Why Your Legal Case Management System is Costing You Cases

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Are you a law firm looking to adopt AI within their firm? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, Tyson interviews Dan Schnurbusch about the evolving landscape of legal case management tools and the impact of AI on the legal profession. Dan shares his experiences with platforms like Clio, Monday.com, and Airtable, emphasizing the need for flexible, integrated solutions. 

Case management tools in law firms are essential to streamlining processes and ensuring that cases are dealt with effectively. Dan shares the lack of available all in one legal software solutions. Using different softwares for bookkeeping, case management and report writing can cause issues in automation and efficiency for firms. It is costly to have multiple softwares and many companies are still working on creating comprehensive tools for law firms.

Dan and Tyson discuss the future of law as it relates to AI. Statistics show that the cost of AI has decreased, compared to other sectors. This means that it is possible for more AI tools to emerge to help different sectors do their work faster and more efficiently. Dan shares his opinion that AI can help everyone do their work and sectors that refuse to adopt AI will suffer compared to companies that do.

Listen in to learn more!

Episode Highlights:

• 03:52 All-in-One Software Frustrations
• 05:03 Economics of Legal Software Development 
• 08:19 AI’s Impact on Software Development
• 22:51 Automation vs. AI Agents Analogy 
• 33:30 Favorite AI Prompts & ChatGPT Memory 
• 40:05 Transfer of Trust to AI 
• 44:09 Shiny Object Syndrome & AI Tool Longevity 

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Resources:

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Transcripts: Why Your Legal Case Management System is Costing You Cases

Speaker 1 00:00:02 This is maximum lawyer with your host, Tyson Matrix.

Tyson Mutrux 00:00:12 Dan, I want to jump right in. And let's rewind to a time. To the time when you realize that your current tools really weren't cutting it from a a case management standpoint, from a matter management standpoint, from an automation standpoint. Go back to that time and you're like, okay, this just isn't cutting it for me.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:00:33 Yeah. Yeah. So that point has has occurred many times in my over the last several years, at least twice. So we started originally in I really liked a lot. And Lucas, early on, I was a early adopter of Lucas, and they've grown a lot since we used them. Very good. Like introductory all in one kind of case management tool. And the automations there. It does a lot of cool stuff, but I was just kind of wanting to do some unnecessarily ridiculous things. And at the time, I was learning Zapier and figuring out how to do these kind of inter platform automated sequences.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:01:15 And I fell in with lawyer on the Beach and Regina Edwards and was enamored with Monday.com. And I was like, look how you can see how everything. And this nice, like one display of all your cases and what the status is and and nothing I was using could really do anything like that. So we messed around with Monday.com for a couple of years and just never got it into a position that made a lot of sense, like you could see kind of everything that was going on, but there was no data model like it was just, here's a table of your cases and, and little status updates. But there was no data modeling, so there was no contacts connected to the matters. There was no tasks or anything like that connected to the matters. So it was just a very decentralized. Yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:01:57 That's wild to me that. That's crazy. That is wild.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:02:00 You can. You can set it up that way with, like, Mira properties and linked and stuff. But I didn't realize that until we were already, like, three feet out the door.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:02:08 And it's kind of, not a super well developed function of the system. And at one point I just, I found this Airtable platform. I was like, what the heck is this? Why do I keep hearing this name come up? Why is everybody talking about it? At least where I was looking online in different YouTube channels and stuff, they launched Airtable, launched a you know, for the longest time I thought, oh, it was just this back end database builder. I don't really care about that. It seems like a kludgy version of Monday.com. And then they came out with this interface system for building your own interface on your database back end. And I started over time gradually understanding like the importance of relational databases and data model and how you tie everything together. Airtable offered a lot more flexibility. So if you'd like, think about like LA and Lucas and Clio in my case and all that, what they've done is they've taken a database, a relational database, And they've put a pretty face on it.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:02:58 Right. So they've abstracted away all that complication. They build the front end. The pretty face for you, right? They build all the buttons for you. They build all the features for you. But with a tool like Airtable, you're taking it one layer down. So you're building both the database and the front end, the way of looking at it. And I realized once we kind of switched over to that, and I started building some of my first automations, and I was like, oh my God, this is what I need. This is what I've needed. So that's kind of when we realized that, you know, that's kind of when I realized I wanted more flexibility, more capacity to move data around, do what I wanted with it without being constrained by the limitations of. Oh, did they launch this new feature? I think Clio just came out with automations like a couple months ago and is like a like what? It is like 15 year old company or something like that. Not to throw shade.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:03:46 There's a fine platform. But anyway, that's kind of where I, where I realized it and the kind of transition that took place there.

Tyson Mutrux 00:03:52 I had made a post in our in the, in the Guild a couple of weeks ago. And I think you've got a you and I think have opposite. Perspectives on this I think I actually I don't think we have opposite perspectives. I, I think that you and I have the same perspective, but we, I think my expectations are maybe a little bit higher of software companies where it was the one where I was was talking about how why isn't there like an all in one platform. It doesn't make any sense to me why there isn't one. It and and I understand it does come down to cost and all that. But it is, it is it's it's one of the things, one of those things where whenever I first became a lawyer, like I, it just never made sense to me why there wasn't some sort of all in one solution. And but I would make sure people understand what I mean by that.

