0:04
Welcome to Behind the Op, a behind the scenes look at the way businesses really grow.
0:09
Today’s guest is someone who’s built not just a law firm, but an operational engine behind it.
0:14
Joining us is Rob Levine, founder and CEO of Rob Levine Law and Rob Levine Needle Solutions.
0:20
For more than 25 years, Rob has built the powerhouse personal injury and disability practice serving Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut and clients nationwide for Social Security and veterans disability claims.
0:33
Known as a heavy hitter, Rob has helped thousands of injured and disabled individuals navigate complex legal systems and secure the compensation they deserve.
0:43
But what makes this conversation especially interesting for us here behind the OPS is what he’s built behind the brand.
0:50
If Rob didn’t just grow a successful law firm, he engineered the infrastructure to support it.
0:55
From medical records retrieval to international staffing and training, he creates scalable operational ecosystem that now helps other law firms across the country increase their efficiency, their profitability, and their growth through Rob Levine Legal Solutions.
1:10
Before all of that, he served as a police officer, military police officer, paramedic, ski patroller, all roles rooted in discipline, service and structure.
1:19
And that mindset shows up and how he leads, how he scales, and how he grows and gives back through initiatives that serve thousands of community each year.
1:29
Today, we’re going behind the scenes on what it really takes to build a firm that wins cases and wins at operations.
1:36
Let’s go behind the up.
1:37
Morning.
1:38
Rob, how are you?
1:39
I’m good.
1:40
Kristen, how about yourself?
1:41
I’m great.
1:41
Thank you for joining us today.
1:43
I appreciate your time.
1:44
Why don’t we appreciate it?
1:46
Thank you.
1:47
Why don’t we start out with having you tell us about you and your company?
1:51
Sure.
1:52
So the main company is Rob Levine Law.
1:55
I run a law firm.
1:57
We do personal injury, Social Security disability, veterans disability, and workers compensation.
2:03
And then I own Rob Levine Legal Solutions, which are basically legal solution businesses that support the law firm and other law firms.
2:12
So I own a record retrieval company.
2:14
So we do medical record retrieval nationwide for myself and a couple hundred other law firms.
2:20
We do staffing, so I own companies in Columbia and Peru, and we hire people in Columbia, Peru and the Philippines.
2:29
And then we train them.
2:30
And then we provide them to my businesses.
2:33
And then we staff other law firms as well, using those businesses.
2:37
And then I run a mastermind group, so law firms belong to my mastermind group to learn how to scale and grow their business.
2:45
Wow.
2:45
So you have a lot of downtime.
2:48
Exactly.
2:49
Yeah, exactly.
2:50
I’m sorry.
2:51
Sometimes it’s better that way, right?
2:52
Yeah.
2:52
So in those businesses, I own 100% actually, I guess I own Drive Your Art.
2:58
It’s not really in the legal field.
2:59
That was just kind of a stray that I thought of an idea.
3:04
And it’s a SAS basically designed to support large form our art designer.
3:11
So if you’re designing for an example, a billboard or the side of a bus or a bus shelter, in today’s world, there’s no way to really see your artwork as a designer to scale or in the real environment in any weather or at any speed.
3:28
So we’ve developed a platform that basically designers can log into, upload their artwork either in a virtual world or what I call augmented reality.
3:39
So literally, they pick the Billboard they want anywhere in the world and lay their artwork on it, and then they can zoom in and zoom out to see what it looks like.
3:48
Or in the virtual world, they can literally get in a car and drive and see their billboard at any speed, any weather, any sunlight direction, whatever they want.
3:57
So that’s literally just launching.
3:59
And then I’m a partner in an AI company.
4:02
Well, that’s fun.
4:03
I love the design AI.
4:04
That’s not a neat.
4:05
I’ve never heard of that.
4:06
That’s really cool.
4:07
Yeah.
4:07
When I say it’s the first of its kind, we’ve patented it pretty much worldwide at this point, So I’m excited to see how it does.
4:15
Yeah, that’s really neat.
4:16
We’ll have to come back and on the show and explore that one at some point.
4:20
Sure.
4:20
Absolutely.
4:21
So let’s talk a little bit about those are some major leaps forward right from I know you and I have spoken in the past that you had a career before you became an attorney as well.
4:31
So you had that career and thank you for your service.
4:35
And you went from that to a lawyer to supplying services to law firms and then we heard the expansion from there.
