Automating Legal Tasks: Making Lawyers' Lives Easier, One Click at a Time with Ali Zahid

Watch the YouTube version of this episode HERE

Are you a law firm owner who is thinking about integrating automation into your workflows? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Ali Zahid, CEO of LegalMate, delves into the transformative impact of legal tech on law firms. 

Ali shares the concept of LegalMate and what it tries to solve for law firms and lawyers alike. LegalMate is an automation platform that is integrated with CRM’s like Clio to streamline processes that would otherwise be done using traditional paper based methods. What makes LegalMate so efficient is it takes away the manual labour and gives time back to lawyers. Tasks like intake can be time consuming and using a paper based system is prone to error and can get lost if not filed properly. LegalMate does all the work for law firms and helps with keeping everything in order.

When it comes to integrating automation with workflows, Ali recommends it is best to start small. This is more so for law firms that do not have an automation system in place at all. It can be tough for teams to adapt to a new system if too many things are being implemented at once. It will take time for teams to learn a new automation system and let go of the old way of working. For firms that have a process mapped out already or currently work with some kind of automation, it is still best to start small but aggressively expand to move things along quicker.

Take a listen to learn more about automation in the legal space!

Episode Highlights:

• 1:42 How Legal Mate helps law firms streamline processes
• 8:43 The process of assessing law firms' workflows 
• 11:02 The approach for law firms to start small with automations 
• 29:43 Discussion on injecting AI into workflows 

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• [email protected]

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Transcripts: Automating Legal Tasks: Making Lawyers' Lives Easier, One Click at a Time with Ali Zahid

Becca (00:02.212)
Welcome to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Ali. How are you?

Ali Zahid (00:05.683)
I'm pretty good, how are you doing today?

Becca (00:07.636)
Good, good, so glad that you're here.

Ali Zahid (00:11.018)
Absolutely, I'm excited to be here. I've been following the group for a long time, so excited to kinda jump in and be part of it.

Becca (00:20.016)
Yes. So today we're going to dive into the topic of automations and law firms. And that's where you come in. So why don't you tell us what is LegalMate and what's the number one pain point that you solve?

Ali Zahid (00:26.817)
Yep.

Ali Zahid (00:33.31)
Yeah, so LegalMate is an automation platform that we've built for legal services that sits on top of different CRMs and things like Clio's of the world, and we help stitch all of these systems together. Our biggest main pain point that we kind of go after is giving lawyers their time back. Many law firms still rely heavily on manual paper-based process, which are pretty inefficient and prone to a lot of errors.

We build all these different automations on top of all these different platforms that are designed to reduce the manual work that the law firm does. A lot of the same repetitive tasks like intake, closing a matter and whatnot. So our aim is to give the lawyers their time back and increase their time that they can invest more in the human judgment and working with their clients and giving their expertise to the clients instead of doing the repetitive task over and over again.

Becca (01:33.236)
Absolutely. Okay, so who started LegalMate and why was it started?

Ali Zahid (01:39.058)
Yeah, great question. So started by me and two of my other two close friends. The story kind of goes a little bit like this. My best friend from university was working at this company called Clio that a lot of your listeners might know. And he was also my housemate at that time. And he would come home every day as being all tech guys, being like, man, like legal services are changing a lot. There's like absolutely brand new opportunities. There's this misconception around lawyers that they don't really.

Becca (01:52.873)
Yes.

Ali Zahid (02:08.726)
adapt to new innovative technology and take up new software. And he, like, I used to kind of poke fun at it, but, you know, when he started to show me Clio and different things they were doing, I was kind of like, wow, this is like a brand new opportunity. So we got a team together and started to work on different areas in legal. I myself am an immigrant to Canada, so dealt with a lot of like immigration lawyers and I always thought like, oh, they can really use the technology. So…

We all came together and started a company around the legal tech systems and started to go deeper into it. So that's who kind of created it. One of our co-founders worked at Clio, the other one and myself were sealer entrepreneurs that have worked in big tech companies. And we're like, OK, let's try to put our heads together and work more on the legal side. And it was also kind of the human part of it too that like

