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LinkedinJonathan Brickman: It seems crazy not to get data to support your … It’s a very easy and a really cost-effective way to back up whatever you … You have good experience, you’ve got instincts, you’ve got colleagues you can talk to, but if you get 100 people giving you their opinion, you’ve just got that much more insight.
David Craig – Host: I’m attorney David Craig, managing partner and one of the founders of Craig, Kelley & Faultless. For over 35 years, I’ve dedicated my career to helping individuals and families who have been seriously injured or lost loved ones in devastating semi-truck, large truck, and other commercial motor vehicle accidents. When tragedy strikes, life can feel chaotic, overwhelming, and uncertain. Many people don’t even know where to begin or what questions to ask. That’s why I created After The Crash, a podcast designed to empower you with the knowledge and resources you need to navigate these challenging times. In each episode, I sit down with experts, professionals, victims, and others involved in truck wreck cases to give you insight, guidance, and practical advice. Together, we’ll help you understand your rights, protect your family, and move forward. This is After the Crash. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another episode of After the Crash. Today, we have a guest from a company called EmotionTrac, and it’s Jonathan Brickman. Jonathan is the Chief Revenue Officer of that company, and I’m extraordinarily excited. We hear about AI, we hear about all this stuff, and how’s it used, and who’s using it, and what. And I’m going to tell you something, one of the challenges when you have a semi-truck wreck, or a catastrophic, or any type of injury case, you want to know what is the value, or how do I increase the value? How do I get more money for my clients? How do I make sure that they get what they deserve? And that has always been a challenge. And these guys can help us. They can help attorneys do that. So Jonathan, welcome to this episode of After The Crash.
Jonathan Brickman: Thank you. Nice to be here. Thanks, David.
David Craig – Host: So tell us a little bit. Tell us, walk us through what is EmotionTrac?
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah, so EmotionTrac, it’s an interesting platform. It does a little bit more than just test for damages, as you know. But originally, it was just designed as a platform to gather insights from a panel. And believe it or not, it didn’t start out just in the legal space. It was actually designed originally for advertising research, but it presents itself well for any content. So if you’re going to tell the story of a case, you’re going to present—I mean, a lot of lawyers do TV ads—any kind of content, and you want to put that in front of a panel audience, a minimum of 100 people, and you want to gather feedback to know how that story is going to resonate, their response to questions that you have, that’s basically what we do in a nutshell, and with a lot of AI built in there to capture the emotional response of a panel because people make decisions based on emotions.
David Craig – Host: Well, and I think as an attorney, I mean, one of the challenges always has been is, how do I develop my case? What parts of my case is helpful and what parts of my case are not helpful? And a lot of times we go by our instincts, but our instincts aren’t always right. And so what I love about it is that when I’m working with a client on a serious injury, I start working on developing that story from the day that I’m hired. And you guys present a unique way for us to test stuff early on. And I will let the audience know that I have used your company and I have been extraordinarily impressed with it. And I know you guys are rolling out some new stuff we’ll talk about, but it’s important for a lawyer to start from the very beginning and start developing that story and seeing what 100 random people, what they did. And then you can tweak your story, you can tweak your discovery, you can tweak every aspect of your depositions. You can tweak everything based upon knowledge of what folks resonate… What facts do they resonate with?
Jonathan Brickman: Absolutely. Yeah. We’re now saying that we basically cover the whole lifecycle, from intake to verdict with our products now. But yeah, early on is definitely when you want to get started with it, see directionally where the case is going to go.
David Craig – Host: Yeah. And I’m a big advocate and I use traditional focus groups. I use trial consultants, but there’s a time and place for all of that. And I don’t think you eliminate the need for those things if a case gets ready to go to trial, but it certainly can provide some stuff early on that can help us get our case ready. Would you agree with that?
Jonathan Brickman: Absolutely. These things are not mutually exclusive. It’s not and/or. I mean, you can use both. They complement each other because we’re collecting a different data layer that you’re not going to get with a traditional focus group. And many times, people will use us first just to get some signals from a panel that they will then use in a more traditional mock trial or a focus group. So you’re right.
David Craig – Host: And I love it because you get to see it. It’s like in real time and you get to watch and then the report and the information that I get back shows the reaction of the people. And you can watch it, you can watch what tracks, what messaging is working, what parts of the story they like, what parts of the story don’t they like? And it is just, I mean, for you folks who haven’t seen it, for you lawyers who happen to be listening, it is fascinating. It is truly eye-opening, I think, to watch what parts of the story resonate and what parts don’t.
