Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Relay, the legal show for personal injury law firm owners, presented by Alexamica, the referral network for plaintiff firms. I'm your host, Gabriel Steeritz. My guest today is Melissa Graham. For 15 years, Melissa was the COO of Richard Harris law firm in Las Vegas, running operations across the injury practice. She started in a law firm at 19 in the copy room, she's done paralegal work, case manager, intake, accounting, and then she ran the whole thing. She also co founded a consulting company with Richard Harris, teaching other firms how to do it. And last month, she left it all behind to become the first VP of industry at Supio, a legal AI company. And in similar news, Google launched a version of Gemini built specifically for law firms yesterday. Not for us to be clear, it's aimed at big corporate firms, but there is so much happening across the industry right now and there's, there are some tie ins between these things that, that I want to draw out today. But more than anything, I'm excited to have Melissa here, excited to talk to her about the change that she's made moving from being in house at a law firm to being on tech side. Melissa, welcome to the show.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about law firm operations and AI.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Wonderful. So I want to start with the big question, which is that you had the dream job in the industry. You had the law firm CEO role, You were doing the consulting, you've been at, you were at a law firm for a very long time, great relationship, and you left.
So I'll just start with, with, tell me about it. Why, why did you decide to, to make the leap from inside to outside.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: So I say this all the time. I don't feel like I have left. I feel like I am getting the opportunity to be on the cutting edge of what's next for operators. I think that a lot of times people are looking at AI as just another piece of tech. And to me, it was something that I, you know, I don't think I quickly realized, but when I realized, it was like this aha moment of it brings something that is going to fundamentally change the way we think and operate. And I honestly think it's something we don't talk enough about. You know, we talk about tech and tools, but we don't talk about the opportunity to completely redesign the way we have, you know, traditionally started operating firms and where, where that goes today. And so for me, it's just the next iteration and an opportunity to get outside of my bubble and be able to see it at scale, to really understand and continue to help my fellow operators do what we all love to do. And that's solve problems, right?
[00:02:47] Speaker A: Absolutely. And you've been both an operator for one firm and a consultant for many. What is it? What's in your view? What does it mean to now be on the tech side? What does your engagement with law firm operations look like now?
[00:03:01] Speaker B: I think it's. I think it's exciting because, again, you know, that was how I felt about consulting. You were learning as much as you were teaching. And so I think to get on this side of it and to be a voice for our industry and to bring a perspective that maybe wasn't necessarily there before, I think gives us an opportunity to really shape, you know, how we choose it, implement it, you know, make sure that there's adoption and make sure that we're using it the best way possible. I think it's just going to be an amazing shift for all of us.
[00:03:36] Speaker A: When's the first time that you touched AI from a legal context? Were you an early adopter of ChatGPT? Have you been watching this from the sidelines and you're like, hey, it's. Something's changed now. What's your journey been like, engaging with AI tools inside of the law?
[00:03:53] Speaker B: AI has been around for a really long time, and I think our space has traditionally been slow to adopt a lot of things. And so you just kind of fall into this rut of, you know, doing things the way that you've always been doing them. And so when it started to be talked about more and more, you know, you know, you play around with it when you're writing a job description or when you're trying to think through a process and, you know, write out an sop. And then I think slowly but surely, I was like, oh, my gosh. Like, this is.
This is so much more than I originally thought of it. Because originally, like most people, I just thought of it as another tech tool. Right.
And I think as I started getting more familiar and I started seeing more things, the wheels just kept turning, like, reimagining, like, should we even be doing this at all, let alone the, you know, oftentimes we brought on either more people or more tech to do the same process faster.
I think it took me a while, but again, it was this aha moment for me of, wait a second, I have to really rethink the way I'm thinking, and should we be doing this process at all? And with the use of AI, you know, where does that give us the Opportunity to leverage our people differently. You know, we always talk as operators about people, you know, are they doing the things that are the highest and best use of their time? And I think that's really where AI comes in and is a game changer. It's like, okay, if, if, if AI and tech can do, you know, 10 steps of this process, the most important steps for a case manager, a paralegal, a lawyer, you know, anyone in a law firm, like where do they sit that they bring so much more value? And so now we can look at our people and make sure that they're doing high value things as opposed to gathering. Right. We, there were so many limitations when we started building processes that you needed to stack people or process to gather information, to put this information here to, you know, to make sure things were done. And now if all those things can be done, you know, where can their time be spent differently? That just adds more value.
