What It Means to Be a “Newfangled Lawyer” Today (Full Transcript)

[00:00:02] Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Zach. And I'm Chad, and this is episode 606 of the Lawyer's Podcast, part of the Legal Talk Network. And today, Zach talks with Patrick Patino about what it means to be a newfangled lawyer.

[00:00:17] Speaker 2: Which, obviously, everybody has an image of what a newfangled lawyer is in their head, so there's no reason to stick around. Patrick has a podcast of his own called The Newfangled Lawyer. He's an attorney out of Minneapolis. He works with one of our labsters. He's part of ALH Law Group. And he has some really interesting ideas on how to connect with clients. So this is actually part of a pair of podcasts. This one is a little, we went for like an hour and 15 minutes, Chad, and we're not gonna put the whole hour and 15 on this episode, but he is on his podcast, Newfangled Lawyer. So if you listen to this and you think, I want more of that, which I think should be everybody, go listen to Patrick's podcast, The Newfangled Lawyer, pretty much anywhere you get your podcasts, so yeah. It's gonna be a good one. So Chad, I haven't seen you on Strava as much lately. Oh man, calling me out. I mean, I don't wanna do it in public, so I'm gonna do it privately here while you and I are just on a call. To be fair, I actually haven't been on Strava as much lately. It got too cold. And I don't, I'm 44 years, 43, 40 something years old. I don't know. And sometimes I just don't wanna, so yeah.

[00:01:50] Speaker 1: Sometimes I just don't wanna. So I feel like since we made this whole stink about this several weeks ago about the Spartan races and training and doing all this Spartan, that now that I have been absent on Strava, there is an explanation due, and there is actually a reason. And I think that there's a lesson here, not only for athletes, but also for law firms. And it is, don't try to do too much too fast.

[00:02:19] Speaker 2: Ooh, there is the, yeah. Okay, so yeah, what happened, what happened?

[00:02:28] Speaker 1: So in my, so I was running basically three times a week. Okay. And which was too much, too fast. I should have eased into it more. And so there was, that was part of the problem. And then also my running shoes I was wearing. I had those running shoes when I trained for the last Spartan. And so I desperately needed to get new shoes and did not do that prior to starting this training regimen. And now I have flared up my shin splints.

[00:03:04] Speaker 2: And now I am in rest mode. Well, there's only one, there's only one thing you can do for shin splints, and that's rest. This actually makes me think of, I have been dealing with the idea that I'm, I'm not an 18-year-old college athlete anymore, and I can't just go out there and rock on my good days. And you're like, oh, I'll recovery, I'll recover. You gotta have a bigger idea of balance when you haven't eased into it for 18 years. You know, when you're running in college, it's like, I've been doing this for years and years and years. I could run five miles every morning and it's fine. Knock it out, because you forget that you already eased into it. You already kind of got into there. I was, so I used chat GPT probably more than I should in my training for my high school athletes. And we do a lot of workouts that are, injury prevention workouts. So workouts that are designed to keep us from getting shin splints, designed to keep our knees healthy, our hips healthy, things like that. And I asked chat GPT one day, I said, you know, design the injury prevention for me personally, because I was thinking the same thing. I wanna make sure that I'm not going too hard, too fast. And it gives me this 2X or 3X the amount of injury prevention to do that we do for the kids. And I like pushed back, because I was a little insulted. And it's like, buddy, you're old. It's like, if you're 16, you can, we just have to do like little things. But your main thing, Zach, like your main exercise is actually injury prevention. That's the deal here. It's a good point. And I think that's tough for us to hear sometimes when we're doing so much stuff is you gotta get the basics right. You gotta, you can't just run in fits and starts. You know, when you're young and able to kind of get beat up a little bit, you can do fits and starts. But when you're seasoned, let's say, you can't do that. And I think what you're getting at, obviously, is that maybe don't do that in your firm either.

[00:05:33] Speaker 1: Yeah, like you had mentioned the basics, right? Getting the basics, laying the foundation, which we do in lab when people first join is we focus on getting the foundation so we can build a strong and healthy law firm on top of it. And the foundation was the part that I skipped in my training this year.

