Podcast Highlights: How Tech is Changing the Legal Industry | Law + Finance

Recently, Lawmatics founder and CEO Matt Spiegel joined the Law + Finance Podcast to discuss the legal tech landscape. Learn more about the founding of Lawmatics, how new features come about, and how the needs of law firms are changing. Read the transcript below, or watch the full conversation above.

Podcast transcript

Terrell Turner

Hi, I'm Terrell Turner, the host of the Law and Finance Show, and today we have another great guest on. Now, the reason why I'm excited about this guest is because many law firms that I have talked to, ones that we do bookkeeping for, and helping them with CFO services, are really trying to figure out how do you really keep a good handle on the CRM part of your business? Just managing that pipeline, all of the data, and the insights that you need to get to make sure that you're growing your firm, and you're on top of that sales funnel, and the front end of your firm. And there's so much more value that you can get when you are using the right tool. So, today we're going to be interviewing Matt Spiegel from Lawmatics, and we're going to be talking about some amazing things that they're doing, weigh his history with being a lawyer, helping build out some of the world's most successful law technology solutions, so stay tuned for today's episode. So, without further ado, let me bring on Matt. Matt, welcome to the show. How are you?

Matt Spiegel

I'm doing well, Terrell. How are you?

Terrell Turner

I am great. I am great. Matt, now a lot of lawyers that I've talked to are, they're familiar with Lawmatics, and I've heard great things. Like I said, literally as you, and I were talking right before this, I was working with a lawyer onboarding, and they were telling me about how much they love Lawmatics. So people may be familiar with Lawmatics, but they may not be as familiar with Matt. So can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Matt Spiegel

Yes. So happy to give you some color there. So, I'm a lawyer, I still have my license. I think my parents would be very upset if they spent all this money on my legal education, and then I didn't at least keep my license, even though I don't practice anymore. So I do maintain my license. So I still technically am a lawyer, but I practiced for five years. And then long story short, I ended up starting the company called MyCase, which is most of your listeners, if they're in the legal tech, they are in the legal world. They probably know what MyCase is. So I started that company back in 2010, and I sold the company, I stayed with the company until 2015. Obviously, MyCase today, especially kind of coupled with a lot of your listeners who are interested in finance, and how it intertwines with the world of law, MyCase is now owned by LawPay. LawPay bought MyCase about, I don't know, a couple months ago.

So, it's very much one of the biggest legal tech companies in the world. And so now in 2017, so I took some time off doing some other things unrelated to law, or legal tech. And then in 2017 I decided that the law firm world, the legal world, was very much missing a critical part of business management. A lot of tools had been built to help us manage our cases and to help us make sure that we get paid. That's good. But no tools had really been developed to help us run our business, and nurture our clients, and create better customer experiences. And so that's why I ended up starting Lawmatics at the end of 2017.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. Now, one other questions I'm curious about, because you hear a lot of people talk about, they went through law school, become a lawyer. You don't often hear the storyline of, you know what? I started developing legal technology. So where did that kind of come into play for you?

Matt Spiegel

I mean, I think most people in legal tech have a similar story in the sense that I scratched my own itch. So I experienced a problem. I mean, MyCase, most people don't really know, but MyCase was started as just a simple client portal. That's all MyCase was. It was not a practice management tool. It didn't do time, and billing, or all the other bells and whistles that it does now. It was very simply a tool to just share data with your client. And this was because I had a client complaint. I had a bar complaint from a client about my communication, just basically that I didn't call them back quick enough. I didn't return their calls.

Even though I did, it wasn't on their time. And so I thought to myself, "This was really silly, there should be an easier way to communicate these things to my client." And doing so with technology was really the only way and there was nothing out there to do that. And so that's, ultimately, how MyCase was born. So, I think this idea of experiencing a problem, and going out, and determining that there was nothing in the market to solve that problem for me, just going out, and building a solution myself, that's ultimately how it went.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. I wonder for when it came down to Lawmatics, I mean creating another technology solution to solve a problem that not only you experienced, but probably thousands of other lawyers when it came down to that, doing the research on, hey, first, let me see if there's something else that's out there. About how many different options of different tech solutions did you end up looking at before you came to the conclusion, "Hey, you know what? No one does what I need it to do?"

Matt Spiegel

Well, luckily, I knew, right? Because I had been in this space for a long time. So, I think I had an advantage in that building MyCase. I kind of knew everything that was out on the market. I knew what solutions were there. I knew what problems were being solved and what problems hadn't been addressed yet. I also had an idea for what problems were on the horizon. Lawmatics, kind of take a step back. Lawmatics would not be possible if lawyers weren't starting to think about their law firms as more than a law firm. If they weren't thinking about their firms as businesses, then Lawmatics wouldn't make sense, because Lawmatics is a tool that helps you think about the business of your law firm, and the things that make up a good business, not just practicing law. And so if you rewind 10, 12 years ago, the legal space was not there.

