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(Video) How To Transform Your Legal Network with Modern Case Referral Automation with Attorney Share
Posted on November 19, 2024 by Law Leaders Editor
One of the biggest challenges attorneys face is how best to manage the process of sending, receiving, tracking, and getting paid for good referrals. In today’s episode of Legal Masterminds @ Law leaders, we are excited to show you a service that could very well change how you manage referrals and help make your life a lot easier and profitable moving forward.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Dustin Ruge (00:00):
One of the biggest challenges I’ve heard throughout the years of working with attorneys is how best to manage the process of sending, receiving, tracking, and getting paid for good referrals. In today’s episode of Legal Masterminds, we’re excited to show you a new service that could very well change how you manage referrals and help make your life a lot easier and more profitable moving forward. So let’s get started. Welcome to Legal Masterminds with Law Leaders. I’m your host, Dustin Ruge, and today we’re joined by Matt Thelen, who is the CEO of Attorney Share and Justice HQ. Matt, thanks for joining us today.
Matt Thelen (00:43):
Oh, thanks for having me, Dustin.
Dustin (00:44):
Great. So Matt, I was really excited to talk to you today. This all started with a conversation I had with Bob Simon a while ago where he was showing me this great system. You guys developed the attorney share system, which we’re going to go through today. And maybe you could, just for somebody who’s not familiar with your system yet and what you’re doing, help me understand or help them understand a little bit as to what is this service and why are you doing it?
Matt (01:08):
Yeah, so the platform is called Attorney Share, like you mentioned, and really the goal of the platform is to facilitate sending and receiving referrals. For attorneys, we are a hundred percent B2B. We don’t interact with the client side of things, but we notice that referrals make up a significant portion of a lot of attorney’s business, whether they’re sending referrals or whether they’re receiving referrals to help grow their practice. But it’s an extremely inefficient system, and so we designed Attorney Share. Currently, it’s an inefficient system, so we designed Attorney Share to solve some of the major pain points and really make attorney’s lives much easier and at the end of the day, hopefully help clients find the best representation.
Dustin (01:51):
Yeah, well, it’s funny you mentioned that because I am sitting there thinking of all the years working with law firms every time I ask them, how do you manage your referral networks and the attorneys you’re working with? And nine times out of 10, they usually had a stack of business cards at the corner of the desk or roll it or something of that nature to say, well, here’s my referral network, here’s how we handle it. And then I also remember especially a lot of the problems with people out of their network, the people outside of not only their community that they practice in, but their state and ultimately how do they connect with those people, especially now that people are living in multiple states and an increasing level. So yeah, really interesting. I thought it was fantastic when I looked at it, and it’s interesting to look at the impact of this on the marketplace. How do you disrupt and how big of an issue is this? And have you guys ever come up with, because I know if you look at the Bar Association, they talk about there may be millions potentially of referrals that take place every year from attorney to attorney. Nobody knows the exact number, but do you guys track any data around that as far as how much financially is taking place or anything of that nature?
Matt (02:58):
Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned, I think it’s a pretty robust market. I think it drives honestly a lot of value throughout the attorney ecosystem, and I think it’s questionable whether or not attorneys today are generating more business for through their own marketing efforts or referrals, especially when you look at practice areas like PI or wrongful termination or things like that. I honestly believe that is in the probably tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars of referral fees are paid out every year. Again, it’s difficult to pin down an exact number because obviously a lot of this information is confidential, but it is a massive industry that is still done by text message, phone call and email in some of the most inefficient communication platforms possible. And so that’s really what we aimed to solve.
Dustin (03:51):
And I know in previous conversations we’ve talked about, you even know of firms that high volume referral, right? I mean, what kind of numbers have you seen just on some of those alone?
Matt (04:01):
Yeah, I’ve seen individual firms that are paying out nine figures annually in referral fees. And again, remember that’s a third of the settlements. So they’re referring out half a billion dollars of business annually and they’re collecting nine figures on those referral fees.
Dustin (04:20):
Wow. Wow. That’s huge numbers. Yep. So let’s talk about some of the goals of this service and what you guys are trying to accomplish. So when you set out to build this system, and we’re going to show that in a moment, what were your goals? What are you trying to accomplish? What do you want the industry to look at this and attorneys to look at this and say, this is something I have to use as part of my tech stack now, or how does that look?
