What if the billable hour isn’t broken… but obsolete?

Kimberly Bennett didn’t just walk away from hourly billing—she built something better. A flat-fee law firm. A legal tech company. And a third business… just for fun.

She nearly burned out doing it all.

So how did she turn that chaos into clarity—and a platform that might just change how legal services are delivered forever?

This one’s not about theory. It’s about what actually works.

Kimberly Bennett: three actually

Jonathan Hawkins: compliment each other, but they're very different. You know, software company's very different than a law

Kimberly Bennett: Yes.

Jonathan Hawkins: How

Kimberly Bennett: it was

Jonathan Hawkins: you?

Kimberly Bennett: It's actually three.

Jonathan Hawkins: Oh three.

Kimberly Bennett: Yeah,

Jonathan Hawkins: What was third? That still going or?

Kimberly Bennett: That one is not a scaled business. It's a passion project. It's just its own business. So I have a community for legal professionals that like, do things differently. So it's a small community for legal professionals. But that was like my small,

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, running one business is enough. How do you do two or three? How do you manage? I mean, how did you do that? And I'm, seriously curious.

Kimberly Bennett: No, almost burning out. I mean, if we're being honest, like it was too much. I am a high achiever if my strengths, like one of my top fives is like high achiever, learner belief input strategic, I might have forgotten one whatever, but I can push through. That is not a healthy way of operating.

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

Let's dive in.

But she is one of the pioneers of subscription based billing for legal services. So, which is a topic that I personally am very, very interested in. So I am excited to talk to Kimberly today about that and some other things, which she's up to today, which is like I sort of mentioned, is maybe not all law.

So, Kimberly, welcome to the show. Why don't you briefly introduce yourself and we'll dive in.

Kimberly Bennett: Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. So yeah, Kimberly Bennett, CEO and co-founder now of fidu. It is the complete client experience platform to help legal teams sell, deliver and scale subscription and flat fee legal services. So, for many years I was a practicing attorney We're about 18 still licensed to practice but and along the way I learned a lot.

So my entire career has basically been this model and so it's exciting to be shifting to help other legal professionals do the exact same thing.

Jonathan Hawkins: Well, there's a lot that I want to talk about today, so fidu for sure, but I think, you know, we have to sort of talk, take through the journey to get where you are today, because that's pretty much where it led you to fidu I think. But, so you were virtual before everybody had to be, so you were ready back in

Kimberly Bennett: I was ready. That's right.

Kimberly Bennett: Yeah. So I was a fun fact the JD PhD student, I went to Villanova Law At the time we had a dual degree and clinical psychology and law school. So I was in law school for a very long time, and I actually got out a year early because it was getting on to be too long. But I came out in oh seven Market crashed oh eight.

But when I came out, because I was in that dual degree, getting a law firm job was really hard and if not impossible. And so I ended up going to a company. And so I worked for a company for many years, well, several years, not many. I shouldn't say that. For the first couple of years of my practicing and, which I think was a blessing because it allowed me to see just a different way of practicing.

So I've worked in other companies in between, but I've always had that practice to build and scale and just learned a lot along the way. What I didn't like. And that led me to getting to a subscription law firm. So,

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, I talked to a lot of people and in my own experience, a lot of times where you end up is eliminating the things you don't like and then you end up in a place that you're just like, okay, this isn't that bad.

But, you know, working in corporate America, you got to bypass the billable hours.

Kimberly Bennett: a hundred percent. So I think that, you know, if so. My main claim to fame is how much I hate the billable hour, probably outside of subscription legal services. And so I've talked about that for many years and I, yeah, I didn't come out of law school and go into my legal career billing by the hour at all.

And then for me, I was not either good at tracking time, I wasn't good at communicating how much it was gonna cost because I don't think I really thought that far through. I was still a young attorney, so you're right. It definitely built a practice that was eliminating the things I hated to focus on the things that I liked and how I best showed up.

Jonathan Hawkins: And so when, when you did eventually, I guess start your firm and you know, how long did it take you with this experimentation to say, all right, we're gonna do subscription and then, you know, 'cause I'm interested in it, I've tested it. We'll get into some of the questions I have on that, but others maybe have tested it. But they're scared to jump in. So how did you make the switch? Did you just burn the boats and go all in or was it sort of a gradual thing?

I stopped tracking 'cause I didn't think that was good for my mental health or for the maintenance of my license. But that was the kind of straw. And it wasn't that long. So I went out probably within a year of stewing hourly, like, oh, this isn't it. 'cause I, I did what people said, get a retainer.

