"Post-Heroic Law Firm" w/ Victor Medina 230

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Victor Medina, founder of Medina Law Group, is a nationally-recognized estate planning and elder law attorney, focusing on traditional estate planning, asset protection, retirement distribution, and proactive income tax planning. Victor has been featured on national television, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and U.S. News & World Report.

6:00 Post heroic law firm model
10:18 Essential to marketing
12:40 The mindset shift
13:53 Become more than what you are
15:02 Adoption of bad team members
18:00 175 days off a year
20:50 You’re not essential
22:25 What to do in your free time
28:30 Lead a great life

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Tyson’s Tip: Case Leap, an alternative to Trial Pad, summarize depositions on this cloud based platform

Victor’s Tip: App: Downie, download video or audio to view and play offline.

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- - - -

Run your law firm the right way.

This is the Maximum Lawyer Podcast.

Your hosts, Jim Hacking and Tyson Mutrux.

Let's partner up and maximize your firm.

Welcome to the show.

 

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

Tyson: And I'm Tyson Mutrux.

What's up, Jimmy?

Jim: Oh, Tyson. It's so surreal. Today's Tuesday. We're recording and I was listening to an episode that we did with Bill Farias a few weeks ago. So, it's sort of the circle of life. We are recording and I'm listening to new episodes all on the same day.

Tyson: Yeah. And I will say it's really cool to listen to Bill talk now, as opposed to a couple of years ago. He's had a lot of growth. It's really great as a person and, I think, as a business owner. So, it really is neat to watch that growth. It's really cool. That was a good episode. I enjoyed it.

Jim: Well, I'm pretty sure that this is going to be a great episode as well. We have Victor Medina with us.

Victor, how are you?

Victor: I'm doing great, Jim. How are you doing?

Jim: Doing great, thanks.

Tyson: So, Victor, this all came up because Jason Carpenter said-- you'd made a couple of really thoughtful comments. We can tell, just by your comments, you're fairly new to the group but you're highly intelligent. You clearly know what the hell you're talking about. It's really interesting and Jason’s like, “You've got to get Victor on the show.” We’re like, “Okay. Yeah, we do.” 

But, Victor, before we get to all that stuff, talk about your journey and how you got to where you are now.

Victor: Yeah, sure.

So, I'm actually an estate planning and elder law attorney in New Jersey. It was never supposed to work out that way. I went to law school and got a federal clerkship. Worked for a large law firm.

I was supposed to follow the whole like corporate big law path. And then, decided really quickly or learned really quickly, I didn't have contacts to become an equity partner at those places. It wasn't going to happen for me.

So, when I left-- and talk about just crazy timing. My wife was pregnant with our second kid. I'm pulling the ripcord on our parachutes and I'm going to start this thing on my own. I ended up landing with an attorney that posted something on a Mac listserv back on Yahoo, or Google Groups, or Yahoo Groups, or whatever it was. So anyway, it wasn't the job bank. It was just a tech thing. And I landed sort of a partnership transfer gig with him and then started a practice on my own.

It was the first time I acknowledged/learned that you could actually be a solo or a small law firm and do great work because I had been trained in that whole entrenchment of the only way to do that is work for a large law firm and be huge and all that kind of stuff.

So anyway, long story short, ended up beginning in estate planning and elder law practice. Adding financial services about eight years ago. So, we have a sort of follow-on, additional services for our clients. And then, more recently, getting involved as an adjunct practice advisor for a company that does attorney coaching. And so, the more recent stuff, I guess, whatever would have led to some of the ideas that I shared on Facebook posts were really born out of being a recipient of coaching for 10 years and then being trained as a coach myself.

Jim: Victor, we talk a lot on the show about niching down. And one of the ultimate niches that I've heard a podcast drill down on was there's a lady who has a podcast about people who start businesses when either they or their spouse are pregnant. So, I launched my law firm when we were pregnant with our third son. Talk to us a little bit about that conversation with your spouse, and sort of what that conversation went like, and sort of how you envisioned what was going to happen versus what actually happened when you did leave that firm.

Victor: Yeah.

And so, for some context, for those people that are familiar with DISC profile, I'm a DI. So, you know, I feel I'm more powerful than my surroundings and the world is tilted in my favor. I'm, of course, married to my complement who loves stability over anything else. So, here she is ripe pregnant, like big belly, ripe pregnant, and I come to her and said, “I'm going to shake up our entire world.” And I had no cognition of her DISC profile at that time or what I was doing to her. 

