Hey, it's Bob Simon taking a break to tell you about CallRail. CallRail is a product that my firm uses, and what CallRail does is it plugs into your phone calls with your intake and with your clients to record those phone calls as real time transcripts so you can get intelligence and with the attorney share. Plugin.
You can actually in real time, be able to send a referral out through the marketplace to find the best match all made possible with CallRail being plugged into your firm's intake with real intelligence CallRail. Welcome to this episode of the Justice Team Podcast on the Justice Team Network. I am your host, Bob Simon. Today we're talking about.
The innovation of digital marketing, using artificial intelligence to do voice intake, what's new in the legal industry, and how artificial intelligence is changing the landscape on how consumers are finding attorneys, and how you as a lawyer or a lead person in the legal space, can leverage a lot of the opportunity out there to better find cases suited for you and what to do if they're not suited for you.
And I work very honored to have on the Eric TransU, who's a digital marketing guru, and Eric's gonna explain to you about. Some exciting stuff in the legal field.
Awesome. Happy to be here, Bob. Um, so like I said, I'm Eric TransU, uh, computer science major. I've worked as a network engineer for. 14 years, which kind of transitioned, uh, slowly into the AI space for me. Um, and, uh, been working a lot now in, in the legal field with ai, which is absolutely moving at a lightning pace right now. Before
you, before you were in legal, um, you were in a different kind of vertical, right? Real estate? Yeah, I was
in real estate. So originally I was with, um, a company called Property First. Who ended up merging with company LoopNet, which was then purchased by CoStar, who owns apartments.com and homes.com and all those. And I was a network engineer, like I said there for 14 years. I, uh, then my son was born, um, and I wanted to be there a little bit more. I couldn't just, uh, fly off to San Francisco for the 24 hour notice to go install servers.
And so I kind of started my own company, an SEO company that I was doing on the side.
Well, I mean, do you feel like the real, because it seems like the real estate in industry was way more innovative and on top of things than the legal industry was using AI and intake and things like that.
Yeah, I, I think it is. Um, you know, obviously there's. A big lead generation platform for real estate. And when that first started, it was great. Now, you know, I, I used to have tons of real estate sites out there to generate leads, and I would see a lead come in on this site and 10 minutes later, come in on this site and then come in on this site.
So, you know, a real estate agent was buying a lead thinking they were the exclusive person getting that lead, when in fact the consumer was signing up on every site that popped up on their phone or on their computer. And now you've had, you know. A number of agents buying the same lead over and over again, and it became very difficult. Um, I find that the follow up was the biggest thing that was lacking. You know, people thought, oh, I got a lead now.
This is a, a closed home that I'm gonna be able to sell. Oh, you gotta, you gotta go fast and you gotta go fast. And you know, I started running a lot of Facebook ads for real estate. And the leads were good, but you could hand the lead to two different agents and one will tell you, Eric, you're giving me crap leads. The other one, like, these are the greatest leads ever. And it really just turned out to be what is the follow up and what's the timeline?
Because when you catch people on Facebook, they're a lot earlier in the cycle usually. Mm-hmm. In the real estate world, it's not someone that's already going to open houses. They're really just starting their research. And what happened in the real estate field, which I think is gonna continue to change. A lot of the consumers knew more about the market and the houses than the real estate agents because there was so much information, access to data and so much information out there.
Well, what are we seeing now? 'cause you know, Eric, bill, what we're using at our law firm for AI, voice intake, and I think a lot of people are very interested in, in it. Um, and I know you're starting to offer workshops at Justice HQ to show people how to build. This exact product. So can you kind of walk us through what you built, the guardrails that you put on it, and kind of the use case that, like my firm for instance, is using it for?
Yeah, of course. So the voice AI is not necessarily to replace an intake team, but it's there to do some filtering. 'cause you are gonna get. A lot of spam calls, depending on the time of the year, you get a lot of political calls and all of that takes manpower in order to, you know, filter those out. Right.
And when it comes to legal, you know, a lot of us are in certain areas, so for instance, in a personal injury attorney, but we get calls for evictions or business law and that's gonna take up time with the intake team when those people call to vet that out, figure out where to, where to put it. Route them to a different firm.
So what the AI can do, and, and we rolled it out initially just on the after hour calls because, um, you usually pay, you know, VAs or whoever it is, some sort of after hour service to take those calls, which could easily be done by ai. Now, with the guardrails you're talking about, what we've put in is, okay, this is our wheelhouse. If something falls into this location or this type of matter. Keep it in-house, send it to our CRM, which happens to be Cleo Grow right now.
Mm-hmm. But whatever CRM you're using, you could route it there. If it's not, what do we do with this? Yeah. If
it, if it goes, if it meets your firm, criteria of what you built goes to our firm, it could hot or warm transfer to our intake team. All that calls recorded, transcribed, goes directly into Clio Grow.
