Ryan Lockman | How One Managing Partner Is Rethinking Attorney Training From the Ground Up

Elise Holtzman: Hi, everyone. It's Elise Holtzman here, a former practicing lawyer and the host of The Lawyer’s Edge podcast.

Welcome back for another episode. In many ways, in part due to the hybrid work model, generational differences and changing client expectations, the apprenticeship model that used to develop lawyers almost automatically, has broken down and many firms are still waiting for someone else to fix it. Today's guest has decided not to wait. He's a managing partner who looked at the training gap in his firm, recognized that the old model wasn't coming back and built something new from scratch, literally using AI to create a bespoke internal training platform in less than 30 hours. In today's episode, we're going to talk about what he built, how he built it and why intentional training is one of the most powerful levers a managing partner has for both, talent retention and firm growth.

Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by the coaching team at the Lawyer's Edge, a training and coaching firm, which has been focused exclusively on lawyers and law firms, since 2008. Each member of the Lawyer's Edge coaching team is a trained, certified and experienced professional coach and either a former practicing attorney, or a former law firm marketing and business development professional. Whatever your professional objectives, our coaches can help you achieve your goals more quickly, more easily and with significantly less stress. To get connected with your coach, just email the team at hello@thelawyersedge.com.

I am delighted to welcome my guest today, Ryan Lockman, who is the managing partner of Horn Williamson & Collins, a boutique construction law firm in Philadelphia and Delaware. Ryan is a trial lawyer, who has secured more than $20 million in verdicts and arbitration awards, including a $3.2 million jury verdict for homeowners in a construction defect trial. But what makes him an unusual managing partner is how deliberately he thinks about building the firm behind the litigation. He earned his MBA from the Wharton School in 2023, where he was selected as the student commencement speaker, doing so while simultaneously running the firm and maintaining an active litigation practice. He brought that business lens directly into how he runs and grows Horn Williamson & Collins, most recently by building from scratch Construction Defects University, an AI-assisted internal training platform for attorneys and paralegals. Ryan, welcome to The Lawyer's Edge.

Ryan Lockman: Hi, Elise. Thanks for having me. Thrilled to be here.

Elise Holtzman: Absolutely. So I knew that I had to interview you, when we met recently at the Managing Partner Forum Conference in Atlanta. I was facilitating a group discussion among managing partners and you were involved in that discussion. And during a break, I noticed you on your phone showing something to another managing partner and kind of wormed my way into the conversation, because I wanted to see exactly what it was you were showing him. You had talked about this idea of building a training program and I wanted to, it was one of those things where I think I needed to see it to believe it. So tell us a little bit about your background and your practice. You're a trial lawyer representing homeowners in construction defect cases. First of all, how did you find your way into that work? What drew you to that?

Ryan Lockman: First off, you're always welcome to butt into my conversations, so that was great. Going back to when I was in college and then law school, I always knew I wanted to help people. And when I came out of law school, I was a civil rights lawyer for 10 years. I did harassment, discrimination, retaliation claims, things like that for employees and other cases for a decade. And at that point, about six or seven years ago, I knew I wanted to change, but I still wanted to help people in my practice. So I came to what was thenHorn Williamson & Collins, now Horn Williamson & Collins. And in reality, you know, I call myself a consumer protection lawyer, you know, less a construction lawyer, I know all that stuff, but I am at heart, I'm a consumer protection lawyer. And when you think about it, a house is the biggest purchase you're going to make in your life. I mean, there is famously, there's no place like it. And so to be able to help people, when they're having problems, where they eat and sleep and live and raise kids and work from home, is really a gift to me to be able to help people, but it also shows how specialized it is. There are substantive areas of knowledge that are necessary and then there are just emotional aspects with client communication. So I've been doing that in 2021, while working. I did go back and get my MBA from Wharton and graduated in May of 2023, three years ago. And during that time became managing partner of the firm and here we are today.

Elise Holtzman: Can we just pause on that for a second? Because that's a ridiculous number of jobs that you were holding down at the same time. What made you decide that you wanted that business lens? And how on earth did you manage all of that or think you were going to manage it? I mean, it's one thing to actually do it. It's another thing to say, oh, yeah, sure. You know, no problem. I can do this. So I'm kind of curious about how that came about.