It wasn't enough. I know that now, but get a retainer bill against a retainer, build a client, okay. Did all those good things and then the client stopped paying and that didn't work. So I literally ripped the bandaid off of hourly completely. I was like, didn't matter. Nope. I'm just gonna give you a price.

I wanted to workshop with them and it, I was trying to wrap my brain around what that looked like. And I think what I thought back to was, okay, when I worked in a company, I just got paid. So I literally pitched a client and I was, the story is I pitched a client $500 a month. Like, hey, it was everything.

It was a stupid price. I know that now, of course, for many reasons. But it was a great price because it led me to where I am today. And I just said, Hey, what if it looked like for $500? I just did these things. They kind of wanted me to show up as a lawyer in this particular capacity. And I was like, sure, okay, lemme do it.

And that led me to saying, oh, well, if. if they could just pay me and I can do things, I can build around that. And I just looked at what other tech tools were doing. What other industries were doing. And I thought, well, why can't I do the same thing? And that's kind of where it started.

Kimberly Bennett: Yes. The unintentional.

Jonathan Hawkins: The other thing is you know, you just gotta start somewhere. You just gotta try it. And then, you know, you're probably gonna you know, your experiment's probably gonna fail, but you learn from it and then you can slowly sort of iterate from there.

So you mentioned you were doing some family law work, so I guess also you probably pivoted away from that. So, you know, part of my thoughts or my the analysis or whatever on subscription is, you know, you can't do everything.

So you gotta sort of figure out what your lanes are first, 'cause you know, if I'm gonna do a subscription for family law and a subscription for, you know, real estate and a subscription for this, you know, there's no way I'm gonna be able to figure it all out. So how did you decide, all right, this is what my lane's gonna be. How did you figure that out first?

What was I willing to commit and invest time into? It wasn't like it was, I took a million, you know, I, I didn't take a million years to make make the decision. I just decided what made the most sense at that time and just moved forward with it. And that's kind of how I started because I had a little bit, I had training in it anyway.

I was taking CLEs and workshops and I was already an entrepreneur anyway, so it was, my life was around business enough. So that's how it started. And I do agree when you are thinking about a subscription while they work in many practice areas, there's probably very few that it doesn't work in.

When you're starting out, if you do all the things, it's just overwhelming. It's just too much. It's just a lot of decision fatigue at the front end when you really just wanna get it out and test it. And so I think the best thing for me was that I just pitched the client with, there wasn't any thought to it other than, you pay me $500 a month and let's see what happens.

Jonathan Hawkins: So that, so I've heard of some folks out there that are doing quote subscriptions but it's sort of like you'll get up to five hours of legal work a month and this, that And the other. And in my view, I mean, I guess it, it can work, but in my view, it's sort of, you're still tracking your hours and how do you, is there a rollover?

How do you figure it out? And then do they get mad if they didn't use all of it? So what's your view on sort of how to design the subscription?

Kimberly Bennett: Yeah. So first I wanna like, 'cause I I mean, I've been told sometimes, Kim, you're a little too strong on it, so I'll say this, I think it's great that you're on the journey. If you're doing that, you're on the journey, you're on the path. That is not a subscription though. It's repackaged hourly, but you're on the journey.

Because you're really trying to say, I'm trying to help you get, go along a journey. And it's might, you know, and it could take 10 to 20 months, I don't know, right? Like, things could happen, but we understand what you're looking to achieve. And these are the things we do month after month with some add-ons as needed to help you achieve that thing.

That's really what a subscription is about. So it's a set of services or products for a particular customer or a client for a defined interval, for a recurring flat fee. So if you do a flat fee today, you could do a subscription, but it's meant to be more like a flat fee month after month, quarter after quarter, right?

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. So another question about design of the subscription. So I imagine there's a number of ways you can go at it. So, you know, one would be, this is my service, you take it or leave it. And you just offer that to everybody. Another might be, well, I've got these three levels. You can pick one of them. Another approach might be. It depends on what this individual client wants and we can design it for that individual client. I guess first question is sort of what approach did you sort of settle in your firm and as you consult with and teach other lawyers how to do it, what advice do you have on those different types of methods?

You're like, every client that comes in, I'm gonna make it very bespoke. But if you're gonna make up bespoke at the core, you should still have standards and systems and processes, because if you don't, bespoke becomes unwieldy. And how do you keep it within a defined you know, a delivery parameters.

