Tony Rupp and Steve Poland

 All right. Welcome to season two of Empire State Entrepreneurs New York Business Lab, A very fun and informative podcast that explores the journeys of New York's most inspiring business leaders. I'm your. Host Dave Pfalzgraf. And I'm blessed to be the managing partner of a local law firm, Rupp Pfalzgraf.

This season two, we're bringing you deeper insights into the challenges and triumphs of entrepreneurs across the Empire State, from innovative startups to transformative non-profits and established business enterprises. Join us as we explore the compelling world of New York business. As always, I wanted to take a quick minute to thank Mike and Erik, and all of our friends at Incept for hosting us in this super cool podcast studio. My firm's been using Incept for a number of projects over the years, and they're doing a great job for us today. I'm really excited to welcome two good friends and incredible entrepreneurs in their own right, Tony Rupp and Steve Poland, as maybe obvious from the name of our law firm, Tony Ru.

This is my co-founder and one of the best trial attorneys in town. And Steve Poland is the former managing director of Z 80 Labs and a guy who has done a ton in the startup space in Western New York. Welcome to both of you guys. Thanks, Dave. Thanks. Before getting into how the three of us came together, how the two of you met, which I think would be relevant for all of our entrepreneur listeners, I did want to, touch on a little bit of both your background so our listeners can get a sense of what has led you to this place today. Why don't we start with Steve, and I'm not sure I know your complete background so walk us through a little bit of where you grew up and how you ended up either in Buffalo or back in Buffalo.

Sure. Yeah. So I grew up in Buffalo, New York. I've been dabbling with computers since I was probably 10 years old, I'd say, started in gaming and such, and then started building computers. Very entrepreneurial. When I was in high school, I took out a school ad and was building computers for people and selling them at that point, went to RIT for a few years to learn programming.

Realized that programming wasn't totally for me, but that I loved it and enjoyed the processes that were involved. And so I wanted to get more into learning how data connects and technology and tools and such, and be able to communicate with programmers and such. From there, that led me to a business management degree at Purdue University.

And then for the past 25 years, I've basically been working on my own, but also one of these stops was doing Z 80 labs. It was a six and a half million dollar fund to invest in tech startups in Buffalo. And so the goal there was to get the startup community here in Buffalo. Really accelerated a bit more

Now, Tony, I know a lot about your background but I do know there's also some programming in your background as well. Yeah. Maybe that's one of the reasons you and Poland hit it off so well. But tell our listeners a little bit about your upbringing and what's brought you here today.

Yeah, sure. I also grew up in Amherst, New York, suburb of Buffalo. And I got into pro. Programming computers when I was about 14 many years before Steve and a much darker, technological age, but self-taught programming. But I always loved it. And to this day, I still program because I enjoy using code to tell a machine to do something and have it do something that's productive or useful.

So I started programming. In fact I was in…before the internet there were dial up bulletin boards. Used a modem to get on, and I was a co-system operator, basically a webmaster of a pre-internet bulletin board. And I was pretty entrepreneurial about that. I had my own page and I was trying to start a little nascent business.

And I like to say, geez, if I hadn't gone into law, I might've been an internet entrepreneur because I was doing that and the pre-internet era, but…then college hit. I went to the University of Rochester. I majored in economics and history, and then went onto law school which was my grandfather's profession.

I always enjoyed it, but coming outta law school at Cornell, I joined Hodgson Ross and was a litigator, but I always had, in the back of my mind, I was always angling for ways to market that were outside of the box. Ways to think about practicing law that were different. I'm very much a contrarian, so I wanted to do this very old profession, but I wanted to do it in a new and different way.

Coming and starting our own firm with you back in 2000 was part of that entrepreneurial spirit and we were able to launch a law firm but also a platform that was gonna be receptive to technology and just different entrepreneurial efforts that we could engage in over the years.

And I think we've done that and I've really enjoyed the partnership with Steve along the lines. 'cause he has that really strong professional foot in the. In the techno space and can make things happen, can take a vision that, I don't have the programming skills or the project management ability to bring, he can bring the forces to bear to allow us to move forward with a tech vision for a new entrepreneurial approach, whether it's a separate business.

And we started several of those, or just an approach to marketing, which, you know and been really big too. And of course our, I think our, critical first project, which is still paying dividends today is our very very outside the box jury selection software as a service that we offer both within the firm and also to paying customers without, to help them select better jurors and.

