Jeff Arnold: Automating the Admin Chaos Holding Law Firms Back

Stop wasting billable hours on admin work. In this episode, you’ll learn how to identify hidden bottlenecks in your firm and turn them into reliable automations that save you hours every week—without tripping over AI ethics or security rules.

In this episode, Steve Fretzin and Jeff Arnold discuss:

• Process mapping before automation and AI
• Common admin bottlenecks in law firms and HR
• Practical examples of email, billing, and document automations
• ABA Formal Opinion 512 and AI risk in legal workflows
• Agents vs. workflows and why most firms aren’t ready for agents yet

Key Takeaways:

• Automation should be built on top of clearly mapped, efficient processes; otherwise, it only helps you make mistakes faster.
• The best automation wins often come from small, repetitive tasks—like email responses, filing documents, or parsing PDFs—that quietly consume hours every week.
• Many legal professionals underestimate how much of their day is administrative; even saving ten minutes per day can translate into an extra workweek of time each year.
• There is a critical distinction between automation and generative AI in law: once client data touches AI, additional ethical and security requirements are triggered.
• Most firms don’t have an “agent” problem; they have a workflow problem—reliable, well-defined automations should come first, with AI layered in only where it truly adds value.

“The most important thing is to get your processes down and get a solid foundation. Work on automation first, then you can work on implementing AI.” —  Jeff Arnold

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About Jeff Arnold: Jeff Arnold is the Founder and President of 4Spot Consulting, an automation and AI implementation firm, and a two-time Amazon Best-Selling author. With more than 20 years implementing automation and 40 years of leadership experience, Jeff helps law firms and professional services teams find and eliminate the manual, repetitive work that quietly drains billable hours, then convert that reclaimed time back into high-value, client-facing work. His core message: technology doesn’t replace your people; it elevates them. Through his flagship keynote, “Stop Logging. Start Leading.,” Jeff shows organizations how to reclaim 25% of their work week through strategic automation.

Connect with Jeff Arnold:

Website: https://4spotconsulting.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jwarnold/

Book (The Automated Law Firm) – Pre-register: The-Automated-Law-.com

OpsMap Quick Audit – a one-pager to help people get started: https://4spotconsulting.com/opsmap-quick-audit/

Connect with Steve Fretzin:

LinkedIn: Steve Fretzin

Twitter: @stevefretzin

Instagram: @fretzinsteve

Facebook: Fretzin, Inc.

Website: Fretzin.com

Email: Steve@Fretzin.com

Book: Legal Business Development Isn’t Rocket Science and more!

YouTube: Steve Fretzin

Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911

Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Steve Fretzin  [00:00]

Hey everybody, before we get to the show, just want to remind you that the Be That Lawyer community is up and running and rock and rolling. We have a lot of amazing business developer and rainmaking attorneys in there. We’ve got incredible content, courses, live events, and all kinds of ways to help you to be that lawyer. Check it out today at Be That lawyer.com/community. And other than that, please enjoy the show.

 

Narrator  [00:29]

You’re listening to Be That Lawyer: Life-Changing Strategies and Resources for Growing a Successful Law Practice. Each episode, your host, author, and lawyer coach, Steve Fretzin, will take a deeper dive, helping you grow your law practice in less time with greater results. Now, here’s your host, Steve Fretzin.

 

Steve Fretzin  [00:51]

Hey everybody, Steve Fretzin here, and welcome to the Be That Lawyer podcast. I’m thrilled that you’re here today in Chicago, and around the country, it’s an absolute heat wave, so you know we’re just bare, you know, hopefully you’re somewhere cool now and comfortable. If anything, this show is going to get you cool and comfortable, because we talk about the things that lawyers want to hear about, the non, the non-legal stuff, right? We’re talking business development, we’re talking automation, we’re talking marketing, building your brand, ultimately to help you be that lawyer, confident, organized, and a skilled rainmaker, and I continue to meet amazing people in the legal space that just are experts at what they do. I’ve got Jeff waiting in the wings to chat with me today. How are you doing, Jeff?

