Above the AI Cloud: How a Boutique New Orleans Firm Went AI-First

Collin McKee

Welcome back to the Endeavors AI Podcast. I'm your host, Collin McKee, founder of Endeavors AI, where we talk about the intersection of artificial intelligence, law, business, and the new economy being built off of it. My guest today runs one of the most AI-forward small firms that I've come across. She's the managing partner of Business Law Group, a boutique firm in New Orleans serving the city's hospitality and creative industries. The florists, the lighting designers, the artists, the people. who actually make the culture down there. She founded the firm in twenty sixteen, has argued before the US Supreme Court, and this is the part I love, started the whole thing by living full time on a sailboat. Amanda Butler Schley, welcome to the show.

Amanda Butler Schley

Thanks, Collin. Thanks for having me. I like this conversation because I hope that it will lead to more people understanding AI and all of the gifts that it's really given us.

Collin McKee

Agreed. So let's start at the beginning. You founded Business Law Group in twenty sixteen. At the same time you decided to go full time in a sailboat. Walk me through that decision.

Amanda Butler Schley

Of course. So I was at a large law firm right before I made the decision that I wanted to to start living on a sailboat and sailing. Initially the Gulf Coast and we had plans to to go around the world, circumnavigation. We ended up making it to Florida, actually, and that's a longer conversation. But in doing that, that was kind of on the cutting edge of the concept of digital nomad. this idea that especially as a transactional attorney without a litigation calendar, I could serve my clients really from any place and still be able to deliver top-notch work. I had that premises and knew that my firm would would not fully see the vision. And as many businesses are started, it was started out of a need. I needed to be able to be my own boss in order to pull that trigger. And that's what I did. So we set sail about six months after I founded the firm. I had, I still retained an office here in town. and I did have an associate that was working with me at that time who was in the office. I thought that would be more palatable for clients. but most of them got the vision, and of course. Since COVID happened, I think that the point was proven that most attorneys that are not in the litigation practice can can really practice remotely without too much trouble. so that's why I ended up pulling the trigger and doing two things at once. Both seemed scary, but one needed the other, and vice versa. And ended up practicing on the water for about 18 months in total. and found that while you could practice law from a boat, it might not be the most optimal condition.

Collin McKee

Well, I applaud you for doing it. You you you tested it, your theory worked, you know, even though you didn't want to do it forever. So so let's talk a little bit about your firm and what you're doing now. So for the folks that don't know New Orleans as well as you do, when you say that you support the creative industry, what does that actually mean in in terms of the clients that you serve?

Amanda Butler Schley

Well, most of my clients are in the hospitality business. So I've I represented one of the fastest growing brunch concepts in the country, the Ruby Slipper Cafe, which was founded shortly after Katrina here in New Orleans, and then grew to 27 or 28 locations under my purview. I'm still their outsource general counsel and happy to continue to serve them. But that experience has given me a lot of insight into. A growth stage client, somebody who's found product market fit and is scaling up, they typically have very similar legal issues that they will encounter in that first phase. So, and I guess it's really not the first phase, it's it's really the second phase, right? It's not the startup phase. We've moved from that place into a place of of growth and scale. And It's not always the same set of skills that got you to the first place doesn't always get you past the second place.

Collin McKee

Cool. So let's talk then about AI when we're talking about growth, because you've taken it a lot further than firms, you know, ten times your size. so but you did kind of start at the same place we all do by using Chat GPT as a glorified Google machine. So when when did that flip for you and when did you it stop being a toy and more of a tool for your business?

Amanda Butler Schley

I would say, you know, I I started using Chat GPT and saw how that LLM model works, how nicely it repackages things into emails and marketing copy and things like that. but when Claude came out with its latest model is when and it's not the model that was shut down by the government, but it it's the model prior to that. I understood that the concept of AI agents was really revolutionary. being able to connect Claude to certain other pieces of of software that we use, like QuickBooks, really gave us a lot of insight and analysis that we hadn't had before. and so I just started playing around with it. My husband at the same time, who is a software developer, was moonlight coding a new internet and was finding so much joy and really passion in doing that with no help, no support other than with AI. And I caught the bug, I guess, ultimately, and started playing around with around with it myself. And it's it was challenging, I think, in the beginning. Now my challenge is almost not to go off the rails with it every single day. I could completely revamp my website in 10 minutes with the help of an AI agent who you know may or may not be making good decisions. You think that they are. But and they're certainly very persuasive. but So that's kind of the where I flipped the switch is I went through understanding what AI agents could do. Specifically, I established a C-suite of AI agents, including a chief marketing officer, a chief executive officer, a CEO, and a chief financial officer, and then started to consult that C-suite every Monday and giving them the reports and things that typically I would look at myself.

