TLH Ep. 41 Turning Revenue into Competitive Advantage: A Conversation with Milan Bobde

Hello, Legal Helm listeners! Today, we’re thrilled to welcome Milan Bobde, CEO and co-founder of Oddr, the legal industry’s first true revenue intelligence platform. With nearly two decades of experience helping law firms modernize their financial and operational systems, Milan is widely recognized as an innovator in legal technology.

At The Legal Helm, we’re passionate about exploring how innovation, leadership, and technology are transforming the legal landscape. In this episode, we’ll dive into how law firms can rethink and redefine revenue operations—turning challenges in billing, collections, payments, and forecasting into real competitive advantages.

Thanks for tuning in—we’re excited to have you with us!

Your host

Bim Dave is Helm360’s Executive Vice President. With 20+ years in the legal industry, his keen understanding of how law firms and lawyers use technology has propelled Helm360 to the industry’s forefront. A technical expert with a penchant for developing solutions that improve business systems and user experience, Bim has a knack for bringing high quality IT architects and developers together to create innovative, useable solutions to the legal arena. 

Our Guest 

Milan Bobde, CEO and co-founder of Oddr

Bim Dave: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Legal Helm where we navigate the currents of legal, innovation and leadership. I’m your host, Bim Dave. Today I’m delighted to be joined by Milan Bobde, the CEO and co-founder of Oddr, the legal industry’s first true revenue intelligence platform. With nearly two decades of experience helping law firms modernize financial and operational systems, Milan is recognized as an innovator in legal technology.

Before launching Oddr, he led product and growth strategy for some of the industry’s most successful platforms. At Oddr Milan is redefining how law firms manage billing collections, payments and forecasting, helping them turn revenue operations into competitive advantage. Milan, hello and welcome to the show.

Milan Bobde: Hi Bim. I’m glad to be here. Thank you for having me.

Bim Dave: It’s great to be, um, firstly having you on the show and obviously you and I go way back, um, from our old elite days, so it’s really good to have a friend on the show. Um, so really good for you to be here. So for those in our audience that don’t know about you, um, it’ll be great for you to just tell us a little bit about the journey that first led you to legal technology in the first place.

Milan Bobde: Well, yeah, it was a very interesting one. So this was somewhere around mid-two thousand and, uh, I did join Elite as a software, uh, engineer. and, um, this was my early days um, you know, back, uh, back in mid two thousand. As I mentioned, uh, one of my very good friend, he was actually in my, uh, masters at USC. He joined Elite and He asked me Hey, elite is hiring and uh, they’re a great company to work. for. So he pulled me into Elite and That was my first, um, job in the legal tech. So I. Who knew? 20 years Later I’ll be doing something in legal tech. But as we know.Ben Legal is a very small and um, very, uh, exciting space to bring innovation to. So, but yeah, that was my first, uh, entrance.to the legal as a software engineer.

Bim Dave: Excellent. No, that’s good. Good to hear. And what, what were you doing before that out of interest?

Milan Bobde: Yeah, I was in a,in asmall, kind of a startup ish consulting, uh, company.Uh, thisis back in LA Um, so I was, uh, uh, just again, I, I started my journey as a software engineer. So I have, uh, I. I did my undergrad and my master’s in computer science, so mainly software engineering for a small, uh, companies. And then Elite was the first one I did, uh, do my, uh. MBA and moved into the product and business, uh, shortly. Once I joined Elite. But, uh, it was, you know, just software engineering job, writing code, and building software.

Bim Dave: Amazing. No, it’s, it’s always interesting to know the, the first start of starting point, because I’ve had so many people come on the show that are like, end up being CEO of a company, but actually their starting point was like non-technology or something completely different.

So, it’s always cool to understand, you know, where, where it all started from. So started as, as somebody being, um, kind of technology driven, um, from the beginning, which is fantastic. And then you, so you spent some time at, at Elite, as we know, kind of working on some of their platform. Forms. Um, what were some of the lessons that you kind of took from that experience that has led into then founding ot?

