In this episode, Steve Fretzin and Ryan Anderson discuss:
- Challenges lawyers are having with technology.
- Solutions regarding document and task management for lawyers.
- How to handle conversations of record.
- Investing in your employees.
Key Takeaways:
- Make sure your systems are all on the cloud.
- The majority of law firms are still on servers, which are more easy to penetrate (from a security perspective) than the cloud is.
- Every document should be uploaded in a system that is searchable and organizable.
- Lawyers need to consider technologies and automations that are going to make their lives easier and more predictable because the world is changing and it is important to stay on top of those kinds of things.
“It is amazing what will happen if an employee feels you’re willing to invest in them.” — Ryan Anderson
Connect with Ryan Anderson:
Website: https://www.filevine.com/
Email: ryan@filevine.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-anderson-49a30740/
Connect with Steve Fretzin:
LinkedIn: Steve Fretzin
Twitter: @stevefretzin
Facebook: Fretzin, Inc.
Website: Fretzin.com
Email: Steve@Fretzin.com
Book: The Ambitious Attorney: Your Guide to Doubling or Even Tripling Your Book of Business and more!
YouTube: Steve Fretzin
Call Steve directly at 847-602-6911
Show notes by Podcastologist Chelsea Taylor-Sturkie
Audio production by Turnkey Podcast Productions. You’re the expert. Your podcast will prove it.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
lawyer, law firm, case, people, technology, steve, called, file, task, skiing, dropbox, conversation, salt lake city, point, software, system, notes, deadline, firm, salt lake
SPEAKERS
Ryan Anderson, Narrator, Steve Fretzin
Ryan Anderson [00:00]
You know, it’s all about making sure that something enters that trusted system. And boy, I’ll tell you, if you were to see fall behind. That’s how it’s built. It looks very different from our competitors system because we really didn’t set out to build like a time and billing system that was meant to solve this slipping through the cracks kind of problem. So that’s really cool.
Narrator [00:22]
You’re listening to be that lawyer, life changing strategies and resources for growing a successful law practice. Each episode, your host, author and lawyer coach, Steve Fretzin, will take a deeper dive helping you grow your law practice in less time, greater results. Now, here’s your host, Steve Fretzin.
Steve Fretzin [00:46]
Hey, everybody, welcome to be that lawyer. I am Steve Fretzin. As the announcer just mentioned, I hope you’re having a terrific day. Today. It is another day to learn it’s another day to try to get some good information about how to be that lawyer someone who’s competent, organized in a skilled Rainmaker, and listen, today, it’s all about technology, technology, technology, it’s it’s the future of law. It’s happening all around us. And we just have to kind of lean into it. So my guest today is going to is going to hit this topic up like a superstar. It’s Ryan Anderson. He’s the CEO and co founder of file vine. How’s it going, Ryan?
Ryan Anderson [01:22]
Good, Steve. How are you?
Steve Fretzin [01:24]
I’m doing okay, I’m doing okay. So you’re calling from Salt Lake City?
Ryan Anderson [01:28]
Yeah, the hardest Salt Lake City. We’re about 25 minutes from Park City, which is where I like to ski and stuff. So yeah, we’re, we’re right in the heart.
Steve Fretzin [01:36]
That’s right. That’s right on. I’m in Chicago in the hills that we have here are horrible. Here is terrible. I don’t recommend anybody come to Wisconsin or Chicago to go skiing. But it’s all we have. Right. So we you know, we just we ski for like, you know, four turns and then we get on a chairlift. Anyway, I’ll have to come out and see
Ryan Anderson [01:55]
you. You will Yeah, you should, you should be our guest. We’re right off the freeway. And so we actually get quite a few people who are planning to come here for a ski trip and I’ll drop by the foul line offices, so Okay.
Steve Fretzin [02:06]
All right. Well, I might have to bring my 14 year old because he he’s, if I tell him I’m going skiing without him. He’ll kill me. There. Yeah. He’s a snowboarder, and he’s all about it. So listen, give me give a little bit of background for my audience on how you came to be. And I think you’re a former lawyer. Correct?