[00:05:55] Speaker 2: Yeah, but doing my ABCs with my foot in order to strengthen my shin or grabbing, like picking up things or grabbing a towel with my toes, that's not sexy. That doesn't go my Strava. You know, I'm not like, oh, guess what I did today? I did 17 lunges. Good job, Zach. But that's the thing that keeps you going. It's boring. Discipline is boring until the results walk in. You know, let's wrap the intro up on that, Chad, because I think you said it really well right there. Discipline is boring until the results walk in.

[00:06:35] Speaker 1: You're absolutely right.

[00:06:38] Speaker 2: Well, maybe be disciplined and stick around and listen to my conversation with Patrick here. It's not boring. This is not boring. But yeah, here's my conversation with Patrick.

[00:07:07] Speaker 3: So I'm Patrick Patino and I'm the Newfangled Lawyer. I have a podcast of that name. I like to lead off saying I'm a novice potter, coffee enthusiast, lover of all things Japan. And lawyer is somewhere towards the bottom of the list of how I self-identify. And this is intentional. I've been an attorney now for over a decade and I've iterated a ton. I see my law practice as a lab, a way to experiment and try new things and push the boundaries of what it means to be professional and provide a new experience. And so that's what I'm out here trying to do is change the narrative around what it means to experience and consume legal services from something that people avoid, dread, or endure into something that could be delightful. And so this is a whole new perspective, I think.

[00:08:28] Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you're right. I love that. And I love that intro. I wish I had like as fun an intro. Because I love your like, lawyer kind of sits in there somewhere in my identity. Like I'm with you on that. It sits in there, but it's not what I tell people I do when I go out to parties.

[00:08:51] Speaker 3: You know, it's like.

[00:08:53] Speaker 2: I don't lead off with it. Yeah, what do you do? I'm a high school cross country coach. Great, cool. And then like three weeks later, they'll find out I'm an attorney, you know? And then they're like, no way. Yeah, they're like, hell you are. I'm with you on it being Friday. I've got my cat over here just kind of, she's just chilling also in a sleepy mode. And I noticed we both have, I never know how to pronounce this, but we both have, is it Cotopaxi? Cotopaxi? Yeah, we both have Cotopaxi. Yeah, Cotopaxi gear, like your hat is, right?

[00:09:33] Speaker 3: That's right. Yeah. It is, this is not a paid sponsor. No, I mean, if they want to, you know? I mean, I'm still trying. I'm still trying to get like Liquid Death or someone to do a collab with me. I've pitched it to them of being like, hey, Liquid Death, we should do like a collab where you have a drink called Last Will and Testament. And it's like a mint tea.

[00:09:59] Speaker 2: It would crush. I love that. Okay, so that kind of segues into, one of the things that I wanted to chat with you about is that your practice, I noticed, and I've been following you for years and kind of seeing you going around to different places and on different social medias and whatnot, but your practice, a lot of what you do is intentionally meet clients where they are. Like you said, you know, it's obviously intentional, but I saw on social media the other day where you're doing like coffee meetups or like it looked like you were gonna be playing a show at like six coffee shops coming up, which I thought was like, and I think it's a, hey, come and meet me clients, right?

[00:10:46] Speaker 3: Something like that? Yeah, or it's like occupy the environment of where clients are. So I mean, background, like I was a bankruptcy attorney for over 11 years. That's all I did was consumer and business bankruptcy. And right, a lot of what I did was the traditional business development of meet with attorneys, take attorneys to lunch, go to coffee with attorneys, do stuff with the bar, do a lot of presenting, writing, kind of that idea. I held myself out as the bankruptcy Swiss army knife. So all things bankruptcy, I did, which was unique in that many people that do bankruptcy, right, do consumer or business, they do debtor or creditor, and I would do it all. And that worked, right? That like playbook worked until like any great experiment, when you're an experimenter, you go, okay, I've run through the experiments and the outcomes I wanted to see. I even went so far as rebranding and calling my law firm High Five Legal with the tagline, high fives, not handshakes.

[00:12:06] Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I remember that.

[00:12:07] Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I took kind of the newfangled approach of backwards hats and hoodies as my branding and the outcome, right? Because any experiment, you don't want to really predetermine the outcome. You're trying to see what the outcome is against a thesis. And my thesis was, this is what clients want, right? They're craving for someone who's gonna meet them where they are, approachable kind. So I just leaned into it of having fun colors, having fun, right, in a practice area that is not known for fun.

[00:12:48] Speaker 2: Bankruptcy, not known for fun?

