7 Lessons from a $100M Law Practice | The Scalable Law Blueprint Ep. 2

What if your law firm ran like a growth-driven business instead of a reactive practice?

In this episode of The Scalable Law Blueprint, host Julien Emery talks with Michael McCready, Managing Partner of McCreadyLaw. From a single Chicago office to four states and over 100 team members, Michael has built one of the most forward-thinking plaintiff firms in the country. His edge? Relentless focus on systems, metrics, and culture.

Whether it's using AI to grade intake calls in real-time, building a data-first intake engine, or training his leadership team to think like operators, Michael shows how scalable law firms are built, one system at a time.

KEY TAKEAWAYS
• Hiring the right people is the foundation of sustainable scale
• Why being a good lawyer is not enough, you also need to lead a business
• The power of SOPs and internal training for consistency across teams
• How to track intake metrics like conversion rate, want rate, and fee generation
• Using AI to evaluate empathy and performance in real-time phone calls
• Why law firms must start acting like modern businesses to compete
• What to measure daily, weekly, and monthly to forecast firm growth
• The right time to hire a full-time trainer (and why it matters)
• Common intake mistakes that cost law firms qualified clients
• The ethical obligation to understand and use AI in legal practice

BEST MOMENTS
00:03:00. “Technology is one of our core values and has been for the 25 years I've been running my firm.”
00:05:23. “Now the top of the pyramid, so to speak, is building a law firm on culture.”
00:07:04. “Most people just put a job posting out... and then they’re stuck with them.”
00:08:12. “We have an in-house full-time trainer that walks them through a very, very specific process.”
00:11:09. “Law is really behind the times... most law firms don’t run their business on metrics. I do.”
00:13:13. “I'm looking at intake every day... the number of leads, the number of cases we signed up.”
00:17:13. “My job is like a sound engineer. I balance the metrics, intake, capacity, settlements.”
00:28:16. “My goal is to have the best intake team around because that’s the first impression of your firm.”

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Transcript

0:30

It doesn't work for everybody. We are not the right place for some people, but when you really put a lot of energy into the hiring process and then training, if I had to point to one thing, is hiring the right people over the years and having a fantastic team that surrounds me is really been responsible for a lot of our success. That's Michael McCready, managing partner at McCready law. From a single office to more than four states and 100 employees. He's built one of the most forward thinking plaintiffs firms the country, by turning law into leadership. Some people might think that I'm lucky, but the harder that I work, the luckier I got. You have to be a good lawyer. You have to know what you're talking about. And how to handle the cases. The next skill is how to be good with clients, and that's completely different than being a good lawyer. In this episode, he shares how data discipline and clear metrics became his firm's competitive edge, transforming gut instinct into a scalable operating system for growth. These lawyers that tell me, oh, I don't think AI is safe yet. I'm going to wait to see what happens. I don't want to be the first one out there. They're already so far behind that they're never going to catch up. Michael's message is clear the future of law belongs to those who adapt. From automation to AI, he's proving that embracing change. Is it risky anymore? It's required. Stick around. I'm Julian Emery, and this is the scalable law blueprint. Welcome to the Scalable Law Blueprint. The show where we explore how modern law firms scale smarter, automate workflows, and deliver five star client experiences without burning out their teams. Each episode brings you impactful conversations with the innovators, operators, and legal tech leaders. Building the future of plaintiff law practice. From intake to impact, you'll learn how to build the systems and strategies that drive real growth. I'm your host, Julian Emery. Let's dive in. Maybe for the audience, it'd be great just to hear from your words a little bit about your background, your firm and you know how you kind of got started in the space. Yeah. Thanks for having me, Julian. And looking forward to it. You are. You know, one of those people that's in the industry that that really knows what they're talking about when it's coming to technology and AI. And that's, that's my background. So I am an attorney. I have, offices in Chicago, Indianapolis, Saint Louis and Minneapolis. We've got 18 lawyers and a team of 125. I run a plaintiff's personal injury law firm, throughout these states. And one of the ways that we're able to handle our cases as effectively as we do is through the use of technology. Technology is one of our, core values at the firm. It has been for the 25 years that I've been running my firm. And it has just accelerated after the last couple of years with the advent of AI and, everything that keeps changing on what seems like a daily basis. That's incredible. I want to get to the technology part and some of the ways you think about operations. But maybe taking a step back a little bit, even just to get to the size that you're at from the very time you started your firms in the very early days. Is there anything that you did differently that gave you a competitive edge