Streamline Your Legal Research with Nicole Clark

With court data difficult to access, Nicole Clark created Trellis. In this episode, Jim and Tyson interview Nicole, the CEO and co-founder of Trellis Research, an innovative legal analytics platform. 

Nicole shares her background as a business litigation and labor and employment attorney, who after dealing with the challenging task of accessing state court data, created Trellis. The best thing about Trellis is that it leverages technology that helps lawyers gain a competitive advantage in the courtroom and help win their cases. 

Law firms who use this platform use it for a variety of things, such as judge and opposing counsel research, writing motions and learning about other cases.

As CEO, Nicole speaks to the importance of evolving in any industry, especially one as complex as the legal field. Building something new is full of ups and downs and trying to figure out how to do something is challenging. Most people do not tackle an issue simply because it’s too hard. But, Nicole speaks to thinking strategically and working with others to push through challenges.

In a world where AI has become so popular, Trellis has a data set that can assist lawyers when they are stumped and don’t know where to start. Are you writing a motion on an unfamiliar topic? Trellis can pull up a few similar motions so you can use them as a template to begin writing. With this, the platform fills in the legal gaps and gives lawyers the confidence to practice!

Attorneys can decide for themselves if Trellis is right for their firm.

With Trellis Research, you never have to go to a confusing county court website again for legal support!

Take a listen.

Jim’s Hack: Book revisiting: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey — so many great lessons in there, especially for law firm owners.

Nicole Tip: Podcast listen: It's called “the Knowledge Project” with Shane Parish.

Tyson’s Tip: Do a 1:1 check ins with leadership team members for 15 mins a month.

Episode Highlights:

• 3:22 Nicole explains how her frustration with the lack of access to state court data led her to create Trellis Research, a legal analytics platform that provides litigators with strategic legal intelligence and judicial analytics.
• 8:49 Nicole talks about the monumental task of collecting and structuring data from different counties, including the antiquated system in Cook County, and how Trellis Research tackles this challenge.
• 18:13 Exploration of how Trellis Research's unique data set can be incorporated into AI technology and improve legal research and writing.
• 21:06 Discussion about the analytics available on Trellis Research, including active cases, average case length, motion granted rate, verdict plaintiff versus defendant, and the potential impact of other companies buying similar platforms.
• 25:05 Discussion about how Trellis Research provides value to attorneys, particularly small firms, by offering access to court of appeals case law, helping with research, and providing a platform for efficient and fast work.

🎥 Watch the full video on YouTube here.

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• YouTube

Resources:

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Transcripts: Streamline Your Legal Research with Nicole Clark

Jim Hacking:
Welcome back to the Maximum Lawyer Podcast. I'm Jim Hacking.

Tyson:
And I'm Tyson Mutrix. What's up, Jimmy?

Jim Hacking:
Well, Tyson, we have a guest on this episode. We haven't had a guest in a while. We've been doing a lot of solo episodes, so I'm really excited. And she has a really interesting product that she's gonna talk to us about and a website and a whole approach to making lawyers better. So I'm excited. You wanna go ahead and introduce her?

Tyson:
Yeah, I'm really excited because it's a really cool product. So it's a really exciting thing. But Nicole Clark is our guest. She is a business litigation and labor and employment attorney who has handled litigation in both state and federal courts. She's worked, I wanted to say yuck when you said federal courts because

Nicole Clark:
I'm

Tyson:
they're just

Nicole Clark:
going to go to bed.

Tyson:
dealing with federal courts. But anyways, we have several cases in federal courts. But she's worked at a variety of law firms ranging from midsize litigation boutiques large firms and is licensed to practice law in three different states. She has defended corporations and employers in complex class action and wage and hour disputes as well as individual employment matters ranging from sexual harassment to wrongful termination. Additionally, Nicole is the CEO and co-founder of Trellis Research. And that's what we're really excited to talk about. A legal analytics platform that uses AI and machine learning to provide litigators with strategic legal intelligence. and judicial analytics. I mean, it's cool. It's very cool. Nicole has an intuitive understanding of technology and is deeply committed to helping lawyers leveraging technology to gain a competitive advantage and achieve more favorable outcomes for their clients. Nicole, welcome.