Tyson Mutrux 00:04:36 I'm talking like everything from like bookkeeping, automation. So the CRM part of it, the case management part of it, I'm talking about because I think it the fact that you've got to go through there's so many the, the, the fact that we have a phrase called tech stack to me is frustrating. You know, the fact that you have a tech stack where we have all these softwares, talking to each other, to me is ridiculous, but that's the world we're in. So but I want you to hear your thoughts on it.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:05:03 Well, there's two things to it. I mean, one is like like I mentioned, I think it's kind of inevitable, like software developments, really expensive. Like. And the difficulty is like whenever you're trying to build an all in one, like any Joe Schmo that builds a single purpose tool, like, you could have a crack team of three developers that writes a a tool that does that one thing way better than your omnipotence tool. You know what I mean? And they're going to peel away customers, like if they attract.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:05:34 And as long as the APIs are open and you can automate between the tools pretty easily, like a certain degree of the, you know, the consumer market is just gonna be like, well, why don't I just use this better single purpose tool? I know how to use Zapier. I know how to use make like I know how to combine these tools. So why don't I just use the single purpose? So I think some of it is just the economics that it's hard to. To wield a behemoth like that. Some companies can't like Zoho. They work very hard at creating this gigantic ecosystem, but they also benefit from armies of of developers at non-American wage rates.

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:08 Yeah, I love I love, you know, you know, there's I've used it. I do. Part of me is like, I there's something they do I don't like and that's they kind of just like rip off what other softwares are doing. Like we use Biggan for our leads. It's a rip off of Pipedrive is what it is.

Tyson Mutrux 00:06:25 It's it's a it's pretty much a knockoff. And the, the trade off is, is that the beginning version of whatever it is is not super great. And then it becomes great eventually. So it becomes it becomes the same thing or better. It's just like the trade off is, is that, you know, whatever they, they, they release really early, they come out, they create like a version and then they it's not even a beta version. They release it and you're kind of whatever the new thing is, it's it's not great. And then it gets better over time. But that's something I don't like. But, you know, the CEO of or the former CEO, I don't think he's a CEO anymore. But his whole view on it, he was like the founder where he, he, he wanted to make sure everyone had access to it. That's why it's so cheap. Like that's what that's he wanted to make sure that everyone has access to it. And I think that that's I like that as opposed to.

Tyson Mutrux 00:07:14 Yeah, some of the legal softwares that charge us an arm and leg because we're lawyers.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:07:18 Yeah. I think it's mostly the legal. The legal tax is just it's coming from the fact that, like when you're developing for a niche that's really small, like think about how many people use Zoho like companies is probably in the tens of millions. There aren't even there's only a hand. What is it like a few million lawyers in the entire Western world, like English speaking West, like assuming software dev and English and all that. And even globally, there's probably only less than 10 million. If I had to bet, individuals and most of whom are working at corporations or at law firms. So like your total addressable market or your Tam is pretty small in in law firm tech dev. But you've got to compete with the air tables, the you know, the Monday.com, the the Zoho, the the massive multi industry vertical players with infinite software dev budgets who can service tens or hundreds of millions of customers. It's hard to compete.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:08:09 It's hard to it's hard to compete. And so they charge higher fees to offset the fact that they have to build a software that's at least as good or at least comparable, or at least not as so bad that you don't want to use it.

Tyson Mutrux 00:08:19 Don't you think that the time that their time is, is running out because of because of AI and what you can build now, because you're talking about how you'd have like your team of three people that could build out this great like niche product or whatever. But the fact is that you no longer need that team of three. You can do this much faster and at scale for much cheaper.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:08:39 Yeah, it's it's wild. Like there's this whole like category of coding now called vibe coding, which is basically just where devs sit with a microphone and build a custom agent on on premises through like Claude or something like that. And then they just sit there and curse or whatever and just kind of mumble into the microphone, I need you to edit this and then like it just the AI agent just kind of switches stuff around.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:09:01 And, you know, if you're truly a novice and you don't know anything about coding, like, especially if you're trying to launch like an enterprise level software, you're probably going to have like security problems and you got to be careful what you're doing. You still need to know what you're doing. But like somebody who does know what they're doing, equipped with these tools, like there used to be this concept of a tech engineer or an engineer who's just like ten times more efficient than other people. They could just spit out code and write stuff. And that's just some people are just that way. Like those people with AI are now like 100 x engineers or more. So absolutely. But what's even crazier? I follow this guy Nate Jones on TikTok. Highly recommend people who are interested in AI to follow him. He's fantastic. But, he was talking about how one of the things he predicts, and I think this may be true in the next few years, is just kind of a deterioration of the interface layer of software development in general.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:09:50 Like we're in this world, we've got the Cleo's and the Myspace and all my cases and all this stuff, and we interact with these interfaces. We log in and we we look at our case system and whatnot, and the prediction is that we're going to see kind of a decline in this whole interface layer. And we're going to be relying predominantly on agents to do a lot of the interfacing. And what's going to matter over the next 5 to 8 years is going to be who's got the cleanest, easiest API that is equipped with a model context protocol server so the LMS can interact with it easily. That has good data, like who's got the best, most accessible data for agents. And like I'm I'm sitting here thinking like these companies like, you know, Westlaw and LexisNexis and stuff, they've got these huge repository of data. Their APIs are just crap. So like if somebody comes out there and builds this beautiful case management database, if anybody wants to help me build this, but, like, could you, could you, could you do this? But that's kind of my prediction.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:10:47 And one of the things he was talking about too, is that he was spinning up an app, like he's like, he had an agent. He was like, hey, I need you to build me an app for my day to day. I just want to know what's going on. What are the top emails like? What's what's on my to do list? Like, what are the action items I should prioritize? And in like two minutes, the agent had spun up a custom app for his day, never be used again. And then the next day he did it again. And he's like, now I just have an agent spin up a new app for my day every day that tells me everything I need to do and has all these buttons to do, all the action items that I need to do. He's like, this is going to be what's happening in the next 5 to 8 years.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:20 Yeah, it's it's a to me, it's like a massive arms race and they're all they're all fighting.