Thankfully, I suppose, she is just an entire model of support for anything I want to do. And she's got a lot of faith in in my ability to go manifest whatever it is I choose to. We bought an old home and renovated it. You know, to the eye of the outside, like, “What are you doing?” you know, and having no vision, she had a lot of faith that it would come out.

So, the conversation really went about “I can't survive any longer where I am. It's a dead end. And here's something that I think we can latch on to.” And she had a lot of faith about my ability to do that.

But I will tell you, my concept of how quickly I would be able to make money was wrong. We had a lot of financial struggles in the beginning. I'm not ashamed at all to admit we're not sure if there's going to be grocery money when we go to check out. You know, all of the common struggles of somebody that's trying to make something out of themselves and just not sure that it's going to happen and being faced with facts that says you may not make this happen. And she had to come along with that journey as well.

And I think that the consequence of that is I almost feel responsible for overcorrecting, now that things are okay. It's like whatever you want to buy. You know, I know what I put you through before, so what else can I-- do you want a pony? I can get you a pony. You know, let's talk about whatever you need.

Tyson: I want a pony, Victor. Will you ship me the pony-- 

Victor: You're not married to me and you don't look as attractive as my wife, Tyson--

Tyson: Fair enough.

Victor: --so we're going to work on some of your value offer.

Tyson: That's fair. That's fair.

All right. So, hey-- so, one of your comments in the Facebook group which I found really interesting is you said, “You can leave your business, your firm, for a very long periods at a time and it will not affect your cash flow.” I believe that's true. Jim could do that, I think, to a large extent. I can do that to a large extent. It's a long process. But I think a lot of people they're thinking, “How is that even possible? You know, this is all about me.” So, will you give them some tips on like, basically, where do you start? Like, how do you start to get to that point?

Victor: And to do that, I'll explain to you the exercise I went through, that first highlighted why and how that was possible. I was in a coaching program where I was the recipient of the coaching. The coach that ran that was getting frustrated because he was trying to teach this idea of a post-heroic model of law firm leadership. It wasn't landing. We were there fighting it as, I think, a lot of attorneys might in that scenario, and it just wasn't locking in. 

So, he had us turn over the piece of paper and he said, “Look, we're going to engage in something we're going to call the exile project and here's the thing. In about 30 days, you're going to get diagnosed with a health condition that is going to require you to leave your practice for six months with zero contact. You know about this. This is coming.” And I think that the coaching program probably happened beginning of December. This is going to be a January 1 thing. He said, “You're going to come down with it around Christmas and you're not going to be able to return your firm. What is it that you need to do, in the next 30 days, to have a job and a firm to come back to?” Well, that crystallized all of the ideas of where we were so essential to the practice that our absence would cause it to collapse. And that was the way that it was first introduced.

Now, sure, there are a lot of tentacles off of that that require planning but if I was to bring somebody through an awakening around why or how this might be possible, I’d go through the same exercise. Look, 30 days from now, you are not going to be able to return to your practice. You've got 30 days. What is everything you need to do, in the next 30 days, to make sure that you can come back to.

We look at hiring-training processes, what we have to document, how we have to transfer stuff over. We go and we ask our team, “What is it that I'm essential for and how do we replace it?” There's a lot of steps involved in that but that form of an exile project, and that exercise of going through it really starts to crystallize how and why you ought to remove yourself from being the linchpin to whether or not your firm is successful.

Jim: Nothing like that's ever going to happen. I mean, when could we ever be prevented from going to our office due to medical issues? I mean, that's never going to happen, Victor.

Victor: Never, Jim.

And it's interesting because, you know, I ended up going to a more large conference for this coaching group. And we had these keynote sort of mini talks. They weren't really Ted Talks but they were “let's show you in practice how this actually might come up.” And the guy who shared it was guy named James Joseph, who's a matrimonial attorney on Long Island, very successful, very public about the fact that he was diagnosed with leukemia very suddenly. And it, for him, crystallized how he needed to get out of being the essential part to making his firm run. From that perspective, it was a very real implementation or example of this exile project, that it actually had happened to somebody.

And I thought that I had the answers all set up too, until about two years ago, where my mom gets diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer, and I need to go spend about three or four days out of the week at Memorial Sloan Kettering, which is about an hour and a half from where my office is, and stay with her and help her through this journey for about six weeks or so. And I had done a lot of work on the implementation side - post-client acquisition, to get that stuff transferred over. But it was in that moment that I realized, “Oh my goodness, I'm essential to all the marketing. Now, the fact that I'm not here means we're not getting any new leads. The sales and the conversion had already been over. We have nothing in terms of new leads.” And it was a way of saying, “You know, just check yourself. You don't quite have it all done.”

