Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Relay, the legal show for personal injury law firm owners, presented by Alex Amica, the number one attorney referral network. I'm your host, Gabriel Stertz. Joining me today is Viraj, founder and CEO of Finch Legal. Before Finch, Viraj spent nine years at DoorDash, most recently as director of product for their convenience grocery and alcohol business. Basically the part of Doordash that isn't restaurants. He studied symbolic systems at Stanford, which means that he's way smarter than me because I don't even know what that means. And Finch is backed by Sequoia, Redpoint and a who's who of operators that include Tony Zhu, Dordash's CEO. And here's why I asked Viraj on this show. About 13 months ago, he launched Finch with a deliberate bet. Sell the completed work, not the software. Now, if you're weigh in on the tech scene like I am, that might sound really familiar because that's Sequoia's thesis at the time. That was really novel, really cutting edge, and a bit of a bet. So I'm really excited to talk to Raj about why that was the bet he made and where it is taking them now and what that looks like moving forward. Raj, thanks so much for being on the show.
[00:01:01] Speaker B: Dude, thanks for having me on and complimenting me right off the bat. Maybe bashful. It's a great way to start an interview.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Did I just butcher Tony's name, by the way?
[00:01:08] Speaker B: No, I think you nailed it. He'd be proud.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Okay. He.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Cool.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: And there was a lot in there. I'm excited to. To dig into it. Maybe one thing I'll say is, like, my hope at the end of this podcast is you are like, hey, there's a lot more similar between personal injury and food delivery than I expected. So that's my goal by the end of this.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: I mean, I, I love that. I think my best conversations are the ones where we span domains and we find the crossover and the similarity. And I'm going to open by saying every company right now is calling itself an AI company. I know that you say Finch. AI. You call yourself Finch, but do you consider yourself an AI company at the core? Yes. No. Where do you stand on that?
[00:01:48] Speaker B: No. We are, we are much more in the camp of AI as a tool that every company is going to use and we're going to use at the right moments, rather than we are an AI company. We're. We're going to index forever on customers and outcomes, which is, I think, how every, like, goals should always be Set at outcomes being true, not at how much you're using AI. And we found that to be true as a guiding light for us so far. We actually, if you look at our website and other places, we try to say AI as little as possible. And part of the why is when Ben and I started the first conference we went to ever legal conference.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Which one was it?
[00:02:18] Speaker B: It was Lottigra. It was like Lottigra of 2024. We were, we thought for some reason that we were like early to the scene, which, you know, we were not. Like, we started a year and a half ago and every conference was 60% AI vendors pitching their stuff. I think we felt a little more AI fatigue than exc. Excitement than we were expecting. There was a little. So many tools out there and I don't quite know which one of these 50 being pitched to me I should go use.
And I, I think the background that
[00:02:44] Speaker A: was the most AI heavy conference, by the way. One, it was, it's a great conference if you're, if you haven't gone to Law de Gras, you have to. And two, there were like 12 AI vendors at that show. Viraj, that was pretty nuts. I think that was like peak AI to vendor and it's has to have gone downhill.
Cannot have been more concentrated than there.
[00:03:02] Speaker B: No, the density was, was insane. And so we're like, okay, we're not nearly the first people solving problems with AI in this space.
And no. So I would, I would say if anything, I think we are, I think the best version of AI in terms of what we are, is AI is in the loop. But we are like a very human led services company in the way that we're an operations company. We are a partner to firms that are looking to grow and want to do so with less overhead and hit great metrics and outcomes for their clients. And so that's, that's more of what we are.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: That's awesome. And the goal of the show today, clearly, you know, make my guests look good. That's always, that's always the goal. But also like help our listeners who are law firm owners understand something better about their firm, whether it's marketing, technology, operations. So what I really want to drill down into is you spent a long time at Doordash, then you moved over to legal. Clearly there's facial differences between those, but I'm really interested in what's the similarities and what are the things that you have seen as you've come into legal. First, let's start with what are the things that immediately struck you as applicable of what you learn from restaurant operations, operations that. That cross over into the legal industry.
