EP052: From Courtrooms to Code - Interview with LawDroid Ai founder Tom Martin

Well, hello, everyone. I'm really excited today to have Tom Martin from law droid. And Jen is with me again. And great to see you guys. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks for having me, Jay. Really glad to be here.

Our pleasure. So, first of all, Tom, tell us a little bit about your background and how it all led to starting an AI company for law firms.

Thanks. Yeah, I think that my trajectory is completely atypical. It's definitely that it proves the rule that, well, I don't know about success. But progress is not a straight line. It's all over the place. So I'm originally from Los Angeles, I live in Vancouver now. I am a practicing lawyer have been for almost 25 years now I went to UCLA law school. But as soon as I got out, I spent some time in the entertainment business, and then became a litigator and then worked in different practice areas. As a litigator, toxic tort, personal injury, class actions, employment law, even some family law. And although that sounds all kind of crazy, and all over the place, I think what it's given me in retrospect is like an ability to empathize, understand and get into the shoes of practicing lawyers, and understand what their problems are, because I share them. And I've always loved technology, ever since I was a little kid, around the age of six years old. Coming back from preschool, my mom was working at Cal State LA, and there's a preschool just up the street. And the AV guy that worked at the university was good friends with my mom. And he was so excited, because he just got an apple two in, and he was showing me, you know, how to how to use it. And that really sparked my love of tech. And so ever since then, as a little kid, I've just tried to work it into everything I do. And so naturally, after becoming a lawyer, I thought, how can I do this better, cheaper, faster, you know, not as stressful. And so I tried to work tech into it opened my own firm in 2006. And use a lot of that technology to, to be able to, to have a much bigger footprint than when small firm would have traditionally had. And, and then, you know, founded lodge droid, seven years ago. And with chatbots, the idea was the same thing. It was how to how to give regular people more access to legal services, and also like, how do I help lawyers take advantage of this technology to do the same?

That's great. And we'll dive deep into law drive. But I want to learn a little bit more about you first, because it's interesting, like you and I sort of flip flopped, crossed over. I grew up in Western Canada. And now I live in the United States. And you did the reverse, how did you end up going from, you know, LA, UCLA to living in Canada and beautiful Vancouver by the way, not a bad place to be.

Yeah, Vancouver is gorgeous, especially today. It's, it's the rare, like, two months out of the year, that we have it nice and sunny, and it's springtime and beautiful. The reason is pretty typical, you know, love relationship. My wife's family is from here from Vancouver. Oh, great. They actually moved over from Italy. Her parents did. And then she grew up here in Vancouver. And I grew up in LA, so very much the city, part of LA, you know, sidewalk asphalt, concrete everywhere, like very cityscape, kind of childhood experience. Although I did go to high school in like locking out of Flint Ridge, which is the nicer part of the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles. But still, it's a pretty urban experience. And so to move up here to Vancouver 10 years ago, part of the motivation was to have my girls have two girls that are 20 and 16. Now, and at the time, they were 20 years younger, to like have a more safe suburban kind of experience. And they truly have had that here. It's it's gorgeous, and the people are fantastic.

That's great. So what what what if you could tell everyone just one quick thing, what's one of the greatest things about you know, Vancouver in Canada?

One of the greatest things well, I don't know if it's a greatest thing, but it's a small thing that really adds to our general happiness, you know, on a daily basis is taking my dog for a walk. You know, I take him for a walk and we have a creek nearby and when You go for the walk, it's along this path of the creek through the forest. And I can't tell you how much it's, you know, a mental escape of relief. Yeah. And just kind of grounds you. And that's awesome. It's like

a quality of life thing. That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, when I when I asked the question, I didn't know my answer, like if people haven't been to Vancouver, and people probably saw Vancouver during the Winter Olympics and different events there, but it's like the most beautiful city that's on the ocean. But yeah, you can see the snow atop mountains. And there's tons of just like natural hiking and lakes and wildlife. And it's just, it's just awesome. So for sure, I guess, you know, let's dip a little bit further, you know, you said you had some technology solutions for running your law firm. Before we get like, deep into AI and, and logged right. You know, what are some of the technology solutions that you use that people could still use today? Because I keep hearing it. You know, so many attorneys are interested in like, we want to automate things we want to work. But you know, we are working remotely, we want to continue to work remotely, we want to be able to work from anywhere. What are some of those tech solutions that you discovered that folks could still take advantage of today?

