Real Talk, Real AI with Colleen & Chris Rose

0:00Colleen Joyce: Welcome everybody. Happy Wednesday. We are so excited to be back for our AI webinar. And we have a very special guest with us today, which I'm going to introduce to everyone in a second. We'll let everybody come in. Jump on camera. We'd love to hear you. Yes. We see some cameras. How's everyone feeling today? Good. Throw one in the chat if we're feeling good. I'll definitely, I'm feeling good. I may be the only one. Nobody else? There we go. Thank you. Yes. There we go. Don't leave me hanging. Thank you guys so much.

0:29Colleen Joyce: All right. So we have the amazing privilege of working with so many lawyers in so many different practice areas and being able to collaborate with our friends and our clients is the greatest privilege that I have. Whether it's collaborating at conferences or reading books. This gentleman I met years ago at conferences. If you have ever been to a legal conference, my guess is you have seen Chris Rose. Chris Rose and I hit it off immediately taking selfies. And right, Chris, it was a lot of fun.

1:09Colleen Joyce: But what I learned in the last few months from Chris is a lot about AI. So what we wanted to do was take this opportunity and really share the stage with Chris. Chris has really built something that's going to change the future of law. It's going to change how everybody's practicing. It's going to change how you're thinking. And it's one thing for me to sit here and report on what's happening. It's another thing to actually hear from an attorney who has built it himself. So with that said, hi, Chris. Welcome.

1:44Chris Rose: Hey, thanks for having me. This has been a long time coming. I set these plans into motion years ago.

1:50Colleen Joyce: Well, I love it. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Really just want to dive right into it. Tell us about your AI journey. Everyone's got a different AI journey, but kind of where did your curiosity start?

2:01Chris Rose: Oh, you know, I'd heard about ChatGPT, like right when it came out, and it seemed like such a novelty. And, you know, for the first like two years, it really was just, you know, something you kind of play around with. It's a toy. But then about nine months ago, so most people know I'm LegalFlare, the referral firm. We take referrals from other law firms, move those around. And so we were getting all of these leads in through email, but we were having to go through and individually put those into our system, figure out where they would go. And we were the bottleneck. And we were very rapidly reaching our bandwidth capacity with minimal leads.

2:45Chris Rose: And so after spending some time, you know, I first went to ChatGPT and I was like, here's my problem. And ChatGPT said, yeah, you know, hire someone that can do this. But it's all snake oil salesmen and charlatans out there. And so after a month of spinning my wheels, I just asked ChatGPT, could I do this myself? You know, could I automate emails coming into my system? And, you know, ChatGPT, the eternal hype man, was like, you got this, you know, whatever you want to do.

3:15Chris Rose: And then, so it really started from there where I was like, okay, help me understand this. How do I do this? What would it require? And some of the first roadblocks I ran into was one, like every new conversation with ChatGPT, and maybe people don't know this, but every new conversation has zero context about what you've said prior to. So every time I would come in, ChatGPT was like, hi stranger, I'm ChatGPT. Nice to meet you. And so I would lose that context. And so I realized that what I needed to do was begin taking all of the information that I had learned and putting it into a document and then copy and pasting that into ChatGPT. And so in that way, I was kind of carrying context forward with me. And I very rapidly realized that ChatGPT is just garbage, garbage.

4:08Colleen Joyce: I don't want to hear it. I know it's true. I know it, but I know.

4:13Chris Rose: It's like a golden retriever puppy, just like super excited to play.

4:18Colleen Joyce: That's why I like it. Wait, so before you continue, just one quick question for everybody. How technically savvy are you? Because we've got people in the room that could build agents left, right, and center. And then we have people who are just like, what? So where do you fit on that scale knowing, hey, we're going to about to learn what you've built?

4:37Chris Rose: Oh, so if like where I started nine months ago, bottom 1%, you know, maybe a little bit more, like I never used it. And now, top 0.01%.

4:55Colleen Joyce: In nine months.