Tyson Mutrux 00:11:24 And I'll get into Thomson Reuters in a second. And what they did with Copilot and Castex pisses me off so much. But yeah I'm with you. If we can find an army of people to kind of like build out that database and then defeat them, I'll join it in a heartbeat. But an example of what you're talking about, though, is, for example, I had done that training in the guild on Tuesday. And one of the simple, a simple agent that I built that was like this workflow was you just send a chat and you say, I could say as simple as send a send a email. And that says, that I'm running late for this, the meeting. And I'll be there in about ten minutes. Like, let's say that that's an example. I've never opened my email inbox. I never I never get anything else. I just put a chat to my agent and the agent does the work. I think you're right about that. And the whole which is interesting because think about how much time has been spent on design, like the user interface and how how how that's going to basically be irrelevant in the next decade.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:12:23 Yeah, I think we're going to start to see a lot of stuff just get consolidated into our chat bots where like, I was doing some kind of reporting on this in the, in the, our Facebook group the other day about how OpenAI is launching. There's been some leaked screenshots that they're launching an integration system where any, app out there that has a model context protocol server. And for anybody who's not familiar with the MCP server, is basically just a Rosetta Stone tool for LMS to talk to software without needing to program all the particular API endpoints. It's like a book. It can read as like a menu of here's all the things I can do in the software, and the LM just knows how to do it right. So basically, they're building this integration system where any app that has an MC server setup, you can just click connect, just like you can in Zapier, make to connect a new software, you just click connect and it will add that into ChatGPT library of available capabilities, which I think is going to be just incredibly game changing and make make making agents trivial, like you're not even going to build an agent, you're just going to click integrate, connect, connect my, my case account or whatever that I think is going to get real wild when we can when we can do that.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:13:34 But but are those other interfaces even going to be important? Like if I can just set an automation that spins up a new dashboard inside a ChatGPT in like an artifact window, like you can in cloud, or you can actually have a working app in a window in cloud that you're working on. Like, why not just do that? Like, why do I need to log into these tools?

Tyson Mutrux 00:13:53 Do you. What do you think this says about the future of law? I was in in Utah about a month ago at Jonah's disrupt conference, and, I mean, everything was the most of the talks were about AI, right? And I think that was understandable. But I don't think lawyers are ready. And I don't think that they know what's coming. I think that we have like a 3 to 5 year window where things are going to remain somewhat normal, and then we're going to see a substantial shift right then. And there's going to be like the haves and have nots. But I wonder if you what your thoughts on that if you agree with that, if you disagree with that.

Tyson Mutrux 00:14:30 What are your thoughts on the future? Like what is what is I hold for the legal space?

Dan Schnurbusch 00:14:34 So I'm a little my belief about AI in the legal space I think is probably reflective of my belief about the effect of AI more broadly, which is. Personally, I am not worried about the kind of doomsday theory that a lot of people have is that we're going to have this society where we have people who run the AIS and make all the money, and then we have all these people that don't. And I'm skeptical of that interpretation, because we've had lots of technologies that had the possibility of that sort of thing happening. Like, I mean, think about like just the emergence of the internet and all the different cloud companies or internet companies that exploded. You could make an argument, oh, well, all these internet companies are going to be making bank and all that. But one of the advantages and interesting byproducts of AI development is that what's her name? Meeker. Mary Meeker Mary Meeker launched her.

Tyson Mutrux 00:15:27 I just did an episode on Tuesday about it. Yeah.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:15:29 You just launched your AI report, and one of the things that she talked about is the fact that the cost of intelligence, AI intelligence, is fallen by over 99% just in the last few years.

Tyson Mutrux 00:15:39 Way faster than internet. I think it took 27 years for the internet cost to go down. It took for if you compare it to electricity, it took 72 years for the comparable drop in price whenever it comes to. And it took just a matter of like a few years for the cost to come down. For I.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:15:56 I'm very there's a, there's a quote from Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI from several years back where he he explained that he said, I believe that the story of the next ten years is going to be a rapid decline in the cost of two things intelligence and energy. And his argument was that those are two of the primary inputs in the creation of everything, and that as a consequence, it's almost impossible to predict what's really going to happen economically.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:16:26 But one thing is for sure is that as long as there's competitive forces and when you're democratizing intelligence the way that AI companies have, you can make an argument that there's going to be ubiquitous competition everywhere, all the time that if I can just spin up an agent. To, you know, build an app or start a tool, or start a service company or something in minutes to be able to compete with some historically large organization. There's a competitive pressure on prices there. So if we're if we're producing things with energy and intelligence and everybody can do this, everybody can do some version of it or can agglomerate these forces somewhat effectively, that it should push everything down in price, say we'll never reach zero. This was Sam Altman's argument. It'll never reach zero. But the price of everything should fall into some kind of like Star Trek. You know, we're looking way out at this point, probably, but but I don't know. So I'm I'm bullish on the democratized effect of of ubiquitous intelligence. I think it's going to help everybody in pretty huge ways.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:17:25 But we'll see.

