Endeavors AI Podcast

He Never Spoke to Half His 5-Star Clients

Ray Gallo (Gallo LLP) on building software to run thousand-client mass actions — and why he's letting AI into it slowly.

Guest: Ray Gallo — Senior partner, Gallo LLP (San Francisco), and founder of the Leverage mass-action platform. A plaintiff's-side consumer-fraud and mass-action litigator of more than 30 years, Ray was named to the ABA Journal's Legal Rebels list for building software that automates client screening, intake, signing, and communication — making cost-effective mass litigation of small claims possible. Gallo LLP has prosecuted more than 1,000 cases for clients whose claims were previously impossible to vindicate. Firm: https://gallo.law · Software: https://leverage.law

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Episode summary

In 2007 Ray Gallo's wife handed him a newspaper story about students who said the California Culinary Academy had defrauded them. Five hundred of them filled out his fee agreement after someone posted it on MySpace — and Ray, with no software to manage them, started building his own. That became Leverage: an integrated one-to-many, many-to-one system combining what he describes as his own versions of SurveyMonkey, MailChimp, DocuSign, Gmail and Blogger, now used by lawyers running mass arbitration cases with as many as 80,000 clients. In this conversation he explains why roughly half his hundred-plus five-star Avvo reviews come from clients he never personally spoke to, breaks down mass joinder versus class action and why he thinks the former is the superior structure for mid-value claims, and describes why he is deliberately introducing AI on the lawyer side of the platform first — because you do not want to make a mistake at scale.

Key takeaways

  • The origin: a June 2007 San Francisco Weekly investigative piece about former California Culinary Academy students led Ray to the case. Someone posted his fee agreement and questionnaire on MySpace, and 500 students filled it out and sent it in — before he'd spoken to any of them.
  • Claims in the "in-between" range are the gap in the system: class actions suit small identical claims, but a ~$50,000 fraud claim is too individualized to certify and too expensive for a client to pursue hourly. Software is what makes representing those clients viable.
  • Leverage is a one-to-many, many-to-one communication system — Ray describes it as their own integrated versions of SurveyMonkey, MailChimp, DocuSign, Gmail, and Blogger, with a secure client portal. Today it's used primarily by lawyers running mass arbitration.
  • Roughly half of his 100+ five-star Avvo reviews come from clients he never spoke to directly — they experienced the firm through recorded video updates and standardized messaging.
  • Why that still earns five stars: the communication is in his own voice and unscripted. When 40 of 50 incoming emails ask the same question, he posts a short follow-up video and bulk-replies pointing to it.
  • His read on client psychology: clients don't actually want to talk to their lawyer — they want assurance their problem is being solved. He compares it to travel agents; nobody misses them, because self-service gave people control.
  • Mass joinder vs. class action: certification requires that if the representative plaintiff wins everyone wins and if he loses everyone loses. In complex fraud, reliance is individualized, so certification often fails.
  • Mass joinder advantages he cites: individual damages (including emotional distress) are recoverable where class actions only prove common facts; a single bad witness doesn't sink everyone; and collateral estoppel means a finding in one case can carry into the rest, raising the value of every remaining case.
  • On class-action economics he quotes a federal judge's line that one of the best ways to get rich in America is to steal a dollar and give back fifty cents — of which lawyers take twenty.
  • His distinction between marketing and fraud: you can say you have the best product in the world; you cannot misstate a verifiable fact for money.
  • Why AI is entering Leverage slowly: it's a mass-communications tool, and he remembers the early email era of reply-all disasters. "You do not want to make a mistake at scale." AI is being integrated on the lawyer-facing content-management side first, not the client-facing side.
  • The near-term AI goal he's pushing his engineer on: a "how do I do X in Leverage" assistant trained on the product, so lawyers can configure complex intake workflows conversationally.
  • On prompting: his CTO taught him that talking to an AI is programming in English — an imprecise language, so the model fills gaps with assumptions. You have to supply the source information, the logic to follow, the required output, and the tests that define acceptable output.
  • His advice to lawyers: pick one tool and actually learn it. Most lawyers never mastered Microsoft Word despite living in it daily; the return on genuinely learning your AI is enormous.
  • Two-year outlook: AI is excellent for orientation, spotting issues, and generating ideas — not for writing briefs unsupervised, where hallucination gets people in trouble. He points to his CTO running three additional screens with Claude working on each as a preview of delegated, agentic work.

