In a special episode of The Geek in Review podcast, we wanted to play a recent episode of the Future Ready Business (FRB) Podcast. FRB is a podcast that Greg Lambert produces and is hosted by ⁠Jackson Walker⁠ attorneys Art Cavazos and Erin Camp and is focused on how new ideas, regulations, laws, and overall societal changes affect the way businesses operate.

In this episode, ⁠Art Cavazos⁠ and ⁠Erin Camp⁠ host ⁠Courtney White⁠ and ⁠William Nilson⁠, attorneys from Jackson Walker’s Houston and Austin offices, and discuss the future of the fashion industry. The conversation touches on how the intersection of art and business has evolved, with topics such as sustainability, diversity, and social media influencers’ impact on the industry. The group also discusses the growing relationship between technology and fashion, including the role of artificial intelligence in streamlining production and enabling customization. Social media’s role in marketing and intellectual property concerns relating to the fashion industry round out the discussion. It is a great conversation, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

Links:

• ⁠Future Ready Business Podcast⁠
• ⁠Follow Courtney White at – Courthouse Couture⁠
• William Nilson on Instagram (⁠@BigWillyGotBack⁠)
• Art Cavazos Twitter (⁠@FinanceLawyer⁠)
• Erin Camp Twitter(⁠@BusinessLawyerE⁠)

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts |  Spotify

Contact Us:

Twitter: ⁠@gebauerm⁠, or ⁠@glambert⁠
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Music: ⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠

⁠

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer 0:07
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert 0:14
And I’m Greg Lambert. So we decided with so many people traveling this week, either for LegalWeek or there’s some KM meetings. And of course, depending on where you are in the country, it might be spring break as well. We wanted to bring you a special episode that I think you all will enjoy. So on the side, I produce a podcast with some of my colleagues here at Jackson Walker called Future Ready Business.

Marlene Gebauer 0:40
And while it’s a group of lawyers talking, it’s really about how laws affect businesses ranging from startups, doctors, crypto, and even fashion.

Greg Lambert 0:49
I enjoyed the topic of the Future of Fashion and the Law that Art Cavazos and Erin Camp pick for this episode. And I really love the fact that they were able to reach out to some friends of mine, Courtney white to actually works for me. She’s known on social media as Courthouse Couture. And William Nilson, who also runs a men’s bespoke suit company on the side. William and I are in our firm band. He’s actually the lead singer. He’s really, really, really talented.

Marlene Gebauer 1:20
And I follow Courthouse Couture, and I’ve had I’ve done so for several years, and I just love what she does. It’s really, it’s really great. So whether you are traveling or this is just a regular week for you, we think you’ll enjoy this discussion of the future of fashion and law.

Erin Camp 1:39
Hi, I’m Erin Camp, a corporate finance lawyer with Jackson Walker.

Art Cavazos 1:43
And I’m Art Cavazos, a corporate and finance lawyer with Jackson Walker. And this is Future Ready Business.

Erin Camp 1:50
As always, we’d like to remind our listeners that the opinions expressed today are ours and those of our guests, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Jackson Walker, its clients or any of their respective affiliates.

Art Cavazos 2:02
We actually really have a great show lined up for us today. And and I say that every time but but this time, it’s absolutely true. So we’ve got Courtney White, and William Nilson, Attorneys at Jackson Walker, and of our Houston and Austin offices, respectively. But more importantly for today’s topic, just really outstanding people in the world of fashion. I’ll kind of throw it over to y’all to let you tell yourselves tell us a little bit about yourselves. Courtney, Will.

William Nilson 2:33
Ladies first please.

Courtney White 2:35
Hi everyone. My name is Courtney. I’m a research attorney in the Houston office. But on line…

Erin Camp 2:40
Hi Courtney.

Courtney White 2:43
Hello, but online I am known as courthouse couture. I do have my name trademarked. I’ve been a blogger for a while since 2014. I got really really serious about Instagram probably 2017-2018. I have close to 30,000 followers on Instagram and almost 20,000 on Tik Tok. It’s definitely a hobby, but it’s one that I’ve really gotten interested in. And I’m so excited to be here with you all today.

Erin Camp 3:11
Thanks for that, Courtney.

Art Cavazos 3:12
And my wife is a huge fan by the way she like there was mandatory for me to say that. So

Courtney White 3:18
Thank you, Art.

Erin Camp 3:21
And she’s a physician. She doesn’t even go to the courthouse. So

Courtney White 3:23
Yeah.

William Nilson 3:25
I’m William Nilson. I’m an associate at the Austin office. He already said I do commercial real estate law. My crossover with fashion is I have a custom clothing company. We specialize in bespoke suit wear. So mainly formal wear, it does go down into informal wear and sometimes casual, but we do kind of focus on formal inclusions. Courtney, you said somebody Oh, yeah, followers. So I personally I have over 700 followers on Instagram, which I’m super proud of

Erin Camp 3:57
Big influencer there.

William Nilson 3:59
I’m really that’s my main.

Art Cavazos 4:00
He’s sold a bespoke suit to each one of them.

William Nilson 4:04
You can only follow me if you’ve bought a bespoke suit from me as a requirement. Now,

Art Cavazos 4:09
it’s a new requirement.

William Nilson 4:10
I would love to. Yeah. I would love to have that kind of following. So Courtney and I are gonna have to talk offline about some or maybe online about some strategies, because that’s fantastic. I love that you have all of that going for you. So that’s cool. But yeah, I love doing it. I love being a fashion and in law. So what’s what’s better than that?

Art Cavazos 4:32
The way that I learned that about us because I saw one of the suits that you were wearing. And I was like, that’s an awesome suit. You know, where did you get that? And he was like, Oh, I made it. And I was like, like, No, really? Where did you get it? He’s like, No, I really made it.

William Nilson 4:48
I’ve had that conversation. I think it’s like 80 times a week like everywhere I go to bed. It’s like the same conversation. And I have to make it feel like it’s totally normal. This is never happened before. But that’s our best way of advertising. It’s just getting out there and talking to people. And that if they like it, they’ll say something. And then I get to say that I made it. And it’s really exciting because I like doing it. And then if they don’t say anything, then I just got this off the rack whenever. It’s a lot of fun going out there that.

Art Cavazos 5:21
So we wanted to talk a little bit about the fashion business, and both of y’all or maybe as side hustles, or hobbies, both involved in that directly, which is, which is really interesting. And then we of course, also have attorneys here who practice in that area on the legal side. So different avenues to approach it. My first question, and, you know, either of y’all can can jump in, what is fashion?

William Nilson 5:52
conversation.

Erin Camp 5:53
Yeah, I am ready to hear your answers.

Art Cavazos 5:56
Why do we care about it? Why should we care about it? And what’s the difference between those two things?

William Nilson 6:02
I’m feeling like Courtney should either go first to make sure the right things are said before the wrong things are said. So Courtney, do you want to start us off?

Courtney White 6:11
Sure, I will. I’ll kind of start with why I really started Courthouse Couture one, I was bored at work. And I told everyone, this was a long time ago, like I was a baby lawyer. And I said, I should start a blog called Courthouse Couture. And I started laughing and someone said, Actually, that’s a really good idea. And I sat on the idea, but when I was working as an insurance defense lawyer in Dallas, I was the only female that I saw. And so I started taking selfies of my outfits at work. And it really became a way for me to express myself, I thought women who were attorneys were supposed to where only one sort of thing. You know, when you’re in law school, you’re given a guideline, you’re told you need to have a navy suit, a black suit and a gray suit or charcoal. I felt like that was all I could wear. However, I grew up watching Legally Blonde and Elle Woods loves pink. I personally love pink. And so I found that fashion was a way for self expression. And so that’s what I would probably say fashion is it’s a way for self expression. And I definitely think we can still do that and being professional. So that’s my answer.

Erin Camp 7:17
That’s so interesting that you say that, Courtney about the like certain color suits, because when I was doing like my OCI interviews back when I was in law school, I actually chose to wear like a I think I honestly, like very boldly wore a red suit just to kind of stick out. And I had someone in the interview, asked me like or say to me like, oh, wow, that’s so bold, that you’re not wearing black, like you’re wearing a different color than black. Needless to say, I did not go to that firm, I had no interest in going to that firm, because they clearly didn’t care or agreed with that perception that like women should only be able to wear three colors in a formal setting. Did you? Have you encountered anything like that? Or have you met anyone that’s told you or reinforced that idea? Because since I’ve been practicing, I feel like no one’s ever made that comment to me again.

Courtney White 8:09
It didn’t happen. But what I did have happen is when I was working as an insurance defense lawyer, I had another female lawyer tell me to be very careful what I wore to court, which I still think a lot of that is true. And she said that I needed to be careful. And I had on a costume pearl necklace. And she said that it was not appropriate. Because if I were going to do a jury trial, a jury may view that one way. I do feel like while that perception isn’t fair, it is likely true. So I do talk a lot about that on my blog, I even talk about why you may need to be careful what handbag you carry to work, because I do think while it is a form of self expression, everybody is not there yet. So there are ways to do it. I think you can wear bright pink, if you’re not doing a jury trial, but I know that there is a lawyer on Tik Tok, that our whole persona is that she wears pink and she wears pink literally every day. And I love it because she’s completely going against that stereotype.

Art Cavazos 9:05
You mentioned the word persona there. And that’s really interesting. Because you also mentioned earlier about, you know, fashion being a mode of self expression. Online, I think there is this interesting kind of intersection between self expression kind of from like an artistry sense. And then kind of the commercial aspect of a persona and marketing and selling. Will you sell your bespoke suits. From a marketing perspective, what is fashion?

William Nilson 9:35
There are probably a lot of answers to that. But especially in men’s suits, you’ll find if you kind of study people that sell this kind of product, they tend to try to expose as many elements that they can provide in as few pieces as they can provide. So if you have one suit, you want to be able to show like every little detail that you might be able to do. So like aligning is going to be a little wonky, you’ll show like a custom signature as opposed to just embroidery of some kind. So it’s like every kind of bell and whistle that you can embellish. Mostly you’re doing that to encourage people to view something that they want on you. The second they see you. So another example of this is a lot of older companies like a lot of fashion companies that started in the 50s and 60s, that still have kind of glass front storefronts on affluent drives, like Winter Park Drive in Orlando, you’ll see like, all you’ll see these strange outfits that have tons of different colors. And it’s things that don’t go together. But the whole point of is to say, what can I get here? Like, what are all the options that I could get here, so that you’ll walk in the store and say, Now I know, I have like tons of options, when I walk in here, this is a place of creativity. So then it kind of expands your mind. And for the business owner, hopefully, I guess their perspective is that it would expand the wallet to it says like, like, I’ll spend money here because I know I can be creative. So that’s definitely from the marketing and business perspective. There’s a lot of that that goes on. As we shift away from mass retail into more sort of what people are doing now, which is customizing things, making them very unique to themselves. Because we have more ability to do that as technology increases with fashion. And sustainability is starting to be a focus, we start to see fashion more as How can I express myself with pieces that I may be modify or get modified. So you kind of want to show a personality and who you are uniquely through your marketing. If you’re a business owner, we’re just through who you are by wearing clothes. So from a marketing perspective, it’s all about showing who you are and creating your we talk a lot about personal brands, right? So it’s it’s a lot of creating a personal brand is what I delve into from the visuals perspective.

Art Cavazos 11:53
Yeah, I love that, you know, the idea of a personal brand. And I think a lot of people online now are realizing that’s what they’re doing online, creating a personal brand. And then also the idea of like, anywhere you look is going to be something that is a hook. You know, Oh, I like that. I want that. That’s really interesting.

William Nilson 12:15
Absolutely, hook that’s, that’s a good word for that. I’ve never thought about that. I’m a nerd for words, as we all are, as attorneys.

Erin Camp 12:23
I do think it is really interesting in fashion, because I feel like with the age of information and fashion has come sort of this like age of individualism. And I think that is what’s kind of unique to our decade and this generation of fashion. So I think that is really interesting that that’s kind of the business model that you chose to go after. But I also think that really, it’s kind of interesting to think about, right? Because at the same time as we are all emphasizing all this individualism, all these major like brands and fashion houses are starting to move away from like commercial marketing, and really start focusing on these like Instagram influencers and individuals and people that want to incorporate the brand into their personal brand, rather than, you know, just models and straight up just like one designer. I think that’s a huge shift in fashion. And I think it’s really interesting. Do you guys have any thoughts on that?

William Nilson 13:18
I completely agree. But I’ve talked a lot. I would love to hear from Courtney.

Courtney White 13:21
In terms of influencer marketing, I think the reason that it’s such a big thing right now is that people really want to see someone who looks like them in clothing. So there was not a lot of diversity in terms of the models that were used with a lot of different fashion companies in terms of size in terms of race and ethnicity, and even ability level. So you have now seen all of those things, especially during the pandemic, when companies did not have a way to formally put on marketing campaigns. They really utilized influencers, one because influencers were cheaper, and people could show how they were wearing items in their real environment at home. And that really, really resonated with people. And the influencer marketing industry I think is only going to continue to grow because of that. And Tik Toc has brought a new element into that because now video content really seems to be growing. And people love seeing people do get ready with me videos and talk about how they’re styling outfits, even what undergarments or whatever they may be wearing. So it’s just it’s fascinating, but I think what brands are realizing is that they can rely on individuals to help them market. I think the area that we need to probably grow in in terms of business is there’s not a lot of regulation of the influencer industry. That’s definitely something that I think Jackson Walker even I’m happy to work on. But I definitely think there needs to be more regulation in the area. There’s not a lot of regulation in terms of contracts. A lot of businesses are trying to create their own contracts on the fly. People are stealing people’s intellectual property, there’s just a lot of things that are going on because this area is so new. So companies are still figuring it out.

Erin Camp 15:09
Totally. And I really think like, with all this and as companies are figuring out, I mean, I think it’s also really influencing how these design houses are progressing in their style and how these new seasons are coming out. I mean, I really feel like there’s such there’s so much more emphasis, at least, especially in women’s clothing on like utility. I feel like it’s just very recent. And it might partially be due to the popularity of those try-ons and stuff, because now people are debating whether or not they’re going to buy things based off whether they’re actually useful, not based off of just what they look like in a picture. So I just think, like, influencers have had and just that marketing style, have had so much influence, you know, from how they mark it to even like how the designs are progressing and evolving from season to season.

Courtney White 16:03
Yeah, because people during the pandemic really, really wanted washable clothing. So people were constantly asking me Hey, is that washable is that washable? People did want to dry clean and dry cleaning prices and went up tremendously after the pandemic. And I still think that’s something that people care about. I do think to bring up something that Will said is that sustainability is definitely something that’s important. A lot of brands have been called out Coach being one of the main ones, because apparently when handbags aren’t, you know, being sold, they’re cutting them up, which is awful. And other brands got in trouble during the pandemic, because people found out they were burning their merchandise instead of selling it and putting it on sale. Burberry was a big culprit in that, as well.

Erin Camp 16:50
And I’ve noticed a shift in like red carpets and fashion events with that in sustainability. You know, less and less people are? Well, I guess more and more people are coming to the these events in like capsule collections or reward items instead of, you know, things that were tailor made for that event. You know, it’s just the fashion industry really is influenced by? I mean, it’s, I feel like we open this up, like what is fashion? Is it important? Is it related to this topic of future ready business? And it really is, I mean, it is a business, it is an industry, and it is truly touched and evolves exactly how like the rest, you know, just kind of like our politics and socio economic everything is evolving. And it’s all interconnected. And I think that’s so interesting.

William Nilson 17:41
Yeah, it was, somebody has a quote on this, that’s way smarter than me. The the idea that like fashion and art always precede changes in thought, like, like the rational spirit is preceded by the art that was driving towards the rationalist period. And then innovation comes after that. So it’s obviously all of our tech is always going to fall kind of behind what our fashion is showing, we want to do. And I think that’s where we’re headed is individualism is so such a focus now among everybody in terms of fashion, especially. And the more we have that focus on it, the more drive it’s going to be towards having a sustainable way to create clothes that we are ours. And it’s not really about trading it for the next style. It’s more about creating my own closet so that I can have something through my life that tells my story. And that’s a much more sustainable practice. And actually, it was a much older practice when people could not there was no innovation that allowed this mass production that we have now of clothing, which, you know, mass production of clothing has created lots of life saving, you know, things so it was a it’s an important step, I think along human progress. But now we’re the I believe the next step is to make things more individual more long term minded, less exchangeable. Less freely throw away-able, just like Courtney was saying, with cutting things up and all that and there’s never there’s never one enemy. It’s really, it’s really a mindset that’s changing overall, I would say.

Art Cavazos 19:09
So, I, you know, I think a lot of those points were were, you know, fantastic and spot on. You know, when I think about kind of the personal image personal brand, the individualism that is happening and the economy that’s moving on to the internet, and more and more commerce is done virtually and people creating their online brand is increasingly the kind of foundation of many different industries. Right? So what about when you introduce AI into that, right? Like, you’d look at what has been done with ChatGPT and, you know, kind of similar, I think Google released Bard to greet What’s the opposite of fanfare? But Courtney, you mentioned the intellectual property, you know, being stolen. You know, what about when someone can type into a software program, create a blog post in the style of Courtney White or, you know, Style Me and outfit in the style of Courtney White or William Nilson, or anyone, right? How does that change the game?

Courtney White 20:32
I think that’s huge. People can already do that, to a certain extent if they go on Pinterest, since Pinterest is definitely searchable, and I’m on Pinterest. That’s part of the reason I wanted to get my name Courthouse Couture trademarked because I was very serious about the fact that people could be stealing what I was doing, and someone actually did steal and influencers, blog posts and was using them. And I don’t know if she used AI, but she was rewriting and influencers blog posts. And she made her whole presence until she got caught copying this person’s work. So it’s already happening. But I if I envisioned people on ChatGPT, what I’d hoped they would be doing is saying, Help me figure out how to style black pants three different ways or helped me how to style a suit. But I do think people could also use it to help write blog posts, but they’re already using people right now a lot of bloggers use, I believe it’s Fiverr people are using services to write their blog posts. Because a lot of people think blogging is dead. I do think that’s the reason that a lot of influencers probably need to move toward owning their brand. They don’t own their online presence. We don’t own any of the platforms that we are on. I do own my blog. But if you look at a lot of influencers now, especially influencers that have a lot of millions of followers, a lot of them don’t even have a blog. So they’re completely relying on Tik Toc, which we know could go on a ban at any moment. If there’s ever an issue, because tick tock comes from a Chinese based company, not that we have anything against them. But I think in terms of business, if influencers want to move forward to become more viable, and to be respected, they probably need to own their brand, having their own blogs, getting their names, trademarked. Trademark is also a way to help you fast track into getting verified on social media websites as well.

William Nilson 22:22
Yeah, I think Courtney’s advice is much more practical than that, I would probably just offer up the pie in the sky, other side of it, which is I definitely, I struggle with copyright. Just generally speaking from a philosophy standpoint, because I went to music school, I grew up in musician and artists and all that, before I did law school, and then I found out that people get totally messed up right, by, by people by bad actors. I mean, that’s really what it is, is bad actors will either try to trick others into saying that they are someone who has created value and then extort value from others. By doing that, that’s one of the main protections. And then the other is using just using symbols that someone else has created or using content that someone else has created, calling it theirs and monetizing it. Both of those are are just stealing. It’s an how do we get past that. But then I struggle with the other side of it, which is how do we encourage creativity and freedom of thought, freedom of creation of new ideas, and placing people into situations where it’s positive to create and to borrow from others. The hip hop revolution was really critical. I feel like to that in terms of the music side of things. But that greatly influenced me in terms of how I view fashion. Fashion is one of the biggest grossing industries just generally, which I think there’s some probably some problems with that. But part of the reason it’s not as because copyright is just generally speaking, far less prevalent. The designs themselves, the patterns, it’s really hard to get down into patent work and copyright work when it comes to those patterns.

Erin Camp 23:56
Unless you’re like Louboutin or Tiffany Blue. Yeah, there’s some exceptions

Courtney White 24:02
It took Louboutin forever to get there. Right. Yeah, it took forever. So

Erin Camp 24:08
It took a huge lawsuit. It was like the last thing so I feel like I read that in like an IP course and law school. Yeah, like we all I think that’s like the token case.

William Nilson 24:17
It’s it kind of exposes how much of a resource to someone in an art. It’s truly it’s an art business. What kind of resources do they need in order to create some sort of value out of a restrictive covenant basically, on what they’ve created? And if it’s not supporting those that are in the most creative space, then it will stunt development in the field overall. So I don’t really have any answers on that. But I do think about that a lot. I think it’s a very important question for us to all be considering in terms of fashion and the way we’re proceeding into personal branding.

Erin Camp 24:53
Yeah, I mean, I completely agree. I think another part of fashion that’s really changed that we haven’t really talked about and on honestly, Will, I mean, you can probably you probably totally relate that to this is like, it is so much easier to start a brand than a that it’s ever been. And to have like a bespoke custom tailored tailoring company. I mean, it’s just, it is easier because it’s easier to advertise on all these platforms like Instagram and things. And so we’re seeing like so much more Diversity in brands, I frequently think about that sort of it’s, it’s like a conflict in what we’re doing, because we want to protect people for their creativity. But we want to encourage people to still participate. And we don’t want to penalize people for participating. So it’s just especially if what they’re adding is just like the next step or something. I mean, it’s just, you should that it’s arguably shouldn’t be patentable, because if we patent that, then the next step on that step can’t be, you know, accessed by anyone except for the person that owns the patent. So, I mean, it is like a huge conflict, that causes a lot of problems, it could cause an increasing amount of problems, if we were to ever change our thoughts on this, but luckily, you know, we are pretty loose on this in the US. And it’s very rare that you can have something, I just think it’s super interesting.

William Nilson 26:09
To give you an example that we had a client that he’s in Boston, he had researched his family lineage and his genealogy everything to find his his crest of his last name, and it’s a specific crest in Scotland. That’s not the his last name is very prevalent in Scotland, but he has a specific family line that has that particular crest. And if you go into like, there’s a word for like Crestology, there’s not Crestology but it’s very complicated. And he did all the research and said, This is it. And I know that this is it. His father passed away he wanted to place as a memorial inside his jacket as the lining. Such a cool idea. And we had to think through what are the copyright crossovers right now. And ultimately, as long as their solution that’s reasonable. I think it all works. And in this case, there was thankfully we bought a license for the image. But then I was conflicted again, thinking this is this guy’s family crest. Why should I need someone’s why should he more specifically ways that he should need someone’s permission to use the family crest that is his lineage to place on the inside of a jacket? That’s only his it’s not mass produced? He’s not making a profit off of it? I am. So I have to be sure that I’m doing it right. But it’s interesting as a question, but I love that we’re running into it on an individual basis right now. Because it’s getting people to think really deeply about what their copyright What am I as a copyright? How am I copywriting myself and my content? Does it matter or not. And if it doesn’t make anybody any money, we’re nobody else is making money on it, maybe it doesn’t matter. But we know people, other people are going to make money on someone else’s labor. If we don’t stop that from happening. Now I’m getting a little passionate.

Art Cavazos 27:51
So speaking of kind of, you know, modern treatment of, you know, traditional things, one of the premises or questions that we’re asking on in the Future Ready Business, you know, is, is this kind of a transformative time for the economy and for business? You know, I think the conventional wisdom unit, the pandemic has changed a lot of things, but we’re kind of exploring on this podcast, all the in the different industries. How is that true? Is that true? And in what ways is that true? Do you all see that being true in the fashion industry, you know, is this kind of a transformative time and what’s going to be different going forward, If so?

Courtney White 28:30
So when I initially wrote my blog post about people, you know, at wearing athleisure, after the pandemic, it was because a lot of companies really were shifting what they were selling in stores, because people were no longer wearing suits. A lot of people said their employees, and this was really to help get them back to work, could wear more casual attire than they had pre pandemic. However, I’m now seeing on the runways, that that’s kind of shifting back and kind of this maximalism is kind of floating back in. So I think we may see a mix of both. I do think that a lot of companies and just America in general is much more casual than other parts of the world in terms of what we wear. But I also think what’s happening is that brands are being forced to listen to the consciousness of the consumers, meaning people don’t just care about the fact that they liked our clothing. They also care about what you stand for. The Black Lives Matter movement was a definite example of that. Also, you have people asking questions about sustainability and about Me Too. And lots of other questions about people who own companies who are on the boards. Are your boards diverse? And so people are becoming much more educated because of Google, and people can look up everything and find out everything they want to know in a matter of minutes and start questioning it. And there’s also sites that are dedicated online to holding fashion brands and companies accountable.

Art Cavazos 28:44
Yeah, I thank you, speaking about one on your Instagram recently, the Birkin Slayer.

Courtney White 30:07
I’ve really enjoyed that. So someone started a page and they only do stories on Instagram called the Dake Burkin and Slayer and this page is dedicated to calling out influencers who are making it seem like they have Hermes Birkin bags, but they do not. And it’s also brought up that apparently these influencers are also linking products. They’re showing the fake product, but it’s a super fake because there’s levels to fakes. These are super fakes that look and feel almost exactly like the actual, whatever designer item, and they’re linking it to items that are real. So there’s this whole seediness of people buying into a lifestyle from influencers and they don’t really own it. It’s been really, really fascinating. But I think a lot of people just fundamentally don’t understand that. selling counterfeit items is illegal. A lot of people are comfortable with buying them, but a lot of people are not and a lot of people have followed this story because they said they felt like influencers were living fake lives. And there’s no way that these people can be buying 10 Birkin bags when Birkin bags. A plain Hermes Birkin bag may start at around $8000 to $10,000 depending upon the leather that you’re using, starting at on the very low end. And also they want you to have an extensive purchase list with them, meaning they want you to purchase their blanket, a bracelet, a scarf, all of these other things where you can even be offered a Birkin. I don’t know if you remember several years ago, they actually turned Oprah, Oprah of all people away from an Hermes store. So the entire topic has been really, really interesting. And even when I try not to be a lawyer online, I still end up becoming a lawyer online, because people end up asking all of these questions like how can people do this. And it’s really because US law allows inspiration, which really means you can be inspired by another design, but you can’t steal it. There’s a lot of brands I can think of that I won’t necessarily mentioned that often live the designs from other more expensive designers, there may be contemporary brands. And that’s okay, but outright stealing and stealing somebody’s logo is not. And I just think people are fascinated by that now, because now they can look everything up. But also DHGate, Alley Express are sites that are becoming huge because people can buy these fakes very easily. They don’t have to go to Canal Street like you used to do in New York, to buy fakes.

Art Cavazos 32:37
Yeah, I’ve been there. Those are not very convincing fake actually.

Courtney White 32:41
They are not. Unless you get taken into the back room Art. They had a back room that? You know, I’ve heard?

William Nilson 32:51
Art doesn’t go into back room. That’s a principle I think.

Art Cavazos 32:54
Will, what is your take on on the future of the fashion industry? And maybe I would actually be very interested in bringing it down to you know, where you’re working, you know, kind of the bespoke suit space. You know, what, what’s going on there? Is that something that is going to become a bigger part of men’s fashion?

William Nilson 33:14
I think it’s yes and no. As a self serving person, I should probably just a resoundingly say yes, yes. So it’s going to be the biggest thing ever. What I think is happening is people are figuring out that they can do things that they want to do for less money than then before because of workstream advances really. Shipping and the way international relations are going has its overall there’s been a dramatic increase in efficiency and flexibility with respect to products from A to B, materials are easy to get from A to B. And I just benefit from that directly. And so to my customers, I mean, it’s very much, we’re in a different world now with respect to making clothes for yourself by experts. So the fact that we can even do that right now was already kind of a paradigm shift. It used to be only done by a kind of traveling salesman style outfits. There recently, there are things like three or four very big companies that do a lot of what I do, it’s a made to measure bespoke process where everything is not from a an archive, an inventory. So it’s made for the client. But now people like me with in smaller operations in different cities are deciding that they have enough access to the market to make something that’s their ideas, put on to people more of what I do. people’s ideas put onto people because I try to focus on what people want to express themselves out. And that’s where I think it’s going to win, which is people bringing their ideas to me and me being kind of the just the, the applier of those ideas onto them in an efficient way. And then offering my consultation more on the side because their ideas are the fundamental that’s creating the piece that I’m doing. I think that’s the way that the market is going because it’s more value to the client for them to get what they want rather than to be at the whims of a designer. I do love designing. So I really relish the opportunity when a client says like, Hey, do you want to just do something for me that you make, I love doing it. But really, I know that the most value for someone is going to be getting to them to and they still want to have what they want. Even when they asked me to do something, it’s really just my creation. If I do something, and they don’t like it, they’re still gonna, they’re not gonna like it, even though they don’t like it. It’s still up to them. So I think that’s the direction is going. I think that the markets cyclicity, if that’s a word, is interesting right now, because luxury markets are always kind of down when free cash flow is down. And that’s where a lot of consumers are right now, because we’re in recession fears and all that. So people are a little bit less likely to be spending money. And that means that anything that’s seen as a luxury good, which could mean personal fashion, is always going to take a dive. And that’s where I see a current market that would change up probably within the next six or seven months. Back to we’re getting back into the office, I have to upgrade my wardrobe, I have to present myself and my personal brand and get real with this. That’s probably the my short term outlook.

Art Cavazos 36:21
And maybe AI will make it easier for people to design their own custom wardrobes. And that will become more and more the norm, you know, with all that supply chain.

William Nilson 36:31
yes.

Erin Camp 36:32
I mean, the designing your own wardrobe things with AI, I just I don’t like that. I want to the creativity part of putting your outfit together I think is you know what I really like. So I really think fashion in my opinion is like one of the few industries that AI like just cannot take over completely unless we find a way to completely recreate human creativity, which I just mean, I think we’re a long way from that.

William Nilson 36:57
I agree. It will not take over. I think it should be a tool. I hope we use it as a paintbrush. As soon as we get to that point, it’s going to be great. Yeah, if people start to you, I think you’ll notice very quickly if people are using only AI, I mean, now blog posts when people are posting that’s clearly AI driven. You can tell the difference in value, just it’s almost like a little Turing test, like you can kind of Oh, yeah, this seems like an AI wrote this. Some people kind of talk like, it seems like an AI wrote your conversation. Because they’re, like, they’re not thinking they don’t want to, you know, that will be part of society, inevitably, but it already is. Because that’s how we are sometimes as people as we try to phone it in and make sure we’re not really rocking the boat.

Art Cavazos 37:42
Well, you know, the time, there’s a lot of parallels, you know, for a lot of different industries, professionals in lots of industries, but the time that it takes a you know, human designer to design a bespoke suit for a customer and, you know, create that is always going to be more than if you have, you know, there’s already essentially video games were, you know, primarily marketed to girls, but we know we’re anybody could go on there and design. I mean, the marketing is funny, we didn’t get into like the gendered aspects of marketing. But for another episode, we can get into that a little bit, but you go in there, and you design, the outfits and everything. So it’d be very easy, I think, to take like these, the software’s that already exists, and just start making real clothes with that, you know, not very easy, but in the sense that it is kind of doable, the technology is there. And yeah, the supply chain management aspects that you mentioned, make it more more doable. But I think there will always be a place for a human designer, but their time is limited. So it kind of democratizes it in a way because for the people who can’t all access, you know, a human bespoke designer, maybe have kind of that as a substitute.

William Nilson 38:54
Yeah, consultancy always creates a certain amount of luxury. And that luxury is quantified by the extra time that it takes which creates that lack of efficiency, it’s always going to be a step above to have someone else working with you on a design and working. And I hope that that is the real value add because really, at the end of the day, the logistics, we want to simplify everything as much as possible. Speaking as attorney, we want to simplify the law as much as possible for the benefit society. I mean, I know that puts me out of a job but law in many ways, the simpler it is for people, the more efficient it is for everyone. Contracts are born out of the inefficiency of criminal mindsets. So it’s we’re kind of at this idea of how do we create a fashion sphere that is efficient for people but doesn’t ruin the value, the evident value of creativity. And that’s where law can be too. I think we’re headed though.

Courtney White 39:48
I do think that AI can be inserted into fashion. The more that people feel like they’re involved in the process, it will be fun for them. But maybe more of what I’m envisioning is AI being used to help us kind of eliminate some of the problems with fast fashion that have been brought up. Figuring out better ways to produce items. So maybe there are several people that want the same type of design, they don’t know they want the same type of design. But if we can all kind of quantify that and put that in one place, maybe there’s an opportunity to kind of streamline that process. I do think that already, you’ve got companies testing this idea out one of them I’ve worked with before. It’s a company that’s actually based in India that they do their best to provide equitable accommodations for the employees that work for them. And you figure out who that person is when you get your item back. But you can change the sleeve length, you can change, you know the color of your dress, you can change the length of your dress, you can put your height in, you can put in your measurements, and they charge you small upgraded fees for certain items when they’re shifted. So you can already kind of start creating what is a custom garment. I do think that more expensive design houses, they’ve always had an element of customization. I don’t think that will go away. But what I do think AI will provide his what Will has already talked about, it will provide people who don’t have access in terms of they don’t have the money to maybe go to Hermes and say I want a custom Hermes bag, but maybe a more contemporary designer has like a couple of designs that someone can use, which I think designers have already toyed around with that. And I think you may see more of that customization, people are already asking for it. You’ve already seen some brands adapt like Old Navy has started selling jeans, Good American does as well, that fit you if you your size fluctuates within three sizes. I didn’t think that was even possible. But the jeans are really popular, especially with women, because they can kind of wear them before childbirth, after childbirth, there’s all these different things. So I think you’ll you’ll just start seeing ways that customization can become a part of a normal shopping experience. Also, I think the way AI can be used is to maybe keep people from the inside of stores. Stores don’t want to hear this. But we know rent is expensive. We know that rent has changed post pandemic. And so I think what you may see is allowing people to have some of those custom experiences that you had to go in a brick and mortar store to do, you no longer will have to do those, you will be able to do all of that online. That’s what I envision. Nordstrom has already experimented with what they call a concept store. And they pretty much have them in California. I don’t know if they ever expanded beyond that, where you literally went into the store, you can see touch and feel things but you never took any items out of the store. The stores were smaller in square footage and footprint of a normal Nordstrom and you would just get the items shipped to your house that saves Nordstrom, they don’t have to be in a large mall and pay the same amount of rent that they normally would have to pay. And so it provides you still with a custom experience. And I just think AI will allow that. I think it will just allow more customization. The only thing that I struggle with is that AI needs to also be there on the production side. So you can have all of this AI but if the production side has not caught up with all of that customization, it still will not help the business owners bottom line, which means there’s going to have to be a limit on that customization. Because it just won’t make sense. Neiman Marcus there I believe it was their CEO or CFO just came out and said that the majority of their business is determined by only 2% of their customers, which means most of the people that are coming in Neiman Marcus are not what’s driving sales. So if Neiman Marcus is saying that I can’t imagine that everyone will be that highly customized. They will have to put limits on it and production will have to catch up for AI to really work in concert with having more customization options, and more freedom of design, which is why I agree with all of you that I don’t think AI is taking over anytime soon, but I could be wrong.

Art Cavazos 44:09
So I think we had a great conversation today about fashion and the intersection of art and business no pun intended, and Will, Courtney, thank you again so much for joining us and y’all were wonderful. Did you want to say anything? Here at the end? Did y’all have any internet handles to share or anything like that?

William Nilson 44:32
Sure. I’m rebranding right now. It’s gonna be awesome bespoke but for right now you could just get me on my personal Instagram which is Big Willy Got Back.

Erin Camp 44:45
Please add to his

William Nilson 44:48
711 followers. I’m desperate for followers. Every time I get to follower, I’m like, man, one step closer to Courtney.

Courtney White 45:00
It took a long time to get there truly. But I am at Courthouse Couture at almost every platform if it’s if courthouse couture is too long it’s courthouse court, but almost every platform, Instagram, Facebook, even YouTube, Courthouse Couture.

William Nilson 45:17
I’m adding you right now Courtney.

Erin Camp 45:18
Yeah. I already follow you Courtney. Well, if you liked our show, please rate and review us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts and share FRB with your friends and colleagues.

Art Cavazos 45:31
Oh, yeah, normally I say that but that’s fine.

Erin Camp 45:34
You were taking too long.

Art Cavazos 45:38
Thank you to our producer Greg on the ones and twos. You can find this on Instagram at Future Ready Business and you can find me on Twitter @Financelawyer.

Erin Camp 45:47
And you can find me on Twitter at @businesslawyerE. E for Erin. As mentioned at the top of the show. The opinions expressed today are ours and those of our guests and do not necessarily reflect the views of Jackson Walker, its clients or any of their respective affiliates.

Art Cavazos 46:01
This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. We hope you enjoyed it. Thanks for listening.

Marlene Gebauer 46:12
Thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to this special episode of Future Ready Business on The Geek in Review podcast. We’ll have all the links to where you can find Future Ready Business and follow Art, Erin, Courtney, and William.

Greg Lambert 46:25
You know William still needs a few more Instagram followers, by the way, so make sure that that we link to that.

Marlene Gebauer 46:33
And if you enjoy our show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert 46:41
And I can be reached @glambert to on Twitter.

Marlene Gebauer 46:45
Or you can leave us a voicemail on our Deacon review Hotline at 713-487-7821 and as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you Jerry.

Greg Lambert 46:55
Thanks Jerry. He’s also very fashionable Alright, talk to you later Marlene.

Marlene Gebauer 47:00
Bye Bye.

[Ed. Note – Please welcome back Jessica de Perio Wittman & Kathleen (Katie) Brown as guest bloggers. – GL]

In case you didn’t know, the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) will release a brand-new version of the bar exam in 2026.  The NCBE conducted a study in 2018 and asked practicing attorneys and non-licensed lawyers about basic technology tasks in their law practice.  Attorneys said they expect proficiency in word processing, research platforms, electronic communication, desktop publishing, and document storage, including the cloud.  This should not be a surprise because D. Casey Flaherty has been talking about minimum tech expectations in the practice of law since 2012.  His technology audit proved that many attorneys do not possess basic technology competency per Model Rule 1.1 and Comment 8. Over 10 years later, we are still talking about the importance of technology competency in the legal profession and highlighting ever-present shortcomings in basic technology skills.  Flaherty himself stated that “lawyers in general are woefully deficient in using the software tools at their disposal – e.g., Word, Acrobat, Excel.”

Joseph Lawson, Law Library Director at the Harris County Robert W. Hainsworth Law Library, identified that a lack of time and training opportunities prevent solo and small firm practitioners from accessing legal technology.  The 2019 American Bar Association Tech Report confirms Lawson’s hypothesis:  only 28 percent of solos report the availability of technology training, while more than 95 percent of attorneys at large firms reported access to training.

Some may argue that law firms should not spend their time and money on offering basic technology training because the training should be offered in law school.  We address how law schools provide technology training in our 2023 article, “Taking on the Ethical Obligation of Technology Competency in the Academy: An Empirical Analysis of Practice-Based Technology Training Today”.  In our longitudinal study, we found that 670 technology courses were offered in the technology space.  Now, 670 courses may sound like a large number, but this number includes every e-discovery, cybersecurity, law office management, and law practice and technology course in the country.  This results in an average of 3.38 technology courses at each of the ABA-accredited law schools.  This statistic also includes the University of North Texas, which is currently the only ABA-accredited law school that mandates the completion of a Practice-Related Technology requirement for all J.D. candidates.  To learn more about how law schools are attempting to address the disconnect in technology training, we encourage you to watch the recorded version of the University of St. Thomas Law Journal Fall 2022 Symposium, A Roadmap for Law School Modernity: Teaching Technology Competence (available at https://youtu.be/hILd5qJ1G4I).

Today, the “next big thing” in legal technology is ChatGPT and generative AI, and we recognize that, in contrast, it’s not sexy to talk about basic technology skills. Or the fact that many attorneys still do not possess them.  But we need to continue having these conversations about basic technology training and possessing the requisite skills for efficient legal practice.  All attorneys should know how to:

• Download forms from databases
• Use formatting styles
• Create tables of authority
• Use Quick Parts and Autotext
• Save Word documents as efile-ready PDFs, and
• Set up shortcut keys to insert a section symbol.

Some believe that our law students were exposed to these basic skills because they grew up surrounded by technology.   Iantha Haight disproves the assumption of native technology competency in her article “Digital Natives, Techno Transplants: Framing Minimum Technology Standards for Law School Graduates”.  She claims that the term digital natives “lulls educators into thinking students need no additional training in technology to be prepared for the workforce.”  Even though we have started to dispel the myth of the digital native in the legal classroom, we must now deal with a new generation of law students who went to “Google School”.

What does it mean to be a Google School student?  These students were handed a Chromebook or an iPad with some (or all) of Google G Suite for Education.   Today, some colleges and universities have been using Google Workspace for Education (previously called G Suite for Education) for at least a decade.  In 2017, Google reported that about 15 million primary- and secondary-school students in the United States use Google Classroom.  By this time, Chromebooks accounted for 58 percent of mobile devices shipped to primary and secondary schools in the United States.   In 2019, Google reported that all eight Ivy League schools use G Suite for Education as a productivity tool of choice for their faculty, staff, and students.  For a discussion on how Google Schools are impacting the law school classroom, you can listen to this podcast: https://www.geeklawblog.com/2022/08/teaching-and-pressuring-law-professors-to-teach-technology-katie-brown-tgir-ep-171.html.

Law schools have the challenge of minimizing the use of Google products in the classroom because most law firms don’t allow employees to use Google apps on their work devices. Microsoft and Adobe productivity tools currently have a large footprint on the legal academy and the legal profession. As a result, there is a disconnect in technology knowledge and skill when you compare what students were accustomed to prior to law school and what they’ll be expected to know when they head into practice.  If the next gen bar exam is intended to simulate scenarios in modern-day practice, then the NCBE must also award points to test takers for successfully completing basic technology tasks that they would be expected to use in practice.  The NCBE can ask test takers to:

• Create documents with specific margins, page numbers, and styles, like the formats expected from local court rules
• Create a table of authorities or a table of contents
• Draft an email using mail merge skills
• Convert a Word document into a PDF and
• Remove any metadata damaging to their client

We recognize that this is not a complete list, but it provides examples for how the NCBE could test basic technology skills that are expected in modern-day law practice.  Only then, can bar examiners determine whether test takers have the requisite knowledge and skills for entry-level practice.

Author Bio:

Jessica de Perio Wittman (UConn) and Kathleen (Katie) Brown (Charleston) have been friends since their law school days at Seattle University.  Although the two have lived in different states for the past 13 years and now serve as Law Library directors at their respective schools, they still manage to hold Zoom marathon writing sessions on a weekly basis.

Benjamin Alarie and Abdi Aidid are legal experts who are heavily involved in the development of legal technology. They are releasing a new book, The Legal Singularity: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Law Radically Better later this year. 

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer 0:08
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer,

Greg Lambert 0:14
And I’m Greg Lambert. So Marlene and I are in the office today we had a presentation at lunch and we just decided to stick around here today. But we have brought in a couple of authors on Toronto. So we have Abdi Aidid, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, and Benjamin Alarie, the Ostler chair in business law at the University of Toronto and also affiliated faculty member at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, which I just love that they have a new book coming out later this year in July, called the legal singularity how artificial intelligence can make law radically better. Abdi and Ben, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Benjamin Alarie 1:00
Thanks. Great. Thanks, Marlene.

Abdi Aidid 1:02
Thanks for having us.

Marlene Gebauer 1:03
So before we dive into the book, Abdi. And Ben, tell us a little bit about yourselves and what got you interested first in the law, and then about AI and the law? Ben, why don’t why don’t you take a stab at this first?

Benjamin Alarie 1:14
Sure. I think this could be a very long answer. I’m gonna make it and the shorter answer. I’ve been a tax law professor here at the University of Toronto since 2004. I went straight through undergrad went through law school, did graduate work in economics, graduate work in law, and and then did a judicial clerkship at the Supreme Court. And, and as an academic, my focus is tax law. I’ve been at the tax law, professing game since 2004. In 2011, I was associate dean of the faculty here at the University of Toronto, it was in the context of leading review of the curriculum, the first year curriculum that I got really interested in thinking about the future of legal education. And it became totally obvious to me that artificial intelligence is going to dramatically affect the future of the profession and of legal education. And that led me to ultimately co found blue J, which is a legal technology company here in Toronto with a couple of my colleagues here from the law school. It was in that context that I then became interested in in writing this book with Abdi. And so it’s a series of coincidences that led me to this point, but really an intense interest in artificial intelligence and the law and the law fascinates me tax law, including tax law, it’s kind of the operating system for society. And so this is a continuous outgrowth and development of my thinking about the law.

Marlene Gebauer 2:48
Oh, that’s interesting. I am sure many of our listeners are familiar with with Blue Jay. opti How about you?

Abdi Aidid 2:56
Sure. So my answer really should be shorter. Because I’m a lot earlier in my career than Ben.

Greg Lambert 3:02
That’s a polite way to put it.

Benjamin Alarie 3:05
Yeah, he’s saying I am old.

Abdi Aidid 3:08
I think that’s hardly hardly Ben’s actually one of one of our youngest faculty here at the law school. So I like Ben, grew up here in Canada, went through my undergraduate education, went off to law school, later did a postgraduate law degree. And I practice for a few years as a commercial litigator in New York, focusing on complex corporate litigation and arbitration. And in that time, I quite enjoyed what I was doing. But I noticed pretty quickly that a lot of what I was doing was drudge work, though, kind of was somewhat, at least on occasion, a bit of a letdown based on what I’d studied, you know, I went to law school, and we were debating lofty ideas and thinking about complex legal questions. And I spent a lot of my time in the early years of practice as your listeners are, for sure familiar, you know, in the legal research universe, trying to find the right cases, running endless Boolean search strings, right. So part of what I was doing, was helping to supply information to more senior lawyers and helping to come up with legal advice for clients. But I was doing so in a manner that I even recognize then as being a little bit inefficient. And so I had always had my eye on ways to improve the practice that day to day especially for early career associates like myself, but I also had my eye on more creative pursuits. I wanted to affect the law at a more systemic level. I wanted to help think through complex problems and the day to day you know, one off client engagements weren’t really exactly my speed because I wanted to sort of ponder the big questions and I was fortunate when I moved back to Toronto to get to know Ben a little bit better and learn about Blue J and eventually joined blue J as later the vice president of legal research, so I led the team have lawyers and research analysts that did the work that helped inform the tools that Bucha developed. The most notable of which for my own work was the AI informed predictive tools helping to predict how future courts are likely to rule on new legal situations. And so in that time, Ben and I realized that there was a ton of overlap in our ideas. And we sort of thought about the future of the law in similar ways. And since then, you know, as part of that work, I was teaching part time here at the law school, related courses and legal research and writing. And this past year, I joined the faculty as a full time law professor teaching, foundational first year subjects like torts and civil procedure.

Greg Lambert 5:45
So the name of the book is the legal singularity, which first of all, that’s pretty bold title, you know, thinking that title think thinking about law becoming self aware. So, Ben, or Abdi, what’s what’s kind of the main thesis of the book? What should the reader expect?

Benjamin Alarie 6:03
The main thesis of the book is that we look at technology, we look at big things that are happening with technology, this is going to come as no surprise to your audience. Now in the wake of ChatGPT, and all of the developments that are pretty top of mind these days, four years ago, when Abdi and I started working on the book, it was it was a lot less obvious that artificial intelligence was going to make a really big impact, at least among most lawyers, it wasn’t obvious, there was a lot of skepticism. The claim of the book is that as we see computational power continue to double every couple of years. And as we see the cost of computing power come down, as we see more and more legal information becoming digitized. And as we see improvements in algorithms, machine learning algorithms, the cost of predicting legal outcomes is going to essentially vanish, it’s going to become very clear what would happen in court with respect to a particular situation in terms of the legal outcome. And this becomes extremely interesting. What happens as a result of this and for Abdi, and for me, we, we decided that it would make sense to do a book length study of the implications for the law across a number of dimensions and explore what does it mean for the judiciary? What does it mean for legal education? What does it mean for practicing attorneys? What does it mean for society? Generally, what does it mean for democracy and voting? So we decided to take it all down. But essentially, the key insight is this, which is that the law is going to become complete, it’s going to become much clearer, much more fair as a result. And as we put it in the subtitle of the book, it’s how artificial intelligence can make the law radically better.

Marlene Gebauer 7:59
So I mean, how are you seeing that applied? Now? I mean, how are you seeing that movement now? Or is this something truly you think is going to be more in the future?

Abdi Aidid 8:10
One, you’re seeing widespread curiosity, right, you’re seeing a lot of lawyers recognizing that there’s great opportunity for them to do their job faster, better with additional technological support, Blue Jays, sort of proof positive of that the company started in 2015. And since then, has had many, many clients among large law firms, accounting firms, both in tax and employment law. And so the the evidence of the uptake, the fact of the uptake rather, is evidence that there’s curiosity and interest and that lawyers are wanting to put their money where their mouth is, when it comes to being forward looking. What we’re also seeing is, I would say deep interest in the future of the profession, sometimes it’s motivated by anxiety about what’s to come. Right, right. But it’s a healthy conversation for us to engage in nevertheless, and part of why you wrote this book was not just to reassure people, but to help them see sort of their place in this unfolding future. And so the fact that we’re having that conversation, the fact that ChatGPT has sort of woken everyone up and made them realize, hey, this is like more around the corner than you think. It gives us an opportunity to engage in a conversation with more rigor, to have a more sophisticated and mature conversation closer to what you’re seeing and other sort of industries. For instance, right now, there’s a pretty sophisticated and mature conversation having happening in the world of transportation policy around how to accommodate self driving vehicles. You don’t you don’t have yet the same as a widespread acceptance in the world of law about this being the imminent future, so to speak. And so part of what we’re trying to do is motivate that conversation and encourage people to really engage with us about what we want this feature to look like, because we have a window right now, for us to sort of forge a consensus about how we want things to look, I want the legal industry to look how I want all of our legal institutions to look. And by extension, how we want our society to look. And so the time for this book, the time for this conversation, is now and the early uptake that we’re seeing in the legal industry through technologies like blue J, is a suggestion that they’re not going away, and they’re only expected to proliferate.

Greg Lambert 10:26
Well, you know, on that, I want to ask you about the intended audience for the book. But I want to preface that a little bit with, have you ever seen the legal market reacts so quickly, as it has over the past, you know, three, three and a half months, since the launch of ChatGPT, because I think we’ve seen, well, here, here’s how I view it. And you can tell me if I’m wrong with this is, you know, for the past, I’d say five years, we have had product, legal product after legal product after a legal product that says, we use artificial intelligence, except as the user, you never really you kind of have to trust that that’s going on in the background. And it wasn’t until we had a product like ChatGPT completely not illegal product, just every you know, every person product that all of a sudden engages the user in it, I think it all of a sudden, after five years of being told, you know AI is coming. Now all of a sudden, it’s real, because we’ve interacted with it, we get to see the response to it. So your the timing of this book may may be perfect for the market. So first of all, have you ever seen the the the legal market react like it has now and then Who do you think is going to be very interested in reading your book? Now?

Benjamin Alarie 11:58
I think what’s really fascinating, Greg is, we haven’t seen a reception of any kind of tech product, like we’ve seen for ChatGPT. Right? I think it launched at the end of November, by the end of January, open AI reported that there were over 100 million active users of the platform. And that apparently is a faster adoption curve than any other software ever in history. So it’s not just the legal profession that has reacted more aggressively in response to ChatGPT. Everybody more generally, who’s who’s reacted really aggressively to it, it’s it’s very interesting, I would say, the particular genius of it, yes, the chat. And the results that you get out of using ChatGPT are really engaging and curious. And I think the the one of the key things, the underappreciated aspects of it is the user interface and the user experience, we’re all used to sending messages back and forth to each other. And it makes people feel really comfortable with having that interaction with the system, haven’t sending a message and then awaiting the response from the system, seeing what it is and then sending another response back and forth. That’s really the I think the conquering genius of chat GPT. And I say that because I was very excited about open AI dropping, but they call the DaVinci, three model, their GPT three model, which ChatGPT is is using. I was very excited about that weeks and weeks before ChatGPT dropped. And I was I was announcing it on social media and talking about it and say, Hey, read this output. I think this is really engaging. And it was available to everybody on open API’s playground, and people could use it. And it didn’t catch fire because it wasn’t wrapped in that user interface of having a conversation with ChatGPT. I think that was a really great innovation. And I think because that innovation has really caught people’s imagination. I think the intended audience for this book is going to be quite broad. I think people are really curious about, well, what does this mean for things like medicine? What does this mean for things like education? What does this mean for areas like law that are really core to how we organize ourselves as a society? And I think we have a lot to say about that. In the book. We also asked a lot of questions in the book. And we provide far fewer answers, but we’re identifying the questions. And we want to convene a conversation, we want to trigger the right kinds of conversations in the book. And we are strong believers that that these are conversations that need to happen. And so this is this is why we’ve written the book and you know, lawyers don’t have a monopoly on good thoughts about what should happen to the legal system. we’re firm believers in that too.

Marlene Gebauer 14:59
I’m not sure if they do But yeah. So technological singularity. So that’s like the definition of that is is basically this sort of hypothetical future point where technology growth becomes uncontrollable, irreversible, and, you know, results in unforeseen change. How does that relate to the concept of of legal clarity, which is your title. So,

Abdi Aidid 15:28
the legal singularity is really as been described earlier about the practical elimination of legal uncertainty, and the sort of impact on our institutions and our society as a result of the elimination of that uncertainty. It’s a future state where the law is unknowable in real time and on demand. And where we can start to do things that we’re not we weren’t previously able to do because the law was either difficult to ascertain, or we didn’t often have a sort of normative consensus around what the law ought to be. And so it’s a concept that rests somewhat on the idea of a technological singularity. But it is not as though the two can develop sort of CO extensively. Why because the technological singularity contemplates much more of a totalizing event. It’s about like all of society, dramatically changing as a result of technology reaching this ability to perform functions that we couldn’t previously imagine and anticipate. What we’re trying to do is account for the impact of technological improvement on law and related institutions. And so in some ways, it’s an equally socially important concept, but it doesn’t purport to describe as much as its technology was simulated before, it’s to describe our focus as lawyers, law professors, as people interested in all of the things that emerge from the world of law here has been on law, its institutions, and also the sort of law jacent subject areas, but we’re not here making a we’re not exactly making predictions about the impact of the same technologies on radiology on necessarily the labor market on transportation, where our analysis is not cabined by any measure, but it is really a law oriented approach.

Greg Lambert 17:24
So, uh, one of the things that and you mentioned it earlier is talking about using AI to enable legal prediction. I want to that. I mean, if you take that to an extreme, I could see some people going, Well, why don’t we just, you know, the do away with with judges and let computers in let the AI take over and sign and genocide. And then that way, you know, we take the human element out of it, and we you know, and we just have, you know, the law, but I don’t think that’s necessarily what you’re going for your. But when you talk about AI enabled legal prediction work, what what are some of the potential benefits of that deep that you see? Sure, I can start

Abdi Aidid 18:11
us off, let me first start by saying, prediction is already what we do in the law. I know some people are spooked by the idea of technologized legal prediction, but think about the legal statements that we make. If I say I own a home, I might be saying my name is on a document somewhere. But what am I really say? I’m saying that if it came down to it, and someone contested my rights, or my interest in my home, I’m confident that a future court would vindicate my property interest. I’m making a legal prediction, almost all of our legal statements involve some prediction, and that the thing that lawyers do day to day, is try to forecast what’s likely to happen based on their experience based on their knowledge, you know, and this has been laws long held aspiration, if you go back to Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1897, and the path of the law, he talked about the prophecies of what courts might do, and nothing less is what I mean by the law. I’m maybe butchering that quote a little bit. But when we’re rendering legal advice, clients are not coming to us saying, explain the contours and the multistep doctrine involved in a given tax question. They’re saying, If I structure my transaction this way, am I likely to elicit scrutiny from regulators? am I likely to run afoul of what courts have determined is the law in this given area? So really, what we’re trying to do all along, even in our, let’s call them analog ways, is make legal predictions. And so part of the idea here is that technology through harnessing computing, power AI machine learning different data science techniques, is able to assist with that prediction in ways that we might be too limited to do right. And so it’s helping to achieve what is the thing that we already do and the long held aspiration of the law? So what does that practically mean? Well, it means a few things, it means that AI can help you predict how future courts are likely to rule in new situations for litigators, that means evaluating the strength of your case, right? It means getting a sense of whether or not your case is a winner or a loser, it means being able to have the certainty of outcome such that you can actually plan your affairs accordingly. If you’re, say, a corporate lawyer or transactional lawyer engaged in for instance, tax planning, you will have a sense of what kind of advice to give based on where the line is, so to speak. And so this is an idea that is sort of broadly applicable and can fundamentally change our relationship to the law, not as the uncertain thing that we have to worry about. But the thing that we know with absolute confidence operates on us, and then we can adjust our behavior accordingly. Of course, I should add that there’s sort of long tail potential here, which is, you and I, in our sort of retail sense, having a real time sense of our legal rights and obligations. One of the major challenges that people have, you know, we talk a lot about access to justice, as lawyers will, one major problem of access to justice is inaccessible legal knowledge, not only because it’s actually hard to reach as a matter of fact, and sometimes the behind lock and key expensive lock and key. But also, because sometimes it’s difficult to understand, difficult to parse, that’s why you need train intermediates very often. So one potential thing that could happen is just lay people, individuals without sophisticated legal training will have sort of a sense of what the law is. But long before that, we’re talking about great opportunity for cost savings for lawyers to be able to reduce the cost of the legal research, perform analysis, much more quickly, obviously, you know, layering their own experience, and expertise, a top that, but being able to bring down their costs, so they can take on more cases potentially more engagements, pivoting the economic model of legal services, from margin to volume, you know, being able to do more satisfy more legal needs. And then it goes without saying that it’s a great opportunity for us to be creative, right? Like think about why many of us went to law school. I didn’t go to law school necessarily to spend my waking hours searching through legal research databases, you know, I dreamed of having a courtroom rhetorical flourish, you know, like a Perry Mason moment or something, or the Jack Nicholson, you can’t handle the truth. moment, right? Well, really, if we can start to automate through technology, some of the Drudge work involved, we can free up the time to be more creative, to do things like provide strategic value to our clients think through implications, and socially, have conversations, not just about what the law is, what the law ought to be, and what we want it to look like.

Marlene Gebauer 22:57
So, you know, you highlighted a few areas of where law can improve. Do you have any other areas where there might be holes, you know, in the current state of law and legal institutions, that could be improved? And how?

Benjamin Alarie 23:13
I think there are no shortage of examples of where the law could be.

Marlene Gebauer 23:20
Another year, right.

Benjamin Alarie 23:22
Yeah, I think I think what we’ll say is I’ll put my law professor hat on as a tax law professor here and say one of the things that we often see the courts talk about are the values of certainty, predictability and fairness in tax law and, and how taxpayers are entitled to plan their affairs on the basis of, you know, the Internal Revenue Code and the regulations. And there are so many instances where taxpayers really struggled to find out where where are the boundaries, where are the where are the lines that ought not to be crossed in setting up a tax structure? We know that there are doctrines like the economic substance doctrine, the step transactions doctrine where it really requires a judgment call about Have I gone too far have I overstepped in availing myself of tax benefits that I really want? I think I can get like I’m reading the text of the Internal Revenue Code, or I’m reading the text of these regs, or I’m reading this private letter ruling. I think I can get there by reading these documents, but I’m not entirely sure if this is going to survive scrutiny. If an auditor comes looking at this very closely. And I don’t want to ask because if I asked for sure, they’re going to look very closely at it. So I’d prefer not to ask I’m just going to do it and go ahead. But then I as a business person, if this is my business, I’m going to have the sword of Damocles. I’m going to feel like there’s a sword of Damocles dangling like over my head until those years are no longer auditable by either the IRS is going to take a position or not. It’s it’s an uncertain tax position, I don’t know for sure if it’s going to survive. That’s just one really simple example. If and when we approach a legal singularity, many years from now, it’ll become absolutely clear what the tax law requires. And it, I will have confidence that that’s the right outcome. Equally, the IRS is going to have confidence if they audit me, and it won’t be an interesting question. It’ll be okay. That over you overstepped right there, we see that in the documentation, and it’ll just make for very good fences between taxpayers and the IRS, for example, that’s just one small example. But what we see is, it’ll lead to certainty, predictability and fairness in the tax law. And it, it’s, it’s gonna be a good outcome for everyone, except, you know, maybe for some of us who really enjoy tax games, because they’re a really interesting puzzle. I love tax games. As a tax professor, I love looking at the complexity of the lawn and figuring out new strategies. But I can I can take that desire to look at really difficult puzzles offline, as it were, and maybe not do it professionally. For tax planning.