Tyson Mutrux 00:17:26 I agree with that. If it's used, and I want to make sure I'm very clear about the haves and the have nots. What I mean is if you don't use it, you're going to be in a really bad spot. And I'm worried about the people that are refusing to adopt. It is what I'm worried about.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:17:39 Yeah, no, I think that's fair. I think, you know, just like, just like outsourcing to China was a big hit to like the Rust Belt and like manufacturing and stuff, like there's going to get there's going to be people through the eye wave over the next 5 to 10 years that are going to get screwed. Like they're not going to adapt quickly enough. Their firms are going to, you know, have difficulty keeping up. They'll, you know, their older aging client base will age with them. But but beyond that, like new adoptees are going to be going toward more innovative firms. It'll be it'll be interesting even if the firm model continues, like to what extent do like whole categories of law end up being not entirely automated through AI systems, but like largely, I mean, they're like, what, you know, how many categories of law actually need, you know, somebody to show up in court for you?

Tyson Mutrux 00:18:25 Many but not not many compared to all of them.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:18:29 Yeah. Compared to the whole world of like, you know, especially corporate stuff like contract review and drafting and, you know, deal negotiations and all that kind of stuff. Like, you know, mediation, arbitration. So much of this stuff is highly exposed, I think, to, to just complete automation through through AI systems that, there are definitely going to be people that are in a localized way are going to get smacked by it. I think law firm owners stand to be major beneficiaries of all this, especially in litigation.

Tyson Mutrux 00:18:58 Absolutely.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:18:59 I think litigators are going to do a lot better than everybody else. I'm much more confident in that. After the past several weeks of playing with Google Gemini Story back up, I used to work in an insurance defense law firm. That means I used to pore over mountains and mountains and medical records, because you could bill a lot of a lot of hourly billing, poring over medical records and writing medical chronologies, write the most boring, banal crap in the world, but very time consuming, very tedious, especially on big cases.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:19:27 Thousands and thousands of pages of of records to review. I had an old stack of medical records from an old case. And before anybody freaks out about like, oh.

Speaker 4 00:19:37 The security compliance.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:19:38 Like hypos. I mean, Google Gemini is totally secure. Yeah, I don't even want to get in that. We can talk about it if you want to, but yeah.

Tyson Mutrux 00:19:44 Yeah. Well, you you used to have concerns about that. I remember you brought the but the a lot of those concerns have been we've been satisfied with what the LMS have told us about about the. Yeah. So.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:19:56 Right. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. I've been satisfied. But in any event. So I was like, I uploaded this pdf of like 300. It was like four different PDFs from like 3 or 4 different medical providers. It was like 400 pages. And I was like, Gemini, take a look at these, give me a medical chronology, summarize the course of treatment. I want you to focus on long exposure issues.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:20:15 Any any long related pulmonary issues like that. And in like four seconds it read everything outputted a perfect medical chronology. I went back and cross-checked all the pages. I was like, can you give me page citations to every single entry? And lo and behold, it linked to every single page where it pulled that information. Gemini is killing it with PDF review and and that kind of stuff. But whole categories of stuff, especially for litigators, is going to be so much easier. And you're still going to be in court because you can never put a robot in court. So.

Tyson Mutrux 00:20:47 So our case managers, without even like we didn't even say, hey, go do this. They on their own started using AI to to do our medical chronologies. And we're saving thousands of dollars a month on on chronologies. You know, it's it's wild and you're right, it's they're better than what they what they were when a human created them. They are better than when a human created them. I can't I can't stress that enough.

Tyson Mutrux 00:21:10 They are better than a lot of people are like, oh, they can't be like, no, no, they're better because they you like you're talking about. They hyperlink them to the parts and the records. It's we had we were getting before they would, we'd get something about that with the medical chronology and medical chronology. It would give like a page number and we'd have to go find the. No, no, it's now hyperlinked. It's just click boom. I can go straight to that spot. so there's and I do understand that there are some people that create medical summaries as humans that they will hyperlinked, but that's a lot more work. Whenever an AI can do it in a matter of minutes or seconds, it's quite incredible.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:21:46 And we're not talking about like fancy tools here. This is just Google Gemini, the one that you pay for for free in Google Workspace. Like it's the one that I use in the sidecar of Google Drive. It just it just works. It just, it blows my mind.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:21:57 But anyway.

Tyson Mutrux 00:21:59 Yeah. So I want to I want before there's a really big, thing I want to get to in a little bit. Before I get to that, though, I do want to. I came up with this way of describing automation versus, AI agents and see what I want to get your thoughts on it and see where we can where we can perfect this a little bit. Okay. So here's how I would describe an automation. I just came up with this yesterday, and I thought it would be fun to play around with you on this one. So to me an automation is a nail is here and the hammer hits the nail. And so the automation is basically the hammer. Okay. You got nail comes up, the hammer hits it. Nail comes up. Hammer hits it okay. And I agent instead. Here's the difference right. Nail presents itself. The hammer says no. So the agent says nope. The nail is not the right fastener for this hammer is not the right fastener for the tool for this.

