Power Up Your Practice Ep. 64: Seamless Client Communication (Full Episode)

Welcome to Power Up Your Practice, the go-to podcast for law firm owners and managing attorneys working on the business, not in it. I'm Ruby Powers, your guide into the heart of law practice management, bringing your insights from leading legal minds, trailblazing attorneys, and expert guests who provide practical perspectives on running your firm more effectively and efficiently. And before we dive in, I'm thrilled to announce that my new latest book, Power Up Your Practice, is out and available on Amazon. It's packed with actionable advice for growing a successful law firm. Be sure to grab your copy today. And don't forget to subscribe to our new letter for exclusive tips and resources. And if you're enjoying this podcast, we love your reviews. They help us reach more attorneys like you who are striving to build the practice of their dreams. Prepare to open your mind, be inspired, and Power Up Your Practice to the next level. Hi everyone, this is Ruby Powers, your guide through law practice management here at Power Up Your Practice. Excited to have our guest today. We have Kenny Eliason, and he's the CEO of Quilia. And we would love to talk through a little bit of a journey and talk about communication. He's been in the legal space for a while and learned some lessons from his career and how we can best apply them in our practice of law. So Kenny, thanks for joining us. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Yeah, excited to be here. Thanks for having me. I worked at a law firm for about a decade in the 2000s. And then actually through that experience, ended up enjoying it so much for some reason that I ended up going to law school. I only went to law school for one year though, and we can talk about that. That's a fun story. And then I got out and got into tech and development and marketing and became a developer. Worked on websites and did consulting for businesses around the country. And then full circle after doing that for a decade, my law life and my tech life came together. And here we are building a new tool for attorneys called Quilia. So that's the short story. We can talk about a lot though. There's a lot to unpack there. Oh yeah, there is a lot to unpack. Well, you said you did a lot in the marketing space. Why don't you just start wherever you want to start unpacking? Yeah, for sure. So when I was doing marketing, we were one of the first, we started in 2011 as a social media marketing agency, which you can take your time machine back to 2011. Social media was very new. We were one of the very first agencies to start promoting the use of businesses. It was the wild west. We'd have viral post after viral post, millions and millions of views because it was just so easy back then. It was like shooting fish in a barrel, as they say. And we took that for a decade. And I wasn't a developer originally. I was kind of a little hacker, but ended up becoming a developer out of necessity to help build websites for our clients. And yeah, over that time, I call it my business education, my business school, because what I loved about it the most, maybe you can relate to this Ruby, is not only was I able to use my knowledge to help businesses grow. It was really cool going into new businesses all the time and learning about how they did things and then using what I knew to kind of help make that better. Because every business is a little unique. They all have different ways of making money. And so for us in particular, we did businesses across every industry. And so from one business to the next, it was a different profit streams and money models and all those different things. And so we'd have to learn how they worked in order to build plans that would make the business succeed. So yeah, it was a fun time. I loved it. The company was called Neon Brand. It still exists. My old partner bought me out and is running that. And it's a good, good thing. But it's not my life anymore. Now I have shifted entirely. But yeah, I love marketing. That's, that's my baby. That was my passion for a long, long time. I love marketing too. And, and it's really interesting because like whatever, I remember discovering Google ads, like in April 2010, and be like, what? And then just, I was, when I normally talk or write or teach about marketing, it's like, there's like some things that are tried and true that never change. And then there's some things that do change and you have to keep up to date with what's going on. And, and the trick is figuring out which ones are the ones that stay the same and which ones change. For sure. Which ones, and then on top of that, I'll give you one more, which ones are the ones that are going to stay because so many come all the time. And you're just like, I got to try this tactic and this tactic. And it's like, you could be spending a lot of time on that. Yeah. Like when Tik Tok came out, I asked my SEO guy, I was like, should I do Tik Tok videos? He was like, no, just stick to YouTube shorts. And I'm like, I wish I wouldn't have listened to him. And I, I mean, you know, I mean, it's also like crystal ball, like who has a crystal ball, but like the more, I think you are in an industry, the more you can start seeing the tea leaves, as they say, or like, can start seeing the potential trends in the future. And, and sometimes you get it wrong, you know, but, but anyway, what's cool is like so many, like, there's so many new cool things that happen all the time, but like the, the tried and true things are always there. Lots of times we get caught up in the get rich quick ideas, like, Oh man, we're