Better juries ultimately and have a better shot to win the case. And I love that we're gonna get into Go To Verdict and how it was created and what the vision was for it originally, and how it's being used today to help trial lawyers all over the country. But before doing that, I think it, it's relevant, Tony, to hear your words about forming the firm and you had just made partner at one of the preeminent law firms in the city of Buffalo. Your career would've been I'm sure, exceptional at that firm. But part of you thought that being an entrepreneur and an attorney might be inspiring and meaningful.

And I'm curious as to, using the word entrepreneur and attorney, it's almost an oxymoron, right? 'cause we're a traditional profession, 200 years. It's a. Noble and very proud one that, your grandfather, my father, both were exceptional lawyers. But it was a bold move to think about leaving the conservative.

You would've had a great career at that firm, but I. Talk our listeners through a little bit, your vision for the law firm originally. You said something along the lines that we could use it as a platform or a foundation to build other businesses off of. But what got you to that point where you thought you could have both a great career as an attorney, but also as an entrepreneur?

So what's interesting is that when we formed the firm, we really formed because of technological advancements. Coming out of Hodges and Russ, which is a great Buffalo law firm - I loved working there, I love the people there - loved everything about it, and top-notch practitioners.

But it had a big library. Stayed in old conservative library with librarians on staff, and it took up a whole floor in the m and t building at the time where part of Hodgson Russ was located. And I didn't want to take a step back, that I was used to having resources to be able to serve my clients.

And so one of the catalysts that enabled us to make the jump to the new firm was the fact that so much of law was being digitized and was searchable. On engines like Lexus and LexiNexis and Westlaw and we said, Hey, we can come out, we can have a very small [library], we don't have to invest in librarians and libraries. We can still practice law at a very high level. So I didn't want to take that step back. So that allowed us to make the jump. And then the thought was, once we have the engine of the law firm stabilized and we're up and running and we're practicing law and making that our base and core pursuit. We could use some opportunities that I thought I had seen to go into other ventures, whether, usually law related adjunct to the practice of law, I like to say, but, thinking about it in a different way that maybe a larger firm wouldn't have the agility to seize on those opportunities or wouldn't have the the desire to pursue something.

It was a little bit. Outside the box or a little bit avant-garde. And I thought that working with a group of people, as we did in the early years when we started the firm, and even continuing on to today, who were focused on thinking about things differently and seizing opportunities and just going for it, that we would have an opportunity to use the firm as a platform and then, and use it to expand into other entrepreneurial pursuits which we've done to great success.

And I've been really proud of that. And it wasn't just colliding with Steve Poland, that sort of lit our - your - desire to do these businesses that were adjunct to practicing law for maybe 15 or 16 years in the firm's history. Before we even met Steve Poland. You were trying to tinker around with whether it was or, businesses that were related to the practice of law and we, you had some successes. We had some failures but can you tell us a little bit about Yeah. Those first, those formative years, those first say 15 years in the firm's 25 year history? Yeah. We started several different ventures that I, again, I don't think you know, a lot of law firms because it is a, it is a.

Conservative profession and it tends to have elements of technophobia to it too. But we started, within a couple of years we had retained programmers who had written a script to help us with some of our insurance clients, estimate losses in a way that was consistent with their insurance policies.

And they were doing it by hand and we were, we would go to seminars and. Speak on legal topics, but pass out our software. And they were blown away. The law firm developed software to help us with this co-insurance coefficient and things like that. So just always looking for opportunities to market differently, do things differently.

We created our own forms where there hadn't been forms for certain practice to law. We started businesses like Hamilton and l and w. Using, again, technology as a platform for that. Always try to keep the firm kind of cutting edge on a technology front, whatever it might be. And, that's continued.

And I think Steve was able to help us to put that on steroids. And now with AI, it's just opened up a whole new world of opportunity to, again, a profession that is slow to embrace new technologies, but those who embrace it. Early on, I think it can really capture some of the legal arena that is, is maybe underserved right now.

And we're Steve and I, we get together, we're just mixing a pot right off the bat. We hit it off because we both will see an opportunity and then we have to reign ourselves in case, alright, what's the priority here? But maybe that's next on the list. So we have a list that's 35, 40 different projects long.

They're all tech based and a lot of 'em AI based now and. So the firm just, for the last 25 years, has been really exciting to, to practice law at a high level, but also do these other things. Tell us Steve your first sort of memories of bumping into Tony Rupp or what, why you guys hit it off at the early stages.

