Adding Value to Clients through Automation and Flat Fees, with Adriana Linares

Zack Glaser (00:11):
Hi, I’m Zack.

Stephanie Everett (00:13):
I’m Stephanie and this is episode 547 of the Lawyerist Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. Today we’re doing this really cool thing, we’re doing a crossover episode with Adriana from New Solo.

Zack Glaser (00:26):
Today’s podcast is brought to you by my case, so stick around and you’ll hear my conversation with them here in a little bit. So Stephanie, to be honest, I actually heard of New Solo before I heard of the Lawyerist Podcast years and years and years ago. I know Gasp.

Stephanie Everett (00:43):
It’s okay. It’s okay. I’ll be the first to admit. I didn’t like the Lawyerist podcast the first time I heard it.

Zack Glaser (00:52):
Oh man.

Stephanie Everett (00:53):
Getting into it here, let’s get it all out there. Sam and Aaron know it. It’s, it’s a long running joke. I had a very specific issue with it, which I told them and we fixed, so yay.

Zack Glaser (01:04):
Good. Yeah, well and it’s better for it, but I guess the point is there are a lot of other lawyer podcasts out there, podcasts that we know that our listeners listen to, some of our listeners don’t know about, and we think that there are a lot of good podcasters who you could probably also listen to, and one of them being Adriana at New Solo. So we got together with her and did a crossover episode.

Stephanie Everett (01:32):
Yeah, I think it’s super fun idea that you had. So I’m going to give you all the credit for it. And so what you’re going to hear is that she interviewed me on her show. I interviewed her on my show, but the two episodes kind of go together. We didn’t really say this yet, but the whole thing is all about how to get started with flat fees and so I talk about it from the business model and how to start thinking about it. She talks about it from the tech side, so you really kind of need to listen to both for it to all make sense and I think it’s super fun.

Zack Glaser (02:05):
Yeah. Yeah. We’ve been referring to it as the super episode, but I think it’s better. They’re companion episodes. Yes, you could listen to them individually and get a lot out of them, but I think together they have a lot jam packed full of information.

Stephanie Everett (02:20):
Yeah, I thought so too. And I think we’re going to do more of these kind of shows, so if we love hearing from you, our listeners, so if you have a favorite legal podcaster or podcaster that you think we should explore and check out and do something with, or if you’re like me and you have something about our show that you hate, you can tell us We do listen, we try to learn and grow from it, I promise.

Zack Glaser (02:48):
Send that to trash@lawyerist.com. No, but really email@lawyerist.com would be where you’d send that. So now here’s our conversation with our sponsored guests and we’ll head into our conversation with Adriana, but before you dive into that inbox that somehow tripled overnight.

Stephanie Everett (03:06):
Yeah, if you love our show, if you don’t like want to sit us the trash, but if you’re like, no, actually you guys make me laugh and I learn a few things along the way, then, then yes, please for those folks, leave us a review. We’d really appreciate that.

Zack Glaser (03:21):
Hey y’all, Zack, the legal tech advisor here at Lawyerist, and today I’d like to talk to you about accounting inside a law practice management software, which I guess is pretty apt for this episode because we’re talking about flat fees, alternative fee structures and things like that. So I’ve got Lindsay Bushong here with me from my case, an APE company, all that family of products. Lindsay, thanks for being with me.

Lindsay Bushong (03:48):
Awesome, thanks Zack. So happy to be here. Really excited to talk about my case accounting. I actually lead our solutions team over at ape, so I have a lot of experience working with folks who are moving into a new tool like my case and setting up accounting and alternative fee structures like you were just mentioning.

Zack Glaser (04:04):
Oh, awesome. Well, accounting is not, as a lawyer that ran my own firm, accounting was not my strong suit. Keeping track of my hours was not necessarily my strong suit. I wasn’t bad at it, but it just wasn’t the thing I love to do. But one of the things that I would want to know in this episode specifically is how my case can kind of support alternative billing structures or different ways of billing and could you help me do flat fee and hourly billing, things like that. Is it I guess flexible?

Lindsay Bushong (04:46):
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s so funny you say that. We hear that all the time from our clients that they have a legal degree, they want to practice law, they aren’t MBAs. Running a small business can sometimes be really challenging, and so they’re looking for a software solution that sort of has those guardrails in place to sort of set you up for success. So with that, we do offer multiple different billing structures so that you can be flexible, whether that’s a flat fee structure, maybe for a DUI case, you’re just going to bill out your $5,000 with an upfront $1,000 cost and then you want to put them on a payment plan thereafter. That’s a really nice option and we’ve been having a lot of conversations how sort of the billing structure is changing a little bit, especially to be more adaptable for our consumers out there. A lot of people don’t have just money laying around to pay a $5,000 invoice upfront, so they want have flexible payment plans and subscription billing available to them, which are my case billing software, and therefore our accounting do support.

