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You know, when I launched my probate real estate business as a real estate agent, one of the challenges was getting business from attorneys.
There are a handful that are great, and they've been able to work and get business from.
But there are quite a few that are difficult to work with, and for a lot of reasons.
Also, the problem for customers to work with attorneys, there was a cost involved, and the handoff can be difficult.
And so I was looking for a solution going back three or four years when I first started and I came across a company that basically sought to fill that.
role for customers. And actually, in some regards, was eliminating the attorney, but other guards
not. And that was easy probate. You found my channel. You've seen Byron Batchez. We've interviewed
him a couple times. Great guy, great resource. And since that time, he's gone through a change
where he's relaunched a new company that's a little slightly different, but the same space
focus. I think a great resource for all of us real estate professionals and probate space.
Personally, I prefer to McKesa open today. I got the confirmation on. I can tell you that I'm not
just promoting him in a sense, but I'm also a user and happy user so far.
Byron, thank you for going back to Profect Weekly.
Appreciate being here.
Absolutely.
Welcome.
I'm sure there's some people who are new here may not remember, and I don't know if anybody
goes into your archives and watches previous ones.
I'll give you a quick intro.
So my name is Byron Botris.
My professional career has been that in finance.
I'm a certified financial planner.
Not necessarily a fun fact, but an interesting fact, I guess.
I was the last graduating class at two World Trade Center for Morgan Stanley.
Wow.
I left August 28th, which was a Friday, maybe Saturday, probably when I flew back.
And obviously, two weeks later, 9-11 happened.
I'll never forget.
I literally had my first client the night before say yes to me, signed documents.
Of course, there was paper back then, wrote me a check, well, not me to check to deposit the account.
And the next day, I remember putting my order in.
8 a.m. and thinking, oh, what a fun thing to do, get your first client and then boom.
So yeah, so I've been in the financial world since 2001, became a certified financial planner
2003. If you don't know what that is, that's really, think of that as getting your like MBA PhD,
if you will, in financial planning. And so it deals with a lot of what you expect, you know, how to
invest, but also really it deals with estate planning. And the,
theories of avoiding probate, the theories of why probate is so bad, but like any professional
only deals in theory, you really never know what it's like unless you go through it yourself.
And in 2012, I became an executor and trustee when my wife's grandmother passed away.
And I'll say this, it's probably the hardest thing anybody will ever do.
How many factors you've addressed some of the issues with traditional law?
but really it's family situations. It becomes a full-time job, very emotional. It's just, it's
tough. And that experience really is what led me to do something different. And so we created a,
I think the world's first online probate system where we were able to help people do probate on
their own without an attorney. Eventually morphed to doing limited scope attorney. So we would eventually
have like an attorney be part of the process, but it was limited. And I'm proud to say that we have
helped, I'm sure this number has grown since I left, but we've helped more than 5,000 families save
about $45 million in legal fees. And so that's a monumental thing. I think the world needs more,
I guess the term is paralegal or legal tech kind of situations to increase the accessibility of
of legal services,
that there are always challenges.
I think when I set out to do this,
one of the things I really wanted to do
is help those who needed help.
And very often that is people who have limited resources.
If you have unlimited resources,
who cares how much an attorney cost, right?
Or how long they can take
because it doesn't necessarily affect you as much.
But one of the things I think what was happening
is that for those who, it felt like I was, well, I'll say this way, for a large portion of our group,
we were helping people who can help themselves. By definition, a DIY service is something that
somebody needs to do themselves. And there was a huge contingent of folks that still needed,
wanted, or were required by jurisdiction to have an attorney. And it just felt really bad
turning that kind of business down. I forget the stat before I left it. I would gather we were
turning down 70% of the inquiries that would come for one reason or another, and largely it was
because they needed a full attorney. In some cases are kind of ridiculous if it's litigation.
There's some things that are out of anybody's scope. Even attorneys don't want to take some cases.
And so one of the things I really started thinking about was how can we have,
help those who need an attorney but have no money themselves or limited resources. And even those
who need an attorney, again, I'm using very broad terms because what I'm doing is not specific
to probate. It's really more financing legal services. That's not litigation. Not the purposes of
this stream, but I'll share some of the applications, I think. And so the thing that I came to conclude is,
you know, maybe we're serving the wrong population.
And I don't know if you guys have ever either heard or read the book for
economics. It's now a podcast. They made a movie.
They have an interesting thing about, I forget one of the episodes, it was about
how to improve on-time arrivals for airplanes.
And the idea is, do you focus your time.
on like the least effective airport, however size it may be typically small,
or is your better effort focused on improving, say, Chicago O'Hare?
Because if you can improve marginally Chicago O'Hare, you've improved largely the entire
situation versus, say, imagine Burlington, Vermont where I'm from.
If they had 100% on-time arrival, wouldn't move the needle.
simply because the size of scope that that airport can do.
So I had one of those moments where I was like,
and I'll be honest, I think if you've ever heard me talk before
or you've seen my original pitch of easy probate,
I was very anti-established law.
And I think I came to realization where I think my best effort
is the Chicago or hair is how can we facilitate
the use of the attachment,
attorney. And that can help more people. So now of the companies really focus on servicing the attorney.