A lot more of the law firms that I dealt with were really big law firms, but the real like, 90% of the lawyers work in small to medium sized law firms. So I really liked working with small businesses because that was my previous company. And I was like, wow, this is where I kind of wanna be. And yeah, so that's how we kind of created LegalMate itself. How do we kind of solve this like automation problem is kind of like the next part of it. When we started to…

come up with different areas that we can tackle in legal tech, a lot of the law firms kind of came to us and were like, hey, can you help us set up Zapier? And we were like, as programmers, we were like, hey, this is supposed to be a no code, low code tool, like you should be able to do it. And when we started to go deeper into it, we were actually amazed how complex some of their workflows were and what they were trying to do. And Zapier is just not built for that. As computer scientists, we're like, yeah, like what you're trying to do is pretty complicated.

It was not possible with Zapier. So we started to understand their workflows. We kind of got ourselves embedded in different law firms, became part of their teams, and understood what people were doing, and started to build this platform to help them reduce the manual processes that they were doing and automate that. So.

Becca (04:23.412)
Absolutely, I love that and that is something that we hear a lot is that you know Zapier is there but they're not really able to do that on their own.

Ali Zahid (04:33.074)
Yeah, you got to understand what an API is, what a JSON object is, how the APIs work, all of the if-else statements that can happen inside your process, what happens when an API changes, it breaks the whole process. So there's a lot of these things that came up. And when I would sit down with an attorney, I'm like, hey, they don't have an open API. They're like, what is an API? And I was like, OK. We got to like…

take a step back and that's how the platform kind of started to get created. And we knew right away that we can't build a platform that we can just hand over to an attorney and let them configure it. So that's how we kind of created this more custom as shop where we go into a law firm and we work with them one-on-one and become part of their team. So if they use like Slack, Google chat or Teams, we're part of that. So very much kind of involved in deep into it because

It wasn't one size fits all is what we also saw. Even though different law firms might be practicing immigration, they're all working at it a little bit differently internally. So we wanted to kind of be able to support that and help them kind of build the dream law firm that they've always wanted to do.

Becca (05:47.452)
That's awesome. And I do want to dive into the customization. But first, so on your website, I read that you have legal services should be accessible to everyone. That's why we built LegalMate. So, I mean, that's something that gets brought up a lot in our community. So define accessible to everyone.

Ali Zahid (06:07.018)
Yeah, so we think a lot about how lawyers can help more people and serve more people. We started in immigration as the first sector and always were like, hey, as an immigrant, like both of my other partners are the same, they've immigrated to different countries and have always felt that. And it was always that, you know, you want to hire a lawyer, but it was really hard. You will call a law firm and then you won't hear back from them.

or they'll be too busy and you have a dying question and you can't find an answer to that. So one of the things that we kind of realized was like, if we can make law firms more efficient, just the way like big tech companies are, that they have a lot of these tools, we can help those lawyers serve more people essentially. So if you make them a bit more efficient, it can have a drastic impact on everybody else around them and allows them to be able to serve more people around them. And

When we started to look at that, we were like, hey, everyone go straight to the client, but the people in the middle who are actually doing the bulk of the work are the ones that should be a lot more efficient. So that's what we mean is, hey, can we make these lawyers and the law firms more efficient, help them run it like an efficient business, and remind them to work on their business, not in their business? That means more people can be able to get their services in the end.

Too many attorneys I talked to are like drowned with leads and they're like, we just can't get to them. And that's when kind of like the automation comes in and whatnot.

Becca (07:41.972)
Absolutely, I love that. Okay, when someone gets started with you, you do a workflow assessment. So what does this process look like and how long does this process take?

Ali Zahid (07:46.946)
Yep. Yeah.