Milan Bobde: I think, uh,you know, uh, we started Oddr about three and a half years or so ago. There were two big chunks of my experiences that really helped me get there along with my co-founders. Uh, one was elite. that was my first, uh, foray into working with law firms. And, uh. it’s a, it’s a very exciting space in my mind honestly, bi because, uh, you know, the. the, the, tremendous opportunities and value that a business can add with law firms, uh, is, is just exciting. Um, you know, as, as was working through different products within the elite. And then, you know, my next 10 years at Intap, uh, one thing I realized is law firms are very unique in their own ways and their processes are very unique. So, you know, the ecosystem within the legal tech. Requires that knowledge and expertise to really know how law firms function how partnerships function. Uh, and, I think once once you have that it’s, it’s so exciting to have ways to help. I. Law firms really streamline their various parts of businesses today. We are focused on you know, their, um, revenue cycle, but. you know, going back to Elite, it was many different, whether it’s BI or their integrations or during my tenure at Intap, you know, it was risk management. And then, uh, you know, to some extent the cloud migration. uh, it’s just exciting. I mean, this is a vertical that, uh, that. that, that is trying to catch up with so much technology happening, and unfortunately, most horizontal solutions really don’t cater to how law firms function.

So, it’s really up to this ecosystem to come up with all these innovative solutions to help law firms streamline all the V aspects of their businesses.

Bim Dave: Yeah, it’s, it’s very true. So w was there a moment in that kind of history where there was that inspiration moment where you were like, there has to be a better way to do this, and that’s where the, the idea from Otter came from?

Milan Bobde: Yeah, I I think uh, there, there’s no single one. I can go back to. them honestly, but, But I think I have been wanting, um, to do something on my own for a very long time. and I’ve, I’ve had the dibs and here while doing something full-time, but we were at a point where me and my two co-founders, you know, we. Um, we had an opportunity, we we had a few, you know, like to, to start a company there. are two, three key ingredients I would say. So one is just kind of having a good sense of the opportunity and during, during my Intapp, uh, You know, days we were exposed to some of these challenges um, just by the nature of us working through. different products and conversations. So, it kind of caught my eye that you know, this process, which is so critical to a law firm, seemed largely manual. with no visibility and insight. So it definitely. Kind of Planted the seed at that time. Uh, with me. but then, you know, we, we were lucky to have some exciting investors who were looking to invest in legal tech. and then I found amazing co-founders, um, who actually quite balance us, so we are very complimentary in what we do. I’m from the product and business as you know, so is from operational and product and Summit is from technology. So Three of us were very complimentary and we were. Um, discussing one day, um, you know, what it would mean. to take a leap of faith and do something on our own. And um, yeah, a few months later we did that and um, I. I’m really excited that we did that. So it’s been pretty awesome. But it’s generally the conversations, right? It’s the art of just when you’re talking to anyone at a law firm, it, it, it’s reading what they’re saying, but also what they’re implying that what are their challenges? Where are they spending? time today That really, doesn’t make sense. Um, and you know, those conversations really helped us kind of get a validation that this is a problem and. We wanted to be the ones helping law firms solve those.

Bim Dave: Well, there’s, there’s a lot of firms that are benefiting from the solution today, so I’m glad, I’m glad you made that leap of faith and I’m sure that they are too. Um, so that, that leads us nicely to, um, kind of my first question around, uh, Oddr and, and your focus area, which is I hear you talk about revenue intelligence and it would be great just to understand like what is revenue intelligence, um, to you and what does that mean for, from a law firm perspective?

Milan Bobde: Yeah, I mean, so if you think about, you know, professional services like law firms that we focus on, you know, their, their, primary source of revenue is, uh, what invoices go out, right. what what are the legal expertise and services provided? Invoices go out, And that’s, the money that comes into the law firm and for a firm. for any firm that’s. so dependent upon getting those invoices paid, uh, They really don’t have a whole lot of visibility, on what’s happening on those. And I think this, this has become increasingly more challenging in the ecosystem and how legal, tech and legal technology in general is evolving. You Know 10 years ago law firms would send invoices. There’s no pressure to get paid. Plans could take some time.

But, but, now with all the economy and the conditions that the law, firms are, the pressures that they are facing, there’s always a drive. to kind of get paid faster and, and today, if you look at the space, this is very fragmented. You look at a revenue cycle, which means from the time, an invoice is finalized to when it is get paid. A law firm could be using anywhere from three to five, even more softwares to manage this lifecycle. and it just, you know, it’s not efficient there. There’s so many challenges. with these point solutions that solve a small piece of the puzzle. And what do. It’s kind of give this single glass pane view to law firms to know exactly where their invoices and their revenue is. Where are the bottlenecks, where are the problems? And Because we have one system. It’s not just one sliver that we optimized. We optimize the entire lifecycle, and that’s when it starts to be really impactful. Right. The two key metrics that. We want every form to kind of track with us is how long are the invoice outstanding for and then what are the right ofs associated? I mean, we know, as invoice ages, the less likelihood it’s gonna get paid. in full. So how do we bring intelligence to really, for law firms to know where, when they will get paid, what do they need to maximize their AR and revenue, and what’s the cost of. You know, let’s say shortening your invoice outstanding days by, you know, two days or five days. It’s a staggering number.

