Robyn:

Today, I’m joined by my guest and good friend, Andrew Hutchinson, who is CEO at Databall. Thanks for being on the show, Andrew.

Andrew:

Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Robyn:

I say this all the time, but for our listeners who haven’t heard me on this soapbox before, Andrew and I regularly have conversations like the one we’re about to have because we’re huge nerds and we do it just for fun. And so, now you all get the joy benefit of getting to listen in on one of those nerdy chats, especially too because Andrew, you’re about to fly out to Buenos Aires tonight, aren’t you?

Andrew:

I am, yes. I have the pleasure of going to a conference surrounded by judges for three days in sunny Buenos Aires. So yes, that’ll be fun.

Robyn:

Yeah, I’ve never been there. I’m excited to see pictures.

Andrew:

Me too. I’ve never been there. I’ve always wanted to go to Latin America, so I’m excited to get to see at least some of it. But you know how it’s at a conference, you’ll see a little bit.

Robyn:

Yes. I’ve been told have fun on vacation by people who shall not be named, but yeah. But anyway, so last week, Andrew and I were at the Legal Marketing Association Northeast Region Conference at the Midtown Hilton in New York, and we had the pleasure of presenting alongside our colleagues, Dawn Sheiker, who is director of client relations at Morris James and Yasmin Zand, who is a client success consultant at Passle. And we presented a session called “Get With It Already Creating Digital Marketing Infrastructure,” which was, as you will hear through the course of this conversation, a very ambitious topic to cover in 90 minutes at 9:00 a.m. on day two of a conference. But that’s okay. So Andrew, I mean, I know what the session was about, but what’s your 30,000-foot view of what we were covering in that session?

Andrew:

Right, okay. So the session last week from my perspective was thinking about how do you build your marketing technology stack? Now firms, marketing departments, business owners departments have thought about this for a long time and have gone out and made purchases. But typically, when they’ve been building the stack, it has really been around what are the features and functions that we’re trying to deploy into those departments. And the message that we were trying to convey in our session from my perspective was actually we need to start thinking about this through the data lens. How do we build more connected data inside our marketing and business development functions that ultimately helps firms drive more revenue, build better client experience, and ultimately do what the firms are looking to do, which is use their data as they should be?

Robyn:

Yeah, and I think it’s interesting because you came from a data perspective. Dawn came from an in-house marketing business developer perspective. Yasmin came from an implementation and user adoption perspective. And I sort of came from this apparently jaded because I was very cynical about a handful of things during that conversation. But this sort of super high-level strategic perspective, how do we connect all of the dots and all of the pieces so that we have infrastructure, hence the name of the session. And what I think was interesting too, and you touched on this just now when you’re talking about your perspective about data, what’s interesting is we are, as legal marketers, often trained to accept the data that we do or do not have access to as opposed to going at it from a, what is the data we should have? What is the data we actually need?

And that’s not to say that people don’t ask that question, but there’s only so much you can make happen sometimes. But what is the data that we need and what is the right way to go about getting it? Because again, just to latch onto something else, you said, we’re looking at a product or a tool based on a feature or function, or we are kind of reacting to a need or a request or direction from whoever, and we’re kind of selecting a tool without necessarily thinking about how it might fit into that overall infrastructure. And again, this is where I get very jaded and cynical.

Andrew:

Well, because you’ve lived and died inside a law firm, so these are real-life problems that you’ve had to wrestle with and now you’ve come to the dark side, or I might say the light side. And so, you can relate, you’ve gone through that and now you’re trying to find ways to help be different, do things in a different way. But it’s interesting, I think I have started on a fitness journey, which is terrifying to me. And one of the things that when you start on a fitness journey is that it’s really hard to get started, and it requires a lot of commitment, and actually, it’s tiring because you’re adding more loads to a day.

But one of the things that you find over time is that it gets easier the more you do it, the more time you put in upfront, the easier it becomes. And actually the easier it makes your life because the fitter you are, the more capacity you have and all those sorts of things. I would say that the data journey is exactly the same. It’s going to hurt to get started, but the more you do, the sooner you get started, the better it gets. Because the more data you have, the more you can use to drive efficiency in your roles to add more value to the partners that you’re working with.

Robyn:

Yeah, I agree with that. So here is, as you know, the episode of this podcast that we’re recording right now is One More Thing, and the question is, what’s one more thing we didn’t get to address or talk about or one thing that maybe we only scratch the surface on that you would really like to dig into and discuss a little bit deeper for our audience?

