Welcome back to trust issues only the kind that make you richer. Today, I am so excited to have a guest, which is Jesse frye. So can a robot write a will? Should chatgpt be your attorney. Today's guest Jesse frye says the future of law is already here, but it's not what you think. He's an executive coach with AI expertise, and he's here to unpack what AI can do, what it shouldn't, and how it can impact lawyers, legal services and beyond. So Coach Jesse, because I feel weird calling you anything else. Tell us about yourself. Why should we care what you have to say? Yeah, thank
you, Ruma, for having me. You can still call me coach, even though I'm not coaching you, but that's okay. So obviously I have a background working in the legal space, so I worked with probably about 100 plus law firms from 2020 through 2025, and now I'm actually working in the generative and agentic AI world. So I'm spending my days literally looking at use cases, helping organizations uncover opportunities to utilize AI, but also really starting to uncover agentic AI, which we can talk a little bit more about.
Okay, cool. So tell me how you went from working with lawyers to now agentic AI,
yeah. I mean, I think as AI started kind of coming in. You know, AI has been around forever, right? And surprisingly, AI has been around for more than 20 years. A lot of people are not aware of that, but what we're really starting to see is generative AI, and that's became really taken us from a space of machine learning, which is what we've been using historically, to now really being able to put it at the fingertips of every single one of us. So when that started happening, I got really excited about the technology and about really the possibilities of this technology and what role it plays in all of our lives. And so I had an opportunity, you know, life, life has a way of throwing new things sometimes. And I went through Hurricane Helene down here in North Carolina, and gave me some perspective on what I wanted to do. And I had a friend of mine that was already working in this space, and he and I talked, and now I am working not a lot with law firms. We are working with some law firms in this space, mostly working with banks, financial institutions and also some medical companies. We're also doing some really cool things outside of those spaces, but that's why you should listen to me, because I deal with AI and work with AI every single day.
Okay, so agentic, AI, in my mind, I see, like, these little, you know, like, I think of, what is that website like rep lit, no, not replica or N, 8n. 8n, right, that's the big thing now, where people can build actual agents, is that what you're referring to as agentic? Ai, yeah,
there. So there's a lot of agent builders, so generative, AI, is only a couple years old, right? So what, we're doing with agentic AI. I want you to think about agentic AI as a way to augment your day to day. And agents can do things. I'll just use you as an example, as a law firm owner, and you have a team of people, but there's still tasks that you personally are doing, but also your team that are doing that could really be augmented with AI, such as you might have a legal assistant or a virtual assistant that's managing your inbox. You can build an agent that literally manages your inbox, just like that virtual assistant. You can have multi agentic environments, so I'll use intake as a great example. You can have one agent handle your intake, from form, online form, to booking, to sending emails, to sending a Slack message to the attorney, letting them know that they actually have a consultation scheduled, to then notifying the actual practice management solution and create automatically said, we have a matter. Create the matter to doing follow ups to then recording the meeting. So you could have another one that, once the meeting is scheduled and started, it automatically goes in and starts recording the meeting, transcribing the meeting. It then trend records, transcribes. It can then take that and send a summary to the attorney. It could then take that summary and also send a summary to the client of what you actually talked about. And then also another agent could take that same transcript and actually create a task inside of Clio. Could actually create a matter in Clio, or my case, or any of these tools, right? And it really is multi. Agentic workflows, so it removes a lot of the administrative burden. It could also you have a collections agent. Then if your practice management solution says that this particular invoice is past due, it could actually send out a notification to Slack, to your collections person on your team saying it's past due, but also send out emails to the client and also provide notifications to other people in the organizations until the person actually pays it. And once it pays it, it could actually send out a receipt to the client, but also then notify the attorney that the client has paid in full. So there's a lot of things with agents. Agentic AI could write emails. It could do with rpa, which is like automation, think like Zapier, right? Zapier uses similar technology. Zapier is also adding or using generative AI, so now you're building these agents that can do workflows, can do automation, can write emails. It can do a lot of things. It could write descriptions into a spreadsheet. There is so many possibilities that agentic AI can do for you as an individual, but also a business. So
that all sounds great. And I feel like that's pretty much what you know, everyone's been saying. And a lot of people are like, so many jobs are going to be eliminated because of agentic AI, yep, even to the point where people are like, like, lawyers, you were coming for your jobs too. And I remember when you, I think our last retreat coaching retreat, you taught a session on running $100 million firm with just three people, yeah. And I was like, how is that possible? And now I'm like, putting two and two together to be like, Oh, he meant these little bots that are going to be crawling in all of my systems. It's like, literally, how I think about
