Alex Babin, CEO at Zero, says that the beautiful part about automating processes is to make the machines work the way the lawyers work so that you get a Return on Invest starting the very first day. For many of us, Alex brings up what we might think as the Holy Grail of implementing change in a law firm, and that is to allow the attorneys to continue working the same way and have the technology do the administrative tasks in the background. With little to no interaction from the attorneys. He says that the best product is the product that doesn’t have to be implemented. The best software is no software so that you don’t have to teach them how to use it. Babin’s product Zero for email compliance, along with the new mobile time capture Apollo is designed to reduce the time spent on these non-billable, administrative tasks for lawyers.

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Information Inspirations
Brittany Luce and Eric Eddings have returned to their podcasting roots after finally leaving The Nod and the mess at Gimlet Media, and their video version of The Nod after the collapse of Quibi. After seven years, they resurrected their original podcast, For Colored Nerds (FCN) on Stitcher/SiriusXM where they discuss Black culture from their own nerdy perspective. Brittany and Eric are great and vulnerable storytellers and their return to FCN, as more mature adults, is a great place to tell and listen to their stories.
Sometimes hardcoding tech gets better results than what you might find with AI, machine learning, or neural networks. BRAIN was developed in the 1980s and is still around today using the idea of “weaving” to identify objects like pastries. The accuracy of this established technology is very good and shows that not all shiny new things are better than the tried and established processes. The New Yorker has a great article on the use of BRAIN.
Contact Us
Twitter: @gebauerm or @glambert.
Voicemail: 713-487-7270
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com.
Music: As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
Transcript

Marlene Gebauer  0:07

Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert  0:15

And I’m Greg Lambert. Marlene, I have to ask you the most important question of this time of the year and that is, have you even started your holiday shopping yet? Because I have not. And luckily, my wife doesn’t listen to the show. So I can be totally honest about my lack of gift purchases at the moment.

Marlene Gebauer  0:36

Well, I guess I’m sorry to say them that I indeed have started. I have a secret Santa at work. So I’ve been at work on that. And also, I’ve gotten my kids to submit their lists. Well, at least one has. The other one just says money. So he’s going to be, he’s gonna be disappointed.

Greg Lambert  0:56

Well, my money is always a good gift. I will tell you, I came from a family that we were not too proud to just give money to people,

Marlene Gebauer  1:04

except people would always lose the money, right? And then you’d have to go through all you’d have to go through everything that you threw out all the boxes, all the wrapping paper in the garbage, you would have to go through and find it because somebody inevitably would lose it.

Greg Lambert  1:16

Actually, I will say, I did see that there was a print catalog that was laying out on the table this morning. That said, Mom Look at this. And then there were all kinds of things circled inside. So I think we have some suggestions. Well, this week we bring in Alex Babin from zero to talk about some automation processes. Fascinating really, really cool stuff. Cool. I love that his thing is always talking about the best processes, no process or the best software’s no software so exciting stuff. So stick around for that. But let’s get to this week’s information inspirations

Greg Lambert  2:00

Well, Marlene might inspiration has nothing really to do with legal other than maybe some of the the legal battles that they had

Marlene Gebauer  2:07

makes two of us that’s good. Good. We don’t do this on purpose. We really don’t.

Greg Lambert  2:13

My favorite podcasts duo our back and kind of where they originally started off, Brittany L:uce and Eric Eddings formerly of The Nod which I’ve had as an inspiration before, they’ve returned to their original podcast. And they also left behind that mess that was there, gimlet media and Spotify, and are now at Stitcher and on the Sirius XM platform. I’m gonna put a link to their FCN podcast in the show notes. But the backstory with Brittany and Eric is fascinating on how they played a part in exposing gimlet media’s problems that they were having and and how they treated their podcast host and creators, as well as their experiment at Quibi, which you may remember Quibi which, of course, collapsed last year. So their podcast continues their discussion on black culture in their own nerdy kind of way. And the first episode back is a bit of a self reflection on how they’ve come back to their beginnings, but as much more experienced adults this time. So I absolutely love the storytelling and honesty that they bring to the show. And even as a, you know, 50 year old plus CIS, male, white male, they still have things that they can teach me about humanity. And I’m hoping that they have much better luck this time around with their podcast, because they certainly have earned it.

