Jeff Robbins still remembers the emotion and feelings he had when his mother passed after open heart surgery. The surgeon consoled him as her situation worsened: "I'm going to treat your mom like she's my mom." That was about eight years ago. Today, Jeff is the director of client experience at DM Injury Law, a role that fit him personally and professionally after working in the healthcare field. “I like sharing that story with people because it kind of gave me that ‘a-ha’ moment of: Experience is not about perfection, it's about presence,” Jeff tells host Paul Bamert. He and Paul have collaborated on research aimed at understanding the modern consumer. In this episode, they discuss what the legal industry can learn from healthcare and how law firms can use tools like Case Status to stay emotionally present across hundreds of cases.

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Bad lawyer jokes are an old genre, but if you're a consumer, finding a client-focused practice is serious. If you're an attorney, understanding today's ethical duty of care is critical. Anchored by current headlines and showcasing major legal minds, Ethical-ish speaks to consumers and attorneys about the modern transparent law practice. Sponsored by Case Status, powered by LawPods.

Hello everyone and welcome to Ethical-ish. I've got my banner here, super excited to have a little bit of backdrop. I also have my mug and my guest, most importantly, Jeff Robbins. Jeff, say hello.

Hello, Ethical-ish.

We'll get you a mug. As long as you're not left-handed, Jeff, if you drink it less- I am

Left-handed.

So you're going to show everybody that you're unethical on the mug, but that's okay. So just a little prop fun. Welcome everybody real quick just to Ethical-ish where we try to dive into what makes a modern law firm ethical or not. It's kind of that gray area. And I'm coming into year two of trying to host my first podcast and have some discussions. So we're going to dive a little bit into getting to know who you are and talk a little bit about the modern consumer from other industries and sort of pull that into the legal space. But before we start and before I start talking about too many things, Jeff, why don't you do a quick introduction? People know who I've got on the hot seat here today.

Oh, the hot seat. Yeah. Okay. So again, Jeff Robbins. I am the director of client experience at DM Injury Law, and we're based here in Kansas City, Missouri, and we have six satellite locations. A big PI firm, we do work comp, big case, all the things. So exciting to be here. It's honored to be on your podcast, Paul. So looking forward to

It. Well, love having you here. It's not mine. Case Status has tried to sponsor this, but I've been trying to recruit some other people to be a guest host. So if you want to consider that change and come in and interview some folks, Jeff, happy to give you the mic and go for that. Yeah. So Jeff, you're a lawyer, right?

No, I am not a lawyer.

Oh, neither am I. That's fun. It's a legal podcast and neither one of us are lawyers. Well, we just did a podcast with Sean Lahokey as well, CEO at Pond LaHockey George Arnold. He's not a lawyer either, and I get a kick out of that. So tell us a little bit about, again, your title, client experience, director of client experience. So DM Law, that's kind of a new idea. I think some firms have client service, maybe client experience, maybe client care or success. Tell me a little bit about how long you've been in the legal space, how long you've been with the firm, and what were you doing beforehand?

Currently with the firm, I've been here almost two years. I moved back to Kansas City after a long stint in mid-Missouri and just knew about the firm and knew that they were creating this role. And it just fit me perfectly at the time of my season of my life. So it's been a great transition into a different service line. And so going back in history, about 20 years, I've been in healthcare, ranging in every care setting you can imagine from skilled therapy services to subacute rehab, to nursing homes, to cardiovascular medicine, psychiatry, all internal medicine. So all those. And then so I brought all that with me to personal injury.

Yeah. A lot of overlap between client and patient, right? But I know a little bit more about also your background in research and whatnot. So there is that tie to understanding how healthcare works and things like that, but you're also data scientist, right? You're data nerd at times. Yeah,

I love it.

And get into the underlying, follow the data, you can understand a lot of what's going on. And that's where, to sort of let the listeners out there understand why I've put you on the hot seat, where I think you bring a lot of value on many different levels. We've done some white papers together. We've gone and nerded out in a few other areas that can be very helpful, but it is kind of understanding that modern consumer. So I think about the time you spent in healthcare, you really started to understand what makes them tick and how the industry over there

Cared about client experience and how do you improve it, not just because it's the right thing to do for that relationship, but also because it's good business sense. And that, Jeff, to give you my sort of year into the podcast, as I went down this path of the American Bar Association Model Rules of Professional Conduct and the different state bars that follow those mandates, really came to the conclusion that, yeah, if it's confidentiality, if it's competency, if it's financially related, you can get disbarred for sort of effing things up. But if you have bad communications, you kind of get a slap on the wrist and nobody gets disbarred over that. So every guest I had, especially in the legal space, especially the lawyers, good business sense, good common sense. And those folks I think have figured it out in our industry, but I think we have a lot to learn from every other industry out there that studies this and ultimately puts this science to bear.