Ali Zahid (07:54.186)
Yeah, so essentially there's two types of law firms that come to us. One that exactly know what they wanna automate. They have a standard of procedures like SOPs written out. They're very articulated. The managing partner or the owner knows exactly what they want to do. And those are kinda like, you know, one in a hundred usually sometimes. And we love working with them because that gives us a roadmap. We go in, we look at their…

SOPs, we audit them and we're like, hey, this is where you can automate this section. This is where you can automate this section. But a lot of the other ones, they have some type of SOPs or some type of workflow, but they're too busy. They haven't had the time to actually write it down. You go talk to the attorney and they exactly know, hey, let's say for an immigration, it's adjustment of status. They exactly know what steps need to be taken. But they never had the time to like sit down and really think about writing them out. So what we do is,

We usually first start off being like, hey, what's your goal? What do you want to do in this year? And then from there on, we sit down with them and kind of interview them for an hour, where the first question that I will ask is like, hey, I gave your office a call. I'm one of your main clients that wants to work with you. Walk me through exactly what happens next. Who picks up the call? What questions do they ask? And what email do they get? Who sends that email? When does that email get sent? Who sends a text message?

So we interviewed them for an hour essentially. Usually that's the amount of time it takes. And then we take that information back and sometimes we build a system diagram out of it, or we write like a task list that they do, or some of that sort of thing that we create that we're like, hey, can you follow along this workflow that you're doing? And that's where we kind of start auditing a lot of their workflows and kind of being like, hey, you know, this process over here is gonna break or becomes a bottleneck in terms of getting the people.

through and that process usually as I said takes in about an hour. It takes more of our time in the end after synthesizing the interview that we did, taking all the information out and that takes two to three days and then we kind of come back to you and be like, hey, this is your workflow.

Becca (10:04.364)
Awesome, that sounds great. So where do you recommend that law firms start? Should they start out small and incorporate some automations if they don't have any? Or do you recommend mapping out the entire process or processes and going all in?

Ali Zahid (10:21.074)
Yeah, that's a big question, right? And I'm going to say it all depends on the law firm. If they have the whole process mapped out from 0 to 100, what we end up doing is we start chunking it into smaller bits and start working with them. What we've always seen is starting small and expanding is the right way to go. It's really hard for change management internally with your team.

with all these new processes coming in and things will break. That's just the reality of the world. I don't wanna over promise you anything like that. So we go in very lightheaded and being like, this is how what the process is. So we always usually start with a small process and then start expanding it out from there on because when they see the power of one small process automated, they're like, they want more. They don't wanna keep doing the same thing over and over. So.

Most of the time we will start one process and then expand, but some law firms are like, want to go 100 and they have everything kind of written out and have all of the SPS kind of done. And then we just, you know, still start small, but we aggressively expand then.

Becca (11:30.036)
Awesome. Okay. So we hear a lot about customization when it comes to products and services for our law firm owners. But another thing that we hear is the huge complaint is that the build out times for customized things are a lot longer than what they anticipated or what they would have hoped. So what is your build out time? And you can give an example because like we just talked about, you know, depending on the project, it will change. But what would that look like typically?

Ali Zahid (11:59.166)
Yeah, so, you know, with Nick's experience working at Clio, we have a lot of exposure to this exact problem, you know, take legal or any software implementation, which is like software as a service, if it's done poorly, it will take forever to implement and kind of get going, especially on a bigger team. So this is something we've been very, very mindful of from the starting and we work with the firm very closely. So think of us like an engineering extension to your team.

We will kind of come in, we will work with you. Again, as I said, we are part of your communications. So that's if you're using Slack, Teams, or Google Chat, or whatever internal system you're using, we're part of it. So you can message us at any moment and we will be able to work with you. And we try to move really, really fast, as fast as the law firm wants us to move, because we are part of their engineering resource at that point.

So, you know, to kind of give you an example, a project can take one month to three months to implement, but that all depends on the complexity and the scope of the project of what they want us to do. It can be all the way from like, I just want this small thing to happen to, here's the whole like complex tree of if this happens, do this, if that happens, do this. And one of the other things that we've kind of realized is like we become critical path of the firm doing the work.