right out of the get go that helps you get to where you are today? Well, you know what? Some people might think that I'm lucky, but, the harder that I work, the luckier I got. There was a lot of hard work that went into this and. And a lot of learning. So, I like to, look at my progression. And I think this is true for most entrepreneurial lawyers. First you have to start out. You have to be a good lawyer, right? You have to know what you're talking about and how to handle the cases. The next skill is how to be good with clients. And that's completely different than being a good lawyer. I know some lawyers, who are fantastic with clients. That or I wouldn't trust them, you know, with a misdemeanor case. But learning. Learning the law, learning how to be good with clients. The next step in the progression is, learning how to operate a business. You know, first, just a mom and pop shop and then. And gradually it grows and all the things that go into, you know, running a business. And now, you know, a multi-state corporation. And, the next step that really turbocharged my growth was learning about marketing. Right. And, and these are all things they don't teach you in law school. So I really dove into all the different types of marketing, whether it's digital or or traditional. And, and, and I had a very large client base which we tap into and remarket. And then finally, where I am now, the top of the pyramid, so to speak, is building a law firm on culture and and having it sustain and and continue and to grow and and have have people who love what they do are passionate for our clients. And that's, that's once again, a whole different skill set. So that's the progression that I went through. And I think that any lawyer that wants to, to grow a successful law firm probably has to follow those steps. I think that's really impressive because you you sort of start as a practitioner, and I think a lot of people aren't able to make that transition to thinking more like a business owner or a CEO and thinking about all the other things they need to to do. I'm curious in that journey, especially when you sound like there's one sort of maybe pivotal moment where we really started thinking about marketing more. Is there any other turning point or one turning point where you realized, wait, I gotta stop thinking like a good lawyer and start thinking like a business owner? Or is there anything that happened in the business that helped you turn that corner that I see so, so many other firms just kind of not able to turn. They're kind of stuck in their business. Yeah, absolutely. You need to learn how to hire people and to train them and retain them. And and listen, I've made a lot of mistakes over the years, and I learned a lot about hiring people. And, and I've got a fantastic team now. But but my, you know, my C-suite, team, you know, my higher level, executive team, all really, really strong a players. And that's not by accident. So, you know, most people just put a job posting out there, you know, small personal injury law firm in search of x, y, z needs to be a self-starter and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then they interview 2 or 3 people and whoever aces the interview, they hire and then they're stuck with them. So we spend a lot of time recruiting, making sure we're getting the right candidates, interviewing them, putting them through, you know, a lot of testing. Make sure that they're a fit for us culturally. You know, we want somebody that's going to be happy within within our firm. It doesn't work for everybody. You know, we are not the right place for some people. But when you really put a lot of energy into the hiring process and then training. Okay, it's all well and good to hire, a superstar and put them down in front of a computer, and they'll look at you and say, okay, what am I supposed to do? Because every law firm does things a little bit differently. So you've got to go through a training process. As we've grown, you know, and we're a large firm now. You know, we have an in-house full time trainer. So every time we hire people, we have a trainer that walks them through a very, very specific process for each of the positions. Now, that's not something that you do when you're a smaller firm, but that's the way you need to think. So, if I had to point to one thing is, is hiring the right people over the years. And, and that's, you know, it can't be all me at this point. And, and having the, you know, a fantastic team that surrounds me is, is really been responsible for a lot of our success. That's excellent. That's really good. It's so critical. I feel like people overlook hiring kind of often just do what's easiest. And, you know, go with to your point, the first few interviews they get on, you know, indeed, or some job posting or, you know, their local net or their, their network which, which works. But but you can tap out your network pretty quickly. I'm curious on the training side that that makes a lot of sense. At what size were you in terms of number of of people total in the firm when you made that hire to bring in an in-house trainer? Probably about a year ago. So we were under 100. I don't know, 80, 90 people somewhere like that. But even without a full time trainer, it's important to develop the processes, and, and create SOPs, standard operating procedures for how you do things. People like to think that law is so complicated, and it can be. But a lot of what we do is routine every day. And and there is a set way that things should be done, on each case. And so documenting those and, and