 

Jeff Arnold  [01:31]

Doing well, thanks. All right, so happy that you’re here and that you’re with us. You know, Bill Gates, you know, done a few things in this time, and I appreciate the quote that you provided. Let’s go through that. I’d love to hear your take on it. So, here we go. The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency. So, yeah, super interesting. Welcome, and give us a little bit more color on that on that quote. Thanks, Steve. So, yeah, I’m in the middle of the desert, so yeah, I’m in the middle of that heat wave as well. So yeah, so that quote, that is kind of the core of what we do whenever we start working with a company, is we go in and we work on mapping their process, because we’ve seen far too often where you know today everybody’s being told there’s a mandate, you know, start using AI or start using automation, and they go in and they start to throw AI at things, but they don’t have their process in place. So, what happens is they make errors faster and more prolifically, right? They’re making errors all over the place. So, most important thing is, get your processes down, get that squared away, and get a solid foundation. Work on automation first, then you can work on implementing AI.

 

Steve Fretzin  [02:49]

Yeah, I really think that’s that’s what a lot of it’s already a ready fire aim situation for most lawyers, right? They just, they get a bug about something. We all fall for this, right? Like, we just think, you know, hey, you know, this is a great idea. Let’s try this, or this is a great, let’s try that. Sometimes it works out, but in many cases, right, it’s not a part of the overall theme of the business, or the process you’ve created, or the like, what’s your why, and like, what’s your, who are your targets? Like, figure out some things before you start firing away in order to make sure that you’re making good decisions, right? Is that spot on?

 

Jeff Arnold  [03:22]

Exactly right. Yeah, yeah. The framework is not fun, but it’s really the important key to making sure you’re successful in the deployment of your automation and AI process.

 

Steve Fretzin  [03:31]

Yeah. All right. Well, we’re going to get some into a deep dive today on automation. I know for most attorneys, automation and delegation are, you know, the missing points that change the game, because if you can’t automate and you can’t delegate, everything’s on you as the lawyer, everything’s on you as the rainmaker, the solo to big law, and very hard to be successful when you’re in the weeds constantly, you know, trying to just, you know, breathe. So, but for everybody checking us out today, we’ve got Jeff Arnold, he is the president and founder of Four Spot Consulting. And give us a little background on you. How you came to be

 

Jeff Arnold  [04:07]

sure. So, back in, you know, pre 2008 I was in the mortgage industry, and I was the vice president of operations for a national mortgage banking enterprise, and my goal was efficiency. I was trying to do everything I could to make our processes more efficient. This was, you know, pre-cloud and all of that back in the day. So I actually had, you know, thumb drives going from computer to computer to move data around, so we didn’t have to copy paste. And so, of course, that went away in 2008 I came out and figured out what do I want to do, how do I want to, you know, approach the next phase of my life, and the stuff that I really enjoyed was the technology side. So I came out and started offering technology services with my company back in 2013 and through that process whittle it down to what we’re really good at, which is building automation.

 

Steve Fretzin  [04:55]

Okay, and obviously you know we love lawyers, they’re they. Had been a very slow moving train for a very long time. How did you leak into the space here?

 

Jeff Arnold  [05:04]

Actually, through clients that I was working with, I was, and we can talk about this a little bit longer, about the fact that I had not niched down inside my company, and so I was kind of everything to everyone. We decided we needed to change that. We started going after some verticals, so we did some research on what industries have the most waste inside of their industry as it relates to labor waste from repetitive processes, and HR came out at the top. 42% of the HR teams are wasting their day, or 42% of their day really is being wasted on administrative work, and legal was at 35% and so we started down the path of HR, and through some clients got involved in the legal space, so now we’re covering HR and legal with what we’re working with, because 80% of what everybody does overlaps when it comes to the admin stuff.

 

Steve Fretzin  [05:55]

Okay, and when you mentioned admin stuff, that you know that could be a lot of different things. When you think specifically of legal, what are some of the chief bottlenecks that you identify and that you help resolve that are keeping them again in those weeds where they’re not performing at their highest level, they’re not making the money they should be making, profitability, etc.

