Andrew Petry on Fixing the Coordination Problem in Law Firms

Jordan Lally:0:00
Welcome back to the High Ticket AI Systems Podcast. Everyone, please welcome the one and only Mr. Andrew Petrie. Andrew, welcome to the show, my man. How you doing today?

Andrew Petry:0:09
Hi Jordan, doing well today. How are you?

Jordan Lally:0:12
Fantastic. Thanks for joining us. Now, really quick, before we dive into all the the nitty-gritty questions, can you give us a high level overview of exactly like what the company does, what is the company, and who you guys sell, who you guys sell to, who you guys serve.

Andrew Petry:0:26
Yeah, absolutely. thanks for having me on today. So the name of my company is called Makase. we build software for the professionals and firms that families trust most. Today that starts with trusts in the state law firms. and our goal is really simple. We want to give attorneys time, more time back to practice law, and less time managing software in the operations of their firm. we started in 2023 on San Diego.

The founding team is based in New York now. So that's a little bit more history on what we are and what we're doing.

Jordan Lally:1:01
When you guys are making processes and and increasing efficiency, is that on the client acquisition side for them? Is it on the operation side, or I guess how far does efficiency expand across the the law firms?

Andrew Petry:1:16
Yeah, so our our origins are really in sort of the the Legion intake world, specifically in law firms and other sorts of professional services businesses. but really it's the the problem isn't a talent problem at these firms or an expertise problem at the firms. It's more of the coordination problem that exists that we are trying to solve.

Jordan Lally:1:41
coordination problem. What do you mean exactly for us I don't know?

Andrew Petry:1:45
Yeah, so attorneys spend a lot of time switching between a lot of different systems doing administrative work to deliver the services or the contracts or the legal documents that you or I or your family may need. you know, there's a tool for intake, there's a tool for billing, there's a tool for time tracking, there's a CRM tool. a lot of the times these tools do not talk to each other. And attorney or paralegal or administrative receptionist is spending a lot of time moving data between systems, which means they're not advising and helping clients with the expertise that the clients are paying them for.

Jordan Lally:2:26
Gotcha. Okay. And what would that look like from the software perspective? Like if I were onboarded into the company as a law firm, how would I take advantage of the actual systems in place?

Andrew Petry:2:40
Yeah, so today we we are built on top of Google workspace. So the lawyers the lawyers that benefit from our operating system.

Jordan Lally:2:44
Yeah.

Andrew Petry:2:50
are using Gmail and Google Calendar and Google Drive and Google Chat and Sheets and the the the Google productivity and collaboration suite. so that is sort of qualifier one, let's call it. And then to my point of the other vertical software point solutions that exist in the market, pretty much what we are doing with our clients is they put Google Drive on top of Mikase Law. we have an intelligence layer called treatise that is actually securing and encrypting and keeping all that data data private and controlled by that law firm because that is very, very, very important to them and also their clients at the end of the day. so Google workspace connects to our system and our system helps manage everything from intake to scheduling consultations to setting up fee agreements to actually want Once the consultation is going on, collecting notes, getting those notes into the system, into the right spot into the system, into the right spot into the Google Drive, once the matter has actually been created from a consultation being signed up. that then moves into the team working out of our operating system, tracking their time, understanding their expenses, understanding, you know, the the the health of that matter, the health of that case, the health of the firm in the sense of the managing partner of that. And then obviously from all that moving parts that sit on top of the activity from the collaboration side, there's a lot of analytics and reporting and dashboards. that go into that to give more visibility into what is actually going on at the law firm. So that's that's a little bit more of kind of what exactly we do when we go into a law firm.

Jordan Lally:4:42
Thanks so much for the context. Is all that automated, is what you're saying?

