Andy Severs, CEO and co-founder of Case Status, joins Ethical-ish for an origin-story conversation that lays out the macro pressures reshaping legal right now: case volumes falling for the first time in history, private equity and MSO money flooding in, marketing spend climbing from 35% to 55% of revenue, and firms making desperate, illogical cuts to stay alive. His counterargument is backed by data most platforms hide: a legal industry NPS near negative 25 versus Case Status firms averaging 70, plus 30 to 50% higher fees and 30 to 60 days faster time on desk.

The heart of the episode is Andy's "third door" on AI. Bet on chatbots and you're wrong, client experience craters. Bet on them and you're right, and the AI companies eventually replace the firms buying them. The way out is human care with AI in support, never in the driver's seat. As Andy puts it, in 2026 the answer is simple: rally with the client.

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00:00 Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Ethical-ish. We're happy to have you where we once again explore that gray area between what makes a modern law firm ethical or not.

00:12 And I'm extremely excited to bring you, one of our, origin story guests, Andy Severs CEO and co-founder of KSTAS, Andy, welcome to Ethical-ish.

00:22 Thanks, thanks for having me. You and I have gotten to work together over the last few years a lot and gotten to know each other, what you're passionate about, what you're trying to disrupt, you know, in the legal services business, but maybe some of our audience members don't know you.

00:35 So, hey, I'd love to, you know, get to know you a little bit, tell our audience a little bit about what makes you tick, where you came from, what you're trying to do, with the client experience platform that is Case Status.

00:45 But also tell a little bit of origin story, because ethicalish, right, you kind of had some drumming ideas that got some of this stuff off the ground.

00:52 So, we'd love to start there as well. Yeah, absolutely. So, So, valid case status eight years ago with a personal injury lawyer who, was just getting, inundated with inbound phone calls and, and clients really the route, having a bad experience, but, but on the surface, just wanting to know it's going

01:11 on with their case and, and she looked around and there was really nothing to solve the client experience gap and legal and, in my background, I was, I was in a band for a long time and the joke is that the lawyers were the only ones that got paid.

01:24 And so I moved to Nashville to go to law school and ultimately my path changed instead of law school and to work at a tech company after clerking in a couple of law firms and then met my co-founder Lauren when I moved to Charleston, South Carolina and she came with this idea and I looked around and was

02:04 or lack of attorney communication rather. And you know it started kind of in this core idea that if you give clients access and ownership over their case, they can, they'll have a better experience, and then from there we can, we can build on the concept and really that's what we've done over the last

02:21 eight years. I think that the idea of what you guys uncovered obviously, Lauren's pain was indirect to a bigger causality and a deeper root cause, which I think has brought us into this idea of client experience, client communication, client engagement.

02:39 But you also hit on, I think, the ethical-ish side of that, right? We talk about the number one bar complaint is communications, and so maybe talk a little bit about, you know, that side of what you've seen in the legal space.

02:51 I know you wrote a book recently, which is coming through publication. You talk about your firm, directly firm experience, and maybe what that complaint looks like inside the firm before it becomes a complaint.

03:04 But, you know, ethics are obviously passionate about the idea that there's an ethical duty of care, but talk a little bit about that idea of not just competency, but really, you know, doing the right thing for the consumer client, not just because it's good business, but also because we have an obligation

03:24 . When I wrote Future Firm, Fossil Firm, I really dove into this concept of what makes a firm one that is going to be successful in this new world and what's leading to, you know, extinction.

03:36 It's really the analogy that we use consistently throughout the book. And it's really about this posture of change, but one of the leading indicators of whether or not a law firm cares about changing is do they care enough about the client?

03:50 Because historically, law firms are a bit disincentivized to care about the client in a lot of ways. I mean, for a long time, they're the ratio of individuals looking for an attorney versus the number of attorneys out there.

04:03 The ratio it was way off if you compare it to, you know, bankers or CPAs or all sorts of professional service.

04:12 And so there wasn't a whole lot of competition to have somebody competent in your specific field was tough before the internet.