Amanda Butler Schley

with the assistance of a of an outsourced CFO that I I myself use once a month. But now I was being able to get advice consistent with his advice because I would always upload our transcripts from our sessions into that skill set so that they would be having that analysis as well. And it became, you know, very addictive almost. I mean, that then has turned into. so many other things that would typically require me to hire another marketer or some other professional. And I've had very spotty success, particularly in the marketing field, I would say, because I don't understand, I understand at a high level, but I don't understand the details that that really go into marketing a law firm. I've been told by countless marketers, even at the highest levels, that marketing for a law firm is very challenging. business to business is particularly more challenging than business to consumer. So a law firm to consumer is really a different subset of skills than B2B. And so getting kind of regular analysis and advice from my CMO on that front has been Very changing from a business standpoint. Has it resulted in some incredible amount of growth that we've seen? Absolutely not. So it has not played out that all of a sudden the firm went from this one particular revenue milestone to something, you know, extraordinary. It hasn't proven itself in that way. so you know, I think some would argue. A CMO agent is only as good as the input being given to it. And if I don't know what I'm doing, I don't know if what it's telling me is accurate. And that could actually be the case. Very similar to using an AI agent as a as a lawyer, you know, for in-house teams as well. So I I see advantages and disadvantages. The the advantage being at least I'm getting regular.

Amanda Butler Schley

Analysis that I think is mostly accurate, you have to take it with a grain of salt and you have to know what its limitations are. The biggest help is being able to dive into those details that I never was able to access before. being able to read a Google Analytics report and having the AI agent be able to walk me through what the report means. you know, where my funnel might be missing the boat, what to look at. And really it's just the overall marketing strategy that you have for a law firm is so complex when you are when you're serving the type of client that we serve.

Collin McKee

Right. Yeah. A lot of good points there. A lot to a lot to unwrap. I appreciate the context. I mean, yeah, it's the dichotomy of time, right? Because you gotta spend time with it to get your time back, but it's not a guarantee that it's necessarily going to be worth that time. We're still kinda in the experimental phase of things. yeah, I mean, if you're outreaching to customers that are just B2C. and you could count how many emails go out and how many come back and how many you get responses for, but it's not that simple when you're marketing to an industry. So it's it's really interesting and and valuable experience that that you're gaining. I mean, one way or the other, you're still learning and still getting there.

Amanda Butler Schley

Absolutely. And I think that I'm learning on the precipice of something that is going to be revolutionary. Whether it is that at the present, I I don't think changes that it absolutely is going to be that in the future. And we just don't know what that looks like yet.

Collin McKee

Right. so with that, I l I always like to have the great experiences, but I I love to highlight the bad and the ugly too. And we talked a little bit about that in our first call. You told me that there was some content that went live that you had to pull it down immediately. Can you share share that story with the audience?

Amanda Butler Schley

Yes, I had a hallucination incident with Chat GPT, where I'd uploaded a summary of a CLE that I had attended into Chat GPT and asked for it to summarize it for a blog post. And I have never I had never before experienced a hallucination with summaries, right? I've I've experienced hallucinations when you ask it general questions and aren't providing Kind of the underlying support, but this was in my mind something that ChatGPT was great at doing. It was great at reading something and then taking that and summarizing what I gave to it. In this particular instance, it summarized the CLE and hallucinated the law entirely. And I read the summary thinking, I don't remember hearing any of this in that CLE. Was I just not paying attention? but brushed it off because it was so persuasive that this was what it was and that I must have gotten it wrong. And so ended up posting the blog report and getting contacted pretty immediately by another lawyer who said, I don't think anything in this article is true. And had that moment of panic, like, my gosh, let me go just double check. Like It was confirming what my own gut had told me. And so pulled down, pulled down the report, rewrote it myself at that point and reposted it. But was very grateful for for the commentary by another lawyer who said, like, your blog post here is garbage. But learned the hard way on that one. And even even when we say, you know, of course we we always look at everything that it gives back to us, it's though.

Collin McKee

Yep. Yep. And that's

Amanda Butler Schley

Almost questioning every sentence sometimes really has to be the case. And I've even seen it, you know, with my my whole team uses AI, and they think, you know, I've I've had circumstances where they say, you know, had I had Claude rewrite my my opposition memo, or I had it do this, and I think it's so much better. Would you look at it? And then I look at it and I say, Well, it has said the law wrong here. I don't trust anything that it has said. I think you need to go back to what you started with and let's start from there because, you know, it still does very often not give you the the greatest output. And if you aren't really, really careful, it can land you in some trouble.

