Learning and Implementing AI: Practical Steps for Law Firms with Ernie Svenson

Ernie Svenson: They increase capabilities. There was a TV show back when I was a kid called The Six Million Dollar Man, and you know, it was like he could do all this amazing stuff because he'd been in an accident and they replaced like his arms and legs. Basically, it was like Superman, but this was all because his limbs had been replaced. I think of AI as like the cognitive version of that.

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Melissa Shanahan: Okay, Ernie Svenson, you're back for round two. Thanks. Thanks for being here.

Ernie: I'm ready. Let's, let's do it.

Melissa: Okay. In the last episode, we talked about the LinkedIn post that you wrote that I loved, and I wanted to have you on to talk more about it. And really, the gist of it is that there needs to be an identity shift for I mean, I guess we're speaking specifically to law firm owners, but there needs to be an identity shift for law firm owners about how they're going to work and what they're going to get paid for in the future and how their business needs to evolve.

Just to touch on a quick couple of things, “the winners won't be traditional lawyers. They'll be knowledge engineers, data scientists, and no-coders. Those are tomorrow's lawyers.” That was something we chatted about for a bit.

And then also the three phases that Richard Susskind talked about when it comes to technology in the firm and AI in the firm. So automation was phase one, innovation is phase two, which is delivering outcomes in new ways, and then elimination is phase three, just preventing the problem that people have before it becomes a problem. So we talked about that, and I loved our conversation about that.

And then the natural follow-up is, okay, if we're all on the same page about that and we all believe this is true, how do you take the steps you need to take? What does that look like?

And you know, before we record, we pushed record on this episode, you were saying, I don't know how someone would do it alone. I don't think it's that doesn't feel like a realistic way to approach this. So maybe just high level, say more about that, and what you feel is important before we kind of get more into the nuts and bolts.

Ernie: Yeah, so the thing about learning AI or learning how to make use of it is you have to deal with the reality that, while like other technologies, it's rapidly evolving, it's evolving much more rapidly than other technologies, and it's radically different in how it works and the output, the benefits are so massive.

So I analogize it to like, it's like learning another language. You have to learn another language. And the best way to learn another language is to go speak it with other people who either already know it or are learning it like you are. And you just get those reps, and you learn things constantly. And you have to be learning this constantly because it's evolving constantly and very quickly.

So it's more about the conversations that you have with other lawyers who are using it that will help you feel confident about security and privacy and methodology, and trying certain tools or not trying certain tools that supposedly hold great promise, but in reality are not for solo and small firm lawyers, or not sufficiently evolved for you yet. I mean, you have to allocate your attention and manage that resource, your attention. And the best way to know that you're doing that well is to be talking to other people who are doing the same thing. 

Melissa: I mean, your, the Inner Circle seems like an obvious answer to me, that is a space for those kinds of conversations and to immerse yourself in learning the new language. Your community and the way that it's set up, how often are these conversations happening asynchronously, you did mention, through posts and comments and things like that in the in the community? Yeah, I'd love to hear just a little bit about what's what's the activity like or the engagement level? How much time do people spend in here?

Ernie: Yes. So for the AI part, in January, I started what I call the workshop, and it's an ongoing workshop, and we meet twice a week on Tuesdays and Fridays for an hour, and some people come to one or the other, some people come to both, some people come to a few for a while and drop out.

But there's an ongoing conversation. There's always at least ten people there, live discussing what's going on. Sometimes there's more, but usually it's ten. We record them. People can watch the recording, read the transcript, or read the AI-driven summary.

So we've been learning a lot of the same things over time, but then we've also been learning new things. And the way that I started the workshop is I call it a ChatGPT lab. And I decided to focus on ChatGPT because I know that when you're trying to learn something, if you spread your effort across multiple places, you dissipate, you know, the capability of learning.