Ryan Lockman: Right, so in terms of why I wanted to do that, I guess I'm a bit of an odd duck. So in college, I majored in government and minored in applied mathematics, which I don't think people knew that that was even a thing. And so I always had this mathematical side of me that I really wasn't just, I was not tapping as a lawyer, doing just my lawyer job. So I'd thought about going to business school for a long time, and on Thanksgiving during COVID, I said, you know what? I'm going to do this. No regrets. And, you know, let's go do it. And six months later, I was at Wharton. In terms of how I did it, there are really, there's my firm and my wife. That's how I did it. I had to delegate a lot of responsibilities to my firm and just hand off a lot of stuff to my wife. And I could not have done that really without the support system I had. So the short answer is I couldn't have done it alone and I didn't do it alone.

Elise Holtzman: Well, I think that's an important message for lawyers to hear all the time, because lawyers tend to be the people who say, if I want something done right, I have to do it myself. And you're saying something really powerful there, which is that I think lawyers who want to be successful need to surround themselves with really fantastic people, who can be a support to them. So I love that story. So I mentioned several times that you're the managing partner of the firm. How has the education that you got at Wharton changed the way you think about building Horn Williamson & Collins?

Ryan Lockman: It changes every minute of the day that I'm wearing my managing partner hat. At the end of the day, whether us lawyers like it or not, this is a business, this is a math problem. And the product we sell is law, is our legal services. And that can be very specialized and complicated and in no way am I trying to turn that into the same thing as making a t-shirt. But at the end of the day, we have a company, we have a P&L, right? We need to look at what is working, both short term and long term. We need to look at what is not working, even if it was done before. And we need to do all of that through data. And so people make fun of me in my law firm, because I have Excel, Microsoft Excel open all the time. Because it's necessary, because we're running a business. And I know that sounds cliched. I go to my MBA and now everything's just a spreadsheet. But at the end of the day, it is a very helpful tool to look at, you know, to sanity check, what you're doing. And we may think something is working and it might be, but it may not. And I want to be able to look at the data and see whether or not we are doing the right things. And then when we change course, evaluate and see if maybe I'm dumb, maybe I did a bad decision and let's reverse course. I mean, I think it just gives you the ability to check your own ego and make the right decisions for the company.

Elise Holtzman: It's funny that you said that, because I was just about to say what you said, which is in many ways that requires putting your ego aside, to be able to say, you know what, we've been doing this this way for a while and maybe people are pretty happy with it, because lawyers tends to like and they tend to like precedent and all of that sort of thing. And maybe I'm the one who's not making the right decisions. Maybe I came up with a bad idea. So that's pretty tough to do if you have the numbers in front of you and you're willing to look at them and you're willing to act on them. I think that right there sets people apart from many who have traditionally run law firms.

Ryan Lockman: It's funny, I did a deep dive, a lot of research, a lot of math, trying to derive our target operating margins. And then what should originators and employees, timekeepers get paid? I did all this math and then I came up with my numbers, my secret sauce. And then I go to our controller and he says, oh yeah, no, you hit it. Those are the percentages we've been doing for 50 years. It was like, oh, okay, well, I'm happy we figured it out. We did the mathematical proof, but I guess I should just listen to the people, who know what they're doing.

Elise Holtzman: That’s funny, I thought you were going to say something very different from that, but that's good confirmation, right? You did the work and you know it's working. I've been talking a lot lately and you and I talked about this, when we saw each other, in Atlanta, about this idea of, quote unquote, the death of apprenticeship, right? So is apprenticeship the best way to train your people? Is it the best way to turn them into business people? Is it the best way to get them to be really solid lawyers, or to be able to communicate really well with clients? All of the sorts of things that lawyers need to be doing. And I think a lot of it's changed, because of the hybrid, fast-paced environment that we're in. This idea that this informal kind of observation-based training model has broken down, is something that people are paying more attention to. And we know in big law, they often have training programs in their firms for lawyers. You clearly have been feeling this problem acutely enough in your law firm, I think you said you're about 20, 23, 25 lawyers, to do something about it, right? So what was the moment that you realized that you could? Build something that would help train your lawyers in a better way. What made you realize you had to do something?

