This week we welcome back Karen Dunn Skinner and David Skinner, founders of Gimbal Consulting, to discuss a revolutionary approach to legal efficiency. Their latest book, The Power Zone Playbook for Lawyers, provides a step-by-step guide to optimizing legal workflows, enhancing productivity, and preventing burnout. With over two decades of experience in legal process improvement and law firm management, Karen and David share their insights on how lawyers can focus on high-value tasks, delegate strategically, and build thriving practices without sacrificing well-being.

A major theme of this conversation revolves around the concept of the Power Zone, which is defined by three key pillars: work that lawyers are uniquely qualified to do, work they are passionate about, and work that delivers the most value. By identifying these core strengths, legal professionals can reduce inefficiencies, optimize workflows, and shift their focus to strategic tasks. The discussion also introduces The Delegation Quadrant, a powerful framework for assigning work effectively, ensuring that lawyers concentrate on their most impactful contributions while leveraging legal assistants, technology, and automation for lower-value tasks.

Another key highlight is the role of AI and automation in legal practice, particularly in light of recent innovations like DeepSeek’s AI-powered legal reasoning model. Karen and David discuss the impact of AI tools in streamlining repetitive legal work, improving access to justice, and increasing efficiency in small firms. However, they emphasize that while AI can handle routine processes, the true value of a lawyer lies in the transformation they provide to clients—whether in business transactions, litigation, or personal legal matters. As legal technology evolves, firms must adapt by embracing new tools while maintaining a strong client-centered approach.

Beyond technology, Karen and David explore how shifting away from the traditional billable hour model can lead to greater profitability and client satisfaction. Flat-fee pricing and value-based billing strategies allow lawyers to align their interests with their clients while enhancing efficiency. They also discuss how different generations of lawyers approach work-life integration, highlighting the importance of early career planning, self-awareness, and continuous professional development. By adopting a Power Zone mindset, attorneys at any stage in their career can reduce stress, increase their impact, and build more sustainable legal careers.

For lawyers looking to take control of their practice, maximize their strengths, and embrace strategic efficiency, The Power Zone Playbook is a must-read. The book provides practical tools, real-world case studies, and actionable insights to help legal professionals optimize their workflow. Grab a copy of The Power Zone Playbook for Lawyers on Amazon and explore Gimbal Consulting’s coaching programs at LeanLegal.academy. Don’t forget to subscribe to The Geek in Review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube to stay updated on the latest insights in legal innovation.

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TRANSCRIPT

Marlene Gebauer (00:06)
Welcome to the Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gabauer. So on this week’s episode, we have returning guests, Karen Dunn Skinner and David Skinner from Gimbal Consulting. Karen and David, welcome back to the Geek in Review.

Greg Lambert (00:13)
and I’m Greg Lambert.

Karen & David Skinner (00:23)
It is fabulous to be here. Thank you for the invitation.

Marlene Gebauer (00:25)
Fabulous, absolutely. Feel the energy, it’s good.

Greg Lambert (00:26)
Yes, this is going to be good, I can tell already.

For the listeners who didn’t catch David and Karen last year on our Love and Legal Tech series, well, first of all, shame on you for not listening to that. So they are a married couple and the founders there at Gumbel Consulting. And the focus is to empower legal professionals globally to…

Marlene Gebauer (00:41)
Go listen to it. Now.

Greg Lambert (00:54)
Build thriving businesses without sacrificing their own.

Karen & David Skinner (01:00)
Yeah, that is what we do.

Marlene Gebauer (01:00)
and

drawing from over 20 years of legal experience and their pioneering work in legal process improvement, they offer coaching, writing, and training through their proven, lean legal approach. When not transforming the legal industry, this Montreal-based couple enjoy skiing, kayaking, and pursuing their passion as a ski patroller and watercolor artist respectively.

Karen & David Skinner (01:21)
He’s the artist, no, just No, I’m definitely not the artist. I work in Sharpie only.

Greg Lambert (01:21)
How’s that for an intro?

Marlene Gebauer (01:28)
Erasable markers, that’s it.

Greg Lambert (01:30)
Hey,

Karen & David Skinner (01:31)
Pretty much.

Greg Lambert (01:33)
I haven’t graduated from finger painting yet, so I’m still learning.

Karen & David Skinner (01:37)
Art is art. Karen keeps saying anybody can become an artist and I so disagree.

Marlene Gebauer (01:44)
Well, hey, so before we jump into your new book, The Power Zone Playbook for Lawyers, great title by the way, we wanted to get your take on a current event that’s happening.

Greg Lambert (01:53)
Yes, so this week, yesterday, and I didn’t look at my 401k today, thank goodness. So the US stock market had a little bit of a jolt when news hit about the Chinese generative AI company DeepSeek and their tool, they launched a reasoning model and said that it was able to…

Marlene Gebauer (01:59)
hahahaha

Karen & David Skinner (02:02)
I think

I know where this is going.

Marlene Gebauer (02:08)
Little bit.

Greg Lambert (02:22)
do something for free that one, only cost them $6 million to create. And it actually is supposed to rival OpenAI’s O1 Pro, which some people, and some people I know, are paying $200 a month to use that. So what I wanted to ask you guys about is, one, what do you think about having a

really good, really cheap, really fast model. And what do you think that the industry could do with something like this if it turns out to truly be cheaper, faster, better?

Karen & David Skinner (03:04)
So it’s interesting because you said good, really good, really cheap, really fast. And if you just think about the theory of constraints, you usually can only get two out of three of those. So we’ll have to see. I mean, there’s a lot of hype right now and that hype caused the big

curfuffle in the markets. But it’s a bit like the reaction that people have whenever anything new arrives on the market. I think the same thing happened when ChatGPT came in and people were like, know, what are we going to do? What’s going to happen? Well, what’s going to happen is we’re going to adapt, right? If DeepSeq can do what it says it can do, fantastic. It’s going to open up low cost AI, which will really help out a lot of our smaller clients. We have a lot of solos and small firms that we work with. And for some of them, it’s just too expensive to get really on board with some of the AI and they just don’t have the bandwidth to do it. So better, faster, cheaper AI, great. And I think we’ll probably talk a lot about this across the course of the podcast, but really when we’re looking at all these new tools and what they can do and whether or not they’re gonna displace what it is that lawyers do, I think we really need to step back and say, what as lawyers, what is our true value to clients? And our real value is not something that a machine can do. Our real value is the transformation that we as lawyers provide to our clients. So maybe we’ve got clients who own one small business and they want to own a whole series of businesses. They want to go and be transformed from being a small business owner to being a really big business owner. Or maybe they own a big business and they want to retire. So they want to transform into a retired person with a really nice nest egg. Or maybe they want to go from being scared and trapped in a bad marriage to feeling safe and feeling like their kids are provided for and they’re confident and they and make this fresh start, that’s a transformation. If it’s criminal law, they want to go from being accused to being not stressed out of their minds and worried about whether they’re going to jail or maybe getting the least onerous sentence they should have, but that’s a transformation. Yeah, and it’s that transformation that Karen’s referring to, that’s what’s valuable to the client. That’s what they’re paying for. So if you could find ways of delivering that transformation better, faster, cheaper, if we can get all those three together, woo.

Everybody wins, right? The client gets the transformation faster and use the attorney. You get to adjust your fees either to increase your margin or to get the client a break or maybe a bit of both. And there’s also, think, an important element that we need to recognize here, Greg, which is the access to justice issue, right? If we can use technology, whether it’s DeepSeek or something else, whatever the next thing is that comes in six months’ time, I don’t know. But if we can use technology… to take on a lot of the sort of the time consuming things that we used to do, drafting routine repetitive things, responding to emails, analyzing huge amounts of documentation, discovery, whatever it may be, then the profession, generally speaking, has more bandwidth. And that has always been a big issue. We can turn the technology into helping us deliver the nuts and bolts to more people. think Something like 80 % of legal needs go unmet in Canada and it’s no different in the US. The goal here would be to make lawyers, empower lawyers to take on more work, more cases, deliver better services, read justice without increasing their workload or without having to spend more time on some of the distinctly human. Giving them more time. Oh sorry, yeah, giving them more time to spend on those distinctly human elements. The elements that are within their power zone, I know we’re gonna get there, within their power zone, which require their unique knowledge, skills, experience, credentials to actually execute the handholding, the reassuring, the navigating complexities of the justice system. I think that’s what I would say. So let’s not all jump out the window. We are going to survive, we are going to adapt, we will overcome, and we will find ways to use the technology in an appropriate fashion.

Marlene Gebauer (07:06)
Ha

Karen & David Skinner (07:14)
I think to deliver better things for our clients and also for ourselves.

Greg Lambert (07:21)
anything to add?

Marlene Gebauer (07:23)
Yeah, well, mean, clearly we’ve seen that there’s a market disruption after this news. And so it remains to be seen whether that will continue in terms of disrupting the market. think Deep Think’s ability, like they developed this competitive AI model at a fraction of the cost, is going to make some of the US companies pause a little bit, the Western companies pause a little bit and sort of take a look at their models and say, okay, how can we do this better, cheaper, faster? And maybe that will be a good thing for all of us. And the last thing that I wanna talk about is the geopolitical considerations. we’re gonna have Sean, so we’re, go go ahead, go ahead, David.

Karen & David Skinner (08:03)
Mm-hmm.