Andrew:

That’s an interesting question.

Robyn:

I know.

Andrew:

There are so many things that we could talk about. I mean, I think one of the things that I would touch on, and you and I have talked about this a lot, is when we think about how we solve this data problem by buying technology, one of the things that we instantly constrain ourselves with is it must be legal tech. Well, in the context of marketing and business development, my question is does that still stand true? In other things, it does make sense, right? You’re buying an accounting system, you have to buy a legal accounting system because you have to be able to deal with things like trust accounting and all those things that are very peculiar to the way that all both work. In a world where I think people are generally accepting that partners will never use marketing and business development technology, regardless of how hard you try, does that open the potential, particularly when we’re thinking about wanting more data to look at other systems? And I think that’s something that I would love to explore.

Robyn:

Yeah. Let’s dig into that one, Andrew. I often have strong feelings on this.

Andrew:

Well, and you are actively out in market talking to people about HubSpot, for example, which is a fantastic product that does all the things that a small law firm, even a medium-sized law firm could want when you look at technology through the lens of generating more data, right?

Robyn:

Well, okay, so a colleague of ours in the industry, I don’t know if she coined this term, but it’s the first time I’ve ever heard it and it made my head explode because it was so perfect. She used the phrase legal exceptionalism when talking about websites, we’re talking about if we are going to build a website that in legal, just to kind of take it off-topic for a second. In legal, there’s this idea that you don’t necessarily need calls to action on a website because it’s not the same as a consumer-facing site or a retail site where people are taking a very specific user journey and why, just because we’re lawyers or we’re law firms or whatever.

So rather than going down that path in conversation to bring it back to this, if we think about HubSpot, it’s a great example. HubSpot is a very robust tool. It has a lot of features and it is constantly adding features and elements and components. And I’m not here to argue whether or not it’s the right tool for everybody, but fundamentally what a firm needs to understand is the data they’re trying to capture and the architecture of that information. And what legal-specific tools do is they quote, unquote, “make it easy for law firms” because there’s already a custom field or an object or whatever for practice areas and matter billing lawyer and a bunch of other fields and components that you may or may not need in a specific tool like a C.R.M.

But having been on the side of implementing those tools, what I have found and what I was often frustrated by is that the law firms actually are, this is some way that law firms are very specific and unique. Whether they should be or not, that’s a different conversation. But the way that they organize the information and the data feeds and the components and all of the widgets, if you are buying a tool that’s already configured and then needs to have more configuration done to it in order for it to work for your firm, then you are actually doing the thing twice and you’re paying exponentially more for it. Sorry, nobody can see the face I just made. But I just made an, oh gosh, I can’t believe I said that out loud.

Andrew:

I do think that’s true to a certain extent. If you go buy a mainstream technology, yes, maybe there is some more configuration that you need to do. But the question that you sort of alluded to in there is do you need to do that? And are some of those configurations things that people think about generally anyway when they’re a corporate organization? So think about taxonomy for example. I’ve got an opportunity in the C.R.M. system, how do I categorize that by practice, by matter type, those things. Those are fairly standard configurations that people in the corporate space would do when deploying Salesforce or HubSpot because every organization doesn’t matter whether you’re a law firm or not thinks about the world in a slightly different way, but I would argue that the upside is great.

One of the things you know about HubSpot and other mainstream technologies, not just C.R.M., is tracking. Tracking sits at the heart of something like HubSpot. And I don’t know if you remember, when you were back at your firm, one of the things that we talked about in the context of experience and proposal generation was being able to see what people looked at in a proposal. How long did they stay there for? Did they spend 10 minutes, five minutes reading a couple of particular bios and cases? Well, wouldn’t that be great to know for the next meeting? Well, why don’t we bring those people in? And that is technology the corporate business has been using for a number of years now. But because there is a small number of legal tech companies who think about the world in a particular way, it takes longer for those things to get in because there isn’t as much competition.

Robyn:

Yeah, I sure do remember that, Andrew, because I remember beating that dead horse to death several times. And to your point on the agency side of things, I am able to do that all the time. Now I can see when somebody interacts with my proposal or my content on my website, I can take action. I can take sales or business development action based on certain behaviors or certain triggers and I can set up the workflows and I can set up the automations and I will control myself from just going down that whole path. But that is table stakes and we are falling behind even further as an industry when we are not demanding that our technology can do what all the other technologies do or we’re not changing course.