Ryan Anderson [02:22]
I am. Yeah. Yeah. It’s still licensed but not practicing. Okay. Okay. So yeah. So what’s your kind of backup to law school, I got married to my wife back in 2004. And was she was teaching at the time. And so we had always kind of hoped to go back east for law school. But she was a teacher and had a good job. And most importantly, she had health insurance. And so I got into BYU. And so we decided that it made sense to just stay right here in Utah and go to school at BYU, which I loved. So absolutely loved my time at BYU law school, and enjoyed it and have made some lifelong friends there, some of whom are customers today, actually. So I’m pretty proud of that.
Steve Fretzin [03:04]
To keep relationships long.
Ryan Anderson [03:07]
All right, yeah. Yeah, I hadn’t even thought of that. But yes, I can. I can name at least two lawyers that I went to law school with, who have now purchased by line. So it’s kind of fun. Anyway, she was from Las Vegas, her family’s from Las Vegas. So she really wanted to be there. And so we moved to Las Vegas, I worked for a calf smallish personal injury firm called a midsize personal injury firm down there, and did that for a few years and then left to start my own firm as lawyers or want to do and I’m sure several people in your audience are similar, left to start my own firm with a friend. And as we started to get cases, I realized pretty quickly that we needed to manage those cases. There was a software that I had heard of in the industry at the time, and I’ll go ahead and say the name there’s nothing against these guys. Clio CLI. Oh, which you may or may not have heard. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So purchased Clio to manage the practice. And that was going great. It was going just fine for about a year. But I was handling kind of not just car accidents, but kind of larger scale medical malpractice cases. And then some some Wage and Hour Work. There was some significant cases around like wager Wage and Hour misclassification kinds of cases. And so because the cases that I was spending most of my time on, because those were larger cases, and I spent a lot of time in the courtroom, and handled trials and things like that. The cases were more complex and required quite a bit of interaction between myself. I think we had one associates and paralegals, and I noticed about the time that I got to kind of five or six people employed at the firm, it became really challenging to manage. It was more sort of the tasks that everyone had to do. You know, I wanted to know not just what I needed to do in a day, I wanted to know what I had asked somebody else to do, and if they had done it, or if they had not done it, and so knowing if so But he hasn’t done something as a lawyer might be more important than knowing if they have, because certain things have to be done within certain timeframes. And so that was that was really important to me. And, you know, I think Clio, if they’re being completely honest, would admit that, you know, task management really wasn’t their thing. It’s more like Time and Billing. And so I set out to find something that could help us with the former, and really just wasn’t successful. I couldn’t find anything out there that would do that. And at the time happened to have a couple of friends who were developers, one of them said to me, Hey, you really ought to talk to this guy named Jim Blake, he just quit the job he was at. They were working together at the time. And I think he was slated to go out and get a job offer from Amazon, he can correct me if I’m wrong on that. But I believe that was the case. And he was about to go do that. But I think he had like two or three weeks in between quitting this job in Las Vegas and going out to Seattle. And Jim showed up in my office and said, Hey, I’d love to kind of get you started before I head off to my real job. So I walked him through problems we were facing at our law office, and in particular, sort of this this task management component where I really kind of wanted to understand what was going on in my firm who was doing what and what Walker’s they might have to do the next thing. And he said, Well, look, you know, here’s some ideas I have, I shared with him some ideas I had, I remember drawing up, sort of like a Facebook feed kind of style program. And I said, it really should look like this. And it should have these components. And he said, Well, let me do some research. And he took maybe two to three weeks where he followed me around my law firm talk to employees of mine, and then went and talked to friends of mine, who were also lawyers and saw what they were doing. And then I remember, he took two or three days just in court, and just sat and watched what attorneys did, and how they interacted with judges and others. But he, you know, he put a lot of kind of FaceTime into the problem, and then came back with a stack of papers kind of, again, two weeks or so into it and said, This is the specifications of a system that I would build to solve this problem, I’m not going to solve this problem, I’m going to go take this job that I told you about. But with these specifications, you should be able to hand them off to a competent engineer, and they should be able to get started. And it was at that point that I made sort of the most significant recruiting effort in my life and said, Jim, I really enjoyed working with you, I really think you shouldn’t do that. And you should work here with me and try and build this thing. And I can’t believe it. But he said yes. And you know, six are coming up on seven years, where six and a half years old. So nearly seven years later file line is gotten to be quite successful, and over 400 employees and, you know, 1000s of customers all across the country. So really, really pleased with its growth. And, and you know, along the way about, you know, several years ago, I stopped practicing law day to day and now focus 100% on this. And so what are
Steve Fretzin [07:55]
you seeing as far as like the main challenges that lawyers are having similar to what you were talking about with task management? What kinds of technology challenges are they having? And I know that file mines solve some of them, but there’s, you know, there’s a lot of different areas that that technology, you know, works to help to help resolve what are the kind of the main things you’re seeing?