Well, so yeah, so yeah, I just want to jump in right there because I actually written notes as I wrote myself a note as you were as you were talking and I think, you know, there are geopolitical concerns and I I, know, the jury’s out, right? Is this going to be treated the same way that initially people thought TikTok would be treated, right? Ultimately, it’s it’s the same sort of point of origin and one legitimately wonders about the security and by that I mean sort of national security and data protection and and and and I don’t have the answer and I’m not willing to cast aspersions I just know that an awful lot of time energy and emotion has gone into that fundamental question and I think those questions are going to continue to dominate regardless of off-the-cuff quick knee-jerk reactions there is going to have to be some adjustment. So whether or not this novelty is even given a platform to thrive remains, I think, to be seen.

Marlene Gebauer (09:08)
Yeah, so. Yeah. And I will mention that Sean West, who is an expert sort of in technology and impacts on geopolitical issues, he’s going to be on the podcast probably in the next month, I think. And he’s just written a book about this. So I’m very excited to get his thoughts on this as well.

Greg Lambert (09:34)
Yeah.

Karen & David Skinner (09:35)
Absolutely. Great question though, thought provoking. Don’t have all the answers.

Marlene Gebauer (09:39)
Not yet.

Greg Lambert (09:39)
I just thought six million dollars to develop it and then six hundred million dollars and petitioning Washington to let them continue.

Karen & David Skinner (09:49)
So, know, I love

I do like that Greg, you know tongue-in-cheek or otherwise but I do think that the there is an important lesson here which is it doesn’t take the mass investment that we pour into Silicon Valley and places like Sorry, Waterloo, Ontario and places like that to come up with great creative ideas There are ways to create a better mousetrap for less time energy investment and effort and I’m not even talking about using it to save time. I’m just talking about the creation. Yeah, but I’m like. I’m an early adopter of lot of technology, but I’m also a bit of a skeptic. So when somebody says we can do this for next to nothing, means six million is not nothing, but compared to what has gone into these other platforms, I’m kind of, I’m at that, well, do you, are you just getting what you paid for sort of position? So I’m super interested to see where it goes, but I’m, I’m keeping my powder a little dry. last comment on that, because you know, we agree and we don’t agree. I think I agree with you, Karen. I think it actually comes down to,

Marlene Gebauer (10:48)
So.

Karen & David Skinner (10:55)
it’s free for now till everybody jumps onto it and then suddenly it’ll be like Netflix and everything else the cost will start to creep up or rocket up and it no longer will be free because that’s not how most things work anymore

Greg Lambert (11:11)
And I can tell you that I tried to use it this morning and the servers were overwhelmed and so it wouldn’t work. Yeah. the same thing. Well, thanks for going on this little side journey with us. Marlene, did you have something else?

Marlene Gebauer (11:16)
Yeah, I bet. I bet.

Karen & David Skinner (11:18)
Just like when ChatGPT first came out.

Marlene Gebauer (11:20)
Right, exactly. Well, hey, let’s.

Karen & David Skinner (11:27)
It’s always a pleasure.

Marlene Gebauer (11:29)
Yeah, so I wanted to jump into the Power Zone Playbook because that’s why we’re here, right? This book emphasizes the importance of identifying and maximizing one’s power zone. So how can attorneys effectively identify their power zone and what are some of the common obstacles they might face in doing so?

Greg Lambert (11:32)
Yay!

Karen & David Skinner (11:33)
So perfect question to get started.

I want to just step back and explain first what a power zone is because it may not be something that people are familiar with, but your power zone is made up of three things. In the book, in our teaching, in our coaching, we call them the three pillars of your power zone. The first is the work that you are uniquely qualified to do because you’re the lawyer or because you’re the owner of the law firm involved, because you have a unique set of skills or the qualifications that are required to do that work. Yeah and the next piece is that it’s work that you love, right? People are happiest and most productive when they’re doing what they love, what fuels their passion. And then the third pillar. Yeah. The final piece is it’s the work that you do that adds the most value that you can add to the firm. So it’s the work you’re uniquely qualified to do the work you love or fuels some passion that you have and the work that you do that adds the most value you personally can add to the firm. Now our, our, our view is that everyone has a power zone. So imagine you’re the rain making partner at a firm. You may be uniquely qualified to do the really high level business development and legal work, but you love making it rain. And when you bring in the big clients, that’s adding the most value to the firm, more so than actually doing the legal work. So maybe that’s part of your power zone. Your power zone can be pretty wide. If you’re a very experienced attorney with tons of years of experience, your power zone is going to be pretty wide. But the question is, you know, where do you add the greatest value? Then in this case it would be rain making and doing the work, but not just sitting down and doing the work. so the nice thing about this whole idea of thinking about how you and everyone on your team works from this optic of what is people’s power zone is if, even if you’re like the receptionist, let’s say at a criminal law firm, you may have excellent communication skills. You may be really empathetic. You may be really good at dealing with that call from a stressed out potential new client on the phone. And you you’re doing that assessing caller, making sure they’re a good fit for your firm, reassuring them, answering some questions, selecting the right lawyer at your firm to forward their call to. That’s for you adding the most value that you can add to the firm. So in the book we set out exactly what it means to identify your power zone. First, having explained what is the power zone, then we talk about how do you go about identifying your power zone. So the book and the toolkit that goes along with the book do exactly that. It starts with understanding Why? Why are you even reading the book? Why do you need to get yourself out of the grind? What do you want to focus on? When you understand why…

And this goes back to tons of people including Simon Sinek, sort of the power of why. When you understand why and maybe you’ve written it down somewhere so you can keep going back to it over and over and grounding yourself in your why, you’re going to be better able to handle the inevitable obstacles, which Karen will talk about in a minute, which usually revolve around volume of work. But you’re going to be able to avoid those inevitable obstacles because you’re going to have your eye on the prize. You’re going to know the destination that you have set for yourself. You’ve got goals and you’re gonna have a path to get there. I mean, the way the book is laid out is really step by step. So it starts with, know, this is what a power zone is. And then, you know, what’s your why? So why are you interested in that? Why do you want to get there? What is it that’s driving you? And then we walk people through step by step what falls into their pillars. So starting with that, you know, what is the work you’re uniquely qualified to do? We’ve got, you know, exercises on what what are your strengths? Really ask yourself, be honest. What are your strengths and weaknesses? I like to call it the SWOT, as opposed to the SWOT.

Greg Lambert (15:47)
Thank

Karen & David Skinner (15:47)
want the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It’s just a sub. Strengths and weaknesses. But you want people to be honest because you might like something but you’re not particularly skilled at it, you’re not good at it, or you feel uncomfortable doing it. So that’s a weakness. And so you may define your power zone in a way that you don’t have to do that work. Or that you want to make sure you build up the skills you need to do it. But you can think about your power zone either way. So then we go, so that’s, what is, what are your strengths? What are you really uniquely qualified to do? Then we pose a series of questions about what kind of work do you like? When are you happiest? What kind of work are you doing when you feel the best at work? What are the types of people that you’re working with on your own team or the types of clients when you feel happiest, most confident, most productive at work? And then we talk to the value piece. And we work them through those pieces. And the value piece I think is really important to recognize and we’ll come back it in a different context in a second or I guess we’ll come back to the question of happiness in a second, but you know what we get people to think in the context of value. We get people to think about you know where they can generate the highest fees. That’s not even fair. Where the margins, where the profitability is greatest, but let’s be really clear. It’s not just about the fees. We want people to think beyond, way beyond the monetary value that the billable work adds to the firm. We want them to think about you know the complexity of the work. Maybe the highly Brainiac work increases the firm’s reputation. So yes, it’s productive and profitable, or maybe it’s not because you’re doing it on a loss leader basis. You’re trying to become an expert in DeepSeek. There won’t be a lot of money necessarily initially because you got to build up, but you gain reputation. It might be strategic planning as a business owner. So we go back to the Rainmaker.

Yeah, I mean, because I just want to jump in and say we actually work a lot with law firm owners. for them, a lot of the work that they do that adds the greatest value to the firm is that strategic planning and those strategic decisions. And that takes time. And if they don’t have enough time to do that, then the firm falters. And that ties back to the notion of value because it’s not immediately revenue generating. Making that decision to open a new office in Phoenix or, you know, to take on six new partners in a different part of the country. Yes, ultimately it will lead to greater revenue and that’s obviously value to the firm. But these strategic decisions don’t have to have an immediate economic impact. And that’s true whether you’re the senior most level rainmaker or you’re coming down to someone in a lower sort of position within the firm. Value shouldn’t be just determined by monetary means. Part of your question, Marlene, was really how do people maximize the work in their power zone? And what we try to do is get people that we work with to spend more time in their power zone. So they identify those three pillars and they identify the work that they really want to do more of and that is going to deliver the most value and the most personal happiness and satisfaction to them. But once they understand what that is, the next step is really to figure out what they’re actually doing all day that’s getting in the way of that work and then delegate as much of it as they can so that they are delegating the work that is not in their power zone and they are keeping the work that is. And this is where one of the most useful tools in the whole book comes out. And this is this idea of having a post-it party or a sticky note session. But we do mean. OK.

Marlene Gebauer (19:23)
Alright, I’m gonna stop you though because we have a lot of questions we’re gonna go through. And we’ll get to all of this, promise, but I think Greg wants to ask his question. Don’t you, Greg?

Greg Lambert (19:34)
Yeah. Well, it’s okay. They’re, they’re excited about this. yeah. I was just wondering, you know, as you, as you wrote the book, I know you deal a lot with owners, but I’m wondering across generations, do you, do you see different generation lawyers approaching and identifying and leveraging the power zone, differently than than their previous generation peers do.