Ryan Lockman: Yeah, I don't think it was one moment. I think it was a few. Our firm's 10 years old. I've been with the firm for six and a half. As we're on this growth trajectory, you just see that a more ad hoc approach no longer works. That's fine when it's three lawyers, five lawyers, maybe even 10, but we needed more structure. And so, things I put in place to help attorneys and paralegals and all staff grow and thrive. First, we created a team system. So every single attorney, paralegal and legal assistant is placed into a team. There's five teams in our office and they're led by a team leader, who's either a junior partner, or senior counsel. And they are the mentors and they can gauge growth and they can gauge the ability of each of these people and they're closer to the ground directing traffic, mentoring, really doing it all, but for a smaller subset of people, right? So that's the first thing. We created monthly and weekly check-ins, checklists, excuse me, with benchmarks for how to stay on top of cases, how to communicate with clients, things like that. There are weekly team meetings, right? So this is all in service of providing people with mentorship, guidance and also the ability to just be in the room, while other people are discussing cases, so they can learn by osmosis. So we did all of that. We also implemented monthly CLEs in the firm. We have created an employee resource center for our employees that includes everything from some time management documents to obviously all their health benefits and other administrative things. But what we kept bumping into, were these attorneys, these new attorneys and new paralegals saying, that's great, but once I've been here for months and have seen all of these meetings, I kind of get a sense of what's going on, but I want training ahead of time. When I get in here, I don't know what all this stuff means. I don't know what, you know, we do construction. They don't know what these, forget about the law, they don't know what the terms mean. They don't know what the, you know, IRC, IBC, weep screed, cladding, people don't know what that is. You know, I didn't know what that was before. And they needed help upfront and that was really the moment where I realized, we need to stop being so ad hoc about this and we need to stop expecting people to just figure it out. Let's provide this program at the outset so they can learn what we want them to know. So that by the time they are in the team meetings, they're not, you know, we're not throwing him in the deep end. You know, we're giving them the ability to learn in the kiddie pool, before doing so.

Elise Holtzman: I want to highlight a few things you mentioned. So first of all, you talked about this idea of we just expect people to figure it out. And I'm pretty sure that's how the legal biz has been for generations. Right. And so we're finding that it's not working as well. What are the reasons you think it's not working as well? First of all, maybe you think it never worked, but to the extent that you think something has changed and that that's why we need to do something different, what do you think the reasons are for that?

Ryan Lockman: Look, I think partially the expectation that you should just be able to hit the ground running was unreasonable. And I frankly find it hard to believe and yet it is true that I think, you know, even when I started, you would get a case and you were just expected to run with it. Even when you were, you didn't even have your… you didn't have shoes on, let alone running shoes, you didn't know what to do. So I think that attitude is going away. And the other issue is, look, people want more support. And that's not a bad thing. I think that's a good thing. People want to see that you're investing in their long-term knowledge and success. They want to see that they're being supported. If they're going to invest in us, they want to see it back, they want to feel it back. And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. If anything, I like that better, they want to see it from us and they're going to give it back and that's what we've seen. I mean, that's what we see with the team system and the checklists and all of that. When people are given this, they really dive in. And I was at a team meeting and just thinking to myself, wow, this is a well-oiled machine. And I couldn't even fathom this a year and a half ago. It would boggle my mind that there were no fires to put out. There weren't any emergencies. There weren't last minute filings or somebody dropped the ball. Obviously, that happens occasionally, but putting these systems in place just put everyone in a better position to succeed, including the partners and team leaders, who weren't given this when they were younger.

Elise Holtzman: I think it's important to point out that this is not just an issue of training your people and having well-trained people. It's also an issue of retaining your talent.

Ryan Lockman: Yeah.

Elise Holtzman: Because as you mentioned, people want to be invested in, they want to grow, they want to learn, they want to be better and they want someone to help them do it, instead of them having to figure it out themselves. And at least anecdotally and there seems to be agreement in the profession and across professions, that people who are invested in tend to stay longer, because the grass doesn't look so green somewhere else.