So, I mean, that’s the Entire gamut of, you know, in my mind the revenue cycle. And you know, obviously there’s preceding space over there with the work to cash, but you know, once an invoice is finalized, the goal that every law firm has is get it out, track it, get paid and You know, go to the next invoice and That’s what we. really help. Uh, then streamline.

Bim Dave: Mm, absolutely. I remember speaking to, um, one of the Magic Circle firms, and they had told me that the minute that an invoice goes out, um, every day that is unpaid. The probability of it being paid in full just reduces every single day. Right. And, and if it.

Milan Bobde: Yeah.

Bim Dave: Within, I think, I think they had done some analysis and it was something like the first 10 days, if you don’t receive payment, then the likelihood of you receiving full payment just, just continues to diminish.

Milan Bobde: Yeah. And, and you know, to, to your point, um, law firms, uh,

Uh, came across this very funny acronym. Um, almost every law firm uses it, which is the GBNF, uh, bucket, which is gone, but not, forgotten. And these are the, invoices that just stay out for longer and then, you know, they don’t want to write it off. But yeah, I mean, You know, the. You look at today’s interest rates and what’s the cost of, you know, financing your client’s debt. Um, and, and I think it’s, it’s not just. Uh, that, but there, there’s so many things that firms really don’t have, the tools to streamline. uh, you know, just knowing nothing should fall through the cracks. These are important invoices.

I was talking to, um, an AMLO 25 firm, and they told me that. They just, Missed sending an invoice worth couple of hundred thousand dollars and now they’re in violation. of the client policy. They just wrote it off. I’m like, geez. You know, it’s, it’s. It’s crazy, You know, the, the these are low. Hanging fruits that within, you know, a few billing cycles home can streamline and then just have a good grasp of where everything is. So it’s exciting times for sure.

Bim Dave: Sure. Yeah, in Indeed. Indeed. Um, so what, when you, when you kind of like zoom out and you look at that revenue cycle, um, as a whole, so the, the, that whole process of billing through collections to payments, where do you see firms struggling the most in that cycle?

Milan Bobde: I think they’re all interrelated then genuinely I feel that so, you know, I can, and I’ll give you an example. Let’s say I start with collections is a big problem and I. Everyone’s trying to figure out what clients to reach out and where to go, but collections cannot be effective if you don’t know what’s happening with the invoices or what are your client patterns. So, uh, you know, it’s kind of, intertwined, but, um, I, I think the whole, the whole exercise boils down to how do we actually maximize the, ar. Right, uh, collections and, and how do we get paid? faster? But it’s not just the collections part that really streamlines it. You know, getting the invoices out faster. is a key ingredient to getting paid faster, right? If you Take five days to get the invoice out, you added five days, to getting paid extra that could have been reduced. so they’re all intertwined and I think it, it kind of ends with getting the invoice paid, but each of these meaningfully eat up on your higher invoice. Outstanding days and the write offs. Um, to your question, I would say, you know, collections, but it’s not something that only collections. can solve. It needs support from the billing And then making it easy for your clients to pay and then reconciling that back intoyour accounting system automatically. All of these. uh, effectively lower. Your, uh, days it takes to get paid.

Bim Dave: Yeah, no abs. Absolutely. Now, now when you look at, um, when you look at it from a solution perspective, so you are, you’ve got a technology solution that solves, um, these problems by given, as you described, like that single pane view of, of what’s happening during the revenue cycle. Um. What about the people aspect of this?

Like is there a cultural shift that’s needed to be able to, um, to be able to kind of take that step to really resolving some of those struggles?