So that's where I wanted to talk a little bit about what you learned on the healthcare side. Hey, maybe just talk about how do we study that? Humans are very squishy ideas like my sentiment and my emotion. How do you turn that into data science? That's got to be the hardest part of this equation, no?

Yeah, it can be. And this is a great segue. I was kind of thinking about how I was going to talk about healthcare on your podcast. And I need to start with, it's very important to me professionally, client experience or patient experience, but it's really important to me on a personal level. And I was going to share this story with you when I was at this university hospital about eight years ago. I was in the cardiovascular medicine service line and my mother was coming in for a ... She had a heart attack years ago and her mitral valve needed to be repaired or replaced. So I brought her to my excellent facility and I was in the service line. So we went through all this pre-op visits and be honest with you, Paul, the pre-op visits were not super touchy, feely, really great for me.

And I was doing patient experience as a side hustle at that point. I kind of felt like we were treated like a number or MRN number or we were just in the machine. We were in a clinical machine going through the things, pulling the levers to go get surgery. So they didn't feel great and I was kind of making mental notes of that. So we fast forward to the surgery, I knew the surgeon personally and it wasn't going great. And we kind of knew the nurse navigator would come up and give us information and I knew it wasn't going great. When I saw that surgeon, my mom finally got to CICU and he was in there and he was just like, "I could tell something was wrong." You just have that gut feeling. And so that's when I started feeling kind of humanity come into the experience where the nursing staff, even the surgeon, I could tell they were connecting to us on a different level.

So what was before more of a detached vibe, now it was more feeling of like humanity and concern and it felt good. And throughout the whole week, she was there for a week. All the medical things were happening, consults, the tests, all that was happening. And I barely remember that, Paul. But what I do remember is the surgeon looking me in the eyes and telling me, I'll review this quote, he goes, "I'm going to treat your mom like she's my mom." And at that moment, I knew that he was really caring about my family. My mother was sedated her whole experience. She didn't know what was going on. This was more like a family experience at the moment. So then I get a phone call on Saturday morning and he says, "Your mother's had several strokes. We're at that point now where we have to do comfort measures." And I knew what that meant.

And my brother was in town from Austin, my dad was there. So we were able to go meet with my mom as she passed away. So it was an intended death and it was one of the most fulfilling emotional experiences I've ever had in my life. And my point is that the outcome could be the total worst possible outcome, but your experience could be amazing. Does that make sense?

Well, that's impactful story. First, Jeff, I appreciate you sharing that. I mean, and absolutely it's the fact that you came away from that outcome, feeling like it was that fulfilling is amazing.

And I remember going back to those pre-op visits and the PA that was doing the informed consent, which as you know, the informed consent is like telling you all the risk of the surgery. And it bothered me because he was like, "We just got to go through this. He's done hundreds of

These."

And yeah, it's 1.5% mortality rate, don't worry about that. That was kind of the vibe I was getting and nobody made mistakes. My mom just didn't survive. And I look back at that and go, that's a missed opportunity to connect with somebody when you're talking about something so serious. And when you're that 1.5%, you're the 100% not coming

Back.

So I like sharing that story with people because it kind of gave me that aha moment of experience is not about perfection, it's about present. And so as things go sideways, if someone shows up for you, it's going to be okay. And that's kind of what I felt in that moment. And I kind of translate that into this legal service line now. And one thing, and I'll stop here. One thing that we share with healthcare and the legal service share is that our clients are dependent on us, we're the experts and these clients are vulnerable, they're hurting, they're in pain, they're scared, and they're dependent on us, period. And all they need, clarity, empathy, and the need to feel seen.

And

If you hit on those, it's going to be okay.