04:20 So the internet changed a little bit and a lot has changed that recently. But when you're building hourly, you're okay if the client wants to call the time you're okay if you build that point whatever hour of time to make a living and it really disincentivized the care of the client in a lot of ways

04:41 and a lot of flat fee and contingency based firms in the market have been the first to feel that pain of man we we don't build for that time and then when we actually do spend the time to care about the client has such an impact on our growth our reputation in the market has an impact on our staff morale

05:00 . Now we can even see the impact that it's having on the value of cases, time on desk, all of these pieces that are so important to really what the client cares about, which is am I being cared for by a trusted lawyer who is fully competent to handle my case?

05:17 And I think most lawyers think it's as long as I'm competent, that's fine. But the industry is changing, client expectations are changing, and it's an interesting world when we're at the forefront of getting to see what AI and what other things in the market are doing to push the industry forward.

05:33 Yeah, well let's dive into some of that. So I'll, you know, say coming from a different industry, you know, everything that you just described is kind of what every other industry has figured out.

05:42 Do right by your client and good things will happen, right? There's a win-win in there. So I might say, you know, eight years ago you started case status and the rest is history, But I would say the rest is futuristic so we're going to get into what is coming I feel like in many ways the folks that I

05:59 talked to I talked to law firm leaders all the time and I feel like we're at an inflection point I feel like the industry isn't facing real pressure in a lot of different areas could be you know the case volumes The size of the pie that's out there for a given practice area.

06:13 It could be those client expectations consumer client continues to evolve in advance and And we as service providers in any industry have to keep up with them.

06:23 You mentioned AI. Of course, we've got an intelligence error. Where does that impact? Obviously, our ethical duty of care, we can go down that marketing spin.

06:31 And we talk about law firms and how they spend those dollars and those competition keeps driving that up. So I know you talk to your customer base, your family of law firms, the extended legal industry, you're out there, you're out there with investors, obviously as running a technology company.

06:47 What are the macro trends that you're seeing? What is the inflection point headline that you would call out right now where we are?

06:53 I mean, I think the biggest, one of the biggest drivers in the book that I talk about of what's causing change to happen right now is in the the the the competition element of acquiring cases has completely flipped on its head.

07:09 For the first time, we're seeing enough law firms to support clients. We're seeing the number of legal cases getting filed dropping for the first time in history because they can now go and find other service providers or even AI to help solve their problems for them.

07:25 We historically have to be a lawyer on a law firm in pretty much every state. We're starting to see some of those laws change, especially in Arizona with the formation of the ABS law firm.

07:35 Now, you've got private money, funding, marketing, and all 50 states. Even MSOs, you've got now a way for law firms to sell, and so you've got private money becoming interested in this space and when they come in with, you know, running the back office, in that back office, a lot of times they're fueling

07:55 marketing growth. And so it's become extremely expensive for law firms to survive in this market historically. It wouldn't be uncommon for a personal injury firm to see a 40 or 50% margin in professional service.

08:08 It's unbelievable. Like, nobody has that type of margin, but law firms have. Well, now they're having to start to innovate and change because their margin is getting compressed.

08:18 They're having to spend more on marketing. It's harder to retain people. It's harder to retain clients and ultimately they need to maximize how they spend money so that they can stay alive.

08:29 I mean, we see firms going from 35% of their revenue goes to marketing to now 55%. I mean, that's a crazy change in the way that they think about acquiring cases across the industry.

08:42 We see firms are starting to shrink. They're starting to, we talk to a firm, they laid off 70 people. That's a byproduct, not of AI.

08:51 They're not saying it's an AI shift in the way that they work. They're saying we just can't survive anymore with so many people we're not growing like we used to.

09:02 We're not getting the settlements or verdicts like we used to because of tort reform. All of these things are all changing all at once, which is really causing law firms to look around and go, you know, okay, am I going to invest and be more efficient?

09:15 Am I going to invest in what I think about bull drive growth? Or am I just in panic mode and they start cutting everywhere and just, you know, and we see a little bit too.

09:25 It's like we have 3,000 of their clients on the case status mogul app and they say, look, I'm genuinely thinking about going to a web portal that no one will use because I'm looking to cut everything and everywhere.

09:41 And when we ultimately show them, well, you're also gonna cut your margin, you're gonna have to hire people back or your client experience is gonna drop so severely that it's gonna do the inverse of what you expect.

09:50 They still have to have those conversations with us because they are a time, a bit of a time of desperation.

09:56 And the macro trend I see is that, that desperation happening across a lot of firms. You kind of use the word desperation there.

