Hamid Kohan:
I want that person to be trained work for me and is incentivized to retain that client.
Chris Dreyer:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind. I'm your host, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io, the legal marketing company the best firms hire when they want the rankings trafficking cases other offering marketing agencies can't deliver. Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. And speaking of the best, I've got some exciting news to share with you. This September at PIMCon in Scottsdale, Arizona, will be joined by none other than my favorite comedian, David Spade. You know him from the classic movies like Tommy Boy and Joe Dirt and of course his unforgettable run on Saturday Night Live. It's going to be a blast having him with us. So say goodbye to FOMO and get your ticket to PIMCon now. Link is in the show notes. All right. Let's dive in.
My guest today is revolutionizing the legal industry and has a remarkable track record of success. After graduating from Chico State University with an engineering degree at just 17 years old and earning his MBA in the business marketing at 21 Hamid Kohan went on to work alongside the now CEOs of Google and Yahoo at Sun Systems. As president of the Emblazoned Technology, he grew the company by 300% in a single year, resulting in a billion dollar valuation. Today, Hamid is the founder and CEO of Legal Soft, a legal growth firm specializing in virtual staffing. They help practices expand from initial stages to multi-state and multi-practice areas in less than 12 months. They offer an on-demand team of legal industry experts and a comprehensive suite of services from virtual staffing to AI powered automation pools. He explains how to find profits in virtual talent, best practices on where to find and retain the perfect virtual employees, and the untapped opportunities that AI presents for forward-thinking firms. Here's Hamid Kohan, CEO of Legal Soft. Let's go.
Hamid Kohan:
I started off finishing up the high school at 14, which I was sort of challenging every classes and I just was always in the rush to finish things. So finished high school, finished college, and I was going to go all the way to get my PhD from engineering and then I got recruited to Silicon Valley because everybody from Chico in northern California goes to Silicon Valley. So the internet itself was a big deal and then was fortunate enough to work with some amazing people and amazing companies who revolutionized the technology from first, from the internet eras, then servers, then the dot com era when we all said, what the heck is this? What are we going to do with this? And now we're like, what do we do without it? You know? So all of a sudden got recruited from Israeli company and I was a president of that company for a few years. A lot of it had to do pretty much with the data management, data sciences, data analysis, data architectural, so data mining, data warehousing, all that stuff. That became a lot of my expertise.
Chris Dreyer:
What inspired you to start Legal Soft specifically the legal vertical and then kind of give me the big, you know, the 80/20 of what Legal Soft does.
Hamid Kohan:
One of my friends who had a personal injury case came into the office one day and said, look, I think something is wrong. So I said, I come with you and try to translate to find out what is that they're telling you. I found out that they blew the statute on her case and it was like, oh my god, what happens? And then I was talking to the managing attorneys and they said, in our field a lot of things happens. And I was like, uh uh, in the tech, we can't say that because then things doesn't just happen on its own. Somebody causes it to happen. And I looked at it and I said, oh my god, compare from where I'm coming from technology and where the law industry is, they're 40 years behind. I start walking around and saying, let's just streamline things. Why so many people need to be involved in the process? Why it takes take so long? And every question I ask from the personal injury attorneys especially saying, what's your cost of client acquisition? I don't know.
How long the typical case takes for pre-lit to lit? We don't know. What's your average fees collected? Basically every single question I asked that somebody in the tech would have an answer for, they never had an answer and they just looked around like we have two happy days, when the client gets retained and when the check arrives and everything in between is sort of cloudy. I started consulting with several PI firms and I did a lot of fixing and recommending and consulting and coaching and I found that the next problem was that they're not set up to implement the recipes. So I started sort of getting involved in the implementation. That's how the Legal Soft came about. It was like a consulting, coaching, masterminding, whatever you want to call it in this field.
