James Pittman: Welcome to Immigration Uncovered, the Docketwise video podcast, where we dive deep into the dynamic world of immigration law, shedding light on the latest developments, practice management strategies, and the transformative impact of legal technology. I'm James Pittman. With me today is Andrew Thrasher. Andrew is the owner of Titus Consulting, which is a firm that specializes in legal design and process engineering for immigration legal service providers. Andrew, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

Andrew Thrasher: Thanks, James. Really excited to be here.

James Pittman: Yep.

James Pittman: Andrew, can you tell us about your journey sort of into the field of immigration? How did you get involved in this niche, and especially, what are the events that led up to your current role at Titus Consulting?

Andrew Thrasher: Yeah. Thanks, James. So I got started in immigration as legal assistant back in 2016, shortly before the 2016 election. Obviously quite an interesting time to get started in immigration. Learned a lot as an immigration assistant working on employment based immigration. Started to take over some of the perm process for kind of the entire firm of about 40 employees with ten attorneys, and started managing a lot of the perm recruitment, realizing that there's all of these nuances and all of these puzle pieces to keep track of across the immigration lifecycle of these perm cases. So really got very interested in some of the more programmatic elements to immigration, kind of looking at the patterns and finding how all these puzzle pieces fit together. So after about a little over a year as a legal assistant, I found an opportunity with bridge Immigration, which was recently acquired by boundless Immigration. So they work on the employment based immigration side. They manage both kind of the software as a case management system for a variety of partner law firms. So my role as, I believe, employee number ten or eleven at bridge was to basically kind of serve as a paraprofessional, working alongside some of these partner law firms that bridge worked with. So also managing the actual client service element of these cases, walking each of these HR professionals through the h one b process, for instance, for the first time. But then also kind of what was really interesting to me was the opportunity to work with the technology team. As you know, obviously working in legal tech, it's just a very different dynamic and a very different work environment than a law firm. So being able to and having the opportunity to work with an engineering team on a daily basis and kind of defining how this legal logic, but also these client workflows and how to get the most out of each interaction with each client was a really interesting part of that role. Kind of seeing how this fits in the legal, the technology side and then just the business side, the operational elements that go into managing a team and scaling a team. So that role was incredibly informative, great experience. I worked there for about three and a half years, and obviously in startup world, three and a half years is quite a bit, basically a decade at that point. So you learn a lot and eventually moved back into the law firm operations and found my way back to my old law firm, working in kind of a strategic role, doing more of the background analysis of how these workflows are going to be laid out as they start to revamp some of their tech stack, so to speak. So really kind of helping them, helping these partners envision what their law firm is going to look like not just in 2023, but 2028, thinking down the road and starting to plan for this digitization that you're seeing across the legal field. So, long story short, that was incredibly informative, kind of moving back from the tech space back into a law firm and learning kind of a little bit more about some of the challenges that they're seeing adopting this technology and realizing that it was a widespread need across the industry. And so that's kind of what ultimately brought me to starting Titus consulting, was trying to find ways to scale that knowledge and kind of that bridging of these distinct areas across immigration and trying to make that work and exploring and testing out some new opportunities to make that work at a broader scale and start solving some of these other issues related to tech adoption, especially.

James Pittman: Yeah, that's very interesting. It's a very interesting story.

James Pittman: So let's drill down on some of these points. In terms of managing the power professional team or your experience in your firm. What were some of the key challenges that you observed, specifically in the legal workflows that needed improvement?

Andrew Thrasher: Yeah, no, that's a great question, and I think one of the ones that stood out to me is finding this balance in your workflows between adaptability. Obviously, every case is going to look different. Every h one B as much as an h one B case is going to look pretty much cookie cutter, the same across what you're including in the case. Building your workflows, though, to adapt to some of those very nuanced but very common issues where someone's, for instance, their job title might change right after you file that LCA, how do you build that into your workflows to adapt to those very common issues that come up, especially as you're scaling a team? When it's one or two people on a team, it's very easy to build adaptability, I guess, into your workflows because of the fact that it's very easy to cooperate with one other person and coordinating on a case. But that becomes a much different issue when you have 40 people on your team and you're trying to still make that adaptability work, but also standardizing those workflows, building workflows that are actually going to make sense for 40 people, so that everyone is working off that same knowledge and that same process, so that your clients ultimately are seeing that same service delivery.

