On Episode Two of The Geek In Review, Marlene Gebauer and Greg Lambert interview Casetext’s Chief Legal Research Officer and co-founder, Pablo Arredondo. Pablo describes his beginnings as a Kirkland & Ellis attorney who thought his research tools should do much more than they did… and then he went out and created those tools.

Greg and Marlene discuss their busy weeks and a few things that caught their attention. For Greg, it was mainly serving on a jury, and drinking a beer (or two) with LexBlog’s Kevin O’Keefe. Not at the same time, of course. Marlene made her way into Brooklyn and caught up with the NYC law librarian crowd. One of her friend’s gave her a mic to help with her new podcasting career. And, it was her “Birthday Week.”

Here are some links discussed in the podcast this week:

Special Thanks:
Original Music by Kevin MacLeod

Transcript:

Marlene Gebauer 0:05
Welcome to The Geek in Review. The podcast designed to cover the legal information profession with a slant toward technology and management. I’m Marlene Gebauer.

Greg Lambert 0:13
And I’m Greg Lambert. So Marlene, apparently we did well enough in the pilot to warrant making an episode two, we’ll see how this goes. So even my, yeah, even my son listened to the podcast last week. And I will tell you part partly because I’m trying to bribe him into becoming my sound editor.

Marlene Gebauer 0:30
Well, we do need a teenager’s touch if we want to keep our sound levels even my son’s listen to it too. And they said it was pretty boring. I got no love man,

Greg Lambert 0:38
maybe when they’re teenagers. So just a reminder to the listeners, if you want to reach out to Marlene or me about what you hear on the podcast. You can find us on Twitter at @gebauerm, or at @glambert and use the hashtag The Geek in Review. And now this week’s episode of The Geek in Review. So coming up later, Marlene and I get to talk to Pablo Arredondo from CaseText where we have a very geeky conversation with him. So he says something extremely geeky what what was the word Marasco

Marlene Gebauer 1:20
says so this is the only legal related podcast where you’re going to hear blastocyst right here ago

Greg Lambert 1:26
so keep an ear out for that. The Marlene has been a heck of a week for me. Let me just run you down on Tuesday. I got to have lunch with the Legal Marketing Association President Ashraf Lakhani, what a great guy. And there must be something in the water here for professional associations because both the Legal Marketing Association and AALL presidents are basically synthetic going on. So it does it at least for this year. Next year, it’s going to be somebody else. Wednesday, I had the joy of going out for jury duty. Luckily for me, the case settled, so we didn’t actually have to do anything except stand in the hallway for a couple of hours and wait for the judge to dismiss us. Also on Wednesday, we released our podcast. Thanks to everyone.

Marlene Gebauer 2:06
Thank you very much.

Greg Lambert 2:07
On Thursday, I had kind of a twofer. So I was a panelist on a webinar hosted by the amazing Bob Ambrogi on emerging trends and legal technology, and where we had three other panelists on law firm and legal information providers talking about how we leverage technology and more importantly, how we leverage people in the experience to improve the overall results within our law firms. And the most common phrase used and I don’t think this will come as a big surprise to Marlene, or to many of our listeners is that people want to break those silos down between. Yes, so it was it was good. And so as you know, Bob is the editor in chief and LexBlog, who we use here three geeks for our blog platform. Well, I had also on the same day, I got to meet with LexBlog founder Kevin O’Keefe. And then we went down. We had we had a great time because we get to go down to the east downtown part or Edo as we call it. Oh, yeah, there’s cool place. So we get to hang out and do a Facebook Live thing, which was pretty cool. It’s first time I’ve done that. And Kevin and I got to drink some good local Houston beer and we hung out at the rodeo goat. So the Facebook Live thing was pretty cool. Kevin and I get to get to have a good conversation and I can test it at least the beer was good. So I’ll let everyone else judge the content of the conversation. But But I felt it was it was fun. It was good. So I’ll put both the link on for the webinar and the Facebook live interview in our podcast notes. And if I may take just a moment of privilege here. I want to send a special thank you out to my senior research librarian, Judy Hamner, who retired this week after 30 plus years at Jackson Walker Fast Takes office. Yeah, 30 years. So Judy is a librarians librarian and she will be sorely missed here. But I know she’s going to enjoy this next phase of her life. So thanks, granulations. Judy. Yeah, so that was my easy week. What would you do? Well, it’s

Marlene Gebauer 4:07
been a busy week for me too. I had a birthday week so spent a lot who has Yes.