Then I said, now challenge number one, they can't find the right staff that they can afford and keep. So there was always shortage of staff on every level. Right before COVID I said, well there's a lot of good talent globally, so why are we stuck in this thing here? So we started recruiting from eight different countries eventually. That's where one of the first Legal Soft intent was to find global talent, screen them, train them, deploy them, and then help managing them into the law firm. So it started from intaking staff and then to case managers, paralegals. Now we do remote attorneys, accounting staff, but all for legal.
Chris Dreyer:
It speaks to the industry and how good their margins were to not understand what the CAC was and the lifetime client value and how long it sits on desk and things like that. But I will say, as you've seen, it's becoming significantly more important where the firms and the firm owners are being forced to learn some of these skills. So this led you down kind of like this pricing arbitrage, understanding how to find profit through global talent. I would say even just a couple years ago it was kind of taboo to even talk about outsourcing or using international labor, but do you think COVID kind of connected us more from a technology perspective and kind of made that not such a barrier?
Hamid Kohan:
Yeah. Christ, exactly that's what happened because before everybody's mentality was everybody has to be sitting right around me somewhere, right, at least in this building. When the COVID happened, people got forced to send people home and then work with them remotely. So when I came into the picture, I basically said, look, if John who is employee of this firm, if he's not in this building, then I don't care where he is, so when we start placing people and we don't place them, actually there are staff that we place and assign permanently full-time to the firms. So I said, look, this person is in Philippines, this one is in Ecuador or Columbia. You don't care because they're not in your office. So that's what jump started that whole notion of market accept-ancy came that way that it says this is not acceptable to try it. So then when they tried it, then they accelerated. Went from getting one to I have firms that have upward of 50, 60 staff of ours in their firm.
Chris Dreyer:
Let's talk about some of these options here because you would know this better than anyone and I've got a background in affiliate marketing. So I've had staff globally. The Philippines, for example, when I hired from there I had issues with their power grid, the time zone implications, but if you get in South America and Columbia, you've got near the same time zone. So when we're thinking about something like, let's say intake, is there a general like hey, this region is typically the best for this and then maybe for case managers or maybe delivery workers, maybe it's a different region. Can you speak to that?
Hamid Kohan:
Absolutely. That's basically the recipe of doing it properly, just like what you said, is to analyze the demographic and analyze the matching of the positions to certain demographic. It's not just a country. It's also cities within the countries. There is age brackets that you need to, is a full demographic that you need to. That's why we have like a recruiters and offices in each of these countries that they focus on where to recruit. For example, we go have partnerships with the law schools and law training institutions within that country that they give us their alumni and their students and so forth. So you got to know where to go and how to source. Like if you are doing anything in the way of managing CRM for the law firm, you go to South America. If you need administrative help, you go to Philippines. If you want a systematic intake, it's Philippine, but if you want creative intake, South America. So it's a spread based on positions and the culture and demographic of each country that you're recruiting talent from.
Chris Dreyer:
Very good, very good. I love that answer that sometimes that's not talked about enough, the different advantages, different regions and, you know, obviously there's different pricing for different regions and the pricing arbitrage that comes into play there.
Hamid Kohan:
But you also have to set them up and manage them properly. You got to treat them like an employee. So we give them computers. We give them online, internet, high-speed access. We provide all of that. We give them health insurance. We give their spouse health insurance. We even go as far as offering retirement account in each respectful country for the staff who will stay six months or a year above. So one thing is getting them on board and training them. The second thing is you have to keep them. For those people who have experience hiring directly through Upwork or other places, the first challenge is getting the right talent. There's a bigger challenge to keep them long term.
Chris Dreyer:
One of the advantages of using it used to be oDesk, I think it's now Upwork now, it has their experience. Right? And they've been vetted. They've went through all these, you can read their reviews, but I think the thing that I've experienced when individuals go to hire is they think about low balling on the pay, but then they get a lot of turn. Right? So then they're having to rehire the individuals but treating them as employees. They attend the meetings attend. They get the benefits of the company. You know, how is that factored into pricing like health insurance, the tax implications? How do those things, are those just factored into like a set fee for Legal Soft?
