[00:00:00] Brian Gamsey: the startup costs were about 500 and that was all in putting in some electrical plugs in my third bedroom. I got, I went to Best Buy and got 0 percent financing, zero money down on a couple ovens. And within three months I had to start hiring people because I couldn’t keep up with the flow.
[00:00:24] Brian Gamsey: And. Within nine months, we were approached by another bakery who said, Hey, we’re open during the day. We have this downtown location open at night. Would you be interested in sharing space? So they just done a build out. It was a new restaurant. So, less than a year into it. We got this. Brand new bakery in downtown Athens and didn’t have to put any capital expenditures and it just got to pay rent and operate out of there.
[00:00:55] [00:01:00]
[00:01:25] Jonathan Hawkins: Welcome to Founding Partner Podcast. I’m your host Jonathan Hawkins. We’ve got a cool guest today. We’ve got Brian Gamzee. He has recently started his firm with a partner. I think maybe they’re two, three months out. So, and they’re doing some pretty cool stuff. So we’re gonna, we’re gonna dig into all of that. Brian, why don’t you introduce yourself? Tell us where you are what kind of work you do and a little bit about your firm.
[00:01:50] Brian Gamsey: Thanks, Jonathan. Appreciate you having me today. I’m Brian Gamzee, founding partner of Mills Gamzee with my partner, Austin Mills. And we are a [00:02:00] law firm that operates as a technology company, and we work in the technology transactions, commercial contract space, and we really try to leverage technology as much as we can and offer some both traditional and non traditional services to our clients.
[00:02:20] Brian Gamsey: focusing on technology, transactions, software, IP development, any sort of transaction that you could imagine with software or technology is kind of our wheelhouse.
[00:02:32] Jonathan Hawkins: So we’re going to dig into all of that stuff you know, including what you guys are doing with technology and then, and some of the other just sort of basics of, you know, you’ve just started a firm and there are people out there that want to know what’s it like in the first few months before we get all that you’ve got a pretty interesting background before you became a lawyer. And I want to dive into some of that because I think it’s pretty cool and I think It probably informs how you approach your law practice. So [00:03:00] Before you were a lawyer. What kind of stuff were you doing? Maybe give us a high level and we’ll dig in.
[00:03:04] Brian Gamsey: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. When I was in law school, it was referred to as non traditional, which was, I think, just a nice way of calling me old. But. I started as a transactional advisor services or big for accounting for firm doing goodwill impairment intangible asset valuation, which was about as exciting as it sounds.
[00:03:27] Brian Gamsey: It really meant I built a lot of models in Excel from there. I went and worked as a part of a startup with a bunch of former Aon after that, I went, I’m going to scratch that and not refer to The names of the people,
[00:03:40] Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. Yep.
[00:03:41] Jonathan Hawkins: Note note. Let’s
[00:03:42] Brian Gamsey: yeah, let me talk from the top. So I started my career in financial consulting and then was part of a startup group that helped a large hospital organization transition from being a governmental run. organization to a [00:04:00] standalone 501 C3 hospital, and then started a charity and then started a cookie delivery company and bakery.
[00:04:12] Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. Yeah. We’re going to get into that for sure. But let’s talk about transitioning that sort of governmental or nonprofit to to a, or was it governmental to a nonprofit? Is that what it was?
[00:04:22] Brian Gamsey: Yeah, we was working with Grady Health Systems. At the time it was part of the Fulton DeKalb Hospital Authority. So it was kind of its own branch of government. And they were transitioning to being a 501 C3 hospital. So the transition there, we were serving as special assistant to the CEO and CFO and really helping organize the hospital from the bureaucracy of governmental run agency to some of the efficiencies with processes that should be run by a non governmental agency.
[00:04:54] Brian Gamsey: Okay.
[00:04:55] Jonathan Hawkins: how old were you when you were doing that?
[00:04:58] Brian Gamsey: I was, I started when I was [00:05:00] 24
[00:05:00] Jonathan Hawkins: were a young pup and you got to be in the room, right? As, as the big boy or big girl decisions are being made. What was that like? Yeah. Yeah.
[00:05:09] Brian Gamsey: It was amazing experience. You know, a lot of, a lot, one of them, one, there was a particular meeting I was thinking of, we were having a really intense conversation because there was some conversation about how we were going to communicate, how the hospital was going to communicate, potentially shutting down some of the services.
[00:05:29] Brian Gamsey: And I can remember one of the senior people at the hospital, I’m on my laptop, have my laptop open and taking notes while we’re working. And they stopped in the middle of the conversation and said, what is this kid doing? Is he playing on the computer while we’re working on this? And what I had done was drafted out the plan of outline and sent it around to everyone during the call to solve the problem.
[00:05:55] Brian Gamsey: And a lot of times when we’re dealing with. These kind of organizations, [00:06:00] especially then it was kind of technology was not certainly within the government was not being utilized in the right ways. And I think it kind of took people back. That you could actually live solve problems. And so getting that experience and earning the trust of those you know, stakeholders was really invaluable to be able to be kind of boots on the ground, solving those problems.
[00:06:24] Brian Gamsey: And some were simple and some were complex, but it really informed the way I thought about organizations moving forward.
[00:06:32] Jonathan Hawkins: And, you know, I would imagine another piece of it is, you know, switching from a slow governmental bureaucracy type attitude to something new. I bet you a lot of people were scared out of their minds. Number one, change just scares everybody, but probably some folks were going to lose their jobs. I don’t know.
[00:06:51] Jonathan Hawkins: I’m sure that was part of it also. Yeah.
[00:06:54] Brian Gamsey: Yeah. I mean, part of the, you know, you, I think you hit the nail right on the head. Every. [00:07:00] The unknown scares a lot of people. And I think that what we were able to prove out was that everyone and what we aimed to do was everyone could keep their jobs as long as they changed what their roles were in those jobs.
[00:07:19] Brian Gamsey: So instead of having to send it to agency one, to have it approved by agency two, to have it voted on by constituency three. If you could manage that internally, you could create a lot of efficiencies, make the hospital run in a way that went from the red to the black, and everyone could keep their job because there would be more money to go around.