Matt (04:42):
Yeah, I mean I think at the end of the day, everything we do at Attorney Share comes back to efficiency and to improving existing processes. And so we’ve designed the entire platform really with that ethos in mind. We started by integrating with the major case management systems, whether that’s Clio or File Vine, lead Docket, my case Case beer went down the full list as many as we can get because we want to this to be a native integration with existing systems that attorneys are using to make their lives easier. We don’t want to add another process and another workflow. What we’d like to do is integrate into existing workflows for them. And so really when we were sitting down and digging into what the major pain points are that currently exist with referrals, we identified three major areas that needed to be addressed. The first of those is the shopping of an individual referral.
(05:37)
You might have a great referral network spans most of the country spans most practice areas, so you have no problem finding a home for individual case that you might not want, but you still end up taking a significant amount of time to shop that case. I might call Dustin and say, Hey Dustin, I have this great case for you. I take 10 minutes explaining the fact pattern. You should take it and it goes on like this, and then you might not want the case. You might see the fact pattern differently. You might have a full docking, you might want to go on vacation. And then in that situation I’m back at square one and then I have to shop that case over again to Sally and then I have to shop that case again to Joe and it just takes a massive amount of time to find a home for these cases. At the end of the day, that’s extremely inefficient for me, but worse, what ends up happening is the client doesn’t get the best representation possible.
(06:30)
We address that through some of the features in the platform and we touch on that in just a second. The second major pain point we identified is finding a home for a case where I don’t have a great referral network. Say I have a med mal case come into my practice for a client in Omaha, Nebraska, and I don’t know anyone that practices medical malpractice in Omaha, Nebraska. So maybe I call the state bar or go to the state bar listserv, maybe I try to call some friends and see, Hey, do you know anyone that does this? Probably more likely than not, I tell the client, Hey, I can’t help you. And not only am I not able to monetize that potential referral, but again, the client has done a huge disservice because I can’t help them and they have nowhere else to turn potentially.
(07:14)
And then the third major pain point we identified was the tracking of successful referrals. As you mentioned, a lot of attorneys have a pile of business cards somewhere in their office for their referral network. A lot of attorneys, the more sophisticated attorneys will track their pending referrals on an Excel sheet somewhere in their office and manually request updates every couple of months to see what’s happening with them. The ones that don’t have the attorneys that don’t have a good system in place, maybe have it written down somewhere in a legal pad, maybe it’s buried in their emails somewhere, maybe they completely forget about it for 12 months until they wake up in the middle of the night and say, Hey, I sent three cases to Dustin last year and I haven’t heard anything back. I wonder what’s happening with those cases. And so there’s just not a good system to track what is happening. And so really we designed the platform to really address those three major pain points and I can demo you on a few of the items the way that we address those, if that would be helpful
Dustin (08:17):
Helpful. Yeah, that would be good. Just to give everybody kind of a flavor as to what it looks like. It was funny when you were talking about the tracking system. I’ve had so many attorneys I’ve worked with over the years, they even told me, yeah, I was just surprised when a check showed up out of the blue.
Matt (08:29):
Exactly. Well, that’s the good news when that happens, but I mean a lot of times people just forget about it and they’re like, oh wait, I should be getting paid on that client. I sent you that case. And then quite frankly, a lot of times there’s disagreement, no, you didn’t send me that case. That case came organically or we agreed to 20%, not 30%. And it’s, there’s no visibility and transparency in the existing system, which is one of the major items that we aimed to solve.
Dustin (08:57):
Great. So let’s jump in. Show us a little bit about the system, how it looks, how you get signed up, and then what somebody can expect to do. Yeah,
Matt (09:04):
So signing up is extremely easy. I’ll walk you through that first in just a second, but I want to talk on that first major pain point before we dive in there. So this is shopping of a case. So if you look at this, this is a create a case page. It will look very familiar to anyone that’s worked in a legal CRM before it has case name, case description. Here’s the case type, whether this is an MBA or medical malpractice, whatever it may be. Jurisdictions all very straightforward. This is where the potential client’s details are shared. This is not shared until a successful referral has been made so that you don’t have people circumventing the referral process and reaching out directly to a client before an agreement’s been made. This is really what I wanted to address here though. This is what we did to solve the shopping of cases and what we call this is waterfall referrals.