[00:04:11] Speaker B: The way we got into the space was actually looking for the. I've only seen one blueprint for company building and it was my eight years at DoorDash and Tony Hsu and seeing what he did, he. A lot of the way that Doordash started was around this thesis of helping an entrepreneur say yes to revenue that they're currently saying no to. Which I still think is a really great way to decide to build a business is one, it's easier to sell revenue than it is to sell efficiency or operational optimization. But two, it usually is when you're looking for a business that expands tam of a market, seeing underserved revenue is. Is a great indication of what that is. And in Tony's case, that was a restaurant in Palo Alto named Oren's Hummus, which if you haven't been to you and I will go one day. That was getting about three orders a day for delivery over the phone. And at three orders a day, it does not make sense to staff a full time delivery driver to deliver those. And more than that, it's. If you are a. This is, by the way, picture 12 years ago where people only knew Pizza Hut and Domino's did delivery. And so the idea of getting it from everywhere else was, was a bit of a very new one.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: This was only 12 years ago.
Yeah, that was 2014. And Uber, Uber also like the, the platform revolution really hadn't hit yet. Right. I mean Uber was happening, but it was still pretty early days. Relatively niche.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Correct. Like it was. Uber was still black car only the summer of 2014.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: That's so crazy. I just can't. Like we have.
The world has changed, like in so many ways. Like it's hard to even imagine a world before we could order cars, food, anything from an app on our phone. And to say 2014, I'm like, yeah, that sounds pretty recent. And then for you to say that's when Doordash started. Uber was so black car.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: It's gone. It's moved so quickly. So that's. That's fascinating. And. And you were there. When did you start with DoorDash?
[00:05:57] Speaker B: I started right around employee number 50. So I actually think the company started 2013. To be honest and accurate, it did not feel like a winner. There were seven other food delivery companies in Palo Alto at the exact same time, to be honest, like when I joined. And so I joined because my friends were there and people seemed smart and it felt like, they were passionate about solving this problem, but really it was like, hey, it becomes if you were a restaurateur, most of them did not start a restaurant business to learn to become experts at logistics and food delivery. Most of them started it because they cared about hospitality and serving customers in a novel way way or making food, and had a passion for food. And so the idea of taking something that you don't need to be excellent at, but you do need to serve all your customers, but, like, isn't the reason you wanted to and isn't your special sauce became kind of the founding reason for Doordash's existence. And where we've seen that map here, the, I guess the glimmer that Ben, my co founder and I saw early in, in Finch's trajectory, before it was named Finch was we had a friend who had previously worked at a very large personal injury firm in Texas and had decided to go out on his own and start his own firm shortly. Three months before we started Finch. Months one and two, drastically successful for him. He had built a really great network in Austin of excellent other attorneys that ended up referring him great cases to get his start right around when he had 50 cases, active cases is where he had to start saying no to some of the other ones. And the reason why for him was he where he had previously depended on a team of excellent case staff that was like an intake team, plus his case managers, paralegals, demand writers, he was now doing all those things on his own. And as we know, the cash flow nature of starting a personal injury firm is you will get paid once these cases settle. And so in six to nine months, he might be able to afford help. But at that moment, he was on his own. So he was turning away clients who needed him and his service and help and otherwise were going to go underserved because he didn't have enough capacity. And so we saw the glimmer of the same problem. And a lot of the way Finch founded was how do we help him say yes to this revenue and these clients who need him. And so we flew out and Ben and I were his case managers for a month and learned what went into it. Had the realization that, hey, a healthy amount of this could be automated, but a huge amount of it is human empathy and thoughtfulness and care in this moment of someone going through one of the worst, you know, experiences of their life. And that led to what fitches in
[00:08:12] Speaker A: my understanding of going back to my question of the overlap and similarity. Like, I think that what you opened with Is, is really compelling because it's, you have restaurateurs, you have people who are creating restaurants. They're good at something. They're good at a specific domain, a spec vertical, which is food. And then there are these other things that are unrelated to that that largely drive the success of the business in the long run. And they need to be good at those things that are not related to their, their core thing in order to drive business. And if you're listening to this as a personal injury law firm owner, clearly you're like, oh, I understand what you're talking about. Like, you go to law school to learn law, then you launch your personal injury practice, and then you either are building that on litigation or marketing. So two things you don't learn directly in law school, and then you still have the business of loss side, which is yet another thing that you have to have capacity in order to serve more clients and grow your business so that that pattern matches really clearly. Something I've been curious to ask you, Viraj, is how much is DoorDash taking on the actual work versus connecting workers and restaurants? And not that that's exactly what you're doing now, but how much of that was how much of the operations have gone into versus you're connecting players on, on a single platform.