When did we first encounter Steve Poland and how did those meetings or initial meetings go down? I'm not sure I recall exactly, but I liked you the moment I met you. I know that. But tell us from your memory when you first encountered Rupp Pfalzgraf and why you thought there might be an opportunity to work with us.

I believe you guys had a meeting with John Gavigan, who's a good friend of yours and such. And went over some ideas at the law firm, I believe, and one of these that came out was this go to birth idea. And so then I remember you and I got together and discussed this. And then it was probably like six months later or something like that, we all had a lunch.

And that's when I first met Tony and it just seemed you John Gavigan, myself and Tony and I seemed to be in our own little world going over this. And so this go to verdicts idea, it just made total sense to me, like, why wouldn't everybody want this as an attorney? And I was like, you need to turn this into an application. And so from there we started to work on that project a bit more. And then I came on full time after six months. And for those listeners that didn't have the good fortune of listening to John Gavigan, he told the great story of a firm retreat and four different shark tanks.

Business pitches and everyone voted for, I think the brewery that our partner, Corey Weber wanted to launch. But the, the most shrewd in the room, Gavigan had heard Rupp present on this using technology to help select juries in a smarter way. And he knew right away that there was an opportunity there, too.

To commercialize that technology disruptor in the legal industry. And that's what prompted him to introduce Steve Poland and the rest is history from there. So I'd love for our listeners to understand Tony, what Go To Verdict is, or how. You are embracing or utilizing technology to try to disrupt a traditional way of jury selection?

Yeah. Sure. So coming out of Hodgson Russ, I started trying cases probably in my second or third year as a lawyer. And I've never stopped. I've been trying 'em now for over 30 years and one of the things that stuck in my craw early on was standing up in front of a group of people I didn't know and pretending to ask them questions that, wouldn't offend them to try to suss out whether they were going to be good jurors for the particular case I was on, whether I was a usually a defendant in those years, but a plaintiff later on, whether they were the right fit. What I really wanted to ask 'em was questions like, how do you vote?

Do you have a gun permit? I wanted to understand whether they were. Blue state, red state, I wanted to know whether they'd be more or less sympathetic to plaintiffs, but I couldn't ask those questions. You can't ask people how they vote. You can't really ask 'em if they've ever declared bankruptcy, not in front of a room of, 40 people that might embarrass them.

But you wanna know that because you wanna know whether they're good with money, right? If you're a defendant and you're being sued for money, you last thing you want is a bunch of people on your jury who aren't good with money and have judgments and tax liens and bankruptcies. So I started having paralegals and associates back in the office.

I would send them the name of the jurors. They would do some quick by hand, manual internet research and public records research, and they would fire back emails to me. And it got to be cumbersome 'cause you're juggling a jury selection, dealing with a judge and opposing counsel, all these jurors trying to make a good first impression.

Also trying to read things on your phone. And they're coming in different formats and. Some of the information's very useful and you could use it. So I said, you know what let's get this in a better format. So I can go into an app, I can see all the juror's names, I can click on the, their name and see the information I wanna see.

And it's all uploaded to that. And Steve came in and said, yeah, we can make that happen and we can turn that into an app. And then, he had the brilliant idea. He said, a lot of this can be automated. If certain data points on the jurors, certain names, ages, towns, addresses.

You can get a lot of that apid. And now go to verdict searches, any number of databases, brings back information that sort of auto collates it into the juror profiles. So we made it very simple to use. Attorneys don't have to learn a software package to be able to select a good jury.

But the information all comes in. You've got a profile on every jury, you know how they vote if you've got that available to you. And New York has that, you know how they, whether they're good with money judgments, tax liens, bankruptcies, you oftentimes know their profession, what they drive.

Google Earth gives us pictures of their homes, things like that. You get a real sense of the jurors before you've even stood up to ask 'em a single question. So I was able to convert my approach to jury selection more into just a, making a good first impression. And not really asking probing questions.

'cause I already knew most of what I wanted to know about the jurors from that profile. And that was all information you couldn't ask. So again, it was, it took a combination of re-imagining the jury selection space and how it had been done for, Anglo-American jurisprudence. It's been selecting juries for, 3, 4, 500 years. I don't even know how far back the jury system goes in England, but now it's very techno driven on our end of it. And I haven't, I have not tried a case without it. It's a jury trial since about 2000 15, 16. And have you seen and results, or do you feel more confident as you then deliver an opening statement?