Jim: Victor, I had the pleasure of speaking to the Missouri Chapter of Elder Law Attorneys about marketing and I have to say that the group’s skewed older than me, and when I talked to them about marketing and concepts, and even just tracking leads in a centralized place. I asked people to sort of raise their hand and there were really only three or four, out of 40, who had a system for keeping track of people that contacted their firm beyond just calling them once or twice after the lead comes in. Has that been your experience and how have you sought to sort of separate yourself from the pack?

Victor: Yeah, it's definitely been my experience, especially in the elder law world because if we start to segregate out practices between what we might consider elective surgery versus trauma. In elder law, they're seeing a lot more people raising their hands who looking for anyone with a pulse. So, there needs to market or understand why they need to engage in those types of activities, including tracking and all that kind of stuff. It’s not as present in when you have to sort of manufacturer the interest or go and try to grow.

I think the way that we've been able to separate out that is a couple of different things. First, adhering to the principles of trying to get post heroic means we need to regulate how we are acquiring leads and being able to have some objective numbers-based ways of affecting that. So, looking at conversion numbers, and looking at sources, and figuring out where we need to invest dollars.

And it's a separation, I think, between-- and this is another one of the posts that I tried to go into some detail on Facebook. But the separation between an academic mindset and a business person mindset, because what happens is, in the academic, you're rewarded for your awards in academia. Be smarter. Do better work. Get law review, that kind of stuff. When you want to shift the game around and you realize you're now being measured by your business skills, all of that stuff matters. All the stuff about tracking. All the stuff about having systems around it, all of a sudden, becomes the report card as opposed to your ability to simply be around, and get leads, and have people hire you.

Tyson: So, Victor, how do you shift that mindset? Because saying it's one thing. Because I, 100% agree with you. For the people who are listening, like how do you tell them, like how do you get them to shift their mindset? Because it's not an easy thing to do. I mean, I think it's a process. So, how do you start with that?

Victor: Yeah, I would agree with you that it is not an easy thing to do. And more, in my experience, it's not something that's done with a great amount of success.

So, if we looked at the way, within a group of lawyers, we would break apart sort of three different phases of mindsets and critical decisions that people have made. People who want to live in a great lawyer mindset occupy about 80% of all lawyers. They're comfortable in that. It's about them as the technician. And when we make that first critical decision to try to grow a practice and create systems, it's probably only 15% that are in that world. And probably the last 5% in what we might consider to be market-dominating mindset, just a critical decision around trying to create something with purpose and longevity around it.

The first critical decision is the one that says that they want to become more than what they are. And for that, you've got to jar them out of the idea about where they are being enough. So, what ends up happening is-- and we've seen these posts inside the group, about people very comfortable with their level of activity, people very comfortable with how busy they are. They're defined by the stuff that they're doing and the work. And so, what we end up having to do is try to create a wedge inside working too long, working too hard, having crappy clients, having a crappy team. When we start to affect time management, marketing, cashflow, and a great team and start to drive wedges about desires to want to improve those areas, we have to introduce a mindset shift, because that thinking that got us the plate of the stuff that we don't like right now is probably not the thinking that we need to get a plate of different stuff.

Jim: So how does that that play out? What are you seeing from other attorneys? How do you see people making mistakes when it comes to that?

Victor: Which area of the four? All of them?

Jim: Yeah. Or the biggest one.

Victor: The biggest ones that I tend to see is adoption of bad team members, so frustration with stuff that's internal - off of their team and how they create it, and their own time management, where they're essentially feeling like there's too much on their plate where they're handling all of the business, all the admin and all of the legal work as well. Those two tend to be more significant and more powerful as leverage than, let’s say, cash flow problems because they'll adjust their lifestyle to the cash flow that they've generated. People do that. They expand their plates to fill the money that's coming in or they'll shrink it off of that. And so, if we can figure out ways why them working so hard or being frustrated at the work that they're doing and/or being frustrated at the team that surrounds them. Those tend to be the most powerful levers, the Archimedes kind of thing, that moves their practice outside of what it is.

