Solving a Mediation Problem with John Rubin
Ever wondered how the legal world and technology intersect? Well, get ready to demystify that as we chat with John Rubin, an innovator changing the game in the legal scene. A seasoned lawyer and entrepreneur, John brings an in-depth look at how he’s leveraged his experiences in the courtroom to create ground-breaking tools for attorneys and mediators.
Join us as we navigate the legal landscape with John, exploring the concept of LitX (Litigation Exchange), a brilliant tool designed to enhance the efficiency of mediation. Probing deeper, we get to unveil the inner workings of LitX, its robust features, and how it’s poised to transform the legal field. From its seamless integration with case management software to its secure, HIPAA-compliant environment, LitX is more than just a tool—it’s a game changer.
But the conversation doesn’t stop there. Together, we unravel the future of legal case management and how LitX is leading the charge. With its freemium model and potential integrations, we delve into how John envisions the platform’s evolution. Whether you’re a lawyer, a mediator, or a technology enthusiast, this episode offers a unique perspective that you wouldn’t want to miss. So, buckle up and join us for this enlightening conversation with John Rubin, and let’s unearth the future of law and technology together!
In this episode, you will hear:
- About John Rubin and his backstory
- Chess game-like case management platform
- Inviting and sharing documents on LitX
- Cost-saving solution for the insurance industry
- Creating LitX and an overview of LitX platform features
- Legal case management software features
- Freemium model and future integrations
Supporting Resources:
If you want to learn more about LitX or try it for free, please visit: www.litx.legal
Episode Transcript:
Elizabeth Larrick: Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. trial lawyer prep. I’m your host, Elizabeth Larrick.
And today’s episode, we are being joined by a guest and a good friend of mine who I’ve known for a little while and knew when I practiced law. And that is Mr. John Rubin. He is here in Austin [00:01:00] and he is one of the go to mediators. And in fact, He doesn’t know this, but I totally stole his CLE and made it into a podcast here recently.
So he’s got some wisdom to share, but more importantly, I want to invite John on to talk to the audience, talk to you guys about a new fancy. No, it’s not really fancy. I’m kidding. A great new tool for lawyers to help with mediation. So John, welcome to the podcast.
John Rubin: Thank you for having me.
Elizabeth Larrick: Awesome. Well, I know we’ve got folks listening from all over, so tell us about yourself.
John Rubin: I have been in Austin practicing a little over 20 years, went to UT undergrad, then went up to Waco, Texas for law school up in Baylor, stayed a longhorn, didn’t convert to a bear. Sorry for all the bears who are out there. Came right back to Austin, started practicing here with a defense firm, [00:02:00] primarily doing defense work.
Thank you. I did that for a number of years. Same for my clerked within law school. Then I switched over to the other side. I did started doing plaintiff’s work with a couple of guys here in town, and it was a small group, so we had two partners and myself, so a lot of trial by fire, if you will, learning the ropes, figuring it out on my own in many ways, not that they weren’t there to assist, but the three man show you wear more hats.
And then in 2007. Hung out the shingles, started doing what I call door law, which is whatever walks through the door you take because you got to make ends meet. And I had a, I remember I had a, I had a desk, I had a computer and I had a phone and that is it. And I had no clients and I had an office I owed rent for.
And that’s how I started. And three years into that, things were going pretty well. And I thought to myself, you know, what would be really neat to do? Mediate. [00:03:00] My former boss, Jeff Jury over at Burns Anderson, very well known mediator. I watched take care of business and thought one day maybe that would be fun to do, but I don’t have any gray hair, at least not then.
And
Elizabeth Larrick: very little now,
John Rubin: some hidden. Yeah. I’m glad you can’t see it, but I thought, well, I’ll do the training and 10 years from now, I can say I’ve been a licensed mediator, a certified mediator for 10 years. And. I speak fluent Spanish and I had a little niche there that I could explore and started working that angle, if you will.
And before I knew it, within three years or so, I was doing this full time, was mediating full time, which left very little time for continued litigation. Although I still took interesting cases here and there. And I think the last case I tried, maybe it was an 18, but became full time mediator. So I’ve had in my career, the.
