Why 60% of Law Firms Blow Their Intake Calls (And How to Fix It) with Suresh Khanna

Jared Correia (00:00):
Hello, everybody. We’ve got a show that promises to be at least mildly interesting for your listening, watching, enjoyment. I’m your host, Jerry Correia. I’m the CEO of Red Cave Law Firm Consulting. For the Monologue, I’ve got some specific tips on how to craft an AI usage policy that suits your law firm. In the interview, we’re talking with Suresh Khanna, the new CEO of Smith.ai. He’s got takes on intake, and we delve into his background a little bit too. For the counter program, we’re bringing back the wheel of justice. But before we get there, the first thing on my list is getting you set up with an AI policy for your law practice.

(00:45):
Even if your law firm doesn’t utilize artificial intelligence in any way, it still needs an artificial intelligence policy. That’s because if you don’t have any rules about the use of artificial intelligence, you basically sanctioned a lawless environment. That can’t be good. What I mean by that is that we all know how this goes. If you get lucky, your staff has no interest in AI and doesn’t use it at all. But the likelier outcome is that your staff is aware that AI will help them to complete their work faster, not necessarily better or more accurately. And then that probably means that your case information begins to leak out into free AI tools, queue, terrible sounding music, because your staff are not going to pay out of pocket for AI products, which free AI tools you have zero control over and which will train on the data input and which will retain that data for the maximum time period.

(01:42):
Those are both bad things. So that’s literally the nightmare scenario. Total lack of control, zero governance. Now I want to be clear, creating an AI policy does not make it impossible for that to happen. It just makes it less likely that it will occur as employees are more likely to adhere to policies you publish if you publish them. Of course, you can’t force people to behave in a certain way, but if you institute an AI usage policy, that reasonable approach to solving a problem like this as well as the technical guardrails you put in place offers you cover for malpractice claims or ethics issues that may arise. Of course, you may be thinking to yourself, that sounds good, but what would my policy actually include? So glad you asked. These things, first educational components. Primarily, the AI policy for your law firm should be a mechanism for educating your staff about the pros and cons of AI usage.

(02:44):
And really, it should be that way for you as well as a policy initiator. There are a few better ways to learn about a thing than by forcing yourself to teach that thing to other people. You’ll outline why law firms should use AI and how it benefits team members and clients, but you’ll also cover the dangers of AI usage, Q-Scary Music again, and address how the policy elements, if followed, effectively account for governance over those tools that will reduce risk. Now for the harp coming in. It makes sense to place the educational elements at the top of the document, by the way, as something of a preamble. Next, needs to be a policy manager and review and training protocols. No policy works effectively without a manager, so someone in the law firm must own the maintenance of the AI program. The policy manager should be named in the document and there should be a method included whereby questions and concerns can be elevated to that person.

(03:43):
It will be that person’s responsibility also to review and update the policy each year, at least, or as circumstances require it. Now, ideally, your AI policy will also feature training requirements, which you actually adhere to. Don’t put the training stuff in unless you’re actually going to do it, but it’s kind of a big deal since the education process around AI should not start and end with the text written into your policy. Next, a list of approved tools and accounts. This is probably the crux of the policy. What AI tools can your team actually use? But you don’t need to treat this like the Bill of Rights. You don’t have to name products that your team can’t use. First of all, there are too many and you’ll never be able to keep up with any of them. So just list the approved tools and indicate that those tools are the only ones that your staff can use on firm data.

(04:35):
Now you should also be specific that only firm approved accounts for those products should be used. If you say that your team can use ChatGPT, for example, without being more descriptive, that could mean a free account. Sometimes it helps to also list features of specific products. For example, your productivity software, your case management software, or your video conferencing software suite may have different AI features included. So identify those which pass muster and those don’t if you’re only allowing people to use certain features of specific products. Next, a mechanism for approving new tools and build-outs. You should also offer up an openness to considering new products for approval, in part to encourage your staff to become and remain curious about using AI. If your team has experimented in certain AI products in their personal life that they would like you to consider for use inside the law firm, there should be a mechanism that would show them how to make that suggestion and for you to approve or deny their proposal.

(05:39):
In terms of the existing AI products you’re using in your practice, your staff should be encouraged to improve those by suggesting changes, including things like revising templates, improving prompts, and adding agents. Certainly, that request must make its way up to the firm ladder of approval before being released across the entire business. Since agents, automated AI workflows effectively will become more important to law firms going forward, your AI policy should include some educational content around what those are and how they work. Law firms should also consider creating their own skunk works departments for AI savvy staff. Lastly, you need human gatekeeping and a remediation and escalation policy. Lawyers have traditionally gotten over their skis on artificial intelligence when they trust the machine to run an entire process without supervision. That’s how hallucinations happen. When an appropriate AI policy in place is followed by team members, hallucinations should never happen.

(06:40):
They should happen and you can root out the issue and actually provide an appropriate case citation or appropriate information about a case holding. Those are probably the easiest things to eliminate though, but that highlights a larger issue, which is that there should be specific processes outlined in your AI policy respecting how human approval gates work in your system. In other words, when, where, and how do humans step in to approach and approve the work of artificial intelligence? For example, when a brief is to be submitted to a court or when a communication is sent to a client, a human should actually review and approve that. Additionally, there should be a process in place for remediating failures. In other words, what happens when an AI error breaches containment? How do you get it under control and notify the appropriate parties? Part of that process also includes the identification of the issue in the first place.

(07:34):
Once that is brought to light, the escalation program kicks in such that the policy manager can begin setting things to right. An artificial intelligence policy is a required implementation for any law firm at this point. Literally every law firm should have one. Even if you don’t believe that your law firm is technically sophisticated enough to require one, the pace of change dictates that you must meet the moment. Speaking of the pace of change, Smith.ai has a new CEO and he’s here to talk with us today. It’s Suresh Khanna. He’s next and nothing is off the table. Well, I’ve effectively run out of things to say, which is awkward because this is a podcast. So I’m just going to softly hum to myself for the next hour. I promise it won’t be off-putting at all.

Suresh Khanna (08:31):
This is going to be delightful.

Jared Correia (08:34):
That’s our guest. It’s Suresh Khanna making his first appearance on the legal late night podcast. He’s the brand ass new CEO of Smith.ai. Suresh, welcome to the show. How are you?

