What if there was a way for lawyers to ditch the billable-hour model without sacrificing value or profits? ADVOS Pro is teaching law firms to do exactly that with its P3 Method.
The P3 Method enables firms to transition to a “deliverables-based” format where the firm’s expertise and results — as opposed to six-minute increments — act as the measure of its worth. The model is designed to reward efficiency, streamline processes and prevent attorney burnout.
In this episode of “Spill the Ink,” Michelle Calcote King invites ADVOS Pro Co-Founder Whitney Harper to share how the experience she and her co-founder Gwen Griggs had as attorneys and business people shaped the creation of the P3 Method. They also discuss ADVOS legal's success using this model over nearly a decade of law practice, and how other firms can do the same.
Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn
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What is ADVOS Pro and the P3 Method
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What is involved in the four-module course on applying the P3 Method
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How points for the deliverables-based model are calculated
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How law firms can break up with the billable model while growing profit margins
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The importance of learning how to pitch your legal services
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How the solution enables firms to invest in tech and automate tedious processes
About our featured guest
Whitney Harper is a seasoned legal professional known for delivering high-value service to her clients through her unique understanding of the intersection of law, operations, sales and strategy. She is the co-founder of ADVOS Pro, a business that helps law firms break up with the billable hour method and begin measuring their worth in expertise and results. Her practice, ADVOS legal, uses the ADVOS Pro P3 Method to provide a range of legal services to high-growth companies, including strategic legal counsel, corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions and commercial contracts.
Resources mentioned in this episode
Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by Reputation Ink.
Founded by Michelle Calcote King, Reputation Ink is a public relations and content marketing agency that serves professional services firms of all shapes and sizes across the United States, including corporate law firms and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) firms.
Reputation Ink understands how sophisticated corporate buyers find and select professional services firms. For more than a decade, they have helped firms grow through thought leadership-fueled strategies, including public relations, content marketing, video marketing, social media, podcasting, marketing strategy services and more.
To learn more, visit www.rep-ink.com or email them at info@rep-ink.com today.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Whitney Harper: We knew that it was a better way. It freed us up to practice in a way that was healthy and whole for us and for the clients. It sort of let us choose our destiny and be able to say, "Here's how we want to work," and it let clients agree to that on the front-end.
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[00:00:21]: Welcome to “Spill the Ink,” a podcast by Reputation Ink, where we feature experts in growth and brand visibility for law firms and architecture, engineering and construction firms. Now, let's get started with the show.
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[00:00:37] Michelle Calcote King: Hey, everyone, I'm Michelle Calcote King. I'm your host and I'm also the principal and president of Reputation Ink. We're a public relations and content marketing agency for law firms and other professional services firms. To learn more, go to rep-ink.com.
The legal industry is undergoing a rapid transformation that's being driven by advancements in technology, but also shifting client demands and expectations. To stay ahead of the curve, many law firms are adopting innovative strategies to help streamline their operations and better serve their clients, including ditching the billable hour.
On that topic today, I've invited Whitney Harper to “Spill the Ink.” She's going to share about how her company, ADVOS legal is helping law firms modernize their practice management. As a side note, Whitney and I both grew up in the same very small town, which we just discovered a few months ago. Welcome to the show, Whitney.
[00:01:31] Whitney: Thanks so much, Michelle. I'm thrilled to be here. Really excited to talk with you about it.
[00:01:35] Michelle: That's right. Let's represent Keystone Heights really well here. Well, let's start with if you can just kind of tell me about ADVOS legal, ADVOS Pro and your background.
[00:01:47] Whitney: Yes, for sure. It's definitely been a career in the making and really two careers in the making. My business partner, Gwen Griggs and I, even before we met, essentially had the same career path, which is— That starts the story of Kismet, like this is meant to be.
We both were big law lawyers litigating a bit, exploring different practice areas, billing by the hour in that machine.Then we both went to in-house roles and were in that different situation where you're part of the business team. You're not measuring hours. Nobody cares how long it took you to do a thing. They actually care, did you get the deal done? Did we hit our profitability metrics? They wanted to know if it was done on time, did they get the intended result?