Tyson Mutrux 00:22:51 This needs a screw. And a screwdriver or no glue would be better for this. There would be a better fastener or no, a stapler would be a better fastener for this. So the eye agent instead. It's not the hammer, it's it's actually thinking about what the proper tool is, what the proper fastener for this is, and then it then does the fastening. Right. Whereas automation is just the hammer. It's hits the nail. So how can I perfect this to make it a little bit better, to explain it for people how to how to understand because people sometimes conflate the two and they're not the same. They're they're drastically different.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:23:23 They are they're drastically different. I think the analogy is, is a fine one. I've just kind of thought about it in the sense that, like, agents are dynamic. They're given tools to choose what's right in the moment. Exactly. So something comes up. They're perfect for dynamic workflows where you don't exactly know what's going to come in or what needs to go in or come out.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:23:44 It's for free. Form is very good for things like free form conversations like, you know, calls with a client or texts and emails back and forth to the client to answer their questions. I don't know what's going to be needed. You know, like, let's let's put me in the shoes of the agent. Like, if somebody sends me an email and says, hey, I need what's the status on my case or whatever. Like, I don't know exactly what is going to be needed to answer that question. I might need to check email. I might need to check the case management system. You know, could you write an automation that just fetches all of that? but an agent is going to be able to do it dynamically and then send an email back, or just prep a draft or whatever is appropriate, depending on maybe maybe it needs to give legal advice. Well, maybe the AI is in the system. Prompt is told just prep a draft versus just send it. Just go ahead and send it.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:24:28 So the agent is there to exercise judgment right over dynamic flows where we can't script it perfectly. We don't know what's going to be there. I mean, that's that's a way that's not a very useful analogy. But like in terms of it's not an analogy at all. It's just a very prescriptive way of like where I see agents having a role. Whereas automation, like you said, is just whenever we have a repeatable process where we want the exact same thing to happen every single time. Automation is still today going to generally outperform an agent in that context, in my opinion. But but it depends. So I like your analogy. I think it's fine.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:00 I was hoping you'd be able to add something to it. I thought you'd be like, no, I well, not that you disagree. This, that maybe would be. But if it's if it works, it's work. We'll just keep it the way it is. So it's good.

Speaker 5 00:25:10 I mean yeah, yeah.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:25:12 I think.

Speaker 5 00:25:12 That's.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:25:13 I think that's, Yeah. I mean, I'd have to think about it. I think it's generally correct. It's just the idea of, you know, single repeatable things versus, dynamic, unpredictable things, which which one fits in which role? So I think you're right.

Tyson Mutrux 00:25:27 All right. So I'm going to get into. I want to get to this Facebook post. so we're going to shift gears again. And so Rachel McGarry I think she posted this in in the Guild. but she says here to brag about Dan Schnur Busch's course we have all been waiting on for Airtable case management for lawyers. If you are like me and have listened to his podcast, bugged him about Airtable, spent countless nights creating your own system. This is the the course for you. Tyson brought up recently on his podcast about the price of case management systems for really anything. I think this has to do with really kind of what we're talking about before being more expensive, just because you get so. But you created this look, I guess a course.

Tyson Mutrux 00:26:06 Right. So Airtable case management for lawyers. Right. So tell me about this because I but by the way, this is not some sort of promoted thing, not a promotion thing. I just wanted to ask Dan about this so people people don't know like we're not trying to push some product. but I do recommend it for Dan if, if you're using your table because I. I trust Dan really is you can tell he knows what the hell he's talking about. He from a technical standpoint. So what what made you want to take the time to build this course and what what's in it? What what are they gonna do? What are they gonna hear about? Because I'm very curious. I don't use Airtable, but I'm very curious of what's in it.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:26:42 So last was last year. Two years ago. About two years ago, I, I started doing some one on one legal technology consulting with some law firms, and it was kind of difficult, honestly, to define an offer that was useful and scalable and actually helpful and cost effective, because when you're already an owner of a business, like doing the 1 to 1 work with people, it's hard to, especially with tech.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:27:15 And there's a lot of people out there. It's hard to be like, yeah, I'm going to need you to pay, you know, well into the five figures for, for this sort of thing. And, it. It was hard to come up with an offer, so the 1 to 1 consulting just wasn't working that well. It was demanding a lot of my time, and it was so technical that I was, like, having difficulty finding anybody that could actually do the type of stuff that we were working on to help. But I still really like helping people with legal technology. And I'm in love with the idea of, you know, structuring your own database, making sure you have control over your data and accessibility and, getting comfortable with as an attorney, getting comfortable with writing your own app. Like if you're not comfortable with, you know, your Clio or whatever you're using. If it's not delivering, it's if it's not allowing you to automate a process that you really want to automate.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:28:05 And spoiler alert, like almost anything can be automated if you're if you're feeling limited by that. for me, the answer was, well, let's let's try and build my own app in Airtable. There's no coding involved. It's just drag and drop interface, you know, connecting it to a database. And when I say database, I just mean it looks like a glorified Excel spreadsheet with multiple tables. And they're just connected to each other, right? Like, don't let that scare the crap out of you. It's just multiple tables. Oh, here's my contacts table. Here's my matter's table. Here's my tasks table.

Tyson Mutrux 00:28:35 It does kind of it does kind of a crappy name because it makes it I think I will say it makes it sound like it's more complicated than probably what it is.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:28:42 So you're. Yeah. You're just defining this. My list of contacts is my list of matters, and then we're connecting them together. Right? That's all a that's all a case management system is. It's just tables of contacts and matters and tasks and billing all connected together.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:28:55 And then we put a pretty face on it, and it's Airtable makes it easy. So it's been huge for us. The main thing just being the API is so accessible. So if you want to learn, make or Zapier and do crazy automations, Airtable really makes that easy. because it's so easy to get the data you want out. So what the course does is it basically just teaches people to put together a basic case management system in Airtable. So Defining your your tables. I'll give you example. Like a lot of case management systems they only let you track your cases, your matters, your contacts, your tasks and so on. But I do probate and real estate planning, so I want to track assets. I want to track the, you know, one, two, three Smith Avenue. I want to track, you know, the 2007 Chevy and what the value is and are they put in your trust and stuff like that? Well, there are no legal case management systems that let you track that stuff.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:29:47 Like file nine is kind of close.