it, yeah. So I'm going to address a couple of different things that you essentially were inferring in your question. So Will people lose their jobs? Yes, at some point in the future, people are going to lose their jobs. I see more jobs basically being lost in in traditional transactional customer service type of roles. I'll give you a good example. I won't use the actual company's name just for the sake of privacy, but think of a big, big insurance companies out there, they want they have a lot of people that handle claims. Right as you can imagine, from everything from FMLA to unemployment insurance to medical insurance, they're handling a lot of them. Some of these departments have more than 1500 claims agents, handling those inbound calls, handling the processing and taking that claim from claim all the way to payment or to rejection, right, depending on the situation, that is a great opportunity to use agentic workflows to actually Lim reduce the workforce. Now it's not great, but it's going to happen, right? But I also recently saw somebody talking about, I saw a video on LinkedIn of a Chick Fil, a robot that delivered food to somebody's house, and they're like, Well, that just eliminated somebody's job because that driver of one of those food delivery services no longer is delivering the Chick fil A to the house. And my argument was, yes, it removed a $12 an hour job, but it potentially created a 60 to $70,000 job, because somebody has to basically maintain that bot. Somebody has to manage that bot. And there's probably teams of people that have been been created because those bots have been created now, those are robots, right? Like, literally autonomous robots that go to your house and deliver you your spicy chicken sandwich for you in your law practice, you need to be thinking of it a little differently, rather than the fear based response this. This goes into the coaching conversation. Rather than thinking of it from a fear based response, you need to be thinking of it as an opportunity response, but also thinking of it. How can you differentiate your firm? I guarantee you anybody listening to this podcast, whether you're a law firm owner or not, go on Google, look at law firm Google reviews and tell me, out of 100 how many of them have five star, impeccable reviews? There's quite a few, but there's equally quite a few that actually have terrible customer service, and it really comes down to not delivering great customer service, because not that the attorney is like going out of there, away or out of the way to create a terrible customer service. They're just stacked up. They have too many cases, too many files. They're busy. They're trained to run their firm as a solo when our agents give them the ability to run their firm in a little bit more intentional way. A and actually have autonomous agents doing some of those repetitive tasks. So now they can actually six, you know, provide great customer service to their clients, and you're not removing jobs. You could still bring in a legal assistant that's going to basically make sure that all those things are working and agents are going to make mistakes. I mean, go to chat GPT and do research for case law in your practice? No,
I don't. I don't
come back with bad, potentially bad stuff right now, right deep research is getting better. There's some people using deep, deep research compared to some existing legal tools on the market, and it's actually showing better results, but the attorney still has to be there to verify that the legal case law is real, that the information they're providing is real and accurate. And that's not going to go away with bots. There still needs as long as you have a regulatory body like the medic, you know, American Medical Association, the American Bar Association, that are regulating what your job is doing, you're not going to get rid of your job because you're still relevant in your space. It's when they write a law to say that bots can do your job. That's when your job is going to be eliminated. But that's not going to happen anytime soon.
Yeah, no. I definitely thought of AI as more of like a tool. But, you know, one of the things I find is that just the people around me are very hesitant about using AI, you know, and I'm kind of like, how do I get my team to feel more comfortable? How do I get them to want to use it in the day to day? Because I'm such, like, an efficiency person. I'm like, if there's an easier, better way to do it, why not do it? But I face a lot of pushback from my staff, just because, like, we have an SOP. They're like, I want to follow the SOP. I don't want to let go of steps three to five. You know?
Yeah, I think that's very fair. People are afraid. People are always afraid of something they don't understand, and when they don't understand something, then there, there's two mindsets that go along with that. First mindset is, I want to learn it. You've got that mindset. I need to learn this because I don't know about it, and I think it's going to make my job easier, right? Work smarter, not harder. The other mindset is, I don't know anything about it, and I've read articles online that AI is going to replace all these jobs. I don't want to deal with it, right? Because it's literally sticking your head in the sand and pretending like you're not hearing it. That's not doesn't mean it's going to go away, right? It's not going to stop. So the best approach, funny enough, I actually taught a CLE yesterday on this very topic. And we talked about, not we, but I talked a lot about in the training, of starting with simple use cases. And it was really about starting at the simple level, building your knowledge. So kind of building a ladder, and when you're at that bottom rung of the ladder, and you don't, you haven't even really used AI, you need to find those use cases that you can use that will make people feel comfortable. So the best thing to do is, is identify the things you literally do every single day that and you know, it's not the downplay the people that are doing the work, but literally a monkey could do, right? And if you can find that and actually say, hey, what if I took this thing? Do you love this thing? Do you love this task? Well, no, I hate this task, right? Like I hate doing meeting summaries. I hate sending out weekly project updates on AI projects that I'm working on. So what did I do? I create AI bots for both So it literally ingests the transcripts from the meeting. It takes that transcript, writes it in a way that I told it that I want it to be written. I do a simple review of it to make sure it's accurate, because sometimes it's not, sometimes it makes things up, and then I literally hit the push button. Now, as it gets more accurate and as you prompt it, you could literally have it do that whole thing and send