Aaron Thomas: [00:00:00] But I think the most, like the biggest first takeaway that I had was that like most people don’t actually have a marketing problem. You know, if you ask an attorney, would you like your marketing to be better? 10 out of 10. Say yes I would love more marketing. Everybody has something they wish they were doing. You know, a lot of it is around video. Oh, I should be doing more video, I should be doing more social media.

You know, even if that’s not the thing that’s working for them. Everybody wants more marketing help, you know, whether it’s for their website or what have you. But when I would dive deeper and ask people, you know, if your marketing blew up and you had twice the number of leads, twice the number of cases knocking on your door. You know what would happen? You know, would you be able to handle it? Would something break? What would break first?

And most of the attorneys, I’d say 6 outta 10, wouldn’t be able to handle the cases anyway. If they had in like something else was the bottleneck. So everyone has like this marketing wishlist, but all these firms would like completely fall apart. In fact, some people were like, I’m already [00:01:00] drowning.

If the marketing spigot actually stays on. If we’re just bringing in, I’m literally going to drown. And so a lot of people actually don’t need marketing problem, you know, marketing help. They need like bottleneck help.

Jonathan Hawkins: Man, you’re speaking to me, you’re speaking to me right now. So true for me, for sure. Marketing, I mean, I just love marketing. I’m like you, I just love doing it. It’s fun. And I’ll never stop but if we doubled, I mean, not even that much. I mean really even 20% more than we are now. It would break.

So like, I don’t know if we talked about it at our lunch, but that is something I’m working on is I’m really working on the back office operation workflow piece because the worst thing you do is you go market and you get all these clients in and you can’t service them, and then they get pissed off and then they’re giving you the one star reviews and you know, all the bad stuff that comes with that.

Welcome to the Founding Partner Podcast. Join your host, Jonathan Hawkins, as we explore the fascinating stories of successful law firm founders. [00:02:00] We’ll uncover their beginnings, triumph over challenges, and practice growth. Whether you aspire to launch your own firm, have an entrepreneurial spirit, or are just curious about the legal business, you’re in the right place.

Let’s dive in.

Jonathan Hawkins: Welcome to Founding Partner podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Hawkins. It’s a podcast where I get to talk to law firm founders and hear about what they’re doing and learn from all the cool stuff they’re doing. And today’s guest is a repeat guest, very special guest. He was the very first guest on this podcast several years ago at this point, maybe two and a half years ago at this point. So Aaron Thomas, welcome back man. It’s been a while. I know we’ve talked offline, but it’s been a while since we’ve talked on the podcast. So welcome

Aaron Thomas: Yeah. Thanks for having me back. Yeah, no, it’s good to be here. I have, you know, I’m a guest, but I’m also a fan of the show, and you have interviewed everybody in the space. So, [00:03:00] I know I was here when you were starting out, but now it’s a real honor to be back here with you, Jonathan.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, the good news back on episode one is that you were a seasoned guest on podcasts generally. So you know, you put me on your back and you took over the show because you know, I’ve learned a lot in terms of interviewing since then. So, so, yeah. But it was good episode, so everybody should go back and check that one out for sure.

To hear more about Aaron, his journey, his story. He’s got pretty cool stuff. He is done, but reintroduce yourself. What’s your firm? What kind of stuff do you guys do?

Aaron Thomas: Yeah. Aaron Thomas. I am the founding attorney of prenups.com. We are a multi-state law firm representing couples looking for prenups and postnup in 30 plus states. And yeah, it’s going well. That’s what we’re doing.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, so part of why I wanted you back, so we had lunch, I don’t know, a month or two or three ago now, and, and you sort of posed this interesting concept to me and I was like, man, you need to come on the show and let’s talk about it. And you were, I think you, you said you were, you had reached out to, you know, a [00:04:00] number of what you called successful law firm owners to ask them what worked in 2025, what didn’t, and what they might be doing if they could push a so-called magic button.

And I thought that was pretty interesting and I wanted to hear about what everybody else was saying. So, I guess first. What gave you the idea to do that?

Aaron Thomas: Yeah, You know, the idea came about when I was doing my solo retreat at the beginning of the year. So I’ve done it a couple years now where I basically disappear for a weekend leave the wife and daughter behind for, you know, 48 hours. Go get a cabin somewhere remote in Georgia and just kind of think for a couple of days and you know, one thing I’m obsessed with everything marketing, you know, I feel like I’ve gotten like a degree in marketing informally over the past, you know, four or five years. I have I’ve worked with like a lawyer coach. I’ve worked with, I hired a publicist when my book came out. I worked with a [00:05:00] branding coaching group for two years.