Andrew Petry:4:48
Is all of that automated? I would say most of that is automated. our our our view and position, right, is consumers want the attorney that uses AI, right? Consumers want the attorney that is spending as much time thinking about their case with all of the expertise and all the different matters they've seen in their history versus the attorney that is saving things down in the right spot, making sure timesheets are updated, making sure the notes are summarized the right way when they get sent into the billing invoice that gets sent via Stripe to the client that, you know, the managing partner doesn't have to spend 14 hours every week reviewing these notes. managing partner should be helping more people. and that's what the managing partner wants to do, and they just haven't had the tools at their disposal to be able to actually do all those things. So we just got our start with trust and estate law firms, but that same sort of architecture of whether it's a contingency matter or a flat fee matter or a flat fee plus hourly matter or a hybrid of all of those, that's that's how we built our system so other law firms can very quickly respond to people that want their services. coordinate them to get the service set up and then give that law firm team you know the time back to actually help that client with their legal background and less of their business operations software backgrounds.

Jordan Lally:6:15
No, that makes a that makes lot of sense. And I feel like from the consumer standpoint, I would much rather you come prepared, have have everything dialed in instead of you billing me for hours because you have to check your notes. Ur er maybe that wasn't the correct way to phrase that, but you you definitely framed it better. But like I want you to work on my case, not work on the back office administration administrative task, one might say.

Andrew Petry:6:40
Yeah. You know, I think I think what you're hitting on, right, is like AI is a tool. humans still want humans, trust is still embedded into relationships. you know, technology changes professions, right? And it's all of our professions. And that's been something that we've been dealing with for ever and ever and will continue to deal with for forever and ever. but the the reality is is people still want someone that they trust when the stakes are high. and now we can enable that. lawyer specifically to go help more people because they have more time back to do that. so that's really just sort of our, you know, where do we want to fit in? We want to be the operating system for the lawyer, not do the work of the lawyer.

Jordan Lally:7:25
Absolutely. I don't I learned this from Cole Gordon, but essentially how you significantly increase LTV lifetime value and client retention is you want to ask yourself like how can I make my business so sticky to where they, my client, cannot run their business without my business involved in theirs? And I think what you're doing right now is exactly that. Like it once you onboard a law firm correctly, properly, they love the results, they see the efficiency. Why would they ever like I I get I guarantee they cannot imagine their life without your software because everything is so much more efficient nowadays. You know what I mean?

Andrew Petry:8:07
Our our yeah, our go our good really good point. Our our goal with our clients is to make it so easy and so simple. Literally click a button, all your old data from all your old systems ports over and your team is just up and running on the case. Well, right. I think what I my background is B2B enterprise software. implementation cycles are long, sales cycles are long, training cycles are long. How do we get that as short?

And as easy as possible. that's that's really our sort of product positioning. we want it to be so, so, so, so easy. And that's for the attorney, that's for the paralegal, that's for the admin, that's for back office and finance at these law firms. And then similarly, these law firms are working with clients, right? I've worked with attorneys, I've been in a a a a car accident before. I've had to work with a personal injury attorney, right? I've had attorneys for my own business use cases. One of one thing that we've seen from attorneys Where they spend a lot of time is actually clients reaching out to them, trying to understand where is their case or what is going on. so you know, one element and one feature that we have in our product is a very secure client portal. So a client does not have to send an email or phone up to the law firm. They can just go to one single secure place and get the update that they need. So they don't have to send that to the attorney, and the attorney doesn't have to spend 15 minutes. getting that update, logging the time, getting it into the system, cleaning up the notes. The customer gets what they need and the lawyer can stay focused on the expertise that people are coming to them for. So that's that's really a little bit more color on, you know, where where we are going and how we think about working with attorneys and and law firms more broadly.

Jordan Lally:10:07
You bring up working with attorneys and law firms, although you have mentioned working with other the you know, professional services. Do you foresee the company niching down into attorney like the attorney world?

Andrew Petry:10:21
Yeah, I'd say our our current focus is attorneys. We've s you know, a lot of my days are spent sitting inside law firm offices, you know, literally building alongside practicing real life attorneys. so you know, our origins are more in the let's call it home services, real estate services world. and that just naturally led us to trust in estate attorneys and really more specifically w why. is the wedge that we've really, really been focused on of when a consumer has really, really high intent and when they need a lot of help is when they buy a house. so we've been working with realtors and home service providers of connecting homeowners with them right when they transact on a home. I think there's a really interesting opportunity long term for us to be sort of the enabler of when you buy a house.