And that's the great thing about the AI is, is it all comes down to the prompting. So you can make certain calls. Like if you say a certain thing on that call, I could say, Hey, trigger this now and do this. So basically I've got a back injury. Okay, boom. We're gonna high priority this, we're gonna do a warmer transfer, or we're gonna blast off a text message or an email to alert someone that we need to get back to this caller immediately.
Or like I said, just transfer them warm right there to a phone number, and that can be picked based off what they said earlier in the call. The call is completely transcribed. You could. Do things off of that transcription at any time during the call, or it could just be sent into the CRM as well, so at least they have all the context and not just a summary. You could go back and read through.
Yeah, and the ethical guardrails are you have to disclose, correct. You're using artificial intelligence. There's a way that you do it. If you call our number, it's eight four. Four. Get team or the team? The team. The team. Yeah. Sorry. Eight, four. Four. The team, if you call that you'll be able to talk to our. AI voice agent to see what Eric built. But the guardrails, it'll let you know it's artificial intelligence.
You could tell if it meets our firm criteria that it's gonna say that our someone from our team's gonna call you back. It cannot give legal advice. You can try to trick it. It will not, and it will tell you that it's gonna have a lawyer from our team call you. But the interesting thing is, what you've built with the integration with attorney share is if it doesn't meet your firm criteria, and it's still a valid case, that if somebody helps with what happens.
Well, if it's still a valid case that someone needs help with, it's gonna be sent in to attorney share, which then could be, you know, routed out to whatever attorneys in the system match that particular matter, and there'll be other notifications or waterfalls or however you've set up your account with an attorney share. Um, that this could, now you can monetize these matters that normally you wouldn't, you wouldn't handle
and track them all and track
them all.
There's no reason why a lawyer would have to hang up the phone and say, I can't help you.
Yeah. Right. And you know, we, we connect the knowledge base to all of this, so it will answer all your normal questions that may come in, you know, what are your hours, where are you located? Um, you could really put anything in that knowledge base that you want to really answer all those questions. Because someone may call in and then, you know, they start to, they're talking to AI and they wanna play around. They, they always do that. Okay. How long have you been in business, you know?
What cases have you tried? And all of that could be put into a knowledge base to answer a lot of questions, that, to be honest, a front desk person may not even know the answers to exactly. So,
and then, um. How many calls can it handle at a time?
Well, that could be ramped up, uh, pretty quickly. There's different plans depending on the service that you're using. There's a lot of services out there right now that are offering AI calling. Um, we're using a, a platform that gives us some flexibility in order to ramp up as we need to. Um, but. Most of 'em out there, depending on how much you're willing to pay there, there's really no limit on how many calls they can have at the time. Yeah, I've heard
some that could do hundreds of calls at the same time.
Yeah. Like most of them, the basic plan will do 30 concurrent calls out the box Wow. At a time, which most, you know, a law firm's not gonna have 30 people calling at the same time. Most of, unless you're running a crazy ad or got some crazy press, uh, immediately that, that's driving people to call the firm. But for most. The basic plans on most of these are going to, um, satisfy what you need. The other part is. The voices are constantly getting updated. Those are getting better and better.
I mean, just the voice from three months ago compared to today is so much different and it's so,
it's pleasant to talk to. It's empathetic. It listens. It can also speak different languages,
right? It could speak different languages. They're multilingual. The, the latency is really coming down on these. Um, and, and the different models are just being able to process the data quicker and get back to you. Now there's a fine line there, you know, where something's answering too fast. For instance, when I used to run my lead generation sites, when someone signed up. They'd get a text message immediately, but this text messages was three or four sentences.
They knew right away this wasn't, you know, it didn't seem natural. They knew it wasn't a real person, but it also didn't seem natural and you didn't get those replies. So trying to put some of that in there, you know, you could have the box with, um, and uh, and, and you could do so much programming there. Where they do get caught up sometimes is some of the natural language stuff.
For instance, when we were first setting up our bot, you know, you'd say I was in an accident on the 4 0 5 freeway. And I says, okay, so you were on the accident, an accident on the 405 freeway. So, you know, you gotta play with some of that stuff. And there's constant tweaking and prompting. But man, it, it's, it's really good. And, and what you can push out right now, um, with very little expertise mm-hmm. Is amazing. But where you got it? Watch out is like you said, the guardrail.
So it doesn't go off and start giving legal advice or, or doing these weird things. Yes. That you in trouble. Law firms.
Yeah. Law firms have to own the intake. It's as if that person works for your firm. Right. Right. So first of all, people reach out to you, just e transue@justiceteam.com? Yes. T-R-A-N-S-U-E. E transu@justiceteam.com and Eric will walk you through the process. Yeah. And help you set these things up. We always say like instead of going just one to your firm, go one to all with the attorney share plugin because it'll auto post the cases for you. Then you can track everything.
Um, I. These things are all so low cost now because of technology. It's crazy. I never thought we could compete in the quote unquote call center.