Nicole Clark:
Thanks so much, great to be here.

Jim Hacking:
Nicole, why don't you go ahead and tell us a little bit, Tyson gave us a little bit of your background, but I love to hear about lawyers that end up doing something other than

Nicole Clark:
Hehehe

Jim Hacking:
like being full-time lawyers. So why don't you walk us through a little bit how you got to where you are right now.

Nicole Clark:
Yeah, absolutely. So as Tyson mentioned, I did a lot of employment litigation. I was in state court constantly. And I think for years, I just couldn't believe how difficult it was to access state court data, that here we were sending around emails asking for intel on judges that we were appearing before, and trying to find out as simple as pulling up the docket of your case and going through a county court website to try to do so and all the hurdles there. And I couldn't believe that there wasn't a single source of truth for the U S state trial court system. And so born out of that frustration, uh, was me complaining to, you know, the only engineers that I knew. And we started coming up with a solution that really I used in practice for a number of years, uh, just mining data from the courts that I was appearing in, and then it dramatically changed my practice. saw that this was just a huge opportunity that other attorneys needed to have access to as well. And so that's really what we do now. Trellis is a research platform for the state trial court system. So I kind of like to think of us as the way you might think of PACER for the federal trial courts, a single system, except far more intuitive with a lot of analytics as well, but you never have to go to a county court website again, and you can search across. the states and across file documents by the body and text of the documents rather than only by, you know, a case number.

Tyson:
I wonder what was like the guiding factor that you were like, I've got to create this product. What was it that triggered, like was there some trigger that

Nicole Clark:
There

Tyson:
said,

Nicole Clark:
was.

Tyson:
I've got to do this? Yeah, what was it?

Nicole Clark:
So in California, judges release a thing called tentative rulings, which is before they rule on the record, the day before the hearing, they release basically a why for why they're going to grant or deny your motion. The policy reason is let's see attorneys go in, and with their couple minutes before the judge the next day, the attorneys know what the judge is going to do, but it gives them what they should focus on in their time. two or three minutes when they get to talk to the judge. No one is collecting this data, no one was collecting it historically, and this was like wild insights into the way judges think about all kinds of issues. And so this isn't something that's ultimately kept on the public record in California, it's released for that 24 hours and then taken down. and I was writing a big summary judgment motion one night and I was complaining to one of my colleagues. It was a complicated issue. I wasn't sure how to structure the motion. I didn't know the judge. And he said that he thought he had appeared before my same judge previously on a similar issue. And we went back and we checked the internal file and there was a PDF in that file, which was a ruling on my exact issue, same motion. And I could see exactly the way the judge thought about it. I could see the case law you preferred, how to organize the motion. I wrote it quarter of the time. I won. And for me, that was the light bulb of, how is it possible that I didn't have access to this from the start? That there was all this data that was out there that wasn't being collected, that we have an industry with great resources and huge amounts of data. and we're not utilizing that data in the largest court system in the entire world. So really that for me sort of became this compulsion of this doesn't exist yet and it needs to and sort of will it exist? Will we have a unified access to state trial court data who can have strategic insights within five, ten years? Yes. So let's do it.

Jim Hacking:
So I'm a little bit in awe of the monumental nature of this task. I mean, luckily in Missouri, we have a pretty good court system, the case net

Nicole Clark:
you.

Jim Hacking:
system. It's really good. And I've spent some time on the Cook County, Illinois website.

Nicole Clark:
Oh, one of our favorites, yep.

Jim Hacking:
It's got to be one of the worst. I mean, I love that expression, how do you get an elephant one bite at a time? But this seems like a herd of 50 elephants all

Nicole Clark:
It is.

Jim Hacking:
with different predilections and I would imagine, aren't there some states where it's even county by county?

Nicole Clark:
It's almost entirely county by county across

Jim Hacking:
Oh

Nicole Clark:
the

Jim Hacking:
god.

Nicole Clark:
nation. It is a county by county effort for us and it always has been. We are lucky enough to early on and continue to be venture backed. So we've had the resources to go after this, but it is a county by county effort. You are entirely right. And every way you can imagine it being different and difficult and separate formats and. You know, there's no unification, no structure to the data. So we do all of that County by County and map it back to our structured system so that we can make it searchable so that we can service analytics on top of it. And yes, monumental task is the right way to put it. Absolutely.