That was a really interesting role. I know for myself, sitting in that spot where you're part of a business team where you've only really— Your business experience has been a law firm, you starkly realize like, "Oh, right, law firms are businesses too. They just think it's gauche to say so."
You have this realization, you go, "Oh, okay, now I can see some differences in how we were operating there versus what we're up to over here." Then Gwen and I each in separate spots in our career, but had this opportunity to jump out and have an operator role. Running a business, running a business unit, now you're a client of the lawyer or the legal team, so that's a whole other experience. What is it to receive service from the lawyer?Yes, you care about the deal done and the profitability metrics and those things, you really also care about the ROI. Was the juice worth the squeeze? That's a different question too.
I think my experience of being a lawyer, particularly at big law, was we start as order takers. Client says, "I need X." I say, "I have X, I can do that." I go do it. We never really have that conversation on the front-end about, "What's the value of X to you, dear client? What's it going to cost? How long is it going to take? What are the likely alternatives that you could approach?"It's not to say that lawyers don't have those conversations with clients. It's just not a built-in part of the model. It's not necessarily done in a systematic way.
We leave our operator roles, and we meet up and we partnered up in what, I say, it's technically a law firm, but it doesn't feel like a law firm.We both knew we couldn't go back to the old-guard way of practicing law because our brains had shifted to this business mentality. We took what we knew about the client experience and business principles and our drive to find a better way, and we built the ADVOS way.
It was interesting. We worked hard to make this easier on ourselves. We wanted to find someone else's platform and model and method. We are both voracious readers, continuous learners. We thought surely, if someone thought of this.
[00:05:04] Michelle: Somebody solved this.
[00:05:06] Whitney: We can't be the first ones doing this. Unfortunately, although I think there are other people out there who have solved portions of it or who have solved it themselves very specifically, there wasn't a solution or a methodology in the market to really lean on. So we had to build it ourselves.
We started operating on our proprietary system. We have a methodology that we've developed, and then we built the software platform to support it. We started doing that in 2015 and really haven't looked back.
[00:05:41] Michelle: Great.
[00:05:42] Whitney: I will say we've iterated a lot. What we have now just looked a whole lot like it did in 2015, although there are some hallmarks in there that have never changed. ADVOS legal has been the test kitchen, if you will.
[00:05:57] Michelle: Yes, I was going to say, so you started with yourself, your law firm, and you went through the process. When you first launched the firm, were you billing hourly at the time and then thought, "Okay, I want to shift this up"? Tell me how that happened. What was that process? How that looked like.
[00:06:19] Whitney: Very good question. We had a couple of clients in the early days where our point person was a lawyer. That person understood billing by the hour, and also understood why there's a potentially different, better way. Also, was a sophisticated buyer of legal services, knew how to get in, get out, that whole thing. In those situations, we were billing by the hour and it worked okay. It was a pain on our end because you've got to go do the work, then bill for the work, then go collect for the work, and like you're chasing that.
It's also reactive. We are, by nature, people who like to build a plan, know that the client agrees with the plan so we can go execute the plan and we feel great about it, and hourly work doesn't lend itself to that very much. We had some hourly work, but we very much had the— We knew we didn't want to do it. The experience of doing it cemented we really don't want to do this. It kind of fueled that fire to build a structure so that it wasn't just ad hoc, like, "Oh, I think that's going to be three grand, that's going to be 10 grand, this is 750 bucks.” Particularly in the early days, we needed to be able to show them Pinocchio and say, "This is a real boy." It's a real thing.
It was an evolution certainly, but it came together pretty quickly when we started working under the agile scrum methodology.We had a friend who said, "Hey, what you're trying to do looks and feels a lot like this thing software developers are doing. They're developing the slate of work in a sprint, a container of time. They're assigning points to that work and they're saying, "Hey, here's how many points we can get done in this period of this sprint, and here's what those points are going to cost."