Greg Lambert 26:18
I’m just curious, do you see similar problems arising, as we’re seeing, say, in the, the automotive industry was self driving cars about who is responsible? So if we get to a point, for example, that we use AI to do our tax advice or something, I think more practical, let’s say I’m a consumer, and I’m having a, you know, I want to return a product to my, to the store, which I bought it, and they have an arbitration clause, you know, do you see like the AI being the arbitrator in, you know, coming up with an answer, and then, you know, do we allow the the AI to do it? Or, you know, what if it contradicts what the law, you know, what a judge would say. And I can see some really interesting versions of this on the horizon,

Benjamin Alarie 27:19
Our strong view is that it, it really makes a ton of sense to keep humans in the loop in a lot of these arbitration context and judicial contexts for a significant period of time. And even even as we approach the legal singularity, and people begin to have kind of, like just a lot of confidence in algorithmic decision making, I still think for the same reason that we have pilots in aircraft. And you know, if you’re taking a commercial flight, virtually anywhere, a lot of that flight is going to be done by algorithm. But I feel personally much more comfortable knowing that there are pilots in the front of that aircraft, as we’re taking off, even though intellectually understand, they’re basically running the algorithms that are responsible for piloting that plane much of the time, I think the same thing is going to be true in our legal system, even if an initial answer is machine generated, I think I’m going to want as a consumer and in the case that you describe, Greg, I’m going to want the ability to appeal to a human to have a look at that what the algorithm is suggesting. If I think that it misfired, if I think that it missed something, if I think that I’m being treated unfairly, I’m going to want to human to interrogate an audit that machine generated decision, and I don’t think that goes away. For a very long time, I think we’re going to want those rights of appeal. It’s really, we want the belt and suspenders kind of approach here. And I think it’s going to be a feature of the system for a long time. Now, a lot of your listeners are gonna say, Oh, thank goodness, now I can still appeal decisions. And then now it just actually expands the number of things that I could object to. On appeal, I could talk about well, the algorithms biased, and what has been trained and how to reach this decision. And I think that’s very healthy for the system. And so if this ties into something that Abdi was saying earlier, we think that the, the composition of legal jobs is going to change over time, the activities that we find ourselves engaged in as lawyers will change over the coming years, but I think we’re gonna see even more lawyers and practitioners, doing things a little bit differently going into the future, but providing a much greater access to justice. Right now. It’s such an elite thing. Many folks don’t really have the resources to hire an attorney if they have if they if they have a dispute. They just have to make the difficult decision to lump it and kind of carry on as faster they can they don’t have the resources necessary to fight for their rights and vindicate those rights. And I think that’s going to change too. And so this is how we think the law becomes radically better. There’s better information about what your entitlements are. And actually, there’s human review of machine judgments, which will lead to accelerated learning in the law.

Abdi Aidid 30:22
Greg, if I may, also, human beings evolved in the loop really improves the technology over time. So I heard a story about an algorithm that was being used by a state government to determine whether certain people with mobility issues were entitled to a publicly funded personal support worker. And so he previously was a determination done by nurses acting as bureaucrats. And they would interview people and review applications and determine whether or not they should have a personal support worker. Well, as part of an austerity measure, they phased out the nurses and had a algo algorithm and a questionnaire that people would fill out. And one of the questions on the questionnaire was, do you have foot pain? And of course, people does binary choice of yes or no? Well, some of the people that answered no, were people who were happy tease people who are paralyzed, because technically speaking, they don’t have foot pain. Now, if there was a nurse conducting an interview, they would have spotted it like this. Right. And so keeping them in the loop helps to inform the technology before the disastrous consequences, helps to refine it, so that the next iteration of that questionnaire, which is going to retrieve the algorithmic information, is going to actually take into account the kinds of things that are nurse would in a deeply human interaction. And we’re not saying the human should be evolved in the loop for the foreseeable future, as a concession to people who are skeptical of the technology. We’re saying this, because we know that the things that the law deals with are deeply human questions, and it’s a deeply human enterprise. And there’s more than ones and zeros at stake. There’s, you know, our, our legal system has notions of mercy and fairness and empathy and procedural justice and all these things that right now human beings still have to contribute. And then of course, there’s the situations where we say, okay, the algorithm is predicting this outcome as the correct or optimal one. But taking into account emerging social mores, or, or taking into account the, you know, broader consequences that might escape the underlying data, we want to go in this different direction, we want to mount a social intervention, we want to treat this outcome differently, because we think that that’s what’s going to put us on the best path down the line. And so keeping human beings involved in and engaged in that dialogue, I think is absolutely critical at this stage. Now, of course, there could be a time when humans have sort of done the job of improving technology to the point where we can start to focus on other things. And part of our contention in this book is that if that day is gonna come, it’s gonna take a lot of our effort and coordination to get there.

Marlene Gebauer 33:11
So how do you address concerns about AI bias and ethics in the legal domain?

Benjamin Alarie 33:17
This is an Abdi answer for sure.

Abdi Aidid 33:19
Yeah. So we’ve been we’ve been talking about this and thinking about this, because we’re, you know, we’re optimists about the future state of technology. But we’re not people who are burying our heads in the sand around the problems. And so I think you can sort of think about the problems of bias and ethical questions raised by AI, you know, not all of those problems are created equal. So in one sense, you have, like Reflection and Amplification type of problems, where what’s happening is we’re projecting social harm social ills and negative histories into the future. For instance, if we built a prediction tool tomorrow, that wanted to predict wages, right, what the right wages are for a given employee? Well, if we’re not attentive to the history of the gender wage gap, right, we risk project, projecting it into the future, if the Federal Housing Administration built a predictor tool that was trying to determine whether or not or sorry, who was eligible for federally insured mortgage product of some kind, and you use the historical data that FHA has, and he did it pay attention to the history of redlining and racial discrimination, which the FHA has admitted to, then you risk projecting that into the future, right. And so part of the the, the problem of bias is really a problem of us having social ills that a society we haven’t adequately addressed. Right? There is a history of, say racism, gender discrimination, class discrimination, these kinds of problems, which of course are going to surface through technology if we’re not paying attention. If we’re not taking adequate stock of those things now, that technology doesn’t take us off the hook, we still have to address those issues and make a decision about the kind of society we want to live in. Right. But there’s a way in which it helps to disinfect the problem, so to speak. So if we built a predictor again, that was trying to predict future wages, and it did indeed project the wheat gender wage gap into the future, and it said, women get 78 cents men get 100 cents, we wouldn’t stand for that we would be shocked, you know, it would it would be jarring to see. But the gender wage gap nevertheless persist in our society in in the diffuse way it exists in relationships that existed, it’s embedded in institutions, and much to our shame, it continues. And so there’s a way in which the technology can bring those things into stark relief. And so even as an empirical research tool, the predictive tools have some value now, we have to have the collective conversation around what the right interventions are. So that’s those are problems of just projecting our, you know, bad history into the future. But then there are other kinds of problems which are distinctly posed by technology. So for instance, there are some people who think that a decision rendered by technology of some kind is per se, neutral. All right, we have to have conversations around transparency and all those kinds of things. There’s some times there have been questions, especially in around some of the cases involving algorithmic prediction and criminal justice around whether or not we could adequately cross examine an algorithm because of say, our trade secret laws. Like these are the kinds of things that we need to contend with. But I think we need to distinguish between the kinds of problems which are really a reflection of unaddressed social problems or inadequate address social problems, and the kinds of problems which are new technological problems. I think if you’re I think for those folks that are paying close attention, you’ll see there’s a lot of that first category, and we are still on the hook collectively as a society for resolving those issues.

Greg Lambert 36:58
Now, we’ve had, I think this may be our fifth or sixth show just this year, where we’ve kind of focused on AI. And there has been a consistent answer to this question. So I’m gonna, I’m gonna throw that answer out first. But then I want I want you guys to address it in a broader sense. And that is, when we ask about how is this going to affect the labor market, especially in the legal industry? Typically, with the answer we get back and I think Damien RIehl may have been the the person that gave this answer was that AI will not replace lawyers, but ai plus lawyers will replace lawyers who do not use AI. So I want you guys to think broader about that. Does that same concept apply to law professors, tax advisers, court clerks, judges, you know, look broader at the legal industry? And where do you think there may be significant impacts on the labor involved in the legal industry?

Benjamin Alarie 38:02
It is really interesting, I think one of the big impacts is going to be I think they’re going to be so many impacts across different legal roles. Let’s focus on legal education. I gave a, I gave a talk to the faculty here, all my colleagues, about a month ago is February 6, about ChatGPT. What is it? Why should we care? What should we do about it? And it was totally fascinating to see my colleagues really struggling with this, should we and and they they went back and forth? Should we try to ban it? Should we contain it? Should we make it clear to students that this would be an academic offense if they leveraged ChatGPT to help inform their academic writing, and to that I said, colleagues in my classes, so I teach an income tax law course, two of them and I teach a law and technology seminar I explained in my classes. I’m encouraging my students to use these technologies. I think I’m, I’m convinced it’s part of the future of legal practice, it behooves us to encourage our students to become familiar with this technology to figure out how to prompt the systems to produce better work product that they’ll be able to use to do their jobs, and also to, you know, to, by extension, improve their academic research to improve their writing, improve their thinking, they can effectively have a conversation with a vast body of literature that would have taken much longer for them to have that effectively a conversation with in the past. And so it’s a way to learn very quickly to outline an argument and to improve their own understanding and so on. To me, it’s very clear that that these are tools that can be harnessed to improve our understanding of the law to improve our ability to think critically and creatively about the law. It’s one of the reasons why in this book Abdi and I are predicting that AI can make the law radically better, because it can make critical thinking about the law and creative thinking about the law better. So I’m not interested as an academic in getting papers that have been produced in the absence of AI, because somehow that that preserves some purity of thought, I’m much more interested in in students having a full throated engagement with the literature, and developing for themselves their own thinking and outlining to the best of their ability kind of no holds barred to produce an original analysis that that they themselves are responsible for, you know, a little bit less directly, maybe than traditionally, they would have been, but I think it’s a much better work product. And it’s going to accelerate our learning, as law professors and in the profession. Generally, if, if we, as educators are open to it, I think super added on to that are all the considerations around can you actually effectively stop students from leveraging these kinds of tools? There are questions about how is this really different from using Google to find research sources and reading them very quickly? And you know, 20 years ago, we could have had a very similar conversation. Well, if students are using Google or searching Google Books, and, you know, systematically canvassing all this information, is that okay, you know, maybe we should insist on them using a card catalog to search the Law Library. And isn’t that the pure way of doing research? I think, I think we don’t want to battle the technology, I think we want to embrace it. And I think we can make the legal system work a lot better. As a result. Yeah. In. And so I, I’m going to stick with our earlier answer, which is that I think it’s going to maintain or increase employment amongst legal professionals, it is going to change how we approach the job, though, and I think it’s going to raise different issues. For regulators, for example, I think we’re likely to see a serious generational contest between those who are relatively young, those who are graduating from law school, this year, next year, the year after, and an old guard, and it’s going to be interesting to see how things play out because the old guard have a ton of judgment, a ton of experience, they have the gray hair or like me, no hair. And they, you know, they’re they’re thinking about things in a very strategic, experienced way. And so they have certain advantages from that experience, in a contest, say, in the context of a particular litigation, the new generation are going to have new tools that they’re very comfortable with that. So they’re gonna be comfortable using algorithms using prediction tools to figure out, you know, how cases likely to go. And there’s going to be some turbulence in the interim as we have, like, this battle between the older generation who have tons of experience and have intuitions and judgment informed by decades of experience and the new generation who are leveraging massive amounts of data and are comfortable with algorithms and are comfortable making algorithmically informed decisions. And I think it’s going to be bumpy for several years. Yep. And it’s going to be interesting, ultimately, to figure out how this plays out. I think Damien is right, though, I think ultimately, lawyers with AI are gonna replace lawyers without AI.

Abdi Aidid 43:51
If I can just add one thing to that. Part of what we’re saying in the book is that the legal singularity doesn’t necessarily come about at the end of a perfectly linear trajectory, right. Like Ben said, it could it could be a rocky road for some periods. And there could be a messy interregnum. And I think it’s important to talk about that, because I continue to want to call people into the conversation because there’s a great risk right now around ChatGPT of overreacting. So let’s say, let’s say, Ben doesn’t win the day at the faculty arguments or the faculty meetings. And instead, the old guard wins the day and they say, we’re going to scrap all writing altogether. And we’re going to do oral exams, right? Like, and students are not going to prepare anything written. They’re going to perform all their knowledge in front of us in a moment, or perhaps even they are going to be able to write but they’re going to write on pen and pad under our dutiful AI. Now, if that’s the case, then what have you done there? Number one, you’ve pushed back on technology that’s going to continue to proliferate anyway. So the students who engage in that old guard salsa Some are going to be worse off, because at some point, they’re not going to be your students, they’re gonna have to contend with these technologies that they’re suddenly not trained in. Right? That’s one thing. The other major risk is that you, you know, cut off in spite your face, suddenly you don’t teach writing skills, you think that there’s two confounding a problem, we’re never gonna be able to evaluate students and improve their writing. So we’re just going to, we’re not going to do it all together, we’re going to test them purely orally, what you’ve done in that situation and overreacting, is you’ve put yourself in a far worse position that you would have been in had you sort of intelligently carefully rigorously figured out how to absorb the technology into what you’re already doing. And as educators, I don’t think we should be intimidated at all. In fact, we should look at our colleagues in the world of mathematics who have found ways to teach fundamentals, even despite the fact that calculators are capable of doing a lot of the major work. And we should, we should sort of rid ourselves of that conservative impulse and really pay attention to the possibilities because our students can become better integrated legal thinkers, and more creative and summon all of the resources, as opposed to have to perform a sort of narrow evaluation tasks with artificial constraints.

Greg Lambert 46:15
Yeah, and, and quite frankly, I think anyone can think back and see parallels to this. I remember when you couldn’t bring a laptop into a classroom. And and you could bring a laptop in, but it couldn’t be connected to the internet. There were times you could not use Google. And so this is in courts, same thing, where technology was was banned, and into the courts you have so I mean, this is it’s not a new reaction. But I think again, all of those kind of barriers that they tried to artificially put up, all fell to the to the wayside. And I think this is something else again, I know like the New York City, public schools have banned ChatGPT access, except everybody has it on their phone. In so you know, it’s fighting about the rules of the game that we’ve already lost. So it’s just really interesting to see how it’s going to be kind of fun to see how people try to fight this knowing that that it’s a losing battle.

Abdi Aidid 47:25
Or Greg, its argument, the rules of a game that we already won, right? Because it’s about access to more information. And now if you have a sort of humble approach, and you say, ChatGPT can assist me with what I’m doing. But really, my job here is not just to reiterate information, but to synthesize, to use it creatively to figure out how to connect it up to bigger problem solving tasks, then you have this like, really knowledgeable assistant, or, you know, the, you know, the the world’s the world and unlimited research assistants like that. That’s, that sounds like a win to me. Now, obviously, you know, I’m Ben and I wrote this book, we’re all we’re thinking about all the problems, too. But we can’t lose sight of that massive gain potential gain, either. And let’s not be so cynical as to throw out our chance at having unlimited information.

Marlene Gebauer 48:25
Yeah, we’re super cynical, sorry. It’s good that you’re talking to us, though. We ask all of our guests at the conclusion of the interview to answer our crystal ball question. I know you guys are optimists about this. So I’ll kind of couch it this way is, you know, what, what are the challenges you see on the horizon? When it comes to the legal industry to AI and legal produce legal prediction over the next two to five years? You know, what are? What are some of the pitfalls that we should be looking out for so that we do move in that more positive direction?

Benjamin Alarie 49:09
I think this is a great question. I think. I think what I’m going to say, in response is, I think we’re going to see a mindset change on the part of the regulators of the profession, around how they deal with attorneys who are not adopting technology, and for that reason, giving poor advice, and it’s really, it’s still going to be about protecting the public interest. But there’s going to be a big change in the way that that the thinking goes for a lot of regulators. I think we see, you know, the start of that, but we’re going to see, it’s gonna be a really big change. So the folks who are not adopting technology are predictably going to be delivering substantially lower quality legal services to their clients. And we’re gonna see State Bar Association’s other regulators around the world really struggling with? How do we deal with predominantly older practitioners who have a particular way of conducting their practices, which may not really be, you know, to the best advantage of their clients? And how did the regulator’s deal with that, and I think it’s going to lead to serious problems for those regulators like how do we deal with the old guard who don’t want to change? And there’s an incontestable issue here, because the public interest is very clear. We need, you know, up to date proper advice. You know, I think it’s going to be a challenge. I don’t know exactly. Is it two years away? Is it five years away? Is it eight years away? But I think it’s coming. And I see it coming very clearly.

Abdi Aidid 50:52
I’ll also add to that. I totally agree with everything Ben is saying, I think what we’re likely to see in the next two to five years, and what I actually hope to see some more coordination among the profession about what kinds of legal predictive tools we need and should produce. Because right now, and you see this a lot in the world of algorithmic decision making. Quite a lot of the technologies are being produced by really vendors to solve a discrete problem, right? Like, someone sees an opportunity to improve bankruptcy law, and they build a tool that’s for bankruptcy lawyers. And someone sees an opportunity to provide some algorithm for policing. And they they sell it exclusively to policing the police departments and, and whatnot. And I think that you actually do need people sort of sitting atop that structure and giving some thought to what are the implications these technologies? What are the right safeguards? What are the appropriate? What tools are appropriate now, based on our technology and capabilities, which which kind of tools do we need some more research and study for? I think, if we all accept that, the technology is going to develop, and we can stand in its way and that there’ll that it has real potential benefits for us, that we can start to come to the table and get on the same page about what we want, what we want it all to look like, and the right sort of cadence for developing these tools. Now, there’s not me suggesting we need to put our thumb on the on the scale or centrally plan what’s likely to come out in the marketplace. It’s just to say that, the sooner that we accept all of this as real and the reality of our very near future, the sooner that we can engage in meaningful and rigorous conversations about what we need and how to absorb it into our day to day practice. And so I would love to see firms talking to each other. I’d love to see state bars looking at examples of other states and how they’ve approached things like regulating alternative legal service providers. I would love to see the judiciary in broader conversation with the profession. And the day to day practitioners about what do our courts of the future look like? Maybe legislatures can get into that conversation, too. We need a little bit more of that consensus building and little more of that coordination. And I think we’re going to be forced to, to reckon with these questions in that sort of two to five year frame.

Greg Lambert 53:36
Well, I was with you all the way up until you said the legislature’s getting involved.

Marlene Gebauer 53:41
Oh, sorry. Sorry. legislatures and coordination.

Abdi Aidid 53:47
Yeah, so I hope so.

Greg Lambert 53:50
Well, Ben Alarie, and Abdi Aidid, I want to thank both of you for coming in and joining us and talking about your book. So before we go, where can listeners go to pre order your book, everything now is about pre ordering.

Benjamin Alarie 54:05
So yeah, folks can go to their favorite online bookstore, whether that’s Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or whatever it may be. It’s available for preorder from everyone’s favorite online bookstore. The title is the legal singularity how artificial intelligence can make law radically better.

Marlene Gebauer 54:21
And we’llhave a we’ll have a link in the show notes.

Greg Lambert 54:23
Yeah, we’ll definitely definitely link that out. So, Ben, and Abdi, thank you again.

Marlene Gebauer 54:29
And I want to thank all of our audience for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert 54:43
And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter. Ben, how about you? Where can people reach out to you?

Benjamin Alarie 54:49
I’m on Twitter @BAlarie

and Abdi

Abdi Aidid 54:53
I’m also on Twitter as @AbdiAidid A B D I A I D I D.

Marlene Gebauer 54:59
And for the Luddites out there. You can leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7821 and as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you so much Jerry.

Greg Lambert 55:11
Thanks, Jerry. I’ll talk to you later.

Marlene Gebauer 55:14
Okay, bye bye .

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

In this episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert interview M.C. Sungaila, an appellate attorney and the host of The Portia Project podcast. The podcast is geared towards highlighting women in traditional and non-traditional legal careers and is set to celebrate its 100th episode during Women’s History Month in March. M.C. Sungaila initially intended to highlight women appellate judges and justices in a book, but quickly realized that a podcast would be the best medium to capture the stories of these women. The podcast now includes women leaders across the industry and beyond, providing a career touchstone for law students and showcasing where women are leading inside and outside the legal profession.

Marlene Gebauer 0:07
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert 0:14
And I’m Greg Lambert.

Marlene Gebauer 0:15
So this week, we’re talking with MC Sungaila of the Portia Project. And this was actually recorded, you know, a few weeks ago, because emcee reached out to us and said, Hey, I’m gonna have my 100th episode coming up. And can we can we do a pod? And we said, Sure. So we were really excited to have her on and we’re really excited about her her 100th episode. So congratulations to her.

Greg Lambert 0:38
Yeah, so in she does great work and reaching out to a lot of women that are on there that are members of the bar, members of the bench, and just members of the legal community. So we were really happy to be there when she launched the project. And now that she’s hit her 100th episode.

Marlene Gebauer 0:59
We’d like to welcome back MC Sungaila, appellate attorney and host of the podcast the Portia project, which is scheduled to celebrate its 100th episode during women’s history month in March. The Portia Project focuses on women in traditional and non traditional legal careers. MC Welcome back to The Geek in Review. And congratulations on the 100th episode.

M.C. Sungaila 1:18
Thank you so much for having me. I really enjoying being back because yours was the very first podcast I did about the podcast. So it makes sense, in my mind to come full circle and be here.

Greg Lambert 1:31
That’s awesome. Glad we stayed on your radar as you had been working your tail off to get out. So you make us look bad MC. So

Marlene Gebauer 1:43
keep doing that, though.

Greg Lambert 1:45
Well, for listeners who may not have heard the podcast or our prior interview with you, would you just mind giving us a little bit of the background and reasoning on why you wanted to start this podcast?

M.C. Sungaila 1:58
Yeah, I initially had focused on a book project with regard to women, appellate judges and justices. In the US. I had noticed as an appellate lawyer that there weren’t as many women on the appellate bench as I’d expected to see by this point in history, about 120. That’s state and federal appellate levels. And so I thought I would highlight them talk about their career trajectories in a book format. And so I started interviewing them for that. But along the way, I realized that they really enjoyed talking, they just love to go on the phone and talk about their stories. And a lot of that was lost in translation once you put it down in a formal setting of a book. And so I wasn’t really sure, I thought the project was still good, but I wasn’t sure it was the right format for the project. So I set it aside for a bit. And then COVID happened. Everybody got online, everybody listened to podcasts, judges became familiar with Zoom, and how to do remote, everything. And so that is where it started. I went okay, maybe we could do a podcast with judges. So if they’re willing to talk to me, that’s what I’ll do. That’s how it started in the podcast format.

Greg Lambert 3:18
Now remind me some of the judges that you had interviewed for the book? Did you go back to some of the same ones and re interview them for the podcast?

M.C. Sungaila 3:27
Yes, some of them I did. Some of them. I did not some of some had retired, some weren’t available. So for the ABA, there are some published essays that I did that were going to be originally for the book that are out there. And then some did participate again, by podcast. But the idea was to celebrate them, but also inspire other women to consider applying since I thought you need to apply to have more women. So maybe we’ll get more women interested in doing this. And one of the ideas behind that was that we often has women tend to apply when we have checked off every box of what we think is required for the criteria. And sometimes people have a sense particularly about the bench that there is one path and if you haven’t followed that path, like if you weren’t a prosecutor if you didn’t clerked for federal judges, if you didn’t do various things, you just shouldn’t bother applying. And the truth of the matter is that there’s a lot of different paths, some very circuitous paths to the bench, and they’re not uniform. Also that a lot of women early on the first women judges and first women appellate judges really had a lot of barriers that we no longer face. So I also thought it was interesting way of kind of a microcosm of women’s progress in the profession. And there’s a certain level of you know, you can do it if there are women who ended up being Chief Justices of their state supreme courts. And they started out like Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Sandra Day O’Connor in a Situ ation where women, you know, could not they just couldn’t be hired in the legal role or they were rejected from those roles, then you say, hey, things are a lot better. Now, I certainly don’t have that situation. And I can definitely accomplish at least as much as they did starting out, you know, with a running start compared to them.

Marlene Gebauer 5:18
So you’ve interviewed people with a bunch of different types of experiences, but also, there’s a huge range of different courts that that, you know, these folks work at so coming. Can you tell us a little bit about like, the types of courts that you’re looking at for the podcast?

M.C. Sungaila 5:33
Yeah. So I started with the colonel with the idea of the appellate judges and focusing on them. But then, as the beauty

Marlene Gebauer 5:42
of the whole got interested, though, right? Yeah, well,

M.C. Sungaila 5:45
no. And the beauty of the podcast for men is you can cheat, you can evolve as you’re going. So it’s not like a book, like I agreed to publish a book on x. And I can’t change it, you know, because that’s what the publisher agreed to. So when I started doing it, people would refer me the guests, the initial guests would refer me to other people, sometimes they weren’t judges, I thought, Well, those are valuable stories to tell also. And then I thought, if I were a law student, now, when I remember my time as a law student, that I didn’t really know all the career options that were available from a law degree. This would also be a way of showcasing the way that women are leading across the industry, outside the industry, and also sort of a career touchstone for those in law school to explore different things they could do with their law degree. So we have people who are in legal nonprofits, people who lead museums, writers, just like just a whole array General Counsel, managing partners of law firms, solo practitioners who started their own firms, people who are now executive coaches who were in house counsel or lawyers before, there’s just academics, Dean’s of law schools, just a whole range of people. And it really is kind of a snapshot of where women are leading inside and outside the professional writing.

Marlene Gebauer 7:11
And I think it’s an important important stories to be told there. So

M.C. Sungaila 7:17
you mentioned to Marlon, I didn’t mean to ignore your question you asked about the courts too. And so there’s a range of courts, I started with appellate courts, I started with state, state courts, federal courts. And then I started thinking also about how you become a judge, are you elected or appointed? I’m not varies state by state. So I thought, well, you think you might want to be a judge in your area, you better know how to do that. And then I started thinking about other kinds of judges, magistrate judges in the federal system, trial court judges of all different stripes in the state and federal courts. So so we expand expanded a little bit, because I thought, if you wanted to be a judge at some other level, you might want to hear about that.

Marlene Gebauer 8:01
Exactly. So, in September of last year, the podcast was a recorder finalist for the California legal Award for Innovation in Diversity and Inclusion. Congratulations on that. You know, I know you had some very stiff competition. And can you share with us what that experience was like?

M.C. Sungaila 8:21
Yeah, I was, I was really, I was really glad I was encouraged to apply by various people. And I’m glad that I did since we were finalist. And we’re the only really individual generated project or a podcast project that was on there. So I kind of feel like not only it represents, to me a shift in the ability to make a difference that that you can create your own platform to to make a difference. The other finalists were more traditional partnerships between public interest organizations and law firms is something where they partnered on projects together that were more institutional based. But here we have, you know, an impact with a bunch of individuals a collective coming together, their collective stories have impact. And then the platform, you know, was created by one person on a podcast. And also, we’ve done a lot of partnerships with other people. So we had a partnership with Girls Inc. And we did a program with their high school girls, 11th graders who were in a workforce training program. And we had local women judges, law professors, lawyers come and present to them. And so the girls who were there had this one on one relationship building, some of them later went to watch the judges in action in their court room. It was just a really great relationship building opportunity. But then the effort that all of those women, you know, made to come there and do that one day was amplified by the podcasts. So now any high school girl goes in or not, can listen to that program on the on the podcast recording. So that sense of creating community from the podcast and then bridging towards traditional groups. I think that’s one of the powers of the new medium as well. There’s a lot of different ways to work with it.

Greg Lambert 10:21
Yeah, does give you kind of an outreach when you when you have a topic that that you’re really inspired by motivated by, it’s good to have this this platform out there that, you know, was wasn’t around, you know, a couple of decades ago. So,

Marlene Gebauer 10:37
yeah, you can get other people excited about it, too.

M.C. Sungaila 10:39
Yeah. And that’s a win win for the organization like Girls Inc, it doesn’t cost Girls Inc, anything to do that. And then you’re amplifying the work of the organization too. So, so I think there’s a win win. For both.

Greg Lambert 10:51
Yep. You know, when when we talk to you, I think it was last March. So almost a year ago. Again, and you kind of mentioned this, that you were pretty focused on the judiciary, you’ve gone into the process of how to get into the judiciary. But you’ve also kind of expanded even beyond that in I see, you’ve had people like Erin Levine, on for legal tech guru out there. You’ve had others on that weren’t necessarily in the judiciary, what have been some of your favorites that were not judges that you’ve had on the show?

M.C. Sungaila 11:32
Oh, gosh, okay. So yes, I’m glad you mentioned that, because I also want to be moving forward and into the future about what what kind of things are on the horizon, I feel like we have the very traditional setting the judicial setting, but then there’s innovations in law itself that I’m not sure people would otherwise know about or be familiar with. I also think there’s a huge story in the legal tech founders. There are not that many women, but the women who are in it are young, they are recent, you know, law school graduates, they’ve been maybe 10 years out many of them, and they decide to drop the firm and, you know, start with their, with their product and their company. I think there’s something to learn from them. And having that kind of confidence in doing that. At the same time. There’s a little bit of a sad aspect to it, because they part of that is because they they felt that there were limitations within law firms, and they’d rather just start their own deal from the beginning. It’s hard, but you know, I’d rather do that there’s more space for me to gain influence by starting my own company, my own product. So there’s sort of a double edged sword to those stories. But their their work is amazing. I think their leadership is amazing. And it’s something that people should know about. So yeah, you mentioned Erin Levine from Hello, divorce. Also Camilla Lopez from people clerk will be coming up. And Noella Sudbury from rasa out of Utah, which works on expunging criminal records. Yeah, there’s there’s a range of them. I also have, I also have a show about legal design. So with some legal design innovators from really all around the world, largely, largely from Europe.

Greg Lambert 13:24
Yeah, that seems to be where it’s focused right now.

M.C. Sungaila 13:28
With Paul Meyer, and test, Manuel, and in sir wese. So that’s another one. And then of course, I had Jack Shafer from clear brief and Nicole Clark from trellis and during the morning from documate, who, who now are like, you know, the senior leaders in the space, I don’t know, like, you know, 32 or something like that. So, so that’s pretty cool. Yeah. So it’s been neat to do that to think ahead. And where, because I think about that, in terms of if you’re in law school now that that’s, that’s actually a career path to think about. Yeah. Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer 14:03
Which you wouldn’t have thought what you wouldn’t have thought about that years ago, likely.

Greg Lambert 14:06
And one of my favorites, and we were talking about this, prior to the recording starting as is Deborah Henzler. At Stanford, in just the fact that she’s a PhD and not a JD, but how she has made just a large impact and legal and analysis and all the things that she did at the RAND. I like the fact that it’s, you know, you’ve you’ve kind of spread out the spectrum of who you’re bringing in a little bit because there’s some really interesting women out there that aren’t necessarily directly, you know, are not not the result of of a traditional lawyer type transition. Yeah. So it’s really interesting if anyone, if anyone hasn’t heard that one with the with Deborah Henzler. I highly suggest that that was a Really fun interview?

M.C. Sungaila 15:01
Yeah, she’s really interesting. I mean, she’s to be a woman leader at RAND when when there weren’t many, and then to really shape the Institute for civil justice. That’s, that’s at RAND. And then her work. Yeah, as you see mentioned, Greg, I think there’s a lot of, I think there’s a common thread amongst the stories, which is, you know, there’s not a straight path to things. And it’s kind of circuitous, and that’s okay. That’s kind of how life goes. And then also that each person, you can see all of the different experiences and like, there’s their particular skills, and they’re the building blocks that make them then leads to where they are like, I don’t think anybody else except Deborah Henssler, could have put together, you know, her training her PhD training, her training and policy work and asking questions, and interviewing people about empirically what’s going on, together with legal analysis in a way that she is now shaping and ahead of the curve, in terms of legal trends, globally. That’s something only Deborah could do. It’s the same way with a lot of people on this that you see, it’s magic, when you learn their stories, and you can see all the threads coming together, you know, like in a quilt, and you’re like, wow, that it all makes sense. And it’s perfect when somebody is in their sweet spot of doing what they do best, and where they can contribute the most and have the most meaning. That’s really nice to see. And I hope that in itself is inspiring, not just the particular ways that people are making a difference, but how you can architect a career that is perfect for you, and that those can be different. I think that law school kind of puts you on the hook is this one path. And if you don’t follow that path, you’re screwed, you’re never going to succeed, you got to have this, this and this. And once you’ve passed it, there’s no hope for you, you know, and that’s not at all the stories of of these people. And in fact, maybe you have to take a little detour to find out what makes you special and what you contribute compared to somebody else.

Marlene Gebauer 17:18
Yeah, we just did one of my book reading groups, we just finished the book range, and basically how experimentation in different areas and being a generalist is generally a better way to go than sort of just having a laser focus in terms of the type of career you have. So I think that reflects on that, that people seem to be more willing, women seem to be more willing to sort of try different things and sort of have alternative paths, rather than sort of what the traditional expectation is.

M.C. Sungaila 17:47
Yeah, I was gonna say that I’m thinking about Ashley Heard, you know, Ashley heard he’s quite popular and Tiktok really built her business, coming from in house counsel up some major companies to her own company called manager method, which really focuses on training managers Filling in the gap in in HR, and legal compliance training. And, you know, there’s so much about her that I’m like, only Ashley could do this, like her particular empathy for people and understanding, wanting to understand where each person comes from and trying to find a middle, at least some understanding, so people don’t treat each other with no sense of a lot. Why would you be doing that? There’s some kind of motivation for that. Just so many things you see. And it’s just, I just think it’s beautiful and magical to see when people maximize their potential. And that’s kind of what I see in some of the guests. And it’s, it’s nice to see, like ultimate humanity, like the best they could be, and applying it in the most meaningful way.

Marlene Gebauer 18:51
I do. I do want to flip the question a little bit, too, because you also I liked what you mentioned, is that you recognized a lot of what’s happening is people are trying new things. But they’re, they’re walking away from the practice of law, because they’re not feeling that that’s going to be a successful path for them that women are doing this. And that is a theme that we have brought up here on the podcast, and we’ve had guests that talked about that. And so I was wondering if you have thoughts about that if your guests have shared thoughts about that, because really, the legal profession is really losing so some talented people, because they’re not offering a path for success.

M.C. Sungaila 19:29
Yeah, I mean, I think that the interviews show that in the podcast episodes show that there’s a range there still, I mean, there are women who are leaving, you know, major law firms who, like Barb Dawson, who’s the incoming chairperson of Snell, and Wilmer Kalpana Sreenivasan, who is the CO Managing Partner Susman, Godfrey, there are a lot of women who are succeeding in traditional venues, and that works for them. I think the story is that To open your eyes to other things that you could potentially consider and to assess six, what is success for you? And what is success for you could be different in different points in your career. I think that there’s this one size fits all kind of model and expectation, and that, that needs to be busted a little bit, because there are a lot of other ways to succeed and to contribute the most. You can contribute.

Greg Lambert 20:26
Before we get to the next question, I want to ask, what’s your puppy’s name?

M.C. Sungaila 20:31
Yeah, sorry about that. There are three puppies. Oh. There are so we love puppies, puppy. And then there are little puppies. Podcast. Puppies, the podcast Mondays. Yes. The podcast puppies. That’s right.

Marlene Gebauer 20:44
You can join pod dog on the call. Yeah. She’s being very quiet right now.

M.C. Sungaila 20:50
Oh, good for her. Yeah,

Marlene Gebauer 20:51
she’s chill off.

M.C. Sungaila 20:52
Like, they know, you know, you’re on and they go, Oh, this is the time they can feel it.

Marlene Gebauer 20:56
I know my nose I’m on. And that’s when she barks. So like,

M.C. Sungaila 21:00
I want to heard. I want to be heard. Yeah.

Greg Lambert 21:03
Well, MC I know. 100 episodes is quite the milestone and you’ve hit hit it pretty fast. I know when we hit 100. In fact, we’re slowly approaching 200 for this podcast. Congratulations. That’s amazing. Yeah. But when you when you hit those milestones, you kind of assess where you where you are, where you’re been and where you’re going. So what do you think that you’ve accomplished in those first 100 episodes? And, you know, is there anything kind of on the horizon on on? I think you’ve touched a little bit on that, but in anything specific that you want to kind of do going forward?

M.C. Sungaila 21:45
Yeah, well, I definitely want to be as comprehensive as I can be, in terms of women judges, especially appellate judges. So I’ll continue to, you know, move towards my goal at the state level to have you know, every woman on every state Supreme Court represented, I’m up to 32 states so far. So I’m very close to that particular goal. And some courts have many, many women like the Michigan Supreme Court, or the Washington State Supreme Court, both of them are disproportionately female at this point, which is, which is exciting. And to have many members of the court, you know, a beach court interviewed is really fun. So that’s definitely the goal. And then, as many more federal appellate judges and potentially US Supreme Court justices as I can entice to be on the program would be great. So I definitely want to fill that out. But I’m also really interested in this idea of, you know, other unique journeys and different different approaches to practice, which is why I reached out to people like Ashley heard, like Laura Frederick, who’s also really big online in a can from in house. I just think those are interesting stories. They’re interesting stories about where you can, how you can grow your business as a lawyer also that there’s still an online component that’s quite strong. That’s changed, I think, in the last few years, and made their careers their business as possible at this point. And yeah, just keep continuing to think outside the box in terms of who who might be interesting. I’ve also started to talk to those who are not in the legal field women executives, either women who have law degrees, but are now CEOs or, you know, in other capacities in business, or even those like piney Zuckerman, who’s the, the new leader of the Orange County Museum of Art at a time when they have a brand new building, it’s a whole new change for the level at which the museum is operating. If there’s something to learn from someone like that. So I’m branching out beyond law to say, what can we bring from other disciplines that would be of interest, or like a new thought for women in the law to

Greg Lambert 24:09
Now you mentioned something about Michigan and Washington having a disproportionate share of women that are on their Supreme Court bench? I mean, is there a reason and can whatever’s happening there be replicated in other states?

M.C. Sungaila 24:26
Well, I think there’s an intention. Yeah. I mean, I think there’s an intention and desire to diversify the courts in those states. I mean, there’s a really interesting story in Washington. While there are a couple of really great stories, Justice whitener and justice Montoya Lewis from that court both have amazing personal stories. But but I’m thinking of Montoya Lewis, who was a tribal court judge previously have served for several different tribes. And I think Well, that’s not your typical, you know, feeder path. Right State Supreme Court usually. Yeah. But but because of that it’s diversifying, not just gender and but but experiences. And it’s, it was really remarkable to talk to her because she’s extremely sensitive to culture extremely sensitive to the community in decision making. And I think that is something that she’s clearly brought with her from the tribal court experience. And that’s a different approach to how you think about the impact of your decisions and what you’re doing on the court. So it just adds another layer to things. And she’s got a beautiful, amazing story. Super touching.

Marlene Gebauer 25:43
MC, you asked your guests a series of lightning round questions. Can you share those with us? And can you share some of the best answers you’ve gotten?

M.C. Sungaila 25:52
Oh, my gosh, yes, I do the lightning round questions. In fact, I had somebody, I was on some of these podcasts, and they turned the lightning round questions around to me. And I thought I should be more compassionate to my guests.

Greg Lambert 26:08
You’re like, no, that’s not how this go. You don’t have like?

M.C. Sungaila 26:13
That is not. That’s not easy. Yeah. So I asked things like, what, you know, what talent or what skill? Do you not have that you wish you did have? asked them about their favorite authors? Um, that’s really illuminating, you know, whether they continue to read what, whether they’re really traditional, you know, Jane Austen, or, or something like that, or whether they’re, they like escapism, and legal thrillers and things like that, John Grisham. And, and from that, there’s actually a really good book list now from from them. And then my, my favorites that published up, no, I’m gonna put it together to do that. Because there’s, there’s some common ones, but then there’s some unusual ones poetry. So it’s just interesting to see what what people’s interests are to historical fiction biographies. I think it’s that question in particular, is really telling about someone, their their personal aspects. And that’s really one of the, at least what the judges in particular was focused on, or I noticed happening was that you really got to know them as people to some degree. And that is, I think, something that is beneficial because people don’t think about judges as people they are. They’re fully rounded people. And it’s, it’s neat to to get that insight into them. And then the last two questions that I usually ask which I, which I also really, like, they’re kind of telling is, you know, who would you invite to a dinner party, like any, you know, alive, not alive, whoever you want, whatever collection of people. That’s really interesting. You know, some people just say, oh, you know, my family, or my, my grandmother, you know, who’s not with us and all this stuff, which is, which is kind of very sweet. And then others is like, an interesting combination of a bunch of historical figures. And that’s interesting in itself. And then you know, who’s your hero in real life? And what is your motto if you have one? So that’s a pretty the motto one’s a good way to close it out. Sometimes people don’t have mottos, but sometimes they do. And it’s a really interesting, you know, nice little bow on next.

Greg Lambert 28:33
Cuz that’s a good way to do it. So Marlene, who would you invite to a dinner party?

Marlene Gebauer 28:39
Alright, so I was thinking about this while she was saying it, and it’s like, okay, so you have I have to have two dinner parties, because I can’t follow the rules. Okay, so, you know, I would have my my grandparents, you know, at at, you know, at a party and probably my great grandparents at a party, but then I have a separate party. And I was thinking about it, and I haven’t actually come up with the names yet. That’s Oh, I was busy on the on the grandparents. But what about you, Greg?

Greg Lambert 29:06
Oh, that was a quick way to not answer and then.

Marlene Gebauer 29:08
Yeah, I like that. That’s right. Yeah. Since you put me on the spot, you know, go home.

Greg Lambert 29:13
Yeah, actually, I was thinking about it while listening to MCs podcasts because

Marlene Gebauer 29:18
do they have to be real?

Greg Lambert 29:20
Yeah, I would say,

Marlene Gebauer 29:21
okay, they have to be real people. Okay.

M.C. Sungaila 29:23
Not like characters or anything. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Not characters. But But, but they don’t need to be currently on this point. Yeah,

Greg Lambert 29:29
I would say I would, I would love to talk with Thurgood Marshall. Having gone to ODU and having he worked to not just desegregate ODU, but also to burn to allow women to come in as well. So it was in and I understand, you know, especially as he got older, he was never super friendly. So I can imagine it would be an uncomfortable dinner, but it would be one I think that it would be quite an experience to, to listen to someone like that. And here’s their their take on how they face the world. So that that would be my choice.

Marlene Gebauer 30:15
All right, I came up with sorry. So I’ve had enough time. So I was like I thought about Chrissy Hein and Deborah Harry and you know, various women sort of in the music and art scene from the late 70s. Early 80s.

Greg Lambert 30:29
Yeah, that’s, that sounds right up your alley. So music and fun.

Marlene Gebauer 30:33
That’d be fun. Yeah, it

M.C. Sungaila 30:35
was like, Oh, that would be really cool. Tim dad,

Marlene Gebauer 30:38
yeah, Joan Jett.

Greg Lambert 30:39
All right, well, we don’t have anything as cool as your your speed round of lightning round of questions. But we do ask our crystal ball question here. So that that’s our little corner. That’s our closer. So MC, we’re going to ask you, what do you think are some challenges or some changes, especially for women in the legal industry over the next two to five years or so?

M.C. Sungaila 31:06
Um, I think two things. What’s really interesting is that, starting the podcast, I wanted to celebrate people and what they’d accomplished, but I was also aware of the challenges, you know, having been in law practice for over 30 years, I’m actually a little bit more optimistic. Having done the podcast than I was before I started because of the range of ways that women are impacting the law and really outside the law with their legal degrees, and really kind of excited about where things can go where their innovation can go, where the creativity can go. And so many, especially newer lawyers, or they don’t feel constrained by a particular setting to do it. And I think that the pandemic has impacted that as well. The platform of, you know, a big law firm is still important, but it’s not. It’s not a prerequisite to accomplishing certain things, and when you’re innovating, may actually be, you know, slow things down. So, so that’s a, that’s a sense of optimism. I think I’ve a bit more optimism about the range of impact of women. Also, I think of I know, there’s a lot of this sense about now debating work from home or not, and, you know, different ways of are we going back to being all all in, in one office and and how does that impact women in particular? And I think really the the, it isn’t really humbling, the question is remote, or virtual versus in person, I think it’s really more about like, people centered, if you’re focused on your people, and what they want or need at any particular time. And because there are people, those can change those. We change over time, and we grow and we have different needs. If you’re people centric, then you’re going to accomplish a lot more, because you’re going to be bringing things out in your people that are going to maximize their their potential and their skills. And people want to stay when they’re, they’re treated that way. So think not really is kind of the debate and it may evolve that way, instead of just this key now strict, are we in person or not? I think there’s something bigger going on there.

Marlene Gebauer 33:32
I wanted to ask, when we can do this as a cold open or whatever. But it’s like, oh, I want to ask about mottos. I do want to ask about mottos. Like, do you have a motto MC

M.C. Sungaila 33:47
she can ask me this? Yeah. You know, I think about, um, I think about my, my mom’s you know, notes to me that she’s done throughout throughout my career. And I kind of think of those in the motto category, in a way.

Marlene Gebauer 34:10
Words To Live By.

M.C. Sungaila 34:11
Yeah, I mean, they’re really simple, but there’s like a lot in them. So I think together like you know, make, make this the best day ever, which is kind of like each day is a new day and you start over and you have that opportunity if yesterday sucked. It’s okay, we can start over and have a brand new day that’s way better. And then like painting your canvas with paint your canvas like with your own brush, like the way you want to do it. Don’t make somebody else don’t just go growing into somebody else’s dictates or, or do what their priorities are, you know, also pay attention to what, what you want to do and what kind of impact you can have. Specifically on the world. That’s how you maximize your potential and your purpose in being here. It’s like simple things. But those those are kind

Marlene Gebauer 35:03
of, yeah, I relate that that this, your mom brought this to you because like the one that I think about often is something that my sister brought to me. And it’s basically no mud, no lotus, and basically meaning that basically meaning that you have to apply yourself if you want, you know, the good results in the end. So,

Greg Lambert 35:23
yeah, my nose deep. Everyone knows mine, which is all problems are communication problems.

Marlene Gebauer 35:32
And that’s not that’s true. So, yeah, that’s

M.C. Sungaila 35:35
a good one. That’s a good one. Yeah, I should put the models together to actually now that you asked, I should put that from, from all the different interviews, that would be pretty interesting.

Marlene Gebauer 35:44
Yeah. Well, MC Sungaila, thank you so much for visiting with us again, today. And again, congratulations on the 100th episode.

M.C. Sungaila 35:53
Thank you so much, both of you.

Greg Lambert 35:58
Well, it was great having MC Sungaila. Back on the show. Again, she’s done a lot with giving exposure to a lot of women in the legal industry. And I think she’s she’s right, that there’s just a lot of different paths that people can can be taking. And she’s really kind of shining a light on the way that so many women in the industry have succeeded in in just so many different paths that they’ve taken to get to that success.

Marlene Gebauer 36:27
Yeah, I mean, I remember back in the beginning, I mean, there was a sole focus on judges. And this is really expanded into a lot of other areas, a lot of other stories that women have to share. And, you know, again, it’s one of these types of podcasts where it’s very inspirational. It’s really great to hear about everybody’s personal stories, and it’s such a good connector. She has said that to us multiple times that, you know, people have reached out to guests on the podcast, you know, guests have have reached out to one another on the podcast. So you know, I love to see that. That sort of, you know, sort of women, women reaching out and collaborating and helping other women.

Greg Lambert 37:07
Absolutely. So thanks again to MC Sungaila, from the Porsche project for coming back on and celebrating her 100th episode with us.

Marlene Gebauer 37:16
And thanks, of course, to all of you, our audience for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on

Greg Lambert 37:29
Twitter, And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter. Or you can leave

Marlene Gebauer 37:33
us a voicemail on The Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7821.

Greg Lambert 37:39
And well now for all the millennials out there. You can also text that number.

Marlene Gebauer 37:45
Yeah, we just don’t even have to

Greg Lambert 37:47
talk to us.

Marlene Gebauer 37:50
It is always the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you so much, Jerry.

Greg Lambert 37:55
Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, I will talk to you later.

Marlene Gebauer 37:57
Okay, bye bye

Transcript:

Marlene Gebauer 0:08
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert 0:14
And I’m Greg Lambert. So Marlene, yesterday I had the pleasure of going out to San Antonio for some work stuff. And I think all conferences that are in San Antonio instead of them being in July, when it’s 100 degrees should be this time in February because it was absolutely gorgeous. My wife and I was perfect. The Riverwalk had a good time. So so I’m gonna reach out to all the associations and say, you know, forget the summer time things. Let’s go to San Antonio in February. That’s that’s the best time to be there.

Marlene Gebauer 0:49
Yeah, well, I had a nice long weekend and finally got out on the bike again. So you know, did about it about 20 miles and that felt really good. And then went over to Top Golf and played some golf yesterday, so Well, we we played a top golf. I wouldn’t say that’s really golf, but it’s fun.

Greg Lambert 1:07
Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s as expensive as playing golf. In that.

Marlene Gebauer 1:11
It’s true. Without the cool clothes.

Greg Lambert 1:15
Yeah. Oh, now you can wear the cool clothes. Okay, that’s just your history. So everyone may notice that our voices may sound a little different, usually mine. That’s because we’re actually we usually record in the afternoons. And this episode we’re recording in the morning because our guest this week joins us from the Netherlands.

Marlene Gebauer 1:34
Yes. So we’d like to welcome Jan Scholtes, chief data scientist at iPro and full professor text mining at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Professor Scholtes Welcome to The Geek in Review.

Johannes Scholtes 1:46
Thank you. Very happy to be here.

Marlene Gebauer 1:48
Yeah. Can you give us a little bit of background on your work as a chief data scientist there at iPro? What does that mean these days to be a chief data scientist?

Johannes Scholtes 1:58
Very good question. Well, I’m mostly interested, it’s a plying interesting new algorithms, we will talk about artificial intelligence and data science to typical ediscovery and information governance problems, especially where the bottlenecks are, and then see not only how we can use these algorithms to solve these problems, and get the bottlenecks out of the way, but also make sure that we apply to technology in a responsible way. And we make sure it’s, it’s legally defensible. It’s, of course, very, very important in the field of ediscovery. And it’s turns bearings. And if we can explain it to our users, and it’s reproducible, man, it’s stable man doesn’t do all kinds of strange. Does they have any kind of strange behavior?

Marlene Gebauer 2:52
Like ChatGPT?

Johannes Scholtes 2:55
Yeah, no, that’s a great example. I’m sure we’re gonna talk about that later today.

Greg Lambert 3:01
Yeah, I’ve already thought it some more questions.

Johannes Scholtes 3:03
Yeah. So so it’s really, it’s really the combination of technology and the business process of ediscovery and information, governance, and then make sure that that technology is implemented in the proper way, use it the proper way. And I kind of tried to oversee that. And so I help people select the right algorithms that make sure that whatever scientific research we do is done properly. That’s both in scientific aspects of doing its rights, but also in school aspects to do with rights. And then the other major, the major, the mansion that are merrily worried about all the time and used to legal defensibility. Because I learned the hard way in the past. If it’s not legally defensible, you should be very, very careful using technology and legal processes.

Greg Lambert 3:51
Like many of our guests, one job just isn’t enough for you. So you, you also work at the University there as the extraordinary chair in text mining, which may be one of the best titles I’ve ever seen, especially for a professor. So tell us a little bit about your your role there and what your responsibilities and focus are.

Johannes Scholtes 4:11
We have different types of chairs in the Netherlands, ordinary chairs, extraordinary chairs, normal chairs. Not if you’re doing this now for almost 15 years, one, five. When I started 15 years ago, I really wanted to do it. Because there in the Netherlands there were no people that had the skill set that we need. It’s our company that no starts the company of Zylabs, which I worked with the majority for my life and at ZyLab, we decided to sponsor a chair, who made sure that we can train them educates the students with the skill sets that we needed them to. So that Moelwyn said I started doing this one day a week. It’s Starting with a course, in text mining says find the interesting methods in texts, legal analytics, social what it’s called in the legal industry. So try to find semantic roles. Both works, but also relationships very quickly. Also started doing the information retrieval, part of the curriculum, search engine building, which is something we did ourselves since Zylab. And we were less here a little bit more time. And after I ZyLab merged with iPro, I’d throw I was no longer operationally responsible. So now, I’m also involved in the advanced natural language processing.

Greg Lambert 5:41
Who are the typical students that that you teach? Are they are they what we would consider an undergrad? Or are they law students, and what’s the typical student

Johannes Scholtes 5:51
job learn your order, there are master students, I teach at the Department of advanced computer sciences in the Department of Engineering, and sciences. And so these are mathematicians, computer science, which is also my background. So we do a lot of programming, we do a lot of math. And then the students when they have to do internships or graduation projects, and sometimes they do applied type of projects, which could either be medical or legal or somewhere in industry, or they develop new algorithms, totally new algorithms. Some of our students, PhD students ended up at Deep minds, other students end up at the government, many of them start their own business, most of them actually already have a job by the time they get into them master. I only teach in the Master. And that companies paid for their studies stick around with these companies must lift GE rapidly is in the southern part of the Netherlands fair, close to Belgium, France, Germany, then the work of beats in Germany. So there’s there’s a lot of industry, manufacturing, and other kind of interesting companies and projects. But most of what we do is medical and legal, then, of course, the whole body of law enforcement, regulatory oversight, that’s where text mining is, is most applied.

Marlene Gebauer 7:14
How is as your research related to you mentioned information governance, so how is your research related to that? You know, what, how was that applied in that context?

Johannes Scholtes 7:24
Well, when I started many years ago, I’ve always believed that, you know, instead of waiting with eDiscovery, until the house is on fire, and we should go more office three. And we should clean up our stuff, I wrote a boast, I think it was in 2012, which was named the dark side of big data, warning people about the increase of data and all the stuff we keep and in depth, you know, when you run into an eDiscovery, that’s all used against you. So it’s a very simple principle of ediscovery is if you have a gigabytes of data, you get a bill gigabytes, if you have a terabytes, you get a terabyte bill, it doesn’t matter what the data is, if you are a lot of you shoot room, and you have data that you no longer need for knowledge management purposes, you should get rid of it. And in the false, you know, we automatically get rid of us of it because the desert mountains or officers or full Iron Mountain bills were higher, You know, we we can whenever can we apply to federal policies, and that’s all gone. Because every 18 months, the the amount of storage we have for the same amount of money doubles. So we have kind of a new low, that new version of Moore’s will deaths, we also see that our legal bill doubles every 18 months, you get more and more data. And it’s more complex, because it’s harder to find what really happened and there’s so much noise, you don’t know where to start. So for a long time, I was also on the board of at the Association of information management’s. And I’ve also done a lot with EDRM and the information governance there. And we really tried to convince people not to just, you know, be reactive, we’ll be more proactive. And that’s, that has always been an uphill battle. Because you know, why do you want to solve the problem of your successor another a lot of companies were interested in that 10 or 15 years ago, but that has completely changed these days. And everybody on the stand so if you don’t have your information governance in order, you’re going to pay for it in ediscovery. And let alone that there’s a lot of risk in this these datasets, others HR risks, there’s intellectual property risks. There’s confidentiality violation risk, so privacy rights risk GDPR risks, and maybe you don’t know how much medical data is floating around in corporates, or resumes or stuff that they should long, long while ago. Is the riddle. And so we see a major, I finally see this this tendency that people are more and more interested in, in solving the problem more upstream. And it’s the same for one now. And the good thing is with eDiscovery, you’ll have to do with rights right away to write the, you know, there’s no room for errors. But then information governance, there’s, you know, that the requirements and quality are not as high. And he, if there’s something goes wrong, you can fix it, you’re also able to use more interesting AI techniques and information governance part, then you can use the discovery discovery, you have to be very careful, every use that is not going to be used against you to be very careful that, you know, that technology has always stood by the other party, you don’t want to have an eDiscovery, you will need discovery. And then so there’s a little bit more room for flexibility and information. So I think you’d vote together and smart companies clean up the house.

Yeah, many firms now have, you know, an Information Governance Policy, but you know, yet it is a struggle, because that that age old, you know, I want to keep it because I might need it, sort of the theory is still with us. But, you know, it certainly has come a long way since you started talking about it and 2012. So,

It’s really interesting, what you’re saying now is, I talked to you, you may know, Jason Baron, you will see former director of litigation supports the White House in the National Archives. And he told me once that from all the data that they got at the National Archives there, there was probably like 1% of what these departments have, and they folded was really, really important to keep, I think they threw away another 95% of that, because they thought it was completely irrelevant. So yet we do believe that something is as more data that’s important than ever, you have to know that it really is.

Greg Lambert 11:54
Well, maybe we’ll call it Scholtes law, that data risk doubles every 10 minutes.

Johannes Scholtes 12:02
Right. God made me famous. Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer 12:06
So Jan, you’ve written about how AI can be used to improve the due diligence process for m&a deals. So, you know, there’s a lot of AI tools out there for m&a due diligence right now. And I would say that they can work well, if you invest the time and the effort in them. And that, at least in law firms, there’s sometimes a struggle with that. Because, you know, people, you know, you mentioned, we mentioned chat, a chat chat AI before. And people are kind of expecting it to work like that, like, you know, you just say something, and it does what you want. And that isn’t always the case with with at least some of the tools that are on the market. So how do you see AI tools, sort of improving the due diligence process for attorneys?

Johannes Scholtes 12:55
Yeah, yeah. Well, m&a and due diligence next to ediscovery is the most successful mark of AI, tools in the legal industry,

Marlene Gebauer 13:06
large amounts of data that you have to crunch right,

Johannes Scholtes 13:09
he has no way around AI, you know, some people call it well, this is not AI, it’s more like information retrieval, and search. I believe it’s more like a sorting process. So you sort the data up along the dimensions that you’re interested in. And then by sorting it and analyzing it and enriching it, you can quicker find answers to typical questions you have. Now if you go back to m&a. And the due diligence, there’s two types of due diligence, there’s the vendor due diligence where you want to sell your company. And then there’s the due diligence where you want to buy it. And they’re very different in nature, it vendor to diligence. corporates, and law firms have access to all the data also to the original data, sometimes emails where it originates from only memos and drafts and, and that can really help you to get an audit of what’s going on. Also, you have to data yourself physically. So you can search safe and reach safe and do all that, you know, all the great stuff, you can do it and find patterns patterns for change of control. You know, a typical list of due diligence risks is pretty limited. And I think 80 or 90% of those risks, you can very quickly find it stands for control liability, jurisdictions, different versions of different templates. The part that’s harder is when you want to buy a company, the other party is often very reluctant giving you the data electronically. So you have to work in one of these m&a environments where you can only base up and page down. You don’t have access to the texts. They don’t want you to text mine. It’s so so you’re limited in what you can do. There’s different parties who markets that have different solutions. But what we see is kind of a tendency from corporates, and also from law firms were to say, well, we just want to have a copy of the data room and then we upload it in tools. Typical similar tools like ediscovery tools, and then we’re going to look for certain patterns and certain risks. Now, you’re looking for very context sensitive, patterns, what I’ve seen is that many of the party staff use these tools, they still use keyword search or regular expressions or basic search. But if you want to have like a change of control in the context of warrant and 49%, of change of ownership, we deserve in the mountains to it. So then you have these really complex relations that you’re looking for, then these tools are pretty limited. But they get better and better. And especially with the development of deep learning, and the transformers that are also use the ChatGPT, they’re much better at finding contextual relationships. So that’s getting better and better and better. On the other hand, I strongly believe in the combination of machines and humans, especially for these legal but also for medical applications. And like I said, so you can probably find 80% of all the problems in the due diligence, by using technology, but then by judging it, whether it’s really a problem, that’s where he needs, in many cases, you need a human to determine the context. So it’s this combination of human and machine where the machine does too heavy lifting and a human decides whether something is relevant or not, whether it’s a false positive or false negative. That’s what we really works. I also believe that’s the way forward in m&a because I really don’t believe, you know, juniors with binders and yellow markers growing to data room binders. Yeah, you’re laughing, but you don’t want to know how many law firms especially in Europe, you know, are still doing that. And, you know, maybe great for your billable hours, but it is also law firms that went bust because they missed something.