Lucky opportunity to work defense and plaintiffs and all sorts of different areas from injury to [00:04:00] construction to toxic exposure. I’ve seen many avenues. And then through mediation, like all of the rest of us lawyers, you get exposed to different subjects and learn about those things and more so in the mediation business than I had otherwise.
And fast forward, I am doing it full time. So that’s my legal career. I have a little bit of an entrepreneurial itch and little known fact, not by many, but by some in 2016, when the legislature passed the Compassionate Use Act. I founded the, what is now the market leader for medical cannabis in Texas called Compassionate Cultivation and aptly named because it’s under the Compassionate Use Act that we can even do this.
And it’s as a DBA of Texas Original, but like I said, it’s now the number one medical cannabis Provider in Texas. And there’s only three, there’s only three licensees currently. [00:05:00] And started here at the desk I’m sitting at, found some folks up in Denver to contract with, got some investors, got together, built a huge facility, got the license.
And now we employ, I think we’re around 70 employees with board members all the way from California on over. And our gross sales exceed a million a month and everything’s going really neat. So I started as the founder and CEO there backed off as the company grew into a general counsel role. And then now I remain on the board that didn’t stop my entrepreneurial itch, unfortunately for me.
And I focused on again, mediation, continue doing the mediations and. It hit me one day that we have a pretty significant problem that has never really been addressed. And thus I came up with litigation exchange, LitX for short.
Elizabeth Larrick: [00:06:00] Sweet. Well, first of all, back it up. You just said a million in sales a month is neat.
Okay. That’s pretty awesome, man. Okay. Let’s not sugarcoat that. That is neat.
John Rubin: We’re pretty thrilled about that. Okay. That’s
Elizabeth Larrick: pretty awesome. I mean, I did not know that. I mean, that is super cool.
John Rubin: It’s been one hell of a ride. It’s a lot like that show Silicon Valley on HBO, if you’ve ever seen it. Or one day you’re thinking, Oh man, this is, we’re going to be so happy.
He’s going to go so great. And the next day you’re thinking, we’re going to go bankrupt. You’re never going to survive. I can’t believe we’re in this trouble. And then the next day you’re up and it’s just highs and lows and highs and lows, and that evens out. Over time. I think that’s the case with a lot of startups, but especially in that arena.
And the nice thing about that company has been seeing the stories of the patients who have taken the medicine and have done so well on it, obviously it’s not a hundred percent effective for a hundred percent of the people, but. It’s pretty darn impressive what it has done for a lot of [00:07:00] folks and it’s fun to see that.
And it’s interesting when you have a room full of board members who hear some of these stories and start to pull out the handkerchiefs and get all teary eyed about it. But it’s all, if nothing else, we feel like we’re doing a lot of good for a lot of people.
Elizabeth Larrick: Well, hey, helping people is a pretty good purpose for making a company.
So
John Rubin: yeah, that’s
Elizabeth Larrick: pretty awesome. I didn’t know that. That is really cool. So first of all, I got to ask as a practicing lawyer, is this why you haven’t been available? Let me tell the people like trying to get on John Rubin’s calendar is like, it’s booked out six months and there’s not even a waiting list.
And here’s the thing. He is an amazing mediator. He gets things done, which is probably why you are an amazing business. Owner and entrepreneur, because you want to get things done and he’s worked so well with people of any background. I’ve mediated with him several times myself, but yeah. So is this, what’s been keeping you so busy?
John Rubin: I I’d like to say yes, but it hasn’t been, it is the [00:08:00] mediation practices that have been keeping me busy. Although Lidex takes up a lot of a significant portion of my time as well. But I, I work that. On weekends, wherever I find gaps in the day, I work late into the night. So it’s a little bit of a two full time jobs going on.
And I, that’s intentional. I need to stay connected with the world of litigation if I’m building litigation software. And yeah, it’s been a pretty tight schedule.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Oh, also, by the way, he has kids, so it’s not like he’s just hanging out by himself here. Yeah.
John Rubin: And a very understanding wife. Yeah.
Elizabeth Larrick: That’s right.
Always got to give a shout out to our understanding partners. So tell me a little bit more about the problem. Okay. So what were you seeing was this problem in mediation?