Milan Bobde: Uh, yeah, it’s a great question. I think, um, there is some change management. Yes. Um, but I think it’s more. uh, more of, um, uh. It’s more of a process refinement because I genuinely feel, you know, when we, when we started Oddr, you know, we spent about nine months. Just talking. to many different firms. So, you know, just all the years I’ve worked with and the connections I’ve had, um, all three of us, We took nine months to just talk to about 80 different law firms and close to 160 different people. And this 160 people, included CFOs, CIOs, director of finance and Revenue billing, collection managers, As builders and collectors. and one thing that was very clear to us was there’s no shortage of hard work. I mean, all these teams are really working long hours to make that impact on the firm’s collections, but they don’t have the right, tools. And it’s more of, you know, two things. One, having the right tool. And having the best practices And, and this is where, you know, you’ll see, and I’m sure when you come across this, that some firms have more, distributed. Um, invoice dispatch, for example. attorneys or legal assistants are sending it, whereas some forms have more centralized, so obviously centralized makes it a lot easier. but having the right tool that supports both of these brings you the visibility. It’s not about a small sliver of uh, invoices that you want to optimize. You want to do the entire invoice, whether they’re being sent by LEAs or whether it’s sent by billing team or by the attorneys. But then. you come to the collections people, they’re putting in long hours, but they don’t have the tool really to know where should they focus. If I’m in collections and I come and I, I want to, you know, my goal of reaching out to 20 or 13 clients today, what are those 20, 30? clients? You know, today’s tools. To not really help them know where they should prioritize, where there’s potential problems that can be handled at this stage rather than three weeks later when it becomes a crisis. And that’s what. you know, um, the tools like Oddr really provide them, which is. Hey, here’s a potential problem, This should be a client that you reach out today or, Hey, this client, uh, has, typically paid you on X days and now it’s, x plus 10 days. Something’s not right here. So all of these insights really help them know where they spend their time and that allows them to. really make an impact. But to your question, the change management comes primarily from.uh.

Bim Dave: Um,

Milan Bobde: Willing to use the tools to help you identify problems, right? Uh, you and I, and at least, I shouldn’t say you, but at least I know for a fact that anything that I do and I someone asked me to change that I, my automatic. resistance kicks in. Right. Just a simple tool that, you know, even if I swap X with y It, it, it could be a challenge. So there is definitely aspects of change management, um, that does, uh, impact the firms to Some extent, but you know, it’s about any other tool, It’s not in the scale of uh, you know, bigger things, but We make it as easy as, possible, you know, um, from our perspective, the platform is so modern that we actually had uh, planned for about, you know, I don’t know, 15 hours of printing sessions, uh, with one of our early customers and within the, within the hour they said. I think we are good. You know, I think that’s the power of modern platform that you make it easy for firms to use the new software and. That’s the change. management. I [00:19:00] think the, results, uh, within a few billing cycles, talk for themselves, but the team has really the good tools to make an impact in their jobs that they’re trying to work so hard all day, all week, all year.

Bim Dave: Yeah, no, it sounds, sounds like that would be the case. so I wonder if you could maybe break down that journey of how a firm uses Oddr to understand what’s happening, um, with an invoice, right? Like if we take that example, maybe you could walk us through like a real-world example of like each of the stages of, of I’ve, I’ve clicked the button to send the invoice out.

What, what, what happens next?

Milan Bobde: Yeah.

So, uh, I think there are a couple of ways, but yeah, let’s walk through that. So once an invoice is finalized in your accounting system, uh, from there, Oddr picks up that invoice and either you can just. Schedule it to go out at a particular day or time, or you can send it out on demand. Um, all different methods, but while you are sending it out you know, there there is, intelligence that starts to kick in with the platform just knowing when the invoice will be paid. That’s a great example for law firms to know, uh, that, Hey, based on this client’s pattern, that’s, when an invoice would be paid. uh, now once the invoice is sent today, it’s like a Proverbial black box. There’s no visibility for law firms to know what’s happening with that invoice. The first time that invoice would pop up, if not paid already, would be a 60 day outstanding AR report. but with our platform you have more insights into what’s happening. Has the email been successfully delivered to the client? Has the client opened the email? has the client, viewed the invoice? Now imagine a net 30 payment terms invoice. And it’s the 25th, and you go to the Oddr platform and see, hey, this client has not even looked at the invoice. There’s no way they’re gonna pay if they have not even, looked at the invoice. Why wait for another 35, 40 days before the 60 day AR report shows that hey, this invoice is? not paid. You can shorten that by having this visibility, and then it’s about. supporting quick actions and automation so you can reach out to thousands of those clients that have not looked at the invoice. let’s say the invoice is due in 14 days or seven days or overdue, and let them know that, hey, maybe they missed the invoice. Here’s the invoice again, by the way, the invoice is, overdue or due in seven days and, and that’s where the power of knowing what’s happening starts to kick in. right now. Once you get to the collection side of things, uh. you want to know, you know, We talked with so many collectors when they come in, they typically have a morning report they would run, and then there’s an Excel and they’re my clients and I’m gonna call them. And these are outstanding are but it’s not just about calling clients from their, from that list. It’s also knowing which clients are behaving differently from their typical patterns. So simple things like, Hey, you know, this client. Typically views your invoice in, let’s say five to seven days, and now it’s 20 days. They have not. Right? Why is that? maybe the person you’re sending, the invoice to has left your client’s organization. No one’s looking at that invoice. Having these kind of intelligence to support really makes every aspect of that process streamlined. You get to the payment side and we haven’t talked about. The client’s experience, and this is why I always talk about this because law firms spend inordinate amount of time and money to Have the best. legal services for their clients. But when it comes to the billing and collection side of things, I genuinely believe I. They don’t have the right tools to provide the same level of service. So what we bring. That is elevating your client’s experience. in all of this. What’s a consumer grade experience, for a client? Right? The age old saying of if you want someone to pay you make it darn easy. Right. And if you do that, the client sees an invoice. If they have to go to 10 steps to actually pay the invoice, forget it. It’s gonna get pushed off. But how about making it easy for your clients to pay, making it easy for your clients to look at historical invoices and statements and be able to pay. And for them not getting 500 emails or 50 emails for that matter, but a streamlined communication with one email that lets them access all their invoices. I think these things start to really impact your client’s behavior and their experience with you as a law firm. And in our everyday when we go out outside of our work, we expect certain things to happen whether we are on Amazon or someplace else. We are trying to go through this experience of, you know, paying our credit card bills or paying bills. It’s so much streamlined compared. to what today forms are able to offer. And once the payment is made, how do you actually make that easier to reconcile? It should not be. uh, a manual tedious exercise to know, hey, which client paid and what amount they paid for which invoice. all of that should be automated. And you know, the funny thing being, and I’m sure you know this, which is Invoice to cash is actually a Gartner’s Magic quadrant. And, and three years ago, or three and a half years ago, when we started this invoice to cash term didn’t even exist in legal. I clearly remember when we are talking the firms and we said, Hey, we are looking at building an invoice to cash platform for. law firms. The first question was well, what’s invoice to cash? Because it’s never a product category that’s either budgeted or thought about. it’s, hey, billing, it’s collections, it’s payments, and it’s reconciliation and it’s fragmented.

