Why In-House Lawyers Should Rethink How Legal Work Gets Built
What if the biggest obstacle facing in house legal teams today is not risk, budget, or staffing, but the way […]
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![0:00 [Music] hello welcome to notes to my legal celf the future belongs to builders together 0:07 we explore topics of interest to Legal innovators know someone who'd make a great guest let us know self-nominations 0:14 are encouraged they're an act of Courage want to get the most from this conversation ask questions comment like 0:22 follow say hello in short engage lastly have fun shaping the 0:29 future of L requires significant effort but finding joy in the process is 0:34 essential let's begin here's your host Olga M well hello everyone it's good to 0:41 see you all I'm really excited about today's conversation it's some when I been having many conversations on 0:48 LinkedIn I don't think we met in real life but I feel like I feel like we have I know you want 0:55 to speak so I'm going to let you come out Britney welcome to the show welcome to no legal self please introduce 1:02 yourself hi everyone I'm so excited to be here thank you so much for having me Olga so as you mentioned my name is 1:08 Britney Hernandez I'm the head of legal Innovation for gavl I'm also a lawyer so I practiced intellectual property and 1:13 entertainment law before I went into the legal Tech space prior to becoming a lawyer I was in the military in the 1:19 Coast Guard in Puerto Rico and Alaska so I've had a long and VAR career in 1:24 different places but I'm excited to be here now talking about the future of legal Innovation and the legal industry 1:30 and how you can engage with that today I love it I love it so let's talk about 1:36 Alaska yes I've been to Alaska a couple of times but more importantly I used to 1:42 live on at the same I guess parallel in another country so very familiar with 1:47 nine months of darkness and yes the Earth that never melts and that type of 1:53 stuff so how was it and more importantly thank you for your service by the way and how was it and how did that both 2:00 Alaska and the military service prepare you H for what you're doing today great 2:06 question so for me Alaska was amazing it was a huge change because I had prior to 2:11 that been stationed in Puerto Rico or it was sunny and beautiful and you go to the beach every day but that was where I 2:18 got to do things like drive a boat for the Coast Guard and do search and rescue missions and do law enforcement missions 2:24 and so for that and I got to buy my first house and just sort of it became it became something that helped me 2:31 become a grown-up it helped me to understand how to relate to other people it helped me learn that you know it's 2:38 okay if you are kind of a little bit of a misfit you can still do your job because my personality really wasn't 2:45 well suited to the military but it's something that I knew I needed to do in order to pay for law school with the GI 2:50 bill so that's kind of how that prepared me for going forward into a career in 2:55 the law and even if even though that's changed a little bit from being a traditional lawyer and a sole 3:01 practitioner over to what I do now um which is very different but I do feel like the military prepared me to not 3:08 always be popular I mean it sounds weird but because of my personality not 3:14 fitting really well I didn't actually get along super well with everyone that I worked with and I had to learn how to 3:21 how to still have an effective outcome in an environment where you don't necessarily fit feel like you fit and 3:29 still accom lishing the goal that you set out for yourself which in my case was to obtain the GI Bill how can I 3:34 still go through this process that I've committed to for four years and then for an additional four years in the reserve 3:41 when you you know when you personally are like uh I don't know that I fit here 3:46 can I still accomplish a goal with people you know as a collective unit so 3:52 I think that really prepared me for opposing Council and dealing with people who are you know not necessarily your 3:59 friends and um but still achieving an outcome that we both are trying to work towards for a common goal and in this 4:06 case that's for each of our clients to get what they need so I think that that's been you know something that I've taken away from being in the military 4:12 for sure I have to say if I had to choice between Puerto Rico Alaska I don't I don't even think 4:20 it I would have to think long and hard I close to equator is is is definitely by 4:26 definition of you know Paradise yeah absolutely and and when I was there I 4:32 was part of a different type of unit which is AIDS to navigation and so what we were doing was very different and 4:38 very fun I got to go up into lighthouses and help clean the lights in ligh houses 4:43 or change out like a solar sensor that lets the you know light know that it's time to turn on when it's Sunset and 4:49 these different things so I got to do that and I got to make sure the buoys were in the right place so it was a very 4:55 different experience and I'm grateful for both experiences okay so you went to law 5:01 school on a GI bill that you earned congratulations that is that is a 5:06 massive achievement and again thank you thank you for your service I you know this is no joke to aside locations aside 5:13 and and all of that it it's it's it's still a big commitment it takes a long 5:19 time so thank you so much for doing it I appreciate that how was law school compared to to the service was it like 5:26 oh this is easy this is a walk in the park let's