John Rubin: It’s a problem I saw in mediation because that’s what I was doing, but it’s a problem throughout litigation. And that is I got tired of hearing day in and day out, multiple times a day.
You, for example, I have one [00:09:00] party on one side and one or two on the other side. And I go into one room and say, all right, well, what are your total medical bills? They’re make up a number 30, 000. I’d go in the other room and say, all right, they have 30, 000 medical bills. And they’d say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute.
What are you talking about? They’ve only given us 10. And I’d go back in the first room and I’d say, well, they only have 10. Well, we supplemented a month ago, a month and a half ago with additional medical. And I’d go back to the other one. This I’d say they sent it to you. No, they didn’t. Yes, we did. No, we didn’t.
Who did you mail it to? Well, I faxed it. Oh, who’d you fax it to? Well, we never got it. And onward and Upward. Everybody’s heard some version of this at some point. You were just
Elizabeth Larrick: hearing it every day, like every
John Rubin: single day. Almost not a mediation went by goes by where that doesn’t pop up. And so what that really means is that whatever we’re doing The systems we’re using now to exchange information doesn’t work.
It [00:10:00] works. Okay But it can work so much better And that was the problem. I thought, why isn’t there some simple solution to this? When we want to file something with a core, we use E file. Easy enough. It works. Simple enough. But yet, everything outside of E file doesn’t seem to work right. And that’s when the idea came, was, well, If it doesn’t exist, why not build it?
So what we built was a platform. We call it Linux, which is the first purpose built workspace for adversaries to use. It’s a bit of, if you can imagine if e file and e service had a baby with share file and Dropbox, what would that look like? And that’s what this is. So it is a neutral HIPAA compliant, secure workspace, a transparent platform where both parties can exchange information, serve information to each other with a simple click, drag, and drop.[00:11:00]
And by doing so, not only are you serving the other party basically instantly, because they have the same access you have, you are creating a record. Which is a repository. So that information, when I, for example, drop you a document in the case on LIDEX, you get a notification that you have a new document to go view and you can quickly log on, you can download it to your own system, you can view it on LIDEX, but there it will sit.
And remain in a perfectly preserved state for the entire life of the case and you know Who sent it what was in it when it was served and it doesn’t change It’s the same as if I mail you something or email you something. I can’t take it back once I give you that information and let’s say I am no longer the lawyer in the case and you have churn, you have rotations of lawyers and staff, all that is quickly and easily updated on LitX.
You always are [00:12:00] confident that you’re getting the information to the other side and that they received it and there’s no more question of, I didn’t get it, you didn’t send it to me, what you said you sent me wasn’t what you sent me, because there it is. And so it works especially well in multi party litigation.
Say you have four or five parties, construction cases where you have 10 or 12 or more, exchanging information back and forth, attorneys and staff rotating in and out of those law firms, coming into cases later as folks are brought in. Rather than try and reconstruct what was done in this case. I’ve just been assigned, or now that I’ve been pulled into this litigation, it’s been going on six months.
Everybody send me everything. You avoid it. You log in, you’re added to the case. Everything’s there for you to review, download, whatever you want to do. And so that’s essentially it. I’ve taken to the analogy lately of a case being like a chess game, sometimes with more than one player across the other side, [00:13:00] and we all are playing You know, if you’ve got a docket of 50 cases, you’re playing 50 chess games at once and keeping track of all those moves is important.
And the way we’re playing chess right now is we’re just telling each other our moves, right. And over time, but we can’t view it all at once at a glance. And sometimes there’s oftentimes there’s a dispute about who made what move and when that is resolved with this platform. So that’s how it works in a nutshell.
Elizabeth Larrick: So just to kind of like get a little deeper into the platform itself. And I know you guys are still working on it and building it out. So basically me as a lawyer, I sign up, I get my accounts. And then is the interface pretty well, like set, meaning like add a case. And so it’s just says plaintiff versus defendant.
And then if you want to invite a co counsel or invite your opposing counsel, you just invite them. And then everything is tracked under the case [00:14:00] name or is it under the attorney name?
John Rubin: It is tracked under the case name. Now I can actually I know this is hard to view on a podcast.
Elizabeth Larrick: Okay, he’s going to show me.
