Morris Tabush & Darragh Fitzpatrick | Finding Clarity Amidst Law Firm Technology Overload

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer's Edge Podcast, where I sit down with successful attorneys, legal marketing specialists, business leaders, and authors to talk about how lawyers and law firms can grow and sustain healthy, profitable businesses.

Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, and I'm back with another episode of The Lawyer’s Edge Podcast. I have some fabulous guests today who are here to talk to us about technology concerns that law firms have or should have.

My guests today are Morris Tabush, founder of Tabush Group, and Darragh Fitzpatrick, a partner in Tabush Group and its executive vice president. Morris is a community activist, tech hobbyist, and serial entrepreneur who can never leave well enough alone.

Growing up passionate about technology and helping others, his parents bought him his first computer when he was seven years old. In 2000, he turned that passion into a business by founding Tabush Group with a mission to simplify IT for businesses.

Morris oversees all aspects of the firm's business and focuses on delivering outstanding service to clients. Darragh Fitzpatrick was born in Limerick, Ireland, and grew up in Parteen. Am I saying that right?

Darragh Fitzpatrick: That's correct.

Elise Holtzman: Okay, good. As a teenager, he aspired to be a consultant, helping business owners solve their issues more efficiently. After earning a BSC and computer science and working in IT, Darragh focused on understanding the business value of technology, particularly for small businesses.

A chance meeting with Morris Tabush in Brooklyn led to their partnership at Tabush Group. Together, they built the company on the principle of providing IT solutions that align with clients' values and business needs. Morris and Darragh, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge.

Darragh Fitzpatrick: Thank you, Elise. Good to be here.

Morris Tabush: Thank you, Elise. Nice to see you again.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, I'm thrilled to have you guys here. The three of us tend to run into each other at conferences, and we've been on panels together, so we've had a lot of fun doing that, but I've never had the opportunity to get you in a room and grill you on all of this technology stuff that you're both so good at.

I want to start out because anybody who listens to this podcast knows that while I'm interested in technology and know how important it is, I'm not exactly what you would call a technology guru. Before we even get started, Morris, would you do me a favor and explain to me and to everybody listening, what is it exactly that the Tabush Group does?

Morris Tabush: So, Elise, it's funny you asked me that, growing up, not only did I love technology, but I was always, and I still am fascinated by how things work. I can't just see something and say, “Oh, that's a great device,” or, “That's a great Broadway show,” and like, “Oh, I love it,” I have to know how it works. What's going on behind the scenes? What makes things happen to a point that I'll be sitting at a Broadway show and I'm wondering, “Wow, how many hands do they have behind the set to change over the sets? How many amps of power does it take to run that lighting rig above?”

These are the questions that are going through. I love to take things apart and figure out how they work. What we do for business is I would say we're both the architects and the engineers behind the scenes.

The first thing is we're the technical architects for our clients. They come to us with their business needs, what works, what doesn't work, what they need, and where the business is headed, and we help them figure out the best product, services, solutions, and recipes to make everything happen.

How do we use technology to meet their business needs? Then we work as the engineers to put all of that together and run it and manage it and all the things that are on behind the scenes to make it work every day so that every single person can sit down wherever they are and whatever device they're on and do what they need to do. There's obviously a lot happening behind the scenes to make all that work and keep it working. We design it, we build it, we maintain it. That's the simplest way to explain it.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, that’s really helpful. I know both of you spend all of your time eating, sleeping, and breathing technology for law firms. What are the technology trends that you are seeing in the legal industry these days? There is so much conversation about technology.

I think there's a lot of noise out there. I think among some law firm leaders, some confusion or anxiety maybe that they're not getting the right things in the right places. What is going on these days in the industry? What are the kinds of technologies that we should be paying attention to?

Morris Tabush: You can't talk about technology today. You can't even open the newspaper today without reading about AI. AI is all the rage. It's all the buzz. Everybody is very concerned with what is AI, how do I use AI beyond just popping something into ChatGPT? More importantly, what's it going to do to my job? What's going to do to my business in the future? I almost want to say let's pause on AI for a minute because that's a whole discussion in and of itself.

Darragh Fitzpatrick: Yeah, I think one of the key things we hear a lot of people wanting to attain and AI is going to help that is access to the right information quickly. One of the things we hear about needing to understand how to leverage technology is to get information out of systems.