Hamid Kohan:
Yes. It's all set fees is usually monthly fees. So for example, you say you get a full-time, bilingual intake staff is a $2,300 a month fix. We take care of everything, the fees, the transfer of the fees, and the payments, health insurance, computers, internet, phone systems. We take care of everything. So it's a 1099 to the law firm. So they have one fixed cost. Each intaker costs $2,300 full time. One of the biggest advantages you also mentioned that was having the flexibility of the time.
So one of the issues I had with the PI firm, we don't know when that seven, eight figure call comes in. It could be a 10:00 PM Pacific standard time or 4:00 AM Eastern time. You have to have people who are trained, not call centers. I don't like call centers at all because when that seven figure call comes in, I don't want some random person somewhere picks up the phone and says, hello, the law firms of A, B, C. I want that person to be trained, work for me, and is incentivized to retain that client. So when you hiring this virtual staff, you can tell, we basically set them up as 24/7s. So you get four staff, you got 24/7 bilinguals trained.
Chris Dreyer:
I think a lot of the attorneys listening, they're like they understand the importance of sales and intake and those that maybe don't have the capital to at least bring it in their building and they're considering their options, whether it's a "call center" or having your own team. You know, so you already touched on one of them. I guess they're answering, a call center could be potentially answering for hundreds of law firms and they could even say the name wrong, the value prop wrong. I guess where I'm going is does Legals Soft, does it have the ability to set up your entire infrastructure and have an intake manager and manage, like say, I want to move my entire intake and have Legals Soft do it. Is that what you do?
Hamid Kohan:
We actually advance it to the point when we are engaging with the firm. We build something that is foreign to them. We actually develop an org chart for the firm. Firms don't have org charts. I mean big law does, but other than that there is no org chart. Again coming from the tech or corporate or Fortune 500, everything starts and ends with the org chart. So we set organizational chart. We put their staff in there and we identify in every department from intake to document collections to demand writings to paralegals, and we identify every position that they can utilize a mutual staff for and then they can pick and choose which one they want to start with. So we said, okay, your intake staff is four people plus a supervisor. You need one that does medical records retrieval. You have one demand writer. You have two paralegals. We identify every position in the firm for them to utilize virtual staff.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. I was wondering about that. I've always, you know, it's like, oh, I need to go to South America and set this up and be there, set up that entity right for all. But it seems like Legal Soft does all of that and has a lot of experience specific. You know, that's the niche expertise that goes into that.
Hamid Kohan:
I have a great example for you, Chris. One of my first clients, which is also a great friend of mine, he hired 12 virtual staff from us, is a PI firm in California, and then to save costs his operation manager told him, we have this, we learn how to do this. Let's go hire our own. So he hired 17 others outside of our system directly, so he had 12 of ours, 17 of his own. After a lot of difficulty, he came back and says, how much you charge me to take over the 17? Because I don't want to do this anymore. I'd much rather do your system, but I want to save some money. So can I transfer all my 17 people to you to add to your 12? He is a great friend too. So it was very revealing about, you know, don't try this at home kind of a thing.
Chris Dreyer:
That's funny. Yeah. That's amazing. 'Cause you have the processes. You got the systems to do it because you've done it so frequently.
Hamid Kohan:
And we watch everybody. We watch everybody very tightly as far as their attendance, their performance. We do screenshots every 15 minutes. We record every single call. We can block him to go to certain URLs or not. There's a lot of controls.
Chris Dreyer:
Does Legal Soft handle the raises and the, so say you're paying $2,300 to start, do they have like a level two intake that's at this tier and a senior at this?
Hamid Kohan:
Everything. We actually become their extended HR because we say if this person performed greatly, 80% or above, in six months, you got to give them a raise. We actually give the first raise ourselves from our part.
Chris Dreyer:
Interesting.