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah. Now some people, I know one of your colleagues is John Romano. He talks about Harvey Moore as an example. They used to use the old dial testing. You turn a dial. So this is the modern day version of dial testing, but you’re not relying on somebody to turn something. It just happens authentically. We’re applying a science called facial action coding, and it picks up the micro expressions of a person when they’re watching something. So you can’t fake it. It just happens.
David Craig – Host: Yeah. So tell us a little bit how it works. I mean, so what does the lawyers do? How does it work and what do they get back?
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah. I mean, simply put, I mean, the lawyer just has to tell the story of the case. So what does that mean? It’s more like a mini opening. The lawyer is going to focus on the important issues of the case, the things that they’re not sure about that are tricky, sticky issues that they want to get feedback on. So what does that mean? They go through an intake process that we have. We learn everything about the case, what the case argument is, what the opposition arguments are, any of the issues, preexisting conditions, maybe someone had substance abuse, maybe there was an existing injury that people are debating over the cause or what caused the additional injury. And then you would send us over any charts, demonstratives, life care plans, deposition clips, whatever you have that’s going to help tell the story. Our team takes all of that and we create like a trailer of the case. It’s this beautiful, curated presentation. Typically, the lawyer’s narrating the case and we’re folding in all these images and demonstratives to help tell that story better. That’s about a five to 10 minute presentation, typically. That’s the product that goes out to the panel. And then you pick the panel. So if you’re in St. Louis or somewhere in the Midwest and I want to have a panel from that area, geographic area, then I can select that as a criteria. Maybe I say I want people that are conservative or ones that were ex-military people. You got a host of metadata that you can select from to really customize what the panel is, depending on the case. The default is just a general audience, which many people will use, but you might want to go with a curated panel. So we go through that process. And a lot of people ask, “Well, how do you get the panel?” So we got smart and we integrated with a panel marketplace. So when the lawyer sets the criteria in our system, it dynamically goes and matches people to the criteria. So anyone that matches the criteria, they get invited into the study. And as soon as we hit your quota, let’s say you only want 100 panelists, we hit the quota, the test starts. They watch your presentation. That’s basically the mechanics of it.
David Craig – Host: And the nice thing about it is that these people do it from their own home or wherever their computer is.
Jonathan Brickman: Yes.
David Craig – Host: The lawyers don’t have to travel. You don’t have to have a trial consultant involved. You can, certainly, but you don’t have to. And it all is pretty seamless.
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah. And to that point, I’m glad you brought that up because unlike a traditional focus group, unfortunately, is laden with bias because you got people sitting together in a group or you have a small number of people. Because everybody’s watching your presentation independently, there is no group bias and they’re all doing it on their own time. And as soon as we collect all of the 100 responses, we aggregate that in the software, and that’s when we present it graphically, so you can see how people responded.
David Craig – Host: I think one of the biggest challenges for lawyers is you’ve got to consolidate it down to what’s really important because you don’t have all day, you don’t have hours to get to this. It’s short. And I think that’s a helpful tool because it helps you focus on picking out the meat of the case, what is significant. And sometimes people don’t do that until it’s towards the end of the case. And really, and I tell, I speak to other lawyers and young lawyers as well. And one of the things is that law school does a great job teaching you what’s relevant, but not everything relevant is persuasive. And so if you put in everything that’s relevant to a jury at trial, you may lose because they get lost in all the information. Whereas if you pick out the persuasive part and you give it to them, you may get a completely different result. Your process makes us focus on that in the very beginning.
Jonathan Brickman: Right, that’s right. In fact, many lawyers have said just that. It forces them to really tighten up their argument and really boil it down to the things that really matter because the things that matter are the things that are going to move somebody, and people make decisions based on that emotional engagement. So we’re helping you figure out what those things are so you can use them to your advantage.
David Craig – Host: So tell us about it. I mean, I think the people would be fascinated by the facial recognition part. I know I was. I think people think of that; Is that technology there? Can we judge that? And we know and we’re trained, when we learn to become trial lawyers, to watch people’s expressions, but it’s impossible. But when you’re trying to look at, depends on what state you’re in, six people, 12 people, seven people. I mean, to watch all of them at the same time, you may be talking to this one and the one down here to your left is reacting and you’re missing it. So I love this, is that it’s watching every person in this audience, their face, right?