Oh, tremendously it's it's a huge advantage to know because everything else historically that you would know about the jersey, you'd have to share with your opponent. So this, I know so much more than I ever knew before and I don't have to share any of it. So information is king.

We live in the information age for a reason. It's been given that moniker and information is just, if you have it's very valuable to you. And so a trial attorney having more information about the jurors than his opponent can make more informed decisions about who to keep on the jury.

And I think that's helped me to win cases for my clients. And it's helped the whole firm. Steve, when you started working with Tony on this concept, your technology background, your programming background led you to believe that this was you could succeed at disrupting something that, for hundreds of years had been done the exact same way.

You saw the opportunity immediately as Tony talked about the traditional way to select a jury, and I'm curious as to what, whether that, led you to. Think that there were other aspects of the legal profession that could also be disrupted, or whether you were seeing things that you said, wow, if you took a tech perspective to this, I think we, we could enhance in the way that your firm practices law.

What how did those conversations then get built off of that initial project of working on go to verdict? Yeah, definitely, at the beginning it was just looking at this and you know how many, we've all seen movies and such with jury trials and such runaway juries and such, and how it's, you're talking millions of dollars and potentially billions of dollars at stake sometimes.

And so just to see how archaic the process is for this. And just knowing the loads of data that exist out there information wise, that could be, given to these attorneys and such, and that Tony was already doing this. It was just like, this should be forever. Every attorney, not just him. So that's what was, very exciting about it.

And that kind of, then as you start going into the legal profession, 'cause I'm not a lawyer at all you start to realize that. A lot of these attorneys are technophobe behind, behind the, the days here. I'm included in that category. I don't think so.

And you can just start to see it. A ton of different opportunities that. Come about from this. I'd love to talk about a couple of those. But one other example I think of where the two of you refined even the tech that you were using to be more efficient and more educated in the jury selection room.

Tony was, the report that would be generated and how that sort of light. Bulb went off in your head. 'cause you would spend, you've described to me, hours after you picked the jury, typing out an email or a letter to an important client to describe who the fate, what, whose hands is their fate in and how did that moment occur where you thought, maybe I'll lean on Poland to enhance that aspect of the overall.

Trial process. Yeah. So in the practice of law there's certain things I like to do and there's other things I don't. So when you're trying a case it's very intense. It's like an, I've likened it to a college or a law school exam period where, you know, a lot of late nights, a lot of high stress pressure, reviewing things, getting ready.

Then you gotta go into the courtroom and deliver like you're taking the exam in a college environment. And it's just a lot of lack of sleep, a lot of pressure, a lot of stress, and. The last thing you wanna do is do busy work. So I would select the jury and typically I would, my client usually is not there for jury selection, so I would call them up afterwards or even send them an email and try to get away with a quick and dirty Hey, got a good jury getting ready for my opening statement.

And they would always email back, or before I could hang up the phone, they'd say, can you just send me a little summary of the jurors? A little summary of the jurors, he gets. Six jurors. You gotta talk about each one of them, who they are, what age, what they do. You gotta talk about why they're on, why they're off the jury.

You then have to explain why you didn't use a peremptory here. You should, you used a for cause challenge there. So the whole process then would take an hour and a half, two hours cut into your sleep probably because you still have to prepare your opening. So I think I mentioned, I don't remember exactly.

How they came about. Maybe Steve does, but I think I mentioned that, those reports were, they actually were some of my worst work product. 'cause I'm trying to race through 'em, right? I'm trying to send on that email or and get that summary out to the client to appease them. But I really want to get on towards the business of winning the case That's really unnecessary for the trial.

It's necessary to keep the client happy. So Steve said I think we can automate that report. So it took a few iterations, but by the end of it, we now have. Just unbelievably robust reports on every data nugget that came in on the jurors. It's well presented. It's hyperlinked.

It's got a table of contents. You can see all the comments of the attorneys and the back room work on whether this person's a good juror or not. You can see the ratings that the trial room attorneys put on it and even the back office people put on, is this person good based on this type of case?

And all of the information, all of the judgments, liens, bankruptcy and voting records, homes that they own, secondary properties, jet skis and cars and things. And I've had people say you sent me everything but their underwear size. And it's true. And it's, the beauty of it is it's. Done in electronically.