Karen & David Skinner (20:07)
So I think that every generation and people at different stages of their practice are looking at and using this power zone idea differently. honestly, in our work, we don’t work as much with very junior lawyers. So we’re not looking at a lot of Gen Z people in our work because they just haven’t acquired enough experience yet to be sort of launching their own businesses and making decisions and running their own practices. But we do see, you know, we have lawyers who are thinking about their power zone from the optic of, know what, I’ve been running this practice for quite a long time now.

I’m ready to really step back and become the CEO of my business and find lawyers that will do the other work for me, senior lawyers and junior lawyers, and create more of a, almost like a machine where they are, they are the CEO or the COO and they are really at the very tip top and they’re not practicing that much law. So for them, they’re defining their power zone as being running the business, being business people, and then hiring people for whom their power zone is really doing some of this work at all the different levels.

There’s that awful notion of sort of, you know, finding, minding and grinding and I think for many Gen Z’ers, they’re at the age where they’re still learning to mind and grind. That’s part of learning to be a lawyer and I’m certainly not advocating for, you know, sending someone into a due diligence document room with a hundred thousand documents and asking them to read each one, which is what we all had to do when we were juniors. Today you can leverage AI to get you part way there, but that notion of what it means to do due diligence, what you’re looking for in due diligence, what the point is of doing due diligence, none of us like doing due diligence, but it’s still an important formative exercise.

That brings me to a second point, which is, you know, we talked about the three pillars of the power zone concept, right? Well, the second one was work that fuels your passion. And I think it’s important to recognize that this element, fueling your passion, is going to get diluted the further down the organizational chain you go. Junior lawyers and most Gen Zs are going to be considered juniors still. They’re not likely to love everything that they do. And that’s okay because the reality is that certain tasks just have to be and have got to get done as part of one’s training.

Marlene Gebauer (22:20)
But I’m curious, I’m curious, like, so how, like, how do lawyers ensure they’re not neglecting critical skills or becoming myopic doing this?

Karen & David Skinner (22:30)
Yeah. That’s a great question. that’s a really interesting question. And it isn’t one that we’ve been asked before, I have to say. The thing is that for the people that we work with,

The more they get into their power zone, the more they’re then looking at the work that they do in their power zone and figuring out how they can optimize it, the more time they have. First of all, the more profane, the more… Experience. Experience. Sorry, sometimes French words come to me and not English ones. The more experienced they become in their power zone, the more elevated their power zones become. So eventually people’s power zones kind of shift up over time as they develop their skills. Constantly changing. But the really key…  thing is that as you do that you’re freeing up time and you’re freeing up bandwidth in your brain to really think strategically about what’s next. So where should you take your practice? What practice areas could you add or what types of work could you add to your practice to meet some other unmet need from your clients? Or what’s cutting edge? What do you see if you’re a tech lawyer? What’s coming down the pipeline that you want to tool up on? You can’t tool up and learn new skills if you are just minding and grinding. If you are stuck in the grind on a day in day out basis. So I love your question.

but I think the result is the opposite. If you’re not in your power zone, you’re more likely to be myopic and miss opportunities and misunderstand or misidentify where your skill set is lacking because you are just churning things out and you’re never stopping to say, is there a better way to do this? Maybe I should actually read some case law, whatever it may be and I’m being a little bit tongue in cheek, but you need the time to think and you don’t have the time to think if you are just grinding. Does that make sense?

Marlene Gebauer (24:19)
Yeah.

Greg Lambert (24:20)
Yeah, yeah, and so let me kind of flip that, and I think this is kind of where you were going with it. I know a lot of, especially solo, small firm lawyers can sometimes feel like they’ve got to be a jack of all trades. They’ve got to be able to do everything. So how would you advise someone like that to kind of really kind of become self-aware and know what  it is to fit this power zone philosophy and try to get, do they get away from that? Do they find that strength or what do you advise?

Karen & David Skinner (25:01)
So I think it’s interesting when you when we walk people through this idea of who’s your ideal client and who do you really most want to serve? What type of work do you most want to do? Some people in our in our world in some of the some of the smaller practices that we work with, they want to be generalists. They want to be the the country lawyer that that does a little of everything well serves a community that he or she knows really well. They want that community role and you can be an absolutely fantastic generalist lawyer and be smack dab in your power zone. But that means you’re doing the highest value legal work that you can do to bring them to add value to your practice. You’re not doing the business and admin work. You’re not stuck in the grind and you know, fixing the photocopier and uploading documents that have to go to court or adjusting outline numbering in Word, right? You’re doing the legal work that’s in your power zone and that can be across a whole series of different practice areas that you want to serve your clients in. So the concept of power zone, think it’s important to recognize, actually covers not just the practice of law, but actually managing and executing on the business and administrative things that go to supporting the practice of law. So if you’re going to be a generalist, you got to get all that stuff off your plate. Because if you’re going to stay current, which is your obligation, if you’re going to stay current with all the different practice areas that you are in, family law, wills and estates, criminal, whatever it may be, you got to have time.

You gotta have time not only to practice and deliver your services, you gotta have time to stay on top. So being in your power zone is practicing not doing all the business and administrative things. Does that make sense?

Marlene Gebauer (26:46)
Yeah. But let’s sort of look at it, like I said, the opposite way. Well, no, it’s the same way, actually. So you have a lot of attorneys that struggle with delegation. They feel like no one else can do the job as well as they can. They want to have a lot of control over everything that’s done. because, I mean, there’s a personality type. We all know that. So How does your book address this concern and provide practical strategies for overcoming this delegation barrier?

Karen & David Skinner (27:19)
Well, so I think the answer is going to come down to the delegation quadrant. I want to do four… Or four columns if you want. But you could be a finger painter and still get there, Greg. But I think your question starts off with this notion, you you asked, know, they feel that nobody else can do the job. And I think that that is one of those myths about delegation that is a serious…

Marlene Gebauer (27:22)
we got a quadrant. Awesome.

Greg Lambert (27:24)
Yeah.

Karen & David Skinner (27:48)
misconception. Other people can do the work just as well as you if you invest the time required to create the resources that will teach them and support them in the execution of the work the way that you believe it can and should be done best. Ask yourself how you got to be so awesome.

It certainly was not by going it alone. It certainly was not by starting with a blank page, and it certainly was not with constantly reinventing the wheel or trying to do everything. Yeah, the book really talks people through step by step, and I’m just going go back to that post-it party idea that I mentioned earlier. And that’s really weekend.

Marlene Gebauer (28:25)
I told you we’d get to the post-it party. I told you we would.

Karen & David Skinner (28:27)
Of course, we love Post-It. But of course, what we want people to do is this exercise that gets them to, over the course of a couple of weeks, because you can’t do it all at once, over a couple of weeks, start writing down on a sticky note every time you do a task. some kinds of phone calls that you have to make, different documents you have to draw, everything goes on a sticky note. And you just throw those sticky notes up on a wall. Everything that you do, fixing the photocopier, dealing with a vendor for whatever that might be, trying to help somebody solve a software problem, or meeting with a client. Draft an engagement letter. Draft an engagement letter. All these different things that might want do. opinion. Each one of those goes on a sticky. And then at the end of a couple of weeks, when you’ve really covered all of the things that you do on a daily basis. What are you doing with those stickies? You’re them on a wall. Okay. And then all, and then, you know, we do it over a couple of weeks because sometimes you do things and you only do them maybe once a month. Maybe it’s something to do with your accounting, you only do it once a month. So once they’re all up there, you step back and you say, okay, I’m going to organize these according to the delegation quadrant. So zone one is the things that you absolutely have to keep because you’re uniquely qualified to do them. Some of them it’s because you are the business owner, whatever it may be. The things that you absolutely have to keep.

Then in quadrant four, so you can kind of imagine a circle, you’ve got quadrant one and quadrant four. Quadrant four is all the things, when you look at it, you think, nobody really needs to do that. Why are we even doing that? That is stuff nobody has to do, and that goes in quadrant four. And then you’ve got these other two quadrants of things. You’ve got, yeah, there’s Dave’s showing you, one, two, three, four. It’s probably backwards on the Might be backwards. But the idea is then you look at these other two quadrants, you’ve got two and three. And two is for all the things that have to get done in the firm.

Karen & David Skinner (30:11)
They don’t have to be done by you. Somebody else could do that work if they knew how. They don’t have to be done by you. And you truly detest doing them. That’s quadrant two. And they could do it better, faster, cheaper. Probably, once they were trained. And then quadrant three is the stuff that somebody else could do. Doesn’t have to be you. But you actually like it. And when we get people to divide them in this way, they’re like, why? Why are we bothering? Because two and three seem awfully alike. They are. They’re things that you don’t have to do that somebody else could probably do better, faster, cheaper than you.

But what’s the distinction? And the thing is that, as you said, one of the things people say is, if I delegate that to somebody, they’re going to make a mistake. It’s going to come back to me. I’m going have to do it anyway. I’m not going to bother. Right? That’s kind of where we started with this, Marlene. But if you’ve delegated work to somebody, and we have a whole process in the book of how to create your SOPs and train people and trust them. But if you’ve delegated work to somebody and they make a mistake, and we all know they’re going to make a mistake the first couple of times they do something, they’re not going to be perfect. But if it’s work that you really, really hate to do, much more likely that you’re going to give them a second chance. Because if they make a mistake with work you like, you’re just going to take it back. If they make a mistake with work you truly hate, then just psychologically you’re like, OK, I really don’t want to do that again. I got it off my plate. I’m just going to show them one more time, and we’re going to be fine.

Greg Lambert (31:27)
Yeah, let me help you get this off my plate.