You have your practice management platform, you have your financial system, you have your document management system, how are you going to get all the right data, the different KPI points that are going to help you understand the efficiencies or where you need to improve aspects of your practice.

That's a thing we hear an awful lot about in some of the conferences that we go to. Understanding those types of reporting tools, one of the ones that a lot of people are developing now is Microsoft Power BI. That takes generally a consultant to be able to deliver on that.

Other people are building products that snap into each of these different types of systems and pull those pieces of information out of those systems presenting them in really understandable dashboards that allow you to put in different data points there. But I think that taking the right data out to present to the different people who make the decisions in the firm is really important.

Elise Holtzman: Darragh, I think I hear you, you were talking about KPIs, which for those who don't know are Key Performance Indicators. When you talk about that kind of information, are you talking largely about information about how the firm is running?

So things like, “How many new clients have we got? What the matters were about? How much money we brought in? How much money we build? How profitable we are?” Those sorts of things, or are you talking about the kinds of information that lawyers need to gather in order to effectively serve their clients from a legal matter perspective or perhaps both?

Darragh Fitzpatrick: I think it's all of the above. Morris, I'm sure you would agree that most systems, if they have their shortcomings, are generally getting the information out in really meaningful way for many different aspects of the business or for the firm.

Morris Tabush: Right. We do so much in our computers right now and in our software systems. There's so much data being collected, both data that we, the humans, are inputting into the systems, as well as metadata, sort of about the way information is input into the systems.

Like Darragh was saying, there are so many tools out there to extract that data and show you insights about your business that you never even realized. Law firms are starting to use that data just to optimize how the firm works. Like you said, Elise, what else can we be doing to better service our clients? What are our clients asking us for? How can we better get that information without manually researching it all the time?

Elise Holtzman: There are still a lot of law firms, understandably so, that are making decisions more based on their gut, or what they're feeling, or what people in the management committee are talking about, or maybe bright, shiny objects that they hear consultants talking about.

That's why I think that if law firms can start using this technology, from what I’m understanding, they can make significantly better decisions. Are you seeing law firms getting excited about that and wanting to sign on? Are you seeing law firms who are reluctant to start implementing these technologies? What is the appetite, do you think, in the legal community for this onslaught of technological availability?

Darragh Fitzpatrick: Well, I think if we just focus on that reporting aspect, or let's just call it attaining the right information from your different systems that actually impact your firm and the decisions you can make, we go to certain managing partner groups together where we connect.

A lot of what has been shown to the managing partners that they get excited about is the right data on multiple different aspects of the grade they need to hit. Of course, there are the standard ones like there's realization and there's billing rates and there's billable hours, but there's a lot more to that that they can utilize that the standard legal applications don't provide.

Just tripping even on from that, we do this a lot in our business. We actually dedicated a team to it last year, but automating a lot of tedious workflows that have always been part and parcel of the firm's operation, that's another area on the flip side. You get all the information, you can see where you can improve, now you've got a leverage technology that allows you to become more lean and more effective.

There's plenty of tools out there now and a lot of tools that you may already have that allow you to automate these processes. A standard complaint that I hear in many law firms is the intake process.

Client intake is hugely laborious at a law firm, so how can you take that from being a job that requires touches from six different people in your business in your firm to two? That's an immense difference in change in how your firm operates.

Morris Tabush: But I think something that's very important to talk about here, there's a misconception. Technology will not make your firm successful. What makes your firm successful is you've got to be really good at what you do. You've got to have a great culture and you've got to have good clients. That's what will make you successful.

Technology will make you or can make you more successful, and can make your firm better. I've seen a few too many times firms come to us, they want to implement all these new systems, but they've got much bigger problems to worry about.

If you've got a bad culture, technology is not going to help change yet. If you don't have clients, technology is not going to fix that. That's something that I stand behind a lot is these technologies are tools to help you be better at what you do.

Elise Holtzman: I love that point because, again, I think that there is this concept of the bright, shiny object. All of a sudden, in the last several years, everyone's talking to law firms about technology.

Understandably, law firms want to be competitive. They want to be able to adapt. They want to be nimble. They want to support their clients and they want to grow. So it can be very overwhelming, I think, for people to figure out what makes sense and what doesn't. What I hear you saying is going back to foundational principles before you buy the newest, hottest thing on the block is really important.