out the email, and you don't even have to look at it, because it's going to get better. My meeting summaries literally lay out what the status of the meeting is. Because it pulls the data, it knows what all the tasks are, because it's connected to a project management tool, and it goes out and looks at the meeting notes from the previous like week and summarizes it sends it out to the people that are in my distribution list. And it goes out right? I don't have to do those things. It's things I hate. So find the things that you don't want to do that are repetitive administrative tasks start there, and then you can slowly go up the ladder to more complex things. But if you're going to hide from it, if you have people on your team that are hiding from it, you need to basically tell them, were you around when? Like, well, maybe a lot of your people aren't, but maybe when Google first came out right, younger people may not recognize that, but there was a day when Google was not. Around when Google came out, everybody was so afraid of it, and then now it's literally an ingrained part of our life. Chatgpt, Claude, Gemini, grok, all these tools are going to be just another part of our life, and we need to get comfortable with
them. Yeah. I mean, I feel like AI is changing every day. I'm subscribed to so many different newsletters and all of these, like, systems that you talk about make total sense. But even myself, I'm like, where do I go to learn about this? How do I, like, figure out how to build something? You know, because, like for me, I've always basically thrown a person at completing something, and now it's such a mindset shift of like, wait, what? What can we actually automate in this process? And what should we automate, you know, in the process? But then I'm like, how, like, how do I do this? And I know, yeah, like, I know there's so many, like, consultants out there and people who are, like, selling all of these offers. Of like, I will build you, build you an AI bot. And, like, I've done some like, info sessions, or just like, you know, to hear what they have to say, and they literally start speaking another language to me. And I'm like, with how fast it's changing, I'm like, what you like, I did a program to build a GPT now, like, the GPT is just old. Like, that's not even, you know. So, like, how do you it's crazy? How do you keep on where
it's funny? I was having a conversation with an AI engineer yesterday, and, or maybe a day before, and we had met with a company in the UK three months ago, talking about this project that they wanted to do and using AI and what we talked to them about three months ago, maybe two months ago, isn't even relevant today, because it's already changed, right, right? So now it's changed for the better. It's making it a little easier. We would have had to do a lot of Python coding in order to build what they wanted inside of like AWS, you know, which is Amazon's cloud, cloud infrastructure, whereas now it's actually there's some newer technology that actually makes this a lot easier. So to your your question is, is like, how do I learn about it? How do I know what I can do when it comes to use cases? I think the best way to do it is really pay attention to where your pain points are in your law firm, where you know, if you have clients that are calling the firm and they're angry upset, really dig deep and understand why are people upset? If your employees come to you and they're like, I'm really frustrated. This is this frustrates me. This how this process, or the lack of process, it really makes slows down our thing. Or if you're always asking an employee, where's this thing, rather than having the thing, then those are opportunities, what I call friction points. Those are friction points in the business that we need to pay attention to. Those are where the opportunity really are so or where are the mundane, kind of boring things that could literally be removed off immediately that are easy, like there was actually the the insurance company, as I gave you the example, when people call inbound, there was actually going to be an audio AI that answers the call, and it would have the conversation with the person, collect the information and actually take that information and put it into a database and actually follow that process downstream. For it, to do it, we you could do a lot of, do a lot of the same things, where you have, like, let's say you struggle to really gather information to have a very clear estate plan, or, right, you know, you're, let's say you're going to build an estate plan for somebody. Look at your estate plan workflow and look at where the friction points are, identify what the friction points are, and see if AI could actually help you. What takes the longest time during an estate plan? It's probably drafting, doing the documentation, right that probably takes the longest period of time. Well, you have a history of the same things, right? You've done 100 of these. Take those history. They become basically blocks of data that you can then use called rag, which is called retrieval, augmented generation, which then doesn't use llms like chat GPT or Gemini or Claude, it doesn't use that to write the content. It uses historical data that you've taught it. So there's tools out there that you could teach it with your own data, and then it's more accurate, and that actually saves your time, but also eliminates some of the concerns that you have in using AI to draft legal documents. There's nothing wrong. Like there's been several courts and court cases where people have been caught using AI, and the judges have said it's okay to use AI, but it's your job. It's your job to verify that content, right? It's your job as an attorney that if you're any. Use AI to write your brief. You need to read the brief to make sure that it's accurate. If you're going to use AI to include case law, you need to verify that your case law exists. So I think just looking at those friction points, finding opportunity and starting somewhere, like, don't be afraid of
it. Okay, this has been so awesome, I think we need a part two. So we are going to continue that, and I'm excited to chat some more
awesome. Let's go. We can talk a little bit more about estate planning and all the fun things that you're doing, and how can we bring
AI into the fold? Yes, I have several more questions about that awesome. Let's go.
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