I’ve read. All the marketing books, you know, the one page marketing plan and all the different marketing books, you know, that we all know about, that you can get your hands on in building my practice. But I realized like the one thing I’d never done was like to sit down literally with other lawyers that I respect who have like built something good and maybe they did it different than I did it or would’ve done it and just ask people directly, you know, attorneys that I already know and trust that I could, you know, trust to tell me like the real deal truth, like what worked, what didn’t work, and kind of learn peer to peer.

And I figured I’ve learned enough that maybe I can be useful to these attorneys, maybe I can share some of the things that worked, you know, and didn’t work for me and hear what worked for other people. So I kind of like pitch it like a trade, you know, and maybe selfishly wanted to steal one or two things, you know, and we all come out the better.

So that’s kind of how it came about.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, you are very good at marketing and I so I, there’s a lot that everyone can learn from you. And I agree with you. You know, with marketing there’s not a whole [00:06:00] lot new under the sun. But sometimes you just need to see what others are doing and say, oh yeah, I wanna borrow that. I mean, I love borrowing little pieces and then making it my own and hopefully getting some success from it.

So of these law firm owners, founders what types of law firms are we talking about or uh, criteria, sizes. I mean, what sorts of folks were you talking to?

Aaron Thomas: Yeah, so the attorneys that I reached out to, it was really based on people that already had a relationship with. So it was more about like how close they were to me than anything else. So it ended up being a real mix of practice areas. I talked to a personal injury attorney. Somebody who does health law, criminal defense, estate planning trademark attorney, family law, real estate business.

So, all of the attorneys that I talked to, I would say all of them probably have revenue at least of a million dollars or more. So all of them have, you know, successful practices. I think a lot of people’s practices or solo attorneys, they get [00:07:00] stuck at that kind of quarter million dollar mark of revenue.

So all of these are. Financially successful attorneys and everyone’s been doing it at least a decade. So that’s the commonality is they’re successful. None of ’em were huge. Maybe the biggest one is, you know, maybe 20 people, 25 people on staff. But they’re also people who, I think they figured out something in marketing.

That has worked for them, whether it’s mostly referrals or mostly, you know, SEO and you know, maybe they’ve got like some great referral sources set up. You know, obviously you were one of the attorneys that I talked to, so, you know, I talked to people who were not just coasting on referrals but had like interest in growing and had interest in marketing.

Jonathan Hawkins: So it sounds like it was a pretty good cross section of all types of firms, which is cool. ’cause if you only focus on, you know, PI attorneys or just divorce attorneys, they’re sort of tried and true methods there that may not translate to others. So that’s good. You got a good cross section. And was it solely to, to learn about.

Marketing things they were doing, or were you [00:08:00] looking for other types of insights as well?

Aaron Thomas: It was broader. You know, I kind of left it open-ended because I wanted to hear what people said. So, you know, I asked people, you know, what was the best thing you did in the last, you know, 12 months or so, what didn’t work? And then like you said, you know, what’s the magic button if you could do, I didn’t specifically limit it to marketing, but I think I went in.

Expecting that was gonna be, you know, we’re all trying to get more business, we’re all trying to grow our businesses and you know, in my mind the first thing goes to marketing. And so that’s what I expected to hear back was like, oh, I, you know, it’s, these blog posts, or it’s the podcast or it’s, it, know, what have you.

And I got like a pretty wide range of answers. I’m sure you want to dive into.

Jonathan Hawkins: All right. Here, let’s dive in. Tell me what’s working out there.

Aaron Thomas: Yeah. So you know, unsurprisingly, referrals are still like the biggest thing for a lot of people. You know, I think, you know what’s funny, almost nobody [00:09:00] said like if they had a magic button, that they would press it and get more leads. And I think what was like really interesting is if you go and you ask people like, would you like better marketing?

You know, some people were like, you know, my YouTube videos are doing well. My Google reviews are working. Almost everybody has referral sources set up. I mean, and that makes sense. If you’ve been practicing for 10 or 20 years, you know, you have clients that are happy, you know, other attorneys in your market or in your area.

