In this episode, Steve Fretzin and Jay McAllister discuss:
- The evolving role of AI in legal practice
- Leveraging AI for business development and marketing
- Ethical and risk considerations when using AI in law
- The future of legal technology and the rise of agentic AI
Key Takeaways:
- Many law firms have shifted from traditional keyword-based legal research to AI-powered tools that analyze case law and provide curated, context-aware results, significantly reducing time spent on research.
- Insurance carriers and other clients are leveraging data analytics and AI to challenge the hours law firms bill, forcing firms to adopt more efficient AI-driven workflows.
- A Stanford AI ethics professor submitted a legal brief with fabricated citations generated by AI, leading the judge to reject it outright and issue a warning that lawyers must verify AI-generated content before submitting it to court.
- Future AI systems will not only respond to queries but proactively complete legal tasks by recognizing key case milestones, drafting motions automatically, and sending them for attorney review.
“There were jobs that were lost, but ultimately, I don’t think of it as a job that was lost. These jobs were transitioned to perform more useful, more useful activities.” — Jay McAllister
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Rankings.io: https://rankings.io/
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Episode References:
The Game with Alex Hormozi: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-game-with-alex-hormozi/id1254720112
$100M Offers by Alex Hormozi: https://www.amazon.com/100M-Offers-People-Stupid-Saying/dp/1737475731
About Jay McAllister: Jay McAllister is the CEO of Paragon Tech. Driven by an unquenchable thirst for applied learning and innovation, Jay helps lawyers get the most out of their technology. In other words, they go from low-tech and busy to high-tech and productive.
Connect with Jay McAllister:
Website: http://paragontechit.com/
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaymcallisterit/
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Website: Fretzin.com
Email: [email protected]
Book: Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science and more!
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Steve Fretzin: [00:00:00] Hey everybody, before we get to the show, I wanted to announce that your favorite podcast and mine, Be That Lawyer, is now syndicated on Above the Law. You can find it on their website, all of our new episodes, as well as my monthly column. I appreciate your listening and loyalty. Please don’t keep our show a secret.
Please tell a friend and let’s make sure that Be That Lawyer continues to grow and be the go to podcast for lawyers all over the world. Thanks and enjoy today’s episode.
Narrator: You’re listening to Be That Lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Each episode, your host, author and lawyer coach, Steve Fretzin, will take a deeper dive, helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results. Now, here’s your host, Steve Fretzin.
Steve Fretzin: Hey everybody, welcome back. It is Steve Fretzin and this is the Be That Lawyer with Fretzin podcast. We are here for helping you be that lawyer. [00:01:00] Confident, organized, and a skilled rainmaker. If you are hearing about Fretzin for the first time, we work with attorneys all over the world, helping them to dramatically grow their law practices.
And, business development is a great thing to focus on. As lawyers don’t learn that in law school or at the law firm level. And I just, I spent all my time doing that. And then I get the pleasure of interviewing all these amazing folks from around the world that do technology and operations and finance and all the stuff that I don’t want to do and have no interest in.
And when you find someone absolutely special that really gets it, you want to bring them on the show. And Jay, I think this is your second time. I think this would be number three. Oh, number three. I thought maybe we’re going to have to cut
Jay McAllister: this
Steve Fretzin: short. I don’t allow third, three timers. But thanks for stopping by.
No, we’re going to have some fun with Jay today, guys. I had Jay speak at my peer advisory group, my rainmaker round table, and man, he just crushed it. There were lawyers asking all kinds of very technical questions and really interested in automations, and Jay didn’t miss a beat. And we’re going to see if [00:02:00] he can double down on our podcast today.
So let’s start off with our quote of the show, Jay. And that is Archimedes who said, give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum to place it on. And I shall move the world. Welcome to the show again. And tell us a little bit about why you love that quote.
Jay McAllister: It’s all about leverage. So everything that I do on a day to day basis is about.
maximizing the amount of leverage that attorneys have at their disposal in order to perform useful tasks. So AI folds directly into that. I was so thrilled when three or four years ago, AI started to make a larger splash into the scene because it was finally ready to be used in a legal setting. You’ll hear me speak all the time about people focus, especially attorneys on the hallucination aspect of AI.