So I would argue that our end client is actually the attorney. And I'll explain what we do.
I even have a demo for you to some degree. So just real quick, let me just step up real quick here
and just kind of reset a little bit because you cover a lot. And I know you in depth.
I really want to introduce you to the people watching this live and on replay.
So Byron was founded Easyhyphen Probate.com, and that entity was acquired by Trustin Will.com.
We had them on the show as well.
And there are a large national company that does kind of do-it-yourself trust and wills.
And somehow probate was fit into it, but somehow they fit in Easy Probate without Byron.
I don't know how that works.
It's not really my business.
And so Byron's now come back with another approach that he's,
sharing them using called Scrivener, S-C-R-I-V-N-R, no E at the end. And that's the service he has now.
And so the refocus he's talking about is how can you work with attorneys more effectively
to deliver ultimately better, more cost-effective service to our customers? When I started,
I said to you, it was hard for me to take a lead. If somebody needed an attorney service and get
it to an attorney. And there's some friction in that process. And what Byron's doing is
trying to help eliminate that friction so that attorneys on their own or we as professionals can
bring business to attorneys in a more official way. Okay, that said,
absolutely.
Now, and before I go, just real quick, this is probateweekly.com. We do it every Thursday, 4 p.m.
We're going to do this for about another 45 minutes or so. Replays at episodes. Dotpreprobate
weekly.com. We have a companion Facebook group, Probate Weekly, where if you miss anything,
have questions, great place. If you're watching this live, the purpose is to be interactive,
to raise your hand and put the chat box of question.
I'll do my best to get you involved.
And if you're watching this on a replay,
we do try to go back and answer all the questions.
Either I will, I'll get them to Byron.
So I'd love to have you participate on that.
Okay, there you go.
Awesome.
So I think a little background is always interesting.
So as any, I think your audience is largely realtors.
And as realtors, you deal with attorneys a lot of time,
both in closing and then obviously referrals and or sometimes in probate.
or if you're doing probate deals within probate,
typically an attorney is going to be involved in that process.
And regardless of the situation,
most legal services require some upfront payment, right?
If you're going to hire any attorney,
typically they're going to ask for a retainer.
That's kind of like to make sure you pay.
Over the years, I think I've come to empathize more with the state of the attorney life,
if you will.
And so a retainer is required, and that typically pays for, you know, the upfront costs of, for example, in probate, court fees, newspaper announcement, and potentially fiduciary bomb, and kind of a guarantee that at least something wouldn't pay to them.
And the thing that is striking now, and these are stats really of this year, 56% of U.S. adults don't have
$1,000 at the ready right now.
That doesn't mean necessarily that 56% of the population doesn't have a $1,000, period.
They could have equity in the house.
They could have a 401k, but they just don't have at the ready assets to pay for an unexpected expense.
The traditional retainer model within probate, you're looking at about somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 of startup capital to hire an attorney for probate.
And so all of a sudden, 56% of the population can't do that.
To even get to $5,000, an additional 16% of population is removed.
So almost 70% of U.S. adults don't have $5,000 to pay for unexpected expenses.
And if they do have it, it's literally all the money they have.
And if anybody knows anything about probate, the person who fronts the money gets reimbursed,
but that could take like a year.
So imagine that's all the money you have.
How many of us can go without that funds for that long?
Very few us.
To get to $10,000, only 8% of U.S. adults have right now $10,000 at their ready that they could part with.
And so that's a very, very small percent of the U.S. population.
And death happens to us all.
If you watch Game of Thrones, you know there's a famous saying,
or is it bigger, more gullis or something like that.
Anyways, everybody dies.
We don't live forever.
And this process affects everybody.
And so what we set out to do is to create really the world's first non-litigation legal financing company.
And that's what we do.
There is not every legal facet we could finance.
But what we're looking for is to finance legal situations that an attorney is going to be
involved where there's ascertainable assets that ultimately get distributed. And the most common
examples of those are obviously distribution of death, and then we think divorce. So we have basically
two programs right now where we're looking to finance, divorce, and probate, if you will.
And so what we typically do and what our actual services, and you'll laugh at this because, again,
I mentioned that my end customer really is the attorney. We are a software company that is
hired by the attorney to help that attorney be better.
Attorneys, I've had the pleasure of working with attorneys for many aspects,
and typically they don't use hardly any technology, if at all.
As part of this startup, I had to do a whole bunch of filings with the SEC and all sorts of stuff,
and you wouldn't believe the amount of emails and documents back and forth.
There was never a central place to say, this is the most current version of the document.
No task.
I couldn't tell, you know, what they were working on when things were due.
It was very, very haphazard.
So what we decided to do is like, well, why don't we install software for the attorney?
And so we are agnostic.
So if an attorney comes to us and say, hey, I am currently turning down clients because they can't pay for it, I can help that attorney finance those clients.
When a professional like Bill comes to me and said, hey, we have a case where the client's waiting now 10 months.
for an attorney to do something, our client wants to fire that attorney, hire a new one, but they're
out of money, we can finance that client. And so what we do is we install software at the attorney's
office. And then that attorney then uses our software to automate and speed up that legal action.