going to get a million views. If we jumped to Tik Tok right now, that's not necessarily true. It's stuff that lasts really stuff that lasts is what really makes the difference. And it's those that survive it over a long period of time that ultimately come out with the spoils. So it's a, it's a fun business. It requires a lot of, uh, stamina. I mean, it was sad when we'd have clients that come to us and they'd want something overnight and they think, you know, I heard of a guy that got it done in two weeks and I want that too. And you have to kind of bring them back down to reality and say, no, but there are some really good opportunities here. If we do it the longterm, you probably also deal with, this is my other favorite thing. Um, helping businesses figure out how to optimize their funnel, because there's one thing to bring in the clients, one thing to bring them in. Like, that's great. But so many times, and this is what got us more into the consulting side. Eventually it was, we deliver all these clients and they'd go to somewhere in the company. And then six months later, they'd be like, you guys haven't sent us a thing. Like, wait, no, we have, we've sent you a lot. Wait, what's your funnel like? And then sure enough, it'd be like, Oh, we got to help you on that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Where are these leads going? Who's answering the phones? What does that call sound like all the way through? Because if you don't have that second half, it doesn't matter what you plug into it. The second half will blow it all up. Right. Same SEO guy told me, he says, Ruby, I can get your phone to ring, but what you do afterwards, that's on you. Good point. And when I was in a consulting session recently, I was like, you know, before you really was what another consultant had told me, like, before you put the fire on marketing, you really need to make sure your systems are in place that you can handle what comes in. And also you don't have like a leaky funnel or bucket or whatever analogy would run with. Yeah. And then I think along the same lines, I'm determining the ROI. It's, well, where are people coming from? Who's your ideal client avatar? And, you know, what is the process and cleaning? Like, let's just like, what are some of the things you do when you're consulting on cleaning up the funnel? Like, what are some of the questions you ask or indications that you look at? Yeah, for sure. The big overarching theme is marketing isn't an activity. It's a mindset. And it flows from that initial display ad all the way through closing a case. And it's always evolving. And so like, you can't just turn it on and then hope it's working because some of the sad stuff is you'll set up a program. You think the funnel works and then you get six months down the road and you realize one of your phone numbers went down three months ago. Like the lead stop, but your phone number's not ringing through like it used to. And you didn't pick up on it because you weren't monitoring. And it's hard to monitor all that stuff for sure. Yeah. But there's ways to keep places. And that goes back to the mindset idea. It's like, okay, every day I'm thinking is by marketing funnel working, am I seeing leads or am I at least seeing traffic? Maybe you have a checklist that you run through, takes a couple minutes, you know, once a week is, are these 10 things still working? You know, are they turned on as the computer that accepts the leads still accepting leads is the form on our website. How many times this was a classic, the form just stops working and nobody knows like the for the contact form. It's just not even there. It's not even displaying anymore. It's like, yeah, I don't know how long has it been like that? Like, you got to just kind of have a list of things to make sure you're staying online, making sure things to keep working. But I agree. I agree with all of that. I feel like I've done all of that. Yeah. Like we sort of had the office manager was in charge. Um, this is like a year or so ago of marketing, like a high level marketing, like to keep the assistance and check and monitoring. And then it's just too much for her. So I took it over, which is sort of ridiculous. Cause like, I'm probably, I'm pretty busy, but anyway, I love marketing. So I was like, okay. So then I just was starting to go into each of the different things. I was like, wait, you guys told me that the, um, automation for the forms was going to the email newsletter and then it wasn't, or like, you know what, everything you just said, like you just, and if you, if somebody makes a change here, it could alter drastically alter the flow or an automation somewhere else. And if people aren't seeing, if nobody's checking the big picture, but yeah, that's, that's really important. Or like, are you monitoring the stupid Google, my business on a regular basis? And they're always adding darn features. And like, are you responding? Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot. And then on top of that, usually like at the firms or businesses that we'd work with, they would hire separate people. Usually like you hire an SEO guy, you hire a social media guy, you hire a website guy, and they're not communicating in the same spot. And that was one of our big advices was like, Hey, we're going to get everybody in the same room so that everybody knows what's going on. We're not going to step on each other's toes. Lots of times the SEO guy may be posting. And so your host may not want to, you know, is worried about you taking that, but really they have to talk because they're setting up pixels and tracking codes and all these things that you care nothing about. But they're super, super important to your business. They have to be able to talk to each other to be able to get that done. And hopefully you get people that are nice and play together. Well, that's a, that's, that's true. That's so deja vu right now. Yeah. We, the same thing. I was like, okay, they were just sort of on autopilot at times where they were just sort of like, give me a report and thought that the job was done. I was like, no, no, we need to like have meetings. We're going to get everybody on the same page because somebody was doing something over here that didn't know the other one was doing it. But, and the other thing I think it's important for law firms is to make sure that whoever's touching or working on your marketing has worked with law firms before, because there's just something about the ethics and just, there's just certain way of wording things as well. If they don't have that experience. Yeah, for sure. I'll give one more, one more tip that comes to mind as, as things have evolved and not to make, probably every podcast comes down to an AI conversation at some point. But as I, as I strategize my own business now, because I'm doing my own stuff every day, I just spent the past week setting up my own pixels and flow and making sure everything's working the way it's supposed to work. And it took a ton of time to do that. But the reason I was able to do it is because I was using ChatGPT as a guide to get stuff done. And so you may not be in doing pixels, but maybe you want to just make sure your marketing funnel is working right. And so you go into ChatGPT with a quick prompt. Hey, I'm working on, I'm a lawyer. I have a website. I get ads from, or I get leads from Google ads and Facebook. How do I make sure it's working? And it'll just bust out a list of checkpoints that you should check. Go to your Facebook page, click here, make sure your leads are on, go to your Google listing, go here, make sure your listings are working, make sure your phone number works. It'll walk you through it. So use it as a tool. And then, and then I keep that thread running is what I would probably do and go back to it again in a couple of weeks and say, Hey, I need to check on this again, run me through it one more time. And just use that as a way to keep up on the systems because otherwise it's, it's confusing. It's a lot. I mean, anybody who's listening to this, that's not a marketer, like you or me or business consultant is thinking that sounds like a ton of work and I don't blame them. It is a lot of work, lots of times, but ChatGPT can really simplify it for us. Yeah, definitely lean into that as a resource. So then after the marketing, you said you went into the consulting side or what was the next? Well, yeah. So about halfway through my decade of marketing and web development, I had a business consultant friend who was consulting a ton of businesses and he and I had a big shared clientele. Most of my clients that were, had a business consultant were using him and he in the reverse. And so we said, you know what, every time we have consulting matched with our marketing, our ROI increases on our, on our deliverables, because we can make sure not only that we're getting the clients to the door, but that once they get to the door that they actually become clients, that was the consulting side. And so we ended up actually joining together and becoming partners. And that way we could offer end to end client, you know, he was in the offices, making sure phone systems worked, training phone answers, you know, making sure the reports were working on where sales were going. The CRMs were tracking everybody. And I was dumping as many people into the funnel as I could. So it really helps having the two people work together. I mean, and if you're not using the same company for those two services, then just having that person in the conversation of the marketing makes it big deal because that way you can know what to expect and then know how to handle it when it gets there. So it made a big difference for us long-term. Oh, that's awesome. I also see like, side note, you, you're an adjunct professor at, what do you teach at the University of Nevada? Oh yeah, UNLV. Yeah, UNLV here, go Rebs. Um, the, uh, a couple of years ago, so through my evolution of crazy things I've done, I owned a co-working space here in town called work in progress and it was the startup hub and everybody that was building there, there's, there was this really crazy startup phase. It happened around Zappos and Tony Hsieh and $500 million and all this crazy stuff that happened in Vegas. And we owned the co-working space where a lot of that was happening. So I got pulled into startups and I helped build websites for them and stuff and consulting and things. But through that, I got really involved in just like what it takes to run a startup, what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Obviously I was an entrepreneur myself, but now I was working with entrepreneurs really, really closely. And one of my friends was teaching at UNLV and he said, you should be an adjunct down there. It's like, no way. And so anyway, one thing leads to another, I got sucked into being an adjunct for, what do I teach now? Um, something entrepreneurial, uh, it's called, I think it's just called starting entrepreneurial organizations. That's what it's called. Start entrepreneurial organizations. And so I teach, it's a part of a minor business minor or something. And, uh, I teach kids how to, how to identify, build and create value for, uh, for startups. So it's fun. I do it and I do it. It's a, it's a