James Pittman: Understood.

James Pittman: So in Titus consulting, having founded your own firm, now, how do you go about employing legal design principles to enhance, let's say, client onboarding workflows and set clear expectations for immigration clients?

Andrew Thrasher: It starts with, in terms of legal design. I think sometimes these terms are new in a way, and obviously can be interpreted different ways. And I think sometimes legal design is too often narrowly focused on the design word, in terms of artistic flows and adding visual elements, which are obviously key to redesigning legalese into much easier layperson language. But it's so much more than redesigning a template, for instance, to make it more user friendly. It can be expanded to things like your entire service delivery, trying to apply how do you build your workflows to better understand your clients? And that starts with feedback. That starts with understanding your clients at a level where you can more confidently build and redesign your workflows based on your true understanding of your clients. And that's something that I feel fairly passionately about, is I think it's really easy as a business owner to get too distant from the end user of your services. And so sometimes there's a lot of assumptions made as a partner at a law firm, when you're working with, let's say, the highest earning clients, for instance, you're not necessarily hearing some of that, quote, unquote, lower level feedback. You may not be receiving that feedback from the employees at some of your corporate clients, for instance. And so how can you build that into your workflows so that you are getting that feedback and you are aware of those things that are ultimately really important for your business to be understanding that and seeing that data and acting.

James Pittman: Well, let's talk about some examples or just some specific improvements that you can make when you're talking about using these design principles. Using these engineering principles, really what it amounts to, to streamline the preparation of, let's say, immigration forms and an application packet, and use these principles to reduce the burden for both the staff and the clients. Let's give some specifics.

Andrew Thrasher: Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I think, for instance, one huge area where I think a lot of firms really struggle is that initial intake and that onboarding of a new client. It's an opportunity to really set clear expectations, but it's also an opportunity to give the client an understanding of how your process may look a little differently from other attorneys that they've worked with in the past or if they're actively in discussion with or comparing two different options. Obviously, every attorney and every law firm does things slightly differently. And so being able to set those expectations up front is going to, one, make your employees happy, because you're going to cut down, hopefully, on some of that back and forth around some of those frequently asked questions, that sometimes it's just a matter of rewording something in your onboarding workflow. Let's relook at our email that we're sending out to every single client. Maybe this is a little outdated. Maybe we're not setting clear expectations here on what a passport photo needs to look like. For instance, those things can have kind of large scale, multiplicative effects on how your services are delivered when you kind of make just these small little changes. So that all comes from, obviously, again, applying these usability heuristics and understanding how to design services around how your clients are actually going to use it.

James Pittman: What are they expecting and how are you measuring progress? What are some of the KPIs that we would be looking at when we're trying to determine how effective our redesign process is going?

Andrew Thrasher: I think it comes from a variety of both quantitative and qualitative data, and some of this depends on the technology that you're using in your firm. It can be as simple as asking all of your paralegal staff to plug in into a simple Google form. What are the most common questions you're receiving from clients after they initially onboard? Things like that. Even though it's not necessarily a KPI, you're not measuring, you're not automating that, but you are kind of actively seeking that feedback from your staff to better understand. Okay, these are the things that we need to address in our onboarding workflow. Beyond that, in terms of some of the more like data, the KPIs that we should be measuring, it obviously depends on what you're trying to address in your service delivery, but it may be something as simple as what is the most common? Or what are we looking at in terms of the average response rate to some of these questions? How often are we getting back to a client within 48 hours, when it's a travel based question that is really important for them to book an upcoming flight or plan for an upcoming start date. How quickly are we addressing those concerns that are so important to that client? Those are the things that may get lost in the scheme of looking at the legal workflow, but are so ultimately important to that client that those are really important to kind of identifying and figuring out how to improve the service delivery across your legal team.

James Pittman: Understood.