But what we specifically do is we finance the payment of the attorney. And I think that's the key here.
No, just hold on one second.
So stop one sec, because you're covering a lot of ground here.
And I think for some of the agents, you know, who are starting in this endeavor,
they're not used to bring cases to attorneys.
What I can tell you, not only work in LA County primarily,
90% of customers after 90 days hate their attorney.
Now, 10% of attorneys are amazing and they do a good job.
The customers are happy.
That's why they're the top 10% attorneys.
but 90% are people do one or two a year at most.
Not only do they not really know what they're doing,
but their per-legals don't really know.
They don't really have the software because they only do one or two a year.
Why would they subscribe to a service that specializing and probate
when they only do one or two a year?
And so I've seen this over and over again in the most recent case Byron talked about
was a client of mine who was frustrated that the attorney, you know,
wasn't taking any action.
And they took the deposit and never actually filed.
the papers, which is amazing, because their intake was efficient enough to get the information.
And it turns out, this attorney obviously knows the law. He was elected a judge. It's not just
the sombozo. He knows law. He just doesn't know the business. And frankly, if he would be open-minded
enough to talk to Byron, he'd say, thank you, Byron. That's my client. Take care of it for me.
But he was not open-minded enough even to take my phone call or hear his customer to look for a solution.
So it's not necessarily that we're looking to take customers from other attorneys.
This is something that attorneys, I've talked to a couple here this week and made a couple of reductions for Byron,
that they should be looking as a way to, instead of paying a paralegal, this should be their probate paralegal.
So when you think about is how you can bring the business to an attorney who might not really be confident,
know what to do to speed up the sales process and the front end in particular our legal work as well as the financing.
Okay, there you go.
Absolutely. And so in this situation, due to the circumstances, two probate cases were needed, which meant the reason the client got so upset is finally when the attorney started to do anything, like, hey, we need more money because we needed another probate case.
So it took them 10 months to even kind of communicate with them what the next steps were. And the first thing they said to them was, we need more money.
And so, again, what we're able to do is we're able to introduce them to an attorney. And what we do is finance that transaction.
On the back end, for the attorney, we install software that automates their process.
And so we don't really do any of the quote-unquote work.
It's still a full-service attorney.
If you know anything about California attorney fees, the statutory fees, we're not lowering the cost in any way.
Sadly, this person is going to have to pay for two statutory fees.
Unlike the previous system I built, we absolutely lowered the cost for probate.
But again, that requires somebody to be able to do it largely on their own.
what we're really facilitating again think of the chicago hair example i think it's like 97% or something
like that of all perfect cases or really all legal action is done by an attorney and rightfully so
and so what we're helping is really facilitate the largest chunk of where the current work is
by both removing one obstacle which is financing besides us there is no legal financing
option outside of litigation. And even then it has to be like a huge class action kind of lawsuit
for something to be financed. So we're really the first to do anything innovative like this.
And I think it's really fascinating to essentially really elevate the attorney. And I think
elevate you the professional because a lot of clients feel uncomfortable doing things on their
own. I did a talk recently where I explained legal services is like doing your own electric work.
I recently installed an EV charger at the house in my second one, and I feel very comfortable,
but most people are nervous to change the plate on just a single 120 volt, let alone
wiring a six-gauge 240-volt 60-amp breaker for your electric car.
Now, I'm a crazy person.
I save maybe $1,500, but you could argue I've risked my house.
most people are not comfortable doing that.
And I think the same goes with legal work.
For those cases that need, want, require an attorney, but have no option.
We wanted to solve that, again, by introducing a financing element to legal services.
I think also, you know, the hard part is when we as real estate agents come across a customer who says,
I need to file a probate, I don't know a probate attorney, who do I go to?
the answer that question is much more difficult you imagine somebody does this all the time
to find the right attorney to find the attorney who's not on vacation who's not too busy
that's a case of the kind that they would take and i think byron you're looking to kind of create
that network of attorneys because if you're putting the money up front you're saying the customer
don't worry about the money we're going to get the intake started even without an attorney assigned
yet and either we're going to put it in one of our network attorneys we'll find one
that again becomes your job.
The customers are, well, you're not going to charge money for that?
Great.
I'll get started because it lowers the friction.
And I think at the end of the day, the attorney ends up getting a case, even as an outside attorney,
where they understand what the case is up front and they know what the issues are,
or it's one of your vetted attorneys who, that's what they're doing or what they know the system.
And it makes that handoff much more possible than it is otherwise.
Absolutely.
And so we, again, are agnostic.
If you have an attorney you love working with, that you're,
you're like, man, it's really slow for them to do stuff. We can step in. So not only can we help the
attorney be more efficient, but most importantly, we can help you and the attorney take on those
cases that they say no to. So what we provide is essentially, there's no technical limit,
but we're really providing about $10,000 of financing. And so if you think about the probate costs,
what does that cover? $5,000 retainer, like we are financing that. We're paying that.
Up to a thousand, well, not up to, typically it's about $1,000 to file the court.
We pay for that.
Somewhere between $500 to $800 for the newspaper announcement, we pay for that.
I remember one case, one time, this is back in the easy probate days, the customer got approved,
but were required to have a bond.