Ryan Anderson [08:17]
Yeah. So what I think lawyers don’t want to have happen is have something fall through the cracks. I think what keeps lawyers up at night is that slipping through the cracks, kind of your I don’t know that I know a lawyer who hasn’t said to me at some point, I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat wondering if I had missed this deadline or that deadline. You know, my father was a lawyer. I remember him telling me those stories. I remember feeling that Personally, myself. And to this day, I talked to lawyers who say these things keep me up at night. And with a lawyer is I’m sure you know, Steve and your work. They don’t mean that figure figuratively, they literally mean they can’t go to bed because they’re so nervous. They’ve missed some sort of deadline. Yeah. So, you know, at any point in time, piece of information can come at you. And as a lawyer, once you’re in receipt of that information, depending on what it is, you may have to react to it. So maybe it’s a letter from the court. Maybe it’s a letter from another lawyer. Maybe it’s a motion that you have to deal with. Maybe it’s a piece of evidence, maybe it’s something your client told you. Maybe it’s it’s an important witness who’s reached out to you. These inputs can come from all over the place and they can come in all sorts of different forms. Somebody could say it to you somebody could email it to you somebody could fax it to you lawyer still use fax it’s kind of crazy that still Oh yeah. Oh my goodness do they use while most of its effects by now, but but they still use fax. And so because it can come in a you know anything from a Slack message to a text message to a Facebook message. I mean, I’ve seen that before, because it can come into you from any area. The ideas gosh, if you don’t have a way to get that piece of information that you need to act on into a trusted system, you’re exposed. The only thing between you and a malpractice claim is your memory. And that is not a good thing to rely on. So
Steve Fretzin [10:14]
yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, if I had to rely on my memory, I wouldn’t be divorced, and I wouldn’t be working. So sometimes I tell my wife, I, she asked me something, and I’ll say, you know, just just, you know, here’s my phone, you know, you can see everything I’m gonna be doing for the next week. There you go. It is in there. My son is waiting for me to pick him up. And it’s not in my calendar. He’s not getting picked up. He’ll just sit there. I’ll
Ryan Anderson [10:39]
present the case. Oh, there, Steve. You’re a man after my own heart. No, I, I have said to myself, if I could just have somebody who just walked around and a 10 feet behind me and made sure that I didn’t lose the things that are around me. I would save hours out of every day, because I’m constantly Yeah, losing keys of iPhone and whatever else it might be. So yeah,
Steve Fretzin [10:59]
but this but the software is, is the reliable software that you can count on to track everything that’s going on around you. So nothing gets misplaced or gets forgotten or lost. That’s really what everyone’s looking for.
Ryan Anderson [11:15]
Yeah, man. So have you ever heard of David Allen’s getting things done the GTD methodology?
Steve Fretzin [11:20]
Not only have I heard of it, but I actually teach it?