Tyson:
So as someone that has actually built, we had built a scraper years

Nicole Clark:
Mm-hmm.

Tyson:
ago that scraped multiple counties

Nicole Clark:
Love it.

Tyson:
in Missouri. And it was, but it was,

Jim Hacking:
I forgot about that.

Tyson:
yeah, it was interesting that cause we had built a whole, it was a whole process where it scraped the data and then it sent out postcards to people. And it

Nicole Clark:
Oh,

Tyson:
was,

Nicole Clark:
genius,

Tyson:
but it was.

Nicole Clark:
I love it.

Tyson:
But it was a monumental task. It was just an absolutely monumental task. So I can't imagine what you're going through. But I wonder with the attorneys that you've rolled it out to, what has been their reaction to it?

Nicole Clark:
I mean, at this point we have thousands of law firms that are customers and folks. The thing that we find is the four sort of main use cases are, I've judged research from the start, opposing counsel research from the start, writing motions, basically using the entire state trial court system as a brief bank. because we have the searchable filed motions and someone has written something similar. And not only something similar, something's been granted by your judge that you can utilize. And then we're also an alerting platform. So if you wanna get alerted on your own cases, if you wanna get alerted on clients or interesting cases in your practice area that you wanna sort of stay up to date on, then we're an alerting platform as well.

Jim Hacking:
I'm really interested. So you're looking at Cook County

Nicole Clark:
Yep.

Jim Hacking:
and it says antiquated. I mean, if it doesn't use frames from the old days, I don't know, it's as basic as can be.

Nicole Clark:
Yes.

Jim Hacking:
Do you say to them, hey, this is what we're gonna do? Or do you just attack it yourself like hackers? Or like walk us through

Nicole Clark:
Yeah.

Jim Hacking:
how you approach a county, especially a county as big as Chicago.

Nicole Clark:
Yeah, I mean we generally approach it ourselves. There's not a lot of tech resources at the county level to be able to help us anyway. There's no API, there's no way to really get the data in a clean format from them. So yes, we attack it ourselves county by county. Quick shout out to for Cook. We provide the Cook County documents free on our website. So if you need to pull Chicago documents, filed documents, please get them on our website. We do that also for those for Los Angeles County, which is another really expensive county and a few others. And we already have 170 million searchable filed documents. So largest brief bank of filed documents that's out there and the body and text is searchable, which is really big deal. But Cook County, what do you do? You go in and you start. from sort of most recent and you start pulling those cases and then we pull them in. What is a, they say it's a general civil case. What does that actually mean? Well, we use our ML and we say, actually this is a personal injury case. What type of personal injury case? Well, it looks like it's a intentional tort or whatever the case may be. And then, okay, well now we have the docket. We classify every single docket entry. So this is a motion. What type of motion? What judge was it before? What was the outcome? Who was the party that brought it? What are the other attorneys in the case? So every case, not only at the entire case level, but also at the individual docket entry level is classified by our system. And then that allows you to sort of slice and dice the data to say, I only wanna find these cases in the last year before this judge where there was a summary judgment motion brought on a negligence issue or whatever you're searching for. But for us, getting the data in the first place, which is not easy, these court websites are, as you probably know from trying, they are not ideal, isn't necessarily the hard part, although it's not the easy part, but the hard part is structuring the data. It's normalizing, structuring, cleaning the data so that you have something that you can make sense of in the end.

Tyson:
So I've got so many questions that I'm trying to figure out where I want to go. I want to go more on the business side, I guess. So

Nicole Clark:
Okay.

Tyson:
this has got to be, I mean, this is a massive shift from where, from what you did before, right?

Nicole Clark:
Oh for sure.

Tyson:
Yeah, massive shift. So I imagine like from a business standpoint, you've got to build this thing before you can even start getting clients, right? Like before you can start targeting attorneys, but then that also requires, it's not just building software, it's actually having to reach out to all these different venues. So I guess my question is like, what has been the most difficult part in building this company?