But way you design to meet the best type of subscription is you understand who your client is and then you understand what the client's goals are, and then you're designed to help the client achieve that goal. The goal could be adopting a child, getting the goal could be having a happy life post, post divorce. The goal is not divorce, the goal is Happy Life post divorce. Right. The goal could be getting my brand on shelves. It's not getting the trademark. Like who cares? They want their brand on shelves, right? It could be if you're an immigration, right. Being able to, you know, achieve whatever, you know, I know the, we're in this world right now, but achieve the, you know, achieve a certain, certain, economic freedom for your family by bringing them to United States.

And that's what I think would be the best. So I would, I always recommend when you're first starting out one subscription that you launch at least, that you're pitching and designing specifically for a client. 'cause if you feel like you're, it's hard to sell, it's probably 'cause you haven't designed it for the particular client, you're just designing it for anyone to try to pick up a subscription.

Jonathan Hawkins: So, yeah, I wanna talk about selling it here in a second, but interested in that. 'cause I I've well, I'll talk about myself in a minute, but so let's talk about like scope.

Kimberly Bennett: Yeah. So I'll do a shameless plug in that we're doing a free flat fee series this entire summer that we'd go through a lot of these topics. So, definitely check it out. Maybe we'll drop it. uh, It's at if you do fidulegal.com/demo, you'll get directed to it. But you need to have defined what's included and what's not.

I think the way you avoid scope creep is to communicate what is included and what's not at that outset and ongoing. You really have to be very clear with the client and have a an out lever, right? So you need to, one of the things like I use in language is I tell clients I like to use the language of projects.

That's what we talk about at DU with our customers. You know, are you gonna activate a new project? When I'm coaching someone, we talk about using this language, but like, what's the language you use in your practice that helps a client know they need to pay more? That's essentially what you're saying. And you say, these are the things that are included.

That feels right. And have that and talk about that. Identify what examples look like, and then consistently say it right? Not in a way to hound the client, but because people will forget if they're coming to you. In high anxiety, even if it's good anxiety or really negative anxiety, like they're coming to you a, at a place where like things are going racing.

And so when you start settling into the work, they're gonna forget everything you said. So it's on you to continue to repeat it. But that means in your agreements it should say what's included and what's not. That means you wouldn't have a timeline of like, how long do you expect it to take? And when it goes outside of that, what happens.

Like I think I just am ultra transparent and that's my goal and that's what I recommend to be ultra transparent with your cl with your clients. And when you don't bill by the hour you can you should. You should be able to say that because you know, you have designed what you need to do to get to the end goal.

And I think that's when it comes back to just like, how do you avoid scope creep? You have processes, you have systems, you have standards, you have templates. And then you understand what it takes to get something to, to the end point. And if you're going off of track, you have to ask yourself, is it you or is it the client?

If it's you, you eat that because that's your fault. If it's the client, then you should have the communication strategies ready to employ as needed and not at the last minute. But you can start seeing about midway that you're going off, off track, then you start having those conversations as soon as you start seeing it.

Kimberly Bennett: yep. And what I say too is if you're, that I'm a giver person, so I. I, I do that, but I designed for that, right? So I designed to be a giver. So if, you know, that's how you show up with your clients and they're gonna need one or two to three extra things, and you're just gonna do that, well, your pricing should reflect that.

And then you do it without worrying, right? But then you have your out, so like you're willing to do those extra things. If the client didn't need it, it could be a win for you. Or you can do, you can bonus the client with something. So I think a lot of this is being intentional about how you designed, design any of your flat fees and or subscriptions to recognize how you and your team, if you're solo, how you show up, you and your team, how you and your team show up.

Right? Or what the client philosophy is of the business designed for it. 'cause if it, if you have no buffer to be a giver in your pricing, you're always gonna have, you're always gonna be underpriced because you're always gonna give anyway.

Kimberly Bennett: Well, you said the, you said the biggest thing, which is like the benefit versus feature. A lot of people sell like the document review. No one cares the trademark application. No one cares the filing a court document. Again, no one cares. That's like not what they're there. They understand their, that is a means to the goal, but they wanna hear about the goal and how you're helping them emotionally.

And it shows up in their business model. It shows up how they talk about it. It shows up their confidence and commitment to it. So if a client says, well, I would rather buy bill by the hour. Okay, fine. Well then why would they select the thing that you've designed better if you have that out path for them?