Yeah. Cared for. I mean, it is a human to human relationship at the end of the day. And I think we'll talk about that before we close. I always like to talk about things in the intelligence era and where that's impacting that human connection. So again, amazing story. And the thing I've been beating a drum on is I haven't trademarked it as the Maya Angelou idea, but she has this great quote, which was, "People will forget what you did, what you said, and only remember how you made them feel." And I think that's the, again, easy to say and a little bit of a tagline, but how do you operationalize that, especially at a larger firm? If you solo attorney out there and you've got one paralegal and you're a really tight group servicing a small number of ... There's a lot that you can do potentially to deploy technology so that a group of two could make that happen.

At a larger firm, and at a hospital system, and that's what most of our healthcare is these days, it's not a cardiothoracic surgeon that operates on their own, right? They're probably on the payroll to a large business entity with an MBA at the top, not an MD. We could talk about that in another podcast episode. But yeah, I think the idea of getting all of that staff to buy into this presence that you call, being present, because I think we all do that. If humans aren't distracted, we can all be pretty good one-on-one, but there's so many distractions, especially for those frontline folks. So it sounds like that was, if I replay it correctly, that was kind of your inspiration to get into how do you help an organization all be present and all be able to be tied to that feeling, that human side of it?

Is that a fair jump? Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. After that, I got out of cardiovascular and went into the Office of Patient Experience, and that's where I started doing all the data deep diving that I've been doing here at DM. It's usually one small thing that causes something. It's easy to get overwhelmed with the data and like, "Oh my gosh, what are we doing?" And you usually have to drill down. My favorite story is at the university was it was one day of the week that was causing the problem for a cardiologist. And one quick fix on that changed the whole thing. So when you have O data that can be deciphered and drilled down on, and then you match it up to the experience data, it's changing-

Yeah. When you say O data, give us some of those folks out there that aren't familiar. What do you mean by O data?

Revenue data, productivity, age, gender. My two favorite cohorts are age and gender and you learn so much from them. And then day of the week, we had diagnosis code in DM, we were looking at settlement amounts, where they're living here at Kansas City, what type of job they have, all payer mix, all that stuff. You can look at all that.

And is there anyone, as you think about folks out there that are maybe getting started in operational data and measuring, other than demographics, what other data has been key to you in sort of managing the emotion? I know we've talked about CSAT, customer or client satisfaction. Of course, at Case Status, we always talk about NPS, but are there any other metrics that are key to what you did in healthcare to sort of monitor people as they go through a journey and see how they're ebbing and flowing?

The biggest thing is going to be, we used to call it comment or I call it sentiment or our MPS and Case Status will let clients leave a comment. I love reading comments. I love reading dissatisfaction comments because those are the ones you learn from. I love hearing that attorney Jeff is great. That's cool. I want to learn what he's not so great at so we can be better. So the comments and then what now with artificial intelligence, what they can do with those unstructured comments and make it into really actionable information. Whereas before we would just do it manually, now it's just a click. I would say your sentiment, your comments are really where the goal is.

I think you're spot on the language models that everybody likes to say AI, but ultimately the AI era we're in is language and a little bit of thinking on that language. So it reads quickly. But to your point, I've gone through tons of surveys in my career and you can always get little nuggets, but it's the connecting the bigger, broad dots. And I think that's where these models come into play. So maybe part of the message out there is we want to encourage those comments, right? Not necessarily wait for them on a public domain of Google. We don't want to do operational excellence in a public display of affection or disaffection. We want to first do it privately. And then when we know things are solid, that's when we say, yes, go on the KISS cam. Let's let everybody watch.

Yeah. We traditionally try to ask, "Why'd you give us this score and then what would make this experience better?" And people like to answer that question. The second one like, "Ooh." You get some goofy ones like, "Have free donuts or stuff like that. " But then you get really good ones on better parking or wayfinding. I couldn't find the place. Or you get the ones like, "My nurse was rude." And then if they give a specific name, then you can kind of investigate that. I mean, that's not great that you have that comment, but at least someone's doing it. And then what's important, Paul, is that you're acknowledging that you've got the message from them and let them be close the loop.

So let's talk about the modern consumer on that. I think there's some things that never change on the human relationship side and things that are constantly changing because we interface a lot of times other than in person. I think about healthcare, there's a lot of face-to-face moments in that. I don't know if that translates into the legal space as you experienced it, but certainly as we think about legal consumers as just being consumers broadly, they are using technology more and more every day. And again, healthcare, the same thing. Telemedicine has taken off, right? So folks are getting nurse practitioner consultations over a video call. So in some ways, healthcare is probably catching up with us on the legal side in that regard, but where does technology play a headwind versus a tailwind in your observation? How has that modern consumer with technology changed while they stayed the same with the sort of needing that presence, needing that human connection?