I’m going to walk you guys through it. I’m going
John Rubin: to walk you through it.
Elizabeth Larrick: That’s right.
John Rubin: Um, so this is the login screen. I’ve just entered my login and password. And I’ve just entered my username and password. And then of course it’s a two factor verification. So it’s asking me to enter my verification code.
So what happens next is you get an email from LitX with your verification code. This will soon also be offered in a text version. And so you simply place your code in, you hit verify, and you’re brought to the primary screen with all the cases. And so there’s a sub panel, a menu here on the left with different items or areas of the app.
You can go to settings, invitations back to the case list screen. And what you’re seeing on your [00:15:00] screen is here is a list of, let’s say, a pretended docket, right? It’s a fake docket. Obviously the names of Kenny versus Cartman and salt and battery case doesn’t really exist, but we’ll have the case name, we’ll have a cause number.
your internal file number, which will be visible to you only. And then of course you can organize by any recent activity or when the case was added, who created the case and you can go into any particular case. And I’m trying to think of what did I load into what case? Here we go. So here’s a fake case involving Looks like four parties.
And within that case, you see every file that’s been added to it. Here’s a new file that was added obviously by me, but it gets a little new flag. So it’s easy to identify what files you have and haven’t seen, but this is the primary interface. And so you would see, for example, if you represented [00:16:00] Mr. Smith here, you’d have your name there and your staff listed underneath who would have the same access you have.
And as we go along, we can add new parties. As we add parties to the case, we can invite folks to join in on the representation of different parties in the case, we can go back to our case screen. We can set up a new case and this is all very straightforward, pretty familiar interface.
Elizabeth Larrick: Very much. Yeah. So
John Rubin: you, as you see here, you click create a case.
You simply name the case. We’ll call it. Plaintiff three versus defendant three. You type in the court you’re assigned your cause number. You can select what kind of case it is. We’re going to say it’s an MBA. I’m going to represent plaintiff three will be defendant three over here. So we say create case.
I’m going to say, like I said, represent plaintiff. I’m the attorney. I create the case and I’m brought to what we call the case [00:17:00] agreement, which is like a rule 11, right? Now this works for paid users. In other words, folks who are already on the platform, we want them to use the platform for all exchange in the case.
That way you’re capturing everything, right? I’m not just using this and then mailing you things and faxing you things and emailing you things. The idea is let’s have it all in one place. So what this is providing is that by using. LidX, you’re agreeing that you’re going to use just LidX. Now, if we’re going to serve documents or other files outside of it, then we can sign an agreement to that effect.
And separate agreement says, look, we’re going to also use a different method of service as we work together. Now, this doesn’t apply in a guest access situation, which I’ll explain here in a minute, but once you have enough users, once hopefully all of us are using Linux, then this is when it works best when we’re just using this platform and capturing all of the information [00:18:00] for the case through this method.
So all sides sign this and you’re in. There’s your case. It’s immediately set up. I invite you over my opposing counsel. I go through this list. I hit invite case and you will get an invitation. John Rubin has invited you to share documents on LidX. And then you go in, you sign up. It’s a five minute process.
And if you are not a paid user, if this is your first time. Being invited to the platform, just as you would with a share file or some other file sharing service, you just, you pick a username, a password, and you get access for free to this case on the other side, you do not need to pay anything. Now, if you want to open your own cases, then of course there’s a free trial.
You can start, and if you really like it, which we hope you will, then you become a paid user. But the guest access feature exists so that we always [00:19:00] have a way of having our paid users be able to take advantage of this, even if the other side is not a member of LitX. If they’re not a user, they can still access information.
They can still send you information through this. So it really is no different. In that sense, from me sending you my Dropbox link, except for the fact that once I send you my link, I still have power over my Dropbox, can remove files, put some in, restrict your access. Once we’re both here on Linux, that is no longer the case.
It is open, it’s transparent, it’s neutral. Even if I’m a paid user, when it comes to this case, I don’t have any more access to this than you do. So that’s the platform, how it’s set up. The UX is friendly. We’ll be obviously working and iterating and adding additional features as we go on and our users.
tell us yes, we want this or no, we don’t want that. But in the settings, you can [00:20:00] add photos right now. It’s just my initials, but you can change different aspects of how you get notifications. Again, right now it’s send me an email. When a new document is added, there’ll be other options here, including just give me a digest.