 

Jeff Arnold  [06:14]

Yeah, think about anything you do, anything that you would say, I need to hire an admin person or I need to hire a VA to help with that, that’s really kind of where you step in using automation. A lot of people are manually processing payments, they’re manually tracking their payments, they’re manually going through and trying to filter emails on their own without having any kind of assistance in the middle to filter out some of the junk from not true junk, but things that you know what’s important to me on a daily basis, that I can work with, working on parsing documents, you know, getting data out of documents, being able to not have to have somebody open all of that up and manually copy paste data out of there, moving data from one of their systems over to another system, filing documents, renaming documents, figuring out where your documents are inside your system. I mean, there’s myriad things that you could be working with on the admin side, anything at all. I always tell people that the first thing to look for is think of the thing you’ve done a couple times today, right? If you’ve copied and pasted data from something that’s automatable, if you’ve saved a file to and had to go through that process, that’s something you can automate, so anything you do repetitively through the day is prime for looking at it as an automated process.

 

Steve Fretzin  [07:28]

Yeah, I was about to respond to an email, and I remembered that I have an automation tool for that, and so I went. I’ve got this thing called JCI, it attaches to my Gmail, okay, and it read it knows every email I’ve ever gotten and every email I’ve ever sent, and so essentially the email that I sent out, I didn’t write it, it wrote it in about two seconds, it was exactly like point to point, exactly what I would have written, because I’ve written it the nose, I’ve written it 100 100 plus times, and all I did was hit send, and I said, you know, I got to go through that particular platform, because otherwise I do find myself going into the habit of writing emails when I really shouldn’t be, or even mass emails, like if I have to write 3040, 50 people an email, I can just take their names and emails, put it into this thing, tell verbally, tell it what I want it to, what’s the message I’m conveying, and it knocks it out. It’s so incredible. So, the redundancy is, I think, to your point, right on, where we’ve got to figure out those bottlenecks and figure out ways to resolve them

 

Jeff Arnold  [08:32]

exactly. And your examples are perfect, because most people, when they think about this, right, they’re being, you know, coming in with some sort of like an AI mandate, or they look at this, they’re like, “Oh my gosh, I need to attack my whole company, right? And it’s like, “No, don’t boil the ocean, just go after one particular thing, just like you did. You attack crafting emails with that piece of software, that’s fantastic. Like, those are the things that people don’t realize, that you know. Okay, now I’ve saved myself. Maybe you saved yourself a minute, right there, but you do that multiple times a day, the one stat, as that I was putting together everything for, you know, all the things that I do, is if you can save 10 minutes a day, you save one week per year, and if you break that down to you’re working an eight or 10 hour day, that’s if you save one minute every hour, like, who can’t save one minute every hour by deploying automation, that’s one week a year, so

 

Steve Fretzin  [09:22]

I mean, I, and that’s where, when

 

Jeff Arnold  [09:23]

you, when you’re sorry,

 

Steve Fretzin  [09:25]

no, no, you go, I

 

Jeff Arnold  [09:26]

guess, that’s where, when you talk about, like, where do they come from, and where did this start, was when I was in the mortgage industry, I realized that I was wasting about two hours a day on admin, and that’s where I started my automation journey, I started the process of automating some things back there and save just immense amount of time. I mean, that two hours a day is a quarter of my work year was taken up with admin, so that’s why I’m so passionate about what we do, is because you can save immense amount of time with what you’re doing and make yourself far more efficient.

 

Steve Fretzin  [09:55]

I was going to add that part of what I try to do with attorneys when I work with them is find. Bottlenecks, and try to help them, and now I’m no, I’m no IT guy, I’m no expert in this stuff, but it’s not that I have to be. It’s just we need to identify that you’re spending, you know, four hours in your inbox each day, you’re just, that’s your life is in your inbox, and you have no system for how to automate it, or how to delegate it, or how to do things that are going to get you, you know, that I don’t think 10 hours, I think 10 hours is laughable. I think every lawyer has an hour to two hours every single day of admin or marketing, or just redundant at, you know, things that they’re doing that they should be getting out of, and whether that’s bringing up, you know, delegating to an associate or having someone review your emails for you, because you can’t get an automation tool in there, whatever it is. But what are you, what are some of the top additional roadblocks in bottlenecks that you see specifically for law firms when you get in there and you kind of like look under the hood?