People know what it is that you do. People are gonna send you cases and your former clients are gonna refer other people to come to you. So that was like the one commonality across the board is everybody who’s successful and is doing good work is getting some. Percentage of their cases from referrals.

For some people it was like a third of their cases or 30% of their cases. And for a couple attorneys I talked to was more like 90 to 95% of their cases came from referrals. But I think the most, like the biggest first takeaway that I had [00:10:00] was that like most people don’t actually have a marketing problem. You know, if you ask an attorney, would you like your marketing to be better? 10 out of 10. Say yes I would love more marketing. Everybody has something they wish they were doing. You know, a lot of it is around video. Oh, I should be doing more video, I should be doing more social media.

You know, even if that’s not the thing that’s working for them. Everybody wants more marketing help, you know, whether it’s for their website or what have you. But when I would dive deeper and ask people, you know, if your marketing blew up and you had twice the number of leads, twice the number of cases knocking on your door. You know what would happen? You know, would you be able to handle it? Would something break? What would break first?

And most of the attorneys, I’d say 6 outta 10, wouldn’t be able to handle the cases anyway. If they had in like something else was the bottleneck. So everyone has like this marketing wishlist, but all these firms would like completely fall apart. In fact, some people were like, I’m already drowning.

If the marketing spigot actually stays on. If we’re [00:11:00] just bringing in, I’m literally going to drown. And so a lot of people actually don’t need marketing problem, you know, marketing help. They need like bottleneck help.

Jonathan Hawkins: Man, you’re speaking to me, you’re speaking to me right now. So true for me, for sure. Marketing, I mean, I just love marketing. I’m like you, I just love doing it. It’s fun. And I’ll never stop but if we doubled, I mean, not even that much. I mean really even 20% more than we are now. It would break.

So like, I don’t know if we talked about it at our lunch, but that is something I’m working on is I’m really working on the back office operation workflow piece because the worst thing you do is you go market and you get all these clients in and you can’t service them, and then they get pissed off and then they’re giving you the one star reviews and you know, all the bad stuff that comes with that. You know, you could go, there’s a cliff you could fall off and be even worse. But I mean, I always view it as a chicken egg thing ’cause especially most firm, most firms are bootstrapping. So you and [00:12:00] especially at the PI firms it can take six to 18 months before those leads actually turn into money. So if you go higher and do too much on the front end before they’ve monetized, then all of a sudden you’re chasing it. So did you dive into that at all with any of these owners? How do they deal with that?

Aaron Thomas: Yeah, I think you know. We didn’t dive too much into, you know, the financials. You know, it is kind of, it’s kind of touchy to ask people specific questions about, you know, like, are you struggling financially? How that, how’s that part going? But I think that the challenge that most of us are dealing with is, you know, is that transition.

And I’ve seen it in my own career where it’s like and it’s like, it’s in every industry, I think, where as soon as you get really good at what you do, you have to stop doing that thing. And now they promote you and now you manage other people doing that thing. And so, you know, when I switched from Aaron Thomas Law, a full service family law shop that did divorce, custody, child support, all of that to my [00:13:00] niche of prenups, I had to give up the thing that really, you know, that got me my name, that got me my reputation, which was performance in the courtroom.

Now I do prenups. I’m not in the courtroom ever. And I had to switch over, you know, to do that. And then the same thing happens. We run our law firms and we’re the only people that do the consultations. Right? And that was like a common theme. Some people have gotten out to doing the consultations, but the common theme of but with these high performing attorneys is you’ve gotten very good at bringing the business in at, you know, addressing people’s objections.

You know, assuaging people’s fears during the consultation and you wanna hold onto that and bring the business in. And so these, but then you’re also the best performer, the best technician, the best like legal brain in your office. And so you’re caught doing everything. And that’s the challenge that I think a lot of these firms, you know, at that million dollar level are having.

Jonathan Hawkins: Great point. So I gave a speech, a presentation a week ago, and one of the points I made was, we’ve all heard what, [00:14:00] which got you here, won’t get you there. I think it’s more of a what got you here. We’ll keep you from getting there and it’s just along the lines you said. And one of the things, I mean, we’re good at the legal work, we’re good at sales, we’re good at the consults, so we just wanna keep doing it ’cause that’s what got us the success we had.