do this or how was it yeah so 5:31 it was definitely a different experience and I had you know since I had gone to undergrad before I went into law I'm 5:39 sorry before I went into the military and then I was in the military for four years working and making money and then 5:44 going directly into law school the day after I separated from the military that 5:49 was a very interesting experience because I was out of the habit of studying I had studied for the elsat of 5:55 course but it wasn't the same level of this is your life now and also you don't make money you give them money you know 6:02 I mean even though I had I had the GI Bell which was paying for tuition yeah that's a really hard thing to get used to when you actually money yes it was it 6:10 was strange I was used to being very independent having my own house and not having to kind of rely on you know any 6:16 kind of additional financial aid or anything and so to kind of go to be out of school in the workforce and then 6:23 coming back into school was quite hard but then that's where I found a lot of my best friends that I'm still friends 6:29 with today I loved my professors I I loved my school I went to California Western in San Diego I had been away for 6:37 for so long you know living in different places so I decided that it didn't really matter necessarily like which 6:42 school it was I just wanted to kind of be back home in San Diego where I'm from so I feel like that experience for me 6:49 was sort of you know I got to see it as a different kind of Adventure and I felt 6:54 like because I had gone through the military and understood kind of what real life or death scenarios looked like 7:01 you know reading 10 cases a night or more whatever else didn't really feel 7:07 that Ser like you know it was hard but you're reading you're not like saving a life or something right now maybe later 7:14 after you graduate but are you saving lives now I would say I'm saving lawyers a lot 7:21 of time and helping to bring more um Revenue but lives you can say that I 7:28 mean I mean I've seen a lot of because a lot of what I think about and and care about is lawyer well-being so I think 7:35 you could say that for those of us who are trying to help people understand how you can be more efficient in your 7:41 practice and reduce the amount of time that you're spending on each case so that you can reduce your avilable hours but still scale I think that we are kind 7:48 of in a way you know not to be like too self-aggrandizing but showing a different way forward that's a healthier 7:54 path I mean saving lives you can spend a life suffering and that's a 8:00 of suffering and if you can you know upgrade that 10 20% even that's 8:05 literally saving years of lives to for a better experience it's a different life 8:11 saving it's not resusitation and CPR type of experience but it's it's it's 8:17 helping Find meaning and having more impact and in it some ways living more 8:22 than one life simultaneously so I guess that's exactly saving lives yeah if you want yeah I think that's a good way of 8:28 putting it and I think I mean all I need to have is a bunch of law degrees to argue this you know right of course we 8:35 can take any side of this argument that we want we could say yeah but I was gonna say yeah I think it really is just 8:40 sort of I had to kind of shift my mindset and get used to the fact that me 8:45 reading these cases and going to these classes and paying attention and engaging and doing well is part of a 8:53 future that will make it to where I can help you know in that case when I was approaching it from a more traditional lawyer sense helping my clients to save 9:01 and protect their you know copyrighted works or or their trademarks and their businesses which is their their you know 9:08 source of income for their fam so that in a way you kind of can look at it all of the different ways and both of us 9:13 could argue this forever that we are saving lives yes for sure that's what a a lot 9:21 of expensive education gives you ability to be on eer side yes exactly so let me ask you this uh was 9:29 with all of those experiences no code platform well for first of all what is low code no code for those folks who 9:35 don't know I would like you to find it but then you know how does one wake up in the morning one day and say done the 9:42 Coast Guard Bill some copyright cases and a few other 9:47 cases right platform that's where I'm going where is the link yeah and I 9:54 actually a quick aside is that um I was interviewing for a job with um a company 10:00 that does a lot of development work for like legal clinics and things like that and I was you know applying to be a 10:06 gavel expert in automation developer you know and that kind of thing and they were it was it would have been my first 10:11 job as that thing and they were looking at my resume and kind of saying we don't 10:17 really see the links here you know how did you go from being in the military this where you let me help you see honey 10:24 let me see I'll give you the gift of seeing uh 100% it was like that and 10:30 actually I really appreciated it in the long run but at the time it felt horrible to be told like we don't really 10:36 see like that you're an expert in anything yet because you've kind of done this and then you've done this but you're not world world class at anything 10:42 and I thought it was a really good Insight but I was trying to say but I really am going to be that in this thing if you give me a chance and let me show 10:49 you so that's just to say you know if you look at it on paper it doesn't make sense for someone to really go from you 10:54 know being in the