So if anything goes wrong, we need to be there because the firm kind of halts in place almost and we don't wanna abandon you or anything. So we give that care, we are part of the team still and we'll be moderating and creating this observability layer that we call it, that once we implement it, we will observe it with you for a long, long time. Essentially, because we're working with your team, we will be there, which is really important from that perspective.

Becca (13:48.188)
Awesome. Okay. So when someone decides that they want to work with you, are they doing project base where it's like one love, some payment, or is this a subscription plan? What do your packages look like? And can they do a setup through you without ongoing management or is it all encompassing?

Ali Zahid (14:07.974)
It's all encompassing. So what we do is we are a platform that sits on top of all these other software that you use. Our aim is that you never come to our platform because if everything works, like you don't need to ever come to us. So it is both a project base and then there's a subscription after. And the subscription is the world's changing every single day. Software gets updated every single day. API changes. And we want to be part of those changes for you.

There's always security patches coming out, et cetera. So that subscription is to have us around to make sure everything's getting fixed. So it's both, it's we will scope out a project with you, which makes the most sense. And then we will go in and have a subscription going on from there. So you can message us at any moment. All four clients have my personal cell phone number. So, you know, I get text messages all the time where we jump in and help you out.

And as I said, we're part of your team. That's the biggest thing, which is different. We're not gonna just give you a tool, make you spend like 20 hours and get frustrated and leave it.

Becca (15:15.26)
Yeah, that's amazing. Okay, so I polled some of our Maximum Lawyer community members to get a better sense of their current challenges when it comes to creating and implementing automations in their firms. So I have a few questions from them. All right, so what would you say to this member? They said, I'm wrestling with the decision of hiring an in-house technology person versus outsourcing consultants.

Ali Zahid (15:28.032)
Yep.

Ali Zahid (15:41.356)
Yep.

Becca (15:41.488)
We want to embrace innovation and make our practice technologically advanced, but that is a unique knowledge set and where to find it and keep it is challenging.

Ali Zahid (15:50.35)
Yeah, so there's a lot of thoughts on this one. Hiring somebody in person, which is going to be like quote unquote, like an engineer, like a software engineer, is going to be really, really hard for a law firm. They're really expensive. And then you're competing with like Facebooks and Googles of the world, where they have infinite amount of perks and money. So usually I never recommend the firm to hire somebody full time, because one, it's expensive to, you know,

It just doesn't feasibly make sense for the business that they're running. So that's never a good recommendation to hire somebody full time because then it's a really expensive cost. Now the second one is outsourcing consultants. I've given this a lot of thought. So a lot of people kind of ask me this question, are you guys consultants? And we're like, no, because we're not just gonna come in and make you an SOP. We're like,

Software engineers, we want to build stuff. We like building and helping you build those things out in the end. Consultants to me is like, I don't know, my kryptonite almost, because we actually like doing things and building things in the end instead of telling you what to do. So for the way, if you want to hire a consultant, first thing you want to know is how technically enabled they are. Are they like software engineers? Do they understand?

what the capabilities of these software are, can they read documentation on the API side and be like, hey, here's an endpoint, this is what it does and what it doesn't do, because there's a lot of times a software will say, we have an open API, but they will not have everything open to you. So having the understanding and deep knowledge is really, really helpful. And if they don't have an open API, how do you kind of tackle those challenges too, if it's an RPA or another technology?

you should be able to assess that and the complexity and the stability of those two. So yeah, long story short, if you want to hire a consultant, you want to wet them a little bit and make sure that they understand what they're talking about. And the easiest way to do that is get them to talk to one of their customers or clients. And if there's somebody new, you really want to interview them just like you would interview hiring somebody in-house and ask them very technically enabled questions.

Becca (18:07.72)
Perfect. All right, what would you say to this member who said, finding a tech person that understands what the software can do and can explain options. Conversely, I don't want someone who asks what I want and assumes I have a grip on the software options. So I'm wondering, is this something that you guys educate on? I mean, someone knows that they want automations, but they don't know what there is to want.