Karen & David Skinner (31:29)
Right, right. Well, well, well, and, and, and likelihood, again, we, we talk a lot about process, not people. So if they didn’t get the delegation, right, the first, if your delegate didn’t execute what you wanted them to do correctly the first time, well, miracle if they did, but it’s usually because the process you set out for them, the SOP, the precedent, the practice guide, the whatever you gave to, and to enable and empower them is somehow lacking. Yeah.

So go back and figure out where they fell down. Go back to what your instructions and figure out if there was something missing. There’s an awful lot that we do that kind of in here and it’s not written down. And we don’t write it down even if we’re purposely writing things down because we think it’s so blatantly obvious. But you’ve been doing it for 15 or 20 years. It’s obvious to you, but it’s not obvious to a fourth or fifth year associate or a paralegal or a legal secretary. So go back and review.

Help me help you. I’m gonna go back and look up my rules, my instructions and see where maybe I let you down and I’m gonna give you a second chance. And don’t throw the baby out with the bath water because it’s never gonna be done right the first time.

Greg Lambert (32:32)
And then the final quadrant.

Marlene Gebauer (32:34)
Mm-hmm.

Karen & David Skinner (32:39)
Well, we did one and four, two and three. So two and three are the ones that you are going to delegate. But you’re going to start by delegating and learning your delegation skills and freeing up more time by delegating the stuff you really don’t like first. Which is quadrant two. Which is quadrant two. Then you’ll get to quadrant three. Exactly. You’ll get to quadrant three eventually. But if you can at least get all that quadrant two stuff off your plate. Because when we talk about the grind, the grind is the stuff you really don’t like. Right? That’s the stuff that you just have to find another way to do because it’s dragging you down making you feel overwhelmed or it’s taking up time and you just feel useless at the end of the day because you’ve spent all this time, you know, fixing the photocopier. Maybe you don’t feel as fulfilled as you could. Useless is a bit strong. So maybe you just don’t feel as fulfilled as you could have had you left the office feeling that you’d really contributed value, whether that was monetary value in terms of billable time or value strategically because you learned about a new area of law that you can then leverage with clients. Don’t know. But that’s the core is the goal is to help people have the time to focus on the stuff that really matters and to think strategically about other things that they could do that could add value or frankly this goes back to our original podcast with you get out of Dodge just go home and recharge your batteries so you can show up at work the next day at your peak performance not dragging your backside because you’re exhausted

Greg Lambert (34:06)
I wanted to follow this up with asking you about how the readers could leverage technology, but I want to give an example of something that I think kind of fits the conversation we just had. And Marlene watched me do this at a meeting we had in Florida where we did the Post-it Notes, where we were putting a lot of things together. And one of the things that really helped me kind of speed the process up was I literally took a picture of the Post-it notes and then I put it into the generative AI tool and said, hey, help me organize these and gave it some criteria. And it was really, really helpful. So I’m just wondering, are there any ways that you think that with the advancements in technology, and it doesn’t just have to be AI,

Karen & David Skinner (34:45)
Mmm.

Greg Lambert (35:05)
Can attorneys leverage those enhancements and enhance the power zone training and help them with their efficiency?

Karen & David Skinner (35:07)
Absolutely.

Absolutely, really, mean, delegating technology is like delegating to people. It is a great way to get work off your plate that’s maybe repetitive, maybe administrative, and a lot of technologies are really good at that work, and that’s perfect because that’s the kind of work you want to start with getting off of your plate. You know, we did a webinar today with Anika Pizcolani, who, if you haven’t checked out Splendor, which is an AI augmented system for capturing and then using your own clauses right in words, it creates ClauseBanks. has a really great clause compare where you can pull in a clause or a whole contract from another from a third party and it’ll compare them to your gold standard clauses. Super cool. Sorry, Splendr is S-P-L-E-N-R. No E at the end. Splendr.ai. so it’s brilliant and she’s developed it because she’s a you been a corporate lawyer for 15 years and she’s developed it to address the things that she really doesn’t like about practicing commercial law. So she’s created this software that, you know, does a lot of the grunt work of drafting for her. It pulls clauses together. She’s now using it to train her juniors, but you upload your best clauses and the program is just, it’s really cool and it just searches. It’ll go through your contract. It’ll say you’ve got these 12 different kinds of clauses. It’s missing these four clauses that you typically have in your contract and then it’ll pull in different ones that are your gold standard closets and compare them and it does a lot of really neat things. But she’s done it because she’s trying to address problems, things that she doesn’t like that are not in her power zone and are definitely in her quadrant too, things that she does not like about the practice of law. it allows people, allows lawyers and other people in the practice to do things even better or faster or cheaper than they could do them before. And that gives them more time. Yeah, I it gives them time I think again.

The constant theme here is they’ve got more time to think strategically. They’ve got more time to focus on the transformation, which we talked about at very beginning. It’s all about transforming, not about remunerative dollars and cents. It’s about transforming people’s lives, however that may be. It gives them more time to bring the human element after all the practice of law has a huge amount of humanity involved in it and the true value that they deliver to their clients. And you can’t do that if you are overwhelmed, constantly leaving the office at seven, eight, nine, 10 o’clock at night or working weekends. Why? Because you can’t get it all done in the 24 hours we have. How many hours are there to work in a, how many hours are there? 167, something under 168 hours in a week factor in how much time you spend, know, having a shower and eating and sleeping and there’s not a lot of time to get all the rest of the stuff done. So you better be organized and efficient about what you choose to do.

And it costs the firm money when you’re not using technologies that are available. We had a really great example of this. were working on a project with a firm in Philadelphia about, or Philadelphia? Somewhere in Pennsylvania. it wasn’t really, but I think it was Pittsburgh maybe. But anyway, we working with a firm on a type of litigation, commercial litigation or employment litigation, and they had a partner there who really didn’t believe in using precedence. That was Pittsburgh. Yeah, that was Pittsburgh. So she really thought that young lawyers needed to learn how to from scratch and she would she expected that they would come into her office to be assigned work with a pad and paper that they would not use precedence. She prided herself on never having started a contract on a computer in her 20 years of practice. And she had a good sized book of business, but she was not efficient and she was making her associates inefficient. And so when we talked to her about technology, she wasn’t interested, but the business that the firm had practice groups in each practice group had a business manager and the business manager looked at the number and discovered that yes, she had a great book of business. I don’t remember what it was. Let’s say it was a million dollars. But it was actually costing the firm $1,000,000 and $20,000 to do that work because she was so inefficient. That was just one keynote client. She had much bigger book of business because she was very senior, but yeah. But that was the thing. They were losing $20,000 every time she generated a million. So they were spending $1,000,000, $20,000 because she was ineffective and inefficient.

Marlene Gebauer (39:28)
And that’s the power of data-driven decisions right there.

Karen & David Skinner (39:31)
100 % right. Exactly. Show the data, look at the data and make your decisions. And technology allows you to accomplish a huge amount that clients are not necessarily willing to pay for all of these inefficiencies anymore. And we have to adapt. And there’s great technology out there.

Greg Lambert (39:50)
Yeah, well, speaking of adapting, let’s say that the the power zone book had come out instead of coming out in 2025, it came out in 1975. So what do you think the how do you think the legal industry would look different if they had had 50 years of this under their belt?

Karen & David Skinner (40:01)
Yes. So, okay. That’s a really cool question. First of all, no one would be able to buy it on Amazon back then. You would have had to put it in a bookstore. that’s okay. I’d be standing on a street corner peeling St. Catherine Street like with a tin cup with pencils. I’d be selling the book. I couldn’t say, my gosh, our ideas would have completely changed the face of the legal profession or averted the billable hour crisis that causes so much damage to lawyers’ lives.

Marlene Gebauer (40:42)
People might be happier in their practice.

Karen & David Skinner (40:47)
But you know what? If you think about it, working in your power zone is driven by our ideas around efficiency, which is really getting the right people, doing the right work, the right way, the right time.

And if people are more focused on process and they’re more focused on efficiency, it’s a short hop to flat fees. mean, flat fees will absolutely lead to greater efficiency, right? Because you align the clients and the lawyers’ interests around value. I’m going to deliver you something. We agree it’s going to cost $100. Now it’s up to me to make sure I can deliver it for $50 worth of effort so that I get a good margin or maybe $98 worth of effort, whatever it may be. But that’s the point. Flat fees allow lawyers to sell the value or the trends that they are delivering rather than time, they can charge for it no matter how quickly they produce it. So I mean the example I always use is you you bill $100 an hour and it takes you…

Five minutes. It takes you 15 minutes. I’m math is that’s too deep. can do, know. So it takes you 15 minutes to do it. You should only be able to charge $25, but you’ve been in practice for 35 years. The only reason you can do it in 15 minutes is because you’ve got 35 years of practice behind you. Who says that you can only charge $25 for it instead of $5,000 for it? What’s the value of the transformation that you’re delivering with that 15 minutes worth of work? That’s the question. And so this notion of efficiency is a key driver for flat fee work. So maybe it would have brought maybe we would have gotten to flat fees a lot sooner than we now. That’s kind of what I think. If people were really thinking about process and efficiency, I think we would have gotten to that. We would have away from flat fees, sorry, gotten away from the billable hour sooner. And I think that would have really changed how firms are structured. It would have really changed how lawyers are compensated. I think lawyers probably wouldn’t struggle with delegation. No, I think that’s right. would have probably been consistently sooner they would have been looking for ways to push work to the right level, right? Our notion of efficiency in the practice of law is the right people doing the right work the right way at the right time and cost with the right resources. Well, resources includes technology, but not necessarily. But that notion of finding, mean, talk to someone who was practicing back in the 1980s, and I’m very close to that, and they’ll say, well, you know, we had this great pyramidal structure and we were great at delegation because we pushed work down they weren’t pushing the right work to the right people who had the right tools to get it done effectively and efficiently. So I think that our book might have brought this question, this investigation. How do we build a better mousetrap? Earlier than now. And so I think the legal industry might look a little different. And I think the other interesting thing is if people were really thinking about what was the work that was in their power zone and doing the work that was adding the most value, I don’t think we would have ended up in this situation once technology arrived that suddenly we took lawyers that had been working one-to-one with a secretary and delegating a lot of work to a very traditional legal secretary in that model. Suddenly those lawyers lost that secretarial support and technology came in and they were expected to do their own formatting and write their own emails and answer their own phone. And suddenly you had senior people doing editing, updating documents, doing admin things because of the way tech came in. But if people were really focused on, that the right work? Is that the work that’s adding the most value? Maybe we wouldn’t have got there.