good time. It's a good experience. It keeps me sharp. You know, before I did that, I taught meetups. So I was an SEO guy, a social media guy, and the meetup scene was really popular here. I don't know what it was like elsewhere, but, um, I would host a monthly meetup. I would teach a class every month, uh, hour long class on one on social media, one on SEO, and I'd have 60 people come and listen to my, my meetup lecture things. And so this is kind of the evolution. I taught that for a long time, and now I'm teaching at UNLV. So that is a crazy, crazy part of the story. Well, you know, I, I, I mentioned that because I, um, I, I teach law off. It's, it's called office management, but I heard that if we change the title, I would take an act of Congress apparently. So I would call it law practice management if I had a choice, but anyway, um, I, I've taught it five semesters and it's, I love it because I feel like it's a, like an incubator for ideas and sort of like what's going on in real time. And then I'm like, I'm doing the podcast, I'm writing, I'm speaking, and then I'm teaching. And then like, that's cool. Sort of like creating all the, yeah, exactly. And then, and then I have a lot of guests on the podcast and in the class. And so then I'm getting to hear from their perspective, what they're seeing. And so then that keeps me on top of things. And it's, it's, I'm loving it, honestly. Who's your typical student at a class like that? Is it? Well, they're law students. But they're second and third years. And so, you know, they're either like a semester or two away from graduating. Yeah. This is one of my, my most important things about law school. As I said, I went for a year. It was fun. I love it. Um, but I didn't end up finishing, but I always joke, you know, like, and other people probably do too. The LSAT doesn't teach you anything you need to know for law school. Law school doesn't teach you anything you need to know for the bar and the bar doesn't teach you anything you need to know for actually running a law firm. Um, but like more about practice management is what these law students need. Cause so many end up trying to run a practice and it's not law. It's a different thing. It's a business education. You gotta have like, know how to business, how to run a business. Yeah. And then the law is like what you're selling. So that's really cool. That sounds like a beneficial class for law students for sure. No, I'm really excited and I'm probably going to teach at another law school and alternate or something pretty soon. So I'm, you know, just share the love and have a bigger reach, but, um, back to Quilia. And, um, so how did you get, what was the journey there? And yeah, let's talk about that. So I, I, uh, it starts back in 2004, a long time ago. I can't believe how long ago that was. When I moved back to Las Vegas, I went on a Mormon mission and I spoke Spanish and I came back to Vegas and I had no job and I needed somewhere to work. And somebody said, Hey, there's a law firm that's hiring Spanish speakers. You want to do it? I was like, sure. I had no idea. Never had ever done anything with law. Uh, it was the last thing I was ever going to do. Ended up starting there, ended up loving it, loved working with the Spanish clients. It was, it was fantastic. Loved the law side of it. Ended up doing pretty much everything inside the law firm. Um, even did some hearing advocacy for, uh, for clients that didn't require a represent the licensed representative. So did all kinds of stuff. And, uh, my favorite part though, was working with the clients. So then I go to law school that fell, falls out after a year. Didn't want to be a case manager for the rest of my life, started the marketing development agency. And then 10 years later, a little more than that, um, my agency was actually doing better than it had ever done. And, but we were on a skeleton crew because of COVID. And so it was crazy because we had gone from like almost 20 people at our agency to like four or five, making more money than ever, but with way fewer people. And my trend of life career patterns is I love working with people. And I wasn't getting to fulfill that very much. I had a small team, everybody was remote. So I kind of started looking around and I got a message from one of my old bosses that said, Hey, they were thinking about building a case management software, you know, like Filevine and CasePure and my case, whatever, Clio. And they wanted me to come look at what they had built already. And potentially help take it to market. So I looked at what they built. It was really cool. And then I demoed every case management software that existed. And then I, my, my summary was whatever, however cool the software you're building is doesn't compete with how far along these other companies are. And, and by now Clio's raised 300 million, Filevine raised a hundred million. I mean, these guys are raising insane amounts of money. So I wasn't going to compete in that space, but I said, there are, there is a real opportunity here for some technology. I didn't know what at that point that we were going to build, but I knew I wanted to build something for legal. I had learned that law historically, and I knew this before, when I worked at the firm, but law historically trailed behind on the technology. And it was always a little, you know, five to even 10 years behind what the rest of the market was actually doing. And because of COVID, everybody in law got slung forward about 10 years into the future because now everybody had to have technology that was allowing clients to be remote and not be person and all that good stuff. And