We just said, "Yes, there's a corollary there," and we developed the early days of the P3 method. We've been operating on this method without having a name. It was just the ADVOS way, this is how we do it. We've been operating on that method since really 2015. We knew that it was a better way. It freed us up to practice in a way that was healthy and whole for us and for the clients. It sort of let us choose our destiny and be able to say, "Here's how we want to work," and it let clients agree to that on the front-end."Yes, that sounds great, let's go do that together."
We were never having the conversation on the back-end of a project where the client says, "If I had known this was going to be this much, I never would've asked you to do it.” That feels gross. We don't do that.We have these client relationships where we really are part of their team because they know there's not a clock running. You build that and you look at and you go, "This thing has to scale." We always knew we wanted to build a solution to scale.
I think in the beginning, we thought we wanted to scale under the ADVOS legal umbrella. Like, "ADVOS legal firm, we think it's wonderful, let's go take it to the masses." We pretty quickly discovered that really lawyers who want to practice differently, want to practice differently. They don't want to practice under my brand. They want a foundation away so that they can have a solid base for how they're going to practice. They want a method that's tried and true. They want to be under their own banner, and they want to be able to choose their own adventure, too.
What's important to one lawyer might not be the thing that's important to somebody else. You might choose more profit and someone else might choose more time flexibility. You might choose a firm of one and somebody else wants a firm of five. All of those things can work on the system but those are the choices, that agency.
[00:10:20] Michelle: Interesting.
[00:10:20] Whitney: We found that people really wanted to be able to have their own choices in it on a consistent, reliable foundation.
[00:10:29] Michelle: What are some of the core changes? I know there’s an entire training course you go through, so I know it would be hard to distill it down for me, but what are some of those core things that law firms have to do to get away from the billable hour and to implement your method?
[00:10:51] Whitney: The P3 method, that is our shift from hourly to deliverables-based training approach, is about exactly these things. What we've tried to do is take something that can be really big and overwhelming and make it very straightforward, bite-sized so that you can start in small bites, get small wins, build a little traction, and then let it begin to gain footholds in the rest of your practice.
That was really important to us because as we have grown and learned, you make a small iteration, you see how that's going, and then where's the next good place to adopt that? That's how you do it while you're still running a business and still need to keep the training running.
[00:11:41] Michelle: Yes, exactly.
[00:11:42] Whitney: The P3 method is pricing, pitching and profit. We say, you have to learn to price, pitch and profit like a pro. The pricing piece is really about taking the billing that an hourly lawyer would do on the backend, going all the way back to the beginning of the engagement and saying, "What are the deliverables that would have been part of this engagement, and how do we break them into their component parts, and how do those component parts size up to each other?" Like small, medium and large, just comparatively. Being able to figured out like, "Let's size them from there."You almost can think about it like tokens in an arcade. This game costs 1 point, that game costs 10 points, this one's 3 points. If I know what a token costs, now I can price-size them, but I also can figure out why is one more valuable than the other? In law land, it's size, complexity and the big bonus here is you get to factor in urgency.
[00:12:51] Michelle: Nice.
[00:12:52] Whitney: If I’m billing by the hour, and you call me at midnight, you're like, "I need this by 8:00 AM," that hour, or however many hours it takes, costs the same as the same number of hours in the middle of tomorrow, or the same number of hours that I can spread out over three weeks at my leisure. In our method, what we're saying is, there's an urgency factor here. Your one-point project might be two points if you need it on an urgent timeline.
[00:13:20] Michelle: Got it.
[00:13:20] Whitney: Clients are fine with that, they get it. It happens in every other place. You want faster shipping, you pay more for that. You want an expedited timeline, pay more for that. We as lawyers have taken it on the shoulder, like, "Oh, we just have to deal with that, that's part of the deal," and it doesn't have to be.
It shifts that client relationship to say, "Hey, client, you've presented me with this issue, here's how I'm pricing it. If you'd like to pay for that, I'd love to do it." Sometimes clients say, "Is there a different way?" I've had more than my fair share of times had clients say, "Oh, I actually don't need it at 8:00 AM tomorrow, I just meant soon."
