Fresh Voices on Legal Tech with Mathew Kerbis

Episode Notes

Transcript

Announcer:

Web 2.0 innovation collaboration, metadata got the world turning as fast as it can hear how technology can help legally speaking with two of the top legal technology experts, authors and lawyers, Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighell. Welcome to the Kennedy Mighell report here on the Legal Talk Network

Dennis Kennedy:

And welcome to episode 395 of the Kennedy Mighell Report. I’m Dennis Kennedy in Ann Arbor,

Tom Mighell:

and I’m Tom Mighell in Dallas.

Dennis Kennedy:

In our last episode, Tom and I, well mainly Tom shared our thoughts on the best tech for travel. I was surprised by our disagreement over the value of extension cords because I can’t travel without them. You get some great tips on travel tech in that episode. Be sure to give it a listen. In this episode, we have another very special guest in our Fresh Voices on Legal Tech’s series in Fresh Voices. We want to showcase different and compelling perspectives on legal tech and much more. Tom, what’s all on our agenda for this episode?

Tom Mighell:

Well, Dennis, in this edition of the Kennedy Mighell report, we are thrilled to continue our fresh voices on Legal Tech interview series with Mathew Kerbis, founding attorney at subscription attorney LLC and a knowledgeable and insightful contributor in new legal business models, legal, tech and ai. We want our Fresh Voices series to not only provide you with and introduce you to terrific leaders in legal tech space, but also provide you with their perspective on the things you need to be paying attention to right now. And as usual, we’ll finish up with our parting shots, that one tip website or observation that you can start to use the second that this podcast is over. But first up, we are so pleased to welcome Mathew Kerbis to our Fresh Voices series. Mathew, welcome to the Kennedy MA Report.

Mathew Kerbis:

I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.

Tom Mighell:

Before we get started, can you tell our audiences a little bit more about you? What is subscription attorney, what’s your role in it and what our audience should know about you to get started?

Mathew Kerbis:

Yeah, so I’ve claimed the title of the subscription attorney and I only claimed it because nobody else did, and that was a little over three years ago. I was billing hours at a firm and not enjoying my life whatsoever. One day got off the phone with my father and was like, okay, that’s a 0.3. And I’m thinking, what am I doing? This is nonsensical, let alone my client’s not calling me before there’s problems or they call me and I help ’em with a problem in two minutes, but to build that file would take more time to open the file than the money we’d make. So it doesn’t make sense to bill him on that thinking about how do I capture that value? And this was like late 2017, early 2018 and started to have conversations with other folks who have paved the way in the industry like Kimberly Bennett, who if she hasn’t been a guest, would be a great guest.

And then in ultimately decided it was too hard to build a practice within a practice. And in March of 2022, I left to start my own law firm based exclusively on the subscription model, hence subscription attorney LLC where I don’t track time, I don’t build time. My subscriptions start at $20 a month and with a la carte addition to that is $50 a page for analysis, review and drafting for clients. I’m essentially a small business lawyer and my clients could outsource their legal things to me like their fractional general counsels. They get back to what they enjoy in their life, in their business. And when I got started, I was using AI from the very beginning though it was not useful. It was machine learning if this then that logic based AI and some automations were good, but it wasn’t like the AI that we have today. But because I’m incentivized to be fast and efficient, that makes me more money since it’s the opposite of billing by the hour I’ve been adopting and using and experimenting and exploring AI and technology since the very beginning. And I’ll sometimes tell people I have a technology company that happens to be a solo practice law firm.

Dennis Kennedy:

So Mathew, first of all, it’s awesome for us to have you as a guest on the podcast. You are actually, you’re refreshing our memories that you were a call in question guests a while back on the show. So I always like to say it’s not easy to talk with lawyers about tech and sometimes I get frustrated with how difficult it still is to explain technology, both all the new technologies and its benefits to those in the legal profession. You do a really great job at it, especially by framing it in a business context as you just did. Would you talk about your own approach to communicating with lawyers and others in the legal profession about technology and what you’ve found that works well for you?

Mathew Kerbis:

Yeah, I mean really great question. I shall also say long time, first time when I sent that and now finally being on the pod, and that was about starting a podcast. I have a legal podcast and so that’s part of it though Dennis, to answer your question is I’m talking to lawyers about this all the time. I teach, I don’t even know, 20 plus CLEs a year on the topic of subscription based legal services, AI adoption. And so some of it is just repetition, repetition, repetition, whatever made any lawyer become a lawyer and get licensed is probably going to, those are the underlying skills of being a good educator, a good teacher, if you’re a litigator, you’re teaching the judge and the jury about your client’s situation. Even a transactional attorney, you’re arguing and negotiating on behalf of your other for your client to get the points that they want in the red lines and the agreement.