Ryan Anderson [11:24]
Oh, okay. Well, look, I mean,
Steve Fretzin [11:27]
I mean, if you look around my office, you will not see a piece of paper. And people are sick of me talking about this remarkable two that I have now, which is that it’s remarkable to I need to get them as a sponsor. And essentially, it feels like paper. Everything is now in here. I don’t do any paper anymore done with paper. And now he just integrated this with Google Drive and Dropbox. So now I have this able to save into Dropbox and vice versa. So I’m done. Like this is it so for me,
Ryan Anderson [12:00]
that’s pretty cool. Tell me so it better than an iPad, I have an iPad, but I don’t tend to use a ladder, which is
Steve Fretzin [12:07]
yeah, like, like a stylus or stylus. Right. So I that was my first move. My first move was grabbed, grab a new iPad, and use it for notes and use it. But it’s so slick, that you’re just the pen just doesn’t work well. It’s kind of slippery. highgrade this feels like paper. It’s a marker, fake marker that feels like paper, I’ve got an eraser at the end. So everything goes in here. All your notes are right here on this pad for oh my gosh, conversation. Now this is when so then, but I can also take documents, PDFs and put them here and then right on top of them. So access, and then I can save all of it to Dropbox, and have a folder with all my podcast interviews or anything clients information, all my notes. So this is like just another piece of the puzzle of how do we use technology to to save trees? Or how to make sure nothing gets through the cracks to your point.
Ryan Anderson [13:02]
That’s it. Yeah. So my word. I mean, that’s really cool. So yeah, I’m a huge David Allen fan. And honestly, I got introduced to him from my developers, maybe you know, the Steve. But getting things done is a big deal. And sort of the developer coding community, which, you know, I don’t code I know enough buzzwords to sound like I did to fake it. For me.
Steve Fretzin [13:25]
I use the word code. So we all just assume that you know more than we do,
Ryan Anderson [13:28]
right? You know, as you might imagine, I’ve now you know, I’m very good friends and co workers, and of course, my co founder, who are highly technical folks, and they love the Getting Things Done methodology. Because it’s, you know, it’s all about making sure that something enters that trusted system. And boy, I’ll tell you, if you were to see fall behind, that’s how it’s built. It looks very different from our competitors system, because we really didn’t set out to build like a time and billing system. It was meant to solve this slipping through the cracks kind of problem. So that’s really cool.
Steve Fretzin [13:59]
Yeah, so getting things done is a huge part of what I’m working with lawyers on all the time so that they can eliminate all those inefficiencies, figure out where to delegate figure out what technology can automate and solve the problem that they’re having. And the idea that you’re integrating that kind of methodology into bio vine, I think is really, that’s a big deal. And I think that lawyers should understand that, that type of mindset of, of efficiency is is mean that might be a huge differentiator for your for your software.
Ryan Anderson [14:34]
It’s a completely different ways, you know, of kind of living your life and organizing all the chaos that we deal with on a day to day basis. And, you know, for better or for worse, once you start using fall behind a little bit, you kind of get addicted to it because you’ve now sort of married yourself to this framework, and it’s very powerful. So, yeah, I’m 100% with you. And look, David Allen if you’re out there. Sorry. Sorry. I didn’t give you any stock at this point. But he’s definitely an inspiration for file line. So
Steve Fretzin [15:05]
I’m sure he’s listening right now. And that’s right. I’m sure that nothing else to do. This would be under his drop it list I think of listening to Fretzin podcasts, I think that’s gonna go under the, I know that I could listen to it like it’s a double speed or something and get it done and in, you know, 20 minutes or 15 minutes. Anyway, so let’s talk about how to modernize a law firm. What are some things that that need to happen? Because the future mean in Utah and Arizona, you know, are at the forefront of, of changes happening legally in the space? And I’ve had a few people on the show to talk about that. But I think we have to get our act together as it relates to modernization. So what are what are three or four things that you work on with law firms that you see have to happen in for a law firm to survive and thrive moving forward into the future?