You know, if I’ve got a hundred cases or if I’m a supervising attorney and I’ve got, an associate multitude of associates handling cases. I probably don’t want a new email every time a document comes in. I may select that. I just want a daily digest, right? Tell me what’s happening on what cases that I’m supervised.
So all of these things will be built out and available to our users.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. I mean, that’s a super simple platform just for everybody who’s listening and driving their car right now. We’ll probably put the video up on YouTube, but it’s a super simple platform. And that was one of my biggest questions and objections that what I was going to ask you about was lawyers as a whole do not like new technology.
I mean, we just, we’re a little bit of a hole out on getting rid of [00:21:00] paper on, you know, doing this online, but you’ve built a platform that, I mean, I kid you not. We’re in the, the entry screen. There is one button
John Rubin: and
Elizabeth Larrick: the menu on the side has four options, you know, super simple, anybody could learn it. And what I love is there’s so much technology out there for lawyers, case management software, trial software.
And there’s always a pause when it’s like, Oh, here’s a tutorial. And it’s like, Oh, like,
John Rubin: yeah,
Elizabeth Larrick: this is not super intuitive. Like. Lawyers are just not going to use it because we don’t have a ton of time to stop and like do a significant amount of learning and training on, on a software program.
John Rubin: Amen. Yeah.
All that is very true. Yeah. Legal is really one of the late industries when it comes to adopting technology. That said, I think there’s a couple of factors that have accelerated our adoption. One is of course COVID. We all got stuck at home and having to figure out, well, how do I do the same [00:22:00] job? But in front of it.
Almost exclusively in front of the computer and two is the younger generation attorney as time has gone on are becoming partners are going solo are in control of their own law firms and making decisions for larger firms and those younger attorneys are attorneys who have used technology more so than the generation before them.
And so on and so on and so on. So now we have lawyers in their forties and thirties who grew up using a lot of tech and are in those decision making positions. So this, like you observed is designed not to be overbearing. We’re not asking you to replace your entire system. We’re not asking you to take a course to learn this.
We are going to make this very simple, very straightforward. I have the case. And just start using, you can start immediately using it within five [00:23:00] to ten minutes, right? And in terms of accessibility, we’re not going, we’re not here to gouge anybody, right? I think no slight to other software out there, but it’s expensive.
Anything you do is expensive, and there’s not always an easy way to justify the expense or to recoup that expense. So with that in mind, we want to make this accessible and provide a way for this to add little to no overhead to the individual firm. So the pricing model is 12 per user per month and 1 per case per month.
So should you choose, you can expense that whopping dollar to that case and never pay any usage cost, right? You simply pay the 12 per user per month, which when you compare that to every other software you pay for is a fraction, it is a drop in the bucket. Oh yeah. So the bar to entry is low. [00:24:00] That learning curve is.
Slight, and it’s a secure, safe way of exchanging information that you know will always be there. You don’t have to worry about those heart attack moments. Oh no, did I send that thing? If it’s on here, it was sent, right? There’s no question about it. And you have it at a glance. Did my secretary do this? Did my legal assistant do that?
Did they send me that stuff? It’s all right there at a glance. If you’re working in a firm with, you know, 40 lawyers, you get assigned a new case or somebody leaves and you can sign 10 cases at a glance. You can see exactly where the information has gone, who got it and what. And so there’ll be future features, of course, which will be primarily dictated by our users.
Other things on the roadmap to tackle, but we’ll take them as they are demanded.
Elizabeth Larrick: And that was one of the things that I had in my mind was, are you guys, you already have this is integrations with other case software or other CRMs [00:25:00] that send you text messages. I mean, there’s just so many different. So are you guys, do you have any integrations yet?
And is that something that maybe is in the future?
John Rubin: That would be future at this stage. We are in our beta looking for a public release this month. And integrations will definitely be coming down the pipeline because we want this to easily sink in with your existing case management software. If you have it, if not, you can click and download directly into your folders.