They had terrible credit.
And so for, I think it was a $600, $700,000 bond, normally that's like $300,000, maybe, $500.
It was $7,000 for the bond.
And if I may, she basically, well, I guess I won't curse because this will be on YouTube.
She soiled her pants, pants, if you will.
As the Walmart commercial, she shipped her pants.
It was very convenient.
So the situation was we got her approved, but she couldn't afford the bond.
Which happens, which happens not infrequently.
So we easy probate at the time.
It wasn't my own company.
I was a larger shareholder where I ended up selling.
I was about 65% owner of Reasy Probate, which is unusual for startups.
Anyways, you can make the decision.
I was like, hey, let's finance it.
We didn't charge you any interest and we got the money back once, you know,
obviously the estate is open and all that.
And so that is essentially what we do.
We are trying to solve the problem.
Oh, one more.
If a client also has what we call emergency arrears, the mortgage is three,
four months behind. One more month and bam, foreclosure will happen or start. Guess what we can do.
We can help that client pay directly those arrears and forestall slash eliminate the fear of foreclosure
to give it enough time to get approved, have the assets, sell the house, whatever. So these are
all the problems that we would see every day that unfortunately for various reasons,
The company that acquired easy probate didn't want to do these type of cases.
Again, there are lots of legit reasons not to take on a case.
The cases they were saying no to, hate to say this, it kind of broke my heart because I like to help people.
And I really put pen to paper.
I was like, how can we help those in those situations that are really not a DIY,
really not a limited scope situation?
Think of that O'Hare Airport example.
And I decided to really, I'm not going to say, fix the attorney.
but really improve the process of which attorney work is done,
especially when it's quote unquote, not legal work, i.e. producing standardized forms.
And again, so what we do is we install software at the attorney,
like the attorney uses software now to automate their legal practice.
That could include many, many different applications.
For those in probate, they can answer a simple questionnaire and zip out and form instantly.
mentioned the case, our attorney partner that we end up choosing was on vacation. And so the,
his robot now did the work. And whereas you would typically wait weeks. Well, that was one of the
main things also, an attorney I'm doing some business with with saying, you know, do I know any
paralegals? Because he was, his paralegal was doing estate planning and doing a great job,
wasn't we doing a very good with probate. And I said, I think that that would work well with
Scrivener and I called Byron and really one way to look at it is, you know, the financing is a big part.
The sales process, the friction of the sale, I think the attorneys don't really like those
conversations.
I'm a salesman.
I'm glad to do it.
If I can set the customer up, get him an input in Scrivener, and then the case goes over
the attorney, they couldn't be more happy.
But it's also the paralegal work.
I believe the costs.
So the attorney who's taken this case referred to them is a great.
to lower their costs, their statutory case by case basis?
Again, we don't get involved in any of the money slash attorney-client relationship.
And so whatever the attorney and client agrees to is what we're subject to.
Obviously, there is a fixed cost for our capital.
So we charge that either directly to the customer or the attorney.
I think one of the examples, one of the referrals that you gave, the attorney wants to build
our financing cost into the traditional attorney fees.
And you'd be surprised how much legwork is involved in all that because, as you can imagine,
there's ethics, there's rules on all sorts of stuff.
And obviously, we have counsel doing the research to make sure that that is not considered.
I forget what rule it is, but you can't subside there.
There's a rule against subsidizing attorney fees and administrative costs for a client to
eluber the business.
so we have to make sure we follow those ethics rules.
But that said, in this case, I said to them, well, you know, the fee for the service was about $2,000,
separate from the costs of being financed, the actual service fee.
And the attorney said to me, well, I pay way more than that for a paralegal.
If I don't need the paralegal due to that work, and I believe you're willing to do the filing fees as well.
So basically, you eliminate like 9% of the paralegal work for $2,000 or a couple thousand dollars.
That's a great value for attorney.
Yeah, and so just as this thing is the point, and so when we work with the attorney and they want to bundle that financing cost, our fee for the work that we do can be incorporated in that.
It's again really up to the attorney.
A good way to think about this.
I don't know.
I feel so privileged for saying this.
If you ever drive an electric car, you know that Teslas are so much better because of their charging infrastructure.
I'm not saying Tesla's are the best car.
We have a bottle Y.
and I also have now an electric pickup truck.
Driving electric pickup truck on a non-Tesla charger is horrible, right?
I love the car, but the charging infrastructure is terrible.
I believe this is a lot of the friction between the attorney, the money, and the clients.
What we want to do is we want to build the electric charging infrastructure equivalent for the legal system,
because now of a sudden the end user, the attorney, both need us to do what, to make everything
smoother.
And that's really the vision, if you will, is to help the attorney help the client, as opposed to
what we did before we were just helping directly the client.
Well, as a real estate agent, if you think about building a business, no realtor's need to
think of their business, not as employees on commission, but as a business person.
My job is to generate the business and the relationships and the referrals.
And then I try to delegate out all of the, you know, the other things I can that are administrative.
And most realtors have or have used familiar with transaction coordinators.
Well, that's not a paralegal.
Paralegal usually is an employee in the office.
That's like a 1960s model versus TCs were probably a 1990s-2000 model.