Greg Lambert 4:14
A whole week. Most people only get a day.

Marlene Gebauer 4:18
So I spent a lot of time eating good food watching movies. Incredibles two two thumbs up. Edna Mode, still racks and still no case. I also went to another birthday celebration in Brooklyn for an old friend and got to catch up with many of the New York City Law Librarian crowd. And one interesting topic of conversation was how to get Millennials more interested in conference attendance. So maybe that’ll be another topic for podcast given The Geek in Review, astounding popularity, or maybe because or maybe because someone simply took pity on me. I have been fortunate enough to be on the receiving end of a microphone donation. So I’m going to be testing these out and I’ll report back which you know, I think it works best Greg. I’m sorry. All right to say that I do not have a Sesame Street themed mic yet, you might have to explain to our listeners what we’re talking about.

Greg Lambert 5:08
Marlene has seen my microphones set. So I have like 1234 I can count four microphones in the office right now, each one with a different foam might cover in which she referred to them as Sesame Street characters because there’s orange and red. And so there’s an Elmo and an Oscar and any which one’s Orange, orange, Ernie and Ernie. It’s quite the montage of Sesame Street characters in here. So if you want I can I can send you a Oscar that.

Marlene Gebauer 5:40
Okay, thank you. That’s very nice. One article I read last week that that really resonated with me. It was it discussed the seminar training a 21st century lawyer envisioning a legal industry Alliance. And this was a session of the Thomson Reuters 2018 legal executive forum in New York. And it really reinforced for, for me the ideas that that law schools really need to structure teaching to help fill legal ops positions, I’m seeing more and more demand for legal experts with additional skills and understanding the practice of law really gives an advantage to those with other skills like tech or knowledge management, or project management. But yet these folks really aren’t so easily found schools, I think, really have an opportunity to educate a new and maybe even more practical sort of legal professional one who participates more, you know, on the business side of the house. Let’s see what sort of reaction we get to that.

Greg Lambert 6:35
That’s interesting. I mean, we’re getting a much more dynamic approach to the industry that it’s not as I said to Zena, last week, you know, fill the same round hole with with a round peg, we’re we’re really looking to diversify in multiple ways. Exactly. Exactly. Well, enough of our busy weeks, let’s jump in and listen to our interview with Pablo Arredondo.

Marlene Gebauer 7:04
Our guest this week is Pablo Arredondo chief legal research officer who along with co founder Jake Heller created the company case text to paraphrase a little from their website case, text is an efficiency tool that Pablo and Jake created that helps litigators improve their research results. The part I like best is when you describe your efforts as creating the tools you wished you had when you’re a litigator. So let me flip that statement around on you, Pablo, what did you feel is missing in your research arsenal? When you were a litigator?

Pablo Arredondo 7:29
Well, I’ll tell it like this. When I was a first year associate at Kirkland and Ellis, one of our clients was Apple, I had this daydream, that Steve Jobs was going to come and check in on all the associates working on one of his many patent case, Steve never did come in, but I thought I don’t want to offend him. So I better buy a Mac, you know, because I was a PC guy up until then, this was 2006, right when that beautiful new iMac could come out where it was all integrated into one tool. And I think one way to look at what was missing was the level of design, elegance, just sort of user intuitiveness, all of the things that we love in other companies like Apple, and we’ve certainly we’ve seen this in other companies as well didn’t seem to really be there, not just in the research tools I was using. But in any of the tools that I was using. Over the years, I sort of accumulated this huge list of things that I just wish were done differently. Very tiny things like when you copy would cite, why not allow you to copy which site already in the parenthetical format with the site, followed by the coded language, since I’ve spent countless times having to go on Microsoft Word and switch them around to I think, much more substantive and deep things and really work case six is focused on is both these little things. But really these deeper problems, which is the case that I was working on the platform was completely oblivious to it. So the searches I did whether I was working on a pro bono criminal law case, or a patent litigation case, the same query in the same database would return the same results, even though of course, I wanted very different things. And so really, the main thing I think that was missing was contextual awareness.