Ryan Anderson [15:59]
So yeah, I’ll dive into those. And I’ll just mention real quickly, I don’t know if you saw it was just announced by LegalZoom, that they’re actually going to hire lawyers in Arizona. So here you have I think, for the first time in US history, lawyers will be employed by a non lawyer Corporation. That’s that’s an interesting thing. I don’t believe that has really happened before, certainly not on the scale, that Legal Zoom is going to do it. So before I sort of get into the, you know, ways the lawyer should modernize, I’ll just mention, that’s a big deal. And it will dramatically change the landscape. I don’t know how soon it will, it will happen. But you know, if Utah is sort of already on that path, Arizona is already on that path. 100%, I noticed the California is going in that direction. If you get a few big states, I think you’ll see a cascading effect. And what it’ll do. And this is kind of a controversial thing to say, but I think it’s going to happen, although we’re not there yet. There are shoes to drop. But I think it’ll mean private equity, money will start flooding into law firms. And that’s already happening through things like litigation, finance, but it’ll be direct, you’ll, you’ll literally just have PE shops, who will fund the law firms, which will really be an interesting world to live in. So setting all that aside, look, the first thing I would do as a law firm is make sure that your systems are all on the cloud. And you and I are sitting here on a zoom, you’re using this what’s called remarkable remarkable to remarkable to, you know, I think it’s fair to say that we are we probably trend a little bit to the right of the bell curve on technology, as compared to many other lawyers and legal professionals, those that are sort of on the on the back half the left half of that bell curve, I gotta tell you, it is shocking to me, how many of them still have their key systems sitting on server base premises based software, it’s still there in a big way, especially Time and Billing. And a lot of these law firms are using VPNs to get into their key key systems. So the very first move, I would say is we got to you got to get off of those. So if you’re still on that, you got to get off it now. Look, the tech forward, folks that probably skew more on your podcast, they’re probably not right. They’re probably on Dropbox, or box or whatever the case may be. And they probably have a cloud based billing system. But I think you’d be shocked even within your customer base. And certainly we see this every single day, the majority of the people we sell to are still on servers. That’s just not okay, in 2021. For a whole bunch of reasons, server based systems are more easy to penetrate. From a security perspective, it’s sort of the opposite of what we had been led to believe, I think from the IT industry for a long time, which was, hey, if you know if it’s on the cloud, who knows how security? Well, you know, you don’t hear of public systems getting getting taken down. But I can point to very specific examples, I won’t, because I certainly wouldn’t want to denigrate those system. But the legal industry is probably aware of server based systems or hybrid systems, which I think is probably the worst of both both worlds, that have literally been taken offline by hackers. I mean, there was a famous case of a competitor of ours that had ransomware applied to their entire customer base that was on their hybrid cloud, just unacceptable in 2021. So that’s kind of that’s kind of job one. There’s, there’s lots to do from there, I would say you need to make sure your digital meaning every single item of mail that comes into your law firm needs to be scanned and uploaded to a secure system, you know, it firewind We think that that your doc management and your case management system should be one thing. We don’t think that people should think of those as two separate systems. So, you know, we’ve done a lot of work to have a document management system that we think is comparable to Dropbox and we think excels exceeds it in some ways. But what I will say is whether whether you’re scanning into Dropbox stir box or some other document management system, every single item of mail that comes in needs to go there because it needs to be indexed OCR and searchable and be able to yield the tag unedited, put it into an online folder structure. So it’s there forever.
Steve Fretzin [20:15]
Go ahead and has the COVID crisis sort of accelerated these these, you know, cloud based and male to digital functions, because the everybody’s working from home and remotely.
Ryan Anderson [20:29]
Totally, it has so on, you might imagine it has been a good thing for five on as a business. But yes, you’re absolutely right. Law Offices are now you know, they replace the received mail, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, if you know, you may have to be out of the office during quarantine. So yeah, there are entire companies that will receive your mail. I think Earth class mail is one of them. I’ve also heard of a company called lob, lob, like a, like a tennis law, that Albee that will actually receive your mail, scan it and send it to you in some sort of secure form. So we don’t do that. And we just we just do the storage component. But yeah, I think that that’s just absolutely critical. So whether you’re using an outside service to do that, or whether you have somebody in your office whose job it is to simply take the mail and scan it in. That seems like job one.