But if you wanna break through the next level. You gotta start giving that up because there’s only so much time in the day and you’re gonna cap out. You’re just gonna cap out. And maybe that’s what you want. And so I don’t want to, you know, some people don’t want to get really big. And maybe that’s, you know, if that’s your ideal firm, you go for it.

But if you want to do bigger things you’ve got to get outta your own way. And it could be the consults, it could be the legal work, it could be whatever. So a hundred percent agree with you on that one.

Aaron Thomas: Yeah. And you’re, I think you’re right. Not everybody is looking to get huge or to double or triple the size. Certainly nobody is like, I want to triple like my head count. You know, people wanna, you know, improve the revenue, but even for the people that I’ve talked to who are happy, kind of [00:15:00] where they were, revenue, they want some time back.

So everybody wants one of those. They want money or they want time. Nobody wants is like, no, I’ll take neither of those. Right. And so it’s still the same kind of answer, and I think the challenge that I saw people having is, you know, they can’t let go. They can’t let go of doing the consultations and trusting somebody else to do it because it’s going to, no one else is gonna close the cases as good as you will.

No one else is going to, you know, do the consultation and have all of the information right there. You know, at the top of my brain, the way that I would during the consultation, and it takes a leap to pass that off the consultation or whatever the other important piece of the job that you’re doing that is not allowing you to scale or free up your time and give that off to another person who is going to do it at 80% of the level that you would do it.

And yeah, it was just amazing to see like these. Hyper successful [00:16:00] attorneys, you know, know exactly, you know, have this bottleneck that is like plain as day, staring them in the face and you know, kind of can’t get past it.

Jonathan Hawkins: I’ll tell you I’m exactly there too. I know what I need to do. I know in my heart, in my brain, I know what I need to do, but I just keep doing, you know, I. I’m not doing the thing I need to do. So I was on a call with some folks earlier this week and they’re all just basically punching me in the face and in the stomach.

Like, this is what you need to, this is what you need to do. I’m like, yeah, that’s what I need to do. So, you know, you gotta commit, you gotta have people behind you pushing you, making sure you do it. And sometimes you’re right. You just gotta hear it from somebody else. You know, I’ve been in, you’ve been in these two, but a lot of masterminds.

It’s really sort of humorous. Someone will get up there well, they’ll be in the audience or whatever. So somebody will be up there and they’re just like throwing darts, you need to do this, you need to do this, you need to, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then it’s their turn to get up there and it’s ’em this exact same problem and they act like they, they don’t know what they’re supposed to do.

Aaron Thomas: [00:17:00] Yeah. Yeah. and I will say that some of what I heard, it’s related to probably the biggest update in my own business since the last time that we talked, which is I’m no longer the primary person doing the consultations and so, other, there are other attorneys that do the consultations. I’m available for kind of like our highest end.

You know, type of client and the cost of that consultation is like multiples of what a normal consultation is. So I do very few of them and it’s working now, but boy, there was a struggle there for a good three or four months where I watched our close rate from consultation to hired client, basically drop in half when I stopped doing the consultations and it was like I had to be dedicated to the idea of like, this is the path to growing the business. It is not sustainable for me to be the face of the business and out here doing podcasts and doing the [00:18:00] marketing and taking care of our, you know, kind of like VIP clients and also be the person doing every single consultation.

And I just had to like, commit to the idea that, you know what, when I started doing consultations, I also didn’t know what I was doing. At the beginning, you know, I fumbled through them. You know, I would, you know, lower my price right there on the spot. I didn’t know how to, you know, effectively address the clients without like, you know, repeating my resume, you know, making the focus be on them.

I learned all of these things by trial and error. And so I had to switch my focus from, you know, maybe I should just jump back in there, you know, once a month I would have the thought. I should just jump back in there and take over the consultation. Because I could close that client. This person, they read the book before they scheduled a consultation.

That’s that person definitely wants to hire us. And if they’re not hiring us, you know the person’s not doing anything correctly. And instead, I had to focus on, okay, let’s, you know, let’s record the consultations, let’s go back, let’s analyze them. Let’s give training, let’s just give them more time in the [00:19:00] seat.

You know, let’s give the attorneys time to repetitions of actually doing the consultations. And slowly but surely over, you know, six to eight months. They’ve gotten back up to a level where, like, now, I would never consider going back to where, you know, I’m doing a hundred percent of the consultations, but it took half a year of pulling my hair out and getting grayer than, you know, I already was before it really sunk in.

I.