Jonathan Brickman: Right. You might bring a trial consultant into the courtroom with you to try to pick that up for you. We do. The human eye cannot pick up micro expressions. It’s just impossible. Some people say they can, but we use an algorithm and software to do that. And this is very much a dress rehearsal where you’re testing your argument before you go into the courtroom, before you go to mediation. So you’re getting lots of feedback so you know the best way to present your argument. So that’s the beauty of it. And so when you think about it like that, you want to be yourself the way you would present your case if you were going live, because you want to get real feedback. How do people respond when I talk to them about my client that had this fabulous life and then it was taken away from them? How are people going to respond when they see the accident or the images of the injury? How are they going to respond when the defense makes their argument that it was partially their fault? I mean, you’re going to be able to get all that feedback so you’re going to know how to present your case and even the order of it, like what things should I present first or last? So we’re giving you the ability to collect all that data so you’re smarter when you’re in battle, as I like to say.
David Craig – Host: But the software and the algorithm and everything you’re using, it’s based upon these folks having a camera on their computer that’s facing them, correct?
Jonathan Brickman: That’s right. Yeah. We use the front-facing camera. It doesn’t have to be a mobile device. It could be an iPad. It could be a webcam on their desktop, but yeah, the front facing camera, regardless of the device, is picking up their micro expressions. And we’re using a science that we’re just leveraging for this workflow, but it’s translating the facial coding or the micro expressions into the corresponding emotion. That’s how it works without going too deep into the science. But what I can tell you about is they’ve been studying this stuff since Charles Darwin. It’s gone way back. There are like eight emotions that are universal. Anywhere in the world, people are going to respond the same way emotionally to it.
David Craig – Host: What feedback are you getting from lawyers?
Jonathan Brickman: On using us?
David Craig – Host: Yeah.
Jonathan Brickman: Oh, it’s incredibly helpful. It just makes, because as you know, if you’ve done a traditional mock trial or focus group, the logistics are burdensome, right? You’ve got to recruit people, you got to get them in a room, you got to feed them. You can’t really control what those people look like very easily because that takes a lot of work. With us, we make that process super easy. Everything is curated, on demand. The lawyer doesn’t have to do very much except tell the story of the case. And as you know, you guys can do it in your sleep because you’re living with this stuff. So it’s not a heavy lift for the lawyer. So logistically they love it. It just makes their life a lot easier, which means they can use it a lot more. Instead of it being a burden, it’s an easy tool in the toolbox that you can use for cases that … You might not use it for a $25,000 fender bender, but anything that has value that you’re unsure about the liability or damages, it’s a very cost-effective, easy way to get feedback.
David Craig – Host: And it’s relatively quick too. How long does it take from beginning to end?
Jonathan Brickman: Super quick. Once we have everything from the attorney and we’ve created their presentation, when we deploy it, results come back typically in less than a day. If it’s a general audience, we might get it back in hours. So it’s super, super fast.
David Craig – Host: That’s great.
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah.
David Craig – Host: That’s one of the things I love about it, is that I can get something, if I’m thinking about a concept and I want to test it, I can test it really quickly with you guys. And I’ll give you an example of a case, for the listeners, that I used you guys. And so we had a case where a pickup truck went through a building, and it was an ice cream store. And it ran through this ice cream store, and it severely injured 10 people, one of whom lost her leg. It was a brutal, it was a horrific thing. And it was like an explosion. People didn’t know what happened. It was just an explosion that was captured by security video. And so clearly the guy who drives the pickup truck shouldn’t drive through the wall. And so that part was easy, but it was limited insurance. It wasn’t going to do anybody any good. It was not going to make a difference in their lives. So you start looking and say, “Well, what’s next?” And so we do discovery and we find out, well, there’s been prior instances where trucks or cars have hit the building. There’s two other ones. And so maybe that would make the landowner responsible. But then you think, what about the ice cream shop? I mean, the ice cream shop’s there. It’s a different owner. They didn’t know about it. How much responsibility would they have, if any? And so what it does early on, you can take your story and tell it to your company, and it helps you shape that story because your goal is to move responsibility away from the pickup truck driver to the people that own the strip mall, and to the ice cream store. That’s the best way for my clients to be compensated. And quite frankly, they, in my opinion, were at fault. They should have put bollards out or something to stop it. But just because I believe that doesn’t mean that average everyday person on the street is, because they’re going to focus on that pickup truck driver. Why in the world did he drive through? And I used EmotionTrac to help me determine what parts of the story resonated with people to help shift that responsibility over to the other people. And that’s a perfect example, I think, for people out there listening, lawyers, is that when you’ve got multiple parties and you need to shift the responsibility to some of the other folks and you need to know what, and you believe they should be responsible, how do you tell the story in such a way that that part of the story is what resonates?