Zack Glaser (05:51):
I like thinking about that even if we’re not doing alternative fee structures on the upfront. A lot of times in order to meet our clients where they are, we have to do some different things like payment plans and stuff like that on the backend to make sure that the people can deal with that. And because this is my case is part of finna pay, which is LawPay all, you’ll now have a lot of experience with taking payments and being able to be flexible in that accounting on the backend.

Lindsay Bushong (06:29):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean that’s one of the huge benefits of using my case as your billing software because not only do we have that integrated accounting like you mentioned, but we also have sort of that world-class payment offering as well. So when you combine all of those together, you get a really nice holistic and compliant and audit ready sort of business. iOS, I’ve been thinking about it as legal business iOS because we’re able to track all of those independent client trust ledgers. We’re able to auto reconcile those funds as they come in. So when someone makes a payment on a payment plan, we see that immediately it’s updated to their trust ledger, it’s going to flow through into those specific chart of accounts on the accounting side so we can prepare our three-way trust reconciliation. So a lot of things are happening in the backend as soon as someone enters their credit card, we’re working sort of on your behalf to make sure everything is set up for you and there’s not a of clicking or integrated systems and data going missing and messed up. It’s sort of like this really nice comprehensive place for you to look so you can focus on serving your clients and not trying to hunt down 10 cents that went missing last month. Yeah.

Zack Glaser (07:38):
Well, so the other aspect of that comprehensiveness of my case accounting would be the general accounting of our company. You can do billing, you can do timekeeping, we can take payments, things like that. But if we’re really going to get the benefit of holistic accounting and something that puts some guardrails on us and lets us practice law and not go get our CPA, which there’s nothing wrong with going getting your CP along fine, but you guys also do kind that general ledger accounting or the pay my bills using the case accounting.

Lindsay Bushong (08:17):
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s legal specific as well, which is nice. You don’t have to configure it. A lot of folks will use QuickBooks, which is a great system, but it’s not necessarily legal specific to handle that IOLTA compliance.

(08:30):
My case accounting comes with those specific trust ledgers and trust accounts that are required by the state bar to run your practice. So it’ll help you sort of set up all of that structure for you, and then as you process those payments, it’s automatically going to log the transactions, all the debits and credits to those specific accounts. So it’s going to make it really easy for folks to do your end of month reconciliation. Also for expense management, that’s something we hear a lot is attorneys advance their costs, so they need to track their expenses, whether that’s a firm operational expense or a client expense. Those are really important to get in the system. I actually was working with a firm and they thought they were losing about 20% of their advanced costs, which I know doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you start to do the math, that’s a lot of money that’s going down the drain and using a system like my case accounting would help you capture or recapture a lot of that.

Zack Glaser (09:21):
Right. In my book, 20% of advanced costs, it’s a lot. So having something that can help you help get that would be extremely helpful. And if people do want to look into my case, my case accounting and all that, they can go to my case.com/ Lawyerist and I assume they can get a free demo or trial or connect with you guys. I mean, you’re trying to sell the product, right? So you’re definitely going to talk to people that go to there.

Lindsay Bushong (09:53):
Absolutely. All of the above. We do offer a free trial. I definitely recommend getting a demo so you can speak with someone like me, a product specialist, and we can walk you through exactly how all of the payments and the accounting and the billing is going to work together, give you sort of a really nice overview of how that would work in the system.

Zack Glaser (10:09):
Awesome, awesome. Well, again, that’s my case.com/ Lawyerist and Lindsay, thank you for being with me and helping to explain all of this to our listeners.

Adriana Linares (10:19):
Absolutely. Thanks, Zack. I’m Adriana ris, a legal technology trainer and consultant. I am not a lawyer, but I love helping lawyers use their technology better.

Stephanie Everett (10:28):
Hi, Adriana. It’s so amazing to finally have you on the show. I don’t think, I mean, you and I have never recorded together.

Adriana Linares (10:35):
I think that’s true.