Bim Dave: Yeah. I, I love that. Thank you for that, that detailed response, because I think just the fact that you’re focused so much on the client experience is, is amazing, right? Because you’re absolutely right. Like, I think that’s the bit that kind of gets forgotten about. Um, and actually making that as easy as possible will make a massive difference to, to the experience with, with any kind of professional services organization.

So that’s really great to hear. Um, talking of that, like, um, that final, the final stage of payment payment, um, what are you doing in that space in terms of trying to make it as easy and as, and as secure as possible for a customer to actually make the payment?

Milan Bobde: Yeah, so, uh, so we, we partner with different, uh, uh, payment gateways. We don’t have our own payment gateway. We partner with a few, but our goal is always to make sure that, two things happen in that payment. one. the client experience is really streamlined. So for example, if I’m using Oddr pay, I get an invoice, I view it in my mobile, and I click pay,

When I click that all my information. is already saved in there, I don’t have to put anything. I don’t have to put what invoice which client, which matter, which is really not a great experience for a client. If someone’s trying to pay the invoice. You know, you need to make it easy with one click. So with Oddr pay. What happens is. It takes all of this information, It’s already pre-populated. You’re paying an invoice or you’re paying five invoices. All of that is pre-populated. Your credit card on your a CH or Other information is already saved in the system. You click review and pay and down. it’s the consumer grade experience we have when we are actually paying our credit card bills or something else, uh, or utility. bills for that matter, but,

But that’s the experience That really matters. And from a firm’s perspective. the Second key point for us is making sense out of this So when a payment comes, letting them know, hit, plan, paid, taking that information and, and putting it back to your accounting system. Um, and for someone to just validate the amount in the bank and then the amount of the invoices that were paid.

All of that is simplified. There are certain nuances also, that are very unique that we bring bi. For example, if you are accepting payments into, different type of retainer accounts, there’s a lot of flexibility. Uh, what we provide. with. So the idea always is with payments, make it easy for your clients make it easy for your law firms. And you know, we see a great uptake in making sure that the clients pay.

Bim Dave: Fantastic. Um, so on the, on the AI side of things, obviously no, no conversation these days is, is without ai. So I think you touched on some of the, the kind of smart analytics, um, that, that are kind of baked into the product to, to help inform decisions around focus areas for collections, for example. where, where else does AI play a part in the other platform and where are you seeing the benefits of that?

Milan Bobde: Yeah, it’s a great question.

And I think one thing I’ll share, which is my philosophy about ai, you know, today Everything is AI period. You know, uh, the other day I was, uh, at Costco and, uh, I, I saw a toothbrush that said AI technology. and I’m like. Are you really serious? Uh, So I think AI has become a more of a marketing gimmick than anything else.