4:55Chris Rose: In nine months. Yeah. In nine months. And so a lot of it was just, I always tell people it's all about problems. Like don't think of solutions, think about a problem and then think about how to, you know, use AI to help you ideate a solution. And then, so going forward, you know, I had kind of figured out context. I realized that ChatGPT is terrible. So I moved over to Claude and Claude is like, you're great, fine, but let's get to work. And then, so, you know, I moved from context to skills, you know, those repetitive motions of like telling Claude, like let's summarize this conversation so I can copy and paste it into the next one. And so from there I began building this system. I created a backend, a database, an Airtable. Maybe people do, or don't know that it's like a super sophisticated Google Sheets. And then I used n8n, which is, if you go to the reference page —

5:47Colleen Joyce: I was just about to say, guys, at the top of the chat, we pinned, Chris yesterday made this.

5:53Chris Rose: Yes, this was yesterday.

5:59Colleen Joyce: He made this amazing website of which has kind of a glossary of all the terms he's going to be using. So if you kind of want a dual screen, you can kind of keep up the words that he's talking about, Airtables, n8n. So definitely click that link for sure.

6:14Chris Rose: Mm-hmm. Yeah, that took me like four hours. Two years ago, some jackass web designer would have charged me like two, $3,000 for this easy. And so I was able to like put it together like that. And actually I just updated it like 10 minutes ago, if you scroll all the way at the bottom. And so I used n8n and Airtable to like be move data around. n8n is an automation software. And then I used Softr, which is a no code, low code. But so through all of this, yeah, it's, I hated it. I hated it. It's fragile. It's terrible. I hated it. But through all of this at the beginning, it was, I would talk to Claude and Claude would tell me what to do. And I kind of think of it as like, you know, those prison scenes, you know, where they're like on the phone and there's the glass in between. And I would say, hey, Claude, this is what I need to do. And Claude would be like, you know, yeah, yeah, do this. And so I was the bottleneck. It was always me that had to perform the functions, go through and then run it through Claude.

7:10Chris Rose: And then, in, I think late December, early January, that's when I switched over to Claude Code. Maybe people know it, maybe they don't. It's a harness for Claude. And so that was when, you know, the screen came down and suddenly I'm in the same room, you know, with the convicts. And, but it just, it allowed so much more because now instead of Claude telling me what to do, I can tell Claude what to do. And Claude just goes out and does it. I've created a file architecture so that now Claude has access to all of our documents, all of our memories. So that even though it's still a new session, every time I say, go look at this to familiarize yourself, Claude looks at all of the context, knows what we're working on, and then has the ability to go and actually interact with the world to create websites to now, instead of me going through any, to any one note at a time, it can create them all itself, you know? And so it's really been a force multiplier.

8:13Colleen Joyce: Well, I guess the first question everyone thinks about is security on that. And I know we're going to dive more into what you've built, but can you speak to kind of the security concerns? Are you worried at all that you have now given access to everything that you have?

8:30Chris Rose: So that's a big misconception. That's not how it actually works. If ever, anyone who's terrified of that doesn't know what they're doing, unless you're using OpenClaw. Right. Right. So everything in mine is, it's all on my own. I, it's not reviewed for internal purposes, you know, they're not using it. I use GitHub where all of my code is tracked. All of the updates are tracked. All of my passwords are gitignored. Nothing sensitive for client information ever goes up to GitHub. I've got safety features. And then on top of that, like six months ago, I wouldn't have known anything about security, but the best way to figure that out is, hey, Claude, tell me how to be secure. What do I need to do? And now to sign into everything, I've got to, you know, put my fingerprints on everything. And so like, well, then —

9:23Colleen Joyce: Well, hey, listen, now that you have something secure, can you walk us through kind of what you've built? What does that look like? And how is that helping your day to day?

