Escaping the Reactive Trap, AI Agents, and Building Scalable Law Firm Operations with Kenny Alami

Welcome to Studying Law Around the World. I'm Claudio Claus. In each episode, I talk with lawyers, law students, and professors from different parts of the world to talk about legal education, careers, and what the profession looks like in real life. We talk about the hard parts, the surprises, and the decisions that shaped their paths. Whether you're planning to study abroad, thinking about working in another legal system, or just curious about how law works around the world, this podcast is for you. Today I'm hosting Kenny Alami, he has a very, very interesting career and an interesting process and company that he's been building for law firms. Specifically his company is called Nod Operations. And I'm so excited to to learn a little bit from you. Kenny. Thank you so much for making the time to be in the podcast today. Pretty excited to chat. I think it's going to be. Fun, awesome, and she started conversations today. I'd love for you to introduce yourself. Sure. So yeah, name is Kenya, Amy, I'm the founder of Nob Paration. So you can think of us as a tech firm and we help professional services firms Essentially whatever they can do with your computer, we help them do with the computer rather than that do it manually. So we worked with 60 something clients, usually between 4 and 50 people in the team. And to give you a bit of the high level vision that we have for the future, which we think is exciting and is getting closer and closer is ready to make work as fun as possible and potentially, you know, just being almost not work. So that you know, you get to enjoy working with your clients, with your team. But at the moment, the mission is really helping people, you know, leverage technology and AI in their businesses as much as possible, so they get rid of the tedious and. Repetitive work amazing. So I, I see there's a lot of intersection of management, AI tech management. There's lots of things that that come about in that topic and I wanted to ask you to tell us a little more about your experience with technology and even how that shaped the approach that you have to business operations nowadays. Yeah. So I mean, I think the approach is really to make it useful to humans to, you know, people working in in those firms is really is really the big thing because with the advent of, you know, tech and AI and, you know, in the Silicon Valley, you feel like everyone wants to use tech to solve everything all the time. And sometimes you realize that people don't understand the problems that they are facing in businesses. So I find that really the most important before even thinking about, hey, do we need technology or which tool we need, which take we need is really understand. OK, what's the problem that we are facing where the problem that we're trying to face, but mostly also, you know, we are working with clients. So when you're working with clients is, hey, what's providing value to the people that we're working with? And then once you have dads and you identify, OK, like you know, we know what would bring value to our clients that you can reach activity and retro engineer from there and say, OK, this is the problem that we have to solve to provide that value. And then what kind of tools and solutions can we, you know, just put in place to solve those problems. So really the approach is, yeah, taking it from from that perspective. So like, OK, what's the value that would would be providing to to our clients and to the team, not the other way? Sounds amazing. So I did read some of the things you've put out there on, on LinkedIn and, and on your website. And I think that one of the things that I saw that kind of repeats a few times is that, you know, many business owners, probably law firm partners and, and operators, administrators, they can feel stuck despite having really, you know, thriving operations. But really on the administrative side, there's some complications, right, that make it feel like things are not progressing as well as they should. And I'm curious, you know in your experience what what you've been seeing around, what are some of the most common bottlenecks that you see in business operations, especially in the law firm contacts? I feel the most common one is, is really, you know, being too reactive. Most people, I think you could throw a stone out there and most people, you know, like you would just hit like a busy person. Like everyone is super busy all the time. And nowadays it's even worse because there's just so much information, so much to consume, so much going on, a lot of change, and it's just overwhelming and everyone seems to be extremely busy. And I find that a lot of the times people are very reactive and they don't necessarily take the time to, you know, just carve maybe 30 minutes or an hour to really try to be a bit more strategic. Reflect on their systems, reflect on, you know, the experiences that they have with clients Or even, you know, just maybe have a bit more of those conversations on like, hey, how can we do better or what can we change? But also, you know, like stemming out of that, then, you know, documenting all those things to to make them easier to train all the people you know, in their firms to, you know, solve those problems faster and things like that. So and that, that creates, you know, a bunch of cascading problems when you get into that situation because it's, it's just hard to, you know, when you're reacting all the time. It's it's just hard to take the time to pose and yeah, just to, you know, solve those problems strategically and, and have a clear mind and, and be clear headed. Absolutely no, I can, I can totally see that. I think in more, you know, colloquial terms, we would say usually you're always kind of putting out fires, right? So there's not, there's not really like a structure for planning and for being able to follow the, the routine you've planned. If kind of every day there's new urgent things that show up and and then you kind of become reactive to that, right. So I really appreciate you bringing that up. I totally agree