Hamid Kohan:
Because again, it's about the retention of that VA. So we say, okay, on the annual you have to give them a raise if their performance justifies it. So that's number one. Second, we almost 80% of the time we teach the firm how to have an incentive program for everybody, number of cases retained, number of cases closed, how many policies they tender. Everything like that, we set them up. It goes to the extent, once we set up for the VAs, they come back and say, could you help us to do this for our local staff too? Because our local staff have no incentive. In this industry contingency basis especially, incentivizing is very important.
Chris Dreyer:
I've worked with recruiters. You know, I am near, I've seen Support Shepherd, which are kind of the generalist I would say, and not the specialist that you're saying. And a lot of these will have guarantees like if the talent churns or sometimes recruiting fees will place a 10 or a 30% on the placement, nothing. So it's here's-
Hamid Kohan:
No long-term contract. I don't tie them down into any contract, is month to month, no penalties, no increases in fees. I mean they can essentially let go of five today and say is I want five more on Monday. It's almost like they're ordering pizza. It's like, can I get five of these with extra cheese on Monday? It's so funny how after they work with the staff for a few years, it becomes so scalable that they have no worries to cut, upgrade, or add people.
Chris Dreyer:
Hamid is uniquely positioned to speak to the incredible potential of AI in the legal space with over two decades of experience in tech, specifically data analysis, data mining. He's written extensively about the impact of artificial intelligence on law firm management. He shares his insights on the most valuable AI related skills for legal professionals.
Hamid Kohan:
I have all these 20 plus years of a tech background, especially data analysis and data mining, which is a foundation of AI. And then I went to low tech law industry. So I was always wearing two hats. I'm a techie, but there's no techie on this side. So when the AI hit, I was just, okay, finally the two perfect people are getting married. We started doing AI and that's the first time I started writing the book 'cause I had to get it out of my system. It was sort of bundled up for a long time and I had to get it out. So what happened is that the legal industry, the only set of data or technology that collects data was available to them was case text, all the previous judgements and decisions by the court, decision by the judges, the juries, the awards, all this other stuff and case samples like LexisNexis or case texts or a whole bunch of these people out there. That was the only thing around. Now with the AI is like first of all, you have all this data.
They were hiring a bunch of interns and so forth to read some old cases and analyze it and make recommendation. Well that's all gone because I unleashed AI on it and you can looking at thousand cases in an hour that you would need the army of associates or law clerks to actually do. So that was the first impact is analyzing existing data from all cases of all types nationwide and give you recommendation, give you advice for discovery, for trial prep, for depositions, for appeals, everything. So that's the first. The second part is for those of folks out there who do transactional law, which is like immigration, bankruptcy, estate planning, that is non-litigation basically for most part, 85% pre-lit, immigration, not even a pre-lit, it's like filling out a whole bunch of forms, collecting a bunch of data, and submitting it to INS. Right?
So all of this, the AI, we have an AI company here in Legal Soft that is going to completely replace all of that. You know, just like if you have uncontested divorce, I mean, what's there? Two people sign a document and say we're done. Why do I need the attorney for that? Or for bankruptcy, I'm doing chapter 7, 11, 13, which ones I got a bunch of forms to fill out, a bunch of documents to provide, and then it gets filed. So all of those going to have a major impact on all of those that does not really require lawyering. That's on transactional law, not on the litigation or plaintiff law is contingency like PI, employment, workers' comp, and so forth. The entire intake process is going to be AI.
There's going to be this people like me that is not real human, going to be talking to people like you and just do an intake, send you a retainer, get it back, and I'm the total machine that looks like a human being, but I'm really not. On the other side, like the product that we just released, which is a fast Demand.ai, is we generate PI demand letters that is 98% accurate reviewed by attorneys for $97 per demand and you can get hundred of them today. You know? It's basically we feed all the medical records in there, reads it, analyze it, summarize it, uses it to write the demand that this AI has been trained on 10,000 similar cases.