10:03 is that the right word? It feels very antagonistic and maybe doomsday, but I see some of the craziness, some of the decisions out there.

10:13 Desperation feels like it might be the right word. I don't know. I mean, what does it mean to be desperate?

10:18 I mean, for some firms, they might say, oh, I'm not desperate, but if they look at themselves and the decisions that they're making, which are just not smart for running a good business, for not caring for their clients, for scaling long-term, they're making decisions that are not logical, that are not

10:34 , would not be supported by any, you know, any business school or any business book, but yet, they're not desperate. They're just making the decisions that they have to make to stay alive.

10:45 Well, that's to me, that is exactly what it means to be desperate. But we do feel for them. It's a vulnerable place to be, but it's also the reality of the reason the industry is changing so fast right now, because these firms are having to make big decisions and when they don't know or don't have the

11:05 support system to make wise decisions, they're just going to make what they know how to make, which is I got to keep cash in the bank.

11:12 I got to do anything I can to keep more cases coming in because I can't support the clients that I have currently.

11:20 It's what's the saying, Rob Peter to pay Paul. We've got to generate revenue now to pay my staff now to support the new cases that are coming in that are going to pay in 18 or 24 months and so it's a challenging time for a lot of firms.

11:35 I agree and I think from ethical lish I've had a lot of guests here and it's funny we try to hit on the ethics drivers to a lot of this and some of them just come back to the business.

11:44 The core business beliefs and the reasons why they invest in one way or the other. A lot of them are well grounded but to your point you know I feel like client experience for Again, all the dots that you've connected in the book, all the dots that you connect in the platform data, when we talk to firms

12:02 that don't invest in client experience, it's still a new idea. And there's not a sense of urgency that it will drive those outcomes yet again and again we see a family of firms that become insulated from a lot of these risks because they make the North Star or the client.

12:19 So do you agree that, I mean, that that's what makes Case Status unique is this, you know, building a mode around that client relationship.

12:29 The human relationship is that, is that what we're getting at when we talk about client experience? Focusing on the client is the only reason we're the only player in the leader in this space.

12:39 We have, you know, we have these case management tools that have tried these free web portals, even in free mobile portals, but the portal was designed as a conduit for the law firm to get what they want.

12:51 We've come up from a different approach where how do we give the client what they deserve, what they need, what they want?

12:59 First, and the benefit that happens when the client trusts the law firm, when they're having a good experience, when they're unblocked in their part of the case, ultimately has a net positive impact on the firm, on the case, on everything, especially the client experience.

13:15 Well, these other types of, you know, point solutions like a client portal are designed to solve an internal problem for the law firm, and that's just not what client experience is about.

13:26 I mean, you have spirit airlines that was all about being the leader, being the cheapest, you know, the cheapest airline, and they've decided We will sacrifice client experience in the name of keeping the cost down.

13:41 Well, what did we find that doesn't work people still today talk about delta or some of these other airlines that are more expensive, but why do they fly those airlines because the experience is good because they feel more care for because it feels maybe more premium because it feels like it's designed

13:59 for the experience that they want to have. and that aligns with supporting the Delta Airlines that must be successful. And as we've seen with Spirit Airlines, we did not support them well enough to stay alive.

14:13 So give me some social proof there. I know we talk about the app, the number of downloads, the five star rating on two, you know, app stores, the reviews, et cetera.

14:26 Is there any stat in your eight years, maybe something more recent that quantifies or you know represents that what you're talking about you know this idea of building for consumer building for that consumer experience.

14:41 What do you point to when you know you're talking to a law firm leader or you're talking to a partner or you're talking to an investor what stands out about the case status platform.

14:50 So many data points I'm such a data nerd when it comes to these things because you know don't take my word for it let's actually look at the data So many platforms hide the data because it's not good.

15:00 We put the data in the front of their face because it It tells the story that we wanted to tell the one I've been telling for the last Seven years is 93% of clients open up the case status app Find what they need and put it back down.

15:13 That's extremely powerful They're going and looking for they have a question they have a concern They have something and they put it back down.

15:20 Well by itself that is interesting But when it's correlated with net promoter score, that's when it becomes powerful. The legal industry has a 25 net promoter score, 0 to 100, or negative 100 to 100.

15:35 And so we look at consumer law, and if you take that slice, it tends to be in the negative 25 range, which is some of the worst professional service in the world.

