Ep 25: Document Automation: Transforming Legal Tech with Barron Henley

[Music] Welcome to Power Up Your Practice, the go-to podcast for law firm owners and managing attorneys working on the business, not in it. I'm Ruby Powers, your guide into the heart of law practice management, bringing you insights from leading legal minds, trailblazing attorneys, and expert guests who provide you with an actionable perspective on running your firm more effectively and efficiently. Prepare to open your mind, be inspired, and power up your practice to the next level.

Hi everyone, I'm your host, Ruby Powers, your companion through the ever-evolving landscape of law practice management. And each episode, we get to hear from our guests about their, uh, their definition of success, their superpowers, and perspectives on, on reaching, uh, their, and through their journey of success, uh, however they define it. And so today I'm really honored to have our guest, Baron Henley, and he is a founding partner of Affinity Consulting Group, and he heads the Affinity document assembly automation software training departments. Um, and we have had the pleasure of meeting mostly through ABA Tech Show. Um, he, W, last year when I spoke, or this year, um, he was the one who helped, uh, organize one of the panels I was on and make sure we turn everything in on time. And um, but, but on, but now I'm on the board with him this coming year, so it's been great getting to know him even more. But um, Baron, thanks so much for joining, joining us here today.

Glad to be here.

So why don't you tell us a little bit more about, um, what, what you do, um, with, um, Affinity, um, and, and just sort of like what your, you know, this space of document assembly and automation as well, because I think that for some firms, um, I, I know like in my, some immigration firms that this isn't really like our, our strong suit, even though we do a lot of documents. So um, why don't you tell us a little bit more about you, what, what you do, and, and just sort of like why this should concern, uh, law firm owners.