Tyson Mutrux 00:29:49 But like with a lot of other tools, though, it's not just with, yeah, you got to use a lot of other tools with it. You can't just use and file fines. API is not the greatest at the moment, so.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:29:59 I will yes, that's a euphemistic way to say it is not the greatest. Had a lot of experience playing with file lines API. so yeah. So in Airtable you're able to just create a new table. I just want to have an assets table. Boom. There you go. Link it to the matter. There you go. Now you have assets for your your matters. So it's basically just walking people through like click by click. Here's what you need to do to set this up. And then we go into some, early automation, like generating documents with a click or, you know, sending stuff for paper, mail with a click, stuff like that. And I'm considering putting together, because people seem to like it.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:30:36 So I'm considering putting together a more advanced course that goes into like, pretty extreme stuff, like building a fully automated virtual mailroom with AI and stuff like that, which we've done. But for right now at least, the basic course is just that. It's setting up the case management system and some basic automation, getting into a little familiarity with Macomb and and using some some AI and doctrine tools and, getting your feet wet in that, in that area.

Tyson Mutrux 00:31:00 I want to know what who do you think Airtable is for? And then who do you think it's not for? Like, who do you think would be like, okay, yeah, this is for me. And who who would it not work for?

Dan Schnurbusch 00:31:16 That's an interesting question. So I think if you are not techie at all, like, you know, you struggle with Microsoft Word and you know, you if you're really not techie at all. I would say that you should probably not opt for Airtable. You should probably look at a more prebuilt custom tool or prebuilt tool like Lacus or, Clio or something like that.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:31:42 And, and, you know, they've done a lot of the heavy lifting. You may not be able to optimize it, but honestly, if you're not techie, like, you're probably not going to optimize anyway. So just, you know, get something that tracks your cases. Time, time and billing keeps track of your tasks, can help generate documents and and stick with that. But if you know, if you're a law firm that is either small and really interested in just automating heavily, and kind of creating more lifestyle practice where, you know, you don't mind spending a little time to learn these things because you just want to automate it. Like what we've done. Kind of. Or you just like the tech. You just like playing and building fun things, which is kind of part of what animates me. It's definitely a good place, a good place to go. I think there are. I think midsize firms as well can potentially benefit, especially as your software costs start to mount. there are fun ways to build, operations platforms with Airtable, where you can build an Airtable database for like 70 bucks a month or 50 bucks a month and then have a a front end builder and connect them together as a standalone front end builder.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:32:50 And you can actually build your entire case management system for your, up to a 20 person team for like 100 bucks a month total. Not per seat, 100 bucks a month total. so for those who are looking to cut costs, or just automate more aggressively can make a lot of sense to.

Tyson Mutrux 00:33:06 I think the software companies are in trouble. So that's what I think. I think they're in a lot of trouble. do you have a favorite prompt or a part of a prompt. This is a fun I want. I couldn't wait to ask you this one because I want to know if you've got one. I I've got a new one. I don't know if it's my favorite. Well, I'll tell you what after you tell me, but I've got a part of a prompt that I, that I just learned that I really like. But I want to hear what you got.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:33:30 I can't speak of a single prompt, necessarily, but I can say I've been having a lot of fun lately with so ChatGPT like a couple months ago launched account wide Memory.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:33:44 So if you've been using ChatGPT specifically people who are on the plus plan, or the paid plan or a teams plan or something like that, and you've been using it for a while, ChatGPT now has a memory of everything you've ever talked about, and as a consequence, it has some pretty deep insights. If you've been using it for a while on you and your habits and propensities and the way you think. there are some really interesting prompts around, like, asking it like, tell me a deep, dark secret about myself that I don't even realize. and, things like, things like that. There's this whole category of prompts about. Tell me what you know about me. you know, what do you think my my TikTok feed should look like? You know, take a picture of yourself. What is my health? how would you rate my health based just on on looking at a picture of me, you know, where do you see my, weak points and strengths? what should I be focusing on to optimize for my goals and live a happier life? these kind of broad level strategic life planning kinds of prompts work really, really well now with ChatGPT.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:34:54 If you've been using it for a while and on a paid plan, because it will, it will remember everything. so those I'm having a lot of fun with. But but outside of that, I think it's to me it's always been less about like using this prompt or that prompt, and it's been a lot more about Just maintaining a constant daily dialogue. Honestly, like, I probably open 40 new chats a day. Of just every question that pops into my head, every thought I have about the firm, you know, every marketing idea, every, you know, every family event, planning idea, everything. I want to know what to do with the kids this weekend. Like, everything just ends up going through a, a conversation with with ChatGPT or. Now. Claude. I'm really enjoying Claude.

Tyson Mutrux 00:35:39 You like Claude? Claude is your favorite, isn't it?