[00:12:51] Speaker 3: Shocking, right? But bringing levity is unexpected, right? And when people experience unexpected in a way that can allow them to have a reprieve, it brings about some amount of joy or calm or relaxation that is counter to what a lot of attorneys market in the spaces. I'm gonna, right, is like fear-based almost. Like you're gonna get garnished. You're gonna lose your house. Where I was like, no, instead, I'm gonna be like, I'm gonna be your best friend. And the outcome of this was that I saw a huge uptick in my Google reviews of people saying I was professional. Fascinating. Yep, Patrick, super professional, very professional. And so then it really led me to, well, what does professional mean? Where else can I kind of bring this? And I'm getting to the coffee stuff, but it's then at a certain point, I was like, okay, bankruptcy, I think I've saturated as much as I can do here. I'm gonna let this all go. I'm gonna let this all go.

[00:14:02] Speaker 2: And so. I built my thing. I'm gonna let the. I built my whole thing, right?

[00:14:07] Speaker 3: Yeah, we'll let the water take it now. Yeah, and one day, I can still remember, because it wasn't that long ago, about a year ago, I had just finished doing an intake call. And I'm really hardcore. I have always kind of operated in the, I like helping good people in bad situations, not bad people in bad situations. And I just hit a string of like, kind of bad people in bad situations. And I went upstairs, I told my wife, I'm done. I'm done doing bankruptcy. I went downstairs, I removed all the content from my website and was just done. And I joined ALH law group with the intention of bringing my kind of vibe, my brand to a different practice area completely. Something I've never done. I'd never done estate planning. I never really had done business transactional work. So the playbook has changed. And so right now I'm experimenting with, what are industries that need legal, that there's a lot of, that lawyers don't find themselves in those communities? So I've targeted basic creatives, right? What falls in that?

[00:15:30] Speaker 2: Tattoo artists, potters, chefs, coffee shops. I had people that made jewelry when I was doing, yeah, when I was doing business law.

[00:15:44] Speaker 3: Like, yeah. And so my playbook now is, I'm going to be in that industry. So I reached out, I wanna be in coffee. I wanna be in restaurants. I wanna, I love food. I love culture and the risk people take when being creatives. And they have legal needs, right? Like they have leases and they have employment issues and they have buy-sell agreements and- But they don't have the time to come deal with stuffy attorney though.

[00:16:20] Speaker 2: Like they don't have the time to go to some, as one of my professors Dent Gitchell in law school would say, the tall building lawyers. They don't have time to go to the tall building lawyers.

[00:16:31] Speaker 3: No, it feels either inaccessible or like they won't be understood. And so I am like, well, that's where I'm going. Like, I'm just going to go get tattoos and go eat at coffee shops and bring something with me as a gift. We have these branded wallet ninjas. It's a wallet ninja. Well, I have to say, I have one right over here. I have a prop going off screen. It's show and tell.

[00:17:12] Speaker 2: So it's a multi-tool.

[00:17:14] Speaker 3: Okay, gotcha. And it's like solid metal, right? Like this isn't cheap and it's heavy, right? And how I've been framing it is I have a gift for you, right? So every coffee shop I go to, every food truck I eat at, every tattoo shop I go to, I say, I have a gift for you. And people are not expecting a gift. And it's something practical and it's not cheap. And it's something that you can carry around with you. And in Minnesota, people love tools. I mean, a lot of hobbyists here. We have hardware stores on every corner. So people, this is like... People love it. So I've been handing these out. So it's like, right? I'm not handing out a business card. I'm not saying call me. I'm saying, hey, I have something for you. So it's like- I like that a lot. Yeah, so it's like now this tour, right? Here in Minnesota, restaurants, coffee shops have been hurt really bad with what's been going on here. And right, like some attorneys are like, I can do habeas work or that. I'm like, well, I'm not a litigator. I don't go to court. But what I can do is create community and experience. What if I created like a tour where I pick different minority owned restaurants and coffee shops and invite other people just to join me there?

[00:18:48] Speaker 2: No, yeah, just join me. No, like we're not gonna do a presentation or something like that, right?

[00:18:56] Speaker 3: No, no sales, no hard sell. No, like, hey, this is the ideal client for me. I've really moved beyond that to just being like, hey, I wanna have a conversation with you.

[00:19:13] Speaker 2: Have you had any of those yet?

[00:19:15] Speaker 3: Have you had one of the tour days yet? No, it's coming up.

