Grow Your Law Firm Ep. 287: Empowered Clients, Stronger Cases (Full Episode)

Welcome to the Grow Your Law Firm podcast brought to you by Pilma. This podcast helps lead lawyers to more growth, profit, and freedom. Here is your legal marketing expert and host, Ken Hardison. Well, hello, everybody. This is Ken Hardison, and welcome to another episode of Grow Your Law Firm. And today we have Kenny Eliason. You got it. I got it. From Quilia's company here. And we're just going to chat a little bit about what he does, his journey, and see if we can find out some stuff about this new. I think it's new. It might have been around for 20 years, but it's new to me. It's new to me. It's new. All right, Kenny. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your company. Yeah, man. So born and raised in Vegas, of all places, right? I'm a Vegas kid. Not too many of us out here. But I worked at a law firm after I went off and learned how to speak Spanish. And I came back and got hired because I spoke Spanish at a law firm. And they needed somebody to translate. I had no other experience other than I could speak Spanish. And I worked there for 10 years. Ended up loving it. My favorite part about the job was actually working with the clients. They were my friends. They're still my friends to this day. I still talked to some of them that were our clients back then. And through my 10 years, though, I ended up doing a ton of different stuff with tech and case management softwares. And this was back 2002 to 2010, around then. So early days, case management needles was the pretty much only option when we started doing that. And after that, I went to law school for a year down in California Western, down in San Diego. That was all it took. And then I got out and went and did tech and marketing for a decade after that. And I had an agency here in Vegas where we helped law firms and basically businesses all over the country and even around the world do marketing plans and build websites and apps and all that good stuff. So then I came back to the PI world after all my tech and marketing. So that's my backstory. Okay, cool. Tell me about this new company you got. Yeah, man. So one of the things we were, when I started, okay, so a little bit on why I even started to do this, I got pulled out of my agency and dev life because one of my good friends who works in PI wanted to build a case management software. And I was like, oh, cool. Sounds good. And then I went and demoed all the case management softwares out there. I was like, no, thanks. They're killing it. The FileVines, Clios, Case Peers, MyCases, all those big names of the world, of PI world are far, far ahead of us. But it inspired me because as I looked at the landscape, we know that law typically is a little bit behind the rest of the tech world, but COVID had pushed everybody very fast into the future with Zooms and everything else. And so I thought there was a really good opportunity, this is 2022, really good opportunity for some new tech, but I didn't know what. And so I went off and I interviewed almost 100 attorneys and just asked them like, what's going on in your day? What do you spend your time on? What's the first thing you do when you get to the office? Learned a ton about general life of an attorney, not just what I knew from my own experience. And came up with a bunch of different ideas, got them all broken out and broken down by many of my friends that were telling me, nope, not a good idea until we landed on one where we said, you know what? We, one of my friends said, let me tell you about my favorite client. And maybe listeners or maybe yourself, you remember a favorite one or two clients. And for this guy, it was, this guy came here, he would text me before and after every appointment. I never had to text him back. He would show up to the appointments and then write down what happened at the appointment. And then at the end of the case, he came in with a spreadsheet of every appointment he ever attended. He said, I basically printed off what he brought in, sent it to the insurance company and settled the case. It was fantastic. Like, well, that's cool. You know, like, wouldn't that be great if every client was, was that awesome? And then I said, well, tell me about your least favorite client. And he said, oh man, I got lots of those. They call too much. They don't call enough. They disappear for weeks at a time. They don't do the recommended treatment, you know, on and on the list. We all, we're all familiar with. It's like, man, that sparked the idea of what if instead of building tools for the attorney, I could build a tool for the client that helps the client do everything they're supposed to do so that the attorneys can focus on what only they can do. And tied in with my past life as a favorite of my case management time, helping clients. I was like, I can help clients do the stuff I was doing, but on scale. So we set off on this path of what Quilia has become, which is a tool for, for clients. It obviously integrates for the law firm and it obviously definitely helps the law firm, but it helps the clients do everything they do on the daily, weekly, monthly basis, logs it all into their own little app, their own little platform called Quilia. And then we shoot everything back into the case management software. So we're integration partners with all the case management softwares. And it allows the firms to offload a bunch of that, you know, what's going on with my case nonsense, because they know they are the