Ryan Lockman: I agree with that. I mean, by the way, it also helps with client service, because if we're teaching everyone how and when to communicate with clients, that's going to give us a better product, hands down. But as far as our people, I completely, completely agree. I mean, one of the documents that we issued was a path to partnership document. That was important, because we, you know, I don't think we're in the days anymore where it's, you know, the Elle Woods, I'm going to make partner by the time I'm 30. Right. And then you have your two and a half kids and your white picket fence and your dog and, you know, and you're fine. People don't see that anymore. Whether that's still true or not is almost besides the point that perception matters more than reality. If people don't see that they have a future here, then they're going to look elsewhere. And, and, we… So what we did is we created a path to partnership document. We actually created an extra layer level of associates. So we did associate and then senior associate and then senior counsel and then non-equity partner and then equity partner. So instead of just a binary option, your associate and then your partner, there's five levels here. And what we did is we published this document and it was here's roughly how many years out you'll be, when you'll start really developing the skills and here are the skills that we expect you to have to move on to the next level. And we have that for everyone. And then when you become partner, it shows the benefits, the additional benefits that you get. So we really wanted to show people, look, if you stick with us, there really is a path where you could get a promotion in the next year, two years, three years, instead of just, okay, well, in eight years, I'm going to get promoted. And if I don't, there's no scenario for why I'm here. And if I do, well, there's nothing else I have to do. And then, you know, my career's over. And that, I think, was really, really helpful for us, to show to people there is more of a short-term gain than they were thinking of staying with us.

Elise Holtzman: A few thoughts are coming to mind. First of all, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you was because of this AI thing that you've developed, which we haven't even talked about yet. Because you already had done the hard work of putting together all sorts of training and mentorship programs in your firm. The other thing that you mentioned that I find fascinating is the path to partnership issues. Some law firms are now starting to understand that when the younger generation say, hey, we want transparency, they're not talking about you taking the P&L and opening it up and having them be able to see everything behind the Oz curtain. What they're talking about is wanting to understand what the future could look like for them, at their firm and I always laugh when senior leaders get aggravated about this sort of thing, because we wanted it to. And listen, I graduated from law school a long time ago. We used to say hey, I don't know how to make it here, I don't really know what's expected of me so I'm just going to put my nose down to the desk and grind out hours like they've asked me to. So I think that you are not only looking at what the firm needs to succeed, but you are looking at what up-and-coming lawyers are asking for and you are responding to that.

Ryan Lockman: As a general principle, I firmly believe people respond to incentives and those incentives do not have to be monetary. They can include money, obviously, but we want to show people that if you do X, Y, and Z, you will be incentivized by moving up in the organization. Lo and behold, when you incentivize people to do something, they tend to do it. Some do it better than others, some are more receptive than others. But at the end of the day, I'm looking to raise the batting average of people who act like they want to be here for a while. Another thing that we're doing and again, like meeting people where they are and what they're looking for, is when we do our billable hour reports to all of our timekeepers, we don't just tell them, all right, here's your billable hours for the month, here it is for the year. We're giving them their per day. We're giving them their average per workday. So we take their total number of hours for a month. We divide that by the number of work days. So that's no weekends, no holidays, no PTO, so we take that out. So the total number of hours that you've worked, divided by the total number of days you've worked, this is your average that you hit. Because at the end of the day, our younger timekeepers, they were not tracking, well, how many hours do I need to bill on average per day, in order to hit my billable hour requirement? We were asking people, when would you come in? When would you leave? And we're like, well, you need to hit 8.05 hours per day on average to hit your billables. So if that's not something you're tracking, you're just never going to hit it. So we give people the tools, where every month they see how they did on average per day that month, so they can track what they need to do on a daily basis to do better. And rather than being mad that people aren't doing that automatically, it took me five minutes. I created an Excel template. You drop down the person's name in a menu and all of their stats populate and we email it to that person and they have it. I can be mad or I can get the result I want and I'd rather you know, I'd rather get the result I want and have people working how we want them to work and be happy.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, super practical. And as you said, you know, what's the behavior we want to drive and how do we incentivize that? So that's good stuff. How are the team leaders responding to this? You mentioned them a minute ago. How are the people that you're putting in charge of these teams and asking them to, in addition to what you might call their day job, help run a team, help mentor and train and grow others in the firm?