We make that happen and your trust, the state will plan is updated instantly by an attorney that's on our network that is powered by Mikase. so that's that's a little bit of color like how we got to where we are and how I'm thinking about, you know, repositioning the company a little bit, let's call it. but really the the problem that we're solving for law firms is a very similar problem to what other service businesses have. It's not an expertise problem, it's a coordination problem.

Jordan Lally:11:32
Yeah.

Andrew Petry:11:44
And the coordination problem has come from a lot of either no software implementation or a lot of software implementation, which is leading to a lot of breaking things. so that's just where we're figuring out, you know, who is our ideal customer. we're more focused on sort of solo to 20 attorney law firms today. but the the operating system that we have built absolutely can and will be brought up market to larger firms one day.

Jordan Lally:12:16
thanks for bringing that up about your ICP and who's like the best perfect fit fit client, because that was literally my next question. I think when you're a bit smaller, I've experienced this. Because you in this this is just business, okay. I think because we lack client results, we lack the MVP in like proving out that this model can actually work, it's extremely difficult to go straight to the enterprise level and sell multi six figure software. contracts, right? But I think starting out with, you know, one to twenty, you know, small to small businesses, you know, it to prove the product works. plus it's less enterprise sales, so like less longer sales cycle, like typically it's like 30, 60 days of max, you know, opposed to six plus months with enterprise and you know you know this more than me. but I I'm all for proving the product, proving the service works. getting client testimonials, getting results, and then immediately going up market. Like you work with better clients, sure it's a longer sales cycle, but you 10x revenue per deal, you know, and I that's in the back of my mind right now. I'm currently working with the team on on strategizing that play. Hopefully the next like 30 days we will we'll start pushing up market. But that's a story for a different day. When it comes to your current contract size and I guess terms of the agreement.

How does that work without going into like exact dollar amounts of you?

Andrew Petry:13:46
Yeah, no, it's it's it's it's it's a really good question. So can't the candid answer is we are figuring that out as we currently speak. Pricing is custom based off of, you know, size of the firm. we our our orientation has been to keep this as simple as possible. you know, that is sales, that is implementation, that is training, it is soup to nuts. so the best way that we've been keeping it simple as possible is a monthly subscription. that's you know a few thousand dollars per month. And the way that I sort of sell that in the market today, right, is you know, what is the cost to hire a new individual for your law firm? because it gets back into It's a coordination problem, right? They have so much demand that they actually need to hire more people, and it's hard to find talented people to hire in. So now I come in at about 75% of roughly what an entry-level job labor cost is, because we're primarily targeting law firms in the state of California. We also have some in New York and Texas and Florida and the Carolinas. but that is that's sort of how I think about the cost of what Mikase is, and I sell it on a recurring monthly subscription basis. And again, that is some a technology that is coming in that is trained instantly and is going to get smarter and smarter every day. is never calling out sick, is never making data entry mistakes. So that's that's sort of how I think about it. But I really sell it as an enabler of the team. Right. So if you go into a law firm Managing partner has different problems than team does. A lot of the times there are a lot of tasks that are delivered and given to team members and

Andrew Petry:15:45
If you talk to the team members, they are absolutely overwhelmed with the number of tasks that they are being given. So what our software has helped them do is remove a lot of the tasks so they can do the tasks that they actually want to go do, which is talking to humans and sitting in consultations and go building referral networks with other attorneys or realist realtors or wealth advisors or tax advisors or other sorts of high-end service providers in the area for that relationship-based sales. mechanism that we're trying to build. So that's that's really more of like how we sell it.

It's not to replace people on the team. It's to actually help you grow your firm faster and help your team have less stress on their plate because we are handling a lot of the work that they really don't want to do, but it has to get done. so that's that's sort of how I think about the easy sale today. I absolutely expect that there will be a world that comes where we could do outcome-based selling, whether that's charging per consultation that gets scheduled or per qualified lead that we take in. or per matter we create or for every invoice we get sent. I think that gets really, really, really, really complicated very fast for myself and also for the lawyer. so maybe that's an opportunity in the future. but right now our our our focus is selling a simple recurring monthly subscription contract with boutique law firms.