Well, so I was an estate planning lawyer way long time ago, and I, I really hated drafting revocable trust in particular, and I would put that off and come in on a Saturday and spend all Saturday drafting trust, which is a really horrible way to spend your weekend if you were wondering. Um, but I wanted to make that process more efficient, and I found a document assembly program called HotDocs version 1.0 back in 1993, and I'm like, this might be useful. So I automated my own estate planning documents, and this, my friends who are lawyers, were all like, hey, can you do that for me? So in 1997, I saw a business model in that, and I was like, and really I was, I've always been a nerd and I've liked technology more than practicing law. And so it was kind of like a, do you want to do what you're passionate about for the rest of your life, or do you want to keep manufacturing enthusiasm for estate planning? And the answer to that question was kind of obvious to me. So the idea was the genesis of the company I started was just to help law firms with technology, because there were rumors back in 1997 that that was going to become a thing, and it turns out that was correct. So, so since then, I've, you know, 27 years or something, I've been doing this, and um, the company just got bigger and bigger, bigger. We still only serve law firms. We do lots of stuff besides document automation. We do basically everything except hardware and e-discovery now. Um, but I have always been a document assembly geek, and we have a whole department that still does that, and we work with not just HotDocs but other platforms. But I spent a lot of time also, you know, I've written manuals in Word and Outlook and Excel and, and Acrobat, and I teach software applications from a legal perspective. Even something like Word, for example, we, you know, lawyers use Word in a widely different way than the rest of the world, um, so it's not easy to get help when you're trying. You know, you can go Google it, but you're not likely to find an answer because we're doing things other people aren't doing. Like if you're stuck on a table of authorities or table of contents, you might be able to find some skeletal checklist of how, what you're supposed to do. But like right before this, for example, somebody emailed me in an appellate brief, and they can't get their table of contents to format correctly. Well, it's not like if your document isn't set up right, you're never going to get your table of contents to come out right. And there's styles that are used to pull – style being a formatting definition in Word – styles are used to generate the table of contents in the first place, and once it's generated, then a new set of styles handles the formatting of said table. You're not going to find, like, what was wrong with her document. She could have spent the next 15 years researching crap on the internet, and she's never gonna find the answer. That's – now I know how to do it, so it takes me like 15 minutes to fix her appellate brief and send it back to her. So that's what I was doing. But that's kind of the problem: using these applications doesn't teach you how to use the applications, and um, a lot of the stuff you need to know is actually hidden from you, so you're just not going to find it by clicking around. You're not going to master a complicated application by just playing with it and using it every day, even though there's an expectation that that's the case. So we try to, you know, we, we believe that the biggest problem within the legal technology world is the underutilization of existing tools. I'm, I am 100% confident that's the biggest problem. Um, if you know, and most people, if they think about their tech stack and the components of that, and you, and if you ask somebody, do you, do you feel like you're using, you know, 50% of those applications? Most people will tell you probably not, not even 50%. They don't feel like they are. Um, some people tell me, you know, I have Clio and I know I'm only using 10% of it, and okay, that's, that's not okay, but okay. Um, you know, remedying that situation is the best use of your technology budget. It's much cheaper than buying something new and having the same. And even if there's something like – let's take case management – there might be 10 things you legitimately don't like about what it does. Okay, you can go to platform B, and you'll get 10 new things you don't like. It's still going to have 10 things. There's no application that does exactly what you want exactly the way you want every single time, right? So like, okay, maximize it, get the most out of what you've got. And there, I'm not saying someone didn't make a wrong decision and they've got something that just isn't going to perform for them, but usually it will if it had been properly deployed and/or people had received training and/or had been customized for them appropriately. They could probably make it do exactly what they want, or get, you know, 95% of the way there. But one of the things we do a lot of is, you know, like, I can't help somebody with automating a complex set of documents until and unless they have a set of templates to start with. And everybody tells me, oh, I use templates, and I go, okay, show me. And they're not templates at all. They're just documents they drafted for another client and another case. They're not like – they have an identified changeable text, they have an identified optional text. It, it's – the thing they're calling a template does not in any way contain all the provisions that could occur in that instrument. Like, they're copying and pasting from all over the place. A template, a template has everything in it. Like it's not some document I did for somebody else. It's got every provision that could ever occur in that kind of document in the order it could occur, annotated. Like, I'm consistently identifying changeable text. I'm, I'm, I'm delineating where an option starts and ends and the test for its inclusion or exclusion, as the, as the case may be. That doesn't require any additional technology. You're using Word or WordPerfect, as the case may be. I'm just, I'm typing right in the thing. This is, this is where that option starts, and this is where it ends, and here's what you should be thinking about when you decide whether or not to include it. That's a template. But it also has to be set up correctly from a Word perspective, so that when it's edited, it's not a pain in the ass. Otherwise, it will be. Everybody who uses Word knows it is, you know, I know what I want it to do, but I can't get it to do that. I know what I want it to look like, but I can't get it to look like that. Word seems possessed sometimes. The formatting shifts on you for no reason, and you're like, I didn't even click on anything, and I got a whole new font. I inserted a footnote, and I've got this other typeface that's nowhere else in the document. Why is it doing this? There's reasons for all that. But getting that set up right, you know, using Word's most important feature – Styles – which almost nobody knows how to use because the interface doesn't tell you anything about it. Doesn't tell you how to control them. It doesn't tell you that there's a style applied to every single paragraph in every single Word document ever created in any version of Word, and you can't turn them off. People tell me, I don't use Styles. I'm like, do you use Word? Yeah. Okay, you use Styles. No, I don't. Yes, you do. You can't have a document with a paragraph – any paragraph – to which a style is not applied. If you don't choose one, Word chooses one for you. And sometimes I just have to show it to them. They're like, what are you, what are you talking about? And I can, I can prove it to them in a web meeting. But anyway, if you want to control Word, you have to learn how to control Styles. And you can use Word every day for 25 years, and you're not going to have any clue how to control Styles. It doesn't teach you that. So that information must be acquired by some other method. And you know, people are kind of exhausted from videos, or they misidentify their skill set. Sometimes lawyers tell me, my support staff people are so good at Word. I'm like, oh, you think? Send me some documents. I love just tearing apart a document and say, okay, here's all the features that they should have used and didn't. Um, they, you – they chiseled your revocable trust out of a stone tablet. They did. They used it like a typewriter. And then that means it took three times as long to generate that trust as it should have. Do you charge – you know, like, by looking at the document – that, how, how long it – wow. Oh yeah, oh yeah. I can tell if they've set up automatic paragraph numbering correctly or they've typed them. If you typed them, you did it wrong. Even if you use automatic paragraph numbering, probably they set up that wrong. Are the cross-references set up so they automatically update? Probably not. Did they type their table of contents, or was it autogenerated so it automatically updates? They probably typed it. Are the, are the page numbers right? Are they starting over when it's supposed to start over? Is the underlying default for the document what it should be, based on what the author wants in the document? If it's not, and 70% – 70% of the documents I review from law firms – the underlying default formatting that's buried in the document is in complete disagreement with what the author clearly wants. And that's why formatting shifts on people. They don't even know that documents have defaults. There's nothing about Word that tells you that. But the, the files you're using were created at some point from a blank document. Somebody at some point created that file from a blank document. And whose ever computer was that? Did that? Buried in that document: Times New Roman 10, left justified, single space as the default. I'm just – that's what it was for years and years. Yeah. And then, but people didn't know how to change the default formatting, so they just select the text and layer something on top, not realizing that what's behind – that's the paint they just painted on top – is still the same. And the problem with default formatting is it won't leave you alone. It keeps percolating through to the surface. That's what causes format shifting when people are using Word. All that is is a default revealing itself. Wow. And people misinterpret that as a satanic possession of their document, or all kinds of crazy conspiracy theories as to why my document won't behave and seems to have a mind of its own. It's all logical, but Word isn't going to disclose any of that stuff. So, so just getting that set up right so that when you edit it, it responds the way you would logically expect it to – if I have a new paragraph, everything below it renumbers and re-letters, the cross-references update, the spacing is correct. I don't have like awkward page breaks where I got a title at the bottom of this page and the, the paragraph it's describing is at the top of the next page, and I'm, I'm hitting enter, enter, enter to try to get those on the same – that's the wrong way to do it. There's, there's paragraph glue. There's features for that. There's features in Word that you would use in every single legal document for which there's no button on any ribbon. Just wrap your head around that. The features are so important, I use them literally in every single document, and there's no button for it anywhere in Word. What, like, are you kidding me? Yeah, not – that's how it works. Like there's things you – you can get to them, you got to right-click and click on Paragraph, and then click on Line and Page Breaks, and check a box. But there's no button for it, even though it's really important. Wow. Welcome to Microsoft Word. So that's the – those are the cards we're dealt. So it's not surprising to me that people are like, this program is so irritating, I just want to chuck my computer out the window, because you would think if I keep using it, I'm going to get better at it. And nobody gets better at it. So we feel like our job is to show them how to take advantage of that. What can it do? How can I control it? And if you set up a template structurally correct from a Word perspective, you won't have to figure out why your formatting screwed up because it never got screwed up. That's – and most people look at me like I have three heads when I tell them, you know, I never have to figure out why my document's messed up because it never gets messed up. They're like, are you using the same program as me? I'm like, yeah, but I'm a nerd. I'm, I'm a geek. I'm a Word geek. I understand it. I can control it. It is controllable.