Ryan Lockman: It was a little rough at the start. Because we were really asking people with no training and pretty suddenly, okay, you're going to be managing a team. You're going to be overseeing them. You're going to be communicating with them. You're going to be day-to-day running meetings and following checklists that we're publishing suddenly. And it was the transition. One thing that we did is we brought in a communications coach for our partners and team leaders in, I don't know, about a year ago, because that was something they needed help with. They needed help not just communicating with clients like they had been doing, but how do you communicate with a junior associate or a paralegal, you know, who they never had to deal with. I mean, obviously they had a paralegal, they had legal assistants, but now this was a much more formalized communication pyramid that they were trying to navigate. So we brought in, actually one of my friends from my MBA program, who is also a lawyer and does communications training, we brought her in and she was great and that's, that's helped. But it, you know, I mean, even like, even as we are training the associates and paralegals, I, we needed to train the team leaders as well.

Elise Holtzman: I saw a law firm try to do something similar around business development. So they tried to create, they said, before I got there, they said, okay, here's what we've decided. We've created these 10 teams in our firm. They had about a hundred lawyers and we're putting partners in charge of these teams and they're going to work with everybody junior to them on business development. And I asked that question, right? Are these folks trained? How comfortable are they with doing these things? Well, it doesn't really matter, because we've told them they're doing it. And I asked them about coaching and I asked them about, you know, kind of a train the trainer kind of a situation, support the team leaders. They decided not to do that. And within fairly short order, they were down to two teams that occasionally had meetings. So I really love your example, because it does demonstrate that there are many parts of this. It's not like I think that neither one of us would want to say hey, this is so super easy to put into place, but you've successfully done it and you've obviously done it in a thoughtful way

Ryan Lockman: The business development stuff is hard too, because we are, you know, most of lawyer training when they're associates is about the practice of law and they're building up their practice and they're building up their experience and they're getting better at it. And, you know, all of a sudden it's like they've become this excellent Michelin starred chef and now we're asking them to go get on a farm and be a farmer. Those are very different skills. And unless we cultivate that early, we're not going to see results.

Elise Holtzman: As anybody who listens to this podcast will know, you're preaching to the choir, because this is something that I'm an evangelist for, is getting people involved, particularly in understanding rainmaking, understanding firm economics, developing the skills that you will need to be able to be a rainmaker later. It isn't easy. And the fact that you're setting something up and thinking about it in advance and not be moaning the fact, when you've got, you know, an eighth year associate or 10th year associate, why isn't this person who we wanted her to be? You're putting into place things that are allowing you to help that person get there. So let's talk about the thing that I mentioned, which is what you're calling Construction Defect University. I love that. An AI-assisted internal training platform. You did it yourself. I mean, so you could have heard a pin drop in the room, when you were describing this to people. Like, what do you mean you took 29 point something hours and you created this and then you opened it up and showed it to people? Tell me about the process that you went through to create Construction Defect University and who you involved in the conversations as you were putting it together.

Ryan Lockman: So the way I used AI for this is I used a two prong approach. So there's Claude code, which does the building, right? And that's really technical. And then I use co-pilot. And the way I saw it was, Claude code was R2D2 and co-pilot was C-3PO, right? I don't know how to talk to R2D2. The stuff that Claude's pumping out, I have no idea. I have no software experience. I didn't, in the middle of being a lawyer, get a master's in software engineering. You know, I don't know any of that. So what I did is I uploaded some of our internal documents, those ad hoc documents we'd created, some CLEs that we had created about timekeeping. I uploaded our weekly checklists, things like that. And I kind of told it, here's what I want. I want a training program. I want it to be in different modules. I want there to be a dashboard on top. I want there to be quizzes and here's what I want in each section. Then I want there to be a capstone. Give me the prompt for Claude Code to do this. And whereas my prompt to Claude Code would have been like exactly the four sentences that I just said, Copilot spit out a prompt that was, if you printed it, would be from the monitor to the floor. And I copied and pasted that. And within about five minutes, I had 80% of what Construction Defect University became. I had the skeleton, I had the skin, I needed, you know, I had to add an arm and I added to add a bunch of muscle, but I had it. And it was that easy. Then it was going through and iterating over and over and over and over and over again. And 27.4 hours later, we had Construction Defect University ready to be sent to an outside software engineer that we hired. And for 600 bucks, they put it on our website. And I can talk about all the security that we have, which I think is important. But with that, it was ready and we've launched.