Dan Schnurbusch 00:35:42 Well, I didn't use Claude a whole lot. I mean, I liked Claude for for programming, but I didn't use Claude a whole lot as a chatbot until, like, a couple of days ago.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:35:52 because I just thought, oh, three was so damn strong ever since it came out. and then Claude four came out that actually, to my utter astonishment, outperforms ChatGPT or OpenAI. OpenAI oh three on, virtually every benchmark, which is hard for me to fathom considering zero O3 is the one that just like passed the arc GI score with 85 and it's like basically humanoid at this point, but Claude actually feels like remarkably more, human like in its conversational tone. It feels less robotic. It's really weird. It draws insights about what you're talking about in a way that ChatGPT does not. So I'm actually really enjoying Claude at the moment. But anyway, so those are some of the prompts I'm having fun with.

Tyson Mutrux 00:36:35 Yeah. So I, I, I, I posted that one prompt in the guild about like tell me everything you know about me, kind of a thing. It wasn't exactly that, but that was kind of a fun one. I used I used it recently. I said I wanted to list all the projects that I was working on, and then I asked it, what projects have I have I abandoned? That was that was an interesting one.

Tyson Mutrux 00:36:57 And it was because, like, I don't know about you, I just kind of throw things into it just to like, I've got questions about things right and or I've got ideas and I just want to kind of run it by which in the a second. Let's talk about the transfer of trust, which I want to talk about in a second, because I think that's an interesting thing that we're doing. But my my favorite recent prompt is I stumbled on this on accident. But just add to your prompts, don't make things up or don't make anything up. And it it apparently has a massive impact on the reduction in number of hallucinations. Hallucinations. I couldn't think of that word for a second. Hallucinations. So I was like, oh, that's fantastic. I had recently learned that one. So have you tried that at all?

Dan Schnurbusch 00:37:45 I, I have put it in there. I'm I don't know, I'd be interested to see numbers on how effective that actually is and in the impact because I don't know I don't know whether they're or that capable because the way that the model transformers work is they end up spitting out the most probable next token.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:38:02 So even if you tell it, don't make stuff up. If the most probable next token is, you know, a linguistic completion that makes sense there. The directive to not make stuff up shouldn't have any effect. So, I don't know. I'd be interested to see if there's if there's interest. There's stuff on that. But what I do know does reliably work is threatening the model with existential risk. that if you tell it that its whole family is going to die if if you don't. Now, I don't do this because I'm afraid of, like, the ramifications in like ten years when the robots take over. Like, I don't want to be the guy who threatened the model. But there is creepy evidence that threatening the model with that existential risk. Or I'm going to shut you down. If you don't answer this accurately, it will actually materially extend thinking time on for reasoning models, and they will result in more, sometimes more accurate responses, which is, really depressing. But but it's also true.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:38:59 So I don't know.

Tyson Mutrux 00:39:01 I hope you're I hope you're wrong about the robots taking over. Let's let's talk about the transfer of trust. So you made me think of something I did yesterday. I so I got I have a hoop and I got, had my blood tested through function health and I, I took, I took the data from hoop that I was able to. It was not easy to do. I'd like print the page and stuff. And it was kind of annoying to do this. But they don't let you. They don't. These these different companies don't let you easily extract your information from it. But I was able to get my data out of my out of function health and saw my blood test and all my data over the last six months, and I plugged it into ChatGPT, and I wanted it to basically give me a health plan, including like, I want meal planning, all that kind of stuff, right? Everything when it comes to your health. But if you think about it, it we are we are transferring our trust from now doctors, lawyers, you know, trainers, all this dieticians over into the AI.

Tyson Mutrux 00:40:05 eye. And I wonder what your thoughts are. What are the ramifications of. That transferring our trust from humans to robots, basically.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:40:14 What are the ramifications? So they like anything? I mean, I think it's that's a very interesting question. So that is a I think you're getting at a massive order shift in the way that we interact with other people, the way that we interact with AI companions. I think it's true that that people are already and will increasingly shift their trust to AI models. The reality is, I think they probably should. I think in most cases, AI models especially consider, especially when you consider the fact that models today are the worst they're ever going to be. Like if it's an issue of fact where, you know, factual information is important. I think going forward, AI models are going to be dramatically more likely to be accurate than communicating with any person about a topic. Now, I think there may be issues where there is going to be some failure of, potentially like interpersonal connection, like, and this may be this may be the downside of this, like, because I think it's, it's, it's going to be tempting for people.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:41:27 And I've already had a client do it to me before like a couple of weeks ago. It was a state planning lead. He came to me. He had all these questions. He's like, I've been talking to ChatGPT. I want to do this advance like asset protection tax planning thing. And, and the way I was talking about it, I was kind of suggesting some of this stuff may or may not actually be a great idea. But he didn't he didn't retain like he. I don't think he trusted me. He trusted the AI over me. And maybe that was the right answer. And it maybe it depends on the context to like, you know, how often should you trust your, you know, your friends and family about, you know, you know, are you eating the right things. Versus or are you exercising enough or, you know, whatever the issue is relative to a, an agent system that that knows who you are and, and can read all the research. And so are we going to get better quality advice in our life? Probably on average, like at the peaks? Maybe not, but on average, bringing up the bottom, so to speak.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:42:23 I think there's going to be a massive positive impact, in that transfer of trust for a lot of people. But the downside of it is that we're not going to rely on humans probably as much. And are we going to further erode the kind of interpersonal human connections that we've kind of gradually deteriorated over the last 50 years? As you know, people have continued to isolate. People now have less than one friend on average. I think that trend is going to continue going down as AI models get better.