9:32Chris Rose: Oh yeah. Oh God. Oh. So if you go to the website, to the webpage that we put up and everybody like scroll, whoops, scroll down, you will see a picture. It says it's under UI. And if you click on that, it will open up a demo portal of everything that I've built. I built all of this. This is no longer Softr. This is, it's my system. Now it's my case portal. It's how I automate referrals. It's how everything gets moved right now. My referrals are moving around between all of my partners. They're being reviewed. Some are being signed, some are being rejected. So they moved to the next layer. I've got leads coming into my system right now. There are agents that are monitoring the workflow. So if there is an error, they can actually go in, figure out what the error is, what should it have done? What did it do? What does it need to do? And then implement the fixes. And so now I have a self healing system. And so I just sit on top of it and essentially, you know, direct my army of ants to, you know —

10:42Colleen Joyce: So it's interesting. You talked about how you have these workflow agents. Can you talk a little specifically about what their roles are in the day to day?

10:47Chris Rose: Yeah, absolutely. And so if on the webpage at the top where it has that, the looping video of me working on Claude Code, if you look on the left, you can see some of my agents. And so if you think about agents, they're really just like tiny solutions all strung together. And so each agent started off with like, I need an agent to just like, go look at my inbox, you know, and just get rid of all the spam. Okay. And then I want to make that agent so it can read my inbox. Okay. Tell me what's there. And then one that categorizes it. And then, so I'm just beginning to put it all together. And now I've got agents that respond on their own. They give me tasks. And so each agent just started off with a tiny problem. What is the smallest problem? And then how can I build on that problem? So the other ones, like for my system, it's just monitor these workflows. And if something happens, let me know. Yeah. Let me know. Okay. Then tell another one to go look and see what went wrong. And so I'm just taking all of these problems, building tiny solutions and putting them all together. And eventually, you have a, you know, an agent.

12:00Colleen Joyce: How much human oversight goes into that, right? So if you're making a workflow agent to handle like your spam emails, right in the early stages, how much human intervention went into saying, this is spam, this is spam, this is spam, or do you feel like the agent was built to go just from the jump?

12:20Chris Rose: So, for my current, so I have a headless agent that just auto move spam at first. So I put in some precautions. I said, everything that you move, it gets moved to a folder that doesn't delete it, but I just want to see what it's deleting. And then give me a report on everything that you're moving. So I can understand why you think it's spam or why you didn't. And then, so at the end of every day, I would just review it and then improve it based on keywords performance, what it thinks is spam and say, no, this is actually spam. That's not spam. And if you're ever unsure, just leave it. And so it was small review until I would say it takes, you know, very little effort to get 90% of the way there. And then all of the effort to get the last 10%. Like that's just how it is. I feel like that's with everything.

13:17Colleen Joyce: Yes. So for those that are listening and are wondering, there's the group that are like, oh man, I get this. This is awesome. Then there's the group that's like, what the hell's going on? What is your end game? I know we were talking about this earlier. You have really dove in these last nine months and committed yourself to, hey, I'm going to build a native law firm, which is really what you've built. Right. What is it? What is the end game? What's your reason? What's your drive for doing this?

13:46Chris Rose: Yeah. Same thing we try to do every night, Pinky. Yeah. I mean like in the end world domination sounds nice. But right now I just, I enjoy doing this so much. It's like I was given the world's biggest Lego set and I'm five years old and you're asking me like, hey, what, like, what are you trying to build? Are you going to build a house, a city? And I'm like, I don't know. I'm just like, I'm just building things right now. Yeah. And so it's like solving problems. That's not the right thing. Oh, good. And so, I mean, eventually, I mean, I want to, you know, have, you know, more money than Jesus. That would be nice. But in the meantime, like I really just, I love it. I love it. Well, there's a term going around called going into the sea hole and it's clawed, you know, which is like burying yourself in work just because it's so enjoyable. It's addictive.

14:48Colleen Joyce: So we had talked, you said you had, instead of enjoying the Memorial Day weekend or honoring, you were working with Claude and you continue to build and make your product better. At what point do you think that you can step aside and say, hey, listen, LegalFlare is now 100% fully automated and I don't need to be involved?