So it’s just about taking these skills and applying them in a different way and practicing and doing it over and over and over again. I’m sure if you found some of my old old podcast appearances or CLEs, they they’re rough around the edges and they’re not great. So some of it is just doing it a lot, getting feedback improving. I was pretty involved in legal education back in the day and when I was on the A section for legal education or mission of theBar, Barry Courier was the director when I got started and Barry used to say that every lawyer is a teacher. We’re not trained, even law professors are not trained to teach usually, but yet they do it. So part of it is just doing more of it. I wish there were some other secret sauce, but that’s part of it. Put your shoes, put your feet in the shoes of the people that you’re talking to and think about things from their perspective. That always helps. I have a four and a half year old and so I’m always trying to think like, okay, I have to really think about her context before I start talking to her. And so I just try to do that a lot too.

Tom Mighell:

As a long time, first time of the podcast, you have no doubt heard us opine many times on lawyer competency around technology. I sometimes feel like Dennis and I are the who are they? The Waldorf and Statler of Legal Tech. When we complain about this, you are giving 20 CLEA year. You are your involvement with I guess young lawyers in a B and other A groups. You are in a position to see lawyers in a way different from a lot of our fresh voices. Guests, what are you seeing out there? What do you think is the current state of technology competence? And maybe the better question is what do you think a technology competent lawyer needs to be able to know about tech today? To be competent,

Mathew Kerbis:

You absolutely need to be learning about ai. And I know you guys tease each other about how much you talk about it and shouldn’t be talking about it, but end up talking about it anyway on the pod. But it’s one of these things now where it’s like when the internet was coming around or computers you had to talk about and you had to think about it adopting it, right? And it’s just one of these things where at least in the model rules, and I could almost quote this verbatim because I give the C at least so many times, but rule 1.5, I think it’s comment five where it says a lawyer should not waste time using unproductive procedures and bill for it essentially is what it says. And I think that if your local rules have some version of that and they almost all do, then it’s essentially implying that if you’re not using the tech and you’re billing by the hour, then you’re arguably in violation of your rules of professional conduct.

And so when I explain that to lawyers, they’re like, oh yeah, we need to learn this stuff. I don’t want to get in trouble because we all the adherent rule followers that we are. But most lawyers I know like Dennis and Tom, I know you’ve been doing a tech show for years I’ve been attending since I was in law school, so I’ve been going for 14 years myself since I’m in Chicago and I’m in the suburbs now. But the lawyers that are interested in tech, love tech, I mean they love it so much. Now granted in the A, b, A and some other organizations, they thought I violated some rule by using special effects. Back when it was early COVID days, I was running for a position in the young lawyers division and I used a virtual background in screen sharing live while recording an unedited live thing. And they were like, oh no, he can’t. How dare. Yeah, there’s some issues there with still understanding how it works. But I think generally speaking, lawyers are interested in technology even if they don’t adopt it.

Dennis Kennedy:

You mentioned this thing about something about the internet and AI and it did make me have a little bit of flashback to the early days of the internet because we would have these conversations around technology and law and people would say, well, other than the internet, what is it that you need to know? And you’d go like, well, the internet is a big thing, it’s the most important thing. And I sort of feel that’s how I am tempted to answer when people say, other than ai, what’s going on? But let me ask the question this way. So what are the areas and you can say ai, AI in the legal profession that need the most attention now, and how can we get people to pay that attention? And in fairness, your answer might be the new business models like you’re experimenting with.

Mathew Kerbis:

Yeah, yeah. I mean you absolutely read my mind there Dennis, and I’m sure it helps that we’re seeing each other every month on legal AI live. But yeah, I mean some of it is even before ai, like generative ai, large language model based ai, which now just means AI means that it was always more profitable than not bill by the hour because when you’re billing by the hour, what you’re doing is you’re capping the amount of revenue that you could earn in a day and in order to get, in order to generate more revenue, you need to hire very expensive billers. Lawyers don’t come cheap. And so your margins on what you’re actually making from hiring more billers to bill more hours, only so many hours you could bill in a day, it just doesn’t make any business sense. And when I’m teaching lawyers and the AI has just really brought this to the forefront for a lot of lawyers and judges and legal professionals because lawyers don’t think critically about their business model, never had to, but lawyers, I’m going to pat, all of us on the back here a little bit are some of the smartest people who I know.

And if they took a moment and thought critically about their business model, they would realize, oh, there is a better way. And you’ve got burnout, there’s mental health issues, there’s retention problems with women attorneys and attorneys of colors in large law firms, and most of them have been guests on my podcast who’ve ditched the billable hour and are doing something innovative. And the business model is a big problem for that. Now also, I think it was Damien Reel who said, it’s hard to tell a bunch of millionaires that their business model is broken, but what are you to do? Well now what we have is we have consumers of legal services, be they in-house counsel at law firms or every day people or small business owners and they’re using AI and they are going to draft a contract or do a review or ask a question or ask the same thing you’d ask from a lawyer in whatever AI service they’re using.