[00:07:43] Jonathan Hawkins: I mean, that, that would have been a tremendous learning experience, I think probably has served you well. You know, you learned so much. You learn. Number one, when you’re the, when you’re the kid playing on your computer, you have to figure out how to gain some trust and authority there, but then also how to just [00:08:00] manage the fear and manage change.
[00:08:02] Jonathan Hawkins: I think that is invaluable experience. So did you go from that straight, I want to talk about the cookie company next. That’s that’s a cool story. So did you go straight to the cookie company or was there something in between?
[00:08:14] Brian Gamsey: So in between, I started a nonprofit organization called Triple Play Foundation. Triple Play uses sports to promote health education and community service to at risk youth, and we’ve got programs in Athens, Georgia still to this day. So I moved down to Athens, was focusing on that as part of the thank yous I would send out.
[00:08:34] Brian Gamsey: I would sometimes send out cookies and a little cartoon to go along with it thanking them. And as it would happen, the head of the entrepreneurship program at UGA saw the cartoon, saw the cookies, said this was a clever idea. Had I ever thought about turning it into a business. so much. I said, well, you know, I haven’t, but I know in other college campuses, there are cookie delivery [00:09:00] companies and Athens doesn’t have one right now.
[00:09:02] Brian Gamsey: And so I think that it could be successful having, I’ve seen it be successful on other college campuses. I think it would be successful here in Athens. He said, how would you like to go into a business plan competition and pitch this? I said, nah, I’m not really interested. I kind of enjoy what I’m doing now.
[00:09:19] Brian Gamsey: And he said, how about a guarantee that you’ll make the finals? So, all right, I can do that. So it was gonna, I was in the finals to win 150, 000 seed money. The angel that was going to write the check after I made my pitch said that this was the dumbest idea he had ever heard and that there was no way it could be successful.
[00:09:41] Brian Gamsey: And so after that, I knew I had to start the company. So. Doing this, the competition, I found a loophole in the Georgia Food Act that allowed me to turn the third bedroom of my house into a licensed bakery. As long as I fell within certain guidelines, [00:10:00] not consecutive days, minimum number of hours. And so on Thursday nights and Saturday nights, we started with one cookie out of the third bedroom of my house.
[00:10:14] Jonathan Hawkins: So how, well. How did you promote the thing? Let’s start there. How
[00:10:18] Jonathan Hawkins: did you, How do people find out
[00:10:20] Jonathan Hawkins: about this? Well, we’ll talk about the name. I think it’s a great name and the brand, maybe we’ll start
[00:10:24] Jonathan Hawkins: there.
[00:10:25] Brian Gamsey: name of the company was always baked goodies. I have the sense of humor of a 12 year old boy. And so I think that the concept that every cookie is baked is funny. And so the cartoon was this little hippie cookie that would walk around being enlightened about the beauty of life. And from there we, we started the company the first way that we marketed was we got onto a third party platform.
[00:10:52] Brian Gamsey: That was the delivery service. They actually did the deliveries and as luck would have it we were the only egg. [00:11:00] And so always baked was on top of the list. And so people started seeing always baked. And that’s kind of how we got our name out there to start.
[00:11:10] Jonathan Hawkins: Was that by accident or had you thought through that?
[00:11:14] Brian Gamsey: I would love to say I was smart enough to have thought through that, but now it just worked out that way that there was no other, we were the top of the A list on the website.
[00:11:27] Jonathan Hawkins: All right. So you start this thing out of your bedroom, basically. How, you know, take us through sort of the growth. How long did it take to sort of catch?
[00:11:34] Brian Gamsey: Yeah. So, You know, the startup costs were about 500 and that was all in putting in some electrical plugs in my third bedroom. I got, I went to Best Buy and got 0 percent financing, zero money down on a couple ovens. And within three months I had to start hiring people [00:12:00] because I couldn’t keep up with the flow.
[00:12:01] Brian Gamsey: And. Within nine months, we were approached by another bakery who said, Hey, we’re open during the day. We have this downtown location open at night. Would you be interested in sharing space? So they just done a build out. It was a new restaurant. So, less than a year into it. We got this. Brand new bakery in downtown Athens and didn’t have to put any capital expenditures and it just got to pay rent and operate out of there.
[00:12:33] Brian Gamsey: Then we went and opened our own brick and mortar location. Then we started getting into some restaurants. Then we started getting into some grocery stores.
[00:12:42] Jonathan Hawkins: You know, I mean, a retail store, I guess I’d call this retail. That’s pretty intense type business. You know, big time grind. I would think,
[00:12:50] Brian Gamsey: It was,
[00:12:51] Jonathan Hawkins: was, that?
[00:12:53] Brian Gamsey: it was a lot of work. It was a lot of work because of the You know, our brand and the [00:13:00] nature of what we were doing you know, store didn’t close on most nights until one, two o’clock in the morning. And then there’s cleanup and then there’s inventory. So, you know, I was putting in. You know, on a good day, 15, 16 hour days sleep, wake up, do it again.
[00:13:20] Brian Gamsey: And that, you know, that was a good day if I was able to get it done in 15, 16 hours. So it was a group food services, not for the weak of heart.
[00:13:29] Jonathan Hawkins: You know, I was listening to the podcast. There are a bunch of them out there, but the guy who started raising canes and you know, he talks about, you know, part of their strategy was they were going to be there. When all the people rolled out of the bars, all the students rolled out of the bars at LSU, they were going to be the ones right there and it seemed to work.
[00:13:46] Jonathan Hawkins: I mean, obviously it’s one of the biggest chains now yeah, he said they were sleeping, you know, waking up, taking turns all night. that’s that’s a grind for sure. All right. So at some point well, let me ask, you’re not [00:14:00] in the cookie business anymore, right?
[00:14:01] Brian Gamsey: I’m not in the cookie
[00:14:02] Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. So what happened? How’d you get out of that?
[00:14:05] Brian Gamsey: So, a confluence of events, I would say is how I got into that. About. Three years into it a separate cookie company hit us with a cease and desist. They, turns out part of their strategy was find local independents that have similar business models move in across the street, which they did, and hit with a cease and desist and try to scare them.