So I'll point out one old one new, one old one, at the time that I even started, the firm is document automation. You know, it's been around for so long, it's had different incarnations. At the time, it was hotdocs. But to be perfectly open with you, like I couldn't afford hotdocs. At the time, it was a pretty pricey licensing fee. So we found this company down in Australia, I think it was called xpressdox. And it was trying to beat out hot dogs and had a great president. Long story short, document automation, tremendous value from that. We were one of the first law firms that partnered so to speak with Legal Zoom, where they were marketing, Prenuptial agreements. And we're the firm that was servicing all of the clients. And I had, I think, at the high point close to two dozen lawyers that were working with me, and we're had a national practice providing prenups that were brought in through Legal Zoom. And the way we made it possible is with the document automation. I had it set up so we had templates for different states and the lawyers were offering the services at flat fees. And the way that it was affordable and possible for the lawyers was that when we got the client through the door, they fit, they filled out an interview and we had this prenup practically 90% done for the lawyers just with a bow on it, they just had to review it. And document automation is awesome. The thing nowadays, for the last 10 years has been slack. You know, we've been running a remote office for 10 years now. And having something to communicate like Slack makes it possible, pulling everyone together. I have a lawyer in Florida, one in Texas, one in California. I'm up here in Vancouver, my paralegals in Idaho, have two assistants work in Wyoming. And, you know, it makes it all possible to have that asynchronous communication. And also like you can pull a little bit of arbitrage with how much you pay out because it's more than enough what I pay for Wyoming. But if if they're working from you know, LA, or in Century City or something they might, it might not be enough when I'm paying to support the whole operation.

Yeah, we love slack. And it'd be interesting to hear how you use it for law firm. But I want to give Jenna an easy, low hanging softball here. Jenna Jenna, what's the coolest? Like? How would you describe how we use Slack? And just explain to someone what it is, if they don't know what it is?

Yeah, so slack allows our team to communicate all day, even though we're all virtual. None of us are in the office together. But I feel like we are. We have very specific channels for specific clients of ours or you can directly message your co workers and it's very easy to stay organized with communication through people who are all over the country or world.

Yeah, so I guess it would be similar for the law firm like we would have a slack for each each client. And then we have a slack for each topic. So like we might we have a search slack. And in there, the search team are like, Hey, we just discovered this new app or, you know, I'll read an article about Google's new algorithm update and I'll put it in the Slack channel for search so we can all stay up to date on a topic and everybody kind of comment on it. How would you use Slack and maybe just to generally explain what it is, you know, it's, I always tell people it's like group chat. You know, like if you're on a group texting feature with like, our family has a group chat. But it's, you know, super organized for business. And also, it's really good at attaching links and documents. So like, all the links and documents around search are stored in that search channel. And all the links and documents for one of our clients is in that client channel. And that channel is the terminology it's like, how would you use it for a law firm? And how would you recommend firms understands like and incorporate it?

Yeah, I was just taking a look at it, actually, to see how we do organize it. And so we have channels set up for different topics, like vacation requests, right? Just really easy for people to drop them in there. And also, it links everyone else in so if it's affecting the team, they can be like, Oh, I can cover that time, no worries, or, you know, like, then leads. So everyone who's on the team that deals with leads, they communicate through that, and they keep each other apprised of what's going on. We have some lawyers that provide phone advice. And so they talk to each other so that they don't step on each other's feet about who's picking up what call and what time, right. And then just a whole bunch of, you know, private messaging between me and individual employees to make sure that we're on track. So yeah, I mean, you can, you can break down the channels to practice areas. And then still keep that one to one communication. And then we use box for managing our documents. So when it comes to document review, like my paralegal, just drop a link into the box, and I click on it, you go to box, and then review that, give it a thumbs up. And so it's all interconnected and works proof, you know, it's real smooth.

So box is a legal is a document review, or is it something else?

