got a question related to that for you, because you, you were one of the earliest champions of virtual staffing in the legal space. Right. And because you you clearly saw something that other people didn't see at the time. And I wonder, is there something on your radar right now that you're seeing that you're like, oh, that's going to be a thing. Is there is there something that you're seeing right now that no one else is seeing?

Hamid Kohan 00:35:15 I like to think so. That's why it keeps our momentum going. We're like you said, we're the largest provider in that segment. And there is a reason, because we have a 96% retention on the virtual staff that we placed in the firms. Yeah. It is about 28% higher than your local staff. So we keep on longer than you can in your own office.

Tyson Mutrux 00:35:39 Well okay. So I'm not like I'm not going to let you off the hook with that. Let me let me rephrase my question. What are you seeing now that that other people aren't seeing when it comes to tech or anything at this point? Because I want to get I want to get your prediction on the record.

Hamid Kohan 00:35:57 Is it is it the law firms, for the most part, going to be Running 80% of the operation with the AI. It started from marketing all the way to settlements. So not just the legal process, the financials and the marketing and the client generation. Like when I was doing the consulting. No single attorney was able to answer half of my questions like, what's your cost, a client acquisition? What's your total cost on the case, and how much is your net profit per case in a different category like prelate lit, whatever. Nobody has any answers. They're all just like they have good days when they get a big check. They have bad days when they get subbed out. I was like, okay, any answers to anything or, or what's your demographic target for your client base or none of this stuff? So what we're developing and what my vision is, is to automate the heck out of that. So I'm not asking no attorney, no managing attorney any of those questions I just asked my AI platform.

Tyson Mutrux 00:37:04 Yeah.

Hamid Kohan 00:37:04 Does that how do I get him in? How long do I keep him? How much is it going to cost me? Month to month to month to month. To just keep him on the system and into the process. And when they got out, what was my net profit as a business owner?

Tyson Mutrux 00:37:21 I was having a conversation a couple of weeks ago with a, with someone that's in tech, and I was talking to them about how, there we were talking about the contraction of the legal space and everything. And I asked him, I said, what, what what individual roles in the firm would you be, would be would you be the most afraid of if you were one of those people? And he said, the paralegal right away. He said, paralegal. and I wonder what your thoughts are like, who's safer? Do you think a lawyer is safer in this environment? Or a paralegal.

Hamid Kohan 00:37:54 Lawyer because it's licensed? It has that the advantage of the license. It's like a unlicensed driver and a licensed driver.

Hamid Kohan 00:38:02 Which car do you want to get into? You know. So yeah. So that's that's the first element. The second thing is that the, the paralegal, the paralegals who are titled paralegal correctly, a lot of people just throw that title around. It's paralegal, but it's not even a case manager. The paralegal who can actually get prepped for deposition can do Depo prep mediation prep, do mediation summary, do a full discovery and analysis. That's the paralegal. So between the whole scheme of the paralegal is probably the safest, but they'll only true paralegals not make believe paralegals.

Tyson Mutrux 00:38:44 Yeah. That is an interesting very interesting point because that we have we have case managers as it was what we have. I would define a paralegal as something different. A paralegal is something different where they, they they actually can prepare the depot outlines and they can prepare the, the all of the exhibits and all that. So are you saying that if if like that the true paralegals are safer than than, say, the case manager type?

Hamid Kohan 00:39:10 That's true.

Hamid Kohan 00:39:11 Paralegals who are completely AI enabled. Yes.

Tyson Mutrux 00:39:16 Interesting.

Hamid Kohan 00:39:18 not not alone. If they're not AI enabled, that they use AI at least 40% of their work, then they're not safe either, because that means they are not a paralegal.

Tyson Mutrux 00:39:30 Do you think we're going to start to see more of your one person or one lawyer, law firms popping up where they maybe they they hire a team of paralegals, like true paralegals.

Hamid Kohan 00:39:39 Then it doesn't start with a paralegal comes way down the line. You have to do your marketing. You have to get your clients. You need to put them to the process. You need a case manager. You need legal assistance. You need all of that before it gets to the paralegal. Paralegal it's really just for true litigation, trial focused litigation, which, if you start off your firm today, two and a half years from now, you're going to need a paralegal.

Tyson Mutrux 00:40:06 Wow. That's a that is quite the prediction. Would you start? Let's say you were starting a law firm today completely AI.

Tyson Mutrux 00:40:12 Would you start with the marketing or would you start with the legal operations side of things?

Hamid Kohan 00:40:17 Marketing? Yeah, 100%. We're actually doing this for like five new law firms. That is completely AI. We intend not to hire anybody, you know, and it starts with marketing. Okay. You know what we do. Just a little secret on that. Even when I'm starting a law firm tomorrow and I'm starting with the marketing, I get the cases. I don't even want to work on the cases right now. I want to start referring them out and get my 3,040% referral fees. Right. Which is more than most firms make on the net profit model.

Tyson Mutrux 00:40:49 Yes.

Hamid Kohan 00:40:50 Yeah. So I work with the two firms that we generate over 500 clients a month, retain clients a month, and we don't practice nothing. Okay. and our staff are only marketing staff. We are a law firm. So what happens is I generate a whole bunch of cases so I get a feel of it about what's the market like? What's the client base like, what's the cost of client acquisition, what's the potential.

Hamid Kohan 00:41:17 And I push the I refer them out to the bunch of firms who have tons of people that were missing cases. So I give it to them once this ball is rolling and I get the gist of it, then I start maybe hiring an intake person and a case manager or AI or something like that. I don't go higher up a whole bunch of people and then go try and make it work. Start by referring out.