Right? So I think if you want to do this, and probably what helped me in the beginning to sell FLA visas and subscriptions, there was no other alternative there. There, there was nothing else. So then I am not the right. Right fit for you. And that is something we have to be comfortable with, right? When we're selling, being comfortable with, not every client is the right client for you, but if you wanna design a business in a certain way, you wanna lead with certain types of certain levels of profitability, you wanna have access to certain things and you design for it in a particular way to allow for you to show up for your clients.

And then once clients start playing flat fee, you will get comfortable then. Okay, let me think about all those extra questions you just asked me that were outta scope time to put you in a script subscription. So you could just ask me as you need to in my designed package way. So if you're on the path and you wanna do it.

Rip off the bandaid, go to flat fee, and then move to subscription. And then how do you sell it? It's really thinking about the benefits. It's talking about making sure you're selling the thing that makes sense for where they are today and then selling the path of where they need to go. So a lot of people only focus on the immediate now, a subscription is not only about the immediate, now it's also about the future.

And so if you design your subscription in a way that is priced at a hundred dollars or 10, $20,000, they all work. You can provide this ongoing supportive advice at whichever, how you deliver that advice. You know, a webinar, one-to-one call via message, whatever. That's kind of where the pricing changes, but that's what you wanna talk to.

I'm there to support you. I'm there to help you ideate. We're we? Before you make the decision, give us a call. So you wanna talk about helping the client move through their big process and then make sure you're committed and make sure like, your funnel makes sense. A lot of, A lot of law, law firms funnels don't make sense, right?

You're like, you sell everything outside of the subscription. Of course, they're never gonna select the subscription. So I, that's a lot of like little tidbits in there. Hopefully

Kimberly Bennett: got? Yes. I think if you go, if you want hourly to subscription, you have to commit to flat fees. 'cause a subscription is a flat fee on steroids. Right. So that's why I'm saying you don't have to call it subscription yet, but you have to rip off the bat I do what I find at any of my consulting clients, so in fiu clearly we have, I have a platform that helps lawyers do this.

We, we also actually help you, you can answer questions and we build an entire subscription for you and platform or flat fee. But out, when I'm working with my private clients and I'm coaching consulting with them, they, what I find is those that still do hourly, some of their clients backdoor to hourly and they don't wanna do hourly, but they find themselves still doing it because that's how that client will pay them.

meet their needs without you having to tie it to time, too. So rip that bandaid off of hourly y'all. Stop billing money the

Jonathan Hawkins: just do it. Okay. So, I do wanna move to fidu but before we do that another, you know, this is more of a, a thing in the software SaaS world, and that's the concept of churn. And so, which I'm sure you know well. And so for those out there that don't know it, churn is basically the folks that you lose every month.

And so, you know, people say in the subscription, if they're not using it, then they don't think there's value, and then they're gonna say, I'm gonna quit. So part of keeping people from churning off your subscription is you gotta constantly get them to use it and see the value. So from a lawyer's perspective, how do you continually deliver that value to the client so they see it and then you don't have the churn or you lower your churn.

That doesn't look like you have to be on calls all the time. That doesn't look like you can provide monthly webinars that are prerecorded that help the client answer particular questions top of mind things. You can provide, you know, briefs of every month. I wouldn't call it a brief, but like an, I'm gonna call it a brief for our purposes, but like an overview of what's happening.

You can provide, You can send ongoing messages. The idea of this is you want ongoing check-ins. This is, if you're moving to subscriptions, you're moving to a relationship driven model, which means you you wanna have a relationship with your clients.

So my clients, when I was, particularly when I was practicing the same ones that's still there, but I say to them, Hey, if you are not active for so many months and we'll, and I can't get you, that might mean we're gonna cancel on our end.

And so really build in ways you can stay top of mind. You can check in. That's messages, that's content. That's one of, you know, one to many kind of envi, delivery methodologies that you could use. Webinars, workshops, live events in person. But if you are designing it to the journey of the client, there are gonna be things that they need to learn or, or do and build that into the subscription.

So what do you want them to do over the first year? Over the first year? You want them to do these five things? No client is okay. A client that's in super crisis is gonna do the five things in that moment because feel like they have to, but the clients that are feel that wanna be proactive are gonna spend times on other things.

Here's what we need to do based off of what you said, and just think through what will be supportive and helpful for your clients. So that's how you wanna think about providing ongoing value, but it's tied to what the client's goal is, right? Think about what they're looking to achieve, break it down into smaller nuggets and figure out different ways to deliver that to them that will, that support different learning and delivery methods.