Jordan Lally:16:59
Yes.

Jordan Lally:17:19
I think when you add in performance play or pay per result at scale, you need like an accountant just to keep track of all the performance metrics that are going on with all the clients. It's very tedious from my experience. So I I'm more of a you pay X, you get Y. And as long as Y is greater than X, as long as you make more than you pay me, everyone's happy. You know what I mean? So that's that. and one thing on on strategy.

I've recently watched his Cole Gordon video. From his statistics, human beings are far more likely, and from his findings, two times more likely to take action when they are avoiding loss. Not gaining something new, but avoiding loss. What I mean by that is if you can frame how your software, even my services as well, but just for this example, your software, it's it's As of right now, you're losing X dollars or X hours per week or per month because you have to ha because you have to have a human do all this manual task for you. All of your systems are not in alignment together and it's causing you more stress, more headache. But more importantly, losing dollars because you're paying some a human to do this where we can help you offset this, and it's costing you time and you don't even want to do this to begin with, you know? So framing the the loss more so than what you'll gain allegedly. works bet works more and works better. So there's some food for thought for ya.

Andrew Petry:18:51
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think it's a very good point.

Jordan Lally:18:54
Yeah, and you come from B to be enterprise sales, right? So I assume you have a pretty decent sales background.

Andrew Petry:19:00
Yeah, my background at a high level is I worked for a software company called YX right when I got out of college. they were helping local service businesses be found online. business online business listings, the modern yellow pages. I then went and did a consulting job where I learned about Digital transformation services and data center builds out build-outs, and A V IV IT office build-outs for very large Fortune 500 businesses. And that was really kind of what got me super, super interested in technology and seeing that that was the future, you know, learning what a data center was way before they were popular. and then I went and did, like I mentioned, self-side equity research, and I understood how, you know, stories were told, finances.

Jordan Lally:19:43
Yeah, right.

Andrew Petry:19:52
you know, distribution models of actually selling enterprise software. And I think that's something that I think is really, really important and critical in terms of how we build our product and the simplicity of it and the simplicity of implementing it and using it down the road and how I think about getting this in the hands of more and more law firms. so that's that's a quick rundown of my background. Then the last job I had before I started this company was a venture investor at Stepstone where I did venture investing, growth equity. and I did a little bit of the private equity stuff because when coming from my Wall Street self side days, a lot of the companies that I covered on the public side were being taken private over the years of 2021 to 2023. So that's that's a high level of my my background and sort of it's a very B2B heavy background. I'm not an engineer, just more the the execution side of things.

Jordan Lally:20:49
Which is highly valuable. And I think

Andrew Petry:20:52
Need both. You need both though, right? Like, you you can't you can't do it alone. And I am so grateful for the the team and this particularly my co-founder that I have. you know, that's been one of the hardest learnings of of business, right? Is you gotta find the right people. And that's that's a big reason why we are so passionate about what we do, right? Especially when you're having a problem in your life and you need to work with an attorney, you wanna work with the attorney that's gonna be the attorney and has all the expertise that you very valuably need. so a little bit more of my background and kind of why why why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Jordan Lally:21:30
When it is it you and the co founder for the team or do you have like W two contractors for help as well?

Andrew Petry:21:37
Yeah, so it's me and my co-founder are based in New York. we both moved there from the West Coast about a year ago. and then we have two more engineers on the team as well. They're in San Francisco and Austin, Texas. But that's what the team composition looks like today.

Jordan Lally:21:44
Gotcha.

Jordan Lally:21:53
Personal question, I always thought, still kind of faint, that San Diego is heaven on earth. Why New York? Well

Andrew Petry:22:01
It's it's funny you it's funny you asked that. I'm actually in San Diego right now. I've been here for a few weeks and we'll be here for the entire month of July actually as well. you know.