Tyson Mutrux 00:41:44 Do you think it's going to be easier for firms to make more money in the future? Or do you think it's going to be more complicated because there's going to be more competition because of the AI?

Hamid Kohan 00:41:54 No, I think it's going to be a division of between. They're going to make more money if they're up to date and they are up to technology efficiencies, productivity, good financial analytics, then they make more money. If they wanted the old fashioned way, they are going to get wiped out.

Tyson Mutrux 00:42:15 I I've had the same view where there's kind of like the princes and the paupers, where you're going to have the people that are that are using AI and they're really going to they're really going to succeed.

Tyson Mutrux 00:42:26 And the ones that are not are just going to in ten years, they won't exist. In five years they may not exist, but certainly not in ten years.

Hamid Kohan 00:42:33 And it's not even AI itself. Is efficiency being on top of the numbers, the financial numbers, you know, workflow processes and tracking everything. I had a I had a customer at Lagos who's been with us for about seven years, And he even did something. I, I have a lot of guts about this stuff. I didn't want to get the guts. He had the office close to LA that he built up for the past six years. They had seven nine bilingual P.I. case managers, and under each one of those, there was a two virtual staff helping them handling about 500 cases. And he came in two weeks ago and says, I'm shutting down the office, which everybody wishes they could have, or buy it or take it over, because who in LA finds nine P.I. case managers experience bilingual? I mean, like, come on, you're in field.

Hamid Kohan 00:43:32 You know how that is. And I said, why are you doing that? Because I'm going to go all AI and virtual. So he added like 1416, experience virtual staff from Legal Soft on the P.I., and he reduced his monthly cost by 68,000 a month. If I shut down the office, he's a happy man. He's like.

Tyson Mutrux 00:43:57 That is wild. you've worked with a lot of firms. I've seen different numbers. I saw 1100 firms. I think it's probably more than that. I wonder what are some of those invisible ceilings that you see? Some firms where they get stuck at a certain revenue level and they just can't get above it?

Hamid Kohan 00:44:17 Is there is there own limitation that they made up in their mind? Like, you know, everybody comes and says, oh, pie over here is saturated, okay, saturated. When one of the reasons I went to the ABS program was because as a, you know, a UB attorney in Arizona, you can practice in 39 states. You don't have to get motion in or anything.

Hamid Kohan 00:44:42 You're licensed to practice in them. Okay. So when somebody comes and says, oh, California pie is Saturated. I said, okay, fine, go higher up here 2400 K. There's 39 states to go after, right? Oh, wow. Well, then they start finding reasons why they shouldn't, you know, so is all the limitation is man made in their own head.

Tyson Mutrux 00:45:05 I like that answer a lot. I think that that is spot on. I, I am very curious. What what lm do you like to use the most like Gemini? ChatGPT grok I'm very curious as to what someone like you would like. Which one do you prefer the most?

Hamid Kohan 00:45:21 I try to get one and then become an expert on it, and not try to move around too much, because they all have their own advantage. Disadvantages. I've been on ChatGPT and I. I'm still not close to being great at it, so why would I change to something else and go start from scratch? This is again, it goes back to the AI problem.

Hamid Kohan 00:45:43 There's so many new thing comes in that doesn't give you opportunity to figure out what you already started with and makes people keep jumping.

Tyson Mutrux 00:45:55 All right. Before we wrap things up, I could talk to you for hours, but the I'm. If people want to reach out to you or they want to know more about legal, soft or anything else that you're working on, what's the what's the best way for them to to reach out to you?

Hamid Kohan 00:46:09 My website which is legal. Com or the law practice AI and my email address. You can post it up is H Cohen with a k h k on at TV.com. I'm very accessible because I love this stuff. I don't, I can't get enough. I work probably still 80 hours a week because I'm just like drawing with this stuff. So I'd be happy to talk to anybody. H Cohan at TV.com.

Tyson Mutrux 00:46:37 All right, so I'm not with this question. I'm not advocating people replace their their employees with AI because I think that right now is an advantage where you can use AI to to help supplement what's going on in your firm, and you can actually shift your people, your humans, to more customer facing roles where they're there helping clients.

Tyson Mutrux 00:46:58 So with that in mind, I do wonder if you were to look, let's look at your standard firm. It could be an estate planning firm, an injury firm, a criminal defense firm. What role are you replacing right now with AI intake.

Hamid Kohan 00:47:17 Legal assistance, document collections and met summaries. Document summaries.

Tyson Mutrux 00:47:26 It's. You and I are on the same page. I think there's I'm not I'm not yet ready with the intake. I'm just. I'm not super comfortable with it. I've seen some really good ones. I know that Gary Falco, he's been working on one. That's that's really good. I know you've got.

Hamid Kohan 00:47:41 It's tricky because he's very critical to the firm. I just spent $100,000 generating leads to be converted into the clients, and I got to depend on my intake to convert it. Otherwise I lost everything. So that's why we took it very seriously. And since we have a 1000 plus legal intake years deployed, that is still part of our organization, we have the insight what it takes to do an intake intake for the legal field.

Tyson Mutrux 00:48:10 I love it. Well, Hamid, we'll leave it there. I really appreciate your time doing this. It's been a lot of fun. I love learning more about the things you're doing and getting your perspectives on AI. I think you might have freaked a few people out, but that's just hope. So that's that's the world we're in right now. But really, thank you for doing this. I really appreciate.

Hamid Kohan 00:48:27 It. Absolutely, Richard, if you want to have some fun and creating some new stuff, I mean.

Tyson Mutrux 00:48:33 I love it. Absolutely. And I'm sure there are plenty of people will. So make sure you reach out to me and his team if you need anything but me. Thank you so much.

Hamid Kohan 00:48:40 Thank you very much. Take care.