Kimberly Bennett: Yeah, I cobbled together a bunch of stuff. I used. legal specific, non-legal specific. So I always had a practice management tool. So for my day winter practice, I had a practice management tool because I, when I worked in corporate, I traveled for work, I did traditional labor, so I worked in unionized workforces.

So I traveled a lot around the country and that meant I wasn't always in one place, so I needed to be able to access files. So I was able to do my old job that I wanna do the same thing in my own firm. And the thing that helped me do it was practice management. So I always had practice management, and then it was like, what else do I need?

Project management, CRM. And I used the portal of my practice management tool. So I used Clio I used Clio's, portal. And then that allowed me to send a message to a client, but it didn't allow me to do anything else. So everything else was more like, you know, me sending a message, me, Hey, schedule a call, like Calendly came into play.

You have Confido now. Clio Payments does it. So we have a lot more options today. But back then I cobbled together and I just figured it out and I just was like, you basically, it was basically only for the client. You just had a, you just connected me with a portal and that was it. And then I managed everything else on my own.

And so the goal, what I did now was trying to make some of that management be easier. And actually, the part that you said ongoing value without working ongoing hours, how do you realize that, right? At scale? So

Jonathan Hawkins: And so

Kimberly Bennett: the hard part early was to scale, I should say. You know, like it's harder to scale when you have to cobble everything.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. Yeah. And so did that lead to Fidu. So maybe you can explain what Fidu is and how that came about and how you got involved.

Sorry to all the tech people. I gave all my feedback too, but now that I'm on this side, give me all your feedback. But so, you know, we met before and then I was doing this virtual event and he was on, we were all kind of on this round table discussing things and he sent me an email and he was like, this is not a sales pitch.

And, And it was good. And it was like, okay, it's not per, we aren't, you know, tip and toe tippy toeing around each other. We're being honest we're communicating. And so from there we, we announced and we launched what is today's version of fidu? And that's how it kind of came to be.

But then. How it came to be on the building of fidu side is that I, I ran it for all these years and then I coached and trained it for another two, two and a half years before I, I launched fidu. I was coaching and consulting on it because people kept on tagging me and I was doing it all for free.

Jonathan Hawkins: And so your firm was basically like R and D department. You're like,

Kimberly Bennett: Yes. And so the reason as of so what, when we were talking earlier July 1st, I put my firm on hiatus and I stopped taking new clients and before that it was the R and D. It kept on being the R and D space for fidu. So it's not that I guess it, it's fully not. 'cause I still have clients, subscription clients tag.

See that? That's how that works. It's amazing. They didn't wanna go even though I told them, but they gave, I gave them the option and I raised prices. So there you go. But yeah, so I where was I going with that? Yes I it, it provided the R and D for the last couple of years and then it still will do that.

Real quick. Thanks for listening. If you're getting any value out of this podcast, please take two seconds to hit the subscribe button and leave a five star review. It would really mean a lot to me. Now back to the show.

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. So a couple questions like logistically, so running, you are basically running or operating two businesses at the same time. And two very different businesses.

Kimberly Bennett: Three actually.

Jonathan Hawkins: compliment each other, but they're very different. You know, software company's very different than a law

Kimberly Bennett: Yes.

Jonathan Hawkins: How,

How

Kimberly Bennett: it was

Jonathan Hawkins: you?

Kimberly Bennett: It's actually three.

Jonathan Hawkins: Oh three.

Kimberly Bennett: Yeah, What's the,

Jonathan Hawkins: What was third? That still going or?

Kimberly Bennett: That one is not a scaled business. It's a passion project. It's just its own business. So I have a community for legal professionals that like, do things differently. So it's a small community for legal professionals. But that was like my small,

Kimberly Bennett: No, almost burning out. I mean, if we're being honest, like it was too much. I, am a high achiever if my strengths, like one of my top fives is like high achiever, learner belief input strategic, I might have forgotten one, whatever, but I can push through. That is not a healthy way of operating. But I can, and I think in the beginning I don't identify as myself as a lawyer. Like I need to hold that title. What I really loved, and I came to this conclusion too, like as I was working through kind of wrapping up the firm, that I love the business side, I love the ops, I love the, like watching my like operational idea come to fruition.

And I think that was me talking to myself because it was just too much, right? And then for the last four years, you know, running two, running three businesses has been a lot, but I learned a lot along the way. I would not recommend somebody do that um, at all. But it, but at least it for me, the firm and fidu fed each other and that helped, right?