15:46 And it's not surprising. Go around and ask anybody who's hired a personal injury lawyer or had an immigration lawyer or a lot of these individuals have had terrible experiences.

15:57 They were not cared for. They were treated like a number. You know, you hear things like ambulance chasers and billboard lawyers and the churn and burn firms.

16:06 I mean, that's not how they should be talked about. Like lawyers are there to advocate for clients. it should they should be looked at as people who truly care and I mean equivalent with doctors, but that's not what's happening.

16:19 So we have this starting point of this negative 25 or 25 net promoter score where when the clients on the case status platform are asked for a net promoter score and a lot of times we require that answer.

16:33 We're saying it is so important that you know if your clients are satisfied we're going to require the ask in a lot of cases.

16:39 There's some and configurability, but we see, we saw 500,000 net promoter scores last year across the million clients on the case status mobile app, and that's million active today, and we have an average of a 70 net promoter score.

16:54 That's, again, that's the client giving a net promoter score to the law firm. And so that is an extremely, it's a material difference in client satisfaction, especially in a format where we require in the answer, or you could argue that it's actually worse because we're requiring the ask and the answer

17:14 . And so that to me gets really, really exciting. And then more recently, we look at the social proof of some of the firms that we work with, to possible a more big single of that 8,000 active cases in the Kansas City area.

17:30 I mean, we're seeing 30%, 40% higher fees when they're on case status versus not. It's not that surprising. There's no gaps in treatment.

17:37 They're engaged, they're part of the process, they're getting better, they understand what it takes to actually have the best case to be able to, as it is, the law firm can advocate for them properly versus this like disengaged, you know, reactive communication world that we've had previously.

17:55 We're seeing 30 to 60 days faster time and dust, that means our cases are getting resolved quickly. you know, marry that with a net promoter score, it to me becomes unethical to not run a consumer case on case status.

18:09 Because if a consumer knew that they could have a case status experience, 70 net promoter score, you know, 30, I mean, originally was an 8% higher, 8% higher fees, and now they're saying this, it might be as high as 50% higher, we're saying what, 60 days less time and desk, I mean, that's like 20% faster

18:30 , you know, at least 15% faster. If all those things, if the client knew they could have that experience or they could go to the normal, hot the cuff, low experience, spirit airlines, billboard lawyer, they would choose the better experience every single time.

18:45 It's that the law firms have no way to truly share why they are better than everybody else because every billboard is we fight for you where the biggest strongest, fastest, most powerful, the loudest, flashiest lawyer for you.

19:01 And the client goes, okay, I don't know any better, but they are starting to change. They're starting to get more sophisticated.

19:08 It's why they're trusting referrals more than anything. They're trusting reviews next. It is that the world is changing in the way that they demand a good experience.

19:18 And so we've had Jeff Robbins on ethical issue. We talked a lot about what he's doing at DM law and the parallels between healthcare and legal services.

19:28 But you just hit on something that made me think about it a totally different way. Like more higher revenue and faster time.

19:36 Not only is that a win for DM law, that's a win for the client, right? So the client's getting good bedside manner and they're getting a higher payout, right?

19:42 Because ultimately this is contingency and it's happening faster, you think that? So it's like a good flywheel of compounding client experience.

19:52 the bedside manner turns into better outcomes, which turn into a happier client in the end. So I think that's a really cool connection as well.

20:00 And you think that most firms would connect with that, but it almost sounds too good to be true. It's the full picture of now where we're going to make the most money and the cases are going to be easier and they need a third number of staff members and the clients are happy, so they're going to grow

20:16 and people go no way. And it's like, it's just that the bar is so low right now for client experience and legal for all the reasons I talk about in the book.

20:26 And again, the book is more about the posture of change, but it is so important that law firms start to care for clients, and that's why we spoke on this topic very specifically.

20:37 It's when you start to care about clients, the posture of the firm just acts differently, It starts to prioritize the right things, the ethically right things that, hey, great news are also profitable for your firm.

20:52 Also lead to the better experience, lead to all the things that they're trying to do. But we're in a season now where a law firm gets nervous and when they start losing cases and the number of new cases coming in is declining, even though they're spending more, then they start to look at, well, what

21:11 else can we get rid of? just so we can dump more in the marketing. But that game is going to continue to run out.

