AI and Learning in Law Firms

00:00 Jack Zinda Foreign welcome to the Effective Lawyer, a podcast for ambitious attorneys who want to improve their practice. My name is Jack Zinda and I'll be your host. Hey everyone. Today we're going to try something a little different. We're going to take some questions that my team has gotten from either attorneys in the firm, people that have come to some of our events, questions we've got online. And I have not read these ahead of time. So we're going to see how well I do in trying to wing this and hopefully you get some value and use out of these. What books or resources have had the biggest impact on your success as a law firm owner? You mentioned several, many times. But which ones have had the biggest impact? That is a tough question. 00:56 Jack Zinda I would say first, just the fact that I've read a lot of books about the topics that I'm interested in have had a huge impact. And it's not necessarily the ones that you know, are the sexiest that have really helped me a lot. I'd say from a business point of view. The E Myth by Michael Gerber was just a great initial book. The Effective Executive is another great book that really made a huge difference. Tim Ferriss book, the Four Hour Work Week that really breaks down how to delegate well and how to take things off your plate. Getting Things Done by David Allen, that is a. A great book about how to manage your life both professionally and personally. 01:37 Jack Zinda And it took a lot of stress off because explains like why you feel that stress, why the task of getting your oil changed creates the same amount of stress sometimes as preparing an opening statement for trial. And it developed a great system for me really to take all that pressure off me in a way to organize it so I could get a lot of things done. You know, when it comes to being an attorney, David Ball's books have been incredible also. You know, Don Keenan and the Reptile, which is part of David Ball's team or used to be, had a very impact on my knowledge as a lawyer. And just, it's funny, just some ones that you wouldn't necessarily think are the most sexy. 02:14 Jack Zinda There's a great book by Paul Sculptor, who passed away about how to take depositions and preparing your clients for depositions. And, and I love books that don't just focus on the, you know, the big picture, kind of like the cool stories, but actually give you usable things that you can build into your practice. And the most fundamental ones actually had the most impact. And, and it's weird ones too. I mean, There's a cle by an attorney, Judy Castora, on subrogation that has been like, massively helping in my helpful in my practice because knowing how to handle subrogation is one of the most annoying, difficult areas we handle as personal injurers. And so using her framework to help break down how we handle those cases has been incredible. 02:59 Jack Zinda But I really look at books in what area I'm trying to improve as an attorney or learn more about. So I'm always reading one business book. I'm always reading one book on advocacy. And I'm usually, you know, listening or reading cles related to a certain topic that's more tactical. So, for example, I'm licensed in four states, so I rotate between Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado on, you know, updates to civil procedure or evidence rules or, you know, changes in case law. And then I usually will focus on something, for example, let's say, taking expert depositions. And so Dorothy Sims has an awesome book about that. So, you know, this quarter I might focus just on that, but, man, it is tough. 03:44 Jack Zinda I know I've left out probably dozens more, but I would say, you know, figure out what you're trying to improve on and then find out who's written a book that's, you know, lasted the test of time. Like, for example, if you look at Tim Ferriss's book, I think it's still, you know, in the top 10 in a section that was written over 15 years ago, at least. Another great book, Atomic Habits and the Power to Habit. That's been two incredible books that have helped me really develop skills and discipline and how to take small actions that lead to big results. 04:14 Jack Zinda Those books were really great for me to realize that kind of discipline is overrated in the sense of if you can make things automatic, it makes the effort that goes into it so much less and help me realize you have a reservoir of ability to both make decisions and be disciplined. That's why if you're on a diet, you're going to cheat, most likely late at night versus early in the morning. So the more things you can set up to set yourself up for success, those books were great for those, but they're definitely like a couple hundred more I'm sure I could come up with at some point. Hopefully that helps. All right, next question. How can AI tools streamline intake, case management, and marketing? 04:56 Jack Zinda Well, I'm going to plug that into ChatGPT or Deep Seek or Claude or one of those two, and they will tell us answer. You know, this is a really tough Question and whatever answer I tell you now will be totally different by the time you listen to it. And if you listen to it a month later, it'll be completely different. Then I would tell you, what I would do is just have as part of your process how to integrate AI into your organization and don't be afraid to spend a little bit of money to do it. So we've been really pushing every member of our team. 05:29 Jack Zinda We, we've set up some team accounts in ChatGPT to try to utilize AI in their different day to day functions and how they are, how they're operating, things are doing and letting it kind of bubble from the ground up on how to use the tool. A couple cool things that I've seen with it. We plugged all of the case. We have a meeting called Case Distribution where we go through every case that the firm brought in the last two weeks. And the partners and I also sit down and decide, okay, is this case with the right person? Is it a case we really want? Is it a really big case we need to all work on together? And so we plugged all of the case files into ChatGPT. 