[00:14:33] Brian Gamsey: The cease and desist they brought to me was a trademark infringement claim. I was quite confident that we had not infringed their trademark. I reached out to a few lawyers found somebody who said, you know, this is a great case. I’m willing to take it on contingency. I think you’re going to win. And so we accepted their cease and desist, prove we’re violating your trademark, and then we countersued them for violation of the Lanham Act and [00:15:00] sought to have them have their trademark canceled.
[00:15:03] Brian Gamsey: it was, yeah, you know, their reaction was like Whoa. We didn’t say you had to stop using your trade. That’s not what we were trying to say. I don’t think they expected that reaction. In doing so I started getting very much at the same time this was happening. I’m negotiating. Deal for to get into a lot of supermarkets it was going to be a big contract.
[00:15:26] Brian Gamsey: We were probably going to need to build a, we were going to need to build a warehouse to kind of get to fulfill the shelf space that we were trying to guarantee. And I started getting more invested in. Researching the Lanham Act and learning IP law that I was in focusing on bringing the contract to a close and focusing on building out the warehouse and getting all that logistics in place.
[00:15:48] Brian Gamsey: Part of that was because the lawyer I hired was on contingency and I turned to the client that I now. despise and start doing the work myself. And so I [00:16:00] would be doing this research and I reached out to a buddy who was a lawyer and said, Hey, I know I’m being a jerk by doing the work. I don’t want to look stupid too.
[00:16:10] Brian Gamsey: Will you look at this to make sure that what I’m saying makes sense? And he said, you seem to like this more than the hooky stuff. Have you ever thought about being a lawyer? I was like, nah, not really. That’s not really what I’m interested in. And said, tell you what, bet you a thousand dollars. You can’t get a higher LSAT score.
[00:16:28] Brian Gamsey: And thank God for my buddy shout out Billy Olson. If it wasn’t for him he knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that this was what I started getting passionate about. And once I find a passion it’s hard for me to let go. And as a result of that took the LSAT. Closed the deal with the supermarket did fairly well on the lsat.
[00:16:47] Brian Gamsey: Got into, got a little scholarship to UNC law sold the contract and got outta the click business and went to law school.
[00:16:56] Jonathan Hawkins: So, did you win the thousand bucks? That’s the question.
[00:16:59] Brian Gamsey: I did [00:17:00] win a thousand bucks. I didn’t make, I didn’t make him pay it.
[00:17:02] Jonathan Hawkins: the
[00:17:02] Jonathan Hawkins: question. Did he pay it?
[00:17:04] Brian Gamsey: He offered to pay it. And the wisdom he passed on by, by leading me down the path that he knew was right for me was more than enough in payment.
[00:17:14] Jonathan Hawkins: That’s pretty sweet. So, you sort of, you found your calling, I’ll say it in law. But, you know, and we’ll get into this, you also get to use all your business experience now that you have your own firm. But before we get to starting your firm, you know, you end up going into law. What What was your path?
[00:17:30] Jonathan Hawkins: You got a big firm, mid firm, you know, where’d you go?
[00:17:33] Brian Gamsey: Yeah, I started a big firm. I was in Atlanta at a firm, you know, again, my going into law school, I really wanted to focus on technology and IP. And so I tried to find the firm that I thought had the best reputation for that and started my career at Morris Manic and was able to work in their technology transactions group.
[00:17:54] Brian Gamsey: And Boy, am I happy I made that decision. It was such a good, you know, the training and the [00:18:00] experience that I was able to get there really laid the groundwork for a successful legal career.
[00:18:07] Jonathan Hawkins: You started your firm how long ago two months three months.
[00:18:11] Brian Gamsey: April 1, 2024. So, yeah, right over 2 months.
[00:18:16] Jonathan Hawkins: All right. Yeah, so let’s talk about it Why’d you do it? What led you to do it?
[00:18:23] Brian Gamsey: So, a few things. So, my partner Austin and I, the first time we met the first project we worked on together back in 2016 was a contract automation project. It was kind of this, the first iteration of smart contracts. And really it was kind of using a Excel like coding to build out contracts to automate that process.
[00:18:48] Brian Gamsey: And there was a, at the time, an initiative to try to move in the direction of offering an alternative to the traditional bill by the hour legal services. [00:19:00] And we ended up, you know, the goal was for us to build out. Eight contracts. And I think we ended up building out for 54 contracts. And when we finished, there was no champion to try to promote that type of work because it didn’t fit within the traditional model.
[00:19:21] Brian Gamsey: How do you build by the hour for something that used to take three hours and now takes 15 minutes. And so fast forward. The technology has improved and at most law firms, the business model has stayed the same. And we thought, you know, Austin and I both Simultaneously and independently came to the conclusion we thought there was a better way to approach the practice of law.
[00:19:52] Brian Gamsey: You know, the, in my opinion, the worst kept secret in the legal community is that the business model is built on [00:20:00] inefficiencies. If you’re an associate at a law firm and you and I are associates of the law firm and you take five hours to turn one contract and I take one hour to take turn five contracts.
[00:20:10] Brian Gamsey: You’re the better associate. That doesn’t make sense that clients deserve better than that. And that’s why we started Mills Gansey.
[00:20:20] Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, that inefficiency issue, I mean, it’s, you know, I’ll look at this. I’m sure you’ve looked at it too. It’s sort of like the Netflix blockbuster. It’s really hard to turn the tanker from within. You almost have to go jump in a speedboat and then sort of out maneuver from outside. And I take it, that’s sort of what you guys are doing or that’s how you view it.
[00:20:44] Brian Gamsey: Yeah, that’s our approach. I mean, look, no knock on the traditional legal business model. It’s very lucrative. There are a lot of ways that you can approach the practice of law. Oh, we just think that. You know, [00:21:00] if someone were to ask for their lawyer to research case law and they didn’t use technology, but instead they went down to the library and they pulled up the books and then they checked those books and they charged eight hours for what now can be done in 10 minutes, the client would balk at that.
[00:21:18] Brian Gamsey: We think that’s the direction a lot of the legal practices are going in. And we wanted to be thought leaders in that space. We didn’t want to wait. For that paradigm shift to occur. We want to be part of it.