James Pittman: Well, one of the things that immigration lawyers have to do a lot of is giving case updates to clients, and effective client communication is just so incredibly important. So what role do case updates and effective communication play in the design process when you go about approaching an immigration lawyer's practice and how to improve it?

Andrew Thrasher: Like any good law answer, it depends. But I think it ultimately comes down to empathy, understanding that sometimes, whereas we as immigration professionals might not look at an automated email every month saying there is simply no progress on your case, it may seem silly to us in a way. Why would I reach out to say there's nothing changing in their case for this month? But at the same time, for a lot of clients, that email telling them that nothing has changed may help them get through their day before feeling like they need to anxiously check on my uscis and see if there's any changes to the receipt number. Those types of little, small changes, again, can have such a big role in just addressing what are those anxieties that the average client is experiencing throughout their immigration?

James Pittman: Well, on your website, you talk a little bit about creating a knowledge base and knowledge management. So when we speak of knowledge management, let's talk about what challenges law firms typically face with their internal knowledge, and how do you at Titus consulting go about addressing these concerns.

Andrew Thrasher: And I think it's an area that kind of fits hand in hand and why I use those terms. The legal, engineering and knowledge management have such an overlapping presence across a law firm and how you're configuring these workflows to incorporate that knowledge that you have across your legal team. And so I think it starts with taking an inventory. What I normally do when I work with clients is starting with just an inventory of where is your knowledge currently? Where are your strengths? Is it in the legal templates that you have? Is it your training material or your process documentation? What areas of your most common workflows do you feel strongly about? Do you feel like your one workflow can use some work and you're constantly getting feedback from clients that the one questionnaire is just not really the most indicative of how they would look at their achievements? For instance, those things can be really helpful in starting with just a broad view of what do you have access to and where is it stored now so that we can kind of remap that and understand how your employees are going to apply this knowledge. How can we start setting those standards across all of the technology that you're using? So, for instance, how can you apply those templates in a way where an area that I'm really passionate about is templates, of all things, is moving away from a typical document library where you might have to choose from 20 different templates and they're all named slightly different titling, and everyone's got a side file or folder full of their own templates because they're not sure which ones to use. And redesigning that into a workflow, building templates into your workflow so that you can help standardize usage so that your knowledge base is being applied. Rather than giving your employees the option to apply that knowledge, you're making it much more user friendly, much more accessible, and ultimately much more valuable so that you're not stuck in these knowledge silos where every person has their little expertise and it becomes a little bit more sustainable when that's easily shared.

James Pittman: Yeah, that's important. I mean, people obviously are always going to have their own areas of expertise, but if the firm has access, I mean, ideally you would want, for example, if, let's say someone's absent on a particular day and something had to be attended to in one of their cases, you would want the knowledge base to be such that someone else in the firm could go in and know exactly what had been done and what needs to be done next, and access the resources to manage the time period that the person that had been working on it is unavailable. Am I correct? Wouldn't that be your ideal?

Andrew Thrasher: That's a great point too, in terms of the employee experience and sometimes usability and legal design almost overemphasizes the client experience as simply the legal client. But clients are also employees. How can we improve the employee experience? And one of the most common issues that you hear from legal professionals is just an overabundance of admin work and burden around managing. I have to click six different times to get this template that I'm using every day, for instance, or I have to log into three different systems to find this series of documents that I'm looking for for this case. And those things can have a dramatic effect, obviously, on your employee experience from setting clear expectations with new employees and improving the onboarding process and how they approach those first three months of their employment. Can all stem from the quality of the knowledge base that you've built in the process. Documentation.

James Pittman: Yeah.

James Pittman: And while we're talking about doing right by your employees, I'll also just make a plug about a topic that I've talked to other guests about, which is employee wellness. I mean, the attorneys see or have access to different programs to make sure that they are staying well and managing their demands, their responsibility, and so forth. But that applies equally to the support staff in the firm. They are just as vulnerable to getting burned out and overwhelmed and frustrated and so forth. And have you done any thinking about employee wellness within the firm?