[00:19:19] Speaker 2: Okay, man, I'm super interested in how that goes.

[00:19:23] Speaker 3: You know, and I've tried, and I've done tattoo events for lawyers. Where, you know, Tyler O'Brien, he's a long hair lawyer. He flew in twice from the West Coast to do this. Came in, got thigh tattoos, flew out. And it is the most fun. I've kind of gotten known for this. I'm trying to, there's some attorneys in Copenhagen that were like, hey, you should do this event in Europe. And I was like, well, I'd go to Europe. Oh, yeah. Like, I'd go to Copenhagen to go get some tattoos. So it's, yeah, it's like the traditional way of doing things of, let's say, like billboards or like any kind of like keeping an email list or a lot of those things, I was like, this is not where like everyday people are looking for lawyers. That's what they expect. That's why Bob, who hasn't updated his practice since 1985 and still uses word perfect, gets clients. Because that is what people expect, not because it's a good experience.

[00:20:48] Speaker 2: Yeah, that's, man, okay, I'm gonna go on a tangent here.

[00:20:55] Speaker 3: Yeah, unpack that, Zach.

[00:20:56] Speaker 2: Yeah, so I used to live in Nashville and I'm from Nashville, but now I've moved to Memphis and I like Memphis a lot. I intentionally moved here. But when I was living in Nashville, it was in East Nashville, it was like a super hip sort of area, had a lot of creatives. I did a lot of work for like people that made jewelry or photographers, you know, things like that. But everybody was building these tall skinnies. Like there was just a boom in building houses. And all of my quote unquote realtor friends were like, oh, people love these tall skinnies. I'm like, no, they don't. It's just the only shit that's out there.

[00:21:36] Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right, they're ugly.

[00:21:39] Speaker 2: Go to Austin, Texas, now that's all there is. Yeah, they're absolutely terrible, but it's the only freaking experience that we can have because nobody wants to actually put a real house on something. Just because people use an experience or a tool or something like that, like you're saying, doesn't mean it's not total crap. Or they wouldn't go do something else, you know? Because who really wants to think like, okay, I'm gonna go get a divorce. I've gotta go into all of this. Like I wanna go have that normal. Yeah, nobody says I want the normal law firm experience.

[00:22:19] Speaker 3: Let me just go do that sometime. That's right, but that's like the default setting. And so even when, the law is this interesting profession of copycat, right? Where it's not about differentiation, it's about sameness. That's why we end up with similar logos and similar color stories and similar bios and similar marketing. And we're starting to see a change though, right? Of what is like the rise of almost like the, what I call like the vibe law firm. Like it's, you're giving an experience and because most people, right, in a Google review aren't like, you know, Patrick, he wrote the best bankruptcy schedules. Oh man, blew my mind. His case citations, he's like learned hand. Oh my gosh. No, no, no. What people leave is how they felt. How they experienced the law and you are the guide and the curator of that experience. And so, I mean, like what does that mean? Is like, you know, even with now let's say technology. This is not hard. Some people are just like, you know what I liked about your firm? You could schedule online. Right. You're like, you know what? I've been able to do that with my barber for a decade. You know, this isn't, or like, you have a way to pay online. Like this stuff's, you know, this stuff's not hard. This stuff is. It's low bar. Right? To exceed this bar, to create kind of this immersive client experience, you see it in other industries all the time, like restaurants. This is why I love restaurants. I love reading about restaurants. I think there's a lot of comparison between being a chef and being a lawyer. It's very hierarchical, right? It's very stressful. Yeah. It's very much so like work really hard and someday you'll be a top chef.

[00:24:47] Speaker 1: Sometime. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:24:50] Speaker 2: If you don't, yeah. If you don't die of alcoholism before then, yeah, you'll be top chef.

[00:24:55] Speaker 3: That's right, or burn out.

[00:24:56] Speaker 2: Yeah, burn out or stab your sous chef.

[00:25:02] Speaker 3: Yeah, or whatever the other ills that could befall us in both these are professions, but the difference, right? The difference is the best restaurants in the world. It's about the experience. What do we talk about the best law firms? It's really about experience, right?

[00:25:25] Speaker 2: You've got something there because like it also is, like some people have figured that out, but the experience, the expected experience is potentially like changing, you know? In some places it is about the, like I go into this fancy law office and it smells of rich mahogany and all of that. And my attorney shows up in a very fancy vehicle dressed very well. And so like, yeah, that's about the experience and that's what some firms are selling. But a lot of us are not selling that and not everybody. I think this is a lot of what you're getting to.