Greg Lambert 16:51
With the change in structure, because you talked about how a lot of times we’re still using keywords to try and identify the sections that that are relevant. Yep. So if you have people that are well established and doing things the traditional way, how do you guide them through to say, here’s the difference on how you apply this type of learning to the project. Rather than looking for those key phrases. We talked more you look at the semantics of the saying, and so the the context of it, yeah. How do you approach people like that, to kind of get them out of the old routine and into the new? Yeah,

Johannes Scholtes 17:34
well, the best way is, is to show them that by examples that it works. So what we typically do is we have like a couple of, we have a data set when we know what’s in the data set, and then we kind of challenge them. Okay, why did you review this data sets the old fashioned way. And let’s see what you come up with how long it takes, and then we do it with technology. And then typically, we find two to three times more relevant information in a fraction of the time. And that is up to them, you know, they have to make a decision, do you want to add? Do you want to deliver a low quality service at a very high price, which at the end of the day is probably not going to be very competitive? Or are you going to offer a high quality service with which you can probably also charge a higher price. Because a lawyer and powers with technology can do more work than the lawyer without taking money, you can charge more per hour for a technology empowered lawyer than for a lawyer in the basement with a binder and a marker. It did the amount of errors is astonishing at computers may not be perfect, but they’re consistent in their errors. And in their performance. A typical computer programs are around 70-80% precision and recall and the new ones using deep learning are around 90% precision and recall. Now good humans are really good humans are to 85% average humans are, you know, maybe 70. Look, those average humans on Monday morning or Friday afternoon can be 30% equality. And you don’t know because we humans are you inconsistent in I was being inconsistent. So if you want to fix it, ours is very hard. And with technology, you there’s a great book you’ve probably read it’s from Paul, Dorothy human plus machine, and they show a lot of example where the computer they’ll slide 80% And then the human is also 80%. But if you do if they work together, you get more than 95 97% and that’s what we see in medical application radiology but also in legal applications. And, you know, humans are completely not suited to analyze the details of 20 binders, email with a marker. Computers are really good at that stuff. But humans are better in stuff that computers are not very good at that you know, computers, you know, very rational misc context in this common sense in how they can reflect and simulate their reflects, and by the culmination, you get the best solution. And the other thing is, and this is very important if you use AI in legal applications, though, the users need to understand and feel that they control the act. So it’s like a car, you know, if you brake you want to go slower, you know, and go faster. And if you hit the gas, you want to go faster. So you should give these lawyers, you should show them how the AI can be, can be steered and can control it. And one of the most successful workshops we had, we started doing that, like seven or eight years ago, we took the general data set, we let in the enrolled, there’s a little travel itinerary. So we left to use our service where the travel itineraries, and we knew there were wild, you know, 80 travel itineraries in there and a half million emails, and typically people would either find five to 5000 emails, including a lot of weekends offers from wells Vegas, or DEI, they would only find like 20, yield to relevant. And we would let them play around with Boolean search of fuzzy search and everything. And, you know, forum search, and nested Boolean, some brackets and, and then we showed him how to do its wits, Assisted Review of learning. And then within 20 minutes, they pulled up the 60 documents, and they only had to look at like 120 or 200 documents in order to find, you know, 95% recall at a minimum effort. And then and then they noticed that if they were getting like, offers for weekends in Vegas, that if they told the computer, this is not what I’m looking forward with in the next iteration, those were gone. And each they they there, there was another one that they missed a there’s a while. So one of these in these in these and they would see that these will actually pop up in one of the final training cycles. So you’re probably familiar with that yourself when you’re using this machine learning. And then you get the feeling that’s you can control things. And that as you can explain, it’s and it’s transparent. And the system behaves similar in different use cases. That’s when you can create trusts, and that’s the most important trust that people will start using it.

Greg Lambert 22:03
Yeah. And we would be remiss if we didn’t have somebody in from Europe and not at least talk a little bit about GDPR. GDPR is a constant issue, both there in Europe and for anyone that’s that’s doing business, either in Europe or with Europeans. In what ways are you seeing AI help companies remain GDPR compliant? And I’m wondering, also, on the flip side of that, are there any risks that may be involved that we’re not thinking about when it comes to using AI?

Johannes Scholtes 22:36
Well, there’s different aspects of the GDPR. First of all, part of it is that you need to have a reason why you store certain data. If you have that reason, and you explain what you’re doing, and you can explain how you’re doing it, you can do pretty much everything you want. It’s only if you have no reason you cannot builds datasets that contain personal data, or worst case, medical data of individuals. And there’s different gradations. And it’s not only the GDPR, I think it’s also the California privacy privacy laws. It’s the Massachusetts, Washington state, we see these rules popping up everywhere to be left privacy rules in China, maybe they use them for different reasons. But But all these rules help us to control data. Now the problem is that these GDPR rules are often contradicting United States ediscovery require and then the only way to solve that is by using technology. And one of the things you can do using text mining technologies to identify whether a word is an is an individual name, or company name or a location, you know, phone number, or address or whatever, bank account number, and then you can do two things, you can either redact them, but you can also proceed to the mindset. And that’s what we see a lot in eDiscovery, between Germany and France, in the United States, whenever there’s like a patent dispute or another reason for large scale ediscovery death in Europe, the data is not redacted or anonymized, but it’s psuedomized. And then for each of the names, we automatically assign you know a number and then the data is transferred to United States, according to the requirements of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and whatever parties negotiates and then whenever if they find that they really need to know the name of natively tool because somebody did something or they need to have the name will def custodian then it can be can be obtained from the pseudonymisation list and that dead work I review a million documents is hard. But redacting a million documents is impossible and human beings are simply not completely suited for that that work. Well, that’s great stuff for that. That’s great work that you can do by using computers. And that’s exactly what is one of the the killer applications of text mining in the legal space. We Europe is redaction and psuedoisation of personal data.

Marlene Gebauer 25:04
So I wanted to pose a question based on a couple of things that you said earlier, you did mention that you’re a strong believer in humans working with new technology, that the technology isn’t going to replace lawyers, you know, and then you also mentioned that, you know, in order to be successful, they have to feel like they’re controlling it. And that resonated with me as well. Because, you know, I look at things like the chat AI type of technology, where it really does, you know, the problems with it aside, I mean, if you give it a control group of documents, it’ll write a base memo, it’ll, it’ll do very, you know, do sort of the basic things to sort of get you started. And while of course, you do need oversight for that. I guess there’s also the argument that you might need fewer people to do that, because their work is generated to an extent. And that I think, leads to maybe some of the the nervousness, I guess, that we’re seeing, in addition to the problems, you know, sort of the made up things, stuff like that. But how would you respond to these concerns that that increased use of AI in the legal field, you know, could lead to job loss for lawyers and other legal professionals that were the ones who were actually doing some of that base level work before?

Johannes Scholtes 26:28
Yeah, that’s a very good question. I believe that’s the industry with the most burnouts is the legal industry. So I think there’s there will always be more than enough work. And you’ll also see that there’s a whole new generation of lawyers, now, young people coming from universities that study law, because they are interested in providing strategic legal advice to their client, they didn’t go to Harvard’s, or you know, Stanford Law School, in order to be the basically the binder and a marker, just so to say, and so we see that I’ve actually been invited by law firms to help them with our recruitment. So they asked me to come to their law firm, show how demo firm was using technology and, you know, talk a little bit about AI and upgraded this, and how we control it and how we measure the quality and how you incorporated to the legal processes. And that’s what they use to show you know, recruits that okay, if you work with us, you’re about to do really interesting work. We have outsource all the boring work through technology. And I don’t know how it is in the US job markets. But here in Europe, it’s very hard for law firms to find really good lawyers. And and they need this technology, you see that that’s not only for for the recruitment, but also for at the end of the day, they will like ours there. If they are not going to jump on this technology bandwagon. The Big Four will. There’s a whole group of people ready to start competing legal firms and only reason why they don’t yet is because the ABA or the European bar associations have forbidden them, but they’re ready to go. Now there’s in the Netherlands KPMG has more lawyers than the larger world firms. And they’re ready, and they embrace technology. So if you provide a service that’s too slow, too expensive, and doesn’t have the quality it could have, at the end of the day. That’s not a competitive service. And I think that most of all firms understand but they should also understand that they they should embrace maybe different methods for billing. And like I said, the lawyer and powered by technology, you could charge more per hour than the warrior is not so powerful. And often they’re afraid to do that. Or, and you can also have subscription model or you can have a fixed price. And the really interesting thing that I noticed is that law firms that do class actions, they all use technology from the beginning to the end because they have to have efficiency. When we talk about it powers. The end of the day, you have to have a competitive service.

Greg Lambert 29:13
Jan, when you were talking about charging more for the attorney Plus technology. That’s not a novel concept for law firms, because we have also charged more for maybe some of our listeners are going to cringe when I say this, but lawyers using Westlaw cost more than then lawyers you know at least per hour cost more and because we would charge back for using basically that technology. It’s not a foreign concept to the legal industry of charging for this and it may be one of the ways that some of the firm’s I think that are knowing that they need to get into it but not sure how they can afford it. Maybe this is one of those one of those options. I don’t know if it’ll work, but it’s like I said, it’s not new.

Johannes Scholtes 30:07
Well, the way how I addressed this is staff, I typically showed him, you know, there’s a difference between revenue and profit. Revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. It’s an old saying, and little firms really go for the revenue. But if you have, like 100 people doing illegal, reasonable and you paid and like $50 an hour, you charge $100 an hour, and you can do the math. And you see that the if you use machine learning and data scientists and AI and more expensive lawyers, at the end of the day, you make more money, and you have less risk, because there’s a huge risk that humans are cooperatively not suited for a lot of the tasks that are currently done manually and ediscovery. And let alone the information governance. And the risks are enormous. So there’s liability risks. And there’s governance risk, regulatory risk. There’s, everybody knows the examples of the law firms that went bust because of these liability risks. So it’s, so I don’t always ask one law firms. Okay, why are you afraid of technology? And is it because you don’t understand it? Because I can, I can explain it to you. If you don’t trust it, I understand that, and I could create trust for you. But if you’d only use technology, there’s two reasons actually, which are very hard to address. One is that if you have a criminal defense lawyer, and most of their clients are guilty, they are absolutely not interested in factuality, they come up with some kind of story like, okay, the bank was robbed. But my client just happened to be there. And actually, he wasn’t part of the robbing gang. And yeah, that he was arrested, you know, you know, those types of stories. Criminal Defense Lawyers, they don’t need AI most of the time, because they know AI will find the evidence against a client. So the other parts are lawyers that are more interested in billable hours, that in providing efficiency, equality, you know, if that’s your business model, you get away with it. Your customers accept it. There’s very little I can do against it. I can only show it away that’s providing more job security in the future. Yeah. That’s to embrace technology and work with together

Marlene Gebauer 32:14
I mean, the thing that we find is that, you know, we get new technologies, but we also that, that also develops new types of work, and new ways, and new and new. And so that’s been historical. So, you know, that’ll happen. That’ll happen here, too.

Johannes Scholtes 32:30
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We will become prompt writers now.

Marlene Gebauer 32:37
brand new career.

Greg Lambert 32:38
Yeah. Our guest last week was talking about how he’s, he’s hiring prompt engineers. Like, really?

Marlene Gebauer 32:47
How different is it than learning Boolean search? I mean, you know, or learning or learning computer domains. It’s the same sort of thing.

Johannes Scholtes 32:53
Well, I was in the Reims in France last week, and I visited the Carnegie Library there, which was donated by Carnegie after in First World War, Reims was completely destructive thing, the First World War and, and there was a reading room with the right and to the left, there were these old antique wooden cardboard box drawers with all the index cards. And it was cool to index room. Yeah, where did the librarians go? But we have, we have different I absolutely agree with you. Yeah. But at 14 to create a trust and to defensibility, and a transparency of what, and this is also an add on if you already interviewed Maura Grossman. But this is also a more assess, you should not accept black boxes said the worst thing we can do in the industry is to provide the industry with black boxes. That’s, that will never create trust. So if a vendor and this proprietary technology and they’re secretive about it, walk away from it.

Marlene Gebauer 33:58
There’s the ethical mean black box, and the ethical obligations just don’t mix

Johannes Scholtes 34:03
well, and under GDPR, there’s Article 22, which gives every citizen the right to explanation if automatic system decides something about it. And very quickly, we’re moving towards the artificial intelligence act where that said even stronger rights. So the rights for explanation is a very important rights that citizens have so as you can explain your technology, you’re in trouble because the AI is going to be even going to have a much bigger impact even than the GDPR hassle doing business in Europe.

Greg Lambert 34:40
Well, yeah, on one of the things that’s getting a lot of press this week is Allen and Overy in the UK, I believe, has launched Harvey AI which is their supposed version of AI tool similar to ChatGPT. That is from The Press accounts is supposed to be open to some of their clients to test on their, we were joking before we jumped on that, when you go to the website there, you get a logo, a little tagline. And then a link that says, you know, click here to get on the waiting list, and not much else. Here we call that, you know, fantastic marketing, because even though that’s all you see, there must be, you know, dozens of articles talking about how innovative A&O is on this. So I know, we can’t, you know, we don’t have specifics of what they’re doing. But let’s go ahead and just talk about what we think they might be doing, or what law firms see as a opportunity here to, I guess, impress their clients and allow them to kind of get that stickiness with the relationship.

Johannes Scholtes 35:51
Yeah. And this is also I think, the way to go. Microsoft has created copilots in GitHub, which you probably know, it’s like, you know, a program that helps you to assist you to write computer codes. And they found that developers are like 40% Faster writing codes. You know, what Allen Overy did, and I have to be careful what I say because I also went to the website from Harvey AI, and is another law firm, I could not put myself on the waiting list. So I don’t know I’ve not seen the demo. I have to rely on the press release, they will send out and they don’t know what or I heard rumors. It’s GPT-4. But then nobody knows what GPT-4 is about anyway. So these are these are the trillion or 100 trillion parameters. We are though. We don’t know what it’s trainable. But I made a couple of interesting observations. And that also relates to what Bing did withChatGPT. I think these are really, really super interesting times, I’ve been in natural language processing for thirty years. And it never worked. You know, I even backtracked from NLP, in 1985, two information retrieval because at least at work that in 2017, Google added because all of this comes from Google, that’s the really interesting part and Microsoft kind of hijack this, Google came with the famous paper essentially, is all you need, introducing the transformers. And that was a radical improvement in the quality. For machine translation, we’ve all noticed I’m good spec, Google Translate became but also in understanding the search queries that are sent to the search engine. And Google service also became much better. And what happened now is that there’s a special form of these transformers, that our decoder only models, normally transformers are encoders, and decoders, the encoders kind of what the decoder does. But they figure it out. If you have a decoder model only, that also works great in certain cases. And that’s what the GPT models are a generative, pre trained transformers. But this, as they say, in MIT, they’re just parrotts, they repeat whatever they’ve seen. And only thing they can do is, is predicts whatever words coming after a couple of other words, but the greater the really great achieved for there are thre parts will that achieved with this, first of all, we can now generate language with computers that can no longer be distinguished from human beings, that’s something we never were able to do. We’re also able to stay within ethical boundaries, more or less, unless you fool with or hack it. And we found a way, reinforcement learning the same method also used to the AlphaGo experiments, the success that we can actually have the computer, talk with other humans, and then make sure it stays on track and the conversation is more engaging. Now the part, there’s two parts missing. In order to be successful, the first part is that the computer doesn’t know what it’s talking about. So he does not understand the meaning of the text. So we need to have some kind of guidance to drive that. And the other part that is missing. The models are now trained with data from the deep dark sides of the internet. So we need to do vertical training, we need to do training with all have no case will contracts. Or this from me with Allen Overy did did all of their legal data, because that’s their, that’s their power in the future. It’s all the contracts all the documents to f they can use to train these models. And if we that we call that vertical training. So if we do more vertical training, and we can control what’s being generated, it’s by understanding the meaning of text. So we move more from just, you know, statistical patterns to natural language understanding and its language inference, then these models will become much better and then the future indeed, is to create co pilots, but the CO pilots can never be trusted and 100%. So you always need to have there again, a human to validate what they do. Now one of the things that I observe both in the Bing search engine and in this part is that the Bing search engine with ChatGPT is doesn’t have any vertical moments and and it get it starts doing really really weird things after a couple of different prompts so they limited you from the also read that great story in The New York Times you’re all everybody’s falling for the Eliza effect and there’s some other great articles awesome diverse written them out have been of course Wired always the best articles and but if you look at the the demo from Microsoft, you see that the queries are very specific very details I want to have this holiday and then this and then this and then this now that’s not how normally people searched and we searched with one keyword or two keywords, we expect to get like the right answers based on one or maybe two keywords said he ever his keyword we Google was 1.2 out a reason why these queries are so very specific, is that otherwise it doesn’t work. Now you also if you look at the examples from Harvey, okay, here we go, I’m at this is one of them. And I copied it this morning, I’m at a German law firm and I go to an Indian bank about the European Union Market abuse regime suggests a skeleton in a five slide present face shape. And for each slide includes three bullet points on its content is highly detailed. And then for these models, it’s okay it’s possible to split these up the number of of prompts a use that to generate data. And but if you have to less specific and less detailed questions or problems, you will see that humans will probably understand what you’re talking about. And they will they know your culture or your background to know he was a client. And so to get much faster than generate the proper documents. And these examples are all extremely think a little bit artificial? Well, it’s a great, it’s very good. We’re doing, it’s very good. We’re doing experiments, I understood that also silicone and Quinn Emanuel are using this. If I were a little firm, I would absolutely also look at this. Because this is what you want, you won’t have a copilots for drafting contracts.

Marlene Gebauer 42:25
Yes. So speaking of the future, we’ve reached the part in the podcast Yan where we ask the crystal ball question. And so we asked you, you know, what do you see as the significant challenge or changes on the horizon for the legal industry over the next two to five years?

Johannes Scholtes 42:44
Yeah, well, I think there’s I think everybody woke up in the legal industry last two months. So that’s really helpful. The parts where we have to be very careful as an industry, you see explainability. Explainable AI, we should address that. Otherwise, we will never have trust. I also think that right now lawyer shouldn’t be too worried. But the moments there are vertically trade models, and they will be there. I’m very confident there’s now probably 50 or 100, startups in building copilots, for specific legal applications. Maybe antitrusts, may be HR, maybe contract or whatever. And once those models are ons, and that’s will be a major change in the industry. And that’s going to happen. I also think that’s what Microsoft did with integrating Bing ChatGPT is a very, very interesting experiment. But there’s one part is missing. What’s missing is that Bing is just finding web pages. And it’s it’s forwarding those web pages, unfiltered unstructured, into ChatGPT. And that doesn’t work. And we need to understand the meaning of these words, we need to understand the meaning of the relation of these words, the semantics, and not just the word sequences, and then you’ll see that these models will become much better. And all of that’s going to happen both in and out in the legal industry, also in the medical industry. Also, I would be really worried if I were a content writer, communication experts because that that industry will probably change first, if you are a telemarketing, if you are in any other creative profession, there will be a lot of changes. But then there’s also a lot of legal risks. There’s a lot of uncertainty now that we have. Copyright risks, liability risks. For me as an AI researcher. These are these are most interesting times of my life. And like I said it finally works, you know, now we have to make sure that we can create the trust that’s needed, so society will embrace what we do.

Greg Lambert 44:55
All right, well, Jan Scholtes, we want to thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us too. This has been fun. And, man, we’re right at the beginning of this.

Marlene Gebauer 45:03
That’s right. And of course, thanks to all of you, our audience for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoyed the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert 45:19
And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter, Jan, what’s the best way for people to reach out to you?

Johannes Scholtes 45:25
On LinkedIn by searching for my name Jan Scholtes. Are you Johannes Scholtes and you find me. I’m more than willing to engage with you.

Marlene Gebauer 45:36
Perfect and well of course have all the connectors on page when we post but if you know you’re old school and you don’t want to do any of that you can leave us a voicemail on our kijken review Hotline at 713-487-7821 and as always, the music here is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you Jerry.

Greg Lambert 45:53
Thank you Jerry. Alright Marlene, I’ll talk to you later.

Marlene Gebauer 45:55
Okay, bye bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

It is pretty apparent that we are in a super Hype Cycle when it comes to AI tools like ChatGPT, but for many of us in the legal profession, we’re not used to reaching this point of the cycle at the same time as the rest of the world. Because things are happening so fast, we wanted to bring in someone like Colin Lachance from Jurisage to talk about how they are integrating Generative AI tools into their products.

• Main: https://jurisage.com/
• MyJr: https://jurisage.com/myjr/
• Chat: https://jurisage.com/ask-myjr-chat/
• Free MyJr Chrome browser extension 
• @ColinLachance (Twitter)

Transcript

Greg Lambert 0:07
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Greg Lambert and Marlene is traveling this week. So you got me again, going solo, but I think we got a really exciting guest on with us. And we kind of pulled him in at just the last minute because there’s so much going on with companies integrating some of the GPT 3.5 tools or ChatGPT, into their products. And I went on a kind of a little rabbit hole adventure this morning, tracking down some things and in something that Dennis Kennedy on his podcast, had mentioned with Tom Mighell. And that was there was a site that basically took the GPT and allowed it digest books. And then it allowed for a chat interface with the, with the book itself. And so I was I was having all kinds of fun with that I posted some stuff on on Twitter, and I said, Hey, would this be great. If you know Lexis and Westlaw were to take their treatises or take their monographs or to take their practice guides and put this type of interface on it so that you’re not just doing a Boolean type searching on it, but you’re actually doing something that librarians were trying to get established 20 years ago, and that is to just use plain language searching. And I’m drawing a blank on the term, natural language searching. So natural language searching. It seems like after 20 some odd years, we’ve kind of figured out how to do that through the AI. I’m joined by Colin Lachance, who is the co founder and CEO of Jurisage AI in Ontario, or in Ottawa, although he is joining us from beautiful Salt Lake City today. So Colin, thank you for coming on here. And I know we’re going to talk some of the stuff that you’re doing as well. And it’s really exciting,

Colin Lachance 2:10
Greg, thanks very much. Big fan of the show.

Greg Lambert 2:12
And thanks. Well, and you were on I believe you were on my In Seclusion podcast years ago, right at the beginning of the pandemic. So this is not your first rodeo here.

Colin Lachance 2:24
So it is not. Although I do miss your Brady Bunch backdrop

Greg Lambert 2:30
That was fun. Well, first of all, Colin, before we dive into some of the really cool stuff that that you’re doing there at Jurisage, give us a little background on how you found yourself co founding yet another legal tech company, they’re in Canada, this time Jurisage. So give us some background.

Colin Lachance 2:42
Sure, Thanks, Greg. So Jurisage is looking to deal with what we call the second biggest legal research problem. If search is the is the first, then then engagement with the content and synthesis and understanding of the content is the second. We keep about this, you know, a roundabout but a logical way when we will get it historically, I’ve been working in legal information and tech since 2011. I was CEO at kami Canadian legal information Institute. And then 2015, I left started working in different aspects of legal tech. In 2016, I started a company called compass, which was built around a case file database that a small independent publisher in Canada, who was shutting down was making available and that gave us a chance to start working with Canadian case law with a view to doing what it is we’re doing right now. So I’m only six years off schedule from why we acquired acquired this database in the relationship with the courts to continue to receive content, that company had built a Key Number system a really robust taxonomy over its decades of operation 150 topics detailed case digest and so on it model, you know, going back decades off the west Key Number system, but its own made in Canada version. So our view back then was this is a great foundation for natural language processing. You have these beautifully editorially tagged items. So I’m going to skip over a bit of the history, we may have an opportunity to come back to it up to 2020. I started a nonprofit with a view of saying what happens if I let more people play with this data, if I start putting it in more hands at academics and you know other companies and so on and let them play explore for non commercial purposes. And this is where I first met my partners inside the founding of Jurisage it was an applied AI company called Alta ml. They do AI machine learning proofs of concepts for governments and large companies and so on. And they wanted to explore legal. So after a little bit of exploration, they said, Oh, this is amazing. We want to do something with it. But how are we going to go about getting the data and And the domain expertise. And so that led to conversations that ultimately led to a joint venture between compass and Alta ml, we created Jurisage joint venture. So that was a concept but a concept without a purpose. Other than we do, there was stuff to happen in legal. So we came up with the name first, before we even decided what we’re going to do casting vote for a good name, it’s going to be something new legal intelligence. And in terms of figuring out our focus, we spent a lot of time talking with knowledge directors, law librarians, law partners, students, associates, and so on, just to explore the range of challenges that they had in dealing with legal research generally, in case law, specifically, in order to find an area and opportunity for us to engage. And so that’s what led us to the point of believing that not only could we create something with the chocolate and peanut butter aspects of what we could bring together, their machine learning capabilities, our data, my domain expertise, but we were getting some strong signals from the market as to where there were some gaps that we thought we could work. Okay. That’s how we started.

Greg Lambert 6:09
Okay. And I brought you on here, because as I was raving at some of the possibilities of what the AI could be doing, you actually pointed out to me was like, you know, hey, we’re already doing it here. So tell us a little bit you have a subset of Jurisage. That is that you call My Junior MyJr. And rather than me trying to explain it, I’m going to let you explain what it does and what the inspiration was behind your creation of it.

Colin Lachance 6:41
Thanks. So my junior was at the idea of saying, Well, what does a junior associate do other than without other but a significant function of a junior associate is to bring forward its research output to its partner, the partner might be going to argue the motion of junior associate has done the work, but who’s helping the junior associate? So what it does is it group of capabilities is it analyzes the case law in the background, so that we when you get exposed to case law, whether you’re on an existing legal research site, like a Westlaw Fastcase, CaseText, what have you, or I’m a Google Scholar or Justia, we’re in Canada CanLII, when you see a citation, all of those tools will offer you the ability to click the link and open a new tab, right click the link and open a new tab. So you can imagine if you’re reading a court opinion, and it cites 10, more court opinions, you run the risk of opening many, many, many tabs. So what we do within my junior, is we having analyzed the case, by using you know, various machine learning NLP, you know, magical things, not so magical things is we create a view into the insights that’s behind that leg. So you can hover over the citation on your page, get a little pop up and explain what’s there. If you want more information without actually reading the case, you can go go to a more robust dashboard, where we’ve broken down more information, including recommendations on related cases by content related cases by citation graphs, and so on. And what we’re adding in going live for our what we call our presale users next week, is that conversation, the chat with a case. So essentially, what you’ve described at the top of this call on engaging with a book, that’s what we’re introducing, it’s it’s having my junior serve in place of your classmate or colleague, to ask the question. So in the matter of Smith v. Jones, you might ask your colleague who’s read the case before, what did Smith argue your colleague would tell him what Smith said, Okay, what a Jones argue. So this is what the my junior function inside our offering does. Okay. You just ask, What did Smith argue what did John’s argue explain this to me, like I’m a 10 year old,

Greg Lambert 8:58
You just give it you just give it plain language? And it gives you hopefully a plain answer. Right?

Colin Lachance 9:05
That’s That’s right. That’s right. And so it does use the ChatGPT technology. So in this case, it’s the DaVinci three API in the GDP GTP 3.5. Although the way we’ve structured it, having done a lot of the underlying analysis of the content organization, we put what you might call guardrails or context around the engagement. So this means when the question is being asked, the answer can only come from the content and not from the universe of language. So the universe of language, what these language models are great at is they’re great at summarization, they’re great at classification. What they’re not great at is answering general questions when specific knowledge is is important to the answer. So we try and address that by limiting its context. So your question is about the content of the case. But the properties of language models allow you to ask it in whatever way makes sense for you. And it comes back in a very clear and digestible way.

Greg Lambert 10:07
Okay, just to make sure I understood that. It’s basically the GPT version is interpreting just the case. Correct? And then applying the answer on that. So it’s it’s not doing any type of general knowledge that it’s bringing back in which, which it’s really good at making stories, but it’s not necessarily really good at creating the truth based on actual facts, right, it will make stuff up if you don’t limit it, like the way that you’re doing.

Colin Lachance 10:40
Yeah, that’s, that’s exactly right. So the way we’ve tested the quality of its responses, and the accuracy of its responses, is just lots and lots and lots and lots of prompts, where the only correct answer has to be something very specific. So that would include things like, what was the legal test? And what is the authority for that test? Okay, there’s only one way to answer that correctly inside the scope of the document. Okay. Now, there may be many ways to say it. But the answer has to be the test is x. And the supporting authority is why is there that’s letter? Why not? Not the question. Right, right. But the nature of how it comes back, allows us to validate it, we can go back into the body and say, Is this correct? Was this correct? And so we try to do a variety of things. And actually, we’re currently hiring prompt engineers to really push the limits of this, to both find what great questions will result in great answers. And to find out what kind of things can result in incomplete answers.

Greg Lambert 11:45
Okay. Yeah, that I know, there are complete Reddit groups out there that talk about the prompting some of them good, some of them evil, but it is how you structure and ask the question of the AI that really influences the answer that that you may get back. Let me dive in just a little deeper, if you don’t mind. And that is, are you setting it up to train the GPT version? Or are you doing it kind of on the fly? Are you are you inserting the case? As the question is being asked? Or are you setting up a model on the back end that that’s actually training on your data?

Colin Lachance 12:29
It’s a bit of both. The model was trained on our data. So we’ve been looking at the different generations of language models, probably going back two years now from that first initial experimentation from Alta ml working with it, the early versions, were the results were uninspiring. Yeah, but we could we could find areas where there was potential. So we’ve been working with like a transformer based approach to accelerate classification. So for example, I mentioned that we have in our historic collection, a lot of like great editorially tagged items. So we’re training, easing, transformer based approaches, training classifiers on tags. So when we are handing one of our documents over to the language model to answer the question, we’re doing two things. We’re saying to the model, answer the question based on this document. So the interface for engagement right now is to our dashboard, down the road, the interface will be through our browser extension, the pop up so you just anytime you see a citation, you can hover over start talking to that case, but right now is through the browser extension. So that gives you that context of the question that’s about to come is about this document. Now for that document in our back end, we’ve already indexed it, we’re not grabbing that on the fly. We already have a copy of it, we’ve already broken down into fragments so the system can engage and talk to, and we’ve already labeled to that file. Other things that we know about that case. So we’ve labeled to that file, that we happen to know that this one might deal with a particular procedural matter, or this one might deal with a particular tort and so on. It’s not intended to influence the result. But it’s it’s intended to constrain the imagination of the document.

Greg Lambert 14:15
So essentially, you’re passing through some of the metadata that you’ve generated over the years as part of it so that it that it does kind of put it into a framework rather than just giving it just an open text to ingest and digest itself. Right.

Colin Lachance 14:33
That’s right. So it will have the ability to draw on the available context, should it be relevant to how the answer comes back. The idea with these language models is they can be influenced by what you let it look at. So GPT is not restricted by a database, the book version that you’re talking about, is restricted. The answer has to come from within that book. The answer for us has to come from within the case document. The other thing that we’re doing with this it’s going to be a later iteration is to pass it back. So we question comes in, tell me the relevant test and how this matter was argued by the plaintiff. So the answer comes back, then we use everything else that we know, including the breakdown of the document. And we’re going to map it back to where in the document, we think the support for the statement came from. That’s good idea. So that’s not part of the first iteration. That’s out right now. But that is something that we’re incorporating into the next which, you know, by having spent so much time analyzing these documents, prior to the incorporation of a GPT type tool, it’s easier for us to work our way back, like an example of that is with one of our classification models is a sentence level classifier, where every sentence of every opinion, is classified as one or more facts, issues, analysis, law, and conclusion.

Greg Lambert 15:52
Wow. It’s pretty granular,

Colin Lachance 15:54
it is pretty granular. And so we can group that into paragraphs, and so on. So it allows us to take other NLP techniques like semantic matching and say, Okay, well, the words of us does this, it was making a point in its paragraph, we can see that it’s saying, fact fact, an outlet or law analysis. So it allows us to match map it back. So this is a, this is a fun time for us to all these things that we’re working towards, like the power of this particular model kind of caught us off guard. But everything that we had built in the structure of the browser extension, the dashboard, the analysis, meant that this was actually quite straightforward for us to plug in and begin using.

Greg Lambert 16:35
Yeah, yeah. Well, sounds like you had a really good baseline of work that you’d already done. And you’re right, this near, especially this DaVinci. Three, seems to be just leaps and bounds better than all the other models that that have been out there. I know. I’ve been, you know, significantly impressed by the whole thing. I’m just doing some very basic stuff.

Colin Lachance 16:59
You’ve been doing some interesting stuff with your automated legal tech news. Yeah.

Greg Lambert 17:03
And comic book news and all kinds of stuff. I’ve been having all kinds of fun with with this. And I think, you know, this is a this is a geeks dream of having a tool that can really kind of inspire people to come up with unique ways to play with information. And yes, like I said, when you told me that you were already working on this project, I was like, Well, I have to learn more about this one.

Colin Lachance 17:30
One thing that we have going for us is my co founder and this His name is Juliana Ravello. He’s been working in AI in one capacity or another for the past 20 years. For the past four years, he’s been working in legal AI and Explainable AI, and also been working with universities and managing a annual National Competition on what’s called legal information extraction, and entailment. So this is like solidly solidly in his domain. So when we build these models, we build them in a way that we’re not dependent on, in this case, the open AI GPT. It’s actually set up in a way that if we decide we like what Google comes out with next better, we swap out the DaVinci API call and swap in something else. There’s an incredible company in Toronto called cohere. It was founded by a guy named Aiden Gomez, who was one of the original authors of the transformer paper at Google, that sort of led us to Bert and everything else, right. And so we’ve been working with their API’s as well, too. So we see this as something that can get better, you know, it becomes a tool. So it’s, let’s just call it a really, really, really powerful wrench. But we don’t have to change our entire garage. Based on the wrench we choose, we can find the right wrench for that for the things that we’re trying to achieve.

Greg Lambert 18:48
Right? Yeah, it’s almost like a like an impact wrench where? Yeah, it does exactly what you know, a regular wrench would do only faster and stronger.

Colin Lachance 18:59
And also it’s, it’s, it’s a point of sadness me that I’ve never actually owned it in that wrench. I’ve had times where I’ve wanted one, but I’ve never

Greg Lambert 19:06
owned, it’s too powerful for me, I’ll do the AI, but I’m not going to use an impact wrench. So let me ask you, who are you thinking is going to be the consumer for this type of product?

Colin Lachance 19:20
When we were putting it together. So a little over a year ago, we had our proof of concept thing that we started bringing back to lawyers, while librarians and others to say, here’s what we think we’re gonna build. What do you think about it? And then from that, it really became obvious to us that this is a tool that you almost have like a consumer level engagement with the individual user because they’re gonna have a personalized experience with it. So a junior attorney is going to engage with this to explore new and unfamiliar areas more quickly, a senior attorney is going to refresh their knowledge. One of the key questions we ask people is assume that if we build this, your law firm will not pay for it. Your university will not pay for it your government department or legal department will not pay for it. Would you reach into your own pocket? Put your credit card and use it having heard enough? Yes, as we went ahead and build it. But from a marketing perspective, that’s who we think it’s going to be the person who wants to solve their own problem by making this a web based overlay. It’s not something that needs to go through a purchasing it’s a very personal experience that we’re creating for individuals.

Greg Lambert 20:31
And so is the consumer going to be the in the Canadian legal market? Or do you see it expanding beyond that at some point.

Colin Lachance 20:39
Everything that we’ve built, we’ve ensured performs equally well on US data as well as Canadian data. Okay, so we have the advantage in Canada of having had a data set, we have opportunities in the US base built around availabilities of different quality datasets, so our initial built was on top of the core Glessner. dataset. So we’ve incorporated a lot that in, we’ve been doing our testing on that, whether it becomes our permanent data set, we’re chatting with different folks to figure out the right way to incorporate the US content in there. But it’s very much something that’s targeted to the entirety of Northwest Canada, US, not Mexico yet. But we’ve also done a lot of testing on on UK and Australia and other other Commonwealth judgments. But right now, for the first half of this year, we’re about 75 80% focused on Canada, the the chat function is going to be available on the Canadian data next week. So roughly from the 20th, February 20. The US data will be available likely in March, awesome, through the through that model, where a finalist at the ad tech shows startup alley, so we better not, you know show up in that house and not have an offering for US Attorney.

Greg Lambert 21:56
Yeah, that’s a you gotta read the room there. And it’s gonna be American lawyers looking for American law. So I’m glad you glad you see that.

Colin Lachance 22:07
Yeah, no, we absolutely see it. But what’s fun is American workers occasionally get exposed to Canadian law and vice versa. And by analyzing both, we can actually provide access to the to the other country’s content to people when they come across it in a judgement.

Greg Lambert 22:21
Yeah. Well, and you’ve been working on this for you said well over a year, right? I mean, this is yes. And what, you know, I don’t want to take any intellectual property from you. And so just limit this to what you can say, but what other kind of concepts? Are you thinking about that you can use a tool like this, to help you create beyond, you know, kind of the junior attorney interpret this case, and, and give me you know, give me a summary, what other concepts are out there that you’re thinking of?

Colin Lachance 22:57
From the perspective of serving the individual attorney, that natural evolution is into a word add in, every everything about the way we set up, could quite easily be turned into a word add in so the engagement becomes an analysis, not of what you’ve been reading, but of what you’ve been writing. And an easier pathway into that. So you can expect that later this year, I don’t think we’re giving away any secrets and suggesting that we want to be where lawyers live. But we’re not jumping in to Outlook or in or to email because we want to be where they’re engaging with the content, right. And that is in their research tools and where they write the other aspect that this is all set up. And we’ve been building it all as background API’s that feed our own services, which means they can feed other services. So everything that we do to analyze what we call a rhetorical legal document. Now, rhetorical just being it’s not a contract. It’s something where someone’s actually arguing and making a case. So that includes briefs that includes and legal memos, demand letters, and so on. So our models are capable of analyzing that material inside databases. So if integration partners want to point our models to enhance the metadata associated with the content already in their systems, that is an evolution of what our tools were built to accomplish. And then the other thing that sort of flows naturally from that week, we’re having conversations with a couple different integration partners, where they’re engaging with user content, already through browser extensions, and outward add ins, but we can layer in extra information for them. So that we, the user doesn’t have to rely on two separate browser extensions to accomplish something. If we just piggyback our capabilities and feed it into an interface that they want. Our philosophy behind all of this. It sort of goes to the same reason we started with this idea of synthesis and reading rather than search is no one really wants to change the first step of the research process. If you like Westlaw, you’re going to stay with Westlaw. If you like Fastcase, you’re going to stay with Fastcase If you encountered you a camera, you’re in a state with cameras, we believe the same thing applies to document management services, and so on. So you need a lot of those places, it’s not the goal to replace the first step. But it’s the goal to enhance the second step when you start engaging. And so integration partners will be better suited to incorporate that and then we will to create a new interface.

Greg Lambert 25:22
Yeah, and that’s one of the things that I’ve been, I’ve been using the term and it may not be the exact right term to use, but it’s tools like this, I see as more of an augmentation of what you’re doing. And so I saw Casey Flaherty had tweeted something out earlier that we want to have a legitimate conversation around what this is doing. And when you start the conversation was saying, this is going to replace lawyers or on the other end, this is a, you know, terrible thing, it will never, you know, never be able to even write documents, both of those extremes just really aren’t a starting point in the conversation. And so using it as an augmentation, I love that you talked about using it for synthesis and reading and not for search. That’s another way that you know, I think most people are like, well, they can’t do search. And they’re just like, yeah, that’s not what it’s set up to do. That’s not the you know, if you want, there’s great search tools out there. You know, this is much more than that synthesis. And in reading, I think, I think you’re the first person I heard say that straight like that.

Colin Lachance 26:32
Yeah, exactly. When Westlaw announced precision, they really emphasize the amount of work that they put into improving the quality of your search results. But the experience of when you start opening up documents, is relatively unchanged and potentially worse. And this isn’t a knock against Westlaw. This is just the reality of the framing of how a legal research tool operates is that they have a way of presenting. And frankly, it would be dangerous for them to change that we have the benefit of starting with zero customers. Well, that’s not entirely true. We’ve actually had a really positive growth in our pre sale. But can you imagine starting with hundreds of 1000s of customers, and you change something,

Greg Lambert 27:13
because you know how much lawyers love change.

Colin Lachance 27:16
They all love change, but they’re not going to come up and pat myself on the back for saying, we’re really glad you change the search interface. Or we change the next step. We’re really glad I have to learn something new.

Greg Lambert 27:27
And again, I think whether it’s what you’re doing or another example would be like what docket alarm is doing with the giving the get three bullet points on on on the docket sheet. That’s an add in that’s an additional thing that doesn’t replace what the core part of the business is. That’s, that’s right. And maybe at some point, it does. But for right now, I think, you know, it’s incremental change, it’s, you know, testing things out, as you go in kind of testing the limits of what a product like this will do.

Colin Lachance 27:58
It also represents a part of what people are looking for, again, they don’t want to keep opening tab after tab after tab. They don’t want another document, they want the information inside the document, when when they already know their app, the document that’s useful. The next step is how do we get that information out? You mentioned Casey, like, honestly one of the guiding principles of setting this up with something that the Lexis fusion when they did their 2600 interviews of clients, and they put out their initial report, I can’t get the quote exactly right. But it was something to the effect of make it easier, make it better, but don’t make me learn. And so,

Greg Lambert 28:34
Casey simply said it in a 5000 word document. That’s the same thing.

Colin Lachance 28:40
But he was he was stuck in that point. He was summarizing the feedback that he received. But the message that we took is okay, that’s that’s the standard we have to achieve. What can we do without actually requiring training? Can people hover over a link? Yes.

Greg Lambert 28:56
What are some of the limitations that you’re running into?

Colin Lachance 28:59
One of the nice things and one of the reasons we didn’t pursue this earlier was cost was a significant limitation. So in fall of last year, open AI reduced the prices of its its DaVinci API’s. And that made a big difference to to moving us down the path of of making this available because it is it is a challenge. Even if you’re just talking pennies and engagement, you still have to say well, what if there are 100,000 engagements or 200,000?

Greg Lambert 29:26
It’s gonna say any anyone that had to pay a large law firms pacer account knows that those payments add up.

Colin Lachance 29:33
That’s right. So having enough confidence that we can plan for that and do this effectively. So one of the ways that we’re approaching that on the Canadian side is the volume of published case law is sufficiently small that we’re actually get a pre process using my junior against the half dozen summarization questions, every case that comes out of the courts, and then make it available as a mailing service. So free Be daily case summaries, choose your court choose your topic, choose your summary style. And then those inside our dashboard become, it’ll, here’s some recommended previews. So you can say here are six different ways I could summarize this case, let me pick one, but it will be now a cached answer because we’ve already processed it. So planning for classes is a big one. And then also, the next big challenge is, if I can, I think was a, you know, stand up Stand up comics in the 90s, always saying that they would get offers for sitcoms, oh, you’re great stand up. But can you act right? So so we’re getting the we’re getting the equivalent of this is really cool. Can I do these next 10 things? Well, maybe at some point, I if there’s a, you know, a logical path for growth. So constraining our own enthusiasm, and those of our prospective customers is, is actually a challenge, because everything else we’ve done up to this point has been trying to concentrate on what we can do in a way that attorneys can trust the result. So that exuberance of not breaking that commitment, say we you can trust the result because of what we put in. So it doesn’t matter that, frankly, and I wish and I hope and I expect, you know, dozens of other companies are going to stick a ChatGPT interface on top of the free law. And they’re going to do lots of amazing stuff. And it’s going to create a different level of expectations. But they’re not committing to that idea of trust. So that’s that is a challenge for us, too, is to make sure that we keep pace with the market’s desire to go further. But without sort of breaking that initial commitment that will give you stuff that you know you can rely on. Yep. Well, I think I think docket alarm get adopted, the docket alarm approach is a good example of keeping that kind of commitment. Because they’re saying, Look, we’ll give you the three point summarization of this to help you decide if you should check, right, that is something that they can with confidence, say we’re delivering what we said, we’re going to, we’re going to deliver for the purpose that we said we’re going to do. So I think, as people approach it that way, that’s the right way to approach it.

Greg Lambert 32:01
I know things are changing very quickly. I mean, three months ago, we weren’t talking about this. And now it’s all we’re talking about. But I want you to pull out your crystal ball here. And kind of let me know, where do you think the legal industry is headed? When it comes to tools like this, and resources like you are setting up?

Colin Lachance 32:26
I believe that by the end of this year, so I’m gonna give you my short term and then a bit of a long term but but by the end of 2023, I do believe the idea of proceeding without some sort of tool that allows that can serve as not necessarily a colleague, but some some form of check tool engagement tool that allows you to test ideas and test theories, first drafts, and so on, I think that’s going to become pretty commonplace, it’s going to move I think more quickly on the transactional side, not on whole documents. But on portions of documents on first drafts. We’ve never seen this before, from the legal community having the same level of enthusiasm for a piece of tank, as the community at large. As we’re seeing here. We’ve never seen the complaints that people offer on online as being I’m disappointed that it didn’t do this tiny little narrow thing correctly, when it did all this amazing stuff correctly. So that kind of adoption of that kind of tool, it’s not necessarily going to be from legal tech companies. But if Microsoft is incorporating GPT into its core products, then it becomes an expectation that you’re going to have some ability to engage with information other than traditional search. And so that for the future beyond 2023 really opens it up, it really opens up our collective imagination for the parts of our system that we can change. I met somebody this morning, who believes that there’s a significant portion of transactional work, that’s anything built around forms to government bodies has to move away from work done by lawyers. So I think a lot of that is it’s going to happen and I think the acceptance of it, it’s going to be it’s going to surprise us. Yeah, like how ready people are for that to happen.

Greg Lambert 34:15
Okay. Anything longer term.

Colin Lachance 34:18
Longer term, I think about the movie Her with the Joaquin Phoenix.

Greg Lambert 34:23
Yes.

Colin Lachance 34:25
Movie you heard where eventually the machines are so smart. They get bored of us and they leave.

Greg Lambert 34:31
Well, you know, in it’s kind of unfair for me to answer my own question here. But that’s never stopped me before. But my guess is that somewhere along the line, and we saw just a glimpse of this last week, when when Google did their bar demo, which was a canned demo, and they lost like 7% of their value over $100 billion of value in just a few minutes. I got I think we have to be careful that And the worst thing that could happen is that somebody relies upon this. And it causes a client to lose their business or to or law firm to go under. No one wants to be embarrassed, and no one wants to lose money. And so I’d say that that’s, you know, the two things and there’s all, you know, it’s always some event happens, it could be in, you know, in we’ve seen it, you know, a crash in the.com. Market 911. The big, you know, the Great Recession, things like COVID. You know, there may be other things that slow the process down. But I think we’re definitely and you were right. I’ve never seen the legal industry, jump on something as quickly as its jumped on this. And so I think, you know, and I think it’s got some traction,

Colin Lachance 35:48
it’s got traction. Yeah. But I agree that there’s some serious risks. And I think there’s a role for Responsible trusted players to show leadership. People ask you, oh, we are running this as a startup. Aren’t you concerned about what the larger guys will do? And I said, there’s nothing that we can do technically that they can’t, right, they absolutely can. So I really encourage them to find the elements that they want to showcase that they want to help move the industry forward on. Either with as a startup, we pick an entry point, and we grow from there, but they ultimately are the ones who are going to turn the dial them in government.

Greg Lambert 36:28
Yeah, that says government in the in the Bar Association’s don’t don’t underestimate their ability to throw throw a monkey wrench into the works on that as well, I suppose. Well, Colin Lachance, CEO and co founder of Jurisage AI. Thank you very much for taking the time to come on and talk with us. And I’m as excited I think, as you are about the potential for this.

Colin Lachance 36:53
Great, thank you, Greg. Appreciate it.

Greg Lambert 36:54
All right. And of course, thanks to everyone listening for tuning in to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We would love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be reached at glamoured on Twitter and Marlene, can be reached at gay Bauer M on Twitter. Colin, how can we reach out to you?

Colin Lachance 37:15
I’m on Twitter. I spent too much time on Twitter. It’s at Colin with Sean co l i n l a chance. Same on now.

Greg Lambert 37:26
Yeah, we’ll make sure that we put that in the show notes along with the information out to both of my junior and to Jurisage. Or if everyone if you’re not into all this advanced AI and you want to pick up the phone and give us a call. You can leave us a message on our geek and review Hotline at 713-487-7821 and as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you Jerry. Thanks again Colin.

Colin Lachance 37:54
Thanks so much.

This week we have Damien Riehl, VP, Litigation Workflow and Analytics Content at FastCase, and one of the drivers behind SALI (Standards Advancement for   for the Legal Industry.) Damien is definitely a “big thinker” when it comes to the benefits of creating and using standards for the legal industry. SALI is a system of tagging legal information to allow for better filtering and analysis. It works like Amazon’s product tags, where a user can search for a specific area of law, such as patent law, and then choose between various services such as advice, registration, transactional, dispute, or bankruptcy services. The tags cover everything from the substance of law to the business of law, with over 13,000 tags in the latest version. SALI is being adopted by major legal information providers such as Thomson Reuters, Lexis, Bloomberg, NetDocuments, and iManage, with each provider using the same standardized identifiers for legal work. With this standardization, it will be possible to perform the same API query across different providers and receive consistent results. Imagine the potential of being able to ask one question that is understood by all your database and external systems?

In that same vein, we expand our discussion to include how Artificial Intelligence tools like Large Language Models (i.e., ChatGPT, Google BARD, Meta’s LLM) could assist legal professionals in their quest to find information, create documents, and help outline legal processes and practices.

He proposed three ways of thinking about the work being done by these models, which are largely analogous to traditional methods. The first way is what Riehl refers to as a “bullshitter,” where a model generates information without providing citations for the information. The second way is called a “searcher,” where a model generates a legal brief, but does not provide citations, forcing the user to search for support. The third way is called a “researcher,” where the model finds relevant cases and statutes, extracts relevant propositions, and crafts a brief based on them.

Riehl believes that option three, being a researcher, is the most likely to win in the future, as it provides “ground truth” from the start. He cites Fastcase’s acquisition of Judicata as an example of how AI can be used to help with research by providing unique identifiers for every proposition and citation, enabling users to evaluate the credibility of the information. In conclusion, Riehl sees a future where AI is used to help researchers by providing a pick list of the most common propositions and citations, which can then be further evaluated by the researcher.

One thing is very clear, we are just at the beginning of a shift in how the legal industry processes information. Riehl’s one-two combination of SALI Standards combined with additional AI and human capabilities will create a divide amongst the bullshitters, the searchers, and the researchers.

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer 0:07
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer,

Greg Lambert 0:14
And I’m Greg Lambert. Well, Marlene, you look a little healthier than you’ve looked the last couple of weeks, so it’s good. Good to have in Dallas.

Marlene Gebauer 0:20
I was not doing too well. Last last week. You know, I caught the dreaded COVID. But first time but thankfully, I mean, it only was about a week and

Greg Lambert 0:28
And you thought you were he probably thought you were special. Right?

Marlene Gebauer 0:31
I thought I was clear. I’m not apparently the cure.

Greg Lambert 0:38
Well, we have a great episode. Today we have a friend of ours, Damien Riehl, from Fastcase, and SALI is on with us. So Marlene, I think I took your line, didn’t I?

Marlene Gebauer 0:50
You totally took my line. But we I would like to welcome you Damien. Damien is the Vice-President of Litigation Workflow and Analytics content and part of the leadership at SALI. Damien, we’re very excited to talk about SALI. We are we are longtime fans. And but we’re also going to talk about legal tech music and more. Definitely, you know, it’s gonna be a great podcast when you say and more.

Damien Riehl 1:14
I’m so thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

Greg Lambert 1:17
Yeah, this is one of those where we have a general outline, and we’re just gonna see how the conversation goes. So Damian wanted to start off first with talking about SALI, we’ve we’ve talked with about SALI standards before, but you’re kind of the, you know, I think you’re one of the biggest motivated people behind it and getting it out there and getting a lot more content. And on the back end was SALI. So would you just kind of give us an overview of what SALI is and some of the things that you’ve been working on lately.

Damien Riehl 1:49
Sure, Marlene, did you want to say something?

Marlene Gebauer 1:50
I was, I was going to echo that just like, you know, what’s the what’s the basic concept behind SALI? I think a lot of people might not kind of fully understand sort of, you know, what’s the purpose?

Damien Riehl 2:02
I love that clarifying question. And so think of SALI as a bunch of tags. So much like you go to Amazon, and you see the left hand view to be able to say, Okay, I’ve run a search for, you know, sports jerseys, right? So now I’ve run a search. And now on the filter, I want to say, in the filter. On the left hand side, there’s tags for men’s sports jerseys, there’s tanks for women’s sports jerseys. There’s tags for children’s sports, like each of those is something that Amazon use to tag up their products for words. So you as a user are better able to filter and analyze those things. So think of SALI almost like that, where SALI is a bunch of tags. But instead of sports jerseys and men’s clothing, women’s clothing, you can instead say, give me this area of law, patent law, and then give me the service. Am I giving advice for patent law? Or am I instead? Should I get a patent? Is it advice, if I decide, yes, I’m going to get a patent, then I file it with a patent or trademark office, that’s the registration service. And then I maybe licensed the patent, that’s the transactional service. That’s a different tack. And then I litigate the patent. That’s a dispute tech, and then I deal with patent assets in bankruptcy, that’s the bankruptcy service tech. So you can imagine if I tag up all of my matters, then I’m able to say, Okay, show me all the patents, things that I’ve done, whether it’s advice, or litigation, etc. And then I can find the light with like, show me other times that we’ve done this matter. Similarly, we’re also for what industries are we doing this work? It’s my clients, maybe an Information Industry, that is the counterparties in the agriculture industry, you could tag up with the agriculture industry in that. And then you can be able to say, Okay, what kind of documents have we done? Have we done merger agreements, motions to dismiss? Okay, that’s it another type of salary tag? Wouldn’t it be great to be able to catch all those? And then you can say within the document, is there a force majeure clause? We’re tagging that up? Is this a breach of contract motion? Is this a negligence motion? Is this a trade secret motion? We’re tagging those things up. So we have now have version two that came out in 2022. Um, had 1000. I know I’m sorry. 10,000. matters. It’s 10,000 tags of everything that matters to the substance of law, and to the also the business of law. We have jumped now from 10,000, the newest version that we’re building, it has about 13,000 tags. So we just keep marching through to be able to essentially take everything that matters to the subject of law, and to the business of law, tagging providing tags that then once you’ve tagged them up, really the value proposition is SALI’s now being adopted by Thomson Reuters. And SALI is being adopted by Lexis. I just had a meeting with Lexis today, SALI is being adopted by Bloomberg. SALI’s being adopted by NetDocuments in a big way, Sal has been adopted by iManage. So you can imagine each of those 13,000 things being standardized within each of those products. So an example and of course, I should say my employees

Greg Lambert 4:52
This gives you chance to save the Fastcase is also doing it right.

Damien Riehl 4:55
It’s true. Yeah. So So for example, today, we’ve tagged up all of our 225 SALI motion types motion to dismiss motion for summary judgment motion for 225 of those. We’ve tagged each of those motions up with the SALI identifier for a motion to dismiss. So if you send me a docket alarm, the SALI tag, give me all the motions to dismiss in the Southern District of New York for breach of contract, we would be able to give you all those back, send that same API query to Thomson Reuters eventually, and they’ll give you all that back, send that same API call to Lexis, and they’ll give it back. So this way, everyone is using the same identifiers for the same legal work.

Marlene Gebauer 5:31
So when you’re talking about Thomson and Lexis, when we’re talking about integration, I’m assuming into their their products? Are we talking about their information products? Are we talking more about their financial products?

Damien Riehl 5:45
So Thomson Reuters has said publicly so I’m saying that only what Thomson Reuters has also said publicly, but Thomson Reuters has said publicly that they are integrating SALI, for every single one of their products across just marching through. Okay. I can’t talk about the roadmap of the thing that they’re building. I know, you know, the products. But what not, but what I can tell you is that legal trackers, the first one that they’ve done, and so really the process for that is that Thomson Reuters and Jim Hannigan from SALI and I said, Okay, let’s say a legal tracker had 500 different fields and tags that they wanted to be able to map. So we just did one by one. We mapped all of them. But 95% of what legal tracker had SALI already had. And for that 5% that SALI did not yet have we push those into into SALI. So now SALI has 100% of legal tracker. Also, importantly, SALI had a lot of things that legal tracker didn’t yet have. And now legal tracker pulled in some SALI things that hasn’t they didn’t have before. So that’s the kind of bi directional improvements that we do with Thomson Reuters. Similarly, with NetDocuments is another one where they have said publicly at their NetDocuments conference in Denver, which I was able to be a part of. They have said that step one for them is I as a user could be able to take up my motion to dismiss breach of contract negligence, or my merger agreement that has a force majeure clause, I could do that manually, step one. But soon after that, this year, they plan to say, Hey, your document is a motion to dismiss for breach of contract, and also has a negligence claim in there. Do you want me to tag those things up programmatically? And the user can say, Yes, please. So this is a way to be able to essentially tag up all of your documents, take up all of your matters, take up your everything. Because once then you tag them up, you can analyze them, how much does a motion to dismiss in the Southern District of New York for breach of contract cost? Once you have those tags, you’re able to do that work?

Marlene Gebauer 7:35
And what’s interesting is like because it’s across the board in different organizations, and that one of the early arguments in favor of salary was that okay, this was across the board. Okay, everybody was using the same standard. And so you could compare apples to apples. And this, it sounds like there’s an opera, there’s a real opportunity to get this into firms in order to really make that happen.

Damien Riehl 7:59
That’s exactly right. And even so within firms, the problem that we’re solving for vendors like Thomson Reuters, Thomson Reuters, the person we’re working with that same as Cory, Cory, his boss said, Hey, Cory, we have 30 products that don’t talk very well to each other, you need to make them talk to each other. Cory said, Gosh, I’m an engineer, I’m not a lawyer, building a taxonomy for the laws really hard. And then he said, Oh, wait, SALI’s already built it. And it’s actually really good. So what is using is SALI is to be able to have all 30 of his products talk to each other. And the side benefit of that is then the API calls that, you know, he can open that up to law firms. So then say, if you want to hit any of those 30 products, then you’re able to use the SALI API query, and then be able to hit any of them. And of course, Doc alarm, same idea, if you hit us with an API call that is SALI, we’re able to do that. So Thomson Reuters is using it as a universal translator, both amongst their internal products, as well as external products. And then of course, as a law firms were also solving a problem for vendors like us, that each individual law firm might have their own bespoke taxonomy that has their crazy, you know, areas of law that nobody’s ever heard of before. So as a vendor, it’s a lot of work for me to connect with 1000 of my mappings to theirs. Wouldn’t it be better if I as a as a vendor, say, hey, law firm, you SALI, and then you’re out of the box, you’re compatible with us? So that’s the really the grounded idea.

Greg Lambert 9:19
I can almost guarantee if a law firm has a taxonomy, it’s a bespoke taxonomy.

Marlene Gebauer 9:24
That is, well, it depends it sometimes it’s client by client. And but if you can basically sync those using your, your existing products. That makes it a lot easier.

Damien Riehl 9:34
That’s right. And so one of the worker in tap is doing a lot of really important work with this. And what they’re doing is they’re trying to solve the problem that I just described. They’re working with, you know, hundreds or 1000s of law firms that each have their bespoke taxonomy. So they’ve built a really cool parser to be able to see what a law firm calls an area of law. So for example, they went through some of the largest law firms in the country, and they scraped from the website all of the areas of law that they have in marketing, one of those areas of law awk is appeals to the P tab. Okay. And they call that an area of law. But then the system that they built is to be able to extract that that is not an area of law, the area of law is patents law, because it’s the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. So that’s the area of law is patent law, the service that has been provided is the appellate litigation service. So that’s the appellate is the service. That’s tag number two. And tag number three is that the P tab is actually a forum. It is not an area of law, if P tab is a forum. So what this intapp tool is doing and rebuilding it internally, at this point, at some point, we’re going to release it to the world is you can input maybe 100 or 1000 rows of what you call a thing, your bespoke taxonomy here, appeals to the P tab. And then it will translate that to the SALI tags. Because you can imagine, appeals to the P tab as a single tag isn’t nearly as useful as the three tags of show me all the patent law things that we’ve done. Okay, now show me all the appellate things that we’ve done. Okay, now show me all the P tab things that we’ve done. Each of those as a individual is much more valuable than the lumped Frankenstein that is appeals to the P tab. So anyway, so that’s, that’s always saying that even if the Frankenstein monster that is your law, firm taxonomy, even if on the front end, the lawyer still says, No, I want to see appeals to the P tab as the thing. Cool, give them a button that says appeals to the PTAB. But then on the back end, tag it up with patent law, plus appeals plus p tab up so that’s the best of both worlds.

Greg Lambert 11:27
Yeah, I think one of the thing that when you talk SALI, especially to someone that just hears standards, oh, great, you know, here’s one more layer of work that we’re going to have to do. And we’ve learned from our iManage, or document management systems, that when you kind of make the person, the attorney or or the Secretary or assistant tag that it tends to either go in general, or we laugh is like if it’s tagged to a country, Afghanistan, tends to get a lot because it’s first on the list. So and we’re going to talk a little bit more later about some of the AI tools that are that are hitting the market. But and I know you’ve you’ve hit some of this with the way that some of the third parties are going to kind of automate the system. Is that how people like us should approach the powers that be at our firm when we talk about standards? Because I think to them, they just see it as Oh, God, you know, we’re gonna have to hire a boatload of people to come in and look at everything and tag it. And we’ll just do without it. So is automation. And are there other things that are going to be the way that these types of standards get implemented at the local level?