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: It's, it is different than a typical marketplace such as, say, ebay or Amazon, where it's like, here's a product that is, do you want it or not? And here's the cost for it. And it is that way because by default, the random person who needs a job is not necessarily going to be excellent at delivering that food exceptionally well without assistance. And so we called it more of a managed marketplace. And you have the spectrum of how managed it is. But I think at DoorDash, the outcome the customer wants is that their food isn't soggy and cold. And that actually requires a healthy amount of management, not just of, hey, when someone is assigned, what do they need to do on that delivery? But also, hey, where should they be waiting for? Like, where is it likely that orders are going to be placed next? And to like, make sure that they are like, very close to a downtown food center, where should they go and wait and spend their time? And when they do pick it up, should they actually take one or should they take two orders? Because are there two customers right near each other that they should go drop off next to? Because that will make the whole ecosystem better. And there's a huge amount of optimization that was just like every year shaving Minutes off of the average delivery time and percentages off of the like greater than 45 minute delivery times that that required I think Jordache to be a more active participant in the operation than just a connector of people and tissue. Which I think if you're, if you're drawing the comparison to us, we've seen the same here where there are amazing paralegals. There are also folks who are experts at one part of case management and have gaps in others, or are incredibly empathetic and customer first and client centric, but haven't really seen what the great workup of a premises case looks like or haven't seen what it looks like in a particular state or for a particular firm's guidelines. And so being able to be that, that map from the SOP or PlayBook that a firm runs and deems excellent to how you can set someone new coming into this firm within a week operating at the same or higher caliber than staff who otherwise take months to operate and onboard has been a goal of ours to get right. And so we, we're close to the managed side of it.
[00:11:15] Speaker A: Yeah, that's, that's really interesting and I. One core tension probably has to be and I'll say this, there are good ways of doing pre litigation and for those of you don't know, that's what Finch does is, is pre lit. I would argue that there is a. Basically there's one way, let's say per state, because there's state level regulation that applies to your workflows operationally, there's basically gonna be one great way to do it per state at most. So pretty limited. It's much more science than it is art. But I haven't met a lawyer yet who couldn't take science and turn it into art and then say that the way that I'm doing it is not only the best ethically and morally, therefore it is the only operational way. How much time. And I'll say it like, I think that is a self defeating way to, to, to run a business. Now the best personal injury law firm owners that I know have really overcome that to a large degree. And I think they're a lot more focused on what are the best practices and how do we achieve those and how do we create operational flow. But this is an industry that is just so under optimized operationally. How much are you seeing? Just kind of gut level. You've spent time where you're shaving minutes off of an order, you're, you're moving someone six feet to the Left so they can keep the food that much warmer. Like, I love that level of precision from that industry where the margins are razor thin. And you're coming over here like, what are you seeing as like how much, how hard is it to do the change management? How open are law firms to let's shave six minutes off of this so the client gets served this much faster, this much better versus all right, we have to re educate, retrain just to get people to be open to that kind of like operational way of thinking.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: It does vary. I will, I will make the argument for the couple of things that I actually think are reasonable to have a take on as a firm that may stray from the default. I'll give the two instances where I've seen firm owners take a like, hey, our firm is different stand and where I think that makes sense. One is when they've been really, if they're very self aware about how strong of a litigation practice they have. It does change the way you work up a case if you know that when you decide to file, it will inspire.
It will, it will command authority in the eyes of most insurance adjusters because your name carries the we are willing to take this all the way to trial versus if you're not. And then the workup of the case and the like, how tight you have like you're signaling the like, chance we take it to trial, how robust the demand letter is. Like a lot of those factors end up mattering more if you don't have the reputation of we like tried 20 cases last year and here's what those outcomes were. So I'll say that that is one piece of nuance and I would say the other is related to financials and cash flow management. There are folks who would be quick to spend money on case expenses where it can further a case. For example, who would say, hey, as soon as we know that there's merit to this case, or we believe that there's merit to this case up front, we should go request all of the ER and EMS records because it can help point us in directions of potential damages and help us form that thought early and help route someone to treatment, which is a very rational take to have. There's also other firms that would take a stance of depending on my lead source and the kind of people that I'm working with and like the kind of client base I have, I actually think it's much more prudent to do a compensability check first. And so in the first 14 days I want to know what liability looks like and what coverage looks like. And if though it's a compensable case, then I want to go do all that work. But otherwise I'm going to be out a healthy amount of money on record costs and provider costs for something that isn't, isn't going to end up being a case that has an outcome. So those are the two.