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. I wanna dive into that whole process a little deeper. I want you to sort of take me through the timeline from, you know, the beginning, sort of the limiting belief mindset shift that had to happen, and how long did that take and how did you get over it to, how did you actually functionally hand off and step out of it?

And then how did you do the training to sort of get the close rates up?

Aaron Thomas: Yeah, so we had a group of attorneys who were gonna start doing the consultations. I knew it was gonna be part of the plan. And we have kind of like a process that we take people through. I will say it [00:20:00] should be in my mind it was gonna be relatively easy because we have kind of like a one product law firm.

We’re selling prenups. We’re selling postnup. You know, they’re essentially the same thing and we walk people through their options during a consultation, we even have kind of like a PowerPoint presentation that we’ll follow along. So in my mind it was, you know, it was kind of dummy proof. The script was written there for the attorneys.

And so we started getting the attorneys in on the calls and the first thing that, you know, popped up was like, some of these consultations aren’t lasting very long. You know, what is happening that they’re dropping off and the good thing is that we do our consultations over Zoom, so it’s easy to record them and go back and watch them.

And going back and watching them was, you know, that was an experience in and of itself because every time somebody says something and it’s not exactly what you would say, you kind of cringing like, oh, you know, but what’s obvious to somebody else may not be obvious to you. And so [00:21:00] we did some training, you know, we fleshed out a little bit more of like, make sure you talk about this, make sure you talk about that.

There were even other things about just like, you know, what should your background look like? And, you know, how do you greet the person when you come on? One of the most helpful things though that we ended up doing was I had a bunch of my old consultations that I had done where we had the fathom.

You know, the recording of it and we could pull the transcript of it and I was able to take some of my old transcripts, bash ’em together, upload them to chat GPT and say. What is it that I’m doing during the consultations? First give me a grade, like, am I actually doing a good job or am I overrated myself?

And chat, GPT, maybe it was being nice and trying to, you know, make me feel good, but it gave me like an a minus. So I felt like that was fair. There’s still room for me to improve, but it pointed out, you know, a few things that I was doing that I didn’t even realize that I was doing. You know, some of just like the things that I think would come natural to me, I talked to a client and like [00:22:00] I would normally congratulate people on their wedding.

You know, the fact that their wedding is coming up and, you know, kind of ease the tone in some of those ways. Or ask a lot of, a lot, ask a lot more questions rather than just explain things. And we were able to pull out some of the things that I didn’t realize that I was doing, and maybe I was just doing after 15, 20 years of experience in talking to clients and then actually create a system around that.

So the attorneys who are doing the consultations, they have a script that now includes some of the soft skill stuff in addition to. You know, most attorneys can adequately explain the law around a prenuptial agreement and what makes it enforceable and what a client’s potential options are for including into the document.

But as you and I know, you know, doing a consultation, connecting with a client making somebody believe that your firm is the best to manage their legal matter goes a lot further beyond just knowing the Black letter law, right.

Real quick, if you haven’t gotten a copy yet, please check out my book, the Law Firm Lifecycle. It’s written for law firm owners [00:23:00] and those who plan to be owners. In the book, I discuss various issues that come up as a law firm progresses through the stages of its growth from just before starting a firm to when it comes to an end.

The law firm lifecycle is available on Amazon. Now, back to the show.

Jonathan Hawkins: So you mentioned that you’re, when you do a consult, it’s a higher price. So how do you manage when a client reaches out or a potential client reaches out and says, I read the book, I gotta talk to the guy, I wrote the book, I wanna talk to Aaron. Do you, what’s the process there? Do you try to say, well, if you wanna talk to Aaron, he is really busy.

It’s gonna take another week and it’s gonna cost three times as much, so it might be better if you talk to this person. How do you handle that request?

Aaron Thomas: If somebody really wants to talk to me, they can talk to me. I have a scheduling link and like you said the cost is a little bit over triple to talk to me as what it would be to talk to somebody else. When I was doing my regular family law practice, I think my hourly rate was, [00:24:00] you know.

15% more than what it, than the other attorneys in my office. And that made it like very easy for clients to say, oh, well yeah, I want you. But then that ends up eating up all of the time of the person who needs to be doing other parts of the business, right? Needs to be managing the business, the marketing, et cetera.