Marlene Gebauer  3:42

Well, you know, I think anybody that tells honest stories, you know, is worth listening to. And I think everybody gets something out of that no matter who you are. So I found a story, Greg, that has just about everything I like, it has a scrappy hero. It has AI, it has the weaving business. Now I’m stretching this to the knitting business based on my family history. It has dessert and curing cancer,

Greg Lambert  4:09

all the good stuff.

Marlene Gebauer  4:10

Are you intrigued?

Greg Lambert  4:10

I am intrigued.

Marlene Gebauer  4:12

Yeah, I was too. So this is in The New Yorker. And it’s long form and everybody should read this. In the Ueno train station train station and I have been there. There is a pastry shop that recognizes your pastry by sight when you check out. So it sees your pastry and can determine if it’s a bear claw or a jelly. And you say, Oh, this is neural network, right? Well, no, not exactly. It’s something based on BRAIN, which is invented by Hisashi Kamabe. In the 1980s. Yes, the 1980s, to identify complex patterns in weaving. Now BRAIN was used for other seeing projects so rendering Kanji characters on computers, was used as a tool to for engineers to build bridges. Then came The bakery scan project in 2007. So we’re still in 2007. All right, this is still before neural nets. People like their pastries unwrapped because they looked fresher. So there’s no barcode to scan and you know, really who wants the cashier to handle your pastries like eww, David. Kamabe bet the farm on this project and there were so many considerations they had to think about. So the lighting for example, that changes all day in a bakery, so shadows interfere with seeing if two pastries are put too close together. So they look like one big one would cause a problem. So Kamabe developed a backlight and an algorithm to identify. I love this “Bakeness” to color. Okay, so resolve some of the issues they faced, you know, you think it could have just ended it that but in 2017, the Louis Pasteur Center for Medical Research and Kyoto approached BRAIN to develop a version of bakery scan for pathologists. So they’re looking at cells instead of baked goods. Other domains soon followed. So distinguishing pills and hospitals, counting the number of people in an 18th century Ukiyo E woodblock print, which I got to check out. Use to label charms and amulets for shrines and to detect incorrectly wired bolts in jet engines. So Kambe said that there are still areas where deep learning neural networks are still impractical. So if a bakery introduced a new variety of pastry every week, the deep learning system would require 1000s of examples. If you show the bakery, scan a pastry that’s never seen before on Earth, it will recognize the next one at 40%. And at five viewings at 90%. Plus, this hard engineered system, results are more articulable than a deep learning system, you can actually understand why the system misidentifies as opposed to kind of the black box of neural networks. So, you know, it’s very rare to see this sort of development now. I mean, it’s it’s truly artisanal, like bread. You know,

Greg Lambert  7:03

I see what you did there.

Marlene Gebauer  7:03

Yeah, you do. You know, deep learning takes a lot of the work around the parameters out of the equation, you know, I’d be actually very curious to hear what our neural network expert friends have to say about this. What made this project successful in its day in and you know, to this day is is a focus on a specific task, and a specific set of data. And the last thing I want to say is, I do like this one quote that Kambe has in the article, it’s “Being a good company is more important than becoming a big company.”

Greg Lambert  7:34

That’s wise words.

Marlene Gebauer  7:36

And that wraps up this week’s information inspirations.

Greg Lambert  7:44

Today’s guest discusses what I think would be the holy grail of the legal industry and creating change without attorneys actually having to change the way they work. This type of automation seems to answer a lot of the issues that most of us run into when we’re bringing in that change to the firm.