refining them. Then you have that manual that you can use for new hires and, and that. Sure. That's the start of the training process. This is how we do things. When you hire someone, there is an onboarding process. There is something that needs to be done every single time you write it out, even if it's on an Excel spreadsheet. Get a copy of the driver's license, have them sign their W-2 for whatever it is I-9 form, you know, give them the information on health insurance. Give them information on the 401 K. If it's an attorney, you know, make sure they're added to the malpractice insurance. So, you know, when you write all these things down, anything that you have to repeat should be written down, plain and simple. That makes total sense. Getting to sort of systems and processes and kind of going a little deeper on that. Are there any particular systems and processes in certain areas of the business that have really impacted your ability to scale like you have, or is it been just like across the board, just curious, like what what processes and systems have have helped you scale the most? Well, listen, the law is is really behind the times when it comes to most things. And there are businesses. Most businesses, you know, run their businesses on metrics. Right. And law firms, by and large, don't. Well I do. So, you know, you start out with very, very simple metrics. Things that I've been tracking literally for 20 years is where do my cases come from? You know, what are my settlements? What's my average settlement? You know, just start with things like that. Because the more information that you have, the more data that you have, you know, the more you can make informed decisions. So where do you start? You start with the real simple things, and then then you can start looking at, you know, what kind of data is important to help the profitability of the firm and help the clients. And you start tracking that, and then you start seeing what you can do to improve whatever those numbers are. So to me, it all starts with numbers. Now, although we have data and we track everything, it doesn't necessarily mean that we always make a decision based on the numbers. You know, there are cases that we handle because it's the right thing to do, not because we're going to make money, because we've got a client that's really being screwed around by an insurance company, and it's the right thing to do. And, you know, the numbers tell us, you know, we shouldn't take that case because we're going to lose money or, you know, or whatever. But when you have the numbers, you can at least make those informed decisions, and you'd be surprised at how better run any business. And a law firm in particular, will be when you have these numbers to look at. That makes a lot of sense. I've talked to a lot of firms that they know some of their numbers, they don't know all their numbers. They look at different numbers. You talking about where cases come from, average settlements, do you look at sort of every detail number every day or like I'm just curious, like what's your day to day like or week over week? Are there 1 or 2 KPIs or metrics for like a top five that you're looking at all the time and you're sharing with your team and the whole team's looking at, I mean, as the managing partner, I'm looking at intake every day. I want to see, you know, the number of leads, the number of cases that are signed up and the facts of those cases. I'm also looking at settlements each day, because I need to keep my finger on the pulse of the firm. So, for example, if if we have 100 leads, I know we're going to sign up about 30 of those. Historically, we sign up about 30% of our leads. Out of those 30 cases, we are going to withdraw no fee from about 20%. You know, these are cases that we've signed up that upon further investigation, we find out there's no liability, there's no insurance or for whatever reason, and, and we refer out about 10%. So out of those 30 cases, we sign up, three get referred out, six we drop. So we're going to settle 21 cases. So if we have a 100 leads, we're probably going to get fees on about 21 cases. I also know how many cases each of my team members can handle. So for example, the case managers caseload should be a certain number of cases. So if I see leads coming in and I see sign ups increasing, I need to make sure that we have enough capacity for case managers. And we want to look at that going forward. We don't want to be caught short handed. And all of a sudden have all these new cases and no case managers. Same thing is when the cases are signed up and if there's an increase, I need to look down the road for medical records, because at some point we're going to need medical records for all these people. I need to look at attorneys to handle them. But but if you have a handle on your numbers, you know you can project these things. Now let's let's look at the other number is settlements. I need to know what my cash flow is going to be. And I need to know and look forward to what I'm going to have to spend to handle all of these cases. So if there's an increase in cases right now, it's going to cost me money to handle them before the fees come in. So I'm always kind of projecting, to, to have an idea of where, you know, where we are financially, and, and that's, that's what I do as a managing partner is really keep my finger on the pulse of the firm. I love that it's this delicate balance of, you know, what's coming in the door. Net new cases, which is going to cause us to increase our cost potentially, or maintain our cost to work these