with that, right. I see that happening. And when you, when you bring the aspect of, you know, having a good sense of what are the actual problems of business as, or what's the lack that's happening there? I'm curious, you know, how did you know, discovering tools and, and now specifically talking about, you know, automation tools change the way you saw these problems and, and maybe even your career and the impact that you've been having with your clients as those coming to place. So I started in operations and project management and I've always, you know, been tinkering with technology since a very young age. So, you know, I've always had a thing or trying to, you know, learning how to code, how to use at some point I was trying to make some games and stuff like that. So I've really been like into, into technology. But really where I'm coming from is project management, the reindeer standing, right? OK, how do we organize ourselves to deliver a project and justice, make sure that, you know, we stay on track and we think strategically whenever something comes along. And I think that's been pretty valuable rather than, you know, coming from a purely technical side, because technology is just so complex that, you know, you can lose yourself in the details. And I'm assuming, you know, you probably also gone through that when maybe you use like cloud, cloud or like those Viper game coding tools. And then you just go through like a rabbit hole. And once you're in there, you just lose track of like, yeah, OK, but what am I doing that? What am I doing? What I'm, what I'm doing, you know, why is it useful? What's the goal I'm trying to achieve and how is that aligning with that goal what I'm doing right now? So, you know, kind of the combination of, of the two is quite useful in the sense of asking those questions of like, OK, what I'm doing right now is really helpful, you know, for the firm. Is that really helping the people to make their work more efficient? Or I would just, you know, using AI or tag because, you know, everyone's using a or tag or is it really, you know, solving a problem that we have? So in that sense, I feel it's, it's quite useful not to be bogged down by, by those details too much and being able to, you know, see kind of the horizon. Fantastic. You know, very, very interesting to to take that into consideration. I love that when I think about love firms and, and I think about the overall like things that are seeing in the media and sometimes how it's portrayed, there is this impression maybe that law firms are very traditional space or that it's very conservative, risk averse. And in some instances can be, you know, complicated when it comes to technology and all of that. But it's, it's obvious that as the world evolves and maybe even as COVID made it kind of impossible, not you more and more law firms of all sizes are really leading into technology big time. So I wanted to ask you a little more, you know, how have you helped legal teams to adopt technology? And, and I'm sure there's, you know, all these concerns about compliance, quality and so forth, privacy. But what are some of the, the steps that you go through? And maybe if you can share with us you know a little more about, you know, the, the work you've done so far and what kind of tools specifically that looks like. For sure. I mean, I think what's the most important I would say is picking the right tools and the right foundation. And what I mean by that is, you know, you don't want to build your firm on Word and spreadsheets in terms of, you know, the business side of things. You don't want to have, you know, all your invoices stuck in in Word or keeping track of your project in the spreadsheet because it's brutal. And, you know, maybe it would work for one or two persons, but once you're past a certain size, you know, there's good software and there is people that have been thinking about the problems like, you know, keeping track of cases or keeping track of projects or keeping track of, you know, yourselves, you know, the relationships that you have or the the leads that you bring in the firm. And you essentially, if you just use a spreadsheet, you're kind of trying to almost spend the same amount of time, you know, build those, rebuild those tools in the spreadsheet. Whereas like you could, you know, just get one off the shelf and get straight off a tool that's very efficient and allows you to solve those problems way faster. You know, like keeping track of your leads or sending contracts automatically, you know, keeping track of your deadlines and in a case management software, things like that. So I would say that's probably the most important, you know, making sure that you have those tools, that they are obviously have a good user experience, so it's pleasant to learn them and to navigate them. And the other thing they are kind of still on the business requirement side is also making sure that they're open. And what I mean by that is that they have what's called an API, which is essentially a way to connect your tools automatically. So, you know, you can transfer data, but you can also do automated actions in it. It's going to be even more important to make sure that you have those open software when you know, people start having like AI agents and you can ask and they are like, hey, just like, you know, go get this data in this tool and go do that other thing on that tool and summarize all the data from those four different tools. And if you have all the software that I closed and specially like, hey, you can't have your, I can't have access to any of that stuff, You're just going to be way slower than those people that, you know, have those tools at their disposal. So that's kind of like, you know, the business for requirement side. And then obviously you have, let's say, the more security side of things, compliance side of things. That's also super important because, you know, we're talking about pulling data in the cloud on the server somewhere or, you know, getting data out or in other software. So, you know, when the data is in your in your in your tool, you just want to make sure that it's secure