Marlene Gebauer  8:04

We’d like to welcome Alex Babin, CEO of zero to The Geek in Review. Alex, it’s really good to have you here.

Alex Babin  8:10

Thank you, Marlene. Great to be here.

Marlene Gebauer  8:13

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you came to your current position?

Alex Babin  8:18

Well, we’re a Silicon Valley company, and, you know, startups being founded in Silicon Valley, the idea comes to someone’s mind, and then you start sharing it with friends. And if they feel like it’s a good idea, they start joining you. That’s the same story happened here. We didn’t start in a garage though. Like like Apple. There were many other companies. We were starting in a nicey nice cozy office. But it started the same way. I had an idea of automation to be applied to knowledge workers. And that was the fascinating problem to be to be solved and really hard one. And I started showing it to a couple of my friends and they join me as a co founders. And here we are six years later, 75 people believing an idea and building this company.

Greg Lambert  9:09

Every time I think of Silicon Valley, I think of the HBO show or Showtime, I can’t remember where where they’re like in a in a house in a garage. And I think that’s what everyone thinks of with Silicon Valley. I did want before we dove in to the conversation, you’ve been doing something that I’ve enjoyed, and I think a lot of people have enjoyed. And that is during the pandemic you actually establish this monthly comedy night. And you had one of our favorite past guests on the show Eugene Cipperoni. And yeah, he’s great. In fact, I thought, you know, he was supposed to be like the the warm up act one one month and I think he kind of like, oh, no, this show he stole the show.

Alex Babin  10:01

That was intentional!

Greg Lambert  10:03

Good, good, good. So how did you come up with that idea?

Alex Babin  10:07

So it’s all started was into going virtual, in the middle of pandemic. And we picked up the sponsorship for a comedy show, which was basically the last one left. And no one knew how this virtual event would, would work out. So we decided, like, why why wouldn’t we do something that we can basically contribute back to the community, because seeing all over again, those peaches from different companies about the products might be a bit boring, especially when things like COVID happening around. So for us, getting something to make people smile, one smile at a time was something that we actually wanted to contribute to. And actually there was accepted so well, so we decided to have it on a monthly basis, inviting different comedians, and then we realize we’re surprised to realize how many of legal professionals are actually into comedy, and the willing to step up and do the part of a show. And I think it’s partially because they consider part of the work, they’re doing kind of a bit boring. So they need to substitute with something more, more enjoyable, something to enjoy with. And that’s the comedy, and we keep doing it. Well, that’s our giving back to the community. Once my audit time.

Greg Lambert  11:34

Yeah, we have to laugh at ourselves, because otherwise, we would just be crying all the time.

Alex Babin  11:40

You’re right.

Marlene Gebauer  11:40

And I can say I know more than one litigator who’s who’s basically turned to stand up. So not not surprising at all, that you have so many, so many comedians in the legal community. So I want to switch more to the main topic of our interview. And I’ll start with this question. What’s the key pain point for lawyers in their day to day work, Alex,

Alex Babin  12:03

besides not having enough comedy? Yeah. Well, I would put it this way, I kind of understand that. People who spend a lot of time getting into the profession, which is really, really requires a lot of knowledge and a lot of practice. They never thought how much tax I mean, that productivity tax, everything they’re doing on a daily basis would take. So no lawyer went to law school to file emails, little did they know how much time it will take them every day, the same with time capture. And if you talk to any legal professional asking for three top things that they have to do everyday, but they kind of don’t like doing and that consumes a lot of the time, that will be probably email management, time capture management, time management, and document review. Right. So document review is a separate topic, it’s more of a practice of law, but email management and time capture, it’s a part of a business of law that we try to automate. And those pain points they accumulate into basically, to build eight hours, you have to work 12, right, or to build to build 12 hours, you have to work much more. So actually, that creates an enormous tax, both on time and on health and kind of a joy of life for legal professionals, we know they burn out really quickly. We see this enormous hours, associates have to work. And that’s what needs to be changed. these pain points are really it’s, it’s not like a scratch on the knee. It’s like feeling like an axe stuck in the back.