Full transcript

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 all around it. My guest today has been living in that intersection longer than almost anyone. Ray Gallo is a senior partner at Gallo LLP, a plaintiff's-side trial lawyer with more than 30 years in, an 87% record at trial, and north of $100 million in recoveries.

But that's not why he's on the show today. A decade before anyone was saying anything about legal AI, Ray was building his own software to run mass litigation — automating the intake, the signing, the client communication, so that cases that were never economically possible could finally be brought. The ABA even called him a Legal Rebel for it. His line is that the law firm of the future is a software company. So if you want an honest, unhyped read on where technology actually helps in a law practice and where it absolutely does not, this is your guy. Ray Gallo, welcome to the show.

Ray Gallo

Thank you, Collin. Pleasure to be here.

Collin McKee

I want to start right with the case, because I don't think you set out to build software — I think this case forced you into it. Can you take me back to the California Culinary Academy? How did that land in your lap?

Ray Gallo

Roughly June 2007, my wife picked up the San Francisco Weekly, which had a big investigative journalism piece about a bunch of former students at the California Culinary Academy screaming that they'd been misled, that they'd been defrauded. I had been a commercial litigator, and I had started doing consumer fraud cases just because liars and thieves always get my juices flowing. If you're going to fight for a living, you've got to have something that's worth fighting over — something egregious enough that you can get a little inspired.

So I started doing these kinds of cases, and she handed this to me and said, "Maybe you could help these people." I reached out to the reporter and said, listen, it sounds like these people really got treated poorly, and if you'd like to introduce them to me, I'd be happy to talk to them. I do this for a living; maybe I can help. And I wound up talking to a bunch of them.

The thing is that class actions are really useful for numerous small identical claims. But you get a claim that's in between — these claims might have been worth fifty grand or so — and we were going to have to do millions of dollars of legal work to fight these guys. So it was a tricky case. Can you certify a class? You can only do that if everybody's claim is sufficiently the same. In fraud cases you usually can't, because there are individual questions. It's not necessarily fair that if Johnny wins everybody wins, and if Johnny loses everybody loses.

So along the way, I decided the thing to do was just sign everybody up. I was willing to represent everybody as long as I had a software solution. We started out with the only thing available — the best thing we could come up with was a Yahoo group. This is 2007; I'm using a Yahoo group to try to talk to people. Somebody posted my fee agreement and my questionnaire online, and 500 students filled that stuff out and sent it in. And I was thinking: do I represent these people? I haven't talked to them. I haven't said I would. But probably they have an expectation. I'm trying to help these people — but it was a little nerve-wracking.

So ultimately we built a bunch of software. What we built was a one-to-many, many-to-one communication system that is still really the only game in town for lawyers who want to do this kind of work. Of course it's evolved over the years. Today it's primarily used by lawyers engaged in mass arbitration. You probably know that as a customer with any big company you do business with, they make you sign their arbitration agreement — that's because you'll be shocked to learn that arbitrators don't tend to give the consumer as good a deal as a judge does. That might have something to do with why big companies want you to sign that agreement. Just maybe.

So you have to do these individually. And the only way you can do it in any kind of cost-effective way — and help people who've been ripped off for a thousand dollars, even five or ten thousand dollars — is if you've got a good software solution. Basically what we did is we built our own versions of SurveyMonkey and MailChimp, DocuSign, Gmail, Blogger, and a couple of other things, and integrated them. So it's one integrated system where you can have all your data in one place and a secure client portal. We just developed technology to solve a real problem: how do you help people who've been ripped off for a thousand or ten thousand dollars? Because normally a lawyer just can't take that case on contingency. And if you're the guy who's out ten thousand dollars, you're going to walk away from it normally, because it's going to cost you more than that if you pay some lawyer hourly to handle your problem. That's a real injustice — where it's just too expensive to get a fair outcome. So at least when it happens to a lot of people, now there's another way to potentially solve the problem.

Collin McKee

So all of these fee agreements came in through MySpace, just to date this.

Ray Gallo

Yes, exactly. Somebody posted my fee agreement on MySpace — which is legally problematic in a bunch of ways. But yeah. MySpace.

Collin McKee

So it all comes flooding in and you realize there's no way this is feasible — you've got to make a many-to-one solution that actually makes dollars and cents.