And then you’re going to bill him for five hours and they’re going to say, well chat PT or Claude or Perplexity gave me the answer in a minute. Why did you bill me five hours or to draft this document when chat PT did it so fast or clawed and what are you going to say now the lawyer, the sophisticated party, we look at the document or the analysis and we understand that it’s not right. These consumer grade AI solutions aren’t designed for legal work and if a lawyer uses it, maybe you could get a better work product, but there’s even legal specific AI that will just do a better job and faster. But the lay person doesn’t necessarily know that. Now the problem is those lawyers serving the in-house attorneys who do know and that the AI did it faster and they’re sophisticated. So either way you’re going to get pressure from institutional clients or from consumer clients retail law and there will be pushback from clients. So it’s important that you get ahead of it right now and AI just is so integral as part of that conversation.

Tom Mighell:

Totally agree. Alright, time for our obligatory collaboration question. We talk about collaboration a lot. We love to hear how our guests are using collaboration. Does the look of collaboration change when you have a subscription based practice or is it like we would expect other lawyers to have? What are your favorite ways to collaborate?

Mathew Kerbis:

Yeah. Well right now I am still a true solo practice attorney, so I don’t collaborate in the sense that I have team members, but I’ve had on my podcast and I’ve helped some law firms that are a little larger than me adopt the subscription model and now they’re able to work on projects collaboratively for their clients and get to end results faster. The goal when you’re not billing by the hour and usually your client, that’s more valuable to them to get something done faster and you could get better work product because right now lawyers are all working in silos because a lawyer or a client doesn’t want to double pay double time for two attorneys to be working on something at the same time. There was even a resolution passed a few years ago in the a house of delegates about making it so that younger attorneys, younger associates are required or they must be permitted to be there for oral arguments or other things in court.

It’s like what you’re basically demanding that our clients pay double just so that young associates can get more experience. It’s absurd like okay, yeah, that’s great, but let’s get rid of the billable hour before we make that change. So it increases when you stop billing by the hour, the ability for collaboration increases and also your clients will contact you before there’s a problem and they contact you a lot. Now they don’t contact you too much. I have unlimited scheduled communications as part of my subscription benefits, but you know what? My clients are making money in their business, they’re enjoying time with their family, they’re doing whatever they’re doing. They don’t want to talk to their lawyer and I’m affable, it’s good to talk to me, but they don’t actually want to be talking to me for very long. But the fact that they can whenever it costing them any more than they’re already paying means that I get to know my clients really well.

And what happens, one of the most valuable things US lawyers can provide regardless of practice area, regardless of transactional litigation, whatever is issue spotting what you learn in your first year of law school turns out is actually really valuable that nobody else learns unless you go to law school yet laws the operating system of society. So I find going back to Dennis’s question, I’m teaching my clients all the time about the law or why this sentence needs to be phrased this way in a contract. And so it just allows you to develop a real relationship with your clients and they’re not worried that they’re on the clock.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we’ve got a lot more questions for Mathew Kerbis , but we need to take a quick break for a word from our, and we’ll be right back

Dennis Kennedy:

And we are back with Mathew Kbu at subscription attorney LLC. Now we found in the Fresh Voices series that not only do we love to hear about our guest career paths, our audience really does as well. And you’ve talked a little bit about the sort of transition you made in your approach to the practice of law, but would you talk about your own career path and the kinds of things that you’ve done to get you into your current role and focus?

Mathew Kerbis:

Absolutely. And I do talk about this a little bit. Guest lecture to law students or even to college and high school students. I do talk about this quite a bit and I never knew or even thought that I would have my own law firm. I never in a million years thought that I would start my own law firm. Now I’ve started businesses and I’ve been entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial being innovative within another company or another law firm, but I never thought I would start my own law firm even though attorneys have been doing it forever because the path they put you on is you’re taking on all this debt to get your law degree unless you’re independently wealthy or have wealthy parents, which I didn’t have undergraduate debt, which I’m very happy and thankful to my parents for paying for that. I also graduated a semester early without the masking, which you could do in your philosophy major.

It’s kind of easy if you’re good at it. And then I had to take out student loans to pay for all of law school. So when it’s all said and done, I will have paid over $250,000 over the course of 15 plus years. Still I’m almost done paying down my student loans, but because of that, you have to now go get the highest paying job that you can. So of course you look at big law and lawyers are like, okay, I’m going to be a big law attorney. I’m just going to get the best grades that I can. And I didn’t even have a TV when I was in my first year of law school. I was that dedicated to my studies and my grades were soso because everyone’s smart and you’re graded on a curve. And so I was like, well, okay, I guess I’m going to have to network.