But my belief is that it is absolutely good enough to serve a utility for the legal profession.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah, it’s I get a lot out of it because I think what we’re saying in this and what he’s saying in that quote is, let’s figure out a solution. Let’s figure out what is it going to take [00:03:00] to make, something move and how do we do it?
And we work backwards from there. What do we want to accomplish? And then let’s work back on how we have to do it. And that’s a lot of legal tech, I think right now. And a lot of AI, it’s like, we think it’s about all these cool things we want to do. And then we back into like, how is this going to do it?
But Jay, give us a little bit of background on yourself, everybody. Jay McAllister, Tech. And this is, you have one of the more interesting. backgrounds and how you got into working with lawyers. I think, you rolled some dice or something.
Jay McAllister: Yeah. I’ve been a skeptic my entire life and I always thought it was a negative trait.
So as I started to go through life, always as a kid, I would question everything. And my father, he was actually a big reason why I think I do the work that I do not because he’s in also works in technology, although he would like to believe so, but it was actually because the fact that he fueled my curiosity by actually giving me.
Adults responses to adult questions that I would ask, Hey, dad, why do we need to wear seatbelts in the car? This is like when I’m six years old, right? And he told me back in the sixties and seventies, there were so many people who [00:04:00] were ejected out of their vehicles. And you would think you’re telling a kid that, but it gave me such an understanding, a profound understanding of cause and effect, and he would continue to do that through my entire childhood.
As I started to get a little bit older, I really started focusing on technology, fascinated me. The fact that you could, again, talking about leverage, you could use technology to force, multiply your efforts and do things that previously were not possible. Carry that with me all the way through my early adult years and decided to found my company, Paragon Tech.
Because I had a skill in technology and realized that it was actually monetizable. Businesses have problems that technology can solve for, and that’s worth something worth money. So it wasn’t until, I found my groove when I started working with my first legal client, because I realized for the first time in my life, I could take my skepticism.
And it perfectly mirrored how all of my clients thought already, there are skeptics about all the tools and the technology out there. And I’m someone who demands real solutions to real problems. So I was able to easily [00:05:00] parlay why this is going to be beneficial, how we’re going to do it and how it’s going to help you to be a more effective attorney.
So that brings us to today. We’re now we’re in our 12th year of business and that we’re thriving, loving it. The legal community has embraced me. I know as well with you, it’s always interesting when you focus on working with lawyers and you’re not a lawyer yourself, but I’m having a lot of fun.
Steve Fretzin: Have you found yourself like more risk averse and more of a perfectionist because of it?
Jay McAllister: No, actually the opposite I would say, because I’m aware of it. And it’s I’m aware of it. So I try to purposely create guardrails to keep me from spiraling down the Endless pursuit that is perfectionism.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah. It’s, just, it’s a lot of the, my father, the late great Larry, the Fretzin, lawyer, Larry, the lawyer, Fretzin, whatever. He had all that perfectionism and risk aversion. And, he also, I also talked about a little bit about it, it’s grew up in the project. So he had serious money issues, like just didn’t have a pot to piss in.
Every dollar he made was not a normal dollar. It was like a [00:06:00] highly coveted dollar that he, you know, I just, it’s my kid will ask me for money and I want him to earn it. And I want him to, have that sense of it. I know you’ve got a young one at home, but it’s like, it’s hopefully not all of his bad money habits fall down on me and all that, but I think he was perfect for the lawyer role because he was, devil’s advocate for his clients and he was helping them avoid major issues because he would see them before they happened and all that.
So what, let’s talk a little bit about the sort of the history, if you will, of not just legal tech, but really leaning into AI and how. It’s shaping the legal profession and how lawyers are generating revenue and how they’re going to, starting to leverage it in a proper way.
Jay McAllister: Okay. So there’s a lot to unpack there.
There’s so much in that before we get there, I just want to say, because of the, and I think this is important for context. I actually listened to, I had the privilege of listening to your episode with your father, Larry, number 200, which was such a heartwarming episode to hear the playful banter back and forth between you [00:07:00] guys.
Now, what I’ve realized actually is, when you talked about the risk aversion and this parlays, trust me, parlays into the technology and AI conversation, that’s one trait that I possess that I believe is actually a direct contrast with most attorneys. I am extremely risk tolerant. You see the helmet.