And so, people can always schedule with me, but the price has been set. So much higher that only the people who truly you know, if that’s like a true desire of theirs to speak to me, they absolutely can, but everybody else is gonna make the decision on their own. So we’re not restricting access to me, we’re allowing them to make their decision based on, you know, the pricing the access to me and to other attorneys.

And I think that is also a mental hurdle for some people to get over is like, you know, pricing yourself. Way higher, you know, based on the needs of your firm and not based on what the market is doing or what, you know, the other attorneys in your area are charging.

Jonathan Hawkins: How do you communicate the difference [00:25:00] in price? When you say, okay, it’s time to schedule the consult, do they see the menu and they’re like, oh, Aaron is. Triple plus the cost, and they’re like, okay, I’ll pick. How’s that communicated? I’m curious.

Aaron Thomas: Yeah, it’s right there on the website so people can see the difference in price of a consultation with me versus the other attorneys.

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay, that’s cool. I like it. You know this, the consult thing is really something I, I personally struggle with, so I’ve been thinking a lot. A lot about it lately. So I’m very interested. We’ll probably talk some more about that offline the transition and the handoff and how you did it. But I don’t wanna, I want to shift a little bit, move more about some of the things you talked about with these, all these attorneys.

And one of the things, everybody’s talking about ai, so I gotta ask about ai. Did you happen to ask these attorneys how they are or are not implementing AI into their practice and their workflows and whatnot?

Aaron Thomas: Yeah, I think that I, again, I will say that the attorneys that I’m speaking to I don’t think they [00:26:00] necessarily represent like a pure, impartial cross section of. The legal market. I think that some of US attorneys who are kind of more forward thinking and look at our firms as businesses are more likely to be diving in on the AI than just, you know, your regular attorney who has more a traditional practice.

But yes, absolutely. I mean, the attorneys that I’m talking to are absolutely implementing AI into their firms. Even the ones who are not using it or not comfortable using it for legal review or entering client data pretty much everybody is seeing the value of using it for marketing, using it for content, using it for even figuring out, you know, how do I put a tracking code, you know, on my website, you know, without going and paying the designer, you know, a thousand bucks to go back into our WordPress.

It’s been super helpful for [00:27:00] those kinds of things. I talked to attorneys who are using AI to review their emails and draft the first response to their email. So there’s like, fixer is one of those tools where you can connect it to your Outlook or your Gmail and it will like read all of your emails and start to draft like the first response of your emails, and it makes people able to batch their responses to emails much quicker. So people are using it for operations. People can use ai. We have it on our website now where we uploaded a copy of the book to Zapier and created a chat bot out of it.

So people will go and type questions and you won’t just get your generic, oh, if you want to book an appointment, here’s what you do and here’s the cost of a consultation. It will give you like substantive advice on the types of conversations to have with your partner.

Jonathan Hawkins: With the caveat that this is not legal advice and we are not establishing a attorney-client relationship. Right.

Aaron Thomas: Always gotta [00:28:00] have the caveats for sure. For sure.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. That’s cool. So I use AI a little bit, probably not as much as others and maybe more than others. You know, it just depends. It is really good.

I love the ideation piece of it. Definitely helps. Give you an 80% draft on marketing type copy. It never quite gets all the way there. I would never just copy and paste, but it gets you there and it gets, it does get you past the blank page for sure. Which is oftentimes the thing that stops me and a lot of people.

And so it’s gonna be interesting to see how a, the whole AI thing plays out. I’m seeing more and more pushback. The other thing that we don’t know, you know, I read about and they say that basically all of our A, we’re paying 200, I mean maybe 20 or 200 a month, whatever you’re paying. We’re still, the VC dollars are subsidizing.

The actual cost of the usage. And if we really had to pay what it actually cost, it’d be, you know, thousands a [00:29:00] month. And so the question remains for me how is that gonna play out? Are the costs gonna come down on the back end enough to make it commercially viable at the prices they’re at now? Or are they gonna just have to jack up the prices and then will people pay the prices?

I don’t know. It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Aaron Thomas: Yeah, at some point, these AI companies have to be profitable. Right? So is it gonna come from, you know, efficiencies and, you know, technological improvements, or is it gonna be subsidized by, you know, at some point it’s gonna be subsidized by the consumer. Or these comp or these corporations rather than the investors, you know, the VC.