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah, that’s an interesting example. And in fact, we created a question about liability to assign fault allocation specifically to address that. So it has to add up to 100%. We used to ask it more as an open-ended question. And then we’ve recently developed a way to just capture. So if you have three parties, it has to add up to 100%. But that’s a good example that a lot of people use this for. And the point you’re making is very true, that we have this conversation all the time, is that you tend to drink your own Kool-Aid, you’re in an echo chamber, and an average person who’s sitting in the box sees it totally differently. And you want to test your argument, see how they view it, because they might pick up on something you’ve totally missed, which is going to be super valuable for you.
David Craig – Host: Yeah. And I’ll give you another example that I’ve used, and it was before EmotionTrac came along, so I had to do it the more traditional way. But I have, like in a semi case, someone was killed in the state of Iowa, and the person didn’t have a seatbelt on, and it was a truck, it was a semi, and it was raining, and the car that my client was in was going over the speed limit. Not much, like five miles over the speed limit, and they had a dog that was unrestrained on their lap. Okay. So now you have to look at Iowa law and you say, okay, you’re supposed to have your seatbelt on. And this dog is on this person’s lap, but the truck pulls right out in front of the car, but it is raining heavily. And so there were three places that I could file that lawsuit. One was in Georgia. One was where the county, it was a small county in Iowa where it happened, and another one was in the headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa. Well, what I want to know in the very beginning is where should I go? Too many lawyers just say, “Okay, let’s go.” No. There’s a difference in everyone. The way people think, the people react, and I’m here in Indiana, in the Midwest. The way I think about it is different than those three places. So the best way to do it was what we did, was focus grouped each one of those three locations. And what I found out was shocking. I mean, I’ve been practicing for 40 years, and I was shocked, is that the people in Georgia really had a problem with them going over the speed limit in the heavy rain with a dog on their lap. It was like, and now being around, I go to Georgia or Atlanta real frequently and traffic is slow because of the traffic, all the volume. So they looked at it as this was a big deal that this person was going that fast. In Iowa, it was not a big deal. They could have cared less that the car was going five miles over the speed limit, but then the dog was a factor in one place and it wasn’t in another. And so if you’re a good trial lawyer, if you want to maximize the value of your case, how in the world should, I mean, you can’t ignore that people are different. And the great thing about your company, which wasn’t in existence then, which would made my job a lot easier than doing three focus groups in three different locations would’ve been, you could have picked that area and let’s do Atlanta, let’s do Iowa, right?
Jonathan Brickman: Absolutely. In fact, in a single focus group, you could create different groups. Let’s say you wanted 150 panelists, you could say, give me 50 from Iowa, 50 from Atlanta and 50 from Nebraska, whatever state. And then you could compare the results across those three groups, to your point, yes. And it’s very easy to do it. You don’t have to go to those venues, you can just do it from your desktop. We make it super easy.
David Craig – Host: Yeah. And I think that’s the beauty of it. And again, I don’t know that it has to be perfect. It has to give me something to go off of. It has to give me more than my gut instinct, and any information I gain is valuable. And then I take that information and then we do other things with it. And I think that’s where the beauty comes is that I think, from at least my perspective, it provides us with some guidance on what parts of the story. I was shocked. For me, and a dog in my, I’m here in Indiana, we have dogs in our car. It’s not a big deal, but in some places of the country, it is a big deal. Having a seatbelt on, no big deal. Some places it is. And so if your ego’s so big that you start thinking, I know the answer to all those questions, then I think probably you’re vulnerable. And if you say, no, let’s gain information by using EmotionTrac, what a great tool.
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah. I mean, again, not being a lawyer, it seems crazy not to get data to support your … It’s a very easy and a really cost-effective way to back up whatever you … You have good experience, you’ve got instincts, you’ve got colleagues you can talk to, but if you get 100 people giving you their opinion, you’ve just got that much more insight that you wouldn’t have.