Greg Lambert 8:58
So Pablo, when I first met you, it was, I believe, at the Stanford Codex, or it was related through Stanford Codex. And so how did you become a fellow at Stanford’s Codex group? And can you tell me more about what that meant for you and you’re wanting to make your vision a reality?

Pablo Arredondo 9:14
You know, I actually made a big difference for me, Codex AI in 2009, is when I decided to put my shoulder to legal tech, one of the first things I did, I wrote a long, very passionate email to Larry Kramer, who’s the Dean of Stanford Law School too long, in fact, and talking about all of the ways that technology was failing along we should all be ashamed of ourselves. And it was this terrible crisis. And I joke, you know, Dean Kramer could have easily referred me to a psychiatrist at that point, given the length of the email, but instead, he sent me to the center of the Stanford Center for Stanford Codex. It wasn’t yet the Stanford Center for legal informatics. And the way I got my fellowship and it’s changed a lot since then, is I had a about a 10 minute phone call with Roland Vogel and with Michael Gennesaret. Michael Jeanette, sir is The research director at codecs. He’s on faculty in the computer science department at Stanford. And I pitched him what is essentially Kara? You know, there’s been different embodiments of it. But what I pitched him at the time was, what if we use the huge amount of information encoded in the litigation record to then tailor the results, ranking algorithms so that they’re more specific? And I’ll never forget, you know, he’s, he’s, you know, he doesn’t waste a lot of time he goes, he sort of went, Uh huh, uh, huh. Yeah. Okay, I like that. You’re a fellow. And I hung up the phone. It was like, even him, I went, baby, I guess I’m a fellow at Stanford. And she’s really just like that. Yeah, this is these are very early days, I think now, there’s a whole lot bigger process to become one. And I think some of the newer fellows look at us, like, how did these guys get in here? But but, you know, back then it was really a place that, you know, I just started off on this, I didn’t know anything about Silicon Valley, I didn’t know anything really about the tech industry, per se, I had been just practicing as an as an IP lawyer up until then. And it really made a huge difference in terms of being able to kind of get grounded and start to develop the network connections, learning some of the language that I needed. So I can’t stress enough how useful Codex was and how valuable it is part of the reason I remain active in the center now is that I see it continuing to play that role for new entrepreneurs, and helping to sort of foster that the next wave. So it really made a huge difference for me,

Greg Lambert 11:14
let me ask, you know, I obviously know everything about being a fellow it, Codex. So I’m going to ask this for a friend. What does it mean to be a fellow at Codex?

Pablo Arredondo 11:25
That is a great question. Um, so when I joined, it meant that my name was on the website under the section that said, fellows, I believe now that there are other types of residential fellows that I think actually are given office space, but really, you know, it’s a community, there’s weekly Talk series that happens, there’s a conference and the fellows are often involved in helping to plan the conference scheduled for that. And I’m really the it’s sort of a community and the codec sniper codec fellowship, at least, when I was there, again, this might be changing wasn’t a place you went for funding, it was a place you went to sort of hang out with like minded folks, you know, I hesitate to liken it to the great homebrew club, right. Or, you know, you always have to be careful with all these references, because you don’t want to seem like you’re putting yourself next to something like that. But But I think in that same sort of vein, it was it was, what it meant is that you could find other folks like you, and especially back in 2010, there were not a huge number of folks who were looking to go to Sand Hill Road and raise funding to take on legal research. What it really meant, I think, was a community. So how

Greg Lambert 12:21
were you able to leverage what you learned in that community to create an actual product?