They were not thinking about their law firms like businesses. They were just thinking about them like law firms. They were just focusing on being a lawyer. But in 2014, 2015 when I was still with MyCase, we started to see that sentiment shift a little bit. We started to see a little kernel of this idea, this concept, of thinking about your firm as more than a law firm, and thinking about it like a business. And so now fast forward two more years, your 2017, and now that environment has really started to change, and this idea of running it like a business was starting to become much more mainstream. And so that made a tool like Lawmatics very valuable.

Terrell Turner

One of the things that, it makes me wonder, because I see a lot of parallels between how lawyers think about law firms, and even when I talk to other accountants. I mean it's just where a similar journey of, for the longest accountants did not think of the firm as I'm running a business. It's just like, "Hey, I'm just practicing accounting." I wonder, from your perspective, did you see anything that started to trigger people to open their eyes to, hey, I'm not just practicing law, I'm actually running a business that happens to practice law?

Matt Spiegel

Yeah, in my opinion, what we saw was a shift to smaller law firms, and competition. So what I think you saw was you saw lawyers, you saw a lot of lawyers leaving big firms, and going to start their own firm, become a solo lawyer, hang their shingle. Then so you now have the market flooded with more small law firms. And all those small law firms are like, "All right, we need to go and advertise. We need to go get business." So when you have more firms, you're just naturally going to have more competition to get clients. And when you have more competition, now you need to do more things than just practice law. You've got to do things you're not necessarily used to doing in order to earn that business.

You have to go and get it. It's not just going to come to you before. If you're in Cleveland, Ohio, and there's 10 law firms, business is going to just come to you, you're going to have plenty. But if you're in Cleveland, Ohio and there's a thousand law firms, business is not just going to come to you. You got to fight for it. And so I think that's what happened. And that forced lawyers to start to think about things beyond just practicing law. They had to think about how to wow their customer, how to go and market, how to attract them, and then how to close them, right? They got to sell.

Terrell Turner

Gotcha. I would guess probably similar to accountants, that became a new skill that they had to learn. Now, as they're kind of learning that new skill, I mean, then having a tool that helps them kind of understand, "Hey, where is this client in that journey? Or how is that working?" How did you find creating a tool in a way where the learning curve for using Lawmatics isn't so high that they get discouraged, because they're having to learn sales, and they got to learn how to use the tool to help them. How did you approach that where it's like, "Hey, how are we going to make this learning curve for this tool?"

Matt Spiegel

That's a tricky question. I don't know that we've done that well yet. I think we're still learning. I think, well, you make the assumption that we're good at that. Maybe we're not. No, I mean, we're always getting better at that, but I think that is the tricky thing. But I think what's what we've done, one way that we approach that is, look, we've been doing this for a long time. We've worked with thousands of law firms at Lawmatics and have worked with tens of thousands of law firms at MyCase. So, we've got a lot of experience at this company now. And so when we sit down with a new customer who's like, "All right, I've never used a CRM. I've never thought about my customer journey, I've never thought about different touch points and how to nurture them. And I've never thought about when someone's case is over, how I want to continue to communicate with them for the first year, or the first five years, or every year on their birthday. I've never thought about that."

So, this is a big ask of them. And so the beauty is we do know some best practices we can help. And so our approach is to actually really push them in a direction, and help them with best practices so that they're not just doing it all from scratch, and they're not relying on themselves. This is not something where they're on an island just trying to figure out what processes to implement on their own. We really want to be a partner for them, and share our experiences, couple that with what they do, and see if we can actually improve their whole process, and experience.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. Now, I'm curious for, as you develop new features, or there are different things that have come out with Lawmatics, have there been any features that you introduced that you may have been surprised how well people gravitated to it, or how well it actually connected with the pain points that the clients were experiencing?

Matt Spiegel

I think so. And I think what I would say more that I was surprised about is I think I've been surprised at how deep we ended up having to go on certain features, that I thought would be good enough at a surface level. So, a good example of that is when we first launched Lawmatics, we knew that something that was going to be very important was going to be e-signatures, right? So, being able to, as part of an intake process, it's obviously very important that you send out your fee agreement, and that they sign it, and now they're signing up with your law firm. So we needed to support those e-signatures, but we thought that, "Look, this could be pretty basic." They have their document in there, we can just give them a little word editor, and they can create their document, they can slap a signature on it, and it's going to be good.