Nicole Clark:
You know, the difficult parts just change. So what was the most difficult in starting the company is different than sort of what's the most difficult part of it now. That's an evolution. And it doesn't actually get any easier. It just gets different. It's kind of like raising a child, right? There's like great parts and difficult parts throughout the entire lifespan and they're wildly great and wildly difficult, but they just slightly change on what those things are.

Tyson:
Jim made that exact same comment earlier today.

Nicole Clark:
Really?

Tyson:
So I think it's funny that you made that comment. Yeah, absolutely.

Nicole Clark:
Yeah, I think early on was collecting the data and really early on with lawyers, it was the how. No one could understand like how that was possible. And so getting people to even sort of be educated that this was something they couldn't do now was an early hurdle. And then… Now it's scaling, right? It's scaling team, it's scaling business, it's moving faster. All difficult, all very different.

Jim Hacking:
There's a certain company that has had the market of Southwest Second Reporters and F-Third Reporters and all

Nicole Clark:
Yeah,

Jim Hacking:
that stuff.

Nicole Clark:
yeah,

Jim Hacking:
I'm

Nicole Clark:
yeah.

Jim Hacking:
wondering,

Nicole Clark:
I've heard of them.

Jim Hacking:
yeah, I'm wondering if they've come into play at all, if they've approached you or maybe you might not want to talk about this stuff. But I'm just wondering, it seemed like that company had such a lockdown on things for so long. I mean, I just, I love how disruptive this is. Like, I just love it. I really do. And so

Nicole Clark:
Yep.

Jim Hacking:
I'm just wondering, like, what are the… the old stodgy saying about what you're trying to do.

Nicole Clark:
You know, they don't say it directly to us. I think they're watching. The nice thing is we're not a rip and replace for them, right? The way we're thinking about it is let them continue to own court of appeals and above. That's great. And that information is valuable. But it's 0.3% of the data that's out there when you really look at the legal data, which is wild when we think about it, right? So the court system where everyone's practicing. And where almost every court or every case goes to die, you know, 99.7% of cases get settled before they make it all the way to trial. So somewhere in that one to three year journey, never make it to trial, let alone to court of appeals. So we're the court system where everything actually happens and we're happy to tackle that. And the truth is they haven't tackled it because, you know, there was a lot of reasons when I started the company for why I thought they hadn't done it yet. Turns out it's just incredibly hard. wildly difficult. They're making money for their shareholders, they've got a lock on something already and will they eventually consider buying someone who's done the hard work? Probably. But right now, let us do the hard work and I think that's the way they're looking at it and we're happy with that. Really owning the trial court system is where we want to be, whether that is for individual, looking up individual cases, pulling documents, whether it is trends and analysis across the court, whether it's data via API, we wanna own the trial court system. And that's really the goal. And I think we're doing a phenomenal job of marching towards that goal.

Tyson:
That, you say 0.3%, is that what you said?

Nicole Clark:
Isn't

Tyson:
0.3%?

Nicole Clark:
that wild?

Tyson:
I mean, that is a, that's a, I mean, like, honestly, our minds can't even comprehend that number. Like

Nicole Clark:
I'm sorry.

Tyson:
that is, that's fascinating. So I think we know the obvious ways of using the product, like,

Nicole Clark:
Okay.

Tyson:
you know, looking at motions and things like that. Are there some

Nicole Clark:
Yep.

Tyson:
non-obvious ways of using it that we might not be thinking of?

Nicole Clark:
Oh, there's tons. Sometimes the way I think about it is you're only limited by how strategic you can think about doing your research. So whether it be, opposing counsel is a great one. Let's talk about that for a second. So you can look up your opposing counsel's other cases. You can see how busy they are. You can see how often they actually take cases to trial. You can dig in and actually look at their… their dockets? When do they settle cases? Is it before MSJ? Is it after MSJ? Are they particularly busy right now? There's so many strategic ways to look at the data. You can look up expert witnesses and find usually because we have the filed documents, a lot of times their testimony is attached as exhibits. You can actually see the way they've testified in the past. You can look up cases that have gone to verdict where they've testified. Were those high stakes cases? Were they low stakes cases? So there's so many different ways to sort of dig into this data in a strategic fashion. You can see attorney's fees. You can see some hourly rates for some of these firms. I mean, it's wild when you think about it. Think about almost any motion you can bring and the ability to get insights, not only from a high level, but on your opposing counsel and that particular motion. On the way that they've drafted. motions related to this exact issue. Well, you know, Newsflash, they're likely using the same motion as a template. Now you know what they're gonna bring. And so you can be proactive in the way you think about the case. So there's so many different ways to drill in and be super strategic with this data when you go in a granular way. I think of it as like… Not any different than the way you'd search on Lexus or Westlab, but the data set that you're searching and the strategic information that you can find. That's the difference.