06:08 Jack Zinda You have to make sure you have the HIPAA compliant and ethical compliance and there's ways to do that. So just asterisks there. Don't just plug it into the one you have for free in that version. That's bad. And it gave me a summary of each case in three to four sentences. And I told it some criteria I was looking for of like what made a big case versus a small case or not small, but you know, not as large or complicated. And it sorted them in the way it thought those were. And then I asked it to sort it by case type and it was okay. It did pretty good. You still have to read it and know what it's saying. But that saved us a lot of time for having to read through everyone several times. 06:45 Jack Zinda Another thing is, you know, I plugged all of the cases we signed up and said, hey, you know, go through these and see if you can come up with any ideas for content we could write or can you come up with different ways we get cases like this, different models. And so we're playing with that as well as, like, how can we use it as an advisor in those things. One trick is you really need to like bite size what you're asking it. The more things you ask, you know, one of these bots or agents, the worse your answer is going to be. We've been experimenting with having, you know, Custom agents that we've created. 07:15 Jack Zinda And I have an AI company that I rolled out last year that we're about to start using to do things like drafting we're using internally first and see how it goes. But that's all about customizing the agent to your specific firm's needs. So to summarize, I would, one, just start using it, encourage your team to use it, pay for the paid version, and then have people kind of report once a week, hey, how did I use this? Maybe you'd have a group team chat. What did you find useful in your team and your team, how you could do it? And then with marketing, I think you can really use it for. Mine for data, mine for content ideas, mine for different referral sources. 07:50 Jack Zinda You would get, hey, you know, most of your big cases are coming from clients or, hey, clients that you met with in the last 30 days. It could tell you information like that you could really use to your advantage. But I'd say just keep using it and trying it and see what works for you. If you'd like a copy of any of the things you heard about here today, or to set up a time to talk about one of our team members about a case, please go to Zendalaw IO and we have amazing resources, downloads, guides, and you can see up a time to talk to us if you want to talk about how we handle things or any case in particular. Next question. If your law firm had a superhero power, what would it be? Oh, man, I'd say X ray vision. 08:39 Jack Zinda We're all really good at seeing through walls. No, that's probably also. That's probably inappropriate. That's probably like very HR inappropriate. So I take that one back. You know, I would say our superpower is empathy. And not in the way that I think most people think of the word when they hear empathy. Most people think of the word sympathy when they hear it. Empathy. And that's not what that word means. Empathy means you can put yourself in the shoes of others and think about and feel what they're going through or what they're thinking. And we try to really use that in everything that we do. For example, obviously you know how you would handle with your client, what are they going through, what are they feeling? But not just like on a superficial level. 09:21 Jack Zinda You know, if I'm a truck driver that makes $45,000 a year, I have two kids, my wife stays at home, we live in the country, we barely have health insurance, and we, you know, it's really month to month on paying the Bills. What does this do to me? Like, what does it feel like when I get in the morning, I can't provide for them and I get the bill and it can't get paid and I'm getting past due notices on my mortgage. Not just like, you know, cerebral, but like, what do I feel like? Do I. What's that anxiety? You know, if I've got a client that shattered their femur, I've been fortunate. Haven't had to have surgery very often, but I did a couple of years ago. And just not getting to use my arm for six weeks was brutal. 10:00 Jack Zinda But if this person couldn't walk, you know, for almost a year, well, what does that actually feel like? You know, not in just the, you know, scenes you would play for a jury, but like getting up every morning, like used to love to run. I can't do that. You know, what depression do they feel? You know, are they grumpier with their family, their kids and really getting into their skin? And I think that's a tough skill to develop. And I think frankly a lot of people don't like doing it. And it's very uncomfortable because you have to confront really tough emotions. You have to tie it back to something you've gone through. The next would be empathizing with the, our opponents. So for example, with an adjuster, I try not to demonize people now. 10:41 Jack Zinda I make jokes about the bad guys or, you know, the Borg or like some giant company that I didn't care about anyone. And some of that is true, some of it's not. But I try to think about this. Okay, let's assume that I am an insurance adjuster. And what am I motivated by? Like why am I making decisions and what gets me to make those decisions? Because remember, I think we all want them to pay us the most amount of money that they are willing to pay if we're able to do it. And so you have to figure out, what does that take? One card that I see attorneys go to all the time is just being a jerk and yelling and screaming at people. Now that can work if you're a badass. 