so it presented a really interesting opportunity for some legal tech to be made. And so from there, I set off on a research project for almost a year. I interviewed almost a hundred attorneys. I was mostly focused on personal injury at the time. And so a hundred personal injury attorneys, almost 50 medical providers that worked within the personal injury space, about 20 body shops. And my only goal at that point was to learn. I wasn't selling anything. And so some of the questions I'd go in, I luckily get a meeting with an attorney and I'd say, what's the first thing you do when you get to the office? And they'd say, oh, I say hello to my receptionist. Oh, cool. Do you get a coffee? You know, and kind of just figured out what was going on. And then I started to see some patterns and I mean, I can get really in the weeds, but really started to see some good stuff come out and went through seven different ideas over that year of things we potentially would make. And then had some good meetings where people said, hey, that idea can, is it built right now? Can we have it? I said, no, it's not, but we will. And that was the indicator to get to work. And so we started building the product that became Julia after that. So that's a struggle. There's a lot of cool stuff I learned from that research though. That was a really good time spending learning. I don't think anybody else has had, anybody I know has had that much access to people to really learn about the space. I became a little expert of the space. Because I knew, I knew everything. I knew what all these guys were doing. That's cool. Are you finding yourself overwhelmed with handling phone calls and spending endless hours on consultations that just don't qualify? Well, let me introduce you to Staffy Live, your ultimate solution for 24-7 live receptionist and intake services tailored specifically for law firms. Now picture this, empathetic, truly bilingual specialist, you understand the intricacies of client care and are experts at asking all the right questions to qualifying callers effectively. Now that staff with Staffy Live, you'll feel like you have a trusted partner for your side, ensuring only qualified consultations make it on your calendar and providing valuable follow-ups when needed. As someone who's been using Staffy Live for my own law firm, I couldn't be happier. And I guess what Staffy Live is now offering, um, a generous 15-day free trial with no strings attached. You can head over to staffy.cc. That's S-T-A-F-I.cc and click get started. And don't forget to use the code Ruby. R-U-B-Y, your future self. Well, thank you. Well, um, on a podcast I was on recently, they asked me like what, um, besides email, what something, or I don't know what they said, besides something, like what do you spend a lot of time on in your, or in the, in whatever. And I was just like collecting documents from clients is one. Yeah. And there's, there's email. Yeah. And you know, just, and then, uh, because like we have the technology can almost do anything now. It's just a matter of like getting it to do what you need it to do and, and the process. So tell us more about, yeah. Yeah. And to tie into that and what you were about to ask, sorry. Um, right now the communication methods that have, that have existed and that we've been thrust into because of COVID era, um, you know, they're, they're good. They're just kind of just scattered. We've got old school phones, which is surprising how many firms are still only using the phone and not the texting part, just the calling part to communicate with clients. That happens a lot. So you're feeling like that's you, you're not alone. And then there's the, the next level, which is texting, which really only came out of the scene, probably in 2017, 2016, when attorneys finally started adopting texting in mass. And so we've got a lot more people texting. Then we've got, you know, in-person visits, which have been around for forever. And then COVID pushed us into zoom meetings. And so we have all these ways of collecting information from clients, which have worked historically and they are never, never bad. They just come with a large labor cost associated with them. Each one of those require humans on both sides, um, to do something, be present in the zoom meeting, schedule the zoom meeting, schedule the, the in-person meeting, or just text back and forth in the time that that takes. And there hasn't been really ways to just collect things automatically. And, you know, everybody knows that number one bar complaint is lack of client or lack of communication with the client. That's what they all complain about. And so what we set out to figure out was, is there a way we could help solve that problem of, of clients feeling like they don't hear from their attorneys enough, while also improving the quality and the outputs of every case that, that comes through a law firm. So we started focusing actually to back up before I say that, one of the things that your listeners may also agree with that I learned through my research was law firms, hate changing software. They hate it. If you, do you have to introduce a new software? Forget it. They, the, the angst that it causes, I mean, if they've gone through a case management migration, which a lot of them have by this point, man, it just, it'll send them to the grave. They just don't want to do it. And so when I was doing the research, I learned that. And I had a few ideas that was going to help law firms do their job better. And I was thinking, and, and as I learned that over and over again, I was like, I can't introduce another software for a firm. The adoption will just