[00:21:28] Jonathan Hawkins: So you guys you’re two months in or so. Let’s talk about sort of your messaging or the branding of the firm. You know, I think you’re leading with sort of the tech stuff, so how do you guys. Message out there to the world and to your potential clients.
[00:21:41] Brian Gamsey: Yeah. So, you know, part of our communication is look, we’re highly trained, classically trained technology, transaction lawyers. We are well versed and we’re experts in this area. And if you want to have the traditional legal services, we’re happy to provide that for you at a more [00:22:00] cost effective way.
[00:22:00] Brian Gamsey: Approach then a big law firm would be able to offer you with the same level of expertise, but if you have, we’re also utilizing right now, we’re utilizing a stack of technology that allows us to kind of product ties, serve certain services to our clients. So for example, contract auditing contract reviews, chain of title reviews, Some of these exercises that are routine in that they are repetitive on what needs to be caught.
[00:22:33] Brian Gamsey: We’re taking those and we’re saying, instead of billing you by the hour for it, what would have taken us four hours we’re going to charge you what two and a half hours would be, but it’s only going to take us 15 minutes. And we’re being upfront about that. We’re saying, look, we’re utilizing this technology.
[00:22:51] Brian Gamsey: We’re going to operate like almost every other business operates and we’re going to build margins. And most of our clients are software [00:23:00] companies or in that space tech enabled space and they get it. And they’ve, everyone wants better, faster, cost effective legal services. And I think we’ve figured out a way to do that.
[00:23:15]
[00:23:28] Jonathan Hawkins: So let’s talk about the tech stack a little bit. You know, I’m not asking for your trade secrets, but I do know you use AI as part of this and then you use some other stuff too. I know AI is the hot thing right now. Everybody’s talking about AI. But as part of your process you went out and you basically researched, I mean, there are lots of different, what I’ll call AI products out there.
[00:23:49] Jonathan Hawkins: So. How did you sort of settle in on the ones that you guys were going to use?
[00:23:55] Brian Gamsey: Yeah, that’s a good question. I mean, we took [00:24:00] basically 10 months and sandboxed As many different products as we could. And we were really trying, you know, our goal was. To kind of try to break the product, right? Let’s push on it to, we know what output we’re looking for. Let’s put, we know the demo is going to show us that we’re going to be able to get the output we want.
[00:24:24] Brian Gamsey: We also want two weeks to be able to play with it. For lack of a better term, push on it and see what works and, you know, really testing for type 1 and type 2 errors, right? False positives and false negatives the way we look, you know, right now, where the technology is, it’s not perfect. There’s going to be errors and what we were more concerned about is we didn’t want, you know, the way we’re flagging these agreements.
[00:24:52] Brian Gamsey: We wanted to make sure if it missed something by being over inclusive. We wanted it to tell us that something was wrong that wasn’t [00:25:00] not miss something that was wrong and tell us it was fine. And we found a lot of the products. On the marketplace right now, really was a not approaching it from a commercial contract standpoint and the way that we wanted to approach it and be instead of focusing on a highly specialized area that they were trying to be all things to all people.
[00:25:25] Brian Gamsey: And, you know, our experience was the products that tried to be all things to all people. Had more flaws than the more specialized products.
[00:25:36] Jonathan Hawkins: You know, we’ve all heard by this point, the, you know, the law firm or lawyer up in New York that used AI chat, GPT, whatever it was to draft a brief and file it without checking it. I don’t think you guys do any litigation, but in terms of the discussions you have with your clients how do you How do you talk through that with them in terms of, you know, they’re going to be mistakes. This is how we’re sort [00:26:00] of fixing it and then, you know, let them decide. And then another piece on that you know, the question comes up a lot with some of these products is, you know, the siloing of client information and potential release of that. How do you deal with those two issues?
[00:26:17] Brian Gamsey: So I’ll do the second question first from the data issue. First and foremost, we’re upfront before we use any technology. We say, this is our technology stack. This is what it does. Here are the third parties we’re using. Here’s kind of the proprietary stuff we’re using. the, here’s what the contracts that we have or what we’ve built says it does.
[00:26:43] Brian Gamsey: Are you comfortable with this? Some clients say no. Some clients say, yeah, it says that it has its own separate instance and that they’re logically segregating all the data and it’s not training on the data. But they’re still not comfortable with it. And we’re totally okay with that. That’s completely reasonable position to [00:27:00] have.
[00:27:00] Brian Gamsey: You know, going back to the people fear the unknown, you don’t know what you don’t know right now with some of these AI products. And so before we ever use any of the AI or any of the LLMs that we have we’re very upfront and transparent with our clients and get their approval. And lay out the framework.
[00:27:23] Brian Gamsey: The second part of that is we are very stringent that our technology is not lawyers. And we’re not asking it to practice law. We’re using it as a force multiplier. We, you know, I think it would be the same way that it would be negligent to have a attorney that’s 3 months into practice, take the final cut of an M and a deal and then send it back to the client.
[00:27:51] Brian Gamsey: It would be negligent to let a tech piece of technology without putting eyes on it. And say, here you go, client. Here’s the final product. Here you go, judge. Here’s the [00:28:00] final product, you know, where the technology is today. You know, it’s not a bike. You can’t just hop on it and take it where you want to go.
[00:28:08] Brian Gamsey: It’s a rocket ship and you need to be an astronaut if you want to be able to maintain control and that’s how we’re approaching it. As you know, we know the limitations of the product because we have built out and tested so many different types of products. We know our processes and we have processes, methodologies in place to check.
[00:28:29] Brian Gamsey: We have redundancies on redundancies. And so we know that we know enough to know that there are limitations. And so, you know, we never, the final review always lays with the person, not the technology.
[00:28:45] Jonathan Hawkins: You know, that’s. Sounds intimidating to most lawyers. I’m sure like oh my god. You guys have done a deep dive spent 10 months looking at all this stuff You’ve created redundancies. Most lawyers are like, you know, what’s chat GPT? [00:29:00] So yeah, I can imagine you know, you’re right. This thing is a rocket ship.