cases. And then what's the revenue are coming or getting coming in. And that. Yeah, that is a delicate balance. I like your perspective there. You know, with all the metrics in the firm. What I like to think of myself as, if you've ever seen, inside a recording studio where they have a mixing board and they've got all these slides and, you know, the producer or the engineer can, you know, move this slide up and move this slide up and balance everything. You know, that's what I look at my job. Right? I'm continuously balancing out these things. And in if one metric goes up I need to adjust the other metrics to keep everything in balance. That there are times that, you know, we get too many cases. And so I will have to adjust that. And, you know, maybe we'll cut down on, you know, some advertising spend or we'll tell the intake to be a little bit more particular about the cases that you sign up, in intake. I have this metaphor is intake is like a fisherman and they cast this big wide net and you pull it all in and you see what you get. But, you know, sometimes it depends on how wide the holes are in the net. So if you have a really tight net, you're going to you're going to pull in a lot of stuff. So there are times if we're slow, I tell them, you know, tighten up the net and maybe we, we get some cases that we might not have taken if we were busy or, you know, let's let's let some of those little, little fish go through the holes and not worry about those because we're so busy. But, you know, that that's what my role is as a managing partner is to see the, you know, the 10,000ft view. I get the sense of like, you've got your there's like a pulse and a feeling in a company. It's like an organism that you can kind of feel. And I, I, I love hearing you talk about it because I can just sense how deeply sort of integrated and connected you are to this whole organism kind of feeling of what's coming in, what's coming. And I think that's how businesses should be run. I think that's the best way to to build companies. Talk to a lot of folks. And, you know, I'm more than happy to share what I do and how I've gotten there, you know? But you can't expect all of a sudden to be like McCready overnight. It's took me 25 years and we're constantly changing and evolving and improving. But there are fundamental steps that that anyone can take. And then once you start understanding and you start seeing the way that a law firm operates as a business, you know, then you can take those new steps. But but you have to take the baby steps first and, and always try to improve typically. What are those baby steps like when you look at other firms and, and I chat with other firms and see other firms, you know, various events and things like that. If there's a, call it a, 5 to 15 person firm, not attorneys, but it's like people, and they're trying to go to the next level, like what is typically the most common barrier that you see and what steps. So like maybe the first two baby steps do you think they ought to take on average? Yeah, I can really only speak towards, plaintiff's personal injury. But some of these things, you know, translate to other practice areas. But, you know, some of which I've already talked about, you need to know where your cases are coming from. Because if your phone's not ringing and if you're not signing up cases, you know, your firm's not going to make it. So always pay attention to where your cases come from. And and always look for new opportunities for cases. Everybody at your law firm should be telling everybody that they know that they work for McCready. Right? You know, whether they're at their kids swim meet or baseball practice, your team, the people that work for you, should be your greatest advocates. And, and then whatever other means that you used to bring in cases. So you gotta watch. Gotta watch where the cases are. We have an intake department. I always recommend, a non attorney, serve as the initial intake person. I could go on for a long time. Why? But you know that the numbers definitely show that a non attorney initial intake person is much better than an attorney. So that's another thing that I recommend. And then then you need to look at what's called time on desk, how long it's taking you to handle these cases. You should try to move cases along as quickly as you can without sacrificing quality. But, but, you know, the longer cases drag out, you know, the longer it is before you get paid. So look at those and then, you know, look at your average fee, and then analyze your cases as to what you can do to increase that average fee. There's basically only three ways that you can increase profit in a law firm. One is get more clients, two is cut costs or three is increase your average fee. I mean, that's it. So you know that that's the recipe for growth. And each of them you can examine and constantly look at to, to to increase the revenue of the firm. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it's interesting because those baby steps are kind of thinking like a business owner all of a sudden switching to thinking about where your case is coming from. What are your numbers? How long are you working these cases? I love that answer. You talked about intake, a little bit. And I wanted to double click on that. And and specifically, yeah, you mentioned having someone who's not a lawyer do intake. I don't know, we see that at some firms. A why is that so important? From your perspective and also just in general when it comes to intake, like, what have you noticed maybe is most important, an intake to hit certain conversion rates. Like what maybe what are some best practices or most common areas that that people get wrong with the intake? All right. So here's why I don't recommend lawyers doing intake. Okay. This is a typical lawyer intake. Oh, okay. You're in an accident. Okay. You went to the hospital. Okay. When? When can you come in? Well, I don't have time to talk about your broken cell phone. When can you come in? I mean, that's all we care about. Whereas somebody, you know, I don't have time. I don't I mean, it's not that I don't care. You know, it's a case. I want to sign it up. I want to move forward. Second is lawyers have a tendency to over analyze, cases and look for the faults and look for the reasons to decline them. We never thinking, you know. Yes. No. Black and white. So having a non attorney, do intake. I don't need an attorney to say that a rear end accident with injuries is a case that I want to sign up right. My intake team, they can said, what is the key? The key is empathy. And and lawyers, you know, tend not to be the most empathetic. Now, they can put on the veneer of empathy when they're in front of a jury. But, you know, their mind is running a million miles an hour. They're analyzing the facts of the case. And every so, so my intake team, you know, they take the time to to listen and talk to the, potential caller. Now, remember I told you that we only sign up about 30% of the cases, which means 70% of the people were declining. Maybe it's not a personal injury case. Maybe it's not a case that we handle. You know, maybe there's no liability. But, you know, my intake team is talking to every single one of them and spending a couple minutes on the phone. And guess what? Those those 70% of the people that we decline, are thankful we get five star reviews from cases that we don't take and that we they go into our database, we remarket to them. And I can't tell you the number of people that we have declined who have come back to us afterwards. So, you know, my intake team by taking a couple minutes and explaining, well, you know what, I really appreciate the fact that you called me. But because you hit the car, you rear ended the car in front of you. You know, we can't make a recovery, okay? It has to be someone else's fault. And, you know, if you get rear ended or if you get hurt at work or, you know, please feel free to give us a call. You know, we're here all the time to answer your questions. You know, lawyers don't have time to do that, to have those conversations. You know, and then also, you know, we have very we have got, intake screening criteria. So, yes, non attorneys can be trained to decide what cases that we take and which ones we don't. Now, we do have attorneys that are available at all times. If if an intake specialist doesn't know whether it's a case or not, you know they'll talk to one of our attorneys, and decide whether to take it, or if it's, you know, a very, very serious case or if the client absolutely wants to talk to an attorney. Yes, we have an attorney available, but, and then finally, you know, intake is is very, very easy to keep track of your metrics and your numbers. Notice, I knew off the top of my head, out of every hundred leads were signing up 30. And we track our want rate. So for every lead that we have in, how many of them did we want and then how many did we sign? That's the conversion rate. Then we look at how many cases did we, sign that generated a fee? These are all really easy numbers to track. And when you have more than one intake person and you have enough data, you know, I know that 30% is where we should be at. So if we have an intake specialist that's signing up 45% of the cases, you know, we can look at that and say, you know, I think you should be a little bit more careful about signing up some of these cases, or if we've got someone who's signing up 20% of the case as well, you know, maybe you should be signing up a few more. And, and when you have enough data, you can, you know, you can come up with some pretty good numbers. If you're a medical firm, you know, your want ratio is probably under 5%. You know, they're just not a lot of viable medical cases. If you're a work comp firm, you're want rate is probably much higher because they got hurt on the job. And, you know, that's that's a want. So that, that that's my analysis. Oh. And then and this is maybe a good time to pivot, to, what we're doing with AI. So we, we record all of our phone calls and we transcribe them, and, and we've built out, an AI system that analyzes each of those phone calls and grades, each of those phone calls on empathy, on explaining things to the client by explaining the contract, by not rushing them and each intake call is graded. And then in real time, our AI is telling them suggestions on what would have made that phone call better. And yeah, and, you know, and we're doing this, you know, now in real time, my, my goal is to have, you know, the, the best intake team around because that's, that's the first impression that people get of your law firm is your intake. So, you know, we're looking at using technology, in all these different ways. And intake is, is definitely a good place to start. That's a really great point. The, and also just thinking about the metrics that you're describing, maybe if you can just double click on how you think about the use of technology to run your business, whether it be for metrics, for recording things, and technology can be AI, technology or not. Technology like how do you how do you view sort of the operations of plaintiff firms 3 