 

Jeff Arnold  [10:57]

Yeah, so the bottleneck typically is sitting in the chair, right, and I suffer from that as well as I grew my company, but the big thing is what I’ve found when working across the board, people don’t know what they don’t know, right, they have no idea what they can automate. One of our best success stories, that was for me a great success story, is an easy win that generates huge ROI, and so one of our success stories was I was talking with one of our clients about, you know, their processes, and as an aside, he mentioned, man, another, another PDF, I hate these, I have to go through, and he explained what he did, and I’m like, I can automate that for you, and so we put together it was honestly a fairly straightforward automation, and he saved 15 hours a week on that particular task, so

 

Steve Fretzin  [11:42]

yeah,

 

Jeff Arnold  [11:42]

so that goes into the one bottleneck is just knowledge, knowing what you can automate. I like to say that with data, all things are possible, so if you have the data, the question doesn’t become can we, it becomes how do we, right? And so that’s kind of the way I approach it. The other thing in the legal space is a major obstacle, which is the differentiation between automation and the use of AI, because the second you have generative AI touch the data, if it’s client-facing data, you suddenly trigger ABA formal opinion 512 which now means that you’ve five different things that you need to make sure you are well aware of with your data as it relates, and that gets into security issues and all kinds of things. So automation, straightforward AI gets into a whole different realm of things.

 

Steve Fretzin  [12:30]

Yeah, and so you know, I think you and I were goofing about when we were talking about the show and doing it together, that you know, like Fai, like I’m tired of hearing about it, and people are frustrated with it, and you know it’s either going to make us, you know, live forever, it’s going to kill us, and we don’t know which. But I think I like the idea of, and I’ve been using automation tools for years, and I keep pushing them on my clients, and they push me back. One of them that has been incredible for me, and I just want to just tell everybody, I mean, I’m not joking when I tell you it saves you saves me an hour a day. I am scheduling meetings all the time. I’ve got people for the podcast, I’ve got people that want to network with me, I’ve got people that want to meet with me about being their coach, whatever it might be. I’ve got emails coming in all the time, and without an auto scheduler, I’m playing this game of, you know, let me know what works for you, and you let me know it works for you, and we go back and forth, and it’s like, how many hours with so many people are we playing this game with? And the pushback I get from my clients is like, well, you’re making it work for them, it’s like you’re putting, taking this work and putting it on their plate. I’m like, I don’t know, I’ve been doing auto scheduler for like maybe over five years, and nobody’s pushing back and saying, how dare you, you know, give me your calendar to choose, like you should be, you know, it’s like, can you think of an easier way to give someone, you know, access to your calendar, just say what works for you, it’s a benefit to them, as I see it, what’s your, I mean, that, that’s one example, so maybe give me your take, but what else would be an example of a great automation tool,

 

Jeff Arnold  [14:00]

yeah, no, those actually, that’s one of the two things I tell people all the time, is that the two biggest things I did when I started my company that took tons of time off my plate, automating my calendar, and yes, it does feel odd to not reply back with what your availability is, and just send people, hey, here’s my booking link, yeah, I always phrase it, here’s my booking link, choose what’s best for you, right, because if time’s on, their time’s available, and the second thing for me was because I work with clients on a retainer basis, monthly retainers, I’m in a situation where I have recurring billing, so one was automating the scheduling, and two was automating the recurring billing and the follow-up behind it if their credit card didn’t go through, or something along those lines, so those were the two out the gate when I started my company, biggest wins that we had, but a lot of what we find also, we just recently finished a project for a client where we auto filed all of their documents, so you know McKinsey has come out and said that about 20% of somebody’s time in the legal space or other areas. Is spent trying to file, find, you know, track down documents. So, what we built for them was a process where they don’t have to worry about that anymore. All they do is save files into one folder, and then the process takes over from there. It reads the data in the file, and it automatically renames it, automatically files it where it belongs in the client file, and all of that, so those are that’s another area where we found is very beneficial for time savings, and then the last general category that we found is data parsing, so we have a lot of people that are using, they’re getting PDFs for orders, they’re getting PDFs for invoices, they’re getting PDFs of information they need to extract, and using the processes to extract that data, and then move that data where it belongs, as opposed to having a human in the middle doing that. That’s been another huge category for us to be able to save tons of time for clients.