Greg Lambert  13:54

I remember years ago, I had a I had one of my researchers who was entering in his time. And then he very sincerely asked me he’s like, Well, can I enter in? Is there a time entry I can enter in for my time entry?

Alex Babin  14:13

Well, that’s exactly it is. That’s the tax.

Greg Lambert  14:16

Exactly. Exactly. Well, in so I know, I know, that you focus in on the business side of law, not necessarily the practice side, but just that amount of time that we have to spend, and, you know, filling out the paperwork, getting time entry and filing those emails, as you said, and so and I know that you do a lot with with automation with Zero. Now I know there’s a lot of automation products out there that are focused on creating workflow efficiency, you know, what’s the focus the Zero has an in you know, what’s your way of distinguishing yourself from from the others.

Alex Babin  15:03

That’s great question, Greg. So you’re right. There’s so many automation, not just products, but also techniques. There’s business process automation, robotic process automation, Intelligent Automation, all that stuff. If we look at this whole picture from like 10,000 feet view, we’ll see that there are processes of a high volume that can be easily automated, like taking data from one place and putting data in another place. But there are proper processes that require mimicking the decision making process of a human being. It’s called cognitive processes. And these processes are really hard to automate. And typically, those processes have a high value, not high volume, like with other type of automation. And I’ll give you a couple of examples. But just to set the, the framework here, if you can imagine a Venn diagram of three circles overlapping. One circle would be high value processes. Another circle would be repetitive processes. And third one would be cognitive processes. So what Zero is doing is in the middle of those three circles, overlapping, and it’s called productivity automation, because most of the productivity tools and techniques they are focused on taking on the high volume processes, that basically connecting different systems and taking information from one place to another, or well defined processes like workflow automation, when you have defined steps. But what’s really, really important and that was the blessing and the curse, once we started building our solution is that there is only one thing that is in common for every knowledge worker in the world might be accountant might be lawyer might be consultant, anyone. Only one thing is that we all work differently. For the high value processes. One lawyer might be doing his time or her time differently from another lawyer in the same firm, daily basis, weekly basis, grouping things, breaking them down into smaller items, describing it differently, and so on, so forth. And I can go on and on with differences. And that’s the only common thing. So basically, you cannot build an automation technique automation tool that will feed all one feed old doesn’t apply here. Because attorneys are highly trained professionals. And if you try to make them work differently from how they’ve been trained themselves to, that’s a recipe for disaster. That means the automation that you bring in should be ideally invisible. No tricks to don’t new, learn new tricks to learn, adaptable, it should be adopting itself to the way professional works not trying to adapt the way the professional work to do the new technique. And that creates a lot of lot of problems when creating this kind of a platform, which we’ve spent six years building. And that’s why it’s called productivity automation, because it elevates the productivity of each individual professional while working with a different legacy systems. Instead of connecting to legacy system, we focus on the knowledge worker, and then high value processes that that knowledge worker is involved with.

Marlene Gebauer  18:33

So Alex, you touched a little bit on some of the themes of my next question. You know, automation tools have been historically hard to implement. You know, based on the tech itself, again, if people have to learn something new, then the resistance to the need to learn a new way of doing things. So how have you and your clients combated this?