military to going to law school and then kind of going over to this kind of really no C loo Tech 11:00 side but what happened was I originally you know there's a long story about I wanted to be in the FBI I was kind of 11:06 going into law school to kind of go down that track and then who doesn't want to 11:11 be in FBI at least once I think everybody wants to be at Le 11:18 once right I mean especially if you were watching the shows that I was watching when I was a kid I was watching Alias 11:24 and Fringe and you know like in my room doing like Shadow Boxing you know so I 11:30 definitely was on that path for a while and then when I got the chance to serve in the military and understood what it was like to be an employee of the 11:36 government and then also later when I was in law school and took criminal law classes and I would just read the I 11:43 would read the cases for that class and I would just start crying and I was like I don't think if I can't even get 11:49 through these cases about what people are doing to each other I don't think I can be the person he's necessarily 11:54 kicking down doors to you know fight it and so that kind of an interesting 12:01 observation I think I think I remember I actually remember a moment like that I was like wow you did this to your 12:07 neighbor or you did this to your friend or you did this to your business partner 12:13 and now you hoping to get Justice my friend oh exactly and I and I kind of I 12:19 think it helped to have other people kind of come into the class and and tell us about their experiences because in 12:25 those classes we would have someone come in and talk about a case that they worked on and I just kind of felt like 12:30 that person knows how to compartmentalize this in their lives and be okay but I don't know how to do that 12:35 and it doesn't come naturally to me and that's okay and it's okay for me to look at something else that might be better suited for me that will be more in my 12:42 zone of Genius that I can that I can be good at you know and so from there and 12:48 this will be I'll shorten this a little bit but during orientation as well I I heard someone speak about how when they 12:55 were at this Clinic New medeor rights they were doing a project where they got to room riew an opera documentary and 13:01 they got to just watch the film before it went out and they got to say you need a license for this you need you know 13:06 you're okay this is in the public domain and like this and that and I was like that's a job for a lawyer I want that job you get to watch a movie and tell 13:13 filmmakers how to like protect their work that sounds amazing so then that completely changed my path I decided to 13:19 go in kind of the soft IP space of in you know copyrights and trademarks and 13:24 in kind of getting into the how do I help filmmakers protect their work so that ended up with me 13:30 so I didn't use all of my GI Bill for law school I still had some left over after I finished so I did a master's 13:36 degree in International Film business in London so I lived in London for three 13:41 and a half years and I only just moved back to California March 12 so I've only been home for a month and you know maybe 13:48 you'll hear an accent come out here and there but so it was kind of during that time that I was in my master's program 13:54 and just before it that I started to learn about legal technology and no code platform and we had like Gabriel Tenon 14:01 balb talk about Q&A markup and we T had you know all like Dan Cass was leading a 14:07 course for I think it was a six week course on with Dirk Harding from Brer legal you know brar's law school about 14:14 legal Tech Essentials so I took that course right before I went into my Master's Degree and dorna Moen the 14:21 founder of gabble was one of the guests who came and spoke to us and so she was talking about at the time it was called 14:27 documate she gave us all free accounts and we could play with it and we did a hackathon that I participated in and I 14:33 just got really interested and I thought why didn't we hear about this while with in law school and I know in the past you 14:39 know in past episodes you've talked about should we be reforming education around you know you know legal education 14:45 is there is it the time for a revolution around like how we teach students and so 14:51 I agree that we we really need to be incorporating this a lot earlier and I have seen the shift towards that but 14:58 yeah go ahead sorry yeah yeah I love that story I me actually I want the 15:04 reason I want to pause on that is that you know many of us lawyers or legal 15:09 technologist uh teach or come and lecture and we always wonder do that 15:14 make a difference right I just spent a lot of time driving you know didn't 15:20 spend time working or with my children or my spouse and everyone's eyes or at 15:26 least it seemed were glazing over and it's been really thank you for sharing this and I I now taught for last 10 15:33 years almost so I now actually have heard from my students not only at the time when I they they were looking for 15:39 grade but well after they actually used it in their lives and how impactful that 15:44 was and you articulated pretty well how that one course one hackathon one leader 15:51 who shares experiences gives you ability to test drive can really change trajectory of your life and how 15:58 important that that Services yeah I wonder it's what happened I'm actually 16:03 really curious about the rest of the story so you what happen what happened yeah so I was a finalist in the 16:10 hackathon and I you know I had my free account that I just sort of I was like