Damien Riehl 12:47
Oh, 100%. Yeah. So I would say that if humans are doing most of this, then the the organization is doing it wrong. That is a lot of this is automatable, in the ways that I described earlier to say, you could input 1000 rows and output the salary tags that go to that 1000 rows. That’s example number one. Example number two is actually within docket alarm, we have a pleading tag where we look at a docket, and it says, order granting motion for summary judgment. We recognize order as a salary tag, we recognize granting as the thing that happens, that disposition, and then we recognize summary judgment as a pleading within the SALI side. So each of those things, we use zero humans for that we just programmatically extracted, that order is a thing. Granting is a thing. And summary judgment is a thing. So it’s 100% machines. And it’s just a matter of vendors like docket alarm vendors like NetDocuments vendors like in tap, essentially building the tools to make the firm’s lives easier because we in the vendor side can build a scale. So for example, we can build, we adopt alarm had built that extraction order granting summary judgment, the precision of that you think about accuracy, precision, our precision is 99.6% precise. We think humans are about 96 or so maybe 97% precise. So our machine is better in accuracy at extracting these things than humans are. So all that’s to say that how many ways are there for it to express the word summary judgment? I would argue one summary judgment, right? Do you have to have some fancy GPT or any other Large Language Models to be able to extract the word summary judgment from your document or from anything? And the answer is no summary judgment to summary judgment, negligence is negligence. So really, of the SALI tags, almost all of them are verbatim. Sometimes there’s things like motions to dismiss, which in California are called dimmers, right? So in within SALI, we have motion to dismiss as a tag, we as a synonym of motion dismiss is dimmer, so the system can pull these things in. So all that’s to say that if humans are tagging these things up, you’re probably doing it wrong. Rely on a vendor and encourage your vendors to use SALI and to be able to pull the SALI tags out. Id even if you don’t use a vendor to do this. There. Easy ways for the machines to be able to extract things at a high precision and high recombinant.

Greg Lambert 15:04
How granular can the salary tags be? In other words, I assume time entry, I assume documents. What other kind of day to day task, or information that lawyers deal with, can SALI help organize?

Damien Riehl 15:22
A great example of this is the UTBMS, also known as the ABA task codes. That is the bane of every litigators existence, including me, I was a litigator for 15 years. And so when I was entering, I took a deposition. So I put in my time entry deposition, ostensibly, that’s to figure out how much the deposition cost. But as a litigator know, well, am I taking the deposition? Or am I defending the deposition? Because that’s going to be our immediately observing the deposition? Those are three different cost points. And then Is it a fact witness? Or is it an expert witness? Or is it a 36? Corporate witness? Each of those is going to move the needle as to more expensive or less expensive? And then is it a patent litigation? Or is it a slip and fall? Because that’s gonna move the needle? And then is it in New York? Or is it in die? Is it in Podunk? Nowhere, Isabelle, all of those things will really tell you things that the ABA task code that is deposition will not tell you. Each of those tags that I’ve just described, is a salary tag, we say are you taking the deposition? Are you defending the deposition? Are you merely observing the deposition? Is it a fact witness? Is it an expert witness? Is it a 36, corporate witness? And so you can imagine on a time entries, you could say, took deposition of experts so and so took deposition expert, cool, I going to tag up those three things. That is very granular. And now if I know that this is a patent matter that’s been used in the Southern District of New York, all of a sudden, I have much more granular data points that I didn’t have with the ABA task code that just said, deposition.

Marlene Gebauer 16:47
So I was curious, how are firms and maybe you know, counsel in house counsel, sort of using the SALI codes, I mean, pricing, staffing, maybe business development, what are some ways that that you’re seeing, you know, creative ways that you’re seeing them than being used?

Damien Riehl 17:07
A good example of Jason Barnwell from Microsoft, Jason is smart. In many ways. As your listeners know, he’s solving a particular business problem where two of his business units are being regulated by various regulators say the FTC or the FCC, we have tags for FTC, for FCC, etc. So his business units are tracking regulators. And then the second column of things that they’re tracking is the regulations, the Federal Trade to act, etc. And so he’s using SALI to be able to tag up all of the regulators and the regulations, and be able to take them up using SALI. And then he’s going to be requiring all of his law firms that work with them on those regulatory matters, to also tag up their matters, using the FTC, SALI tag, the FCC, SALI tag, etc. So that way, as they bidirectionally communicate, they’re able to use SALI as a translator between the firm system and the and the Microsoft System. So that’s just one example of how this is helping a client Microsoft communicate with their law firms. And then you can imagine if some of the documents that they’re creating is a NetDocuments, or an iManage, than iManage, essentially tagging up FTC and FCC in the same way. And so this is kind of the tri directional client plus law firm plus vendor, where everyone is using the same tag for FCC, therefore, you can be able to push and pull data to and from each other. Is it

Marlene Gebauer 18:25
impacted at all like time entry, like how people I mean, not not necessarily the tags, but like how people are actually writing their time?

Damien Riehl 18:33
It’s good question. And when I worked for Thomson, Reuters, I can’t talk much about the work that I did for them. But I can say you can imagine that there’s two ways to be able to create time entries that is eyes a lawyer type time entry. That’s my number one. Way number two is that the system writes the time entry for you. It knows what you’re doing, it sees that I managed his motion to dismiss for breach of contract in the Southern District of New York, and that could maybe populate a time entry friend. So anyway, so really, what is the time entry, but SALI tags embodied in a narrative text? Right? So one could imagine that, are we going to have narrative time entries where a human is actually writing things? Are we going to have extracting the tags from iManage? or extracting the tags from you know, the work that you do? And is the tag the thing that you care about? Less than the narrative side? Certainly, that’s all that’s to say, am I changing my the way that I write the my text to be able to help SALI, maybe, or maybe, maybe the systems you’re creating in the future, maybe your near future will essentially export the salary tags of the things you’re working on?

Marlene Gebauer 19:35
Well, I know men, many people if they didn’t have to actually do their time entry, and it would just be kind of done for them would be super happy.

Damien Riehl 19:42
It’s true. They’ll never totally that’s true. As long as the billable hour reign supreme, I guess happiness will elude us.

Marlene Gebauer 19:51
So Damian, we wanted to shift to sort of the the AI portion of the conversation now if you don’t want Mind. And we had Tony Thai and Ashley Carlisle from HyperDraft on a couple of weeks ago. And we were talking again about, and this was sort of right when it kind of broke. And we didn’t have quite as many examples where suddenly it’s like, oh, it’s only information from 2021. And then it cuts off. And oh, you know, we’re finding all of these mistakes and things like that. So, you know, they were also kind of cautioning about about some of this generative AI. And, you know, I’m wondering sort of what your take is on, you know, some of these, you know, shiny new tools that are going to that are entering sort of this day to day discussion.

Damien Riehl 20:40
I think that the GPT, in particular, and Large Language Models in general, like Bert said, on the Google side, Bert is also using lambda. So I’m going to use Large Language Models, or LLMs, as a shorthand for GPT, like things. So I would say Large Language Models are really transformative in a way that I as a skeptic of this is going to transform the industry. I hate when people say that. But now I find myself saying that on the three on this particular podcast, because I distinctly remember in late November, early December, sitting on my kitchen table, and my wife will attest that I said lots of expletives and said, This is going to change everything. And I’ve now tempered down by enthusiasm for this not going to change everything, but it will change a lot of things. And so some of the ways that I think it will help is Large Language Models. Yes, they are generative AI that is said that I want to create a text write me a poem, right, read me a short story. The problem is they’re also hallucinatory, as has been probably demonstrated lots that sometimes they speak the truth, sometimes they don’t speak the truth. There’s a you know, nobody else, sometimes right? Sometimes wrong, but always surgeon, right? So so the GPT is really, you know, sometimes right? Sometimes wrong, but always certain. So anyway, so that’s the generative AI side of it. But there’s also a generative extractive AI. So as as a Gen X, or I call that a Gen X. And so, so what that is, for example, here’s a paragraph of text, extract, summarize that paragraph of text. So that’s generative extractive, here is a bunch of arguments here, a bunch of documents create counter arguments from those arguments. So that’s extracting the arguments and generating counter arguments, create a decision tree, as to whether I should do this thing or that thing that a generates a decision tree, I’m classify, given this text, here’s three paragraphs, or here’s 100 pages, classify all the causes of action in that text, maybe with SALI texts, and then outputs that classification, create bullet points, that is summarizing the most important aspects of this four paragraphs that I’ll give you right now. So anyway, all of these things are not generative AI, they’re not writing a poem. They’re not give me a brief, right. But they’re saying, given these three paragraphs, or these five pages, extract stuff that matters, and then generate useful things that comes out of it. So I think that the most transformative aspect of it is not the generative side. But what I’m now calling the Gen X side of it. The generative extractive side, more extractive, generative, I guess, is the next gen, but it’s not nearly as fun as saying. But I would say that the generative extractive is the most promising because it’s really even today, it’s really, really good at that. And so that’s, for example, what we’re doing right now, Dr. Laurie, who just yesterday, we released something that said, if I, as a user, hover over a document and document, and I, maybe I, maybe I want to click on it, maybe I don’t want to click on it, I can now go to my GPT summary. And what it does is I click that button, and it runs that through GPT, and gives you the three bullet points as to what that document is about. So now I don’t have to read this 50 page documents if I don’t want to, or this 10 page document even now I can read through the bullet points to see if I actually want to read this document. So this is an example of this generative extractive concept where it’s extracting the document, giving a really good summary. And that is in a useful way. No one is going to accuse that of robot lawyering. And it’s not nearly as sexy as saying I’m going to represent you in court. But it’s really useful. And it’s really accurate. And so that’s the I think the what is transformative is the more even tempered, I given this, this text, give me the stuff that matters out of it.

Greg Lambert 24:19
Now, I know you did a test on and I think you posted it on Twitter, and wrote an article, a quick article about it this week, and where you did that where you gave it certain issues you and then you fed it and in more information and then said Alright, now that we have this, come back with x and it was just a process that you did. I’m curious. Did you have any naysayers attack you on Twitter yesterday when when you posted it?

Damien Riehl 24:50
I would say no, largely because I’d like to think of it’s because my logic is unassailable. That’s probably not true. But I would say that, that really if we think about human Things are really good Sunrisers we have really good AI between our ears, right. And so the the example that I gave in the LinkedIn is essentially using the AI of humans. That is I as a human want to summarize this 50 page document. And so I summarize it in a way that’s human readable. That is called the table of contents. And so the use case that I used that I showed in LinkedIn is I gave GPT Table of Contents appropriately for the open AI lawsuit that’s going on right now, open AI is being sued by a bunch of coders. And they’re being sued over GitHub copilot, which ingested the entirety of GitHub, figured out how code works. And now I as a coder, using GitHub can be able to essentially output code by saying, hey, rights, read me a website code that extracts, you know, that scrapes content from this website, and it’ll generate that code programmatically. The way that it can do that is because it’s already ingested the entirety of GitHub to figure out how code works. So GitHub is being sued right now saying that the coder said, Hey, we released this as a license, you breached that license, therefore, now you’re not you’re not supposed to be able to ingest the GitHub. So that’s what the lawsuit is. So I use that lawsuit, table of contents for the motion to dismiss from open AI, where I ingested the arguments from the table of contents. And I said, Okay, ChatGPT, create counter arguments based on the arguments, take these arguments in the table of contents, and create counter arguments from this table of contents. And then it created counter arguments to be able to say, and it gave me really good ones. So the irony is that I was using open AI as GPT, to argue against open AI as litigation of GPT. And essentially using the tech that they’re being sued over. So there’s, there’s a fun irony there, then on top of that, so that’s really cool that you created the arguments that are condensed, and you know, the cool AI is that we that brief writer, route 50 pages with content, and then said ba 50 pages is hard to grok. I’m going to summarize that in the table of contents, right. And so essentially, we’re using the human AI, which is now I’m going to condense 50 pages into a page. And now we’re taking a robot and saying, Okay, now take this human condensed table of contents, and write counter arguments based on that human condense compensation. So then the counter arguments turned out to be really good. And then I took it a step further, and said, okay, for each of those counter arguments, provide facts that can be used to demonstrate each of those counter arguments. And opening, I give really good facts that I as a lawyer, could if this gets past summary judgment, use in my depositions, using my document requests, use in my any type of legal proceeding to be able to essentially brainstorm. This is not robot lawyering. But it is a useful thing that, uh, how long would it take a first year associate to write counter arguments to a motion to dismiss? How long would it take a first year associate to be able to figure out facts to be able to extract to be able to point to, to show how those counter arguments are wrong? a while, right, but it took me less than a minute to do this.

Greg Lambert 28:06
When you say facts, you’re talking about a factual scenario, not necessarily that it’s going out in giving you facts of this particular situation. Right. And but that’s exactly right. Because I think that’s where it tends to fall down is when you ask it to give you specifics.

Damien Riehl 28:23
That’s right. Give me Give me a factual scenarios, I think is the is the what I had asked for. So not not things that have happened, but things that could happen. And of course, that’s you know, those are things that I asked my client, hey, has this thing happened? Okay, number two is that thing happened? Okay, number three, has this thing happened. So this is ways that I can explore with my clients, to brainstorm with them as to scenarios. And those all of those are really good on the output side.

Marlene Gebauer 28:45
So my eldest son, and I had a discussion about this the other day, and, you know, right after this, this all broke, maybe, I don’t know, a week later, there was a student that basically came out and said, Okay, if you write a paper using ChatGPT, like this, this, this thing that I built can tell you whether or not you did it or not. And of course, my son was very upset about this, because it’s like, why is he ruining it for everybody? And he’s in college? I don’t understand. And and I said, Well, you know, that’s one way of looking at it. I said, But you have to learn how to write you have to learn how to craft an argument, you have to understand how concepts go together, and how to sort of move from from from idea to idea before you can sort of use these shortcuts. And I want to go back to sort of what you were saying about, hey, you know, it would be a lot take a lot longer for an associate to do this work. But what are we doing by essentially cutting out that opportunity for them to learn in that way?

Damien Riehl 29:48
That is really the question that I’ve been talking about with my wife who is a professor of English. So she’s been teaching composition for now 25 years, and so she input a bunch of the queries to say He writes, a comparison of The Bluest Eye, and the color purple can take two characters in their experience and talk about their experiences with race and how they both are similar and dissimilar. We wrote that prompt into ChatGPT. And the output was like a minus work. And that’s with zero work. Right? So then, so she kind of had this existential question like, What am I doing? What have I been doing if a machine can essentially output pretty good stuff? And so I think about a lot like, you know, we teach people how to be able to multiply and subtract and add, right? Those are things calculators can do. So there is the idea that the knowing that what is behind the calculator is important, because you want to know the concepts. But mostly, you’re teaching them by doing that, how to think that how to think and ideas. Once you get to a certain point, you get people calculators, and say, Okay, now that we have that foundation, let’s jump faster, stronger, better. So applied then to English and to ideas and lawyering, we now have this tool that gives us a really good head start. And so our jobs now as humans, maybe we can use that as a way to leapfrog much like a calculator is leapfrogging and now I can use my critical thinking skills, number one, to be able to say is what I’m seeing accurate. That is, I’m not going to accept at face value when it comes in, I’m going to use critical thinking skills to be able to assess whether it’s accurate or not. That’s thing number one. Thing Number two, what is it missing? What are the things that are not showing up here? And then number three, how can I add to those things. So using it like a calculator to be able to say, Alright, now I’m going to use this as a first step, that now I can go faster, better, stronger. So an example from the LinkedIn post that that Greg mentioned, for this factual claim, open a eyes actions were the direct cause of place plaintiffs injuries, I said, now provide factual examples of how a Large Language Models training on text will cause an author of that training text to lose money. That was my prompt, it gave four examples, I’ll only go through one of those with you. The example that an output said that open AI used an author’s copyrighted work as training data for its large language model without obtaining permission from the author. As a result, the author lost potential revenue from licensing their work to other companies for similar uses. That’s a really, really good answer. That is essentially hurting open AI’s case. Right. So now I, as a brief writer, could be able to say, yeah, what, what open AI said, right? I can essentially mimic that. Or maybe I could say, you know, I gave four examples, I can use that as a jumping off point to say, Oh, now that made me think of example, five, an example six, right, it’s getting me to maybe the same place, I would have ended up maybe farther, but we won’t tell anybody. But really, the idea is that this is a way to be able to spur thinking, and to create new ideas, where maybe writer’s block, or a blank page might have kept us from those keeps making those new ideas. Without it,

Greg Lambert 32:51
Damien, that really kind of gives me almost to two things I want to think about on this net is, you know, never underestimate the Bar Association coming in and, you know, shutting this down. And then to you mentioned earlier about issues of copyright and things like that. So let, let me jump into the copyright part of it. And I know that that this is he an area of expertise for you as well. So, you know, let’s, let’s talk about that, you yourself are known for challenging the rules for for copyright. And in fact, you have a TED talk, where you talk about generating, you know, what some billions of, of musical connotations that put on a desk in the neuron to a hard drive and thus, have copyrighted that by doing so, what are agencies like the US Copyright Office? What kind of rules are they going to establish? Are they going to be able to kind of look into the black box of all of these Large Language Models and determine are you taking copyrighted material and using that without getting a license? What’s going to be some of the issues that we’re going to see and I think we’re gonna see relatively quickly.

Damien Riehl 34:14
So two aspects, actually a bunch of aspects from what you just asked, I’ll take you to one insurance. So there’s the the generative assets aspect of it, that is if machine created is a copyrightable. So this is currently been before the Thaler case where the Thaler had aI generated art, tried to file it with the copyright office saying, I’m not the author, the the robot is the author. Therefore, grant me registration. The Copyright Office says no, machines cannot receive copyright, because IP is a constitutional concept saying for limited times to advance the progress of the useful arts and sciences, you shall have limited times of monopoly essentially is what they’re saying. So, so that is incentive for humans to make new things. machines don’t need incentives. Machines are For example of BI all the music project, I hit a button, and it spit out at a rate of 300,000 melodies per second. We’re now up to about 417 billion melodies that are written to disk. Under the Berne Convention, once written to disk, they are copyrighted automatically. So the question is, now that I have 417 billion melodies written to disk, which ostensibly includes every melody that’s ever been, and every melody that ever can be, mathematically, I’ve exhausted the entire dataset is that now copyrightable to be able to keep this from using being used in nefariously. What I did then was putting everything in the public domain under Creative Commons, zero. And the idea is to be able to say, argument number one, maybe each of these melodies that the computer cranked out of 300,000 melodies per second, maybe that’s not copyrightable. And so that may be on original, therefore, on copyrightable, that’s the primary argument. So the same way, maybe the output of GPT is similarly on copyrightable because Machines do not need incentives to be able to create things. And really, if you think about what copyright is, really copyright is the right to exclude somebody else from doing a thing. So really, if I were to copyright my 417 billion melodies, I could say, Now nobody else can use those, I get life of the author, plus 70 years, or I in the case of an institutional author, 120 years. So now those are locked up for 120 years, or GP, TS creation is locked up for 120 years. That’s just crazy talk. Right? So anyway, that’s all the way of saying that, I think on the output side is the output of LLMs. And as the output of a machine is that copyrightable, I think the only sane way to come out is no, because otherwise, humans won’t be able to build anything, because the robots will cover the entire waterfront. So that’s on the output side. Now on the input side, if GPT ingests the entirety of the web, or GPT, and just the entirety of Wikipedia, which it has, each of those things is copyrightable. If you make a website that is copyrighted, right? Books from Google Scholar are copyrighted. So anyway, so the argument that the open AI case that the coders were making are, hey, I made code, my code is copyrightable, you ingested that code, therefore, you’re violating my copyright. But that’s actually not what they’re arguing in the open AI case. They’re not arguing copyright infringement, because there’s a bad case for them. And that bad case is the Authors Guild, the author guild in the Second Circuit concerning Google Books, where Google Books essentially scanned every book in existence. And the Authors Guild sued them saying, Hey, these are copyrighted, you can’t do it. And the court said, yeah, it was a copy technically, but it’s fair use, because the use of that book was transformative, because what Google was doing was creating an index of every book ever written. And then feeding back is a user to run a query and then get a snippet of that book and doing it back. And the Google Books court said, yes, even though you ingested every book, that snippet you provided, is a transformative use, therefore, fair use, therefore not infringing. So if creating an in Google Books, this case, they sometimes provide three or four pages of full text of the book, if that is fair use, then how about the GitHub, where they’re not reproducing three or four pages, if you know how Large Language Models work, they’re extracting the idea of a website, they’re extracting the idea of scraping, they’re extracting the code for each of those ideas. And then they’re combining it in vector space and outputting, a brand new thing that hasn’t been done before. But it’s merely taking the information in the world and transforming it into a new generative thing. So if Google Books is transformative, this other thing is certainly transformative. So that’s why they’re not hanging their hat on copyright infringement. But instead, what they’re saying is, oh, we have a license, that the MIT license or whatever license that they use for GitHub, and they’re saying you breach the license to do that. So they’re trying to essentially, they want to have a copyright like protection, but they’re using a license to be able to try to enforce that copyright like protection, because Google Books is a bad case for them. But then, of course, the the, the response to that is okay, if I have a book, and you’d have a seal on the book, and saying by breaking the seal on the book, that you’ve contractually agree that you will not be a Google Book to scan my thing. Of course, he can’t have a license to keep you from doing something you’re otherwise legally able to do. That’s just ridiculous. So essentially, that’s why I think that the open AI case is probably going to lose, or at least should lose if the court is doing it, right. Because all the machine is doing is what humans do all the time. I read a bunch of books, I assimilates those ideas from the books into a new expression of those ideas in my works. So that’s all the machine is doing in the Large Language Models. They’re ingesting copyrighted things, figuring out the ideas and how language works, and then creating new things just like humans would.

Marlene Gebauer 39:52
You know, we’re talking a lot about lawsuits and a lot of discussion as to you know, what is right and what is wrong. So, Of course, we’re going to be talking about regulation because you know, that’s not far down the road. Any ideas on you know how regulatory agencies are going to try and limit or expand or control these tools?

Damien Riehl 40:17
So I would say, for a tool is a tool. So a hammer is a hammer, I can use it to build houses, I can also use it to hit somebody over the head with right. One tool is useful, and others criminal, right. So really GPT Large Language Models like Bert, these are tools. So how do you use them? Is the real question. So is a hammer illegal? While it depends on how you use it? Right is GPT the unauthorized practice of law? Depends on how you use it. Right? So I would say that, if you’re a regulatory agency, think about another profession that was threatened by technology. So think back to the early 1980s. Think about CPAs what they did for a living, what CPAs did was have letters and books, and they added numbers together, and they figured out, you know what a profit and loss statement would be, all of a sudden a thing came by that just called spreadsheet, all of a sudden, all of these accountants are thinking, gosh, where’s our jobs gonna go? Right? That’s all we do all day is just add numbers together. And all sudden, in a millisecond, this thing comes out. Imagine if the regulatory agency creating for accountants had said, Hey, we need to kill this thing. Because otherwise we won’t have any, we won’t have any more jobs, right?

Marlene Gebauer 41:21
Hey, let’s make something better than Excel. If they did that.

Damien Riehl 41:26
Maybe Lotus 1-2-3 becomes fun. That’s right, Lotus 1-2-3. Exactly. I’m old enough to remember that too. But really what happened is the opposite happened, because accountants realized that once the clients figured out that it wasn’t going to take a week to get their numbers back, but would take a day to get their numbers back. They’d say, hey, accountant, how about you run these numbers with this scenario? Cool. How about this scenario? How about the scenario? How can I do tax to this, and they realize it’s actually more work. And we have way more accountants today than we ever have, largely because of the spreadsheet. So if your regulatory agent, is ChatGPT going to eat jobs? Or is it going to make us more efficient and better to be able to create more work to be able to feed the access to justice gap? That is really everyone’s talking about? No one can afford lawyers because it’s too expensive, because we’re too slow. And we’re too expensive. Can GBT make us faster, better, stronger, to be able to provide self help, or to provide, you know, load unlimited services using people with using lawyers, smart lawyers using GPT as an exoskeleton, like Ironman? Like Ironman? Exactly. It’s an exoskeleton to make you faster, better, stronger. And so really, that’s, I would say that any regulatory agent thinking about banning such things, think of it like a hammer, or like an Excel spreadsheet. It’s it’s a tool, and it might actually give our society more and better things than we have.

Greg Lambert 42:44
Alright, I’m gonna I’m gonna follow up on that and be a Debbie Downer, I guess,

Marlene Gebauer 42:50
Don’t Debbie Downer because he just was talking about how the way it’s like, well, it’s the way you look at it.

Greg Lambert 42:53
Well, yes, we have more accountants than ever. But just like with the expectation that a tool like this will help those at the bottom who need the help. I don’t think that that happened in the accounting industry, I think what happened was, that gave them more opportunity to take bigger, much more of the pie for their existing clients and potential, you know, larger clients. And so I you know, and that’s not necessarily a question, but kind of a statement. I would say that, yeah, that in the in the, you know, the perfect world that a tool like this would enable access to justice issues. In a world like perfect world, allowing non lawyer owned law firms in Arizona would mean that people would come in to service, the people who need help getting access to justice. And what it’s done is it’s actually brought in high end work into the state instead of the the middle and low end of the legal pay scale. You know, I kind of worry that if we’re looking at this is a access to justice issue. I would say history is not in our favor of this being an access to justice way to fill that gap. Maybe I’m wrong, hopefully.

Damien Riehl 44:26
As an analogy, though. Well, let’s think through our accounting example, of course, accountants often do taxes. So think about, you know, in the 1990s rolled around, and there’s a thing called TurboTax that now I’ve I’ve not used an accountant in my entire professional career, I’ve used TurboTax. So I spend 150 bucks and then get out the door. That, you know, that has access to justice for accounting, that is a self help that I don’t have to hire an accountant anymore. So now through the tools, I’m able to be able to do an unserved market, I guess, you know, so you can imagine on the legal side had a similar thing happening. And maybe we have self help tools that are better, stronger, faster, much like TurboTax is better, stronger faster than me just looking at the government website and trying to figure out how to fill out my taxes. That’s really hard, much like the court system is really hard today. What if a GPT like system were to go through trusted sources? Like, by the way, Fastcase and Docket Alarm, we have 700 million judicial opinions and lawyer filed documents that you could imagine, what if open aI had access to those $700 million legal documents to figure out even better how the law works? And then what if you set that free on access to justice initiatives, to be able to say I as a pro se litigants that I’m clogging up the courts right now, maybe I can draft a pretty good brief, based on real case law, based on real arguments that are statistically most likely to win for this judge for this claim, or for this criminal matter. This starts to take it away from these are things that are going to eat my job as a lawyer, and they are instead and maybe ways that we can be able to serve that 80% that haven’t been served with a way that will not clog up the judicial system, because the judges will actually have good arguments, rather than the pro se that we have today.

Greg Lambert 46:06
Daymond I know we could probably continue this conversation and we may have to have you come back in a little while and and just kind of follow up on on where we are. Because it seems like we’ve just gone leaps and bounds just in the little bit that has been 2023. But I’m going to have you look into the future. So pull out your crystal ball. And over the next two to five years. Where do you see tools like Large Language Models, whether it’s Google BERT, or open AI resources or or other products, and I’m sure are right around the corner. So how do you see that affecting later. And

Damien Riehl 46:52
I would say that it really is generative models, there are three ways to think about stuff they’re doing. And those three ways to think about it are largely analogous to what has been in the past. I anticipate that way. Number one is where I as a lawyer, say a bunch of stuff, but I don’t provide a citation for that stuff. We’ll call that a bullshitter. Right? That’s number one. That’s open AI today, they say a bunch of stuff. They’re not giving citations for the stuff. So maybe you believe a bullshitter? Maybe you don’t believe a bullshitter. But you look at them. We’re really, right. So that’s, that’s option number one. Option number two is we’ll call it a searcher. So this is somebody like a partner law firm says, you know, I know there’s law for this proposition, it’s out there somewhere, go ahead and find this law for the proposition. And you sort of read the brief. And so you essentially write the proposition. And you search really hard to try to find some support for that a citation that might be able to support that. So we’ll call that a searcher, right? You could imagine a Large Language Models doing that. So Large Language Models, like GPT spits out a legal brief, but no citations. Now, I have to be a searcher. So for each one of those sentences, try to find a statute that supports it or try to find a case that supports it. We’ll call that a searcher. That’s option number two. Option number three is a little more interesting, where we’ll call it a researcher. That’s where I, as a researcher, find the five or seven cases that are really on points and the statutes that are really on point. And then I extract from those cases, the propositions that matter, and the things that matter. And then I craft my brief around those cases and those statutes. That’s not something that GPT can do, right? I mean, it kind of maybe can, but this is something that humans have done. And we’ll call that a researcher. So for that, maybe that’s the right way to go about it, maybe that’s an option three, maybe we’ll go with option two, to be able to have it spew out things and try to call it on his BS, or not either prove or disprove the thing in option two, or option three, you Fastcase acquired a company called judicata judicata, assigned a unique identifier to every proposition, this thing is true. And also provided a unique identifier for every citation. That is every case, every statute. And so they created a product to say, Hey, why did you when you said this thing is true? Why did you cite this case? Were your side lost? Why didn’t you cite the 12 other cases that said this thing is true? Where your side one. So once you slap a unique identifier on the thing, you’re getting close to the researcher. So maybe a an AI like result is to be able to say I’m going to run a query for breach of contract in the Southern District of New York. And then maybe all the propositions that are statistically most common, get bubbled up. So now you have your most common propositions. And then you as a as a, somebody who is research says I like argument one, not argument two, but I like 345, not six, but I’ll pick seven. So I have a pick list of all my propositions. And then for each of those, I have a pick list of each citation. That is each statute that has that proposition, each case that has a proposition that has provenance, that you know where it came from, because you actually have hard cases. So between option two, which is a searcher, which you’re trying to deal with, is it bullshit There’s an apple ship, or option three, you have ground truth from the get go. i To answer your question crystal ball, I think that number three is probably going to win. Because it’s the way that we do research today. And you don’t have to deal with it, whether it’s BS or not. Yes.

Greg Lambert 50:14
Well, well said.

Marlene Gebauer 50:17
I liked that answer.

Greg Lambert 50:18
Well, Damien RIehl, from Fastcase and with SALI as well, like I said, we could continue this on for ever. So but we’ll just have to bring you back on. But thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us.

Marlene Gebauer 50:32
Yes, thank you.

Damien Riehl 50:33
I’m so thrilled to be here. I listened to every episode and I was so happy you asked me Thank you. So.

Marlene Gebauer 50:37
And of course, thanks to all of you, our audience for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert 50:50
And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter, Damien and your Twitter and

Marlene Gebauer 50:54
where can you be reached on Twitter?

Damien Riehl 50:57
Damien RIehl first name last name da mi e NRIEHL. Power you can just search Damien copyright and I come right up.

Marlene Gebauer 51:03
Or if you guys are old school, you can always leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7821. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca. Thank you so much, Jerry.

Greg Lambert 51:16
All right. Thanks, Marlene. And, Damien. Thank you very much.

Marlene Gebauer 51:19
Thank you all. Thank you. Bye

• The Social Media Butterfly Blog
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Or, check out Stefanie’s French Bulldogs, Lucy and Scarlett’s Instagram

[Note: Please welcome guest bloggers Jennifer Wondracek, Director of the Law Library, Professor of Legal Research & Writing at Capital University Law School, and Rebecca Rich, Assistant Dean for the Law Library and Technology Services, and Assistant Teaching Professor at Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law. – GL]

AI content generation tools, such as ChatGPT, have been in the news a lot lately. It’s the new cool tool for doing everything from coding to graphic art to writing legal briefs. It was even, briefly, used for a robot lawyer that was going to argue in court. And Greg Lambert wrote about it a few weeks ago on this very blog in What a Law Librarian Does with AI Tools like ChatGPT – Organize and Summarize. This post continues Greg’s discussion on ChatGPT use.

AI content generation tools are also the new education bogeyman. A myriad of headlines have been written in the last two months about how ChatGPT is the death of the essay and multiple-choice exams. It’s the newest in a line of digital tools–starting with the Internet and Wikipedia–that students might use to cheat in legal education. But we think this is a bit of an overreaction. ChatGPT and other similar AI-generative content creation tools can, and have, absolutely been misused; but we found that even with expert prompt creation and a high level of expertise, ChatGPT et al. are not yet capable of producing student work that is indistinguishable from real student work. Not all share this belief. Several professors at the University of Minnesota Law School ran some exams through ChatGPT, using a closed universe of cases provided to the program. The exams resulted in an average grade of C+ across the four exams, which were graded blindly. But they noted a few important takeaways, including:

[W]hen ChatGPT’s essay questions were incorrect, they were dramatically incorrect, often garnering the worst scores in the class. Perhaps not surprisingly, this outcome was particularly likely when essay questions required students to assess or draw upon specific cases, theories, or doctrines that were covered in class.

And

In writing essays, ChatGPT displayed a strong grasp of basic legal rules and had consistently solid organization and composition. However, it struggled to identify relevant issues and often only superficially applied rules to facts as compared to real law students.

The authors of this blog post have also done some experiments with ChatGPT. Jenny was curious about the kind of legal work that ChatGPT thought it could perform. When asked what types of legal tasks it could do, ChatGPT listed seven options, ranging from summarizing laws to drafting legal documents. The option that caught Jenny’s eye was “Helping with legal research, by providing the most relevant cases and statutes.” Challenge accepted.

Using a current problem her Legal Research and Writing students were working with, Jenny asked ChatGPT “What are the most relevant cases and statutes to determine if someone is a recreational user land entrant under Ohio law?” A few seconds later, ChatGPT gave her two statutes and three cases with brief summaries of each. While it had the general premise correct that a landowner is not liable for injury to a recreational user, assuming all of the requirements are met, it provided incorrect definitions, and every statute and case cited were incorrect. It also disagreed with itself about the duty of care owed to the recreational user in another sentence. Neither statute provided led to R.C. 1533.18 or 1533.181, the Ohio statutes for this law. When asked for more citations for the three cases listed, Jenny received both regional reporter and Ohio citations that were readable, if not quite properly Bluebooked. Investigations into the cases determined that none of the three existed by name and each of the six reporter citations led to a unique case, none of which were remotely responsive to the question. In the end, ChatGPT gave Jenny a partially correct answer with two incorrect statutes, three made-up cases, and six incorrect cases. Not a good day for accurate legal research!

Becka experimented with the law-review style research and policy paper prompts she uses for her Education Law and AI and the Law classes and had a similar experience.  Even with prompts to write longer papers, ChatGPT produced short, generically written papers with no or minimal citation (including often made-up citations!) and no analysis.  A five-page paper would have an average of two footnotes per page even when prompted to add more. Becka shared the results with one of her students who commented that even she could tell this was an F paper.  Becka also experimented with having ChatGPT create a class policy presentation. Again, even after several refining prompts, the presentation was, at best, a C- presentation.

Given the legal writing learning curve and low level of longer form writing experience of many of our students, along with their documented increased level of stress and reduced mental health, it is understandable that instructors are nonetheless concerned about the use of AI content generation tools.

As with plagiarism tools, there is now a profitable market for detecting the use of AI generated content using AI.  There are currently at least two startups developing tools: AICheatCheck and CrossPlag, both of which have usable demos. GLTR and GPTZero were developed by a collaboration between an MIT and a Harvard professor and a Princeton University student respectively (for more about these tools and a comparison of how they work, take a look at this RIPS-SIS post). Our friendly neighborhood plagiarism detection companies, Turnitin and Copyleaks, are also in the process of adding AI content generation tool use detection to their products. OpenAI (ChatGPT’s company) has developed a tool to assist in detecting the use of its tool in writing and is in the process of adding watermarking to ChatGPT-generated content.

None of these detection tools are 100% effective, so it may also be helpful to consider adding ChatGPT detection options to your paper grading rubric.  Some options:

• ChatGPT generated text is formulaic: it generally follows the 5-paragraph essay, stereotypical topic sentence at the top structure.
• Sentence length does not vary as much as human-generated text does.
• ChatGPT generated text is light on analysis and applying facts to an issue.

Also remember that ChatGPT isn’t good at citation and doesn’t have any information in it from after 2021 yet. Well-done, indistinguishable from humans is a difficult enough problem to solve that no one’s gotten there yet (though an Israeli start-up is trying).

Lastly, we recommend considering teaching students about ChatGPT rather than banning it.  There are so many AI-assisted drafting tools available for lawyers now that we’d be doing them a disservice otherwise (e.g. ClearBrief, Clawdia, and Docugami). The Sentient Syllabus Project has three great principles for doing so:

1. AI cannot pass this class,
2. AI contributions must be limited and true, and
3. AI use should be open and documented.

On to the next experiment!

This week we are joined by Shayne Phillips, Director of Analytics Solutions at Anaqua/Acclaim IP. Shayne talks about the value that Patent Agents bring to the legal industry. She explains how Patent Agents can use data to uncover insights about competitors and potential markets, and how they can go beyond the typical patent search to provide competitive intelligence and business intelligence.

She emphasizes how Patent Agents can help R&D teams use the patent literature to their advantage, such as looking for references to answer an office action from an examiner or to conduct a freedom to operate opinion piece. Additionally, Patent Agents can look for trends in what patents a competitor has let die before their statutory term, and what countries they are now filing in where they maybe hadn’t before with that particular technology. This can help uncover potential markets and provide insight into what the competitor may or may not know about a particular geographical region.

Marlene Gebauer 0:06
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert 0:13
And I’m Greg Lambert. And Marlene you sound like you need some cough medicine.

Marlene Gebauer 0:19
Yes, I apologize to everybody ahead of time, I have a bit of a cold. And so I’m going to try and mute myself when I cough. We’d like to welcome Shayne Phillips, Director analytic solutions. I’m not quite Acclaim IP to The Geek in Review. Welcome, Shayne.

Shayne Phillips 0:36
Thank you both so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Marlene Gebauer 0:40
So we met you recently at a Houston Legal Innovators meeting that we set up and immediately, we wanted you to talk and share some more of your story and insights. So would you mind giving our listeners just a little bit of background on your experiences at places like Halliburton and what you’re doing now?

Shayne Phillips 1:00
Sure, absolutely. When I was finishing up my master’s degree at the University of Cincinnati, in neuroscience and biochemistry, one of the things I realized quite quickly was that I did not want to stay in the lab,

Marlene Gebauer 1:15
I already feel inferior.

Shayne Phillips 1:18
No, you know, I think a lot of folks that that receive a technical degree sometimes don’t know what they’re going to do after they walk out of school. And I had a great opportunity with having been in Cincinnati to take on an internship at Procter and Gamble, which is, of course, headquartered in downtown Cincinnati. And this was through the university. And so I did a year long internship there in a group called Corporate new ventures. So they sat at the top of one of the towers of PNGs headquarters. And it was a group that they would pull together and rotate through internal employees from all over the organization, whether that be finance, r&d, marketing, and so forth. And then new college graduates such as myself into the group, and their task was to look for and to vet new technologies for bringing into P&G. Right. When I had gotten there, they had just finished their analysis and had just announced PNGs acquisition of the items, dog food brands. So that’s one example of an outside technology are company coming into png through corporate new ventures. But while I was there, none, I should say none of the things that that I looked at invented ever turned into products that I could point to today. So they were all kind of turned out to be no, we’re going to pass kind of situations. But while I was there, I got the opportunity to meet some IP attorneys from firm right across the street from PNGs headquarters, a firm that probably many of us have heard of Dinsmore and Shohl. And I met a few attorneys from there and I helped them work on a legal opinion. I was providing some of the technical aspects to it. For something we were vetting for p&g, and right then like it clicked, the light bulb clicked like, This is it. This is what I want to do with my life, you know, that kind of thing. So when the internship ended, I just moved across the street to Densmore, I actually was offered a job there in their IP group. And I was doing things like prior art searching for patentability purposes, or Literature Searching for supporting them with their freedom to operate opinion work, working with the librarian at the firm on what search tools they should have for the VIP group, and best practices around that. So I got to do a lot. It was an amazing experience. And I it was my only time at a firm and my only time ever having to build my time in six minute increments, which that was certainly an eye opener. And for anyone I would say if you haven’t had the opportunity, go work at a firm, you’ll understand many things after you do that.

Marlene Gebauer 4:07
You haven’t experienced that joy, you know, please, please try it out. Absolutely.

Shayne Phillips 4:13
Yeah. So So I learned a lot from there. But I ended up moving to Columbus, you know, from Cincinnati to Columbus to take on an opportunity at a company that creates databases for patent and non patent literature related to chemistry and biochemistry. And so this organization is called Chemical Abstracts service. They’re wholly owned by the American Chemical Society. They’re completely nonprofit. And they started out of the Ohio State University so they actually have a prime piece of land where Cas is property is on the edge of the university campus really close to the horseshoe. So it’s a it’s a great spot. And what Chemical Abstracts service does As is the patents in the non patents when it comes to chemical structures, it’s obviously very difficult to take three dimensional things as chemicals are, and turn them into two dimensional things that people can then search. And so they have a whole group that they call their editorial group that does nothing but create those connections between here are the three dimensional chemical structures being talked about in this patent or this piece of non patent literature. Here’s how we’ve transformed it. So folks can actually find that literature moving forward. So I got the opportunity to work in editorial for a few years. And then I moved to their sales and marketing team, traveling the country training folks on how to search the Chemical Abstracts databases. So my territory was a geographical territory from mid Indiana, all the way to the West Coast. And it didn’t matter what the what the company was all about. They had pharmaceutical companies, chemical companies, oil and gas companies, you name it, I have them as my clients. So that’s how I ended up at Halliburton.

Marlene Gebauer 6:12
Yeah, I remember Chemical Abstracts. Like I remember actually reading some of that stuff, you know, from as a researcher having to use that for our IT team.

Shayne Phillips 6:22
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s how I met the folks at Halliburton that I ended up coming to Houston. And taking on the role at Halliburton. They were a customer of mine from Chemical Abstracts. And I used to visit Houston and go to their facility for training and other purposes quite regularly. And when an opportunity opened up, they asked if I would like to, you know, come on board. And I have to say I was born and raised in Ohio. And I had not left Ohio yet. Yeah. All my schooling was there. All my jobs were there. So so the opportunity to potentially move to Texas was like, wow, I have never thought of that. And nor did I ever imagine working for an oil and gas company either. I really thought I would stay in health care biopharma, you know, that kind of area. So it’s just one of those things, I think to two bits of wisdom I learned was, you know, never pass up an opportunity. Like the internship I, I had, while I was just graduating from UC, and never pass up a job opportunity, even if it sounds really far out there, because you just never know. So I moved to Texas from Ohio in the middle of the summer, very hot and humid. And I stayed at Halliburton for 16 years. And I really loved my time there. I still miss my team after having left there now for almost three years. But at Halliburton, the group that I was in is called intellectual asset management, they sit under the patent liaisons are, are pushed out through the research organization, their direct managers are those vice presidents of the different research teams. And then there was a small group of which I was one of them that sat under strategy. And the idea was that I would push Halliburton patent portfolio from a business and strategy perspective, rather than having to get in the weeds of the legal side of patents. So our team, their team, now, everybody is either a Patent Agent, or a technical person, and they are not allowed to be attorneys. So they are not representing the company as an attorney. And that gave the group a little bit of freedom to do some more business type work and not have to kind of worry about the legal side of things. So we worked really closely with inside counsel, the IP attorneys at Halliburton’s team inside counsel, and sometimes with outside counsel, just depending on the relationship our inside attorneys had with outside counsel. So that was the relationship I was under that central group trying to push consistent processes across the entire organization. So I was in charge of broad competitive intelligence, trying to pull in market intelligence and business intelligence and mix it in with technical intelligence that we were pulling from the patent and non patent literature, you know, trying to create work product that the C suite or an upper management could use to make good decisions about what they wanted to do with the patent portfolio at Halliburton, with data behind it actual data behind it rather than just hunches or feelings about things. So that was my role while I was at Halliburton. So now today I am at an aqua so when I left Halliburton, I did leave because of you know, the pandemic and the downturn in the oil and gas industry. that actually had started just before the pandemic began. So when I left, I really didn’t know what I was going to do next. And I ended up at a NOC was so a NOC, what is another, you know, outside third party provider of services to the IP industry, not like Chemical Abstracts service who were producing databases, but rather an aqua create docketing tools for IP and trademark attorneys. Their dockets are so complex because of the many dates that they have to keep track of, and the many jurisdictions around the world they have to worry about. So they need specialty type of docketing products. And then they also make an analytics tool called Acclaim IP, which is what I have become somewhat expert on. And that’s what I work with clients on or potential clients on is the use of Acclaim IP for analytics purposes.

Greg Lambert 10:55
All right, well, first, I want to back up to something that you mentioned initially with your job, right out of college. And that was, you know, you had had, I guess, pitch some potential products out there. I’m curious, do you remember any of the, the ideas that that you came up with and pitched?

Shayne Phillips 11:15
Well, so I wouldn’t say they were my idea, go ahead and call you but they were things. They were things that were either unsolicited coming in to PNG from, you know, some functional mailboxes or things that others have seen out there. So of course, there was one on a kind of a diet program, but it was more of what I would call a lifestyle type of diet program. That the, you know, obviously companies like p&g, consumer products, companies are always thinking about how can we look at a particular demographic of our customer base and help them with things that they are struggling with, like, like weight loss of courses is one of the big ones. But but being able to sell a whole suite of products potentially. So not just foods, but also lots of other things that could tie on to a weight loss type of program or lifestyle. Another one, gosh, had to do with fertility tracking for women who are either not wanting to or desiring to know the status of that. So so those were a couple of the things that jumped to mind to me. But like I said, None of the ones that I’ve truly, really worked on actually ever made it out to out there that p&g sold or sells,

Marlene Gebauer 12:37
I also wanted to reflect on what you were saying that, you know, you were adding business intelligence and competitive intelligence to technical information. And I picked up on that, because I think, you know, in firms, we struggle a little bit about like, okay, and you know, how do we kind of combine some of that type of information with, you know, say legal advice and sort of using that type of information as a way to better understand your client know, your client, understanding that that’s valuable, just to have kind of conversations to understand what from a business perspective as opposed to a legal perspective, or your clients really, really struggling with because that, in turn, can lead to further conversations. So I thought it was interesting that you did that. Was that kind of the thought process of doing that? Or were you thinking something else?

Shayne Phillips 13:27
So I think personally, that some Some law firms are hesitant to kind of go that way only because they are so crunched for time, they become very transactional, because that’s what’s expected of them. And that’s what you know, their bread and butter. So taking a step back and having the time to do the type of business intelligence and what I’ll call landscaping work that is required to to gain that insight and knowledge is a little bit time consuming, especially if you’re not used to doing it. So a lot, some firms will outsource it to somebody like myself or, or a NACA has a client services team. And but that is something I tried to teach with clients and potential clients is there are some processes that you can put in place that as long as you’re consistent with it, you keep it rigid and you don’t give up on it. What you’re going to get out of it at the end of the day is just a goldmine of information. If you would be so surprised how much patent data and information is out there publicly. The pat the US Patent Office especially they they put out data on everything about their examiner’s how long how many days an examiner has had a an application sitting pending with them. How many times has the examiner sent you know,

Marlene Gebauer 14:50
how many rejections they sent back,

Shayne Phillips 14:53
back to outside counsel, and yep, all of that is tracked all of that is taken into consideration and It could be I call patent data, even if you’re not, you know, you’re not a company that gets a ton of patents. I call that like a window into the soul of a company in some fashion with their r&d teams and with what they’re thinking patents since direction they’re going exactly, because since they take so long to to file and then come to grant, they’re really there’s a there’s a commitment there that a company makes that becomes a bellwether for what they might be thinking about in the future and not looking at it is to me, like, why why would you not look at it, but some, some organizations, they don’t, you know, they have the the philosophy of we don’t allow certain teams in our organization to see the literature because they’re worried about certain duties of candor and certain risks, that comes with full full knowledge of certain things. So it really becomes an opinion, I guess, or philosophy of a company, whether they’re going to allow that to be the case or not at their organization. But law firms, I think they can look at what are our competing firms looking like when it comes to their performance? Is my client moving in a new direction, technology wise, that may require us if we want to keep up with them to hire different patent attorneys that have a different background than than what we have on staff now, you know, things like that, that becomes leading indicators for your firm, really, if you see a competing firm starting to nosedive, maybe in perceived quality of their prosecution work, it’s an opportunity to maybe approach that that company and say, hey, you know, we think we can do better, potentially, it becomes a really powerful piece of business intelligence for firms.

Marlene Gebauer 16:55
There’s a lot to be said, for mining public data. And and firms have only just kind of hit the tip of the iceberg on that. I mean, you’re talking about patents, there’s dockets, there’s, you know, SEC filings, there’s there’s all kinds of things where you can mine that type of data, and, you know, firms should take advantage of it. I agree.

Greg Lambert 17:13
I love how polite Shayne was in saying how, how bad we were at this, this type of stuff. So I’m sure I’m sure everyone appreciate you kind of inherited on that. So one other thing that that you mentioned, with your work at Halliburton was that the patent agents could not be attorneys. So I know, there’s probably a number of people listening to this, that may not be familiar with what a Patent Agent does. Can you give us kind of a, you know, an overview of what a Patent Agent is, you know, what kind of background do they need or education and kind of what what’s the daily routine of a Patent Agent? And what do they bring to the organization?

Shayne Phillips 17:58
Oh, sure, absolutely. So a Patent Agent is not an attorney. So when I say not an attorney, I mean, not a straight up regular went to law school type of attorney, to become a Patent Agent, or to become what we call in the United States, a patent attorney, you no matter what you have to sit before what they call the Patent Bar. The Patent Bar is not like a regular bar exam, where it’s like a three day test. The Patent Bar is 100 questions over an entire day period. And it’s testing the subject on a huge set of manuals called the manual of patent examination procedure, which we call the MPEP. And the MPEP is given to all examiner’s to learn how to examine application. So it’s, it’s a little bit interesting in a way because patent agents will go we going up quote up against tick examiner when they start doing prosecution work on applications, but yet you’re tested on what the examiners need to know about examining applications. So it’s, it’s interesting, but it’s been the way it is, that’s way at the USPTO for many, many years. So you take the Patent Bar, you hopefully pass in order to even be invited to sit for it, you must have a technical degree. It needs to be in a hard science. There are certain even edge sciences that they don’t accept. They are looking at redefining

Marlene Gebauer 19:29
their like library science.

Shayne Phillips 19:32
Well, political science like that nature. They don’t allow or they don’t probably would not agree to that. They are looking at reworking the degrees that they will allow because of the fundamental changes in technology just in general. So some of the biology type degrees, they would say was not a hard enough science, but we are moving so far into the bio areas that they’re looking at that they I also noticed very recently that women who are getting technical degrees are in these edge areas and the number of women that are being accepted to sit before the Patent Bar had started to drop. So they are looking at that as well, because they’ve noticed that shift in the university degrees that people desire to get a degree in, you know, still being technical. So you submit your application and your school transcripts, and you’re either accepted or not, and then you take the bar and you hopefully pass, then you have to sit for a while for a clearance personality type clearance. And then if that goes well, you are receipt, you receive a registration number with the PTO. So you are now a Patent Agent, not a patent attorney, those that have a law degree both have to pass their regular bar exam and the Patent Bar to become a patent attorney. But with a an agent, once they get that registration number, they can draft patent applications, they can file and prosecute those applications all the way to grant, they can even potentially help pay maintenance after the patent was granted. But that really kind of ends their responsibility or their their allowed ability to help clients. Anything that becomes much more transactional or litigation or anything like that is of course moves over to the realm of the attorney. So that’s what a Patent Agent does. And, you know, when I was at Densmore, I don’t believe I could be mistaken, but I don’t believe they had any patent agents on staff. This was a number of years ago, this was over 20 years ago now. And I know they do have patent agents today. But a lot of law firms really only had patent attorneys on staff, they hadn’t really thought about, oh, let’s hire some agents to help us with our prep and process. And they don’t have to always be an attorney. And so I know, a number of agents working at law firms now, myself working in intellectual asset management, I believe, I’d say half of my cohort at Halliburton were agents and Halliburton paid for our training to to sit before the bar and paid for the examination fees, and then gave us some really nice stock options when we passed. So they encouraged it, they greatly encouraged it. And it just, it helps you when you’re dealing with counsel and when you’re dealing with the researchers, because you you know a little bit more about what likely will make it to granted claims versus not. And it allows you to speak a little bit more coherently, likely with counsel. So that’s, you know, an agent gets to do lots of things that maybe an attorney might be precluded from doing,

Greg Lambert 22:47
I can say that law firms are pretty myopic when it comes to who they think, can work in the law firm. And, and also, we can issue stock options. So that’s that might be another thing.

Marlene Gebauer 22:59
And I will note that I’m a little sad that Kim Kardashian can’t just study for this, that she actually has to have a technical degree because that would be fun. Shayne, where’s the profession going? Now? I mean, you you mentioned, sort of, you know, when you were at Halliburton, there was lots of opportunity. And the firm, you know, paid for this. And they were very eager for people to sort of get into the area. Where is the profession generally going now? You know, what are some of the issues that you faced over the past few years? And what do you think some of the pain points the profession is facing at the moment?

Shayne Phillips 23:37
Yeah, so I definitely think we’re all suffering from what I’ll call data overload. There are just hundreds of millions of patent records out there now, not even to talk about non patent literature, and what constitutes prior art. Now, you know, what, what is still new, and can can become patented for my client, that just keeps seeming like a target that’s getting further and further away. And I think everybody feels that way. So we’re all struggling with their data overload. There’s so much out there, how do we get at insights through all this noise? And so that’s something I discussed a lot with my potential clients and my clients because we’re, they’re all struggling, they’re all in that same boat. And one of the things that I was just having a conversation with one of my former co workers about was the fact that it’s really hard to take highly technical literature and put a business lens on top of it. You know, why should the business care about this? What products what services? What areas of where we make money? Will these patents potentially harm us? That is no easy feat for any company at all. And so that’s big. That’s the big pain point right now, I would say Where I think it’s moving, is software is getting there, it’s slowly getting there to help with this problem. So artificial intelligence is obviously here to say it seems to be all over the place, and everyone’s talking about it. But we are seeing a lot of interest from clients and from artificial intelligence software creators asking to work with us in order to work with our clients on how can we create software to help with Intellectual Property Management and cutting through the noise? And our clients are saying, or potential clients? How can you help us with software to wade through all of this? So it’s both a pain point and an opportunity. And I just see AI creeping further and further into IP management. It’s just inevitable to me,

Greg Lambert 25:50
yeah, one of the things you said was, it’s really difficult for a company to look at highly technical documentation, on products, ideas, and figure out a way to make that a part of the company to look at the profitability of something and in kind of, to me, it sounds like all that that technical jargon is not telling the story that needs to be told to the people that need to hear that story. So I’m curious, is it going to be the technology that ends up telling that story? Or is it going to be the is it gotta have a human element in it to relay that value? That’s in those technical documents?

Shayne Phillips 26:34
I do think, you know, there’s a human element there. Sometimes, not always, but sometimes patents will be written purposely vague, in order to, to do exactly what we don’t want, which is, we don’t want anyone to really find this, we want to have it, we want to get claims. But we we want to kind of go under the radar. And hopefully our competitors don’t see this. And you know, if they start to infringe, then, you know, we gotcha, that kind of thing. So you’ll see, just as an example, you’ll see something like a downhole treatment fluid. Well, what, what is, what is it going to do down the hole? You know? And you have to really read through that, just to find out what is it and what is it doing? And so when somebody like myself is setting up, for example, current awareness alerts, where we use key words, and have the data, have the software search the databases every week, or every month to look for new publications that have the key words I’m looking for. If it’s something as vague as that, yeah, we could put a query together that says, you know, downhill fluid, but someone then needs to say, well, what is it? What what part of the company is this affecting? It’s that piece that is very human intensive. And that piece that I think in the future AI will hopefully get at. But yeah, it’s not easy. And it’s so strange today. It was really interesting. Halliburton was sued for patent infringement on three patents from a company called us well, services. And the judge’s order on that case just came out two days ago, and I read about it today. And Halliburton was able to counter argue, on references that actually knocked out the US well services, many of their claims of their patents, not just we are infringing, but you shouldn’t have even gotten these patents in the first place. And here’s literature that you should have found and known about before you put this case out there. So I mean, if there is not an example of knowing what’s out there, knowing what you have and what what is out there in the in the oil and gas industry or in your industry, I can’t think of a better one. And it came out this morning, just before we were going to sit down and record this podcast. So yeah, it speaks volumes when you can not only knock out a suit against yourself, but you can turn around and and really get at that competitor as well, in the way that Halliburton was able to do.

Greg Lambert 29:12
Shayne, I noticed that you’re a member of the licensing executives society. Do you mind just telling us a little bit about what LDS does and what your involvement is with the society?

Shayne Phillips 29:23
Sure, yeah. So the licensing executives society, it started in the mid 60s. So it’s actually been around for many, many years. And it’s an organization, a professional organization of licensing executives, you know, those would that have kind of that business hat, researchers, attorneys, of course, lots of attorneys, and others that touch the whole space around licensing. They have besides the USA, Canada, which is the Las branch that I’m at home at here in the United States, there are 32 disser organizations have led us around the world that cover geographically over 90 countries worldwide. And their idea is to push consistent practices around licensing. They just recently received two standards from antsy. One of them is called intellectual capital in the boardroom. And this is the idea around a standard to mitigate risk when you have business executives in meetings with suppliers or competitors. And they’re talking away and maybe talking a little too much. And what not two or three cocktails, they might accidentally object cocktails, yes, yeah. So they might accidentally remove the ability to to obtain intellectual property rights. So that’s one of their standards. And then their second one is management systems for protecting IP in the supply chain. So once again, when a company is looking for materials, and they have certain requirements for those materials, they often are tipping their hand at what they’re up to what they’re going to use the material for, potentially, and, and things of that nature that once again, if a supplier knows what you’re up to, and can beat you to the patent office, they can not only get a patent for a material you might need, but they can also get a patent for the use of the material in a certain fashion. And that could certainly cause an instance where if they are the sole provider of the material and the use of the material, you have to undertake license agreements with them rather than just straight up purchases. So those two standards were just recently adopted by antsy related to intellectual property and licensing. And then the other thing I would say is they work very hard on making licensing easier and more, less scary, I will say for small startups, for those that are coming out of let’s say, an incubator or a university where they might be pitching their technology for license to a huge corporation. And there’s a power imbalance that we want to get rid of. So we have best practices not only for what what a small startup might need to be on the lookout for, but for ethical behavior that we expect from our corporate members. So that’s kind of the what Le S does. My involvement has been at the Houston chapter level, it’s very, it’s a very active chapter of LPs, we have quarterly meetings, and we bring in a lot of, of course, oil and gas speakers because of the industry that’s prevalent here in Houston, and then also healthcare as well. The Texas Medical Center, at least by square footage is the largest medical center in the world. So we have a lot going on there. And then at the national level, I’ve helped with planning events, I am the chair of the physical sciences industry sector, and that sector covers energy, environmental chemicals, and material science. It’s one of five different sectors that the LS has. And then more recently, I am planning an event here in Houston in February of this year, called the young members Congress. So the young members group started internationally and in USA, Canada, about 10 years ago with a goal of trying to bring in younger professionals to LDS and to bring them content that is meaningful to them. So I don’t know about the both of you. But there are some certainly some professional organizations that a lot of their membership just gets older and older and older. And we we see a vacuum of the younger folk

Marlene Gebauer 33:57
needs to bring the new people in yes, they’re

Greg Lambert 33:59
filled with with experiences is how we put that we call them extremely wise.

Shayne Phillips 34:08
the young members Congress, what we do is it’s a one day event, it’s always on a Friday so that we can have a huge blowout networking event after the content is over. So you know, you pace yourself. If you can stay on out all night long, you’re welcome to do so. But if you can’t just send yourself back to your hotel room. But but the networking component is is huge for young professionals. They are always looking to build their networks and to get speaking opportunities as well. So that’s what the young members Congress was set up to do and to be and it’s been it’s been going strong. The event here in Houston will be the first one for USA Canada and Latin America since before the pandemic so we’re really excited to have it in person again this year.

Marlene Gebauer 34:55
I’m going to ask you like a two part question. Your title right now is director of analytics solution. And you know, we’re real big on talking about analytics here on the podcast. So what is analytics mean in your role and what the value is at your place of work? And what do you think that firms can learn from this in terms of how you’ve set up the analytic solution process at an aqua?