(09:59)
And the way to think about this is it is an automated sequencing system where it will direct a potential referral to an individual first and give them the opportunity to decide whether or not they want it. That’s another kind of core ethos of everything we are doing at attorney chair is we are not decision makers as a platform of where these cases go. It is a hundred percent discretion between the attorneys. It is the referring attorneys decision who receives this case. It is the recipient’s attorney’s ability to negotiate on that case. We don’t direct traffic, we don’t pair attorneys, we don’t send more volume to anyone, we don’t give anyone first looks or anything like that. We are trying to be as passive and as possible and not interfere in the existing process. And so discretion and the ability of attorneys to decide who gets the cases is paramount for us.
(10:56)
And so one of the things we designed is, like I said, this waterfall referral. And so the way to think about this is if I send a matter to Brett here and Brett says this case isn’t for me, the case will then automatically push to Jim. If Jim doesn’t want, it automatically pushes to Gary so I don’t have to shop the case over and over and over again. Each of these individuals get to see that I am sending them a case and get to decide whether or not that case is right for them. The other thing we’ve done is we created time bound. So say I want to give each of these individuals 12 hours to review this case. If Brett doesn’t respond in 12 hours, it will automatically push to Jim. If Jim doesn’t respond in 12 hours, it automatically pushes to Gary. And the reason we did this is a lot of times an attorney will try to send a referral and it just kind of sits out there in the ether. They’ll get a response, they say, Hey, I emailed this case to you last week. What’s happening? And again, that potentially the client is going to talk to other attorneys. The client is left in limbo, doesn’t know if someone’s handling their case, and you don’t know if there’s legitimate interest on the other end of that referral. And so we wanted to help expedite the process and get quick answers on whether or not a potential referral is being made.
Dustin (12:15):
That’s a fantastic feature. I know most attorneys have their network of two to three go-tos, right? For each practice area.
Matt (12:21):
That’s right.
Dustin (12:22):
I can totally see where this with value would be right off that stack list and having a fully automated, that’s fantastic. What happens if they get through the waterfall? Matt,
Matt (12:30):
That’s a perfect question. Yeah, nice segue there. And to your point, a lot of attorneys have one or two great partners in a specific practice area in a specific jurisdiction. What they usually don’t have is a bench of 10 great partners in a specific practice area in a specific jurisdiction. So if they send a case to an individual attorney, say, I send this case to Brett here and Brett is my only guy in Alabama for personal injury, and if Brett doesn’t want the case, I end up telling a client, sorry, I can’t help you. What the beautiful thing about waterfall referrals is in our system, if Brett doesn’t want the case, it will automatically push to what we call the marketplace. And I’ll jump into that in just a second. But what the marketplace allows you to do is it allows you to have more eyeballs on that case and a higher likelihood that you’ll be able to monetize that referral and you’ll be able to get the client the representation they need.
Dustin (13:24):
Nice. So it will default automatically into marketplace after it goes through, so you don’t have to follow up with it. Okay.
Matt (13:28):
That’s exactly right.
Dustin (13:30):
Good.
Matt (13:30):
And just a couple other quick things on waterfall referrals. The great thing about it is none of the attorneys in the waterfall know where they sit in the waterfall. So back to our case with Brett and Jim Purdue here, Jim does not know that he is second in this waterfall. He just knows that I’m sending him a case, so he doesn’t need to know that he’s my second choice. He just again, is happy to receive a potential referral. The other great thing about Waterfall referrals is you can have as many as you want. So you can have, for example, high value MBA, Los Angeles, medium value MBA, Los Angeles, low value MBA Los Angeles, and you can direct your potential referrals to each of those waterfalls based on those criteria so that you can really make sure you’re getting the best attorney for particular case based on the fact pattern.
Dustin (14:21):
And those are prebuilt waterfall lists then, right? That you see as Exactly.