Collin McKee

Yep. Yeah. It'll it'll lie to your face with firm conviction and it's so easy to believe because it says it in such an eloquent way. So that's it's great. You know, trust but verify, you know, let it

Amanda Butler Schley

Yeah, I think I think also it's almost like a confirmation bias, right? Like it's adopting your your stance on something and then feeding that back to you. And you have to be very skeptical, which is hard when what you fed to it really supported that bias to begin with. And so it is not the best for a con a contrarian view of what you've given to it.

Collin McKee

Right. Yep. I mean you can you can try to give it that prompt and, you know, make it that way, but even still it's gonna try to make you happy. And even when it

Amanda Butler Schley

Yeah, and you know, I I have not had great success with the prompts that have it be contrarian. I don't feel like it really does anything to the output that I'm getting, which is interesting and also confounding. we are considering and and have implemented an AI receptionist. And so we're in the process of testing out the AI receptionist and in as part of

Collin McKee

Mm-hmm.

Amanda Butler Schley

onboarding for that, you know, I met with the team that was putting that together for us. And they said something that I hadn't n I hadn't realized before. They said, in essence, that AI will, in essence, not always give you the same response. You know, you you can have the same question and ask that same question 10 times, but the way in which these LLM models work, the they will serve you up a percentage of an array of answers. And so that to me was very interesting because it was a concept that I didn't understand. that it's, you know, there's a bunch of factors at play behind the scenes to ensure that it doesn't actually do the same thing each time. and so I I I think that that's part of the issue.

Collin McKee

Yeah, no, great point. And I'll be interested to see so it's a voice AI agent that you're implementing. Yeah. and you haven't let it run just yet, you're still in the process of training it.

Amanda Butler Schley

No, and in fact, you know, so far everybody's kind of a thumbs down on it. but it'll save us a significant amount of money if it does work. Ultimately, I do think it's important that a human pick up the phone if needed, but oftentimes we really just need to collect the person's information in order to schedule them with the right person. And so from that standpoint, the the typical kind of outsourced receptionist team doesn't do a great job for us anyways. And if we're gonna not have a great job on that front, I would prefer it to be cheaper rather than more expensive. so we're trying this. I don't know if if we're all all systems go or will be able to get there. but we're we are giving it our best shot to see if we can make it work. And I've I don't know if you've stumbled upon any that that you have been impressed with, but I have. I've I've sat through a couple in which I thought, this was, you know, a really easy AI agent to work with and it didn't bother me at all.

Collin McKee

Yeah, there's been a few. I don't wanna call out one over the other, but I think that they're you know, like everything, there's progress being made on a daily basis. And you you know, the point that reoccurs with all of my guests is treat it like a new employee. You know, you have to train it, it's not going to be ready the first day out of the box. You know, you need to spend some time with it. And I applaud you for spending however much time you that you have and still being, you know, critical and not not being ready to just let it run loose because you've you've already had the experience where it's you know fooled me once, fooled me twice, sort of thing. You don't you don't want to let that happen. You're putting in the time. And that's what people need to understand. You know, this it does take time. It's going to save you time in the in the long run, but it could right it could burn burn through more time, you know, fixing mistakes if you just yeah, if you're lazy with it and just let it go. So

Amanda Butler Schley

Maybe. Maybe. I don't know.

Collin McKee

one thing I did want to touch on because you know you work with a lot of clients that I would assume everyone AI is touching everyone nowadays, but I wanted to get the view of your clients, the florists, the the designers, the artists out there, because especially when they're touching like the IP and things that are creative, what have you seen as far as your clients view of AI? You know, are they are and are they ahead? Are they embracing? Are they scared? You know, what what are their yeah what are they what are their thoughts on the

Amanda Butler Schley

I see across the board that they have adopted AI in their specialty. So using AI even as a creative, you know, to enhance their own creative projects, I see them less likely to be using it for business purposes. So it's like it's interesting to me that the adoption really starts usually where the person's kind of course skill set begins. And then as they develop that, that's really where they're drawn to use it. And they don't see application outside of it until somebody reminds them that it's there. And so I think we're gonna see a lot more adoption. As we all know, creatives often are are creative, but their business skills and and where they kind of excel on the creative side, they don't always have the same. business savvy that we would like for them to have. And that's where having a good lawyer can really help them and be advantageous. I think that as we go down the path with AI, more and more of them will start to see that being able to use this not just in their specific core skill sets, but also as an auxiliary to their professionals is is a way to enhance and get more data. Just like I, you know, I've been able to use it in the firm, I think that they will come to it eventually and see that it does have a real advantage for them at at that level as well.