to 5 years from now? And how old sort of technology do you think changed that? Keep it the same. Improve it? Well, Julianne, five years from now, I can't even tell you six months from now. Yeah. Fair enough like that. Things are changing so quickly. It's evolving, you know, in a pace that we've never seen before. And, you know, I've always been at the forefront of technology, and technology, to my mind, has been largely automation, you know, doing things internally automated. If if the process is always A, B, C and D, well, let's get rid of B and C and get them done automatically. If something is done this way every single time, you know, that's an automation. Whether it's templates. Right? I mean, we rarely write a custom letter anymore. Everything is by templates and they're all generated at certain times. So that's technology that that's been around for a long time. That's what's gotten my firm to be able to be so efficient. But the technology that's coming out today is, is leapfrogging that. So most of the technological benefits over the last 5 or 10 years have all revolved around case management systems. And, and these are systems that help you run your practice. In my experience, not many people use their case management system to its fullest potential. You could use Microsoft or Google, you know, for contacts, for your calendar and for your documents. A case management system is so much more if you use it and if you build it out. So so that's where that's where technology has been. But where AI is now and where it's going is allowing and I use AI and air quotes, but, you know, I will be able to analyze your cases, in real time and be able to, tell you what needs to be done. And, and very soon we'll be able to do it. So, for example, if we send discovery out, let's get let's go beyond the fact that I already sends our discovery out. But once the discovery is out and after 28 days in a case management system, that would come a task, you know, follow up defense counsel. It's late. Well, with AI, you know, those tasks go away is in your inbox is a letter to defense counsel saying that your discovery is overdue. It knows that it was overdue. It generated the letter. And the only thing you need to do with all AI is to proof it and send it. My thoughts on AI in terms of, where it's going, we've since we've been using case management systems for years and they're very effective, but I think that AI is going to leapfrog case management systems, because AI is going to know what to do without you having to program it. And to create these processes within the case management system. And you're literally going just going to have a, a data repository, that your AI is going to access and, and give you exactly what you need when you need it. The technology's not there yet. But there are a lot of companies, yourself included, that, you know, are really pushing the envelope in and trying to, and trying to get there with AI. It sounds like what you're describing. And I totally agree with you. Not not just in law, but across all industries, really? Is this this shift from, I sort of describe it as moving from an era of software as a service to services software where the software is now doing work instead of just being sort of the repository of the work and the data. That's kind of what you're describing, right? Is like the it's now, you know, autonomously figuring out what to do and, and maybe drafting an action and asking you to double check it or whatever it might be. I want to say I I'll just say as as technology moves towards greater and greater execution of work, accuracy matters, right? Doing work, AI executing work in the context of of of a law firm. Accuracy matters a lot. Just curious if you have any thoughts or learnings in in based on everything you've adopted, everything you've done in terms of, you know, using new products where AI is executing work just to make sure it's accurate. Like, how do you think about this in terms of like, you know, just adopting this technology in such a way to make sure it is of high quality and, you know, is it making errors? Kind of curious how you think about that. The best practices for AI all revolve around, data integrity. Okay. And what data the AI system is accessing. And almost all of our systems are entirely enclosed within my environment. And I know that my environment is pristine data. So they talk about, you know, hallucinations and case law. I would never use AI to, you know, write a brief, especially without checking it. But guess what we've got? We've got 25 years worth of legal briefs that we've done. Well, that's our database, okay. Because we wrote those briefs the old fashioned way. And now we can, you know, have AI access them, take the facts of our case that we're working on, use our database of all of our briefs that we've done in the past to do a first draft. And, and it's great. The problems that you run into is that, by the simple nature of, of an LLM, a large language model is it's predictive. It's predicting what you want. And that's where the possibility of hallucinations comes in. But if you lock down the data that you're using and that you're allowing the LLM to access, you're going to get much better results. And that's, you know, that's what we've been focusing on for the last year and a half, two years. Yeah. I, I'm always curious to see how people are thinking about it. Because what I find fascinating is, you know, when you're when you're hiring people, people make mistakes, right. And as you're scaling up, there's a certain amount of mistakes baked into the