I could test things. It was like, one of the things that was helpful because when we were building, when we are building fidu and especially the earlier stages of us, us building fidu, I'm like, I wanted to do this thing. This is what actually you need on the other side. And so my clients knew I was building it and they, my clients gave me feedback as a client.

So it was really nice because like, it was like a full ecosystem where we, I had a team at the time. My team members would give feedback, then my clients would give feedback. And so, you know, I would probably do fidu and firm again. I wouldn't do all three though.

Kimberly Bennett: Yeah, and I'll say this from the beginning. I never operated my business like a firm. I always operated it as best as I could, like a business. And so there were things that translated, but just. Like, like I think what I think I would love to see more law firms do is really work on having a proper business funnel, right?

So inside of the SaaS space. I mean, of course SaaS we service, I mean, software's a service. So we're all doing this kind of subscription model but being creative about what's happening behind the scenes more, more sharing is happening there. But what are some other things that I think. you know, I, my firm operated a lot like it, so, okay.

I'll just say what my firm ha has always had, like I said, some of those text a more interesting tech stack than I think I love, just as a pet peeve of mine, lawyers to stop using intake. It's just like it's sales. I don't know, like, and then use onboarding. Like, let's use the proper terminologies that allow for us to learn from other industries and see what the equivalent is and then see, okay, what are they doing there?

Then you, in, in tech, you have to activate them, right? And get them kind of like beyond the sale. You've, You've sold the promise. They've bought the promise, now they're in the platform. Now you want them to actually use it. And see the value ongoing month after month. This is something we're always conti working on in fidu you know, you work, you win some, you lose some, and then, but you wanna work on this activation piece.

So like in law firm world, that's like your onboarding and then delivery to keep in retention. Because we're so transactional in law we've never thought about retention as much. And so I think thinking about that full life cycle, particularly sales activation, retention referral, we think sales referral, ah, the rest of it happens.

I knew how much my clients generally spent, but using the actual terms of art, like lifetime value, like customer acquisition or client acquisition costs in our world, to help you think, am I running a solid business? So if, I know we don't love to hear numbers, but we're business owners so we have to hear the numbers.

And I don't think you need to be A CPA or accounting expert, but there are some core metrics that you can find to be your north star of your business that will help you. And being in a SaaS business now just elevates that conversation more so like what is the journey of a client and then what are the, what we'll call unit economics, that's what you will hear.

So maybe those things.

Jonathan Hawkins: Oh that's, that's great advice. And the thing I'll say too, you know, look, so I was sort, I was an engineering major undergrad, so math's okay with me. But you know, if you look at their, unless you grew up in a business as a kid, no one graduated college or whatever, knowing how to do business and lawyers almost use it as a crutch. Oh, we, they didn't teach us business, so I'm just gonna be ignorant about business. No. Even all the successful business people we represent. They had to learn it too. So it's you can learn it. So, so yeah, I think the sort of the onboarding the cycle you went through, I think that's huge. I'm hearing more people talk about, you know, client journey, client experience, that's some of that. But and lawyers are notoriously bad at that. I mean, we're just, like you said, it's very transactional.

Kimberly Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Kimberly Bennett: It's meant to be a part of the, a part of the platform. Some of our customers use fidu as a standalone and do everything. But what fidu focuses on today is on the client experience, right? So that client journey conversation that we're having, because in a subscription model, you know, retaining clients is the name of the game, right?

You don't want clients, you don't wanna spend all this money on bringing a client in and then that same client leaves in two months, like you're, or a month, right? You've, it's, that's not what you're looking for. You're looking to have some longevity to that relationship that you can predict and then spend against, right?

So portal the way a knowledge hub some initial document generation. What fidu does that no other platform does is it is the place where clients come into and have access to resources and materials designed and curated by the firm. So the firm decides what the client can see and what they can't see, but it's all based off the firm's standards and their templates and their knowledge, and it's accessible to the client wherever they're at from their phone or from the internet.

It's a mobile device, but that's mobile friendly. I mean, it's a web device, web platform that's mobile friendly. And so what you do is you sign up and you integrate it back with a practice management tool or a project management tool, and it's meant to help the client stay up to date on what's happening, and then actually deliver the ongoing value through a lot of different ways, however you've designed it at scale.

It's just simply here's your document, great go forth and conquer. We really wanna make it valuable for the client so that they come back month after month without you having to do all the things to make them come back. So the platform is built on trying to make your, make the platform as sticky for your client and as easy for you to systematize and deliver your your backend operations.

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay, so, I can create, let's say a resource library, and I'm just

Kimberly Bennett: Mm-hmm.