Ali Zahid (18:33.85)
Yeah, yeah, we get questions like this all the time where we will jump on a call in. They're like, I don't know what to automate. And that's where we will ask the question of like, OK, walk us through what happens internally in your firm. And that's where the workflow assessment kind of comes in very handy. And if they have like just general questions, a lot of the time that's about generative AI or LLMs or how to use AI in their firm. And like they kind of asking us all those questions. And.

My co-founder was the CTO of this company called Ada. They're one of the biggest chat bots for customer service and he helped build it out. And they are used over a billion times a day now all across big companies. So he's very, very well rehearsed in this and kind of has built these big teams of 100 plus engineering teams. So we can go really, really deep if you want in terms of a technology aspect of what and what can't a technology do. And we understand that, you know, you're not like a

big law firm of like, you know, thousand plus attorneys working here, so you don't need all the bells and whistles like they would want. You would, you're looking to solve your challenges. So we will ask you, what are you trying to solve? What is a problem that you're running into? What are your goals? And then help you assess those. Cause a lot of the times, you know, tech people have the tendency of like showing you the software instead of understanding what the pain points that those people are trying to solve for.

So we really want to understand what are you trying to solve for and can we help you solve for those? And if the answer is yes, then we will kind of tell you different technologies that are out there that can do that and what the reliability of those are.

Becca (20:11.24)
That sounds super helpful. Okay. All right, so I thought this next comment was very interesting. They said, I compare software companies to MLMs. They sell you a dream when you really need to put in the work to make the dream come to life, either by dedication to learn or hire. Secondly, even when you hire, the best consultants are going to give you a turnkey process implementation.

Ali Zahid (20:21.378)
Ha ha.

Becca (20:36.836)
Every law firm is unique, therefore time with your consultant is imperative and definitely a commitment, both financial and time. So what do you say to this? And what are your expectations time wise for the people that you work with?

Ali Zahid (20:50.23)
Yep. Yeah, so, you know, there's no silver bullet to this. As I mentioned, you know, we're coming with a team of like extensive tech background and also having work in legal tech specifically. We have a lot of discussions like this exactly with a lot of firm owners being like, hey, you know, what you invest in this is what you're gonna get out of this in the end too. So I'm not gonna sell you all the dream. I'm gonna make it very real being like, look, this takes time.

but the outcome on this could look like this. And we understand that sentiment all the time because there's a lot of consultants that will kind of show you something fancy on generative AI. And then when you start to implement it, you're like, this is not what you promised me. And then you never hear back from them. That's the exact opposite of things that we want. Our entire mission and the technology that we're building is to main goal is to help you automate your work and give lawyers their time back. So we're builders at heart.

We're gonna give you the right timelines and expectations. In terms of expectations from the client's time, the max that we've ever seen is about an hour to three hours a week, which is like very, very intensive, frankly. It's more of like, we will come, we will interview you, we will go, we will do our thing, we'll come back with, hit these are the requirements, do these look right? And ask you very detailed questions of like, who sends this email? What does the email look like? What is the subject line?

who goes into CC, like exact, like very, very detailed requirements. And because we're part of your internal team communications, we don't want to jump on calls back and forth. That's not how we like to work. We like to have asynchronous communications, so, and fast communications. We don't want to wait for an email that you might reply back to in a week, and then we're waiting. So we like to work very asynchronously and try to get in front of you as fast as possible.

because if you have one or two questions, we don't want to wait for you to answer those. So yeah, commitment from the firm, usually an hour to three hours a week max, and that's on like, hey, this is a very complex project and we need your time.

Becca (22:59.848)
That sounds incredible and very realistic. So I like that. And it kind of sounds like the magic there is in the questions that you're asking them. So that's how you're getting that information in such a short amount of time.