If people are watching on video, they could see various pieces of motor sports gear behind me. I’m a motorcycle racer and a car racer. And an aviation enthusiast when you pulled
Steve Fretzin: up the first time I met you and you were young 20s and you were in a Corvette. I was like, what? What is going on with
Jay McAllister: this kid?
That’s just that’s a separate conversation on irresponsible financial habits. We can maybe that’ll be episode four. We can define. How I fell in that trap . But no. When it comes to ai, a lot of attorneys I mentioned before, the primary concern is always tends to be around the accuracy of the information that’s being output.
Just hot off the press, if you’ve seen in Minnesota, there is a, an [00:08:00] AI ethics professor, and that was asked to opine on a case. He’s a Stanford professor. He was asked to opine on a case in Minnesota. And it was all about Minnesota’s law against deepfakes. So basically how this goes is they were trying to pass some legislation that strictly prohibit deepfakes, which is essentially creating AI originated video content that portrays someone doing something and, not a positive light.
So they were trying to pass some legislation that would ban deepfakes in the context of political elections, political campaigns. So this individual agreed that was the fact or that these deepfakes should be banned and he actually submitted a brief to the court. Problem is that he’s an AI ethics professor at Stanford and the brief that he sent in actually cited cases that did not exist.
This was like, so the judge just remarked on this about six or seven days ago because once he was found out that his cases didn’t exist, he admitted the fact that he actually didn’t check the sources. And, [00:09:00] the judge came back and said we’re not going to allow you to amend your response, your credibility with the court has been shattered and specifically wrote in this memorandum that any lawyers who use AI need to check the output before submitting to this court with exclamation points in this official document.
So it’s very easy to think about the risk, but as the duty to competency goes. It explains that lawyers must be up to date on the risks, but also the benefits of relevant technology. And then it starts, these sort of things, as they develop over time, we’re in the nascent stages of AI, but it’s already becoming so useful, and we can talk about some specific examples that my clients are using AI in.
You just have to maintain a level of knowledge about these things. They’re not going anywhere. This is definitely not something that is a fad. I think most people can see that. Every year Clio releases a new legal trend study and the report from this year showed that 73 percent of lawyers are using AI in some capacity [00:10:00] versus last year it was 20 something percent.
They’re seeing these major leaps between just one year. Is
Steve Fretzin: AI, but is AI, is there some confusion between AI and automation? There’s automation that I’m using, but is that also AI? Or is that, are they separate?
Jay McAllister: So you can go down the rabbit hole. So this is actually something it’s a scholarly debate that’s going on hot right now because there isn’t actually even an agreed upon definition of what constitutes a I versus what is not a I typically the way we think of a I is that in the legal technology space is that you’re using computers to analyze information and come up with bespoke responses.
Original responses that did not exist before. That’s generative a I. That’s typically what we think of when you when people use the term a I. Casually, but no, this report is specifically talking about a I use now there isn’t any specific data and I actually followed up and I was at Cleo con and talk to Joshua Lennon, who is the individual assembles the report and there isn’t any data around the exact [00:11:00] way and manner that attorneys are using a I.
It was a survey that they about I think 20 or 30, 000 individuals participated in that. But I would imagine based on what I’m seeing with my clients, most of that is probably chat GPT use. Maybe not even necessary for legal production related activities, but more marketing copy and summarizing emails and those types of things.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah, got it. Okay. So then we understand that it’s happening. We understand it’s in our face. What are the things that lawyers should be looking for? in AI to help them with their law practice, to help them with marketing and growth and generating business too.
Jay McAllister: So my belief is that they should not be looking for AI to solve problems that they have.
Oftentimes what I find is that when you look at the problem from that lens of we’re looking to invest in an AI tool that can solve issues that we have, you wind up actually creating more problems than you had before. Now you have additional tools that your firm needs to be up to speed on using, they need to spend time training.
And it may not [00:12:00] necessarily solve a problem in a meaningful way for the firm. So ultimately that tool becomes wasteful spend. I find a much more useful frame to look at the issue through is what are the actual business constraints that the firm is being hindered by? And this usually these constraints come up in your management meetings or, when you have your year end retreat where the partners get away and talk about the firm’s performance.