Which technologies in general, maybe not by name, but the types of technologies, do the two of you think are absolutely essential for law firms to have? If I'm starting out, what are the few technologies that I really need in order to lay that solid technological foundation for my firm?

Morris Tabush: I would say the first two most basics are a good practice management system and a good document management system. Now, practice management, a lot of firms think of it as time and billing. Yes, of course, without time capture and billing, you don't have a firm, but good practice management systems do much more than just your time and billing.

They're tracking the status of your matters. They're doing docketing and calendaring. They're showing when things are past the deadline. They're showing clients that maybe should be in a red flag status because of things that are going on.

They're monitoring utilization rates. They're really helping to facilitate all the things that a firm must do to operate. On the document management side, there are still firms, believe it or not, that just use a shared drive. They have a shared drive, a P or an S drive with a set of folders and subfolders and sub-subfolders, and it just becomes too much of a mess.

A proper document management system lets lawyers find the right documents, track revisions of documents, collaborate with opposing counsel, and really be organized. Those are the two most basic things, I think, that every firm needs to have. Again, you'd be surprised how many times we come across firms that are just using the most basic time capture system to track and bill time. And that's it.

Darragh Fitzpatrick: You have to make sure that, and this is a time of going back to basics a little bit like Morris did a minute ago, is one of the things that's happened as there's been a lot of distribution of people through the pandemic, even though that's a type of, maybe coming back a different way towards more hybrid now, is firms got very tool happy.

You don't need lots of different applications to be done, for instance, by different practice groups to achieve the legal services that the firm wants to deliver. Now, more than ever, you can have singular platforms or applications with one key function that works for every practice group in the organization.

Less is more when it comes to technology. Ultimately, Morris, it's on our website actually now, what do people need to achieve in their technology? You keep it simple at the beginning. You need things to work.

People can sit down at the desk, and turn on the desktop they use, and that needs to be able to run the applications they use to work. They need to do that from anywhere. Things need to be accessible. I need to be able to sit at my desk here at home like I am today, walk into my office and do the same tomorrow, or work at a client's like I did on Friday and have the same experience.

Everything should be very simple. I shouldn't have to jump through hoops when I'm working from my client's desk or from my home here compared to when I'm in the office.

Then lastly, that's all got to be done in a very secure manner. I think when you look at that and you just take red lines from there, it means that technology is complex enough. You don't need to make it more complex. You should be able to put things in place in single blocks for different functions in the business that take care of all of those things.

Morris Tabush: But unfortunately, Darragh, talking about technology should be simple. Something that has become much more complex over the years is cybersecurity. Elise, you mentioned earlier, what are the trends we're seeing in the industry?

Cyber is a trend. It's not a trend that people are doing because they want to. People want better systems. They want more automation. They want AI. They need cyber. We all know that the threat landscape has become wildly different than it was.

I like to tell people 25 years ago when we were first starting out, we sold Norton AntiVirus. That's all you did. If you have Norton AntiVirus, you're good. Today, that's not the case, unfortunately.

Without delving in, every law firm needs very good cyber for two reasons. Number one, because they are a target. As small and as, they may say, “Well, we're not Skadden, Arps,” doesn't matter. If you're a human and you use a computer, you're a target, but law firms particularly because of the sensitive nature of the work they're doing and the money they're moving through if there are certain types of law, but also for compliance reasons, because if you want to do business with certain types of clients, they're going to require that you have certain cyber controls in place.

Our clients get what we call DDQs Due Diligence Questionnaires on a regular basis from their clients. No two DDQs look the same. Very often after you spend an hour or two working on it, they are similar. But everyone is asking more and more questions about the systems you have, the policies you have in place, and the documentation you keep. If you don't meet the standards, well, somebody else is going to get that legal work next quarter, not you.

Elise Holtzman: Let's say I am a law firm leader, such as a managing partner, a member of the management committee, or the technology committee. I come to you guys and I say, “Listen. I've got these things in place. We've got a practice management tool that we really like. We've got a document management system that we're comfortable with. We feel really good about our cybersecurity. We know that all of our people can find the stuff they need regardless of where they are in the world. We're ready for the next level,” what does that next level start to look like?

Is it different for different law firms? Is it similar across the board? What should I, as a law firm leader, who has put those foundational elements into place be thinking about next?