I think the keys into that are showing them some tools that relieve some of the problems in that area. I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the ones that we talk about in terms of time management is a question batching form. So, too many times, people on their team do the drive-by delegation or the drive by, “Hey, you got a minute? You got a second?” And we invite that in. Because we think that's the right thing to do. Once we introduce the tool about the question batching form, that we then train the team around and say, “Look, I'm going to have a time for you, for everything that you have to do, but I want you to batch your questions into all of these areas. And by the way, when you come, have a proposed solution to whatever your problem is and we'll talk about whether or not that's right and we'll use that as a training opportunity.” That starts to alleviate some of the frustration that they're feeling on a time perspective.

Same thing on time and focus management on a time template, having a form of an ideal week where they start to pay attention to the work that they're doing and when they're doing it. We’ll introduce a crazy strategy like maybe you not take every phone call when it comes in, the moment that it comes in. Mind blowing, right? And, for them, they could never conceive of doing it that way. And if we ask them to play a game for about 30 days, where they group their return phone calls. Have a script for message and all kinds of but you're going to return phone calls at 9:30, at 11:00, and a 2:30 and you'll have your team help you with that.

We can introduce tools that will show them a better way out. And once they start to feel that it's like, “What else? Please, anything, because this is starting to feel good.”

Tyson: I guarantee you, when you said that, it made a lot of people nervous. And a lot of people were like, “There's no way in hell that's possible.” Like, I guarantee that that is the instant reaction of some people.

Victor: It’s been my experience, Tyson. That's exactly what it is that “that might work for you, but it will never work for me” or it's somehow wrong. There's sort of like a lifecycle. Almost like the four stages of grief, there's a lifecycle about like a better way to have a practice idea and it follows a lot of those steps. You're right.

Tyson: All right, so there's something else you said and I think this is something that Atticus teaches as well. You take off 175 days a year, free days off a year, and I think that's like no cell phone, no checking email, all that kind of stuff. No weekends. And then, an additional two months off of work days. So, I find that awesome. That's really cool. How the hell do you do it?

Victor: And by the way, I was trying to avoid promoting anything in particular but Atticus is the coaching company that I participate in and I'm a coach for, so it’s the reason why it sounds like it's the same.

How does it happen? Slowly. When I first began, I remember the introduction of one of these five goals of the program that I was in. It’s called Dominate Your Market Program. And it was this 175 free days. And I said, “Well, there's no way to count how many free days I've taken.” They said, “No problem. Take the last quarter and multiply it times four. You're a lawyer, you don't like math. I'm going to make this easy for you.” And that became a very easy calculation because it was zero, four times zero was zero. So the idea that you start to look at your free days, and you're not defined by the hustle which is one of the stories that I continue to struggle, with even in a growth mindset, that somehow the hustle is necessary, definitely something that I continue to struggle with.

You start to introduce ways to buy back some of the stuff slowly because it doesn't work if you take 175 off, off at the start. Why? Your team's not prepared for it. They're going to rebel. They’re going to roll grenades down the aisle for you to jump on. They're going to sabotage your ideas on it. Your practice isn't largely ready for that because it needs to be a post-heroic practice for that to be successful. And so, I think, the ideas that we start to introduce it slowly, just Saturdays - Saturdays and Sundays. Saturdays and Sundays and two days off. How about an afternoon off? And we start to buy that back.

And I think that that initial part, where you're doing spot days and your weekends, is one sort of plateau of understanding how to disengage and you start to build systems around it. When you start to look at time off at a two- or a three-week clip at a time, a mini sabbatical, that is a completely different stage of what it is because what ends up happening-- and this is probably for the people that are rebelling about not taking phone calls when they first come in, that ends up being such a threat to your identity and your purpose, that you have to be prepared for it. 

When you can disappear for three weeks and understand your firm is fine when you come back, and you're no longer essential. We better have a replacement for your purpose because you're going to have an existential threat to your identity from that, you know, once you realize, “Oh, crap. I'm not essential at all. What am I essential at? What do I mean in life?” And I think that that's going to be the next plateau off of it. But even just buying back those initial days and times, I think, is probably a great first step.

 

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Jim: We’re speaking with Victor Medina. He's an estate planning and elder law attorney in the Garden State, the great state of New Jersey.

Victor, on that note that you were just discussing about stepping back and finding that we're not as essential as we think we are, one of the things that I personally have struggled with that and I know it's sort of a crazy thing is, what do I do with my new free time? I've had a real hard time sort of making that shift because part of me wants to just shift into higher level law firm management and marketing stuff as opposed to shifting-- I get the get the idea of not answering the phone all the time. I get the idea of blocking time and free days. That's something they teach in a program I'm in called Strategic Coach, for sure, free days. But one of the things that's really been a hurdle for me is getting to, “Well, what do I do with these free days?”