We now have this massive document assembly platform that allows you to create PDF forms, and use Microsoft Word documents, and create really robust online, almost like Google Docs. And we have conditional logic, so you can have these documents that are based upon data in your system, and merge it all in there, and it's pretty robust. And I would've never thought at the beginning that would've been a direction that we would've gone down. It seemed we would've just needed something really basic. So, I'm always fascinated with how we create what we call an MVP, for a product. It's called minimum viable product, the minimum amount that you can do for a feature to deliver value to your customer. And I'm always surprised at where we start. So where are we release an MVP, and then where that feature ends up after. And so it's always really fascinating to see.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. I gotcha. Now, I guess also thinking is, were there any features that when you first worked on that MVP version of that feature, where in your mind you were like, this is going to be the feature that really knocks it out the part, but then when you released it, you got the actual customer feedback like, "Oh, they're not as excited about this as I was."

Matt Spiegel

So, that happens all the time. That happens way more than the other side. It's way more often that we release something that we're like, "This is going to change the world." And then it's like nobody uses it. I feel like that's almost everything. And honestly, I think that that happens with almost every feature. It's like, because what's funny about law firms, and I think it's also CPAs, we actually look at law firms, and CPAs interchangeably, and we actually suspect that Lawmatics will be available for CPAs at some point down the road, because we just see it as such a similar vertical.

But what I find really interesting is everyone thinks that lawyers are technologically challenged, and they're very slow to adopt technology, but you would be shocked because if that was the case, then giving them something really, really simple would be enough. But that's never how it is. You always give them an inch, and then they want a mile. And so we always release a feature that's super basic, and it's never good enough, because then they need this, and they need that, and they need this, and they need that. And so the product just has to evolve so quickly around it. And I mean that's what keeps it fun and exciting, but it's pretty funny sometimes.

Terrell Turner

It's probably pretty interesting. I mean, when you think about, you guys are helping your clients do a better job of managing the client, their client experience, but on the same hand, I mean you got to manage your own client experience about introducing those new features. Building a product that you're focused on how we help them improve their client experience, do you find that you also have to take a step back? Or do you guys have a client success team, or happiness team that's devoted to how are you improving your client's experience?

Matt Spiegel

So, we always have to think about that from our perspective, and this is where I'm glad that there are law firms that are starting to think about client experience, and client success. From my perspective as a software company, it's all I think about. And we have a massive team of customer success agents who are helping our customers, which are obviously law firms, day in, and day out. And it's a part, we view it as a competitive advantage. If we have a good customer service team, then we are better than a competitor potentially. But what's also interesting is that we will actually use Lawmatics in our own company to do things that law firms would use Lawmatics for. So, we don't just build Lawmatics, but we actually use it for ourselves because of how powerful it is. But we also use Salesforce, and we also use some other marketing automation platforms, which are designed for companies like us.

Lawmatics is not designed for a big tech company. Lawmatics is designed for law firms. So we are very open with the fact that, yeah, we have a CRM, but it's not designed for us, so we're not going to use it for everything. We're going to use Salesforce, right? Because it's designed for us. But Salesforce is not designed for a law firm. It's going to be really terrible for a law firm, not to mention very expensive. So, it's really an interesting experience for us having this type of a platform as our product, and how when we use it, when we don't use it, and how we take experiences from the products that we do use, and translate that into our product that we offer to our customers.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. Now, when you mentioned about MyCase, MyCase bought, and purchase Lawmatics. From that purchase, what have you seen has been some of the synergies that's come from the combination of those two companies?

Matt Spiegel

You mean MyCase? LawPay bought MyCase, right?

Terrell Turner

Yes, yes.

Matt Spiegel

So, what's interesting there is that a big part of MyCase business, which people don't necessarily realize is payments. So, MyCase as a practice management platform, they obviously charge a monthly fee, and they can do all your time tracking and they help you do all your invoicing, but then they also have a huge part of their business called MyCase payments. So, that all the lawyers are running credit card payments, they're sending out their invoices, and the clients are paying the invoices, and MyCase is taking a portion of that processing revenue. That's natural, but they're processing an insane amount of money, a huge amount of money. It would make your head spin. So it's a big revenue source. So now you have a company like LawPay, which all they do is provide credit card processing to law firms buying that company because MyCase, a huge part of what they do are payments.

So, there's a lot of synergies there. It's been a really interesting experience to sit on the outside and watch what is happening over there. I think the whole legal industry, the legal industry, as a whole, is really kind of sitting back and waiting to see what happens with that marriage. I don't know that, in my opinion, it was a little unexpected, and I think it's going to be interesting to see how that relationship plays out and where it goes. I mean, I think for the first time in a lot of years MyCase has shown some signs of life. For a while it was pretty stagnant, and now it's cool to see it moving along. From my perspective, obviously, I will always be tied to that. That's my legacy. Lawmatics is a great company, and will probably be bigger than MyCase one day, hopefully, but MyCase was my first, and so always going to kind of be remembered for that. So I do want to see it be really successful. So it's interesting to see what's happening with it.