Jim Hacking:
You're listening to the Maximum Lawyer podcast. Our guest today, Nicole Clark, she's on a mission to democratize all the data from all the state courts across the country. We're excited to have her. I think we all heard the story about the little chat BT chat GPT fellow, the lawyer that got into trouble

Nicole Clark:
Yup.

Jim Hacking:
with, you know, um, having the computer do is brief. What, what do you think your data will be able to How do you think your data will be able to be incorporated into AI and sort of the future of legal advocacy?

Nicole Clark:
Absolutely. So one, just to start with, that's just bad lawyering, right? It's like we can blame it on technology, but lawyers have been doing a bad job inciting cases that don't say what they say for lots of years. And so it's not that much different than what lawyers have been doing for a long time when they're not great lawyers, or there are a lot of excuses for why that may happen, but it happens. What we're really excited for is you have AI, this incredible technology in general of AI, right? And right now folks are utilizing it based on the large language models that are out there. So open AI or basically think of it as pulling from the entire internet or sort of what the general folks know, which isn't the legal system. And so you're going to be so much more prone to get hallucinations when it doesn't have the answers. What's awesome about the possibility for generative AI with our data set is that we're not just, you know, a chat on top of what you could get on GBT. We actually have a data set and we have a data set that nobody else has.

Jim Hacking:
Mm-hmm.

Nicole Clark:
And this data set, and one of the things I'm really proud of with us is that one, we're just positioned to be able to help more because we have the underlying data, because it doesn't have to guess. because you can look and it can pull. You need help with writing this motion. Well, let's pull from four other motions dealing with similar issues, except let's make sure they were before the judge that you're going before in the county that you're in. But not only that, let's pull from motions that were granted to give you a sort of outline to start with. So we're able to do that when other folks can't. And even folks that have court of appeals data, If you're practicing in trial court, those are great structured, organized motions, but that's not exactly the way it works in trial court. And so having those trial court documents is huge to be able to provide real value to folks. And not only that, we ultimately won't be, and this gets into future and some of the stuff that we're building, but it's not just ask a question and you have to sort of trust the answer. With us, because we have this underlying data, we can give lawyers the confidence to say, well, Charles, I wanna see how you came up with this. And then we can source to the documents that were used in pulling some of this information or making some of these recommendations and folks can dig in. So we get to sort of build trust with our customers instead of just asking for it and giving answers and they don't really know where those answers came from. And it might even take more work to check if those answers are correct. So I'm really excited because at our core, we were a data company and we have the data to give folks confidence.

Tyson:
So I've got the sample analytics report pulled up here that I downloaded from the website. And by the way, our buddy Judge Bourbonis is on here, Jimbo. I've got him pulled up. But

Nicole Clark:
Hello, nice.

Tyson:
yeah, you can pull up active cases, average case length, the motion granted rate,

Nicole Clark:
Mm-hmm.

Tyson:
plain out versus defendant. I mean, the analytics that is in here. It's incredible. It's got a breakdown by case. It's, this is such a cool thing.

Nicole Clark:
Thank you.

Tyson:
Really, really cool. I guess we're running short on time, but I will ask you like, what's on the horizon though, cause like there's companies like that, cause what Jim was talking about too, with like, like the companies that shall not be named, like they do like to swoop in and buy like buy these other companies, like they, like one of them just bought case text with which has co-counsel.

Nicole Clark:
Yeah.

Tyson:
Which I was

Jim Hacking:
Thank

Tyson:
actually

Jim Hacking:
you.

Tyson:
very disappointed by. I was hoping that,

Nicole Clark:
for

Tyson:
I

Nicole Clark:
you.