Collin McKee

It's well it's encouraging to hear because I could see how some people, especially in in that niche, you know, have more of a contrarian view to it or, you know, skepticism. So it's good that they're adopting it one way or another because it is I mean it's here and everyone else is. you even used an analogy, something about being above the cloud. And and if you want to kind of go into that, you know, because that stuck with me. I think that's something that people should hear.

Amanda Butler Schley

Yeah, I think, you know, one of I I listened to a lot of Tim Ferriss' podcast and I I really feel like he's always been on the cutting edge. He was a digital nomad before that was a thing. And he had a a podcast on recently, a guest who talked about what he sees with AI in the future, and that because of AI slop, because of the ability of AI to generate just content on mass. It's going to be an accelerant for people that are already in that space producing content. But if you are not in a space, if you're just graduating from college, if you're just starting a business, if you're just now trying to make impact digitally on the web or have a presence, that he saw AI as kind of being a cloud, and that you were either going to be able to use AI to get further up. Above the cloud, or AI would almost be a barrier to those who haven't really had that digital impact and create a real barrier for those looking to break into business. And I found that to be somewhat compelling because I think it could be true. I don't know if it is. but certainly we know that AI SEO right now is drawing from content that's already available and people who are already putting out content are able to increase the output of that content exponentially. And so as we go down that path, it's going to prefer people who already have a presence and not be giving as much credit to those newer voices that are out there because it won't have the authority necessary to to cite to it or use that new person. and any content that it's produced. And so what happens in the next 10 years, what happens in the next five years? I I do think that we're gonna see content being king. And since content is so easy to make, it becomes getting quality content. And then how do you what is considered quality? is it just more of it if that's the case.

Amanda Butler Schley

more content, certainly people who have been putting out content for a while now are gonna have a huge advantage. That being said, if quality relates to engagement, and we're seeing this right now with Instagram, with Facebook, where the algorithm is not looking just at the number of views, but is really paying attention to how many, how much engagement you're getting with those posts. And that will need to that that might ultimately be a factor in in all of this as well. And I'm sure it will be. Again, I just think the more that you put content out, the more you're able to see what sticks and what doesn't and tweak and move. and those people coming online or trying to start that at this point are gonna just be at a disadvantage, is what I think.

Collin McKee

So it's a good segue to one of the wrap up questions I'd like to ask. So if you can give, you know, a small firm owner, say, you know, your your own self five years ago, one thing that you should start doing now as it r relates to AI, because there are some some slower adopters out there, you know, think of the the more rural areas of the country. What's one thing that someone should do today to help make sure that they're not stuck underneath that cloud and and they can get themselves above that cloud.

Amanda Butler Schley

I do think content is king. And so if you are coming on board, you need to be producing content. You need to be connecting with your audience on whatever platform and really on as many platforms as you possibly can. And oftentimes, you know, that's a really unpleasant place to be. You feel like you're putting content out into the void. But AI SEO is going to be the next generation of SEO. And will be a huge differentiator. And I think without any content, I can certainly guarantee that that you will not be much farther along than when you started. But if you do start now, immediately, you might be able to catch up because of the multiplying effect that we're gonna have and the ability to generate content. Now, again, it can't just be any content. I think you have to be meeting your ideal client with. the answers to questions that they have. And so one of the things that I do regularly is make sure that I write down any question that a client ever asks me that I wouldn't have thought of to ask a question in that way. I use websites like, you know, there are plenty of websites out there that can help you if you put into it a a topic into it, it will help you generate questions related to that that people are searching on the internet. I think that's helpful with B2C more particularly than business-to-business type of marketing. I think business-to-business marketing really does look at the conversations that you are having directly with those C-suite clients representing the the customer. And so it's it requires a bit more of a process around making sure to cull that information from the calls that you have.

Collin McKee

Great. and so as we wrap up, where how can our audience find you? of course we're talking about B2B, so our audience hopefully is a little bit in the in the artistic and expressive niches, but where would they go to learn more about you and your

Amanda Butler Schley

Sure, we have website is lawgroup.biz. You can schedule a consult with us online. you can go to our YouTube channel, we have an Instagram account, Louisiana lawyer, bizlawyer is our Instagram handle. And following us on those channels will give you all of the content that we produce.

Collin McKee

Awesome. Great. And for any of those listening, if you found value here, we have conversations like this on a pretty regular basis, probably a few a week. go ahead and subscribe and share this if you think that there would be benefit to another firm that's trying to, you know, act like a larger firm or or have a larger impact with the same amount of people like like Amanda is doing with with her firm. And if you have any interest in looking into workflows and how AI can help your firm in a disciplined way, please reach out. And that's what we're here for in Endeavors AI. So Amanda Butler Schley, thank you very much once again for your time and the insights and we will see you on the next episode.

Amanda Butler Schley

Thank you.