David Craig – Host: I liked it so well that our firm, I manage the firm and we were redoing our new website. So then I used it for our website. I had two or three different options that I wanted to use for my homepage. And inside, we were having a debate as to which one was the best and we couldn’t come to an agreement. And I said, “Well, you know what? We’re going to test it out on EmotionTrac and see what people think.”
Jonathan Brickman: I love it.
David Craig – Host: And it gave us an answer.
Jonathan Brickman: That’s great. I love to hear that. TV ads are great as well, if you want to get feedback on that. I don’t know, or billboards. We’ve done all of that.
David Craig – Host: Yeah. Well, it helps you revise and strengthen your message no matter what your message, whether it’s a focus group for a trial or whether it’s for your marketing, I think it’s fantastic. And I started, again, 40 years ago, and if you would’ve told me that we would be doing this, I would’ve bet a lot of money against it. Thank God nobody wanted to bet me then. But at the same time, last year, 2025, I actually hired a computer programmer away from a huge company internally to help me design and develop software and implement AI. If you would’ve asked me, would I be adding, a personal injury law firm, a computer programmer and paying the kind of money that you’d pay a lawyer type money, I would’ve said no. And in fact, it is, in my opinion, with the future of where we’re going is so much more with AI, so much more with technology, so much more with using companies like yours. I think that’s the future of our practice.
Jonathan Brickman: I agree. I mean, you just get a lot of operating leverage from these tools. It’s just going to make you move faster, be more efficient, handle more cases, hopefully settle at higher values, so why not make that investment? I’m curious, what other AI tools are you using?
David Craig – Host: We use them for medical records. We use them for summarizing, looking for things, looking, putting stuff in. We have a contained site, so we don’t share it out with the public, but we’re looking at, okay, how does this help us? What kind of stuff does it, what inconsistencies are there? Do they ever mention drugs? Whatever we’re looking for. We’re doing AI research, although it’s very limited. I mean, how we utilize it, we don’t use it in briefs, but we use it for leads. Our software engineer’s actually, the first thing he did was I hired him to follow all my employees around and spend weeks learning how my information flowed through my office. Rather than just getting a cookie cutter case management, I want, here’s how I run things. May not be better or worse, but it is the way we do it. How do you make it better? I don’t want to replace people, but I want to make them more efficient. And then on top of that, I do semi wrecks and I wanted to track every semi wreck in the state of Indiana and throughout the country. And so he developed a software that’s patent pending to help me do that. And so that provides me with a lot of information that no one else has. And so anything, so we’re all-in, where we look at it and say, well, something we haven’t come up with, maybe we’ll use AI to figure out what it is. It’ll tell me, and then we’ll try to figure out how to implement it. So we’re using it for discovery, for answers, we put it through there. So we’re using it a lot more often. But the more exciting thing is that I’ve got lawyers in my office that are, my son, who has a master’s degree in finance and management and operations. He is also a lawyer and he’s one of my partners here. And so he’s on the committee for the AI and saying, “Where do we go? How do we implement things? Where do we go?” And then we have this computer programmer and really the two of them educate us on what’s out there. You don’t have to reinvent something that’s already there, that’s really good and effective, but there are maybe some things that we don’t have that we can develop.
Jonathan Brickman: That’s terrific. I’m glad to see you being super progressive with the thinking. I’ve talked to a lot of firms and a lot are not doing that, I think to their detriment.
David Craig – Host: I agree with you. I mean, I have a business degree, undergrad, and it makes me a little more interested, I think, in some of those things, but it’s fascinating. It really is. I mean, just the software that we came up with … So I’m sitting around having a drink and I come up, it sure would be nice to track semi wrecks, know what’s going on, what are causing them, what roads are dangerous, what roads aren’t dangerous, give a lot of different information that I don’t have. And the government, the federal government puts it out two, three years late. And I’m like, man, seems like I should be able to get that quicker. And then to have a software engineer design it and make it so that I can have that information immediately or relatively quickly, in days, it’s just eye-opening. And it’s like it’s there. There’s so much stuff that we haven’t even come up with yet, but I think that looking at things like your company, I look at that and say, “I would’ve never thought that was even possible. Now I know it is.” What else is not possible that I think is not possible, that is? And let’s go and let’s lead the pack. I have 10 lawyers licensed throughout the Midwest, and we do truck cases all throughout that Midwest. And so how can AI, how can we do a better job for our clients? How are we more efficient and how can we provide a higher quality service?