Marlene Gebauer (44:14)
So what do you find is the most surprising things that people, the one, the most surprising things people discover when they start focusing on their power zones?

Karen & David Skinner (44:20)
Thank you. I think the answer is how quickly they start asking themselves, like as a matter of routine, hey is that in my power zone or should I be delegating that? We literally have clients that have for a little while had post-it notes on their computers that said, you know, could Joey do this? So they’d be about to do something and they’re like, wait, could Joey do this? Yeah, sure. I mean, I have to create an SOP, but this is something that Joey could do rather than me. So how quickly they start to ask themselves that question as a routine part of their practice. That’s my thought.

I think it comes down to the same thing that I was going to say, which is it’s not as hard to delegate as they thought, and they can actually get better results. And as soon as they start to delegate some of that work that was really dragging them down, how amazing they feel. And then because they feel amazing and because they’ve got more time, then they can do more of it. So they free up time, and then they can spend more time figuring out how to get more stuff off their plates. And that’s a huge eye-opener for them. What was it that our client in Atlanta used to say to herself that, I know what it was,

But law broke her. Yeah. broke her. Yeah. And, you know, it’s not all due to working with us, but we have these meetings with her and she’s like, my gosh, you know, last time last month we talked about ABC and I’ve done XYZ and she literally wrote recently after a meeting she had that we coached her in advance. It was going to be a client feedback meeting and she was trying to figure out ways to…

Greg Lambert (45:30)
It’s broke many, many people.

Karen & David Skinner (45:54)
broached some difficult subjects, she wrote back to say, boy, that meeting went better than I ever expected and I am on an absolute high. Yeah, and this was like six months after being broken by her practice. She had the time to strategize how she was going to conduct that unbillable meeting, non-revenue generating, but incredibly strategic and valuable because it was a keynote client, she had the time to think about it because she was focused on her power zone and one of her power zone obligations as the managing partner of the firm is client relationship management. So she prepped for the meeting, she went into the meeting and she knocked it out of the park, but she wouldn’t have had the time to do that prep work had she just been minding and grinding with blinders on.

Greg Lambert (46:37)
Well, we’re almost at the crystal ball question, but in our prep for this, Karen and David asked that they turn the tables on us and you guys had a question for us. I’ll take this one Marlene.

Karen & David Skinner (46:50)
Yeah. I know. I’m OK, so you can answer the question.

Marlene Gebauer (46:50)
Well, I didn’t get the book so I can’t can’t answer the question

Karen & David Skinner (46:57)
But now that we’ve talked about it, maybe you can kind of get a sense. Yeah. Yeah, so our question was really, so assuming that you read the book, and given your roles at Jackson Walker and Mayor Brown, what do you think is going to be the most valuable lesson that you would like your attorneys to learn from reading the book?

Marlene Gebauer (47:00)
I could probably put something together, yeah.

Greg Lambert (47:15)
Yeah, I was thinking initially the easy answer I think would be learning the delegation quadrant and understanding what it is you like to do that needs to be done versus what needs to be done but you don’t like to do versus what doesn’t need to be done kind of dynamic. But one of the things that in kind of flipping back through and trying to recall some of the things, one thing that kind of stood out for me was the fact that I think sprinkled throughout the entire book, there was a reference to going back and remembering your why. And in fact, I think in the outro, you say to write it on the wall, basically have it on the wall somewhere to remember. And I like the idea of being grounded in… something that is part of your core and remembering what it is and why it is that you looked into changing your behavior and going back to that and remembering exactly what that value is and why you’re doing it. So that was my takeaway.

Karen & David Skinner (48:18)
Mm-hmm.

Right. That’s cool. I love it. Marlene, we’re going to send you your book, but can you get out of way?

Marlene Gebauer (48:38)
Yeah, so thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. It’s like, I do think that the quadrant is important. I think it’s good to do it periodically during the course of your career. Like I do think that people even early on could benefit from this because, know, there’s still things you like and you don’t like. And while you may not have the ability to delegate things as much as you’d like, you probably still can.

Karen & David Skinner (49:07)
Yup.

Marlene Gebauer (49:08)
And because I think what happens is, you know, folks kind of get into this, I’m just doing, you know, I’m just I’m just doing the day to day and I’m not stopping and reflecting and being mindful about, you know, what do I really want to be doing? You know, what’s what is, you know, what do I want to be doing? You what is my career going to look like and where am I going to bring value? And I think that that’s really critical because I think just attorneys, everybody just get too far along that road and you just don’t stop to pause. So I do like that. And I love the idea about putting that on the wall because I can see like you start doing, start actually tracking all the things you do and then you’re like, wow, I really do a lot of things. And then I can categorize in terms of like where are the areas I’m doing it and what do I do most? And is that what I want to be doing? So I do think that’s a good visual for people to use.

Karen & David Skinner (50:05)
Yep.

It’s a couple of comments. regarding Gen Z’ers, I agree 100%. It is never too early to start to think about these questions. What is your why? What am I doing? How am I doing it? And even though I’m not a power player, I don’t have a staff underneath me necessarily, ask yourself every day, what did I do yesterday that I could do differently today to do it better, faster, cheaper with a great result for the client and less strain for me, mental health and wellness and everything else included. the tools, the concepts, the frameworks that we set out in the book have universal application regardless of whether you’re a managing partner of the firm or you’re the receptionist because they help people develop the habits that will lead to a practice if they’re a lawyer or a business that they will truly love. And so that I think is something I agree 100%. It’s not that Gen Zers are different, they are, and there are questions and issues and generational differences. I’m an old guy, I’m 60. But they have lessons that they can learn that will help them create the practice that they love and not get to the point where a lot of us do, which is I feel burnt out, I feel crushed, I feel destroyed, and I’m gonna leave the practice and go into real estate.

Marlene Gebauer (51:32)
Exactly. Exactly. You said it much better than I did, but again, it’s like, you know, having the practice that you want, not getting burnt out.

Karen & David Skinner (51:40)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (51:44)
So I think we’re at the crystal ball question now, right? Okay, all right, so now we’ll turn it back to you guys. So what change or challenge do you see on the horizon in the next couple years that you think the Power Zone Playbook for Lawyers will help attorneys face?

Karen & David Skinner (51:59)
So yeah, I’m glad you sent us this one ahead of time actually, so that we could think a little bit about it. And the thing is, I feel like… I feel like there are a lot of dark clouds looming on the horizon right now without even getting political, but there’s a lot going on with how we’re going to stay happy given the increasing competition that we’re facing in the practice, competition from AI, competition from different forms of people who are practicing law, possible hits to the economies in North America. There’s a lot going on and it’s hard for people to keep slugging away without really thinking about building a life and a practice that enhance their personal well-being. We need to find sources of hope and happiness and you can’t do that if you’re overwhelmed, if you’re trapped in what we call the grind, if you’re doing work that you really don’t like and you just feel like you get up in the morning, you go to work, you come home again. Work should not be a struggle. It shouldn’t be a constant source of worry for people. Yeah, if I can just riff on that for a second and it’s trite to say but you know we should work to live and not live to work and I think that somewhere along the way we’ve kind of lost the plot collectively. Who’s to say that Gen Z’ers who we might say well they’ve got a different work ethic, who’s to say that they’re wrong? Maybe Maybe they’re right because they’re all looking for a different balance in their lives or a different, we don’t like to say balance, work-life balance. It’s more like an integration. Integration of work and life together and we start almost every engagement certainly all of our coaching engagements, whether it’s one-to-one or it’s group, by asking a very simple question. Close your eyes and think quietly for a few minutes. What does your life look like in three to five years time? Maybe shorter, maybe longer. But it’s what does your life look like? The corollary is what does your practice or your business look like?

Why do we start with life? Because if you define what your life looks like, if you know the journey, the destination that you want your life to go towards, then you can start to think about what do I need to accomplish in my business, my practice, in my profession, in my career to empower, to fund that life that I want in three to five years’ time. So we’re very much about that longer term.

Where do you want life to look like? Now let’s talk about what does that mean for your practice and then let’s reverse engineer what you need to have accomplished three years in, two years in, one year in, by Q3, by Q4. It’s just a process of taking it apart, but you need a framework within which to work. And you also need to understand to your point, Marlene, what are you doing?