Suresh Khanna (08:48):
I am so excited to be here. I’m a little scared about what you’re going to do to me, but this hopefully will be useful for listeners, or at least fun at the very least.

Jared Correia (08:56):
It’ll be fun. My reputation precedes me. I see. Okay.

Suresh Khanna (09:00):
I want to – And I appreciate you wearing a Giants hat, I believe on my behalf, but perhaps not.

Jared Correia (09:07):
I have a large hat collection, but I do enjoy the… I like the orange and black combo and this one is slightly different than the… It’s got the orange brim and stuff like that. Are you a Giants fan?

Suresh Khanna (09:19):
I am a Giants fan. I’m a big baseball fan. It’s also Halloween, so the colors are also appropriate from a seasonality perspective.

Jared Correia (09:29):
I’m trying. So what the fuck is happening with the Giants right now? They’re fucking terrible. Can we get out of this tailspin?

Suresh Khanna (09:37):
We have a really good farm system finally, so I think there’s hope. I just need to stay alive long enough in my life that these 18-year-olds make it to the majors. But yeah, I’m hopeful from that perspective. Focus on the Banana Ball League right now until the Giants get better. There’s not a lot of major league baseball for me to enjoy.

Jared Correia (10:02):
My daughter is very into the Savannah Bananas, which I never would’ve anticipated because she’s a child and baseball is supposed to be boring, but she loves it. Do you watch it regularly?

Suresh Khanna (10:12):
Oh, no. No.

Jared Correia (10:14):
Just flit in and out.

Suresh Khanna (10:15):
I watch the highlights. Did you see the Iron Lotus catch?

Jared Correia (10:20):
No.

Suresh Khanna (10:20):
Possibly the greatest catch, maybe the greatest sports achievement I’ve ever seen in any sport. You got to watch the clip. Maybe we’ll have to weave the clip into this podcast.

Jared Correia (10:31):
What is the Iron Lotus catch? What does that mean?

Suresh Khanna (10:34):
I

Jared Correia (10:34):
Don’t even know what that is.

Suresh Khanna (10:35):
This guy, I think he was a left fielder on the Savannah Banana whatever slugs. So the ball’s hit to him in the air and he does a forward flip and then catches the ball while he’s in the air from one of his hands that are-That’s

Jared Correia (10:52):
Crazy.

Suresh Khanna (10:52):
It’s turned in a weird direction. He had never pulled it off even in practice and not even once. And then he tried it in a game and he caught it.

Jared Correia (11:00):
I got to check this out. I mean, MLB is just like, “Hey, we have this stadium where you can hit the ball and it hits the roof and maybe it’s now, maybe it’s not.” And people in the Banana Ball League are flipping and doing catches. I don’t know.

Suresh Khanna (11:17):
It’s pretty cool.

Jared Correia (11:19):
It is.

Suresh Khanna (11:19):
Also, just as a fan of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, talk about a gamble. Who comes up with that business plan? It’s like, “I think this could work.”

Jared Correia (11:29):
I know. Weird baseball. Can you see it? Can we talk about Smith.ai? Let’s do it. Can we do a little lore? I don’t know if you even know this, but I always though it was interesting that the company is called Smith.ai. That’s like calling a company like Jones Cloud. What is that all about? Is there a reason behind that?

Suresh Khanna (11:52):
Yeah. Oh yeah.

Jared Correia (11:53):
Okay.

Suresh Khanna (11:53):
TradeSmith.

Jared Correia (11:54):
I’m so glad you know.

Suresh Khanna (11:56):
Yeah, TradeSmith, Smith. I think our original inspiration was how do we help real local businesses connect to their customers and their prospects? And so it was really in honor of what goes into building a proper local business.

Jared Correia (12:16):
Oh, that’s cool. All right. So that’s reasonable. The AI stuff though, I feel like they were pretty ahead on the AI stuff. I feel like it was called Smith.ai in 98.

Suresh Khanna (12:29):
It was 11 years ago. It was the same year OpenAI was founded actually. And so we were founded as a. Ai at the same time. So our founder, Aaron Lee, co-founder, I think he just saw the future. He was very much a brilliant technologist and saw where this was all going to go and thought about voice AI as the path. It took a decade for the models to mature, I think much, much longer than he originally thought it would take for voice to be able to be present on a call, but we got there eventually.

Jared Correia (13:05):
That would’ve only been a better story if the man’s name was Aaron Lee Smith.

Suresh Khanna (13:10):
I’ve asked him that if he should have changed his name.

Jared Correia (13:13):
He should consider it. All right, so I want to talk about your career path in a little bit, but let’s discuss… So Smith.ai, what does it do? What kind of stuff is coming out?Just give me the rundown in case people don’t know.

Suresh Khanna (13:27):
It’s a really cool business. We run intake for law firms, simple, but we do it with AI and we do it with humans. We started with humans with software, really smart software and AI in the background, and now we do it with humans and the AI can also be present on calls. We’ve done it for 11 years. We have over 5,000 clients. We’ve processed more than 30 million phone calls. We started with answering the phone. That was part one, just answer the phone. And I think probably some of your listeners might think of us as a receptionist company if they’ve heard of us at all.

Jared Correia (14:05):
That’s probably true actually. So go ahead and redefine that.

Suresh Khanna (14:10):
We run intake. We want to be as vested in the outcome for our clients as they are. I want to convert that client, or if it’s a judge or opposing counsel or the courthouse, I want to get them to the right place. We want the outcome to be elegant. And often when it comes to intake, we’re talking about winning clients. I want you to win more clients without spending a penny more on marketing or on tooling or on systems. And a lot of the times it’s really meat and potato stuff that we come in and fix.

Jared Correia (14:44):
So if somebody is reaching out to you, well, maybe not you personally, but to Smith.ai, the company, if they’ve not used virtual receptionist services before and these other intake features, if they have, what kind of questions should they be asking? What should they be looking for?

Suresh Khanna (15:04):
Look, I think it starts from credibility. This is not a nice to have feature. This is like some people will buy a seat on Notion or some tool and maybe people use it, maybe they don’t. We’re the front door to our clients, to the world, and so you can’t trust that to just anybody. I think the right questions to ask would be how many clients do you have? How many calls have you processed? What’s your reputation in the market? There’s lots of ways to go find that from other attorneys or from looking online at G2. I think we all are thinking about AI and where does that go? I think most attorneys are not looking to put AI at the front of this process, like the first phone call, right?