Andrew Thrasher: It's an under discussed aspect of the legal field. The distribution of the emotional toll that it takes as an immigration professional is not. There's no magical barrier that ends with the attorney. And obviously, for immigration especially, there's a lot of unique opportunity for paraprofessionals to take on that burden. Even more so, in a lot of firms, the paralegals are the ones that are actively handling most of those urgent phone calls to say, look, I need to travel and get home because someone just passed away. What can I do? What are my options? Those are really difficult emotional experiences, and unfortunately, and I'll spare some of the stronger feelings I have on the subject, but unfortunately, because of some of the structure in the legal field, if you were to look up, for instance, if there's been any studies on how mental health is treated for paraprofessionals, there's very little, if any, serious study or exploration of these things. And it's an unfortunate part of the industry. But it's an important subject to recognize how much this work has an impact on your day to day. And building workplaces that recognize that is the start. It's obviously just recognizing and building a workplace that doesn't use language, for instance, that emphasizes the attorney's burden in taking this work on, it's the legal team's burden, just simple little vocabulary changes like that. The we instead of I can have a really big impact on your team, and making those changes can really reinspire individuals to feel like they're appreciated as part of that legal team and taking that burden.

James Pittman: And the attorneys, I mean, they may have their favorite or trustworthy paralegal who is doing a lot of the affidavit, drafting for all of their asylum cases or all of their VAWA or U visa cases. Be aware that that person is being subjected over and over again to the stories of client trauma, to very emotionally draining interactions. Make sure that they are staying well. It's important. And I agree on their discussed topic.

Andrew Thrasher: I think a lot of firms would benefit from just making more time to speak with each individual employee separately, just hearing from them on a regular basis, giving them the opportunity to have a 30 minutes check in every week or two to say, look, I just got berated by this client for something that it's really taking a toll on my week. Giving those opportunities to speak up and hear from your employees is a great first step to addressing those things and making them feel like they're able to speak up and, I don't know, be part of that team and feel like they're fully supported.

James Pittman: Let's move on to law firm content and it is very important for lawyers who want to grow their businesses to be producing content on a regular basis, whether that is on their firm website or through their social media channels, through LinkedIn and other channels. Can you elaborate on the process for managing updates to law firm content? The editorial considerations, the importance, for example, of avoiding redundancy, making sure that your information is not outdated, and other considerations with content management.

Andrew Thrasher: A lot of that has been a benefit to the current kind of wave of generative AI discussion has been this refocus and a new discussion on how we're producing content within the legal field and how can we better manage that ongoing maintenance of some of this crucial legal content, whether it is on your blog or simply just templates that are available to everyone in your firm that you're sending to your clients routinely, how often are you updating? That starts with tracking the data behind that content, and I think that is where I like to start when I work with clients is are you measuring this content again? And this comes back to having a well organized knowledge base internally. Do you have access to the metadata that is most important when you have an update from USCIs on how they're going to manage h one B cases, for instance, how can you more easily kind of allow the rest of your team to go through all of that content more easily and update it accordingly without having to just manually search through hundreds of blog posts? For instance, how can we create a system where you are actually tracking that metadata? And then you can go back and say these five internal templates that we use for support letters, these three cover letters, and these five blog posts that we routinely link to in our emails for h one b cases, they all need to be updated. But now we have an understanding of everything that is going to be impacted by this USCIs update or a change in how CAC is allowing uploads to their system. Something like that can have kind of a snowball effect over all of this content knowledge that you have across your firm. And it starts with establishing that structure so that you can more easily find and update it on the fly so that you're not spending all of that time kind of manually updating.

James Pittman: Do you have any favorite tools that can be used to update multiple media channels at once?

Andrew Thrasher: I'd stick to canva, honestly. Canva allows you to do a lot of just from my own social media, I'm not doing as much kind of. Obviously, I'm not an attorney. I'm not doing in depth legal blogging. I'm doing more know content that benefits from some visual elements as well. So I use Webflow as my web design and use their CRM system or their CMS system, I should say. So. Webflow and Canva makes it really easy to post things on my blog and then reshare as LinkedIn and Instagram posts and just kind of managing all of that data in one place, but also being able to pull that data when I want it to and be able to look a little bit more in. You know, it's not for everyone. I wouldn't say webflow and canva is probably enough for a large law firm, for instance, but for a smaller operation, it gets the job done.