What are you struggling with? Are you struggling with rising costs and diminished billing rising costs and diminished ability to bill hours that you previously billed before for activities that clients are pushing back on? I’ll give you an example here. Having an insurance defense client.
We’re in Buffalo, New York, and they were having major pushback from the insurance carriers who have, of course, these massive troughs of data from law firms all across the country. And so because of they have the data, they were able to analyze and you better believe they are doing this. They’re able to say, hey, this particular task, it could be automatable via AI, or maybe via traditional [00:13:00] automations as you speak of them.
And they’re saying, we’re not going to pay out the same amount of hours that you say that it takes. So they’re being pushed and challenged on their billing entries. So they have to figure out ways to be resourceful with the tools that they have. And obviously, in this particular case, we’re talking about firms that are, they can’t necessarily dictate.
It’s not a free market, so to speak, what insurance carriers dictate the price that they can charge. So it’s now starting to trickle out from that area into other practice areas of law, family law, even personal injury where it’s contingency based, these folks are incentivized by being as resourceful and as efficient with their time as possible.
So what I realized over time is that this is a fairly abstract way of thinking about solving for the issue. And oftentimes firms were struggling to actually identify what those business constraints are. So I created a framework that I call leverage AI. Which helps them to contextualize how to ultimately [00:14:00] identify activities that would be suitable to be outsourced to AI.
Steve Fretzin: Got it. Okay. With proven SEO and digital marketing strategies that drive actual clients to your firm, Rankings. io prides itself on proof, not promises mentality. The best firms hire Rankings. io when they want rankings traffic in cases other law firm marketing agencies can’t deliver. Get more rankings, get cases, and schedule a free consultation at Rankings.
io today. Hey everybody, Steve Fretzin here. Man, I thought I was a good marketer, but maybe not. Lawyers have been approaching me asking, what’s the Rainmakers Roundtable? I tell them this is a special place created exclusively for rainmaking lawyers to continue their journey of prosperity. Our program is unique as every member has a unique voice.
A significant book of business and is motivated to grow it year after year. Where else does this exist? If you’re a managing partner who’s looking to get off your lonely island and talk shop with America’s top rate makers, please go to my website, Fretzin. com and apply for membership today. [00:15:00] And so then what are you seeing lawyers using it for right now?
Like what is the common lawyer that you’re interacting with and engaging with on a daily basis? What are they actually doing with AI and is it all chat GBT or are there other things they’re doing?
Jay McAllister: So it all starts with most lawyers, they’re using it to draft a grocery list for themselves.
And I think this is a good thing. Like I say this sort of facetiously, but there’s, let’s say you’re someone who’s trying to learn how to swim. There’s so much information out there and YouTube videos and articles you can read, but ultimately the best way to learn how to swim is to actually jump in a pool and get wet.
And maybe you start off on the shallow end so that you can get your bearings and figure out, okay, this is how I float, this is how I measure my breathing and things like that, but ultimately you need hands on experience. So I think it’s good that people are starting, that 76 percent of lawyers using AI, I think people, it’s good that people are starting to interface with these tools and, just for their daily life.
[00:16:00] But when you want to kick things in a high gear and use this for legal production, I always recommend, start off with every lawyer needs to be able to put information out there about themselves in a compelling way that ultimately convinces other people that they might be a good choice to hire.
This is business development, right? So use chat GPT to create some marketing copy. It’s very low barrier to entry. You’re not dealing with sensitive information, so the confidentiality component, which we can talk about that and how lawyers can secure their data when they’re using AI tools for legal production, but those things don’t typically come into play in those contexts.
So that’s what I typically see first, the marketing copy, creating social media posts, there’s a methodology that I use for my social media content, which is you always want to have a very well organized framework for the idea that you want to communicate because there’s an almost unlimited amount of expressions.
That you can use to communicate the same idea. But ultimately the AI just helps you to [00:17:00] get to those expressions really quickly, but you need a great scaffolding in order to be able to construct that. So use that and then pick the best version and use that. Now you have your marble to carve. So that’s way number one.
Now, when we’re talking about legal operations, typically the first thing I see is legal research. Why? Because it’s fairly systematic, the way that attorneys perform legal research currently, and then the way that they can perform legal research with AI. So the current method with legal research is essentially, you have the facts of your particular matter, and you perform a search based on keywords that you’d like to indicate to the legal research tool.