4:43
So talk a little bit about that.
4:44
What does that transition look like and what kind of prompted that, that major transmission, those career changes?
4:51
So when I was young, probably in between my first and second year of college, I took a tour of the FBI building in Washington, DC and decided my goal was to be a federal agent.
5:06
And so I had already been an MP in the Rhode Island National Guard and had been an EMT starting at 16.
5:15
So I went to college for criminal justice and graduated, became a police officer and I became a police officer in Rhode Island, which allowed me to go to law school for free.
5:26
So the law back then, this is a long time ago, was that a police officer in the state, the city that they work for or town had to pay for their bachelor’s, master’s in law degree.
5:38
And so they within six months of me graduating from the Academy, maybe a little longer, they introduced legislation to repeal that law.
5:48
But they were going to grandfather anyone who was accepted or enrolled by a certain date.
5:53
And so I thought to myself, you know, I would be crazy not to apply to law school because that would be a shoe in to become a federal agent, right?
6:01
So I’d have military experience, law enforcement experience, and a law degree.
6:06
So I took the LSAT, got accepted and started to go in my 7th year as a police officer, which was in my last year of law school.
6:15
I had a catastrophic car accident while I was working as a police officer and that ended my career.
6:21
I was in therapy for a year and didn’t I was out of work and then they wouldn’t let me return.
6:26
And so you play the cards you’re dealt.
6:29
I finished law school, took the bar exam and started the next chapter in my life.
6:35
I love that.
6:36
I love that.
6:37
So you get into law and you’re running a law firm and your brain kicks in and says, hold on a second, there’s more to running a law firm than just the law.
6:47
Tell me a little bit about that, what that looks like.
6:49
Well, it’s a little more involved than that.
6:51
So I actually was supposed to open a law firm with a kid that I went to law school with who ended up being my brother-in-law.
6:57
And he owned or his family owned a plumbing and heating company, small company relatively back then, I guess it was a medium sized company, about 50 people, 5 million a year.
7:10
And so his brothers asked that him and I work for the plumbing and heating company because their goal was to scale and grow the business.
7:18
And they they wanted help with accounts receivable.
7:21
They wanted to do real estate acquisitions like a ton of things.
7:25
And so I agreed with the understanding that I could work for them and open a law firm and run a law firm simultaneously.
7:33
So I had two full time jobs and so I started the law firm and then I used the law firm to support them.
7:40
I ran their accounts receivable department.
7:42
I had done inventory control in a prior life and in another job and I built that for them.
7:48
And then I was responsible for the real estate acquisitions.
7:51
So over 7 years, we grew them from 5 million to 40 million and 50 people to 300 people.
7:57
I bought 300 units of real estate.
8:00
I bought a old rundown movie theater and we converted it to a dinner in a movie theater.
8:05
I mean a lot of different things.
8:06
Seven years of drinking from a firehose.
8:10
So I got tremendous business experience and scaled the law firm simultaneously.
8:15
And so after seven years, I basically said, look, the law firms big enough that I can’t really do both jobs anymore.
8:22
I’m farming out most of your legal work and it just doesn’t make sense.
8:26
It’s not fair to you.
8:27
And it’s I’m really holding back the law firm at this point because I’m not putting the time in.
8:31
So we agreed to separate and my then brother-in-law decided to stay at the plumbing company.
8:38
He thought that was in his best interest and I left with the law firm 100% very nice.
8:43
So that’s really where the business experience came from.
8:46
And then I really put the law firm on fire and said, OK, how do we scale and grow?
8:52
So as you look back at that scaling and the growth, what are some of the things that you learned beyond the plumbing business and the and the and the business acumen you got from them?
9:03
What are some of the things you looked at with the operations of a law firm that kind of triggered all I need to fix that and that needs to be different or well, so marketing was obviously a big piece creating the brand, right?
9:14
And being really a household name.
9:17
So for the plumbing business, we took the song.
9:20
You remember the song Jenny.
9:21
Jenny.
9:22
Yes, 8675309 I’m very young when that came up with, right?
9:27
Exactly.
9:27
Me too.
9:29
So we bought the phone number locally.
9:31
So we owned 867-5309 and we took Jenny.
9:36
Jenny.
9:36
The name of the company was Jem GEM Plumbing.