Has that been a challenge over the years in your career?

That's a challenge. Yeah, that's a challenge. I rolled out the patient portal at this university and it took forever for people to adopt it, to be honest with you. And here at DM, we have Case Status, which I believe about 84% of our clients use it. And then you have clients that have downloaded it, but they don't use it. It's always going to be a challenge for people to adopt, but it's a way how they attach to us and we have to really leverage that and really enhance that somehow because I feel that case test is this, I think I talked about this at the summit, it's this trust engine for us. It's like this signal amplifier. It's like a machine. And if you use it appropriately, it can be a huge support for you as an attorney. So where I'm going with that is attorneys are not taught how to be real super emotional connected to their client.

We want them to be legal experts and use really good judgment, the objective, keep me on the track to get the best outcome I can get. But I think in this experienced economy, as we talked about, how we want to feel really good about ourselves and our experience, we expect them to be super emotional, connected with us. And that's very difficult when you have 150 cases. So my point of bringing this up is I think a Case Status as an engine allows attorneys to have this concern or this connection to the client, even though they're still

Detached.

Does that make sense? Yeah. They have this detachment because they have to have, because they'll become burned out. They can't connect to all these clients, but the Case Status allows us to kind of almost embed some empathy in there on the download and we're relating to them or giving status updates, we're telling them what we need. It's like twenty four seven communication. And like I talked about, Paul, it's like creates these habit loops for our team. And when they have that queue and that routine and they get that reward, whether it's through NPS or then it goes to a Google review and the attorney gets a great review online, they're like, "Oh my gosh, what did I do? Oh yeah, I did this, this and this and use maybe an automated message or did something." It's how you use the tool. And it's critical because when you have the

Massive

Amount of cases we do, you've got to have the support engine with you and Case Status does that for us.

Yeah. No, it's an interesting topic because at the end, I think I can just look at Case Status' history. I've only been here about three and a half years at the time of this recording, but arguably our first phase had nothing to do with intelligence. It was just simply getting people to adopt that portal. And again, I think it was a little easier for the practice areas that we work with, Jeff, because a lot of those journeys are linear. I think healthcare almost has a tougher time because think about your healthcare, right? It's kind of back and forth and you're trying to figure out what the path is because you're trying to figure out what the underlying issue is to your symptoms. And so non-linearity for adopting portals, I think. But with an injury case, that's where I think it's like an assembly line, maybe not for the client, it's the first time they've experienced it, but for the law firm, they know the best practices for it to follow and you can bring them along.

Obviously, empowerment, self-service, education, having that access to information and just not being in a black hole, that was step number one, but that's arguably not more human. Our first phase wasn't about ... What it did was it freed up the humans to welcome that phone call coming in, right? And I think that was the human side. It wasn't that the app is more human, it was that it opened up for a more welcoming present, to your point. So now what I hear you, we're kind of evolving into more understanding of that relationship. The way I think about it is if an attorney that touches it less than a case manager knows all of the things that the case manager maybe talked about in the most recent back and forth and can immediately have that knowledge at their fingertips at the next conversation and be empathetic to it, it will almost exude that same emotion that you got from the surgeon about like, "I'm going to treat your mom like my mom," even though it's being helpful because it's the hive mind, as I like to say.

The other staff are getting that knowledge over to them, ASAP, and that makes all staff better. So I don't know if I'm making a stretch there, but those are some key elements to sort of better relationships and overall better client experience to your career level.

Yeah. You have to really look at this as like, I have attorneys that have 200 cases. How on earth are they going to be able to connect to each client unless they have a machine like Case Status to help them with that process and it makes our attorneys more successful. And then for me, it makes them more, not about outcomes and settlements and all that. It's about fewer interruptions from my attorneys, better client trust, lower burnout vibe, more family time at home maybe. I don't know, stronger reviews and referrals, more brain space for all the innovation and strategy and all the cool things that make them tick. That's what the platform does for our attorneys. If they use it to its maximum capabilities, now you throw in the AI engine and all the stuff we're doing now, then it feels more human and more connected, more, I would say empathy is embedded in the moment.