ones filling in the case every day. So kind of a long backstory, but yeah, that's where we get to Quilia. So do they have to download the app, the clients? Is that the deal? Yeah, kind of. So the initial outlook is, you know, you're doing an intake at your firm. You decide you're going to take the case. That's important for privilege reasons and discoverability reasons. After you decide you're going to take the case, you click a button in your file line or whatever. It says invite to Quilia. The button sends a text message to the client. They have three options, really. They can either download the app on iOS or Android, or if they don't want to download an app on either of those, they can use it on the web. So it has all three versions. They plug in their phone number, they're logged in, and off to the races. They can start adding stuff to the case right away. Yeah. Does it give them any, does it prompt them in any way to remind them they need to do stuff, or is it just? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does. So an easy example, one of the things throughout my discovery process of researching and interviewing a ton of attorneys, I actually interviewed about 20 medical providers, because obviously they're critically important to the process as well. And I also interviewed some defense attorneys, because I wanted to get their opinion on the stuff we were building, to make sure, A, they couldn't rip it apart, but B, that we were actually poking holes that they couldn't patch. And one of the things that came up when I interviewed both medical providers and defense attorneys, as well as PI guys, but it came up really important for those two, were pain scores. And we all know pain scores are a defense attorney's best friend. They use them to prove that clients are faking it, because one day they reported a one, and the next day they were a nine, or maybe that afternoon they were a nine. Like, how could that actually be, how could that person actually be injured? And what we found was, through doing the research, it wasn't that the clients were lying, obviously. It was that they were either, A, getting different pain scores that were, you know, one doctor would say, here's your pain score, the next would say, one out of five, or one out of ten. And so they'd report accordingly. Or they've just simply forgot. Maybe they just didn't remember what they said yesterday when they reported their pain. And so what felt like an eight yesterday feels like a six today, even though it's the same pain level. So what we came up with was a pain score tracker. And it's the most simple example, but there's lots more, where clients can add their own pain score to the app. And it's not necessarily for the provider. We don't send it to the provider. We don't send it to the insurance attorney or the defense attorney. We train the client to know what their pain is so that when they do get asked, they're not necessarily relying on the form in front of them. They're saying, you know, I'm reporting a six every day. So they stay consistent and have better reporting throughout the life of the case. Who? Yeah. There's a lot more of that, like wage loss. I mean, I could get into lots of the different things that we take care of, but yeah, that's kind of the idea. Making sure they're doing everything on the regular basis. So it's more than just like communicating back and forth. It's really kind of like an aid for the client. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like there's some tools out there and we can talk about them, but there's some tools out there that do some really good updates to the clients. We have that too. You know, a phase changes inside of your case management software. You pre-write a message to the client that shoots out that says, now you're in the treatment phase. Here's what typically happens in the treatment phase. That's like super easy. We got to make sure we do that. We definitely have that built into the app. But for me and Ken, maybe you can help answer this. By the way, you got a great name. The firm doesn't change statuses all that often. How long does a typical treatment phase last? Anywhere from six weeks to a year. Yeah, right. It could take forever. So now you're thinking about those phase messages you're sending and one goes out at the beginning. Maybe you switch from intake to treatment. Hey, here's what to expect in the treatment phase. And then they don't hear from you for another nine, 12 months, maybe years later because that phase doesn't change after that. So that's a great feature, but it is only a feature. There's a lot more that happens inside of the case that the clients need to be updated on. And so we're sending them notifications, push notifications, text message notifications all the time saying, hey, appointments or pain or case journals or wage loss or property damage, all that stuff. And I'm bundling up in that phrase. It makes it sound like we're being a pest. We really take care to make sure the clients don't get annoyed by what we're doing. But they do know that they're an important part of the case and they have to participate in order for it to get the true value that they actually need out of it. So you started, did you start accounting in 2022? Did you start doing research about it, start thinking about it? I started research in January of 22, finally came up with the Quilia idea in August of 22, started building the product. We waited until we had, so some of the process, I didn't build anything until I had