11:22 Jack Zinda Like if you're someone who's gotten like a bunch of 100 million dollar verdicts, eight figures figure verdicts, and you just crush it every single time. And they're terrified you. That might work, but honestly, I don't even think that works there. The better approach is they're motivated by getting promotions or not getting fired or being efficient, okay? They get those things by settling cases for a number that makes them look good to their boss. So I'm trying to show them in my demand letter, hey, if we try this case, you're going to get embarrassed. So you should offer me all the money that you have, the policy limits, because the outcome's going to be really bad. And I tried to present it to them in an objective way because they do this every day. They don't have emotions about this. 12:07 Jack Zinda It's not because they're bad people. But if you look at a hundred wrongful death cases and as adjuster a month, you can't be emotionally tied to each one. So, you know, trying to pull on like adjectives aren't going to drive it. You have to show them objectively why a jury would give this person a lot of money. It's because of how they are in the community, how they are with their spouse, how they are with their kids. And here's the visuals I'm going to show them to get the money. But I'm not doing it to pull in the adjusters heartstrings. I'm doing that to convince them that they're going to get fired if they don't settle this case. Then for the defense lawyer, you know, a lot of our best referral sources are defense lawyers we've gone up against. 12:48 Jack Zinda I had a defense lawyer that referred us his daughter's case, which was a huge compliment. And it's because one, we're, we kind of have a no rule. Like we're going to be the type of firm, we're going to be professional, we're not going to be lenient on time frames. We'll give you a break if it doesn't hurt our client or hurt the case. But if we say we're going to do something, we're going to do it. We don't make empty threats and we push cases very aggressively and we know what we're doing. The defense lawyer, they want to either, you know, make money by billing on a case. Not that they're going to run up the bill, although some do. And so I might know, hey, I've worked with this lawyer before. 13:21 Jack Zinda They are not going to offer me anything until they bill a certain amount of time on the file. So I might make sure we have plenty of depo sets so this person can bill. I would have to take them anyways. But I just know, let's knock those out early. They might be motivated by efficiency, maybe they're way overworked. And if you have a way to convince them they can pay out on this case and get this case off their docket. They might be willing to do that. Obviously don't under settle the case. So I think about what would I be if I was in that person's shoes, if I was an overworked defense lawyer, or if I was an overworked adjuster, or if I'm an adjuster that works only the seven and eight figure cases, what makes me look good to my boss? 14:00 Jack Zinda And then I really try not to burn bridges because it makes it very difficult for you to empathize with that person. Same empathy with the judge, like, what are the judge's motivations? I've had trials and our firm's had trials in very anti play to jurisdictions that people say you could never get a good verdict out of here. And this judge is awful and they're terrible. Well, you know what? You can't change that, right? So complaining about this terrible judge doesn't change the fact that you have this terrible judge. So what I try to do is put myself into their shoes. And it may be like I am kind of a grumpy that, you know, hates plaintiffs lawyers, and this is what my life is like. So what motivates them? Is it efficiency? Is it why do they hate plaintiffs? 14:47 Jack Zinda Or is it because they come in there unprepared, they're jerks. So I might try to go off code, like, what is this person's perception and how can I break that down and how can I play to their motivations? And that may take me watching some other jury trials they've handled or other hearings. So I kind of know what are they going through. Look at their background, where do they go to law school, what's their undergrad degree, what do I like to do for fun? Don't look at them as the enemy. Look at them as someone to understand so you can convince them to do what you need them to do in trial. So that was a really long answer by saying our superpower is how to fly. 15:19 Jack Zinda So hopefully that was helpful and you can use some of these tips on how to be empathetic and make your firm better. All right, that's it. Thanks for all the questions. I actually get a lot out of these and it helps me think through why I did things sometimes. I'm figuring that out actually as I answer these questions. And I love to hear different ideas, insights. So thank you for sharing them. And if you have any questions of your own, feel free to email us. You could text me, you could call our law firm. I love talking shop and I love helping other attorneys grow because I think a rising tide raises all ships. So thank you and talk to you soon. Thanks for listening today's episode of the Effective Lawyer. 16:05 Jack Zinda You can learn more about our team and find other episodes of our podcast@zendalaw.com as always, we'd appreciate that you subscribe, rate and review the pod. Thanks.