Stephanie Everett (10:36):
Oh, how awesome. Well, great. I’m excited. Yes, welcome. Well, this is a special episode because it’s a companion episode. You also host a podcast and you’re going to be interviewing me next for that show. So maybe I’d love to just hear more about your show and introduce our audience to your show if they’re not familiar with it.

Adriana Linares (10:56):
Oh, well, that’s great. So it’s called New Solo, which is an interesting title because it’s great for new solos, but I always like to tell people that the content and the guests that I have on there really can apply to lawyers at any stage in their career, at any age and in any practice area. So I think it was called New Solo when it originally started, and it stuck like that and it’s fine, but I always do like to say out loud that I have wonderful guests including you next month, Stephanie, and we have really great content. The show is great, certainly not because of me. It’s great because I have wonderful guests who are just very, very generous with their time and their content and their foibles and their successes, and I think it’s a great show. So yes, please have a listen to it. It’s called New Solo and you’ll find it on of course any podcasting app, but it’s produced by the wonderful people at Legal Talk Network.

Stephanie Everett (11:50):
Awesome. Yes, and we’ll in the show notes, we’ll have links and all the fun things that we do. So we’ll make it super easy for you to find the show and check it out. So one of the things that I know our community struggles with, is excited about and so is this idea of how do we move away from the billable hour? And I think I always say that. I mean, I hated billing by the hour, just personally, I always say it sucked a little bit of my soul away. Every point too I ticked off was just like, ugh.

(12:23):
But when we think about it from a business standpoint, it really doesn’t make sense. I was talking to someone yesterday in fact, and she was like, I’ve done all this years of work on my contract drafts and my templates, and when we bill by the hour, it takes me now 10 minutes to complete a contract review for someone. The billable hour doesn’t show the value of that work, right? That’s one example. We were also talking about she can turn around things super fast and sometimes points, sometimes her clients need her to do that, and we’re not really, most of us at least aren’t charging any kind of expedited fee when clients ask for something by the next day. So I mean, I could keep going on and on about why there’s so many inefficiencies are not inefficiencies, that’s not the right word. The billable hour just doesn’t reflect our value.

Adriana Linares (13:12):
So it doesn’t capture experience and expertise. I mean, that’s really what you’re saying and it’s so important for attorneys to hear that.

Stephanie Everett (13:22):
Yes, because you have experience and expertise that you should be able to be compensated for. And so I think the easiest next step for those who are like, okay, I’m with you guys that’s making sense, is to move to a flat fee. And I thought what would be helpful is, okay, now that I know conceptually how I want to do it, I think I help people kind of figure out how do we scope it and how do we price it. But where I think you could really help us is what are some of the tools and how do we get our technology once we’re set on the business model, what tools do we use to make that an easy effective switch?

Adriana Linares (14:04):
Sure. Well, let’s start with a keyword that is going to be behind the success of this shift, and that is automation. So what you’ll find, you mentioned earlier, so you have a client or one of the members who has this contract that she’s been honing and crafting and culling and creating for years, and there’s all these tweaks to it. So the question is when she does need to reuse that form, which we’ll call it a form, you guys, it’s really a template. A form has boxes and lines, but y’all like to call it a form. So we can call it form. I like it. It’s a template. A template in what we see so often, which I learned this word 25 years ago. We’re still using it or this phrase dupe and revise. I’m going to go find the contract, the agreement, the will, the trust that is closest to that I can remember in my mind that is closest to this, I’m going to go find it, we’re going to duplicate it and then I’m going to revise it.

(15:05):
That is a very inefficient way to work. Not to mention there is incredible risk associated with dupe and revise. Let me segment real quick to the risks and then I’m going to come back to why it’s not great. But here’s the risk. You, the human or you a human who supports you has to go through the document and visually find the changes that need to be made. You might miss something if it’s like imagine an SEC filing that’s like two, 300 pages long. Somebody’s going through there either doing a find and replace or a find sounds like looks like. So there’s the visual part of the template that somebody has to work through and risk missing something or making an error or mistyping something. And then there’s of course the hidden data that can be found in the file properties, which can often create a real uncomfortable situation if somebody decides to look at the file properties of a document and you have inadvertently disclosed that this was once a will for Stephanie Everett. Now you’re trying to build it for Adriana ez.

Stephanie Everett (16:12):
So do this advise. That’s a big point that, I mean, I just want to highlight that gets, people aren’t thinking about that. Let’s just be honest.