So it's done five minutes after we leave the jury room. It details the whole history of the jury selection, all the RY challenges used when they were used, what time of day, it's all timestamped. And I was like, I don't have to write this. And so we've gotten customers just based on them seeing like an excess carrier might see the jury selection report and say, how the heck was this done?

And then they reach out to go to verdict and we have a new customer. So that was probably a lower tech aspect of the whole. Idea, but just another thing that you could do to polish the way. Lawyers have always done things, though. Most attorneys in the country still hand write or delegate to a associate or a second chair.

The writing of this report on the jury selection, it's nowhere near as. Presented or as robust as our report and the client's paying for it, whereas ours just generates and they have it and they're blown away by how thorough and comprehensive it is. So that was just a nice enhancement.

It's just an example of if you think about a technology solution to something that you've always done. And in, and the law always means 3, 4, 500 years. You can oftentimes think of a better way to do it 'cause there's so much technology out there. How and Steve from your perspective, seeing and I'm sure it wasn't easy to program how to generate a 50 or 60 or a hundred page report.

I. But it seems flawless and it from my outsider's perspective seemed, relatively easy. A lot more work goes into it. I know. Than meets the eyes. So how did those experiences, the auto generating reports and automating the jury selection process give you hope or confidence or even in a playful way?

Belief that there would be other aspects of this noble profession that, that you could disrupt. What was the next idea you had or what was the next initiative that you took to Tony? Now we've got four 40 things on the list, which is amazing and exciting and daunting and all that.

After GTV, what came next or what, how did you guys dream and scheme from there? So after that the next thing that we worked on was something called Oxford Knox. And essentially we gathered all of the judgment roles from the 62 counties in New York state. And this also ties in with some other firm activities that you guys have been doing for years in terms of judgments and collections work and such.

And so there's these judgements that, get placed in. Once again, I'm an outsider here. I'm not a lawyer, but. You can imagine that somebody has a tenant and this tenant doesn't make payments and they kick out this tenant and now this tenant owes, $3,000 to them. And so they go do small claims court or whatever the case might be, they get a judgment filed against that tenant and then their hope is, okay, now I've got this judgment.

Now the court, now I'm gonna get this money, I'm gonna get my $3,000. Most likely that does not happen that way. However you do, you are owed money from this tenant and you're owed it for the next 10 or 20 years. And so what we found is that there's a lot of people that just forget about that or they're just like I'm never gonna get that money.

And then they forget about that tenant. This judgment information about this $3,000 that this tenant owes, this person is out there publicly available. And so we basically pulled in all of that data. And set up a system to use our GTV or go to virtual resources to then take the debtors and run them through some of these databases to find out.

Do these people own any assets? Are they owning a home now? Do we think that we could possibly collect money from this defendant now? And then we created this whole automated service where we were sending out postcards to these creditors with a unique code on them, having them and informing them. We think we've found some information about this debtor come to this website, input your code.

And we'll show you what we think we have, and then working with us, we'll collect this money and split the proceeds here. And that, and that is that again is an example of utilizing publicly available information, but in a different way than, traditional lawyers would use. So flipping it on its head and scraping that info and running it through measured, through go to verdict software or the work your programmers had done to see what might be, valuable judgments versus ones that probably didn't have as much value.

And then making that assessment but without, personnel time or without an associate of Tony Rupp's time, but rather just by, AI essentially or technology leading to those conclusions. Did that then lead you to other ways to use public information and scraping and to launch related businesses like Oxford, Knox.

Yes. Want me to take it? Yes, you can take it. Yeah, sure. Yeah, no, it, it did that sort of platform, so every day in New York it seems, and across the country, more and more government entities, even private sources are putting vast amounts of data online and searchable databases. This government agency may release a list of these people who have been fined by us, or the DEC may have a list of oil spills in New York somewhere.

And you know the question that Steve and I always ask each other is there something from a marketing standpoint or a business standpoint that could be done with that information, right? You pay your tax dollars for these government agencies to put all of this information online, and theoretically it's publicly available you're paying for it to be up there.

So now most people in the country, most lawyers, most New Yorkers just. Go in and they do manual searches. So where you might have paralegals or staffers for a collections company, for instance, going in and go run a profile on this person. They might take half a day to run all the different public searches to see if they can get a hit.

That might lead to an opportunity to collect or whatever it is you're trying to achieve in the law. The question is, can you write up code that will go onto these servers and find this information and pull it back and collate it for you all at. The speed of light essentially in an API transfer basis and pull it into a comprehensive report where all the data's in the same place and you just hit a button and five minutes later you're looking at the report that's called data from all of these different sources.