So you're like the Word Whisperer. Okay, so now we know who to go to. So what, what's like the low-hanging fruit for – like you said something before we started about how this is um, an area that you can save firms money with, figuring this out? It's the cheapest thing to fix because there's nothing to buy. You don't, you don't need to buy anything. Use your existing software better.

Yes, like you take Word, you master Word. Once you start working with correctly set up documents, it's kind of an epiphany for most people. They've never used one before. I get – I mean big firms who have word processing departments – because Word conceals everything – they still – even if the people whose job it is to word process don't know how to control Word. I'm not, I'm not saying they're dumb or something. It's just that it's, it's hiding it from you. And unless you take a class or read a manual that explains it, you're not going to stumble upon it. You're not going to find it by clicking around, even though that's what everybody thinks will happen. So once they see it, then they're like, oh my God, this is so much better. I'm like, I know, I know. It's always been capable of this. There's a lot of steps to set up a document correctly, um, and none of the steps are hard. There's just so many of them, and, and it's a progression. And once you learn the progression to deconstruct, construct, and rebuild a document, you can fix any document. It doesn't matter what kind it is, what practice area it's in, how complicated it is. It's all fixable. It just – you have to take the time to learn how to control it. And so people don't – I don't know why they just don't.

Well, because what you just talked about sounds really complicated at first. What, what would be like baby steps? Because it seems like you have a PhD, or whatever is beyond a PhD, in, in, in Word, and like people who like, um, you know, maybe living in Google Docs or just like, oh okay, somebody who's just like, okay, how do I start? Like listening to you at the beginning of this, they're like, oh my, I have so – I am super underutilizing, and if I don't know this and I haven't taught my team, my team probably doesn't know. Maybe, maybe who knows. Um, like, where, where would you just start?

Just start identifying documents that you use on a regular basis. And the cheapest – the cheapest way to learn it: contact your bar association and give them my contact information. I teach classes on this all the time. I love teaching classes on this. And it's much cheaper to get my content through a CLE seminar than it is to hire me privately, unless you're doing it for a whole firm, in which case it would be way cheaper to bring us in for the whole firm because we just charge a flat fee. So if you have 20 people, it's very inexpensive per person because we don't charge by the head. But if it's like a small firm, then I would – I have – I mean, I already speak for like 35 state bars and seven law societies in Canada. But I don't teach those classes every year for them. But a lot of times it's just been, you know, a lawyer will go to the bar association and say, I'd really like to bring this guy in for a class, and let's do a whole day, like a six-hour Word boot camp, and you'll get CLE credit for it in every state now, thanks to the rules of professional conduct changing. Um, and you'll learn hands-on how to control this application that's been making you crazy. That's the best way to do it. And I mean, it's the cheapest way to do it because what does it cost for a CLE these days? It's pretty cheap, right?

So if someone – okay, so CLE, contacting you. Um, so let's say like they're super starting out, or they've their firm and they're like trying to get more, uh, structure to it. So would it be good to just figure out what are the documents that you normally use on a regular basis and start figuring out which ones, start trying to make a template? Like first, like maybe choose the best versions of something to start merging it into a good template?

Here's your, here's your approach. Okay, identify the most annoying documents you have to produce most often. Those are your moneymakers. Like they're complicated, they're long. Like if I'm a divorce attorney, it's the separation agreement or the divorce decree or whatever in the jurisdiction – is that big 90-page document that outlines everything. Each one of them is a snowflake. Each paragraph is unique to my fact pattern. They go on and on and on about all these wackadoodle things you think are never going to happen, but you got to draft for them anyway. Those are the, those are the things you make templates out of.