Steve Fretzin [21:18]
And so what about, and I know you’re gonna get into this, but about collaborative work task based work. So I’m a managing partner. Hi, you know, let’s hypothetical, this. I’m a managing partner. I’ve got, you know, 15 attorneys work in the different levels associate partner level, and I need to know stuff’s getting done right, that things are getting filed and cases are moving forward. And, and we’re not talking because we’re all virtual, we’re all running around doing our own thing. So how does how does then the technology and file mind work work within those that for the task for the task management?
Ryan Anderson [21:51]
Right? So you know, we talked earlier about this is a lawyer, you want to know, not just what you need to do, but what you’ve assigned somebody else to do and what the status is on those things. So file, Vine has a list of tasks for the user. But we also have the ability to say, Hey, show me all my tasks that I’ve assigned out. And what is the status of those tasks, you can also say, show me all my tasks that I’ve assigned to a particular person, you can say, show me all the tasks that have been assigned on the Smith case that are coming due in the next 30 days. So one thing that Fabien does a really good job of, and I tend to think this is an area of strength for us, as opposed to some some other competitors is we have really robust reporting, that is we built all ourselves. So you can report against anything in the entire system. So you can say things like, Okay, I want to know all my deadlines over the next 90 days where I’ve assigned the work to Susan, and it applies to these 10 cases, and you can you get the click of a button, you can look at that. And then what we also do is we have sort of these timed reports, and visualizations. So I’ll talk about the time reports first. So you can say look, once a week, I want to get a report of all the deadlines coming up across every assignment that I’ve given to Steve. And we’ll just email you that. And it’ll just be a list of all the things that Ryan has assigned you. And I’ll be able to see oh, looks looks like Steve’s falling behind here, it looks like this one is already completed looks like this one you need some help on. And I can see all that is a report that just hits my email inbox. So I don’t have to go into File line or remember to look at this Bob line will automatically tell me that it needs to happen. So so that’s really critical. And then, you know, generally, we believe that there are lawyers are unique in a couple ways, from other knowledge workers. In the conversations that lawyers have fob on, we call them conversations of record. And here’s what I mean. If you have a conversation with an insurance adjuster, there could be language use in that conversation that makes that conversation. Operative, meaning contractual. In other words, if you have a conversation where you say to an insurance adjuster, I accept your offer. That that is you just made a contract on that phone call that is very different from somebody in a marketing department who needs to know if the copyright they just did is is you know the direction people want to head or they’re looking for feedback on on a billboard or something like that, that conversation you had with that adjuster or that opposing lawyer, that judge or your client who directs you to settle the case or a witness. These are conversations of record. And what we do is we advocate that you immediately take that conversation down in a note and file line. And then what’s great is in following you can actually take these notes about conversations that you’ve had, and then turn them into actual actionable tasks. So if I have a conversation with Bob, about his just take a super simple example. Bob’s got a medical malpractice case against his doctor, and I say to Bob, okay, what do you want to do on this case? It looks like you know, there’s a motion for summary judgment. That’s Come in. I assume you want me to oppose that? And would you like me to make an offer to the other side and Bob gives me direction, I need to take those notes down a. So I remember what Bob said and what, you know, what do you want me to do. And then B, once that note is in fine, I can it with just a couple of keystrokes, a sign that note in context of the case, to another person at the firm who can then go take action on it. And then through something we call the feed, which is very much like a Facebook feed, we can see what the progress of that person has been, as that task progresses. And we can see Oh, looks like, you know, it looks like we’ve gotten the witness affidavit. And we need to beat this motion for summary judgment. And now I know what your progress has been made on this thing that I’ve asked somebody to do. So so so that’s, that’s how we do it is we bring all that communication into the platform. When I was talking earlier, I was saying, hey, like, there’s the inputs for a lawyer can come at them from so many different angles, you know, file on try, say, hey, no matter what source that that information is coming at you from, we’re going to find a way to get into the file line very, very quickly, and make it actionable, make it so you can actually task yourself or somebody on it and see what the progress is.