And so I started networking like crazy, right? I met judges, I got an externship with an appellate judge because I met them at a networking event. And that led to the next thing, led to the next thing, and I ended up at a firm that needed my first job out of law school was a foreclosure defense firm where we would appeal cases when we could because they’d all end in summary judgment. Usually when you’re on the defense side, and I had appellate experience because I networked and it didn’t matter what my grades were. And yet that was a solo attorney who was hiring onto attorneys. I didn’t make a lot of money, but it turned out what he did is he billed his clients a fixed rate every month that we could keep them in their homes. And while he didn’t think about it as the subscription model, I was always curious in the business model.

And that was just in the back of my head. And then I pivoted that job learning civil procedure really well into a sort of broader litigation and real estate transactional based firm for a few years where I headed up the foreclosure defense firm as an attorney with only two years of experience because I did it every day and I knew more about it than anyone else at that firm. That’s why I was hired. But I got to do real estate transactions, got into transactional side of things, I did a few personal injury cases and some magmas lemon law cases, and so I really got my feet wet with some of that. You leveraged that to go into insurance defense where that’s really when I was billing hours, I billed a little bit of hours at the second firm, but I had minimum billable hour recorders if I wanted to keep my job and get my bonus. And that was really when I was like, oh, there’s got to be a better way. There has to be a better way. And I did that for a little over five years before starting my own practice.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we got to talk about a ai, we keep always claiming that we won’t and then we do. There are, well, you’re leading the change to new approaches to legal services delivery. You’re on the front line for that. I think that I have heard you say at one point that AI plus automation is what makes your subscription model possible. Tell me more about that, dig deeper into that. Tell me how that works and how you see them evolving.

Mathew Kerbis:

So when you stop billing by the hour, you start thinking about how can I make this process better? And now interestingly enough, AI is making it easier. I had a podcast series with Lauren Lester called How Run a Law Firm in 2025, and we were literally able to take the transcripts from us just talking about stuff and make standard operating procedures from them because the AI transcribes the audio into text. Then you could take that text, you could put it in your AI tool of choice and you could create procedures and things written of that. So it’s gotten easier than it’s ever been before. But even when getting the client work and one thing, I am so looking for a tool that will automatically take my to-do list, my master list of things that come in from various sources and automatically time block time on my calendar commensurate with the amount of time that I should spend to do the thing.

And I think in this agentic AI world that we’re coming into, and I’m building SOPs specifically for this, so I could plug and play with agentic ai, have the agenda, the AI agents do the preliminary work and then schedule time for human eyes to go in and double check everything and revise. I think we’re getting there soon, but right now as things come in, I just have a master list and I spend 15 minutes at the end of every day taking things and time blocking in on the next day. So that’s a big part of it. That’s one thing I haven’t really automated yet that I would love to. But then the client work itself, I am using Paxton AI as my primary AI tool of choice. And for a lot of the things in there, I’m also simultaneously running it through Notebook. Lm, I’m a pro subscriber, so I have Notebook, LM Pro and it, it’s very comparable, but they get different things sometimes.

And so that’s doing first round analysis or drafting or revising on documents that I get in. Oftentimes I’m getting the other side’s paper that we have to analyze and review and redline and it’s great to be able to just take my brain dump thoughts inside of a Google doc that I have and with Gemini directly built in and create lists of things to accomplish based on just random thoughts that I have or ideas for clients or something like that. I’m all in the Google Workspace suite and so with Gemini baked into that right now, I’m super able to leverage a lot. Back in the day I was just keeping a Google Doc rather than having overpaying for some legal practice management software tech that is an all-in-one solution that does everything mediocre. I would just keep, I’d have dates and what I talked about with a client on that date and just a Google doc for that client.

Well now because of Gemini’s integration, I’m actually able to really leverage the power of that inside of Notebook LM as well that long history of things. So just like the AI for me, and this is part of what I teach, is I just treat it, I would treat a human person on my team and I run everything by the AI first, but instead of it taking days or weeks or months to get back to you, it gets back to you in minutes and you iterate, iterate, iterate, and you get a much better work product in 10 minutes than it used to take 10 hours.

Dennis Kennedy:

So some of the listeners know Mathew, that we’re doing this legal AI live webcast on the second, I think it’s the second Friday of most months is how we’ve set it up. And the idea is that we wanted to talk about how lawyers are actually using it, AI on the ground in practical ways. We have sort of a running group of guests and we’d love to get time on there at some point, but I see AI as both a challenge and an opportunity for the legal profession. You’re seeing a lot, you are doing a lot and we’ve heard a lot of cool things from the people who’ve been on that webcast as well. So what new developments and new perspectives in AI are most interesting to you today? You mentioned Genic ai and then what are you finding your clients most receptive to or do you do client facing AI things?