[00:14:01] Michelle: Right.
[00:14:02] Whitney: Like, cool!
[00:14:04] Michelle: I love that.
[00:14:05] Whitney: How about I don't work through the midnight hour?
[00:14:08] Michelle: That's great.
[00:14:11] Whitney: The first component is really that like, "Let's size things, understand how size equates to a point number, and how it leads to price." Then I think the other thing that's a huge shift, and really it's not that hard, it's just a mental shift for lawyers, is you have to learn to pitch it.
Lawyers, generally we're not super comfortable being salespeople, especially not for ourselves. We will advocate for our client all day long, real hard. In fact, we'll be bulldogs for our client, but when it's for ourselves, we're not great at that. Giving a lawyer a framework that isn't a hard sell, it really is just a very straightforward, "I hear you, here are the things that are part of what I think is the right solution, maybe there's a couple of alternative ways to solve for it. Let's talk about what those could be, too. Here's what this cost and here's the timeline."
Now, the client makes the choice. I'm not selling the client, I'm offering solutions to the client, and they can pick which one is appropriate for them and move forward. We price then we pitch.Then the last piece, and I think this is so fundamental, one of the things I know you talk about a lot on your podcast and in your blogs and things is really the promise of technology. If you are billing by the hour, there's very little promise of technology for you, because if I become more efficient–
[00:15:44] Michelle: Makes you efficient. Sure.
[00:15:44] Whitney: The minute I become more efficient at stuff that would otherwise have been billable by the hour, all I've done is say either I've got to now sell my client on a higher hourly rate, or I've got to go get more clients. Lawyers aren't necessarily great at sales, by being efficient, we just made it harder on ourselves somehow, and that's the opposite of the point of technology.
In the P3 method, if you can price it based on the deliverable, not on the time, and you can get the client say, "Yes, that value is right, then you are freed up to go say, "Give me all the technology.
[00:16:28] Michelle: Absolutely.
[00:16:29] Whitney: It's not just technology. In fact, some of the technology is really low-tech technology, like that ancient technology called a checklist. Sure, it's tech, it is–
[00:16:44] Michelle: It's just being efficient and process. I would guess that just getting better at a certain type of deliverable.
[00:16:53] Whitney: Sure. I'm now incentivized to really train maybe my associate who, if we're billing by the hour, is going have a lower hourly rate, but if I can train them really well and only train them once and give them resources so that they know here are the articles I should look at, or here's the case law or the form or whatever, I can give them great starting points. Maybe I can enable my paralegal to do much higher-level work because I can give them really good guidance.I don't care that their hour bills lower than mine. In fact, I'm exuberant about that because they can go do that work, and I now can do the work that only senior level can do. That whole profit piece is, on the one hand, the pricing is important, let's make sure we're pricing appropriately, but on the other hand, let's make sure that we are actually building in the efficiencies and the continuous improvement loop so that every time we do a thing, we get better, faster, stronger at it.The client is still thrilled to pay the price that we set in the beginning. They don't care that I could do it in 20 minutes instead of 20 hours, it's really about like the value to the client. I'm building a stronger machine and a stronger team, all those things.
[00:18:23] Michelle: It sounds like you're helping clients, one, backup— They've been billing hourly for a long time, so they can look at some matter and say, "Well, that typically takes us 50 hours, let's say, but then you're also bringing in other qualifying factors to help price it, so complexity, urgency, those kinds of things.
[00:18:48] Whitney: Yes. You're breaking it up. If somebody said, I want to sell my business. To sell your business isn't something I can just size, but if we can have some conversation on the front end, and I'm going to invest time with that client on the front end, in our firm, we don't bill for it, I know if some firms do, and that works where it works, it doesn't where it doesn't, but you have a lot of conversation on the front end to say,"Let's understand the character of the transaction itself, what are the party’s needs, how hard do you intend to negotiate it? What timeline do you have?"