Chris Dreyer:
I've seen in this space some of those from different entities is starting to emerge. Right? How is the pairing with Legal Soft? So are you basically going to source your own talent that are AI equipped? Is that the pairing that you're talking about, this harmony?
Hamid Kohan:
Yes. Because right now we have about 20 AI developers who are just writing AI. We have this called PI.AI that I created, which is modular from case generations to intake and then pre-lit demands and lean reduction. So each module that you subscribe to eventually will essentially create my vision of the, again, the techy vision was I press this button and get a case and I press this button, I get a check. You know? And everything in between, the machine does it with some human supervision. I'm not talking about completely human-less system. I'm talking about a system that is accurate, fast, inexpensive, and it can replace 70% of the resources in between.
Chris Dreyer:
So, okay, I think this is a fun exercise. Okay. So we're going to put on how we see the future, right, and forecasting. So I just had Steven Gursten on the call, Michigan Auto Law, and he was talking about the advancements of technology and collision detection and how that impacts auto accidents. You know? There's less auto accidents because collision detection gets improved and now we're talking about AI for transactional. But I would go personally, and I'm not an attorney, I look at the small rear end collisions kind of like some of the auto is almost transactional. Do you think that those would be eliminated just forecasting the future for PI what you see, how we're going to have to evolve and not 900,000 PI, you know, auto accident attorneys. Just how do you see the future today?
Hamid Kohan:
The collision detection that you mentioned, it is something that was developed in one of the universities many, many years ago and it was tried to be used several times before there was any AI or nothing around. The problem with it we actually got it, tested it, and you can actually is an open code so you can have it and test it. Problem was that if it's not a hundred percent accurate, it becomes a huge liability because the collision detection is supposed to notify authorities or family members or whatever that your person just had an accident and if one false alarm goes out there and somebody gets wrong notification is a huge liability.
So a lot of people tried it and nobody really used it because nobody could get around the liability of it. Even 1% mistake, it could be a billion dollar cost of litigation, so that's on that. As far as the AI, AI is going to happen much faster than anybody is imagining. You know, if you think the dot com or cell phone technology happened fast, they are snails compared to what AI is going to do because there's been a lot of underground activities and now that is exposed, everybody's covering above ground. And a lot of it is using ChatGPT as a launching path, so they're jumping on ChatGPT and then developing wraps or vertical solutions from it.
Our focus, since Legal Soft only focuses in legal, we are very determined to develop our own platform with our own training sets because we have access to a lot of legal data. We work with about a thousand law firms in all variety of practice types, and we have shared a lot of information with us to be able to put this thing together on their own wheel. Like I had one of the largest immigration attorneys being in my office today, a meeting with my AI team to bring in all of his 10 years of practice data for our AI machine to learn from. That's going to be some of the issues that the other platforms will have is that they've never been in law or they don't have access to a lot of law oriented data to train the AI. AI is useless if it's not trained.
Chris Dreyer:
Interesting, interesting. Yeah. So, okay, so that in terms of the collision detection, that makes me feel a little bit more comfortable because there is that extreme liability. You know, just a few final questions here. You know, in terms of relinquishing control, because whenever you're using a strategic partner is you relinquish some control to a strategic partner, do they start with intake and then understand typically what you've seen with your clients as you work with a thousand firms. Did they start with intake and they're like, oh, I should do my paralegals, oh, I should do this? Have you seen that expansion? Or is it mostly firms working with you on the intake side or is it on the admin side or is it?
Hamid Kohan:
No. You're right about 70% of it it starts with the intake because everybody has intake problem. It was like you said, it's like sales. You have no sales, you have no company. You have no intake, you have no firm. So it is very sort of a no brainer. I need people to retain clients for me, especially if you're spending money on lead generation. Right? So that's number one. The second most fastest growing segment for us is remote attorneys. So these are attorneys in other countries, finished law school, practice law, so their writing, reading skills is great and they're very mature 'cause they finished law of school and all of that. So they use them to do everything from demands to discoveries to filing motions to filing complaints. The only thing they can't do, they can't sign on the dotted line, which attorneys locally will be very happy to just sign on the doted line. So the remote attorneys and the intake is probably the most gateway into this virtual staffing market.