[00:06:23] Speaker A: One of the things that I'm sure you've seen firsthand is how as a COO, you're designing process operations, SOPs, SLAs around the firm. And now with AI, you're able to implement that in a, in a way that you really couldn't in the past. How much of that is what you're bringing, bringing into Supio? Because one of the things, as I've thought about this episode and what your departure has meant for your, your, the change that your, your role has meant for the industry as a signal is you have this knowledge that exists experientially, intellectually. Having been inside of a law firm for a long time, you know every facet of it, you understand every process intrinsically and for that asset, which is you and your experience, to go from being inside of a law firm to being inside of a tech company that's functionally trying to rep the human work that's being done inside of law firms. How do you see that asset transfer and what, what do you anticipate as the leverage that changes from being, hey, I'm one CEO inside of one law firm. Two I'm a CEO inside of an AI company that can take all of my knowledge and begin to unpack that into scaled processes.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: I think for me, I think the, the biggest asset is being able to be the voice and to challenge the way that I didn't come into AI as a technologist, I came into AI as an operator. And so I think it's just a very different perspective to challenge the way that they're imagining the product that how we're Implementing it in firms, how we're helping firms leverage it. I think it's just perspective. I bring a completely different perspective.
[00:08:10] Speaker A: Do you think that for AI to get maximal leverage today, just from where we are today, is do you need to spend more time focused out at the industry and help the industry to understand how to work with AI, or do you need to be focused inward to the company to help them understand the processes and flows of a law firm? Does AI need to understand legal or does legal need to understand AI?
[00:08:32] Speaker B: I think it's both. I think you can't pick one. I don't think you can focus on one without focusing on the other. Right. Because if you're just focusing on, you know, inside the tech and how it's built, you're missing what's happening in firms. And, you know, they don't all run as similarly as they would like to believe they do. That's always a fun operator conversation, but I think you have to balance both.
[00:08:59] Speaker A: What are the things that you see as the biggest opportunities on each side right now that you're like, if I could change this about the industry, this about the AI side, like, what. What is it that that needs to. What creates the most leverage, unlocks the most value?
[00:09:11] Speaker B: Yeah, I think on, I'll take the law firm side first. I think there's a lot of hype around, you know, who do I pick? What can it do? Instead of like, hey, if I bring on whether it's a new process, a piece of tech AI, what am I trying to solve? What am I trying to solve? What am I trying to enhance, what am I trying to leverage?
It's not just a new shiny toy. It's. It's actually there to make a difference. And so how are we going to make it make a difference? And so I think, understanding that, I think on, you know, the tech side, you know, there's, there's a lot of different style of PI firms out there. And so I don't necessarily believe it's a one size fits all because there is so much to learn about AI and it's capable of so many things. It's, you know, how do we structure it and help firms roll it out so that it, again, makes a difference. So I think those partnerships are going to be super important.
[00:10:20] Speaker A: One of the things that I see from, from my seat and in the intro, I talked about how Google released Gemini for legal yesterday and I watched the video and I know at least one of the folks who has the, one of the initial plugins with it. And it's not geared toward personal injury law firms per se, but it is aimed at legal, which in itself is telling. Right. That like Google views legal as a monolith, which clearly it's, it's not like the way that injury contingency firms operate is so different from the rest of it. But one of the things that stood out to me is that generic AI, while it's incredibly useful, I think the real value comes when it's multiplied by an operator. Like you can look at Google Gemini and it's incredibly powerful. But until it's built around the actual workflows that are needed by law firms, it just doesn't have the immediate value that, that even generic AI with an operator can provide inside of a law firm. So I think it's, it's really telling to me that really at the same time, while Google's releasing a pretty generic version. Super. Is doubling down and saying hey, what we really need is to bring in more operators who can help us to make the AI work for our actual law firm demographic.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think it's super important and you know, it's AI is when you got to give it context. Right. And so how do you give it context?
[00:11:35] Speaker A: Yeah, 100%. And so, and, and I think, look, I tried to force you to pick one side or the other, but I do think the bridge is important between the industry and, and the technologists because if, if there's no mutual understanding, then the chasm is actually quite large even with how, how powerful AI is at this point and how useful it's become. You know, so many layers down that you can go into each of the workflows and what's truly useful versus what still has gaps in the technology. Like we've come back around to voice AI after I was really bullish on it early last year. Hey, this is going to me with the trajectory that it was on, I thought, okay, I, I, this is going to replace intake teams. I was completely wrong. It has not replaced the human labor on intake teams. It's just starting to on like off hours pieces. But it's not anyone's primary tool for, and I really thought it would be like, so that was a, that was a miss on my side. But the amount of usage that we're seeing in legal, there's a chart that came out this week that AI, that legal AI is seeing more adoption inside the industry than any other industry, which I just find absolutely fascinating that like we are at the epicenter in some ways. You and I are right here at the middle of the, the highest value, highest leverage use of AI across any industry at all.