enough that no one can get in it and steal your data or do anything with it. And similarly, you know, when you take it in and out of the stuff that you want to make sure that no one can catch it. O when you choose the software, you need to make sure you do a bit of research on like, Hey, how are they handling my data? Is it safe? I believe you need to make sure you understand at least the big lines of it. Like, you know, hey, I can, you know, assess quickly for software is safe for now. But, you know, seeing like those requirements. So then you don't expose yourself to maybe some guy that just vibe coded CRM and you just gave it money and then somehow it's super dangerous because anyone can enter it. So, yeah, you just want to make sure, you know, you do a bit of, of due diligence there and maybe learn a bit about, you know, what makes the software secure. Don't need to be a cyber expert, but knowing that the big trends and the big lines are are important. Amazing, and I think that one of the interesting things that we can see now we've we've AI and with this advancement is that even if you're not necessarily well versed in these pools, you can always maybe go and ask an AI bought about like how to how to learn those or how to do these assessments. Recently I've I've participated, we've we've a project that basically was creating some of the guidelines of how do you even, how do you even, you know, choose software when it comes to legal? Because really with all the hype going on, there really needs to be some kind of a playbook, right, for, for being able to buy AI. And it's a little different than just buying softwares, right? So it was basically an idea of, of having legal benchmarks for an evaluation framework. So you know what, you ask vendors and, and all of that. And it was very interesting to see how the profession kind of came together to, to really like bring better standards, right? So everyone kind of knew what was going on, everybody's trying to figure it out. But it's really good when this kind of collaboration comes about. And on the other hand, I feel like technology evolves at such a pace that we are kind of always trying to catch up to it, right? Obviously everywhere, every every third article, every 3rd, you know, news, it's something about AI. So from your experience, when is AI the right solution and when are those simple systems more effective being you know, from the cost side or from really the the functionality that it has to be done? So there is a spectrum from, you know, if you're, let's say you have a specific, you know, process, if it's very deterministic. And by that I mean if the rules are always the same, you know, let's say if you're always copy pasting the same thing and always the same info that you're copy pasting, that's that means it's very deterministic. And then you have on the other side of the spectrum, you know, things are a bit more uncertain. So you don't the outcome that you're going to get may vary widely. I feel that on this side where it's very uncertain, AI is usually better and on the side where it's very deterministic, then you can use, you know, tools, you know, code or scripts or ZAP here some of those things that it's easier to have specific rules in place. To give you an example, at some point there was a family law firm in California and they had something like 550,000, you know, names in the database that they had to do conflict checks on. And it was pretty tedious because they were doing that in HubSpot. And, you know, the search in HubSpot is not very good. So there was a potential, you know, to miss something. And they approached me and they were like, Hey, we'd like to use AI to do that. But quickly I realize like, hey, like 50,000 names fitting that to an AI that sounds like it's going to be very slow and the potential that it misses something is pretty high. So in the end, we ended up, you know, to be too technical, but putting everything in database and doing, finding a solution that's actually, we've had for a bunch of years now before I that is quite reliable that, you know, just with code, a way to search all those names and find similarities in the names or even like, you know, in the sounds, if there are similar sounds. And so there are tools to do that that literally would happen in milliseconds rather than potentially minutes with an AI. So in those specific instances, you know, there are tools that we've had for a decade or so before AI came around that we can use to address these use cases. But on the other hand, let's say you're always when countering cases that are, you know, very different from each other. And maybe in the in the example of contracts that are widely different, you know, in widely different industries, you can still extract principles. Like, you know, for example, if you were to teach me how to analyze those contracts, you could do the same for an AI and, you know, try to teach it and formalize that knowledge. And they said, like, here's the contract, you know, go through it and help me, you know, analyze it. Here's the things they need to look out for. In that case, AI is a bit, you know, more useful because you had to just like create all those rules and script them in, in some sort of programming would just take you forever, right? And it's. It doesn't make sense to. To amazing. Well, thank you for for going a little bit more deep into that. I liked that. I think you used the word superpower should describe, you know, when operations become the superpower for illegal businesses, so they go from, you know, a problem, a bottleneck complication in the business should being the businesses superpower. And honestly, I see this very often when I read, you know, LinkedIn, there's a lot of thought leaders that, that constantly talk about the importance of invoicing and how it's such a, such a struggle, it seems throughout the, the profession throughout, you know, different size of firms and all of that. So I'm, I'm curious, you know, can you give some examples of a business that that transform in that way making, you know, really that operation from a bottleneck from a difficult painful thing to really