Ray Gallo

Yeah — before that, we were going to really represent those people and be able to represent them ably. To be able to get their information from them, get the information they needed to them, get them reliable updates. Simple things: most people today — the average American doesn't read super well, actually. And most Americans don't want to read, whether they can or not. Also, when you're talking about your lawyer, you want to have a feeling that your lawyer's actually dialed in and paying attention and is somebody you can trust.

So we make extensive use of video throughout the system — home page, and then securely within the system for updates and to explain what information we need and how to give it to us. There's this funny reality: I have, I think on Avvo, which is one of the big attorney review portals, like a hundred reviews. They're all five stars, and I'm grateful for that. But one of the things I think is funny — funny because it proves the value of the technology properly used — is that like half of those reviews are from people I never spoke to. Talking about what a great job, what great service my firm provided. They just dealt with us through this interface. They interacted with me, but I was on recorded video. And they interacted with us through text and email, but a lot of that messaging was standardized.

Collin McKee

So why do you think you got those five stars? That's actually what I was going to bring up — it's difficult to fathom that an automated solution is going to get you five-star reviews.

Ray Gallo

I think it's because it's all, or mostly all, in my voice. I can personally attend to a thousand clients, because I'm looking at what they need. Here's a simple example. Suppose I post a video and say, hey everybody, here's the update, this is what happened in the last month of your case. And I talk simply and I don't script it. A lot of lawyers can't help themselves — they can't do anything without a piece of paper in front of them, and they sound like a wooden Indian. I just do an outline, I talk to people, I make mistakes, I talk too fast. I'm just me.

Let's say I do that and I make a mistake — there's something I don't explain very well, or more likely I see something that raises a question in people's minds that I didn't think of. So the emails start coming in. Fifty emails come in and forty of them are asking the same question. I just post another video and say, hey, sorry guys, I see I left something out you want to know about — here's the answer. And then I hit reply. Our system allows us to bulk-reply to emails, so I sort through the fifty emails, and to the forty that were about that question I say, great question, I posted a little follow-up video to answer it for you. The other ten I can quickly handle. And probably the other ten are just raising one or two more issues, and I can do the same thing — reply to the four that are about A, the five that are about B.

None of this is rocket science. I'm not some genius programmer. I just did enough programming in high school and college to know this is stuff computers do. And now, of course, with AI it's going to get really fun.

Collin McKee

You bring up a great point. People don't necessarily need to talk to their lawyer to get their answer — they just need to get an answer. And they need to know their question is being answered, even if not right now, that it's being worked on. That doesn't mean you yourself, the lawyer, need to attend to each and every little question, especially when the answer is going to be pretty much the same.

Ray Gallo

Right, exactly. We of course do that too — we post the answers to frequently asked questions, because we know what they're going to be. Sometimes we don't anticipate one and we've got to fix that. But a system that's designed to do that lets the lawyer himself post the FAQ in five minutes without having to engage developers and fool around. That's a big part of it.

But more to your point, it's key that the lawyer be able to simply respond to all fifty people with the same question. And yes — what clients want to know is that their need is being met. I joke with people. People say, "No, I don't think that's going to work, clients want to talk to their lawyers." I'm like: they don't want to talk to you. They'd rather watch TV. They'd rather go to work. They'd rather spend time with their spouse or their kid. They want to talk to you because they have a problem that they don't feel is being solved. But if you let them know it is being solved, they're happy not talking to you.

And of course — if I had to talk to all thousand clients, never mind ten thousand clients — I've got customers of my software who have eighty thousand clients in one case. You can't talk to those people. But that's fine with the clients, as long as you give them what they need: the assurance, a demonstration that the problem's being addressed. I joke with people — hey, you miss your travel agent?

Collin McKee

Right.

Ray Gallo

You don't. At all. Because now you have the control to solve your problem exactly the way you want it. Not wonder if they got you the cheapest flight, not wonder if they got you the most convenient flight. Just do it yourself.

Collin McKee

Yep — or wait for the updates from them. There's more time wasted there. And not to say you didn't like your travel agent, but you probably like the process a whole lot better now.

Ray Gallo

Exactly right. The control, the satisfaction, immediately getting what you need.

Collin McKee

So when people think of these large cases with lots of plaintiffs, they generally think class action. But you're an advocate for something different that we discussed on our call, and I think some in our audience don't know the difference between mass joinder and class action. Can you run down the difference, and why you're a bigger proponent of mass joinder?