But, um, to talk about, Oddr and our philosophy about ai, I think AI is not a magic wand that. you just use and everything starts to function really well. There’s a lot of underlying things that have to happen, and it starts by really understanding, you know, each of the individuals who interact with our platform, whether it is the billing attorney or the biller, or the collector, or

Uh, you know. Billing collection managers, CFO, and what in their flow within the system can be automated, can be streamlined [00:30:00] and can make it easy for them. So in our platform there are there are million things that the AI makes it easy, but I’ll give you a few examples. So we test upon. when the invoice be paid. Right. we talked about anomalies. Well, one of the newer things we introduced is, and it came from, uh, a live example.

So, we were in a meeting with our, um, uh, with our law firm customer, and um, they got a request from a partner that said, Hey, can you tell me what’s happening with this client? And the Simple request translates into so much more time spent by the CFO and the team because they have to go through all their invoices, look at the historical payment patterns, what’s outstanding, um, are there any write-offs associated what’s the health of this client?

And all of this takes time to analyze. There are hundreds and hundreds of nodes that are captured in the collections tool. How do you go through all of that and come up with a small summary that makes sense?

So We just introduced in our last release this AI summary capability and this allows them to, click a button that looks at the entire portfolio of what’s happening with this client and gives you a quick summary, blurb of what’s happening with this client. And this you can imagine, makes makes it so easy. And once we have this technology in, you can then suffer this in many different ways. So a lot of the plumbing is already in our platform, and now we are aggressively with every release. Adding more and more capabilities, whether it is suggesting emails, uh, with, you know, your sentiment capture, in there, or being able to modify the sentiment of the client or whether it is the agent.

AI that will make sure that nothing falls to the cracks or takes care of certain things that needs to be done. Prompts the billers and collectors to make sure they are following up. Makes it easy with generative stuff. That’s what AI needs to. be. So you, know, we are on this journey. There’s there’s a very aggressive roadmap, but what we have today itself adds so much more value to each of the individuals, who are actually interacting with the system. And that’s the way I look at ai. And we look at ai, which is, you know, how do you meaningfully make someone’s lives better and, and not just, you know, hey, we are AI and we are AI powered. So, um. Yeah, a lot of exciting stuff Um, we’ll, we’ll keep sharing, but hopefully that gives you a quick glimpse of where we are in this journey and what’s coming down the road as well.

Bim Dave: No def definitely. And it, it sounds very exciting. Um, and then when, when you kind of think about some of the other challenges that

Milan Bobde: I.

Bim Dave: face today, particularly in the kind of economy that we’re in, um, at the moment, Obviously cash being king. What are you, one of the things I’ve, I’ve learned from, from speaking to customers is, is that forecasting, um, what’s gonna happen from a cashflow perspective can be really challenging. Right. Um, and, and again, like because of the distributed nature of all of the data that you mentioned before, across different systems can be challenging to bring all that together.

So, there’s a lot of stuff that people do in Excel spreadsheets still, right? To this day. what you doing in that space to kind of help to get better, um, you know, and more reliable financial outlooks for firms?

Milan Bobde: Yeah. Um,

So, there are a couple of things we do in this bi. So one, for example, just looking at the client’s pattern and helping them have their short-term roadmap or short-term.

Cashflow, um, analysis. So based on this client patterns and these outstanding invoices here, what’s my next three, four months of cashflow looks like? And then firms can basically use that and then. Either go aggressive, follow up, and make sure they get paid on that. But the other one, which is the larger cash flow, um, you know, we, we launched the first version of this and, what we do is we look at their historical payments and cash flow coming into the firm and we look through many different dimensions, you know, including seasonality and client and new clients and clients that leave and uh, You know, what’s the surge when the client is what are the triggers, for it, the practice and department and geo.

So there, there are like, I don’t know how many dimensions across we look through this to really predict what your next 12 months? of cash flow looks like. And this really allows the firm to have some, grounding in terms of, uh, what does my next, year look like based on everything. else. And this also includes like, Hey, how many new clients do they add over a year? What are the typical. Billings from new clients. How’s that plan growth going? Are we losing any clients? So there are so many dimensions, but you know, today the tools are so powerful that you you, can throw a lot of data at it and then fine tune it, working with customers to make that more impactful. And that’s the, the longer term, uh, cash flow the 12 month cycle that we also have. And, and this is something that we keep. evolving. Um, for example, you know, one of the things um, uh, that we would love to know from as we work with our early customers and we are working with them, is how do they define this for them? What is done today? So it’s not just the Excel, to your point, you know, the Excel, they, they predict stuff, but there a lot of inputs that go into this. For example, hey, how do we factor contingent fees, engagements, right? Those are very difficult to add to the predictions because we don’t know. You know, uh, a $10 million deal might come in July or might come in December or maybe come the next year. So there, there’s still a lot of work to keep refining this, But the idea over here is looking at historical, going through all these different dimensions, and then making something that really sits and founded in the data that law firms have to give them a perspective of what their next 12 months look like.