Let’s just say, LexisNexis, for example, and you’ll submit those keywords, And you’ll go through all the cases, and you’ll keep searching for keywords until no new cases come up. Now, you can obviously imagine this is extremely time consuming. And it’s, we’re really in the nascent, we’re in the nascent stages of this starting to become, of this way of performing legal research becoming not a best practice.
Because of the fact that you’re spending so [00:18:00] much time looking at the same cases over and over again. Because you have to eliminate the outliers. Also, you’re reading cases that have nothing to do with your matter, but in order to understand that, you have to go through and read those cases. So that’s the old way, essentially just brute force method where you exhaust all the options until nothing new arises.
New way, you use an AI power tool that understands the context. Of what you’re looking for, based on the facts of the matter that you’re working on, and then it will go out, and it’ll identify the best cases that are likely to be related to yours, have a similar fact pattern, and then you’re only focusing on that subset of cases.
Now again, and I’ll stress this again, with any AI tool in the current state of AI, these are all meant to be draft, used for draft purposes. You would never want to submit something in its raw state from the AI tool, right? It’s unless,
Steve Fretzin: unless you’re a Harvard professor or wherever that guy was from Stanford, right?
I think there’s a Stanford exception
Jay McAllister: to that. Yeah. The Stanford
Steve Fretzin: exception.
Jay McAllister: That’s what we’re going to coin it. The Stanford except [00:19:00] we had the Stanford prison experiment. And now the Stanford exception, the exception. So you always, think of it as you’re giving it to the brand new associate down the hallway who you’ve never worked with before.
You would never just give them an assignment and then submit that directly to the court. So AI is the same way. You take those cases, you review them, and then you put together the fact pattern, use it to craft your argument, draft your brief, and then now you’ve sufficiently performed that activity. So those are some of the initial ways that I’ve seen it being used and that my clients are interfacing with it.
There’s some interesting methodologies when you get into chat GPT. Now, ChatGBT has gotten a really bad reputation for inaccuracy and hallucination. It’s, it’s been mostly, if you look online, people mostly refer to ChatGBT as being used for entertainment purposes, but there’s absolutely a utility for it in a legal context, even for legal production workflows.
Here’s the thing. There’s actually been some brand new studies out of this year, 2025, where they [00:20:00] have done some double blind studies. Between humans and AI to see which ones hallucinate more. And many of those studies come back saying that humans hallucinate at a higher rate. It’s really depends on the context that you look at it from, because AI doesn’t have mushrooms and we do well amongst other things, and that’s the thing.
It’s it’s what is your comparison medium? Because when, so for example, when electric vehicles first came out, they started introducing autonomous vehicles. Everyone wanted to hoopoo on those autonomous vehicles for getting into accidents. But when you look at your standard electric vehicle and you have it drive, I’m sorry, not standard electric vehicle, your standard autonomous vehicle, and you have it drive 1 million miles.
You’ll see that on average, they get into about one accident per million miles. Now give me any human, the best driver that you know, and have them drive a million miles and tell me how many accidents they get into. So it’s it’s not a zero sum game. People like to focus on it’s drastically overstated the hallucination amount.
That’s why I say it’s [00:21:00] absolutely AI is in a state where it is absolutely good enough to serve utility. As long as you’re, you have the proper oversight and supervise it. I
Steve Fretzin: mean, people feel more safe driving than they do even in an airplane because they feel like they have control and it’s giving up that control with autonomous vehicles.
That’s the fear that people have, even though it may recognize not only it’s driving, but other people’s driving poorly and potential accidents that it can avoid and things like that. And there’s no. Distraction that, we would have because we’re looking at our phones or we’re eating a donut or whatever the hell we’re doing, but it’s I haven’t really observed the I’ve only, seen on TV, like what the hallucinations and the inaccuracies could be.