Adriana Linares (16:21):
I will tell you right now, every single person listening to this podcast, open up any one of your forms templates and go to file in Word and look at the file properties. It’s file info on Word and on a Mac. I think it’s the same, but go look at the file properties I run T guarantee. You are going to see information in there that will make your eyes pop out of your head. It’s either going to be the attorney you first worked for when you got out of law school and you borrowed this form. It’s going to be the name of a client that you used the form for previously, or it’s just going to be some random name that you have no idea where that name, that person that previous author came from. So please do me a favor and go clean up your forms.

(17:10):
Okay, so that’s the first problem with dup and revise or one of the main problems is the risk that you are creating by not having a clean form that you’re starting with every time. And then there’s the whole issue of somebody has to go through and manually insert the data that you need. So how do we address that issue through automation? Now, how does automation help you? First of all, you will hopefully be using a case management system, which will certainly be one of the basic technologies that you need in order to move to a flat fee billing or a partial flat fee billing system because that’s going to help you manage your cases. A case management system helps you manage dates, deadlines, details, documents. But the important part is that when you set up your template correctly, meaning you’ve cleaned it up and you’ve put in the mail merge, so I’m going to use the term mail merge because we all know what that is, but essentially document assembly is the more modern term

(18:07):
We can use. So document assembly means that you are taking this nice clean form that you’re going to start with, that you’ve been honing and crafting. You’re going to clean out all the hidden data, which we can refer to as metadata, but I don’t often like to call it metadata because that’s used so much in eDiscovery. They’re it’s file properties typically in your Word documents. So you’re going to strip out all the file properties. You’re just going to have fields where the basic data from your dashboard in your client, in your practice management system comes from, and you’re going to create those forms, that template with those mail merge fields, those document assembly fields, and start there. And it will automate the process of at least that initial draft. And then of course, you’re going to be able to edit it, draft it, change it however you’d like, and even if it’s something as simple as a case caption. So I know that a lot of times pleadings don’t start with a draft. You’re building them very bespoke and that’s fine, but at least the defendant name, the plaintiff name, the court, the courthouse, the case number, if that’s all in the dashboard in your data fields from your case management system, they can easily get popped in to your documents.

Stephanie Everett (19:21):
That makes so much sense. And I mean, I hope everyone listening is already hearing, oh, that would be easier, faster, cleaner. Those are things your legal assistant could get started for you, and then you’re coming in and using your brain on the hard stuff.

Adriana Linares (19:37):
Absolutely true. And at some point you might not need a legal assistant as much as you need them because you’re able to move some of that work to an automated system, and now your law firm can become more profitable. And not to put legal assistance out of work, I always try to make this clear. I’m not trying to put legal assistance out of work. The problem is legal assistants are becoming few and far between.

(20:04):
It is a dwindling profession, and when you do hire a legal assistant, they’re either going to have one of two skills. They’re not going to have both. They’re either going to have decent technology skills or they’re going to have really good legal expertise. You’re not finding both these days. So I think two, one of the things I try to do when I have conversations like this is future proof. Your law firm, and especially if you’re young and getting started in building, you’re not going to find the legal assistant we had of yesteryear who’s been there for 30 years, knows the law, knows how to manage court dates and court filings. Those people, they’re retired. And guess what? Their daughters are not legal assistants anymore. Their daughters are doctors and engineers and rocket scientists. So I just keep talking about this because I’m trying to remind attorneys that you need to automate not just to be able to move to a more profitable and efficient billing method, but because you’re going to need to.

Stephanie Everett (21:00):
Yeah, I mean, it’s an interesting point. You had me thinking in a future world and where a past law firm might’ve been staffed with a legal assistant like this one idea of structure, the future law firm, it may be more technologists or data scientists, the roles we need to fill to help us do our work might look really different in a future state. And I hesitate to use

Adriana Linares (21:27):
The word future all the time. I’ve always hated the future of law. I’m like, no, it’s actually now we are in it. And when it comes to this population in legal, it is dwindling because those women are now your data scientists and your data stewards, and they just have different jobs. And men too. I mean, there’s plenty of legal assistants who are men, but it’s different. We need to use these human brains in a much more effective and stimulating way, and using automation is one way that you can take them to do something better, more billable.