[00:14:35] Speaker A: But, but I will push back on the second one. The first one makes a lot of sense because you're saying I know that there's a likelihood I'm going to court with this and I need to get it ready for court. The way I go to court is going to be different than someone else. I'll take that as a principal argument. The second one though, there is math that you can do to understand which of those is a better approach and correct.
[00:14:57] Speaker B: It's just an expected value versus a cash flow question. So you're right, the expected value is higher in the former. Always.
[00:15:04] Speaker A: Yeah. And so if the expected value is higher, you should solve your cash flow as in whatever way you can. Like take out, you know, get an operating capital credit line, get a case cost credit line from Esquire Bank. You know like cost of capital is actually pretty low especially relative to the claim values. So I would make the argument that even that one, I get it, like technically whatever you want to cash flow but like over time you should move toward higher expected value. And that is a best practice.
[00:15:31] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: So but those, that's interesting. I mean that is still on some level more sophisticated argument because you're, you're talking financially.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: If you're optimizing for the client experience as you should, like the long term nature of your business is going to be built on how right did you do by clients, how great did you get in the outcomes they need? Because that's the way your CAC will reduce over time as well as you'll get more organic and referrals than you will be spending on marketing. Yes, I think the I will give you my struggle. So my stronger take here is there will be a lot of people who because they have seen things done a certain way for a long time at their firm or at other firms they've been a part of, have accepted that as the norm. And so one of the harder things to learn as we kind of integrate with a firm is really how much follow up you could do. The idea of I'm still waiting on records and we haven't heard back but we chatted last week or hey, we opened a claim and we've like said the L O R but we don't know if the adjusters accepted liability or not. And we like checked it last week versus operating in a world where if agents are doing some of this work for you and you are not constrained by the bandwidth that one human has, who is your claims department, you actually should be able to move these cases a lot faster. You should be able to operate with near perfect information each day and there shouldn't be like these lags of weeks between steps of a case. That's probably been the biggest shift we've seen. I will say that most firm owners have been receptive to it. The idea of hey, if you're willing to do that, that sound great to me. Like I'm not gonna ask my people to call every single day.
But I think that they see the outcomes when they compare time on desk of new cases versus their old cases. And that ends up being convincing.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: Yeah, and it should be convincing as well because that's faster cash flow, that's better client outcomes like dramatically better. If you get your case resolved in a month faster than than you were. It's interesting because that on a per client basis is not going to be something that they've feel. But in the aggregate you will see a rise in customer satisfaction if you're getting clients resolved faster.
[00:17:23] Speaker B: You will, I will say the one place you'll see it in your client experience is especially if you're doing care management correctly. You should be talking to your clients at least every two weeks, if not more often.
And clients can sense if their case isn't really moving behind the scenes. If you are coming to the first three to four of those without a real update on what has happened or liabilities accepted or it wasn't or here's what we're presenting or here's the data we're gathering, they will feel stagnation and we see a lot more withdrawal rates on the client side from firms that are moving slower on these cases than ones that are moving a lot faster.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: So something that I'd love to hear if you have data on or even a gut level. There was a fascinating report that was released. I would guess that it was 0809 during the Obama campaign when email was becoming a huge part of fundraising for in politics. And all of this is just like absolutely industry standard now. But there were early kind of baked in beliefs that there was like a certain number of emails that you could send to a supporter before they would start to get mad at you and stop engaging or engage less or, or send less money to your political campaign. Which side? Whichever side you're on. And because there was this, like, baked in assumption that had never been tested across all parties that they would send, you know, like one email a week or something, even during the hottest part of the campaign. And then this one guy said, well, what would happen if we just kept turning the dial up on emails until we started to see diminishing returns? And the answer was completely bonkers. It was like, we can send like seven emails a day and we'll still get more average engagement, more average opens more money from supporters. That the question that I want to ask is similar. Like, I don't think that law firms have gotten to a place where they have like gone to the maximum level of communication and engagement with clients.