If you’re not using case management software, it’s that easy. Down the road, we are going to offer private file hosting. So in other words, You’ll have a window where you can see everything that went back and forth. Everybody sees the same thing, but you’ll have your private area as well, where you can actually just store all your files.
And it’ll be as simple as I’m going to click from one area to the other area. And now I’ve sent it to the other side, extrapolate from that. That’s how you can e file, right? You’ll be able to at some point e file directly from Linux. [00:26:00] And yes, APIs will definitely be on the map so that we can integrate into the most popular software as it is demanded and needed.
So absolutely. Good question.
Elizabeth Larrick: And I’m assuming you already said HIPAA compliant, all those lovely things. So where are the servers hosted at?
John Rubin: It’s Amazon web services, S3 buckets. It is about as secure as secure can get. And then of course, we also have to comply with other requirements to be HIPAA compliant.
And the nice thing about this is. You are protected from all the phishing and the viruses and the trojan horses I mean i’m getting I don’t know about you, but i’m getting emails that look like from other attorneys, but they’re not and That I think is a real problem It’s almost like when you’re on lit ex you’re sitting inside a safe with opposing counsel and you’re not worried about The rest of the world trying to get in being on Amazon web services.
AWS is ensuring that this is a 99. [00:27:00] 999 percent uptime doesn’t go down. So you don’t have to worry about access to the files going down. There’s plenty of firms that still have their own servers that go down now and again, this, you don’t have to worry about that, but that’s pretty neat.
Elizabeth Larrick: That’s super helpful.
And I’m always like, I’m always slightly shocked when I hear about people who are like, Oh my gosh, you know, the desktop version of this software has gotten so expensive. And I’m like, have you tried the online version? It’s 12 or 20 a month. They’re trying to push you forward.
John Rubin: Well, you know, it’s interesting that more and more software has gone web based.
Right. And there’s the monthly costs and people wait versus the desktop. But the nice thing about. The SAS model, which is what we’re talking about. The web based model is that you never have to worry about updating your software, your software crashing on your computer. So your computer goes down. You can as easily access on something else.
When we update something, we worry [00:28:00] about it. You don’t. You just log in and all of a sudden you have this nice new pretty feature and that’s it. And so there’s a lot of maintenance that you don’t have to do.
Elizabeth Larrick: Now, as part of coming up with this and ins and outs, I heard a little about this before, but, and one of the reasons why is because I asked like, how in the world are you going to convince insurance companies, which is mainly what most lawyers are dealing with is some kind of level of insurance somewhere, not always, but there’s, you know, my background is that.
So. How in the world are you going to convince insurance companies that this is safe and it’s good to use and this is a reimbursable expense for opposing counsels?
John Rubin: Sure. So there’s a technology adoption life cycle, right? And it’s a bit of a curve. You have your innovators, folks who really love whatever’s cutting edge.
I want to try it. I want to use it now. And that moves forward through your early adopters. And then you get over to your late adoption folks, which is where you’re going to find your insurance carriers and et cetera. So The [00:29:00] starting users are going to be individuals in small, solo, medium sized firms. And that includes defense firms who are outside of the direct control of an insurance carrier.
You’re absolutely right. Staff counsel, unless they’re allowed to receive. electronic communications of any kind, for example, Dropbox links, share file links, whatever. If they’re not allowed to use that, then they’re not going to be allowed to use this. But that really only applies to staff counsel. And take a company like State Farm, for example, they primarily use outside counsel.
They’re paying either flat fee or by the hour to individual attorneys or firms. They don’t control what those individual attorneys or firms are using in house, right? They have their reporting requirements and how they want data back from them. But when, for example, when I was at Burns Anderson, we had our partners picked some various systems that they wanted to implement for their firm.
And that was that the different carriers that were [00:30:00] their clients don’t have a say in that. Right. So there will be a somewhat of a delay when it comes to getting. carriers to jump on board for their staff council, their internal people, no question about it. And that will be a target when we have a good enterprise plan put together for those folks.
One of our advisory board members is senior staff counsel at Farmers Insurance. And so we have definitely explored what will it take to get Into their good graces. And that’s what will it will take is enough usage, enough people using it and establishing ourselves as a reliable product. Right. And the nice thing about this is the cost is so low when you compare.
