AI as the Great Equalizer for Law Firms

Hey everyone. Welcome back here to Textrunk TV. I want to introduce you to a lady.

Her name is Gabby Cubiero. Gabby, or Gabriella, is the SVP of product unified growth platform at a company called 8am. Gabby, welcome to Textrunk TV.

It's great to have you on here. Oh, thanks, Alan. It's great to be here.

My pleasure. So Gabby, we're going to talk about 8am, we're going to talk about everybody's favorite subject, lawyers. But before we do that, let's talk a little bit about you.

How did you come to be the SVP of product? Yeah, I've been in legal tech most of my career. Started out by dabbling a bit in law, just as my summer job even in college.

Did some things I thought, oh, I'm never going to be in law firms. That's boring it's not for me, was my takeaway from that. And actually got more into a marketing path.

But that eventually took me into a personal injury law firm, where I ended up building tech for that law firm, so co-founded a product called CaseBeer, which is an LPM for personal injury attorneys. And then by way of acquisitions over the last few years, have gotten into 8am, and really excited to be part of the product team here. We're doing some really exciting stuff.

Very cool. Tell us about 8am. Yeah.

So 8am, we're a company that's been around over 20 years now, and not by name of 8am. That's a new name for us. But we have a professional business platform for professionals, so that's for attorneys, for accountants, and other client-based providers.

And it's really about enabling those business owners to thrive. A lot of these small business owners, they find themselves in that situation often by surprise. They graduate law school, or they become accountants, so they go out on their own, and all of a sudden they realize, oh, I've got a business to run.

This is going to feed me, feed my family. And we're really committed to helping them thrive and focus on what matters most, which is generally spending time with their clients and on the work that really matters. Well, while we're here, let's get this out of the way.

For people who want to find out more about 8am, what's the website to go to, and how would you recommend they engage? Yeah. Super easy.

com, and it's the best place to get to know us and all of our suite of solutions. Many lawyers are probably already familiar with LawPay or My Case, but 8am's a great place to get to know our entire platform. So 8am is sort of the umbrella for all of these- That's correct.

Yeah ... companies that we've-- products. Very cool.

Silly question, who came up with the name 8am? Is there something behind that? I think that came from our executive team, and it was just a name at the time that really resonated.

If anyone's named a business, it's actually really quite hard. And, we looked at, at the time, I think, thousands of different names, and when this one was suggested, it really stuck with us, and felt sort of fresh, new, memorable. And what our core promise is to help our businesses, and help our customers start their day, and we hear feedback.

m. That's okay. m.

m. or midnight, our solutions are there helping our firms thrive, so. The case of 8am being 24/7.

Yes, exactly. So Gabby, we're all living through this era of AI and what's going on with it. Excuse me, a lot of disruption, a lot of change.

A lot of people, frankly, apprehensive about adoption, because what's it going to mean for their jobs and their careers? One of the occupations or categories that people say are ripe for disruption with AI is the legal field, right? And, as I was talking off camera, I was a lawyer in the late '80s, and I tell you firsthand, cutting edge doesn't usually go together with what we did.

True. But it got me into computers, right? I was the Word Perfect guy.

Because lawyers didn't use Word then. It was Word Perfect. Well, it's funny, Alan.

That's actually my joke when I hear people worried about, AI's going to take my job. I still meet clients, or I still meet lawyers that we use Word Perfect. So, that's not that far, long ago for most people.

Yeah, no, it's crazy. But on the other hand, there are, and I've spoken to law firms that are really all in. Yeah.

Right? They're using AI not just from a legal practice of law, pleadings and stuff like that, but really to help them run their businesses. And because, traditionally, two of the worst businessmen are lawyers and doctors.

Right? Yeah. But as I said, a lot of law firms now, they have business partners who are maybe lawyers, maybe not, but they run the business side of the house.

Yeah. And they're beingMade to run like real businesses. So I know this is something you guys are probably heavily, heavily involved in.

What do you think? Yeah, I think there's a lot of stress around, is AI going to replace lawyers? I really don't see that happening at all.

I think, in fact, quite the opposite. I think AI's going to bring a lot of money into the space. I think AI is absolutely going to disrupt.

I think lawyers should buckle up, like a lot is going to evolve. It's going to be really fun. For those of us that like technology, there's going to be a lot of change, but I think the way that lawyers should really be thinking about this is AI is like a great equalizer.