[00:29:04] Jonathan Hawkins: It’s gonna happen and you know, it’s At some point, everybody’s either going to be using it or they’re going to be left behind. So, you know, for the lawyers out there that are scared of AI, you know, you need to start looking at it, you know, be careful, look at it, disclose to your client, you know, that kind of stuff. Um, but it’s coming you know, it’s going to be fun to watch you guys really use this stuff and propel your practice for it. But So let’s, so you disclose it to the clients, you give them sort of the choice. You know, we can do this as a flat fee, or we can do hourly. Do you do anything other than those two options?
[00:29:39] Jonathan Hawkins: Do you have some sort of like membership subscription type?
[00:29:43] Brian Gamsey: We don’t right now, but that’s that is in the kind of plans of next phases, you know, in addition, we kind of also offer a hybrid bottle of. Here’s a flat fee. If you want X, we can also do you know, if you want to add some kind of managed services [00:30:00] on top of it, where instead of you’re just getting the output, we can add some you know, bill by the hour.
[00:30:05] Brian Gamsey: So hybrid approach, it could be flat fee plus model, but yeah, I mean, down the road, part of where we think that we’re going to be able to go is, you know, as we’ve discussed, we looked at the marketplace and right now. We don’t think that there is any one product that does what we’re trying to do. There are several products when used together that kind of get us where we want to be.
[00:30:31] Brian Gamsey: But we think that we’re going to be able to or hope to be able to build out our own proprietary software. And use that in a subscription model and have it either be a licensed subscription where there are lawyers that are going to be using it or use it for in house teams to kind of replace in house teams and sit on top of it with managed services.
[00:30:54] Brian Gamsey: So you still have lawyers again, still want to astronauts driving the rocket ship.
[00:30:58] Jonathan Hawkins: See that’s your that’s the [00:31:00] combination there of your background, your business experience, your technology experience, and your legal experience. That’s beautiful. That’s the your zone of genius, right? Okay. Yeah,
[00:31:12] Brian Gamsey: your words. I, you know, I just, my, my approach is all the pieces matter, you know, everything you experience impacts every other thing you do. And so it would, I would be doing a disservice to myself if I didn’t allow my experiences to inform my decisions. And try to capture all of that, you know, a lot of as you may imagine know, it would be hard pressed for me to convince my parents when I was running a cookie business after having sat at the table with CEOs and CFOs at huge organizations on what I was doing with my career.
[00:31:48] Brian Gamsey: I followed a path that I thought was the best fit for me at the time. And that’s kind of always been my approach for my professional and personal life. And so far it is seem [00:32:00] to be able to stack on top of each other and really help inform what the next thing is going to be.
[00:32:07] Jonathan Hawkins: you know, that’s really important. You know, a lot of young lawyers come out maybe even when they’re in law school, they think I need to decide now what I’m going to do 10 years from now. And it’s really not like that. At least from my experience and others that I’ve talked to, you sort of stumble along, you, you gain these experiences and you start to focus in on something and you may not have even seen it coming and then all of a sudden you’re there. And then boom, you can take advantage of it. Another cool thing you guys are doing. I’ve talked to some other firms that are in completely different niche areas and they, um, they need a solution, a tech solution for what it is they do, and it’s not out there. So they end up sort of building it themselves.
[00:32:50] Jonathan Hawkins: And then once they build it, They iterate on it, make it a little bit better. And then they’re to the point where they’re like, Hey, maybe somebody else can use this. I know that has [00:33:00] happened. I know there’s some out there that I don’t know personally. And then there’s some that I do know personally that, that are doing it now.
[00:33:06] Jonathan Hawkins: And that’s really a cool approach. And if you guys can get there huge opportunity.
[00:33:11] Brian Gamsey: Yeah, we think so too. And, you know, it’s, it is the way of the world. You know, I think you said it. You people are either going to be using the technology or they’re going to be left behind. It’s to us, it really is that simple. Now it’s not easy, but it’s simple.
[00:33:30] Jonathan Hawkins: The other interesting thing that, you know, you, your firm, your clients are. Technology companies. I would think there is almost an expectation that you guys would be on the forefront. And if you’re not there, and I think who are you guys? Why would we work with you? I would think that would be a differentiator that helps you in the marketplace.
[00:33:49] Jonathan Hawkins: Have you found that?
[00:33:50] Brian Gamsey: Yeah, absolutely. And it also helped, you know, on a personal level, Austin and I are both very excited about technology. We are. Want, [00:34:00] but you know, we have, we read the listservs and the newsletters, and we are personally very much you know, excited about not only what we use within our practice of law, but just the advances in all this new technology and love that aspect of it.
[00:34:18] Brian Gamsey: And because of that, because of our familiarity and, you know, being able Beak, you know, technology and know the terms and kind of speak the language and our experience with it. It really does help the clients because we’re not just focused on the what of the contract, we understand the why of the product.
[00:34:42] Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah. So let’s shift a little bit. So, your background, you were at big law and then you were at a mid sized boutique where the platforms already existed. It’s the sort of thing where you need something to happen and it just sort of magically happens and you don’t have to do it. It’s funny how that those [00:35:00] existing platforms are. So there’s a big difference between that and then doing your own firm. So how did you have y’all figured it out? I know you’re still a couple months in, but how did you make the move and the mindset shift and figure all that out?
[00:35:15] Brian Gamsey: Yeah, so, you know, I would say that we are certainly continuing to learn every day, right? And we want to continue to learn and grow. And that’s the only way to our opinion to improve is to take that mindset of you may have figured out for now, but what comes tomorrow may be different. And how are you going to approach that challenge?
[00:35:34] Brian Gamsey: But what we really did was we were very strategic before we decided we were going to go and have this endeavor. Right. And we wanted not only while we were testing the technology for the, you know, contract review and the productization of the legal services, we were also looking at, okay, what do we want as our backend software?
[00:35:58] Brian Gamsey: What do we want as our client [00:36:00] management software? How are we going to do our You know, books, how are we going to keep the accounting? What are we going to do for insurance? Now I was able to lean on my experience of running a small business before of kind of having some of those processes in place, but we were very intentional about Before, you know, we wanted to say on April 1, we are locked and loaded and ready to go to continue.