Shayne Phillips 35:22
Sure, yeah. So my role in analytics, using Acclaim IP is, you know, it’s not super statistics heavy, I don’t have a statistics background. So that’s not like my my comfort zone. But it’s once again, it’s taking broad sets of data, to look for insights in what your competitors are up to, where they might be going with their technology. So you can look at things like what patents did they spend all this money to get granted, and then they haven’t paid maintenance on them. So they’ve let them die before their you know, their statutory term that really gives you an insight into okay, they might be leaving this this potential market for whatever reason, what countries are they now filing in where they maybe hadn’t before with that particular technology? So is there something they don’t know that or they know that we don’t know about a particular geographical region, just as an example, what we see a lot of the time is patent practitioners, those that are especially are doing prosecution work, are really focused on finding just a few references that they need to to answer an office action from an examiner or to conduct a freedom to operate opinion piece. And once they found those references, they’re done, right? They’ve met the task. they’ve searched the literature, they found what they needed, and they’re gone. And r&d is like that, as well. You know, researchers will often use the patent literature just because it is a huge body of technical literature, regardless of the legal aspects of them. And once they find the answer to that technical question, they log out, what I do is I take 1000s upon 1000s of patent records, and look for the trending over time and look for those those insights that you wouldn’t appreciate if you didn’t actually take that massive data set and run your metrics on those. So I call it it’s not the 50,000 foot view, because to me, the 50,000 foot view is an actionable you could tell upper management. Oh, you know, Halliburton has one and a half times more patents than Schlumberger. Well, so what? So what is what’s the action there. And then you have those that I call in the trenches, they’re down in the weeds on the ground, doing the the work that needs to be done for prosecution, and FTO. And patentability. But I want to be somewhere in between, I want to see the the, the forest for the trees, but I don’t want to be so high up that people can’t take my my information and make a good, actionable decision on it. So that’s where I sit. That’s what I tried to do and try to show my clients and potential clients. And it’s a process, you need to set up this rigid process where it’s repeatable, it’s growing over time, and it can be queried, as needed by management, when they ask because they will ask so I can just imagine, when US wall services filed their suit against Halliburton, the first thing that counsel at Halliburton said was, what do we know about this technology, you know, right away. And so when you have that building, knowledge base, that you have rigidly created over years, and over time, it’s there for you to to kind of go into and plunder as you need to. And that’s, that’s what I’m trying to get at and get folks at and for the law firms. Yeah, they might not want to have all that data, of course. But periodically, I even say just take the patents from your client, once a year, take them and just run some basic statistics on them. And see if you see a difference in what you expected to see or not. And just just take a broader view every once in a while, have the data that you find yourself working with every day,

Marlene Gebauer 39:22
run it against their biggest competitor, like do that once a year against their biggest competitor and see and compare them. Yeah,

Shayne Phillips 39:28
absolutely. Absolutely.

Greg Lambert 39:30
So Shayne, come to the part where we’re going to ask you our crystal ball question. What do you see as a major change or a challenge coming up on the horizon that you’ll have to face over the next three to five years?

Shayne Phillips 39:45
So I did mention this earlier, but it’s definitely worth repeating and that is the fact that I do think AI will be more and more prevalent and in use in IP management in Patent Prosecution patent drafting type work and will really infiltrate the IP services and industry fundamentally. We’re not there yet but we are so close and I do think that’s it’s just on the horizon. Short and sweet.

Greg Lambert 40:16
Just like we like it usually usually we get really long crystal ball questions but you get right to the point there so I like it. Well Shayne Phillips, a director analytic solutions at an aqua Acclaim IP. Want to thank you very much for taking the time to come on the show and talking with us. It’s been it’s been fun.

Shayne Phillips 40:37
Thank you so much, again, for having me. I really, I really enjoyed this. And I really appreciated the invitation.

Marlene Gebauer 40:42
Thanks to everyone for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert 40:54
And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter. Shayne, how about you are you got a Twitter handle?

Shayne Phillips 41:00
I do but I don’t know it off the top of my head.

Marlene Gebauer 41:03
We’ll put it in the show notes. And so if you guys don’t have a Twitter handle, you can leave us a voicemail on our Deacon review Hotline at 713-487-7821. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert 41:19
Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, I’ll talk to you later.

This is going to be something that all of you will find “interesting,” but maybe not something that you will like. Last week on 3 Geeks, I posted a blog that talked about how to use AI to generate summaries of legal articles. This week, I wanted to expand on that project a little and see if I could turn the summaries into a podcast. The goal was to try to get it completely automated, and completely AI generated. Well… as you can see from the title of this episode, it was almost completely automated, and AI generated. But not 100%.

• RSS Feed that tracks new BigLaw Podcast Episodes.
• Use a Python script to pull the episode information.
• Use GPT to create a description of the episode.
• Use Descript to translate the text summaries into voice output. (I did lightly edit these with an intro and outro as well as tweak the transitions between each review.)
• Use Soundraw to create an intro/outro music.
• Combine in Audacity.
• Output in mp3.

Transcript

Greg Lambert 0:07
Welcome to a special episode of The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Greg Lambert. So I have a just a special episode that I wanted to play for you today, which is a project I’ve been working on. And I think that a lot of you will be interested in this. And some of you may not like it. But I think it’s something that we wanted to test out and see what the audience thought.

It’s not something that we’re going to be doing with The Geek in Review. But I think it’s just something that with all of the talk about AI, chat, GPT and other tools that are out there, I thought I would expand upon an experiment that I did last week and posted on The Geek in Review about which was to use AI to summarize content.

So this week, what I decided to do was to look at a news feed that I had set up that monitors law firm podcasts. So that’s a interest of mine, I want to know what’s going on with other law firms and what kind of podcasts they’re putting out. So at a minimum, I wanted to kind of just keep up to date on that to know what the topics were, who was putting them out any changes any new additions that were going on? And that’s really all I do with it, it allows me to keep up with what’s going on in the industry.

But as with many things, I started thinking, wouldn’t it be nice if I could just listen to these news reports or these news feeds, rather than having to go on to the computer every morning and then read them. Some folks might like one or the other. But I thought it’d be kind of interesting to see if I could make that happen. And of course, like many things, I don’t have the time to do that. So I looked at the artificial intelligence tools that are out there and the automation tools. And I decided I was gonna give it a go to see if I could create a almost completely AI generated podcast.

And so here’s what I did.

Over this weekend, I worked with a number of tools to see if I could create that output. So here’s the process that I used. And I’m going to actually play the final output that I created. First of all, I have an RSS feed that tracks the big law podcast episodes.

And I then took that feed and fed it through a Python script to pull the episode information.

And then after that, I use the GPT, the actual pay version of GPT through an API to create a description of the episode.

And then the next step was to use a program called descript to translate the text summaries that the GPT tool had created, and put that into a voice output.

Now there is one part and this is why I call it the you know, almost completely AI generated podcast. And that is I did do some light editing on the text summaries so that there was a transition between the articles or the podcast, and I created an intro and an outro. And I kind of tweaked a little bit of the spacing and the timing of the output, but really not a lot of work. On my part.

I used a tool called Soundraw to create an intro and outro for the music.

And then I combined that into Audacity where I did the editing and create an output in mp3. The platform we use is anchor.

And so pretty much everything that I’ve used is a free tool, except for the GPT which is probably about a penny or so per per episode or article that I had a process. I can tell you I’ve been working with it and given and given the paid version of GPT for the last 12 days. And my total bill so far is less than $6. So it’s a really affordable tool for what you get.

There’s actually a much better voice AI tool out there called play h t that I took a look at, although it’s much more realistic, and I would love to have it. It’s not free so I did not use it for this experiment. Now don’t get me wrong. This is not by any stretch of the imagination, a perfect output. But I think it shows the potential that’s out there for doing things like this.

Now I saw a tweet this morning from a really good friend of mine Cat Moon out of Vanderbilt, who talked about how she thought it was interesting how there’s a number of people that look at tools like this and immediately think this is going to end my career there, the the AI tools are going to take over, I think more, we need to get away from the zero sum game, when it comes to technology, that technology is going to be a one for one replacement of human labor, I’m going to tell you right now, I would not do this.

As much as I would enjoy listening to a summary of big law podcast episodes, I’m not gonna do it. I don’t know of a lot of people that have that kind of free time to go through and do that on their own. However, it still is a useful idea, I think, to understand what’s going on in the industry. So instead of looking at it as a replacement for humans, I look at it as an augmentation that I think this these tools are really useful when it comes to providing information in a way that doesn’t take a lot of human time. gives us that time back, but it gives us some really good information that’s available if and when we need it.

So without going into depth any further on on the process. I’m going to let you listen to approximately the next five minutes of an automated well, almost completely automated, almost completely AI generated podcast

AI-Ethan 6:50
Welcome to the Big law podcast update, where we sum up the latest podcasts from am law 102 100 firms.

AI-Emily 6:56
First step we have fastest five minutes, SBIR and contractor minimum wage from Crowell and moring Crowell and moring fastest five minutes is a biweekly podcast that provides a brief summary of significant government contracts legal and regulatory developments posted by Peter Ireland Yuendumu. This week’s episode covers agency labor advisors, data rights, minimum wage for contractors and the strengthening VA Cybersecurity Act of 2020. To tune in to stay up to date on the latest government contracts legal and regulatory developments and access the podcast from pod bean SoundCloud or iTunes

AI-Ethan 7:30
from Wilson Elser, the crazy world of crypto register now February 9 webinar. Join Anjali das partner Chicago, Illinois and co chair of Wilson else’s National Cybersecurity and data privacy practice for her webinar, the crazy world of crypto on February 9 2023. Learn about the crypto ecosystem, the fall of FTX us regulation of the crypto markets and potential silent crypto exposure under traditional insurance policy. CLE credit is available in California, Connecticut, Illinois, New Jersey and New York.

AI-Emily 8:04
Our third summary is Baker Hostetler his podcast. Jarvis Gresham of the American Bar Association litigation section interviews Judge Keith and be frank of the 17th Judicial Circuit of Florida for the sound advice podcast. In the episode Judge Frank provides tips for young lawyers on oral advocacy tune in to hear his advice and gain insight into the legal profession.

AI-Ethan 8:26
More from Baker Hostetler on FINRA signals expanded enforcement priorities and annual report. FINRA is 2023 report on its examination and risk monitoring program highlights the growing risks posed by cybercrime fraud and other bad actors and urges firms to strengthen their internal compliance and reporting structures to combat these threats. The report also covers Financial Crimes manipulative, trading AML fraud and sanctioned and emphasizes the need for firms to evaluate their risk management programs to ensure they are adequately monitoring and reporting on these complex forms of fraud.

AI-Emily 9:00
Ballard Spahr is up next with their mortgage banking update. The CFPB has proposed a registry for non bank supervised by the CFPB that would require reporting and public disclosure of the use of arbitration provisions, waivers and other limits and form contracts. This proposal is a backdoor approach to eliminating arbitration as consumer advocates have been lobbying CFPB director chopper to ban the use of arbitration provisions since he was sworn in. The proposal also covers other contract provisions that the CFPB director dislikes comments on the proposal must be filed by March 13 2023.

AI-Ethan 9:34
Mayor Brown put out its 2023 trends for technology transactions. In this episode of Mayor Browns Tech Talks podcast partners from the technology and IP transactions practice along with host Julian DeVoe discuss eight key trends to look out for in 2023 as companies look to reduce spend and drive revenue topics include cost saving deals digital transformation, leveraging technologies such as AI and open source software and more.

AI-Emily 10:02
Jackson Walker’s podcast talks about value based care and the changing healthcare landscape. In this episode of future ready business, Dr. Lena Anna discusses the shift from fee for service to value based care in the healthcare industry and how his podcast doc to the future is helping to educate rural physicians on the topic. With the help of Glenn Edwards a radio personality Dr. Anna has released three episodes and an intro with plans to release a fourth soon.

AI-Ethan 10:28
Bonds gonna Ken King Latest Episode on Countdown to data privacy day 2023. on cybersecurity and data privacy practices, counting down to world data privacy day with information memoranda, articles, webinars and podcasts to help legal technology professionals stay up to date on data privacy laws and best practices. Contact bonds attorneys for more information on compliance efforts and assessing your organization’s privacy and data protection practices.

AI-Emily 10:56
Our final review today is Willkie Farr and Gallagher discusses US sanctions and export controls 2022 year in review, economic tools take center stage in response to global conflicts in 2022. The US government US sanctions and export controls is its primary tool to respond to global conflicts, particularly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration and its allies impose novel and sweeping sanctions and export controls to curb the Russian government’s ability to fund its war effort and to prevent the Russian Armed Forces from accessing essential items for combat and maintenance. The spotlight also turned to export controls to limit China’s access to us origin critical technologies, Cryptocurrencies entrance into the mainstream also resulted in a greater risk of misuse prompting a whole of government review. Thanks for tuning into today’s big law podcast update.

AI-Ethan 11:44
We’ll be back tomorrow with more reviews to keep you on top of what issues are happening in the large law world.

Greg Lambert 11:53
So like I said, at the beginning, this is not anywhere near a perfect system. It’s not a completely automated process. But I think it’s something that could be made better. I think it’s something that can be made much more automated. And I think that, you know, this is just scratching the very surface of what these tools can do. And again, I’m looking at this as a way of augmenting the abilities that we have, either as librarians, law professionals, lawyers, there are ways to leverage tools like these to give you the ability to do things that you simply just don’t have the time to do. And the ROI of that time just isn’t worth it for a human to do this. But it’s really interesting, and I hope you got a chance to listen to it.

Whether you loved it hated it, hated me for doing it. I would love to hear more from you. So please reach out to me, you can leave comments here. Or you can reach out to me on Twitter at Lambert to @G L A M B E R T, I would like to hear from you and see what you think about it. So thanks for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, or at least find it interesting, please go ahead and share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you so you can reach out to us on social media. Marlene can be reached at @gebauerm on Twitter And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter. Or you can leave us an old fashioned voicemail on our Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7821.

The music that was not artificially generated and is so much better is brought to you by Jerry David DeCicca .Thanks, Jerry. All right everyone. Thanks for listening.

There is obviously a ton of hype and buzz going on right now with ChatGPT and other AI tools, including this week’s Geek in Review podcast. I wanted to see if there’s something that I could do that was a practical use of GPT in my job as a law librarian. I think I’ve found something that might fit that bill. Summarizing text.

Law Librarians are great at finding good information and getting that quickly into the hands of lawyers, legal professionals, judges, pro se representatives, etc. However, we don’t always have a lot of time to read all of that information and create a summary for the person we are working with. It’s not uncommon for a firm to have 100 – 300 attorneys for each librarian. Any tool that would help librarians synthesize information in a useful way is a welcome tool for us all. I put GPT 3.5 (the paid version) to the test to see how it could be that electronic assistant in summarizing information quickly.

It is early in my experiment, but I’m impressed with what I’ve seen so far.

The Current Process

I wanted to try something that I personally set up for myself that is “good” but not “great.” And that is tracking BigLaw Podcasts as they come out. What I have now is an RSS feed (yes, that is still a thing!) that follows AmLaw 100/200 firms’ websites and lets me know when a new episode comes out. I have that RSS feed set up in my MS Outlook folders. I’m using LexisNexis’ NewsDesk to set this up.

Right now, it looks like this:

This works fine, but it really doesn’t give me a lot of information on the podcast. I’d really like to see more of a summary of the podcast before I make a decision to click through and listen.

The Idea

I’ve got the basic information from the RSS feed, but now I want to expand that information. I’m a former programmer from “back in the day” but I haven’t done any serious programming in a long time. But, I know that Python is a great tool for processing text, so my top-of-the-head idea was to have Python look at my RSS output and see if it could get me more information. Actually, I wanted to see if Python might be able to summarize the RSS information directly. This is where the ChatGPT tool came in handy.

Using ChatGPT to build a Python Script

Since I am not a Python expert (even calling me a novice might be too bold), I went to ChatGPT and gave it my idea. Here was my original question.

This gave me some ideas on how to get the information processed. I think spent a little while (hours) working with ChatGPT to help write the Python script to pull the information out of the RSS feed.

It turns out that ChatGPT isn’t perfect at writing Python scripts, so it was pretty hit and miss, but eventually we found a way to process the information.

Since ChatGPT won’t work with automatically processing the information to summarize, I am using the API call from GPT 3.5 which costs money but is very inexpensive. I’ve been using it for five days now and haven’t broken a dollar in charges yet. The Python script takes the description (limited to no more than 512 characters to keep the fees low) and sends a request to GPT 3.5 to “Summarize the following text from a large law firm’s podcast:” and then the description from the RSS feed. The API call sends and receives the information and gives me back a summary based on the description.

After tweaking code, RSS feeds, and trying a number of different options on how to process the data, I finally came up with something that I thought was a good beginning.

The Results (for now…)

Let me start off by saying that it is still very early in the development of anything that I would use or trust, but I on to something.

The process at this point is to:

• Pull the RSS feed information, including the title, link, and description.
• Verify that the link is correct and not a redirect from NewsDesk.
• Use Python to pass the description to GPT 3.5 via the openai API call.
• Retrieve the summary from GPT 3.5 via the openai API call.
• Format the information and output it so that I can read it.

Here’s what that output looks like now:

Now there is still lots and lots of work to do to make this something that I would put into production, but it is a great start. If I wanted to embed this into a webpage or portal page, I’d want to do a little more tweaking and automating so that I don’t have to manually keep a list up to date. When I’m ready to do this, I will go back to ChatGPT and the two of us will struggle to come up with some clean code to schedule and automate the process.

What’s Next?

I don’t know. But, while I don’t think that ChatGPT is ready for anything that you would need to stake your reputation on, I do think that there are some real advantages available to law librarians and other legal professionals currently. Summarizing text is one of those useful tasks that I thought of. Is there anything that you’ve done, or are wanting to do with the tool? Let me know in the comments.

There is a lot of buzz around ChatGPT and GPT 3.5, but is it really the next Tesla, or is it the next IBM Watson? We talk with HyperDraft’s Tony Thai and Ashley Carlisle about OpenAI’s popular tool and why, lawyers at least, shouldn’t be ready to go all in on this specific technology. While there are great examples of how GPT 3.5 impressively handled things like Bar Exam questions, there are still a lot of unknowns from this resource from a company that started out as Open Source and non-profit, but has released a product that is neither.

• ChatGPT  and GPT 3.5
• Bob Ambrogi’s LawNext Interview of Daniel Martin Katz and Michael Bommarito on GPT 3.5’s Bar Results
• HyperDraft AI

Transcript 

Marlene Gebauer 0:08
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert 0:15
And I’m Greg Lambert. And we’re going to do something a little bit differently this year, we’ll well first of all, happy new year. This is our first show of the year. So it’s a new year back. So this week, we’re going to try and do a little quasi live recording with a couple of guests who we’ve had on this show before or other shows before.

Marlene Gebauer 0:37
Yeah, we’re gonna talk about the cChatGPT and GPT 3.5 AI tools with some experts in AI, Tony Thai, and Ashley Carlisle from HyperDraft Ai, Tony and Ashley, glad you could join us on The Geek in Review.

Tony Thai 0:50
Thanks for having us. Excited.

Ashley Carlisle 0:52
Glad to be here.

Marlene Gebauer 0:54
It’s gonna be a good conversation. Yeah,

Greg Lambert 0:55
it is gonna be really exciting. If if the pre talk is is any indication.

Marlene Gebauer 1:00
Exactly.

Greg Lambert 1:03
Ashley has already put some some restraints on Tony as so. Well, Tony, you’ve been on the The Geek in Review before and Ashley, I still want to thank you for stepping in being my co host for a few of the last episodes of the superhuman legal division podcast. So we’re excited to have you both on here to talk about AI and the GPT tool as it applies to the legal industry. And we’ll even may even try and try a few things on the platform while we’re talking and do some real world world testing if we get a chance.

Marlene Gebauer 1:39
So Tony, let’s start with you and get your initial thoughts on what tools like ChatGPT mean for the industry as of now?

Tony Thai 1:47
Yeah, I think I think the intent behind ChatGPT being a chat bot the the interface, right using chat as an interface between, you know, knowledge database, and and a user trying to extract data from it is super key. It’s something that the industry has worked on for past decade, at least. So folks in the industry are very excited about it. ChatGPT as as applied to the legal industry, I think that the limits, folks are still trying to figure out right now. It my personal view, which is not the most popular view on the mainstream is that like chap, GPT is a little bit of a false flag for folks. Because it, it’s so convincing in its output, that I think folks will want to try to rely on it. But the reality of it is is non domain specific. So it is not trained on just legal information, strain on a bulk of a bunch of information off the internet. And so it, it can lead to some misleading results and confidence in the system. But I still think we’re years out maybe maybe maybe five, five plus years from

Marlene Gebauer 3:04
house we don’t know where we don’t know what it’s pulling from no idea how

Tony Thai 3:08
to do, right, we kind of do. And so like when I when I describe it to people, it’s like, you know, if you’re comfortable with getting your your legal advice from Chora or just from your first five results from Google?

Marlene Gebauer 3:21
That’s true as the first page. Yeah, right. It’s sort of like that.

Tony Thai 3:25
It’s sort of like that. We don’t know. Exactly. Merlin’s point. We don’t know exactly where it comes from, but we kind of have a decent enough idea. And we know it scrapes social media as well. So like, you know, someone’s ramblings from Facebook might be included in that data somewhere, as well. So I don’t know how much, you know, I would want to rely actually, I do know how much I would not rely on it at all. But it poses some interesting questions to the industry as a whole in and, you know, just overall industry. Well,

Greg Lambert 3:55
one good explanation of of why I think jet Chet GPT is getting so much buzz. Is that, for better or for worse, I guess, depending on if you’re Tony, or I guess if you’re me, is this is really the first AI that I think has taken the world by storm. It doesn’t matter if you’re a fifth grader trying to explain a neutron star, or if you’re a lawyer, and you want to see if it can pass the bar exam. This is a tipping point in our culture that I think that makes everyone understand that AI is really here this time, we’re not going to go through I think another AI winter that’s it’s going to be part of our society going forward. And and and, you know, like it or not, I think it does have some viability and a lot of the aspects of our lives and so Ashley or Tony any, do you agree or disagree that that we’re at that

Tony Thai 4:59
point It, it reminds me of when amaz what is it called? Amazon Echo, Amazon. Alexa, Alexa Alexa flip stuff, right? And a bunch of us geeks, were already talking about it. I think some of us were kind of gatekeeping. That’s fine, whatever. But a lot of us were like, Dude, we’ve had this right. We’ve had this for years. But the general acceptance of it came after folks were like, yeah, we’ve had these tools before, but the interface was wrong, right? We tried to get people to use these advanced consoles to control stuff around their house. Turns out people are lazy, and would much rather just talk to it. But similar to Alexa, like, I would say that there was a lot of fanfare for the first year, there’s like people playing games with it. There’s like apps being made for Alexa, it’s since kind of died off. And then the privacy concerns popped up or like, Wait, is his fee always listening to us? Or is it always listening to us? And so then, you know, reality kind of set in after after a while, I think this is kind of the same trend. Just to piggyback

Ashley Carlisle 6:06
on that, you know, this is a great tool. And like Tony said, I think a lot of the adoption, especially the quick adoption is how simple the interface is. But other companies have tried stuff like this. I think other companies have taken different approaches that they wanted to understand kind of the repercussions of the software and put some limitations on it before unleashing into the wild. And this company chose the opposite approach to just like, oh, well, let’s just put it out there and see what happens. So I think like Tony said, like, for now, it’s fun. But as soon as people start really diving in and thinking of the repercussions, and the pros and cons and potential biases within the data, or where it’s coming from, we’re going to have a whole other set of conversations, which I think is bittersweet for us, because we’re very pro innovation and you know, anything we say here, please don’t get that wrong, like we’re very pro moving everything forward. But it’s only going to be a trajectory forward if we also think about it thoughtfully, and make sure people don’t get tired of it or don’t get burned by it. So that’s something percent to see.

Marlene Gebauer 7:03
I mean, did you sit? Do you think that they had any idea that this would sort of blow up the way it did? Because I mean, I know when, you know, when it when it was first announced? I mean, I think all of us kind of went on and, you know, started playing with it. But you know, there were a lot of delays. There were a lot of lags. And, you know, yeah. And and you know, did they did they really kind of think this through in terms of how they released it.

Tony Thai 7:30
I think the strategy was this kind of where they’re leading to right now, which is, recently I heard that they’re in the middle of a fundraiser at least kicked one off. Yep. So as part of their marketing strategy, definitely the board, or, you know, and definitely the executives thought through this and said, This is a good marketing tool for us going into fundraise getting our valuation nice and frothy, so that we can go and raise a lot of money very quickly. I do not think that they thought this would kind of blow up as quickly as it as it did. I think it was planned, I just don’t think it was expected that they were going to, you know, have this level of fanfare so quickly. It’s also I’m really curious, because it’s probably costing them a ton of money, right? Like I that’s the part that like, really confuses me. And like, there’s r&d, and then there’s, there’s beta and alpha user data. But this this, this is an expensive experiment. Well, they’ve already you guys thought about, like, what the point is, I because I’m starting to, I feel like there’s diminishing returns from them on this side?

Greg Lambert 8:32
Well, I guess it would depend, because I think they’ve already gotten a billion dollars from Microsoft. And Microsoft announced, I think, yesterday, the day before, that, they’re going to put 10 More billion dollars into it, and they’re going to embed it into Microsoft Word and Bing. I’m not sure about being but you know, I can see some value of something, a tool like this in Word as as you are writing to have prompts that could that could help you write in really, one way I’ve heard this talk about is this, this is kinda like, maybe the end, maybe this is not the company that does it, because there’s going to be tons of companies that are going to enter the space. copycats. Yeah, and, and so, I mean, it could be the same kind of tipping point, with the investment in these types of tools that were made, you know, the same kind of investments that were made in the solar power industry or electric cars, that, you know, finally AI has something that as make making everyone realized that it’s viable, and yeah, there’s it there’s probably going to be a lot of money wasted. But I think, you know, at the same point, I think with the money coming in, I think you’re gonna see improvement and in the structure of tools like The US and I have a feeling again, there’s gonna be tons of tools like these.

Tony Thai 10:03
Yeah, similar to solar and electric vehicles, it does feel like these guys have a, a pretty large lead and gap over the competition. Because honestly, like if we’re talking about in terms of energy, like data is the oil and the fuel for this. And so it just seems like they have such a huge lead on it. They are open sourcing a lot are not open sourcing, but opening up a lot of their API so that other folks can build off of their, you know, existing models. But yeah, it’ll be interesting. Bing Bing is kind of, you know, we’re talking about marketing approaches. We all know, successful products launch off of being, you know, if you if you’re a successful company, then you better be on Bing. Yeah, I don’t know, a soul that uses Bing willingly. So it’s, it’s kind of interesting.

Marlene Gebauer 10:55
So I want to talk about open AI for a second. So this started off as an open source, nonprofit, but it’s not open source or nonprofit any longer. The back end of Chad APD. And it’s more powerful relative GPT 3.5. There are now black boxes. So, you know, there, it could be, you know, garbage in garbage out. It could be, you know, bias issues, you know, what, what does it mean, for both the open AI and now millions of users? You know, what are they getting themselves into? And do they? Are they aware of that?

Tony Thai 11:34
Yeah, no, it’s it’s kind of what I was getting at before, which is that these large language models, right, so ChatGPT is based off of an LLM, or built off of an LLM, that they’re so massive that the data being audited going in, and then the outputs coming out. Like they’re just these massive machines that folks can’t really wrangle, there are entire new startups built around. Machine learning transparency, trying to give humans a way to view the models and get a bit of a better understanding of it. But Marlene, to the point that we were talking about before, like, we don’t know exactly what goes in. And like one of the issues we’ve seen kind of pop up in a parallel space. Is this generative AI for for art, artwork, you’re seeing it probably not. But there is a lot of outcry from artists, like my friends who are digital artists are not having the the best reaction to it. Because they’re like, wait, they trained on our data, we get

Marlene Gebauer 12:48
paid stuff we created, and then they make money off of that. Yeah.

Tony Thai 12:51
And so as soon as you as soon as Greg mentioned, like the integration with Microsoft Word and Office products, I’m thinking to myself, you know, even as maybe as a law firm, pulled up. So I’m paying all of my salaried employees to feed data into your system. So you can build a product that competes with me, that doesn’t sound like a good yield or output, which is good for, like companies like ours who are, are trying to be more agnostic around and letting our clients build tools for themselves so that they they’re not held down by one, you know, huge monopoly. But it’s, it’s an interesting question, because it’s like, you know, how much of it are they going to cannibalize of their own of their own user base. So with Chachi Beatty, and the way that open ai, ai is structured, one, like you mentioned, it’s no longer open, and so is a for profit venture, which means that they’re going to be a lot more secretive, around what what goes into the model, what the process is like to manage and data wrangle. And then that whole content moderation and output moderation, like it’s largely a black box, we don’t know, what they’re doing, we do know, people are involved. And we do know that they’ve done quite a bit in terms of training and tuning it before they released it, in order to avoid you know, rated our material basically, that goes that would get output from from the model. But now it’s it’s a black box to most of us, we have a general idea of of what goes in and what comes out, but like, we don’t have any control over it. So as what we were talking about, before we started recording, you know, there are inherent dangers on on relying on that type of data because it’s like, Alright, do I do I truly trust it to make decisions for me or just provide research data? So then it then becomes a question for the industry of like, how are we going to leverage this tool, right? Are we going to use it as a spade or we’re going to try to make it into a hammer or drill or, you know, use it for some other function? And Greg likes to eat man Shouldn’t again before the call like, there are parallels for this tool that make it so that it is a useful tool, but you have to understand that it’s not self self guiding, right? Like you need a user behind it. And that user needs exercise judgment.

Ashley Carlisle 15:16
Tony, you can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think something that is leading to the increase like word of mouth about ChatGPT, and kind of more confusion is that it’s trained to seem very credible, it’s trained to seem very competent. And so people will see this on social media all the time, like someone will make a post being like, I feel this way. And this way, here are the pros and cons about shot GPT. Like, you know, what do you think and people are like, well, I did this one thing. And it sounds right. So like, it’s right. And I think that’s what’s confusing is I want people to have that fervor and excitement about use cases and technology. But that’s something I think, if you don’t have a, you know, the background that maybe Tony does, as a, as an engineer, you might not think about well, that’s part of the kind of the DNA of this, it’s going to seem credible, which is why we have to have these conversations about reality where the data is coming from and disclosures as to that and really have these conversations, or else, it’s really easy to be tricked. And then it’s like a slippery slope of dependency on it, without even really thinking about it. I think that’s adding to kind of the confusion, and also the word of mouth explosion here.

Marlene Gebauer 16:18
Yeah, as I say, because up until now, you didn’t have that credibility, like, you know, you would, you would see stuff on social media. And it’s like, okay, it’s trying to write a story. And it was like, all disjointed and terrible. And everybody just laughed, these are undergrad. And if you do that crazy AI, you know, and but now you look at it, it’s like, wow, that makes sense. And that, that seems right. And even if it’s not, right, I can basically say, okay, take that point and expound upon it. And you’re like, that makes sense. And so then everybody’s getting very excited about it to figure out where they can they can use it. And I mean, in law firms are doing that, too. They’re like, how do we, how do we play with this? And to Tony’s point before, I’m like, Are they cannibalizing themselves in the doc in the stuff that they put out there? In order to do this?

Greg Lambert 17:05
Yeah. And just to tie on to that? Well, and I guess this can lead into my next question, as well. And that is, you know, just as we were, as we were talking, I was also thinking about, you know, the data that it’s that it’s compiling the data that it’s using in and the language models that it’s building upon, scraping stuff off the the internet, it, you know, one of the things if you think back about IBM Watson, which that may be another example of of hype, hype hype, you know, excitement. Yeah. And then all sudden, nobody hears about Watson anymore. No, no one seems to, to know what it’s up to these days.

Marlene Gebauer 17:51
For the Weather Channel, some 30 service. Right.

Greg Lambert 17:56
Yeah, I would imagine the last I heard and this was probably pre pandemic, was that it was going to focus in on reading medical journals and working with the medical industry. And I don’t know that that ever panned out.

Tony Thai 18:10
I think IBM wrapped it well, they’ve been same for for this is that’s a great analogy. I, it’s so far removed that I didn’t even think about it. And but the the funny thing is, is it’s so it’s such in the similar parallel, right, like the answer Jeopardy questions really, really well. And in a convincing manner. I totally forgot, that’s a really good reminder, I’m going to bring that up for people. That’s

Greg Lambert 18:35
what we’ll turn to you and mentioned and talked about, you know, who watches the watchmen with that, and Watson in the self contained information, I’ve heard people joke that, you know, the, the thing that’s going to bring something like this down is when it starts producing images of Mickey Mouse, or using Disney characters, or scripts in it that, you know, once Disney gets involved in, then they’re going to kind of get a peek behind the, the black box, but, you know, up until then, you know, kind of who’s, who’s kind of watching what this group is doing, and what information that they may have in their

Tony Thai 19:18
head. Yeah, but that is the joke. Usually, when Disney or Nintendo get involved from a copyright perspective, like you’re screwed, there’s no it’s

Greg Lambert 19:25
a Mario.

Tony Thai 19:27
Yeah. I don’t know. I think, you know, not the reason why I’m pessimistic but when I want to analyze a new technology or any technology for that matter, you know, I can’t help but that you know, we, I come come from a hacker background. And by the way, the word hacker meant something different when I was growing up, it meant more people who would like like to tweak with systems and mess around with them. But you know, you’re always looking for exploits and This system, you know, from a lot of us would appear to be such an easily influenceable system, once we figured out where their data pipeline was. And even if we learned that, hey, you know, they’re getting manipulated by user input directly, you know, a lot of us can already think of, you know, a few different ways to influence output. So that becomes a major concern from a from a who watches the watchmen perspective, like, ya know, the question is, what is that data pipeline going in, where the where the data sources and who’s moderating, you know, who’s monitoring and moderating the, the fuel that’s going into these models, we don’t know, just from the sheer amount of data that’s going into, it would require huge teams of data scientists and, you know, data analysts to wrangle this data to make sure that it’s building something that’s coherent. So that output that you’re seeing that super clean, that’s, you know, convincing, that’s really, really impressive. And I think that’s where, you know, I’m most impressed by this system is how convincing it sounds, not the quality of the data that’s coming out of it, but just how convincing it sounds, that’s really interesting for me, but I am sure, after a year or two on the market, that, you know, certain regulatory bodies will come into play, and that the government will start to get more involved from a policy standpoint, because it would not be in the best interest of the public to just have this, you know, model out there influencing and you’ve seen students use it to write their essays, right. Even from an education standpoint, it’s it’s, it’s, it has to be limited, and it has to be controlled and regulated. So there’s already talk on Twitter, and on other social media platforms, by politicians on how are you going to regulate this? So it’s, so you know, I don’t have visibility on it. Exactly. And I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, because I still think that technology is incredibly nascent. So I don’t think it can be deployed anywhere for production, except from potentially correcting grammar. And or giving you, you know, essay ideas for for for school school children

Greg Lambert 22:24
will have I’m just curious Have either of you put it to some serious test and found something that you found was useful in the results?

Tony Thai 22:36
Oh, I’ve heard you say, not useful. Actually, I hadn’t if this sounds really bad, but I’ll mention it, we somehow refer a friend it was like he put a he tried to get it to write a eulogy for him. And I’m like, Dude, that stat. That’s like, I got some good inspiration from them. And that’s, that’s good as tough topic. But I, I’ve played around with it, and gotten it to write some and do some interesting research for me when it comes to know some of the stuff I’m working on, but not stuff that would have beaten me Google searching and getting the input from other people. The limitation I find that I find really funny is if you asked a math question, sometimes it gives you the wrong answer. It always fascinates me. But it should give folks kind of the underlying understanding of like, what’s going on underneath, which is it’s, it’s trying to find consensus for an answer, as opposed to doing calculations. And so that’s, that’s a key thing I always suggest people do is ask it like, like, not relatively complicated math question. But asking a math question that, you know, you’d expect a senior in high school to understand and it’ll get almost there. It won’t, it won’t solve it every time. So it’s, it’s quite interesting. Actually, Have you have you had to do any of our marketing yet?

Ashley Carlisle 23:58
No, I haven’t because I tried to get it to answer just a very simple legal question, because I was always just like, oh, how does this work? And I think the thing I realized, which was just a dull moment for me was I hope that this leads people to be more creative lawyers. You know, like sometimes you see briefs that are just like so witty, and so well written that you’re like, Oh, I wish every brief was like this. And I think what I saw was I asked for a very basic legal issue I got a very bland five paragraph like, you know, first year of law school like probably see be a answer. And so I’m hoping that because that is readily available, people will go for the a plus work, or maybe some of like, the low hanging administrative stuff can be done through technology like ours or ChatGPT or whatever, and people can really kind of be like, you know, Ninja lawyers, lawyers have pin with contracts and briefs and what have you.

Tony Thai 24:52
I’m gonna build on Ashley’s point a little bit that’s, that is one of the reasons why I’m so concerned by the level of hysteria or Manea around it is, there is an inherent value in learning how to do it the slow way before you do it the short way. And what I worry about is everybody’s trying to take the shortcuts and say, You know what, instead of doing research, I’m just going to ask this thing, this, and I’m already seeing it with, you know, people that, that I’ve worked with who, you know, don’t take the extra step, or the extra mile to do their own research to understand the underlying case law or, you know, regulation before they come back and just say, this is the case. Yeah, this, this will never replace humans, and I especially think it is, it will never replace, or, you know, have a place in but it will never place a lawyer or a legal professional in the practice of law. The practice of law is a very human practice, I’ve said this before, many times, like, it cannot replace lawyers, because it unless somehow we’ve given up our own destiny or or, you know, sense of control, we just, we won’t, we want to come to the robot overlords and let them dictate, you know, how rules and laws are interpreted.

Marlene Gebauer 26:17
And, and I find your point fascinating, because for so many years, there’s been such resistance to some technological innovations. point being that, you know, we have to teach sort of the up and coming like, they have to be able to do this themselves, and learn this stuff and sort of learn it the slow way, before they can do it the quick way. And yet, that all seems to be like, you know, out the window, just for this this one thing, and, you know, already sort of discussion about like, oh, how can we started, you know, do first drafts and how can we start research this way? And I just find it amazing that, and I don’t quite fully understand why this particular thing. Just just forced, you know, everybody just decided, okay, well, that’s fine. Yeah, there’s so much resistance. Well, I

Greg Lambert 27:08
think actually nailed that, in that it’s very confident and what it gives you, and so I think

Ashley Carlisle 27:13
so. Yeah, exactly, Greg, sorry to interrupt. But I think lawyers like control. And lawyers do not like feeling dumb. And for the longest time, myself included, when you mentioned math or technology to me, I immediately just tense up, I’m like, I don’t want any part of this conversation, right, I think they did a really good job of spending a lot of time making it sound convincing, making it super easy to look at super easy to use, and how the interface is it makes the person feel in control. Like as you’re putting in the prompt, you can immediately given a good point. And lawyers love control, which is a part of our profession. It’s something that’s a neat twist. It’s why we’re successful. I get it. But I think it’s something that’s not talked about enough is we’re impatient. And we’re control freaks. And we need to be cognizant of that as that we’re assessing technology, because people might make these dumb, short sighted decisions, and then regret them later. Because they just want, oh, this is a solution. We’re gonna do this now. And they’re not thinking of the bigger picture, or maybe what they’re bringing that obstacles to the table. So I don’t know why it took off. I just hope he’s the feeling of control, even though they really don’t have control. They don’t have control. There’s no citation of where it’s coming from. Just guesses.

Tony Thai 28:18
Yeah, that’s, by the way, almost impossible. And the funny thing I’ll call out here, because I’d like it DOM documented. schaunard General Counsel always says it doesn’t countless you say it. So I’m gonna go and say it now. That’s, that’s pretty much impossible. Their entire company is dedicated to that citation side that it won’t work. And what the reality around this is. I’ll bring up a great example. Google has built and worked on these projects for years. And you if you want to talk about who’s got the most data, Google has the most data, they have, basically unlimited data, right? And if they’re not deploying it, there’s there’s probably good reason why they’re not deploying it. And at the end of the day, the way that the architecture works is it would have to basically run a Google search at the end, at the end of all of it than just Google for it like it should just, it should just be Google or or a another search engine like Bing, who’s you know, I’ve heard the biggest up and comer out there.

Unknown Speaker 29:14
All the cool kids are using

Greg Lambert 29:19
Bing now was Yahoo. So

Marlene Gebauer 29:25
my yahoo email now maybe it’ll AOL.

Tony Thai 29:29
Right, AOL, hey, you know what I was I moved recently. And I found I had I had one of those old AOL discs for like, their free 20 hours. I know. I left it somewhere and I wanted to frame it up, because I remember I remember that the good old days

Greg Lambert 29:45
MFF. Well, speaking of lawyers using it and and kind of giving it some some testing. If listeners haven’t listened to Bob Ambrogi he’s Interview with Dan Katz and my called Bommarito, about how they put the GPT 3.5 tool, which is different than the the ChatGPT tool, they put that to the task of of answering bar exam questions. It’s a, it’s a good lesson, I think people should, should go listen to what those two did with the tool. And, and they were saying that, you know, the tool has come a long way over the past few years. And, and, and they’re testing. Again, this might be that confidence level. But they were saying that it was not too far away from getting a passing score in some of the the bar in some states. And then Bommarito made a I thought was a really interesting quote. And talking about where we are in the overall process. And he’s saying, you know, change is constant, but the rate of change is not constant now, and it’s not going to change. So we just need to find a way to live with it and make the world a better place. And, and I guess, you know, and I’ve even heard people saying, I texted Marlene, this before. Earlier today was, I heard someone say that 2023 was, was the year that we will finally reach the singularity. And so but I think going back to Bommarito is quote, you know about making the world a better place. Do you think that we have it in us to take tools like this? Let’s say that they do? bring value to it? Are we going to make the world a better place? Are we just going to screw this up?

Marlene Gebauer 31:43
Why do people always think we have the control over that? Like, why? Why is that? Why does that always come up? It’s like we don’t have control over that. People use it for good and bad. Well, also, they

Ashley Carlisle 31:52
gave us no restrictions, right? It’s like, they decided to leech this virus with it to see what happens. See how long it lives.

Tony Thai 32:03
Here, here’s the interesting thing, I forgot who measured it, but we have at our fingertips, way more opportunity than any other generation before except our rate of innovation has slowed down drastically, just drastically. And so like when you look at it, everyone has in their pockets, a supercomputer by 20 years, like 30 years ago, standards has a supercomputer kit. You know, we use it for things like Tic tock and Instagram and like looking at photos and watching videos like that’s the max that we’re going to do there. No, I don’t think will change the world for really materially the better from it, I think, you know, like with any tool, there is great benefit to it. But there’s always a cost. And to me the cost is education and longer attention spans right? To be able to write an essay requires you sit down, read a book, understand and comprehend it, think about it build a mental model, right? Taking the bar is not getting the answer, right, taking the bar is because the test behind taking the bar is not just getting the answer. It’s understanding the patterns and models around the law so that you can answer something when you don’t know how to win, you don’t have the exact answer. And so, you know, I find it fascinating when people run tests like that, because that’s great. Yes. If I had a database of all the answers in the world regarding this, then yes, I could probably answer a good chunk of it. Right. But when human judgment comes into it, I need to convince a jury are convinced the judge or convince the other party of a certain position. AI is not going to do that, right? It’s just not and once it does, it’s that singularity point before her decades from that decades. I think the closest thing that people are missing is actually neuro link. Neural link is probably the closest thing we’re gonna get to that singularity point. Why? Because that would employ a real live working brain to run compute, and our brains, whether people like it or not a hard the best supercomputers in the world right now in the universe. Right? These things we cannot replicate I was discussing with somebody on Twitter. Somebody was like, why can’t we just use Chappie T to replicate a brain and I’m like, that’s insane, guys, like, there’s just not enough compute. Even if there was an if we utilized all the compute in the world to work the way our brain worked, it would be incredibly slow. It would be incredibly slow, even now, that’s how powerful our brains are. And so I think the the takeaway from this is, I’m hoping it’ll inspire people to go out and try to build stuff to better other industries and realize the mistakes that we’re trying to make, which is to jump from A to C instead of, you know, progressing incrementally. So, alright, I’m off my soapbox. I’m sorry. That’s

Ashley Carlisle 34:58
Greg. Once I was Great. Yeah, that was one thing I’ll say I thought it was really interesting that they used I can’t remember, I think it was the commercial version of ChatGPT to answer the multiple choice bar exam questions, right. So one, I’d love to see how it did on the essay portion. I mean, it might have similar results. I don’t know, I know, it’s a lot easier to run all the multiple choice burst. But to I think this is a discussion that’s been happening in our industry for a long time. So I kind of wonder if those very smart guys who I’m big fans of both of them kind of did this on purpose to hit another issue, which is, is the bar exam outdated? Do we need to change what’s going on, especially with technology evolving? Because I think you know, all of us here are lawyers, we all studied for the bar, we could tell people who have not had that experience, a lot of it is just recall, you know, half the test is recall, you memorize it, you put it on whatever. And the other half takes a little bit more skill, a little bit more analysis, what have you. But the part that they tested it on was the pure memorization and recall part of it, there’s a little bit of strategy, but not that much. So I’m kind of wondering if that’s going to lead us to have another conversation in that direction. And that just happens to include shad GPT, as kind of like what gets it in the news. But maybe the bar exam will be for the better from them running those tests. And then also talking about kind of the greater good, so sorry, to jump here. One of the main reasons why I decided to move from big law and a job that I really liked. And, you know, clients that I really liked to joining Tony. And what he was building is I realized that people were going to try to solve these problems, people were going to see money when it came to lawyers and technology and the fact that we’re 20 years behind, and I didn’t want people to just disrespect our industry and not do it the right way. So when I saw people that were really caring about kind of our profession I wanted to jump in. And so that’s something that I’m kind of scared about, because I think Chad GPT hasn’t gotten to that yet. I think, you know, there, I don’t know the amount of lawyers involved. But I really haven’t seen it hit the tipping point where I’m just distressed. But I see other people try to apply that technology and somewhat interesting ways, including like the $1 million SCOTUS wager, and I’m just sitting there, like, Don’t disrespect or make a mockery of people’s blood, sweat and tears for a marketing ploy, because they worked for Elon Musk. And now you want to, you want to come into the legal industry and make a ton of money. Like you got to realize the amount of hardworking people here that you’re kind of the spitting on. And so that’s a big reason why we do what we do every day is like, you know, some days, it’s not fun, but we really do care about lawyers. And we think that even if they don’t understand technology on day one, we want to make sure they’re part of the process. And we want to make sure that we’re the bridge. So I’m curious to see if more people continue to annoy me by trying to jump in and just make a mockery of some things and not understand like, there’s a lot of smart people in the legal realm. We don’t need to explain things to us, we just need you to like, bring us you know, whatever tech solution will tell you yes or no. That’s it.

Greg Lambert 37:54
What about on the other end, we were talking about the challenge, and I’ll let people Google that. But on the other end, I think one of the one of the big issues and and Tony was was joking before we started that, you know that some some of this may be a solution in search of a problem. But one problem that this industry has, and it’s a significant problem is that we don’t have enough lawyers, legal professionals to serve the entire community that that we are supposed to serve. And so there’s so many people that go unrepresented. There’s so many people that need to seek relief from the courts that don’t have the ability or the knowledge or the pathway to get that relief that that they need. Can a tool like this? Well, let me put it to you two ways. Can a tool like this help plug some of that gap? Or can a tool like this actually exacerbate the problem?

Tony Thai 39:07
I don’t have enough experience in like, public interest or even the like, like what my practice was very much like m&a, like low niche work, not very kind of running the mill type of work that most folks would want to consume. So I preface my my thoughts with that. But if it’s anything like what some of these document preparation companies do for filing for, like, incorporation, I’m not gonna name the company because I know them. I like the guys but they create more work for us. When it gets to the lawyers then then help because I’m always fixing the documents, because people always want to do stuff that’s a little bit different and More times than not, it’ll help plug a plug a hole, but it doesn’t solve the problem. I think for people in in need of actual legal help, I worry that this tool would actually make things worse for folks and put them in a bad position because they think that they, they can they can do it without someone guiding them through the legal process. Because it’s not just the letter of the law. There’s, there’s the human component around it. You know, who do you have to get to Who do you have to call in order to get, you know, something filed or something through? When’s the deadline? The deadline says seven days, but in reality should be you shouldn’t send it by six days, because it was a courier, you know, all that stuff, things are waiting at the mailbox. Those are aspects that a quick Google might solve, or a system might solve. But then again, like, here’s my problem, and this kind of outside in approach, there is alternative solutions, right, which is, why don’t we focus on the infrastructure before we look from the outside? So what does that mean? That means improving websites for courts, that means improving our state websites, websites that cover regulation or laws that affect people and that they’re trying to find information for it? Why don’t we work on that, as opposed to trying to go backwards, and make something disorganized, organized, I would say that that’s probably the cheaper, more efficient solution. And we’re starting to see it like I would say, the California Secretary of State website has had major improvements over the last two, three years. It’s very impressive what’s what’s happened as compared to other websites from other states. So stuff like that I see as a more tangible and quicker solution to delivering actual health for folks as opposed to Candy’s Long Shot ideas, because he’s long shot ideas, or they’re not domain specific enough to be helpful.

Ashley Carlisle 41:55
The only thing I would add is there’s obviously a big access to justice problem in this country, and hopefully, with time that will be discussed, you know, law school will be cheaper, or what have you many things to make that less of a gap. However, you know, there are kind of rules in place now, like people represent themselves pro se or, you know, if you’re giving unofficial legal advice, or their stuff on the internet, it’s the disclosure. And it’s kind of the reminding someone that yes, you’re Googling this, but this is a real problem to you, that could have a lot of implications. And I think that is just something that I want included, as people develop these technologies, and they’re applied to kind of that gap is, it is great, we should keep innovating in that space. But don’t forget the basics of what this person is googling could affect their life. And they might not realize if they do it incorrectly, or if they’re late on something, the repercussions of that, and we should have all the disclosures and all the basic things we’re taught in law school, bar exam, you know, CLE, what have you embedded into everything, and that’s something I don’t want lost within the flash of all these new exciting things. It’s like the basics matter, especially once people’s lives

Tony Thai 43:01
died. Can I give you my long shot? Like, vision for Greg? Dream, though, is I was talking to another client, like, a few weeks ago, and he and I asked him, like, why keep bugging me with your legal questions. Now, I don’t say that. But I do ask them like, Hey, why, why did you go with me? And he’s like, Oh, you’re really good at just like, I like to talk to you. And you kind of like my therapist. And I use that phrase a lot is like, Oh, I’m just a business therapist, right, like people call me I most likely have their answer. But the reason why they call me is because I have their answer and can deliver in a way that makes them feel comfortable. I think everybody deserves that from a legal professional. And so the long shot the dream, the vision is that we get away from the billable hour, fix that problem from the law firm standpoint, so that the law firms can employ their their and deploy their their legal resources in a way that can support the community and help with pro bono services. That’s kind of a more for me a realistic dream and solution rather than then try to, like solve everything with technology. I know it sounds weird coming from a tech company. So

Greg Lambert 44:12
I laugh because my Facebook reminder showed me that 14 years ago today, I posted four articles about killing the billable hour. And it’s just as strong now if not stronger than it was 14 years ago. But one of the things that I’ve kind of heard and it could be pie in the sky, type of hope, hopefulness on this is that tools like this and even tools like like yours, Tony would give us the ability to take back some of our time. And if we can take back some of our time using automation, automating things that should be automated sets. No more argument, then we can make that transition away from charging for the billable hour and and then have that ability to use whatever excess time we have now, to do what you’re saying to build those relationships to be that counsel, to be that trusted counsel to people, and not feel like they’ve got the anvil of the billable hour hanging their head, in order to achieve that very valuable goal that we want to do. So, you know, I think we’re not there yet. I think we’re probably going to fall down before and look really bad before we can figure out ways to actually use tools to help us take back our time and a valuable way such as in order to realign our values away from from the billable hour. So what do you think? I mean, tools tools like yours, or is that kind of the goal that that you have on that? And how should law firms be looking at technology as it comes out? And is trustworthy? And using the tools and effective way?

Tony Thai 46:24
Yeah, so two fronts, one, I think, I’ve done, I’ve talked to a lot of law firms in the abstract, right, talk to them as a as an entity. And from our, from our experience, it’s not worked, right. And, you know, when we took a step back and did the post mortem on it, and we realize, the reason why it doesn’t work is when you say, firm, it’s this, like a amorphous, like very large ship that you think is all rowing in one direction. And it’s not, right, it’s a lot of sub cells of people were just trying to make their day to day work. And they’re all doing different things, all at different times on their own way. And so when we stopped looking at the firms as like, large ships, and we started thinking about them as fleets, right, and so you know, you’ve got different battalions in different spots, and they have a different way that they like to operate. We’ve gotten more surgical with it. And so when I talk to the firm’s, I tell them hey, like, don’t tell me what you think you did, the firm needs. Tell me what you think one group needs one group at a time, right? And we solve it one group at a time. And you know, who’s who’s the squeakiest wheel, because though, they’re most likely going to adopt a tech, if they’re complaining to you the most, and they’re complaining to you in the most of your staff and personnel probably annoyed by it. And so maybe we can solve that problem. And so we go in there first, I see you nodding your head. Yeah, that’s it’s it’s most likely those groups. So my recommendation is finding the incremental improvements, and building on those. And Greg, the reason why, like just Greg and Marlene right, the reason why like, I’m jaded by some of these things is I’ve seen it in the engineering field, where we are today, in 2023, is where we were 15 years ago, I kid you not like from a technological perspective, we haven’t improved that much from a programmer and engineers perspective. we’ve reinvented the wheel like two or three times, and then we’ve gotten back to this point. And then everyone’s just like, oh, it’s all cool and new. I’m like, Dude, this was here. 15 years ago, it’s remarkable that people have such short term memories. And to your point, like we’ve been talking about building innovation for three decades now. Right? It’s no longer innovation. It’s now like this is this is just, it’s it’s a broken record at this point. I don’t think that there is a clear cut answer to the billable hour. I think that from a customer perspective, like consumers of outside counsel, and from, you know, the law firm, billable hour, we find it all very funny that folks bill by the hour, because we actually just, you know, I ran an in house team, like, we paid what we thought was fair, and what we agreed to with folks, I never really thought about the billable hour, unless it was a second tier law firm. That was promising me value on the cost side versus quality. But at the top tier firms like Mayor Brown or Jackson, like those relationships that you built with clients as their business therapists and consultants like that, that doesn’t get measured by by, they gets measured in part by the billable hour, but the real performance is your output and what they feel they got in terms of value out of you. And so I don’t think that that’s a technological solution that when that one’s just a realization on the business side, and we’re seeing by the way, just to be clear, like our clients, our law firms that our clients are starting to move in that direction. We have plenty of clients that are billing flat rate. For for for matters and Using our tech to help deliver that value chain and increase the quality of life for their for their people. And so there’s like, there’s like 50 different factors that come into play. But, and I didn’t answer your question directly, but because I rambled for too long. But yeah, I would say when we looked at firms like, we stopped thinking about them as these ginormous entities, and we started looking more at the individual. And tools like these, like Chechi Beatty, that can empower the individual definitely will help. It’ll just help inspire them to want to improve their process. And it might not be Chechi Beatty, that’s the thing that excites me the most about the spec is it gets people inspired. And they’re like, dude, this can actually help. And then they realize a limitation that like, you know what, maybe I can do better about setting up a system. And being more organized about how I reuse these forms with these data. Now we’re seeing clients come to us with a whole action plan. That’s, by the way, brings me so much joy. It also removes a lot of headache when clients come to us and they said, we’ve seen this tech, this tech, this tech, this is what we want you to do here, here and here. Can you do this, this and this? That’s beautiful. We’ll flick three years ago, folks were coming in and be like, I have no idea what we’re doing. Can you just automate all of it? Which is just an, you know, unrealistic approach?

Greg Lambert 51:19
Well, I think our whole audience was shocked when you said, big law firms are not smooth sailing vessels. I understand.

Tony Thai 51:29
You know what, there’s, there are many folks in law firms that think that way. And it surprised me because once they get to partnership, they’re like, oh, what this this is what, this isn’t what I signed up for you guys Robbins,

Greg Lambert 51:42
where did this coming from? No, no. This

Marlene Gebauer 51:45
is just a microcosm. And then all of a sudden, they see the bigger picture. It’s like, oh, that’s a shocker,

Tony Thai 51:52
though. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, my final point with it is like, despite my negativity, I’m very excited by the Tech because like what I said before, it inspires people to want to improve. And that’s better marketing lane and a use of time and resources for everyone. Right? Like if he if he can inspire people to get better. I’m cool with that or and want to build better solutions that makes brings me a lot of joy. Like what, what I worry about and what I want to warn people of like, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And so like, Guys, come on, like, get excited, but at the same time, like, just temper your expectations around what it can can and can’t do is just trying to be the adult in the room.

Marlene Gebauer 52:39
Gonna say just like your parents taught us and just like our parents taught us. Yeah,

Tony Thai 52:42
yeah, I was terrible at that just.

Greg Lambert 52:47
All right, well, Tony Thai and Ashley Carlisle from HyperDraft. Ai. I want to thank both of you for coming in and having this roundtable discussion. This is this has been great. I’m probably still drinking a little bit of the Kool Aid, but I’m much more self aware now.

Tony Thai 53:03
Yes. Thanks for having us. Thank you so much.

Unknown Speaker 53:06
Thank you. Super fun.

Marlene Gebauer 53:07
So thanks to everyone for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoyed the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at gay Bauer am on Twitter,

Greg Lambert 53:19
And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter. Tony, where can they find you?

Tony Thai 53:24
Actually what we’re working, they find us

Ashley Carlisle 53:26
follow us on HyperDeck you can follow us at HyperDraft Inc. on all social media. We especially love LinkedIn. You can find Tony at Tony Thai. He’s also linked on our Twitter account at HyperDraft Inc. And you can check out our website hyperdraft.ai.

Marlene Gebauer 53:42
If you have any comments about the podcast, you can leave us a voicemail on our geek and review Hotline at 713-487-7821. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert 53:55
Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, Tony, Ashley, we’ll see you guys later.

Marlene Gebauer 53:59
Okay, bye bye. Back dibbles back and back

Mollie Nichols is the CEO of Redgrave Data, a company that uses data analytics and technology to assist the legal industry. After leaving Hogan Lovells, Mollie launched Redgrave Data in January of 2022 and has seen a strong demand for their services in data analytics, regulation, compliance, and internal investigations. Companies often seek the expert assistance of Redgrave Data in order to improve efficiency among the law firms, eDiscovery services, ALSPs, and internal legal operations. She is working to move legal departments away from being seen as a “black hole for money” and focused more on the unique and valuable in achieving the strategic goals of the company. One of the hidden gems in these legal departments is the insights that the legal team can uncover through visualization and analysis of the data within the department. 

• Redgrave Data Website
• Mollie Nichols – Bio
• Mollie Nichols – LinkedIn

We are SUPER GEEKED about our new logo design. Shoutout to logo designer @ChangoATX who did a wonderful job and got our new logo completed just in time for the holidays!! Let us know what you think.

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer 0:07
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert 0:14
And I’m Greg Lambert. So Marlene, I’m really excited about…

Marlene Gebauer 0:18
We have a superize for everybody. Yes.

Greg Lambert 0:24
So a brand new logo for The Geek in Review. And I want to thank Juan out of Austin, who goes by @ChangoATX.

Marlene Gebauer 0:33
Thank you Juan. It’s great.

Greg Lambert 0:34
Yeah. So we’ve had some fun with the logo. We’d like to hear what you think about it as well.

Marlene Gebauer 0:40
Absolutely. We’re getting some good feedback when we posted it. So I’m pleased because it was a really fun process. And I think it’s a really fun logo.

Greg Lambert 0:48
Yeah, yeah, it definitely puts the “geek” in “the geek in review. Super Geek. So yeah, so we’re having fun with that. This week. We have Mollie Nichols from Redgrave Data, she talks to us about her move over from Hogan Lovells earlier this year after winning the Financial Times Award for Most Innovative law firm. And she moved over to actually what was her old law firm, sorry, a new business spin off called Redgrave Data, which is a completely separate business entity from Redgrave LLP, where she once was a partner.

Marlene Gebauer 1:23
Yeah, so in this new role, she can work with many clients instead of just one firm’s clients. So we talked about the scope of data and how she views data in law firms and legal departments as a unique and valuable resource that needs unique and valuable insights that her team brings to her clients through visualization and analysis.