that superpower of the business? Well, there's a good example that I came across in the last couple of weeks that I thought was was pretty interesting. Probably heard about about him. I don't remember the name of his firm, but I think his name was Zach Shapiro. I think he's article went everywhere in the legal world, but I really liked what he built and what he highlighted. So, you know, I think he's been using like cloth in general, like clockwork and cloud code and essentially what it's done is, you know, he's been talking with those tools a lot and having lots of chats and really is brainstorm with the IA way to formalize all his his knowledge in what they call different skills, which are essentially just a collection of, you know, text files that just explain, you know, have your processes and your instructions and all your principles, maybe references on what good looks like. So and the I can reference that. And now, I mean, he claims that now he can just send the contract or something like that. And then, you know, the I just like does all their work automatically. But what I liked and white highlighted, I feel like is where this is going is that, you know, I don't think we've it's not natural for us to learn software. Like it's not natural for us to be like, Oh, I'm going to click here. If I want to get an invoice, I have where do I get this invoice and how do I issue an invoice? You know, I have to click in this menu and maybe I have to right click here. Then I need to search the name, but I don't remember the name. Where was it? And like, I don't it, it doesn't feel natural to do that. Whereas, you know, talking outline, like I'm talking to you've been doing that for hundreds of thousands of years, right. So what I liked about what he was saying is like he couldn't learn software. And I heard that so often when people are like, Hey, I just in love from like, I don't have the time to run software and people buy software, but I don't use it. And I'm like, yeah, it just makes a lot of sense to be like, Hey, I just talk to the and just helps me figure things out, helps me do my work. I can brainstorm with it and you know, eventually you can have. Di do stuff in in other softwares for use. I feel like, you know, we can start doing that right now, and I feel this is kind of like the superpowers that he's describing, and I feel like he's probably also only scratching the surface of that, even though it's super impressive. It's like, hey, it's stuff that would take me days, not take me, you know, maybe hours and research and drafting. And then you can really focus on just providing that value and nurturing their relationship with your clients, you know, making sure you're there, you're there. So I really like this story for that aspect of you have been leveraging. It's being super useful, but also just, you know, talking like you were talking to a human and and having a chronic just feels way more natural than you know, banging your head against self threader you can't figure out. For sure though, absolutely. Yeah, thank you for for mentioning that. When when you look ahead now, what kind of trends in automation and operations are you most excited about, especially when we look at, you know, small and mid sized? Law firms, I think, yeah, it is the the AI agent. I know, I think it was last year, yeah, last year where everyone was like, oh, it's the year of the AI agent. And everyone was talking about AI agents, but they were quite not there. And when you were looking at it. So like, yeah, this is not, you know, reliable or really great at what it's doing. And I think that's that's where it's going. It seems like because, you know, it just makes more sense to, you know, have something you talk to, whether it's on WhatsApp, sounds like, or wherever, and that it can help you, you know, do like you were. So, you know, you were talking about invoicing, like why would you have to logging into Cleo and try to remember how to do it? I mean, if you're using Cleo, you know, or any of those other tools that you might be using for invoicing, why couldn't you just ask the other like the unpaid, you know, it says for the last three months and then, you know, the ones that are appendix, send them over or even have have it done automatically like that. If it feels like that's that's where you would want to do so you don't have to just like have to do all those work that that potentially your computer could do. And that that ties back to what I was telling, you know, like closer to the beginning of the conversation, like having those open software and, you know, making sure while you know, the models are getting better and everyone's trying to figure out, you know, making sure you have those tools that are open that your processes or however, you know, you do, whether it's legal work or more on the business side of things. You know, having everything documented, you know, all your data is safely organize, your files organized, you know your client data organized so that when you can actually safely plug an agent into that, you know, they know where things are. It's easy to figure out, like it would be easy for a human to figure out. So then you can actually leverage them rather than, you know, putting in a in, in in the middle of that it wouldn't understand, OK, why do I need to do and what I need to get those invoices or this client data or anything like that, You won't be able to leverage it. So I would say, well, you know, those capabilities are becoming greater and greater. Just making sure, you know, you're getting ready and you have the foundations in place in your firm is is probably a good call because I think it's, yeah, it's about to be very exciting and very powerful. I feel like very fast. So, you know, being ready to catch that wave is if it's going to be very important. Fantastic. Well, can you thank you so much for making the time to to be in the podcast and to share some of your thoughts and and some of how this, you know, whole process works. I really appreciate you be coming in the. Show cheers. Thank you. Appreciate. It thank you all for tuning in and we will see you on the next episode.