21:18 We're seeing more non-lawyer-owned money come into the market. You will never outspend the private equity. And so I've talked to more lawyers who are like, oh, man, I'm glad I'm almost near retirement.

21:33 Oh, I'll be put out of business before too long. So I'm just going to try and make as much money as I can.

21:41 And so many of them are starting marketing companies and they're getting into other businesses because what do they want to do?

21:46 Anything but practice law. But the best lawyers right now are the ones who are really going out there and putting the client first, really focusing on building a truly good business with the right tools to do that, with the right staff, the right incentives, with all the right pieces and ultimately benefits

22:02 them. Yeah, and that's not just for the law firm. Everything you're describing, especially on the MSO, I think back to March, when we were gathered in the CX mastermind with some of the, you know, most innovative thinking law firms talking about various and sundry client experience, how they leverage

22:21 that to differentiate, to operate better. But when we ask them what kept them up at night, MSO is definitely top of the list.

22:28 And so you know, some of these challenges are you have to reinvent yourself or you, you know, fall back into that which you know and I think some of that what we're talking about here today is the falling back is the slippery slope.

22:45 You didn't mention you were a pilot, I'm a pilot I always got a look for an in on pilot but you know when your airspeed is low and you're coming close to stall there's a tendency to pull back on the yoke to pull the nose up and hopefully keep off the ground but that's actually counter intuitive what

23:01 it should be doing you should be pushing forward pushing your nose toward the ground and getting that airspeed and I feel like that's a little bit of how a lot of law firms are reacting to all the change and all the influx.

23:12 So let's talk a little bit about reinventing, not just the law firm, but also case status. We talk a lot about the type of firm that we work with.

23:21 It really in the definition of your book, it's kind of these future firms. It's not size per se, but it is on innovative thinking, on willingness to change, embrace base change, embrace new ideas, embrace that, which is empirically proven but maybe new to us.

23:38 So, I don't know if you can talk a little bit about that. What you're doing at Case Status to reinvent what we're doing, where we're focusing, you know, the product as well, how we build, how we have our relationships.

23:52 We'd love to learn a little bit more about that because I know, again, coming out of that March timeframe, you know, we've talked about changes in the business as well.

23:59 So I can always go back to the Delta versus Spirit Airlines comparison, is we have no problem going above and beyond to be the best, to deliver the best experience, and we're not afraid to charge for it.

24:13 And so for a long time, I still believe some of our best customers are the ones who were founded on case status.

24:20 They've got 500 Google reviews, they're all five stars, they have a hundred percent an app adoption, and we have one customer in Georgia, it's like $8 million a year, and it's him and his wife run the firm.

24:31 But that's, you know, anybody on this call would probably love to have that business. I know a lot of big, you know, $100 million plus firms that don't have that type of payout for the partners.

24:42 And that's just, you know, it speaks to, we have to focus on the people who understand what it means and how hard it is to deliver the good client experience.

24:53 And so for us, we raised the minimum price that we'll go out to market with, and that's not because we're trying to cut out the firms that are small.

25:04 We just realized, I mean, our price is still less than a third of your least expensive employee. But we're still in a market where a firm comes in and goes, oh man, that's so expensive because they spend $50 a month on Cleo.

25:17 And the reality is there is a race to the bottom in a lot of software in the legal text space right now.

25:23 And we don't have to do that right now. You know, go, if you're not ready for what we provide, which is taking your client experience to the next level, that is okay.

25:34 Go try the other things. And if they work for you, fantastic, that's, that's amazing. But we're going to focus on, you know, not, again, you referenced it, not just the bigger firms, but the firms that are ready for what we're going to deliver for them.

25:46 And it's a full change in their operating model. You know, everything from if they care about retention, do they care about the average feed?

25:55 Do they care about cases that generate revenue? Do they care about their conversion rates? Do they care about their time and desk?

26:01 Do they care about these pieces that really matter? When they do, they start to really understand how a 1% change here and a 2% change here and a 3% change here as a 50% impact.

26:13 It is monumental. And the firms that are larger, they see that. When we have a firm sign up with $2,000 or $5,000 or even 40,000 cases, it scales in a way that they're saying, oh, a 1% impact here is millions and millions of dollars.

26:29 But it's harder for a smaller firm when they have 150 or 250 clients. They might not see the impact in the same way, but that's not because the impact's not there.