Andrew:

Well, and I think the thing that I would add on to that is that we exist in a world, and I’ll be careful how I say this, but we know that our colleagues in marketing and business development aren’t able to leverage the skills that they have to the fullest extent because of the partner community and the perspective that they have on the departments that they work in. And this data, that example that we just talked about, imagine as a B.D. person, if you could roll into a partner’s office and say, “Hey, that proposal we sent? It looks like they’re really interested in Joanna, let’s get Joanna to the next meeting.” And I can tell you that and show you that into data to somebody who always thinks about the justification for something. Partners are always looking for the evidence, now you’ve got it, now you’ve demonstrated strategic thinking and you’ve demonstrated way more value to that partner than you’re able to normally because they’re just throwing tasks at you.

Robyn:

Yeah. And Dawn said this when we were preparing, can you imagine if you had the information, behavioral data or evidence or whatever data full stop, to go into an attorney’s office and say, I understand that you want to prioritize this activity, this article, whatever, but here’s the content that people are looking for. Here’s the behavior, the journey that they take on your website and through our various communication channels, once we’re able to sort of track that path for them. And it is not what you’re trying to do, it’s what we’re trying to get you to do. So tell me why what you’re trying to make our priority is more important?

Can you just imagine we talk just a really pullback, we talk across the industry about being business partners with the… Partner might not be the right word I guess, but to really be viewed as business professionals. And across the industry, we are business professionals and to I think be in a position to really emphasize the knowledge and experience. It all goes back to the information and the data that we’re able to provide because as you and Dawn both said, it’s the evidence.

Andrew:

Right. That’s such a great example that you gave. I don’t know if you’ve seen the new capability where they’re analyzing in the backend and they’re showing you reading trends by topic and you can compare that to your own writing. So you can now look at it and say, oh, we seem to be writing a lot of content on this topic as people are just trending off, not interested about it. And so, having that data now that is a legal focus platform, but it’s a great example of innovating with data and doing exactly what you said, which is to generate the evidence that you can then put in front of somebody and say, “Hey, we need to stop writing about this.” But by the way, if we now mash that data together with experience, we can then say what’s the next thing that’s growing and who’s the best person in the firm to write about that based on that they’re working on?

Robyn:

And especially because I’m laughing at myself getting excited as you know I do. But again, think about the conversation that you’re having in this hypothetical situation. And you always use this phrase, we’re dealing with chronically time-poor people both on the marketing side and certainly the fee earners, the attorneys. So if you’re able to say, okay, here’s the data, here’s the evidence about what we should be writing about and the frequency with which we should be writing and the efficacy of content that is 400 to 500 words versus 1500 words and we’re able to just really zero in on how to make a true impact and get the lawyers to do those activities or get whoever needs to be doing it to do those things. In that way, it is actually going to over time ideally lessen the amount of commitment or time required by those individuals to contribute meaningfully and therefore able to make them more efficient on the production side of things, meaning the delivery of legal services.

Andrew:

But now put all of that in the context of large language models. So you and I know, most of the people at our time slot went to the A.I. session to listen to unicorns and rainbows about large language models and A.I. and what we can do, that’s fantastic. What if you had structured enough data to say here is the upwards trend, here is the person that has the most current experience and growing experience in this topic. Here are the things that we know about this person. And now you throw all of that at large language models and you say, creating the first draft of what a thought leadership piece on this topic covering these areas might look like in the firm tone using the firm language based on this individual’s experience.

And you serve that up to a partner and say, “We took the time to create your first draft for you just finesse it so that it covers what you would want to cover.” Because again, you talk about lawyers being time-poor, but they also don’t like writing this type of stuff because they don’t necessarily know how to do it. There some that do, it’s like rainmaking. There are rainmakers out there but then are who have do really how how to do it, that’s where large language models become powerful, but you have data to start.

Robyn:

Yeah, I am interested. It has me sort of curious now because I know a couple firms do have these sorts of internal A.I. tools and I really don’t know much more than that, but I’ve heard of a couple firms that have their own internal version of ChatGPT and I’m wondering what their data inputs are. If you’re listening and your firm has it, send me a note. I’m really just super curious. What are the data inputs that you’re using or the firm is using to feed that A.I. output? Because it’s my understanding, and I could be wrong that there might be a couple firms that are kind of doing what you are describing, Andrew, but I’m curious with how much success.