okay well let me put that down for now 16:16 and go do my Master's Degree and I'll come back to it later kind of a thing and so I took on cases while I was away 16:22 and still was you know had my own practice for a little bit but what ended up happening is for my dissertation I 16:27 wanted to use legal Tech technology and kind of play with this idea of how might what I how might I incorporate what I 16:34 learned before I started into my Master's you know thesis or dissertation you can say and so for my project I 16:41 decided to originally I was going to create an international copyright comparison tool using gavl where you 16:47 know the person could say I'm trying to register my copyright in these different countries and I need to know like what I 16:53 need to do and so it would kind of lead you down the path of okay you've picked you know the United States UK and these 16:59 are the differences and similarities and so on and so forth and so that was going to be quite a big project that wouldn't 17:06 really fit into the time frame and so what I ended up doing instead was I invented the design and business model 17:13 for an app that would make it to where you know film students and early career filmmakers who have zero dollars for a 17:21 legal budget when they're making their first film or their student film how they could earn points so they would you 17:28 know there was this ecosystem of value exchange that had it to where you know you had advertisers who would have the 17:35 students engage in market research and then the students could earn those points and then those points would 17:40 translate to real dollars to spend on things like checklists templates and 17:45 time with the lawyer so the the lawyer would still get paid at a competitive rate and so this idea of this exchange 17:51 would also incorporate sort of DIY contracts that have been reviewed by 17:57 lawyers and that would be built out with gavel and things like that so I started to just think about how could we get 18:03 creative about the business model aspect of how we deliver legal services so that 18:09 someone who doesn't have a budget for legal can still get access to the advice 18:14 that they need so that was kind of the concept there and then I re you know ricked back up gavl and was interested 18:20 in legal technology again and how we can you know increase access to Legal Services for people who can't afford 18:26 them and and not necessarily on the pro side but sort of like the people who are 18:32 making a salary a little bit but they don't necessarily have a lot of expendable income for Legal Services 18:38 yeah I mean the the reality you know when we talk about access to Justice people often assume that we're talking 18:44 about Indigent only that's not true that's I mean that is definitely need 18:50 it's a big need and the M Sol that is you know that is absolutely but it's not even half the problem actually because 18:57 majority of us even you know mid uper range actually don't have access to 19:02 various things that we should have access to and make uninformed decisions as we go through life and so it it it is 19:10 not it is definitely correlated with income with respect to impact but it is actually widespread to basically 19:17 everyone right and there are opportunities to build and have an 19:23 impact and if appropriately uh monetized every at every uh way you 19:31 dissect that need and that's really interesting that you were tinkering with it I'm I'm now involved with a hackathon 19:38 at Oxford that is building on the hackathon at Stanford and it's basically 19:43 the the point is kind of like your experience Inspire bright excited folks 19:49 who like to learn and have an impact and give them tools to go and actually solve 19:54 really big problems in law which is access problems so tell me you told the 20:01 story now for a little while I want to I'll be really honest I never read the 20:06 book from the beginning to end I always read I read the first I always I guess 20:13 or whatever I think it's very efficient I read the first five pages then I imagine what was going to be the ending 20:19 then I read the last five pages and I'm like yep I knew that you did not have to 20:24 read the middle so tell me the ending because I now have been on this journey for a while would love to know how did 20:31 you get the job and then why are you so excited about it by the way I know you just had a promotion so congratulations 20:38 I did thank you so much I appreciate that yeah before we get to Celebration 20:44 did how did the story end right how did the how did the story end so after so 20:51 the ending is sort of that after I was done with my Master's Degree I ended up working for a legal tech company called 20:56 Vala based out of Scotland they're doing some great work on the access to Justice piece but for the middle class around 21:03 employment discrimination and how you can you know kind of self- representers and how they can you know put together 21:08 their bundles and so on so I got to work with them I picked to back up the tool of gel at the time and reset decided to 21:15 become a gavl developer for Giga with Haley Lev as I did that for a short time 21:20 but I had all these other ideas as well I felt like you know when I was learning it myself there was a need for a 21:26 certification program for gavl so I decided to create that and reached out to dorna and said you know I'd really 21:32 love to create this is that okay and she said yes so now I have a basic silver and gold for for gavel and then also I 21:39 was doing like lightning talks with them and I started that and so I just got really excited and engaged