Ali Zahid (23:10.982)
Yeah, like sometimes firm owners get annoyed with us because I'm peppering them with a million questions. And frankly, sometimes they don't know the answers to that. So they will pull in their paralegal or they'll pull in their front office staff. And they're like, can you answer this question? And sometimes none of them know it because it kind of just goes out, no one does it, even though they thought someone was doing it. And that's totally okay. That's like, I'm not trying to embarrass them or anything. I'm just trying to get the answers out of them.

and help them realize that, hey, this is a process that we're gonna go through and on the other side, the outcome is gonna be something that you know will be good for your firm.

Becca (23:48.616)
So glad that you just brought up bringing in other team members. That was going to be my next question. So this is another one from someone in the community. And their question was, I hired an outside consultant, spent lots of time explaining our processes, what I want to do, et cetera. Then I made the mistake of completing the project to a team that panicked at the first glitch and shut down all automations, deciding applying them manually was better.

and delegated back up to me to solve the problem and complete the project. By then I didn't recall where I stood, I'm back at square three. So when you work with clients, are you typically working with one team member or a group of people? And have you ever had anyone shut down their automations after creating them?

Ali Zahid (24:35.954)
Yeah, so never had anyone shut down the automations. And we usually work with a small group of team members. So that might be the paralegal or case manager or the managing attorney who's leading it. And it's always a team because no one knows the answer to every single detail. So we try to involve as many people as possible that will get affected by the automation that we're doing.

When we launch, we are launching with the team. We keep a very clear to eyes that there will be bugs, there will be glitches, this is software. Nothing in the world is perfect. So like we are very honest with them. And that's why we're like all hands on deck when we launch, we don't launch 100%. We start off very small section of it and then we kind of expand from there. And before that we do extensive testing with them on their own systems.

as a fake client to make sure all of the conditions are met. So that's like all of, we kind of make this extensive plan for a launch and kind of go through that. So it's never like, oh my God, a launch, it's sent email out to all of my clients and you're freaking out. So we never do that because, you know, as a company owner, I would never want to do that either. So we have a pretty drastic launch plan with you where we will go in and tell you how to exactly happen.

And then we also create a lot of videos so all of your staff knows exactly what's happening in your system. So it's not like, we launch it and kinda go away. We're still gonna be part of your team, we're still gonna support you. So this situation will never happen with us because we're never gonna build an automation and just leave. We're gonna launch it, we're gonna monitor it because there might be some conditions that you might not reach for first month or second month.

that you might reach in third month. So we wanna be there for all of it and be part of your team. So that's like the biggest difference in us is like, we're not consultants, we're not trying to sell you a platform and then leave. We're more of like a custom shop almost that works with you to figure out what is right for your firm and builds it on our platform with all of the tool sets that you already have.

Becca (26:48.764)
I like that rollout process. That seems really great. I actually recently bought a product and it's a subscription and then they got delayed in shipping. And it's been at least three times that I can identify that an automation has fired to send us emails. And you know it's going out to everyone because it's an order like confirmation or a shipping confirmation. And then a real person has to send us an email apologizing.

for the rogue emails going out on their own. And this is, I mean, it's been quite a few times and I feel so bad for them.

Ali Zahid (27:23.51)
Yeah, yeah, that's, it's hard, right? Because like you've, someone else built a system, they've gone, and now you're just trying to manage it, there's no way to turn it off. And it just fires off. So no, you know, like, that's very real. And that's why we want to be kind of the engineering attachment to your firm to be able to figure these things out. Because glitches and these things happen, you want to have all the stop conditions kind of.

understood because when things go rogue and you can't stop it, it's like the machine has a life of its own.

Becca (27:56.404)
Absolutely. Okay, another community member, they commented just perfectionism. That's what they said holds them back from creating and implementing automations. Do you see this come up a lot with clients you work with? And do you have any recommendations for someone who knows they could benefit from automations, but their perfectionism is holding them back?