Pablo Arredondo 12:28
Well, so sort of overtime. So for in that sort of first way back in the 2010 2011, I would meet with Professor Gennesaret, sort of regularly to talk about the different aspects of a tool like this, Dean Kramer actually sent me over to Charles Holloway, in the Stanford Business School, I think, is the first time I’ve ever walked into a business school in my life. He was the center of their entrepreneurial studies program there. And he helped sort of, you know, what does it mean to put together a slide deck? For VCs? Really, you have to understand the amount of of handling I was completely new to, you know, a huge amount of the things I learned I learned, either through conversations I had with folks in the sort of Stanford critics community, or through introductions that they had made, I think, would be some of the main ways. And of course, it helps when you’re talking to folks, when you have an affiliation with Stanford, I think that there’s no doubt that that brand can help you sometimes get somebody to return your call.

Greg Lambert 13:13
So switching gears just a little bit here, Pablo, of course, there’s a lot of buzz right now around AI, especially in the legal market. But if I’m going to be completely honest here as a consumer, there seems to be a lot of sizzle. And not a lot of steak when it comes to the practicality of legal research tools, selling and a quote, AI function. Can you tell me about what makes case Tech’s an AI tool?

Marlene Gebauer 13:36
Pablo, he’s throwing it down.

Pablo Arredondo 13:38
Oh, yes, no, that is a very, very fair question. I use a all hat and no cattle sometimes instead of sizzler steak, but you can choose your sort of cowboy based metaphor for this.

Greg Lambert 13:48
It all works. It all works.

Pablo Arredondo 13:51
Exactly. Well, okay. So there’s so much here to this right. So first, we, you know, we, we redefine AI, there’s a million different missions. I like one of the ones I love is as soon as it starts to work, it’s no longer considered AI. I think, you know, AI is a family of algorithms, right? It’s not just one thing. And I think a lot of the hype that happens is when you see legal research companies kind of floating the entire families of the full family of AI as though that’s all irrelevant to legal research. So somehow Facebook’s facial recognition is something that you should care about when assessing whether or not a legal research tool is using AI, right? I think there’s a little bit of a sleight of hand there where you’re trying to take other algorithms from other areas where in fact, there’s been just this incredible success, right? I think of like AlphaGo, the kind of reinforcement learning stuff you’re seeing with games like go and chess, self driving cars and things like that, and trying to sort of just assume, hey, it’s all part and parcel with everything we’re doing and legal research. And the truth is nothing could be further from the truth. The progress that we would need. First and foremost in legal research is more in the family of natural language processing, the ability to understand the written words, especially when you’re in tune with tools that have to interface with the common law. So one way I look at it is an AI that can tell when Justice Scalia was Being sarcastic, and we are light years away from something like that. So when you think about how case Tex is an AI tool, okay, well, certainly we’re doing some of the earlier forms of natural language processing that’s around, we sort of apply that to what we’re doing. I think what we’re also doing is what you might call Legal informatics plus natural language processing. Sometimes I jokingly call it a natural language processing, because there’s so much that is unnatural about the way that judges and legal opinions are written. So I think what makes us an AI tool, we’d be in that family of the natural language processing stuff. And then we would be a sort of subdivision within that able to leverage and exploit specific nuances of judicial opinions. And then that would sort of be our direct claim under the AI umbrella. If you take a more, you know, another way people look at AI is that it’s doing things that seem like they would require human thought to do well, certainly, in that sense, you feed care a brief, and suddenly it brings back relevant case law, you know, traditionally, that was something that a human did, using keywords and things like that. So it sort of has the impact of cognitive entity, even though you know, underneath obviously, it’s not, it’s not using intelligence of the ways in which humans think about it. But but you know, it’s interesting with the physical with this. So I mean, with the sort of the hype around it. So I found in 1970, the Stanford Law Review had an article about can AI be applied to legal reasoning, and I actually dug up my slide decks from 2010 that we were using when we were pitching back in the day. And I found on like, slide number seven is the third bullet point, we had referenced artificial intelligence. So it was sort of there is a thing that you could do in here, maybe it’s another way where you’re using it to help classify opinions and tag them as such. So is a case of patent case or not, let’s say right? Well, traditionally, without AI, you have a bunch of humans read it and make a decision on it. And what AI can help you do is figure out very cool shortcuts to with increasingly high levels of certainty tag whether or not a case is a patent case, when we ran this experiment back in 2010. It turns out that the word call co w period, the abbreviation for column is highly suggestive of it being a patent case, because pens have columns. And when the judges referenced that they reference the columns, that was not one of the words that I would have guessed as a patent litigator, when I was naming all the words I thought could work, right. So, you know, sometimes what the AI can do is it can find features within a text that you might not have guessed yourself, even if you thought surely I can get them all. And so then a more modern one, and we’re relevant to our reference right now is the sight hitter. Obviously, we need shepherds out there for, you know, everybody needs a shepherd. And it turns out that the word today if you see the word today, that’s predictive of the courts overturning an earlier precedent because they have fanfare, they’re like, We today now rejected bla bla bla bla bla, right? I don’t think the word today is one that a bunch of lawyers would have come up with on their own as a word that like, if you see, it’s certainly not alone. It doesn’t mean it by itself. It’s not dispositive, but it’s suggestive. And so that’s another place where you see AI and legal research is the ability to help classify texts in an increasingly efficient and quasi automated way.