Darragh Fitzpatrick: Oh, I'm sorry, I don't mean to laugh, but the first thing that you should do is do what you exactly said because nearly more than half of the time, that process of an IT committee being in place and the process of the IT person being engaged in that discussion doesn't happen.

Elise Holtzman: Right. So my hypothetical is very hypothetical?

Darragh Fitzpatrick: That happens. It generally happens that a committee is formed immediately around the back of a problem and then the IT person is holding it and says, “What do we do to address this?”

The first thing is to do what you actually said, is to have an IT committee, have people responsible for informing the board, and be a conduit to your IT team. That should also include your operations people.

The people who are seeing things from the floor every day can really identify the day-to-day issues that are occurring and make them reach the bigger problem. That would be the first thing I'd say is make sure that that actually happens.

Now, the next question will be once you're in a place where that's happening, I feel like that's a very iterative process. It's very rare that a new piece of technology is introduced and you do a complete 180 in any part of your firm.

But if you have someone who's involved and taking a business perspective and talking to the experts about how the firm is operating or where we can leverage solutions, like Morris mentioned a few minutes ago, IT doesn't build a business, it supports the business as is and gives it the ability to scale or grow or improve if the right people, right clients, right process, right place.

I think we mentioned AI. If you have a committee, if you have the right technical expertise and you have your operations people identifying areas that could be improved, now you can take practical steps to leverage that thing, whatever that aspect of AI is.

I think AI is a perfect example of where that's not happening. Everybody's talking about using AI, excited about what it could do, very different depending on the part of the firm you're working, if you're a managing partner, you're going to see AI being leveraged in your business in one way.

If you're an operations person, you're going to look at it being leveraged in another way. There's no clear plan. Ultimately, nobody really knows what to do with AI right now. I think the big change in the market there in the last two weeks or three weeks, is reflecting how everybody's feeling.

Morris Tabush: I have a little bit of a different answer, Elise, if a firm came to us and said, “All these things are great. We like our software. We like our systems. Our processes are good. We're confident in our security. What should we do next?” first thing I would say is, “Well, if all that's great, then you probably don't need to be speaking to us.”

You're not going to call a plumber when everything is going great in your house and the water pressure is good and there are no leaks. But if they said, “We have IT budget, we have some money to burn in our budget. What should we do with it?” the first thing I would say is from a cyber perspective, I'm sure you're confident in your security. That's probably because they have to click on a multi-factor link every time they log in and they haven't been breached in a while.

Get a cyber security audit. Go hire a firm to specialize to come in, do some white hat hacking and penetration testing, and see, just because you think you're secure, you might not be. It's better to have a good guy find the holes than a bad guy.

The second thing I would do is do an end-user survey. Go out to your lawyers, to your associates, and ask them some detailed questions. Just because you, the committee, think everything is great, there might be some rumblings amongst the staff. See what they think.

Maybe they have ideas of what could be better or what doesn't work so well or what they're hearing from their peers. There might be room for improvement or at the very least training, training your users on how to better utilize the systems you have.

Most firms we see are only taking advantage of 10% to 20% of the features in any application, whether it's doc management or practice management, which is okay, but if everything's going great, this is the time to see what else is out there, what new features have been launched recently that nobody's aware of.

Darragh Fitzpatrick: I'm going to push back a little and say the things you're saying are extra should be done all the time. I say you should always be reviewing, always be assessing. But the problem is, and we're agreeing with you, the problem is that when you don't have generally people in the partner level involved in any way in IT, except when there's a problem, none of that will ever happen. There'll never be extra money in the budget because everything's considered being good. That's the juxtaposition we find ourselves in a lot.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, I think what I hear both of you saying—and I'm reading between the lines here, so correct me if I'm wrong—is that this stuff is not a nice-to-have anymore. The basics are absolutely essential for law firms and that if nobody is paying attention to this and you implement things and say, “Oh, we feel better, we implemented some things,” there’s nothing new going on.

Nobody’s learning, nobody’s deciding what’s coming and whether we should have budget for it. Nobody’s consulting with the staff or the associates or the partners to find out on a day-to-day basis, does this stuff work for you and what would you like to see us make more efficient?

If you have somebody responsible for doing this, not just when there's an emergency, but in terms of actually leading the firm into the future and from a position of strength rather than from behind the eight ball or from behind an emergency, that's what really makes the most sense.

Morris Tabush: Exactly.