Tyson:
was happy for the case text people, but I was disappointed that they are now under their umbrella. But I wonder

Nicole Clark:
Yeah,

Tyson:
what's

Nicole Clark:
I agree.

Tyson:
under, yeah, I wonder what's on the horizon for Trellis.

Nicole Clark:
Yeah, I think that, so certainly that, you know, we've seen that and that is interesting. I do think that you're right that sometimes, and I think this actually can happen very often if a large incumbent buys a fast moving startup that it can sort of grind things to a halt. And I hope that doesn't happen and they were doing some really great stuff. And sometimes… big players will continue to let folks operate independently and keep moving. And so we'll see what ends up happening there. But it is something that, you know, we in the legal industry, the technology is moving now and folks are starting to adopt or at least be open in ways that, you know, certainly we got primed, we got primed with COVID and we sort of were forced to embrace technology. And then now AI has come and we're being told that, you know, our jobs are gonna be replaced. And at the very least, folks are looking into this and saying, is this helpful in a way that they haven't before? Or should I feel risk in a way that they haven't before? And I think that's actually great for the industry because there are ways that it's going to massively benefit us to embrace some of this technology. And yeah, there are some parts of the job which should be automated at the end of the day. And we can reposition some of the work that we do to bringing in more clients and other things that will actually help with the lifestyle and growing the business. But for us, we're focused on building an incredible product. And there's something, that is the North Star for us right now. And so exit opportunities will… we'll see in the future, but right now, the focus is continuing to build a great product and we're not even close to done yet. We currently cover 44, or no, we will be at 44 states by the end of this year, thousands of counties, but we're going big. And the truth is we also enhance our data with a lot of additional data as well, verdict data and other pieces, and that's just going to continue as we grow, even once we've got all 50. We'll then go. federal bring in that data, which is a nice structured data set, but let's own the entire trial court system. We're focused on the messy state courts right now, but ultimately we'll be going after federal data as well and just continuing to grow and then build on our products for more and more providing more and more value to attorneys. And I'll tell you for some attorneys, particularly small firms, we are the primary research platform that they use. It also, because you see some of the, you know, you'll see the motions and you'll see the Court of Appeals case law that's cited for your particular issues, you quickly know sort of what to get to. There's a lot of free Court of Appeals website data out there if you know what you're looking for. So there's all kinds of opportunities to benefit, especially SMBs that have a lot of, they have different needs than some of the large players. And certainly we work with a lot of AM100 firms as well. But we've got this incredible SMB base that is hungry and wants to work fast and wants to be efficient. And we're just excited to keep building for them.

Jim Hacking:
I mean, I really think that at the end of the day, you're really gonna be helping the profession itself because if you go to someone and say, Judge Verbonis ruled against the position you've taken the last three times somebody made that, that's just gonna make things easier and the whole thing's gonna work better. Can you talk to us sort of on a granular level? Most of our listeners are solos or smaller firms. How does it mechanically work as far as the pricing and all

Nicole Clark:
Yep.

Jim Hacking:
that stuff?

Nicole Clark:
Yeah. So we, you know, we really built for SMBs and they can sign up without ever even talking to a human. But of course we're here if you want to talk to us. Basically, you can go to our website, trellis.law slash search and start searching yourselves. What we find is when we give smart attorneys access to the data, they decide for themselves. whether it's valuable for their firm. And that's gonna be the best way to determine if we're the right product for you. So go on trellis.law slash search, you know, start searching for your cases or an opposing counsel, or sometimes I like to do fun searches, celebrities, Trump, like you'll find so much, you know, crazy information on there that even reporters don't usually have access to because it's locked in this court system that's been a black box for so long. And then once you're there, our pricing system at the SMB level, you can sign up for basically $100 a month and have access to the platform. Um, we really try and stay, um, where we're not cost prohibitive for SMBs. Um, so we work on that. And if your firm is a little bit different and has different needs, um, maybe you're a three person firm. Just reach out to us. We also don't charge by the seat. So if you have support staff that you want to have, you want them to pull your judge analytics report every time you have a new complaint, we can get your whole team up and running. It's not by user seat. So definitely reach out to us. You can always request info at sales at trellis.law. We're happy to set up a demo, talk to your team and get you set up with a trial to jump into the data yourself. And then… make sure it's the right fit for you.