9:40
So we converted the song to Jemmy Jemmy and we, we changed enough notes, even though we got sued, but we won because it just wasn’t the same.
9:49
And because we got sued because we don’t want to pay them, they wanted us to pay them for the, the rights of the song, some ridiculous amount of money.
9:58
I don’t remember, but I, so we, I just said, all right, let’s look at the patent.
10:01
Let’s look at the notes and let’s change it.
10:03
And we did.
10:04
And so we used it.
10:06
And so I figured out how to build a brand that became a household name.
10:09
And Gem Plumbing is definitely in Rhode Island, a household name and then figured out how to do the same for the law firm.
10:16
So I ended up becoming the heavy hitter, which is our tagline for the law firm, which I don’t own.
10:22
It’s owned by someone in Florida, but I own everything that we have, my images, my phone number 100% except for the tagline.
10:31
And so the Heavy hitter really resonates with people because when I decided to switch, if we Fast forward to when I grew out of Rhode Island and went into the Boston market, we did a, a study of a number of different names, like I trademarked, for instance, the People’s Guardian, right?
10:47
So because of my background, right, being a paramedic, a police officer, and the concept of a lawyer of what we do in consumer law, I thought, wow, the People’s Guardian, that’s a strong brand.
10:57
And so I own that.
10:58
But when we did a market study to see, you know, using just your name, and we didn’t use my name, we made-up a name because we didn’t want any bias when we did the study.
11:09
And then we used the heavy Hitter brand, we used People’s Guardian and a couple others, Heavy hitter one like 78% hands down, like it was the favorite name.
11:18
And I thought, oh, we’re going to stick with it because it’s working and it’s worked phenomenal.
11:23
Like we’re growing great.
11:25
So I learned a lot about branding and marketing, that’s for sure transitioned well.
11:30
I learned never to put all your apples in one basket.
11:33
So for instance, the law firm was the SIT back then pre 2008, if you remember the subprime real estate market.
11:41
So we owned a huge title and closing business.
11:44
We were doing mail aways for all of the large subprime lenders in the United States.
11:48
A lot of Closings, which and then personal injury, which wasn’t big back then.
11:54
What was big back then was our title and closing business.
11:57
But it died literally overnight.
11:59
Like, I came into work one day and I thought to myself, we have all these back then fax machines, all these fax machines lined up that used to be receiving title orders.
12:09
And like, nothing’s printing, nothing’s running.
12:12
And I’m looking around, pulling my hair out, thinking what is going on.
12:16
And I turned on the TV and I’m like, Oh my God, this literally we died overnight.
12:24
Oh my God.
12:25
And so I realized, OK, now we have personal injury, we have to scale that, really focus on it and we need to add in other things, which is why we then added in Social Security and then added in veterans disability workers compensation.
12:37
Because the truth is you never really know and personal injury lawyers don’t want to face it, right?
12:42
But we have cars with 360° driving protection.
12:47
Eventually we all have safe a self driving cars.
12:51
I mean, we have them, but they’re not really mainstream.
12:54
Eventually they will be mainstream and eventually kids will grow up in a self driving car and not worry about getting a license.
13:02
Like my daughter’s 24, never going to happen.
13:04
Like, she loves to drive.
13:06
She drives a stick shift.
13:07
She thinks it’s the coolest thing ever.
13:09
No one’s taking her right to drive away.
13:12
But eventually it’s going to have to happen, right?
13:14
And who knows what will happen?
13:16
Like maybe we won’t even have people driving cars.
13:19
At which point what happens to personal injury in the auto accident market, right?
13:25
So you have to be prepared.
13:26
You never know what’s coming around the corner.
13:29
So pivot is certainly something you’ve done very well, right is you’ve kind of you’ve seen it, you’ve acted, you watch it, you take in the data, you learn and you move forward.
13:38
So talk a little bit about how you start to make that pivot more of a repeatable process and not necessarily the pivot, but you have to be looking at operations.
13:46
I’m assuming she probably shouldn’t assume, but as you’re looking at your operations and you’re, you’re kind of getting ready to pivot, what kind of things jump out at you and your operational brain, which clearly is steadfast and amazing.
13:59
How are you kind of looking at that repeatable?
14:01
Where do I need repeatable processes so that I can go pivot here, I can change that and maneuver in different directions.
14:09
So from a perspective of scalability, right, it’s important in our model that we find the ability to overlap services.