Jared Correia (15:59):
I think that’s right.

Suresh Khanna (16:00):
So can you find a partner that can do both? Yeah.

Jared Correia (16:03):
Is that fair? Do you think they could or should, or is it better to wait it out a little bit and use this hybrid approach?

Suresh Khanna (16:14):
I think it depends on your practice area and sort of the value of the case. If your personal injury attorney, your potential clients are calling from a hospital, they got in a car crash, they don’t want to talk to a robot. They’re calling down a list on Google. They want empathy at the front. It’s not that they might not be open to AI later in the journey, but I don’t think that first touchpoint, most people in that practice here are not looking for AI. They’re not looking to save money, by the way. I think they’re looking to win more cases. Now, if you are –

Jared Correia (16:53):
I think that’s right. Yeah.

Suresh Khanna (16:54):
Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead.

Jared Correia (16:56):
Well, it’s interesting. So Kurt London, personal injury attorney in Utah, I’ll shout him out, friends of the show, former guest. On LinkedIn the other day, he made a post about how his family had to put their dog down and the veterinarian clinic, they made the appointment and they were like, “Hey, great news. Your appointment with Billy is scheduled for two days from now.” And he’s like, “What the fuck?”

Suresh Khanna (17:19):
Yeah, you’re like, “That doesn’t make any sense, right?”

Jared Correia (17:23):
Yeah. Yeah.

Suresh Khanna (17:24):
Now, I think there’s other practice areas too though. Let’s say family law, you’re getting a divorce. Maybe you don’t want to talk to a robot at the beginning of that. Immigration, you can kind of use your judgment, but there’s other things that are… Lemon law, we’re just talking about volume, mass torts, we’re talking about volume and you just need to process volume. I think AI at the front could make sense in other areas of the industry, but not everyone.

Jared Correia (17:54):
I find this to be true with a lot of attorneys and small business owners and business owners in general. They’re like, “Don’t bother me. Just build out the solution for me. I don’t even want to think about it.” But what you’re saying, and I think this is true, is that you have to be somewhat thoughtful about where I deploy automation, where I deploy AI versus where I have a human being doing something. I have to be willing to pay for the human being to do the job as well.

Suresh Khanna (18:23):
Well, I think the first question is what’s your goal? And I think for most people, the goal is to… Well, not everybody, but for many people it is, I want to win quality clients, like qualified clients. And so it’s not how do I figure out how to take cost out of my intake process, let’s say. That’s not the goal here. And so if you’re doing that, then you’ve got to start from first principles. I’ve spent my whole life, you know this, I spent my whole professional life working on funnels, sales funnels, marketing funnels, and I got into legal tech and I’m sort of a relative newbie. It’s been two years, so I’m not at zero, but I’m dangerous on this stuff. And I look around, I was like, “I would’ve gotten fired from every job I’ve ever had if I ran my funnel the way I see attorneys running their intake.” It’s just like, “Are you kidding me?”

Jared Correia (19:19):
Oh my God. Yeah. Okay. So I still want to get to your career, but I’m finding interesting things to pick at when you talk about this stuff. What can lawyers do to improve the way they run their funnels? How bad is it? Is it tear down rebuild or can we make some tweaks?

Suresh Khanna (19:37):
It’s really bad. It’s really bad. I mean, it has nothing to do with AI, Jared. This isn’t about AI. This is just basic stuff. So let’s start from being open twenty four seven. You got to be open. You got to answer the phone twenty four seven. We put out a legal intake report recently as the first ever when we’ve published. Clio has some of this in their most recent. We said, I think let’s call it 25 to 40% of calls come after hours. They’re just as good from 11 years of us processing data across three million plus calls. They’re just as qualified as your weekday calls during business hours, and yet most people don’t answer the phone on those. So that’s part one. You’re like, “Hey, just answer the damn phone. Start with that.” Okay? The second thing is book the meeting. This is the most crazy thing, because I’ve run sales teams forever.

(20:42):
If we have a hot lead on the phone, do not hang up the phone. You’ll be fired from my team if you hang up the phone without booking the next meeting before you… You know what I mean?

Jared Correia (20:54):
Yeah.

Suresh Khanna (20:54):
And if you had to guess across all of our customers, we have 5,000 clients, what percentage of our clients do you think ask us to book the meeting once we qualify the call?

Jared Correia (21:04):
Oh, this is great. You’re interviewing me now. I’m going to say 22%.

Suresh Khanna (21:11):
22% ask us to book?

Jared Correia (21:14):
Yes.

Suresh Khanna (21:15):
Well, you’re really pessimistic about your industry, aren’t you?

Jared Correia (21:20):
I am. You’ve sussed me out. 58? Am I closer?

Suresh Khanna (21:28):
It’s 40% of our clients have us booked.

Jared Correia (21:32):
I wasn’t that far off.

Suresh Khanna (21:33):
You weren’t that far off. And that is wild.

Jared Correia (21:37):
That’s crazy. Yeah.

Suresh Khanna (21:38):
It’s while less than half of our customers have us book. And guess what? When we book, people say, “Yeah, I’ll book.” You just have to ask. And so these are the types of things we’re talking about where it’s just pretty straightforward stuff.

Jared Correia (21:54):
Well, it’s funny. The approach, what do you do otherwise? Okay, I guess we’ll talk later.That’s what I do with my friend, not with a potential business client. It’s nuts.

Suresh Khanna (22:07):
Right. That’s right. Well, a lot of our clients will have us just transfer the call to them. And this is the circular logic. You’re like, “Wait, but you hired us because you were missing calls and your intake team’s busy.” And so when we get a live one and we’re like, “Oh, here we go. Got a good one here.”

Jared Correia (22:25):
It’s on.

Suresh Khanna (22:25):
We transfer it, and then what do you think is going to happen? It’s going to voicemail.

Jared Correia (22:30):
Yeah, live transfer to voicemail. Beautiful.

Suresh Khanna (22:32):
A live transfer to voicemail, which defeated the entire purpose of having us do the job in the first place.

Jared Correia (22:38):
Let’s be thoughtful about this, friends. Okay, so you’re a Smith now. I’m wondering why did you decide to take a job like this to work with lawyers? And did you know about the intake issues beforehand?