So I said, look, if you want to learn Claude and that's similar enough to ChatGPT, you can come in, you can analogize, but that's on you. We're going to focus on one tool so we can get everybody on the same page as much as possible. And that has worked really well. And then that in fact is what's recommended by, you know, the gurus who help people at the highest level, which are Ethan Mollick, who's a professor at Wharton, has written a book about AI, and he's somebody you should follow on LinkedIn.

Allie K. Miller, same thing. She's a Wharton grad, and she recorded a masterclass with Ethan Mollick. So they're on the same page, although Allie K. Miller is more about nuts and bolts of actual use by people in companies. Mollick's more of the researcher, the academic, but they're both using it, and they're both saying you have to use it, and they give you guidelines and ways of thinking about it. But they also said, you know, use one of them a lot for everything.

And it's funny, at the talk that Susskind give, I figured I think this was in response to a question about, you know, how would we learn to use this? And he first of all said he himself practices law and uses it in his practice. But he said in advising one of these companies, he told one of them, "Look, forget about all the fancy tools, just tell everybody in your organization, I want you to use ChatGPT for at least 15 to 20 minutes a day for, you know, a month or six weeks. And we don't even care if you use it for law-related stuff. We want you to use it. So if it's all personal, that's fine."

Because it really does translate. It's not like if you learn to use it in a personal way, those skills don't translate to business. They do. So it's the use. And he said that when this company did this, they very quickly turned a corner and had a big breakthrough because everyone was learning to use it at a certain level, and that gave them the leg up that they needed. So, yeah, that's what people need.

Melissa: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, there's two things happening in my head right now. When I imagine law firm owners getting better at implementing and leaning into AI and where it's going, there's two things that strike me.

One is they need to spend time on it. They're not going to get attention. They need to spend attention on it, which in most cases means they're going to need to spend some time on it. And they can decide how they do that or, you know, maybe they pay to have some assistance with that thinking. And, you know, that's all great. But I do think that people don't know what to spend their time on, which, being a part of a community, can be helpful. It can give you a bit of a guide to where to start.

But it does seem like the busyness of the day-to-day is easy to win out against spending time because this is, even though it's probably not true, but what people are perceiving is that this is important, not urgent. So they may spend think that they need to spend time on it. They want to spend time on it and they don't make the time for it. They don't carve out the space for it.

And so they're going to get left behind as time moves on. And this is true. I deal with this with whatever the priorities are, or what should be your attention, has to be given there. There has to be space on your calendar for those things. And so people, number one, I would imagine you would agree, they need to make it a priority if they're going to have a shot at staying ahead of the game. This is almost like not, you can't read a book on how to swim. You have to get in the pool.

So that's one barrier that comes up that it almost seems like not worth talking about because of course, but I do think a lot of people that is one of the main reasons people will be left behind.

Ernie: Oh no, it's worth talking about, but my approach to this, because I've been watching lawyers deal with technology for a long time, was to say, Okay, to me, I know because I use it, it has a huge payoff. So I took stock of, like, well, where is that huge payoff going to be immediate and likely to be applicable to as many people as possible, namely, practicing lawyers? Because when people get the payoff immediately, they don't go, "Well, gee, convince me." Like they're convinced. They're getting a payoff.

Melissa: Yeah, that's a great point.

Ernie: So, to me, the areas where there's an immediate payoff are note-taking. And there's a bunch of tools out there like Otter and Fireflies and Fathom, but there's a newcomer that a lot of people don't know about. Now, in our discussion group, everybody knows about this, and everybody has adopted it because they all their questions have been answered, their fears, concerns, whatever. And they go, "Oh, wow." And then when they hear other lawyers saying, "Oh yeah, I'm using this and it's amazing."

The tool is called Granola.ai. And you don't even have to pay for it right now because they're doing beta testing for solo people. You do have to sign up with a Google account initially, but after that, it doesn't even matter. So some people got stuck with that hiccup. But once they get over the hump and they realize that, wait, this thing can attend any meeting I come to. Like I'm using it right now to record this because anytime I'm speaking into a mic or listening, I can fire it up and it'll record.