We can say, typically, the components of this kind of deal are, here's your list, and if we didn't know those are generally, maybe this one's one or two points and this one's three or four points, you can build a range. Maybe your transaction is really somewhere between 20 and 30 points. With my costs, I can tell you what that's going to cost. The client can see, what are the drivers. Now on the front end, the client can say, "Oh, we mean that when I decided to just like go to the mattresses on a dumb point that really doesn't matter? I'm actually costing myself X dollars for every go around of that? Okay, got it. Now I can decide do I want to do it or not?"
[00:20:11] Michelle: You're spending more time at the beginning to really understand what that matter is going to look like. My brain immediately goes to scope creep. What do you do with scope creep? It sounds like spending more time at the front end to really understand what it's going to look like and really map it out, that helps you avoid that scope creep and the more defined scope you have.
[00:20:36] Whitney: That is huge, and continuous communication. We build in a communication loop, if you will, that kind of a cadence where— I'll back up and say 70% of ADVOS legal's business is membership. Those are clients who are on a continuous monthly fee. They know how many points they have to use each quarter. We're in communication with them, some every other week, some every month, some on different cadences.
We're talking with them frequently and saying, "Hey, here's how many points you have for the quarter. Here's where we are using your points," because sometimes projects shift. We thought we were going to do this project, it turns out that project's dead, but you need to have some other project in.
[00:21:22] Michelle: Got it.
[00:21:23] Whitney: That's one way that you handle it, is points are fungible. You walk into the arcade with a bag of tokens, and you thought you wanted to play that one game 10 times, it turns out you want to play this other one. You've got points. Let's go use them. On a project where we scoped a specific project, it's very similar. We built in that communication cadence, so the client knows, "I know I'm going to pay this much, and it might go up and here's why it might go up."
Then if the deal takes a turn, we're having a conversation to say, in some cases, "Hey, something has shifted, I don't think you should move forward with this deal. We need to stop going now. We want to downsize your project."
In other cases, it's just a conversation on the front end. The important part is having the conversation early. You have to be able to project-manage. That doesn't exist in most law practice management software platform. That's not a skill that lawyers think about other than calendaring deadlines for litigation or something of that sort. That's a big thing built into systems and it's for good reason.
We don't, as an industry, typically think about how do we project manage this? How do we make sure that we're staying aligned with the stakeholders? As we were in the infant stages of, we're operating on this method and going, "Whoa, you can do it on a spreadsheet," but when there's more than one person on the team, or you've got more than a handful of clients to do that with, that becomes a full-time job in itself. When we built our software, we built in the project management approach, that communication cadence, the reporting on points that clients are using, all of those pieces, so that we were making it easier to deliver on the promise of this method.
[00:23:25] Michelle: Now you have a training program that law firms can take to implement this at their firms. Tell me about that training program. What does that look like? How long does it take? Who do you get involved to take that course? Talk me through that.
[00:23:47] Whitney: Absolutely. I'll give you the high-level. There's plenty of detail on our website, advospro.com. The P3 method is the course you're referring to. We have a P3 method course that's built into four modules, and each module is two sessions. The first session is like this conversation. It's us walking through the method and the worksheets or assets that we have as part of that course.
The lawyer going through the course has a real-time walkthrough of it. We're talking about it in terms of examples within their practice. Then literally in that session, you go ahead and write some things down on your worksheet or fill in this workbook or whatever, and then defining at the end of that first session, the homework.
Picking, as I mentioned before, that bite-size piece where you can go apply that in your practice and get a sense for how it works without a big risk. Don't go do this on your biggest client, who may or may not be a big fan of yours today. Pick somebody new, pick somebody low-risk, let's go try it out.
Then the second session of each module is really just a check-in report back; how did it go? Safe space to talk about how it was scary or I had some friction over on this part. I thought I understood this, but I didn't, and really make sure that you understand it well so that you can move on to the next module, because it all builds on each other.
It's four modules. We've done it so far as one session each week. It's then eight weeks and really our mission there is to deliver extreme value. We want everybody to come out of that course feeling really capable and really well supported. I always feel like if I take some class or something, I want to come out feeling like a genius.