Jordan Lally:22:06
Okay.

Andrew Petry:22:18
A big reason I moved back to New York last year was because there are a lot of big law firms and a lot of big service businesses there, right? That are looking for people that have actually lived, breathed the problem to buy their software and services from. that was really, really helpful to let more people know about Mikase and you know, build more relationships. the reality of the situation is like so many things are out of your control, as is always with life. And one of our early customers was the Law firm that I mentioned, the Trusts and Estate Law Firm. They were using us for intake. We qualified and booked thousands of leads for them. they came back to us asking for a very specific workflow use case on automating something about around probate docs. That conversation quickly led into none of our systems talk to each other. We are gonna go with the number one legal tech provider. but Could you maybe build us something? so that conversation led to a build, that conversation led to an implementation, that implementation led to a lot more law firms in Southern California spending time with us. and back to sort of how do we make this as easy as possible for more and more law firms and more and more professional service businesses to use one day? My view is you need to spend as much time as possible with your clients. so long-winded answer of did I leave San Diego? Yes, but I am actually back in San Diego and very happy to be back, spending a lot of time with clients, you know, making sure that, you know, implementation is as smooth as smooth can get. it's not perfect, but every day gets a little bit better.

Jordan Lally:24:04
I love it, man. That's awesome. When it comes to client acquisition, we do like to talk about systems on the podcast. Primarily is your channel shaking hands, networking in person, or do you have any inbound, outbound methods?

Andrew Petry:24:18
Yeah, so I am a big relationship person. our clients are big relationship people. So the fastest way to a most successful sale is a referral. attorneys know other attorneys. They all speak about what systems they use. That is without a doubt the most effective channel. I would say we have other sort of interesting outbound mechanisms built out, whether it's on LinkedIn or email. or other social sites of building relationships with attorneys and/or other people that are introducing us to attorneys, specifically trust and estate attorneys. We get a lot of introductions from wealth advisors, financial advisors, RIAs, family offices, multifamily offices, other people that consumers go to when they are in need of help, especially like high ticket value professional services organizations, but those in particular are where we're getting a lot of referrals and sort of sales activity from to date at least.

Jordan Lally:25:30
Thanks for the for the honesty. I heard this stat. I don't know if it was from a past guest or from a YouTube channel. but nonetheless, they said that referrals close at like eighty percent. And like it's not because it's when you can borrow trust from a trusted advisor, I know that's like no pun intended, but like let's say I have a friend, right? And like this is like my my my buddy, you know, I see him at networking events, I talk to him on the weekends, like a legitimate friend.

And I'm like, dude, I love this service provider. They help me do XYZ. You have to give them a go. Like, chances are they're probably like 100% sold or like 95% sold. As long as you don't mess up the deal or like make fun of his mom or something, then like chances are they're probably close. Like they're gonna enroll into your services, you know? It's extremely difficult to. I mean, it can it be done? Of course. And like, I love I love when this happens, but turning cold. strangers into high ticket paying clients, you have you have to have a lot of systems, processes, you have to shorten the sales cycle by building an immense amount of trust in a few short days. Like it a lot has to go into it. But like on on the referral side, again, like it's you close it at 80% rate. Like it's it's like that's amazing. You know? If I can do that all day long, I would.

Andrew Petry:26:48
Yeah, and you know, it's a good point. But but what it is is it's the same problem at the end of the day, right? It's a it's a coordination problem, but more specifically, it's a communication friction piece, right? Whether that person has really, really, really high intent and they're going to Google and clicking on your ad and landing on your website and putting in their phone number. If you don't get back to them, they're going somewhere else. Okay, let's talk about the new search model. Maybe they're going to Chat GPT. Maybe they, you know, your business populates there. They click it. They land on your website. If you still don't fill out, if they still fill out that form, you still don't get back to them, they're probably going somewhere else. Same thing in your use case, right? Like I could recommend you to an attorney that I love and try trust and know really well, but maybe they're in Italy this month. You know, and like they just couldn't respond to that email right then and there. So like, guess what? My referral looks bad. You're probably a little pissed off of me. You're gonna go to another lawyer, right? So like lots of channels, same problem. And this is exactly where we started, right? Like if someone comes to your business and they knock on your door You gotta open an answer, right? and our our sort of wedge of that was like when they come to your website door. we also You know, that could have been an ad on a Facebook form, right? Like you just have to respond. So that's a little bit more of origins of our business and sort of that sort of premium always respond, always be there for you experience is what we are bringing specifically to lawyers and the expansion of that communication friction has evolved from just legion intake to every moving part of the firm's operations.