Mathew Kerbis:

I’ll start with the last question because I think in particular for the practitioners listening, they may have this experience too, and that is Notebook lm, my clients schedule a 15 minute call with me, they might send me the legal project ahead of time or not, or we might just talk about it on the phone. And a great example I love to give and versions of this happen all the time is I have a client who’s a franchisee, and so he has the 600 plus page franchise disclosure document that he needs to comply with, and he wanted to know if he’s able to market outside of his territory of where his physical location could actually be. And I’ve read that 600 page document before because he’s been a client for eight years, even before I had my own practice, he was my first client when I launched, and so I knew something was in there, but I didn’t know where.

And you can’t do a keyword search because a keyword search, I don’t know what words to look for, but inside of these large language model tools and particularly Notebook lm, which is essentially a retrieval augmented generation bot, like it’s build your own sources, it’s only answering based on your sources, which is really important when you’re lawyers and it gives you citations within those sources based on its answer. I was able to search using natural language that question, and it did a semantic search, meaning it was searching for the meaning of the words any way that it would show up within a five minutes. The first five minutes of our 15 minute scheduled call, I had an answer for him. We found the exact sentence and the exact part of that 600 plus page document that said, yes, you are allowed to market outside your territory that didn’t use those words, used different words, but I interpreted it for him and still gave him advice on the phone.

But that’s a 0.1, that’s 0.1 for really valuable information. Right now he’s paying me a thousand dollars a month, let’s ballpark it. It’s not exactly that, but it’s close to that. So I do things like that for him all the time. So that’s the power of these tools. Now, when I told him, I told him I’m doing this in notebook, lm, let’s do this right notebook, lm, Google has in quad duplicate different places where it says it’s your private information. We don’t train on your data. I think I as a lawyer can reasonably rely on their representations that the data is secure when I use it in there as an enterprise pro user. And I’ve reviewed all that documentation and the lawyer listeners should go and read it yourself and not just rely on some lawyer on a podcast talking about it, but I’m comfortable doing it.

My clients are okay with me doing it. They get faster, high quality results. And now that client is using Notebook LM across his organization. He has multiple small businesses, they have an HR notebook, and when they onboard a new person, now this new person is able to listen to an audio overview of all the HR documents and the handbook and other things and ask questions. Hey, am I allowed to do this? Hey, what am I supposed to do in this situation inside of Notebook lm, right? So now my client is using Notebook LM in his business and I’m not worried that he’s ever going to use it instead of me because I’m still providing valuable curation and communication and advice that he could rely on unlike what you could rely on from a machine. So Notebook, lm all the way for that. And I have a client who’s all in on Microsoft.

He has multiple copilot licenses with other multiple businesses, and yet he spun up a new business just to subscribe to Google Workspace. So with a domain he wasn’t using, just so he could play around with notebook lamb and use notebook lamb and finds an amazing, even my father who’s in the insurance business is now using it to create audio summaries like the podcast of the host to understand an insurance policy. This really droll difficult document. I was an insurance defense attorney. I know him to have an interesting way to learn about what’s in the agreement, right? Audibly and verbally and that’s starting to spread and the insurance industry amongst agents. So we’ll see how that takes off. So all the way notebook lm and really, I know we have so much to cover and I forgot the first question, Dennis. Sorry.

Tom Mighell:

That’s what passion for Notebook LM gets you right there.

Dennis Kennedy:

Yeah, I’m on board with you. The stuff I’m doing now in Notebook LM is just amazing to me and I’m so excited about

Tom Mighell:

It. So Mathew, let’s talk a little bit more about just the subscription model delivery of legal services in general. What was it that, I think you’ve talked a little bit about what drew you to it, but what’s working best about it? What do you like? And then maybe a more interesting question is do you see any changes coming to it in the future? What do you see for the future of that subscription model?

Mathew Kerbis:

Yeah, and so there are a couple of companies out there that are legal tech companies that say, we help you do subscription or fixed fee services, and they’re purpose built for that. They’ve never really gelled. Well, super with me because I like to get into the nitty gritty and customize and I like things a certain way and I’m doing subscription different than any other lawyer’s doing it, right? I’ve talked to around 70 attorneys on my podcast about the topic and we’re all kind of doing it in different ways, so there’s no one right way to do it because we’re all experimenting and we’re learning from each other. And that’s why the pod has been so successful, which by the way, you guys gave some great advice tips to everyone. Go back to listen to episode 3 0 1 of the Kennedy Mighell report and you’ll hear the advice Tom and Dennis gave me and it’s really good advice and I followed it.