Matt (14:24):
Exactly. And importantly it is the attorneys building the waterfall. So I’m not creating these waterfalls and saying, you should send all your high value PI to Brett Turnbull in Alabama. He’d say You should, but I’m not the one creating those waterfalls. Again, not directing traffic in any way. And then the other great thing about this is that the attorneys don’t know what you’ve named your waterfalls again. So if I have junk lead, low value case waterfall and the attorneys in that waterfall don’t know that, that’s what I’ve named it. Got it. Moving on to the marketplace, which I previewed for you briefly already. This is the easiest way to think about this is it’s eBay for potential cases. And the value here is the second major pain point that we addressed, which is I have a case where I don’t know where to put it, or we just touched on if I want to give a second look on a particular case and I don’t have another attorney to send it to.
(15:33)
And so like I said, easiest way to think about this is eBay. You can sort by process stage by jurisdiction, by case type. And so say I want signed clients personal injury and I want this Oregon case, I could click on this case and see what the information is about this case. And so I get to look through, there’s police reports, so you probably actually look this up. We actually ask attorneys not to share confidential information, but they are looking for a Spanish speaker. They have progressive insurance. And maybe I think this is a pretty interesting case, but I don’t want to pay 40%. So what I’ll do is I’ll put in 30% because what I think is a reasonable fee split on this case,
(16:22)
This case, what will happen then is I could send this proposal to the referring attorney and they’ll get notified that they have a proposal on their case for 30%, and then the referring attorney gets to decide, no, yes, I’ll take 30%. That seems reasonable. Or no, I’m holding off for 40%, or no, I don’t want to work with Matt. Matt’s not a good attorney. Or yes, I’ll take 30% to work with Matt because he’s a spectacular attorney and I know the client’s going to be handled with the best care. And again, a hundred percent discretion on the referring attorney.
(16:54)
And the whole point here again is to increase the likelihood that we are finding the right attorney for an individual case or individual client. And I think the more eyeballs that get onto an individual case, the better outcome for everyone honestly. And that’s been true across the board. And so not only is it better if we have more eyeballs on a potential referral, better for me as the referring attorney because higher likelihood that I’m able to maximize the outcome and receive a substantial referral fee, that’s important. But probably the least important for us honestly. Second is more, way more important is making sure that the client finds the best representation for them. And then the other thing that we’ve really discovered building this platform is we want to make referrals more meritocracy. Because what happens currently is I went to law school with Dustin, and so I know Dustin practices PI in Illinois, so I’m going to send Dustin all of my PI in Illinois cases.
(18:01)
Dustin might be a great attorney, he might be an okay attorney doesn’t, I don’t really know, but we’re buddies. We go golfing every weekend, so I’m going to send him all my cases. It doesn’t really provide the best outcome for me, doesn’t really provide the best outcome for the client. And worse, it creates cliques within the legal industry because Dustin and I’s dads went to law school. We’ve been in the industry forever. We’re very similarly situated from a demographic perspective or a wealth perspective or whatever it may be. And it’s created a system of, for lack of a better term, an old boys club where underrepresented minorities, female attorneys, individuals that have historically not been a part of the club don’t receive referrals at the same level as people that are part of the club. And what it does is it makes it that much harder for them to build their practice and grow as attorneys and because they’re not getting the same volume of leads. And so through our system, the more eyeballs, the more visibility, the more transparency we’ve created, the higher likelihood that a decision will be made on objective measures as opposed to Dustin and I are golf buddies.
Dustin (19:16):
Right. Matt, just a couple questions I’m sure people have when they look at this. The first question I have is all the matters that are listed here, these are not currently claimed, correct?
Matt (19:26):
That’s correct.
Dustin (19:27):
So when something’s claimed, I’m assuming they all disappear off this marketplace, correct? That’s right. Yep, that’s right. And then the second thing is can you open up another case Again, let’s just say we want to choose one of these, maybe this was the one you just had a moment ago and you want to send a proposal. So let’s go back to that again and say, Hey, I only want to do a third on this as opposed to 40%. Now at the bottom is the button that says Send proposal 2 99. Help everybody understand what is that 2 99 and when does that get charged?
v (19:56):
Yeah, I’m actually going to take you to another screen, but that’s a really good call out here. So let me just log out here and actually go to,
Dustin (20:06):
Because there’s no cost to start using the system, correct?