Ray Gallo

Sure. A class action is allowed if you make a motion and the judge agrees. What you have to show on the motion, simplifying, is that it's fair to both sides — that if your representative plaintiff, we'll call him Johnny, wins, everybody who's got a claim like Johnny also wins; and if Johnny loses, everybody who's got a claim like Johnny also loses.

There are lots of situations where that's true. I use a funny case I did a long time ago — I used to do food fraud cases. Somebody would sell a product called guacamole. Big label: guacamole. There's no avocado in it. Now, everybody bought that product because they looked at it and it said guacamole. Somebody's going to argue, "Ray, they should have known it wasn't avocado," but maybe it was in the refrigerated section, and you can say they should have read the label — but let's just accept for the moment that you can't say it's guacamole and then disclose that it's not in the fine print. That's a class action, because everybody's out four dollars for that dip they bought based on the same misrepresentation. The court can decide, or a jury can decide, is that misleading or not.

But when you get into a case where it's not so clear, or where you may not be able to get class certification — like in a more complex fraud case. We talked about the California Culinary Academy case. The essence of that case was that these schools were telling these kids they could be chefs. It was becoming fashionable to be a chef; people were glamorizing it. The truth is, being a chef is a tough job. If you get to the very top it pays okay — but you're a manager, you're not cooking anymore. Bottom line is it's not possible to go to school for twelve months and become a chef.

These kids spent sixty grand — well, forty-six in tuition plus whatever it cost them to live — and they got the same eleven-dollar-an-hour job they were going to get anyway. Only now they've got sixty thousand dollars' worth of debt, a lot of it at high interest, that they can't pay. You can't even live on eleven dollars an hour. We all know that — not in California, for sure.

But in that case, whether you knew you weren't going to be a chef when you graduated arguably depends. If you've been working in the business for ten years already, maybe you should know that. Maybe. So it's not such a great class case, because the defense can say: listen, just because Johnny and Mary heard the same representation doesn't mean it was reasonable for both of them to rely on it. That depends on their individual circumstances.

The other realities of class actions: because you're just doing the same case, if Johnny has more damages — let's say Johnny became suicidal and jumped off a building and now he's in a wheelchair, all because somebody lied to him and ruined his life and made him insolvent for life. By the way, student debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy. So if you're sixty grand in debt and you've got an eleven-dollar-an-hour job, you're going to be insolvent for the rest of your life. You will never buy a car on credit, you will never buy a house, maybe you're never going to have kids — your life is ruined. Those emotional distress and less concrete damages are not recoverable in a class action. You can't even prove those facts. All you get to prove is the common facts, because you're doing this rough-justice thing.

In addition, as a plaintiff's lawyer, if I try Johnny's case and let's say Johnny turns out to be a terrible witness — on the witness stand he just gives in and does what the other lawyer wants and says, "yeah, you're right, I should have known better," because people do that. They feel guilty, they think they're responsible. How many victims of fraud or rape or anything feel responsible? "It's my fault, I shouldn't have done that." Let's say Johnny does that and he loses. Well, if we're not in a class case, that doesn't mean everybody loses. Now I get to try Mary's case. And then I try Bobby's case, and I keep trying cases until I win — if it's a legit case. Maybe we find out there's some problem with the case, but look, we don't do millions of dollars' worth of legal work if we haven't talked to these people and looked at the documents and figured out this is a legit situation.

So by signing everybody up and doing these cases one at a time, you don't put all your eggs in one basket. You can recover the individual damages that Johnny and Mary and Bobby are entitled to, if they're entitled to them. The lawyer gets a chance to learn, and the defense can't get lucky and get out of it clean just because Bobby folded on the witness stand.

There's also, in the law, something called collateral estoppel — which may or may not be a term you've heard. The idea is that if all these students are making the same allegations, and if it's found in one case that the school knew perfectly well it was misleading most people — that most people would think they were going to be chefs when they graduated. Let's say there's an internal memo, or these days maybe a recorded web call, where the president says, "Aren't these people going to think they're going to be chefs when they graduate?" and somebody goes, "Yeah, but screw 'em." Once a court decides the school knew perfectly well it was lying — and this is hypothetical, I'm not saying that existed in our case — but once the court decides that in Johnny's case, then Mary and Bobby and everybody else go into their trials with the jury being instructed that it has already been decided as a matter of law that the school knew it was misleading lots of people.