Suresh Khanna (22:58):
I’ve worked with lawyers a lot. Yeah. So my background, born and raised in Silicon Valley, I’ve been in technology my whole life. Probably most importantly with regards to the lawyers, I started working with them 2006 to 2012. I was at Google for six years and I led a lot of SMB stuff for Google. My first job, if I could detour for a second –

Jared Correia (23:24):
Please.

Suresh Khanna (23:25):
My first job was digitize every small business in the world. Google had these wild ambitions even back then, right?

Jared Correia (23:30):
That’s crazy. And they were like, did you have a team or were they like, “Hey bro, can you digitize every business in the world?” And they’re like, “Oh, sure. I got time.”

Suresh Khanna (23:39):
So here’s what we came up with. Yeah. I came up with this with my colleagues is we put a link up on Google Maps. Remember, this is pre-street view, pre-local business center. This is the dawn of this stuff. Our job was to get every business to create a login and password to Google Maps, put the pin in the right place on the map, make sure the hours are right, what credit cards do you accept, take a picture of your storefront and upload it. This is the kind of stuff we were trying to do. We were like, “We need a feet on the street. We need the Avon network. We need everybody in the local towns to run around and digitize their town.” So we put a link up on Google Maps. It was like, “Do you want to earn money helping businesses get on Google Maps?” And we got, I don’t remember the number, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people signed up to do the job in two days.

(24:32):
It was wild.

Jared Correia (24:33):
That’s really smart.

Suresh Khanna (24:36):
So I was working on small business stuff there, but then I ran the advertising teams for North America for their SMB business. So we would teach small businesses how to use Google search and YouTube and mobile ads. And that’s where I really got familiar with lawyers and bless their hearts, they’re really good at marketing and aggressive at marketing. It’s interesting. It’s like they’ll spend money on ads, but they will not get the intake part of it right, and they’re very much connected to each other.

Jared Correia (25:10):
I mean, obviously you weren’t necessarily in the legal industry at this time, but I feel like the pandemic was when people were like, “Oh shit, no one’s going to come to my office for a meeting anymore. I have to figure out what my non-analog intake process looks like.” And that’s when lawyers started looking at things like intake software and really heavily looking at reception and that kind of thing. So it’s a good time. You’re entering at a good time, I feel. I think you need to talk to my mom. She’s very angry that she’s on Google Street View right now. She’s like, “What the fuck? They can just take a picture of me? This is insane.” I’m like, “It’s fine.”

Suresh Khanna (25:47):
She did get blurred out. You can see her face?

Jared Correia (25:49):
Yeah. Yeah.

Suresh Khanna (25:51):
Hilarious. Outside her house or where?

Jared Correia (25:53):
Yeah, outside her house on her porch. We just fuck with her all the time. I made my phone screensaver her picture on Google Maps. I’m a terrible person.

Suresh Khanna (26:06):
I still know a person or two there. I can hook that up. Yeah.

Jared Correia (26:10):
She’ll be very happy.

Suresh Khanna (26:11):
If you get me some more softball questions, I’ll help her out.

Jared Correia (26:14):
Oh, they’re almost all softball questions, really. Our bark is worse than our bite. Okay. So let me ask you a little bit about this. So you are on the board right now of a company called Treez, Treez with a Z. That’s

Suresh Khanna (26:30):
Right.

Jared Correia (26:30):
Which is not, by the way, the company that paid Kawhi Leonard a little bit extra money to play for the Clippers. It is not. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because that’s a pretty interesting thing to get involved in.

Suresh Khanna (26:42):
Trees is, it’s a cannabis point of sale. So if you’re familiar with Toast or Square or these point of sale systems you see in restaurants, for instance, Trees is that for cannabis dispensaries. It has more than –

Jared Correia (26:59):
But this is a real issue, right? For cannabis industry in particular? Because they’ve always had trouble getting paid for their shit.

Suresh Khanna (27:07):
It’s usually regulated. It’s hugely regulated. So you need a very specialized system because you have to track the supply chain from farm all the way to retail through the sale. You have to scan IDs when people walk in. There’s limitations to how much you can buy in a given… There’s all kinds of very specific rules. And payments are also sort of complex. So Trees is this end-to-end point of sale and payments company.

Jared Correia (27:32):
So this is not like I walk into CVS and buy a bag of chips. This is a real thing.

Suresh Khanna (27:38):
Yeah.

Jared Correia (27:38):
And you do this stuff kind of on a regular basis. You invest, you advise. What keeps you going doing that? Is it kind of like, oh, this is an interesting problem to solve with this company? I don’t want to jump in on that. How do you pick who to work with on that front?

Suresh Khanna (27:56):
I have this little framework I use in my head at least. One is, am I having fun? So do I like the people and the space and the industry? The second thing is, am I good at this? Can I help this company? And the third is, can I learn and grow from it? And the fourth is obviously, is it financially lucrative? And that’s my frame for… I love working. My wife’s a restaurateur. We’ve been restaurant owners for 18 years in San Francisco. She’s working… If you’re in the restaurant business, you’re always on. And so I just love having my brain engaged. Even if when I’m not working, we’re playing board games, we’re competing at sports. I think work’s the blessing, Jared. I don’t know what we’re going to do when the AI overlords arrive.

Jared Correia (28:45):
I don’t know, man. We’ll be hanging out on the beach reading romance novels together.

Suresh Khanna (28:49):
I guess, but I just love working and doing it with fun people. I laugh all day and I bring my whole self to work and it’s what I look for.

Jared Correia (28:59):
I want to ask you about the restaurant, but first, I’m a big board game guy. I can’t get my kids to play board games. I try. Do you have any –

Suresh Khanna (29:10):
You’re a work parent for me, I think.

Jared Correia (29:12):
Yeah. I think you’re a work parent. Teach me. What recommendations do you have? What should I be suggesting?

Suresh Khanna (29:20):
Maybe don’t feed them if they don’t win or even play.

Jared Correia (29:23):
Oh, that’s a good idea. Okay.

Suresh Khanna (29:26):
We’ll

Jared Correia (29:26):
Work on that.

Suresh Khanna (29:29):
I think this is like… I don’t want to be too personal here. Are they below 10 over 10? You

Jared Correia (29:37):
Personal.

Suresh Khanna (29:38):
How old are they?

Jared Correia (29:39):
My kids are 11 and 14.