If I'm glad you defined "annoying" because I was, I was going to ask for clarification.

Okay, yeah. Like it's got complicated formatting, it's a bottleneck. Like I want to eliminate bottlenecks. So you, you're – the first thing we do is like, I don't want to start with your fact cover sheet. No one complains about that. That takes like nine seconds, no matter what. I want the documents that take six hours and makes people drop F-bombs. Those are the documents we want. So you, you pick those and you fix them, and then you start piling in the pieces and parts. When this happens, I use this provision; when I have this weird fact pattern, you copy and you just paste it in. You just keep adding stuff to this. It's going to be really long, it's fine. To use it, you will delete the things that are irrelevant, and you will do a search and replace to fill in the blanks. So you have to consistently identify your changeable text. Like if I got a document and it's got a Spouse One and Spouse Two – I got it if it's an uppercase S, First Name F, capital F, capital M, one – just be consistent in how you identify those, because it's case sensitive when you do a search and replace. So when I do a search and replace, I'm gonna say find "Spouse Full Name One" and replace it with "Jimmy John," replace all. Find "Spouse Full Name Two," replace it with "Sarah John," replace all. Right? That's what you're doing. Do the same thing for pronouns. You do the same thing for verb conjugation. Whatever might change, you want to just flag it. You just use the highlighter that's built into Word. It's very easy. You can use whatever nomenclature you want to identify changeable text: brackets, squiggly brackets, parentheses, carets – who cares? Just be consistent. Pick what makes sense to you, and then roll that out. And what you want is one template per type of instrument. And almost nobody does that. Like if an estate planning lawyer contacts me and wants me to make templates for them, they'll send me five wills and seven trusts, and they'll say, oh, the wills are the same except this is my simple will, and this is a pourover will, and this one's got a testamentary trust, and this has got a special needs trust, and this has got whatever – this is my single person with no kids, this is my married couple with kids. And I take those documents, I go, okay, let me just make sure I understand: they're the same except for the language that must be different based on the fact pattern variations. Uh-huh, uh-huh. That's never been the case. I run redlines between these. I go into Word and I go, compare this version to that version. There's literally, in 27 years, never not been gobs of unintended differences between those documents, because it's never anybody's job to make sure that common language is actually consistent across the five wills and then seven trusts. And since it's nobody's job, it doesn't get done. Two of the five wills got updated, one of the trusts got updated that one time, four of the seven got updated the other time. None of them always got updated. When we go through and build a master template – which is what we call it – um, we're running comparisons. Like if I have seven versions of a document, I pick – it doesn't matter – pick one and I designate that my baseline, and I compare everything against the baseline. I pay one against two: what are the changes? I pile those into the master. One against three: what are the changes? I pile those into the master. That will reveal all of the unintended differences and the intended ones, and I just annotate that into the master template. Now you don't have anything to worry about. You've only got one template for each. I got one rev trust, I got one will, I got one POA. Okay, that's way easier to maintain than seven of these, five of those, and three of those. I've, I've massively narrowed the scope, and, and there's no way for the common language to be different because it's only in there once. I don't have it in multiple documents of the same type. So but most people, when they start building their own templates, they absolutely build fact-pattern-specific templates for the same instrument. That's how they end up with that mess. I understand the rationale behind it. I just know it doesn't work long term. The only way is to create one template for a type of instrument, and it's not a fun way to spend your afternoon, but you got to get there. And sometimes people do it themselves, and sometimes they just send me all their documents and go – can you just figure this out for me?

Okay, okay, so just a point of clarification. So like, um, because we recently did this for our new – moving over to our new case management software. So in, in immigration court, we have like different motions – motion to change venue, motion to advance, motion to substitute counsel, things like that. So is that, are those – can I keep all of those be their own, or is that supposed to be one and then depending on what I'm trying to accomplish, I would have –

It depends on how long the document is that's contained inside those headings, and um, whether they share information, where they share language. If the only thing that's the same is your caption and your signature lines, then no, it doesn't make sense to combine that.

Okay, good. I think I did it right then, because we made them separate, and they're not, they're not that long, but they have different like language and, and purposes. But yeah, that's fine.

That's fine. It's when you've got, you know, boilerplate – I've got fiduciary powers that go on for four pages, and they're supposed to be the same in all five of these wills, and they're not. Okay, we're going to combine those. That's a big chunk of language that should be in a template once, one template, not five.

Okay, I'm going to ask a question that, uh, just to clarify: what's the difference between – for, for listeners – document automation and document assembly?