26:39 It's maybe their sophistication or their ability to measure the impact. And so we're really focusing on the firms who are innovating the firms who see the value and if they're not ready to go and explore that value, we're very patient because I mean in legal tech, we're before this wave of everything

26:59 being like the boom in legal AI. We remember when when investors said, oh, do lawyers buy software? Do they spend money on these types of things?

27:10 like I don't really like those people. I don't even really want to be involved in that business. I mean, that was the type of conversations we were having with investors back then.

27:18 And now it's, you know, every investor pounds down our door and says, you're the only ones in this space who have scaled like you have, who have shown and demonstrated a consistent delivery of a platform that enhances the client experience and we want to be part of that.

27:34 So that's been exciting and we'll just continue to lean into that in the future. Yeah, I think leaning into it is it's powerful.

27:40 I do want to hit on a few things because you talk about again the premium I appreciate you being transparent on that the idea of humanization dehumanization system of action.

27:51 I feel like there's a lot of noise out there You talk about race to the bottom man Some of the terminology that are used by any legal tech firm to say they are this there that so so draw a distinction for me on this idea of of scale, of being able to be worth, you know, a full-time employee, without,

28:12 you know, are you displacing the full-time employee, or are you enhancing, or are you dehumanizing the law for? Like, what's at play here in your formula, and what does that future look like when it comes to client experience, one, two, three, four years from now in your, in your estimation?

28:29 Yeah, such a good question. And it really, it's in the root of, for the last eight years, I've said the same thing.

28:34 Client experience will never look as bad as it does right now in legal, because my belief is that every day, more firms are deciding it's time to care about the client.

28:45 Well, for the first time about a year ago, when we started seeing this boom of AI and legal specific AI, I actually started to not believe that anymore, because instead of law firms deciding to change.

29:00 They're actually doing the opposite when they adopt some of this AI. They're saying, I'm not going to change. I'm just going to ignore and not do and have AI do it for me.

29:09 And what's one of those things that they're considering? Oh, I'm just going to let a chatbot care for my client.

29:15 I'm just going to let a chatbot drive treatment. I'm just going to let a chatbot do my job for me.

29:21 And yeah, look, the belief is that you should be bringing AI into your day-to-day to become more efficient. And a lot of these providers say, oh, it's supervised.

29:30 It's not supervised in the way that a client deserves supervision. A client deserves real human care, deserves real human connection.

29:39 Otherwise, why hire a law firm at all? Why would the bar associations even exist to maintain that lawyers must be barred in their state and adhere to an ethical duty of care and follow these rules and procedures to help advocate for you because you deserve a human and historically client experience like

30:00 we talked about has been bad. Well now we're going to make it worse by injecting a chatbot and I mean most people who engage with this know the worst client experiences they've probably ever had were at the root of a of a phone agent that was a chatbot or a text agent on a website and you're sitting

30:17 there going real person real person. I mean, there's a stat right now that, and we do use the conservative stat that when a client calls a law firm and gets AI, 25% hang up rate.

30:28 We actually believe it's more like 40%, but we can be conservative because law firms can't afford to lose 25% of their inbound call volume from prospective clients.

30:39 That's going to kill their business. Well, what is it going to do when a client calls in or messages in and gets a AI chat response when they're looking for human care.

30:51 I mean if it was me, I'd fire them immediately and I'd go higher The firm that's going to care for me or Or the other alternative is that's going to work and all the legal tech AI companies will become the biggest competitors of all the law firms in the country privately funded AI that drives all that

31:08 the use cases of AI are all the use cases of running the case and if client care doesn't matter then the law firms will no longer survive.

31:18 They will, these AI companies will become the law firms that they sell to and ultimately completely blow up the market.

31:27 And my position is both scenarios, both bets are bad. You bet on AI and you're wrong, your client experience is terrible, you bet on AI and you're right and you'll be blown out of the market.

31:37 And so we take the complete, the third door, which is client care matters, a client deserves a human in the loop, deserves genuine human care.

31:48 And so that is our philosophy on how we, when every piece of AI we're building into case status starts with human care.

31:55 And but the reason that no other organization has been able to compete with us has been able to move into this space.

32:01 It's because they don't know how to reach the client. They don't know how to put the client first, which back to our beginning of our conversation, that matters.