[00:36:26] Brian Gamsey: So there was no gap in services for any client. So we could continue providing the services the same way we were providing them before. And it was. We were methodical. We tested a lot of things. We trialed a lot of products. We trialed something, we wouldn’t like it. We would go somewhere else. We would say, actually we liked the first thing better.
[00:36:50] Brian Gamsey: We would try it again. And we just spent time saying, here are the different aspects of running the business. Here are the [00:37:00] different aspects of the practice of law. What do we need to accomplish what we want to accomplish? We set out on both sides. Here’s, you know, here are the kind of clients we want.
[00:37:13] Brian Gamsey: Here are the number of clients. Here’s how we want to approach that. Here’s how we want to split up those percentages. And then it was. Okay. Here’s what we want to leverage for technology to accomplish some of these administrative tasks. And here are the people that we want to try to get involved to help us accomplish that and really approached it one piece at a time until we found That we were ready to go.
[00:37:36] Jonathan Hawkins: I talked to a lot of lawyers you know, obviously that’s what I do. I find there’s sort of two camps of the folks that start their firm. They’re the ones that have sort of always known and they have runway to plan sort of like you did you can. You can look into all these things.
[00:37:51] Jonathan Hawkins: So you’re ready to go and you can flip the switch when you’re ready. Then there are others who they’re forced out unexpectedly for a variety of reasons. [00:38:00] And they are just like, holy crap, what do I do? And they’re in a panic. They don’t know what to do. But I think even if you plan for everything, there’s. There are always things that come up that you just like, Oh man, I had no clue. And it’s basic stuff. You know, the story I always tell, it’s like the first time you’re at your own firm and you reach over for the stapler and you’re like, damn, I got to go buy a stapler, uh, you know, that kind of thing. So, well, let’s dig in.
[00:38:25] Jonathan Hawkins: So, you know, there, I’ve talked to a lot of people that, you know, listen to this podcast and, you know, they like hearing from the folks that have been doing this for 20 something years and have built these big firms, but they also want to hear from people like you who are just getting started So I want to talk some of the details here some of the boring details.
[00:38:41] Jonathan Hawkins: So First thing do you have office space
[00:38:46] Brian Gamsey: We have virtual office space where we can have a physical office a la carte if we need it. But for the most, we have not utilized the physical space yet, other than to pick up our [00:39:00] mail. And both of us work from home.
[00:39:03] Jonathan Hawkins: and that’s that you know, that’s again. It depends on the practice, you know, if you have a heavy Litigation practice where you have depth you have to host depositions all the time, you know, it probably makes sense You’re going to need a conference room somewhere. I guess you can borrow space but That gets old at some point. You do have that benefit. So you have this sort of shared virtual space you can tap into if you need it is it a long term commitment or is it month to month kind of thing? Yeah, that’s ideal. So you can cancel, you can pivot, you can do whatever if you need to. Right.
[00:39:32] Brian Gamsey: That’s right.
[00:39:33] Jonathan Hawkins: All right. Let’s talk about you’re big on the technology in terms of servicing your clients.
[00:39:37] Jonathan Hawkins: What about managing your practice? So like a practice management system, you guys use one now. And then how did you go about finding the one you wanted to use?
[00:39:46] Brian Gamsey: Yeah. Same. Yes. We use practice management system that it handles from kind of client intake and client development to, you know, it has our timer, keeps our [00:40:00] hours, does our invoices, you know, it’s kind of soup to nuts product. And the same way we tested all of the other products, we looked at what was on the marketplace.
[00:40:10] Brian Gamsey: We ran we trial, we tried it. We did trials with it. We tried to push on the boundaries of it to see if it was going to do what it said it was going to do, and then settled on the one that we thought worked best for us.
[00:40:25] Jonathan Hawkins: So which one are you using? I’m curious.
[00:40:28] Brian Gamsey: We’re using CLIA.
[00:40:28] Jonathan Hawkins: Okay. Okay. That’s, you know, that’s a lot of people use that. It’s I’d say probably has the biggest market share. I don’t know. It may be changing. I don’t know, but that’s a lot of people use that. So, all right. Another question. Bookkeeping finances, that kind of stuff.
[00:40:43] Jonathan Hawkins: You guys doing it or you outsourcing that?
[00:40:46] Brian Gamsey: So we are, we’re utilizing QuickBooks. We are keeping the books, but we also have a CPA that kind of oversees everything we’re doing at the end of the day, but for now it’s just Austin and I. [00:41:00] We like. You know, we certainly plan on growing and we know that growth will mean taking on highly trained professionals, both from the legal practice and the administrative side.
[00:41:13] Brian Gamsey: But for now we love our margins and we like, we feel confident. Doing the kind of back end work again. I ran my own business. I was part of another startup. I got, I’ve seen how that works. So I’m as much as 1 can like that kind of work. I like it. And so it’s, you know, part of the mindset has had to go from.
[00:41:40] Brian Gamsey: Okay, productive doesn’t just mean did I bill as many hours as I could today? And. That’s not what productive means anymore, and we’ve had to shift our mindset to take that approach.
[00:41:57] Jonathan Hawkins: You know, there’s another grouping of lawyers that [00:42:00] I found. There’s the. Numbers or the spreadsheet lawyers and then the ones that are not I’m the number, I’m a numbers kind of guy. I am not probably a pro in Excel. Like you sound like you might be, but
[00:42:14] Brian Gamsey: I’m moderate at best. Moderate at best.
[00:42:17] Jonathan Hawkins: you know, it really is amazing when you see someone who’s good and they’re doing it in front of you. And there’s like flying around macros and references to different sheets. And it’s just, it’s amazing. You don’t even know what they’re doing, but that’s not me, but I can build a basic spreadsheet. Uh, so, so let’s talk about staff. Do you guys have any staff part time, full time? Virtual whatever to help you guys.
[00:42:40] Brian Gamsey: No, we have an outsourced CPA that helps us oversee for them from time to time, but other than that, it’s just the two of us.