But I think it’s we have to continue to go with trust, but verify, right? You just can’t. If I get a LinkedIn post and I put it through chat, GBT, and I, but I’m going to, I’m never going to do it blindly. Just say whatever it was, I’ll just put it up. I think I have to, there has to still be a set of eyes on it, human eyes before you put something out, whether it’s legal or whether it’s marketing or
Jay McAllister: whether it’s whatever.[00:22:00]
Oh, absolutely. And honestly, this is just an age old pattern repeating itself. What we’re witnessing is the Gartner’s Hype Cycle, which basically goes like this. There’s usually a catalyst event, a new technology, so ChatGPT, let’s call it that. Which, by the way, ChatGPT wasn’t the first available AI. It was actually a tool called GitHub Copilot, which was for programmers and coders, which is why most people know ChatGPT.
Another fun fact, specifically, since we’re talking to lawyers, many people are familiar with the tool spell book, which is a contract drafting and review AI tool spell book actually preceded chat GPT. Most people don’t know that. Came afterward. So here’s the interesting thing, though, the way the gardeners hype cycle works, you have this catalyst event chat, GPTs released, everybody gets excited about the potential realities that could, the way it could revolutionize the way we work, they jump on board and then you reach what’s called peak.
Optimism, right? So everyone’s really happy about it, excited. Then you start to see the trend change. People [00:23:00] find out, Oh, these AI tools can hallucinate. Oh, people are getting in trouble. Lawyers are getting sanctioned from using AI without checking it, right? And then you get into what’s called the trough of disillusionment.
So this is where I think we’re at now where people are starting to take a step back and we’re looking at, okay, how do we, there’s ethics committees being put together on how to use AI and people are taking a step back. Then you get to informed optimism on the other side of the trough of disillusionment, where now people now understand fully the risks and the benefits.
And then after that, typically you get to where you’re in the productivity era. You don’t have as much hype surrounding it, but now you’re actually using the tool. In meaningful ways and technology has evolved to this to the point where it now is able to be employed in a way that actually creates measurable results.
Steve Fretzin: Got it. Yeah, that’s a really interesting life cycle of how we think about AI. So what so let’s wrap up with what as. The up and coming technologies that [00:24:00] are going to be useful to attorneys. What do you think is the next, the 2. 0 of this, that’s going to come out and help them, it’s made eliminate some jobs, but it also might, help lawyers get super focused on, the brain work and the heavy lifting versus the, the minutia work.
Jay McAllister: Every time I present. At a new firm, there’s typically rumblings within the support staff or, the first year associates. And you hear this seems to be able to take over a lot of the things that I’m doing already. And, my belief on this is when has this ever been a bad thing ever?
We used to have switch operators on our phone networks, right? And this is just, I hear I was, this is, these are
Steve Fretzin: rumors.
Jay McAllister: This is all hearsay. There used
Steve Fretzin: to be
Jay McAllister: horses
Steve Fretzin: that got taken out by tractors at some point.
Jay McAllister: Yeah. There were jobs that were lost, but ultimately, I don’t think of it as a job that was lost.
These jobs were transitioned to perform more useful more useful activities. You don’t need someone to just assemble [00:25:00] a list of all the cases that you need to look at so that the attorney can then go and review it. I would argue that you’re paying that person’s salary. It’s much, it’s money much better spent having them perform an activity that’s actually going to move the firm forward in a measurable way.
So I, as far as what’s next, we’re already in the phase of what’s next. You probably heard of agentic AI. It’s a, it’s the next evolution of generative AI. So right now, the standard AI large language models we use, essentially you prompt it and they give you a response. They’re getting a lot better.
ChatGPT just released their O1 model, which has advanced reasoning capabilities, basically meaning instead of just blurting out the first response, the first thing that it comes up with as a response, it will actually analyze what you’re asking. Think about it and determine if there is even an appropriate response to your prompt and give you a much better result.
So that’s, but that’s still this, it’s this, I ask you answer. Agentic AI, what this does is it will actually, [00:26:00] you train it. On a series of tasks that you want it to complete. And it will actually go through and determine what prompts need to be asked. It will ask itself those prompts, and then it will generate the output.
For example, if I need to draft a motion for summary judgment, how do I know what are the triggers that allow me to understand that I need to draft that motion? The AI, you program that in, so it’s able to go in and understand that, okay, when a certain milestone has been met in the case, I need to draft a motion for summary judgment.