Some are restricted in their availability depending on the use and purpose of the public records. Some are government agencies that go for it, bring it, go get the information, it's there for you to. Peruse and see, but that just led to just so many different business opportunities. So many different marketing opportunities.

Almost too many to name here. The, and the list goes on. There's just if we've ever been stymied, it's usually by the programming. There's a need for programmers who, who work in Python and the other languages that are best suited for these types of applications and software as a service applications.

But Steve and I are never lacking for ideas. And we've gone to other attorneys who practice in a given area and we've said, what does your space look like? What do you do? What do you do that's manual? Where do you get your information? And that yields other opportunities to, to build out these technology influenced entrepreneurial ideas.

As a practical example, I know the two of you have have developed a software that, that internally we call lead gen. But could you tell our listeners a little bit about lead gen and how we've used technology for non-traditional marketing and business development? We all, as attorneys, we know the relationship building and the importance of having strong networks and we preach that a lot but one of the things I've.

Always admired about you, Tony is not just taking a one size fits all approach. Your approach to marketing might be very different than mine. And using technology to do marketing and business development is something that was new for the firm and really new for the profession. And I think lead gen is a really good example of ways in which you've leveraged technology to achieve good outcomes when it comes to marketing for new business.

Yeah and as you said, different people market differently. My taking people out and whining 'em, dining 'em is not usually my style. So need to get word of mouth referrals for doing good legal work, but also, had an opportunity to go to people who might have an immediate legal need.

And it might be triggered by something that happened and they've been named in a lawsuit, or they've been fined by an agency, or they're suffering, they're facing this investigation or this potential loss of this license or whatnot. And, rather than just. Billboard advertising, which it's, a broad spectrum audience, but doesn't pinpoint technology allows you to hone in on what it is that you're you're trying to achieve in a given space.

And all these databases combined with the programming and the technology and Steve's, your project management abilities in that startup entrepreneurial tech space. With his programming background, he's always easy to he can spot. What it is that might be needed to be to, we might need to do, to be able to send a targeted notification.

So without giving away all of the secrets of lead gen, which, which I think has been very successful for the firm that it's basically that approach. It's saying that here's this information that's now out there, the government's putting it out there. How can we now use it to reach the, this target audience and offer a legal service?

And there is a balancing because, obviously we have restrictions and I think they're for good reason on attorney advertising and we make sure to make everything we do is completely compliant with the ethics. In fact, every single letter we send out every single and marketing initiative that leaves the firm.

A, a copy gets sent to the eighth judicial district, and they're people who monitor attorney solicitations to make sure we're completely compliant with all of that. But it's yielded and it's made it easier for us from this technology platform to reach people who have a need. And that's cool because as you said you go into law to help people, right? It's a nice profession. It can pay the bills too. But if you're not somebody who enjoys taking on somebody else's problem and fixing it for them, which is the hallmark, I think of a good lawyer, at least a litigator. I think all lawyers wanna do that.

You've got a legal problem, I can fix it for you. So going to people who are at the, like, the depths of despair, they're at their lowest point because they might be losing their business, they might be losing their home, they might be. They're in trouble somehow. They're being fined. They're being investigated.

They could lose their license to do whatever it's they're doing. You're going to them and saying, Hey, I saw this happen to you. We can help. And we often can. And not only is it great marketing for the firm, but for the client, I. It's the best thing that ever happened to 'em. Somebody came forward with the expertise to help them in that problem area that they have and was able to fix it.

That's great. And that's a really cool feeling to have. That's great. That's great. And I hope we continue to expand on our ability to reach clients that we otherwise wouldn't. Through the use of this technology and some of Steve Poland's initiatives and. I wanna talk for a minute about the elephant in the room, ai and how the two of you think about AI specifically as it relates to the legal profession.

And I'm sure there's some law firms that are embracing it, others that are petrified of it. But how do the two of you think AI can be used? Not as a detriment to the practice of law, meaning it's gonna replace all of our attorneys, but rather as an enhancement to what we're doing. Do, how do you both feel about AI and its potential impact on the practice of law?

Yeah, I think ai, obviously we've already seen just huge impacts and it's been, it feels like less than a year. It's gonna be streamlining processes. Things that were boring, mundane, that took a lot of time. There's a wealth even in your firm, you guys have been around for, 25 years or whatever it's been, of all these documents that you guys have for all these clients that you've done in the past, and, a lot of that is laborous.