Andrew:

So I think that’s a really interesting question. It of large language models in business development, I’ve seen some stuff around generating proposals and those sort things. But again, to your point, what’s the data that’s put in where a lot of firms around areas where they have lots of content. So contracts, “Hey, let’s throw the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of contracts that we have sitting in iManage or net documents or whatever into a large language model and then use that to figure out the practice of law.” But I think if you look at stats this week that suggested that in the US probably something like 50% of the AMLO 200 have some sort of work going on with ChatGPT probably, but I’d be interested to know what percentage of that is actually focused down in the area that helps you drive revenue.

Because I think that’s where the opportunity is you look at law firms, they’re under pressure and they continue to grow. I was talking to a big firm recently and they went, “Yeah, we made 3% more profit last year.” Why? Because we increased our rates by 3%. So you didn’t actually grow, you just made more money charging people more, but you haven’t actually grown. And I think there was a period a couple of years ago where firms were doing clever things with the numbers in the measuring, I forget what it’s called now, the AMLO 200 actually. So they were changing anyway, the way they represented partners up. But we should be thinking about this area, this is where the firm should be investing is how do we manage our clients better, generate more revenue, right?

Robyn:

Well, it’s funny. So I have this client who I love all of my clients, but this one client, we kind of get nerdy like the way you and I get nerdy so you know that I really enjoy them. We were having this whole conversation a couple of weeks ago that one partner and I were just chatting over lunch and they are a small firm, but they are very progressive and forward-thinking in terms of technology and opportunity and everything. And so, for their practice, which is very specific focused on a range of industries, but very specific targeted service they deliver. They were looking at ways to kind of feed the data inputs would be successful filings or successful, whatever the right word is, right? Or motions on this particular topic.

And they wanted to be able to query the data essentially using AI to do a first draft of a motion based on the court or the jurisdiction or the certain facets of the case or whatever the matter in order to be able to give them a first draft of a likely successful motion based on all of their own individual experience. And it’s not based on outside experience, it’s based on their actual results and outcomes. So going to the how do you grow business with this? So then if I am that firm and I’m able to say rather than spending seven hours writing a brief, I’m making that up out of thin air, now we leverage this technology based on our library of information and our success rates and our blah blah blah.

And we’ve gotten the win rate from X to Y and we’ve reduced the amount of time it takes to actually deliver this service from seven down to two. We’re showing that it’s going more likely to be successful and going to take less time. Okay, that’s a firm that I want to hire, not just that one time to do this one thing, that’s a firm that I know is caring about effectively and efficiently delivering services to me in a way that actually helps my business.

Andrew:

And I think it’s funny you tell that story. So I was working with a company that told not my story, their story similar where they won some government business, they won all of the government department’s business because when the government first approached them and said, “We have this very specific thing that we need to do in the next two weeks because we’re to release a campaign to go after these people.” Rather than throwing 12 lawyers at it, they said, “Hey, let’s build this into technology, automate the process and we’ll save you a third of the cost.” And the client went, “Yeah, that’s great.” They did it again and all the rest of the work.

And so, thinking cleverly about how do we engage with our clients and demonstrate value, that’s a huge example of value. But there are smaller opportunities to deliver value and one of the things that I talk to people all the time is firms should be thinking about account-based marketing. Now that is something that is very well known in technology companies all over the world and other types of organizations. But this idea that you deeply understand the person that you are trying to engage with, and again, that comes back to the very beginning of this conversation, which is how do we build data about these people that allows us to be very intentional in the way that we reach out?

What if your data told you that, oh, I want to reach out to the general council of Bank of America and I can see that the general council of the Bank of America was the keynote speaker at pick an event in pick a location, whatever. Wouldn’t it be great to reach out to them and say, “Oh, I noticed that you were the keynote speaker. How was that? Did it go well for you?” I don’t know, whatever. And then lead into, “How about we have a catch-up? I’d love to talk to you about some other stuff” because making things relevant to people, engaging with them in a personal way, way better outcomes. And if you think about the next generation of partners who aren’t rainmakers, these are the sorts of things derived from data that can really help move the needle.