[00:26:03] Speaker 3: Not a lot of people really want that experience, you know? They're hungry for what I call the crumble cookie experience. They want it to be frictionless, delightful, easy, tech enabled, where it's like, here's your, you wanted this box of cookies? Look, there's limited options. We sometimes have some specials. The pricing is very clear. It's quick. Pricing is clear. And we open the box and it smells like chocolate chip cookies. So it's like, what does the future law firm look like? I think it's brick and mortar. I think it's community. I think it's community. I think it's you're creating experiences that are adjacent to your practice. Like, what if you walked into a law firm, and there's a barista there and the barista goes, hey, you can have any drink you want. That's the first thing you get greeted with when you walk in. And here's a baked good, right? What a totally different thing. What would be the cost of a law firm to have a good barista just run a, basically a coffee shop front of house? Nothing. Who would talk? That'd be everywhere. People would be, you know? And so I just think, like, I talk all the time. Like, we're spitballing all the time. The benefit I have is Allison, Harrison and I are like a one-two punch of this. I was like, Allison, when we go to events, I was like, what if we had a branded bike that we served ice cream out of? Like a pedal bike that had like a freezer in the front. You partner with a local ice cream shop. You have two flavors that are like, you know, law puns. It would crush. And the cost of that is not expensive. And so this is how I'm thinking, Zach. Yeah. All the time is how do we just, there's so much opportunity in the legal profession because we're so far behind.

[00:28:20] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Oh man, I love that idea of the ice cream. Okay, the barista has gotten me here because I'm like, I'm going down the path because people coming in, you know, those smaller creatives who are just trying to run their photo business or their events business or something, they're working out of these coffee shops, you know? And if your coffee shop is sitting there and it's like, well, right through here is the law office that, you know, is here. Like that's pretty good or could potentially be a pretty good experience. What strikes me a lot of times about your ideas here, because I mean like the guts of this is what do people want? Let's make an experience out of this, is how much it, you didn't strike on something that just happened to live in bankruptcy. And then it was like, oh, I go and do something other than bankruptcy and damn, if people aren't, not wanting this now, like everybody else in the world is just like, nah, I'm gonna do, I want crappy attorney experience.

[00:29:36] Speaker 3: No, it can go across all of these practices of law. So one of the things we're exploring right now at ALH is what I'm calling like the pod model, POD. Where essentially we have a centralized set of systems, right, we have Lawmatics, Clio, Zapier, you know, our tech, right, kind of the brains, the nerve system. And then you have geographic pods, right? I'm here in Minnesota, Alison and the Columbus team are in Ohio, but it's like, how can you both, right, share in resources and create these experiences and create geographic pods that essentially allow this to scale, right? Because it's difficult, it's difficult to do solo if you're creating, because there's also substantive legal work that needs to happen, right?

[00:30:38] Speaker 1: Like. Right.

[00:30:40] Speaker 2: You still gotta, you're still selling something, you know, you still gotta get the widgets out the door.

[00:30:45] Speaker 3: There's still a commodity, right? Yeah. And so that's the productization of legal service delivery models, is that at the end of the day, you still are selling something, right? And so practice area agnostic, right? It's how do you scale this vibe, right? This culture. Yeah. This experience where it stays consistent across geographic location, while also taking into account the local nuance.

[00:31:16] Speaker 2: I think the inexpensiveness of content, you know, that gets to a lot of what we're talking about here is that it is so easy to talk at or to people. And, you know, right now, because of artificial intelligence, because of phones, because of video conferencing, because of all that, but it's not easy to talk, it's not easy to talk with people, you know? And lawyers are crappy at that. Like, I didn't wanna go talk to my clients, you know? But that's, I mean, the clients I had were not necessarily always the people that you wanted to go hang out with, necessarily.

[00:32:00] Speaker 3: Seriously? Their collection clients?

[00:32:02] Speaker 2: I mean, they're fine, but yeah. I wasn't like, let's go to the show, man.

[00:32:07] Speaker 3: Somebody's playing a Basement East, let's go get a beer. Yeah, but why is your collection rate so low, Zach?

[00:32:14] Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm like, you guys are gonna get me down to like 16% now instead of my normal 18%. We need those margins, okay?