[00:26:05] Michelle: Absolutely. The worst whenever you don't.
[00:26:08] Whitney: Right.
[00:26:11] Michelle: That's great. Is there, I think you had explained this to me before, but a type of law firm or size of firm where this works really well? Because I would assume, litigation's probably not going to be the best fit or contingency fee firm, that kind of thing.
[00:26:28] Whitney: Contingency fee, it doesn't make a ton of sense. You might still, in a contingency fee matter, want the software platform just for the project management, but the concept of moving from hourly to deliverable really is from hourly. If you're contingency, you don't need to go scope things into points. You don't care. You get a percentage of what you take and there you go.
If you are hourly though, it makes a ton of sense. We've talked with people who are doing this kind of work in litigation. People think it can't work in litigation, but it really can.
[00:27:07] Michelle: Interesting.
[00:27:09] Whitney: Again, you have to project-manage it. It's an important part. Family law, estate and trusts, we do it in a business law, corporate law setting. Not great for contingency, not great for things like insurance defense where you have a set. There's a model and a machine there and you're not going to change it.
[00:27:33] Michelle: That makes sense.
[00:27:35] Whitney: I would say I don't think it's a great fit for a big firm. A lot of people say like, "Oh, you need to go talk to like AmLaw 500, whatever,” like, "No, no, I am not trying to make a sharp turn in an aircraft carrier."
[00:27:51] Michelle: Right, that would--
[00:27:51] Whitney: It really is— this is tied to our mission too. We see this as something that's a tremendous fit for small or solo law firms. As an aside, we have clients on this methodology who are not law firms. It's certainly not something that's exclusively for law firms. That's the market we know, that's the language we speak. We've got some CPAs, some business brokers, like other people who are on the platform.
[00:28:25] Michelle: Other professional services.
[00:28:27] Whitney: Professional services billing by the hour for any small firm setting. Our mission really is that we want to impact a million lawyers to build the practice they love, the practice of their dreams. If you're sitting in a big firm and they're trying to implement this, that's not necessarily the practice of your dreams. That's the practice of the committee's dreams, which means it’s the practice of no one's dreams.
[00:28:53] Michelle: I can imagine a lot of it is taking back control a little bit for a law firm owner or helping them avoid just some of the pains that the legal industry's well known for. The associate churn and all of that.
[00:29:09] Whitney: Absolutely. We talk about burnout. Lawyers are burning out left and right. Burnout's the nice way to say mental health issues, suicide rates, alcoholism, all the things, and broken families and just communities and people who are soft of unto themselves and all these things. It's because lawyers are practicing in a practice that doesn't love them back. They're in a system that wasn't designed for the health and well-being of the lawyer or the client or the community or the team.
When we think about the work at ADVOS Pro that we really love doing, we have specific offerings because they are the things that we've identified through our work with clients as the drivers of those end goals. We're not here to say, "This is what your ultimate practice needs to look like." Really where we start with a lot of our clients is the deep dive to think about, "What is the practice of your dreams? What is the practice of today? What's not working, right? What are the disconnects between those two things?"
Then roadmap together to say, "First thing we need to address is this." It might not be the P3 method. It might be you need to understand your financials really well. When we've got an offering around that, let's make sure you have good financial foundations or just law firm foundations in place. Or that you have a sense of who your ideal client is, and how you go to market.
Let's make sure that you've got those things squared away. Or if it really is, I want the agency of deciding what I'm going to charge for a thing and having clients decide that they want that. I want a different client relationship and a different way to work, and I don't want to measure my life in six-minute increments. That’s great. Yes.
[00:31:13] Michelle: Amongst your clients who have gone through the training, is there almost a sense of community amongst those firms that have implemented this? Or is that a vision of y'all's to—
[00:31:27] Whitney: Yes, definitely.
[00:31:30] Michelle: I see. I bet it has, yes. We're going through EOS implementation right now. I'm part of a group that discusses that and other agencies, so I can see how it's similar to other agencies working to— Because that's part of that, it's gaining control and—
[00:31:47] Whitney: What's the funny thing, when you are with other people who aren't US people, there's a whole vocabulary.