[00:42:48] Jonathan Hawkins: Well, you know, all the rage now is the outsourced VA. So, you know, you can look at that when you start to get a little more busy, that might be something you want to look at. All right. So we’ve gone through some of the nuts and [00:43:00] bolts, some of the basics, anything else? Yeah. That you’ve sort of learned on just some of the basics two months in, in terms of running the firm.
[00:43:09] Brian Gamsey: Yeah, I mean, I think. My experience has been that sometimes lawyers get so focused on the practice of law that they aren’t able to focus on the business of the practice of law. And, you know, our mindset has been from the beginning that this is a business. Our product is legal services. But we should operate the same way every other business operates.
[00:43:39] Brian Gamsey: We should have KPIs. We should have goals. We should figure out what inputs we need. And instead of just saying, well, if we build this many hours at this much, an hour, we’ll make that much money. To us, that’s not a strategy. We said we wanted this many clients we [00:44:00] want this of that percentage of clients We want to have this many fill up this percentage and we want this many to fill up the back percentage and of those And then, you know, four to five in this bucket.
[00:44:13] Brian Gamsey: We want to make sure we have this many hours per month from that client. And then we just, okay, what clients are going to be able to fulfill these. Right. And so instead of just saying, I want to do this and get your name out there and kind of hope That you’re able to find it. We set goals. We set parameters for what we wanted our practice to look like for what we want our clients to look like.
[00:44:36] Brian Gamsey: And then we tried to move forward, achieving that and getting those clients. You know, it’s easy to kind of. Bray wide and hope that you land where you want to end up. Our thought was let’s use precision. And if you know where you want to go and then you lay a path out for how to get there, [00:45:00] you’re more likely to end up where you want.
[00:45:03] Jonathan Hawkins: I think that’s huge. I think that’s huge. We had that conversation a week or so ago. You mentioned some of this. I thought it was very insightful. The other thing you mentioned we talk about a lot of firms. I’ve been in them, you’ve been in them, where you talk about projections or budgets for the next year, and it’s really, You know, we build 2000 hours last year.
[00:45:25] Jonathan Hawkins: So next year we’re going to build 2, 100 hours and our rate was this and next year is going to be this. And that’s really just like throwing a dart in the dark versus what are the actions or the inputs
[00:45:38] Jonathan Hawkins: that we can do today that’ll actually cause us or have a higher likelihood of causing us to get to these points talk about that a little bit, your approach on that.
[00:45:49] Brian Gamsey: Yeah, so I, you know, my kind of life philosophy is I try to make it as simple as possible. I think life is broken up into three different phases. It’s [00:46:00] inputs, outputs, and outcomes. And all of life stresses come from confusing outputs for outcomes. thinking we have control over anything but inputs.
[00:46:14] Brian Gamsey: And so what do I mean by that? You know, inputs are actions and attitudes. If you’re a practice of law and you know that you take, you get one, you get a client and they send you over a brief and they say, we need you to write a summary judgment brief, you know, that’s going to take you five hours.
[00:46:37] Brian Gamsey: And you know, if you bill at 1, 000 an hour, that’s going to be 5, 000. So your input is. You spend the time, you do the work, you write it up, the output is you have a brief at the end. That’s not the outcome. The outcome isn’t that you wrote the brief. You know, outputs are static. No [00:47:00] matter how many times you write the brief, at the end of the day it’s a brief, right?
[00:47:03] Brian Gamsey: If you put a pot of water onto a stove and you turn it to 212 degrees, it’s gonna boil. Doesn’t, that’s not the outcome though. The outcome is a dynamic. proposition that’s influenced by other people’s inputs and your own inputs, right? I made an A on this test. It doesn’t mean I’m going to have the legal career of my dreams.
[00:47:27] Brian Gamsey: I’ve turned this brief within the timeframe. It doesn’t mean the client’s going to be happy. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to win the argument. And so what we really try to do is focus on our actions and our attitudes. And if you don’t change your actions and your attitudes, you’re going to get The same outputs.
[00:47:47] Brian Gamsey: And if you have different outcomes as a result of that, it’s completely by chance. It has, you have no control over that whatsoever. So it’s how you react to things and what work you’re willing to put into those [00:48:00] things. That’s all you can control everything else. If you try to control it you’re going to have nothing but unnecessary stress
[00:48:12] Jonathan Hawkins: really like that. Inputs, outputs, outcomes. I’m probably going to borrow that. I may riff off of that later, so.
[00:48:20] Brian Gamsey: do it.
[00:48:20] Jonathan Hawkins: I’ll credit you, but yeah. That’s pretty good. I like that, but I’m a big believer too. You know, inputs are different than outputs for sure. I can control input. So I want, you know, 10 clients next year, or I want to generate X amount of revenue, whatever it is, I got to get the client.
[00:48:37] Jonathan Hawkins: So what is it that I can do to get the clients? And, or increase the likelihood that I get the client. So that’s, you know, I you know, go to lunch with a referral source once a week whatever it is. And so I got to make sure I have enough of those inputs to generate the outputs and then the outcomes, as you said, and a lot of firms really don’t seem to really [00:49:00] focus on the inputs.
[00:49:01] Jonathan Hawkins: Some do, and some do it really well. So that’s, you know, for the. Folks out there listening, you know, inputs. Um, so let’s shift again. I got another question for you. So, you know, AI is all the rage and all the rage the last, what, 18 months, at least it’ll probably be that way for a long time, you know, every company out there that wants to raise money or generate interest, they’ve all now have AI components to their business.
[00:49:28] Jonathan Hawkins: You know, everything’s AI. And I get it. It’s cool. There’s, we’ll see, you know, we’ll see where the winners are, but let’s go back three, four years, it was all blockchain, you know, crypto. And so you’re in the technology space. I’m just curious. What is your view?
[00:49:44] Jonathan Hawkins: Where do you see blockchain crypto? Do you have any opinions on that? Where is that going? Are there use cases out there or is it? What is it?
[00:49:53] Brian Gamsey: Yeah. So, I mean, I think you can go, let me approach this two different ways. I think you can go even further back, right? [00:50:00] Before blockchain, it was gig economy. And before gig economy, it was SAS and everyone wanted to capture on the fad. And by definition, fads fizzle out and good businesses now, right?