And it's useful because I can see the transcript in case while I'm talking, I forgot what we covered. But more importantly, at the end of it, it will immediately create a summary. And that summary is really powerful because I can; I didn't have to strain to create notes. The summary is there.

Now, lawyers would say, Okay, because I've worked through all these objections or questions. Well, but wait, I want to take my own notes. Okay, well, go ahead. It's got a pad. You can take your own notes in there. And those will be preserved as well. But more importantly, they'll be incorporated into how the AI generates its notes because if it detects you're more interested in something than something else, it'll work that in. 

The notes are immediately shareable with other people. It doesn't have the audio recording, so that makes lawyers happy because it's not doing that. And you can opt out of training and all that good stuff. It's taking the world by storm. Everybody who starts using it goes, Oh my God, it's the most amazing thing in the world. And it doesn't join a meeting as a bot, so that's another whole annoyance that's happening now with a lot of people. It just listens to you talk and hears what you hear. So, Granola, super amazing and currently apparently still free. 

Melissa: I just last week signed up for it. But by proxy, these conversations happening in your community, and Jeff Lewis is the one that's saying to me, you need to know about Granola. So then I look into Granola. Yeah, we just signed up for it last week. I actually haven't seen any, um, yeah, I think Friday was the first day that I used it. So I haven't, I haven't dug in yet to see exactly, and I'm going to set up some templates on how I want it to structure notes. I think that's possible. Haven't done that yet.

Ernie: Well, when I send you a link to this one that's going to generate, that'll be useful because you know what we talked about, and then you'll see the summary and think, oh, okay, it got most of it right. It got one part a little wrong. But that's it's always going to not be perfect, right? But your notes are not going to be perfect either. So it's an incredible tool. I just think everybody should use it.

And when you're using that and you say, Okay, AI can do that, now you're starting to think, summaries are good. I can use them in other places without Granola for other things. I recognize that yes, they're not perfect, but they're useful. So that's one way I convince people to pay attention to this stuff because they get the payoff. They're, you know,

Melissa: Yeah. Yeah. You know, when we, um, when we host our client retreats, and nowadays, you know, they're virtual often. And with this, the hope is that, because we produce a debrief, we try to produce an artifact after the retreat that they can have and be useful for them. And there's a lot of work that goes into that debrief, but with tools like this, it really lightens, it speeds up how quickly we can get the product to them. 

And for instance, we always have a section for, um, realizations and lessons learned from the previous quarter. Well, now, they're giving them to us, but our client services manager, she can type in after we're just wrapping up that section. She can type in, Please give me, you know, the, it's sort of the live interaction with the tool. Please give me the list of accomplishments, lessons, and lessons learned, and realizations.

And we can, it's a really good, just like with your LinkedIn post, it's a really good first draft that we can finesse to get it good enough to be in their debrief. But that used to take many more minutes than it needs to nowadays. And I just, it just makes me wonder, and these are the conversations you're having with lawyers, in their work, in the legal work, how can they use this to speed everything up for themselves, and to lighten the load?

Ernie: Well, my LinkedIn post began with a Granola recording. So when I was sitting in the audience, using my iPhone because I don't think you can use Android, but I was using an iPhone. There's an app, and I was recording the sessions that I thought were interesting. And that was one I recorded. And it generates a transcript, which, the fidelity can be good or bad or, you know, depending on how the sound quality is. But I was sitting in a good place. It was catching everything. But I also know that because Richard Susskind is Scottish, some of his enunciation might have presented some difficulties. You know, I know it's not going to be perfect.

But what I did, because I've learned, is I took the transcript, fed it into ChatGPT, and I said, This is a transcript that's going to have problems because the speaker was Scottish. I was in this audience, I gave it all the context to understand this is not, you know, straight from a mic kind of transcript. It's got some other considerations.