with like how 21:45 it made me feel like I had a superpower I mean no code technology and low code technology these types of tools they 21:52 make you feel like you can do anything and they give you an instant gratification that you don't get I think it's a little bit more is people who 21:59 give you a chance it is people who make you feel like you're special and you can 22:06 make a difference and dependent on where you come from and who you are and who your parents are and give you 22:12 opportunities and say look you can't make it any worse it's already pretty bad look how many problems we have any 22:18 Improvement is gonna be for the better so go help yourself and everyone else at that for that matter and that that's 22:25 that's you know for driven excited people with high energy and and and love 22:32 for making a difference that's that's pretty much all you need yeah absolutely and what I would say there too as a 22:38 little piece of advice from the way that I was able to kind of launch to where I am now is that I gave people something 22:44 to say yes to so instead of going like oh it'd be nice if we could do something together maybe in the future instead I 22:51 said I have this fully formed idea just say yes and I will go execute maybe we 22:57 make a few tweaks here and there but I brought something that they could look at quickly and say yes we can do that or 23:04 no we can we can't do that or yes we can do that if you make these two tweaks now go and execute so that was things like 23:10 the lightning talks and the certification courses and things like that so I feel like if you're trying to 23:15 get a job in this space bring something to the table they can say yes to I think it's true for every job the most compelling you can say in the interview 23:22 is that here's how I'm going to improve your life on the day one yes and this 23:27 then get customers exactly yeah exactly so that's kind of what I did with dorna 23:33 um and gavl was just that I had all these ideas because I was going through the process of becoming you know a gavel 23:38 expert myself so I was trying to understand what was what was I struggling with or like what you know what would have made it easier for me to 23:44 do this a little bit faster and so I wanted to fill that Gap so because I did that and was working with dorna I got 23:50 invited by them very quickly to become the global ambassador to law schools which is what I've been doing for the 23:56 past year and a half which is delivering the very same presentations that I heard 24:01 DNA deliver back in 2020 when I first met her in that same you know course 24:07 that I was telling you about from Dan and and all the different people I mentioned so it was very full circle to 24:13 become the person who does the presentations that Inspire students to then come around and build things and 24:18 try things so my two requirements when I was I really liked what I was doing 24:24 building out automations for other lawyers with Gabel and other you know tools as well was will I get paid the 24:31 same at least and the other one was can I still can in my role will I still be 24:37 able to build tools out with build different apps with the tool because I that's the part that I really like so I 24:43 didn't want answer to one and two what is now that you how did the conversation 24:50 go great she said yes and yes I love that I love that I mean yes 24:57 and a yes and a good yes and and most recently you got 25:02 promoted I mean that that is a story with many Happy Endings and yes exactly 25:09 Adventures really all over the world kind of yeah and it was one of those things where you sort of you know you 25:15 found something that you're really good at that you can do naturally and that it that comes easy to you um or that you 25:21 want to spend all your time doing I don't know if you read a lot of gay Hendrick's books around like the big leap and the genius Zone but it's the 25:27 idea of you know what can you do all day without getting tired that you enjoy and that you could get paid for and try to 25:34 find this Zone that you can live in and for me that was building out automations and then teaching other people how to do 25:39 that too and so what ended up happening is I was transitioning from living in 25:44 London having my own business and kind of facilitating the law school program moving back to the United States and 25:50 trying to figure out what that was going to look like and so in that transition I kind of went to dor and I said look it'd 25:55 be really great if I could become a full-time team member rather than kind of part-time contractor facilitating 26:01 this one program do you have a spot for me on your team and initially she said 26:06 not right now because we just did a bunch of hiring so maybe next year so I was kind of going off and looking at 26:12 other opportunities and reaching out to different people and then about two weeks later she came back and said actually we would love to have you join 26:19 the team and we want to offer you a job and can you start in two weeks so for the past so for the past three and a 26:26 half weeks I've been the head of legal Innovation for Trav so my role has changed in that my audience is a little 26:32 bit different I still facilitate the you know the academic program so if any you know professors need me to come and do 26:38 guest lectures and so on and you know facilitating the distribution of free accounts for students and things like 26:44 that but my main change is the people I'm talking to are practicing attorneys now and I want to make sure that they 26:51 are understanding how to use these types of Rapid