And now we have virtual TCs, a virtual TC companies.
And the attorneys really don't have that.
or I should say that's starting to roll out.
And I think that we as real estate professionals can bring that to our attorney clients.
This is part of the value we want to create to them to say,
hey, there's a model here that might change for you that make you more profitable.
It gets you out of some of the selling.
Let's me be your sales team, not them selling your services.
But if you have customers considering you, here's an easier way in the door than sitting
with you, writing a check, covering all those costs.
There's a way around that.
So to me, it just seems like a reordering or restructuring of the,
workflow and getting the journey out of what they don't really want to do and into more of what
they wanted to do. I see a good question from Christopher. He wanted to contact you individually.
That's another story. And yes, I do. Someone asked if I had the Rivian, yes, it's the most
amazing thing I've ever owned. Really? Oh, yeah. So, you know, it's so stereotypical that
you're a tech guy who sold his company and it goes out by the Ravian. I'm not going to say that,
but I'm usually I drive them to their dead.
I had a Toyota Tacoma in 2008.
Now, that's my son's car now, but a little gift to myself, I suppose.
Good for you.
Well learned.
As a customer of the easy probate process, I'm glad to have been a small part of that process.
So one of the questions he asks is, can advise types of probate enters that you're not
want to define us?
I will say, I only, here I feel like I know by them pretty well.
I go on the website.
We talk a couple times.
He sends me some stuff.
I'm reading some stuff. I'm logging in. I'm participating. And here, yesterday, I'm reaching out to him saying,
hey, I have this other case. It's not a probate as such. In probate court, there are conservatorships,
but this is a simple one. They just want to establish it to sell their real estate. Do you do that?
And the truth is on your drop-down, you ask, what kind of case is it in a consorthip is a fairly simple one,
is one on your list. So I know in addition to probate you do do some conservative ships and
guardianships, I guess, if there's some assets involved, certain types.
What do you not to?
Again, so we don't do anything.
What we do is we facilitate the attorney to do the work, right?
So, for example, one of our attorney partners, what we would do is contact them and be like,
give me a list of things you do and don't do or you want us to help you automate.
So again, we're hired to install software by the client, and we also provide a financing arm
when legal matters are required and assets are verifiable.
Again, easiest example is probate and divorce because once the order is issued,
somebody's getting money, right?
Hence, we can be paid back for the financing capital.
So by definition, the things that we won't finance, which I think is the question here,
what kind of things won't we finance is when obviously there's no money.
Imagine you need probate, but you have no money to get records from the hospital.
I know that's a weird situation, but it happens every once in a while.
Unless we can say there is money, no. Would we do a case where, hey, I'm going to sue the hospital for wrongful death?
Probably we wouldn't be able to finance that. Those are actually the types of cases that an attorney would take on contingency.
And so, and I'm going to use that word contingency separate from financing because essentially at the end of the day, somebody has to convince an attorney to either work for free or work on a contingency, right?
which working for free doesn't usually work.
So what we're doing is we're financing that transaction.
And so as long as there's verifiable assets, we'll finance.
And keep in mind, this is a non-recourse loan,
which is to say, imagine there's a mistress will, as I call it.
It happened to us once at easy probate.
Grandpa died.
Nobody knew he had a girlfriend.
Nobody knew there was a valid will,
naming the girlfriend to inherit everything and be the administrator.
So our client lost the petition.
and in that situation, had we lent our client money to finance the attorney, finance the probate,
da-da-da-da, we would say, hey, our bad.
Not our bad, but like, too bad.
You know, they're not on the hook.
They're only on the hook if the legal action is successful.
Which means to be, just to put some color on that, they didn't lay out the fee to file the petition
and they didn't lay out the money for the advertisements.
an addition to the attorney's fees that may be contingent.
So even there's a savings of a couple thousand,
whereas I had a case where a customer filed and didn't fully disclose properly.
And it turns out they weren't the priority person and they really weren't in there,
as it turned out.
And yet we were able to talk out the other error into taking over the case.
And that way the charges all came back and got paid back.
But difficult situations, you find those, you know, 100 million deals.
The question is how do we make money?
That's essentially our secret sauce, but I will say this.
We've been able to bridge an enormous gap, which is investors want to make money.
And of course, I want to make money.
Don't get me wrong.
I suppose I have a Rivian.
But also I want to help the folks.
And so if you think of the financing market for legal services, again, it's non-existent.
And so we're charging a fixed fee.
It's upfront. It's known to flat fee of $2,000 if the client comes directly to us and say, I want to finance probate.
We then refer it to an attorney. If it comes the other way, we're negotiating with that attorney for our work as a scrivener is what really is paying for that fee or if they want to just add our fee on top of that.
So we're charging a fixed fee for that. And again, you don't have to use the financing.
if somebody has the money and just once a legal referral, that's what we do.
So if you go to our website, Scrivener.com, S-C-R-I-V-N-R-R-D-R-com,
you'll see that what we do is we do legal referrals.
It's right up to legal financing, referrals, and reporting.
And so that's essentially what we're doing.