James Pittman: You utilize the term legal engineering. We've talked about legal design, so is there a difference in what you mean legal engineering versus legal design? And could you explain what you mean by legal engineering and why you think it's becoming essential for immigration law firms?

Andrew Thrasher: Again, I think some of this vocabulary is probably going to change at some point. So I'm not too stuck on legal engineering. I've seen that term floating around a lot. And the reason why I kind of point to these three cores of my services of legal design, legal engineering, and knowledge management. I think they're, again, this almost three part ven diagram where they all overlap in some ways, but they're all very defined in other ways. Design is more of this understanding of how your clients are going to interact with their journey through your services, and then legal engineering is more of that. Again, if you were to look at the role of an architect versus an engineer and building a large scale organization or a building, for instance, that engineer is going to take that and be a little bit more technical. I don't have a software engineering background, for instance. I'm a political science academic. I don't have that computer science background, but I have enough of that workflow experience from bridge, where I think legal engineering is a good way to describe that. Applying the logic, the legal logic conditional rules, that dynamic knowledge application into your workflows, how can we build off of that design element? Now that we understand how our clients would like our services to look like, how can we now build our workflow to meet that? Most firms have obviously a large tech stack. How can we make that work? From your intake in your billing, to your case management and your feedback system that you're sending out for forms and surveys and whatnot. How can we make all of that work understood?

James Pittman: So let's talk about sort of automation. I mean, where are some of the common areas where you see firms lagging.

Andrew Thrasher: In their automation, the non legal areas? I think there's a lot of opportunities for just simple business operations, especially internal operations. One project that I really enjoy was working with the firm to redo their intake workflow, not just for the client intake, but for the actual starting of a case. Internally, they were having trouble kind of fitting this into their tech stack. There was no great solution for communicating, especially as the firm transitioned into a hybrid work model. After Covid, there was a lot of missed data and a lot of miscommunication when cases were being opened. Some attorneys were still opening cases by emailing the client CC and a paralegal, who then knew that they had to open it on their case management system. Others were opening via in a full agreement. And that was a startup, you get the idea. Obviously, every attorney, every team within this firm was operating slightly differently, and that was not only resulting in mistakes and missed opportunities to sign a client after a consultation, but there was also a lot of kind of downstream effects that we started to see once we made this change. We used power automate and Microsoft forms to standardize how every attorney was kicking off every case so they would complete this form. It standardized what info they were confirming as the case was getting started. That was another piece of feedback that we heard, was that a lot of the team was feeling like they were getting disparate information when they were starting cases, depending on who they were working with for each case. And so one of the keys was setting a standard intake so that every attorney had to confirm the same piece of, same piece of data for each case. But then by using power automate, we were able to turn that info into a planner task. So it was automatically then creating a planner task, automatically assigning both the attorney and the paralegal to that case, and then also including the billing person with all that billing info that the attorney confirmed. So then suddenly the team was much better connected. For each case, there was a clear, documented task on planner for each of these cases to get started. So there was by both obviously improving the knowledge sharing across everyone involved in the case to get started. But it was also minimizing the chances of someone falling through the cracks, not hearing back for two weeks, and suddenly they've signed with a different attorney because they obviously want to get their case started. Things like that. We started to see so many different opportunities from an internal workflow change by just automating these things and leaving it, and not leaving it to manual expectations of your client, your employees, where user error is obviously always risks moving on.

James Pittman: To appointment scheduling and intake, which is so critical. So an area that a lot of firms need improvement in, or they look for various solutions to try to improve, is digitizing the client intake process and appointment scheduling. And there's been a plethora of really good tools for appointment scheduling in recent years. So how can optimizing these two aspects reduce administrative burdens and also enhance the law firm's accessibility to potential clients?