Suresh Khanna (29:42):
Yeah. So you started a little late. We started playing poker when they were five.

Jared Correia (29:47):
They used to play. They just don’t anymore. I think it’s like they do their sports stuff. They’re both big into sports.

Suresh Khanna (29:54):
So the sports thing, it’s an era, I think, that eventually ends. You can come back. So if you’ve got the foundation of games, because they’re going to want to replace the competitive stuff with something and you’re like –

Jared Correia (30:07):
Very true.

Suresh Khanna (30:08):
You can kick dad’s ass over and over again is actually pretty enticing once you’re 18, 17. They’re going to want that.

Jared Correia (30:17):
Oh, interesting. Okay. This is good. You’ve given me some hope. Allright, let’s talk about the restaurant. We were at a conference recently. We were chatting. I fucking love Indian food. It is one of my favorite cuisines in the world, but I may eat the Americanized version of Indian food.

Suresh Khanna (30:37):
It’s all right.

Jared Correia (30:38):
But I would like to try the non-Americanized version. So can you tell me how you got into this restaurant, which is fairly popular in the Bay Area, right? You did this with your wife. Talk to me about that.

Suresh Khanna (30:49):
Look, we’ve been doing this for 18 years through… We opened in the 2008 crisis, so we’ve been through every up and down you can imagine. We’re still going. Here’s the vision. I wrote this business plan in grad school. Chipotle was a tiny little chain at the time, and I was like, “Someone’s going to do that for Indian food.” And now this sounds commonplace. There’s Chipotle for almost every ethnicity. At the time, it was a big deal. And so I wrote this business plan, we sat on it for seven years, six years, and then we’re like, “You know what? Fuck it. Let’s not be that couple that talks about something their whole life and never does it. We didn’t know anything about running restaurants.” And we’re like, “Let’s just do it.” My wife was a lawyer from England. She was London School of Economics. That’s funny.

(31:33):
She practiced law. We got married.

Jared Correia (31:34):
She’s like, “Let’s just go for it. Whatever.”

Suresh Khanna (31:36):
Let’s just do my dad who immigrated here at 35 from India, showed up with a turban and a beard and couldn’t get a job in the mid 60s. And then he got back to being a civil engineer, raises me. I go to Stanford and I’m this tech guy and whatever. And then I marry this beautiful girl from London, from London School of Economics. She’s an attorney. And then we’re like, “Hey dad, we’re opening an Indian restaurant.” And he’s like, “What?” He’s like, “Why did we even leave India in the first place? I don’t even know why I moved here. What was the point of it all?” He was deeply disappointed.

Jared Correia (32:12):
Oh, that’s so funny. See, I though he might’ve been thrilled to be like, “Oh, it’s full circle, man. This is amazing.”

Suresh Khanna (32:18):
No. He was like, “What? I thought she was a lawyer.” I was like, “Well, she has a dragon biting a snake on her shoulder. She’s got a tattoo.” I was like, “You don’t really know what she’s actually like.”

Jared Correia (32:28):
Not your average lawyer, I would say, but that’s a good thing. Okay. So you opened this restaurant and then –

Suresh Khanna (32:34):
We opened this restaurant.

Jared Correia (32:36):
It goes swimmingly, right from day one?

Suresh Khanna (32:38):
It was awesome. We opened, our vision was almost puritanical. We were like, “We are not serving anything that we don’t eat at home.” And most of what people in America, probably what you eat when you eat Indian food is wedding food. It’s heavy. It’s like non and butter chicken and it’s delicious, but then you’re like, “Ugh, I don’t feel great after that and maybe I don’t want to eat that for another month.” And you’re like, “We got-”

Jared Correia (33:04):
I feel like my entire body is heavy cream right now, but it was amazing while it was happening.

Suresh Khanna (33:08):
We had two billion people eating Indian food three times a day. But the food you’re seeing is, that’s wedding food. And so we were like, we’re going to launch with no non, no Biryanis, no vindelu, no samosas, none of it, none of it. My wife was like, “We are serving what we eat at home.” So it was much lighter vegetarian forward meat as well. And we opened two lines around the block. We won best restaurant in San Francisco, best new restaurant.

Jared Correia (33:38):
That’s amazing.

Suresh Khanna (33:39):
We won best meal under $15. It was awesome. And then we opened number two a year later and it totally bombed and we were like, “Oof, maybe we don’t know what we’re doing.” And we almost lost everything on the second restaurant.

Jared Correia (33:54):
Oh man. But it’s still going. Still going. So can people order food remotely or is this like I got to be in San… Could they do Goldbelly or is this more like I got to be in San Francisco to try this, your stuff?

Suresh Khanna (34:08):
When you said remotely, I though you meant from three miles away, but you’re from Boston.

Jared Correia (34:13):
Across the country. Yeah.

Suresh Khanna (34:15):
No, we’re not doing that.

Jared Correia (34:18):
Next time I’m on the Bay Area, I’ll try it.

Suresh Khanna (34:22):
Yeah. I’ll take you. We’ll go there together or just come over to the house. That’d

Jared Correia (34:27):
Be amazing.

Suresh Khanna (34:27):
We’ll get you a home cooked meal at the house.

Jared Correia (34:29):
Oh, beautiful. Okay. So this AI stuff, you think is sticking around or you think you’re going to have to change the name of the company to Smith something else? Not a fad?

Suresh Khanna (34:44):
I think the AI thing might be here to stay. I’ve got a feeling. Yeah. Yeah, it’s a real deal. It’s coming. Are you ready for

Jared Correia (34:53):
It?

Suresh Khanna (34:53):
We don’t need podcast hosts soon, Jared. I don’t know. Your days are number two.

Jared Correia (34:58):
This will just be like two AIs talking to each other.

Suresh Khanna (35:00):
That’s right.

Jared Correia (35:02):
I’m scared shitless, frankly. When we were chatting earlier, not pre-show, but previously, I think you’re really good about trying new AI tools. And the last time we were talking, you had tried the Meta AI, which I still haven’t tried. Do you have a favorite tool right now or if it’s the Meta thing? What’s most interesting to you right now on the AI front? Could be non-legal, could be whatever.

Suresh Khanna (35:31):
Yeah, it was Instinct. You’re thinking of Muse.

Jared Correia (35:36):
Muse.