Okay, what are the facts? Of the case, okay, and it’ll ask itself, okay, what are the facts and only use that to incorporate into that motion, and it’ll actually draft the motion, and then it will trigger an email to be sent to you to say, okay, here’s the completed motion. What do you think of it, and then you ultimately would send it off right and there’s multiple ways you can configure it but the main idea there is that it’s not just question and answer.
It’s performing activities based on specified constraints that you give it.
Steve Fretzin: One of I love that. And [00:27:00] that’s super interesting. The, as you’re talking though, my head is swimming with one other thought is that, Google and the way that we use search and the way that law firms, pay per click or SEO or whatever, social media marketing, that’s going to end up being somewhat eliminated where instead of, paying 200 per lead or per click or whatever.
That, I’m going to ask, I’m looking for a personal injury attorney in Chicago, and it’s going to give me the result that’s best for me. Maybe it’s based on my personality. Maybe it’s based on my injury. Maybe it’s based on all the data of who has handled the most cases in this area for that type of injury.
I don’t know. I don’t think it’s going to give me a list of, two, three pages of results. I think it’s going to be hyper focused on. One result and who’s going to get that one result. Is it the one who has the most content? Is it the one that, that’s paid the most in the past?
Probably not. So I just, I think there are also firms that are leaning on certain types of marketing and that’s where all their business comes from. And I think they’re in for a rude awakening if they don’t look at maybe [00:28:00] diversifying over the next number of years, how they bring in business. That’s just a thought from the marketing business development side of things.
Jay McAllister: And it’s totally possible right now. The technology is already exist for it to do exactly what you described. Now, what you’ll notice is that in most of these large language models, if you prompt it with a question like that, it actually will not, the goal is for it to remain unbiased and there’s a whole debate about whether it is or not, because inherently it’s trained by humans and do their subconscious biases get programmed into the tool.
That’s an entirely different debate, but the goal is to be unbiased. So if you ask it. Who’s the best business development professional for attorneys? It’s not going to say, Oh, you should call Steve Fretzin. It’s going to tell you, I cannot actually provide you information that would promote one vendor over another.
However, here are the criteria that you should use to rank and think about those. There are those safe, those, that’s more of an ethics question. And those safeguards are already built in. But it’s not necessarily a conversation of whether the technology can do it. Because it absolutely could do it. And this [00:29:00] all spun off from this exercise, it’s interesting if anybody listening wants to try it.
You can actually ask ChatGPT to rank your business. Like you can ask it to, I think I saw it on LinkedIn, it was like, Give me an honest critique on my business and you give it your URL. It’ll go through your website, go through your content, and it’ll tell you what it believes you do. And give you a critique about how, where you fall within the marketplace.
That’s where this whole, where I realized that it won’t actually recommend one vendor came from. Interesting and scary. Listen, Jay, we’ve got a red also ask it to roast you just so you know, you give it your LinkedIn profile and just ask it to roast you. I
Steve Fretzin: have a teenager. It’s unnecessary. I’m getting roasted nightly.
And if you guys know my personality, he’s getting, he’s, you mess with the bull, you get the horns. That’s been the motto since he was a kid. So he’s dealing with that. Hey, man, I love your podcast suggestion. It’s been brought up on the show before. And every time it does, I just, I beam with excitement because Alex Hermosi is, if you look at his [00:30:00] background and working with gyms and things like that, you go, what the hell is this guy who works with gyms now, man, this guy’s brilliant.
And I love his book, a hundred M offers and Alex Hermosi, everybody. So let’s keep this pretty brief, but why do you
Jay McAllister: love
Steve Fretzin: Alex?
Jay McAllister: Alex redefined the way that I think about business and value creation. I use that with my clients on a daily basis. So ultimately there’s this thing Theodore Levitt, he was a Harvard economist back in the sixties.
He wrote that business transactions don’t happen until your client believes that they’re getting more value than they’re getting in exchange. So basically the money that they’re giving you, most people think of business as when they think about the value that they create one, it’s this. This abstract concept that they can’t actually define, Alex defined it.
He created the value equation, which essentially gives you a framework for understanding how much tangible value you create with your services for your client. But then the second thing is that people always think that their services should be directly proportional. The [00:31:00] fee that they charge for their services should be proportional to the value that they offer.