Jordan Lally:28:37
Gotcha. No, I completely agree. Completely agree. And I think if you can break it down and simplify like what you just said, what the actual true problem is, it's like this person understands my industry. They understand my exact problems. He's not a novice. I trust this guy. And trust is essential to close deals. wrapping up on time, we have maybe two or three more questions. Over the next 12 months, do you guys have any plans or goals with you and the co founder on what you would love to see happen within the company?

Andrew Petry:29:07
Yeah, I mean w d I would love to see every single law firm in America using our software. we need to be realistic about that though, right? you know, we are a we are a small team, we are focused. our clients have a lot of data security, privacy concerns around software and AI in particular, right? So there are a lot of things that we are investing in to make sure that these systems are as secure as secure can get so we can actually scale up and go to all law firms and all professional services organizations that families trust and rely on. But I would say over the next year you will see us maniacally focused on law firms. So we will continue to grow the Mikase Law product. We also have Mikase Pro. which is our product for other sorts of service businesses to use. You can just think of Mikase Pro as like lead-gen referrals sort of only, not the sort of end-to-end operating system. We also have Mikase Real Realtor.

Which is that sort of like white labeled concierge referral engine. It's back to our origins. And, you know, when a home closes, realtor can stay connected to their clients by making recommendations. So client comes back and buys another house with them. One of those recommendations was a law firm, which is how we got to that law firm initially. So you can see sort of new features and all of those products coming from a lot of the Mikase law build-out that we're doing. we also have on our roadmap a Mikase wealth product, Mikase Wealth is the operate will be the operating system for wealth firms. that will be coming in the future as well. but right now our our maniacal focus is on law firms and going to market with Mikase Law.

Jordan Lally:31:04
I love it. And my piece of advice is to niche down. I think I I I th I think niching down has worked wonders from not only my business but a lot of big scale large operations in in general. And you probably know the saying, I'm not gonna hammer it home, but like who gets paid more? A generalist or a specialist, you know? So

Andrew Petry:31:27
When you build when you build everything for when you build for everyone, you're building for no one, right? And we we I myself have learned that the hard way. so we are we are we have focus and discipline around who we are building for and the problems that they have. And a lot of what we've learned from not lawyers but other service businesses, those learnings have been translated into the product that we have and will continue to be embedded in into what we build in the future. So

Jordan Lally:31:31
Yeah.

Jordan Lally:31:55
That's awesome. And then last question for ya. I never know what I get when I hear this, but we always extract some juice. You can you can of course take your time whenever I ask you, but what is the single best piece of advice you've received over your your career and personal life?

Andrew Petry:32:01
Sure.

Andrew Petry:32:15
I think just to summarize all the pieces of advice I've had given, just go, right? stop overthinking. Your stress, your anxiety is coming from doing the overthinking. Just do the action, get started. It's gonna be a little hard, you're gonna be okay, you're gonna wake up tomorrow. you know, just go. life life can be more fun. So take yourself less serious, right?

Jordan Lally:32:43
Ha ha ha.

Andrew Petry:32:44
So I know that was a lot of things I just threw in there, but you know, just go, right? I think that's my one piece of advice.

Jordan Lally:32:50
No, it all circles together. Andrew, it was a blast having you on, man. Where can they find you?

Andrew Petry:32:55
Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn. my email is andrew at makase a k ase.com, or that's our website, makase.com. so thanks for having me on today.

Jordan Lally:33:09
Absolutely. Audience, we'll talk to you soon.