Terrell Turner

And I'm curious for yourself now with focusing on building out Lawmatics, as you look and see what other players in legal technology are doing. One of the things that I've seen in the accounting world is vertical integration becomes a common strategy for a lot of your tech stack, or tech companies in the accounting space is when you look at Lawmatics, do you see other kind of legal technologies trying to make a vertical move into the CRM space?

Matt Spiegel

So, we don't see it that much, right? We have great relationships and integrations with most of the other legal tech companies out there, the big ones, the ones that do practice management, the companies like Cleo, and Practice Panther, and File Vine, and Rocket Matter, and Smokeball, all these companies that really have dominated the space, and we integrate with them. And so what a CRM does is so fundamentally different than what most other software in legal tech does. And it's very hard for them to just sort of say, "Oh, we want to do CRM stuff now, so we're going to go ahead and develop that." It would be a very unnatural transition. So we don't really see it. There are less than a handful of competitors out there, and most of them have actually been purchased by other companies already. And so that has of removed them from the market as a whole, and has made them very specific to the solutions that they're partnered with. So we feel like we're really the only solution out there that does what we do, and does it without any real ties to any other company.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. I love it. I love it. So a couple things before we wrap up. One of the things that I always love to hear from the founder of the company is when you think about the solution that you provide, when people are asking, "Hey, what's the pain point that you guys are addressing?" In your own words, how do you usually explain that to, "Hey, here's the pain point that Lawmatics is addressing, and here's why our customers are happy with what we provide."

Matt Spiegel

So first of all, Lawmatics, I think delivers on what I call the holy grail of value to a law firm, and CPAs act the same way. But if you're a provider of services or a product to a law firm or a CPA firm, I think that there's only two real value propositions that you can deliver, right? One, you can save time, because time is money. We bill by the hour, we're expensive. So, if I save you time, that's valuable to me. And the second thing is you can bring me more business, but those are really, the only two value props. Save me time, and bring me more business. Now, most legal software out there is designed to save you time, and then you have marketing agencies, which are designed to bring you more business, but there are very few companies that can actually deliver on both value propositions.

Lawmatics helps you do that. So Lawmatics saves you an in incre... The average law firm saves 20 hours a week. It sounds crazy, but they save 20 hours a week combined, because usually we're at law firms with four or five, six lawyers, or more. We're going to save 20 hours a week, which is insane. But because of what we do, we are going to actually help you get more business with nurture campaigns helping you develop referral business, and then helping you convert more of the leads that you're getting into clients. So, that's the value prop. But at the end of the day, I think where we really help lawyers is the way we do this is by helping them deliver a better customer experience. That's what it's all about to us, is we look at the journey that a client goes through with a law firm, and we try to help a law firm delight that customer at every step of the journey.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. I mean, that's an amazing point of reference for, I guess, for all the lawyers that are listening. I mean, let's say if you charge $200 an hour as your billable, I mean, if you're saving 20 hours. I mean the tool more than pays for itself.

Matt Spiegel

Yes, very much so.

Terrell Turner

So, I mean, if people are interested in finding out more about Lawmatics, and learning more about the great things, where should they look for you guys online?

Matt Spiegel

So, very easy. Just head over to Lawmatics.com. That's where you can go, and you can check things out. You can get a demo there, see a little bit about what we do. That's great. Also, I'm always around. I love hearing from lawyers. I love getting random questions. It could have nothing to do with Lawmatics, I get asked about all kinds of stuff. MyCase is fair game law. Lawmatics is fair game. Being a lawyer is fair game. If you want to talk golf, that's fair game. So anybody can always email me matt@lawmatics.com. I get emails all the time. I'm super, super responsive. I truly do love it. It also helps me. You have no idea how many random conversations get started, and they end up turning into something that helps me grow, or helps me learn what we might need to do differently at Lawmatics. So please feel free to reach out.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. Awesome. Well, before we wrap up, one final question, if you're thinking about all the experiences you've had from MyCase to Lawmatics to being the lawyer yourself, and just growing a business, if you had to share one piece of advice for lawyers who are trying to manage, and grow a law firm, what would be that piece of advice you would want to share with them?

Matt Spiegel

I would tell them to worry less about being a good lawyer, and worry more about providing good customer service. Think about your law firm like Trader Joe's thinks about their customer service, or Amazon thinks about their customer service or Nordstrom for that matter. You go back to those places, not because they sell something that other people don't, but it's because you have a great experience when you shop with them, or when you go to their stores, or when you buy things from them. Make it the same at your law firm.

Terrell Turner

Awesome. I love it. Well, Matt, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for being an amazing guest, and taking some time out to help us understand the value, and the benefits that Lawmatics has, and then just also your advice, and your wisdom on building a successful business. It's been a pleasure having you.

Matt Spiegel

Yeah, thank you, Terrell. I appreciate it.

Terrell Turner

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