Jonathan Hawkins: make up some stuff. So I could say, here are some form documents you may want to use. I could also put a library of videos in there that they can access at any time.

Kimberly Bennett: Yep.

Kimberly Bennett: Exactly. So, and yeah, it would, the idea is like each level might have some of the same baseline resources that you can reuse across all levels. So it's not that you have to recreate them all the time. So yeah, you can then, you can sell it if a client, if they only have access to two things, but they can buy something else, they can buy it inside a platform.

So you can do upsells inside a platform. So the client that's paying you a hundred dollars might now wanna pay that a thousand dollars agreement. They can do that from inside of the platform, and then it'll follow your process to collect information or to tell the client to do this thing because there's automations behind it to help you deliver it.

And then the, the times where you need to check in because you've built it to check in that way, like where the human touch needs to be. The human touch comes in and where you don't need it to be, fidu can do it for you or you tell the clients to do things in a timed fashion. So however you would run a process now you would run some of that inside of fidu and some of it you would maintain in the tools that you use today.

Jonathan Hawkins: And so it's, you said it's sort of like a portal too, so you can communicate you can do probably automated communications, but then go in and say, all right, I'm gonna actually do this one communication. And so I, I assume you want to force or encourage the clients to use that to communicate versus, Hey, I'm gonna text you over here or email you over here. Is that.

Kimberly Bennett: Correct our idea today and this is one interface that's not, it won't be the only interface. I think we all know, we all have different interfaces, but we focus on one for now, same for you, so that you're not bringing the client everywhere. So you bring the client into the, for the client's perspective, it's a portal.

They get access to that clear clearly without having you answer the question. They can see it in their, their dashboard. For the legal team, it's all the templates and way that they operate so that you don't have to handhold a client through every step of the way, but you can still provide high value curated.

Legal services that respond to your standards and your, your processes in a streamlined, unscalable way. So yes,

Jonathan Hawkins: That sounds really cool. And when we get off, I'm gonna talk to you some more about this.

Kimberly Bennett: yes. Do it. We just released some really dope features that, like, like I said, from designing it. So you can go in platform talk, tell us about your client, tell us about your business, and then and tell us about the services you want. And we will build a visual representation of your flat fee or your subscription.

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay, so let's talk about, so, you know, you've already gotten a bunch of features. You've built it out, you know, looking down the road, what's sort of the roadmap? Where's this thing going? What are you guys looking to

Kimberly Bennett: Yeah, I mean, you know what? Our big vision is to end the billable hour for good surprise, surprise, right? I would love to provide a pathway for every legal team to stop doing that so they can serve this huge gap in the market. Today's legal market looks like we serve either DIY services, which is not what all, you know, not what folks do that are founding partners, right?

That isn't just templatized, but it has nuance of le of professional services. So that's where we come in. So continue to expand how we leverage ai continuing to make it easier for you to show up thinking through. What is it like to be, to work with different types of clients, whether some are neuro neurodivergent, some are, you know, are high anxiety like thinking, taking those psycho demographics into place, thinking about what it looks like to really reimagine how you do work and what the delivery is.

Our thought is you should still have human touch and how can you create the right hu human touch without burning yourself out? And so we're working on solving that while helping you not build by the hour. And so, you know, we, a lot more AI of course, of as you would expect, but we don't tag ourselves as a AI platform because I fundamentally believe it's just a tool.

But we, that's kind of what we do. So today we provide 360 support. We do training, we do weekly office hours, we do training, we do subscription weeks, we do all the things to help people get outta their own way and just start imperfectly.

Jonathan Hawkins: You know, they've been calling for the death of Bill Billable hour for decades now and, and I feel like we're finally on the cusp of maybe it really happening. And so you mentioned this earlier and you, I think you sort of touched on it there too, but as part of your work with fidu, so again, I'm a lawyer out there that's really interested in exploring or designing a subscription service.

Do you guys also consult on that fidu or is that, would that be you individually or is it someone else?

And then we have a build tier where we'll be your builder behind the scenes that helps you build it out. And that includes some of that training. So if you're looking to design, our hope is that you can design without needing me to intervene. That is, if you want that we wanna have the platform and be able to support people at scale, at our platform level, at our first base price.

It needs to be something like, if I believe what I said earlier to everyone, that what I do is not so, that that it can be standardized, it can be processed out, it can be replica, you know, you know, repeated and replicated at scale. That's what we did for how I coach and train. We did that in the service builder.