Suresh Khanna (35:37):
I refuse to let Meta do this for me. I’d rather trust 10 people I’ve never heard of that just was founded six months ago than give my information to Meta.

Jared Correia (35:46):
Fucking Zuckerberg, man. Yeah, I’m right there with you.

Suresh Khanna (35:48):
Yeah. I’m not doing it. I’m not doing it.

Jared Correia (35:51):
So many people to protest so little time.

Suresh Khanna (35:57):
It’s called Instinct. I think it’s fascinating. Yeah. I mean, I use Instinct. By the time this comes out, everyone’s going to be like, it’s being like, I use Google Search. It’s really cool. Everyone’s probably used it at this point, but it’s amazing.

Jared Correia (36:13):
What do you do with it? Yeah, go ahead.

Suresh Khanna (36:16):
Yeah. Well, I’ll give you an example. We have to file… First of all, let me explain what it is. It lives in your chat, so iMessage or WhatsApp, and it’s a personal AI for you and it connects to your email and your calendar and it can do things for you. And the medium of moving it to text changes how you think about this thing fundamentally. It’s more like talking to a person, like a real assistant. So I’m like, “Hey, monitor my email. Every time I get a super bill from a doctor or my wife gets a super bill, I want you to go to Cigna and file the claim and try to get us a little bit of a refund back because it’s an out-of-network expense.” That’s an example of a workflow. It just runs permanently.

Jared Correia (37:02):
This is so interesting to me. One of the things about AI that I think is going to happen is happening is you’re going to have people who you wait to make that call in normal life. I got to find 15 minutes to call my insurance provider or whatever. I feel like people are going to be just running these daily tasks on an AI that happens overnight or during business hours, and then you just get a report at the end of the day and it’s like, “Oh, I booked a doctor’s appointment for you. I did this thing for you. I did that thing for you.” That’s a good use of AI, I feel like. I don’t want to be doing that shit myself.

Suresh Khanna (37:34):
I think so. The question is what do you do with the time you get back? Do you squander it or do you do something –

Jared Correia (37:40):
Oh, definitely. I definitely squander it.

Suresh Khanna (37:44):
I’m going to watch more sports personally. Yeah, that’s what I plan.

Jared Correia (37:46):
Oh, hell yeah. Okay. I have one more question for you and then we’ll move into our final segment, which is on your team at Smith.ai, how do you try to make sure the organization is AI forward in the sense that you’ve got your team using AI effectively? Or do you care? You view that as more of a personal decision for your employees? What’s your view on that?

Suresh Khanna (38:12):
No, I very much care. I think any CEO of a software company or non-software company frankly cares. My wife cares about it at her restaurant. So I want our teams to be moving up the value curve. I want them to spend more time with our clients and less time running reports, updating people on things, reading things that they could have summarized. There’s just so much time. When you strip it all away, there’s so much time that is not related to helping our clients be the best version of themselves. That’s the core work. And so that’s mostly why I’m trying to do the AI pilling in organization. It also teaches our people new skills. I want them to go have great careers at Smith & Beyond. And this is the window where I think… I mean, the world is obviously changing so fast. So I have our people learning Claude Code.

(39:15):
Don’t just chat, really connect your tools. And it’s like layers of an onion, people start. And I just love watching people remove another layer, be like, “Oh, that’s what I can do with this.” And then the things they start dreaming up, it actually unlocks your creativity. I always felt hamstrung because I’m not a developer and I’ve had 20 ideas that I really wanted to do over the years. I’m a very creative business thinker, I think, and I could never do it without a lot of friction. I got to hire a developer. I don’t know any developers. How much are they going to charge me? What if it’s a dumb idea? And now I can just go implement ideas to my heart’s content. That’s actually really fun. That’s probably the positive side of this. The negative side is our days are numbered together, but that’s a difference.

Jared Correia (40:07):
The singularity approaches. Shires, this is a lot of fun. We could talk forever, obviously, but I think we’ll move into the next segment in a second. Will you stick around for one final piece of the podcast? Okay. We’ll be right back here, buddy. Welcome to The Counter Program, everybody. It’s a podcast within a podcast. This is a conversational space where we can address usually unrelated topics that I want to explore at a greater depth with my guests. Expect no rhyme and very little reason. Suresh, welcome back. How you doing?

Suresh Khanna (40:46):
I’m getting more and more nervous as this thing spins.

Jared Correia (40:49):
Don’t read the categories.

Suresh Khanna (40:51):
Please don’t stop on big bows.

Jared Correia (40:52):
If you read the categories.

Suresh Khanna (40:53):
Please don’t stop on big bowls.

Jared Correia (40:56):
That’s going to be the best category. We’ll see. Who knows? The wheel of judges. Okay, so you’ve kind of figured out what we’re doing here. We’ve got a recurring segment called the Wheel of Justice that I’ll turn to now. I have my glasses on so I can actually read the titles. This is based on the wheel of drinks at Bukowski Tavern in Boston, where you spin the wheel and buy whatever drink the wheel dictates because the wheel is wise as well as just. So Suresh, we’re literally going to spin a wheel and I’ll ask you questions based on whatever comes up. That’s all

Suresh Khanna (41:26):
We’re

Jared Correia (41:27):
Doing. Have you been to Bukowski in Boston, first of all?

Suresh Khanna (41:31):
No, but there’s a place called Soda Popinski in San Francisco that did the same thing and I’ve spent a few nights there.

Jared Correia (41:38):
Named after the boxer from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.

Suresh Khanna (41:43):
I believe so.

Jared Correia (41:43):
Beautiful. I feel like maybe I should stop the segment because you brought some good trivia into the show, but we’re going to go ahead. Evan, give the wheel a spin. Evan, the bearded Vanna White of the Wheel of Justice segment. Category one, point break, point break as I vamp until I find the question. This was the last one I drafted. This is a good one. It’s not too dangerous. How should law firms look at AI governance?

Suresh Khanna (42:21):
How should law firms look at AI governance? I really though this was about the movie, so apologies. I was like, Kianaris, Keanuris.

Jared Correia (42:30):
Oh, don’t worry. We’re trying to mislead you aggressively.

Suresh Khanna (42:37):
I think they’ve got to think very, very carefully in the sense that this whole sort of business is built on trust and confidentiality. I’ll tell you a story maybe. I was sitting next to the chief legal counsel of a major public company recently, chief legal counsel. He runs the legal department and I was like, “So how are you guys thinking about AI governance and how you and your legal teams…” And he was like, “I have no fucking clue.” He’s like, “I got to tell you, I am out over my skis.”