Matt (20:09):
That’s exactly right. So we have pricing here, so there’s no cost to join the platform, full stop. It’s free to join free for everyone to participate in. We want it to be the same level of access for the aggregator firm that’s sending out 4,000 referrals a month. As for the family law attorney, that sends out three a year. And so we want to be able to provide that access for everyone. We do not take any cut of the client’s fees, so we don’t participate. We are not a law firm, we don’t take a rake or anything like that. The referring attorney never pays anything. So whether it is a direct referral through the waterfalls I showed you or they put a case into the marketplace, it is a hundred percent free for everyone involved. The recipient attorney, if they’re receiving a direct referral, say, Dustin sends me a case directly on top of his waterfall, I accept it, we pair on the referral, neither of us pay anything.
(21:09)
And the reason we did that is because a lot of these attorneys have their existing referral networks, they have relationships that go back maybe decades and we didn’t think it was reasonable or fair for us to want to extract any value from that existing relationship. That’s your relationship, that’s yours. The only time anyone pays anything on our platform is if we’re in the marketplace and like we were just showing and I sent a proposal and you accept my proposal, it kicks off a 30 day escrow period. At that point, during that timeframe, I should be in contact with the client, get the engagement letter all buttoned up. If they’re not already engaged, we should get our one five agreement in place. I should really vet the case to make sure that this is something that I really want to take on and that I can provide good representation for.
(22:00)
If at any point during that 30 day escrow period I say, no, I don’t want to work with this client. They misrepresented the facts, or I don’t feel like I can provide the best level of representation or whatever it may be, I can decline the case and I’m not charged a penny, nobody’s charged anything at that point. If during that 30 day period I say, Nope, this is a real case. There’s legitimate damages here. I like this client, I think I can provide them great service, then I can mark it as signed and I’m charged a one-time, 2 99 match fee. And that is the full extent of the economic model. We are, again, not taking a cut of the fees, we’re not participating, we’re not charging a subscription to join the platform. And it doesn’t matter if the case settles for $5,000 or 5 million, our fee does not change.
(22:55)
And so it’s a really, what I believe is a very attractive economic model for attorneys because it is essentially 2 99 a signed client. And then you asked briefly about creating account very easy. We asked for some very basic information here as well as we asked for your bar license number so that we can make sure that you are in good standing with your state bar association. And it takes less than two minutes honestly. Let’s see. And then on this one, the last thing I really want to show you is addresses the third major pain point that we discuss, which is the tracking of referrals as they exist. And so the way we solve that is what we call the, and the easiest way to think about the dashboard is this is your E-Trade account for referrals. We want you to be able to have true visibility into everything that’s happening with your affirms both at a firm level and as an individual.
(23:59)
And one of the things I didn’t talk about previously, and I should have is attorney share is based on a firm level permission. So as the owner or operator of a firm, you can set your firm up on attorney share and decide which individuals within your firm have authority to make certain decisions. Do you want your intake team to have the ability to post potential referrals on your behalf into the system? Do you want your associates to be able to send a proposal on a potential case or accept a referral from another attorney, or do you want to leave that decision making authority with only a few individuals within your firm? You have that flexibility on our platform. And so if you look here, this is both the firm level and the individual level referrals. You can see if they’re inbound or outbound. You can see if they’re marketplace or waterfall.
(24:51)
You can see who the top attorney partners that you have are, who are you working with, where they inbound, what practice areas, what jurisdictions, and this is what we call version 1.0 of the platform. Version 2.0, which will be ready by end of year is creates a dynamic dashboard. So say I have these three cases with Tom, I can click into Tom, see which three cases there are when the referral was made, what the case status of each of those referrals is, what the fee agreement is, it’ll hyperlink to the one five agreement. And I’ll really be able to start to understand what is happening with that referral version 3.0, which will probably be ready in Q1 or Q2 of next year, is really start to unpack some analytics around these referrals. So the first thing we’re going to do is we’re going to both create automated and manual push notifications to request case status updates because as we all know, some people are better about upgrading their case management system than others.
(25:57)
And so sometimes the system hasn’t been updated, so there’s no way to auto trigger a case status update, but if we can manually request an update directly from the attorney or the case manager, then we’ll be able to get that information so that the referring attorney has better visibility. The other thing we’re going to do is provide portfolio analytics. So essentially be able to see what is the expected settlement value of these referrals, what is the expected settlement date of these referrals so that attorneys can start to cashflow, do a cashflow analysis of when they’re going to get paid out on referrals that they’ve sent out so they can do better planning for their firm.