And so sure, you can get it, but my first stop is try our service builder, see what it gets you, if you need more. Sure, of course, we'll continue to improve it, but we want people to do it with or without my, my, my support or the fidu's team fidu support.

And as we continue to add more features, that just gets faster and faster. So we help you think about how to design it, then we help you create the link to sell it. Then we help you create the projects to deliver it, and then we help you think through, okay, what does it take to actually get this out and launch it.

So we do that. Typically it's included with a fidu subscription. So if you don't wanna be a fidu customer, there's like a one-time pay usually that's associated with it. But yeah, that's coming up. But just reach out. We are here to change this industry and it's not today, fidu is the platform that does it.

I don't know any other platform that does what we do. And to explain it sometimes is harder than to see it, and I need to probably do better explaining it sometimes. But if you see it in action, you'll see the opportunity that exists to move from billing by the hour to actually delivering something at scale.

Jonathan Hawkins: And I am not sure we said it, but fidu is f-i-d-u uh, if, if

Kimberly Bennett: fidulegal.com is how you can

Jonathan Hawkins: Okay, cool. So, you know, you, as is clear from this conversation and others that I've heard, I mean, you've been an innovator for quite a long time. I mean, your mindset is different than most lawyers. But you know, any advice out there that you would give to law firm owners, you know, as they're starting firms trying to grow their firms you know, from a mindset perspective as they look forward in the future with AI and other things any advice you might give?

So then my second would be, commit to just doing it differently. And there's gonna be naysayers. So what? Right. I'll do a book recommendation "Being is the New Doing" by Radiah Rhodes.

So, again, "Being is the New Doing" by Radiah Rhodes. It's a short read. It's about elevating your intention, your commitment, how you show up to get the thing done. I think that is just like a mind to move through the mindset blocks and the, the fears that might stop you from doing something that doesn't look like what other people are doing.

And then, you know, you know, just launch one. Right? Just get out there, launch one. You don't have to have it fully built out. You just need to talk to the clients to see what they want and then go from there. I know I, I'm not telling you to go launch a thousand, right, but what I'm saying is launch one, talk to 1, 2, 5 clients.

But you're gonna get a ton of value in exchange for helping me design this in the best way. So if you're stuck, don't design it on your own. Get it out there, pitch the thing, and then get support when you feel like it's not working. We're here. There's other people that, that talk about, about subscriptions.

Go to them, but find if you're staying stuck. It's something that's not impossible. In fact, I think it's a lot easier. I think people overcomplicate pricing. Don't do that to yourself. Just get out there

Kimberly Bennett: Yeah. Not everything all at once. Don't do, Don't do it yourself and don't be like me and try to run a million businesses. Don't Don't do it.

Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. So this has been great. I wanna be respectful of your time, so thanks for coming on. You know, we've talked a little bit about vision, but I always like to ask this question too. You know, what is your vision for the next 10, 15 years for you, for any of your businesses, whatever it can be, you know, life, it can be business, whatever you, whatever it is.

Kimberly Bennett: Yeah. I hope if, you know, if fidu reaches the heights that I want, either we are leading this industry in ways that completely transformed how we show up for our clients and that allow for my goal is to solve the access to justice gap with not non-profit services, but actually for-profit. That's a win-win on both sides.

I didn't start a business. I didn't start my firm to necessarily be a multimillionaire or something. Tech is a different world, so I know it has the opportunity to change my life significantly. But if it does, I hope it allows for me also to spend time with the people that I love and the family and friends that I've made along the way.

Jonathan Hawkins: That's a great way to end it right there. So, Kimberly, thank you for coming on. For people out there that wanna learn about fidu or just talk to you about help with design a subscription or just talk to you about whatever, what's the best way to find you?

We, we do so many free online virtual events that we're here to support you with a question, a next step or whatnot. So reach out.

Jonathan Hawkins: And you still do a lot of speaking, right? Are you on the circuit still?

Kimberly Bennett: Oh I, yes I'm still in the circuit. I have a speaking engagement next week. I have, I think three this month or something, or four this month. I had already, I don't know I don't even know what day I've had, I've done one already, two, I think a four this month, and then maybe one or two next month and three in September.

So yes.

Jonathan Hawkins: the chances are good. You. may be coming through their town, so,

Kimberly Bennett: That's right. I might see you in a town, and if I am, I might be doing a little popup event, so stay tuned.

Jonathan Hawkins: all right, well, thank you, Kimberly.

Kimberly Bennett: Thank you.