Right? Now, the small firm, more than ever before, I think it was always true with tech, but more than ever before, AI is going to allow a small firm to compete with the biggest and the best firms. And that's really exciting.

And of course, it's in both the practice and the business of law, and I like what you said. I think we read a lot of headlines on brief writing and those tools are there. But what I think is most impactful is it's everything in between, and it's the full cycle of a law firm's business.

One of the things that isn't talked about a lot in the AI space is, quite frankly, what I refer to as the quote-unquote "boring stuff," which is actually what I think a lot of law practice management is. It isn't a sexy solution, but it's the solution you log into every day to run your firm, run your cases, run your business, follow up with clients, and do all of that in a compliant, secure way. And layering AI over that contextual data of your firm is where all of the real valuable unlocks are going to come.

So we keep hearing about all these solutions that kind of live outside of the existing law firm data ecosystem, where the work happens. And I think the next year, over the next six months, that's probably what we're going to be hearing about the most. Excellent.

Do you have any metrics in terms of adoption at this point with law firms? It's pretty early. Early days across a lot of products.

But what we've seen, for example, through our legal industry report, we've been querying customers, or not just our customers, also just legal professionals at large, around AI adoption for the last three years, and we've never seen anything like it in terms of willingness to approach. I believe the numbers doubled from last year, just to put it- Hmm ... in perspective.

And being around for when we moved lawyers from servers to the cloud, I can tell you it did not move this fast. It's really exciting, and there's a lot of curiosity about it and interest like I've never seen before in the space. I agree.

But it is not just the legal field. I think this is AI across the board. What I find interesting, and I know you guys have talked about this, is it's not just changing the day-to-day of how a lawyer litigates or pursues a claim or represents a client.

It's the back office functionality. Yeah. And back office from a lawyer to a medical office to an insurance agency to a manufacturer, back office is back office.

There's certain things you need, accounting and bookkeeping stuff, HR, and what have you. But then there are things that are highly specialized for lawyers, right? Mm-hmm.

And for the practice of law. But from what I know, and again, this is going back now 35 more years, right? More than 35 years.

It was really ripe for a little change, wasn't it? Yeah. I think it's no better time than the present.

Although I think that I've been in this field for not quite as long as you, but long enough to be like, look, a lot changed, but a lot didn't, right? A lot of these roles, you still had junior associates coming in, reading everything by hand, sleeping under desks. You hear those rites of passage for people that go into big law in particular, and it's those jobs that are going to go away because AI can do it so much better.

And then you still have an element of judgment that's going to be there. I think that largely, again, when we think about the value that's going to come, you hit it exactly right around the back office. It's handling a lot of the grunt work, a lot of the rote work, a lot of the repetitive work, that technology has actually been trying to chip away at already, right?

Whether that's document automation, but now imagine it's document automation on steroids, or it's being able to summarize a whole case at a glance, so when that client calls you unexpectedly, you can jump right in with the right context to be able to answer that client's question and have a really meaningful and deep conversation with them that doesn't require an hour of file review and catching up on the matter. I think that the payoff, really, and the winners here are going to be the clients. A lot of law firmsAdopting this technology is going to enable them to provide better experiences and ultimately better outcomes for the clients, which is good for business, good for referrals, good for all the things.

And that's why, when I think about really what I see is, I think this is going to be really good for this space, and obviously great on the delivery of justice and all of the other good things that come with that. What about carry-over? Are we going to see, I imagine we are, but medical practices having a very similar kind of path here?

I think so. And I think as consumers and as humans, it's sort of this interesting moment where our lives are going to live online even more than they have before. But I think we're going to see these trends across the board.

We're seeing it in our business. Every single business is going to be disrupted in these ways, and I think we need to come up with a better word because disruptive, just in general, has this very negative connotation. People hear it, and it gets them nervous.

But maybe transformed, right? It really is, I think, going to be largely a force for good. In that doctor example, it's already happening.

" Sure you are. Something like that, right? And it's like, okay, I guess that does sound kind of nice.

A little creepy, but also kind of nice. But I was telling you off-camera, my oldest son's an attorney now, and he graduated last year, but he was the student leader of their technology lab. Yeah.

And the things they were working on were kind of game-changing, really aimed more at people maybe who couldn't afford one of these big firms, and landlord-tenant law, for instance, and stuff like that. But as we were talking about, there's a two-edged sword to making that too available to everyone because our court system is backed up enough. Yeah.