32:08 Putting the client first and thinking about their needs and addressing their needs above all else first is what this is ultimately about.

32:15 And it's so funny because so many people say, well, this is just a mobile app. That takes the human out of it.

32:21 It's like, no, no, you're wrong because it starts by meeting the client where they're at, which is the they deserve control.

32:29 They deserve access. They deserve ownership over their case. And then when they reach out, they deserve a quick response. And because we saw for all those pieces, we're able to meet the client with what they need to be met with.

32:41 I'm having read call to high school English, one of my favorite books, Joseph Heller Catch-22. Kind of caught between two choices, but Yosarian, the main character finds that third door and makes his escape.

32:57 So all those lawyers out there who are readers probably know the story, if not pick up an old book. it's a good, good piece of literature.

33:05 I think it's, it's, you know, what we're just talking about with systems of action and a lot of claims, the catch 22, there is still a lot of noise, that noise, you know, whether it's system of action, whether it's AI, whether it's what's in my tech stack, what should I consolidate, right?

33:22 Consolidation is something that we hear a lot too, Andy, right? So with all of that noise, what is the right play?

33:29 How should these, these law firm leaders be navigating it as they seek any advice you have there and as they go through all of this you know it's one thing to keep up with statutes and to study the UCC and to go into trial and be you know good at your craft but you're an entrepreneur as well and you

33:48 got to run these businesses how do you how do you get through all this all this noise early on in the case status journey we implemented EOS from the book traction which really just talks about the measurable way to run a business and a big portion of that book is in, you can't change what you don't

34:07 measure. You can't impact it positively if you don't even know the starting point. And so many firms are skipping the step of, well let's understand what the state of our business is today.

34:18 And then we can measure that change. We're actually rolling out a whole new customer success process where our customer success team, when they first take on a customer, says, hey, let's start with understanding what your marketing spend is, how many leads you get?

34:31 What's your average fee per client? What's your retention rate? All these data points that in our business, I would have an investor that would let me spend more than an afternoon not knowing that data.

34:42 It is so crucial to running a business. But what it does is it unlocks our ability to impact change. Okay, we're going to make these changes.

34:50 So we're impact in bringing in this new customer success process to help firms uncover these pieces so that But as we start making change, we can see different parts of the business.

35:01 And we benchmark it against case status. We also benchmark it against the industry. Like we talked about earlier, we're seeing marketing spend has to go way up.

35:09 But when you look at, okay, well, how is your marketing spend increased? I had a customer I was talking to up in the Northeast who said, oh, yeah, we haven't really had to spend more.

35:18 We haven't had to do a whole lot. Why? Because our client experience has increased. Because the referrals has increased, their retention has increased, their Google reviews, use all these pieces, and they're like, yeah, we haven't had to change because we changed a different part of our business.

35:32 And so my advice for firms is start there, start by uncovering this measurement of the data that matters in your firm, and then as you, you know, bring in AI, as you bring in case status, as you bring in these different pieces, then you can measure what's having an impact.

35:49 And that's the trend I'm seeing across these firms after a year of AI, they're going, and I just don't know what's having an impact or not.

35:57 I know it's nice to have, but every AI project requires an AI owner. Every piece of AI is costing some amount of dollars, okay?

36:07 And so what type of return is that happy? I mean, in the personal injury space, firms are passing on the fee to the client.

36:14 Well, now, year later, firms are saying totally unethical to pass off the AI fee to a client. I mean, there's a lot of case law that supports You can't pass on, if you're taking a third of the settlement, you can't pass on the paralegal's work, the time that they're spending as a case cost.

36:32 So what you're gonna just eliminate that work and put it in AI and then you're gonna pass that off, completely unethical.

36:38 That's a whole other discussion we could have. And so now they're going, okay, well now I have to absorb that cost.

36:43 Well, why would I spend $300 a case versus $20 on cloud? And so there's this constant like, I don't know, I don't know what's working.

36:51 I don't know how to impact change but when you start to draw out these baselines, then you can actually see what's happening over time.

37:00 I mean, we're rolling out a whole legal engineering team at Case Status where they can hire us to consult and we will set up a data layer, a data infrastructure for them.