 

Steve Fretzin  [15:52]

Yeah, hey everybody. Your next big client might call it 8pm on a Saturday night. The question is, who’s picking up with Lex reception? A real person answers every call 24 hours a day, seven days a week, so you never miss a lead, no matter when they reach out. No AI agents, no voicemail, just professional legal literate receptionists representing your firm the right way around the clock. And right now, you that lawyer listeners get 250 off their first month. Visit www dot lex reception.com/partners/be that lawyer to claim your offer. That’s www dot lex reception.com/partners/be that lawyer. Hey everybody, Steve Fretzin here. and@lawyer.com they don’t just market law firms, they help them grow from connecting millions of consumers to trusted lawyers to smarter intake and industry leading events. They’re building stronger connections across legal visibility intake events growth. That’s lawyer.com Check them out today with proven SEO and digital marketing strategies that drive actual clients to your firm, rankings.io prides itself on proof, not promises mentality. The best firms hire rankings.io when they want rankings, traffic, and cases other law firm marketing agencies can’t deliver. Get more rankings, get cases, and schedule a free consultation@rankings.io today. Wanna go back to something you said. I have every single client from my coaching and training, from my Rainmaker round tables, from my beta lawyer community. They’re all on ach, they’re all on credit card, they’re all on automated billing systems. Nobody’s pushing back on that with me now. I know the law is different, and I know the clients that work with lawyers are different. We can play that game too. However, not having AR is incredible. It is incredible from a time perspective. It’s incredible for consistency and knowing what you’re getting in, and I know that lawyers sometimes this is like on their, like, it’s on their time, where they have to go and, like, make those calls and collect. What’s your suggestion, not only for automation, but maybe how to set expectations and approach clients to get them on some kind of an automated formula? Because I think that’s where a lot of time can get sucked away.

 

Jeff Arnold  [18:16]

Yeah, so I mean, it’s all about increasing capacity, right? And so, from there, for me, I always put it out there as a benefit to the client, right. Hey, this makes it easier for you, you don’t need to think about

 

Steve Fretzin  [18:27]

1. Yeah,

 

Jeff Arnold  [18:27]

and that’s.. I did the same thing with scheduling, right. Hey, here’s a link, schedule on your time, whatever’s convenient for you. There’s.. it’s not bouncing back and forth, but I think most people are used to that. I believe, you know, in the world today, everything, everything’s on subscription, right? Amazon Prime, and the subscriptions, and everything people are doing, they’re very used to subscription processes. So, I don’t think that it’s that dramatically different for people to be able to understand, like, hey, I’m using technology to make myself more efficient, this is what I’m doing.

 

Steve Fretzin  [18:56]

Yeah, I think the issue might be, too, like, is if they’re getting a different bill every month because of the billable hours are changing all the time, they want to review it, that might be a challenge, but maybe there’s even an automation for that. I just, I’m trying to, you know, figure out, like, where their time is getting sucked away, and collections. I hate the fact that attorneys have to do their own collections. I know there’s companies that do that, and there’s probably some, maybe even some AI or automation that’s going to be doing that, or that is doing that, has a very human approach or feel to it, but gets it done without the human being involved.