be too hard for them to actually adopt fully. And, uh, more to the story, I was interviewing one of my buddies and it was kind of after he was like one of the hundredth interviews and I was kind of out of ideas. I was a little burned out. And he said, let me tell you about my favorite client. So my favorite client texted me updates all the time throughout the case. Let me know what was going on, but he never expected me to text him back. It was great. He just kept me updated. Like, don't worry about messaging me back. Just let me know what's going on. Cool. At the end of the case, he showed up with a spreadsheet of everything that had been done on the case. It was all laid out perfectly. And he said, basically all I did at the end of the case was took the papers and sent it off and we settled it up. It was dumb. I was like, yeah, that's really fancy. Like not every client is going to be that on top of things. That's just not how clients are most of the time. And then I said, tell me about your least favorite client. And he did one of those. Oh man. Oh, I got lots of those. They call too much. They don't call enough. They disappear for weeks on end. They never give me the stuff I need. And he listed off all these problems that I could relate to because I was in that firm for 10 years. I was like, yeah, that's right. And so my whole perspective from helping the law firm switched, I wasn't going to introduce a software that helped the firm because there's lots of those that do that. And we don't like switching softwares to what if I could help the clients just do their job better and meet the goals of feeling like they're getting communicated with, you know, push notifications, automatic reminders, things that the clients get a ding on their phone. It's me telling them to just do something on the app that they need to do, but it feels like it's the law firm. So they feel like they're getting communicated with regularly. It solves that problem of lack of communication while also getting more information into a case and allowing them to document it all. And then of course we just send it all back to the law firms. So really helping the clients back to the many old school modes that require two people to take time to communicate. This is a one-sided communication tool for the clients who are often underutilized participants on a case. They want to help. They just don't know how. So we enabled them to help and now they feel like they're communicated with and the case improves anyways. I don't want to make this a sales pitch or anything, but that was like the big part about what we did is like, you know, clients, we can help clients. Let's hope the clients do their job better and everybody will be better because of it. So that's, that's the evolution there. Oh, wow. That's awesome. And I see on the website, you guys integrate with Filevine, Clio, MyCase, Smokeball, Case Pure. So, and coming soon, Lawmatics and Salesforce and Litify and a lot of Zapier integrations. That's awesome. To that point, it was like, I don't want to make attorneys come to use our software. It's shows all up inside of there. So they're already used to use the Filevine or whatever. That's where they stay. And so, yeah, that was a big part of what we put together. And a lot of the case types that you work for are more personal injury. We started with personal injury. That was because that was what I knew best. And we're expanding rapidly into a lot of more, a lot more areas. We have a firm that's not listed on our website yet. We have a firm using it for family law. We have a firm using it for some criminal stuff. Basically, our mission is signature from signature, meaning sign up through disbursement. And so anything that can happen along that path, we are optimizing all the way for personal injury firm, you know, a disbursement comes through, they approve it, money transfers, no more paper checks. That was something I learned. You'd be surprised how many personal injury attorneys sit at the beginning of their day and they look at a stack of checks on their table and they sign them one at a time for 30 or 45 minutes every single morning. It's crazy. So fixing that is one of our things. So signature disbursement. But for any case type, helping the clients do everything they're supposed to do. So and just like before we start transitioning to close, but like what can you give like a concrete example of like what, like how it can use helps the client like and how does it be like an add on, I guess, to an existing case management program? For sure. Yeah, I can give I can give a bunch of examples. I'll try to get some high level ones. I'll start with personal injury and then I'll give you some generic ones that apply across the board. But with personal injury tracking appointments for clients, they go to the doctor a lot. That's something that is very labor intensive. If you were to find out every time a client went to an appointment, you'd be calling a client multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. It's really hard to track. We enabled clients to add all of that automatically. So you get notified every time they come. We send the client reminders to make sure they log it, make sure they tell you what happened at the point, make sure they scheduled the next appointment all automatically without anybody lifting a finger at the law firm. And now all of a sudden at the end of the case, like my buddy who said had his buddy show has guys show up with settlement or a spreadsheet. Now you just open it up and there's everything that the client's done right there in the app, and you haven't had to do anything to get