And I don't think that question is going to get answered until someone like you who's like hyper optimizing for client satisfaction and outcomes and speed to completion turns that all the way up. And is that something that you're thinking about? Like, how many times can you contact a client until they start to say, hey, that's too much, or the medical providers, like, is your team exploring that? Do you feel like you have gotten to a place where people are like, okay, that's actually too much communication, but thank you, Viraj, that was great.
[00:19:36] Speaker B: It's a really fun question that I now want to come back with data on, so the next time I'm on this, I will, I will share it with you. What I'll say is we haven't hit that limit yet either, so we are likely pushing it closer than others have. Conventionally. At firms we have grounded so far in every update should be at least two weeks. Plus, any meaningful update that we have that like, helps someone better understand their case, uh, and that can be multiple times a day and often is. And in those cases, we, as long as there's something to say, we found it really valuable and clients generally haven't. So we have not been told to stop communicating where I would say we have tested it. And so this one, I have more of a metaphor around is when we onboard with a firm, we have equated onboarding to a firm as a lot like hiring an employee. And when you are hiring someone who you are unsure about and are excited you took a bet on, but are like hoping they overperform in a lot of communication for that person is going to be very trust building. Getting a message from them in the morning of what they're going to work on and a message for them at the end of what they worked on and like the ability to course correct and nudge them in the right direction, incredibly trust building. And by week two, if they've done that, you're like, hey, you don't really need to message me twice a day, but like, give me a report at the end of the day on how it went. It could be three bullets. And then by week three, if that went really well, you're like, hey, why don't we just sync at the end of the week and see how that went. And then you go to bi weekly and then you're like, hey, this person's off into the races and running. And I think it's the same. If you've decided to like pull in a partner that is a firm, you are like, hey, I'm nervous. I'm hoping this goes well. I like have never been through this process before. There's some like mystery around it. And so I'm hoping that person stays very communicative with me. And we over index on that early, especially as there are a lot of case updates. And once we have that and if we've done a great job building rapport and helping someone figure out the right treatment plan for them, then it does switch to more of this. Hey, like every two weeks, let's check in. If something happened outside of that, call us, text us whenever you need us as well, and we'll be happy to respond.
[00:21:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. And I think that that's the same thing. It's. You're doing the B2B version. There's the B2C version of it as well. But I think, you know, you talked early about TAM expansion. So what's the total market for claims? And I think that, I mean, two things are going to drive it. One is, are law firms saying yes more? That's a big one. And that's a big one for us. Right, because we're optimizing matching across the entire legal industry. Like there's so many calls that come into law firms that they turn down for whatever reason and we're helping to increase that. And then the other piece is the ability to do that at scale. So being able to say yes to cases that are even smaller in value, they're marginal or whatever. And like that's another thing that technology enables. Are you seeing that second piece happening in real time? As law firms have this way to fulfill demand? Are they taking more cases on? Are you tracking like, are they saying yes to more? Are they expanding their marketing and then they're able to say yes to more. This is just latent demand that exists that law firms are turning away.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: The answer going to be yes broadly. But I'll give you three examples that are all slightly different because I think I wasn't I was expecting this to be linear. I was expecting given I saw Ryan's case and how his firm expanded that hey, there are constantly referral sources and people coming to you with your cases and if you could just say yes, you will organically grow. And it looks a little different for each firm. There's firms that we work with Pondlahockey, which operates nationally as one of the largest if not the largest workers comp and SSCI firm in the country as a part of their marketing they actually do have these organic leads coming in for BI claims and when those leads come in they are today referring those out rather than helping those cases in house which is a chance for brand and for helping a client who will remember your name, who will come back later or send their friends and family your way that they are losing as a result. And so for them the expansion has been they've essentially in multiple states been able to go build a PI practice without hiring support staff or having on the ground offices at all for other firms a large amount of it has been we end up being very very useful when someone is planning growth and is planning for a marketing cycle and the thing that will hold them back from making good on a lot of it is the capacity side of it. And so we will see a lot of the a I I am going to solve this by growing and spending more money and I want to reach more clients who might need me. But I have this backup of I need assistance to be able to take it on. What I will say the grand majority is is aligned to our original take. It is hey, the hardest cases for me to justify saying yes to when there are so many people that time and help and there's not enough attorneys for all the Americans in need are the ones that are very low value. And I feel for the person with thousand dollars in medical bills but I am just when I'm operating a contingency and make a percentage of it and I have my own employees and mouths defeated is hard for me to justify that. And so when we can come in at a hey we would operate this case at about like 50% of the cost it would cost you to operate it. And it's something that you can kind of set and forget and put it on rails where you are consistently getting the client experience that you want to put out into the world. It makes it a lot easier to help those cases. Those are especially the ones that tougher to imagine referring out because you're tougher to imagine who's the other attorney that's going to be able to take that as well. So we are seeing that and I would say that happens around the fridges. The biggest moments become a, like I'm spending a lot of marketing or I'm launching a new state. But for every firm we work with, there's this amount of cases that I would have otherwise said no to that I say yes to with Finch.