And with, ai, you're able to suck all these documents in and start to generate some of these documents. That's one thing. Yeah I just think AI is gonna transform the legal space. And you mentioned law firms that are reluctant to use it or technophobic, I think they're gonna get left behind.

And one of my colleagues has said frequently that, you're not gonna be replaced by AI in the law. You're gonna be replaced by an attorney who's using ai. And I think that's wisdom right there. It's like any new technology. There's a lot of people out there who are. Seeing shadows around every corner.

And then of course, some of the generative AI engines like chat, PT and Claude three have been known to hallucinate cases because they're not there to do legal research, they're there to provide you with a narrated answer to your question. And if they can't. Find it in real space, they'll make it up so that has turned a lot of people off.

But if you know that feature of AI and you see it as a feature, not a bug, you can then use the generative AI engines to do just amazing things. The language when it's, when you guide it correctly, is excellent and it's typo free. It's grammar is good, better than the writers who are coming outta law school, to be honest.

And the research is excellent. I’d pinpoint the same colleague had said that. AI is your, is the best associate you've ever had - gives you instant answers, always available, works late on weekends and everything else. Again, it's not gonna replace attorneys and that's not what we're about. And we've stressed that to our people and we've even consulted with other law firms on our use of AI because as soon as that came out, we saw how transformative it was gonna be.

It was very much like a hearkening back to the conversation we had about the form formative years of the firm, when everything, all the cases started to get digitized and they could be searched by bolan. Operas that we saw as an opportunity to shed the large library infrastructure in the 19th century librarians and move into a techno world and happen to coincide in our move 2000, the start of the new millennium.

And that was a big shift that we could tell and everybody could tell. Now, there's not any lawyers to come outta law school. They might get an hour of instruction on how to do book research. And then they say, okay, now let's go to Lexi and Westlaw and tell you how to do the research there.

AI is gonna be like that. It's gonna be in, it's gonna be integrated into all of the platforms we use. All the software's gonna have an AI component. We're already seeing that in the large document space, case management, practice management software, billing software. It's all going AI.

So you're gonna be using it whether you even know it. So the question is then whether you're gonna be embracive of it as a technology for outside of the box approaches, drafting of documents, saving your clients time and being much more efficient and being able to give them more work product in the hours that you've built before.

I think it's a no brainer that it's gonna happen. I think it's gonna be completely transformative. I, there's part of me that wishes I was. We're at the beginning of my career instead of the end of it, or closer to the end because it's such an exciting time to be a lawyer; I don't think anything's gonna transform the practice of law like AI has and in its entire history.

This will be the most transformative moment and we're right at the ground floor of it, so it's very exciting. That's great. That's great. Tell me, you mentioned, 30 or 40 things on this dream list or this wishlist give our listeners one example, maybe it's the craziest one of the 40 or something that the two of you together smile about to think if we could implement that sort of business or that new change to the legal profession, both of you would be, happy as can be.

Is there a couple of ideas that you have that you think are. Crazy or wishlist items that you'd love to see made? Reality? Yeah. A lot of things on the list are cleaning up. Some projects we're working on now are just extensions, extra modules on existing software. What we'd like to try to find is a new space.

For example, a new database has gone online where now all of this is available to the public. And then seeing if we can do a technology feature from that that, that connects data in a different way. And so it's, there's no one big, massive, we're gonna redesign the practice of law.

If there were one, I would say it's probably Go To Verdict. My view is that, any attorney who's not using technology to help them vet the jurors, it's really not providing good service to their clients. In fact, there's ethical opinions out there that say if you are not using. Public publicly available information to vet your jurors.

You are not zealously advocating for your client to, to the ethical required standard. And so I think it's gonna become more and more evident as time goes on, even to technophobic and recalcitrant attorneys that they need to embrace these technologies. Yeah, we have just a ton of projects for the programming team that that Steve coordinates going on at any given time.

And we're months and months of work ahead to capture everything that we'd like to do. I'd love to accelerate that. Let's get, pull in some more programmers so we can, or you can add to that, Steve, or, I was just gonna say, this is separate, but something I'm looking forward to with the whole AI and robotic space here is.

Just having a robot at my house that will just take care of all the stuff I don't want to do because I do feel like it's coming. I think that's why you have kids sweeping, everything. Tell me two, successful entrepreneurs very different in different ways but so many similarities between the two of you.