It's, it's just a document storage platform. Okay. But they also have built into approvals. So for example, like, he might assign, let's say a motion that he drafted. And I need to add to it. And once I add to it, I hit an approval on there saying, it's good on my end, it's like over and out back to you, and then like, goes back to him. And he gets notified that I've approved it, and then vice versa, back and forth until we're, you know, until we're done. Yeah. So it's a great way of, it's a great way of mimicking the same thing as him walking into my office and saying, Hey, Tom, here's my draft, would you take a look at it, but instead of having to have that in person interaction, we just do it through slack inbox. And in

the old days, you would have printed it out? marked it up with the little yellow red lines or something. Yeah. And now, it's all done digitally, virtually, from the comfort of your own home. Exactly.

I know you told us like, what inspired your love for like the technology and stuff. But what inspired you to start a career in the legal field?

Yeah. Well, first off, like nobody in my family had ever been a lawyer or gone to university yet. So I didn't really have many examples to work off of. But I took a year off after college, I worked for a lawyer to see if I, you know, enjoyed it. I had a degree in philosophy. So part of it was like, What the hell am I going to do with this degree in philosophy. And then it seemed to me like, the law might be like, a practical application of a philosophy degree. And then I worked for a lawyer saw what he did. And even though he was extremely old school, which actually inspired a lot of the tech ideas in my head, I used to review things with him where he would draft it on a yellow pad. And then give it to me, and he'd redline it. And it was just a nightmare of, like, 19th century lawyering. And despite that, I still wanted to go to law school, and then brought tech to bear on it.

Awesome, cool. So tell us here. I mean, maybe give us first 10,000 foot view of law droid? And what the company does and the utility and how folks are using it. And then, you know, the second question is, you know, tell us about the early days of the company, so

Yeah, happy to so law droid. I started it. Seven years ago, it was a kind of an experiment. I was following the news, I saw an article about Joshua Browder, who he has a company called Do Not Pay. At the time though. He was just a student in London, and he used a chatbot, which is kind of a new thing at the time to get himself out of and to help a whole bunch of other people get out of parking tickets by doing parking ticket appeals in London. And when I read that article, it sounds ridiculous, but kind of like the hair stood up because I was like, this is there's a lot of like promise in this thing. Like, as I told you how to experience with document automation, but to be able to automate questions and answers and like the provision of legal information, that was like a whole other step, and it seemed like if you could combine those two things together, you could do an awful lot. And so I launched lodge droid to take advantage of that opportunity. And the first thing out of the box was just a simple chat bot, that interviewed somebody who wanted to start a business, ask them five questions, and then created incorporation documents in California, because seven years ago, California was still a paper based situation to form a corporation. And since then, partly because of feedback that I had conversations I had with some legislators there, it is now all electronic, and they also have a chatbot on their Secretary of State website. Cool.

So, so that was the early days. And what were some of the biggest challenges you face when starting a company.

So once it got past the experimental stage, it felt like there was traction because there was interest in chatbots, from especially the legal aid organizations. And I didn't expect to find it there. Sometimes you kind of find business where it comes to you. And one of my first contracts was working with legal aid organization in Tennessee, and I flew out to Nashville, got to meet the people, wonderful people of Tennessee lines for legal services, got to understand their problems, and how we could solve them. And, you know, once I did that, I understood it's a perfect marriage, you know, automation and Legal Aid, because they have so much so many people that are in need of their services, they don't have enough volunteer attorneys to throw at the problem. And so if you can automate the provision of information and even documents, you can really help them to achieve their mission, which is to help the general public with their legal needs. And so through that, a lot of bespoke projects came from that with different legal aid organizations across the country that brought money in then the money that came in, I used to bootstrap building our own software service platform. And so that led to the creation of the two products we have now, one being a chatbot builder that we've had for about three years now. Where you can do DIY, create your own Chatbot. We like to think of it as WordPress for AI. And the second product is an AI legal assistant called copilot, which helps lawyers to get through their day to day tasks more quickly, easily and, you know, be more profitable.

But there's just I was gonna say, can we just dig a little deeper into each of those products? So the Chatbot builders that to build legal chats or any kind of chats? And what are some of the uses people have derived from that?