They are the same. And, and both of them contemplate, um, the building of an interview. When we're, when you're drafting a document in your head, you're, you're asking and answering questions. Like, in order to get the language I want, if this is true, I have to use this template, and then within that template, if this fact pattern is, is what's happening, then I need to include this and, and delete that one. You know, there's stuff there, it comes in based on something, and you know what these questions are because you process them mentally. A document automation system allows us to codify your decision tree and make it appear on the screen. And how you answer those questions gives you exactly the document you want, based on how you answered those. And so you can calculate text and dates and numbers. You can conditionally include or exclude anything based on literally anything. All of the lists are bottomless, infinite. I don't need to know how many kids there are, how many beneficiaries there are, how many specific bequests there are, how many trustees there are, how many executors there are. Doesn't freaking matter. You could have 9,000 or you could have one. It doesn't matter. It's the same. So it can handle an unlimited number of records for any list. And with legal documents, there's always – how many parties do you have? Could be any number. Um, you think about family law – well, you could have an unlimited number of assets, debts, liabilities, kids. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff. Investments – those are all lists. I need a template set that can handle whatever I need to feed it and have it work. So, so working through that kind of stuff is very – you can only do that in a document automation system. Word can't do that kind of stuff natively. You can do some of it – like I can do conditional logic, fill-in-the-blanks, and stuff like that – but I can't do really fancy things that the document automation system can do. It's all based on a smart interview. It walks you through a very complicated assembly process, um, where all you're doing is you're answering the questions. You can make it so people can't make mistakes. They can't pick a wrong thing. They can't make a wrong choice. Um, if they do make, make a wrong choice, it corrects them and walks them back through it. Um, and then once you're done, it generates – you can generate a whole set of documents simultaneously, and then you don't just get the documents – you also can save your responses to all the questions. And that's really important because, like, let's say I'm doing an estate plan for a married couple. I run the wife's documents first, and his – the husband's selections – and the way his plan is structured is going to probably be substantially similar to a spouse, assuming they didn't come from previous marriages with a bunch of kids from the previous marriages, etc. Well, I want to be able to just flip that. I want to be able to take the answers to the, to the wife and just say, okay, flip these to the husband, change the answer to one question, hit assemble, and it automatically changes husband to wife, wife to husband, and all the name switch, and I appoint her and she appoints me, and that whole set of documents done at the same time. Uh, and if they call me back five years from now and say, you know what, I want to change my trustees, and I want to add some specific bequests – I don't want to have to re-enter all that crap. I like, I could have answered 500 questions previously. I want to see those answers the way I answered them five years ago and just change the ones that need to change. That's what document automation allows you to do. Not only that, I can often send part of that interview to my client directly. It doesn't generate documents for them, but I can gather their information directly, and it'll flow right into my templates. And they're web-based, so I could be sitting on my back deck with an iPad and generate documents. I could be anywhere using any device with an internet connection and crank out really complicated documents. Now, document automation – a lot of times people think, well, that'd be really good for simple documents done in high volume. It can do that for sure, but so can just Microsoft Word with no additional expense. It's the really complicated documents where it shines – when you have hundreds of fill points and hundreds of conditional pieces of logic, phrasing that could come in or out based on some fact pattern. That's when it really pays for itself. That's when you really like – you can take an eight-hour process and squish it into 15 minutes. You charge a flat fee. We have clients that are earning over $2,000 an hour based on the flat fee they charge divided by the number of hours necessary to render that fee. Nobody would ever sign up for that. If you send me an engagement agreement that says you're going to charge me $2,000 an hour, I'm gonna go, no, bye. But if I don't know – like if you can, if it's an estate plan and you charge $2,500 flat fee and it takes you 20 minutes to do it – is it worth less because I did it in 20 minutes because I built a system? No, I, I would argue it's worth more. It's more accurate. I put a lot of thought into the construction of this document. I'm not just recycling old documents like most lawyers do. Um, it's gonna work.

Yeah, well, um, and this has sort of been some of our conversations with other guests about like potential the death of the billable hour, and also um, if you invest all this time and energy into your systems, like you should benefit. You should be able to benefit from, you know, your efficiency. How long it takes you to do it doesn't really matter. It, I mean, it shouldn't matter. I understand that a lot of people came from a billable hour perspective, and so they, they kind of measure their performance and their productivity in terms of the hours they bill. But that really – you know, what should matter is dollars in the door, services rendered, and not how many hours you bill. I, I if, if that's your focus, you have a disincentive to do anything more efficiently because you make more money by going slow. And – and, c, don't want that. And, and today's hypercompetitive legal market, that doesn't even fly anymore. Almost everybody in a transactional area of law is trying to figure out how to go to a flat fee – not just because their clients want it, because they're sick of keeping track of time. I totally understand that. And even in traditional hourly practices like family law – like if they're going to fight, I got to bill them for however long they want to fight. They can – at some point they're going to say uncle. But yeah, the divorce decree or the separation agreement, that big nasty document I have to do at the end – I can do a flat fee for that. I could automate that, and that makes a ton of sense. You might say, okay, it's going to be hourly, $375 an hour, and you fight all you want. The document at the end that wraps all this up and puts a bow on it – that's $1,500 flat fee. Oh, you – that's, that's what it cost, no matter what. That's what it cost, no matter what. It's like a 90-page crazy complicated document, and I'm gonna charge you a flat fee, and if it takes me longer to do it, then I got to eat it. They'll appreciate that. You just compartmentalize the big drafting projects, and you can flat-fee those even within an otherwise completely hourly practice area.