Elise Holtzman: You've mentioned AI a couple of times, and I know also there's been a lot of talk about law firms being in the cloud and all of that sort of thing. What's the reality of how important this stuff is? How much should people be worrying about AI and the cloud? That's a lot of what I think a lot of people are hearing being discussed in the technology world.

Morris Tabush: I'm going to speak about cloud first because that's the simpler topic. We're recording this in August 2024. I don't know when it's going to go live. But as of today in August 2024, you should not be worried about the cloud. Cloud has proven itself many times over.

It is more secure, more reliable, and more cost-effective than doing things on-premise. Just to define, if anybody's not sure what I mean by cloud, cloud is when something IT does not live in your facilities, in your offices, on servers or hardware that you own. Instead, it lives out there somewhere.

The simplest example is Microsoft Office 365. Another example is Zoom that we're using right now. Before Zoom, there were on-premise collaboration tools that companies used to use until we all figured out four years ago that, wow, Zoom is cheaper and more reliable than all of them.

All firms, everyone is using cloud. Even if you think you're not using cloud, you are using cloud, even the AMLaw 200 now are starting to move to the cloud. They were always the last adopters of new technology, but I speak with many CIOs at the AMLaw 200, and they all either have or are in the process of adopting cloud and moving their systems over to the cloud.

That's a great thing, because you know what? Our internet connections these days are really fast, really cheap, and really reliable. Cloud makes more sense than ever before. AI on the other end is a whole different subject.

Darragh Fitzpatrick: Well, you know where they connect, Morris, which is interesting is if you're using old on-premise applications and you're spending time learning about AI, well, guess what? When it comes down to leverage it, you're not going to be in a position to.

Morris Tabush: Oh, absolutely.

Darragh Fitzpatrick: AI is not being developed for on-premise applications. It's being developed for the later, greater, more secure cloud apps.

Morris Tabush: That's because all IT development these days is being done in the cloud. You're right. On-premise IT apps, the ones that everyone was using 10, 15 years ago, they still exist, but they remain very similar to the way they were 10 years ago. They're not really changing anymore.

Elise Holtzman: So people really don't need to worry about it because it's here. I mean, it is what it is. If you're not already in the cloud, you're going to be in the cloud.

Morris Tabush: Correct.

Darragh Fitzpatrick: Yeah, classic cars are beautiful, and that's why people have them. But everyone has a nice new car to go from A to B. That's the type where Morris would be proud of that comparison. He's always telling me I need to get better ones. I thought that was a pretty good one, Morris.

But I think that when it comes to AI, as I said, it's all happening, all that development is happening through integrating in cloud apps because it's even simpler for the people developing the technology anyway.

On much larger companies, private development is going to happen on AI anyway but for the standard small to midsize law firm, you want to be preparing your stack to make that next level anyway.

Morris Tabush: Yeah. But as far as AI, I do believe that we're living in an AI bubble right now. Not to say that the bubble is going to burst and AI is going to go away. No, AI is gradually getting baked into everything that we use.

Obviously, ChatGPT is really nice and really cool. I don't know if it's changing anyone's lives other than the people that started OpenAI, but it's definitely useful for different things.

In fact, I just heard from our finance manager that there was a client that owes us some money. She kept emailing them over and over and they weren't responding. Finally, she used ChatGPT last week to say, “How can I write this email differently?” It redid the whole email for her and within five minutes, the client answered and issued us a payment.

It's definitely useful. But we're living in this bubble and just like the dot-com bubble burst, it didn't mean that dot-com went away, it just matured, shook up the market. These are the real ones and this is how it's going to work going forward. That's, I think, what's going to be the case with AI also.

There's too much money being spent and too many companies trying to hype it up. Listen, AI, let's not forget, it's artificial. An artificial anything is not replacing lawyers. At least, it’s not going to replace good lawyers because people hire lawyers for their expertise.

Elise Holtzman: What about the junior lawyers, the paralegals, the things like document review or first drafts of contracts, those sorts of things, are those the sorts of things that you're seeing law firms use AI for? If they are adopting it, what are they using it for?

Darragh Fitzpatrick: I think that would be generative AI, like using Copilot, using ChatGPT, using these types of big OpenAI models, individuals are leveraging them for different things like even what Morris said, generating better emails, reviewing basic contracts, or requiring contracts that could be customized instead of using an app like Word to compare two documents using ChatGPT to do that type of work.