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah. So with AI, now that you’re leveraging it, and I picked up on your comment that we want to make people more efficient, we don’t want to replace them. What is your mission or vision to leverage that?
David Craig – Host: Yeah. With AI it is that, I think, when I first started law, a lawyer, you hired paralegals that knew how to be paralegals. I’m hiring social workers now. Why? Because they listen. They know how to listen and care and learn. A paralegal can still … So what I need from a paralegal will be different going forward. I need people who talk, listen, who strategize, who can add value to a case, not push papers. And the more efficient we can become with AI and with other technology, the more we can do really the fun stuff. And so when I came back and when I had my meeting with my staff, they’re like, “What’s this? Well, why are we hiring a computer programmer and why are you going to replace me?” And I’m like, “Most of you,” I mean, all the attorneys were law clerks. “I mean, most of you have been around me 20, 30 years. Have I ever done anything that’s … You can trust me. This is the best thing in the world. It’s going to be great. You’re going to be able to do the things you like to do and you don’t have to do the crap you don’t like doing. Whether it’s a request in medical records, summarizing medical records, summarizing discovery, reviewing discovery, all this stuff you don’t like doing, we’ll be able to do for you.” And people have then jumped on, and I’m like, “If you want to be on the committee that does the AI, have at it. You can be on there. It’s open.”
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah. No, it’s really true. I mean, I think it unlocks a lot of time to do other, as you’re saying, things that are more interesting. If I have to sit here, I did it this morning. I had to draft a letter and I can just enter my thoughts. Instead of sitting there struggling over what to put on a piece of paper, it can come up with something that maybe is close to being finished I can iterate on. I’ve just saved myself 30 minutes that I can be doing something else on that adds more value. So I think you’re right about that.
David Craig – Host: Yeah. I mean, I think even an outline for a deposition, I’ve done how many? And so they have them in the system and so they can just kick it out and it’ll mix them up. They have an AI David. So when I respond to social media, so my comments on one of my posts, AI will tell them what I would normally say. And so they can pull my answer without talking to me or asking me and boom, there’s my answer. So just think about how much time I save in not having to respond, by having an AI David who can answer that stuff.
Jonathan Brickman: So I mean, does this translate, do you think, to you handling more cases for the firm?
David Craig – Host: I think it does. I think you handle more cases, but I also think you do a better job. But more importantly, I think you have more fun. I think you get to do the things you love to do. Why you went to law school wasn’t to sit there and spend hours drafting letters. I have a pre-lit department. We utilize it in pre-lit. I mean, I’m not real thrilled with some of the products out there, quite honestly, but yet they’re getting better. And so then the question is, what can you do and tweak it? But you definitely are doing more things, better things, more fun things, more satisfying things. I mean, my goal is to make a positive difference in the lives of others, and this enables you to do that, I think.
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah. So have you heard of the expression vibe coding?
David Craig – Host: No.
Jonathan Brickman: So vibe coding is literally a text to code method now, where you don’t have to be a computer programmer. You can go on one of these platforms and you can literally talk to and tell what you want to create for you. It will write the code for you and you can create something.
David Craig – Host: Isn’t that amazing?
Jonathan Brickman: So we just did that and it’s something that you’re going to have access to here soon. We created a product called SurveyJuror, which again, now is going to handle, like in your pre-lit group, very early on in a case, maybe at intake, when you’re trying to figure out which cases do I want to focus on or not focus on, you can very quickly, it’s fully self-service. You can input the case argument, the opposition arguments. You can test for damages. You can test for liability. Pretty soon, we’re going to give you a way to upload either a client video or an expert witness and test for credibility. Fully self-serve now. You’re not going to be able to dial it in like you can with our regular products, but it’ll go to a general audience based on the US census. It’s going to be a text-based presentation. So there’ll be some limitations to it, but just for a quick read from 100 people to test the value of your case or get a read on liability, it’s going to be a very powerful way to do that and even less expensive than what you’ve been using.
David Craig – Host: And will it be a quick turnaround as well?
Jonathan Brickman: Faster. It’ll be within hours.
David Craig – Host: Really?
Jonathan Brickman: One or two hours. It’s called surveyjuror.com.