Not only would it cost now to use all these different platforms or use service, different apps to serve documents, but the litigation or the fights we have, the wasted time that we have [00:31:00] that results from these disputes. You can reduce, if not eliminate, by having a reliable source like this. And that’s cost saving and that’s going to be attractive, not only to carriers, but to anybody.
Elizabeth Larrick: Sure. Sure. Especially, I mean, in the context that you created it, which was for mediation, which is resolving things efficiently, hopefully in a decent time in the case, but you went out and got advisory board. That was one of the things when you were talking to our group last month, I guess about how like, yep.
Thought ahead, don’t worry, Elizabeth, I got this here. And that’s the cool thing about John, right? He’s got the ear of many, many people that you can bring in to help and make this a successful software. Hopefully that everybody’s going to use to alleviate a pretty significant problem that we’re having.
John Rubin: And that’s the neat thing about this is I’m not in search of a problem, right? It’s it’s a [00:32:00] solution for an existing issue that we can really grow into solving other issues, including one of our big challenges down the pipe is scheduling between attorneys adversaries. That’s a big one, right? But now with AI out there and other potential engines that we can use, we can solve that.
But we got to start somewhere and we start here, right? And then we, we add from there. And I do want to emphasize that while this is a problem I saw most often in mediation, really it’s built for the entire process, right? From start to finish. And so at some point, We’d want to see it with enough adoption, be something you could use throughout the life of the case from pre lit onward.
So all that is in our purview and looking forward to working with the folks and listening and learning and answering the hard questions and some of those questions. I go, Hmm, that’s a good one. I got to figure that one out. But like you said, we had this advisory board put together, which has partners from, [00:33:00] I’m looking at the screen now.
Four of the six are defense attorneys from staff council to medium sized to large law firms. So we know that that is some of the hardest audience to crack. And so from the get go, we wanted their involvement.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. Well, coming from a solo point of view, having that expense be so stinking reasonable. It’s hard to say like, I’m not even going to try this.
That’s most of the time when I look at trying a new piece of technology, one, is there a trial period? You know, can I at least try it? And then also who else is using it? And a lot of times. I’ll try something and, oh yeah. And it’s great. And I sign up or sometimes I’m like, well, I’m going to take a risk.
I’ll just send them. And then it stinks.
John Rubin: Right. You can’t get your money
Elizabeth Larrick: back. And you’re like, oh man. So, I mean, I appreciate, and you showed it to me here today. Like it’s the interface is just simple. I mean, it’s not overly complicated. Like, I love that you’re [00:34:00] starting at a level, like anyone can do this.
And then you’re going to build into more making it. I’m not going to say complicated.
John Rubin: Robust, more useful. Robust, robust, more features, more features. And you brought up a good point and that is trying it for free. freemium model. We’re not here to trick anybody. You can cancel at any point. It’s not trying to get you into any sort of contract.
It’s a month to month deal. You get 30 days for free. Once you’re in that free trial, you do put in a credit card, like in any other freemium model, but the moment you decide you don’t want it, you just go into the settings and cancel out and you don’t have to deal with it anymore. Don’t have to call customer service, no, no, no emails.
It’s a couple of clicks and you’re done.
Elizabeth Larrick: Fantastic. Well, is there anything we didn’t cover about LitX that you want to let everybody know about?
John Rubin: No, I think we did a pretty thorough review. I’m looking forward to our public release, which will come later this month, [00:35:00] once we get through some more QA. And for folks who are interested, we do have our signup page, which is litx.
legal, litx. legal. If you go there, we’ll put a link in the show
Elizabeth Larrick: notes. So if you’re
John Rubin: Perfect
Elizabeth Larrick: driving right now, please don’t there’ll be a link in the show notes. I’ve already signed up myself. It’s super simple. Click the link. It takes you to the page and just put your email in. So,
John Rubin: and we’ll announce from there and yeah.
I’m looking forward to seeing where we can go. It’s exciting.
Elizabeth Larrick: It is exciting. You should integrate soon in the future, right? A way to schedule maybe a calendar kind of situation in the program. That’s what we’re working
John Rubin: on. Yeah. That’s a big one. I
Elizabeth Larrick: blow my mind. Like, I mean that scheduling, I think. Any profession struggles, like with the meetings and the getting on everybody’s calendar and then everyone’s on a different platform.