What it's doing right now, I think generative AI is impacting the individual being able to do things a little bit differently. Where AI is not really being used is firm-wide. We're going to use AI as a technology or a solution to this issue that's going to make the entire firm better. That's really the next step.

The easiest way to move toward that next step is to look at the applications you're already using. If you're using a document management platform in the cloud speaking to those people that product specialist and saying, “What are you doing from an AI perspective that I can use in my firm that's going to help me use your application better?” I think that that type of AI model as the next step is probably the way most firms can make a difference.

Elise Holtzman: Are you saying then that lawyers at small to mid-sized law firms can worry less about implementing AI themselves and could be more concerned with talking to their application providers that they're already using and saying, “We're curious about how you're using AI to make what we're already doing even more efficient”?

Darragh Fitzpatrick: Yeah, that's where I think the next step to leveraging AI is. How close that is to being hugely impactful, I'm not 100% sure yet. I haven't really delved into that area. But I know the major players in the document management platform, for instance, are integrating AI into their platform already.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, I think it's important for this to be pointed out because if that's the case, I think it takes a lot of pressure off of law firm leaders who are not technology experts, even if they are doing great things with technology in their firm.

Instead of them having to say, “Oh, my gosh, we've got to implement AI. What are we doing about AI? ChatGPT scares us for a variety of reasons,” they can then say, “Let's go to our existing providers, our technology companies that are really good at what they're doing and they're innovating and they're growing and they're on the cutting edge of what's going on,” like you guys, for example, “and let them help us figure out where AI makes the most sense to be using in our firm.”

Morris Tabush: You want to be careful with AI, as with all technology, not to put the cart before the horse. You don't want to say, what you just said, Elise, “Oh, wow, AI, we have to implement AI,” you don't want to take that approach.

Rather, you want to take the approach of “What's going on in our firm? What are the processes that are laborious, that are manual, that we can just tell, we feel that these are behind the times, they can be improved?”

Then you say, “Can we use AI to do that?” Maybe you can, maybe you can't. Maybe there's just some workflow software or automation that you can put in place. Or maybe you can use AI.

To speak to what Darragh was saying earlier, AI will replace certain tasks or certain human manual tasks, but it will then create others. Because if AI generates a document, if I can say this on the podcast, you sure should better have a human being review that document before it goes out to a client.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, well, we've seen that play out in the press and in court, and it's not pretty.

Morris Tabush: Exactly.

Darragh Fitzpatrick: Yeah.

Elise Holtzman: In addition to what's coming on the AI front, and some of the companies that law firms are working with already in the software systems they're working with already will grow, will have those AI elements to them, what are some of the other things that you think are coming in terms of technology that's going to help law firms do more with less?

Morris Tabush: I think the big thing, again, it's here, but it's only getting better, is integration between different systems. I'm going to disagree with something Darragh said earlier. It's very rare that you'll find a firm that has one application that they live and breathe by, and that runs the entire firm.

No, it's okay to have different systems. Your practice management system, yeah, it can do doc management, but it's not going to do it that well. You have a separate doc management system.

You may have a bankruptcy department that needs its software. You may have an IP department that needs its docketing system, integrating those systems to each other so there's an automated flow of data and triggering of processes. That is key. There are a lot of tools, the term I'm looking for is low-code development. These are systems that allow you to build software without writing code.

There's a bunch of them out there, and they're becoming very, very popular because they're letting people really take advantage of a technology called API, which is almost like a common language that any software can use to talk to any other piece of software.

Basically what it means is the manual things that used to print this report, convert it to Excel, spend three hours modifying it, and then import it, that can be done automatically on a real-time basis. Get this data from this system and if this happens, do these five things in a row, all those things are happening. These are things that we put them in place for our business and we wonder how we ever live without them.

Elise Holtzman: It's funny that you say that because I'm just sitting here thinking as a small business owner myself, I'm just looking along the bottom of my computer screen at the moment and I see all the different things I'm using, simple things.

Like Microsoft Office 365 or whatever they call it now. I've got Zoom. I'm using Outlook. I've got an iCalendar that's connected to a Google Calendar. I'm using Slack. I've got all kinds of different things. Sometimes I wish they would all just talk to each other so that I didn't have to run around moving things back and forth.