Steve Fretzin [26:10]
Yeah, it’s really interesting stuff. And again, between the cloud the mail to digital, the reporting, and how we manage tasks, that sounds like it’s just a really robust software that just that just solves a lot of problems. And lawyers, you know, need to consider, you know, technologies and automations that are going to make their lives easier and more predictable. Because the world is changing. And we’ve got to stay on top of those kinds of things. One thing I wanted to kind of wrap up with, and maybe just take 30 seconds to a minute on this, and then we’re gonna hit the three best stuff is, is technology as it relates to help attract and recruit talent. And I saw that, I think I saw that on your website. And I was intrigued. How file vine, are your companies helping helping with technology for that purpose?
Ryan Anderson [26:53]
Yeah, so you and I think spoke offline before the podcast around sort of the tactics that you’re seeing out there for recruiting of lawyers, we are in a generational worker shortage in law, there are not enough of them. And the tactics are getting increasingly aggressive. We’re seeing customers are telling us that recruiters will call their law firms, we’ve seen examples of recruiters calling relatives of lawyers that they want to recruit, to come work for them, it is getting extraordinarily aggressive. So you have to be on your game. So the areas where I would use technology, you have to understand how engaged your workforce is. So we use, and by the way, there’s a million of these companies. So we’d like this one. But there’s so many good ones, you can’t go wrong, we use a software called culture amp. This is not a five line company. This is the software that we use culture aamp, that sends out surveys to our team, that just gives us a baseline engagement level. And it measures things like you know, trust and leadership, general happiness at the office engagement, all those kinds of things. And what you want to do with that first survey is not necessarily say, Oh, we’re doing good or bad, because you actually don’t know because every it’s going to be relative, but you want to know that on the on the next survey that you made improvements. And so if you do if you do a survey, and then you do another survey pretty months later or six months later, and there’s improvement, hey, you know, things are going well. And if there’s not, then you know, there’s something maybe to take a look at, that’s maybe evidence of some kind of problem. So I do think kind of culture surveys are a big deal for law firms. And, and we do a lot of those, I also think internal training. So it is amazing what will happen if an employee feels you’re willing to invest in them, the employees know that investing in their career is probably the most important thing they can do. And if they’re very employer says, Hey, we’re going to find you a coach to teach you how to do this thing better, or we’re going to pay for you to get this certification, or we’re going to, you know, bring speakers in at lunchtime to help you learn how to do X, Y, or Z, that that internal coaching, where people feel like the office and in their place of business is some a place where they can actually invest in themselves. That will help engagement quite a bit and drive a lot of loyalty.
Steve Fretzin [29:12]
Yeah, now now is the time to step up and say thank you and ask how can I help you? And what can we do better, and really just, you know, hit your people where it counts because they’re getting hit up every day, to your point by these recruiters and people are jumping ship like crazy. They’re getting, you know, offered huge money. That’s I don’t know how that’s going to end up at some point badly. But, you know, it’s just it’s just nuts out there. So I think that investing internally in your team and net doesn’t have to be money that can be time that could be right just just like, you know, asking How was your day, you know, or taking them on a little retreat or just, you know, some some extra bonus. They weren’t expecting, right? Totally, really great stuff. So let’s move from technology to Salt Lake City. So that That’s a that’s a place I’ve never been. And I definitely on my list. I think you’re like right up there with Austin. I haven’t done Austin either. And that was the guy had. I had a technology guy on my show. Who’s from Austin. Just just maybe it was the last show. But talk to me about if I if I’m coming to visit you, and this is by the way, my treat Ryan. Okay, so I don’t want you to feel. Alright. Sounds good. I will treat you. But what restaurant are you taking me to? What’s your favorite place to go and eat a great meal?