And I said, I want you to create as verbatim a transcript as you can and interpret things that maybe got mis-transcribed. And then it asked me, you know, do you want me to add headings? I'm like, yeah, sure, add headings. That's a good idea. So it adds all these headings and all these topics and broken all down. I thought, wow, that's it's very clean, very accurate now.

And then I took that and fed that into another GPT I have that helps me write LinkedIn posts. And I said, write a LinkedIn post off of this. So it had the best highest quality information. It knows how I want to write a LinkedIn post, and it knows things that matter to me. So those were all incorporated. And then I had this LinkedIn post within a matter of, you know, less than an hour, because it took a few steps.

And then I realized that what people who went to that conference probably want is to be reminded of what he said in a very succinct way, so that we could talk about it. Would it be helpful for me to send them a link to the Granola thing? No, because that's too general. This, it needed to be refined. So when it was refined, that was useful, and that's why it went viral.

Melissa: Yeah. Did it go viral?

Ernie: Oh yeah. I had like I still have forty-five thousand views. I had twenty or thirty like within a couple of days. It was insane.

Melissa: That is amazing. Okay, I didn't I actually didn't know that, but now I know I wasn't the only one that loved it as much as I loved it. That's true. That's remarkable. Okay, also when we're thinking about how and steps people can take, I what a good point that there's certain things where the payoff is immediate, and it'll keep you engaged so that the things that are a little longer game, you can make some headway on, but the immediate payoffs are powerful. That makes a ton of sense to me.

Do you think or do you know of consultants or coaches out there that will work with you, for you, on the thinking and planning of sort of the wave of how this can be implemented into your firm? And or and do you do any of that work? Any one-on-one work if somebody asks you to?

Ernie: Well, I do, I do. But the way I do it, because this is better, is if there were two paths, me meeting with somebody one-on-one, once a week, a couple times a week, and they got no exposure to the other lawyers, that would not be as good as exposure to the lawyers. The exposure to the other lawyers is the most important part.

At some points, and I can see this with some people, they'll say, "Oh, you know, I'm having trouble with this." I'll say, "Oh, wait, let's get on a Zoom call just you and me and work through that." So it gives me the opportunity to see who needs help and when they need help, and what they need help with. And that's a lot easier for me and them.

And I think it has to come off of this ongoing discussion with other lawyers because a couple of lawyers have said very emphatically that, you know, they'll they're like not participate in the discussions as much and I'll say, "Well, do you not want to share?" or you know, oh no, I just love hearing what other lawyers are saying. That's what helps me the most.

And I thought, okay, yeah, that would help me too, to hear them verbalizing why they're concerned about the privacy issue of something or other and how to deal with it. And if they get the answer they want and know that there's consensus about it and that all the questions have been addressed, then they're free to go off and implement based off of what they heard.

So you don't necessarily even have to participate. It's just hearing what people are talking about and making sure that you're not, you know, off on some weird trail, even if you're getting great results, and you're still wondering like, am I about to stuff off a cliff?

Melissa: Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. I, there's another question that isn't fully formed in my head, but about implementation. I think you probably remember from way back, we talked about turtle steps, turtle steps for the win, and that it's just one foot in front of the other, and you just commit to doing that one little thing every day, for example. Um, and how it feels so seemingly insignificant in the moment, but the stack of that adds up to something quite remarkable.

So for anyone listening, there is a propensity for most people to jump in and need eight hours that they think they need a weekend, or they think they need, you know, a retreat to just focus on these things. And not that wouldn't be helpful, but I'm just wondering if you can encourage, if it feels true to you, that it isn't, that's not the way forward. The way forward is consistent turtle steps.

Ernie: Yeah, there's a thing I saw on LinkedIn the other day, and I screen captured it because every week I send out an email, and one of them is, this is worth pondering, and I usually have some quote or something. This one's going to be used next week, and I thought of you, and I got it. It said, “If you feel like giving up because you're not seeing results, remember this: The last thing to grow on a fruit tree is the fruit.”