It’s still going to been going for three years, so there’s no wrong right way to do it, but I really like the way that I’m doing it and I’ve seen a few copycats now, which is good. That’s the point, right? Because part of this is about the latent legal market and the latent legal market for folks who haven’t come across that term before is essentially it means that there’s this market opportunity for lawyers to provide legal services to people, but the business model of law and the way legal services are delivered, it’s not serving them and they otherwise can’t afford it or think they can’t afford it because they need pricing certainty. Grand view research has said that there was 400 billion spent on US legal services in 2024 where mid 2025 at the time of recording, well, according to the World Justice Project, only 20 to 30% of legal needs are being met and 70 to 80% are going unmet.

So $400 billion is around 25%. So you’ve got 75% of the market. Well, the inverse math there, it’s an over trillion dollar market opportunity. So there’s over a trillion dollars on the table that lawyers just need to deliver their legal services in a different way, in a way that consumers of everything else are used to spending their money and it turns out a fixed price and subscription consumers are really used to spending their money that way. And even I’ll be at A CLE and I’ll ask lawyers, how many of you if you really needed to could afford your own billable hour rate and not a hand goes up that we can’t afford our own rates is absurd. And that’s one of my pitches when I’m at these Chamber of Commerce networking events with small business owners. I say, did you know that most lawyers couldn’t afford their own legal services?

Well, that’s one of the reasons I started my own firm so that I could have legal services even I could afford. And that’s I think really important. And it’s one thing to say that, but it’s another thing to even help those people. I think we’re going to see, I know Harvey has been raising a bunch of money and you’ve got Clio acquiring VL Cs and you’ve got all this consolidation in legal tech and legal ai, but I think what that will do is that will actually cause the downfall of big law even because it’s going to be easier than ever to do this type of work to serve this massive market that if the partners and associates at Big Law knew they could still make solid six figure incomes and not have to work as hard and actually help people and not just help large corporations move money around, what do you think they’re going to choose?

And so part of it is just an awareness factor, which again, thanks for having me on the pod and the Law Subscribed podcast is really a passion project of mine. I’m a practitioner, I’m never going to stop practicing law. I love helping clients. But the subscription model really is the way because with fixed fee pricing, which was the alternative fee, the alternative fee, I mean there’s contingency and success-based fees that are out there as well. Far less common. The reason law firms didn’t adopt fixed fees is because there’s an overs scoping and unders scoping problem, right? You win or they win, you the law firm or the client, you’ll win. You spent more or less time on it and it’s a fixed fee. Well, the subscription model solves that problem because if something takes longer that’s out of your control like the other side motioning up more depositions or noticing up more depositions, then guess what?

Another several months are going to go by and the court’s going to kick that case along in a case management conference because there’s more stuff to be done. And subscription tiers work really well there because it’s like, oh, well we thought this was going to be an uncontested divorce. You were paying us X amount a month. Well now that it’s become a contested divorce, you’re paying us X times two a month. And that was in our original engagement agreement. So subscription tiers solve that unders scoping, overs scoping problem. So anyway, I could talk about it all day, but that’s a good taste for the listeners.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, we don’t have all day, but we’d still do have more questions to talk with Mathew Kerbis about, but we need to take another quick break for a message from our sponsors.

Dennis Kennedy:

And now let’s get back to the Kennedy Mighell report. I’m Dennis Kennedy.

Tom Mighell:

And I’m Tom Mighell. And we are joined by our special guest, Mathew Kerbis founding attorney at subscription attorney, the subscription attorney. We have time for just a few more questions.

Dennis Kennedy:

So Mathew, you, it is interesting you talked about the student debt problem that today’s law students and not just today, I mean you’re talking about 15 years working on this, but how would you encourage today’s law students and new lawyers to find career paths in legal tech, non-traditional legal careers or maybe just in a legal career that has more meaning to them?

Mathew Kerbis:

Yeah, I think there’s a lot more opportunity than ever before. I mean especially with all the venture capital money pouring into legal tech right now, what is that money for? Some of it’s for technology, but a lot of it’s for hiring people. And so there’s more opportunities than ever. I’m also part of this group called the Legal Mentor Network and I’ve mentored a lot of law students and lawyers in that community and some of them are international lawyers coming over getting their LLM to take a bar. And for some of them they are, especially the lawyers, maybe they’re not enjoying the practice of law. And so we’ve talked about making sure they’re going to conferences like a tech show and getting to know those tech vendors because they could always use a legal mind to help communicate with other legal minds to purchase products. Now the problem is with all that is the billable hour doesn’t incentivize adopting efficiency technologies.