Dustin (26:37):
And is all that data then going to be pulled from the case management systems?
Matt (26:41):
Correct.
Dustin (26:42):
And that’s great question too. Which systems is this currently integrate to? Is it all the major case management systems.
Matt (26:48):
It’s all the major ones. So it’s Cleo, my case peer file, vine Lead Docket solidify Salesforce. There’s a few other ones, but the major ones for sure.
Dustin (26:57):
Okay. And then the 2.0 you’re talking about, which is about top of the year, they’ll be able to see from the dashboard at least the status of where the case is, right? That’s
Matt (27:06):
Right,
Dustin (27:06):
That’s right. Excellent.
Matt (27:08):
And then the other thing we’re going to do as part of 3.0 is start doing attorney benchmarking. And so if I send Tom three cases in Arizona and Tom’s doing MBA in Arizona, and I could see what the median value of an MBA is in Arizona based on the data that we have, how is Tom performing against that benchmark and how quickly is he settling the cases? Is he working them up or is he just trying to get them off his desk as quickly as possible? Should I be sending more cases to Tom or more cases to Patrick based on how they’re performing against that data? And then the other thing is what we want to provide is just, I mean that’s pretty exciting analytics, but even the basic information around referrals, we want to provide true transparency and visibility. How frequently is Tom responding to my questions around what’s happening with the case? How frequently is he providing case status updates? If they’re not automated in the system, how frequently is he signing the potential cases that I send to him? Or on the flip side, how often is Matt sending me cases that are not real cases and that I don’t end up signing ’em? Is Matt sending me a bunch of junk cases and just really start to be able to have a single point of contact to be able to understand how these referrals are working and how to better optimize them through my practice.
Dustin (28:35):
And that analytics data is huge, right? Because I mean, you’re talking about if I’ve got referrals going out frequently to the California market, I want to know who are my people that are getting the largest settlements out of those. That’s exactly right. And that data is huge. Can you scroll up to Matt? There’s one other thing I noticed on the system here, and it’s the Justice HQ thing. Can you explain what that is and what that badge is and more importantly, do they need to have this badge or not to use the system? Help me understand that.
Matt (29:03):
Yeah, all great questions. So no, you do not need to be a Justice HQ member to use attorney share. It is attorney chair is open to all attorneys. Justice HQ is our sister entity, which is a community of plaintiff’s counsel who are focused on the highest ethical and professional standards and wanted to find a place to collaborate and grow both as individuals and as attorneys. And so what we do at Justice HQ is we try to provide them that support. The community is very high on mentorship, on collaboration, on understanding and supporting each other within this industry, which is not always the friendliest industry and not always the best for individuals personal and mental health. I think it shows how much substance abuse is in the legal industry of how difficult and stressful this job is. And so the focus of Justice HQ is how do we better support attorneys?
(30:10)
And so we have a Slack community and a member portal that show how to collaborate with each other. How do the Slack channel is a wonderful resource that allows attorneys to ask questions of their fellow attorneys, Hey, have you ever tried a case in front of this judge? Have you ever filed a response to this motion? How do you think about handling this type of evidence? What vendors are people using that they’re seeing good results from? And so it’s really about how to improve everything about being an attorney. And I know that is a bold statement, but we really try to go beyond just practice tips or things like that. We want to support attorneys in everything that they do, and it’s an extremely valuable community for individuals that really want to be engaged and want like-minded individuals that value collaboration and ethics. And again, not everyone in this industry unfortunately puts a high premium on ethics and the best professional standards, but the individuals in Justice HQ do and they want to surround themselves with people that view the industry the same way.
Dustin (31:21):
Sure, absolutely. And is there a cost to join that service?
Matt (31:27):
Yes. And then what this does is again, you get special treatment on the attorney share platform because you are a part of our sister organization. The individuals, when you look at say the member directory on attorney share, they get special badging and they are able to highlight their participation in Justice HQ for other attorneys on the platform. And one of the things I know we wanted to talk about today is upcoming features. And one of the things that we are planning on doing is releasing what we call affiliations. And so what affiliations will allow you to do is to highlight other professional memberships on the attorney share platform. If you are a law leaders member and you are of the highest professional standard in the industry, we will be able to highlight that on the platform so that when you are trying to choose between two potential partner attorneys, co-counsel on an individual case and one of ’em is a law leader member and one is not, I can decide that I want to work with them.