Ali Zahid (28:18.054)
Yeah, great question. So no automation is going to be ever perfect. We believe in iterations. We're a startup itself. So like a startup iterates a lot before they find like a product market fit, if you may. So we will iterate on your automation, we will like implement it and you will start using it and you'll come back to us and be like, actually, this doesn't seem right. Something's up with this. Can you change it over here? Can you change it over that? So

we are part of that process with you where it is an iterative process to figure out what works the best for your firm. That's why before we go full D building it out, we will ask you a million questions. We will make you share your screen and be like, watch you do that process to make sure this makes the most sense. And sometimes candidly, we will be like, this doesn't make sense, there's a better way to do this. And we will show them the better way. So, buy size chunk, start very small.

And remember, things will iterate. It's not gonna be the same, you know, just like you're working on a motion or something, there's gonna be version one, version two, version three. It's same with automations. There's gonna be a bunch of versions, but I think one of the things that most people get is overwhelmed with all the things they want. So kind of where to start, where to begin is a pretty big questions that they usually like to ask us.

And that's why we like to bite size it, make a very small project for them and get them started to understand what automation does. We have a pretty good framework for this too, is we teach them is trigger, filter and action. So think through like, what is your trigger? What are the filters that you do about it? And what is the action on the end that you want? And those actions can be time delay, whatever, you know, kind of go crazy at it. And that's when we will kind of come in and look at it and help you with it.

Becca (30:05.14)
Awesome. All right, before we wrap up, let's look into the future. What does the future of workflow automation and AI have for us?

Ali Zahid (30:15.226)
Yeah, this is something that we talk every single day in our company. So, you know, a lot of firms are already probably using some type of AI in their workflows. That might be summarization. You know, if you use Gmail or Microsoft, that might be auto replies on your emails now or giving you suggestions on your email. I think that a lot of them are already doing that. The next step is, in our view, is like injecting AI into your already driven workflow. So…

That's taking information out, parsing that information, and summarizing it. So that could be a receipt that comes in from USCIS and categorizing it appropriately, and sending an email out to your client on your behalf, letting you know, hey, this receipt came in. This is when your next interview is. I've sent you a calendar invite, et cetera. So that's kind of like the next step, is you inject an AI into your workflow, which we're starting to see now happen a little bit too.

The near future that we are seeing already in software world is agents. They're called AI agents. Essentially, you give them instructions, and you kind of unleash them on your computer, and they go do the thing that you want it to do. Now, software engineering is easy, because it's a deterministic characteristic. It's either a 0 or a 1. There's nothing in the middle. So.

you kind of give them an outcome that you want and you let the system figure out how to get there. It's a bit different in legal where there's a lot of gray areas and I think there will be a long, long time before we can get there. I think the role of lawyers will change in terms of being the, you know, almost being the creator of the thing, they will become the editor of the thing to make sure they're practicing law the way they want to practice, where like an agent will create their motion.

or they will create their discovery or what have you, and then the lawyer will look at it and edit it and get to the next level. So what might have taken them five hours now will only take them 30 minutes. And that's kind of the future that we're gonna be seeing. And that's kind of comes back to the accessibility. There's a lot of latent demand in legal world that kind of goes unmet. Jack Newton from Clear talks a lot about it. So I'm pretty excited that latent demand can be met from this.

Ali Zahid (32:41.23)
And I wouldn't be scared of it. It's like, you gotta embrace it. Technology's coming and how can you utilize it?

Becca (32:47.696)
That's amazing. The possibilities are endless and it's very exciting.

Ali Zahid (32:50.922)
Yep. Absolutely. We're excited to kind of build that future and help more attorneys get there.

Becca (32:59.024)
Yes. All right, before we wrap up, if somebody wants to reach out to you about your services, what's the best way?

Ali Zahid (33:07.026)
Yeah, go on our website, sign up or reach out to me at ali at legalmate.co. You can reach out to me anywhere, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or send me an email or a text or whatever works for you. My phone number is out there, too. So we're always available. That's kind of also our unique position is we are proud of ourselves with giving the best customer service, if you may.

We want to be part of your team, so we treat you like our team.

Becca (33:40.008)
That's amazing. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Ali Zahid (33:43.51)
Of course, thank you for having me.

Becca (33:45.532)
Yes.