Alex Babin  18:58

Yeah, that’s that’s great question. And it’s a well known problem for the whole industry. It’s not the cost of the product that scares clients. In many cases. It’s the cost of knowledge to change management. The Change management is what constitutes basically of those enormous processes inside the law firm once the product is being deployed. So there are many great products on the market, but then it basically heats the reality of the product hits reality of internal culture and resistance from lawyers to adapt new techniques, new new software and everything else. And it just breaks down into pieces, right? And in physics, for example, we know that from physics we know that the ideal machine is the one that doesn’t exist, but the job is done. So we have similar concept. We believe that the best interface is no interface to best software is no software, imagine the work is done. But you you didn’t do anything to make that work done. And it’s not applicable most of the cases to practice of law, but we are touching the business of law only imagine those 1/3 of your time as a legal professional that you spend on doing those business of law processing processes, just disappears, that and you can spend that time on billable activity. So in this case, all these processes that consume a lot of your time can be done by a machine. And if you combine it with a cognitive component, which mimics the way you work, and that’s where the magic is being unlocked. Because the machine works the way you would work. I’ve been talking recently to one of the attorneys and Emma 100 and asked her like, what would be your ideal situation? And imagine you have a magic wand, Harry Potter’s or whatever, a magic wand and you can do your magic trick and make yourself productive. What would would that be? And she said, I would clone myself, I have someone like me working for me. So it’s like, well, it’s unachievable, but we can solve a partially like a portion of it for you, helping you with a machine that will be mimicking the way you work and doing those administrative tasks for you. So that’s the way the the tech industry should go. We should not be introducing new software, no new interfaces, no change management, we just need to help legal professionals to do the work better and faster.

Greg Lambert  21:44

Alex, when you when you say for example, when you talk to this, this partner and you tell her that you’re going to automate it, how do you approach it in a way that she understands what you mean by automating the task? Are there some simple examples that you use?

Alex Babin  22:03

Absolutely. So actually, the simpler it is, the better it is. The first question is like, what is it you don’t like doing every single day, but you have to, and typically 123 processes come up as a on the top of the list. And at least two of them can be automated with the products we have. So basically, we always start with a problem that the end users have. And once they realize that they don’t have to learn new tricks. But it can be done. And it can be effectively automated. And the analogy we’re using is saying like, basically, imagine you have an AI assistant, that works the way you want it to work 24/7 Not taking breaks, not being paid, and doing things the way you would like to be done. That’s exactly what Intelligent Automation and in productivity automation is. And then once they start seeing the results, and typically ROI is on the first day, once you turn on the solution, it starts filing for you start doing your email management, it starts capturing your time. And then typically, both firms and users, they come back to us say Hey, can you automate this? And that? No, of course, we have to triage it. Because not everything needs to be done. Not everything can be automated. And not everything should be automated. But in many cases, they’re the full bucket of things that end users want to automate.

Greg Lambert  23:36

Is there typically top one or two things that that they come back to you and say, These are my pain points?

Alex Babin  23:44

Yes. And actually, that’s how our whole suite of productivity tools has been built. We started about five years ago, with one we entered the legal market with a very simple but powerful tool of email compliance automation, where each email in your Outlook has the client and matter prediction, and then being filed into management documents. So you don’t have to do it manually. So and then we started getting the feedback from users. In the second the most requested thing was time capture, can you guys do the time capture for us because we spend a lot of time doing it. And the accuracy is not very high and we’re being under pressure for billable hours and so on so forth. So we did build it we build it on mobile first. And recently we released the product called a polo which kind of have 300 360 degree view now on everything a legal professional is doing both on mobile and desktop. And another example is wrong recipient detection when attorney might be sending an email to someone accidentally adding opposite console or someone else another John Smith, and realizing it only hit like once or clicking this Send the button. And that can be easily prevented with, again, with security, automation, all kinds of things that surface up while working with our clients.

Greg Lambert  25:11

Or if they’re like me, you don’t figure it out until you’ve hit Reply All about three times.

Alex Babin  25:16

Oh, you know what? No. Reply All is the most expensive button in the world. It costs so much money.

Marlene Gebauer  25:26

That’s that’s a true statement right

Greg Lambert  25:28

there that sure is. So I’m glad you brought up time automation, because I think that that’s something that a lot of attorneys think about they want but I think it’s hard for them to kind of wrap their head around the process of that. So what have you found that works best for this type of time automation capture?