How are you spending your time? Do the post-it party. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, early on, this is a bit of a side anecdote, but it’s kind of related. Early on, we got a review about the book from a lawyer who said, look, I don’t know if this is relevant and you can do what you want with this review, but here’s what I’m thinking. He said, I struggled with my mental health for over 20 years. I ultimately realized that my life in the firm that I was working at was high pressure and I was doing a lot of work I didn’t like.

that was a huge source of my mental health struggles. said, so I moved in house. He said, I moved in house and I found what I now recognize is my power zone. Full disclosure, this was years before. And he read the book and thought, that’s what I did. I found my power zone. And then he felt unstoppable. He felt happy. He built this career that he really loved. And he said, you know, I don’t know if you wrote the book to help people with their mental health. And we didn’t. We just wanted to find a way to communicate our view of how lawyers could work in a way that integrated their work in life in a more effective way. he said, you know, I don’t know if you wrote this to be a book about lawyers’ mental health, but I really wish that I had had the insights from this book when I was struggling because I think this idea of a power zone would really have helped me. And that’s kind of why we wrote the book was to help people find a practice that they would continue to love. Our why, and it’s on, I think it’s in the book and it’s definitely on our wall, is we’ve never met an unhappy ex-lawyer. And that’s really really sad about our profession. Like, I want lawyers to be happy. I want lawyers to build lives and careers that they feel are giving value to their communities and to themselves. And so that’s why we wrote the book. We legitimately said at the end of the book that if this book just helps one person, we will have had a huge success.

Greg Lambert (56:44)
That’s what we say about the podcast. If one person listens, we’ve helped. Well, Karen and David, we want to thank you both for coming back on and sharing this with us here on the Geek in Review.

Marlene Gebauer (56:46)
Yeah.

Karen & David Skinner (56:49)
Yep.

Thank you so much for having us. a real pleasure. Thank you so much. It’s always fun. these conversations. They’re stimulating.

Marlene Gebauer (57:02)
Yeah, definitely. Congratulations on the book and thanks for coming back. And of course, thanks to all of you, our listeners for taking the time to listen to the Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoy the show, share it with a colleague. We’d to hear from you, so reach out to us on LinkedIn.

Greg Lambert (57:19)
Marlene, without your permission, I went ahead and posted one of the videos on TikTok this week and already got my first negative review. So, yeah. It’s funny.

Marlene Gebauer (57:21)
God, you did… not… great, well we’ll have to talk about that after the recording.

Karen & David Skinner (57:33)
You’ll have to have a thick skin when you’re on social media.

Greg Lambert (57:36)
Yeah, well, it’s funny because the negative review was because I had posted about automate what you can bring human to where they need to be. And this person was not about automating anything.

Karen & David Skinner (57:51)
Well, we know people like that. That reminds me of Pittsburgh.

Greg Lambert (57:55)
Yeah.

Marlene Gebauer (57:56)
I’m surprised they’re on TikTok.

Greg Lambert (57:58)
Yeah, me too.

Karen & David Skinner (57:58)
Good fight!

Greg Lambert (57:59)
Well, Karen and David, we’ll make sure that we put the information out on the show notes. But if the listeners want to learn more about what you’re doing there at Gimbal Consulting or to buy the book, where would you point them?

Karen & David Skinner (58:13)
So two places, if you want to learn about what we do, our consulting work, the courses that we teach, our coaching programs Leanlegal.academy. Leanlegal.academy. Gimbalconsulting.com should take you there too, but the direct link is leanlegal.academy. then the other place for the book would be simply powersoneplaybook.com.

And it’s on Amazon, so you can go grab it. It’s on Amazon.ca, it’s on Amazon.com. I think it’s on every Amazon. It’s on Amazon, Australia, Europe. Yep, you can search for PowerZone Playbook.

Marlene Gebauer (58:51)
Well, that sounds great. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeSica. Thank you, Jerry.

Greg Lambert (58:57)
Thanks, Jerry. right. Talk to you guys later. Bye.

Marlene Gebauer (59:00)
Bye.

Karen & David Skinner (59:00)
Thank you, bye bye.

 

Let’s jump on the bandwagon about DeepSeek R1 and how it’s got the legal tech world buzzing. I know what you’re thinking, “Another AI model hits the saturated market? Great…” But hold on a second, this one might be different. It’s an open-source large language model (LLM) from DeepSeek, a Chinese AI research company, and it’s got some serious potential to shake things up, especially when we’re talking about running it securely inside our own law firms and corporate legal departments.

We’re not talking about some cloud-based, black box solution here. One of the big selling points of DeepSeek R1 is its ability to be deployed locally. That means we get to keep our sensitive client data within our own network. This is huge for those of us who are constantly worried about data security and compliance. I know many of you, like me, have some interesting discussions and use cases by with cloud vendors, so the idea of doing this ourselves may be incredibly attractive.

So, What Can DeepSeek R1 Actually Do For Us?
This isn’t just some fancy toy. DeepSeek R1 has some genuine use cases that could change the way we do things. Let’s break it down:

  • Contract Analysis and Review: Think about the hours we spend poring over contracts. DeepSeek R1 can analyze these documents, extract key clauses, identify potential risks, and even suggest improvements to language and structure. This isn’t just about saving time, it’s about making sure we are negotiating better deals and complying with all the relevant regulations.
  • Predictive Policing of Internal Communications: This one might raise some eyebrows, but DeepSeek R1 can analyze internal communications, such as emails and chat logs, to identify potential compliance risks and prevent data breaches. It can help ensure that our firm adheres to ethical guidelines and legal standards, which is crucial. Keeping this analysis within our own network is a significant win.
  • Litigation Analysis and Strategy: AI can analyze litigation data, predict case outcomes, and provide insights into judges, opposing counsel, and legal strategies. This can help us make better decisions, develop stronger arguments, and get better outcomes for our clients. Tools like Lex Machina and LegalMation are already being used to enhance litigation strategy and automate document preparation, so why not DeepSeek R1?
  • Document Automation: From pleadings to contracts to discovery requests, DeepSeek R1 can automate the drafting of these standardized legal documents, saving time, reducing errors, and ensuring consistency.
  • E-Discovery: AI can assist in e-discovery by analyzing large volumes of electronically stored information (ESI) to identify relevant documents, categorize them, and even redact sensitive information. This can significantly reduce the time and cost associated with e-discovery.
  • Improved Client Service: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants can provide instant responses to common client queries, schedule appointments, and even offer basic legal guidance, improving client satisfaction and freeing up lawyers for more complex matters.
  • On-Demand Document Summarization: This one is my personal favorite. Let’s face it, we’re drowning in documents. DeepSeek R1 can provide on-demand summarization of various legal documents, including email chains, contracts, case law, legal research articles, and depositions. We could set up an email-based system where lawyers send documents to a dedicated email address and receive summaries in their inbox, or, create an internal web portal with more features. Make it super easy on the users to get benefits from a secure AI model without having to become a prompt expert.

What About the Tech?
You’re probably wondering about the tech stack needed for all this. We’re talking about running DeepSeek R1 locally, on our own systems. That means we need some beefy servers with powerful CPUs and plenty of RAM, as well as multiple high-end GPUs. You’ll also need Docker with NVIDIA support, Ollama (to simplify running the model locally), and monitoring tools like Prometheus and Grafana to keep an eye on everything. And of course, robust security measures are a must. You might need an Azure VPN Gateway to connect your local network to Azure cloud resources, and Azure Blob Storage for your documents and data. Quite frankly, this part is way outside my expertise, so I actually asked one of the AI models to give me a list of hardware/software options that would be necessary to run it locally. (It pointed me here.)

Is it worth the effort?
I’m not saying this is going to be easy. It will require skilled IT personnel with expertise in AI, Docker, and cloud technologies. There are also potential risks and unforeseen consequences to consider. We have to keep an eye on accuracy and bias, as well as ethical considerations. But, the potential benefits of this thing, like reduced costs, increased efficiency, and better accuracy, can’t be ignored.

The Open-Source Advantage
The open-source nature of DeepSeek R1 is also a big deal. It means we have more transparency, the potential for community contributions, and customization options. That’s important because we are moving away from relying on closed, proprietary systems. Plus, DeepSeek R1 is rumored to be more cost-effective than some of its US counterparts. That’s always a nice bonus.

The Elephant in the Room
Of course, we can’t ignore that DeepSeek R1 has Chinese origins, and that might raise some concerns for some of us. We’ve seen the Tik Tok legal and political battles. There are worries about potential biases, censorship mechanisms, and the risk of misuse. The US Navy even banned DeepSeek AI over national security and ethical concerns. DeepSeek has also faced malicious attacks, and there are investigations into whether a DeepSeek-linked group improperly obtained OpenAI data. This requires us to be cautious and diligent.

Final Thoughts
DeepSeek R1 is a fascinating development in the legal tech world. It is not a magic bullet, and you need to be aware of the potential risks. However, the potential for secure, on-premises AI in law firms and corporate legal departments is real. It’s up to us, the legal tech professionals, to figure out how to make the most of it.

What do you think? Is DeepSeek R1 a game-changer, or just another flash in the pan?

This week, we are joined by Atena Reyhani, Chief Product Officer at ContractPodAi, for an engaging discussion on the intersection of AI innovation and the legal industry. Atena brings her deep expertise in AI-driven product development and shares insights into the trends shaping legal technology and how ContractPodAI is at the forefront of this transformation.

The conversation kicks off with a focus on the prevalence of conversational user interfaces (CUIs) in modern legal tech tools. Atena explains that CUIs, inspired by platforms like ChatGPT, are intuitive and reduce the cognitive load for users, making adoption easier. “Conversational user experience is now one of the ways of interacting with super intelligence,” she notes, highlighting how this design helps bridge the gap between human communication and AI capabilities. Atena also predicts a future shift towards deeper human-AI collaboration, moving beyond simple interactions to robust tools that integrate seamlessly with user workflows.