[00:24:30] Speaker A: Which ultimately is value for the law firm and value for the consumers who are getting a yes when they might get a no. And that's, that's the ultimate goal. I think that sometimes from the inside if you're a law firm owner, you can say oh man, there's so much competition. But I think that what's missed, especially now when there's more MSOs and ABs and outside money coming in and this, that and third, what's missed is how many people have claims and still don't end up getting legal help, which is great. Like those are the people who you aren't competing against anyone else for because they haven't said yes. And so go build your brand, go reach more of the market, go niche down in this area and you can take on on more of those claims. I think that the pond is really big right now, even though historically it's felt small because there haven't been as many players as larger players. I think there's a lot of fear and uncertainty right now, but I think in many ways this is the best time to be a personal injury attorney. There's more available, there's more, oh well, until self driving cars come and maybe take all of this away. But you know, that's a net positive for society when we stop having car wrecks. So we're going to celebrate that day when it comes for you. Do you see the main constraints being large for larger firms or for the small firm like your friend who's trying to build a book of business and get going and hey, I don't know where my third, you know, my second hire is coming from or this is like a sophisticated like multi state operator who needs to like go launch, you know, a satellite office overnight.
[00:26:01] Speaker B: We've been been barbelled is kind of the way I would talk about where we've seen product market fit. And so it will be both of those and in the middle you will see a lot of firms who when they've tried to do that self reflection internally on like hey, do I have a nimble enough team that could adapt to new tech and I'm going to try to go build it out myself. And you see a lot more yeses when you're small, solo, two attorneys, three attorneys, you might be like hey, that sounds like we just need more people in capacity. And if these folks can do it, like great. We've avoided needing to hire a giant team which would would prohibit us from getting to work those cases and help clients. And when you're large, you have largely, most of the time we're working with COOs and CFOs when we get to those size deals and those are firms that understand their metrics well enough to know how difficult it's going to be to achieve the kind of outcomes of like cutting your operational costs in half per case on your own. The number one issue that I think those firms have struggled with is they've tried to adopt AI solutions, platforms, et cetera is adoption. It's not how good the tools are, it is that it is challenging to take a team of folks who might have done this the same way for 20 years, who are candidly afraid of AI taking their jobs and ask them to use this totally new platform.