Elise Holtzman: What's been the internal response to it?

Ryan Lockman: Overwhelmingly positive. Obviously there are things we need to keep fixing, keep getting better. There's little teeny glitch, there's some dots, you know, some words that were cut off here and there, which annoyed me and I'm not sure really why that happens, but we're fixing that. The best thing I did, the best decision, I made in making this, was going to new associates and paralegals while I was iterating. Because they had… the best ideas that are in here are from them. Somebody had the idea, hey, can you make a module on just common construction terms? Not construction law, construction terms. So we did that. And I uploaded a report. It had been publicly filed. It was part of a summary judgment response. So it was public. And I gave it to one, I forget which, Jenner of AI. And I said, make these, make the important terms. And then I gave it to Claude and said, make this a module. Other things, having a capstone at the end, I had, but the idea to split it up and have different open-ended questions for each phase of the litigation, that was an associate's idea. So the best thing I did was go to them and make them part of the process. So this was not just mine, it was theirs as well.

Elise Holtzman: Now that you've got it in place, walk me through what this platform actually includes.

Ryan Lockman: There's a program for attorneys and a program for paralegals. They're similar, but obviously they're tailored for the role. So I'll talk about the attorney one. The attorney program is 23 separate modules from the first three, I think are the most important and have nothing to do with the practice of law. It’s client communications, path to partnership and billing and timekeeping. And I made sure that those are up front, because at the end of the day, they want to see that this is part of their job and this is the most important part of their job. After that, there are modules for every single phase of the litigation. There's case initiation, discovery and then each section of discovery from request for production of documents to depositions to testing and expert reports and common expert witness categories to damages, dispositive motions, et cetera. And then after that, there's common causes of action, key cases in construction defect matters, what should I do this week, where they go through based on each phase of litigation they're in, what they should do and what they should be talking to their team leader about. And then common construction terms and then at the end, a capstone. Every single module has information and then quizzes. And this is my personal favorite part of this. If you fail a quiz, what happens is a Microsoft Word Clippy-esque little mascot named Leaky, the Leaky window with a Band-Aid repair and water coming through, tells them that it's going to be okay and they work through the quizzes together. So, you know, even if they're messing up, they get Leaky, Leaky is here to help, that's what he says. And they walk through each quiz. And then when they finish it and they get everything right, then they move on to the next module. So the idea is, you know, understand the life cycle of a case, understand what their role is, understand when you are to escalate to your team leader. And that's explicitly stated in there. And then, you know, what are the next steps in the case, no matter where you are in litigation? So this is designed to give every attorney, it's aimed towards associates, but really every attorney, a sense of why are they doing this and what are they doing at any given point.

Elise Holtzman: Just to be clear, are they expected to go through this university in a certain amount of time?

Ryan Lockman: Right. So what I give them, we think it'll take them about a day. What I tell them is, in your first week, get this done. And what happens is, when they do the capstone answers and it's 10 different essays, it's a paragraph. You give a paragraph or two for each phase. When you do that, you then, there's a prompt to export it and it will, you will download it so you can email it to your team leader. And then you walk through with your team leader. It has no expectation that this person's going to know what they're doing. The point is for the team leader to walk them through, see where they went right, see where they went wrong and then just gauge their readiness, right? You know, maybe this person is actually further along, in understanding the concept of civil litigation. Maybe they're not, maybe they have no clue and this is going to have to be a bigger project than we thought. That's OK. There's roles for everyone. But without the team leader conversation, regarding the capstone answers, the team leader wouldn't really know that. So you do that. Once you finish, click a button, confetti comes down and you get your construction defect diploma.

Elise Holtzman: I think this is absolutely fascinating. It's definitely not something that I've heard from other law firm leaders. A lot of managing partners are interested in AI, right? They're talking about it. Some of them are adopting it. Some of them are afraid of it. Some of them wish it would go away. The ones that are getting stopped in their tracks are, perhaps understandably, being held up by concerns about cost, implementation, ethical issues around client data. You actually did this, right? What did it cost you? And I'm not asking you for specific dollars and cents necessarily, but just to kind of get a ballpark idea, what do you see as the long-term payoff for the firm? And what would you say to a managing partner who's kind of sitting on the fence and saying, wow, this just sounds like something that, sure, it might be a nice idea, but it feels a little uncomfortable and it's not something I think we're going to pursue?