That’s the problem. So there’s this inherent difficulty of getting that across the board and even just today at the time of recording was I think Thomson Reuters released a report that you could save $19,000 a year on average per employee with the time savings that AI can provide you if you factor in the billable rate and non-billable time that people are spending doing practicing law. But what the report didn’t say is getting rid of all the billable hour time that you could also save when leveraging these AI and efficiency tools. So right now those salespeople are like they’re selling, saying, Hey, we’ll get rid of all this non billable time, we’ll streamline it, we’ll make it more efficient. So I think that will dissipate over time as more lawyers adopt alternative fee-based structures, which will become the norm rather than the alternative. But there’s more opportunities than ever.

And frankly, I see a lot of lawyers who don’t even have that much experience practicing law, seeing inefficiencies and very quickly if they’re technical or they know technical people like going and starting a legal tech company, there’s the legal tech fund, there’s all these, there’s first jump, I might be misquoting that one, but there’s all these venture firms now that are, and incubators and accelerators, even just in legal that there’s more opportunity than ever even to just start a business. And that could be scary, but if you partner with the right people, I think you could could find those startups and go work for them. And look, working at a law firm, especially most lawyers, if you look at the bimo distribution curve of which you actually make most lawyers graduate making between 50,000 to $80,000 in their first year, and then there’s 10% that are making the high six figure salary. So the average salary of 120,000, nobody’s making that. Such a small percentage of first year lawyers are actually making that. And for most of the lawyers who are making the 50 to 80,000 in a year their first year, there’s no benefits at that firm. They don’t have health insurance. So what risk are you actually taking by going and working for a legal tech startup fresh out of law school? Maybe it’s not that much of a risk after all.

Tom Mighell:

Alright, in our final question, we have gotten very good results from using our guests to identify new guests and new fresh voices. So I’ll ask the same question that we ask everybody, who are the fresh voices that you think we ought to be paying attention to who you think might be good guests for the podcast?

Mathew Kerbis:

Yeah, so I mean so many, right? Go listen to the law subscribed and at least you’ll hear attorneys doing innovative things using tech and changing the business model of law because part of all those conversations is what tech are you using, right? Let’s talk about your tech. Now it’s not as focused on tech as you guys are, but that’s part of it. I mean, I mentioned Kimberly Bennett though, I dunno if she may have been on already. So there’s other folks out there too. Lia an comes to mind founder of GC ai. She’s got a really cool story being in-house counsel at companies like Amazon and now starting an AI company that has a niche instead of just trying to be this broad solution. There’s even like Dorn Moy, who I don’t know if you’ve had on the founder of Gavel who worked at Sidley Austin and saw these inefficiencies and left to create an automation tool that was documented is now gavel.

She’s got a really great story and they’re trying to revolutionize and change the way things are happening there. What’s interesting about that product is they’re enhancing their product with AI rather than being an AI tool like Lias company right now. It’s hard. I know, yes, they have a product to sell, but I think both of them have some really interesting stories on top of the fact that they’re in the AI space right now and developing and could both speak to the future of the practice of law. But I could give you a huge list of people if you really wanted it.

Tom Mighell:

That is a great start. Thank you very much and we want to thank in particular Mathew Kerbis, founding attorney at subscription attorney LLC for being our guest on the podcast. Mathew, tell us where people can tell our listeners where they can get in touch with you or learn more about you. Where’s the best place to go do that?

Mathew Kerbis:

Absolutely. LinkedIn, right search for Mathew Kerbis or the subscription attorney on LinkedIn. Once a month you’ll see me on legal AI live on LinkedIn is where we are. If you are interested in starting your own firm or running your own firm, how to run a law firm.com. Redirects to the 18 episode series I did with Lauren Lester on that topic. Lauren, who might also be a good guest. If you want to keep talking about the business model revolution in law and law, subscribe dot com’s, the podcast subscription attorney.com is the law firm.

Dennis Kennedy:

Thank you so much, Mathew. You were a fantastic guest as I knew you would be. Great information and advice for our listeners as usual, so many topics to discuss in so little time, but now it’s time for our parting shots at one tip website or observation. You can use the second this podcast ends. Mathew, take it away.

Mathew Kerbis:

All right, so this is tech related though. At first you’re going to be like, what? This isn’t tech related, but if you live in an area and you have a local library, believe it or not, there are some amazing resources technologically at your local library and you just might not know it that you’re already paying for it. This is both as a firm owner, if you’re a firm owner, and this is also just as an individual, right? Like going to my library’s online resources page. If you have a library card, which is free because you’re already paying for it with your taxes, this gets you access to business and consumer grade, different technology, whether that’s background searches for people or companies, database opportunities for potential client lists. I mean consumer reports, small business reference centers, all kinds of incredible things. Online learning, I have access to Udemy and Gale or I’ve seen some libraries have LinkedIn learning. You don’t need to pay for the LinkedIn learning subscription because your library, you just need your library card to get access to that. And so you might not think it in today’s day and age, your local library is useful, but it definitely is. Go check it out.

