Epstein Becker Green’s Wage & Hour Guide for Employers and Telemental Health Laws apps were featured in Law360 Pulse, in “How Mid-Law Firms Found Success in Client-Facing Apps,” by Emma Cueto. As the app marks its milestone 10th anniversary, Michael S. Kun, Member of the Firm in the Employment, Labor & Workforce Management practice in the firm’s Los Angeles office, discusses the value the Wage & Hour app delivers to clients. (Read the full version – subscription required.)
Following is an excerpt:
Many law firms tried out the idea of launching mobile apps in the early 2010s, but a decade later most have been phased out or quietly dropped. However, a small number of Mid-Law firms have not only maintained their apps but even grown or expanded their mobile offerings.
The key, according to these firms, is to base the apps around client needs and not launch an app for the sake of it.
"The reason our app has been successful is because there's substance to it," said Michael Kun, co-chair of Epstein Becker Green's wage and hour practice group and co-creator of its wage and hour app, which launched in 2012. …
Epstein Becker's app, dubbed Wage and Hour Guide, recently hit the 10-year mark and is still kept up to date by attorneys in the firm. The app, which is free, provides current summaries of wage and hour laws in all 50 states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, as well as federal rules.
Kun said he views the app as a success because it met a real client need. The firm used to send clients physical wage and hour guides through the mail. They were popular with clients, he said, but they were expensive to produce and became outdated extremely quickly.
"The saddest day would be disposing of a big stack of laminated guides because of some new development in the law," he said. The app, which was proposed by the firm's IT director at the time, was a much more efficient model.
Today, the app is maintained and updated by the wage and hour group as well as a team of marketing and IT employees, with the most effort happening at the end of the year to prepare an update with new regulations going into effect in the new year. Despite the work involved in maintaining a free product, the firm still finds it valuable, Kun said.
"Our clients have responded positively, and also it has led us to clients," he said. "The support from the firm has been unwavering."
It also fits into the ethos of looking to be partners with clients, allowing attorneys to focus on more strategic matters rather than brief phone calls about wage and hour basics.
"I have been asked many times over the years why on earth I would give this away for free," he said. "If you look at the way our wage hour practice has grown and the number of cases we have and the number of clients we've been working with over the past decade, it answers the question."
The app has in fact been so successful that the firm tried its hand at a similar product focused on laws around telemental health care.