[00:32:24] Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah. We've already charged a lot of this up, okay?

[00:32:29] Speaker 2: We don't, it takes effort to talk with your clients, you know, and to show up where they are, like you're doing.

[00:32:37] Speaker 3: So I, you know, is that, you know, inherently, you know, me by design, I am an introverted person. I was a pretty shy person for a long period of my life. And right, the law favors the extrovert, the loudest person, the most vocal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where on the flip side, I like having deep conversations and I can have those with clients, right? I have to navigate very deep things, death, disability, divorce, right? Even now with what I'm doing, right? You're dealing with people's businesses. Yeah. And estate planning, like these are, these require deep conversations. You have to be comfortable showing that vulnerability and that connection piece of saying, you know, I have kids too. Oh, you might hear my kid in the background. Oh, same. Oh, you might hear my dog in the background. Me too, right? And it's that skill set of conversation. Yeah, is it like a lost art conversation? Is creating content where it's like, hey, I'm here with you. You know, you're not hiring me to do this for you. The law shouldn't be done to you. I hope I'm definitely not against you. I'm here to do it with you. It's a partnership model. It's collaborative. This is very different than the historical model of, well, I gave it to my attorney. Yeah. And the attorney then feeling all the pressure to say, well, now I gotta figure this all out. Yeah. I never tell people like, I'm taking this completely off your plate because that's not true. That would be, that's false. And that's actually showing a lack of compassion and actually a false expectation because in any kind of law you practice, you're gonna need the client. You're gonna need to know what their goals are. What outcome do they want? How do they wanna feel? What do they value? You know, going to debt collection, right? I did bankruptcy is that, you know, one person to be like, I can't stand. If I get a phone call, I'm like, well, have the phone call started? No, it's just a thought of maybe getting the phone calls. I just can't do it. I had other people that was like, whatever.

[00:35:14] Speaker 2: I'm on social security.

[00:35:16] Speaker 3: What are they gonna do? What are they gonna do? I can stomach it. They can mail me stuff, whatever. Historically, right? The experience for both those people would be the same. Yeah, right? Yeah. And as opposed to just being like, okay, I'm gonna meet you where you are and I wanna hear. What do you want out of this? Because it's your life. People will ask me, well, what would you do? Well, I'm not you.

[00:35:39] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:35:41] Speaker 3: So you have a different risk calculus. You want different things, you know? Some people wanna save as much as they can. Some people are like, you know, if I have to start over, I have to start over, right? This is- Yeah. Yeah, right? Like, I just want this done. I don't care. I don't wanna do advanced planning, you know? And I think for a long time, right? Attorneys would be like, right? You get a group of lawyers together. What do they do first?

[00:36:11] Speaker 1: Complain about clients.

[00:36:14] Speaker 3: Well, my pushback to that is get better clients, start saying no to people, and get clear on who your ideal client is. So that when someone comes to you, you're like, well, you're not my ideal client. So that, you know, then it's easy. You don't fit this archetype, this avatar. Sorry, you're not for me. Yeah. And so then when it ends up happening is you wanna actually have a conversation with the client. You wanna ask them questions like, how are you doing? Honestly. And they can ask you, how are you doing? You know, what's new in your life? Because, you know, quite frankly, most of what we do as lawyers has nothing to do with the law.

[00:36:54] Speaker 1: Right.

[00:36:56] Speaker 3: Like, you know, very rarely, even let's say if you're a litigator nowadays, you know, most of it just comes down to like, what do people, what can people live with?

[00:37:06] Speaker 1: Because most things settle.

[00:37:07] Speaker 3: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. What's fair? What's reasonable? What practically makes sense? Yeah. For many of the types of kind of consumer-based law, you know, in practice areas, you're like, yeah, the law says this, but.

[00:37:25] Speaker 2: Do you really wanna do that? Like, yeah, you'll technically win, but you're gonna, like, you have to live next to your neighbor for the rest of your life, you know, for whatever. But yeah, I remember that many times. And the law says this, but they also have an appeal. And so you're gonna have to deal with 45 days of, settle this thing, yeah.

[00:37:50] Speaker 3: And so it's like, yeah, it's like right now when looking at this kind of holistically from a business standpoint, because at the end of the day, right, the laws of business, this isn't, this isn't like just purely altruistic. It's not a game. It, this isn't a show, right? Like, I show up like this, hat, hoodie, joggers every day. Every day, right? It's not an act and it's not an invitation that that's what I mean by being newfangled.