Greg Lambert 17:59
We’ll be back for the second half of our interview with Pablo Arredondo in a moment. I wanted to take a moment and encourage our listeners to attend the AALL Annual Conference in Baltimore, Maryland, July 14 through the 17th keynote, John Waters, the Baltimore icon will talk on Sunday morning, and he will have plenty to say about Baltimore librarians censorship and free speech. I had the pleasure of talking with John a few months ago, and trust me, he’s got a lot to say. So go to AE L L net dot O R G slash conferences for more information. And now back to our interview with Pablo Arredondo.

Marlene Gebauer 18:39
So I want to follow up a little bit about on Greg’s question, the sizzle no steak comments, you’re telling us things do work, but you know we’re lightyears away. And other instances, yet. We’re trying to market this as a solution for the legal community. So if the perception is that there’s the sizzle and no steak, how do you get people to use the product that you’ve so painstakingly worked on to create?

Pablo Arredondo 19:03
And I think what you do is you have to serve them steak. That’s how you do that. And people tell it their sizzler steak. And we’ve had instances where we’ve come in with Cara. And they’ve told us, you know, the last guy that was in here talking AI and legal research wouldn’t let us see a demo wouldn’t let us touch the tool imply that Nobody’s allowed to eat the steak. And so what we’ve tried to do is be very much like, hey, let’s take one of your briefs. And let’s try it with care. Right? Let’s give you guys a trial immediately for free where you guys can put in your own word product and see see how it works. And so I mean, again, I can’t say more clearly that the way you let people tell steak from sizzle is you let them eat you let them dive in and carve into it. And I just want to be clear while we’re lightyears away on some of the deeper natural language processing that would allow the some of the more outlandish claims and legal research to be achieved. No question right now there are things that can be done with the current tools that do add a lot of value that are able to do things. The reason that’s true is that it’s not just a matter of AI, its demand Are what sort of data sources are you playing with while you’re using the current state of AI? And by that, I mean, if you upload a complaint, and you parse it even using traditional AI, the tool is able to recalibrate the research engine to say, Okay, well, this is the jurisdiction. And these are the claims, right? These are the parties. These are the words that are rare within this complaint, you can do a tremendous amount, with just that information by the current state of AI applied to this very information, rich documents like a complaint. I think one of the big things that we’re doing with case Texas saying, you guys, we’ve been ignoring this huge source of information, that is the litigation record, we haven’t been leveraging it nearly as well as we could

Greg Lambert 20:37
you engage quite a bit with the law library community, what is your thought on how law librarians and others in the legal information profession can do things to be innovators and to drive advancements in the industry? What what could we be doing?