 

Jeff Arnold  [19:30]

Yeah, and it comes into, again, automation can be built on the back end to be able to follow up with people, to, you know, just send that, and you can change the tone of the emails as they go out. Right, initially it’s like, oh, hey, by the way, you know, this didn’t go through, and then it gets a little more aggressive as you go down the line, if you need to, but one of the things I do with my clients, and it applies very well into the legal space as well, is I typically a lot of people do like the structure of the standardized monthly payment, so they can work the budgeting side of things, and so I have a number of my clients long. Ending clients, where we have a baseline monthly, and then at the end of the quarter I’ll just tally up with them, and then you know take care of any overages that we have, and so that way they have a pretty standard monthly bill that they’re getting. I keep them apprised of where they are on the overage, so they’re not surprised at the end, but at least they understand. Okay, cool, I know that I have a set amount, and then I know every quarter there’s going to be a little bit of a difference at the end.

 

Steve Fretzin  [20:25]

Yeah, yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to setting expectations. I think lawyers, generally speaking, and if I’m speaking out of turn, you guys can send me angry, angry emails that if we say, look, you know, this is how we do billing to avoid confusion, to avoid frustration, to have to make sure we’re all on the same page, you set those expectations of how billing is going to be done. We’re taking the retainer, we’ve got the credit card, we’ve got whatever it is that we need to do to make sure you know this is happening to keep the machine moving. And if you see something that looks out of line or that you need to question, then you know, great, we’ll work through it. But you don’t need me calling you and collecting from you every month, like let’s get, let’s get ahead of it, and make sure that we’re on the same page. It’ll just, it’ll save us a lot of time and energy. And are you open to that? And then they say, yeah, that sounds great. So you get that buy-in, so you’re setting up the tone and the pace and the way everything works ahead of time, so there’s no, you know, there’s because I think it can obviously create some friction, especially when you know it’s now six months overdue, and it’s sitting in AR, and it’s now you’re not dealing with a $20,000 bill, you’re dealing with $120,000 bill, and that’s much harder to collect, and now it’s like become a kind of a beast of its own.

 

Jeff Arnold  [21:33]

Exactly. Yeah, for me, I mean, think about, as a consumer, like, for me, I’m actually irritated if I have to go in and make payments on a regular basis, right? I want something to be automated. I don’t want to have to take care of that, because that’s just – we’re all over burned with the amount of stuff that we’re trying to take care of. So it’s really, you’re, you’re really helping them by billing automatically, so that they don’t even have to think about

 

Steve Fretzin  [21:55]

1. Yeah, so there’s something that you know I am going to turn to AI a little bit, and there’s all this talk about agents and I, I’m of the ilk that I would love to have, you know, I don’t, you gotta maybe help us define this, but I would love to have a personal agent that works for me and my life and my family, so I want to book a trip to Europe with my wife for our anniversary, and the agent works not only to help figure it out but also to take care of all the arrangements that you know, I just say that sounds great, book at all, they have my credit cards and takes care of it, that could be things like I have to take care of my son getting him to college and for a second year and moving him in and any logistics we need to work through, so there’s a personal agent that I think is going to be part of the future, but then even more it’s like there could be a marketing agent that might not, that I want to replace my team, but that might work with my team, or make my team even more and more efficient, but not, I’m not seeing a lot of people that have them. So, take us through, what is an agent? Why, how would we use it, and why, or why is there sort of a gap between getting one now and maybe in six months?

 

Jeff Arnold  [22:59]

Sure, so an agent is a an AI tool that makes decisions for you, that’s kind of the biggest definition I can give you. That’s not super technical, but, like you said, going on vacation, having it plan your vacation for you, the agent is going to sit and basically replace you in the process of doing what you need to do, you’re going to give it the idea of I want to go to Europe, I want to do this. These are the, these are the required items that I want to take care of, these are things that I want to do. This is the kind of hotel I stay, you know, all that kind of.. I guess I’m a Hilton guy, and so I would, I would tell it I’m a Hilton, find Hilton properties, all that kind of stuff, so part of the issue there, right, is well, first of all, that’s what the agent does. The agent goes out and does the research, it spins up its own little sub-agents to go and do the work. Hey, go research Paris for the best places to do whatever it is, it goes and it gathers all the data, then it comes back with that data, and then it starts to put together a plan. Okay, you know, Jeff said that he’s a Hilton guy, so the stuff for Hilton properties around the things we’re going to be doing, price points, all that kind of stuff. But if you think about what I just talked about and what you talked about, how much do you need to train that agent in order to give you the output that you really want, right? You know, in your brain, I know in my brain, I’m a Hilton guy, like they’re gonna be at a price point I want to, I don’t want to go stay at the most expensive, you know, $2,000 night hotel. I prefer public trade, all that kind of stuff, right? All the stuff that I have in my brain, you kind of need to get into that agent brain, and that’s where most people don’t have the time, energy, desire to be able to build that agent,