Tyson:
That's excellent. For anyone that is interested, go to trellis.law and go through the tour. There's a really cool tour that will show you how to use it. It's great. So highly recommend it. We are going to wrap things up. Before I do, I want to remind everyone to join us in the Facebook group. Just search Maximal Lawyer on Facebook and you'll find us. And then if you want a more high level conversation, join us in the Guild, go to maxlawguild.com. And while you're listening to our tips and hacks of the week, if you don't mind leaving us a five star review, we would greatly appreciate it. Jimmy, what's your hack of the week?

Jim Hacking:
So my hack of the week is this great platform. It's called Trellis, and it lets you

Nicole Clark:
Okay.

Jim Hacking:
search for it. No, I'm teasing. Although it

Nicole Clark:
I

Jim Hacking:
certainly

Nicole Clark:
loved

Jim Hacking:
does

Nicole Clark:
it!

Jim Hacking:
sound great. I'm very excited. I'm very, very excited. I'm going to play around with it for sure. Nicole, I'm going to ask you, from a selfish point of view, everything I do is in federal court. So the sooner you guys get into federal court, the better. Because

Nicole Clark:
Great.

Jim Hacking:
Pacer is literally the same that it was

Nicole Clark:
I know.

Jim Hacking:
as when I was in law school in 1997. So it's

Nicole Clark:
I

Jim Hacking:
literally

Nicole Clark:
know.

Jim Hacking:
the same. I used Pacer before I went to law school. It's the same. So.

Nicole Clark:
It's funny because the pacer for the trial court system has been told to me by other attorneys and every time I win it's a little bit like, come on.

Jim Hacking:
Yeah, yeah. Well, anyway, so my hack of the week is I've been revisiting the seven habits of highly effective people. It's a book that I haven't read since back then when I first became a lawyer. So many great lessons in there, especially for law firm owners. And just one that I'm sort of focused on right now is the emotional bank account that for every interaction we have with clients, with customers, with team members. you're either adding to the emotional bank account or you're subtracting from it. And we really need to spend some time building up that emotional bank account for when those tough times come and there are the invariable withdrawals. But the book overall, you can't ever go wrong. It's one of those books that you should read every year or so. And I'll be adding that to my list.

Tyson:
I like it. That's a good one Jimbo. All right, Nicole So we always ask our guests to give a tip or hack of the week could be a podcast could be a pet It could be a book could be a quote. Whatever. So do you have a tip or a hack for us?

Nicole Clark:
I do. So I love this podcast. It's called the knowledge project with Shane parish and it is phenomenal. There are coaches, huge business leaders. I mean, the folks that he has on are absolutely incredible. And I learned something new every single episode. Can't recommend it highly enough.

Tyson:
I just typed it in, so I will check it out. I have not heard

Nicole Clark:
awesome.

Tyson:
of that one, so I will check it out. My tip of the week is there's something that we started doing with our leadership team and it's monthly check-ins. And so for those of you that are running companies like Nicole or running law firms like our listeners, sometimes you can kind of start to feel a little disconnected with your leadership team and with your employees. And this is something we started doing. So I meet with each one of our… leadership team members once a month for 15 minutes. And I just, I go through, meet up with them really quickly, see it, check in with them, see how things are going. And it's, it seems to be very, very effective. And I, it's, it's allowing me to reconnect with them quite a bit. And then it, it's, it's really all about them. So it's

Nicole Clark:
Thank

Tyson:
not

Nicole Clark:
you.

Tyson:
about, you know, me and them, it's about just them. And so I think that they, they seem to really, really appreciate it. So I highly recommend anyone that is running a company that, that you do, do those check-ins. with your leaders. Nicole, thank you so much for coming on. Really cool product. Awesome. Enjoyed just talking to you about the product. It's really cool.

Nicole Clark:
Absolutely. Thanks for having me guys.

Jim Hacking:
Thanks, Nicole. Good stuff. Bye, guys.

Nicole Clark:
See ya.

Tyson:
See ya. Thanks, Nicole.

Nicole Clark:
Bye.

Tyson:
See ya. Bye.