system. And so we kind of have this known process of doing quality assurance and supervision on people's work and then training people. And there's sort of like this emerging, you know, role job function to do quality assurance and supervision on AI work. And, I don't think it's any different. It's just like there's sort of a new standard operating procedure of doing this. And I'm always kind of curious how how firms have been, you know, figuring that out. Now, let's say we have an obligation, we have an ethical obligation to our clients, to produce the best quality legal output that we can. But according to the ABA and I agree with this. You know, we also have an ethical obligation to stay informed of new technology. And, and that is an ethical obligation that lawyers should become familiar with and use AI. And then of course, be very aware of, the confidentiality issues, the data privacy issues, the inherent bias, baked into most LMS. All of these things, are required, ethically required to be an attorney these days. So, you know, these lawyers that tell me, oh, I don't think AI is safe yet. And I'm going to wait to see what happens. And, you know, I don't want to be the first one out there. They're already so far behind that they're never going to catch up. You know, forget about law firms like mine that is that are really, really using AI to, you know, a lot, you know, even these firms that are using it a little bit are using outside vendors, right. You know, like super panel or some of these other, you know, vendors that are out there. These firms are already ahead of, their competitors who aren't using AI. I like to use this, this historical analogy is, you know, when I started out as a lawyer, lawyers would say, I don't need the internet. I've got a brochure. I get all my clients for my brochure. And guess what? The people that had websites, you know, started doing better, you know, and then the same lawyers would say, well, I've got a website, I don't need SEO. Everybody's going to find me. Well, yeah, you need us, you know, and the firms that were at the forefront of SEO are still at the forefront, and no one's going to catch them, you know? And then, oh, I don't need social media. Yeah, you do need social media. And if you're not doing it, the firms that are are already ahead of you and you'll never catch up. And now there's AI. So anyone who wants to just sit back and see what happens, you're never going to catch up, especially at the pace that is going on with, with AI. Yeah, that's a really good point. Those are good analogies. I've talked to some folks that were have been working in the industry for a very long time that have told me some similar stories, like I don't need a website, like why would I? Everything has worked so far without a website. And it sounds like this sort of inherent adaptability and curiosity and high velocity of learning is something that you just inherently have or worked at and have instilled in your firm. And so I think that's so important. I, I totally agree with you there. Just jumping around kind of back to a topic we touched on earlier. I'm just curious when you talked about hiring and, and all the importance of hiring and how you, you know, look for people, you also talk about your leadership team. I'm curious, like, what does your leadership team look like, and how do you decide what roles exist on your leadership team? Can you kind of walk through that? Yeah, so I've got I've got some people that have, come up with me. Right. They, you know, might have started when we had 30 people at the firm, and now we're, you know, four times that. So they've they have grown and, then I don't have other people that we've brought in as we've got larger. I think though, the key is this is, it is you have to have a nurturing environment. It's got to be a two way street. So I need to be able to trust them to do what their job is, and report back to me without me micromanaging. And then, likewise, I need to give them the authority. And also, the whole team needs to know that my executive team, I support them. I've had this conversation. You know, I may disagree with you in private, but I will never contradict you in front of the team. So everybody knowing that I have entrusted, you know, my leadership in these people, whether it's, you know, the director, you know, my my intake supervisor or the case manager, supervisor, settlement paralegal supervisor, litigation paralegal supervisor, you know, and then, then my book team can team. And my HR team, my marketing team. And then, of course, I've got my firm administrator, you know, and she's, she's at the top of all of this. So going back to my point on culture, you know, it's the combination of all of this. So it's me leading at the top with my vision and our mission, and it going down to the executive team and, and the leaders, who have to be the ones that are communicating, with the people that are doing the work. I've grown too big. I can't supervise or be actively involved in every single person's position in the firm. And so either training someone to be a leader or bringing them in from the outside, has been, you know, has has been key to our ability to continue to scale. That's great. The culture piece is so important. Great to hear that you're thinking about that and talking about that. You know, with culture, you know, what is culture? I wish that I could bottle it up. I wish I could write a book and sell it. It's it's really it's really hard to put your finger on. It's a lot of little things. And those little things, add up. It's it's