(32:39)
More importantly, or potentially equally as important is we were going to create sub communities essentially within the platform. So Justice HQ will have a sub community, certain other affiliations will have sub communities like law leaders will have sub community where if I only want my case that I’m putting into the marketplace to be visible to individuals of a certain community, I’ll have that ability. So it doesn’t go out to everyone on the attorney share platform. It goes down to a subset of individuals on the platform. And the other thing we want to do with this is we want to be able to identify or self-identify underrepresented minorities, female owned law firms, so that if I want this case to go to a individual of those communities where they again might not have the same level of access ordinarily, we can make sure that they are receiving some of those cases as well. If that’s my prerogative as a referring attorney, that’s something we’re really excited about that should be released in January and I think it’s going to be really impactful for our community.
Dustin (33:49):
That’s really cool. And I know in our own use of the system, a couple observations I’ve had, obviously you cover almost every major practice area that I’ve seen within the case types. And then the other thing I’ve noticed, which was kind of interesting was a lot of these cases come in, they don’t even ask for a referral fee. That’s right. Which I thought was really interesting because it’s just a lot of people are just like, Hey, I just want a good attorney to handle this.
Matt (34:12):
So if you look at, this is a great example right here, not a great description. I’m not sure what happened on the intake here, but that you hit the nail on the head, this referring attorney is not looking for a referral fee, they just want to get a pc, a good attorney. So they’re asking for 0% here. And again, this goes back to the entire ethos of what we’re doing is trying to find the best representation for clients regardless of what monetary upside there may be.
Dustin (34:39):
And I think that’s a good point because I think a lot of attorneys, not a lot, but some attorneys might look at this and say, well, this is just a way for maybe attorneys make other money. Actually, I think the bigger value here I’ve seen looking through the matters is there’s a lot of ’em. They don’t want us any type of monetary payment.
Matt (34:55):
That’s right.
Dustin (34:55):
They just want to get somebody to the right attorney. And this is a great marketplace to do that because right now, to your point earlier that you illustrated the amount of time and effort required in order to just do the handoff for many of these attorneys is so difficult. They don’t have processes around that. This really helps to facilitate that. So it’s great that you can not only monetize this, but also just have a great place for matters to go.
Matt (35:17):
Yeah, exactly. It’s a big ask to have an attorney take time out of their day where to find a home for a client that they can’t help themselves, which is why the referral system was built originally. But if you can help them do that a systematized way and you’re not asking them to take a significant time out of their day to find that client representation, everyone wins in the end. And one of the things that I didn’t have a chance to show you is through our integrations with Clio and File Vine and the major case management systems, you can automatically export a matter from your case management system directly into attorney share. So if it comes through your intake and you say, Hey, this is not a practice area we want, this is not jurisdiction we’re licensed in, whatever it may be, you can automatically just push it into attorney share so you’re not, again, taking significant amount of time of your day and you’re not just telling the client or the potential client too bad, I can’t help you. You’re at least trying to get them paired with a good attorney.
Dustin (36:26):
And how difficult are those integrations, Matt? If I’m using Clio right now for my case management and I want to use this system and sign up, how difficult is that connection?
Matt (36:34):
Yeah, I mean it actually takes 10, 15 minutes at most. It’s very straightforward. It’s built into the, we have very detailed guide instructions of how to set it up. Clio and major case management platforms have all been great partners for us and see the value that this brings to their existing client basis. So we’ve tried to make the integration system as seamless as possible.
Dustin (36:57):
Got it. And Matt, there’s obviously attorneys that have not used referral tools like this before or even really sent referrals of anything outside of their network, especially when they’re dealing with other states, right. Attorneys in other states. And we also know that each state has its own rules around attorney referral and fee services. How does the system account for that, or what do you recommend for attorneys that might have a matter in another case and want to send that out but aren’t familiar with the specific bar rules in Utah if they’re based in Colorado, for example?