When asked about the challenge of brand differentiation in a landscape where many tools appear similar, Atena emphasizes the importance of moving from basic chatbots to comprehensive, end-to-end solutions. She points to the rise of agentic AI, where multiple AI agents work together to provide dynamic, actionable insights. According to Atena, “AI can now analyze information, outsource tasks, and dynamically engage multiple AI agents to perform end-to-end operations,” paving the way for truly intelligent legal platforms.

Atena delves into how ContractPodAi leverages AI to address real-world challenges in legal operations. With its Lea AI solution, the company has expanded beyond contract lifecycle management (CLM) to broader enterprise applications such as compliance and obligation management. Atena reveals an exciting new initiative, the Lea Marketplace, which she describes as “a one-stop shop for enterprise legal GenAI,” likening it to the Salesforce or Microsoft Marketplace. This platform will enable partners and subject matter experts to accelerate innovation through collaborative, industry-specific solutions.

Reflecting on her career in AI and her recognition as an award-winning innovator, Atena speaks passionately about the tangible impact of AI on businesses and individuals. She also underscores the importance of diversity in technology development, stating, “Women bring a diverse perspective that is crucial for innovation.” Atena encourages more women to step into leadership roles and shape the future of AI and legal tech.

The episode concludes with Atena’s predictions for the legal tech industry. She identifies key challenges, including aligning AI capabilities with organizational needs and ensuring effective user adoption. “It’s one thing to have the technology and another to use it to its full potential,” she observes, stressing the importance of strategic deployment, training, and change management. Atena’s optimistic vision underscores the vast opportunities for AI to revolutionize legal operations.

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Blue Sky: ⁠@glambertpod⁠ ⁠@marlgeb⁠
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Transcript

Continue Reading The Evolution of AI in Legal Tech: A Conversation with ContractPodAi’s Atena Reyhani

LinkedIn, the platform where professional networking and self-promotion collide, now finds itself in the crosshairs of a major class action lawsuit. The allegation? That LinkedIn has been secretly using Premium users’ private InMail messages to feed AI training models without their knowledge or consent. For a platform that markets itself as a bastion of professional trust, this is a serious breach of both expectations and contracts. As a side-note, while I am not a premium LinkedIn user, I frequent LinkedIn because it’s one of the few (mostly) apolitical social media platforms out there. And while many of us may scoff at the idea that LinkedIn would train AI models on the public content we post, the collecting of InMail content is quite disturbing, if proven true.

[Case: De La Torre v LinkedIn Corp, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 25-00709]

The lawsuit, filed in California federal court, claims that LinkedIn violated not only the privacy of its users but also their trust. Premium subscribers, who shell out extra for the promise of enhanced privacy protections, allegedly had their sensitive communications, think job negotiations, intellectual property discussions, and salary talks, used to train generative AI models. To make matters worse, LinkedIn reportedly attempted to sweep this under the rug by quietly updating its privacy policy after being called out.

Consider the type of content often found in LinkedIn InMail messages. These aren’t just generic notes asking to “connect” or “grab coffee sometime.” They often include deeply personal and highly sensitive information, such as salary negotiations, business strategies, discussions of intellectual property, and even private details about career moves or startup funding. The exposure of such content through unauthorized AI training would be more than just a privacy violation; it could have life-altering consequences for the individuals involved, from damaged professional reputations to lost business opportunities.

Note: Monthly InMail Cost for Premium Users

Here’s the kicker: the lawsuit doesn’t just allege privacy violations. It claims breaches of federal laws, contractual promises, and California’s Unfair Competition Law. The plaintiff seeks damages, injunctive relief, and even “algorithmic disgorgement”, essentially demanding that LinkedIn delete AI models trained on the improperly used data. Is that even possible??

And then there’s the Microsoft connection. LinkedIn’s parent company stands accused of possibly integrating this data into its broader ecosystem, raising questions about where this sensitive information could resurface. Could confidential LinkedIn messages one day power a Microsoft Teams suggestion or autocomplete a Word document? The implications are staggering.

LinkedIn, for its part, denies the allegations, calling them “false claims with no merit.” But as the details of this case unfold, the broader tech industry faces a critical moment. At a time when generative AI is reshaping how companies innovate, this case underscores the urgent need for transparency and consent in data usage.

For legal professionals, privacy advocates, and anyone who’s ever sent an InMail, this story is more than just a cautionary tale—it’s a wake-up call. Many of us joked a few weeks ago when we thought they were only scraping publically available post, where most AI results would start with “I am excited to announce I have joined ____ company this week…”. But this is a much more serious allegation. If LinkedIn, a platform built on professional integrity, can allegedly fumble its privacy commitments, what does that say about the wider industry?

This week we welcome Bobby Puglia, Chief Product Officer at Bloomberg Industry Group, to discuss Bloomberg Law’s latest generative AI-powered tools: Bloomberg Law Answers and Bloomberg Law AI Assistant. Bobby provides an insightful look into how these tools are designed to revolutionize legal research by making it faster, more intuitive, and seamlessly integrated into users’ workflows. The conversation begins with a discussion about the challenges of capturing the attention of legal professionals and the strategies that can bridge the gap between innovation and adoption.

Addressing “Tool Fatigue” and Driving Innovation Adoption

Bobby delves into the strategies behind overcoming “tool fatigue,” a common challenge in the legal industry. He highlights the importance of understanding specific user pain points and delivering targeted solutions. Marlene shares how peer advocates within law firms can champion the adoption of new tools, while Greg emphasizes the need for tailoring communication to align with the unique needs of different legal professionals. These insights reveal Bloomberg’s thoughtful approach to encouraging the adoption of its cutting-edge tools.

Inside Bloomberg Law Answers and AI Assistant

Bobby explains how Bloomberg Law Answers uses generative AI to provide concise, transparent answers directly in search results. With citations and detailed attributions, the tool seamlessly integrates into existing workflows. Meanwhile, the AI Assistant offers a groundbreaking way to interact with legal documents—allowing users to summarize, interrogate, and ask specific questions confined to the document’s “four corners.” These tools are designed to save time and enhance productivity for attorneys and legal researchers.

User-Centric Design and Quality Assurance

The discussion highlights Bloomberg’s user-focused development process, including its Innovation Studio, which uses pre-beta testing to refine tools based on user feedback. Bobby outlines how this iterative approach improves content sourcing, interface design, and overall functionality. Robust benchmarking, guardrails, and human-in-the-loop testing ensure that Bloomberg’s AI tools maintain the highest standards of accuracy and reliability.

The Future of AI in Legal Workflows

Looking ahead, Bobby shares his vision for generative AI’s role in reshaping the legal industry. He predicts a future of integrated, customizable workflows that reduce time spent on routine tasks, allowing legal professionals to focus on high-value work. The conversation also explores how Bloomberg plans to expand its AI Assistant to tackle broader research tasks, streamline navigation, and enable seamless integration with platforms like Microsoft.

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Blue Sky: ⁠@glambertpod⁠ ⁠@marlgeb⁠
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

TRANSCRIPT

Continue Reading From Workflow to Innovation: Bloomberg Law Answers and AI Assistant with Bobby Puglia

This week, we kick off the new year with Patrick Ip, co-founder and CEO of Theo AI. Patrick joins the podcast to discuss his journey from Google to entrepreneurship and how his company is leveraging AI to transform legal workflows. As the legal industry begins to embrace AI, Patrick shares his unique perspective on opportunities, challenges, and the ethical considerations surrounding these groundbreaking technologies.

The conversation begins with a fascinating discussion about a recent pro se lawsuit where AI tools like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and others played a pivotal role in drafting a complex complaint. Patrick and the hosts delve into the implications of this case for legal professionals, highlighting the advancements in AI’s capabilities and the need for caution when non-experts wield these tools. The discussion provides a critical lens on the ethics, risks, and reliability of integrating AI into the legal process.

Patrick shares the inspiring backstory of Theo AI, rooted in his rich professional journey, which spans work at the United Nations, launching startups, and being part of a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated project at Google. At Theo AI, Patrick has combined his entrepreneurial spirit with his legal expertise to develop tools that make legal predictions more accessible and reliable. From managing client expectations to transforming litigation funding, Theo AI’s innovative use of synthetic and firm-level data is driving efficiencies and fostering better decision-making across the legal landscape.

The discussion also ventures into the practical applications of Theo AI, particularly for litigation funders and law firms. Patrick explains how Theo AI compresses case review time from weeks to mere minutes, offering predictive insights that help legal professionals assess case viability, manage risk, and optimize workflows. He emphasizes the role of trust and transparency in AI development, ensuring the technology is both robust and aligned with ethical practices.

As the episode concludes, Patrick reflects on the future of AI in the legal industry, forecasting that the most transformative advancements will seamlessly integrate into existing tools like Microsoft Word and Outlook. He also shares his broader philosophy of balancing work with personal passions, drawing inspiration from his experiences as an entrepreneur, coffee aficionado, and triathlete. This engaging conversation is a must-listen for anyone interested in the evolving role of AI in legal technology and beyond.

Links:

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Blue Sky: ⁠@glambertpod⁠ ⁠@marlgeb⁠
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

TRANSCRIPT

Continue Reading Patrick Ip: How Theo AI is Redefining Legal Predictions

This week, Greg Lambert sits down with Tom Dunlop, CEO and founder of Summize, and Laura Proctor, Chief Marketing Officer, to explore the evolution and impact of Summize in the contract lifecycle management (CLM) space. From its innovative beginnings to its strategic positioning in a competitive market, this discussion unveils the strategies, challenges, and future trends shaping legal technology.