Greg Lambert 1:44
It was a great discussion, so I hope everyone enjoys it as much as we did.

We’d like to welcome Mollie Nichols, co founder and CEO at Redgrave Data. Ali, thanks for taking the time to join us here at The Geek in Review.

Mollie Nichols 2:00
Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for having me, Greg.

Marlene Gebauer 2:03
Mollie, we’re a couple of data geeks ourselves. So would you mind giving us a little background on the mission there at Redgrave Data and especially the idea that that Redgrave LLP, the law firm, reached out to you to create this offshoot that is Redgrave Data? What was the inspiration of getting you and your team over from Hogan Lovells and starting the business?

Mollie Nichols 2:25
Well, thank you, Marlene. So there’s a lot to unpack there. So I was a partner at Redgrave LLP a few years ago, and I left in 2016. To focus more on the data side of the business. At the time I was a partner at we just call it LLP, since Redgrave is the same in both companies. So when I was at LLP, it was just practicing law, there was no data component, they didn’t host data, they didn’t, you know, have the types of capabilities of that a service provider would have they were strictly a law firm. So I left and I ended up going back to big law. When I was at Hogan Lovells, I had the opportunity to build a global team to deal with issues about client data that were unique, and that I was given full rein to pretty much do what I wanted, that was best for our clients, best for the practice, easiest for the lawyers to be able to use the tools to benefit clients. And it was a fabulous experience. And while I was doing that, I built a team. That was my dream team. I’ve been in this business a long time. And I’ve been practicing law for a long time. I had an aha moment, about the turn of the century. So, it was about 1999-2000. I was a special assistant to the Texas Attorney General. And he was doing an investigation and it was a consumer protection matter. It was investigating pharmaceutical companies. All of the documents at that time were produced in an electronic format. Well, in the year 2000, the tools were not like they are today. And so we had I think we had summation in house at that point in time. But it couldn’t handle the volume of data that we had, and the type of data that we had. So, I did some research, and I found an analytics tool. This analytics tool was I’ve never seen anything like it. So, I ended up feeding all the data into this tool, but I drafted a dummy document it was, I don’t think we call them dummy documents anymore. But if I could find a smoking gun document, you know, this is what I wanted to find. And it was literally three or four sentences. It was a paragraph; it wasn’t a true document. I fed it into the analytics engine. And it started ranking the documents on how close they were to what I drafted. And the documents we found in that data set were amazing. So we found one smoking gun after another by using this analytics tool. It was that moment in time that I realized how powerful technology was in the practice of law, the hardest thing lawyers have to do is to distill all this information and find what they need that most important information so that they can advise a client, and they can develop an appropriate legal strategy. To me that was my aha moment is like, this is it, this is what I need in order to do my job. So what happened after that? Well, we went through a period of time, you may or may not remember that this but you know, we’d have email, we print out email, and then we would scan, scan it back into an electronic form, and then OCR it so that we could search it. And then we did coding. I mean, it was such a bad process. I fought through that time. And I kept saying, technology is helpful to lawyers. It’s not this thing that we unfortunately got in this, this weird, circular process. So jumping back to today, that was my aha moment. And I wanted to make a difference in the industry with using technology in law. I had that opportunity at Hogan Lovells, I assembled an amazing team. It was this time last year that we ended up well, Hogan Lovells won the Financial Times award for the most innovative law firm for the business of law. And it was based on a submission from my group. We were doing just things that I’ve never seen done and within a law firm before. And so, we won that award. I was named one of the top five innovative change makers in North America. And we were nominated for another analytics award as well. So, we were writing pretty high this time last year, and Jonathan Redgrave called me. So, Marlene, you didn’t think I was going to circle back to your question.

Marlene Gebauer 8:01
We’re getting there. I knew you were getting there. This is a great setup.

Mollie Nichols 8:08
So yeah, Jonathan called me, and he said, Hey, why don’t you come back to the Redgrave fold and set up a company? That is basically what you’re doing at Hogan Lovells, but do it for all clients, not just token level clients. And it was that opportunity that I said, absolutely, I’m going to do it. So I was lucky enough to bring some members of my team from Hogan with me, but then also adding Dave Lewis, who was the chief data scientist at BrainSpace. He came over and as our Chief Data scientific officer, we assemble this amazing team. Now we are able to service all clients. So it’s not just Hogan Lovells clients, and it’s not just Redgrave LLP clients. So we’re a separate entity, a total separate entity, we’re an LLC, and we’re open for business to meet our client’s needs. Our clients are law firms, and large organizations, tech giants seem to find us. We help them with all sorts of issues. But you know, the mission of what Redgrave Data is to to be that technology that assists in the practice of law in a meaningful way. It’s not a one size fits all type of Proposition which we see it a lot of service providers, they get the client data, they have a process, and it’s just crammed through that process. That’s not what we do. It’s so have individual, it’s custom, whether it’s putting together commercial tools that are currently available, or we’re building our own tools, we have a lot of custom tools, or it’s stacking tools, commercial tools together and maybe writing some glue code or something like that to put them together. But, you know, we tailor our services to the actual needs of the client.

Greg Lambert 10:27
Yeah. So you launched Redgrave Data earlier this year. And like you said, you brought over you brought over your team you had created the stream team at Hogan Lovells, but you also brought in people like Scott Culbertson as your chief strategy officer, you’d mentioned Dave Lewis from the brain space. You also had brought in Mark Noll and Lindsey worth that you work with at Hogan Lovells just kind of talk us through what life has been like and what your experience has been like, since you’ve, you’ve launched this in. And I’d like to know is this something that a firm the size of Redgrave gives you more flexibility to do things like this, versus a big law firm? Can a big law firm create an offshoot like this as well?

Mollie Nichols 11:15
Well, I think we have that off shoot at Hogan Lovells except we only serve as Hogan Lovells clients. So here we’re able to service anyone, it doesn’t have to be Redgrave LLP clients. We’re just associated with them. You know, we’re totally separate LLC separate company. The law firm has a small ownership interest in in our company. But other than that, we don’t have any other type of integration. So when we launched this year, yes, I had my dream team and you know, other people in the industry, like Scott Culbertson and I had worked with him for years on modeling, you know, looking at different pricing, your ways to price services, and he was instrumental, and some of the things that I did it at Hogan Lovells, so I turned to him for, you know, that piece of the business. So we knew we had a great concept. We’re all very, very passionate about what we do. We love what we do, we have a good time. But we did wonder, you know, okay, we’re gonna put out our shingle what’s gonna happen, you know, are we going to get any business? Are we going to stand there and say, Oh, we, we’ve been doing this a long time. You should come and are they gonna?

Greg Lambert 12:38
Come to us? I’m an expert.

Mollie Nichols 12:45
So we really didn’t know. So it was a little scary. I mean, those of us who came from very comfortable jobs, you know, this was the new frontier. But for some of us who are kind of at the twilight of our career, I’ll put it that way. Dave Lewis and I are about about the same. It’s we want to hit a home run. And we want to go out with a bang. And we felt this was our opportunity. And in fact, it happened. So we launched at the end of January of 2022. By March, we had two of the big tech giants, who had engaged us to do some really fascinating work, the kind of work that we were looking for the kind Yeah, that’s in our sweet spot that were like the red Adair, if you know, firefighting of, you know, in this area, if you have a complex problem, and it’s on fire, and you need help immediately, call Redgrave Data because they’ll get you out of it. And so that’s how best actually what happened. We got calls, we got involved in some really big projects. One of the nice projects, one of the first ones that we had actually came from a former partner at Hogan Lovells he had gone to another law firm. And when he heard we were out on our own, he gave us a call. And that was one of our first clients. And so there have been some surprises, things we didn’t anticipate. We were really heavy to begin with on our consulting. But now we’re we’re leaning more on the tech building side. So we’re building all sorts of things right now. We did some building upfront, but we’re building a lot right now. And that’s the fun part. I think when you can offer something that doesn’t exist, and it is unique and tailored to what a client needs. There’s a lot of satisfaction there.

Marlene Gebauer 14:58
What are the common scenarios Where you see there were companies seek the expert assistance of Redgrave Data, like, what are the benefits of that you can share? Or that you share with clients when they’re considering their business goals? And what do you tell them can be avoided in doing so?

Mollie Nichols 15:16
Yeah. So, again, Marlene, us these with better have a lot to unpack.

Marlene Gebauer 15:22
We’ll do one. We’ll do one at a time. So I know I’d like I always like, Okay, what was that part of the question? So what are what are some of the common scenarios where companies seek that that expert assistance? Like where, why When are they coming to you?

Mollie Nichols 15:37
Yeah. So it’s for complex data issues in a legal matter, or they want to do something, but it’s too expensive to do it the way that is normally done. You know, we may automate a process or we may provide a data visualization that would allow attorneys to understand what they were looking at to give advice. To give you some specific examples. I told you that former partner Hogan Lovells gave us a call. Well, we had built a bot for him at Hogan Lovells. And he wanted us to do something similar. We built it differently, though, we didn’t use the same kind of technology, we were more cloud based for this one. So he needed regulatory filings, he needed those collected from the regulatory websites, their public documents, he was having lawyers go on the site and downloading these documents and all the metadata surrounding them. And he was having them do this every day. And it was costing the client 1000s of dollars a day. So what we did with that is we automated that process, built a scraper a bot to go in and pull down those documents. And then we put it in a traditional type of review tool, so that lawyers can do their comments, do codes or categorization or whatever they want to do there. And we do this every night. So what was costing the client 1000s of dollars a day, now cost $3 a day. So, you know, there’s an upfront cost, but you know, they make that up, the return on investment is really quick, especially when they were charging 1000s of dollars a day for lawyers to do that. But you know, we’re doing almost 1000 URLs a night to pull down this information. And it’s worth it to the client. They had a situation they wanted to automate, make it cheaper and make the client happy. And so we worked with this law firm to do

Marlene Gebauer 17:55
it yet. So it sounds like they come to you for creative solutions

Mollie Nichols 18:01
when they have a data problem. So what do you see are the benefits of doing that? Not only just the benefits, but what are they avoiding, and actually taking advantage of that. They’re avoiding wasting money. They’re avoiding making decisions without all the information they need. Legal departments are typically seen as this black hole for money. You know, so you have a litigation, and you just throw all your resources at it and just hope you get through it in one piece. That’s how it’s always been viewed. Law firms and their clients are getting more savvy about dealing with the business and understanding it is a business, understanding that the business uses sophisticated tools. The lawyers haven’t always used sophisticated tools, but the businesses are and that’s important that their lawyers use the same types of tools they have in their business. And also by using these tools, the tools are able to provide information that allow for strategic decision making. This is very important. If you go into these matters, and you really don’t have all the information, then how are you going to adequately represent your client without spending a lot of money to get those documents and look at everything and you might not see relationships between conversations and documents like you would in an electronic means. So it’s really just taking the law practice and incorporating practices that businesses do in their day to day business. They’ve got Legal Operations people now. So they do want to manage Share the spend, there are legal project managers in law firms now that assist with that process. You know, all of this is about the business and their goals. But rather than being viewed as a black hole, they can be a partner in the business and understand the stresses and strains of the business.

Greg Lambert 20:21
I think one of the things that the reason that I think legal departments have been viewed in the past as a, as a black hole as overhead is that these departments tend to be reactive, rather than proactive. And it could be as simple as leveraging the fact that you have compliance issues that you have to stay up on top of, also, again, you’re talking about more legal ops teams working within the legal departments, that it’s not just, you know, taking that call from the sales guy saying, I screwed up, you know, and I’m going to need your help. But rather, it’s constantly staying involved in the strategy of the business. And one of the things that we’ve learned over the past 20 years is that, you know, data is the, you know, the new goldmine. It’s the, you know, what is the data is the new oil. And legal has a has a significant piece of that. And I imagine that there are some people that know that but would reach out to someone like you to help kind of guide them through that process of understanding how to set up the data. What is it that your kind of advice when it comes to the data? What’s important, then I want to I want to tag that on to another question here. But I’ll give you a chance to process that one first.

Mollie Nichols 21:56
Well, what’s important is, what they’re trying to achieve. There are a lot of ways that you can approach a project. And so, we need to understand what the legal needs are and what the business goals are, in order to craft the right solution. So, the one I described to you, that was the bot that was pulling down the filings, there was a business goal there. And the business goal was to save money, they really needed the information. But it was really expensive. So how could we take that pain point away? We do that also in, you know, litigation, we want to see what they need to achieve, what is their goal? And how can we best do that in a way that we can validate if we need to, we can testify about, but we ultimately save money, like reusing lawyer coding decisions, is something that Dave Lewis is an expert. He’s published scientific articles on it, he is the guy. And he has gone into some litigation this year. And he’s made these models. So, he’s reusing work product from with the same client from one service provider with a proprietary tool to another service provider that has relativity. So, to make a model like that, there’s, I’m not a scientist, so I’m not going to go into those details. But, you know, it takes that level of expertise to be able to validate that what you’ve done is you’ve reused that that work product and save the client, the lawyer time, the technical time, you know, it’s very satisfying.

Greg Lambert 23:47
It’s nice that you’re not there, you’re not their law, firm your data. Right? How would you describe that? Are you the data analyst or use the What’s your pitch for that?

Mollie Nichols 24:03
Well, our tagline is data done differently. So, I love it. I love it. So, you know, we go in and solve the most complex data issues in these legal matters. And, you know, it really depends. It’s not all litigation, and it’s its regulatory, and its investigations. It’s all sorts of things. So,

Greg Lambert 24:30
yeah, well, that ties in I was listening to your interview that you did earlier this year with Tom Fox, and you said something that really caught my attention. And that was the fact that you don’t look at the data as just a commodity. And I know you’ve been dealing with, you know, legal, regulatory and business aspects of data since the 90s. And so I really wanted to kind of flesh that out a little bit and so ask you why it is Your perspective is that you don’t look at data as just a commodity. And how do you go about your approach on analyzing it and processing and evaluating the data of your clients?

Mollie Nichols 25:12
So shout out to Tom Fox, they’re my fellow Longhorn. Hook ’em horns. Great, I understand you went to OU law school. So I’m sorry about that.

Greg Lambert 25:22
I’m not going to talk about the game this year.

Mollie Nichols 25:25
Okay, there, there you go. Data is where the most important information is. And you need to figure out how to use that data, to pull that information that is most important out so that the lawyers can make a legal strategy can talk with a client about the risks involved, can talk about a specific facts and their relationships that they see within the data. So if it’s viewed as a commodity, then it’s kind of that one size fits all. But we see it as that goldmine of information, and that information is important for decision making. It’s just like running a business, the data that is so important, the metrics that you’re collecting, you know, just all that information in order to make your decisions. That’s why data visualizations are very important to us. lawyers tend to react really well to them. So if you’re taking structured data, and you’re putting it in a fashion that shows, charts and graphs, or a heat map, you know, that’s the type of thing that we really enjoy doing. Because it’s a meaningful way to present the data. There was one matter that we had, where we had the sales of a product, but then we went ahead and layered some geolocation data on top of it. So we were able to develop a heat map. And then we were able to see what our clients share of that particular product was in the market. And very helpful for the lawyers then to make their legal arguments, their legal strategy. So you know, it’s pulling that information out.

Greg Lambert 27:17
One of the things I noticed is that you guys are going you’re going into Europe now, right, you’re doing business deals in Europe is that

Mollie Nichols 27:26
we are so our clients are global, okay. And some of our clients require that we have a presence, where they are. So we are currently setting up a GmbH in in Germany, that hopefully, will will be set up by the end of the year, but it might be January, and then we’re also setting up a UK Corporation and that one’s about done. So

Greg Lambert 27:54
does that I know there are different regulatory aspects of Europe in the UK, how does that affect you going forward, because I mean, you’re just now you’re not even a year old company. And you’re already expanding internationally is that how’s that affecting the company in this growth.

Mollie Nichols 28:14
So that was a part of our path. We knew what kind of clients we were going to attract, and they weren’t going to be within the US borders, they were going to expand. So we were going to need to come up with solutions that deal with that cross border issues. And we use a lot of cloud services. So we’re able to containerize our applications that we build, and put them into an AWS environment. And we can spin it up anywhere in the world, that that we we need to. So you know at that point, we can work on the data, minimum minimization, and all of those things that are important from a data protection standpoint, and moving data across border, so we can keep the data where it sits. So we use a lot of cloud computing resources, because of that,

Marlene Gebauer 29:13
in light of that, what role does data privacy play in Redgrave data’s work? And how do you ensure compliance with new privacy legislation? And that would be again, both here and you know, in Europe, where the standards are,

Mollie Nichols 29:28
are higher. First, I will say we are not a law firm and we do not practice law. But these things

Greg Lambert 29:37
to fall back on, isn’t it?

Marlene Gebauer 29:39
That’s a good first step first.

Mollie Nichols 29:40
I love it. We understand that there are challenges in different places around the world or even in the US. And we need to understand what those challenges are. And we build a process a workflow that will deal with Have those legal challenges. And so that’s why we have the option, you know, to host data anywhere in the world, you know where the data is located is really important. And then we have other processes that we can use to ensure that, you know, if we need to, to anonymize documents, or whatever it is, we need to do we incorporate that into the process.

Marlene Gebauer 30:27
We talk a lot about data visualization and tools like Power BI and the power automate suite that allow clients to gather, distill and present data in a meaningful way. And one thing I saw that was actually pretty interesting is now you can actually, there’s something you can overlay where you can ask a question, a specific question based on the data that you’re seeing in the visuals, either verbally, or just typing it in. And it’ll kind of focus on that. So how do these tools, you know, either affect data that the company maintains or uses or how they use it? And how does that change your approach to data and the work product of your clients? So like, how does it change what they’re doing? And then as an effect, how does it change what you’re doing?

Mollie Nichols 31:19
Well, from our standpoint, it’s just another tool in the toolkit. If a client needs to use a tool, where they are able to query it in a way, that would not be your standard way, where you need to find out a sentiment, you know, to do a sentiment analysis, there are tools out there that we can do that, even in the cloud. So we have found that there are tools that are not necessarily use for legal, that are cheaper, they’re better, they’re faster than what we find in the legal space.

Greg Lambert 31:53
I’m shocked.

Mollie Nichols 32:03
Yeah, right, we do look for all types of tools, and they’re all just tools in the tool belt, you know, what we have found that clients are really looking for on the data visualizations, they want to be able to understand these this large amount of data and compare it to others. To give you an example of what we found is a big challenge with our corporate clients. They’ll hire a bunch of eDiscovery providers. And they’ll be their preferred network 2345, however many, but they don’t have a way to measure how their performance how well are they actually doing. And so one of the things, we’ve got a big client right now that has us doing that very thing. We are doing onboarding of their preferred providers. And then we’re providing a dashboard, data visualization, to pull consistent types of KPIs from each service provider, so that they can compare them from a performance perspective, and all the KPIs that matter to this specific client, you know, getting that digital visualization, and then being able to use it to look at all of their providers to say, oh, this one’s not doing this. And it shows on the bottom line that they didn’t use analytics here, or, you know, they didn’t even use email threading, and this one saved us 30% When they did you know, so it’s whatever the client decides what they want to measure. But those are ways that clients are finding are valuable to them from a business perspective, so that they can meet their business goals.

Greg Lambert 33:56
Well, Mollie, we got to the point in the interview now where we ask everyone our crystal ball questions, so we’re going to hit you up with it as well. What changes or challenges do you see on the horizon for the legal industry in the next two to five years.

Mollie Nichols 34:15
So in some respects, it’s not going to change, you’re still going to have lawyers who know that there, there’s technology out there that exists that can help them, but they’ll either not understand what it is or what it does, and they won’t use it. And then there are judges who are out there that are not sophisticated on the technology and lawyers come in and they’ve used the technology in the appropriate way. And the judge doesn’t understand or won’t accept, I think those are givens and that will still continue to see. What we will see though is that AI will make a real impact. You know, when it started it will As AI was smoke and mirrors, it’s like, what are we doing now that we can call AI? It’s so much more now. And we’re gonna see it being used in a way that’s going to impact our clients. And the legal matters. You know, the volumes of data continue to grow. I mean, exponentially. We couldn’t even fathom this five years ago, the disparate data sources that we have to find the relationships between that, to do that type of analysis, we need very sophisticated tools. So it’s going to be a big challenge, because of the volume, the complexity of where the data sits, you know, we’ve got data in a company everywhere. How do you get it in a way to be able to use it meaningfully? I think AI will have that big impact.

Marlene Gebauer 35:52
Well, it sounds like we have our work cut out for us still. So, Mollie Nichols, co-founder and CEO at Redgrave Data. Thank you so much for talking with us today.

Greg Lambert 36:05
Yeah, thanks.

Mollie Nichols 36:06
Well, thank you, Greg, and Marlene for having me.

Greg Lambert 36:11
It was great having Mollie on the show. And again, one of the things I really enjoyed about the conversation was the fact that, you know, she does look at data as being not a commodity, that you can’t just take anybody’s data, send it through the same process and expect to have valuable insights. On the other end,

Marlene Gebauer 36:35
different clients have different needs. Yeah. The other thing I liked is that she’s using competitive intelligence, looking at the client’s businesses, not just their legal problems, but she’s sort of looking at their business in order to give insights. And that’s something that I don’t know that every firm is doing. The other thing I like is she was really bold about saying, you know, AI is going to be on the forefront for the for the future. I’m like, well done. Yeah. See in a year?

Greg Lambert 37:08
Well, and I agree, I think she hit some really good points on her predictions, and that you’re still going to run into lawyers and judges that are not going to move the ball forward very far. But I think they’re going to be, you know, they’re not going to be the majority anymore. I think people are seeing the value of some of these automated processes, some of these AI tools that are out there, that, you know, I it’s, it’s just going to be the norm going forward in and to fight that is going to be a losing battle.

Marlene Gebauer 37:49
Well, I have some healthy skepticism there. But I do hope she’s right.

Greg Lambert 37:53
Yeah, me too. So thanks again to Mollie Nichols from Redgrave Data for coming in and talking to us and talking data. We love data

Marlene Gebauer 38:03
we do. And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert 38:16
And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter,

Marlene Gebauer 38:19
or you can leave us a voicemail on The Geek in Review Hotline at 713-487-7821 and as always, the music here is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert 38:30
Thanks, Jerry. All right, Marlene, see you later.

Marlene Gebauer 38:32
Okay, bye

This week, we have a jam-packed episode featuring five of our colleagues from a 2022 American Association of Law Libraries panel on APIs.

• Emily Rushing, Director of Competitive Intelligence, Haynes and Boone, LLP
• Pam Noyd, Information Resources Manager at Foley & Lardner LLP
• Erik Adams, Manager of Library Digital Initiatives Manager of Library Digital Initiatives at Sidley Austin LLP, and Chief of Technology at Golden Arrow Publishing LLC
• Keli Whitnell, Director of Firm Intelligence at Troutman Pepper
• Christopher O’Connor, Senior Director, Product Management at LexisNexis

• Afraid of APIs? Implementing APIs for Law Firm Data Requires Soft Skills as Well
• How To Evaluate and Get Started with Data APIs
• If Data is the New Gold, then Law Libraries are a Goldmine: Panning for Gold with APIs

Brad Blickstein discusses the potential for a recession and its effects on the legal industry. He speculates that Alternative Legal Service Providers (ALSPs) will benefit from the downturn, as law departments will be unable to increase headcount. He also discusses the question of where the work done by ALSPs will go once the recession ends and whether law firms will be able to regain the work.

Marlene Gebauer 0:08
Welcome to The Geek in Review, podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert 0:14
And I’m Greg Lambert. But Marlene, I think we may have our most JAM PACKED episode ever this week. I think I was counting, including our crystal ball guests. We have six people on the show this week.

Marlene Gebauer 0:28
I know because you know, we’re not overachievers or anything like that at all.

Greg Lambert 0:32
Not at all. So I know it took us a while to line up our API guests. So the more the merrier on on that one. But first up, we have Brad Blickstein is back with us to answer our crystal ball question. And on this he not so subtly Hence, if there is a recession coming, you know, ALSPs, the alternative legal service providers are going to pounce and take on these opportunities instead. Sounds like he thinks it’s gonna be a double whammy toward law firms.

Marlene Gebauer 1:05
Yeah, that will be interesting to see what happens next year. So for our main portion of the show, we brought in an entire panel of guests to talk about the opportunities that API’s are going to bring to the legal industry, and how law librarians are positioned to be valuable pieces and what our panel calls the Lego Land of API’s. Yes,

Greg Lambert 1:26
I had to hold your Lego Lego. Yeah, apparently it’s late API’s of API’s. So I had to really kind of hold back on the Lego references and go well, as long as I don’t step on these API’s I’ll be because it’s painful, what is painful, it is painful. So let’s go ahead and jump in and listen to Brad Blickstein. And then we’ll get right into our panel.

Brad Blickstein 1:53
Thanks, Greg. Again, I’m Brad Blickstein, Principal Blickstein Group and Partner and co-head of the new law practice at Baretz+Brunelle. I think we may be heading into recessionary times. And as we do, I think that’s going to be really good news for the ALSPs and the other folks who are non law firms and interested in taking on some of that work from law departments that they will not be able to do themselves because they can’t add headcount. And I think the very big question is maybe looking at hopefully not too long into your two to five year window is as we emerge from those recessionary times. Where will that work go? Will the ALSPs be able to keep it? Will it come back in house as it’s historically done from law firms? Or will law firms be able to get back in the game and get and get,they’re never going to leave the game? But will law firms be able to say okay, now that you can afford law firms, why don’t you send that work here? I think that is the biggest question. Actually. I think that’s the the answer to that question over the next 10 years, is probably the single biggest question facing our industry for the next 50.

Greg Lambert 2:53
Do you think regulatory wise that there will be a lessening of the lawyer run, you know, completely lawyer owned and operated ALSPs? Or do you see what’s going on in Arizona and Utah expanding?

Brad Blickstein 3:11
I think that’s it’s I think it’s definitely expanding. I don’t think it’ll expand in a huge way during the two to five year timeframe that you presented. But I feel like you know, California and or New York drop in a real way I know, there’s some talking in California, I think that’s gonna make a big difference. And, and yeah, but I think over a longer horizon. Absolutely. We are headed there.

Greg Lambert 3:31
Thank you, Brad.

Marlene Gebauer 3:35
We’d like to welcome Emily Rushing, Pam Noyd, EriK Adams, and Christopher O’Connor to The Geek in Review. Keli Whitnell, who is also part of our panel today is having some technical difficulties, and we hope she can join later. Everyone else. Welcome. And thank you for joining.

Greg Lambert 3:50
All right, well, let’s go quickly around the horn here and let everyone introduce themselves, we get a full house. So what I want everyone to do is just introduce themselves. Tell us where you’re working and what city you’re in. And that will allow our audience to put a voice to your name. So Emily, let’s start with you.

Emily Rushing 4:10
Hi, everyone. Thanks for having us. Emily Rushing. I’m the director of competitive intelligence for Haynes and Boone and I’m in Dallas, Texas.

Greg Lambert 4:20
Pam Noyd.

Pam Noyd 4:21
Okay, again, Thanks, Greg and Marlene for having us. I’m really excited to be here with you all. I’m the Information Resources Manager with Foley and Lardner and I’m coming to you from Madison, Wisconsin.

Greg Lambert 4:36
Keli any chance that you can hear us?

Keli Whitnell 4:48
I’m Keli Whitnell again, just like Pam, so happy to be here. I am the director of firm intelligence at Troutman pepper.

Greg Lambert 4:56
In what city are you out of?

Keli Whitnell 4:59
Atlanta? Forgive me.

Greg Lambert 5:02
Erik Adams.

Erik Adams 5:02
I’m Erik Adams. I am the Manager of Library Digital Initiatives at Sidley Austin. I’m also the co founder of golden arrow publishing. And I am based in while I’m currently in Pasadena, California.

Greg Lambert 5:17
All right. And last but not least, Christopher O’Connor,

Christopher O’Connor 5:20
I again, delighted to join. My name is Chris O’Connor. I’m a Product Director at LexisNexis. And I’m based in London in the UK.

Marlene Gebauer 5:29
We’ve all been hearing more and more about API’s and how, after a couple of decades, there seems to finally be more access to information out there in the legal information world, which we can access via API’s. And this panel had a panel on API’s and quite a few legal tech articles about it. So tell us about the panel and how you approach the topic. Emily, do you want to start?

Emily Rushing 5:55
I’ll start us off, thank you, if I may say, so I thought the panel was very well received. Chris is stepping in for Dave DiCicco from Lexis, who was on the original panel. But as you said, we had some good media coverage, discussing what is still I think, relatively new in the law library world, to have librarians talking about API’s to have librarians utilizing API’s coming to understand the technology, advising their institutions on their use, working through licensing and acquisition of API enabled content. So we approached it from a very multidisciplinary standpoint, we each as you heard from our various job titles, various locations around the world, various firms, from sizes from kind of practice area of focus, it’s a diverse group, this panel brought a lot of different perspectives, and backgrounds. And as Pam and I were talking about, range or spectrum of technical proficiency, right, some of us are actual developers and programmers, some of us are really good at knowing about the content, and vetting a vendor and saying, This is somebody we like working with, we trust their data, we can recommend this product. So we wanted to bring a more holistic perspective to this topic to the AALL audience last summer, and I feel that that was pretty well received.

Marlene Gebauer 7:24
Yeah, I perfect. Forgive me, I forgot to note that this was a AALL panel at the conference this past summer.

Greg Lambert 7:30
So what what kind of topics did you cover at the conference itself? And what were the reactions or questions that you got from from the audience?

Erik Adams 7:38
The panel title, and I fear, I’m gonna get it wrong, because it was very, very long was, I think the role of the law librarian in library or in law firm automation API, I think there were a few more buzzwords.

Greg Lambert 7:58
That sounds like an academic set that one.

Erik Adams 8:03
So so the panel itself began with a quick overview of what an API is. And Dave handled that. And then we sort of jumped into a lot of these, a discussion of the projects that we’ve all been working on. And also, frankly, a lot of just like the title of the program where the law librarian in the law firm fits in. I think Emily kind of hinted at that, because these are all a lot of the newer API’s that are coming out now are coming from vendors that law librarians have already been working with, literally for decades. And so we as a profession have a role in the selection and the recommendation of these products, and should not shy away from them just because it’s Ooh, scary technology stuff.

Greg Lambert 8:49
Right. And, Chris, do you mind just giving us a brief kind of description of what an API is? And what that means for the vendor and relationship with the with the client customer?

Christopher O’Connor 9:04
Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll do my best to do as well as they did, I’m actually going to steal his metaphor that he used, I think it’s a good one. But API stands for Application Programming Interface. And it’s basically a pipeline between two different computer environments. And it’s a really, you know, the best practice way of sharing data at scale, and sharing data on a repeated basis. And you know, you can you can share data with a one off data load, but really, when you want to interconnect systems, you need an ongoing flow of data. And what that means in practice for legal solutions, and this is where I’ll use Dave’s analogy that he shared at the panel is API’s are like Lego, and he obviously it’s American said Legos but spirit. I can’t bring myself to say Legos. It’s LEGO. We mentioned in Europe But but API API’s are like Lego, in that They’re the building blocks of various legal solutions. And you can use them wherever you like. So in the past, companies like LexisNexis, and other vendors would build products with their own LEGO. And effectively, what we’re doing with API’s is we’re sharing the box of Lego with all of our customers with all law firms, so they can build their own custom solutions. And exactly like Lego, what that empowers is a huge range of really creative solutions far more than we ourselves as a vendor could envisage. So it’s, it’s really vendors like LexisNexis, and many others, making their data, their content, that in some cases, their analytical tools available to their customers in a really flexible way that they can build them into their own systems and customer applications.

Greg Lambert 10:51
So it’s really kind of a simple way of getting back behind the paywall of the product, and instead of it’s kind of like, you can connect my internal information with Lexis’ external information. Am I reading that right?

Christopher O’Connor 11:08
Yeah, absolutely. I’m in a consistent way, and in a way where you can you can bridge together different data sets, and in an ongoing way, as well,

Keli Whitnell 11:16
And I just wanted to I think, you know, I’m not a librarian, I’ve never been a librarian, it was an interesting choice, I think, for this panel, because I really look at API’s as data sources, you know, at Troutman, we’re trying to do this, you know, move to this firm, wide data ecosystem where everything’s connected. And at the core, what that is, is crowdsourcing crowdsourcing information from lots of places, using lots of different methods. So I’m brought in a lot to assess vendors, validate data, data quality, kind of really decide what that workflow looks like. So, you know, it was really, I think, interesting to hear about it from the research side, because we work so closely with the library in terms of where are you finding these little Legos out in the wild, because they’re everywhere. And there are a variety of sizes and shapes and some fit together, and some don’t, and some are the, you know, some of those LEGO sets, the pieces were last 10 years ago, so it was not awesome experience. And I’m gonna stop there before I keep mumbling,

Pam Noyd 12:24
I’m gonna, I’m gonna jump in. This is Pam and counter to Keli, I am a librarian, I’ve always been a librarian. I’m not a developer or a technologist. And so I’ve often joked, like, I don’t know how I found myself on this panel. But I’m grateful because I’ve, I’m learning so much from Eric, Emily and Keli. And, you know, Dave, and now Christopher, as a law librarian, and I think Emily touched on this API’s, you know, they’re not, they’re not new, but they’re sort of new to our world, in the sense that librarians are looking at them now and working with other people in our firms, and how can we use this? Looking for use cases answering the questions like Keli was saying, we’re familiar with the vendors. We know the data, you know, we’ve been working with that data, in our research for years. Right. So, you know, that’s where we come in. I also think, as far as the panel goes at AALL, trying to represent a range of experiences and where we fit in, I think I represented a large portion of our audience, who as well, librarians keep hearing about API’s, but we don’t know what to do or what it means. And that’s how I feel my role has has been on this panel is, you know, like, it’s okay, I’m here, you guys can be here, too. It’s legit. And, you know, finding our place in this scenario, I guess.

Greg Lambert 14:01
Yeah. In an Eric, I know that Lexis has kind of a sandbox that for API’s, I believe that customers can kind of, I guess, can play around it. Because I think a lot of times what the biggest issue is, is just kind of getting started testing a few things, trying to determine what what would be kind of an easy win of connecting the Lexis information to an internal information or some kind of output. That would be a quick win for for them. So does anyone have any examples? Or where someone should should start, or something that they can test out with API’s?

Emily Rushing 14:45
There are a lot of examples out there. This is not quite on point. But one thing I think more folks can do than they realize. If you’re not in the library, or have access to your library team, get with that team. But go through your existing contracts. We found an absolute goldmine. unbeknownst to us, Lexis Thank you Lexis Lexis through in the LEX machina API in our license renewal. We didn’t know we had it, we did not know we owned that. But at no extra cost to us with our existing license, we just got a software key and started poking around because it was something we already had. In that instance, I think more to the point of your question, and that instance, we have an Appellate Practice Group, and we wanted to slice and dice. I forget rates of appeal from certain district courts to certain appellate or circuit courts, involving certain firms, you know, kind of classic litigation analytics. And I think, Greg, you touched on this, yes, we can go to the Lexmark you know, web app, we can log into a browser page and do a lot of slicing and dicing there. But in this case, we wanted to combine that with our client data. So by keying certain corporate names and identifiers to our client identifiers, we were able to filter that vast amount of data down, combine it with our internal records. I’m sorry, you’re getting Corgi serenade?

Marlene Gebauer 16:16
Dog this time?

Emily Rushing 16:18
Yeah. Sorry. But that was, you know, it sounds super complicated, sophisticated, what a big cost is no money. It cost us a little bit of time. And it proved the case. Do we have a fully operational app as a result of that? No. But it demonstrated the value in the usability like, is it possible? Yes, using things we already have, we can get a long way down the path towards something that provides a business answer and help shape maybe our appellate teams marketing strategies, right, or client communications. That was something that just because we went back and looked at contracts, and so what do we have? So almost anybody can start there?

Marlene Gebauer 16:56
Did the panel cover like potential blockers and kind of how to avoid those things like, you know, possibly like, you know, hosting, or responsibilities or something like that. Maybe the inverse,

Emily Rushing 17:08
but Eric can talk about a really helpful like checklist of kind of where things to work out kind of upfront and go through in order.

Erik Adams 17:18
Yeah, we did talk about that we had a checklist of things that a librarian can check to evaluate whether or not an API is worth pursuing. And it’s spelled out also, here’s a role that a librarian can fill. Here’s a, here’s something that maybe you need a little more technical knowledge. Here’s something where no, you know what, you’re going to need a programmer to really dig into this level of detail. And at each stage, there were things like, as Emily suggested, or do you already have that have access to the API in your contract? Right. And that’s a question that in the library, or whoever’s meant negotiating those contracts, that’s a question for those people to deal with. But there’s also things like, is the API documented? I would assume that any librarian knows how to Google and confined? Oh, yes, here’s the documentation, you don’t have to be able to read it and understand it. But just verifying that it’s there is an important first step. And then down the road, you can find I am a fan of the show, Top Gear, and they used to have their team racing driver on top gear, and I like to think yeah, we if you can find a team programmer who will take some time and read your documentation. And tell you yes, this is well documented or no, you know what, this is missing a lot of things. And I have questions. Yeah. And that kind of feedback would be very useful before pursuing a project.

Greg Lambert 18:49
So the it team’s version of the Stig? Yes, exactly.

Christopher O’Connor 18:55
Similar to Eric’s checklist, Lexis, we tried to use a framework with potential customers or API’s. And really what we recommend is start with the use case. Then think about the API’s that you need to fulfill that use case. And then think about the implementation and the systems you’re going to integrate with and you’ve got to work in that order. And I think very often, we see Marlene, to answer your question about blockers or potential unnecessary blockers, but challenges in deploying API’s, that’s one of the two I’d call out is missing that first step. And not thinking about the use case, not thinking of actually what’s the problem we’re trying to solve? What’s the benefit? We’re trying to deliver to the firm? And getting straight into what what what API’s exist? And which systems are we going to work at. And that’s where you tend to get unstuck. The second challenge I think we often find is resource and available resource. And I had an interesting conversation with the CIO of the law firm, a couple of weeks ago, and he said that they have data science resource, but often they’re not available for library projects, that any data science resource that’s used is used in financial analysis. It’s used in business development applications, because it’s easier to see the direct revenue there. So even if it’s notionally have a team of data scientists or developers, data engineers who work on API projects, getting a share of their time to work on a library project can be challenging. But for me, the answer is to go back to the use case and have a compelling idea of what it is you’re trying to achieve, have a compelling articulation of the benefits so that you can go and fight for that internal resource to support the project.

Greg Lambert 20:30
Is anyone using a platform, say, for example, like foundation to create API’s and just test them without the need necessarily of having the IT development team having to be there every step of the way?

Keli Whitnell 20:45
I can speak to this how much time? You know, that was our first use case is how to populate foundation how to use API’s. Is that information directly integrated? Is it migrated? What are those workflows look like? So we started with client data, bring it in, what is the best way that we can capture and manage data for 10s of 1000s of clients? That is the freshest, some most up to date. Understandable, you know, for the user friendly, it makes sense for your casual user, you have also given the information that the data scientists need the pricing people need. Same on the matter side, we look at API’s, you know, we use actually as foundation kind of as the place where we do our data validation or data checking, we kind of bring everything in the foundation, line it up one by one, as well as manually cultivated data, I think it’s very important to not just compare API’s against themselves, but compare it against, what does it look like, in your firm? What are your firm’s needs? What does that type taxonomy look like? How do you make that information? Not just make sense on a profile, but various accessible for users? How do you ensure that they’re, you know, you’re gonna, I’m gonna sound like a control freak. But, you know, it was very important for me if data needs to be massaged, a little bit manipulated, augmented, if it’s missing, you know, what do you do if you disagree with how a third party has categorized something or tagged something we very much look at it is against a sort of another Lego another piece of the puzzle. And that is, I think, the firm’s that use foundation and look at it as a data tool, where the your end users are your marketing team, your pricing team or diversity team. It’s a data tool, because when the data is right, all of those teams will have what they need to write the narratives to do the staffing. And API’s have become for us an integral part of the sourcing and management of that information. In foundation.

Emily Rushing 23:04
I’ll chime in because I’m also a foundation admin at my organization developer. I would comment as well, if it can be really simple. Keli mentioned like didn’t normalization. A great example is court names. We don’t want anybody anywhere, walking in off the street and trying to type in a court name. We all know how convoluted misspelled you know, with periods, acronyms di s t period, that’s not even how you do that. What it who wrote that? Right, though, it sounds simple, but we just wanted a drop down list of third party vetted, verified official list of US courts, federal and state. We just wanted that free Law Project has open API’s, they have judges, and they have CT data. It’s really well documented to Eric’s checklists, very well documented. You can go on gut GitHub, you can read up all about it. And it can plug directly into foundation and you have a nice clean drop down, and no more. And I think about API’s really it’s like ai, ai generally stuff is automation, right? No more finding and cleaning misspelled things, no more bad reports full of janky data that don’t sort correctly, you’ve eliminated that you’ve automated that away now. So it can be something relatively small, like just a checkbox or a drop down list full of good data. Foundations are good example. I’m working now also on in tap. So we are implementing in tap Open and then tap conflicts and another place we don’t want people typing things in please just use this controlled list. And having a central data repository and firm, unified data strategy is really helping us to say wait a minute, I need industry codes. Here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Why don’t they all just use the same Dorst data? Why don’t we just go by the best list and put it one way and use it everywhere. Plus to Kelly’s point, any tweaks we want to make, you know, we don’t want to say nuclear energy, we want to describe something that we you know, right. So control that though and have every single firm system that needs it, pointing to that. So we’re really getting a lot of efficiencies and automation across the firm and fashion.

Keli Whitnell 25:19
And I’d like to jump back in to piggyback off the piggyback. You know, I think it only touches on an important point, we have leveraged API’s to help us with taxonomy buy in, you know, we’re using the Hoover’s industry code list. So we don’t end up in a debate with 1200. Lawyers on what is our industry taxonomy. The same with courts. And that I think is, you know, during the foundation implementation was instrumental to redirecting focus on what we actually need opinions on as being able to say, here’s an industry standard, we can bring it in. Now, we don’t have to cultivate, you know, the Hoover’s codeless 500. Plus,

Emily Rushing 26:00
that’s a great point get past that low hanging fruit Nope. Decided moving on.

Erik Adams 26:04
You know, it’s it’s funny, though, because, I mean, you’re absolutely right, that bringing in controlled lists from outside outside vendors, is the smart way to go. I also feel though, that it’s a very, very librarian way to do it. Right, let’s find somebody else who’s already made that controlled list that controlled vocabulary, and let’s just use theirs.

Emily Rushing 26:24
We do know about authority, that is kind of what we do.

Christopher O’Connor 26:29
I think it’s also a great example of library driven use case, right. I think often when people think about API’s, they think it needs to be some huge big bang transformational project. And but identifying the smaller use cases, which are very, very powerful. And we like the way we like to organize that have leverage, making an improvement there will have a big leverage over the quality of the data in your systems, which is a much, much bigger investment as much more important to get right. I mean, LexisNexis, one of the products it offers is a DMS enrichment service. And the number of times we hear about, like, the most common country put down on a document is Afghanistan, because the first one in the list, or the most common matter type or document type we get is other because people don’t do the work to categorize it. And the TMS is one of the single biggest investments that a firm makes. So making a comparatively small project to clean up that data to standardize on a go forward basis, has enormous leverage over that much larger investment, much bigger project, because the hours you spend on DMS, even just the Theon hours they spend in the DMS. And I think that’s what it was great bringing this panel together, was bringing together that insight from the librarian community and shining a spotlight on these kinds of use cases, because they can very easily be missed, but they’re incredibly profound.

Keli Whitnell 27:46
And I’d like to just one more point on the foundation’s specific part of this, when using the taxonomy building, great platforms like foundation will allow you to sort of augment within itself. So when we’re bringing in industry lists, if we really need to add something we can and you know your blade, your great platforms are flexible like that, regardless if it is a direct integration,

Emily Rushing 28:11
to your point, you need the subject matter expertise to comfortably make those modifications and turn into your library team to say you guys know better than anybody have looked this up how to verify it, how to advise us, let’s not just make it up. Let’s go to the authority. Great role for a librarian.

Marlene Gebauer 28:27
We noted earlier that API’s are not new. What do you all think has shifted API acceptance in the market lately? And what does that say about the maturity of API’s and legal information?

Pam Noyd 28:38
Well, if you live, I think it’s been a Go ahead, Pam, you start, you know, I was just gonna say if you if you’ve been listening carefully, up until now, the word data has been dropped probably 100 times already, right. It’s it’s that you know, need or desire for data driven decision making. And so the drive to have our systems more integrated with that data and automated as much as possible, I think is driving that bringing that in, but I’m going to turn it over to Keli. Jumping into

Keli Whitnell 29:12
Pam’s is actually much more thoughtful. I think it’s visibility. You know, we hear about it more. It’s almost like a rebranding. You know, I think that there’s just more awareness about it.

Greg Lambert 29:23
Because I was using API’s in 90s. So it’s not new. Yeah.

Emily Rushing 29:28
Yeah, more vendors are offering them I think in response to market demand. And things like a sandbox, you know, becoming more available, sort of lowering the barrier to entry. You have more people who have a little bit of training and have to be dangerous and get in and play around, poke around. It’s very easy to get up to speed on some of these techniques and tools with working with API’s. It used to be a lot harder to learn how to program and code and a lot of it’s low or no code these days. So you have more folks with a little bit of skill and and a little bit of hutzpah getting out and trying to do stuff, that’s for sure. I would also add it to my title. So I always have to talk about competition. Most of us are law firms or law firm facing, you know, the big for the LSPs. they’ve solved for a lot of this, you know, they are addressing efficiencies and dealing with large data volume and producing data, integrated data enabled solutions for our clients for our law firm clients. So we’re either in that space playing that game, or we just sacrifice that to our competitors, the competitors of law firms, we either jump in and say, yes, we want to innovate, we want to bring data and technology solutions to you, the client, package that up with our legal services, have a good clean DMS, right, be able to tell you right away what great experience we have, in our matter foundation system, right? Either we’re delivering those solutions to clients and adding that value that they can and should expect, or we’re saying, you know, what, we were not going to try to do that you’re going to need to call an LSP, you’re gonna have to call our instant knowing if you want that kind of service. And I don’t think firms are gonna go quietly, and give that up. I think we see too much opportunity to add that value for clients.

Erik Adams 31:09
I think there’s also a certain amount of opportunity on the part of vendors that Chris alluded how vendors have been developing these API’s and using them internally, for forever, right, effectively, forever. Now, there’s a market for that. Right? It’s as simple as that, that law firms are willing to pay to have this lower level API kind of access. So Well, if you’ve already done the work to develop an API, why not clean it up a little bit, and then make it available to the public? I make it sound like it’s really easy, Chris, I see you rolling your eyes. I know it’s not.

Christopher O’Connor 31:46
Absolutely not. I think you’re absolutely right. I think one of the things we’ve definitely seen is, you know, to both your point, Eric and your point, Greg API’s have been around for a long time, and had been used by developers. And I think historically in like, where law firms were using API’s, it was in systems integration, like getting databases to speak to one another on the back end. And it didn’t necessarily, although that’s supporting some front of Office applications and things, it’s not necessarily driven by, by by lawyers or librarians, what we’re seeing a shift to is in the market is lots of those back end integrations are now expected by the vendors. And we’re seeing some of the big platforms build these integrations out of the box. So you don’t need to necessarily have developer time on getting different systems to speak to one another, which means that the focus, we hope, and suddenly we’re starting to see the focus for that API effort. And the use cases can shift. And we’re seeing like maybe a lifecycle that is going from the back end data services into maybe some of those supports functions. And so Emily mentioned in competitive intelligence, I mentioned previously business development. And I think eventually getting through to knowledge and law lawyer or even client facing applications.

Keli Whitnell 32:55
And we I can actually say we, we do use API’s to populate data in high queue for clients to see so I think firms, a lot of firms are already doing that.

Marlene Gebauer 33:07
Where do you see API’s having the biggest effect in legal information or in the legal market as a whole? And let’s try and limit it to like one or two things, if we’re going to go around,

Keli Whitnell 33:18
I’d say I mean, it all comes down to money, right? profitability, the more you understand about anything, the more efficient you can be in the future.

Erik Adams 33:28
I think about this a lot, I think the biggest impact is going to be in automating processes and reducing duplication of effort. If you think about, like the typical New Business intake process, where somebody types in the types and the potential clients name once to into Foundation, or some other CRM to see if we’ve done any business with them, and then again, into some other system to see, okay, what’s their litigation pattern and then into a third system. And that repetition of effort really can be automated away. Right?

Emily Rushing 34:09
I talked a lot about with our CI team, I’m automating away your job with things like foundation with utilizing API’s, and don’t be scared, we still have a place. But if the thing you do right now, where you type it type exactly what you’re describing are, it’s gonna go away, that won’t, that won’t happen anymore. Those tasks won’t exist,

Pam Noyd 34:27
right? It’s just the data flow, I think between our applications, right will be much improved. And, you know, information is going to be more up to date and at the ready for our end users. Right. That’s what we’re doing it for, you know, right there and up to date.

Marlene Gebauer 34:44
I imagine it has some impact on risk as well.

Keli Whitnell 34:47
And all of this efficiency is going to equal money, you know, generating revenue money

Christopher O’Connor 34:59
in drafting I think there’s a huge role for bringing more legal information into the drafting process. And I think very often, the information you need to optimize your drafting get to a better first draft, get it get to a better result for your client exists within the firm’s information stores. But even if they’re aggregated, they then need to be brought to the point of need in the drafting workflow.

Greg Lambert 35:24
Well, Emily, I know that the 2022 panel was just the beginning for this, what’s the plans going forward for? For the group here,

Emily Rushing 35:34
you’re not rid of us yet. As you can see, we love to talk about this stuff. And if I may say, so. We’re all pals now and had a really fun time hanging out and working on this. So we met after the 2022 conferences. So let’s keep it rolling. Let’s do that. Let’s keep going. So we’re really, really pleased to have a follow on thanks to Eric for taking lead with our proposal, which I believe is under review. For the 2023 conference in Boston.

Erik Adams 36:03
Yeah, the proposal has been submitted and the first round of reviews actually was completed on November 29th. We won’t have any results for a while yet I think we would hear in January is when they will announce the actual programs. But we have our proposal in

Emily Rushing 36:20
and I think we landed on Is it real world examples. I’m looking at my notes real world API’s. I think some of the questions Marlene and Greg, you guys have asked, you know, kind of like, Tell me about that. And out in the wild. You know, like, what does that really mean? Not just the hype, not just the, you know, stuff you read in the headlines, but the real stuff?

Marlene Gebauer 36:40
They go Lego in the wild?

Emily Rushing 36:42
Yeah, yeah, that’s been the theme. And we started

Greg Lambert 36:45
just a step on it.

Marlene Gebauer 36:46
That’s what that’s what you should title it, like, go in the wild.

Emily Rushing 36:52
Come to Boston, come check it out. Come hang out with us. Come talk to us after the panel. Hopefully, we’re approved. And can we just see everybody and hang out then?

Greg Lambert 37:01
All right. So get to the part now where we ask our crystal ball question of all of our guests. Now we have a lot of guests here. So we’ll probably have to do consolidate some of the answers here. And tag team as so what do you guys see as some challenges or changes in the legal industry over the next three to five years? And how do you think API’s will play a role in that?

Erik Adams 37:27
I want to focus on the second part of that, because it’s what I’m interested in. And actually, I don’t so much have a prediction as much as I want, what I want to happen over the next five years. Emily, you mentioned no code automation, I would really like to see API’s evolves to a point where integrated with no code automation is easy as just click, click click and you’re done. Because right now, I think it’s still very early days with a lot of these API’s. And they are, frankly, and speaking as a developer, a lot of them are really hard to use. Not that I want to see simplification and integration with these easier to use applications and systems.

Marlene Gebauer 38:07
Alright, ease of use. What’s next?

Keli Whitnell 38:10
I think everybody talks about API’s, I think the new buzzword is sort of direct connection. I don’t necessarily think that’s where the future is. It’s where can we bring information into a place and it’s not just, you know, a sandbox for kind of picking and choosing but really translate complex things into digestible data? I think it’s integrating the data within it, you know, but before it comes into your system, sort of, you know, we get a lot of interest in clause identification 50 clauses to certain clauses aren’t as useful as how do you make that really digestible? Put it into a into a chart that someone could understand not, you know, instead of 100 pages, five pages of

Marlene Gebauer 38:53
connection and translation, legalese,

Greg Lambert 38:55
or direct connection. So DC power is how I did that. Yeah. All right. Anyone else?

Christopher O’Connor 39:02
Yeah. From our perspective, and LexisNexis, when we’re thinking about the next couple of years, we kind of think about that in terms of a connected world of legal applications. So I think it’s clear like there’s not going to be one platform that rules them all. Like, there’s going to be a coexistence of a number of platforms, we may see some consolidation. And I certainly think we see, there’s demand for fewer point solutions. But you don’t want to clutter up, you know, lawyers workflow with something that just does a single thing. So that we might find the startup vendors and things need to go and work with multiple of the different platforms to deliver their solutions to the end users. But there’s not going to be a single thing. So we’re thinking a lot about how do we build this connected world between LexisNexis applications and the other core applications employers use in Microsoft, the DMS business intelligence systems? And I think a lot of that is, as Eric kind of alluded to, is pre configuring some of this stuff too. Pre if we pre build integrations of our content in other useful third parties, then we can solve two of those challenges that I referenced earlier, my custom audience question that’s pre identifying the use case. And we can take the common use cases we see in the market, and pre build those. And it also gets around some of the results challenge. And if that works out at the box, then it’s going to be much more useful and addressable to far more firms.

Greg Lambert 40:25
Excellent. Well, we’ll end it there. I’m looking forward to seeing this panel in 2023 in Boston. So Emily Rushing, Pam Noyd, Keli Whitnell, Erik Adams and Chris O’Connor. Thank you all very much for coming in and sharing your experience on the panel and good luck going into next year.

Marlene Gebauer 40:45
Thank you so much.

Greg Lambert 40:52
Marlene, I wasn’t sure that we were going to be able to pull off having five guest on it one time,

Marlene Gebauer 40:57
but it was tough it? Well,

Greg Lambert 40:59
I you know, I think that the I think they’ve worked together long enough that they understood, who was going to say what and how to bounce ideas off of one another. And it was really interesting, because they all came in discussing the API’s from a different perspective. And so each one of them has their own individual piece that they deal with whether it’s looking at the contracts, whether it’s doing the data analysis, or putting it into action. So it’s really interesting. And I think this is just going to be one more thing that we’re going to have to use in order to kind of combine that external information and really use it as valuable tour, internal information, which has been something I’ve been wanting to do for 25 years.

Marlene Gebauer 41:51
Yeah, I mean, I think that the fact that everybody was coming from a different angle is what made them such an interesting panel and why I can see that they were very popular at the AALL conference in the summer and why they are being asked back because again, this as you’ve mentioned, this is a very pertinent topic. This is something every firm is looking at, and getting involved in. So and it’s nice to see that, you know, we have a, you know, a library panel that’s, that’s doing these things.

Greg Lambert 42:20
Yep. Yeah. Well, it’s definitely something that I think if you if you’re listening and your law librarian, this is a golden opportunity for you.

Marlene Gebauer 42:30
So, so many of the information vendors offer these options that it makes perfect sense that that law librarian should be getting involved.

Greg Lambert 42:40
Yep, I agree. So thanks again to our panel of API gurus, Emily Rushing Pam Noyd, Keli Whitnell, Erik Adams, and Chris O’Connor. Thanks, guys.

Marlene Gebauer 42:50
And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter.

Greg Lambert 43:03
And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter,

Marlene Gebauer 43:06
like I guess for now we can be for now.

Greg Lambert 43:10
I’m also a @glambert on what’s the other one?

Marlene Gebauer 43:14
Mastodon

Greg Lambert 43:15
Mastodon, but man, that’s not easy.

Marlene Gebauer 43:17
I’m on that too. So it’s it’s day by hour. I’m on Mastodon but it’s yeah, I’m still getting used to it. Yeah, it’s a little different. But if you don’t want to take that route, go the old fashioned way. Go the old fashioned way. You can leave us a voicemail on our Deacon review Hotline at 713-487-7821 and as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert 43:42
Thanks, Jerry. All right. Marlene, I will talk to you later.

Marlene Gebauer 43:45
All right, bye bye.

We give you the true “3 Geeks” experience on this week’s show as we are joined by an OG (original geek) Toby Brown. Toby, Marlene, and Greg talk with Litify’s President and COO, Ari Treuhaft, and Pam Wickersham, the VP of Product and Engineer there at Litify. One of the taglines at Litify is that they #BreakLegalSilos. Treuhaft and Wickersham explain what that means, and how they focus on providing an operating system, built on Salesforce, that creates transparency between Corporate Counsel and their law firms.

Both Ari and Pam got their start in Financial and Professional services, so they come at these business problems with a different approach. With Pam’s engineering background, and experiences at Google, she brings in a unique perspective on how to build the technology through the lens of the customer. Ari’s experiences with the Financial Services industry going to the cloud over a decade ago also positions him to better understand the naysayers in the legal industry who are still resistant to placing data in the cloud.

It’s a great conversation. We want to thank the great folks at City Acre Brewery in Houston, Texas for letting us record this episode there. And, for not laughing too hard as Greg destroyed his laptop by spilling an entire Maple Porter into his brand-new laptop. We hope this is a semi-regular event! (Recording at City Acre… not pouring a beer into laptops!!)

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts |  Spotify

Crystal Ball Question

Toby Brown takes on our question this week by talking about the fact that attorneys are resistant to changing behaviors, not because they are unwilling to adapt to new technology, but because this is an industry that is very reputational based.

Links Mentioned:

• Platform overview
• Salesforce Advantage
• Specs on Litify for Corporate Legal
• Recent blog by Ari about collaboration
• Recent blog about creating a culture of retention
  • Relevant announcements
    Litify alliance with Deloitte
    Litify winning a Legal Tech Breakthrough Award
  • Ari’s Podcast Interview with Bob Ambrogi

Contact Us:

Twitter: @gebauerm, @glambert, or @gnawledge
Voicemail: 713-487-7821
Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: Jerry David DeCicca

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer 0:17
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer,

Greg Lambert 0:24
And I’m Greg Lambert. Well, this week, we are at…

Marlene Gebauer 0:27
Special! We have a special special episode.

Greg Lambert 0:30
So we are at City Acre brewery here in North, it’s kind of on the north side of downtown Houston. And I want to thank Jimmy here for letting us come in. I’m on laptop number two because I spilled a beer into my personal laptop. So you know have we’re kicking it off. We’re doing it right here. We are joined by our good friend and fellow geek Toby Brown, Toby.

Toby Brown 0:57
Hi, this is Toby. I’m also known as a number two.

Greg Lambert 1:00
Yeah, he’s he’s getting number two. So this is you’re getting the true three geeks treatment here today.

Toby Brown 1:07
It’s been a long time since I’ve dipped my toe in the geek pool.

Marlene Gebauer 1:12
Well, we’re glad to have you, Toby.

Greg Lambert 1:14
So we’re going to have Toby answer our crystal ball question. And then we’re going to jump right into our conversation. And this week is really exciting. We have Ari Treuhaft and Pam Wickersham, from Litify. And had great conversation. So Toby will kick it to you first and then we’ll go right into the interview.

So Toby, we ask everybody, our crystal ball question, which is, what changes or challenges do you see in the legal market, the legal industry over the next three to five years?

Toby Brown 1:53
Pretty much the same one that I’ve always seen, and it’s getting lawyers to change the way they practice law.

Greg Lambert 1:59
How so?

Toby Brown 2:00
Well, if you look at most of the innovation that’s going on, either it’s really trying to push work to cheaper sources, or it’s trying to get lawyers to change the way they actually do the work. And those ones tend to fail. Because lawyers basically say you don’t understand what I do. And I have to do it this way. In fact, I was chatting with somebody recently about this, there’s a product. I’m blanking on the name, and I’m sorry for whoever has this product. But it can reduce the amount of time it takes to draft an initial patent application by 50 to 60%.

Greg Lambert 2:37
Right.

Toby Brown 2:38
Lawyers look at that go yeah, that no. That’s not the way you do it.

Greg Lambert 2:42
And is it the reason? Is it because it cuts time, it cuts billing?

Toby Brown 2:46
I don’t think so I just think lawyers do things the way they do things. And if you tell them to do it differently, then quality will suffer. And so they’re not going to, for them that’s I see our industry is very reputation based. And if they’re going to make a change, and they’re putting their reputation at risk that the quality might go down. It’s that’s a non starter fact that there’s still people who argue about technology assisted review and discovery because they’re like, oh, it’s not a human that good. Can’t be 100%. Yeah.