14:18
If things were really very different and required very unique services, our cost right, would be much higher.
14:26
So for instance, in all of our businesses, the law firm, legal solutions, the record retrieval, I have shared services.
14:34
So marketing overseas, all of the companies, HR overseas, all of the companies, finance overseas, all of the companies.
14:43
And then from the perspective of talent attorneys, paralegals, case managers, legal assistants, we have that obviously and only one vertical.
14:53
But when we look at one vertical, the law firm and you look at the different divisions between Pi social, VA and workers comp, we look look for what are the similarities that we can use for training purposes and scaling.
15:09
So from the perspective of they’re all contingency fee based, I don’t have to chase anyone for money and bill them.
15:16
So if I did criminal law or family law, those are billable services by the hour, it would completely change our model and I would have to have a completely different way that we do accounting, a completely different way we communicate with the client, a completely different contract.
15:34
So for the intake department that signs clients, there would have to be all sorts of differences in explaining to a new customer, oh, we charge you by the hour.
15:43
This is how it works as opposed to everything is contingent based.
15:46
So it, it keeps it streamlined.
15:48
So it’s always trying to find similarities and things that fit as we add.
15:54
That makes perfect sense.
15:55
So as you start to look at that, you know, alignment and the repeatable and predictable outcomes, I think how does, how do you start to differentiate between kind of the maturity of an operational piece versus the, the measure and metrics around it?
16:12
So if you’re looking at this is working and this is not, what are you kind of looking at from a, how do I judge that?
16:18
I guess my question and is it mature enough for me to stop paying attention to it or is there something else?
16:23
I mean, I don’t think I, I would say we verify, but trust.
16:29
So we have KPIs for everything, right?
16:33
So from a structure perspective, there’s nothing that isn’t supervised.
16:38
So you have the team and then above the team is your first level of team leads and that applies to every business model.
16:45
So let’s simple numbers to make it even as ten team members to one team lead.
16:51
So one team lead is supervising 10 people and then that team lead has a manager.
16:55
So for let’s say 10 team leads, you have one division manager, right, who’s running those people.
17:01
And then it just continues to scale up till you get to the CLL.
17:05
And so I wouldn’t, especially now with AI and all of the automations and tracking, I wouldn’t say that we ever decide that something is mature that we stop looking.
17:16
I, I guess when the business is new, maybe there’s more KPIs and we’re much more careful and more scrutiny, but there’s a lot of tracking because there’s a tremendous amount of volume, right?
17:28
The law firm is opening over 1200 cases per month.
17:32
So that’s, that’s 1200 customers, right, that I’m responsible for that have entrusted us to take care of their lives, their, their, their tragedies, their illness, their catastrophic event.
17:44
So we’re very diligent with even returning a phone call, right?
17:49
So when a phone call comes in, it’s marked in the system because it identifies using our whole system.
17:55
It sees it as a customer’s phone number.
17:57
It sees that it went to a paralegal, It sees that a voicemail message was left.
18:02
That’s that phone number is now tracked to ensure within one business day that the phone call is returned and that the call is longer than 30 seconds.
18:11
So we know we just didn’t leave a voice message.
18:14
If not, it’s flagged and it goes on to a tracking sheet to make sure to have a conversation with that paralegal.
18:20
Why didn’t you return the phone call?
18:22
And we basically basically have what I refer to as a 0 tolerance policy.
18:26
If you don’t return your customers call, we terminate you.
18:29
So pretty clear.
18:31
Yeah, we, we track pretty much everything.
18:35
Love that.
18:35
So as the starting point of all of that, right.
18:39
One of the things that I talked to a lot of my owner founders about is where they become the bottleneck.
18:44
And it’s not always an easy conversation.
18:46
But as an owner founder who used to trust but verify, where did you start to learn?
18:52
How did you start to learn what those levers look like?
18:54
So I can pull this lever and kind of watch over here.
18:57
But if I watch over here and this turns I know to come back over to this direction.
19:01
How does that kind of mean that in the plumbing company?
19:04
So when I built the inventory system, which was basically SKU related, right?
19:11
So back then, right, you had box counts on a truck.
19:14
A truck was going to have so many pieces of inventory that it could leave with.
19:18
And then inside the warehouse, you had skews that matched the truck and there were counts.