Well, okay — now all those cases jump in value. So the business proposition from the plaintiff's side is excellent. Unfortunately, mass joinder doesn't happen a lot now, because usually people aren't doing it — they're doing a class action, or they're doing mass arbitration. But I believe — and look, I made this prediction in 2014, and it's twelve years later and the day hasn't really arrived — but I did kind of say we were going to be doing this mass arbitration thing, so maybe the rest of my prediction will turn out to be accurate. I believe it will, because it's just a superior system for a group of cases, particularly the ones that have more than nominal value.

If you're talking about a hundred-dollar radio or a five-dollar can of dip, the class action makes a ton of sense. But if you're talking about Johnny being out fifty grand — or even Collin and Ray being out thirty-five hundred dollars for a fancy TV — maybe that's the marginal case. It may make sense to do it on a mass basis, and the defendant can be better held responsible.

Because you know what happens in these class cases, Collin — everybody sees it. A federal judge put it really well, and I forget which one it was, I'd like to give him credit — he was talking about these class actions and he said it is a sad reality that one of the best ways to get rich in America today is to steal a dollar and give back fifty cents. Which is what happens in these cases. You commit fraud, you get a thousand dollars times a hundred thousand people, and then you get sued because you lied, and you give some of it back. Let's say you give back fifty cents, and then the lawyers take twenty cents of the fifty, and everybody gets thirty cents back of the money that had been stolen from them.

And people say, well, that's fair, and the company wasn't really guilty. Look, that's for judges and juries to decide. By the way, people get down on juries — "that jury did something crazy." Listen, if you were on the jury, I guarantee you would have reached the same conclusion those people did. You know how I know? Because those people are just like you and me. They're business people and teachers and engineers and plumbers and just regular folks, and they heard all the evidence — unlike whoever our mythical critic is, who didn't hear all the evidence and wants to jump to a conclusion.

So if you create a situation where people actually might have to give back everything they stole — listen, we all know if you or I stole something, we'd have to give it all back, and then we'd probably go to jail. We're just asking corporate America to have to give it all back and not even go to jail. That's all we're talking about. So anything that holds people who lie accountable —

My joke is that people used to say, "Ray, don't your business clients dislike that you're filing these consumer cases?" I'd say no. My clients don't lie to their customers. They want other competitors in the marketplace to be held accountable if they lie to their customers, if they engage in misleading marketing. And my line is that these companies need to get a grip on the reality that there's a difference between marketing and fraud. You can say, "I have the best product in the world." I can say I'm the best lawyer in the world. But if I say I've got the best trial record of any lawyer in the United States, that's not true — that's a fact. One is just "I'm so great," which we can all say. You can go say "I'm so handsome, I'm so nice, you should be my friend." Okay, great. But when it gets to actually misleading people about facts for money? Yeah.

I also think this method will start to spill over into mass torts, personal injury at scale. Because it's the same issue. And these lawyers are still using phone banks of paralegals getting paid twelve, fifteen dollars an hour to give clients and potential clients the information they want. If I'm that personal-injury customer, do I want to talk to that person who isn't a lawyer and doesn't really know what's going on? Or would I rather have an albeit recorded message from the trial lawyer — the guy who actually went to law school, has been doing this for thirty years, and actually was in the courtroom when it happened and could explain what's up? So I think that's all going to change.

Collin McKee

That's a good segue. Talking about your product — it's called Leverage, and you're starting to add some facets of AI into it, but you told me you're being cautious and doing that in a deliberate, slow way. Why are you being cautious about implementing AI into this tool?

Ray Gallo

Well — Leverage is a mass-communications tool. Back at the dawn of email — and I realize a lot of people listening to this may have been born after the dawn of email — but about 1994, some of us early adopters, not the earliest but early adopters, started using email. Over the next few years it became a business norm. Those of us who were around then remember all the times somebody hit reply-all when they meant to hit reply and said something profane, insulting, irreverent, or just confidential. Pornographic. Oops. Stuff happened.

Anytime you've got a mass-communications tool, you've got to be careful. You do not want to make a mistake at scale. So we're starting our integration of AI entirely on the lawyer side.

Leverage — people can learn more about it at leverage.law — can be thought of as three sites. There's a public-facing website, the first thing a would-be client's going to find. There's a secure client portal for people who become clients: you sign in, you wind up here, and you can manage all your documents and information, be informed, provide more information, exchange information with your lawyers. Then there's a content management system, a CMS, which is where the lawyers control all this.