Chris Dreyer:
That's amazing. So I see a lot of benefits to this, especially if you're still the attorney listening to this podcast and you're trying to listen to on your cell phone to take these calls. I mean, it's just absolutely essential that you have dedicated intake because especially if you're doing search engine marketing. If you miss a call on local services ads, you're just completely dead and you lose out on a big channel opportunity. I think this will be very valuable to our audience because it's something unique from a staffing perspective that we haven't talked about enough. Where can our audience go to learn more about yourself and Legal Soft?
Hamid Kohan:
Our website is a LegalSoft.com and there's a lot of information in there. My own bio is in there. My own direct email and phone number is even in there and we'd be happy to send anybody a copy of the books. There's three books out there that we'll be happy to send it to anybody who contact us so we can get the free copy of the books. But if they go to LegalSoft.com, they find everything they need to know about us.
Chris Dreyer:
All right, y'all, let's go over the pinpoints, a recap of the key takeaways from today's episode. Remove your bottlenecks, as a PI attorney, your time is your most valuable asset. Every minute you spend on administrative task or routine casework is a minute you're not dedicating to high value activities that move the needle. That's where partnering with staff solutions like Legal Soft comes in. They can provide the support you need exactly when you need it so you can focus on what matters most, winning cases and growing your firm.
Hamid Kohan:
So we set organizational chart, we put their staff in there, and we identify in every department from intake to document collections to demand writings to paralegals, and we identify every position that they can utilize a virtual staff for and then they can pick and choose which one they want to start with. So we said, okay, your intake staff is four people plus a supervisor. You need one that does medical records retrieval. You have one demand writer. You have two paralegals. We identify every position in the firm.
Chris Dreyer:
Cover your bases. I've said it before and I'll say it again, you need a rock solid intake team with 24/7 coverage. When a potential client calls, picking up the phone isn't just about providing great service. It's about increasing your ROI and boosting your local search rankings on Google. Don't let those leads slip through the cracks. Get a dedicated team that's ready to spring in an action whenever a case comes in. And if you're in growth mode and ramping up your marketing spend, you need a team that can handle that influx of new cases. Legals Soft can help you scale up overnight so you never miss an opportunity.
Hamid Kohan:
When that seven figure call comes in, I want that person to be trained, work for me, and is incentivized to retain that client.
Chris Dreyer:
Stay curious. LChris Dreyer:et's face it, the legal industry isn't exactly known for being an early adopter of new technology, but that's exactly why embracing innovation can give you a massive competitive advantage. AI-based tools can supercharge your growth and leave your competitors in the dust. The key is to be strategic. Focus on proven reliable tools that play nicely with your existing systems and workflows. And always, always double check the work. AI is a powerful supplement to your expertise, not a replacement for the judgment of a skilled attorney.
Hamid Kohan:
The only set of data or technology that collects data was available to them was case text. All the previous judgments and decisions by the court like LexisNexis or Casetext. That was the only thing around. Now with the AI is like, first of all, you have all this data. They were hiring a bunch of interns and so forth to read some old cases and analyze it and make recommendation. Well that's all gone because I unleashed AI on it and you can looking at thousand cases in an hour that you would need the army of associates or law clerks to actually do.
Chris Dreyer:
For more information about Hamid, check out the show notes. Before you go, do me a solid and smash that follow button to subscribe. I sincerely appreciate it and you won't want to miss out on the next episode of Personal Injury Mastermind with me, Chris Dreyer, founder and CEO of Rankings.io. All right, everybody, thanks for hanging out. See you next time. I'm out.