Alex Babin  25:50

Actually, let’s go back to a couple of minutes ago when we were talking about the invisible automation. So the best one is the the one that basically you don’t have to interact with original interface, just do your work, you will you do your viewable work. And then you see everything magically appear in existing system. So there are two components. One, it should be non intrusive for the end user. Again, no learning new tricks, no new buttons, no new software, we all hate it. I’ll just attorneys. We all hate it. But another hand, we have existing law firms infrastructure that has been there for years, and a law firm might be spending millions of dollars on setting it up training people, making sure everything, everything works fine. And then if you need to change it to something new, that’s typically really hard to, to do. And in our case, it’s both non intrusive for the IT and the management of the firm. Because as automation, Apolo in all our products, other products live and sit on top of existing systems, never replacing anything but enhancing things. It’s think of it as a intelligent layer between the legacy system, any of them, and the end user. And that intelligent layer produces the the work that the end user, a lawyer, at the end just reviews and says, Well, that’s, that’s fine or changes things, and then the system learns from it. So it should be non intrusive and invisible, both for the user and for the infrastructure. And that’s the beautiful part of automation, because it can be set up pretty quickly. And you start getting ROI on the first day. And it’s less risky. Because asking a law firm to change Time and Billing system to something new. Well, it’s really, really hard, but enhance it. That’s much easier and less risky.

Greg Lambert  27:53

Do you have any type of metrics on on the ROI? Is there a percentage of time capture that you’re catching the normally been missed?

Alex Babin  28:03

One of our clients recently published a case study with Weinstein available on our website. Once they launch our product, they, they found over 20 hours, new billable hours for timekeeper per year, and the number keeps growing, the more the more the product, and the system is being adopted more people using it more time is being captured. And that’s being done without any efforts from from the end users from the attorneys.

Marlene Gebauer  28:35

Yeah, that is fantastic. Because, you know, we’re talking about pain points, you know, this is a pain point attorneys consistently, you know, don’t get their time entry in it’s like, you know, there’s, there’s always memos going around, make sure you get your time and make sure you get your time. And so you know, that they’re not capturing this, like every day every second, but yet, this is a product and this is a tool that can basically do that for them, and they don’t have to think about it

Greg Lambert  29:02

correct. And I’ll say one other thing, because I kind of brought this topic up to a friend of mine to say, is this something that would just aggravate the client? And because there’s like, oh, well, there’s this time I wasn’t built. And he actually came back and said, No, actually, the the client is fine with this because it gives them an actual more accurate time capture in entry. So they know exactly what’s going on. Whereas before, it may have been, you know, the bulk bill and, you know, or just some generic entry on there. So, you know, his approach to it was they don’t mind because it actually gives them a clearer picture of what’s what’s going on.

Alex Babin  29:50

Yeah, and the ability

Marlene Gebauer  29:53

you know, it certainly helps the firm’s sort of figure out I mean, if they’re trying to do you know, different types of pricing, that they have a real true picture of what that you know what that costs? Correct. Alright, so Alex, you had mentioned Apollo, tell us a little bit about it and how it works.

Alex Babin  30:12

Apollo is an extension of our mobile time capture, it’s basically utilizes the same AI engine that we’ve been building that understands what client matter project, anything each piece of information belongs to. And then it has the component activity capture component, which looks into what is being done. And combining those two engines that understands what you’ve been doing, and then understanding who you’ve been doing it for what client that matter. And then utilizing the natural language processing to actually create the description, the narrative, the way you would create it, using the same words that you’ve been creating, historically, looking into the billing guidelines and understanding how client would love to see it, and creates the final time entry. In existing system. Let’s say you have an add on Item key pour in tap or car PDM. This system, the legacy system stays the same, those time entries are being auto populated into existing system. And let’s say you’re your, your attorney go you go into your item keep at the end of the day, and you basically see your whole day being described as time entries. And if for example, and here is here is the power of automation. Let’s say you worked on the email for five, you read an email for three minutes, it’s below the the threshold for being captured. Typically, you will not spend two minutes describing the creating the time entry for three minutes that you read an email, you typically jump from one to another, but then you download an attachment from that email and you spend another three minutes reading that attachment. And then you skipped it and jump to another task. So our consumption is really really fragmented. Even if we try to kind of streamline it have it in, in chunks. It’s still fragmented. And it’s impossible to capture all that time. But in case of a polo, it will combine those elements into one time entry, which belongs to one client and one matter, it will capture that email activity, it will capture that reading the document Word document, even if you had a call after afterwards, just to discuss that document with the client, it will also be combined into one a one time entry. So it will give you not 1000s of tiny fractions of time during the day, but beautifully created and structured time flow. And that requires few clicks and few interactions later to actually understand what is what is you want to build for or not so