It's a very, very unique way to finance legal services,
and obviously a big application is run out.
probate. Yeah. So that's what they do. And like I said, I've been involved in this. One of the
questions that gets asked, Matthew asks, is, and I'd like to answer a part of it and then love you to
put some color on it, Byron, is there an application process and work we find it? It's on the website.
And is a nationwide program. The answer is yes. Obviously, he's growing and building it out.
And I think one of the things that I'm trying to help is bring my network in so that, you know,
you can either come in with an attorney if you're in another state or if you bring the case to them,
they're going to have an attorney and then meet that attorney for additional business.
And so the idea here is we want to be part of the partnership of the process.
And sometimes that means giving before you get.
And so I think there are a lot of realtors to say, great, I went all the referrals.
It doesn't really work that way.
You need to put into something in a relationship to get something out of it.
And my purpose of bringing here today is to say, hey, if you have a case,
and you have a lead.
And I get asked us all the time, do you know an attorney in such and such a place?
Well, there are a lot of attorneys there.
Who's the right one?
And Byron's only, his company's only doing this type of work.
So perhaps they can help with that referral process going outbound.
Similarly, you can go to your attorneys who do probate or like to do probate or trust this type of work and say to them,
hey, if the issue is up front money, the friction of that, the friction of the sale process,
or you don't have the pro-legal staff.
I'd love to share with you a solution,
and then they in turn can bring business into that network.
Okay, so Byron, how do you answer the question?
Is it an application process?
Where can they find it?
And then is it nationwide?
Absolutely.
First, it has a nationwide.
I just want to clarify,
right now we're live in four states.
And that's mostly because, again,
we're a financing company.
I feel like I need to be clear about that
in case there's any misunderstanding.
So we are under the regulations
of consumer finance protection laws and all this.
So right now, we're limited to California, New York, Texas, and Florida.
Both that's where we have attorney partners, and also that's where we are now allowed to
finance legal actions that have assets tied or verified assets attached to them.
And so number one, those are the four states.
We will be expanding, frankly, rather rapidly.
It's surprisingly not that hard to,
well, I guess it is hard, but I've, again, have a novel way to have a verified financing arm for legal services.
And so the other question was, is there an application? Yeah. So the way, again, our system works is we're installing software.
So what first would happen is you would fill out an easy kind of like online intake form. You do.
say, hey, this is the situation I have.
We take that out and then we essentially have an internal marketplace of attorneys.
They're like, who's interesting in this case?
Not that they're bidding per se, but think of like Fundera as an example for business loans.
And so we will match that case to a potential attorney in their jurisdiction.
Once that match happens, the attorney is using our software.
our software is the questionnaire.
And so they fill out the questionnaire.
All the information is then they're ready to provide that kind of automation
to make sure the attorney will say yes to the case.
If you can, let me show my screen because I think it might be helpful to give
an example of what that look like.
You should be able to now.
All right.
So let me move this over.
All right.
So let's share screen.
And let's.
Okay, hopefully you see the portal, correct?
Yes.
So once our attorney partner installs our software, they now have a portal.
Because one of the things that clients get upset about is the lack of communication,
the lack of insight to any case.
And I can tell you as somebody who's just recently hired attorneys to do corporate work,
there's, again, I didn't have a portal.
There's nothing there.
So this is a fake example, obviously.
And so once the client has access to the portal, they click,
on the attorney's intake form. The intake form would then take them to fill out all the information
that that attorney wants to know for their case. So again, if it's divorce, if it's whatever,
we're just automating the intake part of for that attorney. Once they fill this out,
our system then generates the forms needed, which you can't do tabs.
forms needed for that attorney to do whatever the action is going to be. More importantly,
the attorney can then assign tasks to the client. They can be like, hey, client, your task,
because sometimes the problem is the client. You know, what's that Taylor Swift's song? It's like,
it's me, I'm the problem. Sometimes that's the client, right? Not the attorney. If we're waiting on
information for the client, boom, it's right there. Everybody knows, for example, other third
parties can be invited into this type of action. So if we're waiting on bill, say, for give us
the information on what the status report is going to be, or the notice of proposed action for
real estate, everybody knows what the holdup is going to be. And so once that's completed,
it's there. The client can then upload documents. So, for example, if I wanted to upload a form
so that the attorney then has what I'm going to send.
I'm just loading up a fake form here.
Oh, actually, it's a real form, but not anything might.
So here we go.
So I'm going to load up a form.
And then once that is uploaded, takes a little bit.
Everybody who is on visibility of this case will see that a form is uploaded,
a task is completed and then what the next thing is going to be.
Okay, so now I as a client just uploaded a form to my attorney.
Normally what happens is you email.
And if you know anything about email, it's usually a hot mess.
People miss it.
But here it's right there.
Literally experienced this today.
We have a case I referred and they got their filing for their court date
and whoever uploaded the form into the portal,
and I get an email,
and it copies with all the client,
the client's email.
Very easy to respond to them right from that spot.
Yeah, so the attorney's assistant,
because we're training the attorney assistant to use the software
as soon as the court in that particular case approved it,
they are the ones who are uploading.
And so you can have messages.
How many times have, like, you know,
people have miscommunicated because, again,
communication is always hard.
Here you have all the message portals in there.
