Duration: 02:02:25

The Get Automated Podcast Episode 19 is here. Download and listen to this week’s episode as your host Kelsey Bratcher and his guest Allen Rodriguez freely engage in the Unauthorized Practice of Automation (Lawyers will get the joke). That’s right, we have another podcast with someone from the legal industry. However, this week things are a little different. Allen Rodriguez is not a lawyer, his is someone who has helped lawyer’s with the business side of having practice for about twenty years. Allen has also been experimenting with automation for about that long as well. Let’s put it this way his introduction into automation involved a fax machine and 28.8K modem. Before he founded his company ONE400 he worked at LeagalZoom. Allen has taken may of his enterprise level experiences and distilled them down for use with small businesses. Here are a few topics that get explored this week. If you are a lawyer and you are not using automation then you are missing on a great way to hang on to a greater number of leads. If you are a small business owner and you are not using slack you are missing out on a very powerful FREE tool that can change the dynamic of how your staff communicates with each other and interacts with leads. All that and more, but you have to listen to find out.

Check out Allen’s company ONE400400 PicSnippets.

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Pro Tips

I don’t want this to come across this a sales pitch, but this is kind of the reality. I would say if you’re new to automation and, you’re looking to implement this in your law practice hire an expert. Because again lawyers you get paid to provide advice and do legal work. Most lawyers are probably averaging about $250 an hour. So imagine you sitting in front of a computer some kind of automation tool say SharpSpring which is complex or Infusionsoft, which is complex. And there’s no doubt you could figure it out, say after 20, or 30. or 40 hours of effort to make these things happen. -Allen Rodriguez

Because if you’re not even able to make an attempt, then you’re then you’re not going to be able to close that many. You might get 100 leads, but if you can only follow up the 30 of them, they’re 70 at-bats that you missed out on. That could have been a positive situation. -Kelsey Bratcher

Now you’re charging for the call not really the document but you’ve become a collaborator in this person’s business right become a very valuable resource. -Allen Rodriguez

Quotes

And if you’ve ever worked at a law firm or been involved in the practice of law, you’ll know that in a lot of ways the practice of law is still done the way Abraham Lincoln might have done it, 200 years ago, right, There were these inefficiencies when I first got introduced to it. I was seeing the way this this industry kind of operates. It was kind of an interesting challenge for me and I thought, we’re definitely under utilizing technology. Certainly in the early 2000s we were way under utilizing technology, and it was just
seeing these inefficiencies or the under utilization of technology that really inspired me pursue an interest in trying to automate more of the law. -Allen Rodriguez

For instance this podcast this is a very great seamless experience for me on the consumer end, right? I filled out a form then there was this automated response, which I thought was very well-crafted. The onboarding process is clearly automated and it was very great. Now here we are talking, on a Friday morning.-Allen Rodriguez

How to incorporate automation into attorney fulfilled product. So for instance the software engine could generate the draft of the document and then the attorney can go through the initial draft and kind of double-check it or add additional clauses that are particular to needs of specific client. -Allen Rodriguez

It was less about the automation per se and more about offering customers these other things that they wanted convenience and ability, efficiency, lower costs, and things like that.
-Allen Rodriguez

I mean even a brand-new business or law office, whatever on a limited budget could benefit from these tools. You could really have a really competent, we’ll call it “Tech Stack” for between 50 and 100 dollars a month. You can have a lot of these tools available to you with relative ease. -Kelsey Bratcher

Being able to handle those those interactions, as many as possible, as quickly as possible by itself can make it give you a huge advantage over competitors. Especially in real estate. If you go on Zillow you’re looking for a house and you fill out a form on Zillow you’re going to get called by five or six people.-Kelsey Bratcher

At that time was kind of interesting as the first time I got some insight into the reluctance for adopting technology within legal industry. Some lawyers had dropped out of the program because they said I will never communicate via email. It’s unsecured. It is kind of a newer technology in the industry at the time.-Allen Rodriguez

The value that your lawyer brings to the relationship is something that’s a little less tangible. Right? And that’s the advice. Lawyers are counselors at law, right? They are your trusted advisor.
-Allen Rodriguez

A human being, as as flawed as we are, you develop certain level of expertise over a period of time or training like in the case of an attorney. There’s some areas in which judgment cannot be determined by a machine…At least in the current reality and and having the ability to tap into that and blend the two together and the level of efficiency that that creates.-Kelsey Bratcher

Back in 99’ we would send out these monthly reports via fax, and fax was the big efficiency technology at the time. But we were using some I don’t know 28k modem or something. These reports were huge files. And so we would launch the report generating task, I remember the fax software would cue up this old machine. Over the next three days this poor little fax modem inside a little box, would just be churning out these reports and inevitably some attorney would call back. “Hey, I misplaced my report, can you resend it?” -Allen Rodriguez

Links

ONE400

GSuite

Google Sheets

Google Forms

Slack

SharpSpring

Hatchbuck

Proposify

Freshbooks

Zapier

Infusionsoft

Prosperworks

Panda Doc