Jonathan Hawkins: And, you know, everybody talks about, well, I do wonder is gonna make us dumber generally as a civilization but there’s a lot of folks that say, you know, it’s gonna kill all the lawyer jobs. It may kill some tasks, I think. But I saw something on Twitter the other day. One of the big top five law firms just got, you know.

Exposed for citing hallucinated cases. So it [00:30:00] happens to everybody top to bottom. And you know, that’s, it’s something that I think’s gonna have to play out. The other thing is you and I if I ask AI a question that pops out an answer I can tell pretty quickly, is it right or wrong?

’cause I get it sounds right. But I get these answers and I’m like, I know that’s wrong. And they’ve pulled it from somewhere else and they’ve said, oh yeah, this is the answer. What about the people out there that don’t have our experience and judgment? The younger lawyers that are just coming out? You know, what are they gonna do?

And then I guess the last piece, and I’ll throw it back to you, is the other part about people saying it’s gonna lower jobs, it may increase at least on the litigation side, because I think now all these pro se people are gonna just deluge the courts with these AI drafted complaints, and we’re gonna have to be there to clean it up.

Somebody’s gonna have to hire lawyers to clean it up. What are your thoughts on all that?

Aaron Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. So I’ll take it backwards. I’ll address your second point first, which is you know, what hap [00:31:00] what is it gonna kill off the lawyer jobs? Right. And I think that history has shown that. When a technology becomes cheaper and more available, that people use more of it because they’re able to use more of it.

And you know, you’ve probably seen the same kind of, you know, surveys and charts that I have. You know, Clio runs, you know, a big survey every year and it’s something like 75, 80% of legal issues that people have go unaddressed because people don’t have the knowledge or they don’t have the access. To address those things.

And I, I think that as access to legal information or lawyers or, you know, whatever combination of that is, becomes more available. And the field is kind of flattened a little bit that people are going to end up using more of it. You know, I think that the danger is probably in the court system.

How do they handle, you know, like people’s ability to put something coherent on [00:32:00] paper and submit it to the court, right?

Jonathan Hawkins: I mean, think about this, you used to do divorce work. I’m sure you went up against pro se opposition. I’m sure you did it. if they start filing all sorts of AI stuff and you’re over there having to knock ’em back? I mean, I can’t, this, it’s gonna be a mess. I think it probably is. I bet you, I’ve not talked to any judges about it, but I bet you it’s already.

Becoming a noticeable uptick.

Aaron Thomas: Oh I a hundred percent believe that’s the case. I mean, and it’s been four years since I was in the courtroom, so, I don’t even know what it could be like. I can just speak anecdotally. From clients who get their hands on an AI tool and you send them an agreement and they send it back and, you know, ask certain questions.

You know, why can’t you put this in here? What about adding this? And, you know, the interesting thing is if you upload an agreement, you know, one of your, you know, you know, partnership agreements or a prenup to one of these LLMs and ask it for [00:33:00] suggestions to improve it. ChatGPT, Claude, these tools are never going to come back and say, Nope, it’s perfectly fine as it is, no notes.

They’re always going to have a million suggested revisions. And so at some point you have to tell, you know, at least I’ve had to tell clients, all right, this is where the lawyer steps in, like, stop. We’re not gonna put that in there. And like you said, go to your earlier point. You and I as people who have.

20 plus years of legal experience under our belt have the judgment to be able to go in and say, we don’t need this. You know, this kind of clause is suggesting is ridiculous for this type of agreement. We don’t need this here, or this actually is a good point to put in the agreement. And I am terrified for the younger generation of lawyers.

Where do they get their apprenticeship? You know, the big law firm models are built on being able to bake in the price of their first through fifth year associates until [00:34:00] they’re at a level of expertise that they can represent clients intelligently, kind of on their own, and they’re able to learn, you know, on the dime of the clients. Because that apprenticeship is built in, and I do think that there’s probably gonna be a reduction in the need for attorneys to spend 14 hours a day just doing legal research when a skilled attorney who’s a six year can go in and do that same amount of research using these AI tools in half an hour.

And so, and the companies, the corporations who are hiring, I think big law is gonna feel at first the corporations who are hiring these law firms, they’re not stupid. They know what’s going on behind the scenes and they’re gonna apply this downward pressure to the bills that they’re paying because they know that you can work faster, you can do a lot of this work using ai.