Yeah, so logic builder is the Chatbot builder. And we've layered technology on top of it, it started off as kind of choose your own adventure. And then conditional logic, we added a layer of natural language processing. And now we've added the layer of you know, open AI to everything, because it just works so, so well. And being a WordPress for AI, what does that mean? It means that lawyers can use it to create different types of AI tools. One real easy one that doesn't use a lot of AI actually is a lead capture bot, they put on their website, it pops up, and, you know, engages a potential client gets their contact information and all that. But that is probably the most basic thing that you could do with our platform. Another is that you could have like a paralegal bot, which interviews, a client asks dozens of questions, then uses the answers to those questions to create legal documents on the fly, sends those documents over to the attorney is in a Word document format, and the attorney gets the work done on the back end without the client even knowing necessarily and you know, they can get worked on a lot faster. But you could also tie it into phone systems it can it can deal with texting, and and now you can create AI legal assistance with it. Where you know, it can handle more complex tasks.

Awesome. That's the Chatbot does that also explain the legal assistant copilot? Or do you want to dig into that one?

Oh, you're right. So that's law droid builder. And coincidentally, we use logic builder to build our AI legal assistant copilot. That's how powerful it The lottery builder platform is. And so the AI legal assistant, you know, you log into it, you can do some basic legal research, you could summarize documents, you could draft letters and emails, you could do grammar checks, it even has an option for emotional support. If you're in the office way too late, and you just need to talk to somebody, it'll actually be pretty empathetic in giving you some support. And we also just have a new feature where you can upload your own documents into the system, where it becomes much more useful that way. And you could ask questions about the documents you have. And we're going to be rolling out a new feature where you could draft new documents based on your old documents. So it's really exciting. And the feedback I've been getting so far from lawyers is they really enjoy it. We've also got a lot of law students and law librarians that have signed up, because we have a case briefing feature where briefs cases, and the students love that. And lawyers love it too, because it helps them to get to the meat of what a case is about real quick.

That's great. Jenna, go ahead. I know you had a question as well.

Oh, yeah, I was just going to ask how you think your platform differs from similar products that are on the market?

Yeah, and there definitely are a lot of a lot of products that are popping up now. There's probably at the higher end dealing with more like enterprise and larger firms, you have Harvey and CO counsel. And, you know, both of them are several months ahead of our development, and can't really compete with them, they're going after a different market. Plus, I'm bootstrapped from all of the projects that we've done. So I can't really compete with venture funded companies. But I think we've really hit above our weight with what we've been able to achieve with the funding that we do have from our own projects. And the thing is, is that with the technology, nowadays, AI technology, you don't have to have a ton of money to build out something really awesome. And I think that's why we've been able to do it. And it puts us at an advantage in terms of the pricing, because we could price affordably. And we could we could help medium to solo firms, and price affordably, so that they could get into this product. Whereas our competitors, although we might be ahead of this for now, they have to charge a lot more, because they need to satisfy their investors. So I think we do have a good niche for ourselves. And I'm just really excited to see where this goes.

So awesome. So like, I always want to dumb things down so I can understand them. But you know, what is there like a case study of a law firm in a practice area, that's using the product and and just explain it and very, you know, for the for the non techies. Here's, here's here's, here's their instance, here's how they used it. And here's how they're saving time and money today.

So for which, which product of the

well, if you want to learn, yeah, if you want to do both, go ahead.

Yeah, so one firm on the bot builder side, is a firm that I've worked with for a long time. It's workers compensation firm, based out of Tacoma, Washington. And so for them, we built a bot that essentially conducts an interview that asks about three dozen questions about workers compensation. And so keep in mind, somebody, these people have not hired this lawyer yet. But they're looking for help. And they go to his website, and they click on the bot, it runs them through this interview. And then it provides them with a report at the end of the interview, that identifies all the workers comp issues that they have, which they probably didn't even know what those were. And then it provides self help resources that they can click on link to PDF downloads, like all this great info. And it's provided provided to them at at no cost. And so it's a great, it's a great lead magnet. It's a great marketing tool, but it's also a really great, you know, just pro bono benefit that the firm is offering to people and it builds a lot of great goodwill, because they have a positive experience, they got value out of the firm. And then if they ever want to hire somebody down the road, if it gets too complicated for them, they'll probably be thinking about that firm.