37:11 We'll actually pull in the data from all their different systems and then we bring in a tool that we've built called CIR that allows them to have conversations with our data and start benchmarking, and it does reports automatically, if they want that data to be put into a litify or dome or another reporting

37:27 tool or BI tool, we can also help them with that as well. But this is at the root of what I see as one of the biggest gaps in the market is this lack of understanding of what actually, where their business is at and what has impacted it.

37:41 And so we're going to expand the depth of our business and really focus on impact on the client experience at the deepest level means understanding truly how bad the situation is.

37:53 And I go back to where did we start this this this this call it was in this business was how many and down phone calls am I getting and most firms have no idea how many and down phone calls are getting yet they came to case test initially because they were getting too many and down phone calls and so

38:10 this is just the completion of my in my view of the loop back to the beginning we're saying and we're starting at the beginning, and we're gonna help them uncover that data, and we're gonna help them install change.

38:20 So Andy, you know, you talk about broad level, but maybe give me some more specificity for the audience about some of the things that you're building, right?

38:27 You talk about CIR and what it can do, but like, what gets you excited? I know you love your serial entrepreneur, if folks don't know you've started some businesses before case status, and obviously we're doing some powerful things here, but what really gets you excited about the future?

38:43 Again, a lot of challenges, but a lot of opportunity and I guess put your builders hat on as you answer that question.

38:49 If we go back to September last year, we had our first annual CX summit, so the client experience summit. We didn't name it the case status con or anything like that, because this is bringing together people who truly care about impacting the legal industry and driving better client experience and what

39:08 an awesome time. And at that summit, we release client intelligence, which is our data and AI layer really that helps you uncover all this client knowledge that exists within the firm and make it actionable.

39:21 The system of action needs to be directed by something. Well, the core of predictive sentiment, the core of data that matters when we uncover all of these different pieces, then with supervision we can drive for were a really good client experience.

39:38 And so I get really excited because we're starting to pull in all the phone calls that are happening and looking at sentiment and looking at how that impacts the relationship.

39:47 We point in Google reviews and what are the trends in Google reviews and the type of personas in those reviews that are more or less likely to leave.

39:57 Emails, like email is still a part of every business. And we've typically taken a Slack approach, which is emails where efficiency goes to die, but it's still part of the change management process, and occasionally if a client wants to email, let them.

40:12 Now, you can tell them all the benefits of why it's better in case status and the communication of the app or text or anything like that, but if ultimately they are saying, I want to email, that's their choice.

40:23 Well, let's still give them the tools that still inform a lawyer on the client intelligence that exists there. And so now we're centralizing all of these communication channels and it gives us this super power data set of signal that helps us super power the staff members in the firm and so every day

40:41 I hear new stories of the ways that firms are being impacted the biggest challenge we have now is we're trying to go to firms to say this is going to have such impact on your business in a time where a lot of these businesses are feeling impacted other ways and so we can we can empathize with that and

40:57 looking for ways to help them bridge the gap and so you know between now and our next CX summit in September I'm really excited about what we're gonna release and even what we're gonna talk about releasing at that conference.

41:11 Yeah that's a great place to to sort of tie a bow on it land the plane if you like that metaphor I like that metaphor so CX summit this is we're kind of reaching one of longer episodes, but you and I could continue this conversation indefinitely.

41:29 But let's continue this conversation elsewhere. Andy, you're on the road quite a bit. We appreciate that. I know you've had some speaking opportunities very accessible, but at CX Summit as well, you'll be attending.

41:39 I know a lot of those law firm leaders that you both work with, but look up to they're leading the way.

41:46 They're going to be there as well. So all these topics are fair game. I see and hopefully we can see and touch some of this technology that you're talking about and seeing how these folks are actually using it in the wild.

41:58 Anything else to leave? I will say, you know, you finally get one of these mugs. I know you've been thinking about them very enviously as I hand them out to other guests, but we'll make sure to get you one now that you've officially been a guest.

42:13 But any parting wisdom, parting words for our audience here today? Just continue to focus on the client experience. It's all I care about and it's all I'm going to talk about.

42:30 Door number three, I agree with you. That is the only path forward unless we want to let some of that private equity take over and really remove all the humanity and the goodness from what we do.

42:42 Well, Andy is a pleasure to put you on the hot seat, as always. Thanks to my audience for listening to another episode of ethical leash.

42:50 if you like what you hear press subscribe on whatever solution you're using to listen to us check us out on our website and we'll look forward to bringing you another episode in the near future thanks have a great day