Victor: And you and I could probably join the same support group because I'm the same way about figuring out, “What do I do with this time?” And I'll tell you what I've done which is not to say that is what you need to do or may even be relevant. But I had a hard time finding joy, as not defined by my law firm success.

Now, to be sure I have worn a groove in this particular record where the needle is very difficult to jump out of it because, within the struggle and not having grocery money, the idea that I could attend to with hustle, continued success seems like something that we would continue on and invest in. There's actually another member of the group that I [inaudible 00:23:34] but who is a buddy of mine and sort of accountability who is in the stratosphere above where I am and still struggles with it. So, it's never going to be a money issue. And it's never going to be a success issue because it continues in there.

The one-on-one coach that I'm working with, personally, we're trying to hijack the idea of finding joy outside of the practice to leverage it inside because there's a lot of great stuff that can happen outside of that. But re-engaging the passions outside of what the practice is because we became - you and I and anyone else that set the stage, we became virtuosos at doing this stuff. It is what our passion is. You tell [inaudible 00:24:14] like, “Don't touch the cello.” “No, no, no, you understand. This is what I've been doing for 10 years. I'm really good at the cello. I want to go and play the cello some more” but it doesn't serve our ultimate goals.

And so, I have found two things that I've needed to do in order to be successful at winning this free day game and the new purpose game. It's two things because I'm a big dumb dog that doesn't really understand his own psyche and can't pull himself out of it. The first thing is I have to keep my hands occupied. So wouldn’t you know, I have the most extensive expert Lego collection you've ever seen because if I can keep my hands occupied with a 3000-piece Millennium Falcon then, at least, I will have something different to do and keep my brain not occupied on the practice.

The other thing is I have to keep myself largely isolated from the world in order to be successful. Now, that doesn't mean trips because, in this pandemic right now, I'm not sure that's going to happen, but it does mean things like all-day movie affairs, also hard the pandemic but, I mean, I didn't have to go travel for it so I watch the 10 o'clock, the one o'clock, had dinner, the four o'clock and the seven o'clock. And at least, at that point in time, I’ve fully occupied my day because I still find it difficult for me to meet the terms of a free day as it's been set. You give me the day off, I won't check email, but I have an instapaper queue of articles on business development that I would love to read and, by the way, four more books that I'd like to dive into which is completely violative of what I was trying to achieve. So I struggle with that, so let me know when the next support group meeting is because I know they change location from time to time.

Tyson: That's great stuff.

Before we wrap, I want to ask you one last thing. It's MacTrack Legal. I kind of actually kind of stumbled upon this. I think it's really, really interesting. So, talk a little bit about MacTrack Legal.

Victor: So, MacTrack Legal is a conference for Mac-using attorneys. It's an annual conference that has been going on for the last 10 years. It was born out of an idea where I just wanted to create a conference that I wanted to go to. And I wanted to have other people help me pay for it. So, we wanted to create an opportunity for about 60 or 70 of us to get in front of one another and trade tech tips. That was the initial idea off of it.

What I found was an interesting by product which was the attorneys that tend to gravitate to using Mac's in the office, at least back in 2008 - 2009, end up being collegial, entrepreneurial minded, probably the only lawyers outside, let's say, a coaching group like Strategic Coach or Atticus, that I might want to have a beer with because they're decent people, and it morphed into sort of a TED conference for attorneys. That's the configuration that is maintained where it’s sort of this blend of professional practice, life development, and tech tools, and how they can all get integrated.

And so, for the last 10 years or so, we've been hosting it on Disney Property in September. We were scheduled to go this year. I'm pretty sure we're going to postpone because, as an elective conference that a boss can't make you attend, I'm not sure anyone's going to Disney for those purposes anyway, so we'll reschedule probably for the next year.

But it has been a labor of love for me. I don't make-- hardly any money off of it. Don't try to. It really is can we break budget because I want to hang out with these people and learn whatever it is that we've got to share with one another. It is a fantastic group. Many of the attendees, I would say 20 to 30 of them, have been to every single one which I've marked as a source of pride that we've been able to meet them. Many of them register sight unseen, on the agenda, just to attend because they know it's going to be a great conference. It's a lot of fun to do. And it's definitely, to Jim's point, maybe where I should be investing my passion outside of the practice as something to be interested in and find purpose around.