Bim Dave: Yeah, that’s, that’s brilliant. Um, better predictability is all always a good thing. Um, so that’s, that’s good to hear.

Milan Bobde: I wish I, had something like that for our business.

Bim Dave:I was, I was, I was thinking the same thing. Um, we may have to talk, we may have to talk about this. Um, so, so, so, um. So if I’m a law firm leader listening to this conversation today, and they can kind of, um, connect with some of the challenges that we’ve talked about, um, with disparate systems and not having that visibility.

What are the, what’s the starting point for them to a, um, kind of go on the journey of, of solving this using a product like Oddr? Um, and, uh, I’d kind of get, uh, really interested to get your opinion in terms of how, how we measure the success of a rollout of a product like Oddr. Because presumably there’s things that are actionable that somebody in a, a firm leader position today could be measuring in terms of.

Some of the measurements that you talked about to then see what impact happens once they adopt a product like, like ot. But really interested to get your take on, on how firms should be taking that step, um, forward and, and how they measure ROI

Milan Bobde: Yeah, I think it’s a, it’s a great question because I think as businesses and law firms are one of the smartest, uh, businesses that you will see and meet and work with, Um, we always try to have different dimensions of ROI So ROI comes, in, our mind comes from many different aspects, and then we do help them calculate all of these aspects. But for example, Hey, what’s the cost of automating, um, invoice dispatch today, if You look at it? You know, for a typical firm, let’s say they’re sending four to 5,000 invoices out, uh, even if it couldtake five to seven? minutes to send an email, that’s about two FTEs, right? Um, and and that’s a great ROI. those two people don’t need to send that manually out. You can now have that. Focus on collections or maybe some other projects. But, you know, the ROI starts to show right from elimination of all the manual work that happens in The, system. the, the next bucket of ROI, in my mind is the writeoff.

So, I talked about how you can know on day 25th for a net 30 payment terms invoice, uh, the client has not even viewed it, and you, you shorten your invoice outstanding days. Now what’s the value of getting paid, let’s say.

Bim Dave: Say,

Milan Bobde: Uh, let’s pick a, a simple couple of hundred million or 300 million law, uh, dollar law firm revenue and say if you get paid. Five days or six days, or 10 days, uh, faster at today’s interest rate, you can do it’s millions of dollars, uh, that they have accessible to So it’s not the, it’s not net new money coming in. it’s just coming in faster. But the cost of financing client debt. Skyrocketing now with the interest rate. So there’s that value of the ROI. Even if you reduce it by, you know, two or three days or one day, every day matters because that brings, a lot more money within the firm to be used for all these interesting projects and the firm growth. and then, uh, the last one over here is just write offs, right?

Fewer invoices end up in your one 20 and higher bucket. Uh, we all know as As they get to the high ranking buckets, typically form will be like, okay, let’s discount, let’s get, paid what we can, and then move on and. If you have fewer, invoices ending up in your 90, 90, 91, 1 21 plus buckets, uh, you have fewer write-offs. So these are just, uh, the, very simple data driven ROIs that a firm can look at out Outside of this, you know, there are the intangibles, like what’s your client’s experience in all of this? Right? And I’ll give you a simple example. let’s say if a client calls today, and says, Hey, can you send me my last, uh, six months of invoices, or last three statements, or, the simple request from a client can end up taking hours for, a form to respond back if not longer. And all this while I’m looking at, Uh, and if I’m a client, I’m saying how long it takes to send me my invoices, Right? What’s the client’s experience? And Then the client gets three different emails with, you know, three different zip files because now you are breaking all of that up. It’s Not a great experience. for me as a client. How do you elevate that client experience? Because that’s what, brings new business in and happy clients. we all know means more business. So how do you elevate your client’s experience in all of this? So they feel and have the same consumer grade experience they have when they’re doing anything else or any other business somewhere else. So that’s the intangible. but. These are, you know, some of the ways that you can very easily measure ROI, but also feel that, hey, happy customeris is, is bringing more business back to us. Um, but yeah, these are all data driven then. So, you know, we have the data we track it and we make sure that firms are seeing, um, good jump in this. the, the last aspect again which is the non or the intangible, is just the, the, the team. Right now, everyone. is working hard, But having a support system that makes their job easier and it gives the productivity, you have happier, builders and customers. We all know that today the billing and collection staff is so difficult to find because I’m working with so many firms that are struggling to find new billers and collectors. So it’s, it’s really imperative that you keep these. Core, you know, people that, know your. processes happy and using tools like this, really make their job. easier. So they have the right support, they have the right, tools, and their job is made easier. Uh, doesn’t mean they work less, they work equally hard, but they’re able to achieve two x and three x of what they are doing without the tool. if they are happy, it means they’re not jumping ships and they’re not going somewhere else. So, um, so yeah, there are many different dimensions to ROI, but hopefully this gives a little bit of, uh, context to what, you know, we think an ROI should incorporate. I.