And so we have are as much solving an education and training problem internally as we are solving a like capacity
[00:27:15] Speaker A: and operations 100% and I would say to the middle of the bar bail. And those are a lot of the firms that are showing up at mastermind groups or going to some conferences to make this as actionable as possible. Law firms on both sides are adopting either at the super scaled end or the small end, they're adopting tools, products like Finch to increase their efficiencies, reduce their costs. And that money isn't all just going into second and third boats, that's going back into the market to acquire more cases. And so if you're in the middle ground where you're like I don't know if I'm the right fit. At a minimum, you need to understand what you're spending on your case costs on your pre lit. If you haven't broken up pre lit yet, you have to do that. You have to understand that because your competitors are looking at the pre litigation costs and they're not all going to Finch, they're not all going to use Finch. They might use a tool, they might use Finch, they might use something else, but they're understanding that because that is a key piece of the puzzle. And if you're not looking at that as a cost for your law firm, you are behind, full stop, no holds barred. And the people who are looking at it are making intelligent decisions about the direction that they want to go. Is it vertically integrating it? Is it outsourcing it to a Finch? What does that look like? And that is a conversation that you can't afford not to have. I've been saying for a couple years that like this middle piece, this efficient, this is science, this is not art. If you're doing pre litigation is the most scientific part. I mean intake and pre litigation or science, they're not art. Like if you're stuck in a mindset of we've been doing the same thing for 20 years or, you know, this is what I grew up doing, you're way behind. You're just so far behind. Because there's people who are using virage to go and measure their case outcomes in minutes now. And that's the new bar. Like you just can't wait around anymore. You just can't sit on this stuff. Like everyone is moving in this direction and you're pushing the envelope on it. But there are sophisticated operators all over the industry now who are looking at this through the lens of how do we create these optimal client outcomes a hundred percent of the time? One of the people that I respect a lot in the industry is Steve Mayer. He came from consumer electronics. He runs Sweet James. And you know you're talking about like single digit half percent margins on selling consumer electronics. Like when you bring that kind of like battle hardened edge into personal injury where the profit margins are great, that's really dangerous. And I mean that with all due respect. And similar to you, like you came from doordash, restaurants do not have the profit margins of personal injury law. When somebody comes in from the restaurant business who's run a successful operation, people need to wake up up like that. That says something to me as an operator that like the stakes are getting higher because there's really smart people coming in and helping law firms get way, way better than they were 10 years ago.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: I agree with the sentiment. And I'll say the, the, I think the other thing that those firms have in common that, that have either used us or found a solution that is worth partnering on is, and I will, I, I want to draw a restaurant analogy. You're going to be so excited about these.
[00:30:07] Speaker A: I love restaurant analogies for this podcast specifically.
[00:30:10] Speaker B: I know, I think they've figured out if and I'm borrowing this a little bit from our cso Blair, strategy officer at Morgan and Morgan. She's talked about like, you can be McDonald's and you can be Morton Steakhouse and you can be somewhere in between. But in both cases, they know what they're amazing at. And McDonald's is amazing at reaching people. It is amazing at brand. It has built a brand that attracts people across the world and they promise a more limited menu that is very dependable and consistent. That is low cost and low margin. And that is what they do well. And Morton's is. I only pick it because it's the example of steakhouse that more people in America would have heard. But think of as whatever your fancy place is that you go out for. Date night is nailing the hospitality. They are higher value orders. They are spending way more time not on the internal efficiency and like operating at the lowest margin, but they are spending on how do I create an experience that is going to attract the people who want the most amazing night out to come here and celebrate their magical moments. And I don't need you to come back every day. I need you to come back once every year for your like biggest special occasion and come celebrate with us. And Domino's to draw about the delivery is like, we're going to get really, really good at delivery. Like we make pizza. It is decent pizza. College kids like it and people love it when they're drunk. And I'm going to make sure that you can get it at the like press of a button. And I'm going to put a ton of effort into nailing delivery for most of the others. McDonald's, it did not make sense for them to invest in delivery to the same degree. Panera partners on their delivery with DoorDash, they tried running it in house. It made more sense to partner, got better economics for it, was able to like deliver orders faster and then partnered away Taco Bell, et cetera. And I think the realization here of the difference maker for my firm is I'm going to be able to reach more people in need because I'm really good at branding and marketing, getting and like reaching them or I'm exceptional at trial and litigation, like, that is the thing I'm going to differentiate on. And then it does make sense to partner for that middle. If what you want to build is actually like, you're like, hey, I'm, I'm an amazing operator. I come from the background that I can go build this like tech forward operation myself. A thousand percent build it. But any Amount of time you sink into one of those three camps that is not spent on your focus area is time that is like not super well spent. Like you're better off doubling down on what you are amazing at and putting all your focus there. And you, and you. I think Gabe and I know this as business owners, like the more you spread yourself thin across every single bet, the least well, the less well all those bets go. Or better off picking the one to two things you want to nail and operating with focus. And I, I think a lot of the firms we work with have, have identified their focus here.