So if you want to look on, oh, hey, when's the hearing date?
It's right there.
You don't have to search through your junk mail, your whatever you're getting for promotions.
Maybe you deleted it by accident.
You can't delete this.
It's right there, always on time.
And, of course, if there's going to be an actual calendar event, like the hearing that you have to attend,
you're now integrating your calendar to it.
So again, we're installing software that facilitates communication between an attorney and a client.
And most importantly, what we're doing is we are financing legal services where there's ascertainable assets.
And obviously, the application here, as an example, is probate.
As a real estate agent, the beauty years, I've tried to train agents.
What I do is, my case, I'm watching all the key milestones and trying to be a step ahead of the attorney.
And it's interesting how usually I'm a step ahead of the attorney, because,
they're not tracking it as aggressively. They're not as aggressive as we already sells people.
But here, anything happens right away. I'm notified. I can easily notify everybody else in the team.
So it's an amazing, amazing opportunity for us to not to do legal work, not to play in the
attorney's game, but to be a partner into their service and give better service to the customer
at the end of the day. Okay, I posted the website, scrivener.com. And so if somebody is interested
in continuing the relationship or referring a customer to you.
Obviously, on the website, you have a spot for a free consult.
Our goal today was to try to also train people in the opportunity.
So is that the best way they have somebody to have the customer do the consult?
How are we onboard professionals, right?
Because, again, we really serve the professional.
My goal is to serve the attorney, serve the realtor, serve the financial advisor,
or serve whoever is the person oftentimes initiating, not the legal action, but the,
let's call it the inquiry of what needs to happen.
And so we actually have, and I'll send you the link you can pass it on.
It's a professional demo.
You can request one.
We show you how it works.
If you have an attorney you like to work with, how we could work with them.
Again, really elevate that.
Again, we'll send that out.
Nancy just asked, I do want to answer, I think it's an important question.
What's the difference between Scrivener, say,
trust-a-will or frankly now of any of the online DIY-style probate services. The main difference is
we do nothing, I want to repeat this, do nothing to lower the cost of the legal service.
We're essentially hired by the attorney to help them facilitate illegal action slash finance it.
What trust and will, what I won't name others, but other online services, they are doing the great work.
opinion because I kind of launched it, the great work of absolutely lowering the cost of probate.
No other place in the world can you do probate for $600.
Actually, they recently raised a price.
The DIY probate is now nine, let's call it, it's under 1,000.
It's like 900,999, something like that.
They have a concierge model for about 2,000, maybe 2,500 that might raise the price.
And they have a limited scope attorney model.
but honestly all of them are in essence a do-it-yourself probate because the limited scope attorney model
once the petition is approved the attorney is out hence limited scope right so you are getting a limited
model that is really really good for people who can follow instructions do things on their own
and don't have i'm going to say any questions and that's you know some segment of the market
it. What we are doing is really facilitating the full service attorney. Anybody who wants,
needs, or is required by law to use a full service attorney, but they can't pay for it themselves,
and we can verify assets that will transfer, we can finance it. And so that's really our
models. We're really financing the transaction, not just the petition, but like I mentioned
before the bond. Mortgage might be late. And we're going to launch actually two more funds
to stop foreclosures, right? Because sometimes it's too late. Maybe there's already a foreclosure
action. What I want to be able to do is essentially buy that loan right out and they just
eliminate the proverbial guillotene over someone's head. If you know me at all, you know that
the reason I'm so passionate about this is I was in their shoes. I know what it's like to not be able to pay the bills because I wrote a check to the attorney to do the probate action. I know what it's like to front money for an estate and then all of a sudden missed the kid's soccer game and all that stuff. Walking in that person's shoes is why I think we're able to really understand their problem and figure out innovative solutions, which in this case is,
financing the attorney to do the full legal service that attorneys provide.
Which I think most customers want.
It's like real estate agents, you know, we as realtors see an occasional for sale by owner
and it scares us.
But the reality is even still with all the technology, 90% of transactions, almost the same
percent are handled by realtors because customers realize they can't do another round.
They have jobs.
They have lives.
And I think most customers don't really want to do another round.
having worked that angle with customers over the last couple years,
it's a challenge and many people aren't qualified.
And I think this is a much more,
there's a bigger piece of the pie for us to help our customers with
and for us as well as we're involved with as well as we attach yourself to do it yourself
and the customer isn't happy, they're happy with us.
If we attach yourselves an attorney and they're happy
and help the attorney make them happy, then we have happy customers.
Okay.
I'm going to send out the link right now for that.
that demo somebody was asking for it. Just give me a second.
Nancy asked for a link for the new website. I'm not sure what you're talking to.
I think she's talking about the demo too. Okay. Okay. Good.
So if you're a realtor and want to know more about how to work with professionals like
attorneys, let me give you this link for our demo. Just give me a second.
Having done it, it was great. And up and running and we refer a couple. Like I said,
And for me, I think the real opportunity for us as real estate agents is to sit with our attorneys
who, not the ones who do a ton of them and they have great paralegal staffs and they have
machine running, but the one who has customers who come to them with probates and they do them,
but they find the administration overwhelming and the friction of customers up front difficult
to deal with.