people lined up to say they were going to pay for it. Once we had that figured out, it was just napkin drawing stuff. I had people saying, is that available now? Like, no, but it's coming. So that's where we finally switched over to finally building. We built for about a year. We launched actually in July at a conference down there in Texas. And that was our first deployment. We quickly had to rebuild some code because it wasn't fast enough once we had real users on it, you know, typical tech stuff. And so we actually relaunched in May of last year, so a year ago, and then in August of last year, we started selling. So we've only been on the scene for a little more than six months. Okay, good deal. Yeah. Yeah, that's the timeline. And if somebody wanted to get a demo or talk to you about it, how's the best way for them to get up with you, Kenny? Yeah, we're on all the socials, all the networks, but the website's the best. It's Quilia, like a quill, Q-U-I-L-I-A. We do only have one L, and that's because in Spanish, if you say the name Q-U-I-L-L-I-A, it sounds like Quilia, which is a weird name. So we go with Quilia with one L dot com. You can request a demo. You'll get me on the phone, and we'll show you how it works. Okay. You know, Kenny, one of the things that we've talked about with other people is there is this concern, and maybe you're thinking about it yourself, that sometimes our clients won't use tools like this. We have experience with clients that says clients aren't technically savvy, or maybe they're not the smartest, you know, bunch, or maybe they, you know, don't do the stuff I'm already asking. A classic one we get is, I can't get my clients to use DocuSign, and why would they use Quilia? And we've really, really spent a ton of time on this question. You have those same concerns, probably. I can't say nod your head, like clients just won't use this sort of thing. Yeah, for sure. What's cool is, and if I can preach for a second, most of our clients these days know how to use apps. The vast majority are now using apps. They may be new technology to firms, but this is old technology to the rest of us. And so when we talk about clients using things like DocuSign as a comparison, I'd argue those are a little more complicated as you have to scroll and sign things on your phone. It makes it maybe a little more complicated, but a simple app that has buttons that are quickly pressable makes it super obvious. Most, if not all, clients are capable of doing that. We've found that the only people who can't do it are the ones that don't have smartphones. So if you're on a not smartphone, then obviously you don't have a web browser. Obviously, you can't use the apps. You can't use the website. You can't do any of that. So that's kind of our limiting factor. It doesn't matter age, demographic, language. One of our cool things is with language. The apps obviously translate it into pretty much any language, but you can sit and when the clients put their stuff in their first language, which is really nice for them, by the way, to be able to say, you know, in Spanish, how crappy their back feels. That saves, and in historical, you probably have you speaking to PI attorneys in general, probably have Spanish speaking assistants that would receive a message from the client. They would interpret it in their brain, and then they would write into the case management software the English version of what the client said. One of my favorites is in Spanish for lower back. In Spanish, they call it the cintura, which means waist in English. And that sounds really weird when you say, I have a hurt waist, like it doesn't really translate as well. But that's a simple version of where we say in English we hear, or in Spanish we hear lower back. In English we write waist, and now that's a different interpretation. Well, what's cool is when they enter the information in Spanish, it comes through in Spanish along with an English translation. So now you have both versions. You can cross-check and make sure that it's good against what the client was actually intending to say. So anyway, basically, back to the beginning of my story, the clients have always been my favorite and most important part of a case. And this is like the culmination of all of that effort to make the clients the most powerful tool you've got. They're the most important part of every case. And enabling them to do their part of the job, making it easy for them to do their part of the job, helps the case across the board. So, sorry, I'm ranting a lot. That's okay. No, you're doing good. So how do you charge for this? You charge by law firm, by client, by user? I'm open to feedback here, Ken. As we're learning, we've done the use per case route. I thought that was going to be a great route for PI attorneys because you could actually pass it off as a cost. But they weren't interested in that. So we've actually shifted the model. Now we just do a flat rate for the case. As a purchaser of software myself, I hate getting nickel and dimed on user licenses. You know, you only get this many. And so we do our talk at the beginning. We figure about how many active cases you have at any given time, which most attorneys know. So we're going to be able to do that. And then we just set the rate and that's it. You're locked in and you can add as many people as you want. Hopefully, hopefully you're succeeding and your case count is going up because you're able to do more. And I'm not going to punish you for that. So it just stays locked in