15:12Chris Rose: I mean, I imagine, when Claude kills me in my sleep, that's when I will know, just like Skynet taking over. This kind of goes back to what, I mean, it's really a life philosophy at this point, like small, tiny problems, just look at tiny problems and just build from there. And right now all I focus on is just these tiny, tiny problems and solving those. And anytime I try to predict more than like a month into the future, I am always proven wrong because everything is moving so quickly. Yeah. It's like, you know, I'm in an airplane and it's going faster. And like, I stick my head out the window to try and see where we're going. No, it doesn't work that way.

16:04Colleen Joyce: We joke, you know, 10 years ago, you'd be able to sit down and plan for maybe the year. Now you can't even sit down and plan for a quarter because AI is just changing that fast. So something I do want to circle back to, cause I definitely want to spend more time understanding exactly what you've built, right? So you've talked about kind of, you've built all of these workflow managers and agents to manage your business, but what does that look like in real world for everybody listening right now?

16:34Chris Rose: Oh, okay. That's a really good question. So law firms, they get leads, cases that they can't take, wrong case type, jurisdiction, amounts are too small. So they will send me those leads. We get permission to contact from the clients. Everybody's always like, yes, please find someone to help us. Yeah, of course. So, right. And so those get moved into my system. Now I have relationships with firms in different case types across the entire nation. We have negotiated fee splits. We have set up arrangements because honestly, referral relationships are tough. Attorneys on the average are idiots when it comes to running businesses. You know, I'm sorry. I will own that. Like we know it, like they're great at running practices, terrible at running businesses, right? Pick a lane. And so that's why having referral relationships is tough because it's like babysitting children. What happened with this case? Did it pay out? Oh, we dropped that one three months ago. What, or it paid out, you know, ah, I forgot to send you a check. And so managing those referrals is the difficult part.

17:45Chris Rose: So we set all of this up so that these cases just move to where they need to go. We monitor their performance, you know, conversion rates, how quickly they're responding, case values. And so we, our system now ranks in terms of priority, where all of these cases go so that the hard part is not sending the leads where they need to go. That's all automated. That's easy. It's just like the Willy Wonka chocolate factory. Everything is just, you know, going where it needs to go. The hard part is babysitting these firms, like calling them up. Did you sign this case? What's going on with it? Where's the fees split agreement? You know, and just, it's the human component is what it is right now. The human component cannot be removed because law firms are run by people.

18:34Colleen Joyce: Well, you could, what are your thoughts, I guess, on using AI agents to call the law firm and say, hey, Attorney Rose, what's going on with this case or what, you know, what's going on? Do you think that's a month out, a week out? What's your take on using agent voice for that follow-up?

18:52Chris Rose: I mean, we could do it right now. I mean, we just go to ElevenLabs, you know, a hundred percent. Right. But my question is that, yeah, exactly. But my question is your problem is communication. It's information, asymmetry, transparency, accountability. Why voice? Yeah. Why not just send an email? Everyone works out of their inboxes. Anyways, most times firms don't even pick up their damn intake phones. You know, I mean, I've got great relationships with these. So when I call they pick up, but they're not going to want to talk. It's easier just to say, you know, I tell my, you know, I tell Claude, hey, send emails to these people, you know, or if it's a certain amount of time where we just check up, emails go out instantly. They respond. All my agents get those instantly and they put them into the cases where they need to go. So, you know, text is just easier right now.

19:44Colleen Joyce: Yeah. Well, that's what we say. We see that, it's emails tough because there's so many fricking emails out there. And the best way to get someone is just shoot a text. We did a study with consumers. And I'm totally to blame for this. I don't like to just like get a random call. I'd like someone to text me and be like, can I call you? I will not just like, how dare you call me? Like my mom and my dad. Yes. But like everyone else, I don't think so. But again, it's just the, our behaviors are changing so fast that the AI is trying to keep up. And it's, you know, at some point it's going to surpass what we're doing. And I, you know, it sounds like you're already there.