That's great. And I bet you it's a fantastic Link Builder. Like we in SEO search engine optimization. There's a huge value in getting other sites to link to your site. So if you've got this great free pro bono worker's comp analysis tool that cranks out a report for you what a great value for other web sites to link to that website. And the value of those links is it increases your SEO, your search engine optimization performance.

Yeah, for sure. And there have been people linking to it articles written about the, you know, the, that technology. And so it's gotten a good a good amount of PR for for the firm.

While we're on that topic, what what kind of price point to, you know, like if someone wanted to build their own tool to build, like we said, you know, goodwill, and a free utility and lead generator and a link, a link magnet, what kind of price point to start with that product?

Well, that that product is a DIY product. So they could somebody could sign up and build something on their own. And for access to the platform, it's $99 per month, per seat. So if it's just one person, they'll only be paying $99 per month. Now, that doesn't mean we're building out something like that for them for $99 per month, but they they can go in and they could build themselves a solution like that. And we also have templates in our system. So that some of the most common use cases like the lead capture bot, they could literally create their own lead capture bot with one click by using one of our templates to auto generate one of those bots.

That's awesome. That was gonna be my next question is if your platform was pretty simple to use, or if it was really complicated, but that's great that you have templates, you can go in and see what you guys have been doing for other people.

Yeah, that was a great example. Do you want to give us an example for the second product.

So the second product, which is our AI, legal assistant, co pilot, it's kind of early days, we launched in research beta in January. But we now have over 200 users that are using it, and we have close to 900 people on our waitlist. So we're getting lots of great feedback. It's also a work in progress. You know, so purposefully, the point of the feedback is to is to mold the product. And so one of the most requested feature requests was to add the ability for them to upload their own documents and manipulate them. And so that's, that's why, you know, that's our front burner priority that we're very close to having available to users. But I mean, so far it's been it's been good people have stayed on board, you know, this whole time. And I'm also going to reward them for being part of the research beta by giving them a steep discount off of the product once it once it launches publicly.

Do you have a personal injury case study for that product? Or is it better in different practice areas?

The AI legal assistant? Yeah. Yeah. For the AI legal assistant. Don't have a case study for PII specifically, no.

The reason I ask is just because it seems like about 70% of the queries we get in the listeners are PII, but they're not it's not exclusive.

Yeah, I think the one killer application of AI legal assistant, once were able to upload, you know, their own personal documents is a demand letter generation. Because there's a lot of high high volume, and I used to do PII too. So I have some experience with that. But if you have a high volume, PII practice, turning out those demand letters would be great. And if you can, the promise that we're looking at is the ability to connect it into your existing medical records, chiropractic records, lighten nurse life care plans, and then use all of that information to put together a pretty decent demand letter that has a lot of backup, you know.

That's great. All right. Jenna, you want to hit one more question?

Yeah. So when it comes to, you know, building these chatbots and stuff, is this something you guys build for your clients, or this is the platform they go in? They build them out, or they can use your templates for their specific site?

Yeah, so on the chat chatbot builder side, I tried to make it as DIY as possible. It even looks like WordPress, so that it just, you know, has that really intuitive feel to it. And then we have the templates in there for common use cases. And we're building out more and more supportive videos so that they can kind of teach themselves how to use it when I get a lot of the same questions. But when it does come to like bigger scope stuff, like let's say, a legal aid organization comes to us and they say we, you know, we love this platform, but we need to build out a legal wellness checkup that has to do with like six different legal topics, and each one of them takes a deep dive right If that's the case, then, you know, we usually scope out a project for them. And so even though we're using our platform, we build it for them. And so that would have a higher cost because we're actually, you know, doing the build out for them. Right. And so we could do that for larger law firms to if they wanted, he kind of depends on, you know, what their budget is, and how deeply they want to get involved themselves in it.

Sounds awesome. And, you know, one question I would have is, like, you know, here's an attorney, and you built an AI, coding, and team and brought a product to market, you know, what's involved in building a team and finding the folks who can build these kinds of products? And what does that team look like?

Oh, geez. Some of them I've been working with so long that I don't remember exactly how I found them in the first place. But it's also a remote team, I have six people that work with me three on the development side, three on the marketing side. And we're all over, you know, there's one base locally in Vancouver, there's one in Eastern Europe, there's one in London, one of the assistances in Wyoming? You know, like, we're basically like, all over the place. Yeah. And it just works for us. Also, you know, engage through slack, and just keep each other moving forward.