Ryan Anderson [30:28]
Gosh, I’m gonna have to go with just a local favorite. That is right up the road from a foul line. So you could actually walk to it. It’s called the dodo do do, named after the dodo bird. So yeah, just they have a phenomenal turkey sandwich. And that place is packed for lunch every single day. And it is it’s about as local as you can get. So like that. Restaurants been around for a long time. And if you want to go where the locals go, the dodos
Steve Fretzin [30:54]
or the dodo go. Yeah, that’s right. All right. Now I have a feeling I know what you’re going to say here. But what would be something that I would want to see or do in Salt Lake City? Look,
Ryan Anderson [31:05]
Salt Lake is for people who love the outdoors. That’s why I love it here. And if you live here, you know, you better love the outdoors, because otherwise it gets too cold. So yeah, it’s pretty amazing. If you can get up to the mountains. I’m a fan of Park City. So you know any place to go ski Deer Valley if you if you make a lot of money, but there’s just there’s great resorts worldclass all throughout Salt Lake City in the great part. And, you know, I’ve got a lot of friends in Colorado, Colorado, sort of our little front of me state with regards to skiing. The difference between Salt Lake and Denver is that when you fly to Salt Lake, you’re half an hour away from hitting slopes. When you’re flying to Denver, you’re two hours away. And, and so it’s pretty awesome. You can see the mountains right when you land in Salt Lake, it’s pretty incredible place. So if you’re a skier or snowboarder, definitely that’s where I take you.
Steve Fretzin [31:55]
All right, and then what are the locals into what are you into, let’s say outside of skiing, just we know you ski already. Sure what other outdoorsy things do you do or what other things are the locals into.
Ryan Anderson [32:07]
So I mount bike pretty much every week, I hike regularly. The great thing about living in Salt Lake City is you don’t even need to get in a car to hike or mountain bike. So I can literally leave my house and within about 15 minutes, be on a mountain bike trail that is you know, as beautiful as you’ll see anywhere and just just be in the mountains in the hills overlooking Salt Lake. So a lot of mountain biking, a lot of hiking, great rivers fly fisherman, I think really like the Provo River, which is right by here. So yeah, it’s a it’s an incredible place. If you love the outdoors.
Steve Fretzin [32:40]
I have a close friend who builds houses up there and then lives in them and then sells them and he’s always fly fishing. He’s always skiing. He’s just living this total amazing life. And then he when he’s not there, he’s in Costa Rica. So he’s doing the same. He understands how to build and sell homes. So he just builds homes, he lives in them for a year and then sells them for a lot of money. And this is this old gun this whole all this thing got this guy does. Anyway, listen, I think I think what you’re doing is great how you’re helping the legal community is huge. If people want to learn more about file vine or or get in touch with you or your team, what’s the best way for them to reach out?
Ryan Anderson [33:15]
So first of all, people can email me I mean, followed by.com is our email is our website. But Ryan, if eyeline is a great place to reach me random ally.com I’m Ultra responsive on email, probably probably too much. there’s gonna come a point where I can’t respond to all the emails that come in, but I like to be responsive, especially to people who have interest. So yeah, shoot me an email Ryan a follow on.com And we’d love to chat.
Steve Fretzin [33:38]
Awesome, awesome. Well, thanks for being my guest and being on the show sharing your wisdom and your technology with my audience. And hopefully, people are going to check out your website and see what it’s all about. Because it sounds like it’s it’s just got all the bells and whistles to help a law firm really be organized and how they how they run their run their firm.
Ryan Anderson [33:56]
Steve, I really enjoyed the conversation. Thanks so much for having me on.
Steve Fretzin [33:59]
Yeah, it was my pleasure. Hey, everybody, thank you for spending some time with Ryan and I today hopefully again, you got some really good takeaways and I’m taking notes on my remarkable to who by the way, you know, they better be become a sponsor, because I’m talking about them all the time at this point. So but But seriously, if you if you’re looking for it if you’re looking for it, check it out. Check it out, man. It is it is so slick. I was upset because it wasn’t it wasn’t mirroring with Dropbox and I just uploaded the software today. I still haven’t figured out how to do it, but it’s but that’s like the only thing that was missing for me and now it hasn’t so I’m a lot. I’m an absolute badass. So listen, everybody take care of be well be safe. Hopefully we’ll talk to you again soon. hear from you soon. Take care. Bye.
Narrator [34:45]
Thanks for listening to be that lawyer. Life changing strategies and resources for grilling a successful law practice. Visit Steve’s website fretzin.com. For additional information, and to stay up to date on the latest legal bill Business Development and Marketing Trends for more information and important links about today’s episode check out today’s show notes