Very. A flood of AI-initiated lawsuits would wreak havoc on calendars- Yeah ... and schedules.

And we're seeing it even coming out of the law firms. I think to the point of the example that you had with your son, and we said this offline, I actually think that AI is going to finally bring about a real leap in terms of access to justice, which legal tech has always talked about, but I don't think it's ever come to fruition. I do think that this is going to be an equalizer of sorts there as well.

But yeah, with it is going to come a lot of noise, and I'm already hearing this from customers, from attorney friends of mine, where they're getting sent things from their clients, from opposing counsel, and it veers often into this AI slop category where lawyers are billing more because they're reviewing more stuff that's not quite accurate or written well. And so this might be a little bit of a messy middle that we have to work through on a societal level. And I think this is this moment in particular where the AI is still not there yet, right?

And maybe it will never be there. With lawyers, there's so much judgment that goes into it. There's so much care that goes into the work.

These are really high-stakes consequences, both for a lawyer themselves and for the clients, if mistakes are made. And a lot of these tools out there still, the accuracy and trust in these tools may not be there. A lot of these tools out there have not been built for lawyers and with lawyers in mind, and so there's a lot of risk, I believe, that comes with that.

Tell you another avenue, though, and I know at least two or three people like this. People who either were lawyers or were helping to run the business side of law firms- Mm-hmm ... going out and starting their own companies, offering AI-based solutions- Yep ...

to look at. That's probably become a cottage industry unto itself already. But eventually, they get to the point where either they've got to compete with you guys- Mm-hmm ...

or they're content with the lifestyle business, right? Yep. I've seen that over the years.

For instance, orthodontist. Mm-hmm. No one thinks about orthodontists unless your kids are getting braces, right?

Yeah. But when I was doing security PCI work- Mm-hmm ... I realized that no one pays for their kids' braces in one shot.

Yeah. Because it's about five grand, and they usually, however long your kid's going to have braces on, that's how long they- I'm on the monthly payment plan now, Alan. So yeah.

I'm living this. So you know that I went through it myself with my kids. What I came to find out, though, is that basically, almost every orthodontist, if they used QuickBooks, had your credit card number in the QuickBooks.

Oh, never. If they didn't use QuickBooks, and they were even more dinosaur-like, they actually had a list that was stuck near the computer or something, and every month on billing day- Absolutely ... they would do it.

So this was a huge PCI issue, right? Yeah. But none of them are big enough to have a full-time IT person.

Mm-hmm. So you get these IT people, like lifestyle businesses, and they'll handle 20, 25 orthodontist office. Mm-hmm.

And it's the same, they'll help with their website, they help with their QuickBooks or whatever. I don't know, they probably charge 100 bucks a month or something to each one, and they make a living. I think we're going to see a lot of that.

I'm seeing some of the same. I will say, I think that this is a moment in time where a lot of these point solutions are emerging. A lot of them are kind of wrappers around existing AIs and existing LLMs.

And my recommendation when I'm talking to firms is they're evaluating some of these. Many of them could be great, but I'd also make sure that you're looking at their terms of service, making sure that their agreements with those LLMs have agreements in place where they're not training third-party models. There's a lot of care, and quite frankly, a lot of upfront costs that goes into doing these types of things ethically.

I know what we've done with 8am to actually bring AI into our solutions. We know that trust is paramount with our customers. And speaking of PCI with LawPay, we were one of the first businesses out there bringing digital payments into law firms and helping them manage all of the trust implications on collections ethically and in a compliant way.

And so, we don't take that trust for granted. And so just with all of these new AI solutions coming out there, I just strongly recommend to do the due diligence, and ensure that client data is being handled in responsible ways. I love it.

Gabby, we got to wrap up. 15 minutes. We're way past 15 minutes anyway.

But I want to thank you for coming on and talking to us today. We always say around here, right now, it seems like the coders and the marketing people in tech are at the tip of the spear with AI change. But I think lawyers are right there, right?

I think lawyers are right there. It's an exciting time. I really appreciate- Absolutely ...

spending time with you, Alan. All right. Thank you.

All right. Have a great day. Thank you so much.

Gabby Cuellar, SVP, Product, Unified Growth Platform over at 8am. We're going to take a break here on Techstrong. We'll be right back.