I think it eliminates the financing, that friction and then also the outsourcing the paralegal in a sense
is phenomenal.
Okay.
look, Byron's always very generous for this time. Other questions, comments. Again, we don't have this on the live stream. So if you're watching recording, I'll circle back, but either answer the question or route it to Byron. If you're live in the Zoom, raise your hand, put the chat box. Love to answer any questions we have. I see Matthew Price is doing something. Otherwise that's a dance or what's going on there, Matthew, but we'll bring you in at the risk of you being crazy. What's going on? I'm always happy to have him on because there's a huge
market for this because a lot of people go to the, they just go to the clerk of court.
They don't even buy, here in North Carolina anyway, they don't even go to an attorney.
They just have to show up in front of the clerk of court in order to open the estates.
But the problem is, is that the clerk of court can't give them any kind of legal advice.
So they're always looking for people like me who's a certified estate specialist or they're
looking for the cheapest attorney that they can find commonly. Those are the people who probably
have never seen an estate before in their life. And this allows them to actually find all of that
and get it for a competitive price across the board. I know when I opened my mother's estate,
it was $6,000 just to open the estate. But the cost kept piling on. This way it gives
them a single source to be able to do everything that they're going to need to do.
Not yet North Carolina, but I'm sure it's one of the states you're working towards.
And I think my goal, I'm looking to build a national platform to expose these things to you guys
and then hopefully we can work together and find a way in to make that work.
But is North Carolina on your list of states you're working towards?
I mean, it's probably in that next group.
We think of population centers, like 10 states equal 50% of the U.S. population.
And so that is by definition the way that we're going to.
charge it. And without divulging too much of the internal legal stuff, we are able to take,
like, a matter at a time before we quote unquote open. So like, if you had a case in North Carolina
that you want an attorney, again, we have a deep roll of decks. We can introduce your client
to that attorney. We can finance that deal. It takes about for us to install the software at the
attorney's office, it takes about a day and a half. It's really that fast. Like we've really
mastered the simplicity of it. Again, we don't interfere in the attorney-client relationship.
We are installing software at their place of business, obviously through the cloud, and we are
financing the legal action, which is a great onboarding for an attorney. Because, again,
they're turning down clients. We can't pay them. And that's sad. And so many other.
It's no reason to do that. That's what started me with this attorney and brought me to you with
this one is why would you turn out clients that money up front?
If they have a million dollar house, there's money there.
Like we can make that work.
It's not, and more poorly, the customer deserves the help.
If they have no money in the community in a million dollar house, that's the client that needs
the help.
It's just a hard.
The one thing I hope to do in the future is essentially launch a nonprofit because there
are people who have the million dollar house but have a disabled family member or some
situation that a family member is going to stay at the house.
and they're not going to sell.
Who's going to help them?
That's a problem I have yet to solve,
but it's a problem we saw quite a bit.
And I hope to be able to do something about that.
And without sounding greedy,
but there's actually money to be made
in helping those situations as well
because the nonprofit would pay for the attorney,
and of course we're in the middle.
And so that's something that we hope to maybe in the near future I'll have.
Fantastic.
Well, my nonprofit fantasy is
estate planning for everybody owns a house.
If you can't afford to do the state plan,
then you need an estate plan.
If you own a house free and clear,
just to me, I see that problem all the time.
Well, look, you've been real generous.
I appreciate we're kind of wrapping up on the hour here.
And so for those of you watch this on recording,
feel free to ask questions.
We'll circle back.
Those you participated today, thank you so much
for your questions and being involved.
Byron, you know, just continued success and good luck
and really appreciate working with myself.
Scrivener.com is,
the company will have the contact info in the description, California, New York, Texas, and Florida
today, but if you have a probate case, you want to talk to them about reach out or go online and
schedule consult. And then if you're local, if you're realtor in those four states today,
introduce your attorneys, show them this recording. Talk to me. I'd be more glad to help you
with that as we build out our national team together. So thank you. Byron for your time. We appreciate it
so much. Absolutely. All right. Everybody, have a great night. And for the rest of you again,
thank you for being on. This is probateweekly.com. We get together every Thursday, 4 p.m. Pacific,
7 p.m. Eastern. We normally live stream, in this case, we're going to record it to Facebook,
LinkedIn, and YouTube. You can watch the replays. Episodes. Dot probateweekly.com has,
we'll have this episode and all the other past episodes. And then our Facebook group,
feel free to continue the conversation there at ProBate Weekly. It's an open group in Facebook.
We have 2,900 members. Help me get over 3,000. Post your probate-related content there.
So we'll get some more views and activity.
Ask questions, look for referrals.
I love to have you guys participate.
If you're in Southern California and a realtor,
tomorrow, Friday, September 1st,
we host our agents helping agents program.
It's free.
We get together and talk about how to increase production,
free breakfast at the Diamond Bar Holiday Inn,
9 o'clock tomorrow, Friday,
and the first of every month.
If you're interested in text or email me,
I'll get you the link to that,
agents helping agents and Diamond Bar tomorrow.
Thank you, everybody.
Have a fantastic week.
Make today your best day ever.
Appreciate your help.
Thanks, Matthew.
Thank you.