Yeah, that – we, we've had a guest, Bo Atkins from Canada. He does family law, and he charges flat fee, so he's found a way to, to make it work. And um, in immigration, which is my field, um, we've lived in the flat-fee space. I went over to hourly for litigation – I don't know, six or so years ago. I'm trying to move back over to flat fee. Um, and so part of my journey has been the document, um, automation, assembly with our motions in court, um, and getting all of those templates – we've done that this last year to make it like now you can really click a button and boom, we have it. And it's like, well then why would I charge hourly for that after I put – exactly. Diminish the value of it just because you can do it faster because you invested in technology to allow you to do that. I mean, and I get what you're saying about like when I was thinking in this space, I was like, okay, well we'll do the attorney-client agreements, you know, because those are done all the time and I want to make those faster. We'll do like those cover letters we put on a packet. But then like, I wanted to go for those, those annoying ones you were talking about – like those, like sort of quasi-legal brief ones that sometimes my assistants get a little intimidated by. I'm like, but, and, and so then they sit on it a little bit longer. Like, no, we need to get those done because, um, you know, those they need to get out. You know, some of these cases don't have a deadline, but we sort of, uh, we need to get them out. And I, I agree with you – like don't just think about the simple stuff that you do readily, um, but think about the complex things that you could automate so that you could get them out faster, more efficiently, spend less time. So I, um, so this is a great discussion because I, I think it's like affirming a lot of the work I've been doing recently in this space, but still don't have a PhD in what you're doing, like that – I, I hope we didn't like lose people because they're too like overwhelmed, how technical you know a lot about this. I, I've, I've heard about it, but um, this is great.

And so, so what – like before we transition to some more other, other talks about, like ABA Tech Show and other fun things, like your favorite board game and stuff like that – why would you say um, what, why, why should people – tell me, tell me some numbers that makes us feel like, oh yeah, we need to fix this. Like, like what, how much money can people save if they were to like really invest in this? Like because maybe they don't, they don't live in the space. You know, they're not drafting, so they're like, oh I don't know, you know, because they're not living there and they don't see it, but, but they're paying people to do this, and they're paying the inefficiencies. Like, how much money do you think is on the table when, if people –

Unfortunately, a lot of lawyers that are in transactional areas of law – they're not tracking everybody's hours. They don't know how much time is necessary to generate the fee because they're not all tracking their time. But if you took all the support staff time and all the lawyer time and you added it all up – number of hours – and then you take the total fee and you divide by those hours – in many cases, people are very disappointed in that effective hourly rate. Um, and that, that's – so your choice is either do it more efficiently, or raise your fees. And nobody wants to raise their fees. So the natural solution is do it more efficiently. If the deliverable is a set of documents, you first want to figure out, what is my cost to produce these set of documents now? And if you have somebody like – let's say I got a support staff person, and he or she spends three hours on average to get this set of documents done, and they're not billing for that time. Okay, so I want to know what the cost of that is. So the, the way you calculate the cost of those three hours is you take the person's annual salary times 1.4, which factors in taxes, benefits, and overhead, and then you divide by 280 work hours a year – because that's how many there are if you don't take a vacation – and that gives you an, an hourly cost for that human to work in your office per hour. So you can take that – let's say it's $35 an hour. Okay, that times three – that's a cost that you have to subtract out of the profit of any set of documents that you generate for that kind of a thing. And then how much time are you spending as the – and what is your desired effective hourly rate there? And are you achieving that? And you can figure out like if the cost, let's say, to automate a set of documents is $15,000 – you might, some people go, 15 – oh my God, I would never consider that. Might be a no-brainer. Like, the, the statistically – if you can pay for this thing in 12 months or less, the experts say, do it. Do you know if it pays for itself in, in, in 12 months or less? Most people have no idea. They don't even know what the current costs are. So you got to figure that out. Like what is it taking me to do it now? What is my net profit on the current deals? If I can increase the profit on every one of these transactions by $500 – let's say – how many engagements of an extra $500 does it take until I cover the $15,000? It depends on your volume. I mean, this is – that you can arrive at a yes or no answer. Is this worth it? Yes or no? There's a definitive answer. You've got to crunch some numbers and look at your practice a little bit differently than maybe you have in the past to identify the yes or no answer. But you can get there from here, and it's worth doing. And what happens a lot of times is something that maybe wouldn't have passed the smell test in terms of its cost – when they crunch the numbers, it's a no-brainer. It's going to pay for itself in four months. Okay, then you should do it. After it's paid for itself, gravy. You're just making lots more money on every deal. And that's just going to make you have a, you know, a nicer car and a better vacation and whatever, whatever it is that you hope for in your life as a result of better financial situations. Then you're going to get there. Um, but the old-fashioned way of, you know, plodding through stuff and recycling old documents – and you're not going to get there like that. And the highly competitive environment we work in is not going to allow you to be accidentally successful anymore. Like, you know, when I passed the bar in 1993, if you were a good lawyer, you were gonna do pretty well. Today, if you're invisible on the internet, not so much. If you're a jerk, people won't work with you. That didn't used to be the case either. I knew all kinds of complete attorneys who made gobs of money, and, and everybody flocked to them. They're like, yeah, he's an – but now, there you can find alternatives. You can go on the internet, you can find other people. That may have been the only person you knew about in your town. You know, are you stuck with somebody in your town anymore? No. You can get on the internet and I can find another person does the exact same thing in Cleveland or Cincinnati or Columbus or Akron, Canton, Toledo, Dayton – there's lots of places I can go in Ohio and find somebody to help me with this that isn't going to be a jerk. Okay, so the internet opened up all of those avenues to find alternatives. So taking your sweet time isn't going to get you there. You're going to have to start thinking about your law practice as the business that it is and invest in it, uh, or otherwise you're going to be victimized by the technology. You either take advantage of it or you're victimized by it, and there's not much in between. And document automation is one of those things. You're – if you're in a transactional area of law, you're already being competed against by these online services – LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, etc. What technology do you think they're using? Document automation. It's the same thing. You can use those same exact tools and do the same exact thing. In fact, you can build your own system. Some of these platforms, like Gavel, they're designed to make an outward-facing thing – go look up HelloDivorce.com. That's based on Gavel.io, which is another document automation platform. Works off an interview. And if I want to go and do my own, own divorce, okay, apparently I can log in and pay some money and do my own deal. A lot of lawyers thinking about that.