[00:31:53] Michelle: Whole vocabulary, right, yes, exactly.
[00:31:55] Whitney: Are you a visionary or an integrator?
[00:31:56] Michelle: Yes, right. . There you go.
[00:32:02] Whitney: It's great because it does build community. Then you have the shorthand, you know you're not alone, you're part of a tribe, and you got this whole thing. That's definitely a big part of what we see as the value of ADVOS Pro, is being able to bring together that community of people who all are saying, "We love the work we're doing, we love our profession, and we are supporting each other in building a way to do that work so that we all can win." It's tremendous. It gives you chills when you think about it.
[00:32:37] Michelle: It is huge. Especially, as a business owner myself, and law firm owners or small business owners, you feel alone a lot, especially if you don't have a lot of partners, so you suddenly have people you can go to, and share those challenges and ask the questions that you haven't had anyone to ask before. So I can imagine that's a huge part of it.
[00:33:01] Whitney: What's interesting too, Michelle, is I think lawyers are even more hesitant than most to let people know that they have those insecurities or that they feel...
[00:33:13] Michelle: Yes, absolutely.
[00:33:14] Whitney: Because our clients come to us looking for advice. People come to us for answers. For us to say, "I don't know." Like that is like there's some primal fear that goes with that. I feel this way about the work we do at ADVOS legal with our business clients, we're talking with a CEO or a CFO who, similarly, people in the business look for answers, and they need a place to say, "Oh, my gosh, I don't know, this really hard and I don't know the answer."
We do that with law firm owners, lawyers on the ADVOS Pro side, and honestly, that is some of the most fulfilling work. Just being able to be there and hear somebody say, "I need help." Maybe I have an answer or a set of options, or maybe I'm just an ear to hear it, but I think to your point, that community becomes part of the answer. "I need help." Just to hear somebody else go, "Yes, I'm struggling with that too."
[crosstalk]
[00:34:18] Michelle: Right, yes. I'm looking for just someone to listen. Right, absolutely. Or, "I dealt with that too." This is great.
Before we go, is there anything I haven't asked that you think would be important for listeners to know about this? I always like to end that just in case I didn't touch on something that's important.
[00:34:38] Whitney: Hmm.
[00:34:39] Michelle: I know.
[00:34:40] Whitney: ADVOS Pro, I think one of the most interesting conversations we get to have on that side is the evolution of technology for law, technology, generally. In the legal side, we have a lot of clients who are in AI, and machine learning, and RPA, and all the very sexy tech stuff.
We often hear people say, "Aren't you scared, the robots are coming?" I feel like the work we're doing in ADVOS Pro is really like, "Let's welcome the robots in." Let's figure out how to let the robots do the stuff that no lawyer went to law school because they dreamed of spending their day doing that. None of us went to law school and thought, "Let me go do really routine things all day." No. That can be the robot’s job all day long. So we let machines do that stuff, and then we build the processes and the systems and the business models to let us go apply our genius to solving the sticky problems that, frankly, really mattered to our clients and our communities. That makes you excited to be a lawyer again. Let's go do that.
[00:35:53] Michelle: Yes, solve the problems, absolutely. This is great. Thank you so much. We have been talking to Whitney Harper of ADVOS legal and ADVOS Pro. What's the best way people can get in touch with you? LinkedIn or just go to the website?
[00:36:06] Whitney: Yes, we're all over the place. The website is advospro.com. I'm on LinkedIn, Whitney Harper. My email is whitney@advospro.com. Yes, whatever way you want to reach out. I will say, we love talking about this stuff, and we are always open to having conversations. Whether it's a problem we can solve or not, we are really excited to connect with the community of lawyers who are thinking about it, so please feel free to reach out.
[00:36:34] Michelle: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:36:36] Whitney: Michelle, thanks so much for having me. This was really fun.
[00:36:38] Michelle: Absolutely, yes.
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