 

Steve Fretzin  [24:39]

so they don’t want it so bad about getting the agents, I like, they don’t, I mean, I, I think training the agent is a chore and a task. I don’t know what exactly is involved in that, but no one’s presenting an agent to me. No one’s coming to me, and maybe I’m not being sold, or nobody’s like, why isn’t anybody coming to say, “Hey, Steve, I haven’t, you know, I can help you. I’m sure there are people doing it, I. Can create an agent that’s going to do xyz for your business or xyz for your personal life. Is it that we’re not ready for that yet, or it was not as polished as it needs to be, or is that happening, and I’m just not a part of that deal.

 

Jeff Arnold  [25:11]

I’m going to say we’re not ready for it yet. Right? I pulled up a quote from one of the key developers that is with Anthropic, which runs Claude, which is the AI system that I really prefer, and he said most builders don’t have an agent problem, they have a workflow problem dressed up as an agent. Autonomy isn’t the goal, reliability is, and so that to me was really important, coming from somebody at Anthropic, right, who they talk about building agents and all of that. The world is not black and white, whereas computer code is pretty black and white for what needs to be done. So agents are being spun up to work on code because it’s very defined, but like in the situation you described of going to Europe, there are so many variables in there that you, for you to be able to train that agent to work on your behalf to do the things that you want it to do 100% autonomously. You would have to talk to it for days to train it on the information. So, where most people, agents are sexy, right? So, that’s what people want to hear about. They’re, “Oh, I want to build an agent. Oh, agents are great. I personally have not really deployed agents for myself, and I am a massive AI power user, because for me workflows are the things that most people need, and that’s what I believe most people don’t even have. As we talk at the very beginning, most people don’t even have the process down yet. Well, in order to go to an agent level, you need to have not only your process dialed in, you need to make sure it works completely, and you need to have the workflows dialed into that, that the agent can then work with. So, right now, that’s kind of going from like, hey, I just got my driver’s license to I’m driving a McCleary. I mean, that you’re going the whole next level of where you need to go. Most people just need to start with basic automations, just connect the systems that you have, so that they talk to one another, and that data is static data, right? You have structured data coming from one system going into another system, that’s structured, it’s standardized, that gets into what the developer had said is reliability is what people are looking for. AI, no matter how well trained, can always make errors. So that’s where, when you get into, yes, it can make decisions, but with any decision, you have the capability of making an error. So that’s where, in my opinion, and kind of as we talked about with the FAI concept that we had talked about, is most people don’t even have to think about an agent at this point. They need to think about automation. Automation in the legal space keeps you away from the legal risks, you know, with the ABA 512 and if you have something that requires an AI step in it, then you layer AI on top of the automations you’ve already built.

 

Steve Fretzin  [28:00]

Yeah, well, that’s really well, well put and said, and I hope everyone listening is taking, you know, some tips away from what Jeff’s saying. Last question, Jeff, what’s your big mistake?