David Craig – Host: Surveyjuror.com.
Jonathan Brickman: Just like it sounds, one word. So that’s new.
David Craig – Host: And I know I’ll be testing it. I’ve got an appointment already scheduled to test it, so I’m looking forward to it. And is it already rolled out?
Jonathan Brickman: It’s already rolled out. People are using it. We just got this kicked off. So we’ve got the two products out now, the one for damages and the one for liability, and we’ll be rolling out the next version of it for testing credibility. So, real interesting. I’ve even talked to criminal defense attorneys that want to use it for testing for if a client’s guilty or not guilty, what a panel thinks.
David Craig – Host: I was curious, so are personal injury lawyers and criminal lawyers, are they the most common people they use your stuff?
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah, that’s good question. So the demand has definitely been plaintiff civil litigation, personal injury, medical malpractice, just civil rights stuff. Little bit of demand on defense, just same coin, the other side of the coin. And we’ve done some work with criminal defense as well, but most of it’s with guys like you.
David Craig – Host: Yeah. Well, John Romano’s the one that told me about you guys, and I think I saw you down in Miami, I can’t remember. I saw a booth somewhere, in one of the-
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah, we were there. We were in Miami.
David Craig – Host: Okay, one of the conferences that I was at. And so no, and I think it’s been fantastic. So anything else that you guys are working on or anything else you want to talk about as far as EmotionTrac?
Jonathan Brickman: We’re always working on stuff. We’re listening to our clients, so we continue to iterate and make it better. I mean, again, our goal is to eliminate as much of the, just like you’re doing with AI, we want to make this as light a lift as possible for the attorney. So we’re trying to minimize the amount of work that you have to do, so you can get feedback on your cases. So, that SurveyJuror is going to be that next step in the evolution. We’re creating a better reporting, more meaningful insights in the platform, again, so you get more value from it, so you know exactly how to present your case. That’s it for now, but just look for just better versions of what we’re doing in the near term.
David Craig – Host: Well, Jonathan, and how’d you get into this area, out of curiosity? Because I looked up your background a little bit, and how did you get over here in this area?
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah. If you looked at my LinkedIn profile, you can see it’s a very crooked path. I mean, I originally started out as an engineer and went back to business school. After a few corporate type jobs, I was never really cut out for the corporate world. I started doing startups with a college friend of mine. The first one we did, we built a product that was sold to Wall Street professionals so they could figure out how to sell their product to money managers, et cetera. That went through a start to finish exit, still exists today. It’s now owned by Standard & Poor’s, so it’s a big global company. Then we did it again with another product that’s now owned by another public company called ZoomInfo. So I’ve done a series of startups in all kinds of different industries. And then Aaron, who’s the founder of EmotionTrac, found me hanging around here about six years ago, and asked me to help him with this business. So we’ve been at it now for six or seven years. And as I said in the beginning, we kind of stumbled into the legal space, but that’s where we found our home. It’s a perfect fit. It’s really been super successful. People love it, and we’re working with attorneys all over the country.
David Craig – Host: And that could be good or bad.
Jonathan Brickman: Yeah, that could be good or bad. I love firms like yours, frankly. I love the regional firms that are smaller. They’re really fun to work with. It’s been a really good fit.
David Craig – Host: Yeah. Well, Jonathan, thank you so much for being a guest on After the Crash and really appreciate it. And folks, if you’re a client, you want to be asking your lawyer. One of the things that I try to do with this podcast is empower the average, everyday person, and so many times they don’t even know what to ask their lawyer. And so the purpose of this podcast is for you to be able to ask your lawyer, “Have you ever tried EmotionTrac? Have you ever thought about using EmotionTrac?” Encourage them. You have the right, as the client, to take an active role in your case, and I encourage you to do that. And if you’re a lawyer listening, give it a try. Give it a try, especially there’s new thing’s coming out. I think they’re testing. You can test it, try it out and see if you like it, but I would highly recommend EmotionTrac. This is David Craig, and you’ve been listening to After The Crash. If you’d like more information about me or my law firm, please go to our website, ckflaw.com. Or if you’d like to talk to me, you can call 1-800-AskDavid. If you would like a guide on what to do after a truck wreck, then pick up my book, Semitruck Wreck: A Guide for Victims and Their Families, which is available on Amazon, or you can download it for free on our website, ckflaw.com.