19:22
So back in the day when I would pull down someone’s truck and count it down to see, oh, I think this person’s stealing and selling on the side or running their own plumbing company in the side and using our parts, right?
19:33
So you’re, I’m out there pulling stuff down even though I have an inventory department and I realized, OK, this I’m should not be doing this, right.
19:42
And so, and there are a number of other things in when we open the dinner in a movie theater and you want to track, because we had that we served alcohol and it’s tracking that inventory and all the other things that I was responsible for, things that I built, I took personal like, OK, I created the system.
19:58
I have to monitor it and manage it.
20:00
So I just learned that you have to trust the people who work for you and people have to, I have to learn to let them to report up and.
20:06
The bigger we get, the more people that are reporting and then just figuring out how then to create that next layer that someone reports to someone who then reports to me.
20:15
And so, you know, all in we’re 600 people.
20:18
So obviously there’s, I can only have so many report to me or I don’t have time to do my job, which is really big picture and vision.
20:27
So I only have a handful of people that report to me.
20:30
So looking at your 600 people and you’re one person, where did you figure out that culture matters, right as you start to grow to 600?
20:39
So from one to 600, your culture shifted astronomically.
20:43
We’ve discussed the fact that you’re phenomenal at pivoting.
20:46
Talk a little bit about how you keep that culture or what kind of culture you want and how do you get that through a 600 person organization.
20:53
So that was that’s an interesting story.
20:56
So I’ve always been a great cheerleader, right?
21:01
I always was a great driver, a great motivator, but I was always in control.
21:08
And I shouldn’t even say always because in the beginning I was an ******* right?
21:11
So you, you’re right.
21:13
Imagine being a paramedic, you’re on the street, you’re a police officer, you’re on the street, you’re tough, you make decisions instantly.
21:19
You tell people you take control.
21:21
So that’s probably how I was in the beginning.
21:23
And then as that shifted and learned how to do more motivational and take care of the team, I thought we had amazing culture.
21:32
So let’s say that we’re ten years in.
21:35
And so we did an anonymous survey.
21:38
And so I hired an outside consulting company and that’s where we started.
21:42
And when I read the survey, I thought to myself, OK, I guess we’re not doing as good as I thought.
21:48
And So what I realized was people didn’t have a voice, they didn’t have skin in the game, they didn’t have buy in.
21:56
We weren’t asking their opinion.
21:58
We were, we were telling them all the time what to do.
22:01
And here’s a great program.
22:03
This is going to be great for you.
22:04
And here’s a great idea.
22:05
This, you’re going to love this.
22:06
But I’m still standing on top of the desk with the pom poms, rah, rah, rah.
22:11
And so we shifted and I created an Advisory Board.
22:15
And so the Advisory Board has no managers, no team leads, and they come up with ideas and then they communicate to the executive board.
22:24
And you know, from there things really changed because the team recognized that we were investing in that.
22:33
So and then we created a leadership team.
22:35
And so we created a leadership training program.
22:38
And so it’s like 6 months long, you can enter that program and you’re going to be a future leader in your training for the company.
22:45
And we recruit that way.
22:47
And so all of the investment that we made in them, they recognized and shifted.
22:53
And then we do the anonymous surveys probably once a year so that we get feedback and we make sure we, I travel the world now, right?
23:02
So I go to all of the countries and go to holiday parties.
23:05
So I was in Philippines this year, in Manila and Cebu.
23:09
Literally I just got back from Bogota.
23:11
Next month I’m going to Peru.
23:14
I live in Puerto Rico, go to the US.
23:16
So you know, my presence, even though I’m only one person still is very meaningful because we have zoom meetings with literally 600 people, right to talk about what’s going on and share the news.
23:30
And then when I come to their party and I’m out there with them and having a great time and supporting them and it’s they appreciate it to talk a little bit about that.
23:39
It’s a great segue into, I wanted to dive into your international kind of presence in the way that you run a company internationally.
23:47
Talk a little bit about kind of how that became to be and then what some of the the learning mechanisms are for going international with the company.
23:55
So 2020 we had COVID and so we were 100 people in the law firm alone and COVID happened.
24:08
So first of all, hiring was very difficult, right?
24:10
Because you’re high.
24:12
Our law firm was in Rhode Island, and so all of the employees we hired were either in southeastern Massachusetts or Rhode Island.
24:19
So it’s a very small pool of people to recruit from, right?