Andrew Thrasher: Yeah, no, I think scheduling especially has been, obviously, with the ALA Marketplace 2022 study showed that there's been a huge, dramatic increase in appointment scheduling. Obviously post Covid and just adapting to the fact that even courts are holding Webex conference calls and whatnot, there's obviously been a push to be more accessible online for clients that want to schedule, for instance, an initial consultation that has been, I think, overall a great shift in the market because I think it ensures one better data quality. Clients are more likely to provide standard, good quality intake data when you have an automated system, but it also just can start off the entire experience a little bit better. You can add all of these. I love calendly. You can have the follow up email where it says thanks for. You can reschedule on your own so that you don't have to call and obviously ask our administrative assistant or one of the paralegals or an attorney to reschedule for you. You can just do that yourself. So obviously there's some efficiency gain there and just allowing these individual clients to kind of manage some of this by themselves without having to reach out.

Andrew Thrasher: But then on the accessibility side, I think there's a really cool movement towards kind of finding ways to make the average law firm more digitized, more digital friendly in terms of being accessible on the Internet. And one of the cool ways that we saw at my previous firm when we set up acuity scheduling was more clients booking overnight obviously, we're in immigration. Not everyone is working in the same time zone. We are working with clients that are located halfway across the globe and trying to set up a meeting on a shared availability. If they can get on and look at your calendar at two in the morning, yard time and book an appointment, and you get online the next morning and you already have it scheduled and everything's good to go. That's accessibility in the sense that you're making yourself a little bit easier to work with. For someone that is obviously dealing with, whether it be literal location differences or.

James Pittman: Some other accessibility issue, well, it's axiomatic that a firm should strive for a consistently high quality work product. So in terms of achieving consistency and reliability, how do these legal engineering principles help to ensure a standardized work product and reliable service delivery in an immigration firm?

Andrew Thrasher: I always point to this one article that's kind of just stuck with me for the past few years by Jason Barnwell, Microsoft. He wrote for legal evolution back in 2020, I think, an article called designing knowledge work. And he does this great job of explaining how, as an attorney who he previously had a background in software engineering, now as an attorney at Microsoft, kind of explain the two different mindsets of a software engineer that happens to be typically a bit more programmatic in their mindset, and an attorney or other legal professional who's much more analytical, a little bit more critical analysis rather than programmatic analysis. And how those two mindsets, obviously, it sounds very, no duh, they're very different roles. But how those different mindsets kind of come into impacting your business and how for a lot of firms, there's a need for a little bit more of that programmatic mindset, that understanding of, okay, how do we put these puzle pieces together? We have all of these knowledge experts, we have all of these subject matter experts that are incredibly valuable to our firm. How can we actually take advantage of that in a way where we build our workflows so that we're not missing out on this knowledge and it's not siloed in this one person's individual drive on their computer, but also, how can we then when we, for instance, building a workflow where, again, your templates are not a decision making opportunity for each employee, building templates that are built into your workflows so that you're taking away that opportunity to potentially pick an outdated version of a template, for instance, and kind of standardizing just by only giving the opportunity to work off of the best version of your templates. And that way you can kind of test and experiment a little bit better. And if you start to see trends in your EV one results based on a change in how you're structuring the intro to your sport letter, you could start implementing that a little bit easier across all of your casework, especially as you scale as a firm by building that into the actual workflow. So again, kind of setting those rules and setting that knowledge into how you're actually doing this from a to b to c across your processes.

James Pittman: Well, that's a nice segue into my next question, which has to do about data driven decision making. So, once you've implemented these legal engineering principles and you've gotten things standardized to a degree, what role does data driven decision making play in this mindset, especially concerning identifying patterns and insights into your case preparation?