Tom Mighell:

That is amazing. I had literally not even thought about that. That’s just awesome.

Dennis Kennedy:

And some libraries have 3D printers too, so you never know what you’re going to find.

Mathew Kerbis:

We have an engraver and 3D printers. We have multiple 3D printers and laser engravers, so you could have your own merch for free. Just bring the shirts and hats and stuff to your library

Tom Mighell:

All at the library. I have two and it’s a follow up to our last podcast and Dennis’s comment at the beginning of this podcast, which is maybe I do need a travel extension cord because I went on vacation, we rented an Airbnb. I found the one place where I need an extension cord and that is we need to use a Roku stick on a tv. I need it to be able to connect to the internet. And the extension cord that comes with a Roku stick is approximately a foot long and there is no TV that has a power outlet anywhere close to one foot from where a TV is especially mounted on the wall is located. I’m trying to find a travel extension cord that I like. Dennis, you may have some suggestions for me. I will be sure to talk to you about that.

My other tip is a new app that I am going to try. I haven’t, but I’m going to put a link in the show notes. Anyway, Malwarebytes is a website and tool that you may have already heard of. They’re introducing something new that they are calling their scam guard and it’s available in the app that they have both Android and an iOS. You can get that app and what you do is you take a screenshot or you forward a text and it will tell you whether or not that language is a scam. It will use its database and it will tell you whether what you’re getting is legit or not and tell you what to do and protect yourself. So an interesting new tool from scam guard. I am going to check it out. You should do it too, Dennis.

Dennis Kennedy:

Oh my God. I have literally used AI tools on emails and other things to do exactly that. So my parting shots, I also have two. So one I do want to mention the legal AI live webcasts, which you can find on LinkedIn. And the idea is very informal, practical, what are you doing with AI lately? Kind of discussion. The other thing is Mathew is the one who got me going on perplexity. And so one of the things I find is that when I run into a little problem and I want to try to fix it, I just go into perplexity. And so I was doing something where I was doing a lot of copy and pasting and I said, darn it. I would like to just do the thing where you can go back into the clipboard and just keep in the sequence, go back to something I’d done before and paste it. So I did a little research on perplexity and it said, Hey, there’s this app called Paste on Mac and I downloaded it and I’m using it. Totally happy user of it. And it’s a great example of AI where you go, I have this problem, I wonder if there’s a solution to it and you check into it. Sometimes there is, sometimes there isn’t. But if you have this thing where you’re doing a lot of copy and pasting out of sequence, this past app for Mac is great.

Mathew Kerbis:

If I may addendum to that perplexity thing, I’ve noticed something lately with Perplexity, which is like every other platform now it’s trying to keep you on platform. And so I have to do follow up prompts that say, give me the link to the YouTube video or to the article or to the something, because sure, you could highlight over the sources, but sometimes I just want the link in the body and I have to ask for it two or three times. Now I’m like, come on, right?

Tom Mighell:

I include that, give me the link in almost everything that I do because of that exact reason. But I will say, Dennis, I am pretty sure that I am the one who turns you onto Perplexity. Like the day that they came out, it feels like I was automatically subscribed to it. I bought one of those doomed rabbit devices that they had and I automatically got a pro subscription and I’ve loved it ever since. I got it. Anyway,

Mathew Kerbis:

Tom, you planted the seed. I water it. Thanks all. There you go,

Tom Mighell:

Team effort. Alright, so that wraps it up for this edition of the Kennedy Mall report. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. You can find show notes for this episode on the Legal Talk Networks page for the show. You can find all of our previous podcasts along with transcripts on the Legal Talk Network website. If you want to follow us, you can also do that on the Legal Talk Network website or within your favorite podcast app. You want to get in touch with us or suggest a topic for an episode. You can always reach out to us on LinkedIn. We still like Mathew, enjoy getting voicemail at our voicemail box. Bat number is 7 2 0 4 4 1 6 8 2 0. So until the next podcast, I’m Tom Mighell.

Dennis Kennedy:

And I’m Dennis Kennedy and you’ve been listening to the Kennedy Mighell report, a podcast on legal technology with an internet focus. We want to remind you to share the podcast with a friend or two that helps us out. And as always, a big thank you to the Legal Talk Network team for producing and distributing this podcast. And we’ll see you next time for another episode of the Kennedy Mighell Report on the Legal Talk Network.

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