Robyn:

Yeah, we don’t have enough time to talk about this on this podcast, but I’m going to tease this one thing. I was just thinking I should tell Andrew about this before once we hang up, but I’m going to tell it so all of our listeners can hear. So I attended this great session at L.M.A. Midwest that Jessica Aries, who is the owner of By Aries, gave about AI tools for legal marketers. And one of the tools that she gave that she showed to everybody was something called Crystal A.I. Have you heard of this?

Andrew:

I have. It’s been around for a while. It’s clever though.

Robyn:

Okay, well, I needed to be handheld right into that. So today, I put my LinkedIn profile through Crystal A.I. whatever, and I’m going to send it to you after this, I’m going to send you the personality assessment, it spit out about me, it is scarily accurate and talk about the proving that you know somebody, it can tell you how to speak to the person and the type of content that they want to hear about and sort of connector type things. I was mildly afraid and completely blown away and it’s just from my LinkedIn profile. Now, mind you, I have a pretty robust LinkedIn presence, so there’s a lot to work with there, but even still like holy cow.

Andrew:

Yeah.

Robyn:

Anyway.

Andrew:

It’s incredible. And I mean, increasingly live language models can do some of the stuff that Crystal has been doing for a number of years now, not so much CPT, I find that Bard is better for that kind of stuff. But you can give Bard your LinkedIn profile or somebody else’s LinkedIn profile and say, “Tell me about this person” and it’ll do some level of summarization, probably not to that level, but it starts to give you some of those insights and it’s really compelling. How do you reach out to some… I mean, you must get this in your role within lease. The amount of emails I get from people who if they had taken 30 seconds to look at my LinkedIn profile, probably wouldn’t have bothered to send me the email, or if they had bothered to send me the email, they might actually have got my job title right.

They might have figured out the industries that I work in and created something that was meaningful. I had one recently where somebody did it and they were an A.I.-based outreach platform that obviously connected to LinkedIn. And I only figured it out as I was hitting reply that it was an A.I.-generated email. But it was good enough that I hit reply because it figured me out in a way that the other 50 emails that I’d received that day into my junk had no idea.

Robyn:

Wow, scary. The machines can have the best impact. It’s like I always say it’s like Skynet is rising anyway.

Andrew:

But it’s important because if you understand, I mean, take this to the fullest extent, all of this stuff about somebody and now you’re pitching to them, so you’ve got through the door, you’ve opened the door and you’re now sat at the table and you’re having a conversation with them. What you know about them can influence everything down to the people you put at the table, the experience that you put in front of them, the events that you invite them to in the middle of the sales cycle to keep engaged with them. The content that you send them in the midst of the sales cycle to be top of mind all of the time so that when you generate the proposal, it isn’t the first time they hear this stuff. It’s a summary of all of the things that you’ve said to them over that period of time all derived from who are they?

Now, it might be more than one person, it might be five people who are on the decision tree. But how do you build an engagement for each of those people so that they all feel represented? And I don’t know if you remember this, this was one of the things that you and I talked about with that whole digital proposal was being able to take people down journeys. So I’m the procurement person, I only care about this stuff, I don’t care about that stuff. And being able to create these very specific journeys for everybody in the process so that they feel good at the end of it.

Robyn:

I do remember. Actually, you know what? I love it that you keep saying, “I don’t know if you remember this” because I remember this, but I can’t remember what I said 45 minutes ago. I remember the important stuff, Andrew. I love it.

Andrew:

I love it. Well, I would start thinking about the true clothing proposals, but maybe we don’t have time for that.

Robyn:

No, I think we’ve gotten plenty nerdy enough. I appreciate you and maybe we should just have our own podcast series, Andrew, just get nerdy with us.

Andrew:

I love it. It’s a great idea. Let’s get down and dirty with data.

Robyn:

I love it. Okay, cool. Well, thank you. Have a very safe flight to Bueno Aires and we’ll probably be talking soon. Thanks for being on the show.

Andrew:

My pleasure. Looking for the chatting again soon.

You have been listening to All The Things, the podcast from Legal Internet Solutions Incorporated, where we bring you all the things, whether it’s three things we learned hearing from a legal marketing insider and ask me anything session or that one more thing we’ve been dying to tell you all month long but couldn’t. That’s All The Things. Our next episode will be out in a week wherever you get your podcasts, and you can join us for the live events every Friday at 12:30 Eastern on our LinkedIn channel for our live stream where we bring you all the things live.