20:25Chris Rose: Yes. And so you bring up a really good point and it kind of goes to the evolution of it where right now, every time there's a human in the loop, it's friction. We are inefficient. We are moody. We sleep, agents don't. And so at a certain point, each person will have their own agents. They're agents that know everything about them. It's like having, you know, the most reliable executive assistants. So when someone texts you, it doesn't go to you. The agent takes care of that. It only comes to you when a decision has to be made about like taste or priority or some kind of other component.

21:05Colleen Joyce: Yeah, no, I love that. No, I know Kristen just popped in. I would love if people have questions, you know, it's very rare that you meet somebody like Chris. Kristen and I spent maybe an hour and a half with Chris watching him demo his platform and it was mind blowing. It really was. And the fact that you did this in nine months is wild. So I want to use this time to kind of get some questions to Chris. It looks like somebody has it right now. What would you like to do right now that the agents can't do? That's a good question. I don't have my glasses, but Michael.

21:42Chris Rose: Oh, hi, Michael. Yeah. I have, I'm terrible. Talk to my clients, the firms, like sometimes I like talking to them. Other times I don't. And two, when we have a meeting, I mean, I love going to conferences. I'm a people person, but when I'm in my fortress of solitude here, I just want to code. I just want to write. And so when I have a 30 minute meeting with someone, it's like that the ROI is so low. I'm terrible, but yeah, like send a robot, send a robot to talk to these people, ask them questions, you know, and like follow up questions in that instance, like where you get that, where you have their attention, then it would be better. But my attention is worth far more than that.

22:27Colleen Joyce: Well, so do you think, okay, good. We've got another question too. This is a question for me. We go to conferences all the time. I see you at conferences. We host our own conference. Do you feel that with this fast moving AI, the conference scene is going to change at all?

22:44Chris Rose: It should change. It should change there. Inevitably it will change invariably. But what does that change look like? I don't know how people interact, like the presentations, please. Like for a lot of firms or for a lot of conferences, like update your presentations, people. Like if you're not putting your presentation through Claude, you should just go home. Right.

23:11Colleen Joyce: It's freaking amazing what can be done in maybe 30 minutes tops.

23:19Chris Rose: Take a look at the webpage I just built. Right. Like I'm so I'm self hosting this, you know.

23:25Colleen Joyce: It's amazing. All right. I see another question from David. Do you see a point where we reach backlash against automation? Maybe it's too much automation.

23:30Chris Rose: You know, there were similar complaints when like the automobile came out and when elevators, you know, like who's going to feed the children of all of the elevator operators, you know, who's going to feed the children of the telephone switchboard operators, you know? Yeah. People are, the future is uncertain and there's always backlash, but we have an infinite backlog of tasks of things that can be done for every one job that's lost. There are two that's created because it creates new opportunities. So yes, there's always backlash and you know, it's understandable. It's human.

24:23Colleen Joyce: Yeah. I love that. All right. We've got, Michael has a follow-up question. Are there chat pod agents that could chat with clients and get information from them? So could you build an agent that then goes and talks to the client? I know the answer to this, but I'm giving it to you. What do you think?

24:39Chris Rose: Oh, absolutely. I mean, the more sophisticated your agent is, the more sophisticated the questions. If you have, you know, like a frontier model, like Opus 4.7 or even ChatGPT, you know, I mean, it's great at engagement, but as long as you tell it, like you give it context, like only talk about these things, you can strain it so that in the middle, they can't say, you know, like, give me a recipe for like spaghetti and meatballs. And, you know, suddenly ChatGPT is off the rails, but if you can constrain it and you create very quick retrieval augmented generation, so it can go to those files right away. It knows the law right away. Yeah. Yeah. You could do that. But the question is like, are we at the point where clients feel comfortable doing that? We will get there eventually. Yeah. Right now, you know, let's be honest. The people most likely to hurt themselves are the people who have the least exposure to AI right now. And so they are not.

25:36Colleen Joyce: Well, that's, it's true. We said the minute, I don't know how many times you've all have called CVS or, you know, what Walgreens lately, and you try to talk to the pharmacy, I'm ready to throw the phone out the window, right? Move off of the phone tree and into the new world. But to your point, until those major platforms go full eye, full AI, it's very difficult to get the whole general population behind it. So I do think that we haven't even hit the tipping point, so to speak. We're not even anywhere close when it comes to general population.