24:24
So that makes it difficult.
24:26
When COVID happened and we went remote, which was required, right, I realized this is just such an amazing opportunity.
24:36
We can, I used to be right.
24:38
I thought, Oh my God, I would never let people work from home.
24:41
And then I had to let them work from home and I don’t know, it changed everything.
24:47
I just recognized that there’s no difference like walking around an office, while it can be good for motivation because you can high 5 people and talk to them and have private conversations face to face.
24:59
Zoom, which probably existed before 2020 but I didn’t use it ever for anything, is just as good as in person.
25:08
Right?
25:08
So it’s a private conversation one-on-one I can have a team meeting.
25:13
And so while most of my friends and almost everyone in my mastermind group has gone back to their office, I promised our team we would not.
25:25
And that alone is a huge motivating factor.
25:29
We have people who come to work for us either in the US or in other countries simply because we’re remote.
25:36
They want to be able to home with their kids or their family or their elderly parents, and they just love the idea of working from home.
25:43
And we give flex time, so we allow because we’re large enough.
25:47
It doesn’t matter to me what time your day starts, right?
25:49
So you can start at 77389.
25:53
As long as we know what your plan is, it doesn’t matter.
25:56
So there’s a lot of flexibility in their schedules and tracking them, whether they’re sitting at a desk in my office or they’re sitting at home, the tracking is the same.
26:06
There’s zero difference.
26:08
So why make them come into an office?
26:10
And imagine if I had to have an office that held 600 people.
26:13
That would cost me a fortune, yes.
26:15
So it’s a huge cost savings and a huge bonus on culture.
26:20
So it’s a win win.
26:22
That’s fantastic.
26:23
And it’s definitely, it’s still in the trend mode, right?
26:26
Like do we let them work from home?
26:27
Do we bring them in the office?
26:28
And I think a lot of companies are struggling with that.
26:30
And where you can find a balance that works like this, I think it’s fantastic.
26:35
Talk a little bit about how there might be some operational blindness in that though, not just the people being from home, but as you run that big an organization that’s international, are there any operational blind spots?
26:45
And do you have to kind of have you seen any recently and what have you done about them?
26:51
So I mean, we use a system called Active Track, which is one of the monitoring systems we use.
27:00
So aside from it controls what websites they can go to and logs what sites they’re on it, it looks at the time they’re working, it looks at what they’re working on.
27:10
So it recognizes, are they in my case management system?
27:14
Are they on a recognized website?
27:15
What are they using?
27:16
And it takes screenshots of their monitors.
27:20
And so if I had to drill down, so I get, I don’t, but the team leads get a report of the 10 people they’re they’re monitoring.
27:27
And if it there’s passive time or times where they’re on things they’re not supposed to be or looks squashy, literally you could just zoom in and look at somebody’s monitor and see what they’re doing.
27:36
Which is also great for training because when I feel like someone’s not as productive as they could be because we’re looking at KPI reports on what you’re processing every day in a period of time.
27:48
And you have people who are superstars, people who are great.
27:51
And then you see someone who’s slow.
27:52
I can literally watch how somebody’s working and a team lead or one of our trainers could say, hey, let’s take a look at what you’re working on and how you’re doing it and how you have work files open and you’re jumping around and answering the phone and set looking at emails and let’s work on time blocking and how to control your schedule.
28:10
So not only is it great for making sure we don’t have blind spots, it’s also great from a training perspective.
28:16
That is fantastic.
28:17
That’s a great system.
28:18
I think that would be helpful for a lot of people.
28:21
Yeah.
28:21
And any industry, I’m sure if you’re working at a desk, it’s a great system.
28:25
Yeah.
28:25
And that’s whether you’re remote or in an office, right?
28:28
Because if you’re sitting in, you have 50 people in an office where you can’t watch what they’re doing.
28:34
So active track allows you in the same flexibility.
28:37
That’s fantastic.
28:39
So as you look to the future, Rob, what are some of the things that you’re thinking about?
28:43
What are some of the places you’re hoping to go with the company?
28:46
So national expansion for the law firm.
28:49
So we are nationwide now for Social Security and veterans disability or personal injury.
28:55
The goal is also to expand to multiple States and eventually go nationwide.
28:59
So we’re working on that now.
29:01
So social and VA is easy because I only have to be licensed in one state and then I get licensed under that federal organization, Social Security Administration or the Veterans Disability Organization Administration.