Pablo Arredondo 20:51
Well, I think that a lot of folks with tools that maybe aren’t, I think might have been on your blog, actually in a comment section, where somebody said, I’m not a gatekeeper. I’m a bouncer. And if you don’t bring value, you’re shown the door. I think a lot of folks whose tools aren’t bringing value want to blame the law librarian instead of themselves for the tool. By and large, I think that the law librarian community is doing a huge amount, so facilitates the development and the adoption of these tools. And they’re working with a profession that is inherently risk adverse, often they’re working with partners who are being paid, you know, almost NBA salaries, and maybe they don’t want the boat to be disrupted too much. So I tend to think that law librarians are doing a lot more for us than they than they are against, I was very honored to join the committee for relations with information vendors at WWL. And one of the things we’re going to be doing shortly is releasing a survey that is a bunch of questions that startups have for law librarians, basically, you know, how do we not annoy you guys? What are things that we can do to sort of set up best practices for how we go about pitching to you guys contacting you guys, security reviews, all sorts of things. And so I think that’s one area where I think, hopefully we can make some progress is to sort of make sure that startups are able, in a quick place to get a sense of like, you know, these are the mistakes that entrepreneurs and startups have made previously, don’t repeat them. Because again, a lot of these startups, they have no concept of selling to firms. It’s not like Westlaw and Lexus, where they’ve had decades to sort of evolve their system and sort of work out various truces, or de talks about various things, you know, we’re kind of going at it. And the truth is entrepreneurs, we don’t just drink the Kool Aid, we mix the Kool Aid. So we’re particularly prone to, I don’t know, be over exuberance. They’re sort of, you know, have unrealistic expectations about what can be done.

Greg Lambert 22:35
That makes sense. Well, you mentioned earlier that, you know, librarians are risk adverse. So let me let me ask you are librarians to risk adverse to enable startups to shake up this industry, and let me give you an example. So I had someone who was with a startup at one time, and his has now left the industry. And he texted me last week that and kind of quote him here said, unless someone can be better than Lexus or Westlaw 95% of law, librarians won’t spend a dime. Unless someone can get up to $100 million in revenue, VCs won’t invest $1. And both of these take forever. And there’s a huge chicken and egg problem. So as a result, innovation is dead. And people are stuck with Westlaw and Lexus being able to do whatever they want. So is that right? And how do you fight that tendency? In the legal information field?

Pablo Arredondo 23:26
Okay, so I think two things are one is our law librarians to risk adverse. And I’m actually going to say, I don’t think that there are any more risk adverse than the profession as a whole. I might cite here, Chief Justice Roberts, a while back penned an essay about the legal profession and technology, he actually alludes to the the story of the tortoise and the hare and pointed out that that is actually engraved on the Supreme Court building, I had no idea that this was true. I went and looked it up to make sure there’s a tortoise and there’s a hair carved in to the wall, the outside wall of the Supreme Court building, I guess the thinking is, you know, Steady as she goes. That’s the thinking. And I think given the huge amount of issues in terms of access to justice, and the quality of advocacy and things like that, it might behoove us to be something in between a turtle and a rabbit. I think that, you know, generally the law, you know, these are high stakes situations that are involved. And if you look at what we have to go through compared to say what somebody looking to release a new medical device or a new drug has to go through, we have it pretty easy. So I actually I don’t think law librarians are too risk adverse. I think they’re about the level of risk averseness as the legal profession as a whole, which is cognizant of the stakes of the things that they’re working on and the consequences of something as messed up and then to get to your your friends statement about Lala branches, I won’t buy it unless it’s better than Westlaw or somebody tells me it is and VCs won’t invest unless you can get 200 million. Well first the key thing there is the VCs will say can you get to 100 million right? They certainly don’t expect you to be at 200 million when they invest one group of people that is not risk adverse or venture capitalists and These folks understand that sometimes you have to fund a company have negative profits have negative revenue, because it takes time to do these things. We’ve been lucky at case tech. And I think actually a lot of the startups that have done this to have investors that were lawyers themselves. And so they understand that this is not like selling an emoji app to tweens, right, where it’s just you can just go viral right away. And all these things are wonderful. It does take time to establish the credibility to build the things out to get the basically the trust to get the long sales cycle. And all of these things, I don’t think that there’s an insurmountable chicken and egg problem, I think what you need are venture capitalists who understand it takes time. And then companies that can use that funding and do the heavy lifting to get through that chasm and get through to to law firms. And then of course, it does help to have law librarians that are especially willing to bring in folks like this, give them a chance, you know, give them their proverbial day in court.