And I think that's part of it, but then again, if you, if people can get a result or feel like that ongoing thing, they're seeing some fruit and not waiting for it, that's good. So the Granola example is one that's fruit that bears, you know, immediately. 

But then there's another one, which, I don't know if I've mentioned this one to you before, you've heard about it, but it's been adopted like wildfire in our group, which is called Wispr Flow. And Wispr Flow is, it's easy to misunderstand this and think, oh yeah, I know what that is, because it's voice to text. You dictate, it captures your voice, it turns it into text. And people would say, Well, I can dictate into ChatGPT using a little microphone button, and that's good enough. And it's like, well, if you haven't tried something better, maybe it is good enough.

But as soon as you try Wispr Flow, where you hold down the button and dictate, release it, and it doesn't transcribe exactly what you say, it transcribes what you meant to say. So if you mess up in the middle and go, no, I meant 10 o'clock, not 11 o'clock, it doesn't record all that verbatim because that's stupid. So it understands what you're trying to say, and then it generates it.

And once you get in the habit, and it's a habit of learning to do it, and it works everywhere on your computer, then you realize typing is friction. You want to stop typing, and you want to use this tool. And when you're using it with an AI, like ChatGPT or Claude, and you're having conversations very quickly back and forth, and you don't feel restricted in the ability to give context because it's annoying to have to type all the things you know that you want to say. So you just type some of them. The AI works better when you give it more context. If you have total freedom to do that because you just hold down a button and blabber, it's better. And so yeah, Wispr Flow has caught on.

There's other ones that are similar, but this one seems to be the one that has caught, you know, fire in a greater way, and I know why, because it just works better. I tried the other one, it didn't work as well. And this one is growing, and it's I forget what it costs, twelve dollars a month. It works on your phone. And I think it works on Android too, but it definitely works on iPhones.

And that's where I've really had to like retrain my brain. And I really hate typing on a phone, but as much as that's true, I tended to default and behave in the automatic robotic way. But once I've kind of trained myself not to do that, because I'm like, look, if you just take a few more steps and do this, you'll be able to get a better result.

So yeah, part of getting the fruit to grow on the tree is doing things differently, but you can get immediate benefits too. And Wispr Flow, that's the tool to use.

Melissa: Cool. Is it also for your laptop or no, it's just phone?

Ernie: Yeah, yeah, yeah. On your laptop, you just hold down the function key and talk or you can hit it twice and it locks it in and then you hit it again to release it.

But it's not for like, I'm going to dictate, you know, twelve hours or I'm going to record Richard Susskind's speech. It's not for that. It's for short burst. You have a thought, you have something you want to say, you want to email, you want to dictate.

And the other thing I should mention is it's smart about formatting. So you don't have to do all this, you know, new paragraph, new line. It just knows what to do, and it'll sense when to create a bullet point or numbered list. It's not perfect, but it's good enough, and it's fast and it's frictionless.

Melissa: When you say short burst, I mean, I'm curious. There's times where I have an idea, I need to flush out, and so I will open up that little mic that I thought was good enough. Now I'm definitely going to not think that it's good enough. And just talk. So sometimes that could be ten minutes. Is that too long for Wispr Flow?

Ernie: It might not be too long. The thing is, when you finish dictating and release the button, it then it's going up to the cloud and maybe doing that while you're talking, but it takes time to process it. And it processes in one chunk based on when you release the thing. So it's going to use the opportunity to understand the whole context and figure that out. So it takes it a little longer when you do it that way.

So what I find myself doing, again, as I decided to retrain my brain, because it's like, oh, this is easy, I'll just hold it down and blabber. I'll find I get to a point where I go, okay, I finished a good thought there. I'm going to stop, let it generate, see what that looks like. Okay, fine, and then and it's easy to pick back up from where I was. So it's a little more choppy, but it actually makes more sense to do it that way.

Melissa: Yeah, no, that's that's great. Okay, so you've given us two immediate payoff tools, which is Granola and Wispr Flow. If anything else comes to mind that's immediate payoff, definitely share.