They are, and the cost is going down because the models are competing against each other. Now you've got Claude with Anthropic, you've got Chat, GPT, and all of them are coming out with their different models and it's just a race like the best one today. It's not gonna be the best one next week, but there's testing and you gotta get to a certain point where it's enough, right? There's always more. You could always be chasing more. I gotta get better, better.
But if you've got a model that's working and it's answering your calls and doing everything you need to, that's where you gotta watch out because you tweak too much. Now you've taken it off the rails again. So obviously we have different phone numbers so that I could test these new models and we're not testing it on our live one that we know is working. Right. But you've gotta constantly be testing because it is getting better and the prompts are getting smarter and smarter.
I mean, even if you, I mean, if you just do the math and I think. The numbers are probably under this, but for a qualified call that's probably say 50 cents a minute using AI intake. The other ones are a lot more if you have a, you know, manpower answering those phones. Now that's essentially what, 30 bucks an hour? Am I doing math right? Like I. If you just have that maxed out, I mean, you're not gonna be able to get that quality of service for $30 an hour.
It'll be less, be less, but like that's, that's phenomenal.
And also you have someone trans through your phone. Yeah. You know, they may, you're paying them per hour. Where here you're paying per minute. You're only paying when the call is actually happening. So, you know, you. You're winning there and like I said, you're getting the transcription and you're getting the alerts and the hot transfer and the world transfer or however you wanna set up the system.
Yeah, and here's what I'd recommend for lawyers watching or listing is yes, you know, play around with this, set it up. It's an easy way for you to not only get cases in your wheelhouse, but be able to find those referral networks or people you're currently working with to auto push them through this auto posting and be able to track all of those things. And there's no reason why you shouldn't have the ability to.
Say you can help consumers find the best fit for all these practice areas, whether it's mass torts or family law or stuff outside your wheelhouse. 'cause you have a good quality home for it, right? That's a service. That's something that you can do.
Um, and then on the other end, if speed, just like you said in the real estate game, if somebody's putting a case and you see these pings, these hot, hot cases coming through, attorney share, that means that there's usually a consumer that's on the line or quickly off the line. There's nothing stopping anybody from essentially getting those cases broker and you get to see if it's good enough for them or maybe somebody else, or giving that person their AI intake number to call to keep the.
Conversation going till their team can get on the phone to help that consumer
e Exactly. Yeah. Because, you know, a lot of these calls come in after hours. Mm-hmm. And when someone searches in the legal niche, obviously the, one of the top things showing up in Google is gonna be the Google Maps results, right. For your local firms. And if someone calls the first firm and, and they don't answer or they go to voicemail, most of them are gonna go down to number two and call that second person.
So now, I mean, you did all this work to rank there, um, and get that call, and you've already lost that client because you didn't have someone that was able to answer their questions at the time that they called.
Do you think it's gonna be easier for good quality lawyers and law firms to now compete in this, in this space?
I think so, um, obviously there's a lot of changes for how a client is finding a firm. You know, when you search Google now, I mean the top quarter of the page is an AI answer. Usually there's a summary there, so there's a lot more.
Usually I stop there too. It's like, oh, most good. Yeah, there's a lot
more zero click searches they call it, where basically you search and you get the answer right away. You don't have to click on a website anymore most of the time. Um, so, but obviously Google makes money off their ad, so the ads are still appearing above that AI search, depending on most searches. Then you'll have the AI summary, and then you'll usually have the local, the map pack, um, there, and then the websites are being pushed all the way to the bottom of that page, but.
I don't think websites go away because a lot of that AI data and the answers that Google is pulling are coming from those websites. So I think firms that are building websites need to change from the idea of, Hey, I need to just stuff keywords in here to rank for whatever they're trying to rank for, to actually answering the user's question. So that they show up at the top. For instance, a lot of searches that I track right now, they'll give like three or four local firms.
And so I'm always trying to be in there and I see our conversions on our website. A lot of the searches are now starting at chat GPT. Wow. Really? So, yeah. So, um, it's a different game
and a lot of people are finding their lawyers 'cause they're a brand that they don't recognize on social media. So if you're watching or listening. You should have an AI voice intake number and just have it on your profile, like 8, 4, 4, the team, so you're not missing anything. Right. Right. So people know how to contact you. You could do it quickly. You're never gonna miss the call. And even if you cannot help them, you will find the best partner for them. Right. Oh yeah.
What a brave new world. Yep, man. Well, Eric, thanks for coming on the show. Um. Reach out, you know, reach out the Justice team network. If you have questions, reach out to Eric directly. You know, I think we, this will likely air June, 2025 or just a week or two away from June by the time this airs. And I think it's gonna change exponentially and get better, faster, stronger, and less expensive as we go.
Yeah, it's great. It's, it's exciting time. Um, and like I said, just keeping up with it, staying ahead of it, and providing answers to your clients, it's, it's gonna be amazing for attorneys. Cool.
Alright. Well thanks for watching and listening to this episode, the Justice Team Podcast. Take care. Thank you.