 

Jeff Arnold  [28:08]

So, the one thing I realized that people told me year after year after year, and I said no, no, no, was I had never gone in and kind of niched down into a specific industry, so as I mentioned early on with AI and with automation education, training people on all the different things that we can do is kind of one of my biggest things, because people don’t realize what they can do with it, and so I figured, well, I’m going to try to educate everybody and work with everybody, and of course, when you’re marketing to everybody, you’re marketing to nobody, so last year’s when we really started working, we had worked with a company to work on really getting in. We did our research, that’s where we came up with HR and the legal space for some targeting, and that has made a huge difference, being able to go and niche down into one specific target audience that I’m going after and be able to speak specifically to them, know all of the ins and outs for that specific industry, and it just.. it’s really been a big change for.. I almost said game changer, but I hate that phrase. So, it’s been.. it’s been a big.. it’s been a big change for us to be able to go into specific markets and be able to really truly understand everything about there, so that you, I can serve my clients better.

 

Steve Fretzin  [29:23]

Yeah, well, they say the riches are in the niches, so I’m with you on that. I was, I was a generalist working in over 50 industries before I figured out that lawyers have an incredible need for learning business development and learning it in a sales-free manner, and you know, just peanut butter and chocolate slapped together, and realizing, oh, this is delicious, and so I think sometimes when you know the world is trying to tell you something, you got to just got to just listen and go with it, and there’s the fear of giving up things, I’m giving up these other industries, or I’m giving up whatever, and the ultimate, you know, reality is that you’re not, you’re actually going to get more from being a specialist than being a generalist, pretty much,

 

Jeff Arnold  [29:59]

exactly. Been I had the same mindset, right, the same mindset of, oh, I’m eliminating all of this stuff. It’s like, oh, I only have 2 million people to market to now. It’s like, yeah, reality is you get your, your teeny tiny percentage of that, and you’re doing okay. So,

 

Steve Fretzin  [30:12]

yeah, spot on, spot on. Well, thanks so much, Jeff. Let’s take a moment, thank our incredible sponsors, of course, lawyer.com Lex Reception, and Pim Con, and our friends over rankings people want to get in touch with you, Jeff, and you got a new book coming out, too, right?

 

Jeff Arnold  [30:26]

I do. I have The Automated Law Firm that I’m going to be launching at the end of July, so I will provide you with a link. Everybody obviously can go there. I’m going to give everybody a free Kindle copy, so you can pre-register there, and as soon as I launch it, I’ll send you out a notification to get a free copy there, so yeah, I’m looking forward to getting that launched. It kind of goes covers a lot of the stuff we covered here, it goes a little bit deeper into ABA 512 and kind of how that applies inside of your business. And then at the end I have an appendix that has about 110 different things you can automate inside of your law firm, so it’ll give you a really good idea of the things that you’re able to work with, and I have it broken down into two different tracks: one is the ABA covered, and one’s the non-ABA, so you can see what is true automation and what starts to cross the line over into use of AI.

 

Steve Fretzin  [31:14]

Yeah, it’s hard to be successful as a lawyer, as a business developing lawyer, as a rainmaker, without being really organized and automating and delegating everything that you can that isn’t specifically in your area of genius, growing business and in the high level sophisticated law. So this is where this stuff really kicks in, and we can’t – it’s almost like impossible to do one without the other. We have to figure out how to open up gaps of time and be successful in systems and process and automation. Otherwise, it’s very difficult to really be sustainable in how you grow. Jeff, thanks so much, man. I appreciate you coming on the show, sharing your wisdom, and you know, I’m glad that we got to meet, and then we can, you know, work together in a variety of ways.

 

Jeff Arnold  [31:56]

Absolutely, I appreciate you having me on.

 

Steve Fretzin  [31:58]

Yeah, yeah, awesome, man. And thank you, everybody, for hanging out with Jeff and I for last 30. You know, I know we talk about AI quite a bit on this show, and it’s not, you know, for nothing. I think it’s because it is becoming a big part of our lives, and you know, I like the idea that we kind of really focused on more automation today than AI. But that being said, we have to kind of cover what’s important and what’s going to help you in your career to be that lawyer, confident, organized, and a skilled rainmaker. Take care, everybody. Be safe and well, and we will talk again very soon.

 

Narrator  [32:30]

Thanks for listening to Be That Loyal, life-changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Visit Steve’s website, fretzin.com, for additional information and to stay up to date on the latest legal business development and marketing trends. For more information and important links about today’s episode, check out today’s show notes.