For our entrepreneurs that are listening, you've had successes, you've had failures but any advice you'd give to someone who was thinking about launching a business or taking a chance or trying to disrupt an industry from either of you guys any lessons learned along the way?

I would say sell it before you build it. And so there's many different ways that you can do that. But I would be trying to find clients possibly that would pay for whatever you're looking to build. Make sure that you know somebody is there. And ideally you're also the target customer. And so you already know what is needed in the space and you're building for yourself, and it's something that you would pay for as well.

And there's ways to do this also online. You can just test things. You can put up a simple webpage that you know, is basically two pages, pitches the product even has a credit card form on it. And you're not even accepting a credit card, but somebody will input their credit card and then they go to the next page and don't even store the credit card.

Just say, this isn't available yet for sale. But we will be in touch with you, once that is. And then buy some paper click ads. And just start to, do some keyword advertising and see if anybody's gonna click it and actually input their credit card information. That's great. What a unique way to think about testing the market before you, you go live.

I like that. How about you, Tony? Yeah, so I, I, again, gonna quote my one of my colleagues, Chad Davenport, who's really a younger attorney, but is very much into the AI and I think is probably doing more than just about any lawyer probably in the country in that space. And one of the things he said is, when you're going to do a task, especially if you've been practicing like I have for a long time.

Any task, whether it's law related or not, spend five minutes thinking about whether AI can do that task for you. And I've actually adopted that, right? Pretty much things that I've done for 32 years, practicing law or whatever in my personal life, I now say to myself. Is there a way I can use AI to do this for me?

And it's just unbelievable If you stop thinking about yourself as I have to do this task. I gotta generate that letter. I've gotta, I've gotta write that recommendation for that person, or I've gotta sit down and generate these financial things or whatnot. And you say is there a way or not?

And I do a lot of programming. Is there a way that the AI engine can write the code for me? And the answer in a surprisingly high percentage of the case is yes, if you just spend the time to think about it. I think it's gonna take a recalibration of thinking for people who are adults in this day and age.

Maybe children growing up are gonna see AI and always know that it was there, but we just do things. We sit down and say, I gotta do this. All right. I gotta go through that. I gotta review that. Do you have to review it? Can AI review it for you and give you a summary better than you could have done and do it in 30 seconds?

And the answer a lot of times is yes. So I encourage people who have not. Subscribe to AI engines. I'm on several of them at any given time for work and for programming at home and finances and things like that. Think about an AI solution and then see if it just saved you hours and hours of work.

That's great advice. That's great advice. Last question for both of you - tell us something that maybe our listeners wouldn't know about you. We could talk about Tony being a master like chess player and I know Steve Poland had the YouTube link early on before. It became what it is today and started early in his entrepreneurial vision.

But tell these listeners a little unknown fact about you, Steve. Oof. You're a Savers fan. I know you're a Die Savers fan. They won last night, so that was good. But yeah, I'm. I'm into fantasy football, just hobbies and such. I've really got wrapped into that.

I dunno, I feel like there's some edge that could be had, but I know that there isn't AI can't like, make you win fantasy football. No, I've tried and it's not smarter than any of us. I thought you, Tony, Steve's being bashful because I know he is got some really incredible stories to tell. 'cause I, going out to lunch with him is like stepping into a future universe.

I, I just love what. What you can tell me about technology and different things I haven't even thought of. I guess one, one of the things that when I tell it to people they almost don't believe it is I once watched a boxing match with Joe Biden. He came to speak at Cornell Law.

Several of my friends invited him back to, off campus student dorm, apartment housing and with. With old couches. And he came with a couple of his entourage and watched the George Foreman fight back in 91. So I sat as far away from him as I'm sitting to you, I met the man and I said to myself, I wonder…you're with one of a hundred senators only.

Any one of 'em could be president of the United States. And then my second thought was probably not him because he ran in 88 and didn't get anywhere, but sure enough years later. How people find that one. That's true. Yeah. Incredible. I love that. That's great. Thank you both for your time today.

I know. You're both very busy. So taking time outta your schedules to, to appear on this podcast is very much appreciated. Thanks. Thanks to you both and look forward to more great things coming out of both Rupp Pfalzgraf as well as our partnership with Steve Poland. Thanks guys. Thanks Dave.

Thanks for having us. It was good, right? Did a good job.