[00:32:28] Speaker A: But if you haven't, and you might not, you're. This is the warning from me to you. And I've been saying this to firm owners for, for two years. There's three things that you have to be good at. You should pick one or two of them and don't try to do all three. That wasn't a possibility 10 years ago. You just had to do all three. You just have to be good at marketing, good at pre lit, good at litigation with Finch, with like Samica, with other solutions. Like you can choose to take a piece of it and give it to co counsel or to an outsourced player. But what you can't do anymore is for the most part be really good at all three. And I think that lawyers, they already know which direction they lean. I'm, I'm better at marketing, I'm better at litigation. You're gonna have to lean way into that over the next couple of years. And to the extent that you're kind of good at everything, like there's still places, but you're going to have to do that at scale. And that's, that's actually pretty hard. I think that the middle of the market is going to have a harder time without specializing than continuing at the current status quo. And if you want to point a finger, you can point at AI, but it is commoditizing a lot of the labor and making the workflows much faster and much more sophisticated. And the things that were cutting edge last week are not next week. And you have to figure out, out what you're going to do with that as a business owner, as a law firm. So it's, it's. I really appreciate Viraj, you have an interesting perspective on law and operations. And I would encourage someone who hasn't looked at outsourced pre litigation. You owe it to your business to understand what that looks like and what that means for the consumer experience.
Because the future looks like what you are doing. It is going to be fast, it's going to be very tight and it's going to be hyper focused on the end consumer experience. We're going to figure out exactly how many touch points a customer wants and when and what they look like. And that's going to change customer behavior pretty significantly, I think. I mean, candidly, lawyers have had it really easy for a long time, but consumers have gotten a lot more sophisticated and I think that there's going to be a bit of a, a dam breaking when there is a customer experience that is hyper optimized and legal. That's, that is something that people really want across the board and that's going to unlock a lot for the people who get there.
[00:34:39] Speaker B: I think you're right. I like, I like the thread you pulled that if I have a takeaway from this conversation, it is going to be that I think the next fold that we're going to. A lot of the work we've done on the, what an amazing client experience look like has actually like not been fully optimized. It's been taking the best practices pattern matched and like applying them. And I think if I had to say, like we're now, over the next three months we're going to be spending a lot more time. It is going to be that there's amazing tools out there just to shout out some that are not our own, that are focused entirely on how do we create an amazing client experience. And all of them have done something interesting and automated and fast and easy. But I don't think we've, I don't think we've nailed it. I don't think we've pushed that envelope to your point of like how much communication is too much until someone is like, hey, maybe not anymore. What is the right balance of proactive and reactive? How do you pull AI in to be able to answer some stuff right in the moment as soon as somebody has a question. But keep the human in the loop. Who is their like person for the nine months of this case? And so we have a lot of tests there that we're excited to run.
[00:35:32] Speaker A: And I would say over time legal tech has been extremely deferential to law firms like the CRMs with AI and sophisticated operators moving into the space.
I think that that's going to change and I think that's for the better. And if you're a law firm owner, you should be. And I would, I would counsel you and we do this, we do this. Like we've looked at hundreds of law firms and what they do with referrals. And we have moved from taking a much more hey, what's your best practice? And let us adopt that to we actually have seen all the practices like the entire realm of them. And to my earlier question for you, Viraj, I would say it back. It's like we have a very strong point of view on exactly how to maximize and optimize your referral and co counsel part of your law firm. And you shouldn't be coming to someone who has done that for to you know, that's all we do. You might have one or two people in your office, maybe even five. But we're obsessively thinking about this all the time. I think that the cha. The change is going to be the sophisticated law firm owners are going to stop going to tech vendors and saying this is exactly how I want you to do it. And the best ones are going to go to their vendors and say, well, you work with, with everyone. You're obsessed with this. Let's set a standard together. And I'm going to hold you to that. Like you said, it's like hiring somebody and I would rather hire someone who knows exactly what they're doing because they've looked at everyone and can tell me the best way and then I can hold them to that rather than saying, hey, just do exactly what I've done. And, and that's you you're talking about that. But I think you moving from the more descriptive mode of hey, what do you do? Let's capture that to okay, we've seen enough to know what the range of possibilities are. You don't have like we don't have to do it our way. But here's the, here's the numbers. The results speak for themselves and I'm excited to see what that means ultimately for law firm outcomes and the customer experience. So I really appreciate you being on with me. This has been fascinating and I look, we're in crazy times right now. Claude's releasing MCP. We're in this weird moment right now where OpenAI has said they're doing codex for legal, whatever that means. Like you have to look at this day by day right now. Maybe a month from now I'll be an AI avatar talking to you, Viraj. It'll clearly be smarter and better looking so you should hope for that outcome. But I really appreciate you being on and talking with me today.
[00:37:45] Speaker B: Thank you, Gabriel. A pleasure. Always.