Tom Dunlop shares the frustrations that sparked the idea for Summize, recounting his days as an in-house lawyer overwhelmed by the manual review of locked PDF contracts during due diligence. “It was painstaking,” Tom recalls, “I knew there had to be a better way.” Teaming up with a software engineer, he sought to create a tool that could generate instant, usable summaries of contracts. Thus, Summize was born, tackling not only legal pain points but also bridging communication gaps between legal teams and broader business units.

Laura Proctor highlights Summize’s unique approach to embedding its tools within widely used platforms like Microsoft Word, Slack, and Teams. This strategy ensures lawyers and business users can collaborate seamlessly without leaving their existing workflows. “Why ask lawyers to leave Word when they already love working there?” Laura explains, emphasizing Summize’s commitment to user-centric design. This integration not only enhances efficiency but also shifts the perception of legal teams from bottlenecks to enablers.

Central to Summize’s implementation is their “Hero Framework,” a three-step process designed to reduce legal bottlenecks, enhance efficiency, and track progress with actionable analytics. Tom explains, “We focus on reducing low-value, high-volume tasks, enabling self-service for the business, and then optimizing legal workflows.” This framework has even led to unexpected benefits, such as elevating the “personal brand” of legal teams within organizations.

Laura delves into the differences between US and UK markets, noting that US buyers often have prior experience with CLM tools, while UK customers may be making their first purchase. This distinction shapes Summize’s marketing and implementation strategies, with a focus on ensuring rapid time-to-value and addressing previous pain points. “In the US, it’s about reassurance and quick wins,” she explains, highlighting the importance of tailoring approaches to meet varying customer needs.

Looking ahead, Tom envisions a future where AI moves beyond single tasks to orchestrate complex workflows, potentially disrupting the billable hour model and democratizing access to legal knowledge. “If we can monetize legal knowledge rather than time, we could 10x the market,” he predicts. Laura adds that Summize will continue leaning into creativity and differentiation in an increasingly crowded market, ensuring their solutions remain bold and memorable.

This episode is a deep dive into the innovative strategies that are redefining CLM and the broader legal tech landscape. From the practical application of AI to enhancing legal collaboration, Summize offers a glimpse into the transformative potential of technology in the legal world.

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Blue Sky: @glambertpod @marlgeb
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

TRANSCRIPT

Continue Reading Summarizing Success with Summize’s Tom Dunlop and Laura Proctor

In this special year-end episode of The Geek in Review, Greg Lambert takes listeners on a unique journey through the past year’s 50 episodes, all with the help of Google’s NotebookLM audio overview tool. Inspired by Josh Kubicki of the Brainyiacs Newsletter, Greg experiments with this cutting-edge AI tool to synthesize and discuss the key themes, guests, and topics covered throughout 2024. The result is an innovative meta-conversation between Greg and AI-generated co-hosts, offering insights into the future of law and legal technology.

Key Themes from 2024:
The episodes this year highlighted critical shifts in the legal landscape, from the integration of generative AI to the rise of client-centric practices. Technology’s impact on efficiency, mental health, and the evolving role of lawyers emerged as recurrent topics. Discussions also included the push for ethical AI adoption, flat-fee models, and the importance of balancing professional and personal lives, particularly in the “Love and Legal Tech” series. NotebookLM reflected on these trends, offering a synthesized perspective on how the legal industry is adapting to innovation.

Generative AI and Legal Tech:
Generative AI dominated discussions, with guests exploring its transformative potential and the skills needed to leverage it effectively. While some feared job displacement, most viewed AI as an augmentation tool, enabling lawyers to focus on higher-value tasks. Leaders like Dr. Megan Ma and Conrad Everhard shared groundbreaking projects, such as an M&A negotiation simulator, exemplifying AI’s capabilities. The conversation underscored the necessity for prompt engineering skills and ethical considerations in AI deployment.

Data Management, Security, and Transparency:
The importance of robust data management and security was a consistent theme, with experts like Kelly Griswold emphasizing it as a foundational business function. Conversations also explored “garbage in, garbage out” scenarios, the need for explainable AI, and maintaining client trust through transparency. These discussions highlighted how firms must prioritize governance to ensure responsible and effective AI use.

Collaboration, Social Impact, and Access to Justice:
The legal tech community’s collaborative spirit shone through in initiatives like Baker Donelson’s Legal Design Lab and Tom Martin’s LawDroid, which aim to make legal services more accessible. Guests celebrated the social impact of innovative tools designed to reduce barriers to justice and foster inclusivity. These efforts reflect a broader commitment to using technology to address systemic inequities in the legal system.

Looking Ahead:
Wrapping up the year, Greg revisits the podcast’s hallmark “Crystal Ball” question, noting common predictions for the next two to five years. From AI’s continued evolution to shifts in pricing models and the rise of emotional intelligence in leadership, the future of law promises to be dynamic. This episode not only recaps a transformative year but also sets the stage for the challenges and opportunities ahead.

Tune in to this engaging recap as Greg Lambert merges legal innovation with AI technology to reflect on an extraordinary year for The Geek in Review. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year!

 

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Blue Sky: @glambertpod @marlgeb
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

TRANSCRIPT

Continue Reading 50 Episodes of Legal Innovation and a Chat with Google NotebookLM

In this year-end episode of The Geek in Review, hosts Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert are joined by legal tech experts Niki Black, Principal Legal Insight Strategist at AffiniPay, and Sarah Glassmeyer, Director of Data Curation at Legal Technology Hub, to recap the top stories of 2024. From the evolution of generative AI in legal tech to groundbreaking acquisitions, the conversation delves into the successes and challenges that shaped the year in the legal industry.

The discussion kicks off with a look at AI’s growing role in legal research and practice management. Greg recalls the controversial Stanford report that questioned the reliability of AI tools marketed as hallucination-free. The guests explore the importance of unbiased evaluations, the complexity of defining legal research, and the rapid pace of AI development that often outpaces regulatory and academic studies. Sarah highlights the need for peer-reviewed analysis to guide the effective use of these tools, while Niki emphasizes the user-friendly interfaces that generative AI brings to legal software.

Marlene shifts the conversation toward the challenges of integrating AI into law firms’ existing frameworks. The hosts and guests discuss the hesitancy of document management systems to adopt generative AI due to trust and security concerns. Niki and Sarah examine how firms are adapting to AI by organizing data more effectively and addressing client expectations. They also reflect on the potential of AI to bridge access-to-justice gaps, with tools that empower self-represented litigants and underserved communities.

The episode takes a closer look at notable mergers and acquisitions in 2024, such as Bloomberg’s acquisition of Dashboard Legal and Thomson Reuters’ purchase of SafeSign Technologies. Sarah raises concerns about the consolidation of the legal tech market, warning of diminished innovation and competition. Niki observes how cloud-based technologies have facilitated these integrations, making it easier for companies to offer comprehensive solutions that touch multiple aspects of legal practice.

Wrapping up, the group forecasts trends for 2025, including regulatory developments around AI and shifting priorities within law firms regarding tech adoption. While some predictions are cautious, like Sarah’s concern over the impact of external political factors on the tech workforce, others remain optimistic about the growing sophistication of legal tech. The episode concludes with reflections on how the industry can better prepare junior lawyers and law students to navigate an increasingly AI-driven landscape.

Join Marlene, Greg, Niki, and Sarah for this insightful look back at 2024 and an exciting glimpse into the year ahead. As always, we thank our listeners for tuning in, and we encourage you to share this episode with colleagues and connect with us on LinkedIn or Blue Sky!

Listen on mobile platforms:  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ |  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Twitter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@gebauerm⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@glambert
⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

TRANSCRIPT

Continue Reading Sarah Glassmeyer and Niki Black on Legal Tech in 2024 – Highlights, Hiccups, and Hopes for 2025

This week on The Geek in Review, we sit down with Mark Doble, Co-Founder and CEO of Alexi, to discuss the state of AI-driven tools in the legal industry and how they are evolving to meet the needs of modern litigation practices. The conversation begins with a timely debate on measuring productivity in remote work settings. Doble, coming from a background in both law and software engineering, draws intriguing parallels between how legal services and software development measure output and efficiency.

Moving on to Alexi’s core offering, Doble delves into how the platform is currently being used by litigators. He explains that Alexi’s AI technology not only handles the tedious work of research and memo drafting but also provides opportunities for lawyers to explore creative, strategic approaches to cases. By automating routine tasks, Alexi empowers attorneys to focus on high-level legal reasoning and client goals, rather than sifting through mountains of documents.

A key aspect of the discussion centers on the ways in which AI tools, like Alexi, can transform junior associate work. Instead of solely performing rote research or document review, younger lawyers can now leverage these tools as teaching aids, accelerating their path to deeper legal understanding. Doble emphasizes that as automation becomes more sophisticated, the human lawyer’s role in guiding strategy and exercising judgment grows ever more critical.

Doble then addresses concerns around data security and confidentiality. He reiterates that while the underlying technology is evolving, core principles of security remain the same—encrypting data, controlling access, and ensuring that information is never inadvertently trained into the model’s outputs. He acknowledges emerging questions around work product and privilege but sees them as part of the natural adaptation cycle in adopting new technology.

Finally, looking ahead, Doble hints at a significant upcoming announcement from Alexi early next year. He suggests that this new release will push beyond current capabilities, bridging the gap between mere information retrieval and genuine “legal reasoning” support. While keeping details under wraps, Doble leaves listeners with a vision of AI as a true partner in litigation, promising exponential improvements that will redefine how attorneys practice law.

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Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

TRANSCRIPT

Continue Reading Harnessing AI for Litigation: Mark Doble on Alexi’s Next Evolution