26:11Chris Rose: No, no. At a certain point, it won't be, do people accept it? It will just be that there's so much inertia and momentum going that way that it's just, it's what it is, you know, just like people didn't accept the automobile, you know, it's just, it made so much more sense that it was inevitable.

26:31Colleen Joyce: Forced adoption. All right. We've got another question. Speaking of uncertainty, I like how you're like the AI expert, right? We're just, you're like our, ah, go to Chris and learn. You're our crystal ball. Speaking of uncertainty, what do you think is next? Where do you see the evolution of AI going and how do you think it impacts your business specifically?

26:52Chris Rose: The next evolution, I mean, things are moving so quickly, but right now AI is simply data management. Like it moves data around, it moves information around. And so it's all constrained to the internet. The next evolution, who knows how long, but it's the robots, you know, when suddenly AI can now manipulate the physical world, you know, and if, I mean, we've seen how they are. Some are better than others. If you go online and watch a video of one of the robots running into the mirror, it's the funniest thing I've ever seen, but that's the next evolution. How does it help my business? I don't know. It feeds my cats while I'm working place with them, you know.

27:37Colleen Joyce: I like that. Yeah. Okay. Which AI solution do you suggest everyone dives into now in order to leverage them and maximize their own business?

27:46Chris Rose: Yes. Okay. I was hoping for this question. Yes. Matthew. Great question. Love it. Matthew. Oh, so, Wispr Flow, W-I-S-P-R, Wispr Flow. It's, I mean, it's not really AI in the traditional sense, but it's speech to text. It's the best I've seen. And so when I was originally like talking to ChatGPT and then Claude, like I'm typing it out. And the lawyer in me is like going back and correcting spelling, you know, adding the commas. Now I just, I talk and I ramble and I get my thoughts out and it's all pure stream of consciousness. And so if we think of like Claude and AI as a 10X multiplier, if you put something like Wispr Flow in front of that, where it's just even a two X multiplier, putting them together, it is really a 20X multiplier because I can go so much faster because now I'm just like word vomiting all over Claude, but move like this. So Wispr Flow, get that one.

28:55Colleen Joyce: How do you, how would someone install, how would someone use Wispr Flow?

29:00Chris Rose: You just talk. I do it for emails. If you look at my emails, it's all stream of consciousness. When I write, you know, anything in Claude, like even when I'm in the terminal, I still just, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it puts it all out there and Claude knows. And so this way, what normally would have taken me like 10 minutes to type out, it's like 30 seconds of me rambling.

29:20Colleen Joyce: I did. We do it a lot on ChatGPT. You hit the little microphone and then you're live talking with your agent or your, you know, your AI, whatever it may be. So, all right, guys, this was amazing. I know that we have so many more questions, but what I'm going to encourage everyone to do is go check out that website that Chris made in literally less than four hours. It is like he said, professionally done would have cost him thousands of dollars if this was two years ago. And really, Chris, we can't thank you enough for sharing your passion and your expertise. We hope to have you back on, right. And like a week or a month and say, okay, what's new? What have you learned? So what are some parting words that you're going to leave with the room?

30:01Chris Rose: Don't start with solutions. Start with problems. Everybody always thinks like, you know, I want to, you know, do this, you know, so I have some problem and we imagine a solution and you're always going to go wrong. You're, especially if you use AI, it will over-engineer it. Start with a problem. Think simple. So don't think of, I've got it at the bottom. Don't think of AI as the solution. Start with a problem. AI will help you build a solution.

30:31Colleen Joyce: So guys, reach out to Chris. I know he loves talking about it. You are so passionate. So use him, right? You are at the front lines. Help us educate everyone to kind of get the industry that much closer to being that much better. So with that said, Chris, we thank you so much for joining us. Everyone else, thank you. And we'll see you at our next AI webinar.

30:52Chris Rose: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thanks for showing up everybody.