Ernie: Well, ChatGPT or Claude. Those are immediate payoff.

Melissa: Fair. And then I think the other thing is what's top of mind for you that's that's not immediate payoff, but worth at some point you'll probably start heading there once you've gotten some of the quick wins.

Ernie: Yeah, so with ChatGPT, there's a thing, now this is if you pay, and which I should have mentioned, you should be paying the twenty dollars a month, you can create what are called custom GPTs. And I like to think of these as sort of the AI equivalent of an SOP. We still need SOPs for things that are done in with, you know, physical action. And so SOPs are documented, you know, that way is not going away. But if, for example, like in writing my, um, LinkedIn post, that's an SOP. There's an SOP like, ‘Ernie writes his LinkedIn post like this.’

Well, if I were to try to describe how I write them and get all of the, you know, essence of it boiled down to some principles or whatever, how are people supposed to execute on that? How am I supposed to execute on that? But if I tell the AI, look, here are five AI LinkedIn posts that I've written that I think are the ones to use to model, tell me what you think are the essence of these posts. And it'll tell you. 

And you go, great, I can see that makes sense or hey, no, I don't want you to do that. And then when it locks it in, you can go and create a custom GPT and give it that instruction set and say, when I feed you content, you're going to output a LinkedIn post using this methodology. But it's not a template, it's not a set of instructions. It's AI's version of knowing how to do it. And a lot of the things that we do are more like that than following some very rigid, formulaic, step-by-step process.

Melissa: Is this different than, I think it is different. I just don't, I haven't, I haven't messed around with custom GPTs, but how is it different than a project? You give instructions in a project within ChatGPT.

Ernie: Yeah, so they there's overlap. A project can have its own instructions. Projects are useful if you want to collect chats about that topic, whereas the custom GPT is a standalone thing that you use. You can use a custom GPT inside of a project, or you can make the project such that when you query it and do things, it acts like a custom GPT. And all of this is being is evolving

 So I'm pretty sure that what's going to be happening is these custom GPTs are sort of agents, right? They do a very specialized thing. You call them up manually now, but down the road, it'll be automatically, and they do their job. And then maybe that job leads to another job that a different custom GPT needs to do. And you need to train them in for these different types of jobs separately, because when you start to muddy the waters and say, okay, you can do this, but then I also want you to do this, they start to fall apart. Right? So they need to be told to do very specific things. 

So a skill, and this is, you know, on the list of Richard Susskind's, you know, whatever he calls them, you know, we can label it knowledge worker, no-code coder, is thinking, oh, this is a place where a custom GPT or a project would be useful to me or to my team. I shall create this, and then I shall improve it, or my team will create it and we will improve it. That like thinking like that instead of thinking, oh, I'll just do it, or I'll create an SOP, or I'll let them do it, and I'll worry about it. No, you need to be thinking about where you can create these agentic AI bots to do things for you.

Melissa: Yeah, very cool. More of a, um, in-the-weeds question, but when you make a custom GPT, does it show up somewhere in your sidebar? 

Ernie: Yes. So you, there's a collection of them in the sidebar, they'll say GPTs. And you can see some of them, if you've created a bunch, it'll put the most popular ones that you use. But you can call any of them very quickly using at, and then you start to type the name, just like in Slack or any of these tools, where you start, and that's like a power move. Like, that's the thing that I remember hearing, and then I forgot about it. And then when I saw it used again, I thought, oh, that's my solution because otherwise, trying to go navigate manually, laboriously, go find that GPT is a pain in the ass. But when you can call it up very quickly inside of whatever chat you're in and then switch gears and go to a different GPT, that's game-changing.

Melissa: Do you, do you name yours names of like people?

Ernie: Um, some people I've heard do that. Whatever you can remember is the thing to do. For me, it's easier to remember what the task is. So I have them named that way.