Oh, you’re Google. You’re not all that’s right. So a
John Rubin: lot of integrations, a lot of integrations to do there. And it’s a tricky matrix of [00:36:00] decision making that goes into that. But if we can find. And we can build a solution to that. I mean, the amount of time saved would be astronomical. And I know there are firms that we’ve spoken with who have folks on staff and all they do all day is schedule different events in different cases.
I’m not looking to eliminate any jobs, but we can make their lives certainly a lot easier.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah. I mean, there’s plenty to do. Trust me. Like there’s more than enough things to do to go around. So awesome. Okay. So I got to pick your brain really quickly. Well, I got your line. We got a little time left. So are you using chat GPT?
In
John Rubin: my practice, I’ve started toying with it in mediation. It doesn’t really help me with anything. That said, when I want to write a introduction to something having to do with lit eggs or the cannabis company, I sometimes, if you’re fumbling for words, I’ll say, write me a quick introduction to a potential patient on this product, [00:37:00] and it’ll spit it out real quick.
It’s always, I think, easier to. Start with something you’re given and edit and work from that point, and come up with something from scratch. And I think that’s what chat GPT or those other AI engines really do for me anyway. Right now, I know they’re fully capable of so much more, but I did see an order the other day.
I think it was a federal court order. Somebody posted the judge are requiring folks to sign that they didn’t just go to chat GPT to .
Elizabeth Larrick: There was a guy who got caught. It was a, there was a. Found it. Ernie Spenson, Ernie, the attorney. I follow him and he posted this thing on LinkedIn about like how a guy Like went to chat GBT and was like, what case law is there for this?
And he literally copy and pasted and wrote a brief and sent it in and he had to tell the judge like, I didn’t and made up check.
John Rubin: Oh boy. No, they
Elizabeth Larrick: were not real cases.
John Rubin: Oh, they were made up cases.
Elizabeth Larrick: Chat, GBT paid up. Oh wow. I was like, oh yeah. So I , it’s a helpful [00:38:00] thing to get you started, but it doesn’t finish with the job, so.
John Rubin: Wow. Remember that case of Rubin versus Larrick, Texas Supreme Court. Yeah. Wow. Okay.
Elizabeth Larrick: So.
John Rubin: Good. Good. I’m always
Elizabeth Larrick: interested. I’m trying myself to do the same thing. Help me get started or just start generating some thoughts and see what’s out there.
John Rubin: It’s great for thought generation, right? It really may just throw out some ideas you haven’t thought of and you can go from there.
So it’s going to have obviously a lot, it’s got a long ways to go, but it’s got a lot of use to it now.
Elizabeth Larrick: Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, John, thank you so much for joining the podcast. I’m excited about Lytics. I think it’s going to be awesome. And I like the approach that you’re taking, I think is. It’s amazing because so many people develop software to just basically ring lawyers and they don’t care if it’s really useful or not.
They don’t care if it’s functional. They just want lawyers to sign on and pay the bill.
John Rubin: Pay the bill. Yeah. And we’ve all been there, right? We’ve all been caught in a two to three year contract for [00:39:00] some software and you’re like, why? Yeah. We’re not here to do that. We’re here. I
Elizabeth Larrick: appreciate that.
John Rubin: So thank you.
Elizabeth Larrick: You’re welcome. So Check the show notes. If you are listening in, we’re going to have the link to sign up for Liddex to get the notifications. I’ll have John’s information if you have ideas for him, but I would also encourage you to follow him on LinkedIn. Cause I know for sure, once Liddex comes out, like there’s going to be a blast out there too, and that’s probably one of the main platforms you’re going to use to announce things, maybe socially.
John Rubin: We’ll have Liddex, Facebook, I think Instagram is on the radar and it’s all starting next week.
Elizabeth Larrick: Oh, very exciting. Awesome. Well, congrats. I’m excited for you. And thanks for joining the podcast.
John Rubin: Thanks for
Elizabeth Larrick: it. All right. Until next time. Thank you guys so much for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, like, or follow it on your favorite podcast platform and until next time.
Thank [00:40:00] you.