Stephanie Everett (22:06):
Beyond automating our documents and creating these templates and using them that way, are there other technology tools we should be thinking about when we’re trying to set up our flat fee practice? Well,

Adriana Linares (22:18):
Sure, you can consider things like where else is your time wasted? Your time is wasted with phone calls, text messages, and emails. So I’m a huge portal pusher. I’m a self-defined portal pusher. I think there are not enough attorneys taking advantage of the free portal that you get with every single matter. So I say free in air quotes because you’re obviously paying a monthly subscription for a case management system. But all of today’s modern case management systems include portals for every single matter, and every single matter can then have a portal where your client can message you securely. They can upload documents, download documents, they can sign documents, they can pay their bill through the portal. And I still have so many attorneys that don’t want to use a portal and the protests that I typically get, there’s two protests. I do a lot of estate planning.

(23:16):
My clients are too elderly, they’re not going to use a portal, and I don’t want to create that burden for my client and having to log into a portal. So let’s address the issue with thinking your clients are too elderly to deal with a portal. You should ask your clients how they talk to their doctors, their financial advisors, and how they do all their banking, because I can assure you, your clients are not getting their blood work results via email anymore. They’re not getting bills through email anymore. They’re getting them through a portal, and they probably have an app on their iPhone or their Android that they’re doing that through. So sometimes you’re going to find that the best users of your portal are going to be those older clients who are used to communicating with all their other professionals that have figured out how to communicate securely and efficiently with their clients through some web-based system.

(24:11):
I won’t get into the security that can be enhanced by using portals, but let me just say, what are the three ways that you typically communicate with your clients, Stephanie, phone, email, and I guess today text. Exactly. And what do you think are the three least secure ways to communicate with you? Let’s go with phone, email, and text. Okay. Yeah. So not only are you going to do yourself a favor by reducing phone calls, texts, and emails or yeah, phone calls, texts, and emails. You’re also creating a secure way for all of that messaging and those communications to get between you and your client. And on top of that, you are putting everything in a centralized location. So back to maximizing a flat fee, how much time do we waste? And I know waste searching for information in a law firm, and that’s because we’ve got documents on our desktop communications in our assistance email documents, on our assistance desktop, and hopefully, I mean, digital desktops.

(25:14):
So we waste a lot of time searching for information. But if you put everything in your case management system and then use a segment of that, the client facing documents in your portal, then nobody has to ask, where is that? We know that everything is in the case management system, so your policy should be matter centricity, meaning everything related to a matter goes in a centralized location. It’s the case management system, it’s findable, it’s accessible. And back to, of course, creating efficiencies and how to make the flat fee as more as profitable as possible. Think about what you go through to close a matter today. If everything is in that one centralized location, it’s very easy to close a matter. It’s easy to say, Hey, clients, you’ve got 30 days to get all your documents out of the portal before I close down the portal. And then you’re able to deliver the documents that your clients should have back to them.

Stephanie Everett (26:11):
Yeah. I love the example of the elderly folks using all these pieces of technology. I’ve used the example a different way, which is if you had to call your bank between the hours of nine and five to find out how much was in your bank account balance, then you would no dollar do bank. You would not bank with that person anymore. So the idea that the only way clients can find out what’s going on in their matter is to call your office is ridiculous.

Adriana Linares (26:43):
And I’m going to take your banking point. One last point here with banking, because I use that example all the time too. And that is what you don’t realize you’re doing with this portal, which is what banks have done with us, is they’ve created a technology relationship that’s hard for us to break up with. Imagine changing banks today,

(27:02):
You’re like, oh, hell no, I’m not changing banks. I’ve got all my payees set up. Everybody knows my Zelle. No, no, we’re not changing banks. So imagine creating that type of loyalty, if you will, with a portal as an attorney, you’re doing that now you’re adding more value to the relationship, and that flat fee also becomes a little more understandable because you have this long-term relationship where they can continue as long as the case is there and the matter and the portal are open to continue communicating with your client and attorney if you’re the client.

Stephanie Everett (27:38):
Absolutely. I love everything that you just said, and if it’s not obvious to our audience, everything you just said also applies if you’re still billing by the hour.

Adriana Linares (27:48):
Totally.

Stephanie Everett (27:49):
None of these things are bad things. In fact, everyone should do all these things right now. There’s just no excuse not to.

Adriana Linares (27:57):
Agreed. So Stephanie, when I have you on my podcast, we’re going to talk more about the business side, and I have tons of questions for you on that because that’s not my area of expertise, but I know my listeners are going to be very, very happy to get some of these tips from you too.

Stephanie Everett (28:11):
Yeah, I’m excited. I can’t wait. Thank you so much for being with us today and getting us set on some technology things. I learned some stuff today, so I’m pretty excited to go check out my documents and see what those properties let us know. Yes. All right. Thank you.