We're starting out integrating AI into the lawyer system, to make it easier to manage all that information and to set up Leverage as a system. One of the cool things about Leverage is that plaintiffs' lawyers like to act quickly sometimes, and it's business-smart to do it. If you find out that there's a big new fraud, or a big new opportunity, you want to put up a website. Well, it's complex, because you have to decide a lot of things and then implement them. You have to figure out what your homepage should look like. What's your pitch? What's your headline? What do you need to tell people? How do you explain it? "This is the situation. If this happened to you, we think you have a claim, we'd be willing to represent you. Here's what you need to do next." Then they get into an intake situation — well, what questions do you need to ask? If you're only going to give yourself a few hours to think about it, especially if you're not super experienced, that's a big ask.

Most lawyers do the same kinds of cases over and over again. So we've got it set up so you can import surveys and intake questionnaires, which in Leverage get automatically processed: yes, Johnny qualifies; no, Johnny doesn't qualify — meaning he does or doesn't have this claim. Once you get people in the system, you've got all their documents and all their data. We set up complex workflows. If Johnny comes in and answers A to question three, that means we need to get this additional chunk of information. The system will pause a designated amount of time — ten minutes, an hour, a day, to make it look like people are doing work — and then it's going to send him his follow-up survey to say, hey Johnny, we noticed you said A, which means X, which means we've got some more questions for you.

He gets that supplemental and fills it out. Let's say, for example — this is mass arbitration — Johnny actually qualifies for a fee waiver. In California, if you make less than, I think, three times the federal poverty line — I forget what that adds up to, it might be thirty thousand dollars or something — you don't have to pay for your arbitration. You get a fee waiver. So the system will generate the fee waiver and present it to Johnny for signature; he can sign it digitally, and all that happens iteratively.

All that setup I've described is complicated. To the extent that we can integrate AI to little by little make it easier for the lawyer to manage that system — because the client side is easy: answer some questions, upload some documents, read something if you want, watch some video if you want. That's all the client needs to do. But for the lawyers who are trying to manage a thousand clients, ten thousand clients — and for our biggest customers, eighty thousand clients in a single case — that's a tremendously complex proposition. So if we can ease AI into it on that side, it'll be great.

I've been talking to our engineer — my biggest thing lately has been, I don't know about you, but I've become so habitual about turning to AI for my "how do I X" questions. I want to do X, exactly how do I do that? Or, analyze this information. I want to be as soon as possible in a position where I've fed everything about Leverage into Claude, or whatever we're using, so I can say: here's what I want to accomplish, what's the easiest way to get that done in Leverage? Or, I'm trying to use this tool, how do I do that? Those kinds of things make it super easy. And look, Claude is never going to do a better job than the actual how-to video that we make — but the reality is, humans, we're just patterns. We follow the same patterns, we want to do the same thing over and over again. The more you make it easy, the more you make it the same thing we always do, the easier our lives are. So that's a goal. We know how much better AI is now than it was six months ago for ordinary consumers, never mind what the very best models that we haven't seen yet are doing. Hopefully we'll be at a point pretty quickly where that's not too hard.

Collin McKee

You mentioned two very important things. Your disciplined approach — not being greedy about it, letting the AI come into it bit by bit. And then the mentor mode of these different LLMs, which I think people, especially in the law field, there seem to be a good number of people who feel like they know everything. If you give these large language models the opportunity to show you what they need, you can do a lot of learning yourself and avoid a lot of the pitfalls people fall into by not asking the right way, not giving full context.

Ray Gallo

Yeah. I've had the luxury of adopting AI in an environment where I work very closely with our CTO. I'll pat Jeff on the back a little bit. Jeff double-majored in computer science and electrical engineering at Berkeley, which is arguably the best department in the country, and could be anywhere — and just happens to love the small-business environment that we have, the fact that he gets to own the entire stack, and to love that he's working on a piece of software he actually believes in and believes does some good.

But a guy like that — the way he uses AI and the way the ordinary person uses AI is very different. Because he understands that whenever you talk to an AI, you're really just programming, and you're doing it in English. And because English is so incredibly imprecise, the AI is making a bunch of assumptions — like we do when you and I talk. Which is fine, except when you want actual precise information, or a precise piece of code, which is mostly what he does, or a task done in a precise manner.