No, I definitely agree. And I think, um, you know, living in that legal tech space, you know, with ABA Tech Show and other conferences and summits we go to – this is, this is the world we see and we know. Um, what, what percentage of firms do you think, um, have it together with their document assembly and automation?

Pretty low. Okay, so if you like – I mean, I spent a lot of time looking at people's Word documents, and unfortunately, even looking at the general state of Word knowledge in the legal market, it's, it's abysmal. I, I mean God, it's just really awful. People don't know how to make that program do what they want, and they're just – all it just means it's taken a lot longer than it should to crank out these documents. And they're for – and, and it's right, it's increasing their blood pressure and stress. That's true, that's true. So I, if, if you're listening to this and you're like, oh my gosh, I didn't know this was such a big problem and I've got some work to do – you just know you're not, you're not alone. There's a lot of other – situation normal. Situation normal. But but it doesn't – since you don't have to buy anything – like let's just, let's take document automation off the table. You can't even consider document automation till you have a good set of templates. And if you just get a good set of templates and you don't do anything beyond that, you're far ahead of the game. You're ahead of most other lawyers by a long shot. If you're just efficient in your drafting using just what the word processor can do for you, you are way ahead.

Well, there's some hope for us, I guess. Um, so as we transition, um, one of the questions I like to ask all my guests is: what's your favorite board game? Because I like games. Doesn't have to be a board game, but a game of some sort.

I, um, have literally no patience whatsoever – not even a tiny scintilla of it in my entire body – and therefore I, and I, and combine that with the fact that

I am way hypercompetitive about everything. To me, everything is a competition, okay? It doesn't matter what it is. Like, how fast you're going to eat dinner? I will beat you. I will eat my dinner faster than you because I don't even know the game. Everything.

So I don't like to me, the only game I play that I actually enjoy is probably Euchre, which is a card game, not a board game. Um, I I think maybe that's a Midwest thing. I I say the word Euchre to some people like, what? I've heard of it, but I don't I don't see it very often. So yeah, I think yeah, I don't I mean, I for entertainment, I'd rather just talk and not play a game because then I end up wanting to stab the person across the table. Like if they're my partner and they make make a mistake, I overreact to that. And if I lose, I overreact back to that. So in other words, I need I need to be medicated before I can play board games. It's probably and that's just a personal character flaw of mine that I just have to deal with.

Okay, well, next question is, what would you consider your superpower? I'm a really kick-ass cook. Oh, okay. Okay. I love to cook and I'm really freaking good at it. And I'm very creative. Creative. And I I've been doing it long enough that I can tell what something needs and I can riff on any recipe and make it better, I think. And I I I cook every single day. On weekends, twice a day. I love to go to the grocery store. It's like one of my happy places. And I love scouring the internet for new um inspirations. And I love Thai food. I like to make Indian food. I like Vietnamese. I like Chinese. I like Italian. I like I like all kinds of weird um non-eth non-non-traditional things. I like ethnic stuff with intense flavors. And we have a lot of we have a lot of really good ethnic grocery stores around us. So like I can find all kinds of bizarre ingredients I've never even heard of. And I can get my hands on them and and work them into a dish and see how it turns out. And I just remodeled my house and my kitchen is amazing. I mean, it's like I could have a cooking show in my kitchen. That's how awesome it is. Really? W I I've thought about just sleeping in there because I like it so much. But anyway, I was oversharing.