Matt (37:28):
Sure. Yeah. I mean, so what I would recommend to the attorney is to make sure that you are researching and understanding the referral rules in the respective jurisdictions that you’re sending referrals in. We do not police the referral system whether or not that is when people are abiding to the specific rules of the jurisdictions, it is on the attorneys to make sure that they are understanding the rules of professional responsibility, applicable rules of professional responsibility and abiding by them. And so what I would recommend is working with co-counsel in those jurisdictions that may be more familiar with those rules. There are specific states where Florida for example, there’s a 25% cap on referral fees. And so you should be making sure that you’re buying by that if you’re sending referral fees. And when we’ve seen mostly in the platform is if a referring attorney is not familiar with a specific rule in Florida and tries to send a referral, the recipient attorney will educate them and be like, look, there’s a 25% cap on here in Florida, can’t do a third, but happy to give you 25%. And the referring attorney is almost always receptive to that. They’re like, oh, I didn’t know. I’m sorry. I’ll amend it and let’s take it from there. And so I think it’s really making sure you’re educating yourself before you’re sending the referral and making sure you’re abiding by the rules.
Dustin (38:54):
And Matt, you had also mentioned earlier for attorneys that haven’t done this before, you alluded to the one five agreement. Can you help them understand what that is exactly?
Matt (39:01):
Yeah. So again, it is jurisdiction specific. It is the fee sharing agreement is the easiest way to describe it. In California, it’s a 1 5 1 agreement. In other states, they have different code sections for it. But what it is is it outlines what the terms of the fee sharing agreement is. And again, certain states don’t require anything. Certain states like California require both attorneys as well as the client to sign off on the fee split. So again, that’s where it’s really important to educate yourself and make sure that you are following the applicable rules.
Dustin (39:35):
Okay. Excellent. Matt, this is fantastic. I can see why I was excited when Bob first showed it to me, and I can see the potential of this is huge. I mean, for our members alone, there’s a significant value here in just a connection management piece along. Is there anything else we might’ve missed that anybody would find useful at this point to review while we’re on the call?
Matt (39:56):
I mean, I think we’ve covered it pretty good. I mean, I think the biggest thing I think to highlight is that we are impartial communication platform. We do not direct traffic. We do not give anybody sneak peeks of what the cases that are coming on. We are as impartial as we can be, and we want the decision making authority to remain with the attorneys involved in the referral. Nice. So that has kind of been our promise from day one. And that’s something that we stand firm by. And because we think that the minute you put your finger on the scale, not only does it do a disservice to the marketplace, but it does its disservice to the client at the end of the
Dustin (40:38):
Day. Right, exactly. So just to review for everybody, and let me see if I got this correct. It is free to use the sign up for the service.
(40:46)
You can put matters on the service, you can claim them the matters from the service. You can charge a fee or not a fee. There is a one-time fee only if you’ve actually signed the case just to use the service. But the only person paying for that is the one who actually takes the matter. And then they can also sign up as a Justice hq, which is a background member. There’s a small fee to become part of that, but there’s also a Slack community that you can join and a lot of other benefits to doing that as well.
Matt (41:13):
And I highly encourage anyone that is interested in growing as an attorney both personally and professionally to check out Justice hq. It is a wonderful organization that we focus on, like I said, on a community aspect of everything we do, there’s multiple membership tiers and there’s opportunity to really grow as an individual and it is nationwide. So we just hosted an event in Atlanta, and I’m in San Francisco to host an event this week. So we are across the country trying to grow the community as much as possible.
Dustin (41:48):
Excellent. Very good. Now Matt, if they want to get started on all this, where do they need to go at this point?
Matt (41:53):
So if you’re interested in Justice hq, it’s right here. It’s justice hq.com. You can take a look at the membership plans about the information you can apply to join. It is application membership, so you will need to submit an application if you are interested in attorney share, it is just attorney share.com. You could create account in two minutes here. There is no application to join. We just make sure that you are in good standing with your state bar and so that we don’t want attorneys that are having disciplinary issues to be on the platform exception referrals.
Dustin (42:28):
Very good. Excellent. Matt, this is great. Thank you so much. This was fantastic. Looking through the system. I encourage everybody who’s out there give this a try. There’s no cost to sign up and I think you’re going to see the value that we did as well when we started reviewing the initial system. So Matt, again, thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. And thank you for joining us for this version of Legal Masterminds at Law Leaders.