Ryan Lockman: Sure, in terms of cost, that's easy. It took me 27.4 hours. I spent a hundred bucks for a month of Claude Code subscription and we spent 600 bucks for a developer to get it on. So 700 bucks, 27 hours of my time. I actually asked Claude, because it had all the data and it knew all the work, how long would it take a developer to do this outside, on their own and how much would it cost? And he said it would take, and again, I don't know if I believe him, taking it with a grain of salt, three to six months, $40,000, at least. I would have to be involved in that, too. Our director of operations would have to be involved, right? The same involvement, maybe even more, would have to happen with the added cost. So, that's how much it costs. In terms of how I use AI as a lawyer, I use AI as a substitute for my hands, but not my brain. If I wanted to summarize a document, right, or put my thoughts down, I'll put notes down and I'll turn it into a more, you know and it'll turn it into a more fulsome document. That's fine. That's just faster than I type. I am not using it as a substitute for my brain. I am obviously, obviously, obviously not using it for legal research. I am afraid of it hallucinating cases and we have policies at our firm about AI use in that vein. I am pretty adamant that you have to be careful what AI is spitting back out and the outputs are only as good as the inputs as well. So, you know, I use it as a lawyer but I'm careful. As a manager I use it all the time. I have uploaded, again, you know, there's internal, like Copilot has an internal program, where everything stays in-house, but I use it. I upload P&L and originator stats and timekeeper stats and balance sheet. You know, I get reports automatically from just our internal accounting software. I get it at 11 p.m. at the end of every month, quarter and year. And I look at it, obviously. I do my analysis, obviously. But then I give it to Copilot and I say, go. And I say, you're an analyst. I'm the managing partner, give me your report, see your findings. And look, that is not perfect. There are things that are not in those reports that I know that it doesn't, but it is another voice in the conversation. I think it's an important voice, but it's only a voice. And in terms of what I would say to other managers, look, the train is leaving the station. You can either jump on or be left behind.

Elise Holtzman: And I think that goes across the board for every part of a law firm. We have to get better at using it for legal research and making sure that we're not having case hallucinations and that sort of thing. But, you know, I'm not practicing law anymore and I'm using it quite literally on a daily basis, to help me shortcut things, so that I can give my clients the highest level of service. But you've mentioned ways to use it in financials, in training. So I think that even if we're still afraid to use it in the actual practice of law, it's important to recognize all of the areas in which it can be so unbelievably valuable. And your story about how you've used AI to help train, retain, promote, your lawyers is a really, really good one. I think it's going to help a lot of people. So as we wrap up our time here together today, Ryan, I want to ask you a question that I ask all of my guests at the end of the show. There's 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 building intentional training programs inside a small to mid-sized law firm, what's a principle or piece of advice that may seem obvious to you, but is really important for other managing partners and lawyers to hear?

Ryan Lockman: We forget what we didn't know when we were starting out. We, and that happens to me, it happens to the other partners in our firm and they, you know, we're all shocked when somebody doesn't know something that we believe is obvious. But that's because, you know, we've been doing this for a long time. And when I started out, I didn't know any of this. I didn't know any of this. How to push cases forward, how to do a deposition, how to, you know, use discovery requests, the most basic things in the world. Hey, you have to file a complaint. You know, I kind of knew that. I remember Civ Pro from the first semester of law school, but it's just, it's mind boggling how little we knew, when we started. And we have to, We have to give people the space to grow and learn the things that we know now, that now come obvious to us.

Elise Holtzman: Yeah, I think that's a good reminder for those lawyers who are so used to what they know that when an associate does something wrong, or doesn't know something, all of a sudden it's like, well, that associate's dead to me. I'm never working with that person again, right? This is not a one and done kind of a situation. And so that's great advice. And I love that you have that philosophy and also that you're putting programs into place, to make sure that your people grow. So Ryan, thank you so much for being here today. It's been a great conversation.

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