Andrew Thrasher: Yeah, I think data is obviously the future of everything. Maybe that's a little hyperbole, but in terms of, obviously, with generative AI, we're looking at no business is going to operate smoothly in the future without good data quality. And that starts with how can we improve the quality of our existing data? And that comes from identifying the different sources, figuring out not only do we have our own business data as a law firm, we have our client data that we're managing, then we have a lot of government data that is impacting our operations, each case processing times different policies and regulations. So you have these kind of three core areas of data that you're managing as a law firm and figuring out one. How can we make the most of these three different disparate areas, and how can we then inform both our business operations? How can we change our workflows, for instance, to address the fact that prevailing wages are now taking two months more than they were last year, so that we can now better communicate to our HR contacts that this is now the new standard for how long a perm based green card is going to take. How can we use that government data? Obviously, like those processing times, how can we use that client data? Obviously, if a client tells us that they have an upcoming travel set for three months from now, and they have an h one b extension coming up next month, how can we inform ourselves around that workflow so that we can handle their case in a way that's going to make those again, USCIS is not asking on the I 129, do you have a vacation scheduled for three months from now? So in terms of capturing that data from a government form standpoint, you're never going to capture that data point. But it is a key data point to the case in terms of making that client feel like you're handling their case based on this key aspect of their life. It's the same thing with start dates, with employers being able to give employers a better understanding of when an employee can start based on their country of origin, what their current status is. Also, how much capacity do we have internally in our firm to get this case? You're asking us to get this case filed tomorrow. We don't have the capacity, obviously, at a larger scale, planning for vacations, planning for upcoming out of offices. How can we use data to make those decisions a little bit easier and forecast so that we're not reacting? Give firms a little bit more proactive data so that they can plan for these three vacations that they have coming up on the same team, and they have four different corporate clients that they're onboarding right now that all expect to be filing a ton of cases in the next few weeks. How can we plan all of that to make it work for the firm? The operations obviously starts with tracking it and making sure that it's reliable and in an accessible format.

James Pittman: So these legal engineering principles, they are gradually gaining adoption and becoming adopted and utilized by more and more firms. I mean, my sense intuitively, I don't have a survey or anything, but my sense is there's some firms, a minority of firms, who are way out in front and who have really been very good at adopting a process mindset, and then a lot of firms who are sort of in the middle struggling with it, and then some who haven't begun thinking about it. But let's say, looking toward the future, how do you see these types of legal engineering principles shaping the future of immigration law practice and the teams in immigration firms? And what changes might that bring to firms who are still operating within a traditional, or let's say more old fashioned sort of legal practice way of working?

Andrew Thrasher: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think, obviously, I don't want to be a doomsayer and say that obviously the more old fashioned firms are going to struggle. That time will tell how, for instance, this generative AI craze, how we're going to actually define these use cases in the legal field, and how this is actually going to be applied in practice on a day to day comes from one, I think, where I'm really excited for legal engineering and more generally just kind of legal innovation, and seeing where all of these new tech companies are moving into the space is the education around how technology fits into the legal services. We're seeing much more of a conversation around what does immigration work look like on a day to day? It's not just drafting forms, obviously. There's so much more to it. And having those conversations is a great start to getting to a point where we're going to be able to make it a bit easier for these smaller firms and these mid sized firms that are kind of, like you said, in that mid range. They're starting to explore. They know that there's things out there, these new tools that are maybe difficult to really test out right now because it's hard to define how that fits into a poorly defined process. If you don't feel confident in the workflows that you're using today, it's really difficult to assess and evaluate new technology and make that work for you because everything feels intimidating. So that, I guess, is my number one recommendation for any firm that's looking to innovate right now is understand your work. It's not about understanding what options are out there or what tools are out there. It starts with really understanding how you are doing things differently than every firm I've worked with, every attorney I've worked with does things a little different. And so finding those ways to build your process and your workflow, and I know I keep saying that same word over and over, but building that in a way that works for you but is also going to work at scale and allow you to grow your business is so important because that's going to enable you and empower you to actually make those decisions for yourself.

Andrew Thrasher: That's obviously crucial, turning a little bit.

James Pittman: Toward sort of the human side of things. So the legal profession obviously is a profession in which a trained professional utilizes their skills and provides a service to the client. How can firms strike a balance between optimizing their processes, incorporating their technology, and digitizing and yet maintaining a human centric approach when it counts in terms of rendering immigration services and instilling the confidence and trust in the client.