29:16
And that allows me to be nationwide because it’s the practice of federal law, federal agency law, whereas personal injury is licensed by state.
29:25
So in order to practice personal injury law in any state, you have to be licensed in that state.
29:31
So that’s a huge undertaking, one that we’re currently working on.
29:35
Other than that, the next big thing is looking at AI and how we integrate it into the law firm and how we save time and, and really improve what we’re doing and how long it’s taking.
29:46
We’re running a group of probably 60 people right now, for instance, everyone, all of those sixty people are using Copilot.
29:53
And so Copilot we’re Microsoft Office, so it integrates with everything we do.
29:57
And so they fill out time cards every day of what they did with Copilot and how much time they’re saving.
30:03
And we’re tracking how AI is assisting people schedule and how much time saving we have and, and how that looks in the big picture to then continue to roll it out to more people and who it makes sense.
30:14
It’s probably doesn’t make sense necessarily in every position, but it certainly makes sense in a lot of them.
30:21
Well, I think one of the big findings that at least I’ve been in lots of conversations around your mastermind group probably talked about this as well as looking at AI is fantastic.
30:31
And it does take away a lot of the mundane tasks for the easier to put what you have to have in place is your operations, which clearly your organization does you very specific with your KP is the operational procedures.
30:42
You have active tracking and all kinds of things, but I think it’s key when people are looking at AI that they don’t just assume I can stick AI here.
30:50
If you don’t have operating procedures, it’s not going to help.
30:53
It’s going to make it worse, right?
30:54
So I spoke at a seminar a couple of months ago and so I’ve talked about people process technology.
31:03
And if you put technology first, you will fail because if you don’t have team and culture and change management and buy in, the team’s not going to use it.
31:13
If you don’t have processes already in place that this team knows how to follow and systems technology is not going to do it for you.
31:21
So you cannot take technology, put it in place and expect, oh, this is going to fix everything that’s broken.
31:26
No, definitely won’t fix anything that’s broken.
31:28
It’ll probably just make it worse, make it worse 100%.
31:31
And it’s funny how how many times we get to have those conversations.
31:35
So Rob, as a parting question was tell me something that as an entrepreneur or a founder that’s listening to the podcast, they just say if you were to give them one piece of advice or two, what would that look like, One piece of advice or two?
31:51
I mean, I suppose that probably strongly depends on where they are in their business, right?
31:57
And where their goals are.
31:58
I see a lot of lawyers opening law firms and even other businesses that I talked to and they start to make money and and they live to what they make, right.
32:09
So I’ve lived very lean to get to where I am to be able to keep putting money back in the business and grow the business.
32:17
So if you reap the wards upfront, it’s very hard to grow the business.
32:22
To grow business, you need cash.
32:23
There’s there’s, it’s impossible to grow without cash.
32:27
So you’re either taking money from someone else and then you owe someone and you have someone to answer to, or you do it internally.
32:35
And there’s nothing wrong with taking money from someone else.
32:37
If you have that mentality and you don’t mind having a partner and you don’t mind have someone looking over your shoulder.
32:42
But it has to be the right fit, the right culture.
32:46
It’s a serious consideration.
32:48
So the other thing, if I was going to say two things, I would say it’s about making sure that aside from having the right culture, it’s a surrounding yourself with a team that is smarter than you, right?
33:04
So that trusting them, helping them grow, making them better than you.
33:09
I see owners who are afraid what happens if they leave me or what happens if they do this, or what happens if I don’t have control or what happens if I don’t know what’s happening.
33:21
Like you have to trust your team and so trust but verify.
33:24
But you have to let them grow and let them help you get to the next level.
33:28
I mean, no matter how smart I am, I’m still only one person.
33:32
So having 3 smart people or 10 smart people or however big you are, 100 smart people gets you a lot further than one.
33:40
So having control is an illusion anyway, in my opinion.
33:45
Yeah.
33:45
Have children or animals.
33:47
And you learn that very quickly, right?
33:49
Very true.
33:50
Well, thank you so much for your time today.
33:52
I really appreciate it.
33:53
Your insights are fantastic.
33:54
And I think people can really learn a lot from your ability to pivot on progress and data and momentum.
34:01
I think that’s fantastic.
34:03
My pleasure.
34:04
Thanks for having me.
34:05
Thank you.