making people, enjoy coming to work. Not just doing the work, but being empowered and giving them the power to handle situations. It's it's, you know, how you address issues within the firm, and then it's the little things in the four offices that we have. We had an Easter egg hunt. This was not my idea, all right? This was someone else's, and it went over so well. You know, we've got, some international team members, Ramadan. And so, of course, we made sure that everybody understood what Ramadan was. These little kind of things, you know, we give shout outs all the time, to people. We we publicize anniversaries. How long people have been there at the firm and birthdays, the communication between each other. I have my, my wine education certification. So I hosted a wine tasting for the whole firm, you know, and I, gave the shopping list to the three other offices. You know, they went out and bought it, and we did it all on zoom. So part of it is team building. Part of it is how you treat everyone. We have a very, very, we do not have a hierarchical team. The only thing that separates the lawyers from the people who, you know, take out the trash is we went to school longer, right? So we don't we don't. We're no better than anyone else. I like to tell people the quickest way to get fired in the firm is to say, that's not my job, because it's everybody's job. So, you know, all these things contribute to it. We have our monthly meeting by zoom. We have we have everybody on the zoom a month or two ago was employee appreciation Day. Gosh, if you're not doing something for employee appreciation Day, I mean, that's is low hanging fruit is there is how can you expect a team to believe in you when you didn't even pay attention to an employee appreciation day? So, you know, all these little things contribute to creating a firm wide culture. Yeah. That's great. I mean, what I'm getting out of all this is just this sort of shared set of behavioral norms. And sort of ways to behave in certain situations that you've created that that creates an environment that, you know, people want to work in and, you know, want to want to work well. And that's that's really fantastic. The word that you're bouncing around are values. We have firm values. And they they are everything that we do. So I already mentioned one is technology that is a firm value. Another firm value is approachability. You know, we want to break the stereotype of being stuffy lawyers. You know, we're very serious about the work we do, but we don't take ourselves seriously. Another firm value is creativity. And another one is, you know, technology, community and diversity. These are firm values that we live by, every single day. And when someone has a question, about what to do, we can always tell them, look back at our firm values. And that should be able to give you the answer. We always do what's best for the client. How do you screen for those values? Like technology and approachability are not the top things that come to mind when I think of a law firm. How do you screen for that and sort of instill those values? When hiring and when when building the culture? Well, certainly. It's it's it's part of our interview process. And I don't do the hiring any more. But, but, you know, for example, we would say, you know, Julian, one of our firm values is approachability. You know, we want clients to feel like that. They can come and talk to us. You know, a lot of people are intimidated by lawyers or law firms. A lot of people have never talked to a law firm. So if, if if our firm values approachability, you know, how would you handle, a situation? Working for our firm. Right. So but then it's really ingrained once we hire the people, we have a whole section on what our firm values are, what the vision is. We bring it up in all the firm meetings, the lawyers, you know, it's part of their progression through the law firm. If you want to continue to grow through the law firm, you know, you need to learn the firm values and you need to show the firm values because everybody is looking to you as the lawyers. And if you're not, if you're not displaying the firm values, that's a serious problem. How can anybody else care if the boss or the lawyer or whoever you know isn't living these values every single day? So, yeah, it all, it all just it all grows upon it and constantly referencing it. That's fantastic. Michael, this has been so wonderful. There's so many nuggets of wisdom here for people to take away and learnings that I've had from this conversation. If anyone wants to connect with you, learn more from you, follow along the work that you're doing and that your firm is doing. What's the best way to, to connect with you or learn more? Yeah. Probably LinkedIn. I've got a personal page, Michael McCready, and then our firm page. McCready law. You know, we're active on Instagram and Facebook, too, but, I don't really monitor those too much myself. LinkedIn, I see all the time. So that's probably the best way to reach out to me. Perfect. I'll put your profile in the comments and, that, we can wrap it right there. Great. Thanks, Julian. Really enjoyed it. Thanks for checking out the Scalable Law Blueprint. If today's conversation helped you think differently about how your law firm runs, share this episode with a colleague. And don't forget to follow the show so you never miss what's next. To see how automation can transform your intake and operations, visit Super Panel IO and discover how leading plaintiff firms scale with confidence. I'm Julian Emery and I'll see you in the next episode.