You need to do it like a programmer would. You need to give it the information that it needs to work from, the logic that it needs to follow, precisely what the output needs to be. You need to define, like you do when you're coding, what acceptable output is — these are the tests you follow to know whether you're giving me what I need. Nobody else told me that. What a breakthrough. Thank you. Now I can begin to more intelligently use these tools. So that's been a benefit. I guess maybe we'll all figure that out — or maybe AI will just get so smart that nobody will have to, because it'll just start asking us all the right questions.

Collin McKee

Yep, or tell us what we meant to ask. I was going to wrap this up with three rapid-fire questions, and you've answered my first one pretty well, but expound if you want. One thing you'd encourage any lawyer listening to start doing this week to get value out of AI without getting themselves into trouble.

Ray Gallo

I would say pick one. Going with Claude and its Cowork is an easy choice today — I'm not trying to say that's the only one or absolutely the best, but for lawyers it's a good choice. And learn it. Most lawyers still don't know how to use Microsoft Word very well — they certainly aren't masters of it — and yet that's the program they work in all day long, every day. The benefits to a lawyer of learning a piece of software, really learning it so that you can be facile, are tremendous. Yeah, maybe start with Microsoft Word. But learn your AI, make the investment — because the time you're taking away from your billable hours you're going to add back down the road by being able to bill every second of your day, which you can't today because you're spinning your wheels too much. If you're being honest, you're not writing down all that time, because you know you spun your wheels. So understand that your investment in learning will pay off a hundred times over in the very long run.

Collin McKee

Good point. And where do you see AI heading in your portion of law — mass arbitration or mass joinder — in the next two years?

Ray Gallo

I don't know that it's particularly different in that area of litigation than any other. AI is going to give us better and better ways of getting oriented. Right now people use AI to write briefs and they get in big trouble, because it's not that smart, and it hallucinates, and it doesn't have a personal moral compass. But it's wonderful for getting ideas. It's wonderful for getting ideas about cases to look at, and ways to think about and identify issues, and ways to think about those issues. So I assume that's what we'll be doing.

And for myself — look, I'm an ADHD guy. You're not surprised to hear that from the cadence of my speech. I love to be able to get a lot done. Those moments when I'm hyper-focused, amazing. If I can avoid drudgery, if I can avoid getting mired down in grinding detail because somebody has better organized information for me, or given me a better overview, or because I can delegate a simple task and get it back with precision — which I believe will be there with AI within two years — that'll be huge.

And then finally, I talk to my ace engineer Jeff, and he talks about how he's got four screens now. Not because he's pulling information across four screens like a lot of us used to, but because he's got a screen in front of him where he's working, and then he's got three others where Claude is working. So he's got three assistant programmers.

The beauty of Leverage, Collin, is that it does exactly what I tell it to. Clients get exactly the message I want them to get. Whereas when I've got that twelve, fifteen-dollar-an-hour call center paralegal, I can give them a script — maybe they follow it, I don't know. That level of control — if I can get that level of support and that level of control, that's what I think is the future of AI in the legal profession. And that's nirvana for people who actually believe in what they're doing and like helping their clients.

Collin McKee

A hundred percent. And lastly, where can people find more about you and follow your work?

Ray Gallo

Leverage.law is the website of our software business. Gallo.law is my firm website. I'm increasingly working on the software business and trying not to be the tip of the spear quite as often — I feel blunted enough after thirty-four years of banging heads. I still enjoy it sometimes, when the other side manages to be rude or condescending enough to really motivate me. But for the most part I try and let somebody younger and more inspired have the opportunity.

Collin McKee

Ray, I really appreciate the time. It's been a great conversation, and I appreciate how transparent you are about how you're approaching AI — I think it's going to be a lot of value for our audience. Everything about Leverage, the cases, and how to find Ray will be in the show notes.

And if you're listening and wondering where your own firm stands — if you're behind, if you're ready to move forward, if there's anything in this wonderful world of AI you'd like to discuss and see how it applies to your firm — that's what Endeavors AI is for. We do a full business audit and make sure we're implementing these things in a disciplined fashion, just like Ray talked about. So for Endeavors AI, I'm Collin McKee. This is Ray Gallo. Thank you again, and we will see you on the next episode.

Ray Gallo

Thanks, Collin. It's been fun.

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