for the firm. So it's a monthly fee then? Yeah, monthly, billed annually typically, but we can do monthly. Okay, cool deal. Cool deal. Yeah. So are you using any AI in this product or tell me what your thought is about AI? I love AI, Ken. What a great question. You're probably hearing that all the time from all the tools. I'm going to change our domain name to Quilia.ai just because it sounds better and everybody wants AI. One of the cool things about our product is that I'm a big AI fan. Used AI long before ChatGPT, machine learning back in the day. I mean, I've been way involved in the AI scene. And when we built this, we had AI in mind, but it was pre-ChatGPT. It was pre-LLMs. We had already started the whole company. And the unique positioning, all these AI companies, maybe you've seen this. A lot of my friends in the legal AI space are wrappers for ChatGPT, meaning ChatGPT itself can do the thing that you want it to do. But now you're paying a third party for this specific use case. And even worse, when that happens, eventually they realize ChatGPT does it or ChatGPT rolls out an update and now everything goes away. So what I'm getting to is we are using AI in a lot of ways, but my most important way we're using it is in the data side, which is the one constant that never changes. By having the client's data and information about what the clients are doing, then we can use whichever model. You can plug in your model of choice, pick your favorite, and we can have it analyze in real time and say, hey, you know what? Based on data collected across all the cases in your firm, clients that do this, this, and that tend to see better outcomes. And now we have this information that's not being collected anywhere else. Your firm is collecting it second-handed through the client telling the staff and documenting it in your case management. But straight from the client, we don't have anywhere else gathering that data. So our major AI play is the data we're collecting, which is going to feed the LLM of your choice down the road. So it's a unique play. I'm never going to get eaten up by ChatGPT because ChatGPT is just not going to collect this information from the clients. This is the tool, the platform that connects the client to the law firm and other parties. We have medical provider integrations, financing integrations, all kinds of stuff as we become a full platform. Okay. Yeah. I'm interested in this. And so on your website, do you have a demo or do you just… We used to have an online demo. People didn't like it as much. They like talking to people. So I usually jump on and do the demos or my sales guy will jump on and do the demo. We just had a new client sign up this morning right before I got done talking to you. So we're seeing a lot of growth right now. It's a good time. It's a good time. Congratulations. Congratulations. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I think anyway, anytime you can automate, you know, and anytime you can get the client more involved, you're going to have a better outcome. And there's an additional factor that's happening. You know, being around for a little while, you've seen the pressure that insurance companies are placing on settlement of values. And over time, back in the day when I was starting, my attorney who started, he started in 1969. He was awesome, old school Vegas guy, mobster guy. You know, he's been around forever. He would tell us how easily he would get three times meds. Like second phone call, he'd get three times meds. No problem on every case that walked through his door back in the day. And now insurance companies are pushing that down more and more and more. And we have to be extra strategic to help get those multiples on the meds that we all want. And what's interesting is as that pressure is happening, how are firms responding? Well, they are responding. They're responding in two ways. They're being more strategic on what happens in the medicals, what happens with the client, making sure the clients are doing what they're supposed to do, which we do offer support. And the other thing they're doing is they're looking at their costs and they're saying, can I do more with fewer staff? Can I have, you know, instead of 50 cases per case manager, can I do 70 or even 100? Can I do more with fewer staff? And we're kind of that sweet spot of both of those things where we're helping the clients be better at being clients, but we're also allowing you to take on more clients per staff because clients are doing more of the work. And all while, you know, we joke that we got the holy trinity of options, all while increasing the value of each case because clients are more participatory. So anyway, it's an interesting thing we've fallen into. I don't take the credit for it. We did the research. It was something that anybody could have come up with had they done the research like we did, but we've got a good thing going now. And we're hoping to take it a long ways. Good luck to you. I'm excited about this and I hope that our listeners and viewers will check it out and give us our feedback. Okay. For sure. Appreciate it. Yep. Anybody can hit me up. Kenny at Quilia.com. All right, my friend. Until next time, this is Ken Hardison dedicated to your success. You have been listening to the Grow Your Law Firm podcast, the podcast that leads lawyers to more growth, profit, and freedom. Go to growyourlawfirm.com to find more ways to market and manage your law firm. Please leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.