development Tools in order to not only transform their practices 26:57 internally but see the possibilities from the productization standpoint which is where we see the industry going so 27:04 believe it or not we're coming to the end and I feel like we just wow yes so let me ask a few questions 27:11 because I'm around the rapid development what what is it just so that folks have 27:17 and if they want to learn more they can get in touch with you but like definitionally what is it like what is it and how do you eat it type of thing 27:24 yes good question so I actually think that the best definition for me personally when I was first um trying to 27:29 get into this space was by a tool called softer so I know the CEO miam and I've 27:35 met her and she's amazing but she kind of says as a quote that it's this kind of like software software genius 27:41 democratization where it's like anyone who has any inclination towards building 27:46 something online but doesn't have the technical skills for doing that now we've created or these tools have been 27:53 created so that that person the citizen developer or whatever can kind of act access this ability to create products 28:02 and apps and client portals and websites and all of that without having to have a coding background so this is the idea 28:09 that there are certain things that are default elements and the way that you as the person who's using these tools interact with them is meant to be 28:16 intuitive that it says I want this block to go over here and and then I want to move it up and down and then I want to 28:22 put a button here that goes to this place and so instead of having to type all that in coding or or having to learn 28:29 HTML GSS you know CSS and JavaScript and all these different languages or python you just say I'm going to sign up for an 28:36 account and you know an hour later you have a website and you have that be a client portal so all you have all you as 28:43 a citizen developer all you have to have is a vision exactly that's the best 28:50 that's the best way to describe the definition of not code rapid development yeah so let's talk let's make it really 28:57 concrete now that you have a vision what are the examples of things you can create to so folks can kind of maybe 29:04 refine their vision of of what's possible right so obviously I'm here you 29:09 know representing gav I'll use that as an example so with gavel for example you can create internal tools that you or 29:16 your paralal use to create documents in you know in a couple of clicks rather 29:21 than you know duplicating a Word document and then going in and typing in each person's name what you can do is 29:27 build an automation for let's say an estate plan that is you know something that pulls information you already have 29:33 let's say from Cleo or another system that you use pushes it into that particular workflow and out pops you 29:39 know a will and a power of attorney and you know a HIPPA authorization and so on and so forth um the second part of that 29:46 is that you can create client basing products now and that's what I was mentioning about this kind of difference between sort of just pure docum let's 29:53 let's pause you I want to make sure that this is not L I think you making you differentiating between sort of 29:59 something that helps a lawyer right so something like you you you put a Contraption together after you had 30:07 Vision not Visions a vision a specific Vision not many visions and once you 30:13 have that you can generate things to improve your practice right things exactly that are for you to then kind of 30:20 keep working on kind of a first draft of whatever use case number one and then I 30:25 think you now gradually transitioning to use case number two which hey you can automate your practice maybe you don't 30:31 you know it it's it's not a creative exercise maybe you're sort of stamping out things and it's a much more 30:37 administrative part of your practice and you may just directly give it to your 30:42 customers and like what would be examples of that exactly so a really good example is hello divorce where the 30:48 platform itself is you know the underlying infrastructure of hello divorce is built on gavl and so what 30:56 happens is that somebody has a DIY divorce option for $400 so they can 31:02 generate their they can go through the process of typing in their answers and they get you know underlying that is 31:08 different logic that the client is interacting with rather than the lawyer so that's the difference like you mentioned between internal just for your 31:15 team and the client never sees it versus a standalone product that has a pay wall that somebody says here's my $400 and 31:23 they get instant access to the questionnaire that's built with gavl that then generates the doents that they 31:28 need to file with the court for example okay I love it so you can improve your 31:33 practice you can improve your C clients lives what else what else can you do 31:38 with this tool how wor yeah so I think what's another interesting U aspect of this is the 31:44 client portal so there's you know you can do it to where somebody never creates a portal with you at all or has 31:50 their own dedicated place where their past sessions are stored for example but in another scenario you can make it to 31:56 where if you're let's say the client buys multiple bundles or that that's a series of questionnaires that are 32:02 bundled together in a package so let's say for State planning is just a really good example where you have multiple 32:08 documents that a person needs to fill out planing is where they ask a lot of deep questions like where