Andrew Thrasher: Yeah, I think that's especially an important question right now as we're kind of at this cusp of a shift in the marketplace and a shift in legal services is asking where technology fits into our work. And so that starts, again with understanding our clients. There's no way that we're going to be able to incorporate new technology and new solutions into legal work without an understanding of what our clients are actually looking to gain out of this. And so for immigration, it's finding ways to become more strategic. For instance, corporate immigration programs that are looking for more deep insights into what their data looks at scale and how to budget around their immigration program starts with, again, understanding what our clients are actually looking for so that we can better assess where technology fits and where it might turn off clients. And that's obviously going to be the case. Chat bots, for instance, there's a lot of back and forth. There's some research that has found that chat bots are obviously just underutilized. But now with this new craze of these new products in the market, there's also some research that I've seen that's shown that, for instance, chat GBT outputs on a Reddit forum were considered better medical advice than a doctor's. And I say that because my wife is a pediatrician and we discussed this, and it was so interesting to think how some of our priors and our prior assumptions on how people interact with these things are actually not always the case. And so we can't build and we can't figure out how new technology is going to fit into our work without understanding what our work is ultimately coming to, which is the client outcome and delivering the services to the expectations.

James Pittman: Well, Andrew, we're in December and considering the rapidly evolving landscape. I mean, what are you most excited about for 2024? How do you see the intersection of technology and immigration law evolving over the next year and next few years?

Andrew Thrasher: I'm excited for, again, this more broad discussion around technology and how it fits into the legal world and how we're applying it. And that in itself is a very refreshing take on how technology is not this very niche area of the legal field that not everyone's welcome to. I like to look at it as like, this is part of our work and everyone's welcome to the discussion. So I think that's a great kind of shift in workplace culture in the legal field, is just feeling like everyone's a bit more involved in continuing to improve that inclusiveness. But two, it's also just, we're starting to kind of see some of this technology that could potentially really allow us to scale some of these access to justice issues, especially in immigration, where some of these issues that are so common in immigration law, accessibility, just in terms of low cost services, the individuals that don't necessarily meet nonprofit pro bono work qualifications, but also don't have $5,000 to drop on a case for immigration. That's an interesting area for me, where technology could really solve some of these. How can we make it more accessible to these individuals that are already eligible for immigration benefits and are just not, for one way or another, for one reason or another are not there today. And I think that's an exciting area where technology should hopefully allow us to kind of solve some issues.

James Pittman: Hopefully agreed. I mean, access to justice and just achieving efficiencies in some of the really overburdened sectors with the nonprofit sector and other practice settings that are overburdened. And also, personally, I'm very excited about it, the potential for some aspects of adjudications and the utilization of the AI in the adjudications in terms of eliminating biases or standardizing routine decision making in adjudications. It's something which I think holds a lot of promise, obviously needs a lot of exploration and experimentation, but holds a lot of promise.

Andrew Thrasher: No? And again, pointing to the medical community, it's interesting to see how the medical community has approached some of these, for instance, some of these difficult ethical discussions around the use of patient data, for instance, in training a machine learning model. I'm very passionate and very biased in some ways, like I said, with my connections to the healthcare industry. But I think there's a lot of learning that we can take away as legal professionals from a much more advanced, much more mature approach to AI. For instance, there's a lot of AI being applied across our day to day in healthcare that we're not even aware of as individual patients. That I think can be a really useful framework and a layout for the legal profession. Obviously, it's similarly high stakes, confidential data privacy concerns, and ultimately a lot of ethical and moral concerns around how does this all fit into what is ultimately the work being done. So I'm excited to see how these communities can kind of share and collaborate across different industries and across different fields to figure out how this huge precipice of AI kind of democratization is going to actually fit into our day to day. I think it's going to come from looking outward, looking outside of the legal field, and looking for those examples elsewhere.

James Pittman: I agree. And it's bound to be a year, 2024, bound to be a year full of really exciting improvements as we go over the cusp of this AI revolution. Very exciting time in so many fields.

James Pittman: But Andrew, we're getting to the end of the hour, and I want to thank you for joining us for this episode. Now, if people want to get a hold of you, the URL for your consulting firm is what?

Andrew Thrasher: Yes, it's just kituslegaldesign.com. So that's Titus legaldesign.com. Okay.

James Pittman: And you're also active on LinkedIn, but Andrew Thrasher of Titus Consulting. Thanks very much for joining us. Fast discussion.

Andrew Thrasher: Of course. Thank you, James. Great talking to you. Take care.

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