Marlene Gebauer  32:53

and I imagine the doing it that way it reads better for a client as well. Because it’s not all these little bits and pieces, it basically puts it all together. Well, yeah, I was gonna ask about you know how it differs from some other tracking tools like element 55. But I think you’ve explained that. And you’ve also mentioned that it integrates with time entry systems. I mean, have you gotten any pushback on that?

Alex Babin  33:17

Not at all, actually, when we started working on our platform, and not just a poll, but all the other Automation Components. We were talking to many firms trying to understand how they would see the ideal product delivered. And you know what they told us, the best product is no product. So we don’t have to implement it, the best interface for our attorneys would be no interface. So we don’t have to teach them how to do that. New new things. And we implemented all those techniques when we started building our products. And now we have few push backs on. Sometimes there are technical issues. For example, a law firm might be using some technology that we do not support yet. But it’s it’s coming into, into the kind of family of integrations we have. Right now. We support most of the systems that are available in the market. But sometimes there are technical issues. But those are really easy to solve. It’s just the new integration that being added to automation suite.

Greg Lambert  34:20

We’ve talked a lot about automation of time entry and email filing. What are some of the unique things that you’ve been asked to help automate?

Alex Babin  34:31

Well, couple of things. And right now we’re working with a couple of our partners. And one of the examples I can bring in is court notices, automation of court notice intake, and then creating the tasks out of something that clients asked to do to do. So basically, if you look into the whole suite of things that knowledge worker or legal professionals doing during the day, it consists of information intake and information we send out and processing this information and in between. So both parts of intake and sending the information out, can be automated. And beautiful example is court notices. They’re getting in 1000s of them in, then this coordinate does need to be profiled and need to be put into DMS, they need to be taken care of, and so on, so forth. And that’s a high value process. If you miss one, that’s where it can be costly. So all those things are really the target of productivity automation.

Greg Lambert  35:36

Well, Alex Babin from Zero, thank you very much for taking the time to come in and talk with us.

Marlene Gebauer  35:43

Thank you, Alex.

Alex Babin  35:43

Thank you, Greg. Thank you, Marlene. My pleasure.

Marlene Gebauer  35:49

Well, I always love talking about automation and improving workflow. And so you know, Alex, it both of those those points.

Greg Lambert  35:58

Yeah, I think is his idea that being able to have the attorneys just continue to do the things they always do without changing. It’s kind of like the Holy Grail of, of the legal industry when it comes to automation. And so it’s, and I know, I, for one think that the attorneys would love to for that.

Marlene Gebauer  36:17

Absolutely. Like, and I like that phrase, what is it the best solution is no solution, right? Absolutely. Yeah, the best solution is no solution. Yep.

Greg Lambert  36:25

Yeah. Well, thanks again to Alex Babin, the CEO from zero for taking the time to talk with us.

Marlene Gebauer  36:32

Yep. Thanks, Alex. And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert  36:47

and I can be found at @glambert and on Twitter, or you

Marlene Gebauer  36:51

can leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7270 and as always, the music here is Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert  37:02

Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene. I will talk to you later.

Marlene Gebauer  37:06

Okay.