do you want 32:14 your staff and kids to go if you happen to die who will yeah who will take care of 32:20 your kids so all of those different ones that you need to you know you have them answering all these different questions 32:26 so instead of having them you know do it one time and then you know they have to redo their information over again we 32:32 have client portals dedicated to each of your clients that you can you know you can have them create that makes it to 32:37 where all of the information they've already previously entered automatically gets populated in the future so if 32:43 they've already put in their social security number or their first name and their last name and their address and their kids names and all that um if you 32:49 structure it correctly from a variable strategy standpoint um which is a little bit of a weeds conversation um then what 32:56 happens is the person can you you know have it you know they only have to fill out something that they haven't answered before so I feel like that's a really 33:02 good aspect of it as well which is this idea of data persistence and data management so yeah that's a that's a 33:08 really exciting feature as well okay last question before we really we really do have to say goodbye at some point 33:14 okay and I'm committed to that because there's no other way to end the show but I know let me ask you this say I want to 33:23 try I want to dip my toes like I don't want to dump at first I want to do something little see if it's for me and 33:29 maybe incrementally get into a pool or not I made that decision kind of as a 33:35 experiment what is your top advice for doing that right so I think there's two 33:40 things i' would say which is you know at least a lot of tools have a free tier so they make they let you try it for free 33:47 so in our case we have it's where you can have seven days free trial you don't have to put in your credit card so there's a lot like a very easy entry 33:53 point there where you can just you know kind of Tinker around with it and if it's not for you that's completely fine and if you like it you can upgrade or 33:59 not other tools also have you know a free forever tier or whatever else so I feel like there's a very low entry point 34:05 on many of these kind of Staff tools or software as a service tool so just just start a trial and give it a try and the 34:12 second thing I would say is I have an academy that has a lot of free exercises and courses that you can take so if you 34:18 go to Coram academy.com there's a one one hour workflow exercise we put a timer on for one hour and by the end of 34:24 that hour we've built an automation together I love that well Britney 34:30 imagine that we actually reached the destination it's hard we covered a lot 34:36 of ground I mean we managed we managed to talk about Alaska Puerto Rico you 34:42 know the no Co code tools and all kinds of other stuff and ways you can get it into a pool I mean I think we just 34:49 covered a lot of ground we covered a lot what is the one thing you want 34:55 people to do or take away from this convers ation if they take nothing else I mean my takeaway is a if you have a 35:02 choice between Alaska and Puerto Rico choice at all that's definitely a takeaway that I 35:09 want to re but I think what I would say is that I I I think that there's a lot of talk about the future and 35:16 hypothetically if AI does this and maybe it will go that way and I just want to 35:21 you know emphasize that this is not a hypothetical scenario people that are you and you know they went to law school 35:26 and they you know have practiced law for 11 years they are building legal tech companies using these tools and they're 35:32 doing it themselves which makes me as the consumer feel very good that a lawyer and a subject matter expert is 35:38 the one building this rather than a developer who doesn't understand my needs because they've never worked with 35:43 a client before who has this issue so I feel like you can engage in the future of technology today by starting your 35:50 free child trying things out doing the different exercises and then taking that and applying it to your own templates 35:55 and your own knowledge so it's not hypothetical this is now and something that you can do as well I love it the 36:02 tools are here you tools are here the tools are here you have a vision go help 36:07 yourself it is really that easy it is yeah thank you Britney for this 36:13 conversation I thoroughly enjoyed I can't wait to actually meet you in person I know I will see you in person 36:20 very soon I'll see you in tal and Estonia yeah I see I I almost never tell people see you in tal and Estonia yeah 36:28 that is not something I say every day that's for sure but I'm excited to see you there I was there last year and it was very fun so I'm excited that you're 36:34 going to be there too I am super excited thank you everyone for joining I hope I'll see you there in Talan Estonia it's 36:42 an amazing place I haven't been there in about 30 something years so I look forward to being there thank you so much 36:49 everyone bye for stopping by we hope you've enjoyed this episode of notes to my legal self the future belongs to 36:56 builders know someone who'd make a great guest let us know self-nominations are 37:02 encouraged they're an act of Courage keep in mind the future of law is all 37:07 lit up let's roll up our sleeves innovate build and change the world of law together see you soon](https://www.notestomylegalself.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/access-to-justice-risk-in-house-collaboration.png)
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