Greg Lambert 3:22
Well, Have you have you seen an area that there actually has been some some change in how they do it that made it more efficient?

Toby Brown 3:32
Yeah, but it’s typically pockets. It’ll be one partner to firm or maybe a small group at a firm. And it’ll also be a client situation that almost demands it. But then there’s also the client side of it. Same thing, their lawyers don’t want to change either. So it’s one of my sort of core lessons. It’s like, that’s why you should bring clients and law firms together to innovate. Because unless everybody’s on the same page and willing to do that, someone is gonna kill it.

Greg Lambert 4:00
All right, Toby. Thank you.

Toby Brown 4:01
Thank you.

Greg Lambert 4:09
We’d like to welcome Ari Treuhaft, President and CEO of Litify, and Pamela Wickersham, VP of product and engineering of Litify, to The Geek in Review, Ari and Pam, it’s great to have you both on the show.

Ari Treuhaft 4:22
Great to be here.

Pam Wickersham 4:23
Great to be here.

Marlene Gebauer 4:24
So we have a lot of questions about your work at Litify. But Ari, I want to start with you. How on earth do you have the capacity to run a legal practice management company deal with the issues of working in the legal industry, raising funding for the company, all while being a father of five children including a newborn? Do you sleep?

Ari Treuhaft 4:44
Yeah, it’s funny I think if you ask each, you know, party, impartial to the different, like facets and avenues of my life, they’ll they’ll ask, well, you must be doing the other one really well.

Greg Lambert 4:59
Been there.

Ari Treuhaft 4:59
What’s going on with this one. So it’s, it’s exciting. You know, the last couple of years at Litify have been really, really amazing watching the company grow. And you know, and home watching my family grow. I’m one to five. So it’s not like a crazy, crazy idea. My wife is one of six. So this is kind of like, I think the plan from the very beginning, I tell my wife, we’re halfway there. But it’s the last couple years have been really, really exciting.

Greg Lambert 5:28
Yeah, fielding either a baseball team or a football team, right?

Ari Treuhaft 5:33
So we’re a basketball family. That’s my son, my Sundays, I have three boys and two girls, the three older children are boys. So I’m like back to back to back basketball. Every Sunday, I coach a little bit, I coach from the sidelines on the other side of the sidelines from a little bit. So it’s a little bit of all that.

Greg Lambert 5:54
Man sounds busy. So so when you’re not trying to do all of that, and squeezing some some sleep, you know, what does your day look like there at Litify? And how is it did you would describe how you how you run the company?

Ari Treuhaft 6:08
Yeah, I mean, I, I’m blessed to work with a lot of really amazing leaders across the different disciplines at the company. So you know, Pam, she runs our product and engineering group, we have a great sales and marketing leader, our customer success and support functions, our finance functions, I kind of find myself bouncing between all the different disciplines that Litify And really trying to keep the team as one cohesive unit. That’s probably 50% of my time. And the other 50% of my time is focused on growth and focusing on the growth of the business focusing on, you know, potential customers, existing customers and continuing to grow our footprint within the legal technology industry and helping our customers grow their businesses.

Greg Lambert 6:53
Yeah, you mind just given us the elevator pitch on on exactly what Litify does?

Ari Treuhaft 6:59
Yeah, I mean, Litify is, it’s an operating system for enterprise law firms that are providing service to either consumer or corporate clients, as well as a operating system for legal operators, folks that are running legal departments within large corporations, providing services to their internal clients, and also helping coordinate the procurement of legal outside legal services from outside counsel and all the complexities, workflow, and kind of the soft spots and relationships that are kind of bundled up and all of that.

Marlene Gebauer 7:35
Pam, you’ve been a developer and engineer in both legal and professional services for almost 15 years. Tell us a bit about your role at Litify as the VP of product and how your previous experiences compare to what you’re doing now.

Pam Wickersham 7:48
Yeah, absolutely. It feels crazy. That it’s been that long. Starting as someone who wrote code, I don’t know if I imagined this as my career path. But I’m ecstatic that it happened. So at Litify, I started as they basically said, we might want to build a document solution. And so they knew I was the documents girl before that. That’s how I met them when I worked at Spring CM previously. And so I came over, not exactly knowing what I was going to do. And we spent the first 14 months building that platform, from the ground up to what it is today. And then I am slowly from there inherited the rest of the product lines and developed three other new products. So it’s been a wild ride, when I had really no idea what I was getting myself into, but I wouldn’t really have it any other way.

Greg Lambert 8:35
So if you figured it out along the way?

Pam Wickersham 8:38
Aabsolutely. It’s been a I mean, having a background in engineering, I think is such a benefit of being able to really get in there with the engineers, work alongside them and grow those products from the ground up. We now have a very talented team. And I no longer do that. But it’s it’s really been amazing to go from, you know, being one of them to now being able and having the privilege to lead the team. And still being able to, you know, flex on being able to write some code here and there.

Marlene Gebauer 9:06
Like what is what is your day to day look like?

Pam Wickersham 9:08
I’m in meetings a lot. And then fielding calls from Ari on the side on mute, here and there. I think that’s what our relationship looks like. But really just making sure that all the the product teams and the engineers know exactly what we’re building, exactly what the customer needs to be successful, and making sure that it’s not just we need this feature, but this is why this is how it will be used. This is how it will be extended and this is who’s going to be integrating with it. So really making sure that they have that deep product knowledge and really understand our customer.

Greg Lambert 9:40
Well, one of the things that as I was perusing the the website that really stuck out to me on the description of Litify is that you have a hashtag right up front that says #BreakLegalSilos, which I loved. What’s the message behind that phrase and what is it exactly that you’re wanting to convey to the legal one market with it.

Ari Treuhaft 10:01
Yeah, I think if you if you think about the outsider’s perspective of an attorney or legal service, like, I’m not a lawyer, I don’t know who else, Greg, Marlene and Toby, have, you know, you guys, I don’t know if your lawyers work with lawyers, lawyer. Okay, I won’t hold you…

Greg Lambert 10:18
All the above.

Ari Treuhaft 10:20
Exactly. So me not being a lawyer and not coming from legal. In fact, I, my, you know, most of my history working in technologies and financial services, my perspective of lawyers or legal work before being intimately involved in it, is I had no idea like what happens once you hire a lawyer? Like, what are they doing and like, there’s very little transparency for the outside world into what’s going on. And that kind of manifests itself, not just if you’re hiring a lawyer, but if you’re working in a company, and you need legal help with something, and maybe you pull them in, you need help with a matter or you need help with a contract. And there’s very little transparency into what’s actually happening. And when anybody hires a lawyer needs help, that’s kind of a theme that you kind of hear. And it’s reinforced by technology. You know, the decisions that have been made over the last probably 10 to 15 years, you know, how legal technology has been built, and how platforms and applications connect with one another that reinforced this siloed approach to legal service. And what we’re trying to do, and working with both law firms, and corporate legal departments, as well as the consumers of the legal service, is trying to break down those, those kind of walls that exist between all the different stakeholders, and introduce a layer of transparency and, frankly, improved service quality that I think the legal industry is begging for.

Toby Brown 11:52
Picking up on that theme of breaking down the walls. something we’d like to talk about is how and why Litify serves both law firms and corporate legal teams on the one hand, and I’d even be interested in what you see the percentage on each side of that. Litify, on one hand is a practice management platform. And on the other its enterprise legal management. So in what ways does Litify bridge those two legal worlds? How does it all come together for one end to end operating platform?

Ari Treuhaft 12:19
Yeah, I mean, if you think about where legals headed, especially like if we just talk about corporate, the legal ops movement, that’s kind of taken a foothold over the last five years. If you think about it, it’s not really a legal specific movement, it’s more of an operational movement. And you’re seeing a very similar approach happening within larger law firms that are now hiring COOs and CTOs from outside of legal from other industries. And I think more and more lawyers and legal operators are thinking of their practice lines as actual businesses. And having a system that facilitates that whether you’re running a law firm, or whether you’re running a corporate legal department, like the functionality that’s required, the transparency and automation that’s required, is very, very similar. So from a product delivery perspective, and Pam, could probably touch more on this. And you know, there’s a lot of features that Pam and her team have built that are applicable on both sides of the fence. And that’s that’s kind of one I think, answers one part of your question. But the the other part of your question is like, how are we addressing that is really focusing on the workflow where the corporate client and outside counsel are collaborating, not just, you know, sending bills and approving or writing down bills, but like really working together on a litigation or on a specific matter. Where are the touch points? Where are the areas where if there were more transparency, either from the client or from from counsel, it would lead to a better legal outcome for the actual end client. That’s where I think Litify really stands out and can add a tremendous amount of value.

Toby Brown 14:00
So if I understood that correctly, you’re looking at workflows that go back and forth between clients and and law firms?

Ari Treuhaft 14:08
Yeah, I mean, we have a lot of like, just the categories an example. You have insurance companies that are sending high volume of their litigation to outside counsel. And they might have specific practices, specific strategies that they want outside counsel to adhere to, they might want transparency into not just the, again, the financial components, but the actual progress of matters, and maybe they can help shift strategy where they need to, and that that’s, you know, one of the tools that we provide, we provide a portal that allows, you know, matters to be assigned and collaborated on in real time between outside counsel and internal legal teams. So that’s just like one kind of example of that.

Greg Lambert 14:53
Pam, I want to pick up on something that Ari had mentioned before in that both of you did not Come in the typical way, which is usually it’s a couple of lawyers that work together that find a process that they hate. And then they spin off a company and create something to fix that one problem. It sounds like you, you both were much more on the business and engineering front of it and tackling the problems that way. Do you think that in the long run has kind of helped you focus on how to grow, you know, what processes you need to take on next, rather than what a lawyer would do, which, you know, single in on the on the one or two things that drove them crazy?

Pam Wickersham 15:36
Yeah, actually, credit, my background and professional services, sort of having the best of both worlds are coming at it from a technology standpoint, but understanding what the limitations of the platform were, where people needed to expand it. And when I started working with Litify, they didn’t have any traditional use cases, everything was 50 terabytes of data and 1000 merges in an hour. And it was just scale at every single moment. And so understanding the limitations of most document management platforms, and then how the legal industry was trying to use that was, was such an advantage of being able to, to go in and make sure that we weren’t building another document management platform that we were building one for the legal industry, which has a lot of different problems. I think that anything that we try to use as generic, in vertical, falls over for the legal industry, just because of the volume and the ways that they need to extend and use the system. And so that’s been kind of a great angle. And then just listening is always, you know, we can solve problems, Ari and I love coming up with solutions. But making sure that it fits with the customer. And having that background and working heavily with customers has really been beneficial.

Ari Treuhaft 16:41
I think Pam’s also like selling herself short, a little bit. Like Pam worked at Google. And she got to digest what a large scale successful technology organization like how it operates, how it builds technology, how it delivers technology to the end users, and then how they provide feedback and can help, you know, build better product better process. So I think that’s us having that experience here has been incredibly valuable. And then, you know, I, like I mentioned, I worked in financial services. Financial services went through the same kind of digital transformation that legal is going through right now 10-15 years ago, and having lived through that experience that like, dealt with the naysayers and said, Oh, you’re never gonna get this data in the cloud, like it’s not safe in the cloud, what are you talking about? And just going through that kind of cycle, I think has also been very helpful.

Pam Wickersham 17:37
Yeah, that’s true. We didn’t just rebuild old software. And we were able to build it better knowing where it didn’t work in the first place. And I think that’s the true benefit of having a lot of lawyers that we’ve worked with to build that they knew what they loved, and they knew what they hated. And we focused on having what they loved and improving what they hated.

Marlene Gebauer 17:54
So I want to I want to focus on the sort of naysayer and dealing with the naysayers point. Because Salesforce and Legal Operations platforms have had difficulty getting a foothold in the legal market. And so let’s start by talking about the appetite for these Legal Operations platforms. How do you describe Litify to a potential law firm or legal department customer to communicate the value props? You know, particularly since we have this culture of No, I guess, that you’re up against?

Ari Treuhaft 18:30
Yeah. So I think I would challenge the culture of no to the setting the perspective, if you want to have the culture of No, like you’re competing against the culture of I don’t know, and the law firm side, kind of our pitch. And in practice, what what Litify allows them to do is actually know what their attorneys are doing, and what kind of service are they providing. So we work with a lot of large firms that are scaling their efforts, they’re hiring a lot of attorneys there, they might be buying law firms. And what’s so important to them is making sure that the service levels are, you know, the same service levels that would be provided if they were handling the legal work. And how do you do that if you’re building a business, you do that by establishing what the best practices are, and then setting those as standard operating procedures across your entire organization. And what Litify allows you to do is exactly that within a law firm and allows you to do that within a within a corporate legal department as well. So there’s a little bit of education and like, why do you need an operating system? Like what does it do for your, for your business, for your service organization? And then, you know, that kind of clicks usually, and again, a lot of there have been a lot of platforms or point solutions that have been used in the past on the law firm side and specific practice areas. So it might be going to other practices and really explaining the need and the benefits of that on the kind of corporate side, I think there has been technology that’s been making inroads over the last 15-20 years, a lot of it is on premise. So there’s a lot of cloud education that’s happening. I think the industry is picking up on it. What you’re also seeing is a lot of businesses that have been founded in the last five to 10 years that are tech forward businesses that are looking for new cloud based slick technology that integrates with the rest of their business. So it’s interesting that they’re actually gravitating more towards technology that the other departments within their business are using, leveraging similar resources, tech teams, operational teams across other lines of business. So while there are naysayers, there also, it’s been interesting to see how things have evolved.

Pam Wickersham 20:47
New and cloud based just made me laugh a little. But I think the also the culture of going more towards remote work has been a great influence and the adoption of the cloud technologies as well, and the flexibility to work from anywhere.

Toby Brown 21:02
So I’ll bring a finer point to this. So I’ve, well, first of all, say I’m a fan of the concept. In fact, I tried to get someone to build something like this about 12 years ago, and probably too early. But so I’ve just been through a cycle to have the firm really look at this and see the value of it. But I had to set three or four different meetings, one with the practice management team, one with the pricing team, one with the legal project management team. Because the value propositions were different to each portion of the firm, which again, I’m a fan, because I’d rather have one system that that serves all of those needs than three or four, or five, or six, or however many we have now, that meets that. So I personally see a challenge internal to affirm to how I can affirm I’m in how I pitch that up so that everybody can get on the same page. So I’m kind of curious of how you’re navigating that.

Ari Treuhaft 22:00
Yeah, I mean, for me, it’s always been, when engaging with the stakeholders, like the practice group leaders, or if it’s a CIO, is not actually focusing on the technology, it’s focusing on the business value. So if I’m talking to a firm, that, I don’t know, let’s say 75% of their revenue is coming from their employment practice. Like we’re talking about the business drivers, both on the top line and the bottom line for that specific practice is like, how are you providing better service to your to your clients? What type of data are they interested in seeing that’s going to move the needle in their both their perspective on how you’re doing and also drive better results for them? Where are you guys wasting the most time that you’re not billing for in those specific practice areas? And what could you do to improve that? And how can we help? Like, those are the conversations, it’s really coming from a business value perspective, and not necessarily from a technology perspective, I think once you engage folks and demonstrate how technology can solve their business challenges, they start to become advocates, and they start to like, really get it and then they can kind of push that internally. And that’s that’s kind of what’s worked for us is really focusing on the practice areas, focusing on the business processes where we can add the most value and not trying to come in and say, Hey, guys, you need an operating system. Why? Because you just do like it’s more about the business value.

Greg Lambert 23:28
I think it’s pretty well known that when it comes to Salesforce, the legal industry is is such a tiny part of their overall market. So first of all, let me ask you, why do you think that is sorry?

Ari Treuhaft 23:44
Yeah, I think I think people are scared of lawyers.

Greg Lambert 23:50
Lawyers are scared of Salesforce, maybe

Marlene Gebauer 23:51
that’s what I was thinking.

Ari Treuhaft 23:53
I think lawyers, so lawyers that work at law firms don’t a lot of them don’t know what Salesforce is, and they hear sales. And they think, Oh, well, it’s a CRM, like, what do we need a CRM and CRM is more than just a sales tool, CRM. CRM is a customer relationship management tool, and law firms have customers, those customers have, you know, specific wants needs. You know, at the end of the day, lawyers are service providers, much like any other type of service provider, and you need to really do a really good job of keeping track of what’s important to your customer how you’re doing. And I think Salesforce hasn’t focused on it, because they’re kind of just not clear on what what lawyers actually do and what lawyers actually need. I think we’ve been able to bridge that gap. I think lawyers now are more familiar with Salesforce than they ever have, then, thanks to our marketing team. And thanks to you know, a lot of education that’s been pushed also by we partner with Salesforce as sales teams and marketing teams, like we’ve done a lot of education on our own. And I think that there’s a lot that You’ll start to see happening in the next couple of years on Salesforce is both penetration and education of the market.

Greg Lambert 25:07
Well, what made you decide that Salesforce was the platform you were the operating system that you were going to build on? And how do you relay that core benefit to the customers who don’t know what that platform is?

Ari Treuhaft 25:22
Right? So I guess it was, there were a couple of core principles that that Salesforce is founded on that, both from a technology and from a go to market perspective, it just like made a ton of sense for us. We get to leverage best in class security, which, again, lawyers are very risk averse. You know, if you go to any CTO or CIO, In an AmLaw firm, the first question that they’re going to ask you is like, so how do you deal with our clients InfoSec policies, like we’re moving data to the cloud, like, you know, and the answer that we have is the data that you’re going to be moving to the cloud is going to sit on the same cloud as the Department of Homeland Security, American Express and Delta Airlines. Depending on how you feel about those organizations, you know, you’ll you’ll either be comforted or not comforted. But the bottom line is, that’s what we’re dealing with. And then we also get to leverage best in class analytics, reporting dashboards, mobility, amazing features that Salesforce provides natively on their platform that we get to leverage and provide to an industry that otherwise would never have access to that type of functionality. That was really for us, it was like a game changer is like how can we get the the best technology in the world into the hands of lawyers so that they can run their businesses the same way and as an asset at a high of a level as other businesses are able to run. And that was kind of, you know, game over for us.

Pam Wickersham 26:54
But we also had to make it look like it was for the legal team. Again, it’s a generic piece of software out of the box, you get a Salesforce account, it doesn’t look like it’s for the legal industry. What Litify has done is tailored exactly to what they need. The vernacular is correct. They see themselves in the tool, and all of a sudden, it does look like it’s a platform for the legal industry.

Ari Treuhaft 27:15
Yeah, and I think to that point, Pam, you know, the, the extensibility of Salesforce and the ability to configure and customize, you know, lawyers are, you know, they’re specialists, like you ask a lawyer, what do you do, he’ll never say, or she’ll never say, I’m a lawyer, they’ll say, I’m a, you know, I, you know, practice, you know, transactional work or whatever specific type of legal practice that they perform kind of like doctors, you don’t ask a doctor, you know, and they say, Hey, I’m a doctor, they’ll say, I am a pediatric pulmonologist or something like that. And you know, that’s kind of a necessity. And the technology is like, how can you provide a core operating system to a law firm that has 20 distinct practice areas with 20 distinct needs, and still give the lawyers what they need, and they’ll actually use so the business gets what it needs? And you need to give them a platform that can be molded and extended to their specific business line. And that’s kind of I think, what Pam and the team and partnership with Salesforce has been able to do.

Marlene Gebauer 28:18
So just this week, Litify was named overall practice management solution provider of the Year by Legal Tech Breakthrough. So congratulations for that. So this is, you know, a great recognition, especially since I think there were over 1400 nominations submitted for the award. Pam, you know, what do you think makes Litify special in regard to these other products? And what do you think you’re doing to put yourself ahead of the competition?

Pam Wickersham 28:45
Yeah, great question. One of the things I’m extremely proud of is just our speed to market. So our ability to adapt quickly, to be able to release new features on a cadence that is much faster than some of our competitors, and our ability to listen and pivot. And then the ability to extend the platform beyond that. So we have a roadmap where we have, you know, four releases on each product planning here at minimum, Salesforce is also innovating on that platform. And then our professional services team and our customer success team is listening to specific customer needs, and helping them customize beyond that, where they really have their own roadmap. So our ability to not only bring features to market, but to also adapt and make those exactly what you need, I think is what makes our platform so exciting. And it’s also innovative and new. And it looks current of this decade, at least and just great, great to work with that our UX team, I think, dazzles and delights a lot of our customers compared to what’s out there in the market as well.

Toby Brown 29:51
So Pam, I’m going to pick up on a couple of terms you put out there. One was roadmap and one was exciting. So looking ahead… Looking ahead, can you give us an idea of the functionalities that are on your near term roadmap that you think are exciting that people are going to really be interested in?

Pam Wickersham 30:11
Yeah, absolutely. We have a philosophy at Litify, where we like to bring our software to you and to where you work. And I think that’s a lot of the themes that you’re seeing in our roadmap. Currently, we’re releasing new features and Outlook and the email and calendar product, and also within Word and the Microsoft Office Suite. So those are some pretty exciting things happening on the dock row and DMS side. And then we’re also really focusing on integration. So the ability to use Litify, but maybe not all of the Litify platform. So we have a document generation and management tool, but maybe you’re on iManage, maybe you’re on NetDocuments, still being able to use Litify, and Doc Rio to generate documents, but integrating with those other platforms. So we’re really focused on, you know, loving everybody in the ecosystem and understanding that Litify might not be your end to end can be but we also play nicely with with other systems in the DMS space and other systems also in accounting. So we’re integrating our Time and Billing features into accounting aid, but also Aderant and other platforms like that.

Toby Brown 31:14
I’m glad you brought that up. Because as I went through the cycles, that was the some of the sort of red flags people come up with, well, wait a minute, we use, you know, whatever, Brand X of software, and we’re not going to get rid of that. And I think that’s very important that you’re integrating across the board. Because that’s, that’s a hard thing for law firms to do is give up some piece of software that they’ve had for 30 years.

Marlene Gebauer 31:37
That they’ve invested in.

Toby Brown 31:38
Yeah, so I think that’s smart.

Pam Wickersham 31:40
I see it more as a menu. And so if the whole menu works for you, that’s, that’s amazing. And you’re gonna have a one stop solution. But you can also pick and choose pieces of it. And we are, again, benefit of being on the cloud very extensible, and have API’s to integrate with just about any piece of software out there.

Greg Lambert 31:56
Ari and Pam, we ask all of our guests what we call our crystal ball question. And Ari, let’s start off with you first. What do you see as some changes or some challenges for the legal industry over the next three to five years?

Ari Treuhaft 32:12
Yeah, I think we’re starting to see legal get pushed in a way that it hasn’t before both, you know, rate compression, the demands of businesses, we’re in a very highly litigious, you know, world that we live in right now. So legal expenses, and legal fees are just going up ballooning through the roof. And I think what you’re starting to see is legal reaching outside of legal for resources, both from a people process and technology perspective. So ALSPs, obviously, coming to the forefront. But I think more than that, I think you’re starting to see legal operators function more as core operators than as just legal teams. So I think you’re going to start seeing more and more of the kind of digital transformation that you’re seeing happening in the space right now. Leveraging experiences from outside of what we’ve seen in the last 15 and 20 years. So I’m excited. I think we’re all sitting at the forefront of what will be a really exciting time. And we’re continuing to see a tremendous amount of progress in that realm.

Marlene Gebauer 33:20
Pam, same question to you.

Pam Wickersham 33:23
Yeah, I think Ari touched on this a little bit early. But I think that we’re starting to see a lot of our law firms and even corporate legal teams really need to operate like a business and really look at their bottom line and not just be a cost center, but also have opportunity to be making money and operating, operating lean, but really thinking about themselves as a CEO of that department. And so we are creating products that are making that a lot more possible for them to be able to run reports and have analytics and make sure that they’re making decisions based on data and not just on what’s been done in the past, or you know, what, what someone is suggesting that they do. So we’re building products to help make that easier to manage budgets, seeing a lot of things going to alternative fee arrangements, there’s just a lot that’s happening that we need to keep up with, as well as creating products for our customers’ customer. So that’s something that already touched on too, of making sure that their outside counsel, they can interact. And so we’re not just creating a product for the corporate legal team, but also a product for the outside counsel. And same thing with law firms. There’s a client portal so that you can log in and make sure that you can share data back and forth with your your customer. And so that’s something that we’re focused on as well.

Greg Lambert 34:37
Well, Ari Treuhaft In Pam Wickersham I want to thank you both for taking the time to talk with us. This has been great.

Ari Treuhaft 34:44
Yeah, it’s been great. Thanks for having us. I really enjoyed it.

Pam Wickersham 34:47
Thank you very much.

Marlene Gebauer 34:48
Thank you

Greg Lambert 34:52
Well, it’s good I you know, I I thought we’d probably spend more time on the Salesforce thing, but

Toby Brown 34:58
I know I was kind of surprised that didn’t him up and his elevator speech? Because to me that’s like a primary value that they have. And I know he was smart to say, lawyers get confused about it. But it is a known fact, the answer I would have given to his question when he when you said, you know, how are law firms viewing this, you know, with client data going on, as I would have said, your clients are already on this platform with very sensitive information.

Greg Lambert 35:27
Yeah. And I think he mentioned it, you know, mentioned that with all the other companies that are on there. And I will say that he’s done a couple of other podcasts, one with Bob Ambrogi, back last summer, where they really went into what it means to be be on the Salesforce platform. So if anyone wants to hear more of that Bob did a great job.

Toby Brown 35:47
Bob usually does.

Greg Lambert 35:48
Yes.

Marlene Gebauer 35:48
I thought it was interesting that they were talking about that, you know, yeah, there’s there’s been more of a push for, you know, attorneys and law firms to sort of move to this sort of platform and use of data, because I still think there’s there’s still a bit of resistance. That way, people who haven’t been used to being monitored in that sort of fashion, who’s, you know, who have been very autonomous in terms of running their own practice? You know, I still think there’s, there’s a bit of a of a hesitancy to jump on board with that.

Toby Brown 36:20
Yeah, I liked his comment about, you know, ensuring good customer, forget the term of use the customer experience that would that would be consistent. And I do like the idea of bridge between the Customer and the client. But the problem there is, then does the client have the same software as you and the answer? 99 times out of 100 is no.

Greg Lambert 36:43
But the possibility of the client being on Salesforce is probably high.

Toby Brown 36:47
True, true. Well, and plus, with Salesforce, you can open it up so that the clients can come in and view it.

Marlene Gebauer 36:53
But the fact that they’re picking up on sort of this this desire and need for this sort of this deep and more meaningful collaboration. You know, having that ability on a platform, I think is absolutely true. Clients are always asking for that. And you know, this would make it very easy.

Toby Brown 37:10
Well, since I can never have a conversation anymore without mentioning SALI, the standards effort.

Marlene Gebauer 37:15
Mentioned it, we love SALI.

Toby Brown 37:18
And I’ve had conversations with Litify. With Ken there at Litify. About you guys really need to get on SALI. But if you think about it, one of the value proposition of SALI is allowing seamless, frictionless data transfers between different applications. Well, with Litify they’re not different applications. They’re the same one on the Salesforce platform. So that makes it even better.

Greg Lambert 37:42
Yeah. Well, in one thing that I think we kind of glossed over the fact that Pam is an engineer, different background, not coming in from legal.

Marlene Gebauer 37:54
Different perception.

Greg Lambert 37:55
Different perception. I think it’s brilliant to have her on there. Helping to guide this that, you know, she called herself the, the documents, person.

Toby Brown 38:07
That was a little bit of an understatement.

Greg Lambert 38:09
Yeah. Well, and I think Ari pointed that out that, you know, that’s they, they have a real jewel, with having Pam there. And so I think other companies could could learn a lot by what they’ve done. So I want to thank Ari Treuhaft and Pam Wickersham, both of Litify for coming on, and talking to us on the show. And I also want to thank City Acre brewery for letting us crash their place today and …

Toby Brown 38:36
Crash being the operative word.

Greg Lambert 38:37
Yeah, we had a little incident earlier.

Marlene Gebauer 38:42
Yeah, well, unfortunately, we can’t say that any laptops weren’t harmed in the making this podcast.

Greg Lambert 38:48
Thank God we brought two.

Marlene Gebauer 38:51
And want to say thank you to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter.

Greg Lambert 39:04
And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter and Toby, what about you?

Toby Brown 39:08
Knowledge, but it’s spelled unique way?

Greg Lambert 39:10
Yeah, with a “g”.

Toby Brown 39:11
G N O W L E D G E (@gnawledge).

Greg Lambert 39:15
Well done.

Toby Brown 39:15
I gotta right this time.

Marlene Gebauer 39:18
Or you can leave us a voicemail on the new geek interview Hotline at 713-487-7821. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert 39:29
Thanks, Jerry.

Toby Brown 39:30
Thanks Jerry.

Greg Lambert 39:30
All right, Marlene, Toby, see you later.

Marlene Gebauer 39:32
Alright, bye!

At present, the most universal priority for law departments is “controlling outside counsel costs” per 85% of respondents to the most recent TR Legal Department Operations Index.

I understand. I also doubt the marginal utility of simply pressing harder on the traditional levers of cost control (discounts, panels, RFPs, outside counsel guidelines, AFAs). My sometimes solicited, alternative advice:

• Package work. Identify opportunities to enter portfolio arrangements, including integrated law relationships with New Law offerings.
• Move work. Right source, including greater use of legal marketplaces to find the right talent at the right price.
• Re-examine costs on autopilot. Major advances in ediscovery, ADR, court reporting, etc. present substantial, immediate spend-optimization opportunities.
• Don’t stop investing in compliance by design. Embedding legal knowledge in business processes is the only viable, long-term approach to meeting the evolving legal needs of business in an increasingly complex operating environment.

If you want to discuss, call me, maybe.

Herein, however, I am not focused on being better. Rather, we will continue our exploration of avoiding worse. The unpalatable message remains that even when something must be done, doing nothing is superior to doing the wrong thing.

WORD COUNT WARNING: the original, short version is here. Proceed at your own risk.

It is getting ugly out there. We have a failure to communicate grounded in a lack of trust. Even when times are good, clients express surprise, anger, and dismay as they “vow to fight” law firm rate increases that are roughly in line with inflation. I take zero issue with clients pushing back on rate increases but the moral outrage strikes me as a distraction from productive commercial negotiation. Yet, with deteriorating economic conditions and being that time of year, we appear to be in for another edition of clients berating law firms for inefficiency while doing nothing about it beyond demanding discounts and, some places, additional supplier consolidation—which is to say, doing nothing effective about it, in the vein of ‘old man yells at cloud’.

I’m on an apology tour, in part, because I’ve had several recent conversations with prominent law departments who are currently revisiting their outside counsel programs. They inquired if they should employ the questions on law-firm technology usage contained in my guidebook Unless You Ask. I advised them not to. While it may appear like I am producing parody, I assure you these exchanges hewed closely to the following:

In-house: in our RFP to law firms, should we include questions about technology, like in your guidebook?

Me: who will read the answers?

In-house: I don’t know.

Me: how will the answers affect your decisions?

In-house: I don’t know.

Me: then don’t ask. You should not include any questions in your RFP that won’t inform your decisions. Why would you consider doing so?

In-house: seems like we should. Technology is important.

I know the logic presents poorly when laid out in this manner. But I wrote the book on this subject. I therefore have the background and opportunity to probe. Such decisions are often made rapidly and without much reflection, let alone scrutiny.

Ponder the related but more familiar rituals around discounts—which I have labeled “rack-rate kabuki—through the lived experience of Laura Frederick, who was kind enough to comment on my first installment:

Laura is correct in her judgment that the practice is nonsensical. My aim is to pair judgment with empathy.

We intuit the impetus: equitable prices for, and effective oversite of, external legal services. Less automatic is our understanding of how the pursuit of legitimate objectives results in nonsensical practices.

Almost no behavior is irrational, in the sense of being inexplicable. Rather, behavior is rational within context. If a behavior strikes me as irrational, then I lack sufficient understanding of the context. Context is critical. And the in-house context is bordering on crisis. Installment #2 is an exercise in deliberate empathy—almost 3,000 words of deep nerdery exploring context.

Already burned out professionals are under intensifying pressure to immediately address increasingly complex problems in areas outside their core competencies while demand grows and resources remain flat (at best). If you come away from this series not understanding the choice architecture that results in the foregoing examples, I will have failed (again).

this is important

something must be done

but we’re already underwater

X is common and seems like a quick, if only partial, fix

even if X is insufficient, X is still something

let’s do X

….[problems persist while bandwidth continues to dwindle]….

more X it is

Make things as simple as possible but no simpler. In a resource-constrained environment, simple solutions present as the only affordable options to address our complex problems—that is, solutions for which we have sufficient time, attention, and money. For entirely comprehensible reasons, in-house departments consistently choose the path of least resistance and default to simple solutions when addressing the wicked problems of legal buy—to everyone’s detriment.

Unfortunately, while I can explain why simple and easy solutions to complex problems are wrong, I cannot offer alternatives that are simple, easy, and right—problems amenable to simple and easy solutions are, by definition, not complex.

I consistently disappoint in-house departments because they ask me for a fish, and I offer them a worm. Still, I persist in my belief that hard ≠ impossible. But we must first admit we face hard problems not amenable to simple solutions. At the very least, if circumstances render the right approach impracticable, we can stop wasting energy being wrong. Misguided pursuits, no matter how well intentioned, consume finite attention and move us further away from our objectives. Even when something must be done, doing nothing remains superior to expending energy unproductively, let alone aggravating an already precarious situation.

DISCOUNTS DISCOUNTS DISCOUNTS!

Discount is not rate. Rate is not price.

The same way car buyers have been conditioned to not pay over MSRP (except when supply-chain chaos radically alters market dynamics), enterprise legal buyers have conditioned themselves to demand discounts for no other reason than demanding discounts is what enterprise legal buyers do. The market equilibrium is now such that in-house departments would be derelict in their duty by not engaging in the discount discussion. Discounts are baked into most rack rates. And where this is not yet true, in-house departments will ensure it changes (see Laura Frederick above). More’s the pity.

This bazaar-like mandatory haggling introduces unproductive friction into a commercial relationship. Much worse, many in-house departments delude themselves into believing that with discounts they are somehow delivering on a dubious more-with-less savings mandate, disciplining profligate law firms, “winning” the negotiation, or some other such nonsense. They double down. Conditions deteriorate further.

Over-indexing on discount culture extends an already elaborate mating/negotiation ritual and consumes finite focus—in an information economy, attention is the scarcest commodity. Meanwhile, despite all the activity and acrimony, rates (standard, agreed, billed, and collected) continue to ratchet up because of how inflation and markets work.

Some lawyers are totally worth it (yes, I absolutely believe the business value delivered can justify far more than $1,500/hr). Clients should pay premium prices for premium work from premium lawyers because the return on investment makes commercial sense. But fake discounts on premium rates for non-premium work is a bad plan.

Rather than treating discounts as some independent end in themselves, the objective should be to (i) price work, rather than lawyer, based on (a) the value of the work to the enterprise and (b) the market dynamics in which the work is being sourced, and then (ii) allocate work to fit-to-purpose suppliers. Like so much in our space, this is far easier said than done. The foundation is mostly missing.

In-house counsel must first understand the nature of the work (work sorting), including the composition of the work (work decomposition), the business drivers of work volumes (work drivers), and the value of the work to the business (work segmentation). While in-house lawyers genuinely care about business success and view themselves as strong business partners (the business does not share this view), few in-house departments have undertaken the system-level project work to align legal activity to business outcomes. An accessible from a post in my value storytelling series.

• Few law departments measure contract volumes
• Fewer measure contract cycle times
• Fewer still connect contract cycle times to business-centric KPIs like sales velocity
• And even fewer have deconstructed cycle times to determine which interventions would truly improve contracting velocity, let alone the resulting business impact

The example is deliberately straightforward. Such exercises become more challenging when endeavoring to characterize risk, uncertainty, avoidance, reputation, business interruption, etc. But the fact that the low-hanging fruit remains unpicked is telling.

Work sorting is a pre-requisite to proper supplier sorting, pricing, and management: who should handle which work, how, and at what price. Work should be allocated to the most cost-effective resource, where paying market price results in the best overall return on investment to the business.

We should not confuse sticker price with market price. We should also recognize there is no monolithic “market” for legal work. Work type, work complexity, supplier scarcity (or abundance), geography, etc. all complicate the analysis. In theory, good data can uncomplicate it. In reality, the available data is fragmented, uneven, and fraught (among the many reasons in-house counsel should actively push and contribute to industry standards like SALI).

Add on search + switching costs, it is no surprise that instead of trying to strategically source work at market prices, clients instead attempt to rely on their individual market power to drive down rates with their existing law firms—to limited effect, and often in the form of provider panels.

PANELS (AKA ANOTHER DISCOUNT DISCUSSION)

It is really hard to change how you buy if you are unwilling to change what you buy.

Panels take many forms but, at core, mostly serve as a discount variant. While the motivations are multi-faceted (e.g., reduced administrative burden) and the stated rationales often meritorious (e.g., partnership), most convergence initiatives are merely prolonged negotiations where clients theoretically consolidate their buying power to extract greater rate concessions from their suppliers.

Sadly, most panels fail in most respects. Those charged with putting the panel together lack the authority to distribute the work. Work allocation remains essentially unchanged. We should weep for the opportunity cost of the countless hours squandered auditioning for and constructing preferred provider programs that award no preference.

Sadly, some panels ostensibly succeed. Clients do consolidate work at purportedly favorable rates. But they start from the wrong premise: an arbitrary goal of concentrating work amongst an arbitrary target number of firms. This construct favors firms with broad practice and geographic footprints—i.e., the largest and most expensive. While bizarro savings math dictates that discounting a standard rate of $900 down to an effective rate of $650 is a big win (the more you spend, the more you ‘save’), actual arithmetic still holds that a standard rate of $450 is less money. Moreover, the resulting entanglements can grow so gnarly that moving the work becomes exceedingly difficult—creating a perverse form of lock-in that reduces client leverage in subsequent negotiations. Again, so much effort, so little ROI.

Sadly, panels need not be worthless—I commend this series from the consistently excellent Dan Currell. Purposeful lock-in (i.e., mutual commitment) can create alignment and deliver returns on investment for both parties. But true strategic partnerships are uncommon because so few have the mindset, bandwidth and patience to create, nurture, and grow them. Instead, we rely on increasingly byzantine mechanisms like excruciating RFPs and onerous outside guidelines, counting on mere words to be sufficient to drive positive change (spoiler: they aren’t).

RFPs (DISCOUNTS ON DISCOUNTS)

Panels are often the product of a tortuous RFP process. But RFPs are also in broad use for individual matters. Even Cravath has a full-time RFP manager.

As with panels, the personnel charged with putting out RFPs are usually not empowered to make the final selection. Despite so much ink being spilled, the ultimate decision makers continue to go with who they know and default to their favored firms. Automaticity is among the most potent forces driving human behavior:

the idea that purchase decisions arise from conscious choice flies in the face of much research in behavioral psychology….Processing fluency is itself the product of repeated experience, and it increases exponentially with the number of times we have the experience…In short, research into the workings of the human brain suggests that the mind loves automaticity more than just about anything else — certainly more than engaging in conscious consideration. Given a choice, it would like to do the same things again and again….A driving reason to choose the leading product in the market, therefore, is simply that it is the easiest thing to do.

To counter automaticity, RFPs, done well, have their place.

On large and complex matters—assuming proper scoping (an audacious assumption)—responses from independent experts laying out proposed strategies, sequencing, and staffing can enrich a client’s understanding, in addition to aiding firm selection. Similarly, RFPs can serve as a price-discovery mechanism for non-standard work in a noisy market.

Often, however, RFPs are merely a price-competition mechanism dressed up as something more. Reverse auctions have a mixed history that need not be revisited here. Rather, I’ll be concise: if that is all clients are doing, they should just do it. Too much time is wasted from everyone involved on the fluff and ceremony surrounding what is at core a straightforward negotiation. So many questions asked. So few answers that genuinely inform the purchase decision.

This is a lesson I failed to learn before I put out my guidebook aimed at improving the situation at the relationship-level (i.e., for preferred providers, including, but not limited to, panel firms). I had—and have personally executed on—a vision for sustained structured dialogue to continuously improve the process and technology of legal service delivery. RFIs/RFPs were the first step in collecting the information necessary to engage in the dialogue. I should have known this would usually turn out to also be the final step. In-house counsel added the proposed questions to their RFPs (approaching ubiquity) but are doing absolutely nothing with the answers, including reading them. I shudder at all the hours wasted as a result.

Misguided pursuits, even if they are my own and well intentioned, consume finite attention and move us further away from our objectives. Among my meritorious objectives was to stop the madness of outside counsel guidelines.

OUTSIDE COUNSEL GUIDELINES (MICRO DISCOUNTS, POST HOC)

Micromanagement is bad. Blunt instruments are bad. Micromanagement via blunt instrument is terrible.

I’ve always been a hater when it comes to OCGs (receipts). One of my first learning experiences as an associate was how to play silly word games to circumvent client billing prohibitions. Clients had constructed administrative apparatuses to identify technical violations of their guidelines. My firm had a corresponding administrative apparatus dedicated to malicious compliance. It was white-collar CAPTCHA.

No substantive behavior changed. No money was saved. Ample pain was inflicted. And considerable energy was wasted making billing narratives even less informative (no small feat).

Recently, in highlighting this point during a presentation, I was challenged by a legal-operations professional who possessed hard data on the violations flagged when her organization switched on automated billing compliance software. I have no doubt her data was correct, and the corporation paid out less than it would have otherwise on that initial tranche of invoices.

In response, I offered three conjectures:

1. Compliance increased rapidly and then stabilized
2. The corporation lacked sufficient metrics to determine whether their total cost of ownership for matters was reduced due to enhanced enforcement
3. In particular, the corporation had no way of telling whether outside counsel were padding their entries to compensate for the extra time spent playing silly word games (consciously or not, it is easy to tack on 0.1s at the end of the day/week/month when exhausted, annoyed, and guestimating anyway)

My conjectures were confirmed.

Returning to the graph showing rates smoothly ratcheting up, note the stable relationship between what is billed and what is collected despite more than a decade of increasingly onerous billing guidelines, improvements to automated bill review, and the proliferation of bill-review specialists, including dedicated third-party providers.

Cast in a more favorable light, OCGs are not about paying less than billed. Law departments hope OCGs will reduce how much is billed in the first instance. Hope is not a plan.

Again, discounts are not rates, and rates are not price. Price is usually determined by an equation, the function of rate x hours. OCGs are an attempt to control hours, the multiplier. Understandable impulse. Ineffective manifestation thereof.

The first rule of legal work is to expertly execute the work—by whatever means necessary. Everything else is subordinate to mission accomplishment. Mission-oriented outside counsel do the work as best they know how (after all, they are the experts) and then perform the requisite linguistic gymnastics to conform the narratives of their unchanged behavior to each clients’ peculiar description prescriptions.

If in-house departments want to change how work is done, then in-house departments need to be directly involved in changing how work is done—i.e., sustained, material improvement in active relationship management and matter management. But this requires time and attention (and, frequently, expertise) they cannot seem to spare.

Outside counsel guidelines have their place and their use. “Send invoices to” is an essential OCG. The best use of OCGs is not to serve as a discount variant but, rather, to improve data quality [cough, SALI, cough]. Better data can be used in many ways, including legitimately useful alternative fee arrangements (“AFAs”).

AFAs (STILL, MOSTLY JUST DISCOUNTS)

If it quacks like a duck.

I know some readers too well. They are geared up to fire off a tweet because they know in their soul the one true cure to the ills outlined above is to finally kill the billable hour—plus, they are chafed I refer to alternative fee arrangements, instead of appropriate or value fee arrangements.

First, I try to ground my observations in the empirical (what is) rather than the normative (what ought to be). The billable hour remains dominant to the point where vocal practitioners of AFAs exclaim that most purported AFAs fail a purity test and are simply slight variants on the billable hour. So, too, the familiarity of the term AFAs. Pretending otherwise only causes confusion.

Second, I agree we are over reliant on the billable hour. I also consider hourly billing essential to the pricing toolkit, even in an ideal world. Like Bill Henderson, I am not a billable hour truther. To those who regard eradication of the billable hour as the skeleton key to improving legal service delivery, I implore you to revisit your root-cause analysis.

Consider that the billable hour lacks explanatory power as to why in-house departments exhibit the same pathologies as law firms despite the complete absence of compensable timesheets. And if you persist in defending, rather than re-examining, your thesis by proposing some form of original-sin theory where law firm culture has infected in-house departments, you must come to terms with the fact you are negating your own contention that excising the billable hour is sufficient to unleash transformational change.

Third, and most pertinently, I am not being critical of AFAs—just as I am not critical, in the abstract, of price negotiation, panels, RFPs, and outside counsel guidelines. There is nothing wrong with AFAs except the false hope they present a simple and easy cure-all. This mischaracterization renders most real-world attempts at introducing AFAs a colossal waste of collective time. Even law firms are frustrated:

Leaders of international law firms are frustrated by a perceived unwillingness on the part of existing clients to move from traditional billing and hourly rates to alternative fee models… Many firms have spent considerable money and effort in building up more robust pricing and legal project management teams…Yet despite these efforts, alternative fee arrangements had remained fairly consistent at roughly 20% of law firm revenues… firm leaders report that clients remain more likely to accept either traditional hourly arrangements with discounts or budget caps applied.

Among those time-wasting RFP questions is the requirement for AFA proposals that will never go anywhere because:

• Law departments cannot provide the requisite scoping information due to insufficient information, lack of bandwidth, poor data quality, etc.
• In-house lawyers are unfamiliar with AFAs, which makes them uncomfortable, including the fear of striking a bad bargain due to insufficient information, lack of bandwidth, poor data quality, etc.
• Law department systems and metrics are billable-hour centric (e.g., accounting, reporting, savings math)

Mostly, this results in time wasted crafting and negotiating AFA proposals only to have the in-house team default to discounted billable hours. The worse, and painfully common, outcome is nominal AFAs that are discounted billable hours in camouflage, fooling no one but adding all manner of complicatedness to tracking and invoicing—exacerbating the already wicked problem of billing at scale and further degrading data quality.

Scoping can be genuinely challenging even with good information and solid data. Few legal matters are composed solely of known knowns—if all is known, there is little need to lawyer up. Basic matters present all manner of known unknowns—assumptions that could fall somewhere along a range and are often dependent on choices made by others (counterparties, judges, regulators, et al.). Expertly scoped matters are still susceptible to unknown unknowns—those fun surprises that turn a matter on its head.

The noise of such variance can often be smoothed out with volume (the law of large numbers). Hence my strong preference for portfolio partnerships. For one-off matters, I am a proponent of inherently flexible arrangements that enhance alignment, like the ACES engagement model. And where circumstances dictate we dive in immediately and blindly, there is nothing wrong with starting on the billable hour and reaching well-calibrated terms as the matter comes into focus. Similarly, some matters are so infrequent and so small that scoping is not only impossible but wasteful, making the billable hour perfectly serviceable.

The problem is that all three “alternative” approaches—portfolio partnerships, flexible engagement models, hybrid structures—require work and trust. There is little slack for the former. And the latter continues to erode.

T-R-U-S-T

Trust is a basic building block of economic exchange. Going back to the well on discounts, panels, RFPs, OCGs, and nominal AFAs evinces the corrosion of trust between law departments and law firms.

What law departments experience as price gouging, law firms characterize as market-responsive, client-tailored dynamic pricing. What law departments characterize as introducing business rigor, law firms experience as moral judgment, ad hominem attacks, and increasingly extreme demands untethered from market realities. Both sides are right. Both are wrong. Both are responsible for remedying the situation. But in a buyers’ market, the professional buyers must lead.

Data and dialogue will drive better outcomes than performative discipline and browbeating. But that requires law departments to materially reconfigure what they buy and how they buy, rooted in a more nuanced understanding of why they buy.

The problem, of course, is that like insourcing, the standard approaches to external cost control work until they don’t—i.e., real initial benefits are followed by diminishing returns and problematic path dependence. This is fixable. But the fixes are not obvious, simple, nor easy.

I urge in-house departments to take advantage of the current crisis to explore true transformation in their approach to legal buy. But if bandwidth or political constraints make that impracticable, I implore you to, at the very least, not waste your own finite energy or that of your law-firm partners on cost-control theater that will not do much to control costs. Even when something must be done, doing nothing is superior to doing the wrong things.

In a recent article from Legal IT Insider, Caroline Hill wrote about how “63% of all legal contracts are gender-biased” based on a report from Genie AI. We wanted to dive deeper into that topic, so we asked Caroline and Alex Denne, Genie AI’s Growth Marketing Lead, to come on at talk with us.

Genie AI is an Open-Source product with some 1,500 legal templates available in the UK currently and is looking to expand into the US in 2023. Alex Denne mentions that in the evaluation of these templates, and in discussions he was having in the industry, there was talk of gender-bias in contracts, but that there was no baseline to measure whether the industry was improving or regressing in its bias. Therefore, Genie AI took it upon itself to evaluate the contracts it had for bias terms and phrases. It was this evaluation that found that nearly 2/3rds of contracts had gender-biased terms in them.

Caroline Hill shares her experiences in the Legal Tech industry to note that the number of CIOs in the UK who are women is actually going down instead of up, and that she’s noticed that even in simple things like job descriptions, gender-biased terms have a cumulative effect. Jobs which pull from STEM graduates still used gender-biased terms and according to Hill, phrases like “we are looking for a strong” or “aggressive” or “go getter” tend to have a direct effect on whether women apply for these positions or not.

Alex Denne points out that the UK government is requiring gender-neutral language in all contracts they approve. Both Denne and Hill agree that in order for law firms to adjust their own contract language to use more gender-neutral terms, clients have a direct impact on how seriously they take that mission. If it is part of the culture of the client to reduce gender-bias, then perhaps that should be part of the outside counsel guidelines for the firms they use.

• Legal Gender Bias Report 2022
• Genie AI’s Gender-Neutral Legal Templates
• Textio
• Textmetrics
• LexisNexis New Guide to Gender-Neutral Drafting (subscription)

This week, Erik Perez, Central Legal Operations Officer at Shell USA, Inc., answers our Crystal Ball Question by focusing on the long-term needs of legal operations to both stay on task, hire and retain excellent talent, and use the right people for the right tasks.

Transcript

Greg Lambert 0:07
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas and the legal industry. I’m Greg Lambert doing the solo this week while Marlene Gebauer is away, but the good news is she’ll be back next week and we’ll be bringing one of the original members of the Three Geeks team, Toby Brown, back to help us co host next week’s episode, so really excited to have Toby on the podcast for the first time ever. This week I talked with Alex Denne, Growth Marketing Lead at Genie AI and Caroline Hill, Editor In Chief at Legal IT Insider. We talk about Genie AI’s recent revelation that they uncovered nearly two thirds of all legal contracts are gender biased. We talk about why that’s a problem, the pushback that Alex has seen from some in the industry, and Caroline’s view on how the legal tech portion of the market has its own issues with gender bias as well. First up, we continue our crystal ball question this week with Erik Perez, Central Legal Operations Officer for Shell. Erik’s vision of the future, not surprisingly, includes a lot more focus on Legal Operations. So we’ll hear from Erik first and then we’ll jump into our conversation with Alex Denne and Caroline Hill.

Erik Perez 1:21
Thanks Greg. Erik Perez at Shell USA, Inc. What I’ve seen in the future is really the need for embracing legal ops as a whole. And really thinking about people retention, and demonstrating the value of what legal ops brings, as well as having the patience to wait for and to invest in the long like the long game. Really saying from a standpoint of people will love immediate satisfaction. And in some cases, some of these programs take years to implement, and then years to see the outcome, but in their long term that the outcome is really worth the time and investment in legal ops as a whole. In that you have a good team and legal ops as well as the not only the attraction of legal ops professionals, but the retention as well.

Greg Lambert 2:07
When you say legal ops in you’re coming from the client side, what does that look like for the if people don’t understand what legal ops looks like, on the client side?

Erik Perez 2:16
That’s good. That’s a really good um, for me, it’s, I try and stick to a philosophy of only do things that you can do. So if there are things that you don’t need an attorney for, we should be doing it. So from my standpoint, we look at pricing. We look at, I have teams that I currently have teams that do invoicing, I have teams that do IT support, project management. Administrative support and really kind of flow down the work. If a paralegal can do it, the attorney should be touching it. If an admin could touch it, paralegal shouldn’t touch it. If it’s an invoice issue, or invoice challenge, or whatever the case may be, why why have attorneys spend time doing it? Really how, you know, put that into the right hands of the train staff and big ops groups. That’s your specialty. Let them do what they do best. So the attorneys will do what they do best.

Greg Lambert 3:05
Awesome. All right. Thanks, Eric.

Erik Perez 3:07
Thanks, Greg.

Greg Lambert 3:10
We’d like to welcome Alex Denne, Growth Marketing Lead at Genie AI, and Caroline Hill, Editor in Chief, Legal IT Insider. Alex and Caroline, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Caroline Hill 3:21
Thank you, Greg.

Alex Denne 3:21
Great to be here. Thank you.

Greg Lambert 3:23
So I asked both of you to come on the show because I had read Caroline’s article from a couple of weeks ago, that was titled “63% of all legal contracts are gender bias, that new data reveals.” And that number was extracted Alex by your company, Genie AI. And so Alex, before we dive into the middle of the topic itself, would you mind just kind of giving us a little bit of background on Genie AI, and why you guys wanted to conduct research on the issue of gender bias in existing contracts?

Alex Denne 3:59
Yeah, sure. I mean, first off, I just express shock that I thought I’d be speaking to Adam Lambert, based on your Twitter handle.

Greg Lambert 4:07
Yeah, there’s still many, I guess, or 20 year olds now that are mad at me.

Alex Denne 4:11
Yeah, well, they’ve reunited so your Twitter DMS must be going crazy, right? Yep. Maroon Five are touring next year. You must have noticed that before many I’m sure.

Greg Lambert 4:19
Yeah. Queen Queen and I are on tour next year. So

Alex Denne 4:23
Amazing. I love that. I’m looking forward to the duet. So Genie AI like we currently describe ourselves as the UK is largest open source template library. But that’s really just the foundation for what we’re trying to do, which is effectively open source to law and really reduce the barriers to access for legal documents for businesses, mostly primarily their target market. And through that usage data, we can drive insights that you know will just become fascinating. For lawyers, for businesses and help people sort of self serve their own legal research with the form of the sort of AI legal assistance, but really it’s, it’s, you know, machine learning and data analysis applied on a broad layer of legal clauses issues.

Greg Lambert 5:17
When you say, open source, can you kind of put some parameters on it? What do you mean by open source?

Alex Denne 5:25
Well, so we’re working towards a fully open source license, we’re not there quite yet. We’re still figuring out our pricing model. We’re currently pre revenue. And so right, as of today, open source means anyone can use our entire platform free of charge, which has 1500 legal templates available in the UK, we’ll be looking to expand into the US early next year. The pricing model, whatever we implement, there’s always going to be access to those legal documents for free in some form or another. So that’s the open source mission, we’re pushing here.

Greg Lambert 5:59
As far as the the gender bias what what kind of caught your eye on that, that you wanted to do a report and find out and actually put some statistics on on the gender bias and existing contracts?

Alex Denne 6:13
Well, first of all, it feels like when you do a little bit of research into this, it feels like a lot of people have been talking about it for some time. But no one can really say if we’re progressing. So the fact that there was no answer to that question made me want to try and find an answer to that question. Secondly, because we, you know, we’ve spent four years sort of poring over legal data building this library of 1500 templates, which, you know, as I say, as the starting point, we’ll be taking all of those contracts, splitting them into clauses or like components, and then offering different solutions within all of those to tackle whatever legal issue that clauses supposing to tackle. And we need a massive data set in order to do that. And given that we’re currently going through that motion, it gives us a great opportunity to regularly pour over that data and analyze it for evidence of bias on a clause level. So right now, we’ve done that on the contract level. And it’s just going to become part of our our operations really, that we’ll be able to see all of these public filings, all of this public access data and report on are we actually progressing as a as an industry as a as a country I suppose and as a as a planet towards more inclusive, more gender neutral language.

Greg Lambert 7:35
Now, Caroline, when I was reading your story, your your Editor’s Note was almost as long as the story itself, because I could tell that he had a real passion for this topic. And you talked about how the legal tech part of the market is actually becoming worse at gender bias in his language, leaning heavily toward male representation in contracts, advertising and other industry language. What were some of the examples of things that you’re seeing in the legal market? Or at least the legal tech market?

Caroline Hill 8:08
Yeah. So I think I’m saying that it was getting worse in terms of female representation in the legal tech market. So the number of UK CIOs, UK, female UK CIOs is actually down, not up. I think that contracts have always been biased. I really commend Genie AI on the work that they’ve done. This is a great group, you know, they have this great initiative, I think, with contracts have been always been biased. But I think what’s changing is our understanding of the impact that language so a our ability to analyze that and be understanding of the impact that that has on us. And also our tolerance for it. I think there’s a, you know, there’s there’s should be zero tolerance for it. Now, because there’s absolutely no place for gender bias within our contracts it, it serves no purpose, obviously, you have to be careful that the odd mention of the word Sir isn’t relevant in a different context. But mostly, it serves no purpose. And I think that gender bias really came on to my radar. So a few years ago, I was thinking, Gosh, how can I use my platform to try and help improve diversity, or at least learn more, I hosted a meeting at one of the big law firms, which was chaired by their head of diversity. And she gave the most brilliant presentation, showing us word clouds of things like, you know, the words that girls and boys are subjected to as they’re growing up, and the impact that that has on them in terms of their adoption of STEM subjects. And, I mean, all of this stuff is happening at such a subconscious level. But we’re being bombarded continuously with language that affects our expectations of ourselves. And I think that its analysis has shown us so much more intelligence around, you know, analysis of, for example, job applications. She, again, this came up in that meeting, and the head of diversity was showing about job applications within STEM certs, subjects, particularly If the if they use certain words like, exhaustive, enforcement, fairness, they’re more likely to attract men than women, even if the women are equally as qualified. So I think just STEM is a really difficult subject. There’s lots of things that will take years to improve in terms of diversity ratios, but there are some quicker wins. And I think that the sort of stuff that Genie AI is done and other other firms are doing is a quicker win.

Greg Lambert 10:25
Yeah. Interesting, because I think a lot of people don’t really think about it. I think, one, I think it also shows some laziness on behalf of the people that are writing these and then relying upon the language as it’s always been, you know, this is how we’ve always done it kind of thing. And so, and I imagine that there are people that get very defensive when you start calling it, you know, calling these things out as well. So, Alex, what, what were some of the common languages used, that showed up in in these contract language and in the contracts themselves? And how prevalent are gender bias terms used over gender neutral terms, for example, you know, Chairman, Chairwoman or chairperson, what kind of examples are you finding?

Alex Denne 11:17
So to clarify, in our analysis, which you know, is a starting point, our analysis will definitely get more advanced as our technology gets more advanced. But we sort of broke it down into two steps. There’s the gender specific pronouns, such as he and she, obviously, and then we have gendered nouns like chairman or actress or policeman. Now, it’s funny that you mentioned some people, you know, get frustrated with this subject, we noticed that when we started to put this out there, you know, a couple of people pick this up, and some of the comments, you know, people have furiously saying, I cannot believe that, you’re telling me I can’t use chairman. You know, I didn’t know chairman was gendered. It’s like, what do you mean, it’s got man in it.

Greg Lambert 12:02
It’s got a man right at the end of it.

Alex Denne 12:06
What else is that worth doing there? So some people still hung up on this for some reason. But in terms of their headline findings, no one was surprised by the headline finding, I should say, I think some of the finer details were more interesting. And but the headline was, that, if we say that a document is biased, if it uses either a gender specific pronoun, or a gendered noun, at some point, we can say that roughly two thirds of all the documents we analyzed, were biased, in some form or another. So that leaves 1/3 doing the right thing, which is they have absolutely no place in our documents, we don’t need them. So yeah, a third people, or a third of contracts going out there third, a document being filed, are not using these terms, and kudos to them if you’re one of those people. So thank you. And if you consider that you might not be, then take a look at the research, we do provide a list of all of the words that we used, and it’s very easy to just run a quick search on your own templates in Word or something like that.