And [00:35:00] so, I think it’s gonna hurt. I think it’s going to hit the billable hour. First, I think that the billable hour is really in jeopardy. I think attorneys are gonna adjust. We’re gonna, you know, especially those of us who already have skills and experience are gonna adjust. And those of us who are able to like combine our intelligence with the use of efficient AI tools are gonna flourish.

But I do wonder what the legal industry looks like 10, 20 years down the line.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, it’s gonna be interesting to watch. So, Aaron, last question before we wrap this thing up. So you met with these 10 law firm founders, successful law firm owners. What was your one or two takeaways that you’re like, okay, I’m doing this for my firm?,

Aaron Thomas: I think that, one thing that I definitely want to take away from that I got is like, something that wasn’t even really on my radar is just like a better system for getting reviews because whether your goal is SEO, whether your goal is [00:36:00] showing up higher on Google, whether your goal is showing up higher in LLMs whether you’re goal is just like client satisfaction. All of those things are fueled by, you know, this public review process. And there are some firms out there that have like some really great systems for, you know, getting the Google reviews and it’s like, you know, we’re lawyers. We’re used to litigating, we’re used to, you know, confronting hard problems.

And then at the end of the day, it becomes difficult to like go and like ask your client, Hey, can you go on Google and say, you know, a few nice words about me? You were happy with my representation. And so confronting that, like any other problem that we would do. You know, it is something that I’ve had challenges with, I don’t wanna go and beg people, you know, for the review, but coming up with like a respectful possibly persistent way to, you know, ask people who, you know, you did a good job for, you did right by them as clients to go leave a review for you. That’s one thing I [00:37:00] would definitely take away.

And then other, I’ll give you one other thing, which is a tip that I ended up, you know, I was going, trying to like learn from other people, but I was sharing some of the best things that I did. And one thing that a couple people said, I’m gonna take that from you, is when it comes to the consultations I took everything I noticed when I was going back and looking at all the consultations that I had drafted, you know, that I’d taken the transcripts from that. In a lot of these meetings, I was saying the same things over and over, and I’m sure you and other attorneys listen to this.

You have your spiel, you know, whether it’s about how you talk with opposing counsel or how you like to communicate with your attorney or even just what your firm’s process is, how often they can expect communication, all of those things that you say during a consultation don’t have to be part of the consultation.

And what we did in my firm is we recorded a video with all of those things that we say over and over. And when a client schedules a consultation, they get sent that video ahead of time. So they can spend 15 [00:38:00] minutes learning all of your spiel, how you work, you know, how they communicate with you, all of that ahead of time.

And then when they come in for the consultation, one, they need less of your time in the consultation. And two, you can dive right into addressing the things that are top on the client’s mind rather than, you know, repeating it your spiel for the client.

Jonathan Hawkins: That is a great idea. It also starts to create the relationship. If these are videos, they’re already starting to get to know you. That’s a great idea. I’m writing that down. That’s taking that one. I will say this on consultations and I’ve hired. Not many attorneys over the years, but I’ve hired vendors and this, that and the other.

And I’ll tell you, when I have a good onboarding process, from the consultation to the onboarding, I notice it is, it’s magic sometimes, and I’m really like, wow, that is good. That is it. I’m in it. I’m learning and they’re showing me how to do the thing. And at the same time, I’m just thinking, man, this is really good.

So I would imagine. If you could [00:39:00] really, lawyers out there, if we can really design our consultations in such a way that, ’cause part of what you’re doing is, you know, you’re selling your services, but you’re demonstrating how you work just in that process. So, I think that’s awesome. And that video, the pre consultation video thing, that’s a great idea.

Aaron, thanks for coming on, man. You’ve given me more time than I, I had hoped for. So, thanks. This is uh, again, episode one to episode, whatever this is.

Aaron Thomas: Okay, there we go. There we go. Always get a chat with Jonathan offline or offline. Yeah. Have me back again

Jonathan Hawkins: so, yeah. And, And for people out there that wanna find you what’s the best way?

Aaron Thomas: prenups.com. Very easy to find. We’re in 30 states, including Georgia.

Jonathan Hawkins: Awesome. Reach out to Aaron. He’s doing some cool stuff.

OutroUpdatedWebsite-1: Thanks for listening to this episode of the founding partner podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your [00:40:00] podcasts to stay up to date on the latest episodes. You can also connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn and check out the show notes. With links to resources mentioned throughout our discussion by visiting www.lawfirmgc.com. We’ll see you next time for more origin stories and insights from successful law firm founders.