Jared Correia (43:16):
And I think there’s a lot of fear too, right? Yeah.

Suresh Khanna (43:19):
I don’t think anybody has the answer on this. Nobody. I just don’t know.

Jared Correia (43:26):
Good start. Good story. Stories are appropriate answers here in the wheel of justice section. Let’s spin again. I don’t know how many we’re going to get through. Six, eight, seven. I don’t know. Stepping stone. Stepping stone is our next question. Another law firm question. We talked a little bit about this before in terms of intake, but what do you think the most important thing is that law firm owners miss when it comes to running their business in general? It doesn’t have to be intake.

Suresh Khanna (44:03):
I’m going to stick with intake.

Jared Correia (44:05):
Okay.

Suresh Khanna (44:06):
And I think the number one thing is book the meeting when you have a qualified lead. The conversion rates are just terrible in the industry, terrible. From someone who’s qualified, how many of those people sign up is atrocious. And the single easiest thing you do is just book the next meeting. That’s it.

Jared Correia (44:27):
Can I ask you something? Because I have conversations about law firms on this front all the time. Law firms, a lot of them don’t understand this concept of a qualified lead. What does it mean to have a lead that you want versus the lead that you don’t want, and how do you set up that criteria? Do you have any thoughts on that for law firm owners?

Suresh Khanna (44:51):
Yeah. I think people come to us with what they think is their sort of intake process and their initial qualification guidelines. We’ll adopt those. But I think increasingly we’re like, “Wait, I’m teaching my teams to use their mom and dad voice to be like,” Do not do that. Do not do that. Put that intake process down because they’re one law firm. We’ve got thousands and thousands we’ve worked with, and it’s our ability to… We should help our clients figure out the right… Should I ask five questions or eight questions or 12 questions? What questions? In what order? “We have data on all of that. We should bring that data to the table and actually be very prescriptive.

Jared Correia (45:38):
Yeah, because that’s the thing. I think if you’re going to do that correctly, then you’ve got to get reports out on it and you have to set baselines and goals.

Suresh Khanna (45:44):
And that’s what we’re going to increasingly do. Yeah.

Jared Correia (45:48):
The Wheel of Justice is precariously pushed on big balls twice in a row, but has not landed on it yet. We may never know what that’s even about. Can we get another spin, Evan? I have to tell you, we have had far worse programs than this. Okay. Islands in the Stream. RIP, Dolly Parton. This is one of the more underrated duets there is, I think. Islands in the Stream. The question is, what’s the best thing you’ve watched on streaming in the last year?

Suresh Khanna (46:27):
I think I’d go with Adolescence.

Jared Correia (46:29):
I’ve heard of that. I’ve not seen it. Yeah. Is that Netflix? Is that right?

Suresh Khanna (46:34):
It was Netflix. It’s British, four episodes. And I mean, it’s really dark and heavy.

Jared Correia (46:44):
That’s all right. We like that.

Suresh Khanna (46:45):
It’s shot. Every episode is one take, just like this podcast, one take all the way from front to back. It never shuts off.

Jared Correia (46:53):
People have told me we’re the adolescents of legal podcasts. What is it about? Is it truly about someone going through adolescence?

Suresh Khanna (47:04):
No, it’s about… I don’t want to… Spoilers coming. I’ll try not to spill it too much.

Jared Correia (47:10):
Light spoilers ahead, everyone. Okay, go.

Suresh Khanna (47:12):
Yeah. It’s about a young boy that is accused of killing a classmate, and it’s about the whole male, sort of female dynamic. I’m forgetting the phrase, that whole category of… I don’t really want to go down this path probably on this podcast. It’s a dark topic about –

Jared Correia (47:38):
Let’s encourage people to read the summary and choose if they want to watch it on Netflix on their own.

Suresh Khanna (47:44):
Yeah. How’s

Jared Correia (47:45):
That?

Suresh Khanna (47:45):
It’s really well written and shot is what I’ll say. But it is heavy.

Jared Correia (47:49):
I like a good British show every now and then.

Suresh Khanna (47:53):
Peaky Blinders, the best.

Jared Correia (47:55):
My brother loves Peaky Blinders.

Suresh Khanna (47:58):
Have you seen Peaky Blinders?

Jared Correia (47:59):
I have not watched a single episode, but my brother loves it. Should I watch it?

Suresh Khanna (48:03):
It’s going to make you want to drink whiskey and smoke cigarettes every day.

Jared Correia (48:07):
I mean, sounds amazing. Okay. Let’s spin the wheel. Let’s see what comes up next. It could literally be anything. That’s why we love the Wheel of Justice. The stuff of Legend. Suresh, I would like to know, did you have a favorite stuffed animal as a kid? If so, describe it and tell me what its name was.

Suresh Khanna (48:33):
That’s exactly what I though this question was going to be about.

Jared Correia (48:36):
Right, right. Well, I’ll tell you a little bit of background. My daughter is like, she’s cleaning out our stuffed animal collection, and so I’ve had stuffed animals on the mind of late. And I’ll share mine as well, just so we’re in this together, but go ahead.

Suresh Khanna (48:51):
Can I tell an adjacent story?

Jared Correia (48:52):
Of course.

Suresh Khanna (48:53):
I did not have a stuffed animal. Really? Zero stuffed animals, but I had a favorite poster and it was the Bash Brothers, McGuire and Canseco were up on my wall and it’s sort of like a stuffed animal.

Jared Correia (49:06):
I should worn my Ace hat.

Suresh Khanna (49:09):
I was an Ace fan and then I gave up on the Ace. Yeah.

Jared Correia (49:12):
Well, they gave up on you, sadly. Now they’re in Vegas.

Suresh Khanna (49:15):
That’s what happened first.

Jared Correia (49:21):
Were you still a Jose Consteco fan when the ball was hitting him in the head and bouncing into the stands at Fenway Park?

Suresh Khanna (49:27):
No. And then he wrote Juiced.

Jared Correia (49:29):
When Mar McGuire was like, “I’m going to take all the steroids.”

Suresh Khanna (49:35):
No, it lost a little bit of its luster at that era. And then Juiced, Jose kind of narced on all of his friends and that didn’t feel great.