But I will wrap with just sort of this idea kind of circling on with MacTrack - coaching and purpose. One of the things that I've felt very comfortable with is in the definition of my great life, how I'm going to lead a great life and what that purpose is going to look like. I made a shift about three years ago that my great life is defined by the great lives that I create around me. And so, it's pretty easy with my family, my wife and my kids. Probably just as easy with my team members, but has more recently been taken, in my definition, to be including the Bar and my colleagues who are attorneys, and how can I help them improve. This is like one of the reasons why I got trained as a coach and do coaching. One of the reasons why I hold this conference, just to say, “How many other lives can I affect positively this way?”

Tyson: All right. Great stuff.

It actually sounds a lot like MaxLawCon. We're going to have to get you to come to MaxLawCon next year because it--

Victor: Oh, that'd be great. I love it. Thank you for the invitation.

Tyson: So, we’ll have to get you there.

All right. We do need to wrap things up. Before I do, I want to remind everyone to go to the Facebook group, get involved there. A lot of smart people like Victor in that group sharing a lot of great information. It's a really good group.

And then, also, if you're interested, join us in the Guild, Maximum Lawyer Guild. Go to maximumlawyer.com, easy for me to say.

Jimmy, what is your hack of the week?

Jim: Well, so my not real hack is following up on something that Victor said which is Legos. So, we've been building the Hogwarts Castle. It has 6000 pieces. It came with 47 bags and we are on bag 19. It's really coming in cool. It's pretty sweet. My daughter wants me to spring an extra $180. You can light it up. So, you can insert lights in the whole thing, so it lights up at night. So, I don't know if we're going to do that but it has been a real hoot.

But my real hack of the week is an app called Miro, M-I-R-O. It's sort of like Gliffy but it's very collaborative. You can make workflows on it, diagrams. It's like a big electronic whiteboard. It integrates with Slack. Adelle and I were both working on it at the same time. It's miro.com. So, that's my hack of the week.

Tyson: Nice. I'm going to check that out.

All right, Victor. So, I don't know if you know but we always ask our guest to give a tip or a hack of the week. Do you have a tip or a hack for us?

Victor: I do. I do.

One of my favorite apps in the entire world is something called Downie, D-O-W-N-I-E. And so, that app will allow you to throw a URL link. It actually includes a browser-based extension that gets installed in Safari as well as Google Chrome. And if you had a YouTube link or any link that had audio or video, you can throw the link at it and it will download and scrape that as available for you for offline watching. So you might imagine In that if we've got CLEs - now, in New Jersey, we've lifted the in-person requirement, you can now watch this stuff on webinar, get all 24 hours if you'd like. Wouldn't it be great to throw a link like that at a program lockdown and be able to scrape that through and have that available to you? So, it is really moderately priced off of it but it works so, so good. You're going to have a number of export options. You can send a video just out as mp3. You can send something as the video. It will download it off of it. Just super, super simple. I've taken even great stuff like Tiny Desk NPR concerts that I want to listen to and then scrape them as mp3’s and throw them onto my playlist on my Apple Music. So, I love Downie and totally would recommend that app.

Tyson: And how do you spell that again?

Victor: I think it's D-O-W-N-I-E.

Tyson: Gotcha. Not like the fabric softener?

Victor: No. No, no, no.

Tyson: All right. So my tip of the week is-- so this actually comes from Carolyn Elefant. Elefant, I'm not sure how you say her last name, but I've always wanted to say elephant. But she posted a comment in the Facebook group just asking, “Is there an alternative out there to TrialPad because the problem with TrialPad is you can only use it on a freaking iPad. It kind of sucks.

So, she’s looking for an alternative. And she was asking about Case Slate and another one. So, I looked up Case Slate this morning and I checked it out. It’s actually kind of an interesting product. You can summarize depositions. You can pull out issues. It's actually very similar to a Lexus product that I saw 10 years ago but it's all cloud based and so it doesn't matter if you're a Mac, or a PC, or TrialPad, or an iPad or not. And so, I'm testing that out now. It seems pretty cool. So, it's called Case Slate.

Victor, thanks so much for coming on. It's been a lot of fun. We've had a lot of fun talking to you, so thank you so much.

Victor: I appreciate the offer. It was really a great opportunity to share some of my ideas. Thanks so much to Jim and Tyson for having me on.

Jim: Thanks, Victor.

Tyson: Thanks, Victor. We'll see you, bud. 

 

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