Morris Tabush: So they can.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah.

Morris Tabush: They can, and you don't know how to write code to do it. We've built some really cool integrations ourselves for our own systems, like I said. Sometimes we wonder, “How do we ever live without these things?”

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, it's amazing.

Darragh Fitzpatrick: A lot of these different applications actually have pre-built ways of talking to each other. You don't even have to build things yourself, low code or not. They have doors that you can connect to each other. You can buy a plugin that connects this to this.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, listen, a lot of the law firm leaders who are listening to this podcast know a lot more about it than I do, but it just made me laugh because I thought, “Elise, you need to get with the program over here with this integration.”

So I do think it's important because, again, there is so much out there. I think that it can become overwhelming for people. Particularly in small and midsized law firms where leaders understandably might not have the kind of staff that can be devoted to this full-time, I think it's important to know that these things exist and where to turn to get the help with them.

Darragh Fitzpatrick: I think, Elise, another thing that is going to be important, and I'm not going to talk to specific products here, but digitization of your interfacing with your client.

We all know most firms now do document signing online, but what about there's still an awful lot of transition of data between law firm to law firm, client to law firm that is still not digital, that is not being transferred in a secure manner in simple ways.

That's because even in law firms, one attorney is going to transfer it using OneDrive, another attorney is going to transfer some files using Dropbox. Standardization of tools down to a singular type of tool, that's going to create an entirely different experience for your client online.

The more familiar it is for your client to be able to interface with John the attorney in one practice and David the attorney in another across the entire firm, the better the firm is going to be at interfacing with their client. Then communicating with their clients.

A lot of tools are focusing on Zoom itself right now, this whole thing just is happening with their product where they want to be more known as Zoom Workplace, not as their Zoom video app.

The whole point to that is they want to create a type of an environment where all aspects of the communication with your client happens in this one environment. I think that type of transformation about making that communication up to your client much more easier is going to be a big focus moving forward.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, and perhaps to make an obvious point, the idea is that when communication is easier for your client, more seamless, they feel like everyone in the firm knows what's going on with their matter from all different parts of the firm, it makes the client relationship, what we would call stickier and more likely for the client to stay with you for the long term rather than running off to some other firm to get something that you could be providing for them.

Morris Tabush: Mm-hmm.

Elise Holtzman: As we start to wind down our time here together today, I want to ask you the question that I ask all of my guests at the end of the show. I'm going to ask it to each one of you. We'll start with Darragh and then wrap up with Morris at the end.

There is a phenomenon called the curse of knowledge where experts sometimes forget that what is so obvious and natural to them is not at all obvious to others. When it comes to using technology for law firm growth, especially in such a competitive marketplace where things are constantly changing, what's a principle or a piece of advice that may seem obvious to you, but you think is important for people in law firms to hear?

Darragh Fitzpatrick: I'm going to give you two quick ones. The first one is, I always say this, Morris, it will give him a little bit of a smile when he hears me say, but I say simplicity is your friend and complexity is your enemy.

There is a tendency to really make already complex things more complex. That's not just like technology, but it happens a lot in technology. I think that you have to be very careful to understand what problem you're trying to solve and go after that with the simplest solution.

I think the second thing is, Morris said it earlier, IT doesn't build your business, it supports it. Your IT should enable your people to work and reflect how they work. It shouldn't be making them work in a very specific way. So we work from everywhere. IT should enable and support that ability to work from everywhere. I think that that's two important simple things.

Elise Holtzman: Thanks, Darragh. Morris, what are your thoughts?

Morris Tabush: I think what I'll say here is, for the most part, when you're buying something, it doesn't matter if it's technology or you're buying a car, it's not going to be as great as you think it is.

Salespeople have a certain job, and they do that job really well. At the end of the day, relationships matter. Sometimes more important than what you're buying is who you're buying it from and what type of relationship you have with that vendor. So if and when you need them, they'll be there for you. It's especially true with technology because fortunately or unfortunately, when IT stops, the business grinds to a halt.

Elise Holtzman: Great advice. Thank you both for being here today, Morris and Darragh. I always enjoy seeing you. Today is no different. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom and your experience with me and with everybody who listens to the show.

I'm also going to thank our listeners for tuning in. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.

Thank you for tuning in. If you've enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, rate, and review us at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. In the meantime, be bold, take action, and make things happen. We'll see you next time.