Greg Lambert 13:13
Yeah, I say people get defensive, because I know, oh, gosh, it’s probably been 10 years ago, but I gave a presentation once. And there was a woman afterwards that came up and very politely kind of told me said, Look, you’re really using male examples, male gender all the time in your talk. And my first reaction was, you know, how dare you tell me, you know, da da da? And then but, you know, after thinking about it, I was like, okay, you know, yes, it doesn’t hurt me at all, to make sure that I’m very balanced in how I present so I can see, you know, why that would be important to, you know, that was important to, you know, that small audience. And I can imagine that when you expand that to, you know, 1000s, Millions of people that may have to deal with with contracts or language, that you know, that those little things really add up after a while. So I’m really happy that you guys are setting a baseline for where we are so that we can measure are we actually improving. Caroline, I know, Alex and and Genie AI and his group are working on this. But you had mentioned that there are some other tools out there as well. Like, I think it’s Textio, for example, that helps you clean up gender bias language. So you get to see a lot of tools that are out there with your day job. Where do you think we still need to put more effort into cleaning up our gender bias language here in the legal industry?

Caroline Hill 14:52
Yeah, I think it there’s no doubt it’s, it’s, you know, take some effort. So tech Textio is actually for job interviews, as I mentioned above, you know that the language of job interviews is surprisingly important and texts do you think it’s free, you can, you can just put your job interview and I really highly recommend people do this because it’s amazing, the small changes that you can make using something like Textio, in terms of the language that you’re using, and they’ve got real examples of how that will affect the applicant applications that you receive. So it’s really worth doing if people aren’t doing that already.

Greg Lambert 15:28
That’s what you’d mentioned earlier, right? With the with the language, that’s not just pronoun issues, but there’s actually certain certain phrases that that it may pick up as well?

Caroline Hill 15:41
Exactly. And I can I can imagine, I can imagine people listening, Oh, for goodness sakes, this is just all just taking it too far. But they’ve got they’ve got measured, you know, they’ve done research is extensive research, if anybody wants to Google this, there’s extensive research showing that language does affect you know, whether you particularly women see themselves as propriate, as good enough as know whether they’re likely to apply. So if you in your we typically, so people are like, Oh, we really want more diversity. But actually, if you’re if you’re if you’re putting out a job advert that only really appeals to men, you’re falling at the first hurdle, right. And if you and it may seem like you know, are taking it too far, but in other words, I don’t know that anyone would use go getter, but you know, like, sort of masculine sounding terms, will immediately put women off on the climb. So that’s one

Greg Lambert 16:28
I can see go getter being put in a in a job. Job description, we need a real go getter here,

Caroline Hill 16:37
Once you’ve given me some job interviews, once you’re aware of it, it’s about the awareness, like you were saying with your talk, right? It wasn’t, there was nothing, you didn’t have any bad intentions. But the more you become aware of this, the more actually you start to pick up on all of this stuff. So it’s really great that we’re having this conversation, because then the next time you look at a job interview, and it’s like, we need a strong, you know, whatever it might be, you go, Oh, I can see why that might not appeal. So there’s another one called Text Metrics, which I’m not as familiar with, but maybe that’s worth a look. But in terms of law firm, so you know, they’ve got these vast knowledge banks, which are going to be, you know, quite, in many cases, gender biased. And they can work with a company like Genie AI ai, or I don’t see any reason. I mean, Alex you could tell me otherwise. But I don’t see that we’re not certainly not short in the industry of contract analysis, and drafting tools. And I see no reason why they couldn’t use their own software, whatever they’re using to conduct a similar exercise, and, and take steps to remediate it. But there’s one Magic Circle firm that has built its own tool, using Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service for language, which is a cloud based service, they use NLP, so they’ve decided that because they’re looking for gender specific words, rather than concepts, they didn’t actually need to use, you know, perhaps on a cost basis, they didn’t need to use an external provider, obviously, it’s too laborious to kind of do a CTRL F, exercise, too time consuming. So they built their own solution. So we started to see and they’ve gone through all of their, they’ve gone through, I mean, it’s also they put the output into Excel. And then there is a manual exercise that the knowledge team have to engage in, it’s not automated, and they have to be very careful, because obviously, you can’t just do a CTRL F type thing, because there may be words in I mean, knowledge is, you know, is the lifeblood of the firm. And if they were to change, if they were to change something that actually has a place in there, then then you know, that’s going to be really problematic. So there it is time, it can be time consuming, but there are ways of, of creating shortcuts and, and sort of doing it in a in a more efficient way.

Greg Lambert 18:55
Well, as you were saying that, you know, I was thinking, I’ve heard of some firms, and maybe there’s some companies out there that are doing this, with contracts that are kind of taking contracts and anonymizing them, you know, taking out certain certain phrases, certain personal information, it would seem almost logical that that those same tools could then take out the gender bias language as well, and make that part of the process. So Alex, maybe that’s the next thing for Genie AI.

Alex Denne 19:29
It’s funny, you mentioned that we actually have academic research collaborations with some key London universities, one of those has been around using AI and maintaining the privacy of the datasets that AI ingests and it can be quite telling, the way that things are phrased in documents could be a sign that it’s from a certain firm. So in order to maintain privacy of datasets, and anonymization of large data To set, it makes sense to be doing this kind of work. And yeah, it would not be a massive extra step to include something like this, you know, even just as a notification or a notice that says, hey, we know that like, Thank you for contributing this dataset, or just so you know, we’ve used this as part of our data set, we noticed that it was gender bias, by the way, if that’s something you’ve taken steps to improve.

Greg Lambert 20:23
And then they yell at you.

Alex Denne 20:27
You know, I want to tell another story as well, I reached out to a few members of the LGBTQ+ committee of the Law Society here in the UK. And I got into an email thread with one. And they said that someone had actively responded to a gender neutral, I think it was a living will document and said, this only uses the word they, I would like you to replace it all with he and Mr. And man, and all of these things. And it’s like, how, how are there people who want to push back against this? Who cares? You know, it literally it’s, it’s completely unnecessary, it’s undesirable. And it hurts absolutely nobody. And yet, there are some people who have a visceral reaction to this thing. So I think it’s very important to just raise and continue to nudge and I think there’s gonna be lots of polite nudges and prod towards this, which is why annually reporting will show us that hopefully, all of these limb proceeds have not just will be pushing us in the right direction.

Greg Lambert 21:34
Yeah. And I found out I was actually in a, in a non legal meeting a few weeks ago, where they were, we were discussing some certain laws against the LGBTQ+ community, and the bias that was going on there. And the speaker said something that was really interesting, and that was, when you reduce bullying on one group of people, it actually has an effect to reduce bullying on everyone, that it’s not just the it doesn’t just have an effect just on that one group. But it has these waves that go out, in effect, other you know, the, the bullying that may go on in other groups as well. So, you know, empathy is not everyone has it. And I think there are some people that don’t understand what the reason is behind what we’re doing. I think I think our audience is sophisticated enough to understand what what’s going on and what the benefit is. But I know that there are groups out there that feel like, I don’t know, for some reason, like it’s like a personal attack upon them. When you when you do this, when really you’re just saying, Look, we’re looking really to make this equally accessible and appliable to everyone. And the way it is now it is not. So, again, I applaud you for doing that.

Caroline Hill 22:58
I mean, change is tough, right? And there’s always going to be people that resist, but I think you just have to look oh, it has of gender, the statistics across the legal tech sector, in terms of the diversity that we’re seeing, and it is so bad. And of course, the legal sector, I mean, actually mainstream legal, I think the stats are better. And obviously they’ve got targets, etc. But but if you look at the number of female CIOs, we’re doing better with heads of innovation, that we are actually out there, as you see some improvement. But overall, you know, you just have to point out to people that clearly we need to do a lot more right, and that we can’t just continue to maintain the status quo.

Greg Lambert 23:36
Now, Alex, I know gender neutral drafting of contracts is actually a policy there in the UK with the government. So how does the UK Government encourage and or require gender neutral drafting and government contracts? And are you are you seeing other countries apply this principle?

Alex Denne 23:56
I don’t think I can answer the other countries applying this principle that I’m aware of. I know there are lots of bodies picking this up, and many of them will be institutional.

Greg Lambert 24:07
What’s the UK doing?

Alex Denne 24:09
Yeah, so the UK is Office of the Parliamentary Council and the government legal department have been sort of promoting gender neutral drafting for UK statutes and Statutory Instruments for years. They released something in 2019. That was effectively a guide to gender neutral drafting. And ultimately, they’re pushing it to become a better employer themselves and push others to become better, more inclusive employers. And I sort of want to, I’m going to drift a little bit away from government and there’s this quote I found from a new guide to gender neutral drafting from LexisNexis, which was a significant percentage of the next generation of the workforce no longer sees gender as binary and expect to see a new and better approach to gender identity and expression in documentation. And I feel like, you know, there are a lot of big entities increasingly aware of this increasingly pushing this and the UK government’s just just one of many pushing us in this direction. I wonder if they have some of those tools that you’ve mentioned embedded Caroline? I hope they do.

Greg Lambert 25:19
Yeah. After I asked the question, a memory was jarred. And I remember last year that President Biden here in the US ordered all military terminology to be gender neutral. And so that, and, again, I think that was something that made sense because rank is gender neutral. And there are, you know, this, it’s not a all male army. So it’s, it’s, you know, makes sense to do that. So I know, that’s one thing that that we’re seeing here in the US, and I’m sure there are states and others that are that are using that in their contract language as well. So I think we’re on I think we’re on that road. I think it just makes sense. But we’ll see how how, how windy the road is as we go forward. So Caroline, I know that Genie AI’s report suggests that gender bias contract should be sent back to the company that creates those contracts, and told that you’re not going to be able to sign those contracts until the gender bias language is changed. So I’m just curious, have you ever done something like this where you’ve sent a contract back and told them revise this language or redline that for them and send it back?

Caroline Hill 26:47
I, so I haven’t been an I was a lawyer. But it’s such a long time ago. And I And so me, personally, excuse me? No, but I think I think my observation is, particularly for all of our clients who can do that should be doing that. So we what we’re seeing within we’re seeing clients really putting law firms under pressure when it comes to things like diversity ratios on their deals. So last year, Coca Cola became the latest company to threaten to withhold legal fees from its Law Firms that failed to meet minimum diversity requirements. For example, HP has threatened to withhold up to 10% of costs invoice by law firms that don’t meet its minimum diversity, staffing. And in the UK, we have BT, which said that it would offer guaranteed panel renewal for firms with the best diversity and inclusion records. Those clients that so they’re doing, you know, they’re giving the giving, giving diversity status teeth for the clients are the ones who really can make a difference, because they they can say to their law firms, this has to happen. And we’ll jump to get them how high how much can we do, and they can be doing the same thing. They I believe that they haven’t really had an obligation where they spot gender bias in their contracts, they really should be sending it back and saying you need to fix this. And I think that will make a massive offense.

Greg Lambert 28:11
Yeah, I definitely would, I can imagine if a client sent something back and said, you know, rework this, because the bias in here is is not in accordance with our policy, or our culture. And that that would have more of an effect on on anything. So, you know, Alex, following that up? Oh, go ahead Caroline.

Caroline Hill 28:33
Go ahead. Sorry, I was just saying sorry, is interrupted. But just because I mean, it’s difficult because of time, right. So so, you know, when you will know, you have these deals and time, time is of the essence. But there must be ways of structuring it even if not right within the context of that deal. You know, when when you need to get something done within 24 hours, but you can build a process around it. And you can have a debrief at the end of the day or something like that we at the end, you say Right, these needs, this needs to be corrected.

Greg Lambert 28:58
Outside counsel guidelines is where it needs to start is setting it up there with the expectation that that the counsel that you’re using the law firm that you’re using the attorneys that you’re using, that are outside of your firm, you know, we tell them that you know that we give them instructions on you can’t charge for pizza after seven o’clock, or you can only only do this or that. So you can add that in. I know that that is one of the easiest ways to set the tone for how your your work with the outside counsel goes. And again, if that is part of your culture, then that should be part of your outside counsel guidelines as well. Alex, what other suggestions do you have for people who are writing contracts and those of us again that are asked to sign them? Or even on the the data side for those of us that are trying to clean up contracts? What are you suggestions on how to correct gender bias in contracts themselves?

Alex Denne 30:06
Yeah, so to correct gender bias and contracts themselves, you know, start with a gender neutral template, we have 1500, they are available from all of your major template hubs. So that would be a very sensible place to start, if you have your own in house hub or library, or template, bank contract bank, just get a data analyst to run over them with the tool and point out all of the points where you’re using one of the words that we use in our analysis. And if Caroline’s able to share any of the phrases and the sort of areas that might perhaps be more sort of male gendered, I think that would be a really helpful dataset to to just share with the community in order to then make sure that you’re getting a sort of return on on your efforts. And it’s not just last time because you know, time is money. I think it has not, you know, so true as it is in the legal industry compared to any other I would, I would say, I think we hear time and time again, that lawyers, clients counterparties all want to reduce pushback. There’s a lot of time spent with the back and forth. And so get ahead of it. If this becomes more of a prevalent reason for pushback, then just just cut it out, because it’s not going to affect any of the legal soundness or any element of the contract. And the other thing is, is almost a little bit of a warning, and I feel a bit cheeky saying it, but I’m just quite excited about when we when our database, this was this sort of like a pilot study, if you like, when a dataset gets a lot larger, we will be calling out the big multinational companies or the companies that have to do public filing on whether they’re using these terms or not. So keep an eye out. Because you might end up on a list that you might not want to be on because you’re using antiquated templates, antiquated wording? You know, there’s new standards, and it just makes sense to, to, you know, jump on the wagon.

Greg Lambert 32:10
Great. And I was so thrilled that you use the word cheeky. So

Alex Denne 32:17
It’s a great word it is.

Greg Lambert 32:19
It is we don’t use that enough here. Love that. So Alex before we get to our crystal ball question, what’s on the horizon for Genie AI?

Alex Denne 32:31
Well, that is a big and exciting question. We are on the cusp, I would say, of providing market standard data across all practice areas in the UK in the US. And that sort of data isn’t really available anywhere. The idea of being able to say, you know, 93% of consultancy agreements include some sort of intellectual property or confidentiality clause, yours doesn’t you want to add that, or something that says, in your industry, for senior employment agreements, the standard notice period is actually six months do you want to change that. And, you know, we’ve seen standards changed hugely with things like force majeure with a pandemic, and, you know, working from home, etc. And I think with a lot of the tools that are out there online, you don’t really know where they came from, and how old they are, and how up to date they are. So with a tool like Genie with active AI, sort of seeking out new market standards on a daily basis, cooling all of those public filings, we’ve got, you know, 100 or so lawyers who contribute to our libraries and our data sets, you can add your own clauses. And, you know, try and set new market standards yourself on the clause level. So we’re really excited about that. But we’re also going to be doing end to end so not only will you be able to create a contract from scratch from our clause library, but you’ll also be able to use esign products to handle that organize all your documents, all of the in between the redline editing. So we’re just trying to create a bit of an end to end platform here that has legal intelligence at the absolute heart of it, powered by AI. And hopefully, we’ll also have a little checkbox as part of that, when you’re ready to sign and we’ll say just so you know, this has some terms that are not inclusive. So, you know, you want to change that before you send it to sign.

Greg Lambert 34:30
Excellent, excellent sounds sounds like a good path to be on. So now we’re at the point where we ask all of our guests our crystal ball question and and I know we’ve talked a lot about gender bias and in contract language, but I don’t want to necessarily limit you to this on on the answer for this question. So take it however you want. Alex, I’ll start with you. What what do you see as changes or challenges in the legal industry over the next three to five years?

Alex Denne 35:00
So I want to, I want to pick up on something that one of your previous guests mentioned, actually. So you had Dr. Alexander Hudek and Noah Weisberg on and they were talking about their their AI for Lawyers book. And they mentioned that there’s often a lot of pushback, a lot of distrust about AI in the industry, you know, feels complicated, not that transparent. And we get that we’ve heard that we hear you. And there’s also I think, a little bit of fear, uncertainty doubt around the idea that AI is trying to replace some legal professional services jobs. Whereas actually, they mentioned in that episode, brilliant episode, the Javon’s Paradox, I think, yes. Where if, if you make something far more efficient through the use of technology, people might think that demand is going to go down because you need less of it. But actually, demand goes up. If you make a coal power plant more efficient for every lump of coal you put in, actually, you end up putting more coal in because you’re producing more power, and people can then create more energy intensive industries, etc, off the back of that additional power generation. So free, I think it’s very similar thing in the legal industry, we are not trying to turn everyone into a lawyer, we’re not trying to create an AI lawyer, what we’re looking at is, within five years, most legal professional services jobs will have a legal assistant in their pocket, that just helps them with so many of the tasks that they do, so they can help more businesses, they can solve more problems. And they can bill more clients. So it’s, it’s really a win win. And, you know, it’s not an either or. And so I think there’s a real challenge in trying to see how that feeling progresses over the next few years. And hopefully, we can win people around to that sort of futuristic way of looking.

Greg Lambert 37:01
Thanks. Well, Caroline, I know, you see so much in what’s going on in the legal, especially legal tech industry, what, what are some of the changes or challenges you see in the next three to five years?

Caroline Hill 37:15
So I think, perhaps, what you might not expect me to say, but I think my challenges are around culture. I think that there’s not enough change. I think that we talk about tech all the time, but I see lots of people talking about innovation, but actually, I don’t see very much change in terms of how real firms are structured in terms of the management in terms of, you know, obviously diversity being a part of that. And I think that, whilst we’ve got the same people doing the same things that we can’t really expect to really properly move on and innovate in the way that we should be. So for me, that’s, you know, that’s something that we’re now moving into hybrid working, right. So that’s going to be to, that’s going to be more of a challenge than ever, you know, and we really need the right culture to create, you know, to manage that situation as it needs to be met. It’s going to be a massive challenge from a tech and a culture perspective, really bringing on teams and you need leadership from the top. And what you’re seeing is leaders who actually want to just now work from home. And they’re telling their young team, they’re young ones to come into the office, right? There’s all sorts of there’s so many examples of how the culture needs to change. And until the culture changes, we can talk about tech till we are blue in the face. And we can talk about innovation till we’re blue in the face. But until the culture really changes until law firms start really being honest with themselves and probably corporate legal as well. I don’t think that much it’s going to not as much as it should change or change.

Greg Lambert 38:40
I think I’ve told you this before that, to me culture is the is the worst behavior that a law firm will tolerate from its moneymakers. So that’s the culture there.

Caroline Hill 38:58
Yes, I think it’s going to be challenging. You see some you see some firms bringing in, you know, there’s some some of the US firms do some great stuff. They brought in some brilliant people at the C suite level, and they’re really starting to shake things up. But, you know, it’s happening, but it’s happening slowly. And then and then they’re talking about innovation. They’re talking about technology, as if it’s, you know, can be can be sort of talked about in isolation, but it can’t.

Greg Lambert 39:21
Yeah, yeah. The siloing of of innovation in firms is is really interesting. So I know that’s an odd spot to leave off. But I want to thank both of you for coming in Alex Denne from Genie AI and Caroline Hill. From Legal IT Insider. And also on Fridays, you can catch Caroline on Bob Ambrogi’s live legal week presentation on Facebook and zoom and I always enjoy that. So Alex, Caroline, thank you both for coming on.

Caroline Hill 39:57
Thank you Greg.

Alex Denne 39:57
Thank you.

Greg Lambert 39:58
Thanks again to Alex denne and Caroline Hill for talking with me today. And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. We really appreciate having an audience that we can share a topic like reducing gender bias in contract language with and those that really understand the importance of it. So if you enjoy the show, please share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So you can reach out to us on social media. Marlene can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter, And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter and I’m also on HIVE social network at @glambert as well. Once again, disappointing Adam Lambert fans everywhere. Sorry, go Lambert’s or you can leave us a voicemail on our new Deacon review Hotline at 713-487-7821. And as always, the musicae here is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you, Jerry. Marlene well be back next week along with our good friend Toby Brown. We’ll see then.

Tim Parilla isn’t just the Chief Legal Officer at LinkSquares… he’s also a customer. That unique position of being the leader of the legal department of a company whose mission is to improve the workflow and efficiency of corporate legal departments, creates an exciting environment for Tim and his team.

Juliette Kopecky is the Chief Marketing Officer at LinkSquares and is leading the company’s DEI Initiatives and works closely with the in-house legal team to handle everything from internal issues to reviewing all the marketing and business development contracts. Juliette points to the fact that both she and Tim sit on the company’s executive team and have aligned their individual departments to the company’s overall mission, helps both of them understand and prioritize their overall processes.

• Have clear communications
• Set scope and expectations
• Be professional and competent

Stuart Dodds is Principle at Positive Pricing and is an executive board member at the Legal Value Network. When it comes to the future of legal pricing, he sees a focus on setting expectations for delivering superior client service, understanding the need to find the right people with the correct skillsets, and establishing the correct change management processes to help lawyers and others adjust to the upcoming shifts in the legal market.

Transcript

Marlene Gebauer 00:06
Welcome to The Geek in Review, podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert 00:12
And I’m Greg Lambert. Marlene, we have a very interesting couple of guests from a corporate legal team whose company designs technology to improve the corporate legal team’s overall processes. So Tim Parilla, chief legal officer and Juliette Kopecky, Chief Marketing Officer at LinkSquares joins us to talk about how they deal with outside counsel, in house legal teams, and how they balance their roles as not just leaders at LinkSquares, but also as customers of LinkSquares as well. But first up, we have an answer to our crystal ball question from Stuart Dodds, Principal at Positive Pricing and a Legal Value Network board member. So let’s hear from Stuart first. And then we’ll jump into our conversation with Tim and Juliette.

Stuart Dodds 00:59
Hi, Greg, my role as a co founder and board member of LVM, I get to see quite a lot of different things, I also see a lot of different things in my role as a consultant with positive pricing. And the themes that are coming up again and again, I think are two or three fold. Firstly, this issue about expectations, I think within the league law firms, particularly about sustaining the levels of profitability that they’ve had over a number of years, and how they can best do that, while keeping very much focused in mind, the issue of delivering superior client value, so how can they continue to strong performance? But how they can they continue to meet those changing client expectations? I think that comes on to the second point, which is where do we find those people from? How do we build the skills and capabilities and a lot of firms certainly, I’m saying, are beginning to invest very, very heavily in training their partners are trading their associates and training as you those key business professionals who are having commercial conversations with our clients about how to do that better, how to be having much more of a conversation, having much more of a collaborative discussion about what to do. And therefore trying to work out what are the best ways that we can help our clients be successful, both at an organizational level, at an individual level? And also potentially, how are we better placed than other firms in our respective markets? I think that’s another challenge that sort of links into also, where are these business professionals coming from because we see a much broader range, particularly those here here at LVN. And it’s great to see so many different people, you know, we’ve got pricing professionals, what legal technology professionals, we’ve got data scientists, we’ve got legal project managers, you name it, the list is endless. And that’s a very, very specific skill set. And a lot of it is actually hard to find. So how can we as firms begin to grow that capability, make sure there’s a progression those individuals need. But also remember that a lot of this is about changing behaviors. And people, particularly those who are very senior in firms are, let’s be honest, a little bit sometimes set in their ways, they’ve been very successful, they are very successful. And they were successful doing certain things in a certain approach. We’re asking them to fundamentally change what they do tomorrow compared to what they did today. And that takes a very different skill. It’s around change management is around empathy. It’s around engagement, and it’s around patients. And I think sometimes we also need to have maybe suits of armor just to protect us from the bricks that may be coming our way. But I think being able to service and meet expectations, client and internal is a key challenge. I think there’s also the issue around how do we build that skill and capability internally, both from the fee earning population, the partner population from the business professional population, and also we see this and again, LVN is a great example of this, from the client perspective, how do they make sure that they’re getting the right value from their firms?

Greg Lambert 03:35
Right, let me let me follow up because you were saying about finding the right people. Law firms especially tend to want to have people who have practice come in and do operations. Is that kind of the benchmark? Is that a requirement for operations?

Stuart Dodds 03:53
I think I’m a bit biased. I mean, I came from a management consultancy background. And we would have, if I, if I’ve used me, as an example, I was a supply chain consultant, I supply chain strategy, and a procurement strategy. And I did a little bit of project management on the side because that’s what you were you’re required to do, to be able to deliver successful engagements to your clients. But if it was a very, very big complex project, we would get the specialists in project management to do that. It didn’t matter that they didn’t know what a truck was or what a warehouse was, or what a purchase order was. At the end of the day, I’d rather get the experts that are very, very good at doing something to drive those process changes because that’s what they’re skilled and that’s what they’re trained in, rather than somebody who is trying to do it on a best endeavours basis. Now, I appreciate that not everything justifies that investment in that special skill set. And for those other things, yeah, best endeavors. maybe it’s good enough or best endeavors with a little bit of training and coaching and support. But that support has to come from those experts. The fact that I didn’t practice law, the fact that many very successful pricing legal project management legal technology people did not practice, is irrelevant because that’s not what you’re hiring them for. You’re not hiring them for their legal expertise. You’re hiring them for their process skills expertise.

Greg Lambert 05:05
Thank you very much.

Marlene Gebauer 05:08
We’d like to welcome Tim Parilla, Chief Legal Officer at LinkSquares and Juliette Kopecky Chief Marketing Officer at LinkSquares to the show, Tim and Juliette, welcome to The Geek in Review.

Juliette Kopecky 05:18
Thank you so much for having us.

Tim Parilla 05:20
Thank you, Marlene.

Greg Lambert 05:21
So, Tim, I know you were at DraftKings before joining LinkSquares I really kind of I’m very curious about that endeavor. Because I think that must have been both very interesting, and at the same time, very challenging. As a company that, you know, as, as in house there, you’re working your way with an online sports betting company, and how did you approach your work there? And, you know, there just had to be so much risk management that you had to cover?

Tim Parilla 05:52
Yeah, I mean, that’s, that’s a good question. It was really, it was an incredible experience, I first started doing work with the company, and there were fewer than 20 people there, just helping them review some contracts. And then eventually, you know, over the course of let’s just call it six months or so, getting to know the team and the management there. Was brought on full times companies first in house counsel, and at the time, it really wasn’t a sports gambling company. And I know if anyone familiar with the situations would recognize that fantasy sports are a game of skill, which means it’s not really a betting company or a gambling company, as far as a legal term of art is concerned. But that being said, we definitely had regulatory issues associated with that. And we had to design products in such a way where we were able to demonstrate that skill was the factor that determines the winner in each of these contests. And a lot of the first two years that I was working with with DraftKings, it was just like any other high growth startup, you’re raising money, you’re doing a lot of commercial deals, brand awareness, trying to gain market share, trying to gain customers. And it really wasn’t until October of 2015, when some of the regulatory issues really started to come to a head. And you know, at that point, we had already done our due diligence, as far as what the law says, and how our games were structured and how people interacted with our games, when we were very confident in our legal position and every jurisdiction where we operated. You know, at that point, the risk management becomes a little bit different, I guess, when when you think about it, in terms of knowing that you’re right on the law. And by the way, we were proved right, in every single jurisdiction, either through legislative action, obtaining legislative clarity, or looking at what I was really happy about the decision coming out of the Court of Appeals in New York, probably about six months after I left the company in 2021. And so that was like a huge exclamation point. And really, I think everybody in the industry felt vindicated by that decision. So it was great. So the risk management actually really came down moreso to understanding how long you could continue to be effective and run your business with that sort of external regulatory pressure. Right, right, that uncertainty, and we’re able to navigate that well. And you know, I’d like to say that it was me really guiding that ship, but credit where credit is due, of course, Jason Robbins, Matt Kalish, Paul Lieberman, Tim Dan, the rest of the exec team. They were the driving force behind the success. And I was just sort of trying to spin plates and make sure that, that I gave him enough runway so that they could take off once we get, you know, these regulatory issues put put to bed.

Greg Lambert 08:50
Well, you know, and I was curious, because at the time, you were talking about brand awareness. And you couldn’t turn on a sports channel without, you know, every third commercial being a DraftKings commercial. So there was definitely a lot of brand awareness. So I was just curious as as an in house person, would you be saying, Man, it feels like you’re trying to put a target on our back by just putting our name out there so much. I thought it’d be very interesting to be on that in house legal team during that time, because it was such a big growth period of time.

Tim Parilla 09:25
It really was. And I think, you know, I think it’s important. This is something that I that I talk a lot about in different thought leadership forum. As an in house attorney, you have to be confident that you’re able to handle controversy at each step. And your you have to be competent, that you can handle risk at each step. So there’s a saying that I think is particularly pertinent for in house attorneys is a saying that I’ll borrow from aviation whereas it’s not the first mistake that kills you, it’s the tenth. So, you look at this in terms of you know, maybe had something going on with privacy or even the regulatory issues at DraftKings. Like, it’s not like one bad decision results in this cataclysmic outcome. But a series of things have to happen. And typically, if you’re running through and trying to manage this in a, you know, in a meaningful, thoughtful way, you have a number of different opportunities between everything’s okay. And worst case scenario where you can find a positive outcome or at least a survivable or reasonable outcome depending on on your situation. And so it really is important, and you think about it, and maybe just the simple litigation contacts you have, you know, okay, maybe you you got sued. Okay, well, that’s terrible. We’ll file a motion to dismiss. You lost the motion to dismiss now go and talk to the other party and you have an evidentiary issues, Discovery issues, go in argue and try to figure out what you can do to gain some advantage and negotiating leverage at that point, and go and see if there’s an opportunity for settlement, or does your case get better? Does your case get worse? He has a summary judgment phase, right and right, use a summary judgment and maybe you’re going to trial now. Right? Or maybe you’re not going to trial and is over for it. But there are different phases in any controversy, where if you’re able to leverage relationships, build relationships, rebuild relationships, and steer the ship in a positive way, where it makes a win win for both parties usually can avoid a worst case scenario.

Marlene Gebauer 11:29
Tim, tell us a little about what LinkSquares mission is. And Tim how life as an in house counsel at a legal solutions company differs from your previous role at DraftKings

Tim Parilla 11:41
sure i LinkSquares mission is to change the way that we will departments operate and elevate the status of the legal function within an organization. And we do that using cutting edge technology that’s specifically geared for and tailored to these the needs of the in house legal department. Juliette? Please tell me if I missed something.

Greg Lambert 12:01
it sounds like you’ve memorized it really well.

Marlene Gebauer 12:03
Does that sound right? Usually,

Juliette Kopecky 12:06
My work here is done.

Tim Parilla 12:10
So in as far as how the role is different than a lot of ways. It’s not, in a lot of ways. It’s kind of the same and fast growing tech startup, really outstanding growth trajectory, incredible user adoption, and continued product innovation. And so the legal issues around that are pretty similar, right? No matter sort of what kind of tech company you’re in, you’re, you’re going you’re raising money, you’re you’re figuring out, you know, the best way to communicate with your customers, the best way to position your product for broad acceptance, et cetera, et cetera. The aspect of LinkSquares that I think is really interesting, is that I’m a customer. Right. And it was similar at DraftKings. But it was, you know, fantasy sports. And so it kind of casually fantasy sports, but like, as an in house lawyer, and that’s what I do for a living, this product is built specifically with me in mind. So being able to have that customer mindset actually puts me into conversations that most in House lawyers in any other type of tech company wouldn’t be a part of it right? The level of involvement with the product teams, the level of involvement with the sales and marketing teams is, I think, much more involved than what you would see in other types of companies. And that’s been really exciting. You know, to be perfectly honest with you a lot of the legal work, the actual substantive legal works, a lot of contract review. And as I said, like different, you know, corporate matters and things like that. It’s pretty run of the mill, pretty plain vanilla. But what really gets me excited to come into the office every single day, is working with the sales team to help to give that that perspective of the customer to work with the product teams to help articulate the problems that our software is purporting to solve. That’s really the most exciting part of it.

Marlene Gebauer 13:54
Yeah, I would imagine.

Juliette Kopecky 13:56
I think like Tim is being too modest here, where obviously, there’s like the legal function that him and his team perform. But I very much so think that the legal team at LinkSquares kind of plays double duty, or even triple duty in some ways where there is a product feedback, you know, I think at LinkSquares, we’re our own best customer. And so much of the input that we get from like a product standpoint, from Tim and his team in terms of how they use the product, how they think about the legal function is such an important piece of that. And then certainly like the relationship that my team on the marketing side has with him and his team in terms of content that we develop, and how do we speak to this audience? How do we think about what legal teams you know the issues and topics that they care about the platforms and things that they read or listen to that partnership that we have and that I know that we spend a ton of time with the legal team in terms of developing out like content that persona, the feedback and input that we got that? I think in many ways like his team plays like triple duty, if not more than that, like in many different arenas?

Marlene Gebauer 14:58
Yeah, I mean, I would imagine being A user of the product, you know, gives an enormous advantage in terms of sort of understanding it, and, and understanding the, you know, and being able to offer the feedback for it.

Juliette Kopecky 15:10
Definitely. And we are so lucky that we have a legal team that wants to do that and wants to be involved and wants to make, you know, the company and our product and everything else even better, and sort of give us those insights and then input.

Tim Parilla 15:24
It’s funny. So when I said that the legal work is pretty like plain vanilla. Like, it’s like, cry in your cereal boring, okay. It’s not, it’s not thrilling work. And honestly, like, so I do an onboarding session for new employees every other week. And I tell them, like, that’s how I was able to convince people to come here is because we’re doing fun stuff, like having a conversation with you all. All of the cool stuff that Molly, that Juliette and her team have us doing is really like that. And the product in the interactions relationship with the business is what makes it fun.

Juliette Kopecky 16:06
Yeah. And for me as like the marketer and someone who runs our corporate communications or PR, I’m very, very happy for him and for like Tim’s team, to have very poor plain boring vanilla work as he calls it. We’re not embroiled in like, scandals, litigation, and all those items. So let’s just like let’s just keep it that way. Right.

Tim Parilla 16:29
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer 16:30
Exciting lawsuits. Yeah.

Tim Parilla 16:32
We’ll get there Julia.

Greg Lambert 16:36
That’s when you know you’re really successful is when you when you start getting sued.

Juliette Kopecky 16:41
I’ll remember that. The bright side of things.

Greg Lambert 16:45
Finally, we’ve been sued. So Julia, you’ve been at some high power companies before like HubSpot and Datto and Tala? How have those roles in I would say a non legal environment prepared you to come over into a legal tech world company, and Ron, the marketing team there. How do those compare and contrast?

Juliette Kopecky 17:10
I would say, for me, I have a fairly non traditional marketing background. I actually started out my early career working in finance, I went to business school at MIT and did a little bit of a complete like 180 with my career. I’d always been interested in tech companies and startups, and marketing in particular. And I joined HubSpot in sort of the early phases in the company back when that company was about 140 employees back in 2010, which is kind of crazy to think about when you look at HubSpot today. For my career, even at HubSpot, I worked in sales, I worked in product, and I worked in marketing, and then really grow my marketing career from there. And so when I think about my career, I’ve worked in a number of different departments, whether that’s finance, product sales and marketing. And so for me, when I think about how that experience really shaped my career and set me up for success and LinkSquares, I very much so care about that relationship between all those different teams and think about the company goals, and how does marketing support it? And I think from my experience working on the product side, you know, I think a lot about, you know, how do you understand the customer, when I was at HubSpot working in product, I ran the customer research and user testing group, and informing you know, how does our product team like, build a product for customers and take that feedback into account? So very much so when I joined LinkSquares. So previous to this, I had not had experienced marketing to legal teams in particular. But I took some of those things from like being on a product team and doing that research and really understanding the persona, and the user and the buyer, and what is that process? What are the things that you’re thinking about? What are the ways in which they use the product, and really set on sort of like a research mission to better understand it, just knowing that a legal audience like I don’t have a legal background, myself, I hadn’t marketed to this particular role before. But how do I really educate myself in it, and kind of what I was alluding to before, I mean, it’s amazing having the legal team at LinkSquares that we do led by Tim, and we we use them for research into that informs like our marketing campaigns and what we do and what’s going to resonate with our audience. I work a lot with our sales team in terms of understanding like, what’s going to be successful for them. I work with our customer success team in terms of like, which of our customers are really successful, and what is their feedback on the product? And what are the ways in which they’re thinking about it. And so, while I don’t have that legal background, I’m just I would say like, genuinely curious like to learn more about our audience to take all the different inputs. And that’s the thing that I think I’ve taken from my previous experience that has set me up for success here at LinkSquares.

Marlene Gebauer 19:57
So you’ve also focused on DEI initatives there at LinkSquares Right?

Juliette Kopecky 20:01
Yes.

Marlene Gebauer 20:01
So what does the work on DEI initiatives look like in the corporate environments?

Juliette Kopecky 20:08
If I had to. So I realized that we’re on a podcast and that it’s just audio, I think, like for me for Dei, as a woman, and both a person of color, you know, it’s certainly like a very personal issue for me. And I think for Dei, like if I had to give advice for, you know, other people in leadership roles within corporations, it’s all about how do you make it authentic? And how do you make it meaningful to your employees? So for me, even when I think about sort of the the early stages of us really building out like a dei initiative at LinkSquares. You know, I certainly have like one point of view, and in some ways, like dei is always going to be something that’s personal and has affected you know, me personally, in that, like, I really care about and thinking about, like, how do we shape our culture? How do we shape our approach? How do we put initiatives and plan sort of in place that are going to be meaningful to our employees, but one of the things that I personally have loved at LinkSquares is how much support and sort of ally ship that I’ve gotten from both the leadership and even within our employees, like, this is certainly a topic area that I am even, you know, continuing to educate myself about. And I have certainly one point of view. But it’s also like, how do you make space for people within the company with different points of view, different experiences, and really build out something that’s authentic to employees? And there are a number of different ways that we’ve sort of approached this topic? And how do we build out like true diversity, equity and inclusion within the company, certainly, like within hiring and the ways in which that we look at candidates and that we recruit, there’s kind of no way to build diversity into a company, if you’re not looking at like, are we really taking in, you know, sort of an unbiased approach, looking at ways in which we can build diversity from like a hiring perspective? And then also from like, an employee perspective? How do we give employees from different backgrounds, different experiences? And how do we give them a voice within the company, whether that comes from the hiring process, whether that comes from things like employee resource groups, there are a number of different things that we do across the company to really build this out?

Marlene Gebauer 22:20
Yeah, I like that. You’re saying, you know, that you’re trying to make it authentic for the different groups? Because I mean, that’s really a challenge, isn’t it? Because you have very different groups with, you know, possibly very different needs. So I appreciate that you’re working on that.

Juliette Kopecky 22:33
Absolutely. And there are different ways that we listen to employees and hear different viewpoints, whether that’s through things like our employee engagement survey, whether that’s through like one on ones and ways in which like, we communicate as both like a leadership side with different employees. And I think part of that is like, a lot of companies start dei initiatives, and maybe it just feels like lip service to employees, where they say it’s something that they care about, but they’re not seeing, like the true action and initiatives behind it.

Greg Lambert 23:04
Now, you’ve covered a lot on the internals of DEI, and how you are approaching it, how the employees in the leadership, they’re approaching it, I want to kind of flip that around, how are customers reacting to these types of initiatives? And and are they putting any kind of demands on companies like LinkSquares, to improve the equity parody and inclusion of the companies that they work with? So are you also seeing pressure coming in externally for this?

Juliette Kopecky 23:37
I mean, certainly, I think on all levels, I would say that legal teams, you know, there’s a lot of diversity built in and certainly with the companies in which they work with, and I think at like some level, right, people want to work with engage with people that sort of look like them, or that represent them, whether that’s different viewpoints, whether that’s different backgrounds, all across the board. And there are different ways that we listen to our customers, whether it’s through channels within our customer success team, we actually recently just hosted a customer event here in Boston, where we invited a number of our customers in for a couple days of programming and sessions, and ways in which we hear from our customers and that we listen to them. Also through other things like we hear about ways in which our customers are even thinking about dei initiatives through events that we host like virtual networking nights, which is an opportunity for general counsel’s and legal teams to meet up and discuss topics and you know, sort of a real, honest, meaningful way with with their peers, that we in some ways get to kind of like, learn from and hear from and help better inform things that we do as a company. content that we create are ways in which we can engage with our audience. So there’s some really interesting channels there that we hear both from what our customers want and expect from LinkSquares As a company, but also topics and areas of interest for them how they’re thinking about shaping their own businesses and the cultures within it.

Marlene Gebauer 25:07
So Tim, I’m going to turn it back to you. Now you’ve worked with outside counsel both at DraftKings and LinkSquares, and especially at LinkSquares, where your whole business model is on improving the efficiency of legal teams. And, you know, I always like asking this next question, because, you know, we don’t often get sort of the inside knowledge. So I’m very excited to hear what you have to say here. So when you actually need to work with outside counsel, you know, What expectations do you place on them when it comes to providing effective legal counsel? And also, you know, streamlining the work they do? So they don’t waste their time or your company’s money?

Tim Parilla 25:46
That’s, that’s, that’s a big question. How much time? Do we have? Much time? Outside? Yeah, outside counsel, is? That’s that’s a huge topic, I think, you know, working working in a legal tech company that’s specifically designed to increase the efficiency of your legal function. I think sort of the route of the interaction with outside counsel and efficiency is something that maybe historically has been in opposition. Right? I don’t think that our software necessarily will reduce your need for outside counsel, in most cases, which is, which is good. It will in certain, like project based circumstances, for example, due diligence around you know, any m&a activity, right, rather than having associates go through your contracts and pull out important information, Rei doesn’t does it just as well, if not better. But when you are working with outside attorneys, there’s a reason why right? You need that level of expertise, or you are experiencing volumes of work that your in house team just can’t process on a given timeline, right. So you need some overflow support. So, you know, how do you do that effectively? How do you do that efficiently, I think there are a couple of guiding principles that you need to keep in mind as an in house attorney, when you engage your outside attorneys. Number one is make sure that you’re comfortable with the cost of it. And what I mean by that is at the outset, get an estimate for the work that is to be done. If you’re going to go through a financing, right, like you took go venture financing, have a conversation, say, you know, ballpark, we’re gonna raise x amount, it’s probably going to take us y number of weeks, you know, how much how much in your experience, something like that gonna cost and it’s less about trying to hold the outside attorneys accountable, per se. It’s more about managing the expectations because no one’s gonna give you a guaranteed This is how much it costs. But anybody, anybody who’s who’s worth, you know, who’s worth the amount that you’re going to be paying them to do that work has done it before and has a good idea what the costs are, like I you know, I can tell you at a top tier law firm that a motion to dismiss, in your typical civil litigation contract dispute, or even in a in a class action suit, I can tell you that it’s going to be anywhere between 75 and $115,000. For that fully briefs, motion to dismiss, right, that’s about what you’re gonna pay at the big the big top tier top 10 law firm. And you will get, you know, due diligence around a financing transaction. And same thing, there’s, there’s these categories, depending on where you are in stage of company and your outside attorney, you should have an idea. But what that does is that set some expectations where if it’s looking like their bills are going to be way above that they call you and talk to you. And some of the downside of it is like if it looks like the bills are gonna be way below that, then maybe there might be a little bit of fluff in there. But you’ve, you’ve kind of come to expect that that’s okay. Right? Yeah, predictability oftentimes, is just as powerful as efficiency. So that’s the first thing make sure that you that you establish how you’re going to be managing the financial side of it. Second is how are you managing the communication side of it? When you are communicating with outside counsel? And you’re asking for thoughts on an issue? I’m always very deliberate about I need you to find the answer to this. I don’t want like oh, it should be this or just based on my experiences as like, go find an answer. I need the answer. Right? very deliberate about that. And I’m also very deliberate about I don’t need you to go spend and like do case law research about this, that and the next thing and come back to me in two weeks just partners Senior Associate you’ve had a lot of at bats, where do you think this is gonna come out? Happy to have a phone call on it if you rather that put it in an email 10 minutes, 15 minutes, good. So making sure that you communicate effectively with what you want with each sort of request is also really important. The other thing that I look at with outside counsel, that’s hugely important and honestly can make your life as an in house attorney either really good or really bad is whether your outside attorneys understand why you’re asking the question, like your best outside attorneys, when you ask them a question are going to follow up and say, Okay, your question is this, I get it, unless it’s like painfully obvious that is the issue. It’d be like, what else is going on? Is there something else happening? Is there other context around this that that you want to provide? Because normally, when people ask me this question, it’s actually part of the bigger thing, right, and being able to have that conversation with your outside attorney does a couple of things. Number one, it helps you, once you go back to whatever the source was that brought that question to you. It allows you a little bit more context and a different way to think about it. And quite frankly, as an as an in house attorney, it makes you look like you know what you’re talking about, which makes you look good. Write to your to your business. So you want you want outside attorneys that make you look good. Similarly, you want to make sure that in email communications, the way that people are communicating that your outside counsel are communicating to you is professional buttoned up neat, thoughtful, thorough, like anything that I have that calls for an email response or a document type response, I expect it to be of a certain quality, right. And I’m not a perfectionist, and I’m not going to have a fit about someone having a typo in their emails. But it’s something that I that I think about, right and are like Subject Verb Agreement, like different things like this. All of that kind of adds up. And if there’s something else that shortfalls like, alright, this, is this indicative of your attention to detail, is this indicative of the level of service that you provide? Like you’re not proofreading your emails, you’re not directly answering the question the way that it’s almost like you you’re responding back to my email so that I don’t email you again, like you like I pick up on these things. And as soon as you start to see something like that you have to have a conversation is rarely Will that get better and often just gets worse and worse. Yeah, that’s that’s kind of the way that I think about managing outside counsel effectively and efficiently.

Greg Lambert 32:32
I like that, if I can read that back to you a little bit is you’re saying, you know, have those conversations, set scope and expectation and professionalism? Those are the kind of the four things that really kind of drive the way that you deal with outside counsel.

Tim Parilla 32:50
Yeah. And it goes without saying that that competency, like, you have to make sure that you’re verifying that your outside counsel is competent, a lot of outside attorneys will hold themselves out to be experts in whatever it is, and they’re not.

Greg Lambert 33:05
Yeah, I imagine that conversation and expectations kind of nail those down pretty quickly. And I think that’s one of the things I hear over and over again, is that there’s this inability to have good, clear communication back and forth. Attorneys are notorious for not timely responses to emails or phone calls, things like that, that just just kind of drive outside counsel in any clients crazy.

Tim Parilla 33:33
That’s one of the biggest complaints for attorneys that are reported to the Bar Association’s for violations. Any complaints are usually based around the attorneys failure to communicate effectively.

Greg Lambert 33:45
So Juliette, I’m going to turn the tables. So Tim wants, you know, competency wants communication. He wants to set scope and expectation for his outside counsel now, for you. He’s your counsel. So how do you work with Tim’s group? And, you know, kind of make sure that you’re setting the expectations when you’re when you’re working with him?

Juliette Kopecky 34:12
It’s actually surprisingly easy, I would say for us. I mean, so I think first and foremost, I mean, both Tim and I both sit on the executive team at LinkSquares. And so there’s a lot of work that we do, and just as part of both of our roles and sitting on the exec team in terms of setting out that company vision, what are our company goals and building alignment there. And so when I’m thinking about whether it’s marketing campaigns that we’re working on with Tim and his team, or pieces of it that are part of let’s say, like the legal process, I’ll give you an example. So our teams just came back from a big event that we were sponsoring through the association of corporate counsel. They host their annual event this year. It was in Vegas just a couple of weeks ago, and we did a bit of a takeover campaign. At the event, we had a huge booth, we had some out of home add ons that we did. So the location that it was in Resorts World, actually, the whole front face of the building is a digital screen. And so we did a big ad campaign there. And we also did it in the airport, we also hosted three separate events there, Tim had a speaking slot. So needless to say, to run a campaign and a takeover campaign of that size and scale, there was a lot of contracts that were involved in it. And a lot of contracts, you know, that we, that we kind of had to get in a very quick manner are reviewed and signed and out and sort of budget deployed for them. And so because we have that alignment at an executive team level in terms of like, Hey, we’re doing this event, we’re doing a big spend, these are the reasons why and how they’re going to help the company meet its goals, when it comes down to doing that contract review. And working with him and his team on that. It’s a very simple process, because Tim has a ton of visibility into why we’re doing a campaign like that, the results that we see as a company, and how that should sort of be prioritized. And so when it’s like, hey, Tam, I’m going to be sending over, you know, tons of contracts for your team to look at, I’m going to need these reviewed, you know, over the next couple of days so that we can get everything sort of locked and loaded for that event. He’s like, Yep, totally know why we’re doing it, the teams on it, let me know what you need. And let’s work together on it. When it comes to things like the speaking engagement that Tim did at the event there and like hosted a panel, same kind of thing when my team’s working on him in terms of developing out that content topic, in terms of securing panelists for that event, in terms of working through some of the logistical component, Tim 100% understands, like why we’re doing that event, how speaking engagements help us build out our thought leadership, how it helps us drive business for our team and further engagement with our customers. And so that relationship is just very easy. I think when you have that alignment, and sort of like those goals and why those things are going on. I think for maybe teams that don’t have that luxury, I definitely encourage them to have those conversations, whether that’s with different leadership, you know, whether it’s like your GC and your sales team, whether it’s your GC and your marketing team or your product team, how do you build that alignment overall, in terms of those goals? And I think some of the details, in many ways work out themselves,

Marlene Gebauer 37:21
Tim, I mean, I appreciate it that you set out very clearly like this is what the expectations are for outside counsel, because oftentimes on the podcast, or if we go to conferences, you hear about how outside counsel may think, you know, they they think that they’re satisfying what you want, like they this is what they think you want, versus what you actually want. So, you know, it seems to me that that you basically have those conversations early on to basically set those expectations so that you can avoid that type of thing.

Tim Parilla 37:55
Yeah, absolutely. And oftentimes, in house attorneys are a little bashful about communicating what they need from outside attorneys. I’m not even slightly shy about it. Extremely direct and low press. And I’m not a jerk, but also at a point where I’m paying somebody associates in the $700 an hour range and partners up to $1,500 an hour, I’m expecting something in return. And if I’m not getting something that is of quality, then it’s my responsibility as a steward of the company’s funds to change that. And so I think it’s just you’ve got to be as direct as possible. And, and it’s not, I mean, lawyers deal with conflict differently than then like most like normal humans, right? Conflict is not something that raises your pulse at all. It just is what it is. It’s a way of doing something. And the only time that you find yourself raising your voice or getting outwardly emotional about something, typically you’re doing it for a reason. You’re doing it to accomplish a goal, not because you’re necessarily actually right. Maybe sometimes you are, but it always comes with what am I trying to accomplish first, so so so pushing that conflict with outside counsel, there should be absolutely no concern or and if you’re worried about how your outside counsel might react, then maybe you should change. Change attorney.

Greg Lambert 39:29
Tim, earlier, you had mentioned that you’re not just the in house counsel there. You’re also your client. You’re a customer, you’re a tester, you work with the development team. And so that got me thinking about one of the complaints that I’ve had for years and law firms is that as a law firm, we’re not a software development company yet we we tried to build a number of products internally. And so it makes it really hard. For us, as customers have an internal product to work with our development team, especially when something’s not going, right, because you almost feel like you’re walking on eggshells, you want to point make sure that you point out the five things that are going right before you mentioned the one thing that that is going wrong so that you can keep that relationship. How do you approach that as a customer? And as a essentially, as a beta tester, I would imagine, for the product, how do you work with that development team, to give them critical feedback that they need for the product,

Tim Parilla 40:37
oftentimes, I think the biggest value that that my team and I will bring to that process is being able to articulate a problem. One of the things that I think has made LinkSquares, as successful as, as LinkSquares has been is that the founders approached, building the LinkSquares platform. From a business perspective, neither of them are lawyers. And they experienced relatively painful situation associated with the sale of a company where they both worked, and they said, This is a crazy process, there must be software out there that that can help with this process. And, you know, there, there really wasn’t anything that hit the nail on the head. And so these two business people got together and they said, This is a real business problem. And let’s create a business solution for that problem. And so the platform comes at it from there, I think all of our competitors look at look at the software that they make is seeking to solve a legal problem, right? It’s not actually a legal problem in any in any way, shape, or form. It’s a business issue. And so when I’m interacting with our product team and our development team, what I’m really focused on is on is trying to figure out if they’re asking me my opinion on a particular feature or something, I you know, my feedback, and my questioning of them will be around well, what are you trying to solve for? And is that the right problem to solve for, then we kind of go back and forth. And hopefully, you know, they’ve got a more robust understanding of why the problem that they’re seeking to solve is actually a problem and what else it impacts. And I actually am really conscious to try to not propose a solution. But a lot of people will come to the legal tech area and say, I need this software that does x, right, it needs to manage this in this way. And it’s like, okay, well, what problem are you actually trying to solve? Right? Oh, it’s got to, it has to have like this automatic that and the next thing, like, Okay, well, the actual problem is you being able to meaningfully track approvals of language within your agreement. So let’s figure out how to meaningfully track language that needs approvals within your dream and approval from the CFO or the CTO or the CFO or something like that, right? I really approach it like that, and let you know, let the business people try to find a business solution to this business problem.

Marlene Gebauer 43:12
So Julian, and Tim, you know, you can either tag team on this answer or handle it individually. But we ask all of our guests our crystal ball question. And that is what change or challenge do you see in the legal market over the next three to five years?

Juliette Kopecky 43:29
I might let Tim answer this one first.

Tim Parilla 43:32
So I think there’s going to be an acceleration of adoption of legal technology, from the perspective of efficiency for the in house function. So obviously, there’s already been, you know, sort of mandated adoption of your ediscovery platforms and things like that. But I think what is missing is sort of this software that’s going to help provide quantitative data around the work that in house legal teams are performing. You think about it in the context of law firms. And law, if you’re going to a law firm, you have to learn this software, you got to learn the billing software, you got to learn how to open a matter and associated with the client, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And you got to track your time and six minute increments as part of your job, you are not doing your job if you don’t know that software, if you’re not using that software, if you’re not tracking your time, but that’s how law firms make their money. In house, legal departments don’t track their time, by and large, and they’re not held to account for the time spent on a particular project, with the exception of is the business stakeholder happy with your turnaround times. Right? At least reasonably so. Okay, so what that results in is a deep prioritization of that organizational framework that you do have in law firms, and there’s no sort of replacement. And I think what What executives are demanding of their legal function now is starting to change. It’s not enough to go in there and go into the executive room and say, I had conversations and everyone’s pretty happy with the way the legal team is operating on to the next. And then Juliet has slide after slide after slide with all of this data about the ROI on, on the initiatives that she’s put together, the content created, leads generated all this and how is just absolutely benefiting the business from propelling the business forward. And then you go to your, you know, your head, your ad product, and same thing, your your ad revenues, same thing as CFO, same thing. Everyone’s got data except for the legal function. And so executives are demanding more than that. But executives are demanding that the legal function show its value within an organization. And I think the only way to do that is not only to buy a piece of technology, you have to buy into that technology, you have to use it, right? It’s like you think about it in terms of Salesforce, for example. Let’s say you had an account executive who on the first day said you don’t want to update Salesforce at the end of the month, how long do you think that person would continue to be avoided that organization, probably about five minutes, right. But somehow on the legal function, that’s okay, you can buy legal software and not use it and still, like be considered a great contributing member of the team. That idea, I think, is changing and has to change. Because the end state of being able to quantify the work that the legal team is doing is what is being demanded by the executives of the legal team. So we’re gonna, because of that, I think we’re gonna see additional tech adoption around how are you running your HR department, and I think there’s gonna be a fundamental shift in the next, you know, three to five years of what it means to actually run and operate a high performing legal function within an organization. Juliette, what do you see?

Juliette Kopecky 47:02
Yeah, and I don’t have a ton of controversy to add to this, obviously, you know, Tim and I, there are bets that we’re making as a company with LinkSquares, you know, in this arena, and how we see the evolution of the modern legal team within an organization and things that we’re doing on the product side to support it. And also like the feedback, I think, yeah, companies that are have, let’s say, that modern legal team, we’re hearing those themes, right, that general counsel’s and chief legal officers that they very much so want that seat at the table, that they don’t want to be seen as that team of No, the team that’s hindering business, they want to be seen as those enablers, right? They want to help power the business. And then part of being able to get that seat at the table, is to come with some of that data to be able to show this is how we’re enabling the business. This is how we’re constantly improving the legal function. This is how we’re supporting other parts of the organization in terms of meeting these higher level company goals. It’s not enough these days to be reactive, right? And how do you be more proactive? Obviously, technology and software can help enable that and make that job easier, so that you’re not managing, like, tons of different Excel spreadsheets, or you’re pulling together, you know, data and spending hours and hours of time doing that. And I think it’s a really interesting shift. And I think that’s a shift that is happening now. And legal teams that are at the forefront are already doing these things and thinking about these things. But in terms of that widespread adoption, and whether that’s expectations that are being set at the executive level function for the legal team and being sort of pushed down into them, or legal teams that are coming and saying, like, Hey, let me proactively show you how legal is empowering the business. I think that is a more, let’s say, fuller shift that we’re going to see over the next three to five years. I think those modern GCS are doing that right now proactively, and others are sort of catching, catching wind of it. And I think in terms of, you know, that change and how that shift happens, you know, certainly LinkSquares being being a part of it, and being that enabler and helping legal teams being able to accomplish that.

Greg Lambert 49:12
Well, Tim Parilla, chief legal officer and Juliette Kopecky chief marketing officer, both at LinkSquares. I want to thank both of you for taking the time to come in and talk with us. I’m really enjoyed listening to your perspectives. Thank you.

Juliette Kopecky 49:27
Thank you so much for having us.

Tim Parilla 49:29
Thank you. Appreciate it, Greg.

Greg Lambert 49:34
So it was kind of interesting to have an in house person come on the show. We don’t get a lot of a lot of them. So I think we kind of hit him with a lot of questions.

Marlene Gebauer 49:44
Yeah, I love getting the in house perspective. I always feel like it’s like we’re getting inside baseball knowledge and

Greg Lambert 49:50
especially the uniqueness of this position where he’s not just the in house. It’s almost like the Men’s Wearhouse commercial right I’m not just your in house thinking, not just your in house lawyer, I’m also a customer.

Marlene Gebauer 50:07
Also customer, I was really thinking that during the podcast, it was funny. That’s hysterical. So, you know, I do think I mean, there’s there’s a definite advantage there to sort of you have your sort of built in testers built in feedback, you know, that can, these are actual users and can talk the talk if you want, and you know, want to think of it that way in terms of, of other users, because they’re going to be doing it in very similar ways. So they can really share their positive experiences about it.

Greg Lambert 50:35
Yeah, it was interesting, listening to the way that Tim and Juliette kind of played off of each other, and other goes on their senior management team. But there’s just a number of things that I think, you know, cmo can teach a clo, and vice versa on that. So it’s really kind of magical, watching the two of them interact, and just kind of kind of play off of each other and learn from each other. And I think Tim was was spot on with, you can’t just show up at these meetings as the legal officer and just go, yeah, everything’s okay. And then follow that up with these, you know, amazing data presentations, that the marketing team that the finance team that everyone else is showing up with. So I think he’s got his, his thumb on the pulse here of what it is that not just in house, but I imagine outside counsel are also going to have to do to show with data, actual results.

Marlene Gebauer 51:39
Yeah, I mean, this was a very good example of personnel and and, you know, business personnel sort of working in tandem really, really well. And again, I think that is a lesson for all of the industry, you know, to see. It’s like how how positive that is, and how well that supports the business.

Greg Lambert 52:02
I agree. So thanks again to Tim Parilla, chief legal officer and to Juliette Kopecky, Chief Marketing Officer at LinkSquares for joining us today.

Marlene Gebauer 52:13
And of course, thanks to all of you for taking the time to listen to The Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you. So reach out to us on social media. I can be found at @gebauerm on Twitter,

Greg Lambert 52:26
And I can be reached @glambert on Twitter.

Marlene Gebauer 52:29
Or you can leave us a voicemail on our new geek and review Hotline at 713-487-7821. And as always, the music you hear is from the wonderful Jerry David DeCicca Thank you Jerry.

Greg Lambert 52:43
Thank you wonderful Jerry

This week we are joined by LexisNexis’ Chief Inclusion and Diversity Officer and Head of Global Talent Development, Ronda Bazley Moore. Ronda and a team of LexisNexis leadership in the LexisNexis African Ancestry Network & LexisNexis Rule of Law Foundation Fellowship tasked 18 Fellows from Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCU) Law Schools with one very complex task: Uncover how LexisNexis products could be used to address and eliminate systemic racism in the legal system.

1. Equity for Youth in the Legal System
2. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Legal Education
3. Diversity in Leadership of Legal Profession
4. Diversity and Equity in the Courts
5. Equity in the Criminal Justice System
6. Racial Equity in Wealth and Ownership

• 2022 LexisNexis Fellowship Publication.pdf
• During Symposium, Law Students Tackle Racial Inequity in Legal System – The Washington Informer

Listen on mobile platforms:  Apple Podcasts |  Spotify

Crystal Ball Question – Legal Value Network Conference

Amanda Norris, Senior Operations Manager at Integreon steps up this week to answer our Crystal Ball question. Amanda has a very interesting expectation on how support staff at law firms, specifically Legal Assistants and Legal Secretaries, provide support both in-person and remotely over the next few years.

Transcript