That's great. What do you do for you know, this, I was talking with someone at this conference as that last week, what do you do to prepare team building? And, you know, aside from the functionality of slack, you know, how do you build those same relationships that folks make in person, when your virtual remote company?

Well, so I mean, some of the private messaging, you know, like, you try to, like, how's it going, like, you know, understand, like, where people are at, unfortunately, over the past couple of years, partly because of COVID, just partly because maybe it's just been bad luck, or hard times for, for everyone, a number of the people I work with have had, you know, some family medical issues, and there's been family members who have passed away, and it's, it's been hard on my staff and just keeping in touch with them, and letting them know, like, in some ways that either just a, you know, a care package or a gift or like, asking them, you know, taking interest, all of that is really important to me. And sometimes just showing up, like, you know, I, my paralegal who's in Idaho, I coordinate with him and flew out, and we hung out for a day, did a little work the next day, and just kind of caught up in person, it had been several years since we'd seen each other in person, but um, you know, having that in, in person time if they want to, right, because it also depends on the person, like maybe they're far too busy or something. But I think just taking the time to have a personal interest and care about other people. I mean, they're putting their hours and days into this project and what we're doing together and just taking the time to care,

right. And one of the questions I like to ask everyone on the podcast is, what's an application like an app or a software website that you use, or maybe a couple that you use personally and professionally, that would save people time, or maybe just be fun? Well,

the saving time are the two that I mentioned before will probably be good examples like Slack and box. You know, those are go to obviously zoom, or Google meet Google meet. Sometimes for me, it's easier on like, demos, for some reasons, zoom. makes it complicated sometimes when it shouldn't be for fun. So there's two ways for fun. Like one is non tech, which is gardening. Just going into the garden and like working with the earth and planting stuff. And I mean, it's such a relief because your mind gets disconnected. Like you can actually have some peace of mind just thinking about the here and now and this particular thing and no other thing at that time. Right?

Yeah, a little grounding with the earth. Yeah,

so there's that. As far as the tech side, I have an Oculus, you know, VR headset and that thing, I like it actually not so much for like all the games, which are great. And you know, I do play the Sabre game on there. But the Google Streetview maps where you could jump like to someplace you visited couple years ago, like let's say Prague, and find yourself right where you stood. A couple of years ago. And for me, it's really it really helps me to ground my memory. Because instead of letting those memories fade, when you actually go into that particular location, and you're looking around, you're like, oh, yeah, this is where we went for lunch. And we have, you know, this there, and it really helps to cement that experience.

So you can walk through Google Maps with an Oculus? Yeah, that's awesome.

Great, we are so crazy, that you have virtual opposite. So like, if everyone on your team had a headset, you can go in and design your whole office and even brings up your computer screen in there. You could share your screen to the wall, it is so crazy what you can do.

Great. Well, you know that that's all the formal questions I had. But I guess one other valuable question is, you know, where can people find you? And how do they give law drive to try? Where do they sign up? And how does that work?

Yeah, I'd be happy for them to give it a try. They just go to law droid.com. And, you know, there's a button where they could sign up. And, you know, I send them some videos, I walk them through it, I try to be as involved as I can. With everyone. That's the chosen interest in law droid. They could also follow me on Twitter at law droid. And I also have a substack, like everyone else in the world. And mine is called law droid manifesto.com.

Okay, great. I'll make sure we get those in the show notes. Well, thank you so much for doing this. And I guess this will be past past tense. Maybe you're not. We're, we're doing a webinar. Well, it'll be past tense, but it'll be on YouTube. So when we get this recording up, we'll probably already have completed the chat GPT and AI All Stars webinar. And Tom has been gracious enough to participate in that as well, with Carolyn elephant, and Dennis, you and myself. And so if you're hearing us after the webinar, which you will be if you want to see that and learn a little bit more about law Droid and a number of other tools that you can use to manage your law firm, and dentists use so, so informational. They'll probably be tons of AI tools just for life. And in business. You'll find that the 10 Golden Rules YouTube page, and you can check out the entire webinar. So Tom, thanks for doing this. And I look forward to our chat with the other experts next week.