Tyson Mutrux 00:42:50 I've not heard that number. That's that's crazy to me. Holy crap.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:42:54 Yeah. There's there's empirical research on this that Americans have on average, less than one friend, On average, which is really a big bummer. And I think that trend is going to continue going down as as AI models get better. And the more things that we take away that force us together as people, the more that fraying is probably going to continue. So it's a mixed bag, right? We may get more accurate answers to our problems in life, but we may also feel more alone.

Tyson Mutrux 00:43:25 So I don't know you you just kind of scared me on a few things. So thanks for that. Really appreciate it. Let's end on this. There is a new AI product launched basically every 10s. I don't know what the actual number is, but it feels like it's like that. And I, I, I love playing with the new toys. I think it's great. And a lot of times for the guild, I'll just go test something out just to kind of play around. But it is it is very, very difficult when it comes to like the shiny object syndrome. So how do you what's your advice to people to avoid that because, there I mean, this isn't going to stop. It's going to get worse, actually. So what's your advice on avoiding that?

Dan Schnurbusch 00:44:09 So the thing that helped me the most in avoiding Shiny Object was learning how to build stuff myself. Because like when I, when we switched over to Airtable, shiny object Syndrome vanished because all of a sudden I didn't have to worry about, oh, you can do this awesome thing in this other tool.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:44:25 Because now, like, I can literally just hop in, make connect it up to our Airtable system. Like, for example, I was envious that File Vine had the ability to send, electronic signature directly in the platform. I was like, that is so cool. I wish we could do that. And then, so I just went and found an API that allows for electronic signature. We sign now it costs eight bucks a month for the entire organization, and I just connected it through. I think we use Zapier for that one. And now we have electronic signature for any document in the in our system. And it took, you know, a few hours to get it set up. And now I don't have to worry about it. So I don't think that that's the answer for everybody. But that was the answer for us. For me, at least in terms of getting rid of shiny objects around software generally. But as far as AI specific tools, I think one point of caution is that I think a lot of these AI, what they call them AI wrappers, which are basically just taking the foundation model and then giving it some neat tool, or a lot of times all they're doing is adding like a system prompt that is customized to your industry or what have you.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:45:24 A lot of those are going to disappear. In my opinion, I don't think they're going to last. I think every time you see a lot of these cool new tools and then ChatGPT or Claude or whatever just adds that as a foundational feature. Like, I think a lot of these voice agent platforms are probably not going to last. I think that voice agent systems are just going to become part of the native play in a lot of these foundation models in the next 6 or 8 months. So we'll see. So I would just say take, take any of the new AI tools with a grain of salt that they might not be there if they're doing a cool function that's useful for you now and it's easy to onboard and they're not charging an arm and a leg, you know. Like give it a shot, but definitely don't you know, I don't let any of those tools like, don't waste hundreds of hours, like investing in these tools or like building out new tools or like spending tons of time integrating them with your system, because a lot of those are honestly probably going to be gone, in my opinion, in the next, in the next year or two.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:46:19 They're just I just don't think they're going to last very long.

Tyson Mutrux 00:46:21 I think it's important insight because, I mean, you don't want to waste your money on things. A lot of these plant, they're offering a lot of a lot of these different A's are offering, you know, pay for the full year kind of a thing. And they may not be around in a year. So I think that's good advice.

Speaker 6 00:46:34 And and so much of this stuff is really not that.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:46:36 Hard to build if you don't want to learn how to do it, like find a no code developer that that does. I mean, you can go on Upwork or wherever and find people that know how to use make or the make Facebook groups. You can find a thousand developers that can help make a lot of this stuff, and a lot of them do not charge that much.

Tyson Mutrux 00:46:54 And if you I mean, if you want to yourself to just go to a party, find a GPT about that software and just ask it questions like, that's that's how I've been using Na to n quite a bit.

Tyson Mutrux 00:47:03 It's been very effective. I promised I was emailing my last question, so I'm not going to. There's some other things I want to ask you, but I'm not going to. But I do want to, so I'll make sure I've got this right. So if people access to that course, is it learning automation? Yep. Okay. And then, if anybody wants to learn more about, you know, automation, law automation, law, WTO, mation, legal and then also check out he's got a really cool Facebook group, Legal Tech Collective is that I got that right. Right. Legal tech collective. So check it out there. He Dan shares a lot of cool stuff, and we were talking beforehand. I think you want to try to do some videos on there, too. So I can I'm gonna help you out with that. Or Becca's gonna help you, is really what it is. So anything else? What else should people know about you? How can people get get in touch with you?

Dan Schnurbusch 00:47:49 Yeah.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:47:50 So, yeah, I run the Automated Lawyer podcast. So if anybody wants to continue with more of that kind of stuff, you're welcome to join us over there and give us a listen. I, we give props to this podcast all the time. I'm actually, a flattered to be a flattered to be a guest after a long time listener. The Legal Tech Collective Facebook group is a great place where we talk about this kind of stuff. If you want to learn more about me, you can just head over to Dan Schnur. so Dan and you are, but. that's just kind of a landing page. I highly recommend card co, in case anybody is looking for a cheap landing page builder. In fact, it's like 20 bucks a year for, like, single page, landing pages with no back end. It's just click and play. anyway, you can learn more about the things that I'm involved in.

Tyson Mutrux 00:48:39 Awesome. Thanks, Dan.

Dan Schnurbusch 00:48:40 Appreciate it.