[00:38:28] Speaker 1: That's not it.

[00:38:30] Speaker 3: It's really an invitation to do you, right? Some people, what I've discovered is like, right, like some people love big law. They strive in big, they thrive. Yeah. And they love the billable hour.

[00:38:45] Speaker 1: Cool, great.

[00:38:48] Speaker 2: Now, I mean, that's not for everyone, but cool. Good luck with AI, you know what I'm saying? But hey, I mean, like, yeah, you can love it.

[00:38:56] Speaker 3: You know, and some clients are gonna say, I don't want you to use AI at all, right? There's market segmentation that's gonna happen where there's an attorney for everyone and there's more people that need legal services than lawyers. And so I've really tried to divorce from this idea of, you know, we all have to be like, you know, laid back, chill. I mean, there's a time and place for, I guess that aggressive litigator, right? That doesn't mean they're a bad person, right? They're just maybe, I call them technicians, right? People say bulldogs.

[00:39:36] Speaker 1: No, no, no, the technician.

[00:39:39] Speaker 3: I think for our profession to continue to evolve, we need to just start embracing that there's many different ways to practice and be and have values. And there's enough for everyone. It's not a scarcity. I mean, there is an opportunity for all of us. And I'm a huge proponent of solo small because it allows you to do this very, right? There's no better time than now. The cost of entry of doing it is very low.

[00:40:18] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. And you can be very nimble as well. Oh yeah. And there's a lot of tattoo shops out there that you can go hang out at.

[00:40:27] Speaker 3: And- Ha A man's dream. Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean, you know, right. It's one of those things that you ask a lot of lawyers, like, what's your ideal client?

[00:40:44] Speaker 2: They're just like, personal injury. Like, no, Like, what beer do they drink?

[00:40:51] Speaker 3: Where do they spend time on the weekend? Are they Packers fans? Are they University of Tennessee Volunteers fans? Like I was as a kid, you know, where, you know. Do you like the paint? Do you like the Manning brothers? Right. Do you not? Like, you can get to that level. And the more you put that out there, it's amazing how it starts showing up.

[00:41:15] Speaker 2: Yeah. Like, it attracts that client anyway. If you're putting yourself out there like that.

[00:41:22] Speaker 3: Yeah. I like that. Well, Zach, how I wrap it up is, what do you think it means to be a new fangled lawyer?

[00:41:31] Speaker 2: To me, it is, and I'm gonna step away from, like, the idea of what I know you are as the new fangled lawyer. But to be a new fangled lawyer is to question. It's to be comfortable in the questions. You know, where are the clients? What do I do? How do I practice law? To, even if you're in the box, to observe the box. To know it's there. To know that it's, you know, it's meets and bounds and whatnot. And to be comfortable in the question.

[00:42:02] Speaker 3: I love that. And to acknowledge the box with maybe not respecting it. Yeah, you don't have to respect it. Take a hammer, treat it like one of those rage rooms and just smash it to bits.

[00:42:15] Speaker 2: Well, if you're gonna acknowledge it, you're likely gonna destroy it. You know, like, once you see it, nobody wants to be there, you know.

[00:42:27] Speaker 3: Well, it's because you and I are disruptors. So that's naturally our first inclination, is to say, well, I'm not gonna sit here. Why am I in this box? Yeah, I'm gonna rip a hole. Can I just rip, I'm gonna rip this all down while I'm sitting in it. This sounds really smart. And then someone comes along and goes, Zach, Patrick, do you realize you're in the room still? And you're like, ooh, one second. Let me wait.

[00:42:55] Speaker 1: Yeah.

[00:42:56] Speaker 3: Well, Zach, this is a ton of fun. I could do this all the time with you. Same here, same here. Friday afternoons, post burrito while your cat's taking a nap.

[00:43:04] Speaker 2: That's Zach and Patrick. It's a long title, but I think it'll catch on.

[00:43:09] Speaker 3: We'll let the lawyer's team massage that, massage something out of that. Well, I appreciate it. And thank you so much for the conversation. And I think this is gonna be a big hit.

[00:43:21] Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, too. Thank you, too.

[00:43:23] Speaker 1: I really enjoyed this one, Patrick. Thank you.