it. So that's like a pretty high level one. But probably on the day to day for everybody document collection and just notes for family law. There's a ton of stuff that happens in a divorce case, maybe a child custody case where the husband or the wife is telling the lawyer he or she's late again, didn't get a pickup, you know, all these things that are happening all the time on a custody case. Right now they're texting them to the law firm, which is fine, that gets them there. But now law firm is getting a ding every time and the law firm doesn't have to do everything, doesn't have to do anything. They just have to have it documented. So this gives the client the ability to put that into the log, tell them what's going on. Law firm receives it not as a text message, but as a notification inside of the case management software. And now when it becomes time, it comes time for a hearing or whatever they need to go to, they can say, look, here's the history of what has happened. And it's all stored right here inside of the case band. It makes it really easy to document and track everything. Of course, uploading images, uploading files, all of that's handled as well. It's that right into the case management system. It's almost sort of like the client facing version of what the law firm sees where we put our notes and everything, but one that they can put, and then it's, we can see what's going on, I guess you could say. You're making the comparison. I call it, there's case management for law firms, and this is client management for clients. So it's, if, back in the day, if you, if you've been doing it for a while, I remember when clients would show up with their giant manila envelope of everything that was going on in their case, that was their case file. You know, they'd walk in, they'd be all proud. I mean, newsflash, that still happens in 2015. It still happens, right? Yeah, for sure. You used to have a lot more. It still happens. This is the digital equivalent of that file that the attorney has access to 24 seven. And so now instead of putting stuff into that paper file, they're just taking pictures, aggregating it all for them. It's just on their phone. They get to see it all in one place for you. You get access to it whenever they add to it. So, yeah. And so in all of that, it helps decrease the, the bar complaints, the misunderstandings, the miscommunication, the, all of that, because everyone should, has more means to communicate more readily and, and the time to do so, and hopefully cuts down on unnecessary emails, which, I mean, seriously, you could just spend your whole, all your days just doing emails, not getting any work, work done. If, if you, if you let it, unfortunately. Perfect explanation, Ruby. You're hired. Let's get to work. I didn't even know I was at a job interview, but. I was kidding. I was kidding. Well, yeah, that's it. Yeah. No, no, but it's so true. Like we're using like an email, a program called candle AI. We're trying to like find ways to minimize like the amount of time our client, our assistants are using. Cause like, it's like, if you just stop asking me this question, I could actually do the work, you know, I love you, but you know, it's true. I mean, life's busy. The only, the only thing that doesn't scale is our time. And so we got to find ways to make that time stretch further. And this is one of those where it's like, man, there's so much minutia that happens on a case that staff has to do right now. We can shift that over to the very willing clients who are willing to do it at no charge, by the way, you don't have to pay them to do this work. They just going to document it for you. It's a huge time savings on the firm and a huge case value improvement over the longterm of the file. So, and actually, okay, before I start asking you the fun last questions, it reminds me of something I saw when I was doing some national park tours during the pandemic, it was like, I started seeing self checkout or self ordering at the menu or a lot of leveraging the client or the customer's time and effort. It seems a lot more like that. And I was thinking, what's the self checkout in law? And I think it's having clients upload or complete answering questionnaire, which they would have to do anyway, but making it more simple as opposed to attaching a whole bunch of emails or stopping by and expecting us to scan a whole bunch of things, because it's also labeling the document and putting, organizing it. There's a lot of time spent there too. Yeah. It's pretty cool because clients, we use phones all the time. Like it's just second nature. There's an app for everything, right? And so why isn't there an app for the case? It's where I can help you organize everything that I'm giving you. They actually do some of that organization. It's really slick how it works out. Yeah. It's just how, it's just how we anticipate things will be in the future is easy on an app. So. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and the other thing is they're seeing more ease of use in other industries. And like you said, the law legal is always way behind, but we did have a leap towards the future during the pandemic. And I hope we keep more present and more in line with the rest of the industries, but you know, they can't, they, they want us to be like Amazon and other, you know, or the Domino's pizza tracker. They want us to, and Netflix that where you barely talk to a human, they, they don't, they, you know, they, they want to be able to communicate and know what's going on and not have to have a lot of back and forth. Um, so what's your favorite board game? Oh, my favorite board games. That's a fun question because my wife loves playing games and my kids love playing games. And I'm usually the curmudgeon that says, I don't want to play a board game. My favorite go-to though, if they're going to make me play a board game, oh, does card, do card games count? Yeah. Yeah. Phase 10 is usually the one I'll be like, okay, I'll play phase 10 with everybody. I can handle phase 10 for a little while. You know what phase 10 is? Uh-uh. It's a, it's not like a, it's not like a playing card game. It's a specific card game where you have to like do special runs and matching and duplicates. It's, it's pretty good. Um, I'll play that one. I'll look, I'll look it up. Okay. Yeah. Check it out. What, what is your superpower? Hmm. My superpower. Um, that's a good one. I, I, how do you say it without sounding, sounding prideful or cocky? Um, I have a lot of empathy for people. It's a, it's a definitely a gift. And so when I have, when I did the research portion, when I was talking to attorneys, when I was working with clients, I really have a unique gift of being able to like feel for people's situations. And I think that helps drives a lot of my decision-making where I'm trying to help solve those problems for people because I feel the real pain point for them. And so that kind of, that kind of becomes my superpower. Maybe, I don't know. Everybody has that before, but I think that does help influence a lot of what I do. So yeah, it is. Um, I think I have a lot of that too. Uh, what's a habit that contributes to your success? So aside from never stopping working ever, because I just have, that's just what I think about all the time. Um, I, when I started being an entrepreneur now, 15 years ago, almost, um, I had somebody tell me about managing my time. And he said, if you can't, as a business owner, if you can't get it done in 40 hours, you're probably doing something wrong. And he was talking to, you know, being present when I go home and trying not to work all the time. And so that's probably a habit. I don't, I, I try real hard and I get there most of the time, not always. Um, but I try to, you know, 40 hours is a long time. I should be able to get a lot done. So I really try to focus while I'm at work to get work done. And then when I go home, I try to turn work off. It doesn't always work that way, but that's one of the habits. It's a good reminder for entrepreneurs. It's hard. Um, what's a favorite book or podcast you're like, Oh my gosh, I really want everyone to know about this. Maybe an oldie favorite or one you're reading or listening to. Yeah. I got a few books. One of my favorite old, my, one of my oldest favorite books is called execution and it's, um, by, uh, Ramaswamy. I think this is who did it. I can't remember. Um, but there's a lot of wisdom in just getting crap done. And that's kind of what the whole book is about. You know, work, get this, get the work done. Don't sit and wait and think about doing the work, get the work done. And so that's, that's a favorite execution. And then podcast. I love all in podcast, all of those guys for a long, long time. That's probably my go-to number one that I get most, uh, excited about when it comes up. All in all in all. Okay. Dash in podcasts. So it's kind of a start. It started being a startup podcast and venture funding and all this stuff, which is why I got into it at the beginning. It's evolved into a little bit more political than some people might like, but I, uh, I really like the four guys that run it. And so it's a good one. Okay. And the execution is the discipline of getting things done by Larry off city and Ram Sharon or something like Ram Sharon. That's it. I said, Ram Swamy. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Um, how can people find you connect after this podcast? I am on LinkedIn. I try to be active there. Like every good startup person tries to be, um, I'm on LinkedIn, just Kenny Eliason and then, uh, Quilia.com q u i l i a.com. Kenny at Quilia.com. I'm around. You can find me. Awesome. Well, Kenny was great connecting with you. Um, thanks for reaching out. Yeah. And I'm great for, you know, asking those questions and trying to solve a common problem that a lot of law firms, um, with their clients are, are facing. And, um, you know, I think that the more you're in the space and you ask questions and you're trying to solve those, those pain points, the, the more you can continue to, to create those solutions. And that's, that's awesome. Um, yeah, well, um, great connecting. Um, thanks everyone for listening. Uh, we've got, um, I think, I don't know if I said this, but power up your practice. The book is on Kindle form or e-reader now on Amazon. So that's late breaking the last couple of weeks. And, um, I'll be at some conferences coming up this summer in the fall, but, um, thanks for listening and we'll see you next time. Thank you for tuning into the power up your practice law practice management podcast. I'm your host Ruby powers, and it's been a pleasure sharing this time with you. If you've enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to leave us for review, tell someone else about us. And I would love to get this podcast shared with others to reach more listeners. Like you don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter for exclusive content tips and updates straight to your inbox and exciting news. Our book, the power up your practice is out and available on Amazon. It's packed with strategies, 25 chapters, uh, to help you elevate your practice and achieve your goals. So join us next week as we dive into more advice and insight on law practice management. We'll see you next time.