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think we're, I think we're only getting started. That was kind of a big motivator for me to make the change that I did was because I saw how drastically it is going to change our industry as a whole. And so to have the opportunity to be a part of that change. Right. It's one thing to operate your law firm in a traditional way, but to be able to take my career to the next level and say I, I want to be a part of the shift in how law firms operate as a whole like to was the, that was the most exciting piece of. It is, you know, most operators love to break it and build it and fix it and solve problems. And you know, I wanted the opportunity to really dive into what I believe is going to be a very big change in the way that we look at processes as a whole.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: I think it's been really interesting from my vantage point to see the movement of talent between as two examples you have moved from legal from being inside of a firm to moving on the tech side. I've seen a lot of tech companies hiring talent out of law firms into the tech companies. So there's this, this real transition there. And then the other piece is as meso' become more a part of our industry, we're also seeing an outflow of, of of talent from law firms to their MSO entities. Another great example of a operator and consultant, Chad Dudley moving from being Dudley DeBoer and a consultant to now he's running an MSO as a CEO of Uplift. And so there's a lot of like if I look at the flow of talent right now, it is candidly out from law firms into other entities that are business of law practice of law, but are not attorney owned. From your perspective, is that being driven more by the change but. Or is there a component here where people like yourself who are highly talented, you're at the top of the industry are seeing hey, I'm maxed out inside of a firm. There are, there's more headroom now by moving to another part of the industry. And what do you think? Does that mean something larger for where law firms will, what law firms will look like in five or 10 years?
[00:15:13] Speaker B: I mean I definitely think law firms are going to look different five years from now. Right. You're, you're seeing a lot of shifts that are indicators that you know a lot's changing. I don't know that I necessarily Myself thought about that or saw it coming. But yes, it's a very real, you know, real thing for me personally. I never looked at it like I was maxed out.
I mean, you said it earlier, I have worked in a law firm my entire life. So from the time I was 19 on, I have done some form of a job in, in a law firm. It started out as a work comp firm and then, you know, civil firms in, in California and then, you know, the last 16 years in a personal injury firm. And, and so I don't know that I said to myself, like, I am personally tapped out. But over the past 16 years, I have built a network of colleagues and people I consider my.
For me, it was more of an opportunity to get out and expand my knowledge and reimagine, you know, the challenges that, that operators face that I've been in rooms for years talking about. And so it was if I can take this opportunity and make a difference for all of us, like, that's what was exciting for me. So it wasn't necessarily, I think there is always some degree of like, hey, what's, what's going to be my next big accomplishment, you know, personally, that, that this felt like, you know, I was going to challenge myself because boy, let me tell you, you know, I didn't walk in day one knowing very much about the, the AI side of it. And so I think there's a lot to learn, you know, but I think there's a lot of opportunity in doing this for, for all of us. So, you know, where that takes me five years from now, who knows? But I definitely wasn't going to turn down the opportunity to, to get in on, on the change.
[00:17:20] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's, it's an, it's an amazing opportunity. And I think what is also interesting to me is like as an operator, you're going into a tech company and imparting what that is, that, you know, you're really solving operational issues. Maybe it's all of them, maybe it's some of them, but you're solving them. When you're a consultant, you're helping individuals. When you're in this role, you're helping the industry. Right. Like, and, and not to say that Supio will have every customer, but all this is developing so closely. Whether it's Supio, Eve Evenup, they're, you're all pattern matching off of each other. But like, that is a level of penetration into the industry where you have, each of these companies has hundreds or thousands of customers that are all adopting AI. Workflows that are being designed by Melissa Graham, the product team. Right. Like, that's. That's just a really different thing. And I. I think that five, ten years from now to. To speculate it. I think that a lot of the problems that consultants were helping law firms solve over and over and over, one by one, a lot of them won't exist anymore. Like, I just. I think that's true. Like, Melissa, by the time you're done imparting everything you know to Supio and they're done building that into their application with AI, with agents, that's just a different kind of solve than we've seen in past, where every person, every firm had to be trained from the ground up every single time. This is different. Like, you really do have. And I think we're seeing this more and more of the law firm exists inside of the agentic workflows rather than back when you bought a case management system and you customize it and you built it from the ground up and then you trained your team how to use it. Like, it's a very different system now than it was five years ago, even. And I think that the movement of operators into tech companies is a big part of that. And you are right there in that first group of people whose operational knowledge will be forever embedded in the tech systems that law firms run.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. It's an exciting time.
[00:19:13] Speaker A: Any closing thoughts before we wrap up here? I really appreciate you taking time to share a bit of your journey with us.
[00:19:20] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for having me. I use the word excited all the time because it's exciting. I can't wait to see where we sit.
You know, I say a year from now, but, I mean, I feel like it's changing every day.
So it's a fun time, and I just can't wait to see what's next.
[00:19:37] Speaker A: Fantastic. Well, Melissa, thanks for being on the show for my listeners. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time on the relay.