[00:50:19] Brian Gamsey: There are good and great. And exceptional SAS companies. There are good and great and exceptional gig economy companies. The same is true for blockchain and crypto currencies, there’s good and great and exceptional crypto currencies. There’s also bad crypto currencies, there are also bad sass products, there’s also bad gig economy.
[00:50:41] Brian Gamsey: And the nature of fads is everyone wants to hop on board what gets them the most attention. Again that’s an out or an output. It’s not an input. If you just say, well, we’re a AI company now because AI is hot [00:51:00] without actually thinking through what is this going to do to our business? How is this going to impact our business?
[00:51:07] Brian Gamsey: We’re a crypto company now because blockchain gets more clicks. So let’s say that we use blockchain. If you’re not actually utilizing the technology in the way it’s supposed to be, you’re not going to have long term success. You may get initialized. But you’re not planning for the long term success. The technology behind blockchain is brilliant and there are use cases for it.
[00:51:34] Brian Gamsey: Out both inside and outside of cryptocurrencies. And, you know, the decentralization concept that it’s built around is really smart and has a lot of value if property properly utilized, just like any other tool. And so, you know, I think that companies that [00:52:00] are willing to do the work to build infrastructures around the technology For a long term success, as opposed to using a fad to try to get attention are going to have long term success.
[00:52:17] Brian Gamsey: And it’s, I would say that with any, you know, there’s always going to be competition, but any technology or tool is law, if you’re building the framework of your company around that, you’re going to have to make sure you understand the fundamentals and build it out to have long term success instead of just using it.
[00:52:36] Brian Gamsey: As a marketing strategy. No, don’t get me wrong. You want to use it as a marketing strategy. You should just know that it’s not going to be, you know, three months from now, 18 months from now, whenever the next thing happens. If you decide that you were a blockchain company, that’s now an AI company, that’s now a, whatever, the next thing is [00:53:00] company, you’re a supercomputer company, people are going to stop taking you as seriously, unless you’re able to put some real structure behind what you’re saying.
[00:53:11] Jonathan Hawkins: Yeah, we’ll be, what is it maybe nanotext next, or I I don’t know.
[00:53:15] Jonathan Hawkins: It all, it all it all goes back to, it all goes back to. That’s where it all goes back to. So let’s shift again. So you’re two months in there are other folks out there thinking about starting a firm. Let’s talk about some of the lessons you’ve learned so far and maybe any advice for people out there thinking about
[00:53:34] Brian Gamsey: so, you know, a few, a lot of things. For me. What was most important before anything was finding someone that I trusted and wanted to work with. You know, I’m in a very fortunate position in that Austin is not only the, if not the smartest, one of the smartest lawyers I’ve [00:54:00] ever worked with. I also genuinely like him as a person and we are aligned on a personal human level.
[00:54:07] Brian Gamsey: You know, Find someone like that, that you want to be in business with, not only because you think they’re good at their job, because this is somebody that you are going to have to depend on and trust and know that if. You know, if something happens with your family, God forbid, or you need to do X, Y, or Z, the unknown unknowns occur, which always occur because life is random, that this is someone that is, you can depend on that was, you know, so important to me as part of this process is that finding someone that I was willing to be able to say, I know that I trust this person and that he can, or she can trust me.
[00:54:54] Jonathan Hawkins: it. So it’s clear you’re a very thoughtful person. And so I’m sure you’ve [00:55:00] thought through this. What’s the vision for the firm? Where do you see it? 5, 10, 15 years from now, or where would you like it to go?
[00:55:07] Brian Gamsey: Yeah, so, you know, I think our long term plans are kind of, two paths. I see us in one path, and I think both of these paths are simultaneously achievable. I see in one path we continue in the practice of law, utilizing the technology the way that we have been, continuing to build and grow our team, and have a traditional law firm with a non traditional model.
[00:55:36] Brian Gamsey: And then at the same time, I think that we can also as a separate path, have a technology company that offers this subscription model that can be independent from the practice of law and that other lawyers can utilize to help as a force multiplier for their practices of law. [00:56:00] We believe that, you know, that both of those paths are simultaneously achievable and we think we’re well positioned based on our experience in technology, in law and in technology law to make that happen.
[00:56:18] Jonathan Hawkins: There are a lot of people out there that say, you know, law firms are really have no value. No one would ever want to buy it. And for a lot of law firms, that is absolutely 100 percent true. But I always tell people, as you are practicing law, figure out a way to increase the value of your firm.
[00:56:36] Jonathan Hawkins: And one of those ways is to build assets. There are lots of different types of assets you can build. Software is one of them. And so long term you can spin it out and keep it firm, whatever you do, but that is an asset that can be extremely valuable and make all practice extremely valuable. So that is something definitely worth exploring. For the faint hearted, but it’s it’s as I’m sure, you [00:57:00] know, with your technology clients, but yeah that’s going to be cool to watch.
[00:57:05] Brian Gamsey: We’re really excited.
[00:57:06] Jonathan Hawkins: well, thanks for coming on. It’s been real fun. It’s going to be fun to watch you guys see where you go. And now I know where to go for all my AI questions and for folks out there that want to reach out to you, find you, what’s the best way to to get you.
[00:57:22] Brian Gamsey: You can go to millsgamzy. com. I’m at brian at millsgamzy. com. You can reach out to austin at millsgamzy. com. Go to the website, check out what we’re doing. We talk a little bit more about kind of our philosophy of the practice of law and some of the technology that we’re utilizing and how we’re shaping the, and framing this paradigm shift from our own approach.
[00:57:48] Brian Gamsey: And we’d love to hear from you.
[00:57:51] Jonathan Hawkins: Well, no doubt you’re going to do well if you can build a cookie company and sell it. I’m sure The law is going to be a lot simpler [00:58:00] fewer headaches for you. I would expect but again, thanks for coming on
[00:58:04] Brian Gamsey: Well, I have a simple, not easy, but I appreciate the opportunity. It’s always great speaking with John.
[00:58:10] Jonathan Hawkins: Thank you
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