So it's just going to be better.

Well, that is, and again, we hit on this topic in a lot of discussions of AI automation versus AI augmentation. And I think we're going to figure out as an industry when and where those play in. But where we've seen a lot of successes is arming law firm staff, regardless of what their pay grade is or what their role is with the tools that make them more present, to your point, as opposed to totally front ending, "Hey, this is the most..." Imagine if you were in your surgery example and they said, "Talk to the bot." The bot's going to have all the

Answers

For you, Jeff. So again, I'm not going to dismiss that a voice bot or a chatbot might have benefits for certain things, but to say that it could replace the human to human relationship, I mean, I'm not there. If I have my world turned upside down healthcare or legal, the last thing I want to do is get answers from Claude, right? I don't know where you guys are on that. Do you talk about that much from a client experience standpoint, the augmentation of staff versus the automation? Yeah.

We actually do. We're talking about how do you do intake maybe with help of AI? Those are always things that AI can grade our intake calls, it's all there. And I look back at my healthcare days, this was not there when I was there. So I can imagine what they're going through too with all this. I think with Case Status, and I go back to, there's really two journeys, Paul, I think. I think there's the technical and legal journey that the attorneys pulling the levers and pushing the buttons and calling the adjusters. That's the legal journey. Then there's the emotional journey that client's going through and that's where sometimes where we miss the mark because we're not trained to be empathetic and to be emotionally connected. So how do you do that? And well, maybe you can have Case Status queue you up like, "Hey, John Doe is not doing great and it currently does this.

Sentiment is low, you might want to reach out or you might want ... " And I want to do that through treatment too. During their treatment journey, maybe they had an injection and they're not doing great. They're in pain. "Hey, reach out to John Doe. He's having pain right now. "So that's how I look at platform and AI and how can this assist our staff to be operationalized, empathy in a way that they're not used to because it's insane to think that they could do this

On their own. Yeah. No, these tools, I wish I had them in my own domestic relationships. They would help me out immensely to connect the dots and read the tea leaves, which oftentimes I miss those cues. It's ever present in the human relationship. Well, Jeff, I appreciate it. I think we'll be crossing your path hopefully in the coming months. I know we've got a few different places where we will connect, not the least of which is the CX Summit in the fall. Hopefully we will be able to have you as another speaker and go nerd out on some of the operational data and how it affects. And again, I say that with nothing but mad respect on what it is that you do. But yeah, any closing remarks you have for the audience out there as they go down this path in 2026 to try to bring-

Yeah, I was going to revisit, I talked about closing the loop earlier with your clients on feedback. And so I'm going to go back to my mother's deal and my brother who's a professional of journalism and he's a journalist and he's a writer. He wrote, after the experience we had, he wrote this nice two-page letter to the chair of the Department of Surgery, the CEO, my CXO, and maybe the president of the university. I hand delivered these letters. It was important to me to express my

Gratitude

To the team and called out some people like how amazing they were. And out of those five letters, Paul, I got one response. Yeah, it was the chair of Department of Surgery and he was very grateful and had a nice thing to say, but I've never forgotten that. And I was an employee of that hospital and it didn't really set well. And so it's kind of been this thing with me since then, like if someone's going to get feedback, whether it's negative or positive, please respond and close that loop with them because they want to be acknowledged. I wanted to be acknowledged that those people got recognized and I wasn't, and it just didn't feel great. So my closing argument is respond and close the loop and take care of your people.

No, I love it. Thank you for sharing, being vulnerable on that story. Again, I wish it had a different outcome.

Me too.

I know that you take the very high road in how you look at it. And I'm grateful from a macro standpoint that you have jumped into the areas that you have. I think you probably have helped out a lot of folks to not have to go through some of those same experiences when life gets turned upside down. And so I think you can rest good and think of your mom in a high regard with that.

Thank you. Appreciate that. Yeah.

Appreciate the time, Jeff. We'll look for you and we'll have some more information about how folks can get in touch with you and/or your law firm.

Love to talk about it.

So thank you for listening to another episode of Ethical-ish. We hope that you enjoyed this program and we'll look forward to some of our other episodes. If you like what you hear, you can always subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We are there and just subscribe and we will make sure to show up as episodes roll out. So until then, thanks again, Jeff, and thank you for listening to Ethical-ish. We'll see you next time.

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