Bim Dave: Yeah. No, that’s great. Great advice. I appreciate you sharing, um, the specifics of that because I think that can be helpful for, for anyone running these teams as it stands today, and then measuring the success going forward. So really, really pleased, uh, you shared that. So, um, that’s been really good.

It would be really great to just kind of move to some wrap up questions now. a few fun ones. So the first, first one that I ask all of my guests is if you had a doctor whose time machine and you could go back to yourself at 18 years old, advice would you give yourself.

Milan Bobde: Oh, that’s, uh, if I’m 18 years old. Um, start the business sooner. I think I took way too long. Um, I, it took me a long time to take the leap of faith. Um, I would say, you know, things work out. It’s amazing how many people help you and, you know, with no append interest to them. And thanks to all the people who have done us, done this with us, and in a way we are in our journey. But I would definitely tell. 18-year-old says that to take the leap of faith way sooner. Don’t, don’t wait that long.

Bim Dave: That’s really good advice. Good, good answer. Uh, um, although I will say that I think the reason why you’ve had some of that help along the way is ’cause you are one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, so that helps, uh, the situation. People wanna help you Milan, so that’s good. Um.

Milan Bobde: Thank you for your nice words as always.

Bim Dave: Yeah. Yeah. The, other, the other one is around.

If, so, if you, if you weren’t doing what you, what you’re doing today, so let’s just say you did not take that step into legal technology, would you, can you think of another, a career path that you may have done? Uh, instead of that.

Milan Bobde: Does it have to be realistic.

Bim Dave: Mistake? No, it can be anything.

Milan Bobde: Oh, I would’ve loved to be a PLO driver. I, I have, I’ve been, uh, that’s one of my favorite sports since as long as I remember, since mid nineties. I’m a very avid p lo and follower watch every race. I’ve done that for the last 30 years. Uh, I’ve been to Silverstone. I’ve actually driven on Silverstone in uk. Um Um, so, but yeah, I mean that’s, that’s one of my passions. So again, that’s why I, is it realistic? probably not, Um, but, um, that, that was my passion. for a long time. Uh, and it still is. So in a hypothetical world, I would love to be a Formula One driver. I.

Or at least be involved in some capacity with Formula One. You know, there’s a whole world of Formula One that moves along with all these races between, you know, through a calendar year. Being involved in any shape or capacity would’ve been awesome.

Bim Dave: Yeah. No, that, that’s, that’s a really good answer actually. And, and I can see that being exciting and great that you managed to get to, to go to Silverstone. Amazing.

Milan Bobde: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Bim Dave: So just finally, Milan, um, what’s the best way to reach out and learn more about Oddr for our audience?

Milan Bobde: Yeah, I mean, there, there are a couple of ways. So one, you know, obviously reach out to me. Um, I, I always, always, um, uh, respond to anyone that has any questions for us. But we also have some information on our website. Submit a request. Um, if you wanna just learn more, you’re curious what we do. Curious to know what impact.

We could have for your revenue cycle. Um, please reach out. I think you’ll be amazed, um, on how we could help. Um, and, you know, just learning more about the platform. If nothing, we’ll give you some good ideas that you can track and implement within yourself. We always love to share best practices as we see from our, all our customers. Um, and happy to always help from streamline whether they use Oddr or not.

But if they do, I’m always, uh, hoping they do, and, uh, we are part of their journey.

Bim Dave: amazing. I’m sure. I’m sure they will. Milan, thank you very much for today. It’s been a, uh, an inspiring conversation. Really wish you the success, um, going forward, and thank you for joining us today.

Milan Bobde: Thank you Bim. It is, it was really exciting conversation. I, you made me rule a lot of my early days as well, so I’m excited, uh, and thank you for the opportunity to be with you on the podcast.

Bim Dave: No worries. Now I have to go and buy an AI toothbrush. Fantastic.

Milan Bobde: Tell me if you figure out What that brush does.

Bim Dave: Yes haha