Legal Talk Network - Law News and Legal Topics

This episode is sponsored by Smith.ai.

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The money you pour into your marketing is meaningless if you don’t answer the phone call fast. Prospects have choices. You got their attention with marketing and networking, and then you don’t answer the phone call promptly … and the caller moves on to the next law firm on their list. In 20 seconds, you blew that marketing spend.

Guest Maddy Martin is GM of legal at Smith.ai, which provides end-to-end intake services for law firms. It’s all about 24/7 customer engagement powered by a combination of human expertise and AI driven tech, allowing small and medium sized law firms to provide customer engagement that rivals even the biggest firms.

Technology changes, but the level of responsiveness clients want, and expect, doesn’t. Calls handled by a combination of trained professions and AI-enabled technology can lead to a higher level of closings, getting clients to hire you and sign the contract. It’s all about building that connection and getting it right the first time.

You’ve spent money and time to convince that potential client to call. Don’t give them a reason to hang up and call someone else. Even if you have an intake professional in house, do you even know if you’re losing calls when someone phones and your staff is busy with someone else? Hear how a hybrid AI solution maximizes onboarding from those leads you’ve worked so hard to attract.

Mentioned in This Episode:

Clio Legal Trends Report

Smith.ai

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It’s Halloween week, so we’re turning off the lights and telling scary stories. But twist! These aren’t about ghosts, they’re about the legal industry in 2026. First up: how the Supreme Court let Alabama bring back a congressional map a federal court found intentionally discriminatory, without offering a word of explanation. Then there’s the Justice Department’s plan to let the Attorney General freeze state bar ethics investigations into DOJ lawyers. And no firm is too elite to get burned: Sullivan & Cromwell had to apologize to a bankruptcy judge for AI hallucinations, and Skadden and Kirkland got hit with a $2 million benchslap for hiding evidence.

We also look at what happens when a law firm starts to unravel. Cadwalader’s merger with Hogan Lovells was supposed to stop the bleeding, but it sent even more partners running for the exits. And Freshfields’ global managing partner lived every lawyer’s nightmare when he accidentally sent the firm’s secret AI spinoff plans to the entire firm, along with a bonus insult to some very important clients. Listen in, then tell us which story scared you most by emailing tips@abovethelaw.com with your pick for the scariest story of the year.

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Federal judges are telling their own children not to answer the door to strangers, and that's the reality bar leaders are now building policy around. Kevin Maxim, national President-Elect of the Federal Bar Association and a commercial litigator in Atlanta, breaks down why judicial security has climbed to the top of the organization's Capitol Hill advocacy alongside judicial vacancies and court funding. He traces how the pandemic hollowed out the informal, in-person relationship-building that once held the profession together, and why rebuilding those connections, especially for newer members, has become part of his leadership philosophy. Maxim also raises a sharper concern facing the profession: what happens to attorney-client privilege once confidential communications start feeding into AI tools, particularly as a generational divide widens between attorneys who treat data protection as sacred and younger practitioners who see information differently. Law firms remain constant targets for phishing and cyberattacks, he says, and the profession's next real test is figuring out how much trust it can extend to the tools it's racing to adopt.

Proving once again that ALPS Insurance puts the "treat" in retreat, they gathered leaders in law from across the country this summer. These sit-down conversations reveal flavors of leadership and legal trends from a variety of perspectives. Cool takes, one scoop at a time, recorded live at the 2026 ALPS Bar Leaders Retreat in Missoula, MT.

Hiring anyone is different from hiring properly. In this episode, tips from HR expert Jeff Levin, the founder, CEO, and president of Levin HR Consulting, a fractional HR consulting partner.

Many law firms don’t put real thought into hiring, they’re “winging it,” Levin says. The key to successful hiring is developing a dependable, repeatable process. Get organized. When you’re running a small firm, your own firm, you are the HR department, and you can’t take that responsibility lightly.

If you’re hiring, sit down and think about it for a while. Give yourself the time to work on it. What do you want? What skills are important, vital even? “If you can come up with what that list is before you begin, that’s your anchor,” Levin says. And how do you write the perfect job posting?

Hiring is a delicate dance, and it can also have consequences, even from asking the wrong or improper questions. And if it’s too much, when do you call in a professional HR consultant to help with the process?

Topics:

Hiring the right people as you build your team and scale your business is too important to be left to chance and whims. You need a reliable, repeatable process.

Build a profile before you start interviewing. What skills, what experience, what capabilities will the right person have? If you don’t make a list, you’re flailing around the dark. Build a “success profile” for each position.

It’s OK to admit something’s not right after you’ve made the hire. Sometimes you have deal with that, whether that means an improvement plan or ultimately parting ways.



Resources:

Microsoft Excel

Clio legal software

ClioCon 2026

ABA Techshow 2027

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In a custody case, a good legal outcome can still fall short of protecting a family. Attorney Lindsay Belmont of Nebraska Legal Group, who has spent over a decade in private practice and gravitates toward the most contentious custody cases, explains why fear of the unknown drives so much conflict between divorcing parents and what judges want to see from them instead. She breaks down how courts handle parental alienation, including a case where she proved everything on paper and the relationship still did not recover, and why she argues that neither mom nor dad should be presumed to deserve a particular custody arrangement. Belmont walks through how a child’s age shapes a parenting schedule, from a 2-2-3 rotation for young children to week on, week off for older kids, and what happens when a teenager refuses to follow a court order, including a judge’s blunt question to a father who wanted his 16-year-old forced to comply. The conversation also covers when courts interview children, why counseling for kids can be ordered over a parent’s objection, and why a CPS finding of “unfounded” or “insufficient evidence” is not the end of the road when abuse is alleged. Belmont closes with a candid look at whether divorce hurts kids and what she most wants parents to remember when the dust settles.

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