Jared Correia (49:46):
Not a great look. Hey, we all have youthful transgressions. Evan, if you spin the wheel, I will mention now that I had… My favorite stuffed animal as a child was a stuffed tiger named Daniel that I still sleep with. No, that’s not true. Okay. Treasure Planet is the next question. Oh, this is a good one because you’ve been in a lot of different businesses and advised a lot of different businesses. What is the single best way to maximize profit in the business?

Suresh Khanna (50:17):
Price increase.

Jared Correia (50:17):
Or a best way. Price increase. Oh, I love this one. That’s amazing.

Suresh Khanna (50:21):
Price increase, especially if you have a valuable service, just switching costs can be hard for people. And if you’re driving value, you probably have earned the right to… I mean, it’s just the fastest way to juice profits. Google used to have, back in the day, minimum cost per click. It was like this setting in the back end of AdWords and you’d be like, “I feel like I did not know this way above my pay grade.” But what it felt like was Google was like, “Are we possibly going to miss earnings? Just click the minimum CPC from five cents to six cents for a week and you’ll just make a bunch more money and then you turn it back down after earnings are over.”

Jared Correia (51:04):
I mean, I tell this lawyers never raise their prices or if they do, it’s like every 10 years and then it’s just uncaptured. It’s like money just sitting there and it’s okay to do it. Yeah.

Suresh Khanna (51:17):
Well, aren’t they extra afraid now? I would imagine with AI native firms and people are expecting fees to go down.

Jared Correia (51:26):
Also, cost of living is really high. Inflation continues to be a thing, so it’s a good idea to review it at least on a regular basis. Let’s do maybe two more. Evan, give me a spin here.

Suresh Khanna (51:37):
This is like Russian roulette. I haven’t crapped out yet, but I’m getting nervous here.

Jared Correia (51:42):
You’re doing great.

Suresh Khanna (51:42):
I’m running out of things to say.

Jared Correia (51:44):
I think you’re doing an amazing job. That’s why we’ll only do two more. Don’t worry. What I like about this segment is anything could happen, first of all, but then there are some questions we’re just not going to get to and no one will ever know what they were except for me. AI, AIO is the question. And I want to know, do you think AI is sentient at this point?

Suresh Khanna (52:11):
Not in the models that we’re using. I think it probably is in a lab somewhere.

Jared Correia (52:18):
Great. Thank you for that.

Suresh Khanna (52:22):
Yeah. I mean, we might as well just do all these questions.

Jared Correia (52:24):
How much time do we have?

Suresh Khanna (52:29):
It’s definitely not today.

Jared Correia (52:30):
What I got, like six months?

Suresh Khanna (52:31):
Yeah. I think we’ve got through the end of next year, sometime next year. I mean, that’s what I’m sort of starting to hear is AGI. We’ve heard this before. Obviously there’s been sort of breathless proclamations about this, but I really feel like it’s getting there.

Jared Correia (52:49):
Me too. So a year.

Suresh Khanna (52:51):
And yet at the same time, it struggles with running a phone call. I mean, it’s both progressing at a blistering pace and our primary use case still is coding. And so how do we keep those two realities sort of aligned?

Jared Correia (53:07):
Or taking a picture and being like, “What does this faucet do?” Let’s do one more. Evan, can you give us one final –

Suresh Khanna (53:17):
Still

Jared Correia (53:17):
Alive.

Suresh Khanna (53:18):
Still alive.

Jared Correia (53:18):
Party spin.

Suresh Khanna (53:19):
Don’t I get kicked off the pod when I fail a question? I feel like I…

Jared Correia (53:23):
Ho much money is this question word? This is really a trivial one. Well, this isn’t really a trivia question. We don’t have prizes. This is the low-key version of it. I can throw you some crazy ass trivia

Suresh Khanna (53:33):
Questions.

Jared Correia (53:34):
Next time around. Oh, you know what? I already asked you this in the interview. It came up anyway. Let’s do one more spin, Evan, because we covered that one.

Suresh Khanna (53:43):
Big balls is still out there.

Jared Correia (53:45):
One can only hope. Oh, all right.This is a good one to end on. You don’t… Samo say… We love punts here on the show.

Suresh Khanna (53:58):
I bet this wasn’t even custom written for me.

Jared Correia (54:01):
Oh no, not at all.

Suresh Khanna (54:02):
Yeah. Okay.

Jared Correia (54:03):
I just threw it into AI. I’m like, give me some questions. What is your personal favorite Indian food? You could also do wedding food division versus authentic division.

Suresh Khanna (54:16):
Okay. I’ll give you my eating at home version. It’s Barta, which is smoked eggplant with peas. And it’s got this beautiful… You do it on a grill, ideally a charcoal grill for hours and hours, and then it’s this beautiful vegetarian dish. It’s awesome. At the restaurant, I mean, you’re going to laugh. I honestly love butter chicken. I am Punjabi.

Jared Correia (54:42):
Shit, me too.

Suresh Khanna (54:43):
It’s like saying I love orange chicken at Band Express. It’s my favorite if I was Chinese. It’s so freaking good, Jared. Can we agree on that?

Jared Correia (54:52):
We can definitely agree on that. What a great way to end the podcast. Thank you for coming on. You’re a great sport. I appreciate it.

Suresh Khanna (54:59):
Thank you so much. Anytime.

Jared Correia (55:01):
Thanks for our guest today, Suresh Khanna, the CEO of Smith.ai. To learn more about Suresh, his work, visit smith.ai. That’s smith.ai. Now, because I’ll always be a ’90s kid who watched the O.J. Simpson Bronco Chase while doing pre-calculus homework, that’s true, but his true passion is burning CDs for anyone who would listen. I’m now just doing the modern version of that, which is creating Spotify playlists for every podcast episode that I record where the songs are tangentially related to an episode topic. For this week’s playlist, it’s time to unleash the Thanksgiving playlist, which is very much focused on the American notion of Thanksgiving in which one stuffs oneself full of food as a way to express one’s appreciation for the Lord on high, which works out because of manifest destiny and the fact that I’m pretty fucking hungry right about now. And it’s sponsored by Kasa Restaurant.

(55:55):
Hey, maybe we could actually pull that off, that’s Seresha’s restaurant, but for now it’s more like free advertising. That’s okay. Join us next time when I train my pet lizard to get me a beer.