Well, that's okay. Well, everyone who listens will will get to know a lot more about you. But um, Mia, maybe you could have an episode of Nailed It or something and I can come join. Um, so it okay. So before you let us know like how we can find you, I think just like parting thought, like what someone's listening and they're like, whoa, I have a lot of work to do.

Okay, okay. Here here's the thing. Everybody knows they could they could get a better handle on Word. Everybody knows they could more efficiently draft documents. That all starts with templates. Pick the documents again. Go back to that I have to produce them most often. And it is the mo the biggest bottleneck, the most annoying. Pick just start with something and just keep coming back to it. Like put a little appointment on your calendar. It could be only 15 minutes every couple of days. You're going to come back and work on finishing that template and building out that template and adding in the conditional stuff and identifying the changeable text and building something. You can start from stop using compromised negotiated documents as your starting point. Stop using documents that are missing things you need to add. Stop stop using documents that are full of crap you need to take out. Stop using documents that were negotiated with opposing counsel. Templates will take you to the neutral. You've got a you've got a solid starting point. You can share it with other people in your office. You raise the bar for everyone when you share. How do you share what you know with other people in your office? A template is a way to do that. And and and and that makes everybody better. And now you've got something also you can update, improve, and feed. If you draft some cool thing for a fact pattern you're likely to encounter again and it only lives in some client's document, you're very likely to never see it again unless you've got a great memory on client name and what you called that document where you put it. If you've got a template now you got a spot. You just go copy P. Oh, I'm never losing that. I've got a drawer to put it in. And otherwise, all you got is 2 million documents that you have great difficulty finding. And that's not going to help you. No money's involved. It's just a little time. Baby steps, baby steps yield big differences.

Well, that that was a good good inspirational summary. Thank you, Baron. So how can people find you if if they want to to follow up and ask more questions?

Well, you could just send an email to B Henley at Affinity AI. N I T consulting.com. Well, our our website is being completely redone, but there's a lot of information on our website. Affinity consulting.com. Um, we only help law firms and legal departments make better use of technology. So if that's what you're looking for, we can help.

Awesome. And I guess one last plug for ABA Tech Show. What what would you say to people who uh are debating like whether or not to come, um, or what they never been there, or like, you know, try to fit it in with their schedule?

If you want to see every good thing in the world that has to do with the intersection of law and technology, that is your pilgrimage. That is your Mecca. That is where you go. I've been going for 35 years at least. Um, I even had one of my children were their birth was induced so I could go to Tech Show. Child, she was already overdue by eight days. I just want to say that I'm not a total but I'm like, honey, we need to get this baby out because I want to be here for the birth. And I really am. I'm I had to speak. I had it was one of my first speaking engagements at Tech Show and and it was really important to me and I didn't want to miss it. And so my wife still makes fun of me about that. And I think she's still angry at me, probably. But we're celebrating our 34th wedding anniversary July 7th. So I'm G call congratulations.

Yeah, if that wasn't a commercial for ABA Tech Show, I don't know what it. Like you scheduled the birth. I mean, it's just like you meet you meet that you meet that those people. You meet people with similar interests. A lot of times in your practice area, it's a great place to share intel, meet other people similarly situated, and learn how to improve your practice and therefore your life. I know that sounds like I'm overplaying it, but I'm not.

No, you're not. You just got to experience it. And I think once people try it, then they come back because it's it's like an annual fun thing. And you get to see all the same people again and commiserate and what did you do this year? Oh, try. You know, it's just a great exchange of ideas.

Yes. I I wholeheartedly agree. And I joined the party later, only about five or so years ago, but I'm super excited. And it's hard to and I'm already on the board. I just love it so much. I'm like s like soaking it all in and getting to to learn so much. Beautiful thing, beautiful thing.

Well, Baron, thank you so much for joining us and um, all the enthusiasm about document assembly and automation and just Word and and just everything. Um, I feel like this is low-hanging fruit. I think you're right about the whole need. Uh, there's just a lot of underutilized tech just we're paying for and it's just sitting on the table. And part of that whole shiny object syndrome, we want to like, oh, what's new, you know, blah, blah, blah. We just need to use what we have and make sure we've optimized it and rolled it out before we go get something else.

Um, you got it. Yeah.

Well, um, thanks everyone for joining us on our insightful journey today. Your time and engagement has meant the world to us. Um, if you enjoyed this episode, um, want to continue the conversation, you can join us on the Power Up Your Practice Facebook group. Join our newsletter. Um, so like, subscribe, share, tell another friend about this Power Up Your Practice podcast. And exciting news, um, the most recent My Power Up Your Practice book is going to be coming out this summer. More details to come, but stay tuned for updates. So thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time.

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