And that’s where people get it wrong. And I learned that, in just my research, but Alex reinforced the idea of that. You really need to make sure there’s a disproportionate amount of value perceived from your client. And only when you reach that status, are you able to charge fees that are profitable and also above what the marketplace typically allows for.
Steve Fretzin: Yeah, really fantastic. I can’t recommend that book enough. It’s a comes in a workbook form, so you can really write on it. And then his podcast, the game. And I think he, on the podcast actually does the audio versions of. His books. So if you want to pick up either listen to the podcast or pick up the book.
I like the manual book because I think, writing in there and putting down, in a workbook, what you want to do or questions you have or things that you want to highlight. That’s always a good way to do it. Awesome. Let’s wrap up with our sponsors. We’ve got PymCon coming up, everybody, and October, you can go from good to goat with PymCon and our friends over at Rankings.
[00:32:00] io. And of course, check out LawHer podcast if you’re looking for a great podcast to accompany the Be That Lawyer podcast especially if you’re a woman who’s really looking to take things to the next level in your career LawHer is the way to go. My friend Sonia over there crushing it. J man, you’ve been fantastic.
I so appreciate you coming on the show a third time and give us your digits. People want to get in touch with you. They want to work with you, talk with you, learn from you. How do they do
Jay McAllister: that? So I’m most active on LinkedIn. So we’ll drop the LinkedIn URL. Just search for J McAllister. I’m constantly putting out.
Really thought provoking at least what I think is thought provoking content. Steve, what do you think? Is any of it thought provoking? It’s all thought provoking. Everything you
Steve Fretzin: say is thought provoking. I was just sitting there in shock as you were talking to my peer advisory group and I just, every word out of your mouth, I was like, damn, this guy’s smart and he knows what he’s talking about.
Jay McAllister: Yeah. This is all just, it’s a stream of consciousness. It’s my learnings as I work with various law firms and see what works and what doesn’t, and I share those findings with my LinkedIn audience. So there, and also YouTube, Paragon [00:33:00] Tech. Where I have entire tutorials on using AI with law firm context, building out custom GPTs, evaluating your fee structure in this AI powered world.
I have, one hour long tutorials on there for things like that. So those are the main places to reach me. If you want to call 815 582 9799, it is my phone number.
Steve Fretzin: And we’ll put all that in the show notes as well. Jay, thanks so much, man. I appreciate you coming on the show, sharing your wisdom and really talking up AI.
It’s a topic I don’t think many people are bored with yet, but it’s just, it’s always evolving, which is, which I think keeps it interesting.
Jay McAllister: Can I offer one more thing? That’s going to be mind blowing. Okay. Yeah. Throw it in. So if you haven’t had a chance yet to, this sort of was released without a lot of fanfare and it’s no one really realized it’s here.
Chat GPT over the holiday season, there were 12 days of AI campaign. They released the advanced voice mode, which allows you to interact with chat GPT in near real time. You can have conversations with it. So instead of prompting it and typing in your [00:34:00] prompts, you talk with it and it gives you really insightful feedback.
Now you can take that and put it on steroids because actually what it allows you to do is you can actually give it access to your camera and you can ask questions based on things that are in your environment. So if you’re working on your car, for example, and there’s a part that’s broken, you can point your camera there and say, what’s the issue here and what are the repair steps?
And it’ll actually, it’s very good. I actually built a, for the people watching on video, I just did a tutorial. This will be on YouTube in a couple of days. I did a tutorial from a personal injury context where this is a sketch that a, a fictitious client would have given you about a car accident they were involved in.
And I show how to use chat GPT’s advanced video mode to analyze that car wreck and put together the initial statement of facts for the attorney, just so they can start working on the case.
Steve Fretzin: Wow, really powerful stuff. Yeah. Awesome, man. I appreciate that. Guys, everybody check out Jay on online and see what he’s up to.
But thank you, Jay. And thank you everybody for spending time on the Be That Lawyer with Fretzin podcast. We are here to help you be that lawyer, [00:35:00] confident, organized, and a skilled rainmaker. Take care, be safe, be well. We’ll talk again soon.
Narrator: Thanks for listening to Be That Lawyer. Life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Visit Steve’s website Fretzin. com for additional information and to stay up to date on the latest legal business development and marketing trends. For more information and important links about today’s episode, check out today’s show notes.