Melissa: Like I was just thinking, I don't know, for some reason, with your LinkedIn stuff, the word Lana came to mind. At Lana, please. I don't know. And also, I mean, this is something that I'm learning and I'll get better at, but you read a lot about agents and you just, you've been, we've been seeing things about like they are real team members along with your team, and that you can incorporate them in ways, which sounds crazy at the moment. I have a feeling a year from now, it'll be laughable. Well, of course, that's what people do, you know? But um, that's that's where my head went, was having names for these bots.

Ernie: Yeah. And you said something about like they increase capability. So there was a there was a TV show back when I was a kid called The Six Million Dollar Man with Lee Majors. And you know, it was like he could do all this amazing stuff because he'd been in an accident and they replaced like his arms and his legs with these prosthetic devices that were super powerful, and he could run faster, and he could jump higher, and he could beat people up and lift heavy objects.

Basically, it was like Superman, but this was all because his limbs had been replaced. I think of AI as like the cognitive version of that. Like you can do more with your mind using these tools, but it has to amplify something.

If what you're giving it is low-level, there's not a lot of amplification going on. But if you're thinking through and thinking better, it's amplifying that. So when lawyers say, well, I'm afraid my job's going to disappear, it will if it's very low level thinking that you're doing, but if you're thinking at a higher level, you're going to be ahead of the tsunami.

Melissa: This is so cool. I love talking about this stuff. I was just having a conversation with a friend, her kids are middle school going into high school. And so AI is a big part of the conversation, and trying to… the fear for parents, especially with kids that age, is that the your brain doesn't have to work the way it used to have to work. And the language that she used is mush. Like, if your brain doesn't have to do this, then it doesn't have the ability to do that, then it's there's mush there.

You know, I can see that because that's from our current position, yes, I can see what they're saying. But the brain will be used differently. It's not that it won't be used, it'll be used differently. And I'm so curious what that means for our evolution as a species. But things are happening faster and faster. So it's that's such a fascinating conversation and just yeah, the world is full of wonder, man.

Ernie: I think the brain turning to mush is more of a problem if people are saying, well, I'm forced to do these things with my brain, which trains it to do certain things. And if I'm no longer forced to do those things, my brain will turn to mush. Yeah, I suppose that is true, but like you can, right, you're right.

You can use your brain for different things. Like if you want to learn to speak a language, there's AI tools to learn a language. You learn it faster. You want to learn to play bridge, there's tools to let you learn to play bridge. You like you can learn a lot of things. But if one is not curious and inquisitive and doesn't want to learn, I don't know.

Melissa: Right. Right. I mean, my son, who's five and a half, I downloaded this just thinking I was ahead of the game, just so funny how this works. I downloaded a typing tutor. My husband was like, he's not going to need that. He's just not going to need that. I thought, wait a minute, is that true? So anyway.

Ernie: Well, you're still training his brain, so that's good.

Melissa: Yes, that's true. Yeah. So funny. Man, Ernie, thank you so much. What a resource you are for law firm owners. And I'm so glad your community exists. I'm so glad you were willing to come on and talk about your viral post. Very cool. Yeah, again, everyone can join your Inner Circle.

Ernie: Yeah, it's easy to join.

Melissa: Be a part of, sit in on these workshops. Yeah.

Ernie: Yeah. Come be part of it. You know, you're you've been in the Inner Circle. I think you're still in there. And um, yeah, it's a good group. It's a good group of people. You know, if I had been only around lawyers, this nice and fun to be around, I might still be practicing law.

Melissa: That is, that's true. The people you attract are pretty remarkable. That's for sure.

Ernie: Same for you. Same for you. That's why we get along.

Melissa: Yeah. Yes. Yes. I agree. Thank you for coming on. And next time we shouldn't wait so long to do this. It's been a while since I've had you on, and I hope we can do this more.

Hey, want to watch the video of this episode? Head over to Velocity Work’s YouTube channel. You’ll find the link in the show notes.

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