Marlene Gebauer 25:51
So Pablo, you’re talking a little bit about competition, you know, VC funding, I want to approach this in a different way. How does the startup environment contribute and impact competition in the legal information platform space, both with the big players but but also amongst the small players? And this might go back to your earlier comment about the the camaraderie that you know everyone was looking for in the early days of Codex, maybe that’s part of the benefit. Do you feel that it’s a positive or negative in terms of how startups are impacting the industry?

Pablo Arredondo 26:26
First, I don’t I’m not sure yet that the jury’s in on how we are going to impact the industry. I think I’ll use a metaphor dear to my heart here. So you guys know, I just had my daughter and well, Liz was in the early stages of being pregnant. You see, each week, the website would say she’s the size of a pea, or she’s the size of a walnut. Right. And the truth is, I think, at least for this next wave of legal tech, certainly, we’re standing on the shoulder of giants. And there’s been a lot of efforts that predate this current wave of illegal tech. But for this current wave, I think that we’re still in the blastocyst phase. And if you are inside the blastocyst, there seems like there’s a lot going on. There’s all sorts of potential in pieces moving, there’s a huge amount of things that can happen. But the truth is, if you’re outside, you’re outside of that bubble. And you’re just looking at, it’s not clear that the legal profession is if you will, sort of showing yet I don’t think we’ve made a huge dent in at least on the legal research side, right? We’re certainly trying to build the tools to do it and get it out there. Once it’s out there. I think we’re going to start to see both good and bad impact of our tools. But one of the things I liken it to is think about cytoflex What a wonderful thing to have a red flag if a case has been overturned. But one of the things that’s been a real problem, and we were researching lawyers that were over relying on the flags that weren’t seeing that, you know, perhaps a case has been overruled for one point, but not the other one that matters, or not understanding, I think Paul calles, like they’re

Marlene Gebauer 27:46
relying on the basic visual, but not digging deeper to make sure that it applies in their situation exactly.

Pablo Arredondo 27:51
And a tool that could be helpful, if used correctly becomes something that’s frankly, a liability. And certainly when you think of a tool like a carrot, the ability to say, well, the machine is going to do my research for me, of course, it’s not the bill to do your research for you. There are certain things and this this really gets into what I’m talking about about how we’re lightyears away from a tool that could do a sort of full sense of legal research, I think that the impact we have is going to be what’s instrumental to our impact is whether or not we’re able to get into legal research station and make sure that folks understand that while one day, it may be malpractice to not use these tools, it will be malpractice almost certainly to only use these tools right to not add in your own human evaluation.

Marlene Gebauer 28:29
Pablo, it’s always a pleasure talking with you. I wish you in case tax all the best.

Pablo Arredondo 28:33
Thank you guys so much. As always enjoy talking with you guys. Congratulations on this new podcast. I look forward to hearing many, many great episodes. All right, thanks, Pablo.

Marlene Gebauer 28:41
That was Pablo Arredondo Chief Legal Research Officer and co founder of CaseText, and all around great guy.

Greg Lambert 28:47
So it was great talking with Pablo, he’s you can just feel the excitement when he talks about what it is that he does. And I’d love to see more startups getting out there and making it on their own such such a hard industry to break into.

Marlene Gebauer 29:02
Yeah, I agree. I mean, it’s so enjoyable speaking to someone who clearly has such a passion for what he does. And you know, what he does is very important for our industry. And you know, you I think you’re gonna see more and more groups getting out there and sort of sending these types of messages that, you know, we need to be paying attention to some of this new technology.

Greg Lambert 29:22
In reality, you just liked it. He used a lot of geeky words. So,

Unknown Speaker 29:25
you know,

Marlene Gebauer 29:26
I always appreciate a podcast where I have to look up things because I don’t know the words.

Greg Lambert 29:33
Alright, Marlene, I think that wraps up our second episode of The Geek in Review. So exciting. Yes, it is. All right. Thank you everyone for tuning in. We will be back next week for The Geek in Review. I am Greg Lambert

Marlene Gebauer 29:45
and I’m Marlene Gebauer. Bye, bye. Bye.

Greg Lambert 29:50
This has been The Geek in Review Special thanks to Pablo Arredondo for his insights, and Kevin MacLeod for his original music